/tg/ - Traditional Games

You cannot uncuck what was written with a clearly ideology based bullshit and ended up being a SJW future manifesto on par with Numenera for its retardation in both levels of SJ and game design.

Take the base premise (Ai bites us in the ass) and go do it with any other system. I beg of you. There are so many good systems out there why would you spend any time at all trying to fix an obviously flawed one?

>>224771

The system and the setting are flawed, but overall still very good. Why throw them out completely?

>>224775

That sounds like a fun idea, actually.

>Anarchists really do live in chaos

>Uplifts are barbaric human-animal hybrids

>Egocasting and resleeving erases all your humanity, leaving you without mercy, love or compassion

Without the wicked technology of the hypercorps and the anarchists to assist you, you have to rely on your wits, your strength and your willpower in your quest to protect the innocent and pure from the terrors of transhumanism. Kind of like Kenshiro, but catholic.

One big way to improve it would be to adjust the lore a bit so that egocasting and resleeving do not in fact transfer your own consciousness, they just make a (perfect) copy. Or if this is already implied, make it outright certain.

Modern SF in general is cucked, by and large. Part of my motivation in writing my own novel, with a world of my own, is to counter this trend, by giving the middle finger to nihilism and collectivism, and whatever else leftists can come up with.

>>224778

What's wrong with transfering your consciousness?

>>224778

Take it even further, and reveal that the copy is also subtly altered, to serve the corps that make the equipment.

Whether that's just a sudden increase in brand loyalty and subliminal marketing tricks or turning people into sleeper agents.

>>224782

At this point, do you really have to sage this thread?

>>224780

Because if you make it so the consciousness isn't transferred it adds a heavy dimension of horror to the whole thing. When you're resleeved, you haven't changed bodies - rather, you've died. There is now another person walking around who perceives himself to be you and has all your memories and personality: but it's not you, you're dead.

Of course, players would simply keep playing as the new character but from a lore standpoint it would be good.

It'd also provide further justification for the Jovians to be opposed to transhumanism, as transhumans are basically killing themselves as a matter of course.

>>224783

Forgot to take it off.

>>224784

Could also have a GITS style cyberbrain that you'd slowly and expensively make by having nanomachines convert your brain tissue into whatever the cyberbrain is made of. Then add some armour and shit to increase the chance of the brain being intact even if you're shot, so you'd have at least some perks.

Of course, the kicker is that the resleeving is much cheaper, but technically kills you and allows you to be tampered with by the corporations, a fact that the majority of the retarded plebs are wholly ignorant of, while the Jovians and anyone high up in the corporations that know how it works wouldn't touch the shit with a ten feet pole.

>>224784

The setting does address this fear, actually. That you die a little bit whenever a backup of you is installed.

This would also be a nice way of fucking with the setting. A super-agent who is repeatedly told that he is nothing but the sum of is neural circuits is killed, then cloned, with a backup-consciousness. He finds that he has a weird obsession with a women he never met. Eventually, he finds out that he and that women fell in love just before he died, and despite his memory being erased, he still does love her, because his soul has never died. Then he stops a government conspiracy from destroying the world and gives the people hope again.

Reminder that if you are an MRA (or more accurately, anyone not a kool-aid drinking feminist, since these people gets all lumped with MRA anyway) you are not allowed to play this game.

>>224799

>telling people what they can and can't do

How.. disgustingly authoritarian of them.

>>224805

No no no, it's not authoritarian, it's just protecting the beautiful, delicate sensibilities of good, strong independent and progressive liberal persyns from vicious, violent hate speech, triggering and rape from backwards, uncivilized evil misogynerd racist nazists! They're the GOOD GUYS PERSYNS, don't forget!

>>224805

http://eclipsephase.com/regarding-mras

If you haven't read it already. The last part of it is a good tl;dr of their stupidity.

>Here's our stance: If you self-define as an MRA, please fire yourself as an Eclipse Phase fan. We don't want you. We want our forums to be open and inclusive, and we don't see the point of debating with you anymore.

>We want our forums to be open and inclusive

>We don't want you

>>224748

>>224808

this is what Jovians actually believe.

>>224808

>>224829

Is it me or are all transhumanist SJW too? Granted it make sense, its the same reasoning as trannies only given a scifi justification. Their cis white male shame is so extreme it has morphed into human guilt.

>>224832

I don't think all are, but most.

>>224833

Its a bit of a shame because I can understand the desire to transcend human nature but it seems most transhumanist online tend to be self-loathing weirdo.

>>224829

>this is what Jovians actually believe.

"No, no it isn't. Only union types, self-aggregating business interests, terrorist groups, and communist organizers like you would think that.

Jovian bio-ethics policies make a whole lot of sense when you're faced against self-propagating biotechnological horrors whose spread would only be recklessly accelerated through the staple 'medical practices' and communication infrastructure utilised by the other groups. Its level of preparedness against existential threats rates highly against competing 'colonies', standing at the forefront of human survival. When the rest of have been annihilated or hollowed out as mere puppets of the TITANs' arsenal, the Jovians will endure." – Jovian Bureaucrat

>>224832

>are all transhumanist SJW too?

They widely vary—you get got internet Liberterian idealists (think Rand on roids social Darwinists to the max), and those that expound Humanist ethics, being all round naturalists, either with ideologies firmly planted in democratic, technocratic, or ultra-nationalist ideologies. You get all sorts.

>>224836

>You get all sorts.

Personally I've only encountered the pretentious 'humans are evil monsters hardwired to be evil so must evolve into a perfect species free from gender and race' type.

>>224835

Online activists in general tend to be self-loathing weirdos, so maybe the older members of shit like humanity+ might be reasonable people. I don't know though, maybe they're wackos too.

>>224832

Transhumanist reporting in (and by that I mean I think the use of technology to augment humans beyond our base capabilities is a good thing, not that I have it as an identity or some shit like that), am what the ZOG media would call far-right.

>>224839

Fortunately a lot, if not most of the transhumanist stuff is decades away. Probably more given the imminent collapse of western civilization. Unless the Muslims really like the idea of robot arms, I suppose…

>>224840

>and by that I mean I think the use of technology to augment humans beyond our base capabilities

So you use a toaster oven?

>>224843

Thanks for the nightmares, anon!

>>224844

That's not augmenting a human directly, but it does follow the same logic.

>>224847

I've got a vague idea but for the sake of my sanity I'd rather not read that thank you very much.

>>224850

Hey what's wrong with fetish-based modification? Why wouldn't we use it to ourselves look better? Althought I suppose in this case its more 'catgirls' and shit.

…Meh, I wouldn't mind anime-style catgirl.

>>224832

You know how they say gender is a social construct?

And it is, in the same way as language is - a vital social consensus on meaning as to ease comprehension, communication and action?

Shit gets really cool when you can modify your body at will to be male. Or female. Or both. Or none. Or N things or combination of things entirely different that are neither male, nor female, nor both, nor none.

Then gender becomes truly meaningless.

Or we build a dictionary on it.

>>224847

Well, damn.

Guess I'm firmly on the side of the future anti-AI luddites. Time to ready my EMPs and microwave emitters.

>>224855

>Then gender becomes truly meaningless.

But then they would actually be out of things to complain FOR REAL!

>>224854

>That fucking furry RPG

Jesus christ don't remind me of that shit show, anon. That was some high tier faggotry

>>224863

>Believing this.

Its called sarcasm, you nitwit. These people have the frankly superhuman ability of beign offended by breathable air.

>>224865

Two reasons.

1.) Because one of the "writers" always starts these, and every time they come across like a autist.

2.) It's apart of the game's theme. It's not entirely done poorly, but it's pretty clear some elements (sleeving for example) were poorly thought out and as a result, can be easily retrofited into a existential horror type of campaign. Hell look like the ideas for a Jovian campaign earlier in the thread.

>>224857

>>224864

>Anyone who doesn't want to have a fluffy tail has no heart or soul.

Here's what I would bloody well do if I could, knowing that you wanted a damn god-awful tail so bloody much. I'd turn you into one of those 4-ft. critter folk, to be left in some settlement out in the wilderness, where you'd be forced to survive in either your cuddly communal egalitarian care-bear colony, or slowly perish as you witness it descend into complete and utter chaos – probably rampant with cannibalism, or worse!

And even if you do survive by the sheer stint of effort and whatever scrape of good fortune that comes your way. You will never, ever be permitted to return to good, decent, wholesome human civilisation. The only time you'll ever see another human face again is in the form of tourism to keep your squalid little joke of a self-government alive from self-destruction. The aid is provided by a generous external influx of wealth because, at the end of the day, all you'd be is little more than a petting-zoo.

>>224865

Who said anyone was being serious?

>>224867

>can be easily retrofited into a existential horror type of campaign.

That's actually supposed to already be part of the game. I didnt really look at the supplement books, but I always thought the core is pretty solid, and not really filled with as much ideological bullshit as everyone always says, but maybe that's just me filling the blanks.

Personally, I always got the impression that the rim-commies are retarded cunts for giving the consortium so much shit.

It's literally only been 10 years since the fucking apocalypse. Of course you can't give people free bodies if your main habitat (Mars) had to take multiple times its own population in refugees and has a gorillion people in dead storage they want to revive before the world changes too much.

I want to see the shitheads in the rim deal with that.

>>224870

I'd prefer waking up from dead storage when the solar system has been, ya know, fixed up. Who would want to wake up to a trashed-system? Some poor shmuck will wake up because they were picked up out of storage over their credentials, not because of their place in some kind of queue. Either be rich enough to afford or merit it. Wanting a free handout like that is asking for a bit much when the threat isn't disease or starvation.

Why do they think themselves to have a right to a handout, as it were, eh? Why are they expecting a handout from Mars?

>>224865

Because no one's played the game and the lore has been discussed to death

>>224872

The longer you are in dead storage, the more alien the world is going to be for you and the harder your loved ones are going to be track down. Dying in the Fall is probably jarring enough already.

Also, if you get woken up by the Consortium, they give you the option to get a body you can work off, or go back into dead storage, so sitting the whole thing out is an option.

I don't think it's that the rim-commies think they have a right to hand-outs, they're the ones giving the hand-outs. They just criticize the Consortium for not doing that aswell, when the Consortium is the one taking the brunt of the whole thing.

>>224879

Fine, let's start learning computer science. I'll just assume everyone has caught up with the requisite reading, we're going straight into Finite Automata!

A finite automaton is a 5-tuple (A, Σ, δ, q_0, F), where

1. Q is a finite set called the states,

2. Σ is a finite set called the alphabet,

3. δ: Q x Σ→Q is the transition function,

4. q_0 ∈ Q is the start state, and

5. F ⊆ Q is the set of accept states.

>>224884

>they give you the option to get a body you can work off

Their indentured servitude contracts are tantamount to slavery. No thanks. Future shock is a better investment. Being propagated into an unambiguous future in which the probabilistic certainty of being awoken in some form or another is the winning bet.

Either you subjectively experience being resleeved in an Everett-branch where humanity survives or you'll wake up in a nightmarish TITAN run simulation, or somewhere else entirely. (re: results may vary!)

The abovementioned is a little loopy of course—The weak anthropic principle is the statement that for the purpose of testing probabilistic theories, it is wrong to calculate the absolute probabilities that measurements will have given outcomes, but correct to calculate relative probabilities given the existence of an observer. But this can get finicky.

There are ways of doing it depending on your approach. For instance, let's say we have a steady state equilibrium distribution concerning the breakdown of machines for a dedicated server farm that runs egos. We are given the information to calculate the equilibrium distribution for the number of working machines and broken machines. We can calculate the perceived expectation of continuity loss from the likelihood of catastrophic hardware failure.

>>224884

>The longer you are in dead storage, the more alien the world is going to be for you and the harder your loved ones are going to be track down.

>Dying in the Fall is probably jarring enough already.

That is so messed up.

>How to make Eclipse Phase more good

You make it into this:

>>201285

>>201304

>>201379

>>224832

Transhumanism is always alluring to people who believe that the human self needs to be changed.

SJWs at their logical conclusion that Communism doesn't work because of the people and system are incompatible will either come around to no longer believing in it because the system needs to suit the people or believing that people should change to suit the system. The latter are the ones who want Transhumanism.

>>224828

Honestly it feels kind of stupid to sell digital .pdfs, because as soon as one person has one no amount of DRM will ever keep them from cracking it and putting it up to torrent.

If I were selling rulesbooks I think I might make .pdfs free and sell physical copies, DM blinds, etc.

>>224906

>cracking it and putting it up online

These are discussed as possible plot hooks with some of the cyberpunk dystopian themes when involving the megacorps.

>>224850

Kinda funny there given Space Marines are horrifying kludges of biotechnology that require a small pile of human corpses for every successful Marine.

>>224913

Well they're still used for ultimately noble ends.

>>224864

>These people have the frankly superhuman ability of beign offended by breathable air.

You should see how we deal with drinking water.

>>224832

I believe in Transhumanism for a number of reasons - primarily amongst them that nature and evolution take too long to improve our species and our race. As such, as a responsible and right minded society we should be examining all possible avenues for improving our society and the individuals that make up our society. It doesn't make much sense to me to want to reform the political and economic system holding us back if we don't also examine and reform the biology limiting us as both individuals and a society.

When I say 'all possible avenues' that's not just mechanical or biological augmentation, that's everything down to examining improvements to childhood and adult education and physical training programs, and improving the environment we live in ensuring that it meets our needs in a sustainable fashion. A person and a society can only be as strong as its weakest component, it makes no sense to focus entirely on upgrading one area when the whole thing needs improvement.

Probably best not to get me started on the SJ cultists who infested the idea.

>>224825

I have no problem with them hating MRA's. I do, too. What I hate about this post is how they make an exception for MRA's, but all other immoral ideologies get a free pass? Yeah, right. I'd fire the stalinists first.

>>224868

>I'd turn you into one of those 4-ft. critter folk, to be left in some settlement out in the wilderness

But I didn't ask for this.

>>224863

Cosmetic surgery and permanent bodily modification is already a very, very big and profitable thing. Hell, maybe it cosmetics will be more profitable than actual practical augmentation.

Actual evolution will start by some guy wanting a bigger dick, by some girl wanting to have cat ears and by some weirdo wanting to be both a guy and a girl.

It's all the same for me and everyone else. The market provides what the people wants, the funds pour in from wherever they can, the tech ends up being the same.

>>224870

>That's actually supposed to already be part of the game. I didnt really look at the supplement books, but I always thought the core is pretty solid, and not really filled with as much ideological bullshit as everyone always says, but maybe that's just me filling the blanks.

I had the same impression, actually.

>>224907

Contrary to popular rightist belief - which is justifiable considering the modern left is both Marxist and Constructivist - Marx and original Marxism were both staunchly realist.

To the point of Marx critiquing Socialist literature that painted an idealized, heroic proletariat instead of the "real" picture. To the point of theorzing about the industrialization of art as to make it acessible to the masses.

But then, came post-marxists. Frankfurt. Then came the post-post-marxists, and that's what we're dealing with now.

Still, for what it's worth, while saying that reality is consensus is literally objectively wrong… Individuals can be rational and objective. Groups can't. When you think in terms of groups, reality might as well be a constructed notion. It certainly is for some.

>>224900

>or believing that people should change to suit the system.

Some serious rewiring is necessary to make Communism even start to be feasible. People compatible with it may even look like humans, but sure as hell won't think like humans.

>>224978

2. That's not how ego-casting works. They're scanning your brain and simultaneously wipe your personality out of the body. Then they take the digital image of your brain and send it as data to your destination, where it is written into a different body.

Still iffy and people are supposed to have different opinions on that in the setting. As far as I know, most people avoid it.

Also if you are faced with certain death at the hands of space cthulhu and have the chance of sort of maybe surviving in some way, you're probably going to take the latter.

3. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember a line about how cybersecurity got so good, people had to start infiltrating physically again. There's definitely room for a GM to balance it.

4. I wouldn't call it hard sci-fi with Skynet catching alien AIDS that was left as a trap a gorillion years ago. Also Star Gates.

5. Part of the racism against robot bodies is that people fear they might get hacked when Skynet comes back. Also classicism because mars is full of evil, evil capitalist pigs.

>>224984

There's some stuff about continuity to make it more a grey area. Basically if you resleeve with the "continuity" option, your brain will be scanned (and gradually deleted from the meat brain), a mind emulation will be made, and the emulation will be read into the new body simultaneously. You are awake during the process and can watch a movie or something. It's still iffy, but people have the amazing ability to rationalize anything, so I dont think it's that far out there that people would do it.

However, I want to repeat that I think most people avoid this kind of shit, because of just those concerns. It's the weirdos who go bodyhopping or egocasting across the solar system every other week. Most people will have a backup so they can continue existing in some way, if they should die and their cortial stack prove unrecoverable, and they'll get a new body if their old one is starting to break down.

If you're faced with death and sort-of-death, I think most people would take sort-of-death, and after a while only those people would still be around, right?

A meatbody with a cyberbrain is considered a pod, and they're discriminated against too.

A meatbrain can be "hacked" that way, but not as quickly and not remotely. They're fearing that all the clankers might suddenly go full robo uprising in a flash, if a TITAN decides to fuck with humanity again.

>>224929

The problem is that SJWs wouldn't really be able to do this. If you were to genetically modify humanity for the better, you'd first have to face the facts. Including things like racial differences in IQ, gender differences, etc. And you can imagine how that'd work out.

Which is a shame, because accepting the differences in races and genders would be a great step towards improving the situation for everyone, even today.

No more feminist bullshit with gender quotas and trying to force women into things they aren't suited to, schools actually modifying their curriculum and teaching methods based on race and gender etc.

