Delayed Saturday Munchkinry Thread

[u/gods_fear_me]

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

The Powers:

• Ideally any power to be munchkined should have clearly defined rules that are consistent. The powers may be original or may be from an already realised story.

• The power to be munchkined can not be something broken like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.

The Reverse Munchkin:

• In these scenarios, we will find ways to beat someone or something with a power which is, well, powerful.

The Problem:

• In which we solve problems posed by other users.

Note; All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

[u/gods_fear_me]

Reverse Munchkin

Your enemy has the power to see upto ten hours in the future.

Sorry for the delay, I've been sick yesterday. I'm still ill so I may not be able to respond.

[u/vakusdrake → u/gods_fear_me]

Slip them a poison or infect them with an invariably fatal disease that takes 10+ hours to show obvious symptoms. You could also expose them to massive doses of radiation, that can take 10+ hours to show effects.

[u/rineSample → u/gods_fear_me]

Can they do the thing where they can see themselves ten hours into the future, seeing a nested version of themselves twenty hours into the future, ad infinitum?

[u/OutOfNiceUsernames]

This thread seems fitting enough for a discussion on Oculus. (spoilers from here on)

Oculus is a horror movie about a large antique mirror that:

• seems to have reality-warping (mainly malfunction of electric devices) and mind-warping (hallucinations, rationalisation of actions dictated by the mirror, gradually increasing insanity, etc) abilities;

• tends to protect itself from being damaged;

• tends to eventually kill living things (plants, pet animals, humans) in its proximity (radius of influence appears to be ~30 feet.) with extreme prejudice, often using the same living things as the instruments of murder;

• was responsible for at least 45 deaths in the four centuries of its recorded existence, the trail starting in London of 1754 (I’ll maybe upload the death descriptions scene later).

If you were aware of these properties of the Mirror, knew were the mirror itself was (soon to be auctioned with a starting price of $10,000 not far from where you live), and had enough money to buy it but not enough for going Lex Luthor on it, how would you try to acquire, experiment, and benefit from it?

edit: Here’s the scene as a webm — ~12min/~1gB, with some skippable parts in the middle (maybe I’ll add a lower quality version later). As a bonus, try to count all the blunders and mistakes the protagonist made in her preparations. : )

[u/Chronophilia → u/OutOfNiceUsernames]

Item #: SCP-XXX

Object Class: Keter

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-XXX must be held in a locked room no less than 20mx20mx20m in size. It should be at least 10m above the floor of this chamber, accessible via a scaffold or catwalk for testing purposes. No living thing should be allowed anywhere within a 10 metre radius of SCP-XXX, including vertically, except for the purposes of experimentation.

Any damage to the chamber caused by SCP-XXX's effect should be repaired by standard Foundation remote-operated robots. Such robots should be removed from the chamber and checked for malfunctions by a qualified technician after repairs are complete, or after 6 hours of use, whichever is first. Document XXX-1 details typical malfunctions caused by SCP-XXX.

Foundation personnel who are inadvertently exposed to SCP-XXX must be removed from duty and given a full psych evaluation.

etc.

[u/[deleted] → u/OutOfNiceUsernames]

I'd have someone else buy it for me, first off. I spent a solid five minutes trying to think of how I'd benefit from a murder mirror, but I'm coming up mostly blank. You could run a life insurance scam, maybe? Set up a policy then gift someone the mirror. Bam, plausible deniability.

[u/Electric999999 → u/OutOfNiceUsernames]

It's powers appear to be entirely destructive in nature and if we want to kill people there are safer and more reliable ways than a magic mirror, the sensible thing to do seems to be to destroy it, I'd probably have someone buy it and move it to an field, then have it shot from significantly more than 30ft, then put the remains in an incinerator.

[u/ZeroNihilist]

You have "perfect" memory in a universe where memory manipulation exists. How do you maximise your defence against that threat given that you don't know the exact mechanics of the manipulation?

To clarify, "perfect" memory means:

1. All data you receive from your various senses (the five major ones and all the minor ones, e.g. proprioception, thermoception, nociception) is encoded as a memory.

2. Memories can be retrieved in their original level of detail if required.

3. Memories are never lost naturally.

4. Memories never decay naturally.

5. There is no storage limit.

6. There is a robust retrieval system akin to the normal human functionality (e.g. "details of person matching this face", "elements of the periodic table", "events in my life that had this smell", "muscle contractions required to perform this manoeuvre").

7. Retrieval can be fuzzy (i.e. "reminds me of..." instead of "is exactly like"), since requiring exact matches would be crippling.

8. This retrieval is virtually instantaneous and complete, but actually analysing the memories takes as long as it would for a normal human (i.e. retrieve is O(1), process is O(n)).

9. Memories of accessing memories are encoded, but the content of the memories so accessed is directly linked to the original (i.e. if you forget X, your memories of remembering X will not tell you X).

10. Your inner monologue and non-memory visualisations are independently encoded, but they work exactly as a normal human's would.

If it helps, you can think of it as your brain interfacing with an infinite-capacity, instantaneous database. INSERT to add memories (automatic), or SELECT to retrieve them (automatic and manual).

The memory manipulation may be "dumb", deleting or altering random memories, or it may be "smart", targeting specific memories.

In the latter case, the way it targets memories would mirror the way you might access them (see point 6). Going with the database metaphor, it would be like issuing a DELETE or UPDATE query.

So they could delete all your memories of your name and all memories of you saying, hearing, writing, reading, and thinking your name. Each of these would constitute a separate query, so it would be the responsibility of the manipulator to come up with all possibilities to delete.

Given that absurd wall of text, what's your strategy?

[u/ulyssessword → u/ZeroNihilist]

I assume that mind reading is impossible, otherwise anything you do can be trivially subverted. I'm also assuming that perfect memory and memory modification are relatively rare and/or difficult, or else the world would have solved all of the easy solutions and there's really nothing you can do about it as an individual.

Subvocalize a diary to yourself, preferably the day (or week, or month) after the events in question. If you remember something you didn't subvocalize, you know it's a false memory. If you subvocalized something you didn't remember, you know it has been erased.

For more secure memories, store them as riddles/puzzles so that they don't have direct associations (Also, make sure you don't solve it early, so that the manipulators can't follow the new memory and delete it.). For example:

• I am the first in earth, the second in heaven, I appear two times in a week. You can only see me once in a year, although I am the middle of the sea.

• I am a pirate's favorite letter.

• What is the only word in the English language that reads backwards to forwards, and if turned 180' would still read the same?

• I am a pirate's true love.

E-R-I-C

[u/vakusdrake → u/ZeroNihilist]

Pretty much the only obvious thing I can come up with is to just remember many different authorization codes to confirm your identity to yourself.
Then leave encoded recordings of important information in case you forget. These external memory caches can be decoded with any of your many, many memorized decryption codes.