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Apocryphal
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Yeah, I’m not sure I buy PKD’s take on it either, but it’s interesting to think about.
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> @NeilNjae said: > That's a question I was considering asking: is the idea of "found family" and community a significant element of the narrative? People in the book are often doing things for others, not themselves. The Crows and …
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This reminded me of a T-shirt I once saw that said: "I may not look like I'm doing much, but on a cellular level I'm really quite busy."
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@BarnerCobblewood I think that depends on who spoke the words, and their context. I don’t recall the exact quote, but I think something similar to this was said toward the end, just when they were deciding whether to break through the barricades - p…
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Yes, sure - probably all of these. Since the train is metaphorical it would easily be swapped out for any enclosed environment which is keeping out an outside environment. A sailing ship or a space ship would do. Putting it in that light, think of t…
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I always like it when chapters get short toward the climax - it gives the feel of momentum. Also especially suitable for a runaway train metaphor. The first time I noticed this writing technique was in our reading of The Windup Girl, lo those many y…
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Here this might mean that (a) industry must go on, or at the end of the book that (b) nature’s reclamation must go on, or that (c) time will go on, regardless of anything else. I don’t think it says much about the characters in the book, except f…
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Nature goes on an endless journey of transformation. The train is just the metaphoric vehicle.
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In my ecological reading of the book, this change represents our eventual capitulation to nature. Sure, we can walk it out for a time, but nature always wins. The efforts of humanity to transform the planet in its own image will be a losing proposit…
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Since these characters all blended together for me, I really couldn’t say I noticed any difference lol.
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Keep in mind it’s a fake name - she would have adopted it knowing what it meant.
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I’d say the crows and the captain represented two arms of authority.
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Lol - no relations stood out to me. Only the roles played by various people. I never thought of relationship as a driver of anything. The train was moving forward regardless. The wasteland was infiltrating the train regardless. I suppose at the end …
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I actually found the lack of definition of names to be quite confusing. Weiwei, Elena, the Captain and the crow were memorable because of their roles. But to me the rest kind of blended together.
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The curious thing, if you look at the map of the train, is that there is gardly enough room for passengers of any class. This whole effort, with walls and armoured trains and captains and crew, and past trains from which lessons were learned, is in …
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I mostly thought it was an ecological fable, so more the first, however I could see a side case for the second interpretation. I saw it as a metaphor for shutting ourselves off from nature, and perhaps a hopeful message for the future- the environme…
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@clash_bowley @NeilNjae @BarnerCobblewood Any comments on this? Some might have already bought Plutoshine and started it, in which case I’d suggest just to proceed among those who can get it.
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Riddle of the Sands is available from the Toronto Public Library as an e-book or as reference only hardcovers (which means you have to sit in the library to read them :rolleyes:) and there's a free Gutenberg e-book edition. There are also a few diff…
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Also not available at my library, it seems. They don't have any books by that author. A search of Amazon.ca only renders Projekt Pluto by that author, in German.
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I’ve finished as well.
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Yes, thanks for lending us your expertise!
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I'm not sure if it's worth it to buy Artesia. The game is unwieldy, but it's one of my favourite indie games I own for it's cool setting (a bit like a mix of ancient Greece and Persia in an early renaissance time period), and it has really interesti…
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On the other hand, it's hard to see how anyone could read @RichardAbbott 's two examples and not conclude that the AI in question knew what words meant, what muffins were, and that muffins could roll, lol.
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Hmm, yes. Much of which seems to be to say - the things we are currently calling Artificial Intelligence are not at all intelligent. They still remain tools - sets of rules or algorithms - written by human intelligences with purpose of speeding up o…
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So this means that AI doesn’t really think like we do. We would conceive of a plot, then assemble the words in such a way as to reveal the plot. But AI arrives at a plot by following a word-tree, picking one word at a time without knowing the plot, …
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The trouble with a rainbow is that although you can see it and run toward it, you can never actually reach it. And that may be another thing rainbows have in common with AI.
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A lot of rules-lite games in particular do not have levelling at all. Diaspora, which is based on the Fate system, allows you to change your aspects (prose character descriptions) to represent change at the end of a session, but you don't really imp…
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Autumn start would be good.
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FYI - I have now found a print copy of this, so ready to proceed should this move ahead. It certainly is a big book, in physical terms!
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It's an interesting question. No reason to think that an AI will have the same perception of time that we do.