#cog sci

[art-of-mathematics]

[ Source ]

[onemoreattempt]

My prison is metacognition.

[route-to-eutopia-if]

Chapter 1 is up!

How many times have you escaped death? How many times have you lived through your borrowed time? Counting has lost its meaning; you are supposed to be dead. And now, death has finally come knocking at your front door.

PLAY Route to Eutopia demo

First update : 24/01/2024 ETA for next update : a month or so.

Link to the main post.

What to expect?

This update contains three parts in total: Prelude, Prologue, and Chapter 1; allow you to explore the world of Eutopia (in a confinement of your mansion.), and the situation your MC has been in for their entire life. Enjoy your adolescent reminiscence, a few flashbacks, a weird dream, and a scary beginning of the end at your expense.

You can also customize your MC's name, sex and gender, appearance, current sexuality and so on.

Since there will only be few necessary variables I need from the players as of now (or in other word, as far as the story goes.) so no worries, this will not be the only time you can customize them, there will be a timeskip in the next few chapters that will allow you to fully develop/customize your MC in a more in-depth fashion. (Stubbles, unnatural hair color, body shape, height, discovered sexuality or more will be available in the next few updates.)

Any issues regarding coding status, unaligned flavored text, grammar errors or just questions about the story itself can be sent via my ASK dm.

Thank you, and see you next time!

[mortala-if]

Mortala, the word, derives from the Latin adjective "Mortalis." meaning "subject to death." Comparable to the English word "Mortal." meaning the same. —

You live in a rotting world. And that's not a metaphor.

You've known that since you can remember. It's a fact that's been drilled into your mind on repeat.

A rotting world that you must not explore. Stay where you are, stay where you're familiar with, stay where you're comfortable— In The Cinders with your older brother.

The Cinders might not look pretty, but it's not horrible. Steer clear of most streets, keep your head down, don't poke around in other people's business, and you'll be fine. You've learned to navigate pretty well, not to toot your own horn.

Plus, you've got a job, and so does your brother. Not good ones, but ones that can, with a joint salary, keep a crumbling roof over your heads. —

Another thing that's been forced into your mind since you were spoon-fed is to never, ever disobey Belamour.

Belamour is a peaceful organization that was made to keep you safe. To do this, they have strict laws in place, and officers crawl over the cities to make sure you follow them. They are not a government, and they make it very known that they are not.

If you fail to obey, you'll get sent to your city's rehabilitation center! Isn't that nice? Or, on the worse side, you can end up in the Belamour Rehabilitation Center all the way in The Frost.

You and your brother made an agreement when you were very little that you would stick together, and neither of you would break any of the rules for fear of being sent to a rehabilitation center.

. . . An agreement your brother broke.

Now you have to find out how to get him the fuck out of there.

Mortala is a 16+ game due to explicit language, violence, death, anxiety, mention of past emotional abuse (not of MC), messy relationships, and more. A detailed trigger warning list will be listed before every chapter.

Customize the flawed main character, ranging from their gender to their style. (Semi-set personality. Set last name and age.)

Make risky choices that might result in you dying or being injured.

Build relationships between characters, romanceable and not.

Finally wipe The Cinders' ashes off you and explore more than just the burnt city you grew up in.

Go against everything you were taught growing up.

Lie to save your (and your brother's) skin.

These characters are not all romanceable, and you will not meet most of these characters until Chapter Two. Also, it's important to note that not all these characters have plot armor. This does not include sub-romances or all the characters you'll interact with.

FINNLEY ROSE. ✩ ---- Finnley has raised you since you were 5, making him 11 when you started to rely on him. You never really understood the gravity of that until you were in your late teenage years, and that's when you really started to appreciate him. You regret things you've said to him, how you've hurt him— and lately, with his absence, that's all you can think about. ---- His skin is a shade lighter than yours, the same textured hair as yours, and he has brown hooded eyes outlined with eyelashes that make you jealous. He stands at 6 feet, 2 inches. (187.96cm)

HIRO LA'EI. ✩ ---- Hiro has been your best friend since you were in diapers. You know everything about him, and he knows everything about you. You genuinely think he might be one of the sweetest people alive, despite what others might assume, and he jumps at the chance to help you with anything. . . ---- He has tan skin, wavy dark brown hair, and pretty doe-like brown eyes. He stands at 5 feet, 10 inches. (177.8cm) ! Option to have a crush on him— it goes nowhere, though.

