/cyoa/ - Choose Your Own Adventure★

as a philosopher I find C to be the most useful. Learning languages the regular way is a pain in the ass.

C is a parlor trick unless you happen to be in a field where knowing dead languages is helpful.

B is extremely useful for all kinds of mostly obvious reasons.

A is a neat trick that comes with it functional immortality and invulnerability and while it's not quite clear I think you can switch back to your normal self ("at-will" rather than "instantly" suggests the ability to do it more than once, which in turn suggests the ability to switch back, but again, not actually clear) in case you ever get trapped in a fate worse than death. Plus you get the Halo Effect going for you full-tilt whenever you want except you have no birth certificate, driver's license, etc. etc. as a woman so it's going to be very difficult to function in the modern world as your female alter-ego.

I typically hop aboard the immortality train if at all possible in a CYOA, but this one doesn't have any guaranteed safeguards against a fate worse than death and comes with the drawback that you'll have to build yourself a new identity from the ground up, not just socially but legally. And you might be a 10/10 woman, but that doesn't mean you have a lifetime's experience manipulating people the way an actual 10/10 woman has spent her entire life since second grade learning how to convince people to do what she wants rather than do it herself. The lack of experience means you aren't actually going to be able to manipulate your way around society as effectively as you might expect and even then, fabricating birth certificates and driver's licenses and social security numbers is some fairly high-risk social manipulation that your standard manipulative bitch would be best-advised to stay away from.

I'd go with B. It's very helpful and easy to conceal. If you know things that people thought it was impossible to know and you're all mysterious about how you found out, no one is going to take "psychic" as an explanation so seriously as to kidnap you and study you in a lab.

>>1387

>C is a parlor trick unless you happen to be in a field where knowing dead languages is helpful.

A person that is totally fluent in both Mandarin Chinese and English can walk into any Fortune 500 company and name their price. Hundred thousand per year? Two-hundred thousand per year? You got it.

And forget dead languages, the possibilities for dying languages are limitless. There are hundreds of languages in rural parts of the world spoken by just a handful of people, in some cases just ONE person, and these are often elderly people who will not pass on their language to children, and who know little of other languages. The amount of cultural heritage you could get from a single conversation in the native tongue with such a person is breathtaking.

There are ancient languages, inscribed on stone artifacts or clay tablets, that have still yet to be deciphered. An incredible bounty of historical knowledge is just waiting to be discovered.

And you call it "a parlor trick". So small you are; no wonder you jump at something as insipid and childish as immortality.

>>1388

>A person that is totally fluent in both Mandarin Chinese and English can walk into any Fortune 500 company and name their price.

I personally know someone with exactly that skillset. No, you cannot do this.

>There are hundreds of languages in rural parts of the world spoken by just a handful of people, in some cases just ONE person, and these are often elderly people who will not pass on their language to children, and who know little of other languages.

And your plan to find these people and get them to speak to you at length about a cultural heritage they have not bothered passing on to their own children is what exactly? We as a society already have the ability to speak, decipher, or at least record those dying languages. The reason we are not doing so is because the fluent speakers are uncooperative or difficult to locate and financial support for such endeavors is limited. The one part of the problem power C solves is the one part of the problem that is already solved.

>There are ancient languages, inscribed on stone artifacts or clay tablets, that have still yet to be deciphered.

And if you happen to be in a field where you can decipher those languages and deliver an explanation other than "genie magic," the utility of power C jumps up significantly. This is something I already mentioned. As it is, coming out with a complete translation of otherwise untranslated languages and no explanation whatsoever for how you arrived at it will not be at all credible until after other people have already translated those languages.

>So small you are; no wonder you jump at something as insipid and childish as immortality.

If you had half the wisdom you're pretending at, you'd recognize that the ability to lay plans on the scale of centuries and still be around to adapt them when the universe inevitably does not cooperate with your initial predictions is an incredibly useful thing to have. Learning a skill that takes decades is a serious impediment to someone who has a finite amount of time to spend, but for someone who is immortal (or even who will just live for an extraordinarily long time such that decades of practice are chump change to the overall lifespan) it is only a question of discipline, discipline that you can keep cultivating until you get good at it no matter how long that takes.

B. And screw staying secret, I don't trust myself to be good with that and it doesn't pay very well.

1. Get people I trust to join me on my quest, for safety's sake.

2. Go talk to a good lawyer and a good PR guy. Offer them a share of the gross after proving my abilities.

3. With their help and connections, become famous enough not to be disappeared easily. (Collect James Randi's million dollar prize, appear on talk shows, etc.)

4. Offer my services to those who can pay the price, or whom I like. Military intelligence and scientific research would probably be the main issues.

5. One of the top priorities of what I do with my payment is top-of-the-line private security.

An easy road to a multi-millionaire's life.

>>1383

Direct the flow of consciousness by having a third party engage the target in conversation. At its most basic, blindly reiterate the target's flow of consciousness, and have a fourth party listen along to your transcription and give useful information to the third party on how to direct the conversation.

>>1391

Immortality doesn't really work like that. Why the hell would you assume that you'd be one of the shapers of civilization just because you can't die? That's called delusions of grandeur. Even if you subscribe to the Great Person theory of the world, only a few people among billions have that influence. You will not be one of them.

And get used to being in school, because you're going to have to stay in school for virtually your entire immortal existence. The speed of advancement of the sciences is such that, if you skip a decade (and honestly, doing so is easy when you live through centuries like normal people live through weekends) you'll find yourself speaking Newton in a world already speaking Einstein.

