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FEMA summer camp posted:hey what about peter f. hamilton i read fallen dragon once and it seemed really severely self-indulgent
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Aug 28, 2011 05:52
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Kirk posted:call me when someone drops off that vhs series of the original movies where you line em up and its the enterprise I have this
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Aug 28, 2011 06:28
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NoneMoreNegative posted:I read 'The Reality Dysfunction' last week, umpty-hundred pages with more characters than you can keep track of and the end of the book doesn't even attempt to wrap things up; nope, straight on to the next breezeblock sized publication 'The Neutronium Alchemist'... I don't think I care enough.
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Aug 28, 2011 07:30
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^yeahFarmer Crack-rear end posted:i read fallen dragon once and it seemed really severely self-indulgent how'd'ya figgger?
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Aug 28, 2011 09:56
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commonwealth is ok space opera with a tweest. not great, not dramatic, just okish.
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Aug 28, 2011 18:12
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FEMA summer camp posted:how'd'ya figgger? one of the main characters, as a (fat, nerd) teenager, falls in love with a superhot teenage girl, has a lot of hot sex and transforms into a confident and fit young man (while still being brilliant), fucks it up (kinda), then goes on to have an enormously successful career as a nigh-impervious supersoldier mercenary, then at the end of the book gets to go back in time and have a do-over where he lives happily ever after with the girl he loved also somehow it's the colony founded by CALIFORNIANS who (heh of course) become the ultra-youth-obsessed genetically engineered animal people who are supremely interconnected with their environment (although admittedly it was fun reading them kicking the poo poo out of the rear end in a top hat mercenaries... hey there's that indulgence again!)
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Aug 28, 2011 18:16
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Yeah Hamilton [and a lot of other authors] is really big on people preserving cultural identity after they move to a new planet, like People from India colonize a new world and somehow it's 100% planetwide straight-up monoculture. Seems kinda lazy to me.
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Aug 28, 2011 18:36
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oh i forgot, he also kind of has a smug "heh, reality kicked in, interstellar travel isn't actually profitable at all" attitude about macro-level technology, but he has no problem with just furiously masturbating over how loving awesome nanotechnology is.
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Aug 28, 2011 20:59
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is it FTL interstellar travel or boring sleeper/generation ship interstellar travel, because i can definitely see the latter not being profitable
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Aug 28, 2011 21:16
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it was FTL and it wasn't just like "oh we established a colony, then it went to poo poo when we realized we couldn't make money off it", it was "we somehow blew the money to establish and heavily develop a bunch of colonies before figuring out that we weren't going to make much money off this" which then turned into "welp might as well just start literally plundering and looting the colonies every few years, gotta turn a profit somehow (b/c most of the colonies were corporate-founded iirc)"
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Aug 28, 2011 21:33
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which on further thought doesn't make a huge amount of sense; i mean if you're going to go the whole "bean counters rule the world" thing, someone should have immediately pointed out that you don't need to blow a trillion dollars to establish a settlement light-years away, you could just build orbital O'Neill stations and excavated lunar bases for a fraction of the cost, and use robots to mine the solar system's asteroids it's been awhile since i read the book though, maybe there's something i'm forgetting. the nanowank and the teenaged sex and the happy ending are still enough to shove the book solidly into "severely self-indulgent" in my opinion.
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Aug 28, 2011 21:37
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space mining/colonization in general doesn't really make much sense I mean what are we going to do with an extra 8 trillion tons of iron
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Aug 28, 2011 21:41
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yeah i dont really get why it wouldn't be profitable to mine useful metals from asteroids and poo poo, idk also maybe don't start colonies in incredibly hostile environments??? maybe find some earthlike planets???
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Aug 28, 2011 21:41
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no my point is that for space mining to be even remotely profitable without magic free energy you'd need to bring back so much raw material that you'd crash the market for it
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Aug 28, 2011 21:43
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 unironically good, and it's not even about genetic mutants in giant armour suits
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Aug 28, 2011 22:00
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qirex posted:no my point is that for space mining to be even remotely profitable without magic free energy you'd need to bring back so much raw material that you'd crash the market for it not if the market for raw materials is so vast that any supplies bought in are instantly sold, whereas energy is so cheap it's like oil in the 60s and 70s due to dysonsphering the sun or w/e
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Aug 28, 2011 22:05
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but if we have free energy we can just recycle everything like most of the stuff humans need are organic compounds not dense metals "welp we got nothing to eat but GODDAMN WE'RE SWIMMING IN CADMIUM I mean look at all this fuckin cadmium we're rich" qirex fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Aug 28, 2011 |
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Aug 28, 2011 22:12
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i think the implication in most sci-fi is that there are materials you cant get on earth and those are the ones you bound across the galaxy looking for
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Aug 28, 2011 22:18
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Kirk posted:i think the implication in most sci-fi is that there are materials you cant get on earth and those are the ones you bound across the galaxy looking for are any of those materials real elements and not mystery sci-fi voodoo unobtanium? [gently caress you James Cameron] because there's people talking about asteroid mining right now and I'm like 
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Aug 28, 2011 22:22
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qirex posted:space mining/colonization in general doesn't really make much sense I mean what are we going to do with an extra 8 trillion tons of iron you narrowminded fool! if we can magnetize that we can erase every vhs tape in the galaxy!
