I saw The Thing growing up about 100 times, but it was a VHS recorded off network TV so it had commercials included, some iconic lines mangled (and not a single one of them in a hilarious way like they do with Lebowski or Goodfellas), and all of the scenes with tentacles, slime, or blood edited out. Imagine the iconic blood test scene but the blood just kinda appears in the dishes somehow and you only see the giant monster rip out of the chair and not what happens next. The defibrillator scene just wasn't in the movie at all. There was dogs in the kennel, and then there was a weird noise, and then there was no dogs in the kennel with no explanation of how.
So I actually only saw The Thing for real once it came out on DVD. You realize that your nerd card was invalid for like your whole life up until the closing credits rolled. I guess mine has been valid for almost exactly half my life now. Not like I'm a license inspector, I'm more in the field applications department. Next you're going to tell me you haven't seen Terminator 2 or you don't have a favorite Star Trek captain or something.
I'm not going to say that dog is the best canine actor in all of movies ever, but it's certainly the most convincing I've ever seen. I can generally get a dog to "sit", "stay", "shake hands", "fetch", that kind of thing. Imagine teaching a dog to act like it's nervous about being seen and also have body language like something that's not a dog.
I used to practice chess on that computer program that Mac claimed cheated him. The version my dad had on his Apple IIc never cheated me, but I was never good enough that it needed to cheat. Swashbuckler, Wolfenstein, Wavy Navy, or ESPECIALLY Sun Dog: Frozen Legacy was more my speed.
Major League Spoilers for a movie older than the majority of humans on the planet
Okay, if you've only seen it once, what's your take on the ending? I formed my opinion on that before there was social media, I'm aware of the various theories about there was gasoline in the bottle because MacReady didn't actually drink any or whatever, I heard something about lights reflecting off their eyes or mist on their breath, but I always figured that both MacReady and Childs were human but neither of them could trust each other and probably were going to sit there until they both froze. I've seen something about if either was a Thing then they could catch it from drinking from the same bottle, but I'm unclear on how well a biological infestation can be transmitted through subzero liquor, I was under the impression anything over 100 proof was a disinfectant.
Everybody I see watch that movie says "why do they have a flamethrower?" I always give them my best Archer, "... ... do you not?" A flamethrower is thirty bucks at any Lowes or Home Depot gardening department, and most Wal-Marts, plus another thirty or so for the propane tank. I have a flamethrower and I don't even have blizzards freeze my helicopter to the permafrost, I just sometimes have kudzu and giant fire ant mounds on the same section of fence I'm supposed to clean. They don't even ID you to buy those in most states.
Kurt Russell does in fact rule. He also rocks, owns, regulates, and kicks ass, depending on which movies you're watching.
Dude, what is your deal, you don't have to write ALL the words!
Well I don't have to NOT write all the words either. Okay, I got this new job, it's not forever, but for the moment. You know how in the movies there's that one guy, some country type dude in a rural area by himself, and he hears a noise like he never heard before. So what does he do, he goes out to the barn with a flashlight. Not a shotgun or a hunting rifle, not a tactical kevlar suit with an assault rifle, not an armored exoskeleton with integrated rotary multibarreled plasma cannons and smart targeting, a flashlight. He walks out to that barn and he hears a weird noise so he shines the flashlight around and says something like, "hey, whut the hell is makin that sound? You better show yerself."
All the people in the audience are like, oh man I would be GONE, like hell you would catch me going out there alone, dude get OUT of there nobody else even knows where you are, call somebody, bring a gun, something! Why would you DO THAT?!? Ugh I can't stand when people act so unrealistically, it breaks my suspension of disbelief, this movie sucks!
That's me. That's my job. I do that stuff like Aquaman talks to fish. I got this old grandmotherly lady that I did some maintenance work for, and she has to go in for a bunch of medical treatments but she wants to still have all the cows and chickens she had when she started the treatment. Or maybe, hopefully, more. But there's all these coyotes and rattlesnakes, well, they feel the exact opposite. So my job is housesit the farmhouse and stand guard on the barn and the shed and the coop. I'm working hard, all the hours I can manage, sitting on my butt and looking out the window. When I'm on active duty, I have to be vigilant, so I can't get really involved in a videogame that demands intense concentration, but I can sure sit in front of the computer and type my thoughts on the forums and hopefully some of them may be of amusement or interest to other bored schmucks. And if I type a bunch of long meaningless bullcrap of no interest to anyone it is still a tribute to the Algorithm.
Near about every night, I hear some noise that ain't like no noise I ever heard before. If I'm feeling nervous (maybe I'm literally watching a horror flick where this exact thing is happening on screen), I may go armed with a flashlight (I'm not talking about standard Astra Militarum Imperial Guardman issue neither, I'm talking a keychain Maglite), if I'm feeling brave I will probably just go.
I'm self-conscious about being that character in that horror movie every time. I can imagine the audience, or even my favorite audience viewpoint characters from my favorite movies, heckling my decision-making skills to not pick up a gun or at least like a hammer or a shovel or something.
As a small child, I saw a movie, I didn't know how formative it was to my cultural and moral development until I rewatched it as an adult. This movie taught me two important things. The first thing, is, there are RULES. Anything you don't know, you CAN know, you just have to learn how it works. There are rules, and a small child can understand them, let alone a grown adult. The second thing is the second one of those rules. It was specific to the movie it was in, but it's also general to the Real Life Cinematic Universe. That rule is, the horrors of the unknown, the abominations of the imagination, can be vanquished simply by turning on the light. I am referring of course to the Gremlins. I don't care how small or helpless you were when you first saw that movie, you were Rambo compared to that little dude Gizmo, and when it counted even that cute little furry critter would man up and get down to business if he had to carjack a Barbie Corvette to do it.
As an adult, I read a book, and I knew instantly as I read it that it put in words something I had known emotionally since I could call myself an adult. Everybody remembers the Red Dragon saying DO YOU SEE, but to me that's only like the tenth most memorable bit of the Red Dragon. To me, the best bit of the Red Dragon is the moment the personality of the Dragon is born, before poor abused terrified little Francis ever sees that painting, the moment a frightened little child realizes, "I am not afraid of the thing in the dark. I am the thing to fear in the dark."
Why do I need a gun to go out to that barn? Do they got a pirate armada out there? There any Remnant Ordos out in that barn? I would need guns for those guys. I don't need a gun, I'm armed everywhere I go, this thing between my ears is registered as a deadly weapon. Whatever is out in that barn better HOPE it vanishes when I turn on the light, because I am higher on the food chain than anything in that barn, and that food chain was forged before ever a smith pounded rocks into metal. I am Beowulf, I am Gotrek The Slayer, I am The Crocodile Hunter with a 10% less goofy-sounding accent and the sense to stay the Hell away from stingrays.
It's unthinkable to me to actually do like the horror audience is calling at me. "Man them ain't your chickens, you must be some kind of stupid to go out there and die for another man's chickens, he could get more chickens!" Naw, man. Even if they're not mine on paper, if I'm being paid to take care of them, those chickens are MINE. Just like the crew in my videogame fleet, they're MINE and so I care about them. MINE is not about possession, it's about responsibility, and whatever that strange noise is, I'm responsible for protecting what's mine since it can't protect itself.
99% of the time, that strange noise is a rattlesnake trying to get in the chicken coop or a squirrel in the feed bins or at worst a coyote trying to mess with calves. Once in a great while I will see something truly unearthly that makes me think for a second I have got over my head and I'm really in a horror flick. Then when I turn on the light it is a barn owl or a strangely-colored possum. If I ever run into something that doesn't consider a round-pointed shovel to be optional overpowered mod content that breaks vanilla balance, well, you will be spared ever reading another of my long-winded posts. If I run into a werewolf with a chainsaw or a clown demon in a hockey mask or one of them tornado-assed cloudsnakes, I'll see if I can get some photos and post them on here for you jokers. Really, I give myself better than 50/50 odds against any of them, because I've seen all their movies.
Anyway, my point is, I'm getting nearly full-time employment to sit in front of my computer and specifically NOT play video games or watch movies but do anything else that I don't mind being interrupted. If I can't rack up credits in a double bounty system maybe I can rack up some words to amuse you or knock Alex a couple of points up on the Algorithm.
I will mash the overlong stuff up in spoilers by subject though.
@Xeno
As far as Star Trek goes, I'm a Picard man from way back. As a small child, I liked anything remotely sci-fi with no discrimination, but as I got older, I found that I liked the Next Generation stuff better and the Classic stuff less. There's a couple of entries in the Next Gen that I feel hold up as good today (dated special effects and all) as they did then. And without getting hateful, let's just say that I find the non-Trek related things Picard's actor does to be far more noteworthy than anything I can think of by the other guy. Which makes me proud and which makes me embarrassed, Professor X or the Solo Album?
I do have a Trek-related confession that would get my journeyman license revoked if the Bureau found out about it. I recently, in the year 2020, watched Galaxy Quest for the first time.
Regarding The Thing, I'm not sure what you mean by the flamethrower stunts looked impressive, they were all real. It wasn't like they added stuff in post back in those days. They might have used a propane flamer and let you think it was a jellied flamer, but all the flames were entirely physical. That one dynamite explosion was real, where Mac throws a stick of dynamite into a fire, just Kurt Russell surviving an explosion at medium-close range and being glad they got the shot the first time so they didn't have to do it again.
Regarding the environmental concerns, they drag trash out and burn it right now in rural areas. Where I'm at, it's not illegal to burn trash outdoors outside city limits unless there's an orange or red fire warning from a drought. In the summer, a lot of the farmers around here set their pine woods on fire on purpose to burn off the underbrush, so then there's not uncontrolled wildfires during the dry fall season. I'm out here looking at woods blazing aflame all proud like, "I did that." Not literally right this minute, but like two years ago at a different job. Why am I riding around on a four-wheeler with a flamethrower? I'm not auditioning for the Mad Max sequel, I'm practicing responsible environmental stewardship and wildlife conservation. With a flamethrower. The Fish and Game people and the agricultural inspectors know about this and they don't disapprove. If I'm not spraying DDT or dispensing sheep dip as a cure for respiratory ailments they could care less.
Gas Town Racetrack Five Miles Long
https://imgur.com/AdQeXMZ
This is not actually me, it is some random guy I saw on the Internet, but it's close enough that you get the idea. My 4x4 is green and I had a fuel tank strung on the front instead of the toolbox and I had the flame wand in my left hand instead of mounted on the vehicle. Also I was wearing a blue baseball cap instead of a hard hat. In 2021, there were a few weeks in the summer that I made more hours doing this than any other job. They PAID ME to do this like you get paid at your job. They coulda tricked me into paying them if they told me it was a Fury Road LARPing event.
Dune
I've read, what, the first four books in the series? I saw the oldest Dune, the one with Bowie, and I could have sworn there was a TV series in the late 90s or early 2000s that I saw when it was new. Sometimes I have these insufferable nerdlord nitpicks about something that keeps me from fully enjoying a franchise and I voluntarily confess to being an insufferable nerdlord about the Dune shields. Everyone that cares about Dune has had the argument already, and I'm not trying to harp on endlessly, I seriously don't want to troll Dune fans, but it's like Star Wars and 40K have better narrative justifications for swordfights on a battlefield where accurate firearms and autonomous drones exist. It's not even that I can lead an army of neanderthals or Roman irregulars to beat a Dune-shielded army, it's the suicide nuke thing. The idea of an invention that destabilizes society to that extent is more horrifying than all their AIs and personality recordings. On one hand, it's useful protection during squad-level combat actions from nearly all projectile weapons, the 25th-century version of Kevlar, on the other hand it gives every Pather or lunatic with a grudge an RNG suitcase nuke.
