Thread 718434574

Is it all written for and by low IQ people?

Everything in pic related still holds up today.

Same with Deus Ex, especially compared to Human Revolution
>people cutting off healthy body parts to replace them with augs
>in 2027
>"two more years guys! It's gonna happen I swears!"

>>718434574 (OP)
sci-fi today is made for people to consume it, not think about it, which further confirms what older sci-fi media made us think about
I'd argue both Nier games are good story-wise, but have very different themes compared to older sci-fi media

>>718434574 (OP)
for sure, write your own Sci-fi game and we'll also judge lmao

>>718434574 (OP)
Because writers then didn't ONLY consume videogame writing or television writing, they actually engaged with the real stuff, read papers, news and articles.

Videogame writers now are just gamers who draw inspiration from other videogames or some shit tv or movie slop. This is also why movies and tv writing are bad.

>>718439038
Ok boomer.

>>718439507
They literally did, pic related. The rest of this appendix delves into explaining why the alien planet functions the way it does, both for background and also to justify gameplay mechanics (such as why your mineral mines never run dry). When's the last time a sci-fi game took pains to realistically explain how humanity got to the point that it transformed into the game's setting, instead of just an NPC offhandedly mentioning "It sure is great that warp drives / cyborg implants / alien communication / etc. became commonplace"?

>>718440305
Can't have compelling sci fi when it needs to sell in the third world. All problems stem from the internet being opened up to the entire world indiscriminately. Trump built the wrong wall, what we need is an internet wall.

>>718440305
>NASA.GOV
How far America has fallen, bros. Now NASA's gonna shut down.

>>718440519
> Last I checked they were substantially closer to going back to the moon than at any point in Obama or Biden's terms but ok

>>718440305
tfw modern sci-fi literature is shit, and there will be nothing to add to the classics.

>>718440305
I found this guy who's really into planets, and SMAC's the only media that has the highest score for him, at B, iirc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci20Do0FwX8&pp=ygUfcmVhbGlzdGljIGFscGhhIGNlbnRhdXJpIHBsYW5ldA%3D%3D

>>718440753
Imagine being so new that you have no idea how to use greentexting. Lurk more gigantic trryrd) retard.

>>718434574 (OP)
sci-fi is a dead genre, nobody really cares for them anymore and it applies to games too. Everyone is too busy going into fantasy.

>>718440305
Starfield did it.

>>718441086
>tfw modern sci-fi literature is shit, and there will be nothing to add to the classics.
If you're reading the sloppa they put out on the front page, sure.
There's plenty going on in scifi literature. Peter Watts alone is keeping the speculative parts of the genre alive. Neal Stephenson writes good harder scifi, and most of his novels are basically half excitedly info dumping about the tech or physics behind what he's writing about.
What is lagging is philosophy and its application in novels. Everyone is afraid to SAY something, take a hard philosophical stance and play it out in a novel. And thats a problem across basically all literature right now.

I've thought about this problem for a while.
I think we got to a point, kind of in the 90's, but definitely by the 00's, where we'd explored all the really obvious/optimistic sci-fi ideas, and what was left was actually too terrifying/ethically questionable/morally ambiguous etc. for average judeo-christian audiences to consider. Things beyond the pale.

Basically every Sci-Fi idea, that we were on the cusp of exploring and discussing publically in the 90's, things like
>nanotechnology and "grey goo" swarms
>man-machine interface
>genetic engineering and cloning
>the creation of designer individuals or designer species via genetic engineering and the associated ethics
>human reproduction via wholly artificial means
>Robotics, AI, and AI ethics
>manipulation of the human bio system/nervous system/brain via remote EM stimulation
etc. etc. etc.

