Malkavian Whispers

i think you were one of the three voices i mentioned

but lol i like your atitude: it's not the NPCs that are central to the action and the whispers peripheral to the plot, no.

to you it is ALL about the whispers, you wanna cuddle up in a corner all your own and focus on the lullaby that they sing to you, to lap up what arcane wisdom they have to confer, and would earnestly disregard those pesky NPCs that keep barging in with boring mundane information about the dull real outside world and keep making of you these inconsiderate demands to take action in the world.

The problem with those NPCs is that they never tell you the whole story. But the voices will tell you everything, if you listen long enough... and if you can hear them over the so-called 'real' world.

All the whispers I have found are just some randomized babble. Sort of general warning or whatever.

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Childe of Malkav wrote:

All the whispers I have found are just some randomized babble. Sort of general warning or whatever.

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LOL I was trying to sound deep. I know the whispers we've been talking about are exactly that -- random babble, that doesn't make much sense other than as a general warning: "Liar!", "Beast", etc.. But if you can tell us where these whispered warnings are located in the Vampire folders, we could investigate ourselves. Again, I don't mean the whispers in the Warrens and Ocean House ("Put the corpse in the oven with peppers and myrrh"), or the whispering you hear during Obfuscate, which are only mumbled whispers.

I don't think you guys would really want to hear voices...believe me...i heard some voices in my head and it took me time to control them...now i can ignore them or wholly suppress them...when I'm alone i let them roam free...it makes it easier to turn them into background noise later...now, I'm not crazy...I just had an unfortunate run in with life

PGM, Childe of Malkav, as has been discussed above, in the case of our character the whispers don't say much because we are not "demented" enough, in the case of Grout they obviously said, well, too much, even, hidden insights.

Jimmyto... i am not one to have prejudice against mental illness, to voice such prejudice by dismissing people who suffer from it with the derogatory apelation "crazy".
because... well i have to live with the fact that i am more than a little bit "crazy" myself, and i will do it "in your face", either you take me as i am or...

anyway, i have some knowledge of schizophrenia, some personal experience - i am not schizophrenic, but... close - and loads of speculations.

is it quite normal to think in the form of dialogue with someone that is not there? shrinks speak of "object", the representation of that whom you love in your mind, the other you love within you.
and sometimes i think by having conversations with others that are not there, i make a movie in my head of me and the other together and us having a conversation. i can get... pretty lost, in those converstations. but not to the point where i loose conncetion with the fact that it is a movie in my head and the other is really not there, and that whatever the other says is not really the other but a part of me that is "dressed up" like the other and talking back at another part of me "dressed up" as me.

but it is my view that schizophrenics have been "pushed too far", and that their minds have "fractured", so that the-other-in-them, the object, the part of them dressed up as the other, really becomes a distinct, individual part of their mind, so that they do hear voices from the other that are really perceived as coming from outside themselves. the really "hear voices", perceived through their auditory sensorial input, actually using the voice of another.

there's more. i read a theory of consciousness that says that the notion of unity of self is an illusion. we have a "parliament", several parts of us, that discuss amongst themselves, and when they reach a conclusion, they comunicate it to the "princess". and the "princess" is our illusory notion of unity of self, but in fact it is merely the "speaker", "speaking of" decisions that have been taken by "comitee".
a schizophrenic is someone who hears as distinct voices the voices of each member of the parliament. the princess speaks less loudly, the members of the parliament speak so loudly that the schizophrenic is actually able to hear as distinct voices the voice of each "member of the parliament".

and on a side note, if it really exists, the illness of split personality is a case where there are several "princesses".

so, my advice to schizophrenics, and, not saying that you are one of them, jimmyto, but also to you, is, try to understand, accept, embrace, love, those voices as parts of you that have become too diferentiated, too autonomous in each other, and too little bound to the others and to the whole, to maintain the illusion of unty; and they should try to bring them to the fold.

did i make my point accross?

argh... yes, i have thought long and hard about these things, reflections that i have kept mine, private, for a very long time, but... i always feel this urge to share everything that i think, because it is only if others know of it that i truly exist. so, i thought this oportunity too good to let it pass, i just had to share these reflections with someone and this presented itself as the perfect oportunity, the perfect pretext, for it.