>>224938

MRAs are immoral now? What happened?

>>224913

Well, Marines were never really designed to replace mankind anyway, hence why they're exclusively male and can't breed on their marine genes beyond the progenoid.

Then again, mankind in 40k is already genetically engineered from the golden age, and then there's stuff like life-prolongin tech etc.

>>224777

>this is what Christards and Cuckservatives actually believe

>>224978

>1. OP forgot about the whales that fly around on the sun. The authors forgot they weren't writing for Spelljammer.

Space whales are one of the coolest things in the setting.

>5. People are racist against people with cheap morphs? Really?? No. I don't buy it. At all. People are basically all transgender and transethnic and arguably trans-species, but somehow a person with a low-rent body is just "ew gross" Nah. I call bullshit.

It makes sense when those people are seen as poorfags, elitism and all. You don't call them hyperelite for nothing, after all. What is retarded is how the book just mentions that synths are discriminated against and then call it a day. Why would they be? Sure, they look inhuman, but biomorphs look archaic. It's not even like they are consistently cheap. Some, like the Steel and the Reaper, are fucking expensive, and should be regarded as a status-symbol.

>>224988

>MRAs are immoral now? What happened?

Acknowledging that men and women are different is alright. Trying to be manly is alright. The problem lies less in the core-beliefs of MRA's and more in what a lot of them actually advocate, and their attitude towards women. I've talked to some that wanted to abolish women's suffrage, and one even suggested that rape should be legalized.

No idea whether "a lot" are actually a sizable part of the movement or just a few loud, outspoken cunts. I might be treating the rest of the movement unfairly.

>>224993

Really, nigger? Always on the defensive, eh? Can't let anyone say anything bad about your ideology. Is your worldview really that fragile?

>>225001

You owe your comfortable modern lifestyle to all that evil technology. Go back to living in mud huts and shagging goats, christcuck.

>>225000

>No idea whether "a lot" are actually a sizable part of the movement or just a few loud, outspoken cunts. I might be treating the rest of the movement unfairly.

MRAs are just the male version of feminism. Which means, yeah, some good, valid points, but the people that get all the attention are complete shitbags. There is not a concept or ideal that can not be ruined by assholes and idiots.

Didn't /tg/ try to make a transhuman setting along these lines a while ago.. and it fell apart in less than a thread?

>>225009

>Didn't /tg/ try to make a transhuman setting along these lines a while ago.. and it fell apart in less than a thread?

Not that I remember, but I'm glad for every sci-fi setting I see that's not blatantly leftist.

>>225009

>Didn't /tg/ try to make a transhuman setting along these lines a while ago.. and it fell apart in less than a thread?

They always do.

I don't think making a setting from scratch is the way to go.

Here's what you do. Get some people together, tell them you're playing an RPG, something in the fashion of Ghost in the Shell, then make the rest up as you go.

I want to do a story with a terrorist group? Now I gotta come up with a terrorist group. How does that fit with the rest of it. Your players ask you a question about anything, then you gotta think of an answer. Over time it starts building up into something big. If you have some inconsistencies, just retcon and fix it. Add as you go, just like the good folks who write all our tv shows.

>>225018

>Your entire life's path is determined in the womb

There are at least 10 dystopia novels with that concept.

>>225009

The biggest difference between feminism and MRA is that the valid, good points that feminism brings up ceased to be relevant in western civilization decades ago, whereas the ones the MRAs bring up are still very much relevant issues.

And unfortunately, feminists largely tend to focus on disgusting, selfish SJW crap instead of actually trying to help all the women that are still being oppressed by Islam and other barbaric cultures.

>>225014

Normal humans could easily be done by relying on power armour, mecha, biosuits that connect to the nervous system or any other forms of high tech assistance that puts them roughly on the same level as the transhumans.

Maybe they want to stay pure for religious or cultural reasons, or maybe they have more practical concerns, for example, keeping a society that support normal humans as a failsafe in case of some kind of catastrophe or purely because it is cheaper and easier.

You could also add in interesting things like colonies of pure humans hiring out flesh bodies for the more exotic transhumans so they can experience a "real human" vacation or something.

>>225018

The funny thing is, they go on about everyone being equal and ignoring any racial, sexual and cultural differences that could be "problematic", but at the same time they want to fetishize special snowflake crap to appease their overgrown egos.

>>225026

>The funny thing is, they go on about everyone being equal and ignoring any racial, sexual and cultural differences that could be "problematic", but at the same time they want to fetishize special snowflake crap to appease their overgrown egos.

There is something inherently bizarre with SJW: they are a paradox of collectivist and determinist people-are-only-categories yet their entire 'social ecology' (not sure what the right term here is, sorry) is entirely built around trying to be the most special snowflake, playing victim and generally acting in a way that is egotistical. They are spoiled brats whose entire way of life relies on manipulation and maintaining their spoiled lives yet their utopia is a collectivist society.

>>225018

>nd provide everyone with the lifelong education and formation they need to reach their personal apex, not just professionally but artistically and academically as well

So you're a fan of the ultra-fatalistic approach where everyone just goes with what they're assigned at birth, even shutting off platforms of expression?

Nigga that's cold as ice, not to mention pretty dystopian and unless every government in the world conforms to it roughly at the same time this is as unlikely to happen as fucking 'TRUE COMMUNISM'

>>225026

>Normal humans could easily be done by relying on power armour, mecha, biosuits that connect to the nervous system or any other forms of high tech assistance that puts them roughly on the same level as the transhumans.

I agree, but I don't fucking care. I'd push for humans having to adapt to survive, and every offshoot of humanity considers itself "pure". In a universe full of weirdos and freaks, any 'pure humans' just become insufferable snowflakes "I don't need parasitic larva nesting in my chest or implants to go in space, I can just wear a suit!". I mean, I like coming here, I play 40K, but I just wouldn't leave room for the HFY bullshit, because instead of saying "these are the ideas that are around in the future, what would you prefer" it's allows for "I'm sure we could just be exactly as we are now and do fine, because we're SO FUCKING COOL!".

I don't mind settings that still use it, but that's also exactly why I'd steer clear of it. I'd want five or six distinct races, so no one can just say "I want to be standard guy". I know that not everyone would like that, but that's fine.

>>225034

You wouldn't need to force people into their correct niche though. Just do something like, provide free education for the right path(s), but allow people to try whatever they want at their own expense.

>>225018

I used to have a speech impediment when I was a kid. I also couldn't hold a pen worth shit. My teachers wanted to send me to special ed, for that reason. My mother told them to stick it, and now I'm studying law, lifting weights and writing a novel. I wouldn't call myself a genius (yet, I hope), but I'm far from being a retard.

Enter one of my friends (is that an english expression? Fuck it). He was sent to school a year early, was diagnosed with a high IQ, and then he went on to drop out of university. He's also a smartass, and his lifts are weak. He isn't a loser, but he isn't at the top 2%, either, even though his IQ would put him there.

My point being: At our current level of understanding, reliably guessing where someone will be in advance is fucking impossible. A 70% chance of making a correct guess leaves you with fucking up in 30% of all cases, and that is not acceptable. Hell, currently, teachers can't even fucking tell whether a kid is retarded or not, so the 70% are a very, VERY optimistic estimate. I don't see that change any time soon, either. With mind-computer-interfaces, advanced prosthetic limbs, genetic treatments and nootropics, we are constantly making small steps forward, the technology gets cheaper and more reliable, and we know what direction to advance in. Pedagogy is at a dead end, just like most social sciences, barely yielding better results than pure intuition, at times.

Mind you, not only do we lack results, but even if we had them, we'd then have to hope that the people who have to apply your great Unified Theory of Education wouldn't fuck up. If they did fuck up, congratulations, you just destroyed the dreams of a kid that wanted to become a pilot but instead became a mediocre novelist. Again: Not acceptable. Not only are we closer to cybernetic arms with built-in lasers than we are to your idea of a transhumanist society, we'll also do much less harm walking that road than we would with half-assed social engineering.

>>225034

So accepting facts is somehow a negative, dystopian thing that makes me a bad person?

>Premise 1: people do not have equal abilities or potential.

>Premise 2: we have finite resources (including time) to dedicate to each individuals development, education, and formation.

>Premise 3: limited resources should be spent in a way that maximises the return we receive from them.

Premises 1&2 are statements of fact premise 3 is arguable, but only if you want to say that wasting a finite resource is a good thing. From that I would argue that as soon as we have the capability to determine a persons capabilities we should focus the way we spend our resources to maximise their capabilities. The earlier we are able to make an accurate analysis the higher the return we get on the resources spent. I would argue that is a good thing. If people wanted to spend their own resources on education that they're not suited for then that would be their own choice - but it would be wasteful to spend public resources on that sort of thing.

>>225044

This guy gets it.

>>225045

I also had a speech impediment (I stuttered), and I have dyspraxia. Both of those were fixed with therapy - I no longer take 20 seconds to say "Good Morning", and I'll only walk into the wall beside a door if I am very drunk.

That's not the sort of thing I'm talking about, as we've both shown those problems can be fixed. However I am not going to be the man who advances our understanding of high level physics, or the man who writes a symphony that will be played centuries after my death. As such what is the point in spending public money in the attempt to make me a physicist or a composer when that is something I am unable to achieve? Who benefits from anybody lying about that? How is it to societies advantage to spend limited public funds on something that will produce no appreciable result

>>225045

Damn, good post.

Yeah, the concept that we could anytime soon start picking out what is best for people based PURELY on genetics, is absurd. We can't even reliably section out people based on race or gender because people are capable of surprising us and just making strives in different fields, the environmental variables are more than can be comprehended.

>>225049

>more than can be comprehended.

>more than can be comprehended at the moment.

FTFY.

>>225045

Then make it happen slowly, and test it out in small scale first.

It's not going to work right away, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

>>225048

>Premise 1: people do not have equal abilities or potential.

True. But people work harder and better doing what they WANT and LIKE to do. To the point they get good. Better than talented people that don't like what they're doing.

My family, father side, has 3 generations of sports trainers. Everyone agrees that it is a delight to work with talented and dedicated athletes. But if you need to choose between talented and dedicated, you should always pick dedicated. Every. Time.

But then, if only we could brainwash people from an early age…

>Premise 2: we have finite resources (including time) to dedicate to each individuals development, education, and formation.

It is interesting that you think you should dedicate time of a person towards the development of anyone but the person itself.

Because if the time is the person's, it might as well do what the hell the person wants, right?

But we should all labor - oh, all those labor-hours which make the true value of things - towards the common good of all. I get it.

>Premise 3: limited resources should be spent in a way that maximises the return we receive from them.

Well, if you want to treat people as simples resources that must optimized, acumulated and spent for maximum return…

>However I am not going to be the man who advances our understanding of high level physics

Well, the two notable figures of physics I remember are one guy who did sucky bad in school and another who studied Alchemy and put little objects into their eye sockets.

But eh, well… Next we know we're pouring alcohol into the batch of toilet cleaners and taking soma to have a good night's sleep before the communal orgy.

>>225061

In premise 2, the time spent is obviously first and foremost the time of everyone else, teachers, employers, and society in general. Just take the classic problem of problem kids in a classroom. It's mostly a problem because school is more suited to females, and fail to take into account the more boisterous boys that really ought to be outside fighting or running around. By acknowledging this difference and taking measures to offer alternatives for it, you'd save a lot of time that would otherwise have been wasted trying to deal with problems.

But at the same time, someone might end up wasting their own time as well, trying their hardest to live up to expectations from society, their parents or whatever, even though they really have no aptitude for it.

>>225070

But you're basically leading to segregation and it's proven that people just can't do "separate but equal", one group will get better treatment than others and that will just lead to the same gender/racial problems we have right now. People with sons will want the male school to be the best, people with daughters will want the female school the best, and people who just naturally get along with the opposite gender will end up getting less out of things than others. There are a lot of real reasons that apply RIGHT NOW that account for why we have mixed gender/race schooling.

>>225070

>society

>But at the same time, someone might end up wasting their own time as well, trying their hardest to live up to expectations from society, their parents or whatever, even though they really have no aptitude for it.

Am I wasting society time? Or is society wasting my time?

Is society responsible for me? Or am I responsible for society?

Do society owes me for this time lost? Or do I owe my time to society?

>By acknowledging this difference and taking measures to offer alternatives for it, you'd save a lot of time that would otherwise have been wasted trying to deal with problems.

Well, that education sucks in most of the west is a given. And that good pedagogy seems to take a backseat to feel-good look-good seem-good pedagogy is a constant.

But, in my opinion, highly deterministic, unwilling, forced specialization is not exactly the way to go. High-school and later willing specialization seems to yield good results in some educational models, though.

>>225077

> in most of the west is a given.

Scratch that. It sucks basically everywhere, but in different ways.

>>225075

>separate but equal

I can find the problem here, and it's not in the "separate" part.

Damn me, does anyone here have that "Comprachicos" pdf, by good ole Missus Rand?

That was a good read. If I remember it right, it got it from /tg/.

>>225075

>There are a lot of real reasons that apply RIGHT NOW that account for why we have mixed gender/race schooling.

Yes, like how mixed schooling improved results. Except oh, no, wait - they didn't.

Well it must be about how they improved integration, except, yeah, not really.

Hmm, did they improve peoples ability to get along with each other …..

But mixed schools definitely did something positive, right?

It wasn't just a counterproductive move made purely to placate a political ideology that cares more about feeling good than making things better for anyone, right? I mean, it can't be, you're so certain that it's a good thing, just like you were taught.

>>225083

>Hmm, did they improve peoples ability to get along with each other

Pretty sure lynchings are down. Got any facts to suggest otherwise?

>>225083

>>225085 (me)

And before I head out for the night, if we're talking LONG TERM GOALS, pretending integration won't lead to more racial harmony long term, and thus get the human race focused on less fucking bullshit, I don't know what to tell you. Because you're thinking it matters if we have robo arms when we still care if a nigga is black! Your specialized from birth society is just as absurd as true communism, it SOUNDS great in your head but it would just slow down human progress and breed corruption. It's a system designed to fail.

>>225087

Your entire premise is based on making everyone equal, segregation is never on the premise of equality and is never inherent in the system and therefore is a feature not a failure.

>>225085

Have you not been paying attention anon?

http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/22/a-hate-crime-veteran-assaulted-calls-on-black-lives-matter-to-condemn-attack/

http://downtrend.com/71superb/black-cop-shoots-and-kills-6-year-old-white-boy-with-autism

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/03/vox-riots-arson-and-shootings-aside-black-lives-matter-is-pretty-peaceful/

http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2015/08/28/black-activists-called-for-lynching-and-hanging-of-white-people-and-cops/

That's what I could find with about 20 seconds of searching, should give you some interesting reading over your breakfast tomorrow.

>>225087

>pretending integration won't lead to more racial harmony long term

It doesn't. The amount of racial strife is a simple equation of proximity+time and that's leaving aside the proven effect of the breakdown of societal trust created by racial mingling or the fact that racial differences are more significant than appearance.

>>225092

>black on white killings

>lynchings

top kek homkey that's social justice

>>225087

>harmony

But how much are we willing to sacrifice in the name of "harmony"?

Should we educate less in the name of harmony? Should or kids not learn some things or be selectively taught in the name of harmony? Should what we teach priorize harmony before actual knowledge and competence? Should outliers be digested and spat out by the system in the name of harmony? Should we make a school of cliques and peer pressure in the name of harmony? Or should we force childen to integrate and cooperate - breaking their individuality in the process - in the name of harmony?

Humanity is not harmonic. Thankfully, harmony sucks, is boring as shit and does basically nothing good. Your harmonic society is as absurd as true communism, which is also boring and stagnant and inhuman.

We thrive in conflict and competition. We are unequal. We are competitive and exceptionalist as a species. We like not only being good, but being the best and giving the best we got in that in which we like to work on. And we love being given credit and rewards for being better than our peers.

We are not harmonic. Harmony kills us. And we kill it right back and make something greater on its corpse.

This is the very best in humanity.

>>225077

Forced specialisation probably wouldn't be ideal, no. But there's a lot of nuances that could work. Free education for whatever aligns with your aptitudes, but allow people to go other ways if they really want to, and are willing to take out a study loan or something. That way you'd still leave opportunities for people to do what they want if they really have some burning desire to do it, even if it's not what they're "supposed" to be doing.

I mean, the main idea here is not to force people to become drones by micromanaging all aspects of their lives (So not something like in Psycho Pass), but help plot out a course that would help people utilize their gifts to their full potential.

The point is to give people information about their abilities, and encourage them to hone these.

It's also worth mentioning that a lot of class discrimination and such is happening because everyone is supposed to be equal, and thus, those that end up down in the gutter have somehow failed and are looked down upon.

It's not inconceivable that a society where everyone is guided down the path they are most suited to, would cause less discrimination.

>>225094

Integration is a joke anyways. There's only one thing that really works, and that's assimilation. Multiculturalism is a veritable powder keg at the best of times, it only "works" because it hasn't exploded yet. All you need is one tiny spark to activate up the "Us vs Them" mode, and shit hits the fan, and failing that you'll see one culture growing and gradually choking out the other ones.

In fact, just look at Islamic communities throughout Europe. Time and again, we see how they become even MORE extreme than their kin in their homelands, simply because they have to work harder to preserve their uncivilized culture when in such close proximity to the more advanced and free western cultures.

Some things just shouldn't be mixed. You can still visit a exotic country to experience a foreign culture, and you could still hang out with people that have different potentials than you.

>>225088

>You niggers aren't even pretending you're talking about a game anymore.

Sure we can! Here, lemme try,

>>224978

>People are racist against people with cheap morphs? Really?? No. I don't buy it. At all. synths are discriminated against and then call it a day.

