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Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

I was worried that the show was going to lose a lot of the unsettling weirdness about sleeving, but (Ep 4) Ortega sleeving her crotchety gran in a neo-nazi for Die de Muertos is loving genius.

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Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

The change that most irritates me is a really minor one in ep 2: he buys all his guns from a blackmarket dealer

In the book he goes to a swanky walnut walled establishment, where a very dapper synth sells him perfectly legal hyper-cyanide tipped knives, and a mag-flechette with a spare battery and "a charger compatible with all standard household outlets"

It gave a really nice civilised veneer to the dystopia, and made it a lot more than a generic gritty cyberpunk.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

^^^^^^
As if that would make any difference to anything! We still have horrifying political dynasties now, because you can just pass all your money and influence to your inbred chinless offspring.

Boris Galerkin posted:

Sorry I’ve never read the books nor the Wikipedia page so I have no idea about half of these terms/names and was just going by what I picked up from the show only. Not saying you’re wrong or anything, but this is what I pieced together from the show:


Kovacs was one of the “good guys” being trained since he was a kid for whatever reason. I keep saying “good guys” in quotes because honestly I have no idea what that group was called, but I think it was the same group of people that killed him at the beginning of the series. The dudes in the full body armor. They seemed like they were the military/enforcement arm of the recognized world government(s), thus I call them the “good guys.”

During the training scene in that forest I was under the impression that Kovacs revealed that he was one of those good guys, that opposed the group of terrorists/rebels that Kovacs ended up joining. He got lucky in that he wasn’t a VIP and didn’t get himself assassinated and sometime later he changed sides and joined in with the terrorists/rebels.

I have no idea what the terrorists/rebels are all about so I have no idea if if they are suppose to be good guys, like the Rebellion in Star Wars, or if they really are just terrorists.


If I’m wrong about that can someone point out where and why.

The reason you're struggling is because the show half-assed it, chopping around all the forces and idealogies in the book into a stupid mush that doesn't make any sense.

Show:
Kovacs joins the Protectorate's CTAC (can't remember what it stands for) who are somewhere between a marine strike team and a repressive totalitarian, getting downloaded into bodies all over the galaxy to crush dissent take out criminals, using anti-sleeving sickness drugs to speed up the adaptation.

Quell leads a bunch of anti-immortality rebels, training them as Envoys - people who can download into any body any planet and quickly start assembling terror cells and resistance movements. Despite this, her only goal with the Envoys is a single suicide mission to take out the system core that magically controls all stack transfers for some loving reason.


Book:
Envoys are the elite body swapping forces of the Protectorate, given elite training to let them adapt rapidly to foreign environments and changing social and tactical landscapes (c.f The Forever War for the Vietnam-scale mess you get into if you don't do this). They're conditioned to be near-sociopaths, and are legally forbidden from every holding public office. They drop into planets to crush dissent, topple governments, all sorts of dirty work.

Quell leads a failed socialist/anarchist revolt, which Kovacs and his commanding officer (Virginia Ver-something) join up to after a catastrophic Envoy mission leads to their whole team getting wiped out by a viral strike. Quell is explicitly pro-Sleeving, because it ensures that the revolution can never die - the same old class conflicts will keep grinding the galaxy down, but eventually people will get resleeved and the revolution can begin again.


It's part of a general trend in the show of taking all the anti-capitalist cyberpunk themes of the Books and turning it into a very on the nose conflict about whether or not its a good thing to make some people immortal. Every time the book comes up with some social or cultural explanation for a problem in the future the show just reworks it to be a fictional result of Sleeving, which completely robs the story of any meaningful subtext. Instead its all lazy "world-building" about how fictional property X of fictional technology Y leads to fictional problem Z. It's boring, its cowardly, and its not good sci-fi.

Book Meths don't go crazy because they're so immortal, they're evil upper-classholes who have so much power and wealth that they're completely above the law and start growing bored with the mundane pursuits the rest of us can afford. Being resleeved a bunch doesn't cause you to go crazy because you've passed some mythical 10 sleeve limit, you're just gonna suffer the mental strain of being constantly torn away from everything you know and everyone you love. Sleeving sickness isn't a problem, the problem is being dropped into a foreign world with no cultural touchstones for you to understand, with no connections to your fellow man.

Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Feb 5, 2018

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Gyges posted:

I had read a review or two about the show that complained that the show took it's technology and came to the conclusion that immortality was bad. Having watched it, to me it seems that the show was pretty clear that the issue was rich assholes becoming too powerful and that power leading to corruption. Even good people are corrupted, because the limitless power is just too much. The show even goes out of it's way to give a voice to several people who are in favor of death, and to varying degrees shows how that's not the answer to the problem.