Um, thanks for the warnings folks, but I have no problems hearing voices in real life. I do talk to myself sometimes, as do many people who are alone a lot; but this is just 'thinking aloud' -- I have no illusions that these are real voices. Any comments I've made, about the voices in my head agreeing with someone, were purely for comic effect.

It was not my intent to dredge up old memories of past psychiatric problems. I was merely wondering about those whispers in the game that give Malkavians insight into their current situation, or conversation. If it's not possible to look at them or listen to them from a file somewhere, that's okay. It was just idle curiosity... something that's made me curious since the first time I played a Malkavian in Bloodlines.

I'd like to voice my apology as well. To be honest, I couldn't tell how serious you were being. Still, I am curious on what the Malk whispers are actually saying.

Usually just random crap. You can find them with vpk tool. I had them extracted and listened to them a while back. There was literally nothing interesting. Can't even remember where I found them all specifically - that's how informative they were :p

All this talk of politics brings back memories, there was a time when i could have gone over the edge...i personally don't know why i didn't, but instead i came out of it with, what i consider, a stronger mind...and a lack of fear, I'm not entirely sure that the lack of fear is a good thing though, however it is welcomed...on occasions, I know I'm not schizophrenic, since I'm in full control, most people call my lack of fear a lack of emotion, and i have a friend that asked what i felt, just like that and i gotta say i had no response, I jokingly answered that i laugh at funny stuff and that i can get angry, but i couldn't really think of anything else, now, as I'm writing this I don't really care about the whole "emotion" thing, I'm merely curious as to whether what i went through killed my emotions, I mean i think i have emotions, maybe they're just no quite as loud as before

8people wrote:

Usually just random crap. You can find them with vpk tool. I had them extracted and listened to them a while back. There was literally nothing interesting. Can't even remember where I found them all specifically - that's how informative they were :p

You are right, they are in one of the .vpk archives. As I have them all unpacked on my harddisk, I don't know in which one. If you care to unpack, you'll find them in the directory \vampire\sound\whispers. There are some subdirectories with about three to five wave files.
"Random crap" is a good description.

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hey! no need for apologies! as i said, i am perfectly comfortable with it, it's not an issue!
i just like to live too much in the open, as it were.
now i feel silly for having turned this thread too serious...

it's a pity, though...
that, apart from the very infrquent "shouts" that actually contain a modicum of relevant information, above mentioned, the rest of malkavian whispers are random crap.

i am hooked on grout. i do find his mansion fascinating, and i do find his recordings fascinating, and more so the notion that his voices provided him with hidden insight, accurate insight, on those who surrounded him - accurate enough to foresse his final death, not that that helped him...
yes i am well aware that he became overwhelmed with the voices, that he became a recluse because of them, and paranoid in the extreme, all those deffences in his mansions, and that in the end the voices proved useless, they did not help him prevent his own death.
but. to me that gives him a tragic dimension that makes him precious to me... thinking this, and in reference to another topic thread, he just might have become my favorite character, er... NPC. imagine that. my favorite NPC is one that has already met his final death...

in the war of troy my favorite character is kassandra, and i feel grout is the same kind of character, and i love that tragedy, the whole having a privileged awareness of the future and being totally helpless to prevent it

so i can't help wish, nay long for, that the Malkavian Character's whispes were as insightful, accurate, as Grout's...

and, specially, when they activate the discipline. insight, isn't it? it's suposed to be insightful, to provide insights.