These are all simply too uncomfortable for the average person to think about.
So unless your sci-fi falls into the kind of slim selection of topics people find acceptable
>space travel, space colonization
>robots that are obviously inferior and/or subservient
>sexually appealing aliens
etc. etc. etc.
or is horror explicitly intending to make people uncomfortable by pressing into taboos
you just don't get very smart sci-fi

t. cheesy sci-fi author

>>718442795
That actually might explain why shit like Blindsight took off and became so popular. It IS explicitly horror and Watts mostly writes shit that is either horror or at least horror adjacent. And the picture he paints is bleak as fuck.

>>718434574 (OP)
>people cutting off healthy body parts
like that'll ever happen

>>718434574 (OP)
think about the most average person you know. and how stupid they are. 50% of people are dumber than that

Authors should start reading real papers again, to move past the common tropes of futurism
>flying cars
>teleportation
>space travel and colonization

Like:
Beyond the Pump: A Narrative Study Exploring Heart Memory
>recipient receives heart from donor
>gets donor's preferences even memory

>>718443295
Ironically, this is a meme parrot ed by stupid people.

>>718441831
Shame for me. I much prefer sci-fi to fantasy.

>>718442586
>Peter Watts
Blindsight is nice, but in a more ideal era, it would just be a mid tier work.

>>718434574 (OP)
Back in the mid/early 2000s, I supposedly measured about 130 IQ then when I was 10 or younger. I could play Red Alert 2 and Simcity 3000, but Alpha Centauri absolutely filtered me. I could move the weird settlers around and press some buttons but it felt like fucking with literal alien tier technology. (I had this sweet bundle with those three games, Sid Meier's Sim Golf, and something else forgettable)

back then PC games were made for middle income americans and euros. now they are made for the lowest common demoninator for mod support

>>718445000
Personally I think the Sunflower saga is far better and Echopraxia has a lot more to say. But Blindsight is the one that took off and became popular

>>718434574 (OP)
It's spookily prophetic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwqN3Ur-wP0

>>718434574 (OP)
Leftists back in 90s and early 00s were dreamers. Now they are trannies and corporate stooges. The magic is gone.

>>718441831
There's enough sci-fi out there to read for 100 years. I love sci-fi and fantasy because they explore concepts that might be plausible scenarios but are in no way academic. They actually can push human standing pretty far when people are just exploring with their minds and not writing "up-market" or whatever.

>>718445238
Miriam would be flanderized in a modern version of this game.

>>718443339
>Beyond the Pump: A Narrative Study Exploring Heart Memory
>>recipient receives heart from donor
>>gets donor's preferences even memory
This sounds really basic. Was hoping for something a lot deeper.

I sing the body electric

>>718441831
Sci-Fi isn't "dead" but Fantasy is definitely in the limelight right now. Understandable since it's much more of an escape from current reality.

>>718441872
In a very superficial way.

>>718445000
Retard opinion, Blindsight would be a classic in any era.

>>718434574 (OP)
Everything is written for low IQ people nowadays.

>>718434574 (OP)
A significant portion of America is illiterate at this point. Do you think corporations want to drive them all away with high concept sci-fi? We are FUCKED.

>>718445238
I've gotta be honest
the "woah bro, we're living in a technological dystopia" tunnel vision people have seems to me to be some kind of latent sado-masochistic impulse in the collective unconcious
and I hate it.
There is a multiverse of possible optimistic futures we could imagine and move towards, but it's like everyone wants to focus on this mass technological dominance BDSM scenario

>>718447541
>There is a multiverse of possible optimistic futures we could imagine and move towards
No one believes that anymore, that's why scifi stories don't focus on anything grand or positive. All the cool shit we dreamed of as kids, mechs and exploring the universe. We realize that's all just a pipe dream now and anything that gets invented will just be controlled by big corpo to make our lives more miserable. Not to mention that with no freedom of association we're all forced into one shitty melting pot, no one is allowed to exist outside of the corpo influence. It's just depressing and doesn't lead to people dreaming of inspiring futures.