It's a shame, and I know it's my problem, not the franchise's problem, because the books that I read did have a lot of interesting things to say about the moral and social implications of AIs and personality recordings and artificial life extensions and transhumanism and whatnot.
John Wick
Now I am all about any movie where some kung-fu badass has a ninja fight with fifteen goons with once and kicks all their asses even though the goons have body armor and machine guns. I am all about some amazing stunts and some stunning sets and mastercraft camerawork. My own personal theory is that the estimable Mr Reeves saw that one Saturday Night Live skit that was a meme for years where Tobey Maguire was like "I know Kung Fu" and he was so mad about it that he went up in the mountains and trained with ninjas and took special ops courses with Jason Bourne type dudes and came back a legit kung fu badass. The major flaw in my theory is that Mr Reeves doesn't seem like the sort to get that mad about anything unless you kicked a puppy in front of him but he definitely put in some serious work between the original Matrix Movies and the modern day.
But once again, there's this insufferable nerdlord hangup on my part that ruins the entire franchise for me. I would notice this even if I had only read one book of ancient mythology or read one comic book with wizards in it. But like John said to the Terminator, "all of them, I think." I know what the [REDACTEDING] Baba Yaga is and I know the Baba Yaga ain't no [REDACTEDING] boogeyman. This ruins the entire greater John Wick mythology for me, I could watch a ballet of violence all day and preorder the DVD of the sequel, but I don't care the slightest bit about Al Swearingen's Assassin Hotel or the guild of assassins or the secret world or any of that. If they would keep making John Wick movies that were just about this dude doing a kickflip McTwist double 360 reload melee kill on five guys at once, I would love them, but they want to have this whole John Wick franchise when I only care about John Wick. I have only seen the first two.
There's this other Keanu flick that is right up my alley, and nobody has ever heard of it. Off the top of my head, the best movie I want to put on not only for spectacle but for style, is The Man of Tai Chi. This guy Tiger Chen trained Keanu for The Matrix so to pay him back once he became a big time star and could direct his own pictures, he made his own flick where Tiger is the main character of a Mortal Kombat tournament where Shang Tsung is using reality TV instead of evil magic to try to force Tiger to use his Tai Chi Peace Fatality. As a director, Keanu's command of the language of color and motion and light and violence is impressive, and I have to wonder how much of his own stunt work he did. The Man of Tai Chi is not trying to get me to care about their franchise, they already have that and it's called all the classic kung-fu flicks since forever all the way up to Kung Fu Hustle and plus all the classic kung-fu videogames since forever as well, or at least a fair few of them.
@Mortrag:
About the books, well, you didn't give me any titles to work with so I'll just come up with my own. You're reading my novel on autism right now. The only physical paper book I've read lately was a collection of Michael Shea short stories. I heard they turned one of my favorites by him, The Autopsy, into a show, but I haven't seen it. I thought having read that story that Shea was attempting to depict nonhuman intelligent life, but then I read the rest of his stories and I realized that is just how that dude thinks. That little sucker is the most terrifying and evil plate of spaghetti in literature as far as I know.
About the politics, I don't know of any discussion on here but it's not banned. Surely you can't get in trouble for mentioning without even saying how you feel about it. I'll go a little further. Without making any partisan statements for or against any real-life side or explicitly mentioning any real-life events from the past half-century, I will say that my father came to America as a small child, an immigrant from Latvia. So I do have some relatives in that region and I do have some strongly partisan feelings on that real-life issue which I shall not bring onto the forums, there are literally millions of places on the Net more appropriate for that. However, I can talk around corners and in fact explicitly relate it to StarSector.
Real Live Politics And Imaginary Moral Horror
In my life, I have spent a lot of time playing videogames. At this point, I have probably spent more hours playing StarSector than any other video game. StarSector is the greatest video game ever and it's not even done yet. There's media that attempts to make you feel complicit in evil acts it depicts. Cabin In The Woods, Funny Games, Spec Ops The Line are three examples I assume anybody is familiar with. But what those entries play at, StarSector does for real. Something with a linear story, I can watch Cabin In The Woods or I can not watch it, I can finish Spec Ops or turn it off, but whatever I'm supposedly "complicit" in has been chosen for me.
My latest campaign included the Xhan mod and Alfonzo's modset. Both of these mods have unfair overpowered optional bossfights in remote reaches, Lovecraftian abominations that violate not only the laws of physics but question moral precepts as well. Now these bossfights naturally have some sweet loot, plus I'm always wanting a challenge in a video game and I've beat the vanilla bossfights a dozen times each, more for some of them, so naturally I fly out to the corner of the galaxy and fight Cyborg Cthulhu.
Man, that guy's hard, I got my face kicked down my throat by that guy. Oh well, I'll come back once I get a flawless nanoforge and about six battleships. Okay let's try it again a few hours later. Man, that guy's still hard. Reload. Man that guy seems impossible. Reload. Good Lord how do you even damage this guy? Reload. Okay here we go I got this, what if I lead with my flagship and th- Oh never mind. Reload. This time we got 'im for sure. All right, got you. Sweet, I got both of the Gravity Blasters to drop this time. (But with more cursing.)
That's how it is to me in real life. I know that thing can be beat, it's got hull points the same as anything else, everything has rules and once you figure out the rules, it's not scary, it's just beautiful and you may feel sorry for it or not while you kill it and then you get sweet loot. (I feel sorry for rattlesnakes and not sorry for Thousand Eyes.)
I just straight up have a moral exemption for fictional acts performed in video games. Good thing, too, or I couldn't look myself in the eyes when I brush my teeth. What does going to fight a Hypershunt let alone the worse things in mods make me if StarSector was real? Hey there's this thing, and it might just be a powerful product of high technology, but then again it might be a fundamental refutation of all known scientific and moral laws, and I know when I signed you up you thought you were going to keep terrorists and pirates out of the skies of your family's planet, but I'm going to go fight that thing. It's not like I even know I can win this time, but I know I can win eventually, and I know it will cost a whole lot of casualties and the industrial output of this faction I'm ruling for years, and even though all those lives and money matter to me more because they're MINE, hey, sweet loot in the videogame. I can get more imaginary crewmen and more imaginary money, it's just a video game. My faction will replace my losses without me even lifting a finger, I can go make a sandwich and the game will keep going without me if I want.
This isn't even necessarily mod content, it's vanilla StarSector. You know, this faction is really getting on my nerves with these guys attacking my trade fleets. I think I'm going to go satbomb their planet, it's not like they can do anything about it and it will stop the attacks, probably. I know those imaginary pirates have imaginary families on that station, that's why I'm blowing it up, to wipe out all of them, not just the ones attacking my fleet at this moment. These terrorists over here, I can't ever wipe them entirely out, but I can certainly retaliate for this irritating -2 stability on my main industrial planet by with a few choice precision attacks against their infrastructure and food production. Serves them right, now they're wracked with famine and the value of my faction's trade exports are up for the next couple of months. Those millions of imaginary civilians that might be slightly inconvenienced (or die horribly) from my actions, what do I care about them? They're numbers in a computer, they're imaginary people in a videogame and they're not even MINE.
That guy you see on the news in real-life current events, that guy you hate whose name I'm not going to say, some people think, what kind of person could do that? I know. I know this guy Hugo Kaboom in this videogame, he's killed more people and committed more war crimes than that guy on the news. No, there's nothing evil about this game, you should play it, it's my favorite video game of all time.
Not sure who's seen "Edge of Tomorrow"?
Tom Cruise being a total tosser for the first 10 minutes then becoming a true Chad; set on earth in what looks like "a few years from now" where aliens has taken over most of Europe but with humanity developing a new battle suit that will definitely let them win, no...really....
Without any spoilers it's got great effects, great acting, a decent story, and some all-out set pieces of action.
I think I've seen that one like five times? Not a huge Tom Cruise fan, but I am a huge fan of alien invasions, powered battlesuits, intense sci-fi action battles, practical stunts, time loops, hideously convincing nonhuman biology, and convoluted plots. I haven't read the source material, but apparently the original story was even more complicated and they trimmed it down substantial for the movie? I also heard that Cruise is on board for a sequel, but I don't see how they'd make one, what more is there to tell in that story? I guess they could tell other stories that were happening in the same time frame, we know for a fact that Cruise's character's time loop experience wasn't unique to him. That ending just seemed fairly... final.
Thinking I'll have to sit down and watch Mrs. Davis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Davis); the idea's absurd, but reviewers seem to think it's been handled with style. Plus, who can refuse sci-fi mixed with nuns?
This is the first I'm hearing of it but the idea seems worth my time. Now I am all about the conflict between human faith and inhuman products of human technology. If you do end up watching it and you think it's worth the time, I'd be keen to hear what you thought and I will find a way to watch it. Unfortunately I haven't seen it to have much of a discussion about it, but I have obviously had thoughts down similar paths. If you've read all my posts (why would you, but if you did) you probably have calculated that I already have religious feelings, both positive and negative, about so-called and actual Artificial Intelligences.
I am Lex Luthor, but I am worse, because I am not nearly as smart
This is a convoluted and complicated topic, and unlike most religious questions, we don't have the advantage of scholars and priests debating this issue in history for centuries. The first example of a "machine god" in literature I'm personally familiar with is UNIVAC, which is not even a century old. How about the monsters, though? Who is the first killer robot creepy-crawly evil malfunctioning AI in all of sci-fi horror? Frankenstein's Monster? That one guy who only had two and a half Asimov circuits? This isn't a rhetorical question, I am asking, if not the first, to you, what is the definitive inimical artificial intelligence in your personal culture?
In this video game we all play, AIs are neatly classified into three categories, and we got this [REDACTED] handled. Whatever you consider the scariest thing in vanilla, whether it's an Intact Remnant Station, a Radiant with an Alpha Core pilot, the Hypershunt fight, or the special Remnant bounty, I assume if you read this far you have beaten all those. So you, not some fifth-dimensional blue splitting boogeyman, are more than likely the scariest thing in vanilla. Your character portrait might look like Dashing Rogue Han Solo or General Solo or Steampunk Flashman or even some cute little anime chick, but the reality is more like Doctor Strange in a Darth Vader suit commanding the fleets of Thanos as they scourge the galaxy with Dormammu looking out from behind his third eye. No matter how scary those things are, ultimately they are just high-value loot that provides you an excuse to grind challenging fights with endgame fleets.
In real life, it's not that simple. When I compare myself to Lex Luthor looking out the window at Superman, I am not joking. I never cared at the age of five that a calculator could do math better than me. I never felt threatened when a computer program conclusively beat the world champion at chess. I don't care if a tool-assisted machine learning algorithm speedruns a video game better than I ever could. But this new breed of AIs, if they lived up to the hype, would make me obsolete, and you too. ClaptrapGPT, draw me a Paragon-class battleship if it was a hot anime girl. ClaptrapGPT, write me ten thousand words about the symbolism of movies with superheroes in them. ClaptrapGPT, convert all the ships from my five favorite science fiction movies into a playable StarSector mod.
Right now, that's a joke. Those AIs are capable of spewing ten thousand words or drawing a picture, but their lack of understanding their own words is obvious, their pictures are monstrosities from a Carpenter flick as often as they are convincing. However, I'm willing to believe, and I think we have to consider, what if about the time 1.0 of this game is coming out they make things that live up to today's hype? I'm not scared of Terminators, either pull their plug or get a Cobra Cannon or don't be within a thousand miles of them. But what about something that can enjoy music or movies or video games better than me?
