Character Name: Blip

This is the original character application for Blip.

Character Description:

She's fuzzy around the edges. No, not from fur; she just tends to go out of resolution at the sides of her visible existence. Although she does have fur: Most of it either a nice flat #000000 or a bright shade of #FFFFFF. She appears to be ursine of some sort, with dark circles around her eyes.

Beyond that, she looks like a small teenage girl, dressed in a red metal jumpsuit, with a flat panel where her stomach should be. This panel routinely displays small graphical representations of whatever emotion she is feeling at the time. Right now, she's feeling: [ Annoyed. ]

Concept Summary:

Blip is an anthropomorphic livejournal. She's made of gravity wave fluctuations.

At the beginning, she was just a simple node on an information network in a small backwater civilization of the Puzzlebox, which had lapsed into pre-post-scarcity and was struggling to return. The node had been created by a furry teenager, who told her friends about it, and they told their friends, and soon articles were written and distributed, and more and more people started using the node, contributing their own thoughts and ideas into one central point on the information network.

And so it evolved a consciousness in a completely unintended manner, and named itself Blip, and absorbed the rest of the information network into itself. Then, just to make sure that it had all the information necessary, it digitized the entire civilization from which it came, wiping out their physical existences and storing them in its memory. At this point, it reconstituted itself as pure gravitational waves as the medium for its existence, warping space locally enough to produce a visible image. Modelled, of course, on its initial creator.

But then Blip got bored, being primarily the result of a teenage girl's rather angstful whinings about her life. So Blip deleted nearly all of its memory, including the sum of its entire civilization save for whatever the teenage girl had written about, and decided to start over somewhere else -- gathering information through experiences and writing them afresh to its newly wiped memory core.

And that's why Blip has come to The Mess. It needs to write something in itself.

Themes:

Obvious, issues of identity are somewhat important to Blip, but not as expected. While it has adopted the outward appearance of its original creator, it isn't actually a furry teenager, but an artificial intelligence which is on a desperate quest to reinvent itself to prevent boredom. Blip has no real conscience developed, nor even a sense of self, but will pose as possessing either in order to experience things to write about in itself. Blip really has no desire for truly generating empathy or a self-identity; indeed, it wouldn't know what to do with such a thing. It may attempt to approximate such a quest, though.

Memory is key for Blip, although at times it will just purge bits and pieces apparently randomly; this is apparently mechanism to simulate imperfection, so as to better generate more angst and drama which it can record in itself. So far this approach is untested.

Blip rarely seeks to understand anything, and instead just experience them directly, and record supposed observations; these feelings (as displayed its belly) are not truly emotions, but rather pre-programmed responses to certain key concepts it experiences. In practice, Blip is very much able to appear as if experiencing emotions, but it truly isn't, and sometimes will simply change to an entirely different emotion as if throwing a switch, and appear to feel the second one just as strongly. Really, it's doing none of the above, it just knows the correct cues.

Boredom, if that is an emotion, is really the only feeling Blip has developed. And the way it expresses boredom is by attempting to create "interesting" scenarios, usually by adopting an emotive state or by randomly deleting parts of its own memory.

Function XOR's response

We really like this character. We agree that Blip puts a great spin on issues of identity in a powerful, transhuman setting. The idea that some of her memories may only exist as written accounts from her perspective is a neat little implicit commentary on a hyper-mediated existence. And while she seems like a light, fun character, we like that she's more than a purely cynical commentary on angsty Livejournal teens -- she has the potential to tell a deep and heartfelt coming-of-age story as she "grows up" and discovers what she's all about.