>>718442795
Why not have certain sci-fi IPs just dip their toes into it then?
Every sci-fi show/video game franchise will have cookie cutter space colonization and robutts and sexy aliens
But maybe this one goes more into man-machine interfaces, this one does cloning, another one does a discussion on AI personhood self-determination stuff
make it digestible- both paint-by-numbers but with at least one thing central to it that has an edge

dare to middlebrow, i guess

>>718447679
I have a personal theory that much of what you've said simply isn't true, it's just what people have chosen to believe, because most people are genuinely afraid of optimistic ideas and the idea that life could actually be better.
More comfortable with the known pain than the prospect of an unknown pleasure.

>>718447956
I hope you're right, I've been ground down by life too much to believe anymore but maybe our children will see the future we could only dream of.

>>718439038
The reason this is good isn't because the inspiration came from non-gaming media, it's because being meaningfully inspired by other media demonstrates an active and well-nurtured interest in the subject matter. Older media especially, since it shows you have an interest in the history and progression of the subject.
A lot of people miss that and decry any signs of a game being inspired by another game in any capacity.

>>718445636
>Not extrapolating it into booming business of selling body parts in order to obtain new skills and knowledge

>>718446184
>>718445195
>>718445000
blindsight vampire shit costs it a whole letter grade

>>718447873
I've been thinking about it, and it seems like a good way to approach it is with a Nietzschean antagonist.
In Bladerunner you have Tyrell going full mad scientist with his genetically engineered slaves, Char Aznable tries to force mankind's psychic evolution by initiating interstellar war, Prometheus' David despises his human creators and so is willing to expose them to an alien grey goo mutagen just to see what it does, 2001: A Space Odysseys monoliths are meant to spur man's evolution and they start by teaching primitive man violence, etc. etc.

Anyone read A Mote in God's Eye? I liked the mix of fantasy and sci fi.

>>718434574 (OP)
Because the people making them are dumber, and the people buying them are dumber as well, and the people making games are prioritizing shit other than being smart. See also the shit with the hugo and nebula awards prioritizing intersectionality over science in their sci fi.

Also, it's because nowadays, the attention to detail is wasted time and effort. Do you think modern audiences care what type of atmosphere Chiron has? The seasons it has, the density or the gravity? Maybe the amount of moons or suns, sure, but for deeper detail, I don't think the average consumer cares about that, AND companies want to keep pumping out games as fast as possible, too.

>>718445238
>story written by nerds
>has a religious fundamentalist character
>actually portrayed sympathetically but not uncritically
They don't make them like this any more

>>718449178
People are obsessed with completely trifling "lore" and "canon" to a greater extent than ever before so it wouldn't be wasted effort at least.

>>718447956
The problem with that thinking is that life could actually be better, but there is nothing within your power to help make it better.
Humanity spends the majority of it's resources on excess, not on anything that would actually improve peoples lives. Things that actively attempt to make them forget about the fact that they dont actually have a choice.

People that could help make things better, choose to actively make things worse, that is the way of our world. No amount of optimism or hope will ever change that fact, because sociopaths are the ones ruling the world.

>>718450115
>but there is nothing within your power to help make it better
That's what they (meaning most of the masses and a few assholes in power) want you to believe.
You just say "no" and start making life better.

>>718434574 (OP)
Are SMAC and OG Deus Ex good because they portray future society and advancements fairly negatively, while Deus Ex HR is bad because widely available consumer grade body modifications is positive (sorta) advancement and there shouldn't be any of that, period?

>>718445542
As if. She triggers the fuckers so goddam hard that they can't even admit that she or christfags exist at all. Check Beyond Earth. They have the indians be the religious faction, barely, and the brazilians/latin americans aren't christian at all. Even rome, spain and the mid east aren't religious.

>>718452261
In what world does DXHR present augs as good? They're presented as misguided at best, malicious at worst. You need them to get good jobs, but they force you to take that anti-rejection med or you die, and the fucking illuminati pushes a software update OTA to your brain chip that turns you psychotic
DXMD is retarded because it makes augs into a minority like niggers which is just so dumb dumb stupid retard fuck dumb i hate it i hate it why can't millenials WRITE

>>718448794
>Anyone read A Mote in God's Eye?