MEDUSA CALIXTE. ♡ ---- Medusa. What can you say about Medusa? To put it plainly, she's your best friend's ex-girlfriend. She broke up with him and gave no reason. At the time of their relationship, you thought she was. . . interesting, for lack of a better word, and when she left your best friend, it took a huge toll on him, and from the looks of it, it barely affected her. ---- She has russet brown skin, coiled light brown hair, often shoulder-length and worn in dreads, and upturned hazel eyes. She stands at 5 feet, 2 inches. (157.48cm)

MONROE HALILI. ♡ ---- Your brother's best friend. They're concerned, and not just about their best friend. They're observant, annoyingly so, and can tell how bad his leave has affected you. Obviously, due to their status, they've taken it upon themselves to check on you- wanted or not. ---- They have deep tawny skin, curly black hair with white underneath, and dark brown monolid eyes framed with long, naturally curled eyelashes. He stands at 6 feet tall. (182.88cm) ! Option to have a childhood crush on them. (Three-year age gap.)

LIVIA ALARIE. ✩ ---- Monroe's daughter. From what you heard from your brother, she's incredibly timid- Oh, and she's smiled at him. (He wouldn't shut up about it for a week.) You've never seen her or talked to her yet. ---- She has tawny skin, wavy black hair that reaches below her ears, and dark brown almond eyes. She stands at 3 feet, 7 inches. (109.22cm)

VIVIAN DE LA CRUZ. ♡ ---- Your ex. You still think about them occasionally— you don't date someone for 5 years and forget about them even if you want to. You don't like how things ended, but you don't know if you want to see them again. ---- They have warm golden skin, light blue wavy hair, and downturned brown eyes. They stand at 6ft, 1 inch. (185.42cm) ! Details of the past relationship in their character profile.

Character profiles

Hiro La'ei Medusa Calixte Monroe Halili Vivian de la Cruz

Informational posts

The Cities Belamour Organization

Outside of Tumblr links

Playlists Pinterest Demo/Proof of concept

Extra

My other interactive fiction blog @destined-if My personal account @bunnifly

Important

My banner is by Thomas Dubois This interactive fiction is very loosely inspired by The Hunger Games

Thank you for reading ♡

[spoodleydoodley]

Cap'n Cog returns! I've been enjoying pirate media lately and decided the old Captain could do with some newer art, so I re-made him: simplifying, streamlining, and stylizing him to my new skill level~ It was fun to breathe some new life into this Buccaneer Bot Hope you all like this re-make~

[echoland]

Sigh I have to continue my presentation slash discussion leading for 2 hours tomorrow

[quietwingsinthesky]

if i ever end up writing even’s actual first encounter and adventure with the doctor, one of the running themes is going to be how there aren’t any windows on the ship.

which doesn’t seem like such a big thing at first, but that’s from our point of view, or the doctor’s, because we (and him) know the size of the universe. we know what space is, maybe not entirely, but enough to know the shape of it, yeah? we know what stars look like even when their light is a trillion years and miles away. but there are no windows on this ship. and even has never seen the night sky, has never seen a star or a planet or just the empty space that’s separated from them by feet of metal and a great deal of luck. even has lived their whole life inside, and space is not a thing they can see or touch. it’s an abstract threat beyond their walls. they could not imagine the enormity of it if they tried.

they don’t know the shape of the ship either. imagine someone let you run through a maze and then told you to draw it. you could draw the corridors you walked through and the dead-ends you ran into, but could you for certain say that you ever found the edges of it? that know the walls on the outside look like the walls on the inside? how big is it? and really, what you should be imagining is that your maze is one of a dozen different mazes all tied together with rubber bands, and none of you actually know what the whole thing looks like, and you don’t have time to talk through the walls to figure that out because if you stop moving for too long, the food dispenser at the end won’t give you anything despite reaching your goal because you were too slow, better try harder next time, stop talking and start running.

