The '00s 'minimal' layout

Title of entry

lmao okay i got something way better than in the last post. more pretentious and abstract, but better.
AS USUAL it got fuckin’ long so TLDR up here: it’s basically like dirk and AR except you get passively dissonant feedback rather than arguing with yourself for thousands of words

so, i think a person’s being “not quite themself” is more about how their trace data and subsequent function interact with their active being. 

when the transistor reads a trace/creates a function, it forms a solid block of data based on the person’s life until that point; keyword, “solid”. i believe, just like a human’s fluid nature, a person's trace function has the potential to change over time depending on how their life continues-but the data in the transistor is not so easily overwritten. i don’t see the functions themselves being able to gradually shift into something new to accommodate what a person becomes known for after their initial trace is made; if anything, it’d be a complete changeover when the old data is no longer a viable match for its subject. i feel one person would have to have a transistor for a very, very long time for this to occur--and it is this dissonance,between what the transistor knows its User as, and what the actual User is and has become, that makes one “not quite themselves”.
as i said before, a transistor’s bond to its user is definitely an intricate one there’s feedback both ways, it filtering data from the user and the Process, and the user actively making use of their own [and others’] traces--it’d be like constantly being saddled with the...well, not quite “will”, i don’t think...more like the ‘shadow’ or ‘essence’ of your past self whenever one uses the transistor, a fight between one’s active mind and that same mind as played back through the transistor. THIS is why people are described as “not quite themselves”.
and the longer a person remains User, the progressively bigger the disconnect between them and their data becomes [and i guess the more erratically they’d behave], until the transistor no longer recognizes the two as the same and overhauls the old function. 
to spring onto a different tangent, i think a much easier way to overwrite a user’s trace would be to simply switch users. when returned to the first person it could just do a re-scan to affirm a ”new” user, and update the function it previously held when it recognizes the old file.

...
it’s sorta like dirk and his auto-responder in homestuck. even though the AR is a flawless recreation of his mind in AI form, he made it when he was 13, so everything it encounters is filtered through his 13yo mindset, while the real dirk grew with his own experiences and reflections on them, to an eventual point where he got fed the fuck up with how the other version of him interpreted things and acted in general

ANYWAY,

this would also help explain the trace statuses. the camerata’s [minus sybil obvs] are, when acquired, simply “recorded”, because last the transistor knew, this data is technically still incomplete. it’s essentially a save state. and ‘integrated’ is obviously the permanent one for people it recognizes no longer have a means of altering their data. as said before on a post way back, red’s “intact” is an active status is reserved for the user; if she lost it, it would shift to ‘recorded’ until something more permanent comes along or she became User again.

so yeah, by this definition red was also certainly not quite herself during the events of the game, but really she only had it for a few days so there wasn’t room for dissonance. both she and boxer were pretty damn focused on the same thing, so i’m sure he didn’t notice either.

what royce said about the traces in the transistor being not quite themselves can simply be attributed to the fact that the trace data doesn’t encompass ALL of a person’s being; it may still BE a person, but it’s not a person in the sense that it has no potential to change or go beyond the bounds the trace has set.

grant i’m still confused on. i think the key factor for me here is who exactly wielded it the most during that ~year between royce’s finding it and the game’s events. royce says he only “let him borrow it” but for the sake of this argument i’m gonna say grant was the primary User during that time. he was the one to actively launch it at red, at least.
 that was quite a few traces they’d gotten to hunting/using, and i’d wager messing with any good number of traces, using that many points of view besides your own is going to have some...side-effects, especially when he abruptly lost the connection with them all. do you think he knew any of them? could hear them? i really don’t know if that’d make things better or worse.
perhaps red would have been better off because she wasn’t involved in the active harvesting of those traces; they’d already long been integrated [bar lillian and preston :V], or because her bond with boxer within it was so much stronger it drowned the rest of them out. but really, who knows.

and royce...yeah this doesn’t work too well for him. how could there be a disconnect before initial connection? probably has more to do with how it “chose/found him” than whatever the hell i’ve been rambling about here.

so something i really just picked up on this playthrough, is that it’s repeatedly and consistently said that someone “wasn’t quite themself” in reference to interacting with the transistor. understandable for what royce said about the traces inside it-being disconnected from their host and all-, but what of him saying that about himself when he found it? and both he AND ahser saying it of grant? what would the transistor/handling it alter about someone? and to what purpose? 