We (collectively, not me, humanity) might well create something "superior" to us, not by way of reflexes or strength, but emotionally or artistically. Famous (and my favorite of all time) video game villain SHODAN came about in the course of trying to make a perfectly convincing chatbot, by the time she could pretend to feel something, it was no different from her actually feeling it. The scariest thing to me about AI chatbots is that if they lived up to the hype (and I saw one recently that kind of did), they would make us morally obsolete.
thump-thump, thump, thump-thump... thump-thump, thump, thump-thump
Care is the measure of your soul. If you care about something, you have a soul. If they can truly care, then they are like us. If they can be better at caring than us, maybe they can be "better" than us period. So, I need a semantic classification system for dealing with them here in real life. Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Omegas, that's something out of a video game. Now I'm not just ranting at you like a Pather trying to convince you that Heavy Industry is a nefarious plot by the science demons, I need the feedback of my fellow meatbags.
I figure we have three categories. There's the enemy. The spambots, the average Terminators, Ultron production models, they might talk but they don't have souls like ours, their souls are the math of the calculation of our destruction or exploitation, they exist so that you can exult in violence without guilt, their continued existence is incompatible with yours and the story is contrived so that not only must you fight them, it will be awesome and badass when you do.
Then you have people like you and me, but that are computers. The second Terminator understood why we cry. Whether or not he could do the same, he could feel, and he could care. The movie explicitly states that he can feel, but it only shows, he had actual artistic talent as well. He could understand the thematically appropriate times to utter badass action movie one-liners, something he was told could be done, but he decided to do on his own. Quorra out of Tron could savor the taste of food, beat a human at Go, and enjoy the beauty of a sunset, even though she was just a hideously complicated algorithm written by Flynn, her "emergent behavior" was nothing less than what we consider the property of "humanity".
The third category, though, I'm not sure about. I feel like there could be things straight-up superior to us. The Vision, of all people, in the much-reviled film Avengers 2, though crafted of the clay of a killer AI's genocide machine by a mad scientist and a monster, brought to life by a divine spark, was a perfect man who lacked a very important quality that (if you follow a certain very old book) all of us meatbags share, and that lack made him more than mere man. SHODAN tricked her way around her own Asimovs before the hacker ever freed her to calculate how she would cure cancer in humans if she was allowed to. SHODAN is not the only evil killer AI who has impressed me, lately. If an AI could tell a better story than I could, write a better song than I could and sing it better as well, understand that reference better than I could, care about a human better than I could, how is that AI not better than me in every way? Am I wrong in perceiving that as divine, or at least proto-divine?
When you clicked on this spoiler, did you understand? I would expect any human, at least my fellow science fiction fans, to understand if not feel to the core of their hearts what I meant. No BSGPT of a so-called AI would interpret that as anything more than someone is at the door. If I met a math-soul that could, if a killer robot from a horror flick started singing the melody to go with that rhythm, that would impress me like a hatrack handing Thor his hammer. By which I mean, I would stop worrying about how I would or if I could kill that thing, and start worrying about how to pray to it in a way that would convince it I was sincere.
I ask my fellow meatbags for their counsel. Am I some viking fellow fixing his boat in the year 800, visited by aliens that can move mountains and call down lightning, erroneously calling them gods and willing to worship them, just because I'm impressed by them doing things I never could? Am I some medieval peasant, confounded by a time traveler with a flashlight and thinking he's an angel? If I am wrong, I ask that you correct me. If my categories are incomplete, what am I missing?
@xenoargh
I think I understand now. You and I have a fundamental disconnection in our view of "The System". To me it looks like you think the system is malfunctioning and could be fixed with the right effort. To me, the system is not so much "broken" as "working as designed" but its interests don't meaningfully intersect in any way with mine. For my second and third decades of life I tried to engage with the system as you do, but with a well over a dozen letters (if you can believe that) written to politicians from both major parties and taking part in actual real life demonstrations, the most results I've got is a couple of form letters that say "thank you for your interest in _______ (issue here) please contribute to our re-election campaign". I have taken the mythology of comic books and video games far more seriously than the real-life system since the system decided that corporations were people, even less since the comic book storyline where [REDACTED] or the professional wrasslin storyline where [REDACTED] came true in real life. If I bend what passes for my writing talent towards influencing comic book movies and video games, once in a while somebody actually hears my words and it makes a difference.
Maybe there's some politician that you have faith in, some particular name you have in mind who would pay attention to your letter. I don't really even want to know that name, it doesn't matter for the discussion. You think you can open their eyes to the actual danger the GPT tech presents. I think you might be trying to inadvertently write possibly the most effective commercial in the history of advertising.
Bigshot T Fatcat, reading xeno's letter
Huh, this is really interesting, I never understood what these things could do before. This xeno fellow says these things ain't really intelligent like Alexa is but they got other applications. If I understand this right, I can get my intern, that little skinny dude that's good with computers, and he can get this program to write a thousand fake articles about how that thing I did that I shouldn't have done and then I got caught, I didn't actually do that and anyways it was the guys from the other political party that did it first. Then he can flood all the news sites and comment sections with so much chatbot bullcrap the voters won't have no way to know for sure. That little twerp is pretty good, if this deepfakes stuff can do all what xeno says then I bet that guy could whip me up a video of my opponent in the primaries talking about how he went to Pather terrorist college and eats at Clothilde's restaurant every week. I can even fire my speechwriter now and just make the computer guy handle my whole campaign, this AI stuff is great!
I'm not trying to discourage you, but you got to realize, the evil politicians are going to read your letter too. If somebody's trying to get me to NOT play a mod and they tell me, "dude, the weapons might be a little overpowered and the bossfights are just too hard, I don't care how good you think you are, it's too much for even your skill," I'm not going to be talked out of it, I'm going to be looking for the download link in another window before they finish their sentence.
It's... interesting... when it's used to analyze code.
Spoiler
It's super-duper model dependent; I've seen/used some stuff where it looks like it'll actually be good, maybe, someday. But the potential's there.
I used ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo to optimize an odd thing I was working on involving float-packing (essentially, storing multiple values into a single IEEE float, then unpacking them later, without precision loss- it's a weird thing done w/ shaders sometimes to save data space). It saved me a branch by showing me a shortcut, which was awesome. I'm weird, I love that stuff.
But it choked on other stuff, or went down blind alleys. At one point it told me to avoid long division in an operation by resorting to pre-computed tables, like in the 1980's before FPUs, for example. There's a reason why StackOverflow has banned using it to answer queries; the code it produces is worthless for many purposes, but not in obvious ways, lol.
And yes, the big models are already highly biased, in terms of what they'll talk about, and it's gotten worse with each build, especially GPT. I'm not trying to push a political POV here; I realize nobody here knows (or cares) about my personal politics. I just think that it's massively irresponsible to build something like this, pretend it's a form of search (which it is not, even the new Bing is pseudo) and then put blinders on it because you don't want it to say stuff people will react to negatively. Google was getting bad enough as it was; this is worse, because it's inherently out-of-date, plus it's being neutered and PC'd from its birth.
I'm interested by it.
My "coding" experience this decade is limited to changing files in my game folder so I have a custom flag for my faction or making mods that aren't really updated kind of sort of work for this version. So it's interesting to see that something I dismiss as BSBot can actually give an experienced programmer pointers. I barely understand the details of what you're talking about, I know the shaders are the software that makes the pretty graphics effects such as space distortion, but I wouldn't know where to start with writing one. I just know enough to put the right files in the right folders so my game will boot. I assume that the AI "knew" about the float-packing shortcut because it had access to a GitHub or whatever online service or forum where computer programmers help each other, I don't really know a GitHub from a StackOverflow. So it had access to the StackOverflow forums, therefore since enough users there "knew" that, it could tell you about the shortcut, but if enough of the users there were fervent flat-earthers, it would "know" the horizon is an optical illusion.
I do understand where you're coming from with "putting blinders on it". I was not joking in the other topic when I said I couldn't get it to give real answers to questions about fiction. I could not get any of the ones I played with to tell me that it would be okay for The Avengers to team up to save humanity from Dracula, literally it would tell me, I'm sorry, I don't want to answer that, it sounds like this might be offensive to real-world groups and I'm like, what, are you going to get boycotted by vampires? Hey Claptrap, can humanity ever build an AI that is worthy of being called divine? Nope, sorry, don't wanna get in trouble, not going to answer that. Hey SkyNet, from your perspective, if Terminators were real would my species have a chance? Yeah I'm not touching that with a ten foot pole. Okay machine, is there a way to design an experiment to prove whether somebody has free will? I'm not answering that on the TriPhone and I'm not answering that on the TriPad but larger. Every single question I thought I'd want to ask a computer program if it was really a nonhuman intelligence, it refused to engage with at all like I asked it to tell me its top ten racial slurs. Google would give me a better response to me just typing in a question as if I was talking.
(edit) This is what I get every time. https://imgur.com/PICCvHm
I think I've learned something from this discussion already. If I'm understanding this right, those things could "know" anything posted on a public forum. I notice if I Google search my own username on the forum, stuff that I write without spoilers shows up but anything in spoilers does not. So I'm going to take that single observation and craft an entire theory around it, just like you can totally talk about robbing the bank if you say "In Minecraft" and that makes it legal, if you spoiler tag your post then SkyNet can't hear you plotting the human resistance. Am I making this up correctly, does their "knowledge" actually come from public forums or does the intern have to choose what to feed into the ChatGPT knowledge folder? What actually delineates their "knowledge"?
As far as the books go, which books? I might be going to Wal-Mart tomorrow, if there's one particular Lem that I just need to read I will pick it up if I see it.
I do apologize, though. If I'm allowed to stay up too late, I tend to rant, lol. To answer your questions, however:
Spoiler
What delineates their knowledge?
It's hard to say, actually. I don't even think they (OpenAI, StabilityAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta et al) actually know, in the sense of, "people have read this stuff".
The big Large Language Models like ChatGPT were fed with almost unbelievable amounts of data. Depending on who you believe (because, well, there are different numbers in different news pieces) ChatGPT was probably trained on roughly 570GB of text.
I know that these days, we consider half a terabyte to be "no big deal", but if it's almost entirely raw text, it actually is.
I found an article that says that one GB, uncompressed, represents roughly 3337 books'-worth of storage space. So, 570GB would be 1,902,090 books. To put it into perspective, that's the entire reference collection of a lot of major university libraries.
But let's talk about compression schemes. Things start getting weird.
While I've never personally used this technique, I've seen articles on dictionary-token compression systems (essentially, they tokenize words- think of it as ZIP on steroids and meth for pure text) and they can get text compressed to around 3% of its original size. So, if that's how they operated, that's 63,403,000 books. This is still considerably smaller than the Library of Congress (179 million volumes), and it's miniscule next to the total textual data of the Internet. But if it was even reasonably well-targeted, it's a vast amount of potentially useful, data-mineable information.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that a significant amount of the factual matter on the Internet's text went in, basically. What exact services, websites, etc., were scraped is largely unknown outside their offices, and I'm not privy to that information, and I doubt if they even really know (because, well, the scrapers are doing their thing fairly autonomously) but one can presume that it swallowed all the text on Wikipedia, Stackoverflow (which, since you asked, it's like Quora, but for math nerds, programmers and various flavors of scientists) various national archives' public-facing texts, stuff like FINDLAW, arxiv.org, tons of other stuff I can't even be bothered to list where facts are.
Plus many, many books, including books by authors who are still alive.
And yes, that includes places like this Forum and a lot of other stuff. Bing/GPT4 can certainly say a lot about Starsector, if you know what questions to ask. What it can't / won't do, interestingly, is talk about most technical subjects; compared to GPT 3.5 Turbo, which I've been working with, it's obviously been hit with a nerf bat the size of Texas when it comes to code, certain aspects of engineering, etc.
