Streaky Haddock

not pictured: the tesla eating the actual shuttle.

It's he!

Curses! Foiled by those meddling validhunters! And their dog, too!

Veeeeeeeeeeeery nice. I love social engineering.

Neeeeat. A simple but cool character concept. That's a pretty plausible, albeit horrific depiction of what a diona might look like, too. Now just put it in a big floofy black dress and a white curly wig. Are those figures accurate?

THIS USED TO BE A THING. I SWEAR TO FUCK, THIS WAS A FEATURE ONCE. WHERE DID IT GO???? AM I CRAZY???

like the FUCKING APIARY?

Name: Zsi Gender: Male Orientation: Undisclosed Nicknames/Alias: None Recorded Picture: Kindly drawn by Fei Hazelwood (FeiH). Age/D.O.B: Unclear, Physically Mature. Place Of Birth: Arkship IIb Species: Grey Blood Type: AB+ Alignment: Good Affiliation: Nanotrasen Religious Beliefs: Complicated. Seen too much redspace shit to be an atheist, but doesn't trust enties from outside of realspace. Childhood: Born on Schedule. No Genetic Deviancies. Xenobiology Researcher. Adulthood: Logistics and Human Resources Fanatic. Applies his Xenosociological theories to Security, Human Resources and Medical work. Absorbs as much SOP and Space Law as possible to become the ultimate administrator and bureaucrat. Detailed Information Appearance: Very little genetic deviation is present in the face of this Grey. Large black eyes, an almost identical face to many other Greys that come and go from the Cyberiad. In this picture he is wearing an alien face shirt. His neck slouches forward a little, giving him a laboured and nervous bearing, though this is just a trait of his species. Long fingers and thin-sinewed arms hand down by his sides as he stands in front of a measurement wall which seems to show him to be about 5'11 in height. Zsi moves and shifts about with a nervous, almost restless energy. He's prone to small tics like snapping his fingers, spinning and pacing and flipping a full 360 degrees. When he tries to smile, or frown or snarl he often produces a gurning rictus. Facial expressions not being instinctual to Greys, it's likely his uncanny-valley triggering attempt to ingratiate himself with multicultural society. Character Voice: A flat, monotone drone occasionally punctuated with awkward pauses and jarring, stilted emphasis of words when he makes puns. When angry or stressed to the point where he elevates his voice, his voice emits a nasal, reedy screeching. Personality: Zsi is at ease with deindividualisation and has no issues becoming part of a greater organisation. He throws himself fully into whatever work he is assigned and accomplishes it as effectively and humanely as he can manage. He's easy going and enjoys friendly relationships with a variety of coworkers and civilians. However, he does struggle noticeably to form meaningful connections and he has admitted to some fears that his relationships with his fellow Cyberiad colleagues are superficial in nature. He enjoys coffee, creating dumb personas out of costumes he wears and music and dance of all types. Zsi does, however, have an addictive personality. He is easily hooked on caffeine, and tends not to reach for the healthy sleeper treatment to addiction than falls into the denial and fix-seeking tendencies once afflicted. Morphine, Various types of Coffee and Space Drugs have all hit him at some point or another. To this point he refuses to smoke or consume alcohol or drugs if he can help it. He's a compulsive neat freak and hates mess and disorder. He's also not brave, and though he has too much professional pride to outright cave into cowardice, he's far more likely to fire and flee from a threat than he is to fire and pursue. Medical Record: August 28th 2561 - Detox for Caffeine Addiction September 1st 2561 - Detox for Caffeine Addiction September 12th 2561 Detox for Caffeine Addiction September 26th 2561 - Hospitalised for extreme water burns over 80% of his body. Was brought in next to a charred plasma-man body. September 29th 2561 - Retrieved from an unauthorised quantum pad expedition on board the cyberiad, deceased on arrival. Corpse quarantined as a highly virulent strain of brainrot was found in his cells and the body destroyed. He was then cloned from backup. Security Record: November 2nd 2561 - Convicted of Manslaughter of a Command Officer. Due to extenuating circumstances, he was demoted to Officer, sentenced to a spell in the brig. Compliant and contrite throughout the process. Character Biography Background: Raised in the Xenobiology Commune of Arkship IIb. He claims to have many happy memories studying inter-species diplomatic tapes, filing medical and