Syths, which is to say the cyberbrain devices are easier for superintelligence horrors to hack than organic brains. Even simpler, hostile AI systems would be able to perform bodyjacking on the behest of regular criminals.

The public "outward" aspect of the victim's personality can be retained as a kind of mask, and the imposter acts from within this shell. If it is detectable at all, such a masquerade may be apparent only to close friends and associates, or to expert security programs. Then they can continue to spread. That is the kind of scenario that plays out in their minds.

>>224978

>a 3d printer can make a clone of them elsewhere.

>>224984

>They destroy the contents of your brain and make a copy of it elsewhere.

The clones are grown in vats. And there is a version of the procedure that is discussed where the process of transference is gradual, without any perceived break in experience, so as not to harm self-concept and continuity. You're awake during the entire course of the procedure. (Re: ego bridge under the Resleaving entry.)

>>224978

>4. Psychics. We had a perfectly good hard scifi setting concept, and they had to ruin it with pseudo-scientific History Channel woo-woo nonsense.

It's meant to be an added dose of Eldritch Horror, Clarke's three laws, sp00py space, Event Horizon (1997), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), etc. The idea being that a superintelligence, wether the TITANs, exsurgent virus, ETI, or other forces, they'd stumble upon advances that would go beyond what we currently understand.

>>224982

>Still iffy

Debateable. But I'm personally planted firmly in the Still-iffy Camp. Existential problems raised concerning how much data is required to create a high-fidelity digitised emulation, and all those squicky uncomfortable feelings.

>>224984

>Pruning forks and sending them out to then being reintegrated makes sense to me.

This should be the part that should strike a stronger nerve with your sensibilities! This should be the part that makes your stomach turn! Sending whittled down, lobotomised versions of yourself to run errands, and then merging with them if they survive! The process of merging is not a psychologically safe thing!

"Running multiple instances whose memories and conclusions are eventually merged" (Stuart Armstrong, Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom) is a trick that is not feasible for the native human cognitive architecture. They basically get Σ(You, Fork#1, … Fork#n,), and selectively merge the experiences down into a single representative sample according to some rule. You are killed and what is left is a somewhat diminished, diluted, fractured being! Something less representative of who you were before merging!

I mean, sure. People change a whole lot and all all the time. But people are not all that flexible. They don't change that much so quickly, unless it's a bloody brain injury! You're going to need better merging software procedures to overcome that kind of issue. *cough*It doesn't fix the phenomenological issues.*cough* The rule is, the longer that a fork has been out and about, the more dangerous it is to merge with it, because it has diverged to drastically from you. Also, only merge with well pruned forks. The more diminished the copy, the better. The more of you you'll end up with, as you subsume their experiences with less harm done to your sense of self.

>>224984

>Even meat brains can be "hacked" by forcing a person to de-sleeve into an infomorph, editing them, then resleeving them as their thrall.

Aye. This is a thing that happens.

>>224987

>but people have the amazing ability to rationalize anything

True. And those that go mad might just go on duplicating themselves into oblivion after feeling like nothing matters anymore, that identity, the idea of the self is an illusion. (Insert Eclipse Phase pic of smile brunette grasping a scalpel, suspended in zero-g. Blood is smeared all over the space station walls. She is smiling.)

>>224982

>Skynet catching alien AIDS that was left as a trap a gorillion years ago.

Nature, devoid of any self-guided initiative, was able to generate self-optimisers. It only takes one man to develop a cure for polio, and it only takes good logistics to spread that cure worldwide. Now think, with motivation, with deliberate effort and foresight, the kind of work that went into making supra self-propagating hyper-adaptive space AIDS. In a universe as big as this, with an unprecedented timescale for the rise and fall of so many civilisations, they had ample opportunity to do so.

>>225109

>In fact, just look at Islamic communities throughout Europe.

No one wants integrate Islamic bullshit, the goal is to make them LESS Islamic. And people are dying now as they are fearful of losing their culture, but them losing their shit culture is the point.

The transition above racial segregation has to be done eventually, because humanity will have to move forward as a united race at a certain point. Feminism, SJWs, MRAs, BLM… all this is shit that we'll move past. All these labels and identities don't serve any purpose, except to put people into little groups, and little groups can only do so much. So if >>225018

seriously wants to push everyone forward, we have to realize most of our genetic differences are not significant enough to warrant dividing people up over them.

They want the short term benefits of segregation without dealing with the long term problems. If people are obsessed with the short term they'll never have what it takes to actually move people forward, they will stunt the species. I suppose that would be the most logical "badguy" of such a future, a group obsessed with modern labels and identity bullshit. While other branches of humanity push forward, groups like that would constantly fight advancement.

>>225120

>The transition above racial segregation has to be done eventually, because humanity will have to move forward as a united race at a certain point.

What exactly do blacks have to offer us besides the bounty of resources they're squatting on in Africa? And if those resources are worth dealing with blacks, wouldn't we be better off just dealing with them in the other sense so the resources are then accessible?

So since everyone is getting political anyway, what type of religions would spring up along with transhumanism? I think it would be odd for humans to completely abandon the concept, even if minds could be kept permanently, there would be the chance of data corruption or data loss, still the chance of death or deletion. What would God be in the eyes of a mind that can inhabit (knowingly and purposefully) several bodies and explore the stars?

>>225120

We must take short term steps as the preparation for the long term steps, are long term plans not just a series of short term actions that serve the same objective?

One society setting up that sort of system would, theoretically at least, outperform other comparable societies that have not adopted that system - leading other societies to either adopt those policies or simply remove themselves from contention. Over time those societies would be more likely to favour co-operation with other similar societies around the world regardless of racial difference, leading them to move closer and closer together to the point of integration.

>>225124

From what I've seen religion must fill some kind of psychological need in the human mind, it's something that would not have survived if people didn't need it. Even with self professed atheists you can see that various things take the role of religion in their lives.

You'd most likely see at least some form of the major world religions, possibly changed beyond anything we'd recognise today, but people have been predicting the death of religion for some time now and faith has proved to be remarkably hardy.

I think one thing you might see develop would be some form of ritualised humanism - as self directed evolution would be a huge step towards giving humanity power that would be easily seen as divine.

It'd have to fulfill largely the same social role as 'religion' (using a broad definition) - giving its society a point of unity (presumably through shared belief in humanities new abilities and responsibility), and a foundational set of rules for its adherents to keep, if only to give them a way to say "I'm a [religion name]" and so belong to the group.

I'd need a bit more time to give you much more than this general idea, but I think it holds up as something for a game.

>>225124

>what type of religions would spring up along with transhumanism?

Religious computationalists—believing that the soul was the Aristotelian form of the mind—first and chiefly caring about the greatest improvement of the soul. They speak ofthe soul and its qualities, of virtue, power, wisdom, and the like. By them, temperance is implanted in the soul, and where temperance is, there health is speedily imparted, not only to the head, but to the whole body.

"And in the searchings or deliberations of the soul, not the quietest, as I imagine, and he who with difficulty deliberates and discovers, is thought worthy of praise, but he who does so most easily and quickly? [..] And in all that concerns either body or soul, swiftness and activity are clearly better than slowness and quietness? Clearly they are."

>>225120

>most of our genetic differences are not significant enough to warrant dividing people up over them.

You heard the man, no more genetic discrimination! All races have to be treated equal, so make the ones that never evolved lactose tolerance drink their damn milk. It's problematic for them to claim they can't

>>225120

Our genetic differences are massive, the 92% that all mammal life shares is irrelevant because what makes us different from any other mammal is the 8%. 44% of our genes is the same as a Fruit Fly but it's the 66% that makes us different. And the differences between each other in the same species is not how many chromosomes or genes we have apart it's how our genes are coded.

You see the double helix, that twisting ladder, the code on both chromosomes that combine at the center of that is what makes you different from another race because the codes are not exactly the same and in fact may be entirely different resulting in two separate codes from different races coming together to cause very different genetic expressions then if you combined two chromosomes from the same race although there are gene sequences that are different within each race there are very common widespread near universal sets of code within each respective race that they'll reliably appear in the sequence if two people from that race breed. These sequences came about because each race branched off in entirely different environments which lead to feedback loops that in time changed those sequences to either be beneficial to that environment or be benign and irrelevant to the environment but due to the chaotic nature of gene inheritance resulted in the sequences that expressed the same thing changing locations and stuff like that which leads to huge differences.

Ask anyone who actually deals with Blacks, especially African Blacks,and they all universally say the same thing that Blacks do not have a concept of time and a lacking in abstract thought. They generally didn't need to know what time is because the weather barely changes whereas places with cyclical good and severe weather required such abstract concepts to survive and thus is a common traits. They don't need to be co-operative or even that smart because they have/had so much food they never had to put in the effort whereas places like the steppes required solidarity to survive.

That's not even touching what Communism and all it's myriad forms does to a gene pool, the most obvious being wiping out the genes that leads to an increase in the average intelligence of a race disappearing and thus reducing that average since all the smart people are dead only the stupid remain.

>>225146

>Back on topic

You're new here. /tg/ never gets back on topic.

>>225153

>0% actually fixing the shitty game mechanics

play GURPS instead

>>225154

>memes

I begin to question why I even come to /tg/

If I wanted an SJW freakout with no productive content, then I'd be go on rpg.net

>>225155

>not liking memes

I guess rpg.net would be better for you

>>225145

>Genetics!

One widely accepted theory of the causes of world inequality is the geography hypothesis, which claims that the great divide between rich and poor countries is created by geographical differences. Many poor countries, such as those of Africa, Central America, and South Asia, are between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Rich nations, in contrast, tend to be in temperate latitudes. This geographic concentration of poverty and prosperity gives a superficial appeal to the geography hypothesis, which is the starting point of the theories and views of many social scientists and pundits alike. But this doesn't make it any less wrong.

As early as the late eighteenth century, the great French political philosopher Montesquieu noted the geographic concentration of prosperity and poverty, and proposed an explanation for it. He argued that people in tropical climates tended to be lazy and to lack inquisitiveness. As a consequence, they didn't work hard and were not innovative, and this was the reason why they were poor. Montesquieu also speculated that lazy people tended to be ruled by despots, suggesting that a tropical location could explain not just poverty but also some of the political phenomena associated with economic failure, such as dictatorship.

The theory that hot countries are intrinsically poor, though contradicted by the recent rapid economic advance of countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Botswana, is still forcefully advocated by some, such as the economist Jeffrey Sachs. The modern version of this view emphasizes not the direct effects of climate on work effort or thought processes, but two additional arguments: first, that tropical diseases, particularly malaria, have very adverse consequences for health and therefore labor productivity; and second, that tropical soils do not allow for productive agriculture. The conclusion, though, is the same: temperate climates have a relative advantage over tropical and semitropical areas.

World inequality, however, cannot be explained by climate or diseases, or any version of the geography hypothesis. Just think of Nogales. What separates the two parts is not climate, geography, or disease environment, but the U.S.-Mexico border.

If the geography hypothesis cannot explain differences between the north and south of Nogales, or North and South Korea, or those between East and West Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, could it still be a useful theory for explaining differences between North and South America? Between Europe and Africa? Simply, no.

History illustrates that there is no simple or enduring connection between climate or geography and economic success. For instance, it is not true that the tropics have always been poorer than temperate latitudes. As we saw in the last chapter, at the time of the conquest of the Americas by Columbus, the areas south of the Tropic of Cancer and north of the Tropic of Capricorn, which today include Mexico, Central America, Peru, and Bolivia, held the great Aztec and Inca civilizations. These empires were politically centralized and complex, built roads, and provided famine relief. The Aztecs had both money and writing, and the Incas, even though they lacked both these two key technologies, recorded vast amounts of information on knotted ropes called quipus. In sharp contrast, at the time of the Aztecs and Incas, the north and south of the area inhabited by the Aztecs and Incas, which today includes the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Chile, were mostly inhabited by Stone Age civilizations lacking these technologies. The tropics in the Americas were thus much richer than the temperate zones, suggesting that the "obvious fact" of tropical poverty is neither obvious nor a fact. Instead, the greater riches in the United States and Canada represent a stark reversal of fortune relative to what was there when the Europeans arrived.

>>225160

This reversal clearly had nothing to do with geography and, as we have already seen, something to do with the way these areas were colonized. This reversal was not confined to the Americas. People in South Asia, especially the Indian subcontinent, and in China were more prosperous than those in many other parts of Asia and certainly more than the peoples inhabiting Australia and New Zealand. This, too, was reversed, with South Korea, Singapore, and Japan emerging as the richest nations in Asia, and Australia and New Zealand surpassing almost all of Asia in terms of prosperity. Even within sub-Saharan Africa there was a similar reversal. More recently, before the start of intense European contact with Africa, the southern Africa region was the most sparsely settled and the farthest from having developed states with any kind of control over their territories. Yet South Africa is now one of the most prosperous nations in sub-Saharan Africa. Further back in history we again see much prosperity in the tropics; some of the great premodern civilizations, such as Angkor in modern Cambodia, Vijayanagara in southern India, and Aksum in Ethiopia, flourished in the tropics, as did the great Indus Valley civilizations of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa in modern Pakistan. History thus leaves little doubt that there is no simple connection between a tropical location and economic success.

Tropical diseases obviously cause much suffering and high rates of infant mortality in Africa, but they are not the reason Africa is poor. Disease is largely a consequence of poverty and of governments being unable or unwilling to undertake the public health measures necessary to eradicate them. England in the nineteenth century was also a very unhealthy place, but the government gradually invested in clean water, in the proper treatment of sewage and effluent, and, eventually, in an effective health service. Improved health and life expectancy were not the cause of England's economic success but one of the fruits of its previous political and economic changes. The same is true for Nogales, Arizona.

The other part of the geography hypothesis is that the tropics are poor because tropical agriculture is intrinsically unproductive. Tropical soils are thin and unable to maintain nutrients, the argument goes, and emphasizes how quickly these soils are eroded by torrential rains. There certainly is some merit in this argument, but as we'll show, the prime determinant of why agricultural productivity—agricultural output per acre—is so low in many poor countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, has little to do with soil quality. Rather, it is a consequence of the ownership structure of the land and the incentives that are created for farmers by the governments and institutions under which they live. The great inequality of the modern world that emerged in the nineteenth century was caused by the uneven dissemination of industrial technologies and manufacturing production. It was not caused by divergence in agricultural performance.

Another influential version of the geography hypothesis is advanced by the ecologist and evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond. He argues that the origins of intercontinental inequality at the start of the modern period, five hundred years ago, rested in different historical endowments of plant and animal species, which subsequently influenced agricultural productivity. In some places, such as the Fertile Crescent in the modern Middle East, there were a large number of species that could be domesticated by humans. Elsewhere, such as the Americas, there were not. Having many species capable of being domesticated made it very attractive for societies to make the transition from a hunter-gatherer to a farming lifestyle. As a consequence, farming developed earlier in the Fertile Crescent than in the Americas. Population density grew, allowing specialization of labor, trade, urbanization, and political development. Crucially, in places where farming dominated, technological innovation took place much more rapidly than in other parts of the world. Thus, according to Diamond, the differential availability of animal and plant species created differential intensities of farming, which led to different paths of technological change and prosperity across different continents.

>>225158

I can't tell if this is meant to be satire or if this some stark reality I am horribly naïve to as a non-American. I mean, the prose is done up in that way where it's just so ambiguous, but apparently some kids were growing up thinking the stuff that was written in Lemony Snicket books was plausible enough to have actually have happened.

>>225166

Your mother is a whore.

>>225156

If I ever design my own game, I will totally use that technology complexity-system. The endless stacking of implants really is a bad mechanic in EP.

>>225153

Let's put on our thinking caps for a moment. What are the most glaring problems with Eclipse Phase?

>An at best questionable understanding of transhumanism

which is related to

>Authors forcing their politics into the game and the game community

Which was caused by

>SJWs within the company

Does that help you anon?

>>224854

I know Hc Svnt Dracones is utter shit, but only retards save thumbnails.

Furshit should just stick to fantasy and alien planets. Their post-humanity sci-fi is always fucking trash. I say this as a furfag. Taurs are also shit.

>>225188

>not wanting to transform yourself into a biocomputer to attain immortality

See

>TheRealYou.pdf

in >>224847

>>225175

>Your mother is a whore.

That's a low blow there, Anon. My mother never thought she'd ever end up a whore. A little dancing for money, sure, but this—selling her 'assets' to those maintenance workers! All the damn day in the bar—or on her back in the rooms they got out behind. And there's this bad man—he said she had to give him a percentage, otherwise he'd get one of his goons to knock her around. (And it has happened, like when she told him to 'go to hell on a sled'.) How do you think it feels knowing that's happening to your own mother? Seeing her late one night, the hastily removed makeup and smudged eyeliner after she's tried drinking away the memories of how fucked up everything is for her?

Can you even begin to imagine the kind of shame she feels at the strong disapproval for the so-called immorality of the acts she has to perform in order to survive. The shameful acts she has to commit day in and day out—selling her body to every man who has had the price. Her life's circumstances had placed her there as a means of survival. While her body was performing unworthy acts, she was doing it to keep a household off the streets. Her heart was always so pure.

People forced into prostitution because of poverty is not something to take lightly. And don't get me started on that good-for-nothing, lazy layabout of a father that had run out on the family. I have a big enough chip on my shoulder from that cheap absinthe drinking, indolent drunk.

Fuck you, Anon. To hell with you and your vicious judgements and condemnations. What the hell would you know about survival?

>>225186

>questionable understanding of transhumanism

What are you talking about? They have it well nailed down with the exhumans and singularity seekers and such. Have you even read the books?