As to the problem some people are having with the ending, do the books explain why Rei spins up Takeshi as the solution to Mark Antony's Adventure of the Sealed Room? Making Rei Kovacs' sister at least explains why a Meth would seek out the last remaining super terrorist veteran of a notorious resistance movement with Maoist shading. From what you guys are saying about the character in the books, I'm not sure why she chooses Kovacs to be the patsy investigator to seal up the loose ends of her plan.

Book spoilers: Not sure she's the one who specifies Tak. I think Bancroft finds him of his own accord. I might be wrong.

Importantly, Tak is less of a big deal in the books. The Envoy's are the elite strike forces of the protectorate, and rogue Envoys that can be hired by the super-rich are a dime a dozen.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Neddy Seagoon posted:

So minor thing for episode 6; They kinda missing the point on Kadmin using the quote "That's loving enough". How it goes in the book is a brutal gun battle in the Oakley VR cafe, with Kadmin rocking up in a cheap synth body with some hired goons. They shoot the hell out of him, have him dead to rights, and that's when he says "That's loving enough". Which is enough for Kovacs to drag Ortega into cover a few seconds before Kadmin self-destructs just like the interrogated woman on Adoracion. That said, past that bit I think it's a good adaptation of the fight in the Panama Rose. Also the general change of Laurens Bancroft being such a violent manipulative piece of poo poo is just dull and utterly sinks how the story is (presumably) going to go by the end seeing how tightly they're generally riding the original book. The whole "Meths are an elite breed :rolleyes::fh:" thing is still stupid too.


Also the Reaper thing is still annoying, just because it's the only thing they've gotten outright-wrong with the adaptation; Betathanatine isn't a relaxant in way they use it, it just makes you calm and uncaring, no matter what you do. You could take a flamethrower to an orphanage and feel nothing beyond the fact that it's gotten a tad warm and a bit loud (hence the street-name of The Reaper). It's used a lot in Protectorate military operations. All it'd do is make Kovacs and Ortega not care at all if Kadmin started carving up the other.


I'd say the third book is definitely the weakest of the three, not just because it lacks a coherent end-goal like the first two, but they're all well worth a read.


Kovacs getting jumped so often is because he's on a foreign world, in a sleeve with some serious local history, and there's too much he doesn't know. Half the stuff that makes a run at him is going in thinking he's Ryker.

Also there's no reason for him to know the significance of that phrase - in the show, only Quell and Tak know what happened on Adoracion. In the book it's not such a secret. It's like they half adapted the whole idea of Kadmin being strangely well read for a psychotic hitman, then missed one of their own edits.

See also: the attempted hack of Bancrofts datastream, which is never resolved in either Tak's real or fictitious explanation.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

MrMojok posted:

Also she died a couple hundred years prior to the events of Altered Carbon. Although in the third book it turns out she has survived, digitally.

Super late game spoiler here. As in "climax of book three" - should probably flag it as such.

That said, the above spoiler really should be "the start of book three, and the impetus behind the whole book" instead of the bloody ending.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Neddy Seagoon posted:

That multi-sleeve psychosis thing is mostly the series' bad writing. It is a thing in the books, but you gotta really gently caress yourself up with repeated re-sleevings in a short span of time. Dimi the Twin gets like that because he regularly resleeves for jobs across the world, nevermind double-sleeving himself. The brother angle is just bad too, because the book has a far more pragmatic reason for him double-sleeving himself that tells you far more about the character; it's so he has backup he can trust.




So episode 7 is evidently the flashback episode and good grief we get real stupid real fast here :nallears:. And show the writers just cannot hold their own when stepping away from the book's storyline. Again though, there have been some neat moments like Dia de la Muertos and skinhead grandma. It's a neat holiday to consider, given Stacks. Poe having presence as an actual character is good too. The Hendrix was just accommodation, mostly.

The big problem is their new stuff wildly conflicts with what's extracted from the book rather than trying to build off it. Which often means it conflicts with other parts extracted from the book. The whole recruitment/betrayal thing is just terrible for starters (and I won't even go into that whole "you're a child IN A MAN'S BODY!" mess); The UN Protectorate are iron-fisted assholes, but the flipside of that is they actually honor their agreements. And can be very generous/forgiving if you do or give them something worth it. If they tell you they'll look after someone, they may as well be bulletproof. Takeshi's origins are far more mundane in the book, and better for it; He ditched home and his deadbeat father at eighteen and enlisted in the military. Did well, got selected for Envoy training from there. poo poo goes south on Innenin during an operation, he gets himself discharged. Also the General overseeing the Innenin beachhead assault mysteriously gets RD'ed in his home, but that's completely unrelated...