biochemical data and analysing stool samples from an early age. Zsi remembers how quiet the arkship was. The silence wasn't something his colleagues noticed, as all communication was stored in psi-computers or through the ship's psionic expression link. Yet even from this early age he was aurally conscious. As he matured he found himself more interested in the societal structures and anthropology of alien species than their biology and chemistry. Why did the Vox refuse to leave even their corpses behind? Why was humanity so comfortable with death yet so uncomfortable with their own reproduction? Why were the Kidan so terrified of their own females? Though the strict, militaristic and authoritarian nature of Arkship science didn't stifle him (in fact he was rather comfortable with the routine and clear expectations, as many ship-bound greys are) he knew he wasn't going to get any closer to other species where he was. Social mobility isn't much of a thing on the Arkships as they are on Mauna-b. So he signed up with Nanotrasen, the sole rights-holder of the Grey's diplomatic channels to the Human-Skrellian alliance, after obtaining a letter of endorsement from his Department Head. He can't go back. Not because leaving is taboo, but because re-entry is impractical. The moment he applied to leave, his replacement was being inseminated in a test tube. It was at Nanotrasen that he discovered music. Family: Arkship IIb Xenobiology Commune. Standard Genetic Template. Personal Relationships [Friend] Kennard Rose - "The only person I have regular non-work related conversations with. I wouldn't say we're close though. I'm too busy and I fear I lack the capacity for deep bonds. He'd told fragments of his personal life but I haven't given back. He's also as busy as I am, but his line of work has jaded him. I don't think he has the capacity to fully trust anyone any more than I have the capacity to meaningfully connect with people." [Respected] Gerhard van Lutz - "His diction isn't the best, and i'm certain he hears voices in his head. Regardless, he's one of the more competant medical administrators i've witnessed, and understands that managing his department is as much about keeping it supplied and trained as it is about being personally proficient." [Dislike] Ipsum Bellus Critinus - "At this stage I'm reasonably sure he is a cosmic mistake that reality is continuously trying to fix that we keep un-fixing, squandering resources and whatever equipment was on his lost corpse in the process. It's only a matter of time until his continued existance, in some form or another, contributes to the decay of our reality." [Fear] Dimethyl - "I used to see a goofy, robust greytider and little more. Then one day I pressed him to open up, and I saw the monster within the suit. It's a monster that views me as it's friend. If i'm lucky, it'll stay that way." [Neutral] Isthel Straub - "And here I thought Brooke had good judgement! [Neutral] Ruum-Ovv-Oumn - "I'm reasonably sure he's the type of guy to hear voices in his head. His sole interests appear to be soap, and how to recklessly endanger our lives, risking creating a stage 4 singularity, by fitting bluespace containers inside bluespace containers to carry as much soap as he possibly can." [Acquaintance] KALKI - "Who is this fucker and why is he giving me dead rats?" Romantically Involved | Romantic Interest | Admire | Respected | Close Friend | Good Friend | Friend | Acquaintance | Neutral/Unsure | Dislike | Hate | Despise | Death Wish | Fear Faction Relations [Allied] Nanotrasen - "I don't care for the salary, and though I like the work I'm not so sure about the goals that work leads to. What is the Cyberiad? Why is it rebuilt again and again? Why can't I remember things others do? What are we even doing here? Research? Really?" [Dislike] Syndicate - "They kill us, they bomb us, they brainwash us into turning on our friends and colleagues. Yet there are some that seem to have morals. Sometimes their arguments give me a flicker of doubt in my duties and commitments. One day, maybe one day I'll just go postal with an energy sword and a holoparasite only to be replaced the next shift with a blissfully ignorant, loyal clone. Perhaps this has already happened." [Enemy] Abductors - "Their butchery and hostile method of study are reprehensible and can't possibly obtain good test results. They don't even use control subjects! They just rip out organs and put in new ones, ones that aren't even catalogued. It's a disgrace that we were shaped by the same masters." Allied | Love | Like | Neutral | Dislike | Hate | Enemy Other Information Knows too much space law.