>>225194

>>225193

>TheRealYou.pdf

Kek. Both of them were real.

As you live, you make more memories and your old memories forgotten. Are you still you 60 years later? What if you forget your past? Where are you if parts of your brain are removed, but you regain consciousness?

>>225219

>What is the ship of theseus

We can argue about this kind of thing until the cows come home, but in the story it's pretty clear that it's a copy given that it was purely first person. Wish I had that one whompcomic saved where it was pretty much the exact same thing condensed into three\four panels.

>>225153

Sorry to say anon, but I think someone hit the nail on the head earlier when they said no one actually plays this fucking game, they just read the book and the synth catalogue and just goes on from there. I don't think I've ever actually seen a storytime on half or full tg regarding a game session, it's odd really but something we have to accept, it's not a game you play it's a game you discuss.

>>225222

Is a perfect copy less real than the original?

>>225223

It's real, but it's also not the original.

>>225219

But what makes the you?

Can there be two yous at the same, then, if a copy is made? Even if you yourself only see yourself through one perspective and see the other you as a copy and vice-versa?

Is it the body? Is it the consciousness? Is it the continuity? Is there a soul? Can't I be the little girl without uploads?

>all the retarded luddites and catholics ITT

Yikes.

>>225190

That was my bad, i was in a rush and quickly grabbed it off google images.

>>225190

That was my bad, i was in a rush and quickly grabbed it off google images.

>>225240

>that post

Like, zoinks, Scoob!

>>225221

No.

>>225161

>>225160

What's the source on this?

>>225194

>>225221

>>225257

It was a little funny

>>225240

Yes. Everyone who disagrees with your shitty psudeo philosophy and futurism is now a follower of a dead 19'th Century movement protesting the loss of their jobs, or worse, a CHRISTIAN. The hated enemy of all fedoras, beside wyminz and Chad Thundercock.

>>225311

Exactly. Just like those who say that "Catholicism isn't really Christianity; it's a pagan abomination consolidated from various religions of Europe and the Mediterranean just like Islam is in the Middle East." That's like saying "Evolution is the religion of scientists who laugh at God" and that "The Protestant faith is an aberration consolidated by the Free Masons". Or that "Microsoft has joined the Illuminati in the past business quarter."

>>225193

Having posted up TheRealYou PDF. The only trick they have for this in all the other many hundreds of stories that creepily describe this procedure in the first person would be to be unconscious so that "you" don't notice that anything happened. Wake up groggily, and be left wondering how the procedure went, and then be left wondering about that conscious gap you now have in your memory. Then the dread sets in…

>>225219

>Both of them were real.

It's the one being put through the abattoir that I'm worried about.

>>225219

Either there is a You or it is a delusion, or there is some cut off point, or hitherto unconsidered possibility. You can have a creature that burrows into your skull, slowly eating away brain tissue and gradually replacing it with itself, whilst mimicking its function, and you would never notice a thing. Much like a type of creature that does the same with a fishes' tongue, effectively replacing it.

>>225219

>Are you still you 60 years later?

I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the kid. That kid was a rotten lil' bastard. Now if we could just deal with the inflammation around the joints then that'd be fine. At that age it's still easy to stay fit and limber—take up tennis—, it's the cataracts and cholesterol that creeps up on you. Other health problems that would have started to seep in were hardly due to decrepitude, just poor maintenance, or it was hereditary, or owing to injury. 60 would be the new middle age, if you knew how to take care of yourself. You could still look like a damn athlete and not start falling apart if you only had the right kind of treatment.

>>225222

>that one whompcomic

It was fucking horrifying.

The last two panels.

>>225223

>Is a perfect copy less real than the original?

>>225224

>It's real, but it's also not the original.

The Prestige Ending spoilers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHKan75x7GI

Building a machine that near-instantaneously duplicates a person an arbitrary distance away is equivelent to building a machine that teleports a person whilst leaving behind a perfect duplicate.

>>225231

>But what makes the you?

Perhaps localised evolution of a system as defined by its spatial co-ordinates. If we're talking about just its information-theoretic qualities, then the question becomes trickier, and then it becomes a question of philosophy, which needs more rigorously defined phenomenological underpinnings if you're after actual results to get the swampmen and Greek ships over the rivers that cannot be tread in more than once.

>>225260

>What's the source on this?

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, by Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson

>>225318

If we can get a few other anons in on this I'm so down. /tg/ gets shit done time.

>>225318

Men automatically get custody rights, PUAs are kings that plow the women freely like a field, women have to dress modestly to avoid being raped and can only win a rape case if she has at least 7 male witnesses in her defense…

Actually, we could just use Sharia…

>>225321

Since you're pretty much RPing already, did anyone ever make a Bioshock RPG or homebrew?

>>225321

>Walt Disney's brain, brainstem, and upper spinal column had survived cryogenic preservation with sufficient structural integrity?

>>225323

Adventures in Ayn Rand's Underwater Disneyland Europa

"I asked myself, in what country was there a place for men like me? Men who refused to say yes to the parasites and the doubters. Men who believed that work was sacred and property rights inviolate. And then one day the happy answer came to me, my friends: there was NO country for people like me. And THAT was the moment I decided… to build one. A city amongst the stars.

Europa is the smallest of the four large 'Galilean' satellites of Jupitor. Little known before 1979, well before my time, it has recently become the prime target of my interests for suitable colonisation sites. Its icy surface and rocky interior, and strange surface topography of low-relief ridges and chaotic terrain, make Europa one of the most unusual objects and therefore most valuable objects in the solar system. Most intriguing is that this unusual surface overlies a liquid ocean.

I intend to build my city there, in the undersea domain of Europa. Already I am considering to invest in the suitable gear for deep sea activity and large scale construction projects, at least until I've been further advised on the prospective site. With a radius of a mere 969.96 miles, there is hardly room for expansion. Current logistical estimates set the housing maximum at 2,292,280 permanent residence. ((48781250000*√(π)/(37719)).

What I hope to build is a model social order, an inspiration, the first in a line of many like it. A chain of societies built on true cooperation, on enlightened self-interest. Something that the failed and failing ant societies around us fail to understand. It will be a small city. But it would be a shining beacon, an anomalous lighthouse against the stygian void, blazing out from the light-shafted depths of the dark with a light that exceeds the majesty of the stars themselves.

>>225318

>>225318

Just do your best to make the Jovians the good guys, while shitting on the anarchists. Me and a few others made some suggestions at the beginning of the thread. I'm all down for Kenshiro from Jupiter.

>>225320

The best argument against hardcore MRA's (the crazy ones who call women "cunts" out of principle) is the islamic world. Arabic women are consistently some of the shittiest fucking patients any hospital could ever ask for. They are entitled, cruel, hysteric, arrogant and without any dignity whatsoever. Avoid at all costs.

If feminists could activate their brains for ten seconds, they'd actually bring this up, but somehow, they are in love with the two most misogynistic groups on the planet: Blacks and muslims. Shows that they don't care about women, they only care about subverting muh patriarchy.

>>225321

I don't care if you're RPing, I fucking love you for this post. The parents of my last girlfriend started out as poorfags, now they got their own company with seventeen trucks.

>>225369

I know lots of Greeks and other Eurofags who were in that kind of situation. Down on their luck working men who started off as electricians or in other professions, and then started up their own businesses. My favourite story is the one about the Greek: He couldn't speak a word of English. The guy was selling fruit on the side of the road, and he was undercutting business from the fruit store down the street. When the fruit store owner found out, he was impressed as peaches. (Because the fruit the Greek was selling was the fruit he was buying from that damn store!) And so the store owner he gave the wog a job!

Decades later, the wog is owning an entire shopping center. (Malls as you 'mericans call it.)

There are a lot of stories like that.

>>225369

>RPing on /tg/.

It happens more often than you think. But people have no impulse control and make a disgrace of themselves in public. They should only do it when it's relevant. In this case, a 20th century hyper-capitalist straight out of a deconstruction of Rand is the closest relevant thing we have to the topic of shiting on anarchists. Especially when what they say isn't pages and pages of prose produced by amphetamine abuse.

The part about investing part of their pay checks is a bad idea though, especially with the collapse of the automotive industry. Those workers who had company shares had found themselves well and truly broke. Meanwhile the CEO is laughing it up and gets off it easily.

>>225377

Half the reason that we're seeing so many bubbles lately is because there is literally nothing reliable left to invest in. Small businesses fail 90% of the time while startups take hundreds of millions in investments from the idle rich with nothing else to do with their money.

Rags-to-riches stories have always been statistical outliers. The system is set up to keep the poor in poverty and the rich wealthy, with individual cases of massive luck and/or insanity being the only exceptions to class rigidity.

>>225378

Exactly this.

>>225380

Miracles need a lot of maintenance, Mr. Ryan! Thing is, wouldn't you be short on people to deal with the sewage, the cleaning, and the landscaping in Arcadia? You got posh types who never suffered worse than a paper cut–but precious few who can dig a ditch or plumb a pipe.

>>225378

>is because there is literally nothing reliable left to invest in.

This might be true.

>The system is set up to keep the poor in poverty and the rich wealthy, with individual cases of massive luck and/or insanity being the only exceptions to class rigidity.

But this is bullshit. Or at least was bullshit.

Havent't seen a single "rags-to-riches" story that didn't have as the target someone exceptionally competent, skilled and smart. It was no luck. And it's only insanity in the manner of breaking from the mediocre norm.

But not only that, quite a lot of those stories tend to end in the sons and daughters of the now-millionaire running his empire to the ground as soon as he dies, wasting his money and ruining his assets, and most returning to poverty after a few years of gleeful hedonism. No luck, no insanity.

On the mechanics of the system, there is nothing - not a single thing - for "keeping the poor in poverty".

And the rich are penalized in growth % by being idle and simply investing. It's just that it's a system that deals with growth, not absolute values. So you won't get to burn the rich and split their property, you only get to grow more than them - especially if you are good in what you do.

>Rags-to-riches stories have always been statistical outliers.

Competence has always been rare.

>>225381

They ended up with what amounted to plutocrats and an impoverished underclass. There are the luxury quarters for the elite, and then there's the little cubbyholes under the stairs where the servants live. The poorest of the maintenance workers and the dead broke made themselves a shacktown in the old Metro passage. They called it 'Pauper's Drop'.

There were no safety nets or social services of any kind for failure. And once you've signed up for living there, you could never leave, because it would risk the secrecy of that place. They wanted to keep that place out of Soviet and 'merican hands. If they knew about it, then spys and subversive elements from external forces would be crawling all over the place.

>>225382

>exceptionally competent, skilled and smart.

Hard work and dedication. Don't forget the magic ingredient. Which is not to say that people who work hard can't get screwed over, but there is something to say about people who never bothered to try at all.

>>225382

>in the sons and daughters of the now-millionaire running his empire to the ground as soon as he dies, wasting his money and ruining his assets, and most returning to poverty after a few years of gleeful hedonism. No luck, no insanity.

I love these stories. I imagine the dead spinning in their graves at the thought of this. "All that hard work, for nothin'!" Oh well. can't take it with you to the grave.

>>225382

>Competence has always been rare.

High-achievers appear perceptively rare. But that comes from a lack of looking, not from there being so few. As you grow older and gain many acquaintances, and meet a lot more people, the number of personally known exceptional people to envy only grows with time.

>>225386

>>An actual AR character.

And here I was just sticking to Bioshock. I guess we needed more trains.

http://the-toast.net/2015/09/08/ayn-rands-charlottes-web/

>>225386

Exactly!

Going back to the game, Bill used a brass fitting while the other two workmen on the job were using tin—explaining that he wouldn't want to be "bailing out your loo once a fortnight. Tin's not reliable, like. If it's the price you're worried about, I'll pick up the cost of the brass".

And why did Bill do a thing like that? It's because "no man bails water out of privies built by Bill McDonagh."

Not only that, not only that! Bill wasn't the sort to pad the bill, since he gave a percentage to his and Ryan was rich. Most would have just stretched their time, inflated the bill. But not Bill. Most people assume they can take advantage of wealthy men. But Bill believe in being paid, even being paid well—but only for the work he does.

Because Bill is a man of pride and capability, who knows who he is. And this was why Ryan ended up offering him a job as his new building engineer.

Involving a personal anecdote: My own grandfather did well working as a miner in the former Polish People's Republic. He once modified a piece of equipment that ended up being a great cost cutting measure. It was handed off to engineers, and some presumably corrupt bureaucrat made a killing. Sure, the design only got him a poultry sum, roughly $2000 in today's age if you count for inflation and the current buying power and then adjust for the exchange rate, but he was happy to be paid all the same.

>Visiting a relative's house.

>There is a small bronze bust of Lenin

>No, they're no commies. People just keep old tat like that as bookends and such.

>There were also plaques beaten in with Cyrillic.

I can't read this; I refuse to believe these are real letters that people read and write with. I need my A to Ż like a normal human being. I need latin letters with accents, even of its Scandinavian gobbledygook. Especially if its Scandinavian gobbledygook. The little eagle statues are a-okay though.

I think this is the one thing the American's here can agree on. We need more knickknacks and other eagle based décor. You can never have enough eagles. Unless they're in the form of book ends. Then that's just a systemic shelving problem you've got there.

>>225382

>"rags-to-riches" story

I don't have one of those stories, or its opposite. More a, average-to-average story.

My own father, he went off with a lot of other men on a tour bus out of the country—and none of them came back. This was a typical thing done in those sorts of countries where they didn't want the people to leave.

So he caught a trip to one of the better places of the world. Naturally this meant one of the prosperous lands in the Anglosphere. He came with only what he could carry in a single luggage, (or two, I don't recall.) Learning English by night and working as a bus driver by day. (He would have been in his early twenties at the time.)

He found where the "ethnic community" resided, to pick on the local language better from those who were bi-lingual, and to see if there was work available. (re: nepotism) It was either that or there was already someone there waiting for him and there were plans to meet up. (I can't remember exactly. I've had a falling out with the old man, and we haven't been on speaking terms for years.) He was quick to start a cleaning business, contracting with companies to come in at night to clean their offices with a work crew. It did well. He then sold that business, ran a plant nursery for a while, then sold that off, did a bunch of other stuff.

Now there are two versions of this story. Either these businesses didn't do as well as I was led to believe, or he was dissatisfied with this line of work and was always after some bigger yet ungraspable, ephemeral fish. Oh, and he was caught cheating on his wife and left, causing his wife a whole lot of grief in order to spite her. It was not a good time for all involved.

Currently he is running some small business to whatever level passes for success. Has a nice house for himself and his new wife. I don't see him, but my sister still visits him. I never ask questions. It never bodes well to pry.

I do however love the story he had told me many, many years ago, about his friend who was planning to go down to Australia, thinking that, as a civil engineer of a sort, that they'd be able to provide water for what they'd thought was a nation that had so little. I can only imagine that he had wondrous designs for large-scale water processing facilities for desalination and other water treatment processes, and ways of carrying water over a long distance. Needless to say, when the poor man arrived in Australia, he was shocked to find himself to have landed in a thriving modern-day metropolis.

>>225088

>You niggers aren't even pretending you're talking about a game anymore.

So, System Shock 2? Is that not Eclipse Phase the PC game?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRC4ulWn-ZE

>>225290

A lot of books are made by shits, but if you like the system and the fluff, you might get to run it someday.

So since there is very little talk about what Eclipse Phase actually is, is the game any good at all? By the lack of stories from people actually playing the game, should I just assume it's shit?

>>225408

The core paints an interesting setting with lots of stuff to do and factions to deal with. It leans towards the left and SJW shit, but overall it isn't too bad. This apparently changed in the supplements.

The system itself is sort of mediocre. Default chargen is a nightmare without tools to assist you, but there are two alternate chargen methods, which are supposedly very smooth. I thought the combat was kinda clunky and they expect you to roll initiative every single round. Otherwise it's a pretty standard d100 system.

Personally I'd just throw some crazy shit into GURPS Transhuman Space and play that.

>>225411

Are there reasons to roll init every round, like speed factors based on previous round actions, or is it just a clumsy part of the system that's easily ignored?

But basically I'm getting the impression that the setting is interesting, and the system is just there.

>>225413

I don't remember, I think wounds and other things might factor into initiative, so that can change as the battle goes on. You can probably still just ignore the rule and only roll initiative once per combat.

The only thing that isn't easily replaced with another system is the stress and mental damage stuff. Since physical damage isn't all that bad for these people, you need to carefully manage your sanity, especially since the default campaign sends you against space cthulhu.

A lot of the complaints in this thread about how casual EP transhumans interact with these technologies are actually kind of addressed in these rules. Getting into a new, unfamiliar body can stress you out, experiencing death will stress you out, but even worse is usually lacking continuity and missing weeks or months of your life, knowing that some version of you probably died under unknown circumstances.

>>225009

>I've talked to some that wanted to abolish women's suffrage

Looks like someone has zero understanding of how devestating universal suffrage is, or how women use their voting power in the US, Canada, Europe, etc. I think universal suffrage for both men and women is a bad idea, but it's ESPECIALLY so for women.

For some reason retards just love to ignore the very obvious connection between liberal dogma taking over white society, and women having a say in politics. Want to know which groups you can thank for giving massive power to leftism? Women and non-whites, mostly. Sure, there are plenty of white men that are also liberal cuck retards, but white men are much more divided in their political ideologies. Women and non-whites vote more collectively for leftist policies. Women make up the majority of voters in the US, and they're more homogenous in how they vote, making them the stronger voting group simply for behaving mindlessly and acting as a hivemind. And, big surprise, they automatically vote liberal the majority of the time. Same goes for non-whites, they listen to propaganda from the liberal-dominated media, and support liberal policies that take money from white men and re-distribute it to women and non-whites.

