Annular Ring

Hey, you! You tired of nothin' to watch on this station? Only the same eight NT-approved Entertainment Segment™ bullshit shows? Tired of just beating the clown up for fun? ...no? yeah, me either, it's pretty good, I ain't gonna lie

But, buddy, i got news for you!

I gotta show you the ring. yeah, the ring. It's huge, stretches real wide! Gets new seeds on the regular, too!

... dude, why you gotta look at me like that? c'mon bro

So, like, it's real sneaky shit... some fucking nerds built it ages back. There's relay stations out there, yeah? Meant to carry messages back to CentCom, yeah?

Well, if you got a load of 'em in a line? and tell the last one, to send its message to the first one? you get this big ring! And if you pump a message into one of the relays... it sends it to the next one, and the next one, and when it gets back to the first one, yeah? It goes around again! And it takes so long, we got loadsa stuff seeded onto it!

And, like, if you tune yer PDA just right you can pick up the chunk the ring's blastin'!

I know, right!? Genius! Doc says it's like an old Sol thing called "Cable tee vee"... everybody sees the same thing, and if you want anything different ya just gotta wait.

Yeah, I know a guy who can fix ya pda up good for it; but yer gonna wanna pay extra for the greetings filter... nah, trust me, bro... trust me, you're gonna want the filter.

...'kay, but don't say I dint warn ya.

...

...Hey, you into that Mary Time Horrorporno? ... Cool, cool...

The Brainstorm
]Warc: maritime horror porno, inexplicably one of the largest sections at the last remaining brick and mortar audiovisual thinktape rental store in the frontier. [20:40]A bee: Are you implying they had the time to set up multiple [20:44]Warc: Absolutely, and imo they only went under because most stranded colonists moved on to some sort of streaming platform where radio repeaters forward unencrypted content in an annular ring around the system, using the transmission delay to store a few days worth of entertainment and porno at a time [20:44]Tambob: XD [20:45]Warc: new content pops in and out of the ring as people upload it to their closest buoy, which naturally causes it to miss the incoming annular transmission [20:46]Warc: a whopping 12% of the vacuum radio entropy in the system is occupied by reuploads of a still image known only as greetings.dmi, which homologated reciever units filter out automatically.

The source of the transmissions is unknown. [20:47]A bee: The shared maritime horror porno mixtape [20:47]A bee: I love this [20:47]Tambob: Spacers make do. [20:48]Bobcaribou: occasionally charitableactor.dmi makes the rounds and only a select few oldtimers know the significance [20:48]Warc: (anyway this is semi-joke-semi-srs but I really do think this is how data sharing would look like in universe, as an internet stand-in. more like IRC with local people DVRing the transmissions to keep records, but no static hosting, always fighting for bandwidth) [20:49]Bobcaribou: just one big time delay tape loop bus, huh [20:49]Tambob: hell yeh [20:49]Warc: whatever truly static hosting wouldve existed would have been dependent on ansible-like fast coms through the channel [20:50]A bee: I can't help but think the astronomy guys would be big on the recording part [20:52]Warc: oh absolutely, youd have dudes using the repeating transmissions and their progressive degradation to make all sorts of inferences about the system [20:53]Warc: echoes off of various bodies compared to the most recent matching fragment, all sorts of shit [20:59]Tambob: :D [20:59]Tambob: passive system scan [21:01]Warc: its yeah basically continuous radar [21:02]Tambob: I'm gonna go nail this conversation to the wiki [21:03]Tambob: with as little context as I can get away with. [21:03]thorium: Charging my phone in a gas station bathroom to say that’s a swell idea warc [21:03]Tambob: it's an idea that's got some swellings [21:06]Warc: a turgid concept [21:08]A bee: Can't get concepts this turgid elsewhere