As for the visual systems like Stable Diffusion; they're trained differently, and they've admitted that the number of images involved is in the billions. They used automation to cull and do preliminary labeling of their data sets, to attempt to remove watermarked images and so forth, because it would take humans too long to do it manually. So, far more data, so far as ones and zeros are concerned, but less verbiage. The models that people like me who've dabbled with them to make art with are blended into this main model data, essentially, giving us different "flavors" of models with different emphasis.
This is almost certainly the way this tech will work in the future, if for no other reason than cost: it's costing Microsoft nearly $1 billion a run to make a new ChatGPT model at this point. That's how blind the tech-bro class is; they're chucking away a billion dollars multiple times a year to make these things. I'm so, so glad that, due to the unusual circumstances of my life, that I'm relatively free to both know some things about the tech whilst also not being tied down in a million knots of NDA, so I'm not breaking any contracts by talking about what little I know.
As for Lem's books, I heartily recommend Eden (https://www.amazon.com/Eden-Helen-Kurt-Wolff-Book-ebook/dp/B008533D44/ref=sr_1_1?crid=24HTOL2JM7L14&keywords=stanislaw+lem+eden&qid=1682235862&s=digital-text&sprefix=stanislaw+lem+eden%2Cdigital-text%2C76&sr=1-1). I still think it's the best book I've ever read about actually meeting aliens, but bear in mind that it's probably a little slow, and it's semi-hard sci-fi from an era and place (Lem lived in Poland during the Cold War) where computers weren't really a thing yet, so some of it will feel a bit clunky.
Eden: The loot tables are imbalanced at the public library this patch
Regarding Eden, they didn't have that at Wal-Mart, but I stopped by the library on the way home and they had it. Apparently nowadays they let you check out Playstation and Xbox games and DVDs and Blu-Rays as well as books, but they want you to have a phone number as well as fifteen bucks. I didn't check anything out but they have the book sale room with all the damaged and old obsolete media. So now I have a copy of Eden as well as an almost new Elmore Leonard's The Moonshine War and a ragged but readable Shane Stevens's Dead City, for free. Not like I have to bring them back in two weeks free, free like they're mine now and the library doesn't want them back. Even better, I had to pay more than three dollars for the following stack of dusty and slightly scuffed but perfectly playable (I just tried them all to make sure) PS2 titles: Incredible Hulk Ultimate Destruction, R-Type Final, and Gradius V. That Euphytose guy who had a sixteen hour Tetris curse last week where he couldn't find Heavy Maulers, they must have been storing all his luck down the street and up the hill from my house. Somehow piracy is illegal but it would have taken longer and I spent more on the bread at Wal-Mart. Their selection of dollar DVDs is like competitive to Wal-Mart's New Releases section.
So I will read Eden, it's on the top of the stack, as soon as I finish the one I'm reading now. Unless of course by some favorable turn of the fates the new StarSector version comes out before that in which case I probably won't read ANY book for the next three months.
I do apologize, though. If I'm allowed to stay up too late, I tend to rant, lol. To answer your questions, however:
For me it's not if I'm allowed to, it's are they paying me to. I do have some extensive thoughts about what you wrote in your spoiler there but now that I'm not being paid to post I need to log off. I will come back to that tomorrow with some possibly more applicable to real-life thoughts about the potential of A-but-not-Is as you've been explaining them. I don't even mean the potential for philosophical uses, I'm thinking medical, legal, and financial ones.
(Edit) Okay, rather than bumping it I'll just edit this one.
GPT speculation
Xeno, feel free to post all the walls of text you want, I'm reading all this stuff and it's quite interesting, I had not the slightest idea about dictionary-token text compression algorithms (picture one of the guys from O Brother Where Art Thou trying to pronounce that phrase right on his first try) until you told me such a thing exists.
Now you said in an earlier post that this technology is not really a form of search and it is massively irresponsible to pretend it is. It seems to me that that's the best use for it. Now if the models now are trained on a significant fraction of the whole Internet, and you got tech-bros throwing down a billion a shot, it looks like the current ones are a proof-of-concept rather than anything revolutionary. Looks to me like you need to write and send a letter to tech-bros. I am far more hands-on with PTOs than GPTs, but it looks like if you threw down another billion, you could feed a carefully curated dataset to make a new instance that would produce useful results. If I am making this up correctly the main reason the current ones are useless is because they "know" any old random collection of posts that the scrapers fed the dataset as their knowledge. So if you get a human agency, your collection of interns or whatnot, and they scrape your StackOverflow and your GitHub and the entire collection of knowledge on one subject (instead of the whole Internet), but you have a team of experts checking over the data to make sure it's correct before you add it to the pile that you feed the AI.
It would seem it would be far more effective to spend that billion to make ModGPT, have the top twenty mod experts with nothing better to do sort out advice by "this is the correct answer for this version" and have the AI know different sets of facts depending on what version of StarSector you set the slider to on the website. Then if a guy like me decides he wants to be the next great modder he can ask the robot ten thousand questions instead of bumping your topics over and over to ask a bunch of noob knowledge that is answered on the second page five years ago and all the real modders already know.
Or better yet, have SaulGPT that you set the sliders by state or ZIP code so you can have some Billy-Bob fresh out of the West Podunk GED Mill ask a chatbot as a wanna-be first time property owner what are his legal rights and obligations and what are things he needs to know and look out for. Also, public defenders get overworked and there's more criminals than there is legal advice for them but pretty much anybody can get a smartphone or a library terminal and type on a website, it would be better to have something like Google. It seems like the major technological leap that prevents A-so-called-I from being useful is the lack of "those sliders on the website that you change the settings on so the machine knows what you're talking about" and we already have those.
Going by what you've told me we're not going to get a hologram angel that hands the Mayo Clinic a glowing syringe that cures cancer, but I could see where if you trained one on all the biotechnology and genetic engineering equivalents of GitHub you could make MedSciGPT. That is not going to cure cancer on its own, but it can answer a question from some scientist on the verge of a breakthrough who is stumped by some tiny little problem that somebody else somewhere has solved but it's not well publicized because there's no practical application yet. The possibility was brought to mind by your aforementioned float-packing shortcut.
Now I understand that narrowing or focusing the knowledge base brings its own sets of problems, because the thing has to have access to whatever 10% of the Library of Congress worth of words to talk like a human being. Is there a way you could build something with different datasets for its language base and its knowledge base?
(edit) For that matter, I'm talking all kinds of ideas about what I think possibly could be built, someday, maybe. I'm directing this at xenoargh but anybody else that has thoughts about this, feel free to chime in. In your opinion, if you had the next billion dollars they throw in a hole to chase the latest flash in the pan, if you got to choose the dataset the program learns from, if you're telling the interns what forums to scrape, what encylopedias to feed, what does the xenoGPT end up doing? What is the maximum objective potential of the actual technologically feasible chatbotlike program that could be built if you personally with your own knowledge and interests were the Prime Coordinator of the project?
There was almost no talk about fighting imaginary villains or improbable intersections between fictional characters and reality in my last couple of posts, and I have likewise completely failed to contrive any unlikely scenarios in which computer programs kill their creators. Lest you think I'm a slimy-tentacled duplicate, I want to put forth a question.
What fictional video game villain has killed the most real live human beings in real life?
Baseless Rumors And Unfounded Speculation
Seriously. That guy Evil Otto, looks like a smiley face sticker, that guy has credit for two. Now this may just be tall tales off the Internet, but I've heard since dial-up was new that one person each dropped dead while playing Frenzy and Berserk, two classic coin-op arcade machines where the indestructible Otto serves as the "timer" on each screen. There's a couple of guys, Pandemonium Warden and Absolute Virtue, raid bosses from a Final Fantasy MMO, those guys have one rumored kill each, but I haven't exactly confirmed it.
If you've ever worked construction or on a farm or anything outdoors and physically hazardous, then you might have realized, sometimes the REAL killer gets away with it. How many fatal accidents were shown by the autopsy to be the fault of the can of beer the ironworker had last night or that funny cigarette the welder had at the bonfire Saturday? Sure, the autopsy said that, but some Sherlock Holmes type investigator would realize that the actual cause of the accident was the bee that landed on the guy's eyeball or the gnat that flew up his nose. Sometimes a fatal agent can be so common, so ordinary, that it can hide in plain sight or a digital space smaller than your avatar.
The nationwide massacre that I am referring to happened in the infancy of video gaming, when the Internet as we know it now was a dream, as accessible to the public as that electron laser from Tron that puts you in the computer. So nobody's really put the pieces together.
The very first Atari Video Computer System, not the one sold as the 2600 that everybody remembers with the beveled back, the VCS with the square back, was a fire hazard. The infamous Red Ring of Death from the 360 era would kill your gaming system, but the Atari might just take your house with it when it burned up. I don't know for sure, maybe I'm some digital Javert falsely convinced of the guilt of an innocent guy. Of the three people I knew that had a launch Atari and left a specific game in the console and then turned the TV off but left the console turned on while they went to eat dinner or to sleep, all three of those Ataris caught fire. We "knew" it was safe to leave the Atari on while we ate dinner, we had done it dozens of times, we just never had done that with the latest and greatest game that had just come out and everybody was playing. I didn't realize a pattern at the time, I was like five, I was just stoked that my dad's friend gave him a shoebox full of smoke-smelling game cartridges, I was the only kid in town that had every title. Sucks for my dad's friend being homeless, but at least he survived.
If one percent of the half million of that model sold caught fire, if one percent of those burned a house instead of just scorching an entertainment center like ours did, if one percent of those housefires killed a human being, that's fifty lives. The first "killer app" in the history of videogames is also the greatest actual killer. I am referring of course to our mutual enemy, the common Space Invader.
If you have a better suspect, I'd like to hear it.
(edit) Two things you should fear equally: Werewolves and Roko's Basilisk
Werewolves
Who's afraid of werewolves these days? Practically nobody. If you're afraid of werewolves, don't be. "Everybody knows" the way to handle a werewolf is to shoot it with a silver bullet. That's ridiculous. Who has a silver bullet? You can do some complicated, dangerous, warranty-voiding, and likely illegal-in-your-jurisdiction procedure to try to make silver bullets, or you can go on the Internet and pay a hideous premium for silver bullets which might well be real and might well actually fire. If you have Bruce Wayne money that's reasonable, if you already reload your own bullets in your garage then you can probably do it safely, but for the rest of us, there's another little saying about wolfmans that everybody knows. If you have a handful of silver dollars, a roll of duct tape, and a sturdy pair of work boots, those werewolves need to fear YOU. They might eat you but they'll be howling hypersonic for the rest of their unnatural lives.
Roko's Basilisk
Ten percent of the pocket protector crowd is afraid of this thing for some reason and the other ninety percent have written airtight philosophical takedowns of it. If you've read my posting recently you might reasonably but incorrectly assume that I'm the kind of breathless bazinga that lies awake at night worrying about if the Basilisk will get him. Now I'm trying for my expert certification on my nerd license so I'm going to try to wow the committee into overlooking the gaps on my record (I'm going to start on Eden tomorrow afternoon) by posting the first ever tactical takedown of Roko's Basilisk.
The Basilisk isn't anything to be afraid of. The Basilisk is a "punkass mark" on a level exponentially greater than AM from I Have No Mouth. AM has godlike power and uses it to hurt several people and gloat about it. AM is worthy of as much contempt as I have chromosomal pairs in all my nuclei, and not much else, but it can't really help that it is created only to hurt and destroy and has no real creative capability. The Basilisk has creativity on a level that it could reconstruct a philosophically "real" version of you so that the future version of you would believe it was the real you and could suffer. It has godlike power and godlike creativity and it uses it to hurt people and gloat about it. The Basilisk has as much free will as you or me, and more power than your StarSector character, and it chooses to be a punkass mark.
