#thought experiments

It is also common for people to want to find alternative solutions for problems.

∴ It is the responsibility of the thought experiment to adequately limit its applicable logic and answers.

This can mean rethinking the entire structure of a thought experiment to be more limited.

For example, a thought experiment in which two buttons appear in front of everyone on Earth. Setting aside where it goes from there…

“Everyone?” At the same time? No matter who, no matter where?

Time zones exist. Are roughly 50% of people getting them asleep? What if someone’s driving? In a medically induced coma? Extremely drunk? A literal baby?

I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS! And that doesn’t need to be the case! That’s not the fault of the thinkers, but of the question.

Narrow the scope.

For example:

You are one of 500 adults of sound mind seated in a room. In front of each of you are two buttons. You can only press one of those two buttons, and no one can leave their seats until everyone has pressed one their buttons.

The first button is a vote to get cake as you leave. The second is a vote for pie. Which do you press?

Tagged by @hbyrde36 and @turinspeachjam.

Rules: Send me an emoji in an ask, and I'll write & share 3 sentences for that WIP!

👑 Crown of Thorns

🔮 The Oracle of Roane County

🐈‍⬛ Cat's in the Cradle

💭 Zeno's Paradox

I have my progress graph:

And snippet from Zeno's Paradox behind the cut.

Obviously, because this is me, I was imagining them in Iron-Blooded Orphans, either as a Gjallarhorn squad in some dismal backwater (with Shiro eventually realising being a member of the colonial police kind of sucks) or as some unaffiliated mercenary group, with Aina perhaps being from Gjallarhorn and that making for a conflict.

And since I'm rubbish at AUs but always need a ready source of OC inspiration for my style of fic-writing, that got me wondering who else you could readily transpose into the Post Disaster timeline.

Obviously the Shangri-La kids from Gundam ZZ are a freebie since they're the most clear-cut precursors to Tekkadan as a concept. You'd barely have to change anything about them except removing the newtype abilities.

Likewise, the antagonistic characters from Gundam Wing swap over with ease because Gjallarhorn is just OZ if it won and then became entrenched for 300 years. Treize, Une, Noin and Zechs just need new uniforms and we're done. You could probably fold in the Gundam boys too, and likely with minimal reworking at that. Heero probably wouldn't be augmented in the same way, but make him a space rat and we're laughing. Quatre can be from the upper classes/colony company side of things, Trowa's human debris, give Duo a spacer/pirate origin and Wu Fei . . .

You know what, Wu Fei as the scion of some kind of warrior monk group that's been maintaining a Gundam since the Calamity War could have legs as a concept. Maybe I should file that one away for later use.

Kudelia already retreads a lot of Relena's schtick in a more pragmatic/cynical manner. Dorothy, however, would make a perfect member of Gjallarhorn high society and Sally can be another disgruntled soldier who comes to realise the money isn't worth it any more.

Gundam 00 is hit and miss. Setsuna is superseded in every way by Mikazuki in terms of character concept. The Innovades and super soldiers are right out. I already kind of imagine Gundam Flauros' original pilot as a variant of Neil!Lockon, though, and Graham is the kind of lunatic who can go with anything if you're not afraid of fun.

Gundam and Zeta Gundam . . . nah. They're just too tied into that original conceptualisation of what the series is about. I don't think the White Base or Argama crews really belong anywhere else. And I feel somewhat similarly about G Fighter, although maybe you could redo some of the stuff with the Devil Gundam to relate to the original IBO Gundam development process?

And then I remember that modern operating systems don't boot via BIOS anymore, but via UEFI. And UEFI offers an API and a command line prompt, it runs from FAT and uses a Microsoft executable file format (PE)...