You seem to imply with the hand-wavey way you dismiss it, that women being able to vote is some untouchable sacred cow, and anybody who challenges the idea is entirely motivated by hateful sexism.

>>225026

>And unfortunately, feminists largely tend to focus on disgusting, selfish SJW crap instead of actually trying to help all the women that are still being oppressed by Islam and other barbaric cultures.

Except, in these barbaric shitskin cultures that you claim are "oppressing wimmins", the men have it worse. Men are incarcerated, tortured, and executed at a far higher rate than women, for far lesser crimes, in the vast majority of these nebulously-defined cultures that you mention. Not to mention being forced into war. How are any of these cultures oppressing women, these EVIL PATRIARCHAL SOCIETIES, if the men have it worse in every single case? Sounds more like they're just backwards shitskin countries that are exponentially worse for nearly everyone there. But people just focus on the women being attacked because they think they're so innocent and pure, while they just shrug their shoulders at the more frequent and gruesome violence against the men.

Women not being allowed to drive, or go to school, or cheat on their husbands, while that might be kind of shitty, is nothing compared to the violence and death that the men have to face in just about any "barbaric culture" you could think of. The examples of women being attacked for going to school or not wearing their burka, are rare outlier examples compared to how many men are having violence committed against them for even lesser crimes.

so, tl;dr, in your attempts to discredit MRAs and say that they're just "reverse-SJWs", you've shown how retarded your grasp on the situation is. You likely are spineless retards that still "respect" women, and are trying desperately to be an enlightened, middle-ground neutral who never takes sides and sees that both sides in a conflict are always wrong, and the only ones with a clear perspective are enlightened, middle-ground neutrals like yourself who call out BOTH sides because they're so anti-conformist.

>>225423

>But people just focus on the women being attacked because they think they're so innocent and pure, while they just shrug their shoulders at the more frequent and gruesome violence against the men.

Well, men are ALWAYS treated worse in effect, on account of being disposable to society and prone to violent competition against each other.

The big difference of course, is that if you look at Islamic fascist societies, women have pretty much no options. They're largely treated as property, and although this does entail them being protected and coddled, as long as they obey their man, they definitely aren't free.

Men on the other hand, are much more free to seek their own destiny, even though this also entail a greater risk of shit happening. As far as I'm concerned, both men and women should have the same options, whether that's dressing as they want or being tortured to death for dumb transgressions.

>so, tl;dr, in your attempts to discredit MRAs and say that they're just "reverse-SJWs", you've shown how retarded your grasp on the situation is.

SOMEONE definitely has a retarded grasp on the situation, yes. I straight out wrote that MRAs have valid concerns, whereas feminism is completely worthless outside of uncivilized barbaric cultures. How you managed to misconstruct that into HURR DURR REVERSE SJWS is beyond me.

>>225423

>white

>white

>white

>white

Fuck your identity politics, no one ever said we were talking about "white" societies. Whatever the fuck ""white"" means, since a lot of """white""" people would be killing other """"white"""" people if they could, so different are their cultures and beliefs.

With that said, universal suffrage sucks. The Rhodie system seemed really good, though.

>But people just focus on the women being attacked because they think they're so innocent and pure

>innocent and pure

kek

Though the media focuses on women for their own agenda, do note that, since women have absolutely real influence or participation in the going of such barbaric cultures, they can be classified as pure victims. While men, though "having it worse", can actually participate in the system.

It is a clear example of patriarchal societies and a clear example of systemic opression of women. And men have it real fucking shitty too. But that doesn't mean it's not patriarchal and that women without any agency or responsibility at all are not being actually opressed (compare and contrast to "opression" on western culture).

>>225423

Tl;dr

Faggot

>>225427

> I straight out wrote that MRAs have valid concerns, whereas feminism is completely worthless outside of uncivilized barbaric cultures. How you managed to misconstruct that into HURR DURR REVERSE SJWS is beyond me.

To be fair to you, with that last part I was moreso collectively addressing multiple posters, including ones that I didn't even bother to quote but still expressed things that I addressed in my post. And I don't think that you were a BIG offender on that front, I mostly just disagreed with a few smaller implications you made, but I don't think that last part applies to you very much, as it does to the first guy I quoted. Sorry, I know that I didn't make it clear at all. But there are parts that I disagree with you on, still.

>They're largely treated as property, and although this does entail them being protected and coddled, as long as they obey their man, they definitely aren't free.

Men on the other hand, are much more free to seek their own destiny, even though this also entail a greater risk of shit happening.

Having a cushy, protected life where you're restricted from many free pursuits, sounds a lot better than having a dangerous, risky life where you face tons more violence in exchange for being (pretty marginally) more free to pursue your hobbies or whatever. Even if the men ARE allowed to have more freedom and variety in the things they pursue in these nebulously-defined shitskin countries we're talking about (I assume mainly Islamic ones), I'd still gladly take the woman's position. And, I don't really believe that men DO have that much more freedom than the women there, if you really think about it. Sure, it sounds like a nice, feel-good thing, 'they have the more risky lives but they're more free!', but still we see that the men must obey tons of restrictions on their behavior, beliefs, and expression, IN ADDITION to being far more likely to be killed at a young age before they could ever use this supposed "extra freedom"

>How you managed to misconstruct that into HURR DURR REVERSE SJWS is beyond me.

The entire discussion is mainly that multiple people think MRAs are just the male version of feminists. You even sort of implied that in the previous post from you that I originally replied to. You agreed that MRA and feminism are mostly the same, aside from the fact that feminism has become less relevant "in western civilization" (but that they apparently still have good, valid points even though those points aren't relevant? I mainly blame the first poster who said that, but you seemed to MOSTLY agree)

>I straight out wrote that MRAs have valid concerns, whereas feminism is completely worthless outside of uncivilized barbaric cultures

And my entire post was basically saying that feminism is useless, even in these uncivilized barbaric cultures. It won't just offer more protection for the already protected class (if it would at all, really), it would also skew laws further against men. Just look at what feminist influence does to rape laws in any country they touch, like India. Feminism is universally useless, not just in white societies.

>>225432

>Fuck your identity politics, no one ever said we were talking about "white" societies.

Well I brought up white societies because those are the ones that most of us on this site come from, and those are the ones that are primarily being brought under heavy liberal influence and harmed by it. And they ARE white societies because they're majority white, they were created and owned by whites.

Nobody would debate that China isn't owned by the chinks living there, and nobody would argue against them barring random shitskins, or even whites, from going into their country en masse. Why is it different for countries that are owned by whites?

>Whatever the fuck ""white"" means

Look, we all know that there's no perfectly-defined cut-off points between human races. We can spend all day pedantically debating the definition of "race", or "white", or "black". But still, the different races exist, whether you want to call them "races" or not. Whites exist as a distinct racial group, whether you want to call them "whites" or not. Look up how self-reported race correlates with a person's genetically-determined race at nearly 100%.

>since a lot of """white""" people would be killing other """"white"""" people if they could, so different are their cultures and beliefs.

And lots of blacks kill other blacks, but that's not the point. "Diversity" is just going to help one population at the expense of another (usually at the expense of whites). Saying "people of the same race still kill eachother" is just side-stepping the main issue.

>>But people just focus on the women being attacked because they think they're so innocent and pure

>>innocent and pure

>kek

>Though the media focuses on women for their own agenda

The media pushes this agenda because "OPPRESSED WIMMINS" headlines sell. They sell because the AVERAGE PERSON is attracted to things like that, they get a big emotional reaction out of hearing about women being victimized. It's obvious that this stems from the average person caring more about women's suffering than men's, and seeing women as poor innocent victims, while the men can "tough it out" or did something bad that justified the violence or something. It's just the general attitude that most people naturally have towards violence.

>since women have absolutely real influence or participation in the going of such barbaric cultures, they can be classified as pure victims. While men, though "having it worse", can actually participate in the system.

Considering how vaguely defined these barbaric shitskin countries we're talking about are, in many if not the large majority of these nations, the AVERAGE men still don't really have much political agency at all, very little power for the average man to have a say in how his society is run, or what laws are made. In most cases, the law is determined by an elite group, usually (if not always) backed by an unquestionable religious dogma. Saudi Arabia has a KING.. I fail to see how it is that the average woman is being oppressed more than the average man in these examples.

> since women have absolutely real influence or participation in the going of such barbaric cultures

Women always have a say in political matters INDIRECTLY, because women have a big influence over men. Just like how, despite women earning a minority of the money in the US, they do the majority of the spending. Women have access to male power by proxy (including when they have power of their own, too).

>It is a clear example of patriarchal societies

Yeah, simply because the elite who control these societies are a small group of men, but still the average man gets thrown under the bus just as much or moreso than women ever do.

>and a clear example of systemic opression of women

I'd rather be a protected, valued object than a disposable, worthless object. Both the average men and women are in shitty situations, so I don't see what unique element it is that makes women the real victims. I already addressed the points about men supposedly being more free, and it just isn't a real justification for saying that the women are the oppressed victims while the average man is not, despite the men having it worse.

>(compare and contrast to "opression" on western culture).

Obviously the whining about oppression of women in US/Europe/etc. is complete bullshit. But my entire argument is that people continue to over-exaggerate how "oppressed" women are in these (still vaguely-defined) shitskin countries, and act like the male position in these cultures is better despite the fact that the men face far more violence and death.

>>225432

>Fuck your identity politics, no one ever said we were talking about "white" societies. h.

We're talking about SJWs, mRAs, transhumanism, etc.

You damn well know we're talking about white societies.

>>225441

>white

What the fuck is "white"?

Like, are you really going to group thousand of different cultures of thousand different genotypes into a single identitary group based on a single phenotype?

Well, for example, who owns Ireland? The white men, or the other white men?

>Why is it different for countries that are owned by whites?

Because "white" is not a national identity. American, French, German, Norwegian, Portuguese - these hold ownership. Not "white people". Now go and try to settle immigrate Spanish people in Catalan territory. Oh wait, spanish are not white, are they?

Should have used Ireland again.

>But still, the different races exist

They do.

But then the Pole declares himself white on a paper whose three options are "white", "brown" and "black" and then the polack says they're slav and then they are used as an example of the white immigrants building America and then…

>"Diversity"

Is mostly horrible. Though some assimilating methods work.

>at the expense of whites

Which whites? The protestants or the catholics or the ortodox or the pagan? The northerners, the southerners, the iberics, the eastern, the mediterranean…?

>Saying "people of the same race still kill eachother" is just side-stepping the main issue.

I didn't say people of the same race kill each other. I said some people whose only linking characteristic is having white skin and maybe living under western-style democracy are so different from other kind of white people, due to cultural, religious, ideological, racial or national reasons, that they would kill each other if they could.

White is not a race. White is a phenotypical element of some races. Races those that originated even more and more different cultures and systems.

Going "muh white" is identitary bullshit, as niggeresque as some half-black man in America feeling sympathy for some rapist oogabooga back in the jungle just because he's black. And not only that, it also gives fuel to SJWs going "muh white privilege", because now they can say it like it is a legitimate thing. Like it is some kind of organized, homogeneous group.

>It's just the general attitude that most people naturally have towards violence.

Can't argue with that whole paragraph.

>I fail to see how it is that the average woman is being oppressed more than the average man in these examples.

They are opressed because even such average man can hold literal command over such average woman.

I mean, not that the men aren't also being opressed. And, as you said, we don't get headlines about that.

>Women always have a say in political matters INDIRECTLY

They do it indirectly because they can't do it directly. When speaking of political power, that's literally opression.

When speaking of spending, that's men being dumb, and women being women, I guess.

>so I don't see what unique element it is that makes women the real victims.

They having no say or personal responsibility for even their own actions. No agency whatsoever besides indirect influence (which is way lower in such barbaric kebab societies). Now, when beatings are not only okay but incentivized to keep your wife in check, and she can't be held accountable for even her own actions…

Surely they aren't not being opressed, right?

>>225442

SJWs and MRAs don't exist in Singapore. Japan. Korea. China.

Neither does transhumanism.

>>225449

>What the fuck is "white"?

>Like, are you really going to group thousand of different cultures of thousand different genotypes into a single identitary group based on a single phenotype?

Yes, you can group them that way. It IS a broad term, but a classification still, and it works. Of course you can seperate any group into smaller and smaller populations that are different in more and more minor ways. And I fully encourage these groups to dispute over these differences, and fight with eachother or segregate as much as they want.

But categories like "white", "black", "asian", etc., though they aren't pefectly defined, and there are gray areas, sub-division, and inter-mixing between races, still have meaning. They just define the most OBVIOUS differences between these broad classes of human. Two random "whites", as different as they may be, and as much as they may hate eachother, are going to be more genetically related to eachother than either of them would be to a random "black". Obviously we can find many differences within the populations, and people will endlessly fight over both big and small differences. But white, black, etc. can still be used as shorthand when talking about these major differences in human populations.

>White is not a race. White is a phenotypical element of some races. Races those that originated even more and more different cultures and systems.

No. White is a race, and you can identify different populations within it. The color of one's skin, is just good shorthand because it mostly correlates with major racial differences. Groups that look more similar, ARE more similar, and vice versa.

>Going "muh white" is identitary bullshit, as niggeresque as some half-black man in America feeling sympathy for some rapist oogabooga back in the jungle just because he's black. And not only that, it also gives fuel to SJWs going "muh white privilege", because now they can say it like it is a legitimate thing. Like it is some kind of organized, homogeneous group.

I make no mistake of thinking that all whites of the world should hold hands and join forces, or that each race is a homogenous, completely distinct group.

Most of this conversation was talking in broad terms. I mainly referred to the US when speaking about differences in political ideology between races. I'm noting general trends in broad categories, of course there are exceptions, and of course there are sub-categories within every category.

But to say "white" is meaningless isn't true. Race ISN'T just skin-deep, and many different factors about an individuals behavior and genetic make-up CORRELATE with their skin color.

>it also gives fuel to SJWs going "muh white privilege", because now they can say it like it is a legitimate thing

I don't see how my words could justify the idea of white privilege unless they were heavily twisted. I argue that differences between people are inherent and genetic, including how they behave and their intelligence. That is a direct anti-thesis to the idea of whites simply being handed everything despite all races supposedly being equal.

(1/2)

>>225449

>>225468

>They are opressed because even such average man can hold literal command over such average woman.

>They having no say or personal responsibility for even their own actions. No agency whatsoever besides indirect influence (which is way lower in such barbaric kebab societies).

This is the natural way of humans, for the man to be the decision-maker. When men are the ones who must do difficult work and earn the money, and they are held more accountable for the crimes they commit by far, and they are responsible for their own protection, as well as the protection of their families, and in many cases are even responsible for the protection of their community, or state, and must go to war. With all of these negative things they must be responsible for, men are also given responsibility over "positive" things such as lawmaking matters, both of state and within the household. I wouldn't say it's really a "compensation" or "reward", but more like men are just responsible for more things while women naturally perform a safer, more restricted role. It's just the way of things, and of course there are different degrees to it, and different cultural influences on it, and I disagree with aspects of this kind of system (depending on which specific example being talked about).

>Now, when beatings are not only okay but incentivized to keep your wife in check, and she can't be held accountable for even her own actions…

I'd rather get a beating than a beheading. Women are accountable for their behavior by their husbands, while men are accountable for their behavior by the state. I assure you that the state will be far more harsh in the vast majority of cases.

When someone says "oppression", I think cruel and unjust treatment. When someone says a society "oppresses women", I would then assume that the women have it worse than the men. Yeah, the women face shitty things too, but I fail to see how that makes them stand out from all of the average people being oppressed, still. Both the men and women are oppressed in different ways, and to me, what the men face seems worse, and I know that if I was faced with a choice between a brutal execution, and a beating, I'd pick the latter any day, no matter what other restrictions on my political agency it might entail.

>>225470

Not only do I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm especially perplexed by you saying "again" at the end there.

>>225472

>>225088

>>225487

But, that was part of my point, I completely agree with that. I argued that it doesn't matter if it's a patriarchy in this post:

>>>It is a clear example of patriarchal societies

>Yeah, simply because the elite who control these societies are a small group of men, but still the average man gets thrown under the bus just as much or moreso than women ever do.

I wasn't arguing that the barbaric shitskin countries AREN'T patriarchal, just that it doesn't mean anything when comparing how bad the average woman has it vs. how bad the average man has it.

>>225488

fuck, I forgot to link to the post where I said that

>>225441

>>225423

>making them the stronger voting group simply for behaving mindlessly and acting as a hive mind. And, big surprise, they automatically vote [one way] the majority of the time.

So the problem here is that the democracy isn't working as intended, because you need a well educated and informed electorate. And there seems to be a dire lack of that with the wilful lack of self-initiative and the spin-doctoring from the current rhetoricticians. It's a sad state of affairs as it is. And they'll pay the price. The consequence will send them scuttling for cover like rats from a hailstorm. Of course, what's worse is that they've brought it down on people like yourself.

>>225423

>people just focus on the women being attacked because they think they're so innocent and pure, while they just shrug their shoulders at the more frequent and gruesome violence against the men.

These are things I would never have considered unless you would have raised them as an issue. It addresses an atypically, unaddressed issue of things being slanted. It brings to mind of the reports of women I hear, weeping out of fear for their menfolk, worried that they might come back alive, what with the escalation in violence that grips the streets, and those in morning over their lost sons and husbands. Even closer to home, those places on the breadline, the fear over the violence that grips the streets at night that has fallen over the community.

Thank you for your time on addressing the apathy of "middle-ground neutrality". It is a path I find myself drooply walking upon. You've given me a lot to think about.

