MINERVA - read-only archives

"genocidal half-wit with the attention span of a goldfish."

Don't know why you would call our character that. We are not genocidal at all. To be a genocidal maniac requires one seriously warped personality. And as we all know, our character has absolutely no personality at all. It was stripped out of him by the Combine. You could go as far as to say our character is not even male or female any more.

I honestly think that some people are taking some of Minerva's messages a little too literally and missing the subtext. For example:

"If we remain true to the standard meaning of the language, only an entity born or designed on Earth or who sees Earth as her home (for whatever reason) would write "our" oceans. That would make her either human or an Earth-designed A.I."

Using precise, dictionary definitions is clearly going to lead to misinterpretation. By focusing in on individual words or sections we'll miss the over meaning of the sentence.
Minerva clearly interprets the action of the player wading out to kill themselves. she even says so: "I have invested far to much time for you to end it all here". She thinks you're trying to kill yourself.
You've suddenly found yourself in to a highly hostile environment. You're receiving msgs from god knows who and god knows how, and you've got a lot of strange looking men shooting at you. If that isn't a traumatic situation to suddenly wake up in i don't know what is. On top of that, tactically, it's a stupid thing to do (in reality).
Who here can walk or run through water as fast as they can on land?

Regarding her intelligence, i'm only really assuming her intellect is far greater, and tbh there is evidence to suggest her intellect isn't that colossal, she just has access to a lot of analytical machinery.
For example, as you step further down in to the structure there is that message in which she says the subatomic detritus of this structure is remarkable similar to that found in and around a citadel, but with a few, subtle differences. It isn't until further exploration that she is able to discern why there are these differences. However she is still able to analyse the data in real time. Which suggests to me a far superior intellect and mental processing capacity (which could be due to her augmentations i suppose).

"The posters in the thread were generally basing their theories on the M:M story."

Same here; assumption, conjecture, gut instinct... what's the difference?

The plurality of places one could call "home" doesn't unmake a particular place's status as "home." In other words, the fact the Minerva could call home several planets doesn't eliminate Earth as her first home.

You know what i meant!

Also, Valve's universe/Half Life mythos is what the Half-Life series tell us they are. I'm confused by your distinction.

OK, what i mean is, if you were to remove the series of events and the characters from the universe that Valve has created i.e a universe being ruined by a unnatural force known as the Combine, what would you be left with? Valves universe and the Combine, that's what. And a lot of untold stories.
Iain M Banks has done something very similar. Anyone hear ever heard of his "Culture" novels. They are a series of (exceptional good) stories in which the tales you read about are all played out in the same universe. The individual books however are all entirely separate from each other. You do not need to have read one to fully understand the other. The thing that links them all together is the universe in which they are told and this mass conglomerate of species known as "The Culture".

You can either stick to an exegesis of existing pieces of information which are assumed to be internally consistent. Or you can chose to ignore some of the information and fill the rest of the picture with your imagination.

But this is precisely what i hope/believe Adam Foster has done. The internal consistency you speak of is Valves universe. The bits of information he has chosen to ignore is the stories Valve has told so far in said universe, namely, the Half Life saga.

"Meocene, the Old Black Mesa Incident (i.e. this) IS pretty much separated from anything Valve has produced. It's an Adam creation, as far as I know, therefore of the utmost importance for Minerva's storyline.
You shouldn't be that much disappointed, if you look it this way."

Actually, is what Valve/Mark Laidlaw laid down.

"About the matter of "a friend of a f=iend" signature, I tried to check if there was any recursiveness in the misspelling of archive 4 text, but the spelling errors seems to be random."

This is precisely what I'm talking about. Instead of taking the over all meaning of the message, we're focusing in on tiny details.
Do you honestly think that it was purely an arbitrary choice by Adam Foster to replace the 'r' with an equals?
If you really wanted to do what I've been saying we should all try to avoid, and deeply analyse that sentence, as in, imagine we're sat in an English Lit class and dealing with Shakespeare, our tutor would go stark raving bonkers and probably give up on us all if we concluded that the replaced 'r' was entirely unimportant and held no meaning at all.

"Moreover, another striking feature is the great difference between archive 4 and archive 5: while in archive 4 Mrs. M seems to be in some difficulty, writing the message in a console input, with numerous mistakes, in archive 5 she is confident with the Internet"

These differences lead me to believe they have been written by two different beings, but maybe by beings of the same species - Minerva being what the Combine would consider an "improved" version, hence her affinity with interfacing, and considerable better command of the English language. This is me agreeing with part of your theories, that she was augmented by the Combine. That is something we can all agree on.

That, imo is the only indisputable conclusion we have all come to.

I've just had a quick flick through the half life time line i linked you all to and realised the OBMI isn't actually in there! shit...
Links please!

However this is but an atom sized dent in my armour so don't y'all start thinking you've got me! :)

The imprtant thing to keep in mind here is that if you are going to argue with locworks about who Minerva is, or other important plot points, you must remember that he actually knows much of this stuff directly from Adam himself, but has been sworn to secrecy. So if he come straight out and says something is this way or that, he's more likely to be right than any of the rest of us.

Meocene, the only mention of the OBMI EVER was in the Minerva Archives. It was created by Adam. I'd think that at this point Valve considers it canon (considering the popularity of the Minerva mod and the fact that they assisted in the completion of it) but it was still an original event made by the same man that created our dear friend Mrs. M (and I do say, I love the new abbreviation!)

Also, show me on bit of substantial evidence from in game or the archives that shows that Minerva is not and never has been human. And if you once again say "gut feeling", I won't except it, because all other theories were derived from physical evidence or quotes, even my far-fetched theory about the Marathon/Halo connection (which I realize now was probably just a "hats off" to a couple great series).

I apologize for seeming harsh, but it's the truth. No real evidence means that it holds no water.

no worries ZeroMachine, it's all in the spirit of debate, and in response, I've yet to see any concrete evidence that she is human.

my mum's in for some quizzing about the Dial * for... books. haven't read them myself.

edit: having re-read a few things i'm thinking i'm back to square one.

locworks, my good man. just because i think i may be wrong in some places, does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean that i think any one else is right! :)