The series, on the other hand, completely forgets what Envoys are. They infer the whole cold steely rear end in a top hat nature is just Kovacs' ex-military background, when it's supposed to be how they all are. It's part of their nigh-torturted-to-create mental discipline, after all. Instead we get cliche guerilla grunts in a jungle and no actual training. "I will train your mind", snap-cut, "Congratulations, let's go on an operation" is not good writing in the least. Especially when they keep trying to declare Kovacs as The Last Special Envoy, while at the same time still keep on saying he's unique among all the other Envoys in the flashbacks.

The Rawlings viral strike is also just cut-and-paste terrible; "stack-transmissible" doesn't actually mean anything, because the things aren't able to broadcast or receive anything (Ones like Laurens' with remote-backup broadcast are expensive variants). It's a computer virus that killed almost everyone on the Innenin operation because it got broadcast through their comm gear and individually infected their stacks from there through the rest of their gear. Kovacs only survived because of a busted radio.

"The Central Core", along with the anti-immortal diatribe is so cliche, I can't believe they actually ran with that. It'd be like saying "ALL INTERNET GOES THROUGH THE CENTRAL CORE, DESTROY THE CORE AND NO MORE INTERNET" just because everyone uses a smartphone.


The sad thing is that i would have happily watched a story about two hosed up kids tearing across the galaxy after centuries apart I think there's a compelling story there. But bolting it on to a murder mystery and making her the most evil woman alive didn't work very well.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

I would say that Netflix has proved that 10 episodes is precisely the worst length for a series. But then Defenders was only 8.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

General Battuta posted:

It's actually the opposite - the internal chronicle of you is far less disrupted by a fork operation than outside observers (who can see, for example, that you've been on ice for 250 years and then woke up in a new body). To the subjective first-person qualia, the, 'I', there's no change, at least until you get some sensory evidence you're in a new place. SOMA handles this really well.

SOMA's greatest strength is making the main character an idiot. It could easily have been a bunch of dry philosophical wanking, but instead it sharpened their focus onto the subjective vs objective bit.

SOMA owns.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Collateral posted:

I just had a really bad premonition with regards to Quell. How terrible, how cliche, could they really make it?

Her d.h.f. I know where it is. Search your heart, you know too.

In the diary? Somehow.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

I feel the core of the disagreement is how much we should privilege biological continuity.

You can say that "you" exist only when you have a continuity of consciousness - but then sleeping, getting knocked out, and losing your train of thought count as "death". The new you when you wake up has just a strong a claim as the copy I made from your brain scan. Obviously once both exist at the same time they become different people (because out of petty vengeance I'm making the copies of you all fight to the death)

So maybe we should say that the original is whichever exists in the same substrate - I'm the original because I'm the same flesh and blood as I was when I went to sleep. But this isn't a complete answer - my atoms are not quite the same as they were a week ago, and very different from what they were 10 years ago.

So we can't really take biological continuity as the most important thing. And if we do, we have to say why being in the same meat-chassis is so very important - and it's hard to make that argument without getting all mystical and hand-wavey.

Neddy Seagoon posted:

Nooope, that's all the series doing and its "Look, we are like Caligula's orgies, morals are for poors" bullshit.


I really liked that bit, especially the reveal that the rebellious teenage daughter was in her 60s. I didn't take it in an especially sexual way (although its hard to interpret "I'm using my mum's body to gently caress strangers" in a completely non-sexual way), but more like she was stealing her mum's ferraria to go for a joy-ride. It was just a repressed, spoilt child acting out. It would have been extremely weird to have Miriam be permanently mid-20s like in the book, but this is a good middle-ground.

Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Feb 14, 2018

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

There Bias Two posted:

Another question maybe the book readers have an answer to:

Why are people still bothering to use flesh bodies and live in the Real, other than for religious reasons? Usually stories with digitization of consciousness result in hiveminds and VR civilizations, but I don't see much of that here.

I assume you're refering to Blindsight in this.

If not - you should totally read Blindsight. Part of the setting has people uploading their minds into a virtual heaven (with their bodies in storage/life-support) and it's seen as the ultimate in giving up, in accepting that you have nothing more to contribute to the world.

It also has characters express surprise at someone who only takes their sex in the first-person, instead of doing it all in VR. 95% of the planet are physically virgins.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Zaphod42 posted:

Nah this still exists even without souls, don't let him saying "maybe there are souls" distract you. You still have the death problem with zero souls. I don't believe in souls.