>>225472

"It's fine. What you're doing is in the spirit of the free market. But there's a kind of marketplace of ideas too, yes? People need to be able to trade in ideas. Now unions—we saw where that leads… So—Anons enter the marketplace, perfectly harmless. But even the marketplace-of-ideas cannot be censored—that would be interfering with the market. If people get offended, and if it's a lot of people, then no use reasoning with a mob. But the place is thriving, absolutely thriving. Hear that droning murmur? That is the sounds of wheels within wheels spinning. The people versifying, conversing. Like the sound of a well oiled machine."

>>225487

>Patriarchies aren't meant to benefit the average man.

>Patriarchies

Why did I misread that as Patricians? Damn you and your deceptive choice of statues.

>>225497

>Red Bull

There is nothing quite like the syrupy sweetness of an over caffeinated beverage. The phosphorous glint it gives in the light. Under the right lighting, it gives a distinct glow in glass. The implied power in it. Does it still have that distinct aftertaste of sickly saccharine that lingers pleasantly on the back of the tongue like over ripened cherries or have they changed the recipe again after all these years?

>>225503

>"It tastes the same as ever, like shit," said Anon, having discussed the distillery's selection.

Man, maybe I did just enjoy the odd bubbly putrid yellow tangy cough syrup back in the day. It came in those sleek metal cans, as all those sorts of drinks do, and is best served chilled. I guess a refrigerated carbonated elixir was all it was.

I've recently seen billboards advertising what I assumed are meant to be trendy flavoured water beverages, and they have some of the laziest sounding names. The marketing department must have had an uninspired day when they came up with "hoi" or whatever the hell the forgettable three letter misspelt phrase it was. The bottle designs weren't all that better. Each bottle was some wide coloured band on a white backdrop with some simple abstract design. But it seemed more uninspired than the purported elegance they might have been trying to convey.

Advertising will only be getting worse in the future. More intrusive, and so on. When was the last time you've been advertised something you actually wanted? (Granted, there would be occasions.) But what are some of the most shameless and insincere advertising ploys you've ever witnessed?

>>225440

>The entire discussion is mainly that multiple people think MRAs are just the male version of feminists.

I'd argue they might be more described as the male equivalent of the 'dictionary feminist', ie, the 'feel good can't do no wrong amirite' version. The reason why I make this nuance is that I've never seen any male supremacy belief expressed from any major name from the men's right community, whereas feminists have always had that streak of female supremacy going back to their founding days.

The 'worst' it can get are mens right people being rather brutal in their honesty of human nature when it come to gender, which mean it hurt the delicate and weak ego of those who buy into the whole 'women are wise and pure creatures' narrative. The strange reality is that these media-slandered MRA aren't anywhere as vile as feminists: They might have their flaws and some certainly buy into a bit of a victim narrative but you could argue that in some cases they might actually be right. I'd suppose saying 'victim' is wrong, since I'd hardly call people victimized in western society as its not really a thing but they are entirely correct in pointing out the society imbalances, especially in the area of children custody or the fact the same people who decry female genital mutilation, something that doesn't happen in western society (unless fucked up, barbaric immigrants are involved) will completely turn a blind eye to the fact mothers are allowed to have a doctor chop off a chunk of an infant's dick for 'esthetic' purposes. Or that a mother can choose to get an abortion without even asking her boyfriend/husband if she feel like it. Meanwhile what are the great injustice toward women in modern western society? People saying mean words, heaters being sexist and a gender pay gap that doesn't actually fucking exist and gets debunked within seconds.

So in that regard I'd argue MRA, for all their flaws, certainly got a better track record of saying shit that is relevant. What little budding MRA theories exist are hardly anywhere as hateful and disconnected from reality as that piece of shit that is Patriarchy theory, a theory which ultimately boil down to people looking at men and women completely wrong…probably because the people writing it were insane harpies who hated men. And don't even fucking bring up Roosh V in this, he's said it time and time again he does not identify as one of them. He only gets labelled one because its easier to slander the men's right community.

Since I suspect this post will get called an MRA apology, I figure I ought to offer a counterpoint as to where MRA completely drop the ball: they are frankly still trying too hard to get liked and understood by people, when the reality of their struggle is probably pointless because the sad truth is men are the more expendable gender overall. They are also easily co-opted by traditionalist women (see: judge bitchy) and are also too reliant on women to get heard. The last one I can offer no way out because currently our society only listen to women and even then, these women are easily thrown under the bus as category traitor. Finally there is the fact their movement DOES in fact attract that stereotype of the ugly, fat neckbeard with a fedora but to be fair, I heavily suspect that many of them are just former male feminist who have woken up to reality.

Actually, if the media were doing their job right they would in fact report on this little nugget that MRA basically became a thing when male feminist *dared* to actually raise their hand and ask "Okay so, we know feminism stand for equality between men and women so can we take a moment to discuss these little issues faced by men." Only to be labelled monsters for that. Wether or not they actually tackled these issues well is a completely different thing, however.

There is a lot to criticize but simply labelling them the bizarro version of feminism does not even begin to remotely explain the nuance of the situation.

>>225514

I'd go with:

>Living on Mars.

Sidereal period 686.980 days

Rotation period 24h 37m 22s.6

Mean orbital velocity 24.1 km/s (15 miles/s)

Orbital inclination 1° 50' 59".4

Orbital eccentricity 0.093

Inclination to ecliptic 1º.8

Apparent diameter max. 25".7, min. 3".5

Reciprocal mass, (Sun = 1) 3,098,700

Density, (water = 1) 3.94

Mass, (Earth = 1) 0.107

Volume, (Earth = 1) 0.150

Escape velocity 5.03 (or 5.02) km/s (3.1 miles/s)

Surface gravity, (Earth = 1) 0.380 (0.379)

Mean surface temperature 23°C

Oblateness 0.009

Albedo 0.16 (0.15)

Maximum magnitude 2.8

Diameter (equatorial) 6794 km (4222 miles)

Diameter (polar) 6759 km

Axial inclination 24º.0

Density 3.93 g/cm^3

Mass 6.4191*10^23kg

Reciprocal mass (Sun = 1) 1/3,098,710

Surface temperature 299 K (maximum)

250 K (mean)

136 K (minimum)

Mean opposition magnitude 22.0

Distance from the Sun 249,100,000 km (greatest)

227,940,000 km (mean)

206,700,000 km (least)

The perk of staying away from those damn awful uplifts is alone worth the price of admission. Being one of the clanking masses at least makes it easier to apply those costly software patches for a few minor Int mods. No point going all out like a junkie. All habitats have to deal with heat dissipation, cooling, adequate airflow, water supply, etc. So there will be work by necessity. The question comes down to if there'd be any jobs still available. Work requires energy and dissipates both in principle and in practice. There is ongoing degradation—parts break down, things need to be replaced. Hopefully the habitats expand to cover the planet's surface, even burrowing deeper beneath the earth or towering higher into the sky. I could only hope there is a push for expansion that kick-starts the job market.

There is a lot of utility in having a cyberbrain. Being able to run calculations that would take far longer to perform by hand or to prepare for a machine to solve is defiantly one of them. Now a baseline human would know many useful tricks, such as computing chemically reacting flows, like the assumptions that a calorically perfect gas is valid if the intermolecular forces are negligible and the temperature is relatively low.

Computer programs are available (i.e., Gordon and McBride, 1971) that can be used to compute the composition and thermodynamic properties of equilibrium mixtures of gases. Also available are computer programs that obtain properties by interpolating values from tables of equilibrium data or by using simplified curve fits of the data. Included in the latter approach are the curve fits of Srinivasan et al. (1987) for the thermodynamic properties of equilibrium air.

With a substandard, clunky machine body, the only other concerns are the backup insurance, a backup body, a steady power supply, and a small place to stay. Which assumes that a 'decent' paying job can be found at all. And even then, it would just be spending those paychecks on Int mods as an equalizer until job security could be made tenable with a proper employment contract. People wouldn't just be blowing off their moolah on hookers and crack. Most of the infogees wouldn't be able to afford that unless they do that kind of business in a simuspace. Of course, they would be required to pay rent due, what with server costs being what they are.

And so the job of calculating body forces, mass diffusion, finite-rate chemical reactions, and external heat addition begins. *Beep-boop beep.* Living the post-apocalyptic wageslave dream. "DAMAGE DETECTED. Send a Swarmoid repair crew to apply some sealant."

Life on Earth was better.

>>225524

If I lived on mars, I'd probably join the rusters or whatever they were called. Mars cowboys.

>>225492

>>225519

I struggle to find anything to say in reply to these posts aside from "I agree with every word"

But I do have this to say: I started arguing the moment I saw people bring up the oppression of women in uncivilized cultures. I started off on a somewhat hostile/insulting foot, thinking that I might as well start off being a dick since arguments on other boards always seem to devolve into hostility and pedantry.

But things took a really unexpected turn towards a very thought-provoking discussion, if you ask me. Even the people that I disagreed with still made some good points that made me pause for thought. I've never seen an argument like this turn out so well in the end.

This is one of the reasons that /tg/ is a great board, to me. Not only do I love the discussion of tabletop games, their settings and mechanics, but I also love the random off-topic shit that gets discussed here too, and /tg/ seems to just be the best place for facilitating general discussion out of any individual board that I've seen.

Thank you, /tg/

>>225531

Well that's fine. If people started off pretending to be nice, then all they'd do is end up as dicks. If people started off as dicks, then the only place left to go is to be nice. "Let thee who is not guilty of ever having a knee-jerk reaction in their life, let them cast the first stone. And by stone, let it be of silicate rock, preferably no larger than a fistful. To be aimed below the neck."

>>225537

>We are a civil society.

>>225531

>This is one of the reasons that /tg/ is a great board, to me. Not only do I love the discussion of tabletop games, their settings and mechanics, but I also love the random off-topic shit that gets discussed here too, and /tg/ seems to just be the best place for facilitating general discussion out of any individual board that I've seen.

People have really bought way too much into this idea that tabletop players are weird antisocial weirdo but I would like to posit a completely diferent stances:

Because our hobby (especially tabletop RPG) relies on interacting with people, we are actually a lot more sociable than given credit for. The same passion that make games both great and sometimes completely terrible animate us when it come to discussing other matters and I think to a degree we are able to disagree without wanting to tear each other's throats because any decent player/GM has long learned to deal with the fact people will react and think differently. As much as this may piss off some of the more…radical…among us I think tabletop spaces are rather tolerant because there can be no game without a form of interaction. It isn't to say we won't kick out assholes, of course we do. Its just that those of us that are willing to be passionate and stick to our guns without making someone else time a pain is what the stuff of great groups are made of. We disagree as much as we agree but its rarely in a way where one person gets seriously ticked off and overly emotional about it like a tumblrina.

In other words, it is the right kind of ambiance and mindset to foster a genuine kind of debate and not those circle-jerks you'd see on reddit, tumblr or a university classroom. Well that and I suspect autism in many of us but that come with the territory.

>>225539

>are weird antisocial weirdos

I had encountered those who were, and it was a morbidly eye-opening experience. That such people could even exist just boggles the mind.

>>225539

>'tism in many of us

Everyone has something they're passionate about. Finding that one thing in a co-worker or your boss works as great leverage. It fosters a sense of camaraderie if you can show a genuine interest in their committed pastime. Going on that weekend fishing trip could mean getting that promotion. Showing an interest in their prize winning hounds could mean getting a free puppy for a niece or nephew. It's not to say that you should only show an interest out of some ill-conceived notion of getting a reward out of it. But those war stories the old boys have really are something special, and they it's not like they have anyone to talk about it with anymore (assuming they even want to talk about the war at all). Showing an interest in others is important. Being self-absorbed is such a dull way of living when people have a whole wealth of experience to share.

>>225539

>are weird antisocial weirdos

I had encountered those who were, and it was a morbidly eye-opening experience. That such people could even exist just boggles the mind.

>>225539

>'tism in many of us

Everyone has something they're passionate about. Finding that one thing in a co-worker or your boss works as great leverage. It fosters a sense of camaraderie if you can show a genuine interest in their committed pastime. Going on that weekend fishing trip could mean getting that promotion. Showing an interest in their prize winning hounds could mean getting a free puppy for a niece or nephew. It's not to say that you should only show an interest out of some ill-conceived notion of getting a reward out of it. But those war stories the old boys have really are something special, and they it's not like they have anyone to talk about it with anymore (assuming they even want to talk about the war at all). Showing an interest in others is important. Being self-absorbed is such a dull way of living when people have a whole wealth of experience to share.

>>225543

What if our society just look down on male hobbies because increasingly they are a hated concept? I've noticed most women tend to hate hobbies and things their boyfriend/husband/son enjoy because they cannot control what passionate them and cannot understand them either.

>>225548

>This

I swear, every man over the age of 70, and ever married man and divorcée, and every guy in a relationship that lacks synergy tells me this kind of thing. But I never get that kind of disdain and aloofness from the girls I have as friends, co-workers, superiors, etc. Does something happen when people get together that "lets out a girl's inner bitch and makes men miserable"?

>>225524

Would there be wageslaves in the post-singularity? The big shots are stuffed to the gills with tailored genes, drugs and augs and literally out-competed everyone else. Crap jobs will be done by AI, drones, nanomachines or literal semi-sentinent slave races.

Clankers would only exist in slums, scavengers scrabbling for every erg, every piece of semi-intact datapacket, scraps of still-pliable ultracarbon to survive in a trash heap of a post-industrial backwater out of sight of the inheritor's shining megaplexes. Everything's disgustingly antiquated, a fuming shithole of desperation. And that's when whatever posthuman demigods aren't stirring shit up for their own amusement.

>>225574

You need to go and actually read the books from cover to cover and not just rely on the make-belief game setting that exists only in your head, created from the cherry picked assortment of half-remembered stuff.

>>225567

This would be great if humanity lived in some kind of technological utopia where they lived in excessive levels of luxury to peruse whatever took their interests, while the other work was handed off to the quite literal subhumans. But there are teaming masses out of work. NEETS need jobs. There isn't as much in the way of social services, so everyone is trying to outcompete each other for work or sign up for commie clusters or anarchists groups', and hope those don't fail like every over wishful Kick-starter fundraising campaign. You'd be surprised what people could acomplish if they're invested in not dying. But in space, everything can go wrong, and people are a hair's breadth away from going bat shit insane. This is some SS13 levels of Trying Not to Die Today.

>The mesh is filled with all manner of virtual communities where members hope to eventually gather the means to create their own habitats.

Think of your typical college dreamers, thinking up their new world order as they're drafting up their manifestos in Starbucks. Nothing original, just a whole lot of paraphrasing from previous political movements and offshoots. But self-motivated something that may become embers all the same.

>The ability of a few thousand like-minded people of moderate means to acquire a small habitat where they can create their own society.

Crowd sourcing. Good-luck getting this off the ground.

>In most cases, these are merely idle dreams; most participants are not willing to sacrifice the time and rep or money needed.

Work takes effort.

>Occasionally the members try, only to find out that some of the people promoting this effort are con artists.

In the best case scenario, you've just lost all your cash. In the worst case scenarion, you've just become a slave or been lured into an abattoir.

>Others succeed in building their own habitat only to find their new society is not as idyllic as hoped.

Dystopia.

>An amazing amount thrive.

And the given examples are creepy as all fuck.

>>225566

>smart enough to save and buy Int upgrades vs. the fashionable fucky bunch.

Like there isn't a perfect shopping list for this.

The first thing I would purchase in terms of Int upgrade is one that "pays attention to the sensory input on which the character is not focusing, alerting them about important things they might otherwise overlook". This upgrade works "as a sort of memory buffer and search aid, extending short term memory, helping the character recall memories and details, and crosschecking them with other memories".

It should be mandatory to hand out a cure that eliminates the careless mistakes made owing to forgetfulness. Any safe treatment against stupid should be mandatory. (It's probably not safe in the long-term. Who knows?)

Then I'd go get Math Boost. According to the in-text description, anyone with that upgrade can perform the kind of work associated with statistical decision theory as effortlessly as they were performing single digit arithmetic. Actually, THIS would be the first upgrade to get then. That would be a 1200x speed boost to getting math work done. (Holy shit! Why can't this be a real treatment?!)

"Hyper Linguist: An intuitive understanding of linguistic structures that facilitates learning new languages easily." This would be so useful across other domains of learning. I mean, learning "any human language in one day simply by constant immersive exposure to it" is a must have.

Eidetic Memory: Yes, plz.

Multi-Tasking: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Access Jacks: Beep Boop Bleep. Need Those.

Direction Sense: Gotta Have Dat.

Skillware: HAHAHAHAHA! No Thanx. All the other stuff just would make that redundant. Assuming any of that other stuff is affordable.

>>225567

Might share your reasoning with us? Giving a species sapience, then enslaving them sounds like unwarranted cruelty to me.

>>225222

I actually GMed an Eclipse Phase campaign for a while back when I was in university. That was like 3 or 4 years ago now, I think; I was actually one of the people banned from the Eclipse Phase forum in the run-up to them banning all MRAs.

The party members that I can remember include a flexmorph hacker (with the robot swarm mod added in so that its individual components could act individually), a guy who'd turned himself into a gecko-person (I think he was the party's main face), and an octomorph gunslinger with something like six heavy pistols and a pair of wings.

On the line of mechanical issues with the system? Extra limbs, the Ambidexterity merit, and how wielding multiple guns works in the system. That octomorph gunslinger? He could kill rooms full of mooks or the full-blown mecha battlesuits from the NPC file more-or-less singlehandedly.

