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Robot montage? But seriously, it's like 1. GoT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Dexter 3. LOST 4. BSG e: worst page snipe. How bout that Expanse, you guys?
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Dec 27, 2019 16:00
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You know, I think the BSG finale just offended me in a way that I couldn't be offended by GoT, because by that point I was only half-watching. I was still hoping for some kind of payoff to something in BSG, so I yield the point about GoT being more terrible. But my larger point, about shows with supposed series-long arcs that finished so disastrously that it makes the earlier good stuff unwatchable, stands. e: The Expanse hits a perfect sweet spot where if they're canceled at any time, well, I would like to see the Roci on more adventures, but they've told a series of complete stories. Norton the First fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Dec 27, 2019 |
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Dec 27, 2019 16:09
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Sandwich Anarchist posted:Firefly existing gave us Serenity, so it's good in my book. Now whose the loving dumbass Phi230 fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Dec 27, 2019 |
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Dec 27, 2019 16:34
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Phenotype posted:Robot montage? I know its fun to poo poo on GoT because it was a bigger show and it happened more recently but thinking its ending was even comparable to the apocalyptic trainwreck of Dexter is ridiculous.
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Dec 27, 2019 16:36
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You know if they kept to a weekly release schedule the thread would be talking about the show, unlike now
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Dec 27, 2019 16:41
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It's testament to this show that I often wish secondary characters stick around with the Roci crew. I wouldn't have minded Dr. Okoye or Prax joining them for another season. Or Clarissa, even if it wouldn't have made much sense. Amos's backstory gets darker all the time, I kinda hope it gets left as this vague thing. Laying it all out at some point would probably never live up to the implication. Phi230 posted:You know if they kept to a weekly release schedule the thread would be talking about the show, unlike now I honestly prefer a weekly released episode to a new show getting dumped whole season. It's nice to have a thing to look forward to weekly, plus it makes me feel less pressured to watch the whole thing before accidently running into spoilers. davidspackage fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Dec 27, 2019 |
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Dec 27, 2019 16:46
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I liked Firefly a lot as a teen. I told a female friend to go watch it and she came back enthusiastic but the last episode (the one where the black bounty hunter calmly and coolly threatens to force himself on Kaylee) was so viscerally disturbing to her that it ruined the whole show retroactively. Took me a while to "get it" but then all that stuff about Whedon being a sex pest came out, and now I really just don't want to touch anything by him ever againPhi230 posted:You know if they kept to a weekly release schedule the thread would be talking about the show, unlike now Yeah 
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Dec 27, 2019 16:52
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One of my favorite sci-fi books is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, partly because it takes stuff like living your whole life in low-g seriously. I don't think the first few episodes of the first season are really worth rewatching, because it's all about moving pieces into place, but I loved the giant skinny Belter being subjected to gravity torture. I wish they'd had the effects budget to follow up on this a little, rather than Belters just being normal people who have to take drugs to maybe survive in 1 g. 0.3-0.4 g seems to be the standard for Martians and the Belt, but loonies live at only 1/6 of Earth's gravity, they surely must be weird looking. davidspackage posted:It's testament to this show that I often wish secondary characters stick around with the Roci crew. I wouldn't have minded Dr. Okoye or Prax joining them for another season. Or Clarissa, even if it wouldn't have made much sense. When is Bobbi going to join the crew, goddamn it?  Amoses are an expendable resource!
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Dec 27, 2019 16:55
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Phenotype posted:Robot montage? Also, in case this was a genuine question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHUEYIE_MZA
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Dec 27, 2019 17:36
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BSG takes place in a fictional reality where a monotheistic god actually exists and intervenes in human affairs and that broke a lot of brains. I don't think any other sci-fi show has ever tried something like that. The overall themes were pretty solid to the very end but the writing got really lovely and then Lee tried to hit a pigeon with a broom for like literally half an episode for absolutely no reason. Still, comparing it to whatever the gently caress GoT was is pretty unfair to BSG.
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Dec 27, 2019 17:54
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BSG was a product of its time, like Jericho and Firefly. All poo poo
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Dec 27, 2019 18:00
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Phi230 posted:BSG was a product of its time, like Jericho and Firefly. All poo poo No. In Babylon 5,
But the plotting, and some of the character arcs? Those were tight as poo poo. Cheap syndicated genre television did a better job at planning than a series with a sequence that ends in "And they have a plan."