even isn’t surprised that the tardis is bigger on the inside. it doesn’t hit them until the doctor lets them see the ship they were on from the outside. like a farewell wave, opening the doors of the tardis as she orbits the ship, and even takes in the shape of it first. (they can’t figure out where they lived, where they worked, from the outside. they don’t recognize any of it.)

but then they see everything else, beyond the ship, while the doctor is standing behind them and saying something reassuring, ‘they’ll be alright without you, don’t worry about them, we fixed everything’, absently, kindly, because he knows they need a moment alone to say goodbye but someone has to stand at the controls and the silence gets to him a little too much. doesn’t see that even’s eyes are so, so wide staring beyond the ship at the universe around it.

it’s too big. they panic. they shut themselves inside the tardis.

that’s what gives the doctor pause. makes him waver, here, because even’s good companion material, they’ve got that spark in them that makes them want to help, whatever it takes, (this is what will undo them, eventually.) and he doesn’t want to leave them there. but you can’t just take something out of its natural habitat and expect it to flourish. that’s how you get wilting leaves and patchy coats and enough stress to kill something from heartbreak alone.

‘i can take you back,’ he offers. it’s the last time that’ll ever be true, but if he knew that when he said it, it’d be a very different kind of story. so he doesn’t.

even is shaking. tearing up. scared. elated? hiccuping on little gasps of air. the stars are beautiful, and terrifying, and now that even knows they exist, they can never go back to before they knew.

the doctor is cruel like that. he wants to show you the universe.

but here’s what’s true now and will be true forever: even doesn’t want to go back. i mean, god, could you blame them. one day, in a few years/decades/centuries/after the long way round to the end of the universe and the short trip back, he’s going to tell them that they can either say to his face that they’d rather he’d left them on that ship or they can stop adding it to his list of sins. they won’t be able to.

so they say no.

and they pull the doors back open just a crack, wide enough for one eye, small enough to shut again with the tremble of a hand. and they peek back out at the universe they’ve been living in. they don’t notice the ship, as the tardis breaks her orbit, speeding further and further away to a destination its passengers will never see.

that’s why there are no windows on the ship. well, that, and it wasn’t very well-designed in the first place.

[dandelionmoss]

“Being able to solve a problem" in computer science means being guaranteed to come up with the right answer every time. In contrast, in animal behavior, "being able to solve a problem" means reliably coming up with the right answer at rates significantly greater than chance. So whether a neural network or an animal can solve a problem depends on what you mean by "being able to solve the problem."

Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science

[sarasa-cat]

Me and my aesthetic:

I am endlessly fascinated, calmed, and in the good vibes zone when watching semi-retired older generation (pre computer) architects draw & paint with pencil, ink, and watercolor.

Bonus if they narrate with running commentary on whatever it is they feel like saying.

Freehand drafting that is so spot on yet still expressing a style. Damn. Nomnomnom.

[art-of-mathematics]

Sometimes/often I just want to be an ordinary man with ordinary interests, ordinary expectations from life and ordinary wishes and here I am: autistic and conscious of all my lack of basic life skills.

--

Currently lt's disabling. My focus is non-existent. My clumsyness is so severe that I even refuse to leave the bed, not due to being depressed, but because I have no "brain capacity" to determine my moves properly without causing chain reactions of incidences. It is no exaggeration, but whenever I attempt to solve a problem (like a glass of water fell down..) I cause even more shitty incidences. It's the quanity and frequentation of those incidences that is disabling.

My sensory problems are severe as well. Both sensory processing is deficitary as well as the "output" via motoric control of my body.

Whenever I fail 90% in what I do, I always remember all the shitty degrading comments I received.

I had a bit of self esteem, but thanks to severely desinterested psych workers I have lost my self esteem entirely.

Everyday I hear these comments in my mind and I have nothing to hold against it. I have no counter-example. I have so few experiences where I could achieve something, where my kind of thinking was even wanted.