I have. Anything by Niven and Pournelle is great. Footfall is my personal favorite.

>>718452261
What? I don't understand your argument at all.

>>718449649
multiple religious fundamentalist characters portrayed sympathetically if i remember
bought this game on release, the manual was fucking massive
only played through it like 3 times, always ended up going for transcendence victory
the mind worms are your friends

Pushing Ice is another one I really enjoyed.

>>718450115
One angry man with a gun can change the course of history.
Its honestly shocking to me this doesn't happen more regularly.

>>718445238
>plays like a raging cunt ingame
>is one of the few to have died a natural death rather than jumping between various clones or abusing the longevity vaccine
The fact that she took the equivalent of the lame and the pathetic from the Unity and built an entire nation out of them is pretty notable. She's a bible thumper that you could get behind when you pull the curtain back on the rest of the cast.

>>718453892
>Its honestly shocking to me this doesn't happen more regularly.
You stating that as a common fact throughout history is already dangerous enough. Because despite the level of influence and power at play death is the universal equalizer. Despite how much one is willing to delude themselves otherwise. You can't sidestep nor supersede it without some very methodical steps and contingencies in place to ensure your own continued existence.

>>718448498
Why are you such a midwit?
If he had called them anything but vampires no one would bat an eye at a spec-evo branch of extinct hominids that prey on humans being brought back from the dead to be autistic consultants because blindsight's humanity is about progress with zero regard for consequences.

>>718454114
Vampires aren't as goofy as the "aliens who can do a things that require sapient intuition are not actually sapient!!" twist

>>718454225
>require sapient intuition
No wonder no one writes interesting scifi. Retards are so confident they aren't retarded they'll confidently critique your writing while failing to understand it.

>>718452261
SMAC is a positive view of the future

>>718454359
But enough about yourself.

Does based Sid himself even work on games or is he a retired man?

>>718452261
SMAC has a lot of future tech that would be a net positive when you consider the Transcendence ending. It also has the meme technologies like the Dream Twister, Gene Jacks and Self Aware Colony. Even a basic bitch component in the fusion power research tree would be such a massive improvement in our current state it would become exponential from there. By the game's end they have effectively weaponized black holes, achieved instantaneous teleportation, functional immortality, FTL travel and the ability to matter replicate most of their basic requirements. Simple stuff like cybernetics and genetic engineering is so far down on the scale that it becomes an everyday thing.

>>718434574 (OP)
>people cutting off healthy body parts to replace them with augs
They do that now but instead replace them with holes and thigh flesh

>>718447873
but that's what you do get. you have SOMA which is explicitly horror, but not very high brow outside of its specific interest of man-machine interfaces and human consciousness. SIGNALIS does a similar thing. outside the lowest common denominators like Mass Effect, you always had (the original) BioShock or Dead Space. they always leaned into the horror genre because that inherently lowers the barrier for entry for outlandish ideas.

>>718445636
>not turning it into REPO MAN the video game

>>718434574 (OP)
that apply to overall the gaming industry anon, most are made by morons for morons, that's why games who are focusing on fun and gameplay die or barely make any money while walking simulators/cinematic experiences make 9 digits or more (RDR2, BG3, God of war etc )

>>718439038
I think it's mostly this, modern writers just don't read old sci-fi or know anything about the current state of science, if they read at all. They're all fucking secondaries making fanfiction of fanfiction of sci-fi instead of, at the very least, adapting real sci-fi to another medium or writing actual sci-fi. There is no science in what they write, it's pure fantasy that happens to be in space or some other mumbo jumbo technological future. It's a feedback loop of parasites reinforcing the same tired old elements again and again.

With modern graphics and shaders, I'd love to see something by Greg Egan actually rendered, with skewed dimensions, non-euclidean topologies and all kinds of space-time fuckery. His work might not be very philosophical at all, and might be more theoretical physics fiction or math-fiction, but it'd look real good on a screen. There's little more out-there than a world where you can't turn more than 90° in each direction before elongating into infinity.

