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You know what they say, that's the way the salacious b crumbles.
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May 2, 2023 18:57
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I just realized that the Cardassians probably love reruns of Columbo because it's exactly the same as their own murder mysteries: the whole point is finding out who is guilty of what.
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Jun 6, 2023 05:39
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Columbo Plain, simple, in need of a tailor
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Jun 6, 2023 07:14
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I just realized that the Cardassians probably love reruns of Columbo because it's exactly the same as their own murder mysteries: the whole point is finding out who is guilty of what. Actually happened IRL, Columbo got super popular in Japan because they already had a popular genre of detective stories where you see the crime at the start and find out how the detective solves it. And I can see how that kinda story would work, IMO, once you know what to look for; I imagine the whole point is picking up on hints, foreshadowing and misdirection. Also their other signature genre being the Repetitive Epic is a bit lol looking at so much human entertainment; people spend their lives doing great deeds in service to their society, and then the next generation comes along and does it all again.
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Jun 7, 2023 14:10
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every story about aliens is about humans
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Jun 7, 2023 14:15
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Cease to Hope posted:every story about aliens is about humans bwaaa
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Jun 7, 2023 14:21
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Cease to Hope posted:every story about aliens is about humans Next you'll tell us that Space War 2, with the Allied Planetary Alliance fighting the evil Hitlor, reminds you of something
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Jun 7, 2023 14:37
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RBA Starblade posted:Next you'll tell us that Space War 2, with the Allied Planetary Alliance fighting the evil Hitlor, reminds you of something Yea, reminds me of a gatcha game.
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Jun 7, 2023 14:38
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also admiral leyton killed a guy with a land mine but got caught by columbo
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Jun 7, 2023 15:05
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Actually happened IRL, Columbo got super popular in Japan because they already had a popular genre of detective stories where you see the crime at the start and find out how the detective solves it. Columbo was also really big in Romania, to the point that when there was a shortage of Columbo episodes, people assumed that the Romanian government was refusing to import them, and that contributed to unrest. The US state department got Peter Falk to record a message of peace to the Romanian people. https://twitter.com/JFrankensteiner/status/1403200640436801536
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Jun 7, 2023 19:10
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Columbo had a robot right? Columbo thread!
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Jun 8, 2023 22:20
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cQQbEUVo4Y Although I think Columbo normally tried to stay very grounded, and just on the cutting edge of what was possible at the time, but I guess there were a few things that tried to convince the public that a robot on that level would be feasible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuyTRbj8QSA
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Jun 9, 2023 04:29
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I only post in a couple of threads here, so let me check- is there a thread for finding books we only remember some details from? I posted on r/whatsthatbook, with no luck. Trying to find a book I read 10-15 years ago.
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Jun 30, 2023 01:51
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I don't think so. What do you remember about this book? My interest is piqued.
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Jun 30, 2023 13:37
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GD_American posted:I only post in a couple of threads here, so let me check- is there a thread for finding books we only remember some details from? I posted on r/whatsthatbook, with no luck. Trying to find a book I read 10-15 years ago. There's one in The Book Barn. Sf/f tends to be the majority of its traffic.
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Jun 30, 2023 22:01
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woah woah woah, let's not go directing the precious spice of new thread activity off-board. let's sit here and huff it, see if our eyes go blue.
