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Altered Carbon is p good
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May 10, 2018 11:30
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The quiche’nspinach ham’nracks. 
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May 10, 2018 11:30
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Kumqwat Haagendasz
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May 10, 2018 11:49
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Vlex posted:On that topic, why is it The Shadout Mapes? Like “The Honorable Judge Holden” or “The Reverend Al Sharpton.”
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May 10, 2018 12:28
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I've been wondering about Mentats (and also the BG with their prana bindu and so on.) Are these guys biologically the same as us regular humans, but with a whole lot of training and weird chemicals on board? Or are they actually genetically distinct from what we'd call human?
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May 10, 2018 12:53
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Tree Bucket posted:I've been wondering about Mentats (and also the BG with their prana bindu and so on.) Are these guys biologically the same as us regular humans, but with a whole lot of training and weird chemicals on board? Or are they actually genetically distinct from what we'd call human? highly trained humans who use sappho juice to think harder or something much more human than a guild navigator
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May 10, 2018 13:00
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Yo if like on give a Shadout to my good buddy Mapes if I could
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May 10, 2018 17:49
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Murray Mantoinette posted:“The Honorable Judge Holden” Hangin' Judge Holden. He'd prolly get on famously with the Baron. Johnny Aztec posted:Yo if like on give a Shadout to my good buddy Mapes if I could What if I'm an irretrievable dork for laughing at this?
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May 10, 2018 17:54
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Tree Bucket posted:I've been wondering about Mentats (and also the BG with their prana bindu and so on.) Are these guys biologically the same as us regular humans, but with a whole lot of training and weird chemicals on board? Or are they actually genetically distinct from what we'd call human? they are autistic people with nootropics if nootropics worked
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May 10, 2018 18:51
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Yandat posted:they are autistic people with nootropics if nootropics worked They’re not really straight up autistic. To do what they do they have to be able to understand people perfectly. They just think completely differently, since they cultivated the “naive mind” where they drop all of their preconceptions and are completely objective.
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May 10, 2018 19:03
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piracetam actually works bud
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May 10, 2018 19:33
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sure it does
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May 10, 2018 19:37
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lol In the United States, it is not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for any medical use and it is not permitted to be sold as a dietary supplement Evidence to support its use for many conditions is unclear.
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May 10, 2018 19:44
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Drake meme with "Machine Thinking" and "Drug Thinking"
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May 10, 2018 19:47
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basic hitler posted:piracetam actually works bud The spice must flow
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May 10, 2018 20:00
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piracetam gave me crazy cool dreams and improved my memory by quite a bit back in the day. i still have a bunch of it + choline. although it's like 10 years old now it has probably lost a lot of potency and it tastes like bitter salt so i don't use it but maybe i should at least finish it off.
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May 10, 2018 20:06
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vintage spice!
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May 10, 2018 20:12
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Piracetam actually does work. As an aside I read the Metabarons last night and it was cool.
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May 10, 2018 20:33
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Come on guys, it is in the text. Shadout is a title meaning "well-dipper" and if you can't see why that would be a pretty big title amongst fremen I don't know what to say.
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May 10, 2018 22:52
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The way I sort of understood the explanation for mentats and to a certain extent most of the superhuman poo poo people can do not directly related to spice is that in real life, there’s idiot savant autistics who can’t read or otherwise function in society but can perform astounding feats of mathematics. And the fact that those people exist by fluke in real life means that the squishy hardware of the human brain is in fact capable of that level of thinking, and therefore in the future with super advanced trining techniques and magic space drugs, maybe anyone could learn to think like that.
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May 10, 2018 23:07
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Some advances are a result of breeding programs. See: duncan Idaho getting clowned by Moneo in god emperor
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May 10, 2018 23:15
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So is that the new baseline for humanity or is Moneo special because he’s part of Leto’s program? Are “regular people” still schlubs like us, albeit maybe with everyone having some Fremen ancestry now because of the jihad? It occurs to me that there’s vanishingly few examples of completely “normal” people in the series. It’s why one of my favorite parts is after Teg gets bullet time and is being transported to safety by a network of spies who all formerly served under his command or had sons who did. And they’re just describing weird poo poo on post-Harkonnen Geidi Prime like a caste of sewer workers born with no sense of smell or roving gangs of kids who will kill anyone who doesn’t accept Leto II as their lord and savior. And of course this is interspersed with him eating Goku levels of food because again, for some preposterous reason Teg randomly gets super speed and a resulting increased metabolism? Most of the series could basically be a stage play in various palaces or cave forts and monasteries. There’s nothing wrong with that but it left me wanting to see Herbert describe a “normal” dystopian space city full of weirdos.