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Dec 27, 2019 18:15
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Norton the First posted:Also, in case this was a genuine question: Haha it was a genuine question, I didn't remember that bit. But yeah, at least it followed naturally from the themes the show developed all along. Like, I really wasn't too annoyed that the "head" characters ended up being unexplainable angels, because the show had always had an undercurrent of religion and faith. AnEdgelord posted:I know its fun to poo poo on GoT because it was a bigger show and it happened more recently but thinking its ending was even comparable to the apocalyptic trainwreck of Dexter is ridiculous. Dexter wasn't nearly as expensive a production as GoT, it wasn't nearly as big a national sensation, and it didn't rely on a single overarching epic story. And honestly I don't think it ever hit the quality or promise of early GoT, either. It's kind of an apples and oranges comparison in my mind. It's basically impossible for Dexter's ending to be as bad as GoT's because just by design, Dexter relied a lot less on sticking that landing. Dexter was always kind of a schlocky fun adventure show, with minor season-long plot arcs but a lot of focus on killer-of-the-week plots that were wrapped up within an episode or two. Dexter's ending was really lovely, but the entire show hadn't been leading up to that resolution, so it doesn't retroactively make the Doakes season any less good the way GoT's ending hosed up the entire series-long plot.
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Dec 27, 2019 18:19
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Norton the First posted:No. In Babylon 5, Babylon 5 was on a steep downward slide by the last season. It's a shame it looks so drat rough on streaming, it's kept some people I recommended it to from sticking with it. Expanse content: I enjoyed this season a lot and I was amazed that the tether actually mostly worked because 99% of the show is "we made a desperate plan and it almost worked but then something went wrong which caused us to make even more desperate plans, forever." I was convinced the belter ship was going to crash
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Dec 27, 2019 18:51
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qirex posted:Babylon 5 was on a steep downward slide by the last season. It's a shame it looks so drat rough on streaming, it's kept some people I recommended it to from sticking with it. Not by the last season, in the last season. They thought they were canceled so they took their plan and wrapped up everything. Then they got another season, which is extraneous. The Expanse is very good, incidentally. The best I've seen.
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Dec 27, 2019 19:26
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Just jumped into this thread for the 1st time, as I finished binging all 4 seasons of this show. Is this thread actually about the show because all Ive seen is discussion about BSG and other sci fi shows. I have legit questions about the protomolecule and the ring.If these are answered in future books, please do not spoil. 1. My understanding of the PM is that the proto species created it as a tool and that it was human meddling that weaponized it. Ok fine, but why did it start building the ring? Was that its purpose before it was discovered by humanity or only after when they crashed it on Venus? 2. Did the ring used to exist in the past? It is stated that the proto species blew up 1300 worlds trying to stop the thing that would eventually extinct them. Why now open these gates to humans and are these the same worlds that they previously destroyed? 3. The alien structures on Ilus are from the proto species or the species that destroyed them and the PM activated them to find answers as to who they were? Is it a coincidence that the colonists just happened to pick this planet or did they bring the PM with them. I know these were probably answered in show and I probably just missed them or misunderstood, but I binged 40 eps in like a week. Lastly, would anyone recommend reading the books concurrently with the show or wait until it is finished. I dont want to cross spoil myself by reading Book 4 for example which may contain spoilers for Season 5.
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Dec 27, 2019 20:03
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TommyGun85 posted:Just jumped into this thread for the 1st time, as I finished binging all 4 seasons of this show. 1. Yeah, that was the purpose of it. It was shot at the Sun billions of years ago to build the ring so they could colonize the system. 2. Nobody said it blew up 1300 worlds just that some were blown up. The 1300 is how many were opened up by rings to humanity. Nobody sent the PM to us after that happened, it was already en route and got caught in Saturn's gravity. The PM is an automatic system that just did what it was programmed to do. 3. Seems the structures were PM race and the station in the ring space was trying to figure out what happened, so it sent Miller to start fiddling around and investigating. Everything that was left was just the automated support systems and AI. It can be assumed that nearly every planet they access from the rings will have PM poo poo on it.
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Dec 27, 2019 20:15
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qirex posted:Expanse content: I enjoyed this season a lot and I was amazed that the tether actually mostly worked because 99% of the show is "we made a desperate plan and it almost worked but then something went wrong which caused us to make even more desperate plans, forever." I was convinced the belter ship was going to crash When Lucia get knocked into space I had no hope at all that things would resolve the way that they did. But, like everyone's childhood fear of quicksand, that's one of the ways to die that terrifies me regardless of how implausible it is to ever encounter.
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Dec 27, 2019 20:35
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The Spoiler thread has less of the bullshit in here lol but yall gotta read the books.
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Dec 27, 2019 21:54
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One thing I do appreciate about the show is how it's impossible to actually blockade anything at the scale of space and the speeds things are moving, that's such a lazy convention in tons of sci fi, especially the Clone Wars cartoon where 3 ships sitting next to each other was a full planetary blockade. That does bring up something I might not remember, Ilus/New Terra was mostly covered by water and there were just a few islands to land on, right? "There's a whole drat planet and every faction needs to be in the same spot" is another sci fi cliche.