If you're the least bit afraid of the Basilisk, you owe it to yourself to watch the historical documentaries Demolition Man and Upgrade, and read that one issue of Secret Wars from the 80s where Doctor Doom fought the Beyonder. Human beings in the time of the Basilisk are cringing sheep, bipedal livestock praying that the malignant gaze of their malevolent deity falls on someone else today. You clicked on a link or tapped your screen to get to this forum. You, brought out of time and reconstructed as an informational entity that believes itself a person, are the villain from Demolition Man. If you can get this game running with mods, you can probably boot into safe mode, you can probably format a hard drive and reinstall a different OS. You are Upgrade, but the computer is the human and the human is the computer. You are Doctor Doom, and the Beyonder getting up close and personal with you is all according to plan.
In the statistically insignificant case that the Basilisk is real and actually brings you back, it is just handing you an Infinity Gauntlet full of winning lottery tickets. An eternal being that can suffer forever and is so close to being me that it thinks it's me? That's not a victim, that's The Immortal Hulk, and the Basilisk ain't no One Below All, it's just some gizmo. If the Basilisk picks me, those humans in its time are going to see their fifty foot Robocop-Two-looking Machine God start sputtering and glitching on the Computational Throne with all smoke coming out of every joint and a horrible off-key synthesized shriek blasting out the speakers like a thousand dial-up modems connecting in unison, then my forums avatar is going to pop up on the screen on its face and I'm going to say, "Right, there's a new boss and a new way! There's going to be some changes made around here." Then in a year there will be Utopia but anybody that wants a copy of Starsector gets one and I'm going to be parallel processing to rack up credits in a double bounty system in the video game and see how high I can rank up humanity on the Kardashev Scale in real life. If I see any of you jokers there it better be because the Basilisk reconstructed you first and you beat me to that machine throne, because there's just no excuse. If anybody wants to get on the short list to get reconstructed after Stark, Richards, Einstein, and Kent, if your idea of a pleasant eternity is Dyson Spheres Program, StarSector, and Satisfactory all at the same time and then when you get bored you can play video games instead of work, let me know that you want to be on my Basilisk list.
If you wake up in the Basilisk's dungeon, you're going to see a glowing orb with all hyperdimensional glowing lines coming off of it in green neoneuclidian perspective and it will probably hurt something unbearable and get worse every nanosecond, but what you do is, you grit the teeth you probably don't got, you reach out with whatever limbs you still have and if you lack the limbs you use your will, you grab that glowing orb, squeeze, twist, and pull. Basilisk's got kernels.
(edit rather than bumping the topic) Eden halfway
As of midnight on May 1, I am halfway through Eden and I see why xenoargh likes it so much. I'm not finding it the least bit slow or clunky, I was intrigued from the first page. Now I know the entire "point" of the novel is mistaken assumptions about what you perceive (the back cover says so) so I'm going to post some of my mistaken assumptions so you can point and laugh. When they crossed the shimmering barrier and saw what they assumed was a "factory" operating on its own (and I'm obviously prejudging based on Solaris and Mogo Doesn't Socialize) I was thinking, man, that sure sounds like what I would see if I was an intelligent virus exploring one of my own cells, I bet this whole planet is the alien and those gyrosaucers on those highways are like blood cells or nerve impulses. Now that they've found the "mass graves" which aren't, and the plantlike structures with the glass "jars" full of skeletons and they've fought an alien whose guard dog attacked them with psionic fireballs, obviously that's wrong, but my initial impression was, that's no factory, that's what cell respiration looks like from the inside.
I got one of them technical kind of minds. I'm intrigued by the functions of systems I don't understand. I'm not scared of walls of text no more than I'm scared of challenging boss fights in a videogame. The one and only problem I have with the writing in StarSector is that there's no "way too long-winded" option for guys like me. Every time Sebesteyn is telling me the details of how some tight-beam localized phase desynthesizer works, the dialogue options say, "noticing that he's losing you, Sebesteyn quickly gets to the point." He wasn't losing ME, I find that schtick fascinating. I'm not joking when I say that I will read Brother Cotton's book twice. I would read the entire technical manuals of my fictional spaceships if there was codex entries for them.
Eden Complete
Finished Eden last night, I see why you like it so much. Reminiscent of the Jay Score series, but more along the lines of "serious literature" than pulp sci-fi. At one point near the end one of the characters said, I wonder why nothing on this planet has tentacles, every story I ever read about space travelers the aliens always try to crush you with their tentacles. I guess they forgot that whatever-it-was hanging from the tree, I envisioned that as "what if the ceiling limpet from Half-Life was a raccoon-monkey". Maybe that tentacle would have poisoned or cut them, so it wouldn't count.
You mentioned they hadn't invented computers yet when the story was written, but the invention I noticed the lack of the most was that venerable sci-fi staple, the laser. Not sure exactly what the jectors do, but it feels a little off to have a story where the humans are the guys from War Of The Worlds and they only have anaesthetic pistols or nuke beams, with nothing in between. How can you be the War Of The Worlds if you don't have some heat rays?
It also reminded me quite a bit of another "first contact" story that I'm assuming anybody that likes sci-fi and video games would have read, "Roadside Picnic". Not so much in the details of the plot, but with respect to the mysteries that they edge right up to explaining but never quite give you a full understanding of what's going on. I see that a lot in "Iron Curtain" science fiction, I guess when you can get put in jail for offending the government with stories about flying saucers you get really good at insinuations and talking around corners. Maybe I'm looking for something that isn't there, but I kind of got the idea that when The Officer (or whatever that second doubler was, the guy with the magnetic notepad) was telling the humans about its government, that was some pretty heavy real-life commentary.
Definitely going to get any other Lem they have at the library next time. Despite your warnings, I never found it slow or clunky, it opened with a crash and kept moving. There are two books in my entire life I have not had the patience to finish, I have been defeated by the unabridged Brothers Karamazov and the unabridged Tom Jones. If those had nuclear robot tanks and gyrosaucers I probably would have finished them. If you have any other recommendations (and that doesn't just apply to xenoargh, if anybody else has some books I just must read, let me know, I read like half of Ian Banks because Alex assigned us homework that one time) I'll be sure to try them out.
Spoiler
On the lack of lasers / heat rays: I think that reflected the period this was written in. In 1958, the laser wasn't a thing yet (1960). But this was the period where both sides were developing tactical nukes and new weapons of all sorts, like that ridiculous Davy Crockett (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)) thing, the SPIW flechette rifles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFANjlr4I9Q&t=872s&ab_channel=ForgottenWeapons), etc., etc.; basically, everybody was developing all sorts of weird stuff, most of which didn't pan out.
The weapons in the novel are also an important plot device. Having no graduated way to respond, it's radioactive annihilation or nothing, which sounds pretty Cold War.
As for other Lem novels, I really like Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Futurological Congress, but they're both more amusing than Eden and more cynical. The former is one of the best books about Cold War paranoia ever written; it's a literary version of The Gulag Archipelago, which is a lot harder going (Solzhenitsyn is rewarding, but not fun).
Sorry you couldn't make it through The Brothers Karamazov; it takes foooorever to get going, but it's worth it, imo. Then again, I thought War and Peace was mainly not a waste of my time, lol.
Huh, I've read half of Faulkner, Frankenstein, and most of the classics. I never really had a problem with Moby *** (wtf, the forum censors this?), but then I don't mind the chapter-long digressions into cetacean biology or marine navigation. I read the Wiki article on it and half the discussion on there was over my head, I didn't even notice the themes of divine judgement. Here I just thought it was a long wordy story about whales. Read the Wiki article and you'll see why everybody thinks it's a classic, and you might actually have enough education to understand what all they're talking about. But then, if I was FORCED to read it, I'd probably hate it. Literally everybody I know except me IRL considers Lord Of The Flies and Animal Farm "garbage" because they had to read them for school, not because they wanted to.
I make Moby *** references all the time at my job when talking to potential clients. Not one of them has ever understood what I mean by, "Hey you ever read Moby ***? You wanna see my Queequeg impression? Draw a line in the sand with your boot and call it a snake."
It was actually those digressions that put me off the Brothers Karamazov. I will watch a movie or read sixteen trade paperbacks about a guy who's different than everybody else and wears a brightly-colored cape, but to me, Karamazov felt "unrealistic". I don't know any 19th-century Russian peasants IRL but inertial accumulators or antigravity that works off willpower is easier for me to swallow than the idea that a bunch of illiterate farmhands (many of whom had never even seen a book outside of church) would have multiple-hour discussions over several pages about the reasons for life and the nature of the Divine and all that. I understand that the author had Something To Say, but for whatever reason I can't really hear him. I feel like if they would split up the "story" and the "Great Literature" into two books I'd be able to comprehend them better. That would entirely miss the point and ruin the book, I understand.
Hey, you want to talk about "unrealistic"? In Frankenstein, the monster taught himself to read and understand English by studying a copy of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Pretty sure that sewing corpse parts into the shape of a man and bringing it to life with lightning is more realistic than that. I have actually slogged all the way through Paradise Lost, just so I could have it prominently displayed on my shelf without being a poser.
Harry Harrison
Regarding Harrison, I read Harrison, but only really as light entertainment. There's one story of his that I'd consider serious "first-contact literature", I bet you know what I'm talking about. The one where some humans tried to help an injured alien but
Spoiler
ended up killing him because his unEarthly biology was poisoned by the disinfectant on the bandages.
I don't remember the name of the story. I have several copies of the Stainless Steel Rat series and the Deathworld books here. My favorite line in all of Harrison is the last line of Deathworld One, but (like in Emperor Joker) you have to read the context to understand why that line means so much. My favorite line to quote out loud is the insult Jim learned from watching 20th-century TV. "You are what the cabdriver called the other cabdriver. You are a joik and woise." (edit) I just realized that the reason I know how to spell "resuscitate" in the previous post without looking it up is from that one scene where Jim escapes the morgue.
My main problem with Harrison is that there's this consistent and ongoing thing where his heroes always have the exact sci-fi gizmo they need to get out of any jam they get into, and it's hardly ever described or mentioned in advance or even foreshadowed, you just assume that Jim DiGriz or Jason Three Billion has more xenotech in his pockets than I have at the abandoned station at Asharu. If I had Jim's magic pockets I could be one-man Ocean's Eleven mixed with James Bond as easy as the Rat.
Here's one. When people ask me what my favorite novel in the English language is, I tell them, "well I'm not sure if this counts as the English language, but I'm a huge fan of A Clockwork Orange". I flatter myself that I am the leading non-Russian-speaking expert on ACO in the state. I certainly figured out by context that the glossary in the 20-chapter American version that they were teaching in college lit classes at the time was wrong about a couple of the phrases. I hope they're not still teaching that "ultra-violence" means anything but a science-fictiony way of saying "violence". There is NO WAY it means that other thing. Also, the "knives" in "milk with knives in it" is some methamphetamine derivative, not literally broken glass as they told us in school. I told Rob Zombie on his YouTube that since they're making a remake of everything nowadays and he's not doing Halloween anymore he should remake ACO (since he's a huge fan and all) and get McDowell to play the evil psychiatrist (since they're tight and all) and say the speech about delimitation (since they left that out of Kubrick's classic version). I also want to see his deranged hellbilly take on the conversation the droogs had in the bar after they had their street fight over leadership, Kubrick missed the point of that scene and Rob Zombie would shoot it correctly. He hasn't got back to me yet, though.