In fact Battuta's "you exist anywhere your state is, even if thousands of years later, even if not the same atoms or data or anything, even if 10,000 copies are made" seems to require a soul to me, because how else would consciousness transfer between physical bodies?

Nah, just that each of those copies are you. Not a copy, exactly the same as you.

At least at the moment of creation. After that they start to diverge and become their own dudes.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Zaphod42 posted:

They can be exactly you without being the you instance of you.

You're so hung up on identity you're missing that there's more to life. (No, NOT a soul)

A human being experiences suffering. A USB drive does not. A human has something that USB drives don't, even without souls.

That subjective experience is why suffering and death are bad things. Not because information is lost.

Yeah, they're a separate instance. But GB's point is that there is no difference between the separate instances.

You can have subjective experience, nothing GB is saying invalidates that. In fact, accepting that all copies can have subjective experiences is kind of a prerequisite to what he's saying - otherwise it's abundantly clear which is the original and which is the copy.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Zoracle Zed posted:

it's a waste of time to complain about not being able to adapt books 2 and 3 properly, they're gonna keep all the same characters and actors and invent another murder mystery for Kovacs to solve

I would be perfectly fine if they never moved past the first three chapters of book 2, and we got 10 whole episodes of Catch-22-in space!

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

DropsySufferer posted:

Are the books worth reading? The show was ok... the premise is amazing but too much time was wasted on the cop drama stuff. Do the books focus more on the big picture and the setting itself?

I've been selling it to my friends thusly:

The books are some very clever, very angry sci-fi, hidden beneath a slick cyberpunk murder thriller. The show manages to just be a slick cyberpunk murder thriller.

If any of the implications of Stack tech or their social consequences interested you in the slightest then you'll absolutely dig the hell out of the book.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Bust Rodd posted:

You or other persons have said the sex is “kind of rape-y” multiple times and I’d really like some clarification as to what that means. Is he loving bodies without stacks? Is it a digital torture scene like the one from the first book? Is Kovacs the one doing the rape stuff?

Broken Angels has a traumatised rape victim who Kovacs rescues from soldiers, and because he needs her functional quickly he puts her through military pack bonding treatment that's explicitly a hairs-breadth away from sexual assault itself. It's another piece of the settings subtle body-horror - you're nothing more than biological resources, and the people in power will happily open up your body and soul, rummage around inside, and put you back together in a way that suits them - and it's portrayed as a really hosed up thing to do, but it's still kinda skeezy.

Why does so much scifi/fantasy try and be clever with sexual assault? The sex with Ortega was great - it captured all the weird uncomfortable stuff of stacks and sleeves, without crossing into creepy.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Neddy Seagoon posted:

Even I gloss over that one, but iirc that was more just mutual blowing off steam. None of it was about bonding, it was just all about keeping her mind from regressing into itself because he needed her functional for the job and she was not capable of much when she was pulled out of the prison in a malnourished and badly abused sleeve. She does mention that she can feel whatever he's done to her psychologically at the edge of her mind a bit, or something like that, basically hypnotizing her into being mentally-sound whether she likes it or not.

I'd actually like to file the VR sex under "the good kind of weird" - drug aided VR sex is dangerously plausible, as is the way their avatars are somewhat pornified versions of their normal sleeves. And the archaeologist literally sculpting her tits and rear end in front of Kovacs is hilarious.

Edit: to clarify - Envoy psyche-reassembly is rapey, but not a sex scene. VR sex is sex, but not rapey.

Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Jul 31, 2018

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Presumably he owns the building and maintenance costs are low because it's all AI run. Also maybe he's making money somehow on the side.

This is the tiniest change in the show that annoyed me. In the show he's just an AI running a hotel. In the book, Ortega remarks how a bunch of hotel-AIs upgraded themselves to full sentience and bought themselves from senior management.

It's a trivial little detail, but it makes me smile whenever I think of it.

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Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Neddy Seagoon posted:

I have much, much, higher hopes for the anime being good than the second season.


There is a lot from the books that would play better in anime than live-action TV. If only for the sheer amount of brutally-casual gore that occurs in some of the fights. When you can just resleeve a wounded soldier, or heal them from critical to combat-ready in a span of days, "shoot to wound" goes right out the window in favour of "use a vibrational shockwave blaster that liquifies people".

I love the disconnect between injuries organic property damage and actual suffering in the series. All those soldiers in book two chilling out while their eyes regrow or their intestines get poured back into them. After all, it's just the sleeve.

The masses of drugs probably help too.

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