Educational Programming

ukyo_rulz

Easy. I live in one and use it to craft the best version of myself. Am I a smoker? Do I have a drinking problem? Not anymore. Do I eat too much and never exercise? Now I'm a health-nut-gym-rat. Am I messy/sloppy? Now I’m a neat-freak. Can I only take advantage of my hotties 2-3 times a day? Now I have limitless stamina. Before you know it I won’t even need brain-washing to get girls. Speaking of what I’d do in Peter’s shoes, I’d skip the collegiate hotties and gather all the ugliest social outcasts on campus instead. A couple months living in my apartments and they’re all Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue material. Afterwards, just for funsies, I’ll set them free from my control and see how long it takes for them to backslide and come crawling back to me. I'm thinking they'll have to really beg for it before I let them back into the fold.

Ice Bear

I think I'd be too nervous about getting Neighbors-From-Back-When'ed, brainwashed by subliminals coming through the walls that aren't even intended for me. I lived in college residence halls for a lot of years, and those walls can be pretty thin in places, especially the newer remodeled buildings. And yeah, I hear ya. I kept finding myself wanting to do more scenes and less of what wound up going on the page, but I remembered that I was writing for a silly prompt and not to do the usual smut routine and tried to be disciplined. Sometimes I have a little fun with wanting more than I give myself. :)

WDB

As someone with, like, zero impulse control, you *absolutely* move in. Why drive yourself to a restaurant if you could live with a team of cooks dedicated to satiating your appetites? And, man, on the point of Peter's harem... I really liked this story. I really liked the viewpoint of Omni. It was a fun story. But, man, it broke my heart a bit to have something like that epic payoff be left to the imagination. (The athletic director quit her job! To be a student! For Peter's benefit!) I wish I could have gotten a more dialogue-y version of that part of the story. It's too good to be left vague!

Ice Bear

Real question: If you're in Peter's position, 46 campus apartment wired for brainwashing collegiate hotties. Do you assign one of them to yourself so you have easy proximity to your harem, then disable every smart device in the joint, or do you accept your current housing assignment elsewhere on campus and deal with the commute (or delay on delivery)? Is convenience of proximity worth a ~2% reduction in offerings?

ukyo_rulz

I give Peter like... six months before he accidentally turns himself into a bimbo while trying to quit smoking. Serves him right for naming the files SmokingSTOP.mp3 and SmokingHOT.mp3.

Ice Bear

I was hoping somebody would call me on my total ignorance of IT. :D It deserves pointing out that I was meddling with powers beyond my control. I suppose I hadn't considered so much that Omni was thinking the narration so much as conveniently articulating (in a quasi-humanish voice) the amusing portions of his interactions. To your comments: - YES. Peter's casual indifference borders on ineptitude in a bunch of ways. In a more serious story, I would have to punish the hell out of him for his sloppiness. - If I were designing Omni, I might try implementing an static-negative matrix to reduce ambient data bleed, then tweak the HHC protocols to maximize output of his BIOS interface. (My friends and family have had to suffer through many such attempts at inventing jargon for things I totally don't understand. I'm pretty competent at infuriatingly unaware gibberish for auto maintenance as well! :D) - For that particular statistic, I believe the intent was to convey that she had previously never dialogued with Omni when it was using its default voice, but started doing so about a third of the time after it switched to Peter's. But I can see how it's not clear. Somebody really ought to develop standardized measurements for a lot of this stuff.

ukyo_rulz

Overall I found the story to be good. Not amazing, not bad. Very interesting premise. The human characters were kinda “meh”. It’s hard to care one way or another about Peter and Jenny, but I suppose that they’re really just the supporting cast. The computer was the real main character. Speaking of which I work as a software engineer and, if this scenario were true, the AI powering this computer is really something else. A computer that actually thinks to itself in the same way that a human would (rather than just using natural language as a user interface) is so much more advanced than anything we have. Why bother using it to brainwash random girls when every tech giant would pay millions (billions?) to license this technology for their products? That kind of money could net you an entire harem of bimbos if you wanted. Random Comments: It slightly bothers me that the mp3 filenames aren’t numbered and seem to follow no naming convention. It’d quickly grow nightmarish to tell slutlegion.mp3 apart from Slutlegion.mp3. Based on how it simulates human thinking it would seem that Omni’s AI is powered by a neural network, but then it wouldn’t make sense for Omni to refer to how he was “programmed”. Neural networks are trained to do things, not programmed. Maybe the user (Peter in this case) writes a small script describing what he wants to do, which is then interpreted by the neural network? Maybe a separate UX was created to streamline interacting with Omni for smart-home purposes? Some of Jen’s numbers seemed interesting. Like when "frequency of masturbating during conversations with devices increased from 0% the week of June 24t​h​ to 33% during the following week”. Does this mean she never used to masturbate while conversing with devices, but she started to do so at a rate equal to 50% of her previous masturbating activities? Or does it mean that she maintained a steady level of masturbating, but started to talk to the devices while doing so 33% of the time?

I really enjoyed reading this from an unconventional perspective. One of my favorite stand alone shorts for sure :D

WDB

Don't ever delete the stupid jokes! I *love* the stupid jokes! And that "Come ON" was partly like "You can't throw a joke like that at me in the first few paragraphs! I've got seventeen pages to read, you gotta *pace yourself*." Second place for Best Joke (I legit love that PC joke) has to go to "For more information, please see the ASCC’s website or contact future former Associate Director Elizabeth Wiehl." The construction of that joke, like... *chef's kiss*.

Ice Bear

Yeah, early on I think I wanted Omni to be a little funnier, then I soon decided to (mostly) be more clinical and have the humor come more from circumstance than narration, but by the time I got around to editing, I loved the stupid joke too much to delete it. :)

WDB

Okay, that was really cute. Great work!

WDB

"That’s computerist, and I’ve always considered myself to be PC." ... ... Come ON.