My favorite moment? When one of the PCs got infected by one of the mind-affecting Exsurgent Viruses (the ones that give you super psychic powers at the cost of becoming an inhuman monster in human form). First stage of infection? The character gains a Mental Disorder. So, I opened the PDF, flipped to that section, and went, "Okay, so he gets the Multiple Personality disorder! The new personality is an inhuman alien monstrosity, and it wants to kill the other PCs. Roll Initiative!" I then got to watch the other PCs try to figure out what to do with their now-traitorous buddy (answer: he's infected with an incurable virus, so kill him, destroy his stack, and let Firewall restore him from backup).

Also on the subject of system issues, the system is pretty absurdly deadly in general. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's something to keep in mind for conversions to other systems; your characters might be posthuman ubermenchen, but if they act stupid and get in a gunfight with a bunch of mooks, it's entirely possible that one or more of them will be having their brains scraped off their bulkhead by the time the combat's over. It actually really reminded me of Shadowrun in that regard.

>>225590

Why not just get a Hyperbright morph? It's got all those mods other than the Oracle nanoware built right in (along with Mental Speed nanoware), and don't forget some Drive, Klar, and Comfurt Drug Glands. The addiction is purely mental anyway, and they don't have any (mechanical) negative side-effects, so you can just mainline them all the time and jack your COG and INT way up.

If you really want to go to mental augmentation town, buy a Multi-Tasking implant to allow forking and merging on the fly, and three Ghostrider Modules for your forks to live in, along with a Parallel Processing augmentation to let you pool your mental talents together to further increase your COG, and maybe download some freeware infomorph eidolons to improve the mental abilities of your forks a bit further (along with narcoalgorithms to simulate the benefits of your drug glands, of course).

Of course, by this point, you're a hive mind of yourself rather than simply a single individual anymore, and probably heading well into what one of the in-universe commentators euphemistically refers to as "neurodiverse mind spaces". It's all worth it for the ability to jack your intelligence this much, though, right? +25 COG is enough to turn an average transhuman into a full-blown posthuman.

Of course, garbage in, garbage out; a superhuman mind is limited by the quality of the data it acquires to process. Needless to say, once you've acquired all the mental augmentations, acquiring all the Enhanced Sense mods is a must. Additionally, since a biological body can't mount a Nanoscopic Vision implant, you will of course want to get a mindless robot drone or two that one of your forks can control and monitor the data of (preferably with the Wirehead eidolon), and a full suite of surveillance software, which one of your other forks can manage (likely with the Sage eidolon); your third can most likely work as a hacker/security chief to help you ferret out the information you need from other people's secure systems, and to protect your systems from hostile intruders (likely using the Agent eidolon).

And, of course, one can't discount the beneficial effects of the Watts-Macleod Strain of the Exsurgent Virus. Psi-Chi sleights allow their users to augment their mental capabilities in ways that Transhuman technology has not yet replicated; some of them can cause some mental damage, but you're mainlining Comfurt anyway, and it's nothing that some time in a time-accelerated simulspace with an psychotherapy AI (i.e. a standard Muse) can't fix.

Similarly, by this point, you've augmented your mind to the point where you can likely calculate the most effective course of action much more quickly and efficiently without needing to hard-wire it into your biological instincts; to improve efficiency, an Endocrine Control mod and a number of psychosurgical modifications to remove known human cognitive biases that result from instinct are a must; these can likely be carried out by one of your forks - you have been training yourself in psychosurgical techniques as a part of your augmentation scheme, right?

Of course, by this point, you're almost definitely what most people would classify as an Exhuman; even if you don't have any malign goals, one of the primary threats to your continued existence is other transhumans. So, naturally, since you can't fight all of humanity and expect to win, and since one of the best ways to accomplish your goals (whatever they might be) would be the social manipulation of those transhumans around you, you invest in some treatments to give you Striking Looks (you're never going to pass for "normal", anyway, what with having a bunch of cooling fins radiating out of your head), along with some Pheremone Control implants and a Hither Drug Gland.

However, you can't manipulate everyone all the time, so you invest in some discreet armor and a good-quality handgun, because augmenting your body is not always the most efficient course of action; sometimes you just need to use readily available equipment instead.

And then your bog-standard infugee worker has become a Player Character. It turns out that pushing intelligence augmentations as far as they can go tends to catch Firewall's attention, and you managed to convince them that despite your mental divergences, you still see the extinction of humanity as an existential threat to yourself; anything that could take out all of humanity would likely take you out as well.

Welcome to Eclipse Phase.

>>224748

>paleolibertarian

I seriously doubt that a bunch of SJW anarchist devs are nuanced enough to know what that is.

>>224780

How do you transfer the consciousness? With computers whenever you move a file, you're really simultaneously copying the file in a new location and deleting the original.

That's the reason why transhumanism is kinda bullshit (and why it's a legit bioconservative argument in some other transhuman settings that go into it) unless something like the human soul is real and can be transferred with technology or magic.

>>224850

The last three images are inaccurate AFAIK. Ghosts are just psychics in skinsuits. Astartes cybernetics are more optional/used as prosthetics for the most part, they aren't default. Crysis? Nano powered armor.

>>224847

That was horrifying.

>>224852

>Why wouldn't we use it to ourselves look better?

You're being disingenuous. That pic was of furries, not "make yourself look more attractive".

>>224863

>>People can do some things AI are weak at. AI has fairly low active skills, cannot take much initiative, and often do not understand social relations.

I know you're roleplaying, but these are speculative assumptions. Nobody knows what a sapient AI will be like, especially if we deliberately trying pushing them to be more "human".

>>224947

>Some serious rewiring is necessary to make Communism even start to be feasible. People compatible with it may even look like humans, but sure as hell won't think like humans.

Like what?

>>224987

>If you're faced with death and sort-of-death, I think most people would take sort-of-death, and after a while only those people would still be around, right?

Only within a particular generation, and assuming they always have that option to resleeve/activate a backup.

>>224988

>Then again, mankind in 40k is already genetically engineered from the golden age

They never really go into that aspect of transhumanism. Outside of the astartes, they only really touch on cybernetic and some biological augmentation.

>>225000

>No idea whether "a lot" are actually a sizable part of the movement or just a few loud, outspoken cunts. I might be treating the rest of the movement unfairly.

I wonder if you do the same with feminism.

>>225423

>Women and non-whites, mostly.

Only single unmarried women. The totally non-sexist option is to make having children having been formerly married one prerequisite out of X many you need to vote.

>>225449

>Oh wait, spanish are not white, are they?

You're American aren't you? The "Spanish' you're receiving aren't considered "white" by even other Americans is because they're mixed race or native-americans. That's why if you took 1000 Spaniards and 1000 Mexicans (particularly the lower class ones who are illegal immigrants) you"ll see they tend to look different.

>Because "white" is not a national identity.

Nationality and ethnicity are distinct things. An arab in the UK is still not an anglo-saxon. White is a racial identity just like "black". It's a collective group of ethnicities.

That's why being "American" has lost more and more meaning. To me SJWs are inherently un-american in their values.

>slav

They're a sub-set of whites, just like how germanics are. They exist genetically, linguistically and culturally as a distinct group from say, Italians while Italians have more in common with the Greeks or Spaniards.

>>225519

>judge bitchy

Who?

>>225539

>Because our hobby (especially tabletop RPG) relies on interacting with

I only play online. ;___;

>>225539

>As much as this may piss off some of the more…radical…among us I think tabletop spaces are rather tolerant because there can be no game without a form of interaction. It isn't to say we won't kick out assholes, of course we do. Its just that those of us that are willing to be passionate and stick to our guns without making someone else time a pain is what the stuff of great groups are made of. We disagree as much as we agree but its rarely in a way where one person gets seriously ticked off and overly emotional about it like a tumblrina.

This is more *chan culture than anything else. RPG.net is auschwitz for anyone who isn't a strawman SJW. I'm sure you've seen the shit people get banned for there. You could be an actual SJW and still get banned for being offensive in some byzantine way. Mods and a few other people of course get a free pass to be as offensive and dickish as possible.

>we are actually a lot more sociable than given credit for

>Well that and I suspect autism in many of us but that come with the territory.

Either you're using "autistic" to mean "giving a shit about something" or you're saying autistic people are more sociable (online?) than they're given credit for.

>>225572

Yes. It's called feminism. That's why it's male spaces that get attacked and scrutinized all the time. Men are maybe allowed the garage so long as no other guys are around.

>>225596

They're literally aren't human and are uplifted animals so it may be instrinscially easier to unfairly exploit them. Especially if they're engineered as a slave race–just smart enough to do the job and made with a submissive and docile personality. Literal sheeple.

>>225625

Do what with feminists? Make generalizing statements about them? I do that. Acknowledge that I might be wrong with these statements? I don't do that, because I'm fairly certain now that the movement is beyond redemption. I might give individual feminists more benefit of doubt, for various reasons, although that is dwindling.

I guess the era of sexy altgirls is over. Too bad.

>>225625

>This is more *chan culture than anything else. RPG.net is auschwitz for anyone who isn't a strawman SJW. I'm sure you've seen the shit people get banned for there. You could be an actual SJW and still get banned for being offensive in some byzantine way. Mods and a few other people of course get a free pass to be as offensive and dickish as possible.

Oh I never claim its a universal thing and you are right that it does not apply to major internet forum. But generally, tabletop groups are a lot more willing to let shit slide when people disagree.

>>225626

And how exactly is enslaving them morally defensible, then? Practicability a shit.

>>224847

I don't get the ending. Didn't he actually die? What was actually going on? Assuming that electrical him was really still him there's the part about how the human self isn't there anymore. Didn't he die? Hell, who knows what that AI really did to him? Could've manipulated him into loving 'her' by fitting the description of his old crush. I wish there was more to it. Where's it from?

>>225572

When a man engage in his hobbies, usually with other men, he is experiencing pleasure and fulfillment that is not controllable by a woman's emotions or sexuality. That is why women have consistently tried to shut down male spaces and criminalize male activities. See: the prohibition.

Men think differently when women are around. That is why they consistently try to destroy our hobbies. I don't think they even necessarily have to do it consciously. There are, to an extent, rare exceptions which are bearable in said activities but they are rare. Note that I did say bearable, at no point did I ever say they are on the same level as men. This is not some sort of statement of my evil male soggy knee but rather just pointing out the fact that as much as one could try to treat these people like dudes, their brains on some level can't.

Women are simply clingy and controlling and like all form of abuser/controller, they despise what break their control over what they think they are the masters of.

>>225632

>I don't get the ending. Didn't he actually die?

He did actually die. But all the medical staff and people standing by would not have known this. As far as they're aware, everything was going perfectly fine, just as they were assured. And the 'copy' is living on blissfully unware of what was happening to the original, having been convinced that it was laying in the hospital bed all along and was as much a part of the procedure as it was told it was.

>>225634

It made it sound like up until the digital one was the "real one". But then the digital one experienced death upon the flatline, right?

Wait. It could've actually been the AI talking through the speaker and not a 'fake him'. Fuck. That's probably what happened. That makes more sense. So he died, and then she turned on the fake copy and convinced it that it was real by saying it had a constant state of consciousness, when it really didn't. Or maybe to make it more convincing the copy itself was talking through the speakers.

>>225609

>Welcome to Eclipse Phase.

Now this is how you boot-strap yourself into godhood, reaching the upper limits of interferential and predictive capabilities!

>>225609

>some of them can cause some mental damage, but you're mainlining Comfurt anyway, and it's nothing that some time in a time-accelerated simulspace with an psychotherapy AI (i.e. a standard Muse) can't fix.

That "A God Am I" moment can go irreparably wrong in so many, many ways. The experienced realization that the physical processes of observation, prediction, and memory share a certain underlying mathematical structure can cause some serious mental issues. They might go off and try to isolate themselves from the rest of the highly irreversible and disordered universe—shielding themselves from thermal noise and outside interference—working off of reversible computation. A process that is limited by the need for error correction and perception. This will clash with the pathological drive for first-hand, primary sources of information, and raise the issue of dealing with possibilistic uncertain information, and the need to resolve the conflicts between contradictory beliefs.

That moment of reaching that cusp of a new level of understanding can burn out a person, destroying them utterly. It's more than just being able to increase numerical skills or raw information processing power. It's necessary to be able to integrate those new experiences. And you provided a whole list of perfectly good suggestions on how to do just that, and curtail any issues of mental instability—hopefully!

>>225609

>Why not just get a Hyperbright morph?

Those would cost a fortune I'd imagine!

>>225615

Don't thank me. You should really be thanking Pete. Find him. Find Pete.

>>225624

>That was horrifying.

My work here is done.

>>225624

>these are speculative assumptions. Nobody knows what a sapient AI will be like [..]

Those are the in-setting relevant answers for Eclipse Phase on why people are still employable.

>>225625

>slav

>>225449

>But then the Pole

I shall post up the "diversity chart".

>>225596

It was just a dumb post. I had some reaction images with baristas and store clerks, and so decided to post one entirely devoid of humanity and mirth. I just liked that it looked like a depressed dog with a nametag. Dejected, disheartened, down in the dumps. But honestly, I was half hoping that someone here actually worked at Gamestop, and then I'd make a remark at their expense, but in a friendly sort of way that made them smile.

I couldn't think of anything to write for another Ryan post. And it's already 2:49 AM. Insomnia. Goodnight.

>>225626

>They're literally aren't human

I'll just steal this answer.

>>225631

>And how exactly is enslaving them morally defensible, then?

Dogs need jobs to. It would be morally irresponsible to leave them without work. That'd be just asking for trouble. Canis Canem Edit. That'd Latin for something. That means something, it might even be relevant. Ergo, I must be in the right on the matter. Ignoratio elenchi.

>>225598

Everything about this warrants a longer story telling.

>>225638

All of those are possibilities, especially when it's considered that there's a "Cartesian Demon" capable of editing not only your sensory inputs but also your memories.

>>225633

By 'the prohibition' I hope you don't mean the prohibition of alcohol in the 20s-30s. Because to say women were behind that would be very wrong indeed.

>>225646

But they were a big factor behind it.

>>225647

The war, religious fundamentalism, business owners' disapproval and general moral rejection of alcohol were much bigger. Women's societies basically just added their (small) voices and said the same shit everyone else was.

>>225596

Depends on how sentient you make them though, and whether or not you mod them to be subservient. How about dogpeople that are wired to be obsessed with serving their master or dolphin guys made specifically to get a rush of endorphins from doing underwater maintenance? If you're even gonna waste time making freaks like these, you better make them into a useful kind of servant species, it makes no sense to just make a straight up free sentient species that will end up competing with humanity.

>>225658

Finally, someone who shares my sincere human centric perspective. Humanity has to take care of humanity's own. We cannot trust that any life we may encounter, man-made or otherwise, will share humanity's interests at heart. Already we are worried about the enemy within, but it is the enemy in exclusive of ourselves that worries me most as a long-term threat. A humanity divided against itself is a species vulnerable against the predations of external forces.

Ultimately, life may express itself in a myriad of forms. But we know not what expression it may ultimately take when we should first encounter it. With those possibilities considered, it bodes well to be cautious and expect to encounter forces that ultimately prove hostile. I do not demand that we necessarily ready ourselves as the aggressor, merely remain vigilant, ever prepared for the possibility of having to defend ourselves, to survive at all costs. It is imperative not just as a people but as a species that we endure.

>>224787

Isn't that just the ship of Theseus?

Replacing your brain slowly one neuron at a time is the same as cut and pasting your consciousness into another brain/brain-like thing in the end.

The original is still destroyed.

>>225644

>Everything about this warrants a longer story telling.

Well, on the mechanical side, the main reason that octomorph gunslinger was so deadly was because how wielding multiple guns works in this game is that each additional gun basically gives you an additional combat action. As a result, said octomorph got six combat actions for every one action everyone else got.

You get cumulative penalties to hit for every additional enemy you attack, but those don't add up to much until you're on your third or fourth enemy, so one guy can clear a room of mooks without too much problem, and taking down a single super-tough enemy is a piece of cake.

And yeah, the system is pretty deadly. Low HP + high damage firearms means that your characters will just get shot to death in short order if they're being shot at, and that's leaving aside the stuff that is basically "you die, no save" like the TITAN nanoviruses. A typical burst from an Assault Rifle will deal about 15 damage IIRC, while the typical PC will have between 30 and 50 hp, so they'll probably be killed after about 2-3 hits.

Other than that, though, I can't remember terribly much of the fine details of the game I ran; I was mostly using pre-written adventures, both fan-written and official; the incident with the Split Personality PC was, IIRC, when I was playing a fan-written adventure with a bunch of scientists/computer programmers who had been infected with the Exsurgent virus.

>>225737

>ship of Theseus

The point of the "ship of Theseus" was to raise questions on whether there even is such a concept of "original". You could be destroyed and replaced wholesale 10^15 or 10^18 times a second, and sure as heck never notice a thing. At the scale of femtochemistry and attophysics, that might as well be happening.

"Alright, Simon. Guess what we'll be doing today?" the doctor asked, not bothering to turn from the workbench as he prepared the stock solutions. "Simon?"

"Err, will we be making heroin?" he said, looking over the coffee table, still littered with syringes from the night before.

"What?! Don't be stupid, Simon!" he said, knowing it couldn't be helped. "No. That'll be your job." He replied, lining up some volumetric flasks. He would have enough to keep him going for months.

"What?! I can't do tha—!" he tried protesting. But as was often the case, those whines feel on deaf ears.

"Of course you can! As it turns out, due to some obscure loophole in the law: You cannot be held legally responsible for this sort of thing… So long as you don't plan to sell any of it." But when he saw the creature looking up at him with those dark, trusting eyes, he added "And no, I forbid you from becoming a drug dealer. What would the neighbours think? What would my work colleagues think?! They might come up with the same idea? You know how competitive they can be! That is not a game I would want to resort to have to participate in."