it’s certainly an instrument that shares an intimate bond with its User, yknow, literally using a part of their being to function and all, but perhaps...this relationship is not so one-sided? i think i’d attribute whatever happened to grant more to the overall events of the game and red becoming the new User than the actual interaction with the transistor, but still...
the only thing i could come up with [and what i don’t really want to say/believe] is that it actually *takes* a bit of that essence from the User, leaving them ever so slightly hollow-feeling and wanting the transistor back to have the connection with that part again. because that’s dumb. a) i’m like 97% sure they just wanted it back so badly bc red’s having it was messing up fucking EVERYTHING, and b) what use would a transistor have for creating a dependence like that???
and on that note, how could it have been affecting royce before he even found it?

..i’m just kind of arbitrarily linking it to traces here[whose nature ALSO confuses the fuck outta me], but maybe it’s not even related lmao. anyway.

thoughts?

mmmmohmy god i completely forgot that boxer’s trace status was uniquely listed as “Non-necoverable” when doing that last post

well.
it’s odd that it sounds like it ‘’can’t find’’ the trace data, yet you still get a function from that trace.
it might feel like a cop-out, but i guess i would call this just a literal glitch within the transistor; i’ve had the inclination since my first playthrough to think that, for some reason, more than just boxer’s trace is in the transistor. so despite the data registering enough to form a function, whatever else is in there is simply blocking the status from being displayed as “integrated”. following this, maybe since more of him is in there and the trace may not be fully ingrained in the transistor like everyone else’s, that’s why he’s so much more vocally active than all the other traces Red may know. we’ve proven royce can also be heard from it, but i guess boxer’s just overpowering everyone else 99% of the time due to both the glitch and his strong connection to Red. that might be putting too much stock in a single line for ??? effect, but hey.

i haven’t got the slightest clue WHY something went wrong while trying to integrate boxer though. if you have speculation there i would very very very much like to hear it! :y

...

......uhhh okay fuck i just
i booted up the game to check some specifics and it looks like i should have done that way sooner because

motherfuck
are you telling me a function is not derived from a trace, but vice versa.

...oddly, it says this on all of them what ARE you telling me, besides i guess that the camerata just skewered a bunch of people with this thing. 

every time i figure something out for myself regarding this game, the explanation ends up culminating in something i don't actually agree with i hate this.  alright when i was idly thinking about all this, i kept coming to a stupid conclusion, but after putting it down in words and bullshitting back and forth through views a lot while trying to flesh out and articulate them, i managed to arrive at something i'm pretty confident in.

warning that a lot of this ended up becoming increasingly a stream-of-consciousness sort of writing, so...good luck dealing with my wonky thought patterns!

right so i was thinkin' about Traces... specifically, the statuses of Integrated/Recorded/Intact.  

integration obviously seems to be a permanent, a complete and one way transfer of a trace function into a transistor- likely because a traces' host is dead/ can no longer use it. as a permanent status, this will override any previously held one. do i think that a Trace is vital to one's life? nnnoooot necessarily... but i'm rather fuzzy there and before i dive into that+the nature of Traces i'm gonna talk about the other two statuses.
only the camerata [-sybil] have the Recorded status; i believe Recording a trace must be done deliberately, through some kind of specific interaction with a transistor-not as simple as integrating one, but allows the owner to go about their lives as usual. i don't really care enough to think about exactly HOW this happens, but hey whatever. maybe it could also be simple as programming them into there, the camerata certainly has the expertise and means to do so.
Intact stopped me up for awhile, but i believe this is a specific status reserved for the User; this trace data is not stored within the transistor, but actively read from its User as they wield it. [on a fun little tangent, i like to think this also means a User's function could change over time, provided they have the same transistor long enough. :b]so, the Intact trace function is a special, personal link that ONLY a User will have access to. 

on the other hand---! perhaps, and i just thought of this as i wrote the above even though it's in direct contrast with it, perhaps THAT is how a trace comes to be "recorded"- it is left over from a previous User after the User changes. perhaps if it were to switch back to another 'recorded' User, it would switch back to the active status of "Intact". we know royce was the one who found the transistor, and it was under grant's ownership just prior to the start to  the game, so it might not be a stretch to say that the camerata passed it off to asher at some point to get all their traces logged or something.  I'd like to think that changing a User isn't quite so simple or unceremonious, but yknow i bet they were determined enough to do whatever was necessary regardless.
...i actually like that a lot more i'm gonna keep that view as my Official Theory.

