LNH20: Earth-Twenty Roundup Thread And Getting The New Tag In There

[Andrew Perron]

On Sun, 27 Nov 2011 02:09:09 +0000 (UTC), Lalo Martins wrote:

> Tori is a member of the LNH, a robot, a legal citizen of Japan, a 
> millionaire, and a very popular toy franchise.
> 
> It was built circa 1981 by Kid Enthusiastic. 

Incidentally, I had originally thought of him as being born in 1982, but
I'm thinking of moving it back to 1972.

> Maybe it's the only truly 
> sentient creation of Kid E, along the lines of “nobody had told him he 
> couldn't do it, so he did it”. Mostly, being way too intelligent for his 
> own good, young James had no good friends, so he built one.

Oooooooh.  You know, I had had a vague idea along these lines, but I didn't
get any further with it.  Clearly, you did.

> Tori looks kind of like a 1m-tall, classic-Anime stylized version of the 
> Space Shuttle, with somewhat anthropomorphized head, and penguin-like 
> flappers on the sides. It looks like that because Kid E read somewhere 
> the Shuttle's design was based on a bird, and not having the web around 
> to quickly dispel that myth, he was excited by it and his imagination 
> came up with a robot.

D'awwww!  That's adorable.  ...and hard to imagine; I'm basically
visualizing the Space Shuttle with flamingo legs.

>  It can walk upright, but also fly; its feet have 
> small shuttle-like wings on the sides, and of course, rockets on the 
> bottom. When it needs fine manipulation, a pair of cavities open in the 
> chest and little robotic manipulators come out.

Reminds me of the "cleaning robot" I came up with in 4th grade.  It had
little helicopter propellers it flew around on, and a robot arm inside
which would grab cleaning untensils; you used a remote with a TV screen on
it to fly it around.  Because that was so much easier than spraying a wall
and wiping it down yourself, right?

> Kid Enthusiastic and Tori remained close friends for about 20 years, and 
> during the 90s, it was for all practical purposes Kid E's sidekick. Then, 
> during the Crossover Crisis that led to the creation of the Killfile, 
> things somehow got sour between them, and by the time of the Killfile, 
> they went their separate ways.

Hmmmmmmmmm. I'm trying to think about what they'd split up over, but I'm
not coming up with anything.

> At some point in the mid-90s, after it had saved the world and 
> experienced teenage angst, some of the Saviors campaigned to have its 
> rights recognized as a sentient being, and eventually, Japan thought it 
> would be a good marketing ploy to go with it, and gave Tori full 
> citizenship. 

Note that it couldn't be the Saviors if this is post-Killfile.  Or did this
happen first?

> Its legal name is Jinkozuno Tori (or Tori Jinkozuno in the 
> West) For the select few with working unicode: 人工頭脳鳥.

Works fine for me, though I think it makes my browser display in a
different font.

> In a moment of inspiration, it went to Bandai while it was still in the 
> public eye, and licensed its image to toys of all kinds, a successful 
> series of video games, and an anime, that wasn't commercially very 
> successful but became a cult and later had two equally failed, equally 
> cultish relaunch attempts (the second one in late 2011). For a self-
> respecting young otaku, a plush Tori is about as mandatory as a plush 
> Totoro.

And even more adorable! (Note: This is impossible.)

> So by the time it split up with Kid E, Tori was a very rich robot. It 
> went back to Japan and attempted to live a somewhat normal life, although 
> the life of a Japanese celebrity is even farther from normal than that of 
> an American celebrity.

Especially when one is a robot. I'm not sure how "normal life" would even
work, at that point. (But then, I've always been somewhat fuzzy on it.)

> - Why did it never try to reproduce, or even mass-produce itself? Or 
> maybe it has, but with the Killfile in place it just couldn't be done?

I had actually thought about this.  Basically: True AI is nearly impossible
to create; all the known examples are unique events, created in entirely
different ways, and all attempts to replicated the circumstances of
creation have failed.  Kid E basically did it by accident.

> - Why did the Killfile leave it alone? Maybe it was in space when it 
> happened? But then how did it come back and continue to work?

Simply put, the Killfile stops *humans* from having powers.  It doesn't
stop something nonhuman from being so.

> - What is it powered by? Being the 80s, maybe an atomic reactor heart? 
> Does that cause it to be less popular these days when atomic energy is 
> viewed with suspicion?

Hmmm.  Well, this *was* before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.

> - What is their relationship like today, with both in the LNH?

Depends on how it broke up, I suppose!

> - Do cybernetic birds dream of cloud computing?

Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, puffy white servers.