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Dec 28, 2019 00:13
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qirex posted:One thing I do appreciate about the show is how it's impossible to actually blockade anything at the scale of space and the speeds things are moving, that's such a lazy convention in tons of sci fi, especially the Clone Wars cartoon where 3 ships sitting next to each other was a full planetary blockade. That does bring up something I might not remember, Ilus/New Terra was mostly covered by water and there were just a few islands to land on, right? "There's a whole drat planet and every faction needs to be in the same spot" is another sci fi cliche. Although Illus as a planet has huge amounts of lithium, I don't think it's necessarily evenly distributed - in the book it is not, and the belters landed right on the most concentrated area. Plus adverse possession is a thing, it wouldn't help the corporation's legal position to land elsewhere and leave the belters alone and unsupervised as well as free to take and sell lithium whose ownership is disputed.
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Dec 28, 2019 00:20
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Apparatchik Magnet posted:Although Illus as a planet has huge amounts of lithium, I don't think it's necessarily evenly distributed - in the book it is not, and the belters landed right on the most concentrated area. Yeah I figured it was the adverse possession thing and I'm guessing they would not have ended up in the same camp if the belters hadn't blown up the landing platform in the first place. Unintended consequences is a recurring theme in this franchise.
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Dec 28, 2019 00:29
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Lol adverse possession of a planet
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Dec 28, 2019 00:36
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They do sort of have blockade but it's more reasonable. They didn't talk about in the show, but in the book the Rocinante is basically blockading the Ilus system on its own because it's the only warship, so any unarmed ship in the entire system is at its mercy. It doesn't have to be physically in the way of ships, it can destroy anything in the area whenever it wants and there isn't poo poo you can do about it.
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Dec 28, 2019 00:41
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TommyGun85 posted:
Couple misconceptions here: 1. The species that built the protomolecule sent the PM to hundreds of different star systems millions of years ago -- it's a tool they programmed that's supposed to land on a planet, absorb biological matter, and use it to create a Ring Gate and link up to the weirdspace between Gates, so the Builders can quickly hop to that star system once it's finished. I think it's mentioned that the Builders were intending it to find primordial ooze and maybe plant matter, it wasn't intended as a weapon against humanity because humanity simply didn't exist millions of years ago when it was sent. This leads to weirdness like Julie Mao and ghost Miller because the PM isn't built to deal with complex life like humanity, and so humans left their imprint on it. 2. Humanity's ring gate didn't exist in the past, but the Builders sent out tons of PM probes that resulted in at least 1300 other Gates to different star systems. The Builders didn't scour all those worlds with the weapon from Holden's vision in S3, just a few. And the Ring space had been shut down with the death of the Builders, but Holden and ghost Miller turned it back on last season to stop the station's defense systems and open the rings back up. I think the 1300 worlds were just the ones that hadn't been destroyed. 3. The alien stuff on Ilus was all from the protomolecule Builders, except for the weird blob of nothingness in the last episode, which was a weapon that an unknown species used to destroy the Builders. I think the implication was that the structures were all built by the protomolecule (with programming that said "absorb biological matter and then build a weird cone drill thing" instead of "absorb biological matter and then build a ring"). It's not a coincidence that stuff is there, there's likely to be abandoned Builder structures on any planet beyond a Ring Gate because those planets were all part of the Builder "empire", so Avasarala sent Holden to go investigate and see if that stuff is going to be trouble. And then ghost Miller made all of it spring to life and become trouble. Sorry for the BSG shitposting, friend. 
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Dec 28, 2019 00:43
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to put it in an analogy, the PM probe sent to the solar system to use on-site materials and biomass to build a ring is basically a steamroller flattening some ants to build a road. there will be further infrastructure built for whatever purposes, but that's much easier once the road is in place first. except the steamroller got stuck in traffic for millions of years, long enough for the ants to develop intelligence and take notice of the steamroller and start poking at the controls and maybe try driving it over rival anthills. there is no original driver in this analogy, the steamroller drives itself. also it is made of computing substrate and doesn't just run over the ants, it eats them, but then it turns out the intelligences that the steamroller consumes are compatible with the steamroller's ubiquitous computing substrate so it starts putting parts of them together for its own purposes so there's like a GPS ant and a search engine ant but it puts together too much and one of the ants starts self-re-assembling and okay this got away from me at some point and I'm not sure how to get it back.
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Dec 28, 2019 11:01
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What does PM need with some ratty swamp plant carbon? Presumably it can do its own organic chemistry and much better than early cells?
