[production-notes] 12.2 (Patreon)

Hello folks, sorry this one's a little late.

Another deep-dive into the origins of the Novamediterra in the first part of this episode!

One day I'll ship actual Novamediterra flags...

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Postal chess is interesting, and perfect for a low-bandwidth connection, like LUNA's. 

I'm imagining each turn can be expressed with just two bytes: a `from` square and a `to` square. I wonder if a clever chess algorithm could compress that to just one byte, by removing impossible states? 2 doesn't seem too bad.

As you probably know by now, the AIs in LT communicate using Lojban , a language that encodes emotion as pronounceable suffixes called Attitudinals. An example of this is you might use the attitudinal ".oi" at the end of a complaint. This is fun, as it's pronounced the same as the English complaint noise: "OI!"

It is this language that allows Seth, and therefore the audience, to hear the emotions of the AIs he's chatting to, even though they might not be communicating on a voice link.

We have used emoticons and similar since before the internet (telegraph operators for instance) to convey the same. Lojban's advantage is that you can pronounce the attitudinal words, rather than rely on READING them as markup.

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Though no such species as my giant/gargantuan octopus have yet to be discovered, there are plenty of very large octopus that HAVE. 4-5m is the longest arm lengths that my research could yield. It seems perfectly reasonable that in the depths of the unexplored ocean there could be even bigger friends to find!

The sharp suckers on their arms DO exist in giant squid - whales often have circular marks around their mouths where they have fought with giant squid. What an incredible sight that would be!

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The SIGNAL for this episode I'm DELIGHTED with. https://soundcloud.com/namtao/dark-sonar

I've been missing a really good reverb plugin for my ambient tracks so far. Ambient music lives and dies on its reverb! I discovered a WONDERFUL plugin called ABYSS for my editor, repear.fm (https://github.com/JoepVanlier/JSFX/tree/master/Abyss) This is an incredible plugin where sound goes to die and be reborn. Expect more!

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Did you spot the Red Dwarf reference in the final act of this episode? 14b is the kind of pipe cleaner Rimmer asks Lister for in the first episode. What a show!

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Thanks so much for your support, talk to you next time!
Tris <3