"But you've always complained that I should've gone out and gotten myself a real job. That I ought've branched out and stuff. Do more with my lot in life…"

"Yes well, I say a lot of things. But what is the most important one of all, the one thing to abide by above all others?"

"…Not to contradict you?" he replied, dearly hoping he got it right. Simon wanted to avoid the cattle prod for answering one of 'the important' questions incorrectly. It had been years since he'd slipped up, but it was always a concern that dwelt in the back of his mind.

"Precisely. And your lot in life is to be here, working with me. Sure, you're barely fit to clean the test tubes. But that's just the way things are. Fortunately, today you get a chance to make yourself a lot more useful to me. So what is it that I want from you today, hmm?" The human asked, finally regarding him with a brief glance.

"To teach me to… make drugs?"

"Silly, simple Simon. We are not merely making drugs. We are synthesising an opioid, an ester of morphine. You can just call it diamorphine if it makes you feel any better. And if you do a good job, I promise not the test anything on you for a few months. How about it: no more nausea, dysphoria or any hallucinations for thirteen weeks? That sounds like a pretty good deal, doesn't it?" He said before gesturing over to the back room—the room where the cage was kept. " Noncompliance can be very unpleasant. There really isn't much of a point making life a lot harder on yourself than it has to be. Remember, it can always be a whole lot worse."

"…So, why do you even need the, err, 'medicine'?" Simon hurriedly asked, wanting to change the topic. It was better than having to dwell on the past. Those cold lonely nights in the storage room, being kept behind steel bars.

"Well, I'm almost glad you took the initiative to show some spine and ask. You see, in my old age, arthritic pain hampers my work performance. These joints just aren't what they used to be. The advantages of such a drug far outweigh the disadvantages, some of which are more imagined than real." He answered, looking out distantly and appearing somewhat annoyed. "What I need is highly effective pain relief and conferred mental detachment from this terrible migraine."

"You're a doctor, so couldn't you just prescribe yourself some diamorphine or whatever?" Simon suggested, but in that way that only lesser men did when hesitating, with that deplorably unconfident, unsure shrug. Shrugging was another annoying little habit that Dr. Kaufmann felt he might have to condition out of such a vile creature.

"What kind of doctor do you think I am?" he responded cautiously. Wanting to see just how far the scope of Simon's ignorance truly spanned.

"The, umm, …, best doctor I know!" He said, not really wanting to answer. Lying to avoid repercussions was one of the first tricks Simon managed to learn.

>>225755

"You have absolutely no clue, do you? No, don't answer that. There's only so much of your naivety I can handle in such a short span. In short: I do not have the authority to be in possession of, prescribe, supply, dispense or administer 'drugs of addiction'. At least not the kind I want, as frequently as I'd like, at the quantities I so damn desire without arousing suspicion. I do not have a prescription pad on hand that I can just magically order up such things with, and my physician has the skewed notion that I have a developing failure to cope with a developing addiction? But really, I just want another set of hands to do the work for me. And Simon, there are just so many times that you can sweep the floor, stack the shelves, and run inventory before you lazy good-for-nothing gets back to frittering away the rest of your day on your Nintendo."

"It's an Xbox," Simon pointed out. "It's not a Nintendo. It's an Xbox. There's a difference."

"It's all Chinese to me." the doctor replied dismissively. "And a waste of your allowance. I mean really, you wasted what little I give you on some toy."

"I don't spend all of my free time playing games!" He said, seeming quite indignant about this particularly point.

"And that's what concerns me. Our entirely LAN could get subverted by criminals because of your security negligence. I've heard a lot of worrying things on the news. I don't want my money stolen by cyber crooks. Do we even know: I mean, who is this 4chan person? Don't you be smiling at me like you know something I don't know!"

"I wasn't smiling, I was just thinking about something funny and entirely unrelated to this conversation," said Simon, smiling.

"Yes. A low attention span, a poor work ethic, and not much going on upstairs. Why do I bother putting up with you?"

"You do it out of Loneliness? Sadistic pleasure? Low-cost labour?" They all seemed like perfectly valid answers, but none that Simon would ever actually say out loud. "Out of the goodness of your heat, Dr. Kaufmann."

"Oh do shut up. Okay? So, first we will refine codeine, convert it into morphine, then into diamorphine. Are you following me so far?" the human inquired sternly. Maybe some more coercive measures might be needed if there was a troubling lack of attentive yes.

"Yeah, yeah. I got it. I mean, I do have Netflix."

"…How is that relevant to this?"

"Well I did watch Breaking Bad."

"The allusion you are making is lost on me. Now really, do pay attention. The most important things I want you to take not of is: That there are some carefully sealed receptacles kept in the safe in storage. That's where the codeine is kept. And only work with glass glassware. Don't ever be using plastic for this. Oh yes, and we only need to use the cheap pH strips. The chloroform doesn't work like in does in the films, but you need good ventilation when working with it all the same. You need good ventilation working, period. Okay, what have I told you so far?"

"Ah, Cody is nice and safe; only use the good glass; cheap strippers are fine; don't inhale the chloroform, seriously, don't . Yeah. Something like that, right?" Simon hoped this wasn't something that warranted the cattle prod.

"Hmm, close enough. I'll just write these down for you if it's all the same. The ingredients needed for cooking are: relatively pure white codeine, distilled water, sodium hydroxide, chloroform, pyridinium chloride, and acetic anhydride—oh what is it now?"

>>225758

>And for our next trick, Labracadabra will make street quality narcotics appear before your very eyes.

"[the] elites jealously guarded [the] machines, capable of building almost anything from the atoms up. They placed all sorts of restrictions on their usage and availability, claiming that the capability to construct drugs, weapons, or other restricted items was a security risk that required them to be strictly controlled." – Eclipse Phase 4th Printing

And that sure didn't last long.

>>225609

Jay-sus. The question I never got to ask the first time arround: How long did it take you to come up with this plan?

>>225759

The amount of time I spent writing that post, to be honest. Things just popped into my head, making the next logical course of action obvious.

Also, because autism, I decided to generate a full-fledged character based on that post (minus the psychic powers because I ran out of points - I suppose that it gives the character a goal to work towards, though).

http://pastebin.com/tJ5YPDtA

They're not really much of a combat character, being more of a hacking/face character instead, though they've got the basic sort of skills and equipment needed to at least sort of contribute to a fight.

I decided to make them a fish-person because they're already Uncanny Valley, you might as well go full-throttle with it until you come out the other side, and since Hyperbrights have got cooling fins built into their head, why not embrace the aesthetic and give them a bunch of fins on other parts of their body, too? I figure that they've probably got pale grey skin along their front with darker blue colors on their back, and a bunch of lines of bio-luminescent lights running down their body and along edges of their fins, too.

I used the character creator linked to in halfchan /tg/'s EP General thread (http://eclipsephase.next-loop.com/Creator/version4/index.php1) to generate the text file, though I had to do a bit of hand-editting to get it into the final state that I posted it in.

>>225631

Make them not actually sapient I guess. It still disgusts my sensibilities.

>>225629

>Do what with feminists?

Give them more a benefit of a doubt than you do MRAs.

>>225652

Nah. The temperance movement is known for showing female political power for the first time in America.

>>225811

>"That daydream where you wondered what would happen if you dosed an entire population with NZT-48?"

I think it'd end in a lot of people coming down with a case of "violent thoughts, brain damage, blackouts, suicidal feelings, homicidal feelings, extreme paranoia, rapid aging, time dysplasia, psychosis and possibly even death".

So we have to start off with isolated groups. And a school would be a horrible place to run preclinical trials. The teachers, the parents. It'd be too open, too public. The school shootings would be a hell of a lot more inventive on a whole though. So much more interesting. A whole Battle Royal scenario in that.

>>225816

>a school shooter on NZT-48.

My time has arrived. You shall bear witness to my triumph. My vision of the future is rather simple. There will be no new age, only a dark age.

The world will destroy itself. I will only turn events to their rightful conclusion. Man invented these weapons, now he shall die by them. The light shall shine out from this point. From the hall of learning: The hot nuclear light of destruction. The world will explode into light and fire and wind—and then nothing. That's what I will gain: Chaos.

It will be a blessing upon the people. They lead lives of quiet despair. I shall end their suffering. Burn it out! Wipe out the dull, feeble people of this Earth. An ignorant, arrogant, violent race. Judged guilty.

The world is mad. I know my purpose. The weapons are mine. Let war begin. Everything shall die.

>>225790

>It still disgusts my sensibilities.

Gamestop's slipshod customer service is exceptionally disgusting. That much we can agree on.

"I purchased this game (Rise of the Tomb Raider) approximately 3 weeks ago. At the time Gamestop had the price listed at $17.99 (**). Initially I was charged this price. However Gamestop charged me an ADDITIONAL $59.99 a few hours later. I called customer support and (after waiting 3 hours to talk to someone) was repeatedly told that the game was never $17.99. I proceeded to send Gamestop a screenshot of the game at that price, as well as my bank statement, clearly showing both charges.

Finally, after quite a bit of debating the point with them, I told them that I did not want the game at all. I was informed that, despite the fact that I did not activate the game code, that issuing a refund was against policy. The supervisor that I spoke with finally agreed to grant an exception to policy, and issue a refund. I was then informed that it would be processed in 3-5 days. Now, 3 weeks later, I still have not been refunded and Gamestop is not responding to ANY of my emails." – Robert of Boone, NC on March 8, 2016.

>>225645

>Russia

>Fashion: Furry

lol

>>225790

>>Do what with feminists?

>Give them more a benefit of a doubt than you do MRAs.

No thanks, I'd rather treat both groups equally, dismissing the identity politics-obsessed and talking with reasonable ones.

>inb4 there are no reasonable feminists

>>225737

No, your body is also always replacing cells, but you still consider yourself the same person. Merely extending this to the brain and making it slowly change into a more resilient wouldn't really change much. And perhaps most importantly, it gives you the feeling of continuity that you wouldn't get from many other processes.

>>225865

You forgot,

>English.

>Fashion: French

>>225737

Eventually you just reach the level where you can never be the same person as previously, because as your body and mind operates its constantly changing and so you're never the exact same as just a moment ago.

In the end the entire thing is just how much of a sense of continuity is enough to satisfy your autism, if that's even possible.

>>225741

>And yeah, the system is pretty deadly

And here I was looking into getting something together. I hate high lethality because I can't make a character worth a shit, it's always the same pattern that ends with me having the GM making my character for me or being kicked out because they think I'm being shit on purpose.

Back to being the eternal DnD kiddie for me I guess

>>225930

>In the end the entire thing is: Just how much of a sense of continuity is enough to satisfy your sense existential crises? (If that's even possible.)

It's like when we wake up and can't remember all of our dreams, or those days when we can hardly remember what we ate for breakfast unless we live according to some highly strict schedule or have some extraordinary memory. Our minds are very fallible, but we just shrug it off. If we really tried facing some uncomfortable possibilities: How would you know that you didn't 'die' each time you fell unconscious, and then a whole new person was constructed from memory? Those sharp changes in mood, those times when you don't 'feel like yourself'.

>>225930

High-lethality games are meant to be games played as exercises in caution. This can very well be the work of a negligent DM. A DM needs to have a very specific, prior game in mind if prospective characters that players can come up with can be discounted as useless from the get-go. Something which should have been established from the start. Or better yet, they should have offered premade characters for the adventure they have planned. Much like for Call of Cthulhu.

>>225865

>No thanks, I'd rather treat both groups equally, dismissing the identity politics-obsessed and talking with reasonable ones.

The difference is that reasonable MRA are not shunned as anti-MRA and expelled/shut down whereas the more reasonable feminist (what few 2-3 exist) are basically excommunicated (see: Christina Hoff Sommers)

>>224778

resleeving and egocasting can be done without a break in consciousness

There are two bodies, your brain works in one, some work is offloaded to the other body, with communication done between the brains, continue this until the consciousness has fully transferred over to the second body.

I don't even think it needs to be a slow thing.

>>225153

I actually tried to get some discussion going on this at 4chan's /tg/ but it was flooded with people saying the setting didn't have a strong liberal/sjw slant, that it's supposed to have a strong liberal/sjw slant, and that there's literally nothing wrong with the game mechanics and there's no functional difference between a d100 system and an ndn system (e.g. 3d6)

I honestly think some of the devs of the game post on 4chan's /tg/. Or maybe /tg/ just isn't like how I remember it; I haven't posted there regularly in almost 2 years.

I was extremely surprised to see people defending the game's SJW crap or claiming it didn't exist. Especially when /tg/'s general consensus when the game first came out was that it was full of SJW crap. (Well, it wasn't called SJW back then)

>>225981

I remember something about SJWs trying to take over 4/tg/ because it was "friendlier" than other boards.

Guess it worked.

>>225978

>resleeving and egocasting can be done without a break in consciousness

The phrase is 'break in continuity'. With resleeving, it can be done with an egobridge, but not with edgocasting. With egocasting, at least in the case of cyberbrains, they halt the running of the virtual mind-state, transmit a copy elsewhere, and then resume running it at the new location.

>>224748

Here's a quick list of things I took issue with:

>Constant jabs/butt of jokes directed at jovians

>Jovian habs being literal space sewers for no more reason than hurr backwards conservatives. Seriously, the Reagan Cylinders were the hightech of hightech when they were made, some problems could be understandable, but they'd be fixed after the first few habs were completed. To have a systemic technical issues on the scale of "THE ENTIRE HAB IS LIKE A SEWER LOL" is just fucking ridiculous.

>Not enough possibilities for TITAN's/Promethean origins or goals

>shitty d100 system; maybe d100 can be good (I've never seen it done well), but EP is one of the most poorly designed overcomplicated systems I've ever seen

>reorganize the rulebook so it isn't literally filled with "GOTO pg 12 for more rules", "GOTO pg 344 for more rules", etc. over and over GOTO's are bad design in programming because they make the program confusing as hell and that holds true no matter when/where you're using GOTO's, even in a rulebook. I think there's some parts of the rulebook which literally have you flipping back and forth a dozen pages over and over again just to have the full understanding of the rules involved

>every faction should have some good and bad things about them with their ideologies better represented rather than becoming caricatures

I'm not even sure what a good mechanical system for the game would be.

I could easily give re-writing some stuff in the rulebook a shot, but there's so much it's just a monumental task to do even a little bit.

>>225986

I don't see why egocasting can't have a continuous stream of consciousness though

Yeah, there'd be delay from speed of light, but that doesn't necessarily mean you can't have some sort of really slowed down state of perception. Personally, I'd just have it do some kind of psychological/ego damage because it just doesn't feel right. Maybe with a skill (I think one already exists) that makes the saving throw easier.

>>225989

Because it would take a very, very long time, even on a high-bandwidth channel because of the signal latency.

>>225991

Well, do the math for it so we can see.

Latency depends on distance, so what distances have reasonable speeds for maintaining stream of consciousness?

An egobridge is okay at 1m distance.

What about 12m?

What about 1000km?

Speed of light lag over a distance of 10,000km is 33 milliseconds, earth to moon is 1.2s

>>225995

It's a two-way communication channel. Electronic filters in the receiver are tuned to amplify one range (or "band") of frequencies at a time. Or, using sophisticated data processing techniques, thousands of separate narrow frequency bands can be detected so as to receive a lot more data at a time.

This applies to signals sent across the entire spectrum: infra, optical, RF, etc. The intensity (or strength) of RF energy reaching Earth is small compared with the radiation received in the visible range. Thus, the radio equipment must have a large antenna, in order to be useful.

Not an optical transceiver, but whatever they use to send and receive signals as light pulses through space would work.

>>225995

>Math

Distance from Earth, centre to centre:

max. (apogee) 406,697 km (252.681 miles)

mean 384,400 km (238,828 miles)

min. (perigee) 356,410 km (221,438 miles)

The Moon's distance is increasing at a rate of less than 4 centimetres (1.5 inches) per year.

>>225996

Okay, but you said:

>Because it would take a very, very long time, even on a high-bandwidth channel because of the signal latency.

Which very strongly implies you know how much bandwidth, time, and latency is required for this. Were you just handwaving it?

If you're just handwaving it, I don't see how you can legitimately claim it's impossible to do ego-casting while maintaining stream of consciousness over distance. Especially considering we know that a short distance is okay.

Logically, it follows that if a short distance is okay, a slightly less short distance, say 1mm further, is also okay.

If we don't know how many such increments it's possible to make before the distance is too big, then you can't just outright state that egocasting cannot maintain stream of consciousness due to the distance/time-lag involved, there's an unknown qualifier that has to be determined first.

I'm not trying to say that I completely disagree with the idea of ego-casting requiring copy/destroy, but there *IS* a distance over which you can egocast without needing to do this and it would be reasonable to figure this out if there's going to be a design implementations that interacts with player-characters who specifically want to maintain stream of consciousness

Also I recall reading that it's common to use neutrino transmitter/receivers for egocasting; that solves the interference problems pretty handily. Doesn't fix signal strength, but you can boost signal strength with a stronger signal which should be trivial enough for dedicated transportation infrastructure.

>>225790

>It still disgusts my sensibilities.

A human head is round and placed on top so that he can behold the heavens, whereas the dog's head is oblong and drawn out in a snout so he looks to the ground. I think the argument is very self-explanatory.

>>225987

>Not enough possibilities for TITAN's/Promethean origins or goals

There is a huge, huge backlog of sci-fi goodness from the '60s onwards that details these. The game's ultimate villains are enigmatic in that Lovecraftian sort of way, but they have enough stuff written about them scattered around in the books to provide ample inspiration. The devoted to some of the kinds of experiments they perform are out-and-out horrifying.

>>225998