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Dec 28, 2019 11:34
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Originally the PM was meant to smash into a planet with biomass to use as raw material to build the gate. Not sure the delivery or targeting methods. I doubt they were just throwing rocks at random. The PM is just an advanced set of instructions with maybe limited code to deal with variables it encounters. It's a 3D printer but uses biomass and other materials much like DNA in organics. Instead of sending giant ships that could convert systems and connect to the Gate network it makes sense to send something that unfolds and uses what ever material is nearby. Organics just seem to be the most maliable and maybe the PM requires electrical/chemical reaction which is why they can't just convert dead planets.
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Dec 28, 2019 12:49
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wait I think I got it back so the search engine ant doesn't work all that great at first so takes several (thousand) iterations to really get to a state where it can accomplish anything but the steamroller has made the ant too powerful so the ant becomes google and immediately goes off and does a bunch of poo poo that nobody wants it to no nevermind it's still lost.
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Dec 28, 2019 13:16
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qirex posted:One thing I do appreciate about the show is how it's impossible to actually blockade anything at the scale of space and the speeds things are moving, that's such a lazy convention in tons of sci fi, especially the Clone Wars cartoon where 3 ships sitting next to each other was a full planetary blockade. That does bring up something I might not remember, Ilus/New Terra was mostly covered by water and there were just a few islands to land on, right? "There's a whole drat planet and every faction needs to be in the same spot" is another sci fi cliche. The Belters were already there and had set up a rudimentary town/living area. Landing there gives the scientists an already functioning base of operations so they can get to "sciencing" instead of having to build a base from scratch. Meanwhile, Murtry and his mercs were there to "make the Belters an offer they couldn't refuse" AKA take some money and get the gently caress off this world or we murder the lot of you. It harder to do that if you land on the other side of the planet or something.
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Dec 28, 2019 14:15
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Tertius Oculum posted:Originally the PM was meant to smash into a planet with biomass to use as raw material to build the gate. Not sure the delivery or targeting methods. I doubt they were just throwing rocks at random. The other point of using organic materials is to ensure a habitable planet in-system. The Builders appear to have been fundamentally similar in terms of what they needed from a planet (and carbon-based), and the PM may use organics as building blocks but not enough to completely wipe out a biosphere. If some disaster had happened in a system after sending out the PM seed asteroid, it wouldn’t “fertilize” itself and build the gate and the Builders wouldn’t waste their time connecting to a dead system. It’s unclear how non-standard the Sol PM has ended up; Venus has the organics needed but doesn’t seem especially colonizable, but Julie may have overridden the PM’s targeting directives. It’s also unclear whether “normal” PM builds other structures like we saw on Illus and Sol’s just got detailed, or whether the Builders sent additional instructions after the PM made contact, or even if there were Builders living on Illus whose traces got swallowed up by whatever the Others used on them.
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Dec 28, 2019 15:12
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I mean, there is nothing special about organic chemistry or biochemistry. If it can make freaky magic metallic alloys it can make proteins. Refining living organisms to extract some specific proteins is extremely inefficient and only something you do if you are some backwater ape civilization with a poor grasp of biophysics and huge cost concerns. And I don't even know what the PM would even want with insulin or actinin.
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Dec 28, 2019 16:30
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Ultimately it does the vast majority of its work on Venus, so I'm not sure if we really know what it needs.
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Dec 28, 2019 16:36
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It doesn't help that the only things we know about the Builders we learn from their broken toys and leftover appliances they left running. That and something hated PM tech, specifically Ring gates, enough to slaughter them all.
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Dec 28, 2019 16:37
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GABA ghoul posted:And I don't even know what the PM would even want with insulin or actinin. Spoilers but all the PM builders had diabetes
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Dec 28, 2019 16:50
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GABA ghoul posted:I mean, there is nothing special about organic chemistry or biochemistry. If it can make freaky magic metallic alloys it can make proteins. I don't know if that makes sense or if there's any world where pond scum would seriously aid in that process, but that's the premise at least as I understand it. They didn't send any sort of substantial machine, they sent a molecule that had to build everything else on site.
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Dec 28, 2019 21:28
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It's described as hijacking already extant self-replicators more than itself being a self-replicating Von Neumann machine kind of deal. It also seems like it would only do that on a planet the PM aliens can live on, so if it were to hit a poorly scouted planet that has life but isn't habitable for them, it'd just fail. But PM tech is all sort of mysterious and unexplained because it's incomprehensibly advanced.
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Dec 28, 2019 21:40
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guys, what if the PM Builders just moved to a different galaxy and put this one up for sale?????
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Dec 28, 2019 22:00
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Tertius Oculum posted:guys, what if the PM Builders just moved to a different galaxy and put this one up for sale????? "galaxy sold as is; furniture and appliances included. big fixer upper."
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Dec 29, 2019 00:08
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Johnny Truant posted:"galaxy sold as is; furniture and appliances included. big fixer upper." You got a death wish, Johnny Truant?
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Dec 29, 2019 00:12
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