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IJBM: Ghost Ants

glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
edited 2016-08-11 21:35:26 in Meatspace
Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
Ghost ants.  These are tiny little ants, a couple millimeters long or shorter.  They get their name from their characteristically light-colored abdomen, which suggests the appearance of a "ghost" in the sense of having a head but no body.

These are fast little ants.  And they are also persistent little fuckers.

They've been all over the house lately.  A few keep on appearing everywhere and it's damn hard to trace them to whence they came.

And their latest conquest?  Setting up a nest in my car.

Fuck you, ants.  Fants.

Comments

  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    Checked your house for ancient Indian burial ground?
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    lrdgck wrote: »
    Checked your house for ancient Indian burial ground?


    Good idea.
  • fourteenwingsfourteenwings
    There is love everywhere, I already know
    Somehow it feels appropriate that somebody haunting GMH would take the form of something small and usually insignificant so as to properly bring him despair.
  • KilgoreTroutKilgoreTrout
    If you decided to spring for an exterminator and killed them all off (assuming that they're still around a month later, of course), what would they become then? Ghost ghost ants? Ghost ant ghosts?
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    edited 2016-09-11 21:03:28
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    Or simply "ants", if the ghost operator is its own inverse. That would make for some fun ant algebra. (I guess I've just betrayed my piss-poor knowledge of algebra, but whatever, I'm an experimentalist and I've had all the time since first year to forget all about it.)
  • KilgoreTroutKilgoreTrout
    ^ You just blew my mind.
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    edited 2016-09-11 21:54:59
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    lrdgck wrote: »
    Or simply "ants", if the ghost operator is its own inverse. That would make for some fun ant algebra. (I guess I've just betrayed my piss-poor knowledge of algebra, but whatever, I'm an experimentalist and I've had all the time since first year to forget all about it.)



    But actually the "undead" designator is some sort of opposite of dead.

    Without being alive.

    So maybe instead of just having two states, alive (+1) and dead (-1), there's actually a third state of existence status, which is...I dunno, undead (0), or perhaps even a whole second dimension, with undead (+i) and neither-dead-nor-alive-nor-undead-somehow (-i).
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    edited 2016-09-11 22:02:50
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    I have two picks. One, undead is that which should be dead, yet is alive. So, -undead would be one that should be alive, yet is dead. Hard to imagine. So perhaps the other possibility is better: never-born-yet-alive. If so, then a good example of the (-i) state is the Golem. (Edit: just realized this fits both definitions.)

    (edit 2)

    Therefore, ghost ants = undead ants = i*ants

    ghost ghost ants = i*(i*ants) = -ants

    ...so, tell me if I get this wrong, you can't have ghosts of ghost ants, since ghost ghost ants are simply dead? But by killing ghost ants you turn them into robots? Nah...
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    edited 2016-09-11 22:01:30
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Actually perhaps it's a two-axis thing where there's what one is and what one should be

    is alive, should be alive: living
    is dead, should be dead: dead
    is alive, should be dead: undead
    is dead, should be alive: ?????

    golem: a third axis?  or maybe the origin of these two axes?  or maybe it is the ?????
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    Is dead, should be alive = Lazarus? I'd say Golem is either this, or we leave this an exercise for the reader. I guess so far we better stick to lower-dimensional spaces for simplicity, but that's obviously a natural expansion of the theory.
  • DYREDYRE
    edited 2016-09-11 23:49:06
    Let's say...
    life and death is complex (clearly it is if we live among the undead)
    un-alive = dead
    alive is clearly not the same thing as dead.
    undead is also something different from being alive,
    and un-undead is something like, after using Holy Water in a Final Fantasy game, you might say that you made your character un-undead, and that's equivalent to them just being alive.

    So basically I think it's fair to say that multiplying by un three times gives the multiplicative identity, so that should mean un is a cube root of unity, or un =
    (-1 ± i√3)/2.
  • BeeBee
    edited 2016-09-15 16:31:01
    Most mythologies and game mechanics delineate undead as "alive or animate but missing a few existential things" (generally coherent consciousness or some functioning bodily systems).  This helps to distinguish between that and raise spells, which do the job a bit more cleanly.
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    Come to think of it, I don't really remember too many cases of fantasy-style "Raise Dead" from world's mythologies. Burying dragon's teeth from Greek mythology seems more like a summon creature magic item (wicked cool but not what we speak of). Voodoo is - as far as I know - more like, the first part of the spell is magicking the guy dead in the first place, which kind of misses the point. And mythical vampires, while quite close, also tend to miss one or another important factor.
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