agamemnonymous

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agamemnonymous,

This year, mostly GURPS. It’s such a delightfully comprehensive TTRPG. If you can think of it, you can do it, and odds are that unless you’re thinking of something really out there, it’s explicitly outlined in one of the source books. Even if it is really out there, you can probably find several forum posts outlining several ways to run the mechanics.

It’s not a perfect reality simulator, but it’s good enough for me.

agamemnonymous,

Mhmm! They had to invent it because Steve Jackson Games wasn’t terribly keen on the level of violence in Fallout.

Another fun fact, their 3e Cyberpunk supplement was so convincing that they got raided by the US Secret Service under suspicion of cyber terrorism.

agamemnonymous,

I really prefer 3d6 to d20 though. And honestly, I like the math

agamemnonymous,

Guess that depends on which magic system you use

I don’t mind the base system though, pre-reqs make sense

agamemnonymous,

I predict that once robotics and AI advanced beyond some particular threshold, human-on-human relationships will be seen as strange and needlessly fetishistic. Who would want some grimey partner with their own needs when you can generate an infinitely moldable soulmate?

agamemnonymous,

You would think so, wouldn’t you? But how is it any different than fast food, porn, or trash tv?

agamemnonymous,

You don’t make your own robot lover either. You do select it, same as you select your fast food order, porn video, and TV channel.

agamemnonymous,

The third person neuter pronoun in English, but that’s not important right now.

agamemnonymous,

On a serious note, yes Christmas was placed where it was in order to coincide with Saturnalia, the Roman winter solstice festival. This was an attempt by Constantine, the emperor who legalized Christianity in Rome, to transition the Romans to Christianity more easily.

agamemnonymous,

Primer and The Man from Earth are two of my all time favorite films. Production value is nice and all, but an interesting idea explored well wins every time for me.

agamemnonymous,

Yeah that’s a good take, it’s like a modern Fifth Element.

Same director. I didn’t see it, but I love The Fifth Element

agamemnonymous,

It was more trouble than it was worth maintenance-wise considering the age, but my '66 Beetle. Such a fun little car, like an elaborate go-kart.

agamemnonymous,

The Complete Novels of James Joyce

agamemnonymous,

If you can etch something into it, technically it’s not a vertex.

agamemnonymous,

It unreasonably bothers me when people say “a medusa”. Medusa is a proper name, the creature she was was a gorgon. It’s like calling anyone who plays basketball “a Shaq”.

agamemnonymous,

Add that to the stack of reasons why I found a better system.

agamemnonymous,

Out of sight, out of mind.

agamemnonymous,

That business model is exclusive to extremely physiologically addictive drugs, like heroin and meth. Is that generally your market?

agamemnonymous,

I too am an American who visited Cuba legally a few years back. My understanding is that the restrictions in question were loosened at the time, and have since been tightened again.

agamemnonymous,

Keming

agamemnonymous,

Brainwashed mostly, both parties contribute, but the right wing significantly moreso. Focus is actively concentrated on culture/morality issues like gun control, abortion, sexuality, etc. so that voters make decisions based on those positions rather than material issues. Additionally, American politicians have led a smear campaign against socialism for at least a century. You can’t vote for the scary socialists, they murder babies and destroy the economy and force everyone to get sex changes.

agamemnonymous,

Who remembers Altoids Sours?

agamemnonymous,

Ironically, Luc Besson himself made two sequels to Arthur and the Invisibles, both novels and films.

agamemnonymous,

It was apparently too intense for test audiences, and this was in the pre-DVD-special-features era when no one bothered to keep cut footage. Maybe they cut too much. I watched it recently because I had heard fantastic things and I was just… generally unimpressed. It was an interesting concept that really wasn’t very well explored, and the writing was so stiff.

agamemnonymous,

The books, game, BBC radio series, BBC television series, and film were all written by Adams, each with slightly independent canon.

agamemnonymous,

Jeff Goldblum playing one of the least eccentric characters in the film was also great.

agamemnonymous,

Ah, common logical mistake. A =⟩ B does not imply B=⟩ A, like squares and rectangles.

‘No sequel’ =⟩ ‘film very bad’ OR ‘film very good’

does not imply

‘Film very bad’ OR ‘film very good’ =⟩ ‘no sequel’

In the same way

Square =⟩ rectangle

does not imply

Rectangle =⟩ square

agamemnonymous,

Honestly I was pretty pleased. I think both are masterclasses in worldbuilding and natural exposition

agamemnonymous,

Carbon?

agamemnonymous,

A tad aspirationally, Hagbard Celine

agamemnonymous, (edited )

You probably don’t physically reach for GURPS Darkness because it’s just a 17 page PDF, but those 17 pages are jam-packed with content including 6 distinct varieties of darkness.

Edit: I forgot that most GMs don’t even use GURPS Darkness. If you go to the Steve Jackson Games forums you’ll find a 15 year old discussion building darkness from scratch, ending with Kromm coming in to say he just runs it as a Ghost with Weakness(Light) and gets on with his day.

agamemnonymous,

Justlistentotherhythmofmyheart

agamemnonymous,

I used to be into Nerf blasters when I was younger, into my teens I would remove the air restrictors and change out the springs, other various performance modifications.

I recently discovered the Adventure Force Aeon Pro, which is an off brand blaster that seems to be marketed for that demographic, and it certainly delivers. Playing with it practically makes me giggle.

agamemnonymous,

The Secret is to not base your identity on questionable ideas.

agamemnonymous,

Of course. I was doing a joke you see, playing with the definition of “questionable” being colloquially equivalent to “doubtful or unreliable”.

agamemnonymous,

My favorite movie about time travel is Back to the Future, but the movie that I think did time travel best is Primer. If time travel works, it’s probably like that.

agamemnonymous,

Long pig

agamemnonymous,

Starting with good quality is important. No amount of maintenance will keep poor quality products good forever. Certainly, negligence can ruin good quality things, but poor quality will degrade with regular use.