Constantly being deemed as dumb and whatever is painful when you know you can be smart - with a bit of self esteem and trust in yourself, with just few affirmative words - and an option to advance your knowledge and skills.

Having no options to use my knowledge and skills - and especially not being able to improve and work on them makes me sad. Additionally, working on expanding/improving my knowledge and skills could help me with my self-esteem.

It's saddening.

In the last months I could not train my mind enough to remain functional.

I need daily mental workout to remain a basic level of functionality of basic cognitive abilities. It's like a person with muscular dystrophy - they have to train hard everyday just to remain at a basic functionality.

My verbal and communication skills severely decreased over the last months. Whenever I attempt to write something - may it be poetry, philosophy or about STEM topics it turns into utter gibberish shortly after I started writing.

Even basic grammar becomes deficitary. Word finding problems are severe too.

My brain is super slow. Processing information is filled with more errors than i am able to detect and correct via metacognition. Even basic perception is exhausting because of this. In moments of severe exhaustion my vision becomes double (double pictures) and if I continue the exhausting task (mostly tasks that require much working memory capacity) I become delirious and then fall asleep while doing the task... mental overload... mental shutdown. Mental CPU used by 100%.

The dissociation aspect in my cognitive processes makes it all too difficult, as, well, my memory is like a server having multiple co-existing sub-systems - each of them is also errorous. And sending information between the servers, as to use this analogy, is a very "mental-CPU-exhausting task"...

.... hmmm I might want to write an article about cognitive processes in general - and how it is with my own sensory as well as memory processing. Some weeks ago I started doing short explanations of analogies between cognitive processes and "computer and math terms".

I also want to use pseudocode to depict some "working mechanisms" of my cognition, so to speak.

(I made these many months ago:)

I might go into detail when I actually continue this project.

[ceasarslegion]

I made the decision to resign after some events from yesterday gave me the emotional shove i needed to realize that im not happy here and things will never improve for me if i dont looke elsewhere

So they have me until ive found a new job but spiritually im already gone

[fives-girlfriend]

*checks watch* ah yeah time to be sad about Jesse today

[linisiane]

you know the nerds have made it when the comp sci geek or minecraft Youtuber is the heart throb guy in a band

[raskies456]

please I must know what is your PhD in???

I wish I knew too lmao I’m not actually a graduate student atm

My undergrad was mathematics (+ a physics minor) but I’m currently a research tech in a biophysiology lab, so while I’m looking at applying for a genetics program or something similar sometime next year I can not discount the possibility of changing track again

[sparklecarehospital]

HI COMETCARE FANS. for the past couple months ive been working on designs for some side characters and i wanted to share them publicly (because i've done that before and it's fun :3)

aster is one of sly's online friends, he's an artist like sly and works on a ferrie webcomic. they do a lot of commission art and afford to live on their own because of it. he also really likes space stuff, which is where their comic takes place!

mars is a kid at the comet's high school. she's into sci-fi movies and books. she seems to have a secret of some kind...

crayola is another kid at their school. he's a paint artist and does abstract art and such.

pinch is soob's boyfriend, he's a (semi) professional clown! he's super silly and loves to prank people, like using his balloon-self to create static electricity and zap people!

jerry is another one of sly's online friends. he is also an artist really into warrior cogs, and he just really loves cogs in general. he volunteers at a ferry shelter and loves to care for cogs and other small ferries.

pinch is my personal favorite. you can probably see why!!!

[dalekowrites]

What would your favourite choice of the games interactive stories be? Would you have a favourite type? Romance, Fantasy etc. and did any of the inspire you with the ones you are currently writing? 😁

Oh boy! This is going to be a long answer, brace yourself lol

Let me start by saying that I have a degree in English literature (in fact, I'm going to do a PhD on it), so reading, in general, is one of the core activities of my life.