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May 10, 2018 23:57
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Dune is a series of novels that advocates positive eugenics
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May 11, 2018 00:08
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and all threats that could wipe us out are either us or are made by us and humanity must constantly be kept under pressure so the strong will survive and the weak will be culled so we don't destroy ourselves and we must never relax and we must eliminate all weakness and all humanity in ourselves
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May 11, 2018 00:14
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I am gonna move to a backwater planet and breed mediocre children because I am the one person in the universe not obsessed with breeding super humans or measuring my family's lifespans in millenia
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May 11, 2018 00:20
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"My son Paul-Leto wants to study theatre at the Atreides School for the Performing Arts"
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May 11, 2018 00:22
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tactlessbastard posted:Altered Carbon is p good
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May 11, 2018 00:41
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Liquid Dinosaur posted:The way I sort of understood the explanation for mentats and to a certain extent most of the superhuman poo poo people can do not directly related to spice is that in real life, there’s idiot savant autistics who can’t read or otherwise function in society but can perform astounding feats of mathematics. And the fact that those people exist by fluke in real life means that the squishy hardware of the human brain is in fact capable of that level of thinking, and therefore in the future with super advanced trining techniques and magic space drugs, maybe anyone could learn to think like that. A lot of it is noticing certain potentials and then training them to amazing heights. Mentats in particular are very rare and few people have the potential to be a mentat. This is why it was a huge deal to have a ducal heir (Paul) being trained as a mentat. That just didn't happen under normal circumstances as mentats jumped up pretty randomly. You also had to identify them early and basically train them from birth; the potential took a lot of time to develop properly. They also claimed that the sapho juice made them smarter by putting making their brains more energetic but it's never explained if that actually works or not, I think. In any event mentats had brains that were far, far along the bell curve and then trained the gently caress out of them. They could remember vast amounts of information but detach their emotional responses from it enough to make incredible leaps of intuition. The human body is capable of a lot more than we give it credit for and like you said sometimes savants just appear that can do ridiculous things. Incidentally they aren't always stupid or autistic either; some of them are extremely normal other than something strange like an ability to see a number no matter how large and just know if it's a prime or not. Liquid Dinosaur posted:So is that the new baseline for humanity or is Moneo special because he’s part of Leto’s program? Are “regular people” still schlubs like us, albeit maybe with everyone having some Fremen ancestry now because of the jihad? Stories don't tend to tell much about normal schulbs like us because that isn't where the drama is. "Joey McFisherton woke up at 7 a.m. He got on his fishing boat at 8, caught fish all day, ate one for lunch, then was home by 7. He did this 6 days a week for 57 years. Then he died of a heart attack" doesn't make for an epic story. It sounds like a pretty good life given that that basically meant nothing ever went wrong for Joey but writing a novel about it? Meh. So yeah in the setting the vast majority of humans alive are going to be boring, normal people doing boring, normal things. Even among the Fremen most of them are going to be pretty boring and normal. They have stuff like machines and food sources that needed tended to so most of them are going to be doing that sort of thing. A story about a Fremen mechanic who babysat a wind trap and didn't do much else with his life until he was 73 isn't going to be an interesting read. Yeah he'd be an important part of the Fremen lifestyle but not particularly interesting to read about. The main character of Dune is the spice. The stories are more about who comes in contact with it than anything else; your average person probably won't ever see the stuff and will probably live a life like Joey McFisherton. The Landsraad is supposed to be galaxy-spanning. There's a lot of people in it and it's safe to assume that most of them lead normal lives. I think stuff like sewer workers with no sense of smell is getting into another thing that Frank Herbert played with; humans are adaptable as gently caress. So if you have a bunch of people that live on Dune for long enough you end up with the Fremen. You have people who work in sewers for multiple generations you get people who can't smell anymore. Get rid of computers and expect people to fill that role and over time you develop mentats. Develop genetic manipulation for several thousand years and the Bene Tleilax happen.
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May 11, 2018 01:17
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Hey so I just finished book 1 today too and ol Frank definitely tries to cast the smell of sweaty balls and vaginas as "the smell of home, of the steich, and safety." That guy really had a thing about sweaty balls.
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May 11, 2018 02:36
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ToxicSlurpee posted:A lot of it is noticing certain potentials and then training them to amazing heights. Mentats in particular are very rare and few people have the potential to be a mentat. This is why it was a huge deal to have a ducal heir (Paul) being trained as a mentat. That just didn't happen under normal circumstances as mentats jumped up pretty randomly. You also had to identify them early and basically train them from birth; the potential took a lot of time to develop properly. i didnt know this and am interested whats this from????
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May 11, 2018 02:42
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paul_soccer10 posted:i didnt know this and am interested whats this from???? It's in the first book like a few dozen pages in. Leto is all like "oh bee tee dubz, Hawat noticed you have the potential and has been training you all along." It happens before they even leave Caladan.
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May 11, 2018 02:54
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It's in the first book like a few dozen pages in. Leto is all like "oh bee tee dubz, Hawat noticed you have the potential and has been training you all along." It happens before they even leave Caladan. Yeah, Leto says "At first you can train a mentat just through behavior but eventually you have to tell them you're doing it, so surprise."
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May 11, 2018 02:56
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oh cool
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May 11, 2018 02:57
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cultivated autism to serve a feudal eugenonarchy ftw
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May 11, 2018 02:58
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Liquid Dinosaur posted:And of course this is interspersed with him eating Goku levels of food because again, for some preposterous reason Teg randomly gets super speed and a resulting increased metabolism? It wasn't random really. Teg had a real gift even for mentats, so when he was tortured by that weird feedback machine, his mind was racing at positronic speed. His abilities as a mentat jumped so far ahead that he had to adjust his movement to his thinking. The first thing he notices after he gets into bullet time is that grazing a fingernail on his restraints rips it right off. He near-instantly corrects for that and manages to kill his abductors before they can shout for help. I'm pretty sure Herbert alludes to the typical dystopia many times, but doesn't linger on them since they're easy to imagine. As for the weirdos, well, there's the Tleilaxu and those guys with the hypnobong 
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May 11, 2018 03:06
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Teg's also another weird talent out of the Atreides bloodline. The entire BG is directly descended from Siona and therefore Paul.
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May 11, 2018 03:09
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Yeah. By the end (I'm referring to book 6) about half the dramatis personae are Atreides.
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May 11, 2018 03:12
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phasmid posted:Yeah. By the end (I'm referring to book 6) about half the dramatis personae are Atreides. Freaking Bene Gesserit and their damned centuries-long eugenics program. 
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May 11, 2018 03:24
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P sure the Leto basically made it so that his sister has as many descendants per capita as Genghis Khan.
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May 11, 2018 03:37
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dis astranagant posted:P sure the Leto basically made it so that his sister has as many descendants per capita as Genghis Khan. Do you mean Siona?
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May 11, 2018 03:51
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