That said, 1 pair of good boots is cheaper than 10 pairs of bad ones.

agamemnonymous,

If the owner did they occupy a class position as a worker and owner.

Yup. Employers are entitled to a portion of total revenue proportional to the value they added. In the case of employers who perform necessary work, including administrative/clerical work, this can be a healthy sum. In the case of employers who solely fit the capitalist role of investor, this amount is $0.

agamemnonymous,

I agree with the first sentence, seriously disagree with the second. The shape of the Earth is a testable hypothesis, we have the technology to just go look.

As you go down the rabbit hole of consciousness and existence itself, with a purely rational and materialist mindset, the most reasonable and conservative hypotheses approach the descriptions of deity. Certainly the more specific claims of various religions are as you described, conspiracy theories, but the entire concept? Wholesale dismissal of the generalized God hypothesis strikes me as evidence of rationality applied incompletely, arbitrarily cut short.

agamemnonymous,

Here’s one of those who arbitrarily stops using rationality I was talking about. What is consciousness made of?

agamemnonymous,

The Abrahamic religions do not have a monopoly on the concept of God. The irrationality of their particular fables, talking snakes and walking on water and all the behavioral quirks they claim God has expressed, has nothing to do with the concept itself.

Let’s say I popularized the idea that electricity is really just tiny pixies dancing around, and I came up with all manner of personality traits and stories to go along with them. Let’s say millions, billions of people embraced my pixie theory, and it mutated over time into schismatic alternatives with their own traits and stories. Do the ridiculous things now ascribed to electricity, so pervasively that most people picture little pixies when they hear the words, prove that electricity doesn’t exist?

agamemnonymous,

Good, you’ve got the gist: a ridiculous claim centered in an observable phenomenon does not invalidate that phenomenon.

Now replace electricity with consciousness, subjective experience itself. We observe consciousness, we are consciousness, of course it exists. It is important to investigate the cause, determine the nature of the phenomenon and consider seriously the possible explanations.

By a due investigation, and serious and rational consideration, what possible explanations do you find for consciousness?

agamemnonymous,

we can conclude that it is an emergent property that has arisen like other properties emergent from biological matter

Examples?

agamemnonymous,

Emergence is actually a considerable personal interest of mine, so this is a fun topic for me, and your position is one I used to hold. There’s a basic problem with this line of thinking though.

Emergent patterns and behavior are observed, only. The emergent property isn’t composed of any substance, it is a mathematical construct. That is to say, the higher order organization of ant colonies and bird flocks do not in and of themselves experience qualia. They certainly might look like it from the outside, but that’s the entire point of emergence: this “substance” is an illusion, there is no subjective experience associated with the ant colony or the bird flock. Each individual has it, but the collective itself only looks like it does.

Consciousness is made of some “substance”. The experience itself is made out of “I am”, whatever that is. So if you’re being intellectually honest, and follow the logic fully, you come to one of two conclusions :

  1. Subjective experience does arise purely from emergence: any sufficiently complex and interconnected system can develop a similar phenomenon. If this is the case, then a sufficiently large flock of birds could theoretically “turn on” and begin to have a centralized conscious experience like we do. The Internet itself might “turn on” one day. Why not the universe itself, which is so much larger and more complex still? It’s laughably unscientific to suggest that this phenomenon only emerges at the extremely specific scale of the human nervous system, but nothing bigger.

The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is that it’s more likely than not that the entire universe has an emergent consciousness.

  1. Subjective experience does not arise purely from emergence: the “I am” substance is some fundamental property of the universe, similar to gravity or electromagnetism. The role of emergence is either to develop non-conscious matter into a form that interacts with a consciousness “field” like building a radio, or all matter experiences consciousness and the role of emergence is to develop it into more sophisticated forms.

The logical conclusion of that line of thinking is that there is a panpsychic field permeating the universe.

I’m very explicitly not saying that there’s literally a giant bearded man who lives in the clouds who got into a fight with a talking snake. All of that is a combination of metaphors to explain abstract concepts to bronze age shepherds, translation errors, and bad faith actors trying to secure power for themselves.

What I am saying is that a thorough persistence in the rational exploration of the phenomenon of subjectivity leads one to a universe-spanning consciousness of one nature or another, and that attempts to describe it with human language evoke descriptions consistent with pretty much every major cultures core concept of God before the power-hungry priests started telling people that the universal consciousness will punish them for being naughty.

Personally I’m in the panpsychist camp. I don’t know how much physics you’ve taken, but the modern view basically treats everything as the interaction of fields.

agamemnonymous,

Yeah this is it. Trek has always had such a grandiose atmosphere, but life isn’t like that all the time. It’s refreshing to see the principles of the Federation shine through its imperfect aspects. I love second contact, I love maintenance duties and bureaucratic bullshit and all the other details that makes a fictional universe feel “lived in”.

agamemnonymous,

Eh, I haven’t really used it personally but from what I can tell it’s more about formatting than anything else. It would probably be useful if you want to type up any analysis that uses less common symbols, but as far as I know it doesn’t really present symbols which don’t originate elsewhere.

agamemnonymous,

I think the best is when you’re exposed to mechanics one at a time, acolytes with one aspect of the BBEG’s power, some creature with another, a foot soldier with a surprisingly formidable weapon, etc. Then, the finale combines them all. That way the experience is novel and challenging, but the players aren’t blindsided when it matters.

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