I remember. I think the Bartender is great with his dispensers, but he's kinda cut off from hydroponics if he wants to make things like blumpkin juice, bottler recipes, cherry juice and stuff like that. I miss what it felt like to be part of a catering team. Although I remember the horrors of never having ingredients as a bartender. I never want to go back to those days.

SHAME

Honestly, if the Captain used the words 'Antagonists' in character, that draws the imagery to me of revolutionaries and mutineers, so it's not IMMEDIATELY immersion breaking... ...I mean, it's clearly not what was going on.

He's also poorly positioned to coordinate anyone. Really that Sub-head role should be given to the Chef and Hydro/Bar/Kitchen merged together into one bigger department. Called *Catering*.

I was the Warden! I strongly suspected Blaire had done something only because I saw her putting her hypo into her backpack, but when the brig phys came over and said "I dunno what this guy's got, but the cure is copper" I didn't put the pieces together until you exploded into a borg. At that point I was like: "Welp. There's no way I can prove my suspicions, best to just move on." IT was code green at the time, so I couldn't just tell someone to nab and examine the CMO's hypo.

Head of Personnels 90% of the time. Two Cardinal Sins: First being paperwork for paperwork's sake. The purposes of stamps and forms is retain and communicate information over long periods of time. For regular job transfers no stamps are needed, no signatures needed, you just need to ask over the command radio: "Hey is X good for Y". Then you'll get an answer or no response. You break out the stamps and signatures when the relevant head of staff isn't responding over radios (Basically: Look pal, you want your job, you're gonna have to track down your soon-to-be-boss for me) or when someone's getting additional accesses you want to make sure are properly recorded and remembers for later. Like, when someone asks "WHY THE FUCK DOES THE CLOWN HAVE SEC ACCESS" and you don't quite remember, you go to your file cabinet, open the draw and see the transfer letter with the clown and cryo'd HoS stamp and you say: "Ah, yes, the HoS thought sec's morale was low." and then you hear "BUT I'M THE HOS" and then you say. "You're the NEW HoS. The Old HoS cryo'd." People who do paperwork for paperwork's sake slow things the fuck down. There's one HoP who I won't name who is so anal about pointless, fruitless bureaucracy that i've seen four separate riots outside their line and when they aren't rioting it's never empty. You should want your line empty for as much of the round as possible because: Sin Number two: Not managing your departments. Head of Personnel is seen as an easy logistics job well let me tell you otherwise, Sonny Jim, the Head of Personnel has the second most crucial job on the station. Whilst the Captain manages the Heads of Staff, the Head of Personnel manages the crew. He was the OG, man. The original Internal Affairs; and actually acts as Human Resources. He checks that the clown isn't dead and is actually trying to be funny, he makes sure the mime isn't speaking, he makes sure the janitor isn't SSD or dead in a closet somewhere and he makes sure that Hydroponics and Cargo are supplying science, the kitchen, engineering, security. Heads come to him going "weehhh i have no chemist" or "wehhhhh my detective got gibbed" and for about 70% of these issues, the Head of Personnel's solution is simple gratifying and that is: Throw more People and more Resources at the problem. The Head of Personnel should be hiring and supplying new/extra janitors and detectives. He should be helping Medical get their blood bags and spray bottles.The Head of Personnel is able, if given permission from relevant heads, to logistically macromanage the shit out of the manifest. Do you realise how powerful extra detectives are? In a community where I get ahelps from furious antags who are certain of meta but never take basic forensic precautions, extra detectives are POWERFUL. The ability to hire replacements for turbo-dead or just plain perma-missing personnel is a godsend to a stressed department. Not to mention, the Head of Personnel is uniquely placed in having hydroponics, mining AND cargo access. If the QM is tearing his hair about points, he is uniquely placed to just SHOWER cargo in extra points. Just... just DRENCH those short-wearing nerdos in points. A Good HoP never had to valid-hunt (first because it's against the rules) because if he's doing everything well, the station should be a well-oiled production MACHINE. Yet 90% of the HoPs I see just sit there doing fuck-all and making sure job transfers are as agonising as possible and then whine "but i have nothing to doooohoohoohooooooooo" until they eventually get promoted to Captain.

that looks fucking awesome.

Take a look at this, tell me if there are any obvious spriting issues or fuckups or if a sprite is unbearably poorly shaded or ugly. These items in-game has no grey sprites, so they currently show up as naked if you put them on. I'm working down a big list, so my attitude is very much "get these done, make them majestic when I have the skill later on, if I survive". https://imgur.com/a/VSTos If you hate the shape of the uniforms, that's not a priority right now. That's the shape of the grey body, and all the grey uniform sprites right now are shaped like this. I cannot stress enough that right now my sole concern is whether they are obviously broken or unbearably hideous. Also bearing in mind many of these uniforms will have armour, labcoats, backpacks etc over them.

This Drask is one cool dude.

Also, not forgetting that IPCs when debrained and with their speaker set to off, can't ghost from their brain without giving their right to respawn/reconstruction. And when IPCs ARE repaired, they don't get a notification to go back in their bodies. Their bodies, which, by the way, show up as 'catatonic'. So it's entirely possible someone will bring them to life, see they're cataonic, shake their head sadly to the blueshield and then the IPC gets their shit stripped and replaced.

Well, you say the slips never cause damage, but what about the times when the surgery proc doesn't trigger, and you end up beating them in the head with your welding tool/crowbar?

and did any of the bees go for B0R-15, his target? Did they fuck

Thanks! I remember you bringing this up. The easiest solution would definitely be to make some alternate colour thunderdome sprites, and we already have eswords p much every colour of the rainbow. So this should be a trivial change for our mappers. We'd need to make different colour thunderdome sprites but that should be so simply a monkey could do it. ...Maybe I could give it a shot.

https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/8562 make sure to comment on the pull request

EMP x Sleep-pen is a terrible comparison. IPCs are not immune to meme-chems, only ones that cause tox damage. No, IPCs can't literally do that, as they have internal component damage now which require surgery and if their arms are damaged they can't hold the welder.