As for text adventures, even if not from Choice of Games Ltd., I'd like to mention a few inspirations: my passion first came from the original Choose Your Own Adventure series, and I still remember which numbers obsessed me as a child: Mountain Survival #28, The Dragons' Den #33, and more than any other, Space Patrol #22! (The latter may have also fueled my unhealthy obsession with Star Trek TOS, actually). For those unfamiliar with this fantastic book series, the genres of the three books I mentioned are, respectively, adventure, fantasy, and sci-fi. This gives you an idea of how varied my tastes are...

Later on, I discovered interactive fictions and text adventures. Dude, it was a dream come true. I started with Adventure ('76, never finished it, of course) and Zork ('79, never finished that either… of course. How damn hard were they?!). Then Mystery Mansion ('78), Castle Adventure ('82), and too many, many others. I'm a sucker for Sorcery! from inkle, and I deeply loved Magium (RIP Chris, you won't be forgotten). For my Italian-speaking friends, I also really enjoyed the Fra Tenebra e Abisso series (although its current status is unknown).

But back to CoG-related things. I've read a lot, and I'd probably be faster telling you what I didn't like! As you may have figured out by now, I don't have any particular genre preferences as long as a story is well-written, though horror-thriller stories usually grab my attention more easily.

Important note: I've read a lot of stories and, with a few exceptions, I liked most of them. To avoid writing a too-long list, here are the published stories that really impressed me:

A Crown of Sorcery and Steel,

A Midsummer Night's Choice,

Blood for Poppies,

Blood Moon,

Broadway: 1849,

Choice of the Cat,

Choice of the Vampire,

Donor,

Doomsday on Demand (1 and 2),

Gilded Rails,

Golden Rose: Book One,

Jazz Age,

Lies Under Ice,

Life of a Mercenary,

Life of a Space Force Captain,

MetaHuman Inc.,

Noblesse Oblige,

Paradox Factor,

The Evertree Saga (all four books),

Rent-a-Vice,

Revolution Diabolique,

Siege of Treboulain,

Tally Ho,

The Daily Blackmail,

The Dragon and the Djinn,

The Fernweh Saga: Book One,

The Fog Knows Your Name,

The Gray Painter,

The Grim and I,

The Ghost and the Golem,

The Lost Heir,

The Midnight Saga: The Monster,

The Parenting Simulator,

The Play's the Thing,

The Soul Stone War (1 and 2),

The War for the West,

Tudor Intrigue,

Vampire Regent,

Vampire: The Masquerade (all of them),

Way Walkers: University (1 and 2),

Welcome to Moreytown,

Werewolves: Haven Raising,

Zombie Exodus,

Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven.

And now, onto works in progress! There aren’t that many because I barely have time to follow my own (heh…), so here, in alphabetical order, are the ones I'm following with the most interest:

Adoriel's Tears (@adoriels-tears-if),

A Father's Love (@kal-down),

Crown of Ashes and Flames (@coeluvr),

Dawn Chorus (@dawnchorus-if)

Disenchanted (@disenchantedif),

Dragon's Edged (@dragonedged-if),

Elysium (@elysiumcircusif),

Fallen Lights (@fallenlightsif),

For King and Country (@forkingandcountry-if),

From The Ashes We Rise (@kal-down),

Hubris (@hubris-the-if-game),

Kingdoms and Empires (@kingdoms-and-empires),

Return to Misty Cove (@fluorescent-if),

The Abyssal Song (@ri-writes-if),

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - An affair of the heart (@doriana-gray-games),

The Lonely Shore (@thelonelyshore-if),

The King's Hound (@the-kingshound),

The Reaper Watches Me (@thereaperwatchesme),

The Bureau (@thebureau),

The Unseelie (@theunseelieif),

Van Helsing (@vanhelsing-if),

When Life Gives You Lemons (@when-life-gives-you-lemons-if).

Okay, that was… a lot. As for direct inspirations, I don't have any direct ones, but I can say I felt like writing a post-apocalyptic story after reading Doomsday on Demand! Other than that, I guess the collection of narrative, text adventures, and interactive fiction I've read have led me to where I am now.

Damn, it took me hours to write this answer. I hope it's satisfying at least! Thanks for asking ☺