>>718454114
>If he had called them anything but vampires
No, the problem is not the name, it's the fact that the entire vampire subplot exists only to showcase how a big of hard-on the author has for them.

>>718458365
that's just a dipshit take. they might be a little superfluous, but they complement both books' feeling of dealing with something far greater and far more powerful than you could ever be. it coming from two completely different directions just makes it more powerful.

>>718459532
>they complement
No they fucking don't. The vampires being there is almost entirely irrelevant in Blindsight and, if anything, the author being so horny for them actively detracts from the experience in Echopraxia.

>>718439038
Fucking THIS
Not inly that, but people today have literally no life experience. They just watch shit on they phone and work. That's their lives. The closest to actual drawn-from-life writing comes from fucking women whining about getting passed around in college in indies about rape.

>>718452261
SMAC doesn't portray future society negatively.
SMAC portrays current (well, now historical) visible groups in society driven to the extreme.

The Spartans aren't a view of the future, they're the people who fetishized Gulf War and all the other conflicts that US went into and easily won in the 1980s and 1990s. They're misguided from the perspective of game devs who were more than sperm during Vietnam War and see them as retarded kids.
The UN is a joke organisation that throws around strongly worded letters but in reality can't do absolute shit since they had just lived through the Yugoslav Wars and all the very public fuck-ups that UN forces there incurred. As opposed to the UN in Civ which is always portrayed as a noble effort, even a victory condition in the more modern ones.
It doesn't really say the tech you get is wrong or is causing the issues. The planet is out to kill you whether you go full capitalist or full hippie. It instead goes "If we had perfect robotics, mind control and fusion power... the soccer moms would try to ban it, but that's still better than your CEO who'd create the drone slaves he oh so wishes he'd employ instead of us, or the techie who thinks he's smarter than anyone else and thus has the right to dictate everything, because that's going to be better for us all in his stupid mind, et cetera."

Reposting from another thread because its on topic
Tldr Endless Legend 2 is some insanely pozzed garbage wrapped around a fairly ok science fantasy 4x game

>try Endless Legend 2 demo
>human faction is literally nothing but brown people and white women
>lore is there's some mythical figure called Garin who, of course, is a woman
>whatever, play anyway
>there's a companion system where basically your heroes, if they get high enough a level, gets to make a house with another npc drawn from all the races you have befriended/subjugated, on top of getting a major stat bonus
>have a female warrior (because of course) that I picked because she is the literal only white option, who gets high enough a level to pick a companion
>shrug and pick a companion that gives her a huge strength bonus, a giant lizard creature
>literally two turns later, get a random event where she is experiencing ptsd but lo and behold her companion comes to soothe her
>this is pretty much explicitly written as them fucking
>now I get to read about my white woman hero getting spitroasted by an alien monstrosity all because I picked a good mechanical option for her
Game is fun but holy fuck the leftoid nonsense is off the charts. Maybe I'll pirate it after a modder makes it less retarded

>>718462092
I have lost all hope for Amplitude as a studio after Humankind. they have become creatively, and now morally, bankrupt.

>>718462017
>It doesn't really say the tech you get is wrong or is causing the issues

>My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack's muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?
– Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"

>>718462017
>It doesn't really say the tech you get is wrong or is causing the issues.

Self-Aware Colony

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwqN3Ur-wP0

"Hey, wouldn't it be cool if our city could literally just rat-trap the 'problem' segments of our population and vaporize them in a dark alley at night?"

SMAC is 10000% worse than what the word "Dystopia" could ever implies or embody. Some of these techs are the purest demonstration of what happens when a tool a human has made is used so recklessly that the tool becomes its own entity with its own identity and agenda.