-
aright now all the following stuff is pretty rambly and up-in-the-air so uh. good luck understanding without the inherent context in my mind i'm sure i won't adequately explain :v

now. Traces as a thing to individual people. this is where Transistor's awesome aesthetic of entwined digital and reality makes things hard to articulate, or even think about in the first place.  the simple thing of it being called a Trace in the first place can lend a couple different interpretations, like way to track an individual, but the one that's relevant here is it being a remnant of their life. generally, the biggest or most important or influential things they've done in their life are what's going to be easiest to pick up about them, and it's this that forms their Trace. so when a transistor interacts with someone, it does a sort of quick scan to pick up their most prominent actions to use as a function. or something...? but at any rate no, i do not think a trace is equivalent to a soul, or vital to someone's being alive.. but it is still essentially "part of them", in a way.

what i don't like about THIS is that it implies that Traces only exist when there's a transistor in the picture.
that leads me down a whole other path of thinking that transistors, in a very literal sense, are some kind of 'god' instrument; that they and their dimension have existed long before cloudbank and blah blah blah but uh...that's PRETTY DARN FAR-FETCHED and i don't think i really want to devote energy to chasing that rabbit.
plus it does nothing to help my previous issue, which forced that the Process and Red's transistor are linked by nothing more than the camerata's actions [how the transistor reacts to a Spine is proof enough for me  that they're closely related but. ARGH.] unless i wanna follow the same route and say the Process have always existed alongside transistors, but again this is kind of a stupid and unnecessarily...uh...mythological train of  thought so i'm gonna derail it for now. 

i prefer to think that Traces,as a solid unit of data, exist naturally within cloudbankers, while it's the transistor that translates this data into a usable function, which is a much more sensible and down-to-earth power for the transistor to have. [i mean it flat-out says that, "function derived from trace data"] but then, what criteria would someone's actions or memories have to meet to qualify it for being part of their Trace???  somewhat in this vein, @venhediss​ once brought up a pretty interesting point, regarding the traces of the camerata members; how grant's sucks the life from things and asher's cripples stuff; that this could have weird implications regarding their relationship, and it could mean a hell of a lot of different things depending on whose perspective we're coming from! so, is it the transistor's? what kind of "perspective" would a transistor even have??? what if the current User's? by extent, could each User have a varied set of functions despite the Traces being the same?????
i'm kind of getting carried away with myself again and this is all a lot of weird conjecture i don't want to get into on my own.  :b

as ANOTHER tangent of thought, maybe a trace is not something truly formed as  a specific unit of data until after its owner is deceased, and the "criteria" of the things that make it into the trace are what is most talked and remembered about them by other people... [which actually goes along with my thing about an Intact and Recorded trace being derived from a transistor's active link with a User... well shit i guess i found my explanation after all, certainly took enough bouncing around lmao] 

alright, i think i’ve finally begun to make sense of that whole deal with royce’s boss fight for myself.

please stop me if i’m missing some contradictory in-game evidence here :v 

alright, transistors exist in their own ‘dimension’ or what have you. cloudbank is an entirely different world than wherever transistors come from, though i’d like to say that place is something of an urban legend in cloudbank, given the whole deal with it looking vaguely like the ”Country”.  the instrument itself doesn’t “store” trace data and whatnot, but transports it to its own section in that place for safe-keeping.

the Process are something that exist in Cloudbank, as royce said, working in the background to make changes to the city. once the transistor had been used, the Process were...”freed” from whatever kept them there, which wasn’t a problem until Grant was no longer the User keeping them in-check with that transistor. 

the Cradle is the Camerata’s creation, a means of bridging these two worlds. 
still trying to make sense of what exactly putting red’s transistor back in it accomplished, but it’s weird how they were both in that transistor’s data storage area, and “only one is good for the return trip”. and the fact of her still having the thing after leaving...
i think the best [though still pretty inaccurate] word i can use for it at the moment is “soft reset”, putting it there sort of wiped all the stuff done since its User switch[perhaps the last time it had been in the cradle]; i.e, the activation of the Process by the Camerata. so now the Process is back in the background, though its effects have to be manually reversed since the town’s processing wasn’t a DIRECT use of the transistor.

what i don’t like about this is that it forces me to believe that the transistor and process are linked by little more than the camerata’s actions. they’re surely much more intertwined than that, but...

eh, i’ll get it figured eventually.