Hiveminds and the pride flag machine by
Tomash
on 2019-07-01 06:25:00 UTC
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A bit earlier, Delta started off some RP in Rudi's with a machien that would print out relevant pride flags for characters that looked at it (but without outing people).
My tangential reaction to this was imagining some sort of plural entity (maybe one of those hiveminds that are made up of people who voluntarily decided to join brains for some reason - come to think it, have those come up in the thread yet?) coming by the machine and having it just hurl out all the flags.
And then I got encouraged to post the thought here, so ... yeah.
I love hive minds! by
Cicada
on 2019-06-27 20:27:00 UTC
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To add my two cents, I think Gestalts are somewhat distinct. Gestalts almost never assimilate, and they don't often breed new bodies, either. They only add new ones if some of the old ones die. They're very high on the composite side- either they have a few individuals, each of which is responsible for a certain task, or they have task groups responsible for different things. And they can be quite affected by their component parts.
They're one of my favorites mainly because I think the whole assimilation thing can make a hive-mind rather one-note. They're gonna getcha, and you'll either have to kill them or convince them to leave, and then they're kinda out of the picture. But a gestalt is capable of chilling out with other characters.
But then again, sometimes it's a great deal of fun to run from or try to negotiate with the spooky hive mind.
Most gestalts I've seen either treat the parts of the gestalt as lobes of the brain, which are slightly more vulnerable to damage, or as something like moods.
One of my favorite gestalts is Gavotte from Skin Horse, a webcomic I enjoy quite a bit. It also has plenty of other sorts of hive mind.
I also built a gestalt myself, though I've not written anything for them, with the gestalt "portions" acting almost like different moods. They kind of have the problem of being too human.
I guess that's the tension in a lot of sci-fi, that it's hard to interact with things that are meaningfully different from humans.
But speaking of fantasy- anyone know of any fantasy hive minds? I guess there are mind flayers from D&D...
Sample Types of Hive Minds by
Good Mod Addict
on 2019-06-27 01:06:00 UTC
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Here are the three broad categories of hive mind we came up with in Discord, if that's helpful.
Insectile/Swarm: One mind controlling many bodies, but the bodies have no effect on the mind
Mind Hive: One body, many consciousnesses that form some kind of composite mind, with each consciousness contributing its own experiences and worldviews
Mind Hive Mind (thanks, Granz, for the term): A Mind Hive where the composite mind has control over multiple separate bodies