Nacarbac [any]

I recall seeing a video of her as a young university student, making a fairly progressive speech with what seemed like some actual passion - so perhaps she started out as a far better person than who she became.

…but it does mean she’s just American Liz Truss.

It’s very, very, similar to GURPS Transhuman Space - mainly adding Cortical Stacks from Altered Carbon, spessmagic, and an apocalypse.

There wouldn’t be many problems just running the setting with THS.

“Jeeves, jot down this tweet for me. Send it to that chick.”

Birds?

I don’t know if the power density would actually be high enough to cook birds… but I don’t really care to check because it’ll never be built in reality so real-world performance is irrelevant, and sci-fi maser satellites are cool. Unless you’re a bird.

Godzilla X Kong was just dumb cyborgmonkeypunching fun: “he hurt his arm, luckily we made a punch-gooder-arm and it’s right here, like a hundred metres away”.

And well, I enjoyed the impersonal force of nature that Godzilla was when responding to threats - straight line to target, not even noticing the cities in the way.

The Easter Island episode of Fall of Civilizations was quite eye opening on the western habit of casual extermination, mythologisation as cautionary tales of “inferior savages”, and commercialisation to sell plastic moai as cute garden toys with no history whatsoever.

You mean you don’t find rolling the Iconic d20^TM fifty times in an hour to be a thrilling visual experience that engages you with the Iconic brand and makes you want a t-shirt expressing your enjoyment of said dice rolling?

But another part is ironically the decentralization of research effort as it is privatized.

A negative decentralisation of research into redundant and insular walled gardens, alongside techbro cults? Clearly this is a precursor to the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Semi-serious, because I would like it: The most anarchic of creatures are the cat and the various cephalopods, and thus the highest awards possible are a lil’ sleepy cat pin, octopus tentacle holding a hammer, or cuddlefish.

Earth Defense Force 6. It’s great - wave after wave of mysterious monsters (ants, wasps, spiders), basically humans (frog-people), and hideous non-humans (greys), now with more robots and terrifying demon gods.

But it’s one to play after playing Earth Defense Force 5, because it does have an actual plot - well, a mashup of monster b-movie tropes that somehow manages to be impressively grim and cheerfully absurd. It’s just that it mostly assumes you’ve played EDF5 as it only cherry picks a few notable line. A lot of levels are some of the better levels of EDF5 with a twist, and since the game itself isn’t a dramatic upgrade in mechanics (though there are a lot of little improvements) it’s not worth skipping 5.

It does need more Crazy Space Laser Lady GOD though. She’s the best.

British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch reportedly missing after yacht sinks off Sicily

The name of that ship? The Bayesian.

I am currently in the habit of wearing a (far too warm) hat to hide my earbuds at work, so, you’re absolutely correct.

I can’t quite pin it down, but maybe the BG3 characters felt a bit “glossy” compared to Owlcat’s? Or perhaps it’s a side effect of voice acting making complex conversations drag, and lose a lot of the descriptive depth that text allows - not that they did a bad job of it!

I didn’t really like any of the characters in WotR or BG3, but in WotR they felt more interesting - ah! Part of it was definitely that all the BG3 characters were like a parody of inappropriate backstories, “You would know me as Fuckslayer the Legendary Badass, Level 1”, “I’m actually an Archmage, but I got knocked out in a cutscene and all my XP fell out of my pockets”.

Yeah, it just isn’t happening without a massive cooperative effort over generations. Not just the time for each generation of volunteers to be monitored, but also the work needed to address age-related entropy that isn’t purely “lifespan” - no point splicing yourself into tortoise-person if you spend the next three hundred years as Joe Biden.

That’s a selfless undertaking for tens of thousands who will never see the benefits and might suffer some real nasty side effects. Leaving aside whether or not it should be done in the first place, it’s just not compatible with the Rich Man Afraid of Hypothetical Screaming Void impulse which drives modern life extension nowadays.

Lovely post, thanks for the effort.

Switching it around on the theme of misuse - motivation and praise might sometimes fit as violence (though one whose damage is probably delayed temporally). Army Recruiters seeming to be a very easy example.

Cyber City Oedo is a lot of fun - a three part OVA about three prisoners who are offered a chance to reduce their thousand year sentences (for the crime of being total badasses) by donning bomb collars and going on suicide missions for the cyber-police.

It’s definitely doable in Star Trek, though non-essential genetic engineering inside the Federation is one of their few holdout prejudices.

There are other ways - it’d probably be “fairly easy” to rig a transporter into the holodeck, cross a few wires, and be uploaded into the machine, because the safety manual for both of those is just the sentence “do not turn on, if you turned it on back away from the console, if you did not back away: pray” repeated a thousand times in progressively larger letters.

Well, they do tend to be designed to be resistant to that kind of thing - and some sorta fancy bunker buster would probably disperse the fissile material anyway. Certainly a big ol’ not good, but criticality depends on having enough mass in close proximity, so it’s similar to how you can blow up a nuclear missile with an interceptor safely-ish.

Setting an oil facility ablaze is going to be much easier and have worse health effects in the vicinity.

I’m most of the way through Vol 1, and it got a lot more engaging. The mass of repetition and minor variation to establish concepts mostly ended (and when it comes up it’s in much smaller chunks) and it got into some infuriating and fascinating historical analysis. Perhaps try skipping to those chapters to see if they work for you?