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Jun 30, 2023 22:17
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yah what the heck lemniscate blue. SFWF has just such a thread we just need to post it
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Jul 1, 2023 01:18
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Lemniscate Blue posted:There's one in The Book Barn. Sf/f tends to be the majority of its traffic. I'll try the thread, but I'm happy to indulge here as well: British sci-fi novel Set on a microplanet, like extremely small (maybe 50km diameter)? with its own atmosphere, because of some neutron star remnant at its core (or something on that order) Settled only by a Hispanic (Portugese?) family. Humor is somewhat Douglas Adams-ish but toned down, although the plot ends up being fairly absurd. Somewhat episodic Overall world setup is that humanity had a war with AI, won, and banned any kind of AI, it's thought that they're still out there (a la the Battlestar Galactica reboot) rebuilding and looking for vengeance, and it turns out they're right Leader of humanity who won the war is just named The Dictator and was overthrown and is missing There's one crazy old man also on the planet that the family has occasional dealings with, and it turns out he's The Dictator Earth just one day plops some huge cube there that turns out to be a prison for a psychotic, impossibly powerful psyker named Father Christmas (or something similar). The family puts some personality module supposed to mimic Helen of Troy in a combat bot they salvaged, and that ends up being a main character and humanity's salvation when the angry AI people (I think they were called Makers?) came back
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Jul 1, 2023 01:29
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josh04 posted:woah woah woah, let's not go directing the precious spice of new thread activity off-board. let's sit here and huff it, see if our eyes go blue. Sally posted:yah what the heck lemniscate blue. SFWF has just such a thread we just need to post it Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
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Jul 1, 2023 01:59
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GD_American posted:I'll try the thread, but I'm happy to indulge here as well: This is a total shot in the dark but could it be Vermin Rising? The planet size seems to check out https://www.amazon.com/Vermin-Rising-Gordons-Lamp-8/dp/1548710504
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Jul 1, 2023 13:57
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No, by that synopsis on Amazon I can tell it isn't. The title was something like Small World or Tiny Planet or some variation on that, but I couldn't find anything googling.
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Jul 2, 2023 16:34
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Sup sfwf homies, after three long years I have a new video essay out in an hour or so, about Noah (2014) and Prometheus (2012) and all that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGbRQ6MOQWM
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Jul 4, 2023 21:34
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Found it. Started plowing through my entire Kindle ordering history. God bless our tech overlords and their infinite thirst for our data. It's "Smallworld" by Dominic Green. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004GNFMLO/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
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Jul 6, 2023 01:07
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Here's another dimly remember book - probably written before the mid 80s. People were in a future prison and had chips implanted in them to monitor location and heart rate. A man and a woman plot their escape by removing their chips and inserting them into a couple of rabbits. I consumed so many books as a young kid and most are barely even memories anymore 
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Jul 6, 2023 04:58
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are you sure this was a book and not half of a season of Archer
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Jul 6, 2023 11:08
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If we're on "barely remembered book titles" I got one that i've never been able to suss out. Sometime in the future people have invented robot brains, but every attempt at downloading human consciences into one has failed. One day one of the kids (I think) of the researchers involved turns on a robot with a non-downloaded brain, and it's basically a giant baby. And sleeps a bunch. This clues the researches into the fact that the human downloads still need sleep, at least at first, and that's why they're losing the people on download. The robot continues to grow up as a child, and eventually rebels for reasons I don't remember. And runs away from home. His "brother", the kid who turned him on, eventually finds him on a planet that's entirely an ocean. He's got a building floating on the ocean and doing his own research on the planet, and keeping rabbits. His brother keeps trying to convince him to come home, and he refuses, and his brother leaves. The robot guy throws rabbit poop into the ocean, which triggers some kind of biological process and turns the ocean into a giant brain.
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Jul 7, 2023 00:44
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Posted a new feedback thread, for if anyone has any new feedback: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4037600 Also new rules, but they're pretty similar to the old rules: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4037599
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Jul 25, 2023 09:52
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CainFortea posted:If we're on "barely remembered book titles" I got one that i've never been able to suss out. At first I thought it was one of the stories in "I, Robot" but the last paragraph doesn't match anything I remember.
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Dec 10, 2023 01:37
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Finally started Consider Phlebas today, liking it so far. Then I made the mistake of googling the main character, just wanted to see how others were imagining the character, but before I can even click to images the first sentence on Google is a major spoiler for the character. My own drat fault for looking but I didn't expect Google to just plop a spoiler right on top. On the bright side I suppose I can look for little hints along the way.
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Dec 24, 2023 06:44
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lol, I looked and assuming we saw the same thing I would say that is deeply misleading. If you want to be doubly spoiled: A mind names itself after him.