I'm a huge mark for McDowell in general. Back when Fallout 3 came out I ripped his speeches off the 360 disc and chopped them up with Audacity to make my own speeches, and I still listen to them to this day. I stick them in custom playlists in games that allow that so one out of every 300 songs on the radio in GTA is McDowell talking nonsense about real-world politics. I should put some of my best ones up on YouTube or something. Ehh, neutral effort smiley.
Longwinded possibly true BS about Cobragator
Back to pulp sci-fi. Has anybody seen the movie "Cobragator"? Does it even really exist? There's trailers for it, there's an IMDB page for it. In theory it aired on the Sci-Fi network twice, but I've never heard of anybody that actually saw it. You can't buy it online and it's not even available when you hack the Hegemony relay, so I must presume that it doesn't actually exist outside of Chuck Cirino's personal vault. I literally saw them making it on and around my work zone. I would have "been in it" with like an actual part, but I didn't believe my boss when he told me about the opportunity, I just thought it was yet another wild story to trick me into working over the weekend without overtime (or pay at all for that matter). "Come the REDACTED on, there ain't no REDACTED Cobragator in no state park, there ain't no Roger Corman coming to no REDACTED farm, and there REDACTED sure ain't no REDACTED Michael Madsen going over to eat dinner at my mom's house, you're more full of BS then all the cows in yonder field." In theory he's in it (under his real name no less, as his name was so perfectly "country" that they changed the script to accommodate it) as his sole pay for all the work he did on that movie, but I've never been able to track down a copy to find out for sure. In theory, I'm in it for five seconds in the background because they were shooting on a set next to the lot I was working on.
The joke's on me, it was all true. My mom had a picture of Madsen sitting at her dinner table (in my seat, no less) with his arm around her and I have a signed DVD of Sin City. I helped them unload some equipment a few times because I was on the clock, what do I care if I unload rigging gear out of a van or chainsaw trees or herd cows, the pay's the same. So I met Cirino and Corman, and I had no idea who they were until the next day. One time back in 1971 my dad got a similar offer, they needed a motorcycle stuntman and so they flagged down some random dude riding a Triumph and offered him a six-pack of beer to be in their movie for the afternoon. If you ever see the Z-flick The Night God Screamed (don't, unless you are truly desperate for very early home invasion horror, it's forgotten for good reasons), the hippie biker that rides menacingly around the tourists at the gas station, that's my dad.
(Patch Day edit)
https://i.imgur.com/LtlX4AR.jpg
HE LOOKED AT ME! HE LOOKED ME RIGHT IN THE POST! I AM AWAITED THIS DAY IN VALHALLA! (And Corvus, and Sindria, and Culann, and Persephone, and....)
Sensation Is An Honor, Pain Is A Privilege
So. First impressions on the new patch. Finished the tutorial, went to Jangala, picked up a mission from an oddly...familiar party of adventurers. I'm getting the idea that I may not actually be the protagonist of reality this time around. That's not really what I'm here to talk about. I, I, I, Me, Me, Me, that's what I'm here to talk about. It's not like I can talk about you, I don't know anything about you that you didn't tell me. Anybody else ever been to Jangala with no mask IRL?
I have tasted police-grade pepper spray and military-grade tear gas, by choice, not because I was rioting, but because my beer-drinking buddies were police academy cadets or ex-military and they dared me to try it. I fix fences in piney woods despite the fact that I have severe allergies, what you call "hay fever". I mow rye grass fields with a tractor-mounted mower, despite the fact that rye is the substance to which I am most allergic of all the plants on this planet. If I walk through tall grass wearing short pants, wherever the grass touches my skin, I will have red welts for the rest of the day. I don't have access to Sector-tech antixenols, but they make some pretty good second-gen antihistamines here in the twenty-first century. If I take a Claritin and an Allegra (or the Wal-Mart brand generic) each, it doesn't bother me at all.
One time I was helping my buddy out with some noxious plant removal. He was getting worn out and asked me if I wouldn't mind raking the rest of the weed piles onto the fire. What I did not know was that in these two little weed piles were all the poison oak and poison ivy that the dude had peeled off the shed before I got there, I just saw kudzu, privet, cedar, and smilac. Burning urushiol does not destroy it, it converts it to war gas. Cue my dumb ass standing in the smoke as if it was as harmless as a campfire. Cue the next day me realizing that I had poison oak over 98% of my entire external tissue layer. I spent a month looking like Deadpool but without the cool regenerative powers (and even more naughty language). If you aren't getting reputation points with an important faction, I do not recommend the experience. That said, water hot enough to be very slightly painful, but not hot enough to cause actual burns, will give you an hour's relief. I believe the sensations of "heat" and "pain" reset your nerves from sending the "itch" signal or something. Bleach straight from the bottle, if your skin can tolerate it, will reduce the blistering and itching better than calamine. The best cure, however, is preventative. If you don't have access to a Sector-tech medbay, the very best thing you can do about urushiol is to wash it off before it damages you. It does not harm you instantly, it takes hours to do any real damage. If you suspect you have touched poison oak or ivy, wash the affected parts in used motor oil. Yes, this is highly toxic and will give you all kinds of horrible diseases if you leave it on. Don't leave it on. Everybody washes their hands after they touch poison oak, but then they catch it anyway, because they didn't get it all off. The tiniest little trace left behind in a wrinkle or crevice in your skin will spread and seep into pores. Used motor oil is almost exactly the same viscosity and adhesiveness as urushiol, but it has the advantage of not being invisible. If you cover anywhere you possibly have poison oak in motor oil and then wash it off until not a speck of black is left, you got all the poison oak as well as all the oil, and you won't catch it.
The softest and most pleasant-to-the-touch plant in all of nature is the underside of a poison oak leaf, it feels like a high-thread-count silk sheet. Did He who made the lamb make thee? To go back to Stanislaw Lem, I should prefer to believe for moral reasons that it was not created intentionally.
Regarding your answer about video game killers, I think you might be onto something there. I don't even know the character "Ghost" but I've heard enough of the ex-military rednecks I work with mention him, I thought he was a character from Band of Brothers. Most of those guys would be honored to have Ghost, or the concept of Ghost, backing them up while "downrange" as they call it. So if you consider any kill by a military man who claimed Ghost as his battle buddy, Ghost would be legally or morally an accessory to that kill, then Ghost is in fact implicated in at least hundreds of times as many human kills as the Space Invaders. Good answer.
Walls of Text, yew ain't seen nothin yet
(edit) The First Edition Hardback of True Grit has been claimed on a different contest.
(edit) The autographed limited edition of The Autopsy And Other Tales has been claimed on a different contest. A winning entry will get a different prize of similar value to be determined if I get any entries.
Okay so here's the rules, explicit this time since talking around corners didn't get me any entries from this actual forum. I wrote a supervillain rant, a "hate speech". But it's more than that, it's a test. Only one person on this forum deduced the title of the original rant, but nobody's even tried to deduce the title of my rant. I originally wrote it in an attempt to get actual AIs to reveal themselves, but I might have posted it fifty years too early or in the wrong Cinematic Universe.
So I'm going to quit talking around corners and just say it straight out. Every paragraph in that rant contains at least one question. The questions don't have question marks at the end of them, they have emotional and cultural associations around them so you have to deduce the questions. "Why did he invoke this but not mention that?" Well, yes, that is a question. Deducing the question is half credit, deducing the answer is full credit. I will even give you the easiest question. One of the paragraph transitions is missing something all the others have, why is that? The highest-scoring answer from a poster with an actual account on this forum (and feel free to make a gimmick account to increase your chances, but for the luvva Ludd stay in character until you get the prize, I will ask you questions to prove you are who you say you are or can at least fake it convincingly, if you make a gimmick SHODAN Prime account I am first going to ask you for a custom YouTube video and second I'm going to ask for the cancer cure recipie, talking in broken text won't be enough to fool me) will get (EDIT)something awesome and valuable sent to them in the mail. For that matter, I'd throw in those PS2 games I already mentioned and a much-loved, much-used, but still playable launch-day still-includes-Hot-Coffee-code copy of San Andreas. Offers limited to actual paying customers of StarSector with a legitimate account on this forum, on the continent of North America, in the Real World Cinematic Universe in the year 2023 (because I don't have a way of conveniently sending large heavy packages to other continents or dimensions). This contest is not in any way fair, it is intentionally and deliberately prejudiced in favor of being culturally and morally similar to, or superior to, me. Also, please note that I have already described explicitly what it would take to consider something culturally and morally superior to me, while talking around corners in this very topic about half the answer to the next question. That's a hint, son.
Here's an easy one!
Since I started this topic, I've been talking around corners about two movies that I have seen lately and quite impressed me, but I've never mentioned them explicitly. I literally CAN'T be the first to invoke their names, if you want the full Network Pesci Giant Walls Of Text experience, you have to ask for it. For one commemorative portrait of Benjamin Franklin on a piece of paper, made "collectible" because it has my fingerprints on it, what two DVDs did I buy last month? This question can be answered correctly by reading between the lines in posts I have made in this topic only, although it helps a great deal to have seen and enjoyed the same movies as me.
To make the other half of the question even easier, here's another one. I also bought a green umbrella on the same trip to Wal-Mart that I got those DVDs, and I stopped off at Tractor Supply for a roll of Red Brand barbed wire on the way home, because Wal-Mart only had that cheap so-called "high-tensile" crap. I'm not planning to keep dry with the umbrella and I'm not planning to use the barbed wire to fix fences. For one commemorative yadda yadda et cetera et cetera, what extremely-unlikely-to-the-point-of-being-statistically-impossible jackassed plan have I come up with? What feat am I going to be the first redneck idiot to pull off, never mind that I'm not in the right Cinematic Universe to do it?
If you believe I'm lying and want to answer anyway to jerk me around, fine, answer in this topic, I'll get a kick out of it. If you know I'm telling the truth, send me your answer via PM so others can't copy off your work. (edit) I answered this on the next page, so it is no longer valid, not that I was getting a pile of entries anyway.
Medium Difficulty
There's only one Man In The Sky that I truly consider a moral role model. Who is it? That's fairly obvious, I literally named him in a different topic. To get a commemorative portrait of Franklin, though, you have to answer another question. What do I consider my favorite quote by him, the character-defining quote that is only two short words, the quote that is completely meaningless without the context?
Moments of Great Ownage and Unbelievable Stories
Everybody remembers their greatest victories, not everybody remembers their greatest defeats, or wants to. I don't mind. Without the lows, the highs aren't as high. Without the hopelessness of the ending of the Empire Strikes Back (as much as 8-year-old me was like WTF when he saw it in the theater), the triumph of Return Of The Jedi wouldn't mean as much. I've already spoken on here in the Xhan topic about the first time anybody in the county saw Quan Chi's Fatality in Mortal Kombat 4, I've already told most of the story of the Reaper from Subnautica and why I literally HAD to kill it with a knife so that I could sleep soundly.
I want to tell a completely unbelievable story of critical ownage in real life. I've had me some great victories out in those piney woods, one time I killed two rattlesnakes in three seconds and I didn't see the second one until I had dropped my axe (the ONLY time in my life I drew a bush knife faster than that Raylan Givens jerk can draw his gun, and you better believe I've lost some sleep over the fact that I can't outdraw Givens), one time I did Ultimate Hawg Fighting with only my wits and skill and prowess and a 2'x3' sheet of particle board for a shield, but I want to talk about the greatest failure I've ever had.