>>718464506
>reduces the universal maintaince cost associated with energy by half
Even from the implications alone that's hilarious as shit. You're effectively killing off entire swathes like pests for falling out of line while subsequently offsetting the deficit via cloning vats. At some point the resources themselves aren't the only constant being consumed but the meat slaves that were once called humans are bought and sold at the industrial scale. You have boiled the entire model down to a well oiled machine that can self replicate without the need to account for frivolous human concepts like morale, desire and sense of belonging beyond the global mandate dictated by the societal doctrine.

>>718464856
It gets worse.

The prior technology to Self-Aware Colony is Self-Aware Machines. From a wiki (not fanbox, because fanbox is shit) on the research tech:
"... These machines are capable of complex, higher-order thinking, and value the experience of existence as much as any biological being."

Tell me, what is a drone, again?
Oh, right...
> "Drones are discontented, undereducated citizens which appear as a result of population pressure and other social forces"
It doesn't say "human" it says "citizen" which implies that self-aware machines could possibly BE citizens.

> "As with other living organisms, self-preservation is paramount for these specimens."
Shutting off these self-aware machines can illicit a self-preservation reaction from them.

So, logically the consequences of "The Self-Aware Colony" secret project is that once it gets implemented, it could as a citizen become discontented in a drone riot... and begin to intentionally murder other citizens.
The entire fucking city, heel-face turning, choosing to murder its own citizens because "Ok time to replace you with version 2.0"

> But they'd never implement a tech that could do that to their own-
My Probe Team says otherwise. Have fun.

>>718464856
>You're effectively killing off entire swathes like pests for falling out of line while subsequently offsetting the deficit via cloning vats
In the worst possible circumstances, yeah. The self-aware colony can be built by anyone with any government. The fact that you can boil down ethics to an equation means you could instead program the AGI to maximize citizen satisfaction the most efficiently so they can be more productive, for it to run the supply chain with no waste perfectly on time, for it to route services and solve emergencies instantly or outright prevent them from happening. Registering every resident into a database and logging everything about them could be use to find dissidents and disappear them but it just as easily could be used to put them into the most suitable career path and social circle to maximize their life.
That's what's so good about SMAC's tech and building names and descriptions. They're neutrally described or are quotes from in-universe people such that you can instantly get a feel for both the best and worst ways it can and will be used.

>>718465683
Like a self inflicted Bodysnatchers invasion or Sunny's brothers in I-Robot going full Skynet. It's bad enough that the city is beaming you for existing but when the skinthropes are suiciding you with two shots it becomes borderline comical. At what point is a society that invests in this kind of technology even worthy of taking the path towards transcendence when they were pulling stunts like this to get there?

>>718465879
That's another good way to look at it but even then the level of micromanagement involved would be enough to give the average megalomaniac a wet dream. Considering the setting has the potential to attain functionally unlimited power and the ability to generate all forms of resources to continue unabated this model can tick along without any real competition. Outside of something external that far outscales it by orders of magnitude.

>>718434574 (OP)
The guys who wrote sci-fi in the past read a lot of books and had life experience. They did extensive research at the library.
The people writing sci-fi nowadays have just watched other sci-fi and use reddit. This is why they're no better than an AI chatbot.

>>718462402
Amplitude died when Mathiu Girard left

>>718462092
They haven't really changed anon, you just let these things make you unable to enjoy things anymore.
Besides xenofucking is hot.

>>718462092
>>shrug and pick a companion that gives her a huge strength bonus, a giant lizard creature
>>literally two turns later, get a random event where she is experiencing ptsd but lo and behold her companion comes to soothe her
>>this is pretty much explicitly written as them fucking
>>now I get to read about my white woman hero getting spitroasted by an alien monstrosity all because I picked a good mechanical option for her
This reminds me of something I saw on /aco/ years ago.