Wow Velvet, you just took this game to a whole new level, LOL.

so what??

i do love this game.
i find this game better than... most books, i find this game on a par with some of my favorite books,
and to me books, the kind of books that i read, Science Fiction and Fantasy mostly, all of them are true to this... motto, which i paraphrase:
"while seemingly telling us lies, they sneak in profound truths, about the world, and about us."
i've always taking my hobbies, gaming and reading, seriously, have always considered escapism seriously, MY notion of escapism, that i have seen marvelously defined in an essay which i also paraphrase:
"escapism is when the author is talented enough that you actually experience the fictional situations that he depicts, so that you come out of the book not as if you had read it but as if you had experienced it, lived through it, so that the memories you have from the book are on the level of memories of situations you have actually experienced; more importantly, you are changed, transformed, by the book, you take from it life lessons that are as deeply impressed as if you had gone through the situations that taught you those lessons."
this is my favorite game ever because it does that, it allows for that level of perfect escapism and does sneak in profound truths about the world and about myself, for all that it is fictional, it rings profoundly true.

on a side note, i have claimed somewhere else that one of the things that make this game my fav ever is that you get to do mundane things like chores, chores as mundane as the ones you perform in your everyday real life, you have a "knapsack" and a chest that you can tidy, you have a fridge for chrissakes, and you get to vegetate listening to radio and tv (which makes for a zen experience of me the player listening to radio and tv while the character i'm playing is listening to radio and tv) and i get to go to clubs and dance....
all these details make this game so true to life, to me, no matter that everything else is so fantastic, these are little details that ground the game in verisimilitude and make it... my fav.

my point was, yes, it elicits profound resonances with life, and with me.
on a resonance, a nice vicious circle, a positive reinforcement feedback loop, i do like to play malkavians because they resonate with my real nature of a "slightly crazy" individual. that there is a game that allows for that is... precious, to me.

but... argh!!!!!
you wanted to make light of it, zer0morph, and i appreciate you enormously for that.
and instead of taking your cue here i went once again in.....
dismiss everything that i just wrote as the random crap that you hear in malkavaian whispers, as what the voices mumble in your hears when you are playing a malkavian character.

my point remains: i think the game developpers missed out big time when they made malkavian whispers just random crap instead of really informative.
maybe they wanted to level out the playing field? it would be bad for a class to have access to privileged intel?
they wanted to make the discipline insight only as powerful as others, not one that actually gave you access to ptivileged insight?

on another note:
i discussed this in another forum long ago:
some of Malkavian Dialogue Lines are INDEED insightful, they do make reference to upcoming events much earlier on than when they actually happen, in totally unrelated situations.
i recall this experience from that forum: a girl, someone's girlfriend, had played the game through with another class. then her boyfriend played the game, for his first time around, with a malkavian character, with the girlfriend watching. and sometimes the girlfriend would exclaim, whe confronted with a Malkavian's dialogue line from the character her boyfriend was playing: "hey! this thing that he just said, it's a mention to something that would happen later on!" the girlfriend, writing on that forum, said that this happens over and over again.

so, even if malkavian whispers are not particularly informative, at least their dialogue lines are sometimes remarkably informative.

Have anyone ever told you you write really briliant and insightful posts? And I'm serious with it.

Feral wrote:

Have anyone ever told you you write really briliant and insightful posts? And I'm serious with it.

So true

*BLUSH* aw shucks.
now you left me speechless.
there is no way to answer that.
without sounding, either on one hand unduly modest, which unfortunately i am not
but on the other hand i will fall imediately into sounding unsuffereably arrogant, even if being only straightforwardly honest.
yes people have commended me on my insights.

now can we move on?
please?

But of course, you are welcome.

Dangit! And now I was too late to mention your awesomeness, too. Well, then I'll keep it to myself...

yes.
of course.

Thank You.

it would be the only appropriate response.

and that includes you, Eliza.
if it counts for something, i think you are something too as well.
and hey Feral you are not so bad yourself

and all others included.

gosh now i am thanking everyone, as if i had gotten a stupid award.
how silly of me.

can we please move on???????

Whenever you feel like it.
And thanks, btw.

Velvet wrote:

can we please move on???????

Ok. *starts biking away*