Out-Of-Mind visual textures

Trope-a-Day: A Glitch in the Matrix

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A Glitch in the Matrix: Avoiding this sort of thing, when it comes to virtual reality, is one of the few legitimate uses for the Out-of-Mind visual textures. (Others mostly including hiding gifts and playing really terrible practical jokes.)

A more commonly seen variant are “weavespiders”, small metallic fractal spiders (which everyone knows to ignore) used in virtual realms to collect trash, reassemble broken scenery, and otherwise do maintenance. While, obviously enough, this can simply be done programmatically without requiring any visual metaphor, reifying them like this is a simple way of avoiding the uncanny valley effect of changes “just happening” with no apparent in-world cause.

You’ve Got To Read This

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basilisk hack: (from the mythical petrifying serpent); a class of cognoweapon capable of being introduced through normal sensory channels which attack metalogical defects in sensory input processing or cognition, causing various cognitive dysfunctions, neural storms, seizures, and in advanced cases, coma.  Most publicly known families of basilisk hack are automatically filtered by modern security metacortex extensions.

YGBM hack: (“you’ve got to believe me”); a more advanced class of cognoweapon based on basilisk hack (q.v.) principles, in which the basic hack serves as a channel to introduce a memetic payload without it passing through normal cognitive/memetic processing, thus causing instant belief and/or conversion.  This is largely a theoretical class due to the difficulty of passing a memetic payload through limited sensory bandwidth and the nature of available cognitive exploits, but certain simple examples are known to exist, including the Andreth-Calcië emotropic symphonies, the Citizen Nondescript bioshell series, the Out-Of-Mind visual textures, and the Must-Have-It Box.

YGHM hack: (“you’ve got to have me”); a specific YGBM hack (q.v.) variant focused on inducing desire, or simple lust.  While no target-specific forms are known to exist live, one subset of the Andreth-Calcië emotropic symphonies is known to induce these mental states in a generalized sense.  (Legal warning: effective-fidelity recordings of these qualify as a Class I Coercive Substance and, as such, non-consensual exposure to such is a serious crime under Imperial law.)

yaghem: (slang); a person whose sexuality presentation and/or seduction techniques possess all the subtlety of a YGHM hack (q.v.), albeit without the effectiveness.  Considered derogatory.

– excerpted from Cognitive Threats Monthly: Special Introductory Issue