I've given up on waiting for games to ever be as well written as Alpha Centauri was, I've learned to live with the pain

>>718465683
>"... These machines are capable of complex, higher-order thinking, and value the experience of existence as much as any biological being."
That's one of the fun things about SMAC is thinking about how much society actually changes with each level of tech. The first couple levels are all basic survivalists that can barely even step out of their hab dome without getting shat on while a hundred years later you're having sky scrapers that reach low orbit staffed/lived in by 90% gene edited work force who are using their psionics or cybernetic implants to do all their work in a few minutes while socializing at their favorite fungus noodle stop.
The GURPS splatbook is really nice to have as a companion even if its not entirely accurate

>>718462092
Endless Legend 1 has 5 human factions (counting Mezari), 3 are led by women and 2 by niggers. If you count the not-elves as 6th that's your singular white male option. I don't know why you expected otherwise. Haven't played yet but forced PTSD events sounds far worse than my heroes fucking some aliens

>>718462092
They're French, what did you expect

>>718466003
>At what point is a society that invests in this kind of technology even worthy of taking the path towards transcendence when they were pulling stunts like this to get there?
Frankly I like to consider the possibility that the "Transcendence" ending is a meta-commentary on the nature of the game itself, and that by "Winning" with transcendence you (the faction leader that transcends existence) just decide that "attempt" wasn't good enough, so you start over with a new game on a new planet in a different universe, and try to avoid making the same mistakes you made the previous time.
Maybe this time you don't actually use nukes.
Or you don't virus bomb people.
Or you don't let Yang exist.
Or you don't send mind worm boils to that defenseless starting colony.

Also keep in mind the Progenitors exist in the expansion and have been doing the same shit for much, much longer than the Humans on Planet have been.
It's all (ATROCITY) all the way down.

>>718434574 (OP)
Many of that time grew up reading the greats. Now hardly anyone reads, and I see increasing amount of kids who can't read, or the most basic of proficiency.
I read the The Riftwar Saga at 12, the last generation to actually read was the Harry Potter generation. The quality of writing is shit across the board and the future is grim.

what do anons think about Solaris?

>>718466239
>Outside of something external that far outscales it by orders of magnitude.

> Proxima Centauri used "Solar Flare"
> It was SUPER EFFECTIVE!
> Datalinks fainted!
And then everyone goes back to T0 tech and has to start over with Recycling Tanks again.

>>718467721
You'd hate to be the transcendent Planetmind who gets lobotomised by a cosmic disaster, and you have to spend millions of years with retards on your surface oh wait
But I figure if Zakharov can figure out Temporal Mechanics he can probably figure out how to avoid a solar flare
The order of magnitude we're talking about would have to be something like someone throwing the whole sun at them instead

>>718460215
>>718458365
retarded speedreader, the vampires in blindsight function as a conceptual gap in the whole intelligence without consciusness debacle between humanity and rorschach's aliens, they present the book's conundrum (consciousness is a hindrance to intelligence) in a context that the reader is familiar with (earth's evolutionary history) so that the author can subtly use that context to make rorschach's aliens and the whole story of the first contact seem more plausible, they also add another layer to the narrative by making the eventual war in the second book not just between humanity and the rorschach aliens but between the rorschach aliens and the vampires, which in the context of the book are just humanity but better (and this is another horror layer that would not have been present without the vampires)

>>718467983
Planet is pretty much an organic matrioshka brain minus the need to pirate a star for energy. With the autism blast from Zakharov and subsequent transcendence ending it becomes a fully sapient entity. One that could potentially see a danger coming in from a mile out. It would still be pretty funny if the whole thing gets licked by a wild solar flare because they still have their upper limits when you haven't made it past the planet bound stage yet. Even with the black hole guns and the ability to gas hobos in real time.

>>718468156
>pseudo-intellectual bs to justify the writer's barely concealed fetish
Instead of typing all of that up, you could've just said you're a monster fucker like Watts and no one would judge, anon.

>>718447541
I know for a FACT that I'm suffering from it and wouldn't be having nearly as hard of a life if my deepest thoughts and desires weren't just spied on through a computer but simulated over an AI chatbot too so they know the stuff I've never even said or typed as well.

>>718447956
> it's just what people have chosen to believe, because most people are genuinely afraid of optimistic ideas and the idea that life could actually be better.
Every "democracy" in the world is just an oligarchy with extra steps.

