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BarnerCobblewood
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Good question. I guess I see the relationships among the PCs and NPCs as being the responsibility of the whole table, so for that I only need to do my part by making the N/PCs I play functional within their roles. I think my ideas about the Wastelan…
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It was incredibly weak. It reminded me of Harry Potter, where the wizards and witches grow up to be middle class home owners. Weiwei becomes the Captain, Marya finds true love, and everything continues in an unbelievable way. A tale for children.
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This really is the essence of my critique of the book. Transformation? I didn't see any transformation. Changes, yes, but at the end everything continues as it was, in a clear dream-sequence similar to the end of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but without …
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I'm a little unclear here of the premise here. It seems to me tha there's being related with the world, which everything does, relating to the world, which only alienated selves might do, and attempting to dominate the world, which currently is most…
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I think of this book as an undergraduate book. I mean its full of ideas that are discussed by undergraduates in university, important ideas, but their importance and relation with the world isn't yet well understood. I think the author shows a lot o…
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I'm with @Apocryphal on this. The important relationships were with the dead, or inaccessible, and not among the present and living. Goes with the conception of class. Part of how I recognise a death cult.
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I didn't really see this as a theme. For me a theme needs to be worked and varied, and I don't think this book did this. However I have given it only one reading. First, I think this is an artifact of the 1st person narrative. Once a name is assign…
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@Apocryphal Makes sense. I guess I see it as an expression of a social imperative, wherein the only consequence of an action that matters is that the action maintains and regenerates the company that does the action.
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@NeilNjae Like @Apocryphal I'm not sure what these questions mean, or maybe what they are about. The idea expressed in the quote is one of the principal drivers of the narrative action: Everyone who is on the train in some way must make their own pe…
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I noticed the writing, which is not usually a good sign. It wasn't bad writing, but I think it worked against the premise of the book. About 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through I thought about the kind of text a LLM would produce, and felt this book was i…
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I'm easy either way. It's pricey to get Plutoshine in time from amazon.ca.
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Whenever you like. I'll be free to respond on the weekend.
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@NeilNjae Thanks.
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Thank you everyone. @Apocryphal do you think it's worth getting a copy of Artesia? It's not cheap for such an old game without a community ($20 US), and the reviews all talk about the art. Pictures are not really my thing - they're nice, but I am b…
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(Quote) I'm not sure that either of these is true. I'd like to hear from @NeilNjae about this. Anyway this is where I am at with thinking about this stuff: When discussing AI, we need to be more careful in our language. There are several technolog…
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@clash_bowley I'm tired of leveling too, but I don't know how else to govern the effect of experience. It's one of the reasons that PCs go off track, as I mentioned in post to @Apocryphal, and I want a way to enforce the consequences, even if the pl…
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@Apocryphal that Artesia looks quite interesting. Have you played it? It looks like the players can choose a path for their PC, who then accumulates rewards on that path as the play develops, i.e. they get rewarded for playing their role in the game…
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(Quote) yeah. Where I'm getting a little hung up is that this applies to the players as much as the PCs. I would like to think that level advancement would correspond with the players becoming better players, which is something that mechanical / rul…
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(Quote) This makes almost perfect sense to me - I think there is a problem lurking in bracketed list that shows that observable physical forms (quanta?) can't be as neatly isolated from what I think you mean by qualia. But I agree that they don't e…
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> @Apocryphal said: > A rainbow doesn’t have a body, but it does have an existence. (It does have a physical manifestation in the form of water droplets and photons, but I wouldn’t call this a body). I do see AI as being rather like this, yes…
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> @NeilNjae said: > (Quote) > That's pretty much synonymous with "life": bacteria will move from areas of "discomfort" to "comfort". If "sentience" has a useful meaning, it needs to be something mor…
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@clash_bowley yeah that was a part of the game I thought was quite elegant. What I didn't notice though was the ways that adventures themselves modified PCs' character sheets that would impact the next session. I guess I think of a campaign as a ser…
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I think that I get what your saying. What I'm saying is that you sound like you are thinking of AI as an enduring self, not say a transient arrangement of transistors that is entirely ephemeral, transient, etc., and so nothing other than a manifesta…
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@Apocryphal I think you're saying that AI is not embodied, but it seems to me that it is embodied in the hardware that supports it. Likewise biological living beings refresh and renew their physical bodies, until they cannot. When that fails the bod…
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@Apocryphal interesting point. For me sentience indicates responses that suggest comfort and discomfort, which entail that there is a self there, even if it is not aware of itself.
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@Apocryphal yes the city in the novel was TO. That was clear even in my fading memory. And I thought it was clearly a North American city.
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Thanks everyone. I read like @clash_bowley. This question was sparked by my reading to other people. As I mentioned I'm reading Foucault's Pendulum, and the listener, while enjoying each session, cannot keep what is happening straight. Based on thes…
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I think the conflict of PC with its doppleganger is always a good hook for an adventure. I think this book is more about dopplegangers, mirror universes, etc. which of course are much older than the technological suit they are dressed up in. See htt…
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I thought there was a pun on terminal (interface with a computer), and terminal (end of life). We're now aware of some of the weirder (white, european, industrialised, rich, democratic) ideas related to this, e.g. the singularity. Looking at the ide…
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@Apocryphal Not sure what you mean by immortality here. It seems like humans know (more or less) that they will cease to exist, and any AI that was at a similar level would also. The time-scale might be different, but the cessation would be the same…