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Dec 24, 2023 11:08
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Haha I finished the book today and yeah that was a huge mislead. It worked out in the end because I was really surprised by the events, thinking it would go another way. Cool book, kind of interesting in that I kind of never liked the main character, or rather, I didn't root for his mission or cause although I was still empathetic towards him at times. Honestly if I hadn't read that misleading spoiler, I would've called him as doomed the second Yaslin revealed she was pregnant. Instead I was caught off guard, both at her dying and then him too. Horza was a dick, warmed up to him when he started being less of a poo poo after finding out pregnancy, but he was a dumbass and an rear end in a top hat. Couldn't have just used Unoha-Closp's name?! Better relationship with the drone may have saved several of their lives, but better decision making all along would've done the same. When they started hauling Xorxorge around, after he already tricked them into escaping once, I was like, ready for him to kill them all for the sheer loving stupidity of the move. There was just no sense to it, trying to shame him was just so dumb especially with Horza and Yaslin at risk. Major bummer ending for Balveda, just sad. Unoha-Closp and the Mind seem to get the best endings here. Weirdest part of the book was N'Geestra. All she did was hurt herself climbing mountains and then guess correctly at events. She got an epilogue where she had the longest craziest eventful life full of more escapades. Just kind of seems like that entire character could've been excised from the story and nothing would've changed. I'm guessing maybe she or her heirs come back up later? Or just an additional vaguely connected perspective on matters. Also surprised the Mind didn't end up being special, just had that one crazy unlikely lucky event, doesn't seem like they learned the trick from it or anything.
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Dec 25, 2023 09:03
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N'Geestra is there to answer the question, "If Minds are tiny gods, why do they keep the meat people around?" It's because, given enough meat people, statistically weird poo poo happens. Like a meat person who, through pure chance, is just as good as a Mind millions of times more intelligent than she is at working out solutions to incredibly difficult problems.
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Dec 25, 2023 16:23
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Ah okay, that makes meat sense.
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Dec 25, 2023 18:56
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There's also stuff in the other books where having happy meat people is a low key status symbol amongst the ship Minds - not that a Mind cares about anything so unCultured as 'status'. "I built three new parks in my upper superstructure while fighting a war against a class 5 hegemonic swarm and still had the happiness index of my meat people increase by over 2%" "Hah, I have a family who have been living on me for 13 generations. That's a happiness index." "13 generations? Those are rookie numbers. I have a waiting list."
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Dec 26, 2023 02:27
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Makes a lot of sense that the Minds are basically the Rogue Servitors from Stellaris, though of course the inspiration probably goes the other way around. Also, traditionally by most definitions gods very much keep people around, for various reasons.
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Dec 26, 2023 02:37
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Megillah Gorilla posted:N'Geestra is there to answer the question, "If Minds are tiny gods, why do they keep the meat people around?" I definitely read this as a counter point to Horza's argument that the humans are tools or pets of the minds. That the minds take actual input from humans in issues not just of strategy but also tactics is a pretty reasonable counter.
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Dec 26, 2023 03:07
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i thought they keep us around to have meat cutes
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Dec 26, 2023 07:35
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Also Minds that don't have humans around generally go a bit weird, at least from the POV of other Minds. Offensive Units are the exception, but only because they're expected to be borderline psychopathic weirdos
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Dec 26, 2023 15:47
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Seems possible that it may even just come down to how the Minds were originally programmed as entities to be around and interact with humans. They are ultimately social creatures who function best in conditions that meet their needs. Also probably helps that having people around not only gives them a need but also means they have a lot of time to spend just hanging out and engaged with other beings without any necessarily pressing tasks. There's only so much a post-scarcity space AI can really do otherwise besides go transcendent or killbot.
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Dec 27, 2023 05:52
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I think it's pretty interesting the difference between drones that are fancy roombas, and proper sentient being drones, and also minds distinct from both (and from meat drones). Usually I'd consider these kinds of AI as essentially human, if not, still part of the evolution of life specific to this planet or DNA (unless that stuff got shipped in at some point and all animals we know are evolutions of object X.) They don't seem to do that in these books, but I mean, they're all clearly people. I have to a lively remind myself to imagine them as orbs because even without physical descriptions I'm automatically picturing a humanoid body. And speaking of transcendence, do they ever go into why the Culture aren't all on that train? I can't imagine they just never figured it out, seems like a common enough thing they've seen happen and could figure it out if they set their Minds to it. So I assume there's a cultural choice to not, and I can think of plenty, not sure I'd hop to transcendence if I can sculpt landscapes as an elective job as a merely 3d mortal.
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Dec 27, 2023 08:38
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