"If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity." (from "The Limits to Growth" study conclusions).

This means, there will be no cyborgs, space travel, or futuristic augmentations, because the resources will eventually become too hard to get. We already used all good sand in this world, good sand used in industry literally is gone, there is none.

Depopulation is so rampant, South Korea is going to extinct in your lifetime. Japan is next. Nobody can't afford to have kids anymore.

We, as humanity, moving rapidly towards ecological apocalypse. World's glaciers melting faster than ever recorded. Climate change is inevitable, and world billionaires know that. This is why they build bunkers for themselves. They know what's going to happen in the next, idk, 25 years tops?

So pray tell, how life could actually be better?

>>718468232
I feel like you skip the "planet bound stage" when you become the planet, you could probably just ask to get thrusters attached to your ass
Besides I'm pretty sure they're mining Nessus (the moon) and other celestial bodies by that point, the losers in the Transcendence race are being sent on a mission back to find Earth again (as evidenced by the end slides in the event (You) lose), and the people sticking around like your second favourite Talent are uploading their consciousnesses to the network, so they could probably just fuck off elsewhere as well
Which opens up all these other cans of worms like what kind of machines people could occupy with their brains (up to a planet, down to a Nano Factory) and the reach of Planetmind itself, but what is Alpha Centauri if not a can of (mind)worms emporium

>>718468592
>So pray tell, how life could actually be better?
Like this
*does magic*

>>718468424
I can almost guarantee that's not what's actually happening to you + you're secretly desperate to talk to people about your "deepest thoughts and desires" by which you mean your repressed sexual fantasies.
Whether or not this is true, you're baiting for a response like this to your post.

>>718440519
NASA's fall is directly tied to the scientists from operation Paperclip retiring.
America's NASA never did much shit. Germany's NASA did.

>>718468592
>We already used all good sand in this world, good sand used in industry literally is gone, there is none.
sand is rocks and we can always create more sand by smashing rocks.
What the """economists""" are telling you is that the easy-to-access with the broadest profit margin sand is less available. not gone, just less available. so instead of just walking over to a beach and SCOOPING, they instead have to make further deals and trades with other industries to get their rocks, to sell to sand fabricators, who take their financial cut-out, in order to produce whatever products need that sand.

of course, it's not mentioned but it's how those rocks get smashed into new sand (by machines? or by foreign slave laborers held in local prisons...) and the reason why that sand is being melted into the 9999th new window in the downtown area (so some 10th generational israeli mossad agent jew can tell a recently relocated palestine kid "ok here's a rock, go smash that window so i can blame you for it and then get more money from the USA goylems so i can kill you in 20 years and start the process over again") is what makes the future potentially worse than today or not.

always remember that the person spouting doom-and-gloom about the future is probably also the person selling the apocalypse bunkers... and the futures stocks on the business that sells those apocalypse bunkers. (which should tell you that it's a fucking scam, because those stocks become worthless if the apocalypse actually does happen and shits on the "global" economy)

>>718468592
You’re not wrong about the trajectory we’re on, but slipping into fatalism is just handing the wheel over while the car's already skidding into a ditch. Yes, we’re barrelling toward collapse-ecological, societal, spiritual even-but pretending that guarantees how the story ends is missing the point. The entire arc of species history is fucking chaos, with small localized miracles beating the odds constantly.

There won’t be some Star Trek future for everyone. There never was. But that doesn’t mean isolated nodes of post-industrial survival, knowledge preservation, or even technological uplift can’t spring up. Think of how many times humanity should have permanently collapsed but didn’t. Every dark age had torchbearers.

Honestly, “how life could actually be better” doesn’t start top-down. It starts with communities regaining sovereignty-energy, food, culture. DIY spirit with smarter tech, not government-tier garbage. The world you fear isn't an endpoint, it's a filter. Whether we get a fungus-brained Planetmind or a Return-to-Monke episode 500 depends on how we pass through it.