At night, to stop myself thinking, I invent characters and insert them into random universes.
Spring Knight
He’s a grayish humanoid from another planet, highly homogeneous to his somewhat androgynous species. It’s a very windy planet overrun with fire-breathing flying lizards, devoid of any large plantlife. As a result projectile warfare never properly evolved, and all structures are built with fortified stone underground, and the humanoids are highly communal and sleep in large dormitories which they’re constantly rebuilding due to attacks from the surface lizards, who are their primary source of heat and food. As a result they’ve not developed beyond our medieval age by much, but are good at forging metal using fire from the baby lizards they capture/enslave.
Their primary weapon/tool is a combination of a pogo-stick, a sword, and a slaver’s club. Essentially, imagine a chest-high sword which is sharp on one edge and tapers out blunt on the other, but instead of a pointy end it has a blunt flap you can stand on coming out. The whole sword shaft is made of sections, and has several very strong and very efficient springs within it that allows the sword to compress like a pogo stick. (The metal has properties that has a small compression ratio, but stupendously high compression potential).
This tool, when used in unison with others holding the same, is a formidable weapon for killing/subduing the surface lizards. The main point of attack is a running sprint towards your target, sword swings forward, and then you step one foot on the flap, hit the release on the hilt, and you are launched upwards and forwards 30 feet, where you can then use the rolling motion to grip the sword into a spinning attack.
After a fire breach, our character stumbles into a fractured cavern to escape the chaos and plummets seemingly towards his death but is somehow transported to Earth’s DCAU. There he learns english, teams up with the Teen Titans to fight crime, and slowly begins to learn individualism whilst dealing with the crushing loneliness of being away from his hive.
im not even joking i will sooner become a shaman that lives in the middle of the woods than a techbro im so done with tech i swear
We are all stardust though. Billion-year-old carbon.
yes but do you consider that important in any way? if you do you are closer to the person on the left
I would say it is a neutral fact.
Imo there is no meaning to life, everyone decides for themselves what to live for.
If someone likes the fact that we are made from starstuff, why yuck that yum specifically? It is kind of a nice perspective to take sometimes when life gets stressful.
It is also a part of a nice song by Joni Mitchell and a nice speech by Carl Sagan, both people I admire, but not something I think about a lot…
I have met the guy on the right irl. He was unbearable
We scoff at them both, but seriously pick one and get comfortable, looking reality right in the butt-cheeks is bad for the soul.
Stop looking at the cheeks, grit those teeth, and give that anus a good gander.
(Full disclosure: I am not a therapist, but it’s good advice.)
Post scarcity is kind of an odd man out here. The idea predates tech broism by a solid half century, and informs a lot of contemporary leftist theory. There is nothing inherently wrong with using utopian thinking as a guiding principle for iterative policy. I’d argue that anything which doesn’t do that is cynicism.
It occurs to me that I’d argue we’re heading towards a forced scarcity society rather than post scarcity. That’s the only way they can make sure we don’t get a Star Trek type future if/when we figure out fusion power. Hell, we’ve already basically been able to feed everyone for ages.
Artificial scarcity is definitely nothing new. Look at the diamond industry, for example. Diamonds are common as hell, but they regulate the supply so severely in order to sell these cheap chunks of carbon for thousands of dollars.
If there’s no competition in a market willing to race others to the bottom in terms of price, there’s no incentive to actually produce a reasonable amount of something people want. You can just withold supply and charge way more.
Or just the fact that grocery stores throw away thousands of tons of perfectly edible food every day while there are people dying of malnutrition. They aren’t starving, they are being starved.
Diamonds
So we need cultured post-scarcity, the lab-grown stuff
forced vs post scarcity
tbh i’m happy whenever someone at least acknowledges the tension between these two facets.
anyway my actual point, imo the “too many humans” propaganda is part of the forced scarcity lobby. there’s perhaps too many humans to live as wastefully as we are, so why wouldn’t reducing waste be our #1-3 top priorities?
but waste is more ‘profitable’ (in short term), so we go all in - while pretending Us Living & Others Not-Living is a moral obligation on our part wtflol
There is also nothing inherently wrong with “optimization” and “automation”. It’s just that they are buzzwords and how the tech bros approach these topics.
