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James Barry

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Unexplored modes of language
James Barry30

To loosen mental constraints around language a little bit: How you push-data-out doesn't need an obvious or direct map to how you pull-data-in. This is already true in the usual cases: Ears don't speak and mouths don't hear (but they're either writing to or reading from air pressure directly). Pens don't read and eyes don't write (but they're working with the same low-level-language of "how stuff looks").

I'd like to show that there can be a more obvious difference between how we generate symbols and how we receive symbols. Examples:

  • A common game mechanic allows players to quickly select from a radial menu (button-down, mouse-movement, button-up) and other-players in game will just see the emote/chat/effect.
  • The tribes ascent VGS system, navigation to select output, https://tribes.fandom.com/wiki/Voice_Game_System
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Babble challenge: 50 ways of sending something to the moon
Answer by James Barry70

||

  1. rocket
  2. slingshot
  3. hulk throw
  4. throw a bunch of money on a bounty to get something there
  5. lazer etch it into the surface
  6. embed it in/on the next-planned rover/astronaut to go there
  7. bring the moon to the earth
  8. steal moon rocks from Space Johnson and bring them to the object
  9. railgun
  10. the nuclear-manhole-cover method
  11. make a wish foundation
  12. giant wave-spike maker https://youtu.be/iWKFPTgkpXo?t=81
  13. thoughts and prayers
  14. very many dynamites
  15. send replicator nanobots up there to assemble it
  16. huge centrifugal force on a rope
  17. trebuchet (scaled way up)
  18. go into cryo-sleep (dead cold brain) until The Future makes it easier
  19. scream at the object Very Loudly
  20. harold and the purple crayon a UFO around it
  21. gift it to the Moon Aliens
  22. [have-already-always-been-using] time-travel to make it come from the moon
  23. all combinations of the above; ( slingshot into a rocket which then railguns it to the moon ...
  24. (first consume earths atmosphere to decrease air resistance, change the shape of the earth such that at least one end it stretches up to the moon)
  25. repeatedly shoot it with increasingly powerful sniper rifles such that it increases both vertical and horizontal velocity
  26. take a long walk
  27. grow a supertall tree
  28. lava-flow-tunnel-printer-bot-army (using lava as both the structure and as power source (temp diffs))
  29. three giant hot air balloons with elastic-slingshot-like-ribbons connected to the ground
  30. capture a hurricane and turbine-gearbox/tree (increasing-speed-decreasing-torque) it down to a single pipe that shoots things to the moon (sry idk what I mean by this)
  31. very large card-tower made of business cards (an infinite resource)
  32. use the power of friendship to punch it to the moon
  33. hulk smash everything else that exists
  34. use a supervolcano and the best luck
  35. accidentally teleport it there via Quantum Magick
  36. rewrite history books to make its being there into Common Knowledge
  37. tie a long rope to it and drag it up
  38. pizza delivery service
  39. make something with really long legs
  40. essentially the wave-flow-pool idea but with a graph of solid/structural components/legs/edges that propogate the force
  41. genie wish (+ the genie wish that it would have net positive effects through history)
  42. <all the faking/redefining it is the moon ideas>
  43. <all the bringing fake/redefined moons to it ideas>
  44. <all the future magitech>
  45. chain of double-sided helicopters/fans/drones (pushing atmosphere up towards the moon)
  46. bubble that contains/is-inflated-by a large chunk of the earth's mass
  47. consume 32 cups of coffee, then Telekenesis it
  48. run a paperclip-maximizer for the object or the moon
  49. create religion around making pilgrimages to the moon with the object
  50. destroy the fabric of spacetime or whatever fundamental-distance-substrate between the moon and the object ||

Can't help but think I missed a lot of obvious-in-retrospect and mostly-realistic ways to get something there.

...

comments/notes after reading others' answers:

  • Project Orion! That's a big one I missed
  • There's a lot of repetition of ideas between people, even in the creative [not-first-order-of-obviousness] answers
  • It becomes more challenging and the ideas become more interesting if [when you notice a class-of-idea] you count it as a single idea.
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Puzzle Games
James Barry40

marblespuzzle.com (dead link) is the most simple and pure example of a puzzle game I know of, and is one of my favorites.
Playable in the time machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190909085700/http://marblespuzzle.com/

Baba is top tier, but in some levels the character movement eats much more time than the puzzle solving; the idea of blocks or tokens that predictably change things based on which other blocks are nearby can be taken much, _much_ further.

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