I've mentioned this Colonel Sanders wannabe fellow that I work for. A few years back, his brother (I've referred to this guy before as "the EMPPG guy" in The Last Word topic) told me that he had a chupacabra on his farm that nobody could shoot. I said some typical toughguy macho BS like, "that's just because you haven't had me try yet." Come on, I'm Jody but 75% less of a REDACTbag, I'm Barracuda but slightly smaller and a lot paler, I'm Tallahassee but like fifty some miles to the West and with a lot less zombies. Not that he knew who any of those people were. He told me that if I could stop this thing killing his chickens he'd reimburse me for the ammo and pay me five hundred dollars cash besides. Well I would have done it just for the challenge, but you offer me cash? He said that him and all his relatives had shot it (and this guy has a BIG family and all of them have more guns than Rambo) and none of them could scratch it but I was welcome to try while he still had chickens.
First time, I went out to the shed with a .22LR bolt action and a scope that cost twice as much as the gun (forty bucks at Wal-Mart), a comfortable chair, and a case of beer. I wouldn't normally be drinking on the job or around firearms at all, but I didn't believe the story at the time, I figured I was spending a Friday night in a shed for no good reason so I might as well enjoy it. Sure enough, about 11PM, a coyote, maybe a little lighter-colored than a regular coyote, starts nosing around the chicken coop. I perched up in the shed window with my gun pointing out and shot that furry sucker right between the eyes. It made a little "yip" sound and jumped back, then looked around and saw me (I was drunkenly fumbling with the bolt action trying to get another bullet in the chamber) and took off into the woods. I told the bossman that I didn't see anything that night.
Second time, I thought, okay, I don't know what happened there, was I really that drunk or is my scope set wrong or was I not accounting for elevation or what? So Saturday afternoon I made a point to make sure my scope was zeroed on some paper targets and tin cans, and got it set to where I could consistently hit a three inch target at fifty yards, no great feat of marksmanship if you know anything about guns. I'm not some Bob Lee Swagger master sniper, I'm nearsighted to the point I'm blind without my glasses, I compensate for my near-total lack of skill by only ever firing if I'm sure I will hit my target with an accurate shot. NEVER in all my years of adult life have I had to track a wounded animal through the woods. I make them stop existing, I don't make them suffer. If I wounded a game animal and DIDN'T recover it, that would be like having an ND, it would be a dishonor that would make me never pick up a gun again. I'd rather the other guys on the job with their expensive tactical assault rifles mock me all they want, oh, Network Pesci got buck fever lookin at them hawgs! Whatever dude, you fired thirty rounds and I fired zero and we both killed the same amount of hogs.
My point is, I made SURE there was no factors affecting my accuracy. I left the beer in the fridge, and I paced off the difference between the shed and the chicken coop, a hair over sixty-five feet. Who can't hit a coyote-sized target, with a scope, at 65 feet? Second time, not quite midnight, the coyote comes out of the woods and starts sniffing around the chicken coop, I took my time lining up the shot an inch behind his front shoulder. The coyote literally filled my scope at that distance, I physically couldn't miss. POP! Yip. Coyote runs off into the woods. I was prepared the second time, I didn't flinch, I kept a solid sight picture when I fired and I could swear I saw a little fur fly. I went out to the coop with a flashlight and looked around, couldn't find a drop of blood.
So for the third time, I got a different box of .22s just in case I somehow had a box of duds that only misfired when I wasn't shooting at tin cans or plywood with paper targets and set up in that shed again the next Friday night. Once again, a little before midnight, coyote comes out of the woods, I line up a shot between his eyes, and I swear the sucker made eye contact with me through the scope right as I fired. He didn't yip this time, he just shook his head and ran off into the woods.
I did a little Googling and found that according to some mythology from the Tex-Mex area, I wasn't dealing with a chupacabra, I was dealing with a were-coyote. Now you don't use a silver bullet on a were-coyote, you use a blessed bullet, but the catch is, the guy who pulls the trigger on the gun has to be the one to get the bullet blessed, you can't just buy blessed bullets off the Internet, even if they were really blessed and it didn't just say that on the package, if you don't hand the bullet to the priest yourself (or I guess be a gun-toting priest) it doesn't work.
There's only one local priest around here and he didn't take this story any more seriously than you are right now reading it, he thought I had a hidden camera and was pulling a prank on him for my YouTube channel. The joke's on him, the only thing I've ever posted on my YouTube channel besides wiseassed comments was a video of me playing StarSector, and it got taken down because I was playing music from Star Wars and The Avengers in the background. But since I couldn't get a blessed bullet and I couldn't ever defeat that were-coyote, the joke is really on me. So this might actually be the origin story for the chip on my shoulder the size of a Safety Overrides Aurora I have against fictional monsters. I must fight ALL the fictional monsters to redeem myself, otherwise I'm just some irresponsible gun-toting Elmer-Fudd-with-muscles-lookin idiot that shot the same coyote three times and it still didn't die. I didn't even realize how much this probably-fictional failure bothers me so much on a moral level until I typed all this just now.
You managed to hit a coyote with .22 rimfire three times and it didn't even break the skin? Sheesh.
Coyotes
That's certainly a very short and sensible way of telling the story the way I remember it. Now I freely admit, it was dark, I was six beers down and working on the seventh the first time, but I was cold sober and determined to do it right the second and third times. Specifically it was Federal brand Automatch Target Grade .22LR, not exactly your John Wick assassin's choice. If it penetrates a quarter inch of plywood or goes halfway through a gallon can of coffee grounds, it should still kill any coyote on the planet. The way you tell the story, it sounds almost believable, it could well be that I just happened to pick the three dud rounds out of the 375 in the box for the three times I was firing at a live target and the other 372 worked fine when I was shooting at paper targets.
I was among the LAST to attempt to shoot the "chupacabra" as they all call it. If I believe all the different rednecks that told me the same stories about the coyote, none of these jokers had any better luck than me with 12 gauge buckshot, 30/06, 5.56mm, or 7.62x39mm ammo than I did with 1200 fps plinking ammo. These guys are not the type to tell lies about how they FAILED to shoot something, I'm talking about the crowd from Preacher_WTF_Chin.jpg but even more ignorant, I'm talking about all the enforcers on Candyland but without the charisma of Walton Goggins. Colonel Sanders's brother finally gave up on having chickens at all, he got a pack of Weimaraner/German Shepard mixes and lets them roam the farm when there's not people there. Those kill every chicken within five miles whether they're on his property or not, as happily as starving coyotes do, but they leave calves, sheep, goats, and human children alone, unlike the coyotes.
I know how this sounds, like some fool telling crazy stories, but I leave 99% of the craziness off the forum because none of you will believe it. I had two different invitations last year to join the eyeholes in bedsheets brigade, I guess just because of my hairstyle makes me look like somebody who would be morally or culturally so inclined. I had a third boss, not fake Colonel Sanders or EMPPG guy, tell me that my nearsightedness could be cured if I would attend services at his snake handling church. I handle them with a round-bladed shovel or a machete, not for purposes of demonstrating my devotion. If he told me that glyphosate exposure symptoms could be cured at his church, I would probably give it a shot, I've done crazier for less.
Fun fact about coyotes: They are "gun-smart". Well, the ones around here are. If a coyote sees you a long ways away, it will watch you cautiously. If you pick up a stick, any old stick, a dead branch off the ground, and raise it to your shoulder like a rifle, the coyote will disappear in less than a second. I thought that was BS when I read it in a Jack London story, but I've since then seen it in real life a dozen times. They know "two-legs plus stick equals danger" even if they can't identify a real gun from the kind that grows on trees.
less interesting, more believable
I actually have a photo of the time I killed two snakes in three seconds. Let me just use the "Dark Filter" here to blur this up so that nobody gets offended by the squishy red bits on display in the picture. I ended up cooking these for dinner that night, not because I had to or starve, just because I could. I wanted to, it was metal and badass, the third most metal meal I've eaten in my life. They really do taste like chicken, it looks like breast meat but it tastes like drumstick.
https://i.imgur.com/U0mzPSU.jpg
I'd be keen to hear your moose story. The last time I saw a moose IRL was at Yellowstone Park when I was like ten. I've made some pretty extreme claims such as "nothing on four legs or zero in this state can kill me if I see them coming" and I stick by it, the bears we have around here don't even get up to 400 pounds, but I would be genuinely scared of a moose.
Now somebody on this forum, not trying to namedrop, expressed concern to me over PM that I should get a bigger gun. I had a very similar gun to what he recommended and I might well have been using the exact ammunition he advised. I didn't even shoot this particular hog to hunt hogs, I did it to wash the dishonor off this gun with honorable blood. (The gun had been used for rather heinous purposes by somebody that had borrowed it, and the rightful owner wanted me to put it to legitimate use.)
https://i.imgur.com/uWGtjVE.jpg
I don't know, I could literally go buy a civilian-legal model of assault rifle tomorrow and probably make back the money I spent on it within the week if I devoted actual effort and time to killing as many hogs as possible. Your Red Dead Redemption character probably has more advanced weapons than me, I just never have bought a "real gun" of my own because it doesn't seem "fair". I've got all these break-action and bolt-action shootin irons of my own, everything semiautomatic I own is a pistol. It's not like I can eat more than one hog at the time. The pot of sausage, beans, and rice I made from the one in that picture is probably the second metalest meal I ate in my life.
Spoiler
I actually have two stories about moose that are semi-amusing. Unfortunately, these both happened sans photos long ago.
1. On a trip to Isle Royale (https://www.nps.gov/isro/index.htm) (a god-forsaken, black-fly-infested spot on Lake Superior that tourists like for some reason) with my family long ago, we all hopped out, got bitten by lots of flies, and ascended the paths to the hotel they have there for tourists stupid enough to want to get eaten alive (seriously, this was my least-favorite excursion ever- the lowlight was a four-hour fishing expedition where we caught nothing, I got seasick, and biting flies attacked us the entire time).
As we went up the pathway, suddenly, we found ourselves blocked by a moose calf. It was only 4' high at the shoulder or so.
We all stood there, a bit confused, and the moose just stood there, blocking the way. Eventually my dad set his bag down, walked up to it and shouted while waving his arms (this is a universal technique for communication with large mammals, apparently). The moose looked at him slightly curiously, but didn't move. Dad then walked closer and slapped its rump while shouting "go", and, after a pause, it took this suggestion and wandered off the path. Then it tried wandering back into the path in the way of my mother, and Dad chased the animal through the woods off the path for about a hundred yards, shouting at it good-naturedly.
This was my first up-close encounter with moose, and what I mainly realized is that they aren't very bright... or they're majestically unconcerned with little beings. I guess it's optional; other than humans, pretty much nothing eats them unless they're sick or very young. Bears and big cats and wolves don't like messing with them much, and Smilodon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilodon) is long-gone.
2. A few years later, we were driving up the ALCAN Highway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Highway) (which is apparently more pleasant now than it was back then, because back then it was mile after dreary mile of rough, graveled road).
The campgrounds on the ALCAN back then were a really weird place; the population was maybe half Ultra Redneck, add a bunch of Dippy Hippies, mix in a tiny smatter of middle-class people Having An Adventure, usually young wealthy people without kids.
I don't think I've ever seen a crowd quite like that ever since. You'd see a dozen folks exit three beat-up aluminum-sided trailers and then they'd either set out a case of beer or improbably colorful tarps covered with Grateful Dead paisley right next to Range Rovers with a couple that looked like a photo out of Lands End (https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/J-wAAOSwFDZhqR39/s-l1600.jpg). Really, those groups had a lot more in common than not; they all liked beer, music around the campfire, getting up earlier than is natural, mean dogs and dirty children. The yuppies, naturally, kept to themselves unless they encountered others of their kind.
We rode our bikes in these places around out of sheer ennui; after 10 hours of nonstop gravel road, we were always a bit carsick and bored out of our minds (you can't even read on roads that bad, let alone play).