While post scarcity is excellent and I do believe it is possible in theory, it’s used as a buzzword to handwave away all the dystopian things being pushed.
Stellaris players: How it feels to have a Spiritualist empire on one side of your border and a Materialist empire on the other.
I choose death
Depending on how serious you are:
Choose weed instead
Or the crisis line. You probably already know where to find it. Help is available. You do not have to suffer alone. I love you homie.
Or the crisis line.
What happens is that they “triage” you, where depending on how you answer their script you get cops at your door and a trip to hell on earth, or you are on hold for 20 minutes to speak with someone who also is reading a script and doesn’t give a rats ass about you.
Maybe states that aren’t Oklahoma have mental hospitals which are preferable to drinking yourself to sleep, but who knows.
He’s an assassassin. He never said the death was his own…
The asses are never safe
They be assin’
Just kidding, unless given that exact choice lol. Weed has been a great help this year. Love you too fam, appreciate the thoughtful comment.
“Everyone and everything will end in my lifetime. I’ll be here to see it all crumble just before I am incinerated in the blast.”
is another popular escapist fantasy.
No one wants to believe they’ll just have to hobble through a slow and painful decline.
This is so overwhelmingly hyperbolic I’m not sure what to take from it
I choose neither, and instead day dream about fully automated luxury gay space communism, knowing I’m gonna die before such a thing could ever come to fruition.
I just want to drop in and call out “death is a design flaw” specifically. It is not. Without death, there can be no evolution, and any change to the environment is extinction.
The mountains seem eternal, but there were forests before many of them, and though the trees will be different in the distant eons when the mountains are worn to nothing, the forests will live on.
Hmm, why can’t there be evolution without death? As long as organisms reproduce, genes are passed on, and some reproduce more successfully than others, why would it matter if existing individuals stay around or not? I don’t see how it makes evolution fundamentally impossible.
Without death you can’t have reproduction, you’d get way too many organisms to be sustainable in any way.
So we could go visit our great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents and they’d look like Jabba the Hutt. Holidays would be a beast.
That’s pretty cool in nature, especially with plants and fungi that don’t think. But applying it to people is kinda eugenics-y. “Billions should die so that our genes can improve”
Oh, giving ourselves endless lifespans is a fine endeavor. We’ve got plenty of ways to adapt to changing environments without changing our bodies, and we’re pretty close to being able to do that without dying and evolving anyway. Shit might get weird, but it always does with us.
Based. I always think stories about “immortality is bad actually” are weird because people are fundamentally capable of change. Lots of people choose not to change, but I think that’s because the boredom in their life is smaller than other forces like poverty, oppression, trauma, and culture. Give people infinite time to heal from their traumas and I think they eventually will. I think enlightenment is a more stable state than ignorance.
This is interesting because you propose that eugenics is inherently bad because it requires a lot of sacrifice, is that right? Because it doesn’t have to. This line from Gattaca always stuck with me:
[Vincent’s parents are planning a second child, and are shown four candidate embryos] Geneticist: We want to give your child the best possible start. Believe me, we have enough imperfection built in already. Your child doesn’t need any more additional burdens. Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply, the best, of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result.
I could argue, could, that not doing eugenics on this level would be immoral. If we can use science to make people less prone to disease, to make them stronger and smarter, why wouldn’t we? I’m not a fucking nazi here, I’m looking for a serious debate. We are already doing this in a different categorical scope with modern medicine. If we claim that all births must be “natural”, then perhaps disease and death are also “natural” and we shouldn’t intervene, and do without medical science and just have nature run its natural course.
I don’t want parents to be able to choose whether their kids are autistic, because there’s nothing wrong with us, but society would rather change us than change the world so it can accommodate us.
Basically the dark shadows of the Hippy Age Of Aquarius and sandal-wearing tech Utopianism corrupted Into evil by the baby boomers ageing into the dominant political class in the West.
At this point they basically have all the money and all the votes that they need, not to mention the cognitive dissonance they are capable of withstanding is absolutely INSANE
I feel like “both” is also an option