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Aug 28, 2011 22:24
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I could maybe see harvesting hydrogen/helium from gas giants but not mining metals from planets or asteroids edit: my avatar has hit some sort of crazy quantum state thanks to GBS mod Toby qirex fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Aug 28, 2011 |
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Aug 28, 2011 22:25
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e: wait nvm wth
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Aug 28, 2011 22:27
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cya later sithlords
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Aug 28, 2011 22:28
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qirex posted:I could maybe see harvesting hydrogen/helium from gas giants but not mining metals from planets or asteroids why not? if you make spaceships, and you need more space ships, you need more metals
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Aug 28, 2011 22:29
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CHARONS BOAT RIDER posted:why not? if you make spaceships, and you need more space ships, you need more metals it would be cheaper to build the ships where the materials are, no?
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Aug 28, 2011 22:35
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the cool thing about mining and powerplants and industry in space is that who fuckin cares about toxic waste, just vent your plutonium where ever.
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Aug 28, 2011 23:31
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likewise with mars
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Aug 28, 2011 23:31
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qirex posted:it would be cheaper to build the ships where the materials are, no? depends on if it's easy/cheaper to move a spacedock big enough to forge the metals and make the ship to where the metals are or not i guess?
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Aug 28, 2011 23:37
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rotor posted:likewise with farts
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Aug 28, 2011 23:38
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reading Fire and Ice by George RRRRRR martin after watching the series and it's pretty impressive how closely the series stayed to the book with the exception of making most characters appropriately older
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Aug 28, 2011 23:39
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Teh boners
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Trig Discipline posted:in space, no one can hear you cut one
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Aug 28, 2011 23:40
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z0ratio fartboner posted:reading Fire and Ice by George RRRRRR martin after watching the series and it's pretty impressive how closely the series stayed to the book with the exception of making most characters appropriately older and better looking
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Aug 28, 2011 23:41
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im mostly just mad that he's using RR as his middle initials i mean, ok, so like fantasy novels have been stealing ideas from tolkien since forever, now they stealin his initials too?? that aint right.
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Aug 28, 2011 23:43
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i mean tyrion is repeatedly referred to as monstrous and disfigured in the books, and peter dinklage ain't that. i would go so far as to say that if i was going to get it on with a male dwarf he'd be pretty high on the list likewise brienne and a bunch of other characters - supposed to be uggos but we can't have that on tv now can we
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Aug 28, 2011 23:43
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qirex posted:are any of those materials real elements and not mystery sci-fi voodoo unobtanium? [gently caress you James Cameron] because there's people talking about asteroid mining right now and I'm like you have to realize that space travel in sci-fi is, quite literally, just a stand-in for sea exploration on earth. you can only get spices from the far east and you can't make them back home in england, so fleets of ships going to and-fro make sense. in translating that to space they didn't really consider the fact that in reality the resource expenditure in building a starship, sending it to planet tin and hauling back a few trillion tons of the stuff doesn't really make sense. a lot of the staples of sci-fi were developed before we even knew about this poo poo. personally i don't care and i'm willing to look the other way because i'm a big gay homo that likes big ships flying around the galaxy so i'm satisfied. on the flip side, when i am hungry from some slightly more realistic and imaginative sci-fi there's lots of modern stuff that takes these limitations into account.
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Aug 28, 2011 23:46
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Kirk posted:i'm a big gay homo that likes big ships flying around the galaxy 
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Aug 28, 2011 23:48
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rotor posted:im mostly just mad that he's using RR as his middle initials drat i never even realized that 
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Aug 28, 2011 23:50
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Trig Discipline posted:
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Aug 28, 2011 23:50
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Trig Discipline posted:
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Aug 28, 2011 23:50
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I thought George RRRRrrrRRRrrrRrrRrrrR Marrrrrrrrrtin said something about how he regretted making the characters so young or something?
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Aug 28, 2011 23:51
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