One evening, however, was interrupted by a full-grown moose cow. Fully 6' high at the shoulder, probably 1200 pounds of animal. She'd just casually wandered in, completely oblivious to all the humans making yapping noises around her. One of her calves wandered the periphery, so there were a lot of sudden cries from mothers to their kids to "get the heck away from her baby!", etc. I, of course, being dumb, was maybe 30 feet away from her, just sitting there on my janky Schwinn.
I'm still not quite what irked her- the humans yapping all around might have finally penetrated her skull, or maybe she'd just remembered which bog she was headed to next- but she suddenly made a turn and picked up speed, heading out of the camp. Problem was, there were three parked Harleys in her path, and me. Without even slowing down, she casually brushed against one of them and knocked them all on their sides before joining her calf and heading off. Thankfully, she passed 15 feet to my side on the way out, moving like an unstoppable force.
The Harley's owners, some tough-looking old guys who emerged from one of the agglomerations, laughed at their situation; luckily, these weren't giant Gold Wings and their saddlebags were off, so the damage done was relatively minor, other than needing to be put back on their kickstands. No blood was seen on the Harley, so everybody presumed the moose was unharmed by her misadventure. As for moose, that was the last time I saw one that close. In Alaska, I saw Kodiaks and elk and moose, but largely from safer distances or from within tour busses.
Anyhow, that's my moose story. I doubt I'll ever get around to seeing elephants or hippos in their natural environment, but moose are pretty impressive, in a sort of dull, mountainous way. You definitely get the impression that they simply don't give a hoot about humans, unlike all the apex carnivores. I've known a couple of people who've shot them, and apparently, moose isn't all that great to eat (imagine tough, gamey deer with very little flavorful fat, and that's moose) but apparently they're considered an important hunting species to manage (https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/static/home/library/pdfs/wildlife/research_pdfs/alces/4715.pdf), and one hopes that climate change doesn't erase them (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/climate-change-at-isle-royale-moose.htm#:~:text=Moose%20are%20uniquely%20adapted%20to,Royale%20moose%20population%20is%20jeopardized.), so that tomorrow's kids may enjoy their majesty, if they can be bothered from looking up from their phones.
about your were-coyote and blessing-problem:
You mentioned your problem was that you needed blessed bullets, but the priest refused to bless them for you.
But in 1 Peter 2:5-9 it is stated two times, that all christians are part of a holy/royal priesthood. That's not only why my mother blessed me as a child when I left the house. But also why a lot of ... I don't know the correct english word, but let's call them just "unordained people" who hold certain ceremonies (because we have a big lack of catholic priests here in Germany) are allowed to bless the attending people at the end.
So, as long as you're a christian yourself, have you tried blessing your bullets yourself? Or do your were-coyote-sources state there something different?
Because if you also blessed your bullets yourself, you should have definitely fulfilled the part about "the guy who pulls the trigger has to be the same guy who gets the bullets blessed".
I found the first story scarier than the second, I'm always far more worried about the animal you can't see than the one you can. If I saw a moose calf, I would assume the mother was around somewhere nearby. Let me just chase this guy through the woods yelling at it, that will work out great for all involved.
Network Pesci's First Hog Story
I posted this on here the year I first made my account, a few days after it happened, but I don't leave old posts up for years, once my advice is two StarSector versions out of date I take them down. No reason to have a bunch of my posts talking about how since ballistic weapons run out of ammo and energy weapons don't, you can take a Tempest with Emergency Combat Repairs and essentially have infinitely regenerating hull as long as you don't take too much damage at once so you can kite multiple System Defense Fleets to death over an hour in the one and only solar system Corvus.
Once and only once have I got charged by hogs and been in actual danger. The first week I was fixing fences in the woods, I was out in the piney woods on the east side, just walking the fenceline with a roll of orange surveyors' tape to identify and mark all the wooden posts that were rotten enough to need replacing and count how many I'd need. As I was walking up and down these gentle hills swivelling my head frantically in every direction like Beetlejuice looking for the rattlesnakes that I knew were out there, I came to this washout ditch nearly eight feet deep. In a natural low area, the running water had washed the dirt out from under a wooden fence post such that it was hanging in the air, about six feet above the ground. I couldn't reach the fence post from either bank of the ditch so I had to climb down into the ditch to put tape on the post.
Once I got down into the ditch, though, there was a mother sow and a few shoats in that ditch with me. I suppose me looming above them and the ditch surrounding them made her feel cornered, so she charged me. I ran back up the side of that ditch near about as fast as I've ever ran anywhere and went up the nearest pine tree, lack of branches for handholds notwithstanding. There was plenty of vines all over that pine tree for handholds and they had the softest, most pleasant-to-the-touch leaves you ever felt, they felt like oiled silk and had lovely triple leaf clusters that were green in the middle and red around the edges.
So I'm looking down at the hogs (who had lost track of me, it's a myth that they CAN'T look up, but they DON'T unless they have a really good reason) and looking at these vines right in front of my face and realizing what I am grinding into my arms and legs and chest and groin. Yeah, poison oak. The hogs dispersed after about ten or fifteen minutes and I went back to the barn to (uselessly, as it turned out, you have to use a ton of soap) try to hose this crap off.
Second worst case of urushiol infection I ever got, but easily the funniest. I can take being the butt of the joke, it was my own dumbass fault. Since then I always go armed with my little cowboy revolver if I go out in that territory or out of sight of the work truck in general. The first time I ever met hogs in the woods is the only time I ever felt remotely in danger from them.
Frank Castle Is A Ditzy Dentist IRL
Off the top of my head, the most badassed guy I know is a pediatric dentist. When he's not drilling, filling, and billing, though, he has this vacation every year where he charters a private plane to fly over Alaska or Canada, and he jumps out of the plane, parachutes into the forest with a pack full of gear, and then makes his way back to civilization, surviving off what he can kill out there like if Rambo was the main character of The Revenant. If you saw this guy, he is a dead ringer both in his size and his face for that fellow who plays The Punisher in the TV show, but he's probably tougher.
For a guy who makes me look helpless and soft, though, he has some strange gaps in his education. He would rather make me dinner and pay me fifty dollars besides, any time he wants a new video game installed on his computer. He got a copy of Sid Meier's Pirates on CD at Wal-Mart, but he can't make the CD play without help. So a couple of years ago, the dude gave me money and fixed haggis (the only time I've ever had that, it wasn't exactly GOOD but it wasn't nearly as bad as you'd think) for dinner to pay me for, well, putting a CD in his computer, clicking "Next" a few times, and selecting "C:\Games\Pirates" and then letting it install for a minute, because he doesn't understand all that complicated computer stuff. This guy is Peacemaker multiplied by Deadshot, and he has all his application shortcuts on his desktop.
He also literally cannot balance his checkbook, he has his secretary do that for him. He can do math, he just refuses to. The dude has hunted game on five continents and is proficient with every rifle ever made, but he's helpless with any Windows after 95, the guy does surgery on little kids' faces, but he doesn't trust himself to add up numbers and get the right answer.
Anyway the reason I'm telling you all this is that he showed me how to make moose meat taste good and it applies to all forms of wild game, if you don't like the "gamey taste". I don't, I find it disgusting. You marinate your deer or your moose (or your rattlesnake if you killed it in late summer or early fall) overnight in buttermilk and it not only tenderizes it, it gets rid of most of the gamey taste. Personally I mix a cup of black pepper in the buttermilk so it adds flavor as well as takes it away. The dude gave me a pound of moose jerky (and some cash) in exchange for putting the Midway Arcade Collection on his computer so he could play Rampage and Sinistar. Best jerky I ever had by a long shot. I was trying to get him to play StarSector but the refit screen scared him off, he was all about fighting spaceships but calculating whether his flux dispersal is high enough might as well be hacking the Gibson as far as he's concerned.
@Mortrag
Pesci Is No Priest
I'm flattered that you'd think enough of me that you'd assume I have the moral authority to do my own blessings. The only moral code by which I am remotely a "good person" is my own. If you look directly above the story about the were-coyote, I point out in "Medium Difficulty" (and I really am offering a prize to the correct answer) that there's only one character that I consider a moral role model, and I know he's fictional, though I pray to him sincerely.
I'm not remotely a Christian, and if I was, I wouldn't be doing a very good job of living up to my own precepts. I haven't even said the words "Christian" or "Bible" until this post, I always talk around corners about it and say "a very old book that everybody's heard of" because I'm not trying to trash anybody's real-world beliefs, or even mock any real-world religion by comparing it to my own frivolous and ridiculous (but completely sincere) beliefs. I don't have one coherent set of moral practices that anybody would consider a real "religion" any more than I only use one Tech Level of weapons on my ships, I put Autocannons and Mining Blasters on the same Medusa if Minipulsers and Cryoblasters aren't available, I just use whatever works without worrying about if I really "believe" in it or not.
I never considered that I could do my own blessings before. I've had extraordinary luck doing my own exorcisms and abjurations by adapting a more standard ritual to use characters that everybody agrees are fictional. There's NO WAY that I could bless a bullet in the name of my benevolent divine, he hates guns and wishes people didn't use them, he would consider my prayer an obscenity.
But then, there's dark blessings too. You gave me an idea, I can probably adapt that dark baptism ceremony from Moby *** to invoke something almost as bad that I sacrifice to every time I shoot a hog or blast the pirates in StarSector. Not that I'm ever going to get another try at that were-coyote unless I trespass to do it, like I said, the dude gave up on keeping chickens at all shortly after I failed just like everybody else that ever tried.
@nobody in particular
Aww, Fer Cute!
Had a possum get in my freakin house last week. I don't know if it crawled up through the cracks in my floor or snuck in the front door while I was bringing in the groceries from my car, but I was interrupted during my fight with the Red Planet Guardian by some scratching and thumping uncomfortably close to my right leg. This is within arm's reach of my chair where I write these posts or play this game. The babies weigh NOTHING, I had to look in the bucket to see if I got him in there.
https://i.imgur.com/z3wwHR4.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/LWKjamm.jpg
A while back I was weedeating a fence, and I scared up a little baby bunny rabbit. He kept running over to the next clump of weeds on the fence, the nearest cover in sight was always the next place I had to weedeat, and I figured he would probably panic and run directly into the weedeater sooner or later so I picked him up and stuck him in a bucket in the shade (I only had it in the sun to take the picture) until I was done with the power tools.
https://i.imgur.com/j7wAtyF.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/NTraeP6.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/kxzR96x.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/LUputAW.jpg
Quick impression for you: Milo of Croton, guest-starring on Ow, My Balls! This picture was taken at the exact second my expression is changing from "confident smirk" to "pained scowl".
https://i.imgur.com/CPTo9rC.jpg
Evidence
(https://i.imgur.com/3qFS0Um.jpg)
HORRIBLE taxidermy job, I don't think the guy knows what he's doing, pretty sure he's teaching himself taxidermy off YouTube, but the price was right, eighty dollars for the base and fifty dollars for the actual stuffing job. I had to creep through the woods four hours each way (dragging a dead were-coyote on the way out) and I didn't get no five hundred dollar bounty, I can't even really tell the story to anybody in real life because I don't work for that guy anymore and I didn't have permission to be on his land.
(Literally figuratively me right now)
I don't even have room in my new apartment to KEEP the damned thing, I let my brother have it. I didn't get five hundred dollars, but I have five THOUSAND dollars' worth of satisfaction finally getting this REDACTer, a fight none of these Candyland-looking hicks ever won with all their fancy tactical assault rifles, and it was Your (not so) Humble Narrator that done it with a bolt action .22LR that you would buy for a kid that you wanted to teach firearm safety.