So the most likely outcome of being immortal is that you'll simply become useless and outdated, increasing more over time. After a century, you'll be the learned equivalent of banging rocks together while the kindergartners are doing vector calculus.

>>1396

>Why the hell would you assume that you'd be one of the shapers of civilization just because you can't die?

I didn't. Learn to fucking read.

>The speed of advancement of the sciences is such that, if you skip a decade (and honestly, doing so is easy when you live through centuries like normal people live through weekends) you'll find yourself speaking Newton in a world already speaking Einstein.

The time gap between Newton and Einstein was in fact two and a half centuries, not one decade. Old people can and do stay up to date with the times, most of them simply don't bother.

>>1398

Einstein's theories changed all understanding of physics in less than a decade. People had been following Newton's for those centuries until they were proven wrong/incomplete. You're using facts incorrectly to try to make an argument, which is a bit like spouting off that the boiling point of water is 100 degrees centigrade therefore you win. I bet you had to look up on wikipedia when Newton was born, too.

>>1399

>You're using facts incorrectly to try to make an argument, which is a bit like spouting off that the boiling point of water is 100 degrees centigrade therefore you win.

No, you're changing the goalposts and then trying to pretend my previous answer was a red herring. What you actually said was this:

>And get used to being in school, because you're going to have to stay in school for virtually your entire immortal existence. The speed of advancement of the sciences is such that, if you skip a decade…you'll find yourself speaking Newton in a world already speaking Einstein.

You have explicitly stated that keeping up to date with modern knowledge at a layman's level (plus whatever you need for the actual field, scientific or otherwise, you're working in) would require nearly all of an immortal person's time. This is only true if revolutionary changes are made frequently enough that you would have to be constantly educating yourself or else miss them. It does not matter how long the new theory takes to change things, what matters is how often they happen as compared to how long they take to learn. And to learn Einstein's theories to the point where a layman would understand them is something that takes a matter of weeks, and such revolutionary changes happen once every few centuries. Your objection is dishonesty rooted in the desire to make real the fairy tale where magical consequences are attached to magical immortality for dramatic effect. But life is not a fairy tale, and the inherent drawbacks of immortality are actually quite insignificant compared to its inherent benefits.

>I bet you had to look up on wikipedia when Newton was born, too.

Are you fucking fourteen? Even if I did, no one cares about dates because dates are nearly useless as historical information - but they're easy to grade, so high school history classes test for them. No one outside of high school gives a shit.

>>1400

you're still going to be a nobody dude. what are you gonna do jack off for a billions years?

>>1401

Live my fucking life? As a general rule, people dislike it when you kill them, and the reason is not because they expect to be God-Emperor someday, it's because people want to live.

>>1403

nah man, you were talkin something about laying plans on the scale of centuries. that means you think you have a plan that is important and meaningful enough to warrant that time investment. which is hilarious because your a nobody on a chan board.

>>1404

>that means you think you have a plan that is important and meaningful enough to warrant that time investment.

Okay, I'm going to walk you through this step-by-step, because apparently you're stupid.

In the real world, plans that take multiple centuries require not only that multiple people be involved, but that people who weren't even alive when the plan started and won't be when it ends dedicate their lives to it anyway. This is super hard and is only the kind of thing that can be accomplished by entire civilizations.

But if you're immortal, sinking two centuries into something is not actually a big deal. Because you have a minimum of tens of thousands of years to play with before humanity starts to become biologically unrecognizable. If you want to, like, create a Skyrim mod or some shit and the scale rapidly spirals out of control and you realize it would take three decades to finish at the rate you're going, you don't have to care. You've got time. If you have a plan to become a multi-millionaire that's foolproof just so long as you can build wealth for 200 years, you can go ahead and do that anyway.

The reason why plans on the scale of centuries are civilization scale projects is because we are not immortal, and being able to dedicate centuries-long plans to trivial pet projects is the entire reason immortality is such a good deal.

C because who doesn't want to tell erotic anime fanfiction in sumerian?

A doesn't really seem that great to me, even if used for immortality.

B could be useful, but I'd honestly not want to know every useless thought the people in my view are having.

C is more down to earth, with benefits that would be useful to me right at this moment.

First off, I no longer have language limitations on the media that I can consume. I don't need to wait for subs or translations.

Second, the ability would prove useful for getting a job as an interpreter, raking in huge amounts of cash, relative to my current income.

Third, I could help reveal a lot about the past in archaeology.

Not to mention that the other two have huge drawbacks;

With A, you would need to either establish your new form with your current identity, or create a whole new identity.

With B, you would need to be extremely careful and stealthy in order to NOT get detained and experimented on by a government that considers you a major threat to national security.

C, I can get a comfy job as translator.

>>282

Looking young and hot on the outside won't stop your heart from aging.

this one is easy, C

C because I wouldn't know how to shut B down and my feefees would get hurt

>>1729

>physics is a language

What is the point of C if you can chose B?

But at the end, nothing beats immortality, so of course i take A

>>7893

How does option A hrant you immortality?

>>7902

Is being old, sick, dying 10/10?

C is very tempting, but I'd go with A whether or not it gives immortality. Ability to play all those jap games and money with a lot of effort, vs love and affection and people will always be willing assist and give me things with little to no effort.

I'd rather not know other's thoughts; what they tell me can be bad enough as it is. Don't want to find out people are even more selfish or petty than I thought.

>>7922

They're going to be cutting up this 10/10 at the morgue and wondering why she has an 90 year old woman's heart.