Except I've been told on multiple occasions that because IPCs are so awkwardly coded that to remove the IPC weakness would require a complete re-code. So I'm operating on the presumption that option's just not on the table.

This may be controversial because IPCS are immune to toxins, viruses, bleed, clone and skeletal damage. However, IPCs as they are are tragically fragile for reasons that made sense when they were first introduce, but are no longer apply. For instance, IPCs used to be very easy to repair. They only required a welding tool and cable coil/nanopaste, had no internal organs besides their brain, so all you had to do was put them on a table, endure the failure chance and reassemble them on the spot. However, now, you are required to open up the affected IPC's chest and repair their internal organs. With the additional risk that comes with ghetto surgery of the attack proc'ing instead, or of regular surgery slippage, this makes IPC revival actually very hard. IPCs not having to fear from genetics, viruses and toxins is not quite as one-sided as it seems. Legitimately dangerous and disruptive viruses are few and far between, and often very quickly dealt with by medbay (most nasty viruses requiring gold, salt, or mannitol) to cure. In addition, IPCs can't benefit from healing viruses which are actually very effective and provide a tangible difference to one's survivability. In addition, IPCs can't benefit from any kind of genetic powers. The downsides there are obvious, in addition to ruling them out of the geneticist job without using a sentient test subject. IPCs not suffering from tox damage is quite a powerful aid, I grant you. However, toxins damage isn't that common. Toxins Damage is inflicted via green spiders, radiation, drinking something dumb or someone aggressively trying to poison you. However, anybody with access to efficient and effective poisons likely also has access to resources to produce EMPs. EMPS = Are area of effect and travel through walls. The majority of the time, unless you're at the very edges of the radius, it will scorch every single internal and external organ in the IPC's body, killing them instantly. Of the eight game-mode antagonists on our server, five of them have access to cheap and efficient EMPs. Traitors have EMP flashlights and EMP implants (the latter of which can be activated while stunned and cuffed), Changelings have the EMP screeh (which can be activated while stunned and cuffed), Cultists have the EMP talisman, Wizards... well, wizards are powerful against everything but it sucks to be EMP'd through a wall when you weren't even aware the Wizard was there, and Nuclear Operatives have access to traitor stuff and more. This brings me back to the misconception that IPCs are "easy to fix." All other races can be pushed into a fully upgraded sleeper and every inch of them healed within moments. IPCs have to manually repair every inch of their body. When insta-killed with an EMP, the IPC needs the following repaired: Both Hands, Both Arms, IPC charging implant, Head, Eyes, Upper Chest, Microbattery, Brain, lower both, both legs, both feet. Many Roboticists don't know how to repair IPCs, many don't realise the brain is in the head. Many don't know how IPC surgery works. Many forget to fix or replace your power charging implant that goes in your right arm. Given how commonplace EMPs are (it's easy to be killed by an EMP when you aren't even INVOLVED in the antag's business) and given how horrendously IPCs and EMPs are coded (as i've been told many times by the coding team) the terrible EMP weakness can't be modified or really removed. So why not remove the brute/burn weakness? I don't believe it makes sense anymore, given IPCs limbs propensity to pop off, and given how awkard they can be to repair. Yes, IPCs can repair themselves so long as they've got a functional arm AND hand, but that still uses up a healthy amount of welding fuel and if they DO lose a limb, they can't re-attach it themselves. It also makes them horrendously vulnerable to things like space and frost oil. Frost Oil and Syndi-Bee Toxin will keep an IPC down for the rest of the round, as nobody knows what the hell degreaser is or thinks to use it when an IPC is poisoned. Hell, the idea of IPCs beingpoisoned is so foreign to many people (IPCs included) that often they persistent dying upon revival is met with confusion and despair. Not to mention, removing their damage weaknesses should be easy enough, since these things are coded far more simply. All it would involve is deleting some numbers and then their brute and burn resistance would be the same as most other races. Other alternatives, that I can think of, are more complicated: A) Making IPC surgery easy as hell. Make roller beds and tables count as 100% success chance, make their surgeries quicker, etc. So they really can be reassembled in the field instead of laboured over by a labcoat that would much rather be dealing with a mech or cyborg. B) Making Nanopaste heal every single part of an IPC's body, in and out. The exact number it heals I'm not too fussy about, so long as it's not necessary to agonisingly heal every single organ after the inevitable EMP. C) Overhauling IPCs or EMPs or both completely. This is not a realistic option I know, but... eugh. Edit: Also this is very stream of consciousness, but IPCs get fucked p hard in Blob/Nuke Ops rounds. It's not uncommon to get one's arms shot off in one hit by Nuke Ops, and one shove from a blob will... also make your limbs pop off.