Grrl Power #555 – One stop inconvenience shopping
It always bugged me in Buffy when the scoobys were looking up the latest demonic threat, they’d all be desperately scouring through stacks of books, and I always wondered why they didn’t scan them. Buffy was on the air a while ago, but it wasn’t pre-computer.
Edit: As about 2 dozen people have pointed out, they did scan some of the library in Buffy, to detrimental results. It’s been a while since I watched the series.
Sure, scanning books in ancient languages doesn’t make them instantly searchable. But it would have to save you some time, right? The Sunnydale library’s OCR software probably doesn’t do Sanskrit, but you can bet your ass that The Council’s and ARC-Light’s software does. Also Mesopotamian, Sumerian and Hittite.
It also does facial recognition on the drawings of demons in it, in case the person drawing them was particularly skilled and the demon in question is long lived enough to still be around when someone digs up the tome 2000 years later. Also they can use it to quickly identify creatures based on horn configurations, tusks, tails, number of eyes, etc. Assuming the resident demonologist isn’t all “oh yeah I know what that is.”
Scanning also presents the issue of potentially not capturing all the information in any given book. Some might have notes in the margins that can only be read under the full moon, or evil creatures see different coordinates on the ancient map than good creatures. So obviously you’d keep the original texts around, but it would still give you a head start in a lot of cases.
This page colored by Keith.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Remember to always used an enchanted dongle protector when practicing supernatural cybersex.
I can accept that explanation. Thanks for the knowledge dump yorp.
*wags tail in satisfaction*
The Librarians is awesome. Pity the blog doesn’t update enough.
Speaking of Warehouse 13 anyone heard of the SCP Foundation? SCP stands for Secure, Contain, Protect. It’s kind of like Warehouse 13 but it was written before Warehouse 13. Its collaborative fiction written in the format of a wiki. Personally I think SCP-001 through SCP-999 are the best but I haven’t been back since SCP-1999 came out. They focus more on how to contain it than they do seeking out the item/person/place.
It gets quoted and linked a lot in these forums.
Sydney referenced Warehouse 13, but not the SCP Foundation?
Did she miss the part where Warehouse 13 caused quite a bit of grief when they wholesale copied chunks of the SCP wiki to pad out their site?
I expected better from her.
I’ve never even heard of this “Warehouse 13” thing… but you say they basically just plagiarised the SCP?
warehouse 13 is basically the scp foundation but instead of a global spaning super organization that contains danagerous anomalies is basically just a warehouse that… well houses weird shit, like magical items from ancient and lost civilizations, alien technology, things that dont make much sence, that kinda stuff
so basically like the scp foundation lite
Had forgotten Dave made a Friday the 13th the Series reference. Well, now I know we’re both in the same age range.