On Sun, 2024-05-19 at 15:09 -0700, Edward Murphy via agora-discussion wrote: > ais523 wrote: > > > particular, if a contract would be given a Rest (the equivalent of a > > Blot), every member of the contract would be given a Rest instead. > > > the Insulator (equivalent of today's Referee) was required to report > > the Fugitive status. > > For those wondering how "Rest" and "Insulator" fit together: the > primary currencies at the time were Notes, tracked by the Conductor, > whose author evidently had a shameless disregard for mixed metaphors.
It was quite a well-constructed series of interlocking puns (starting with "Notes" = banknotes or musical notes; and if you did something helpful to Agora you would be noted for it). It is possible that some of these were fortunate coincidences rather than intentional. A Rest had a value of -1 Note (originally, you could use a Note to cancel out a Rest). I am surprised that puns on "ar-Rest-ed" weren't made more often. Incidentally, I vaguely remember that Notes and Ribbons were descendants of the same system (i.e. originally a Ribbons win was obtained via getting an ancestor-of-Notes from every possible source, with the ancestors of Notes having ribbon-style colors rather than musical pitches), although they had diverged somewhat before I started playing and no longer matched up to each other. That economy ended up being temporarily revived semi-recently under the Glitter system (which was effectively an economic reward for doing something that would give you a Ribbon). -- ais523
