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Here's some good highlights of (and more details on) Kabaddi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xcRSzgIqVc Watching a bunch of kids struggling to tackle each other can be more fun than the 'pro' level where it seems like either speed is the best skill or it verges on semi-pro wrestling. I have to admit that the 'we only know the potential victim's name' is kind of an interesting plot device, but having it come from a predictive computer is awfully silly if it can't also figure out the criminal ahead of time. Kangra fucked around with this message at 00:43 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 00:41
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Air is lava! posted:Lao is kind of a sociopath. Kicking a person who died less than a minute ago isn't really nice. I imagine the kick was kind of like reflex testing, to see if the guy's nerves had been wrecked by mindjacking.
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May 5, 2016 01:55
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Yeah, let's... go with that!
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May 5, 2016 02:47
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Alright, let's update and give an update! So one thing I always forget about the SSLP format is the time various parts take. I don't mind the screenshots, I don't mind the dumb jokes, but with that plus transcribing all the dialogue, it ends up taking a whole evening to do an update, and with various situations (finished up my contract work/PhD, need to find new job, etc.) I don't have a lot of "whole evenings" left. BUT I do really enjoy Technobabylon. I think we're gonna shift gears, is what I'm saying, to a VLP. That should hopefully crank the updates out at a reasonable rate - so here's offering one of those!
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May 22, 2016 21:14
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Sorry to hear about all your stress. I liked the screenshot format, but this video seems to be nice as well. So, the game takes place in a dictatoric police state were the government is perfectly capable and willing to literally enslave the mind of criminals, preventing them from having any unsavory thoughts. That's only slightly better than the Chinese human bot-network. Also I always found this part of the plot quite dump. They are only cells. Sure they are one of the last things of your dead wife, but come on. If they were children, you'd have a personal attachment, due to the shared memories and the instinct to protect your youth. But those are just wads of DNA which shouldn't even be considered alive right now. (Unless that's your opinion, in which case your opinion is weird.) Sorry my mind trailed of to the discussion of "life begins with conception", which arguably didn't even happen here. But an older guy chasing a bunch of petri dishes and betrying his collegues and friends to protect HIS BABIES is something I just can't take seriously.
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May 22, 2016 21:50
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Air is lava! posted:But an older guy chasing a bunch of petri dishes and betrying his collegues and friends to protect HIS BABIES is something I just can't take seriously. While I agree partly on the betraying your colleagues angle, remember what you saw in that episode, that Regis lives in borderline poverty in order for his wife to have a nice memorial. Can you see that someone who was looking to blackmail Regis would pick his frozen embryos?
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May 23, 2016 01:37
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Yeah, he's in a state where he's sacrificed his present for the past. The embryos could be unthawed at any time, but he didn't go forward with it. He's spending all his dang money keeping up a dying (or at least sickly) tree. He hates the new technology. This guy is a big poster going "I AM STUCK IN THE PAST". Good odds on this challenge from parties unknown being either a test that'll push him forward, getting him unstuck in life, or the jaws of regret finally cutting him in two. And he's the protagonist, so... Well, ok. He's ONE of the protagonists. There are plenty of other ones who could carry on, supposing he pulls off a face-heel turn as he becomes obsessed with the past, which wouldn't be a half-bad twist!
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May 23, 2016 03:04
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I'm only halfway through the third update so far but I just want to say that his is a good lp and this looks like an interesting adventure game, which is really saying something. So far 100% of the lps I've seen that mentioned or focused on mindjacking have been good lps. Although so far they have been very different to the point where the word "mind-jack" has been the only common thread between the two. ...Can you guess which other one I'm talking about? Ok, you guessed it, it's Mindjack! Seriously though I like this lp.
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May 23, 2016 03:12
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I like the video format, especially if it's easier for you to put out updates. This game seems to keep heading in the right direction, but then shoots itself in the foot with something really clunky. Like the fact that he mentioned the embryos, but never suggests that he plans to have them implanted some day, which might at least have foreshadowed his reaction. Or the fact that you have this mystery going on with the computer and then out of nowhere it says "HUMAN ERROR" just in case we missed that they're doing the same thing 2001 did. So I guess we're in Perth or somewhere like that?
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May 23, 2016 03:50
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Other side of the Ocean, I think. Somewhere in Somalia.  Let's see if we can flesh out them backstories a little bit, eh? That's one thing I think TB does a good job of - hinting at a broad world. THROUGH TRAGEDY! And grumpy old men.
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May 26, 2016 05:49
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First puzzle I'm almost certain I did the same way. I got Lao to hack the door though. I found the idea of genetically engineered suicide bombers something simultaneously disgusting and totally something that would happen if that technology were available.
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May 26, 2016 08:00
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In regards to that 'social score' you mentioned: The program is called Sesame Credit, and it's a product of Alibaba(think Chinese Amazon). Information available is limited, but there are plenty of rumors. You should look into it, though I advise a teaspoon of salt.
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May 26, 2016 10:07
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Yeah, digital security and privacy is enough of a thing that it might be cool to do a little side-update on some recent topics in it.
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May 26, 2016 16:37
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Relevant: one of the jobs I applied for has the following description:quote:We protect children and save lives.
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May 26, 2016 21:36
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Any word on where they get these chatlogs, emails and documents from? 24 hour monitoring staff sounds a wee bit like a totalitarian nightmare . And while protecting children sounds like a noble goal, I bet you'd just have to change a few lines to get a program which checks for political dissidents from early age..
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May 26, 2016 23:19
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Depending on how the messages are sent, getting the data might be less of a problem. A lot of services pull up a ton of data on people. I mean, my bank knows more about me at any given moment then my family does, and I'm pretty sure google can look at my emails to advertise to me. Depends on who they sell the product to. Schools? Concerned parents? Apparently South Korea is pretty big on monitoring apps for their children's phones. Even aside from that, there's probably enough public forward facing information put out by most kids on Facebook to give a system like that plenty of data to chew on. edit: Also I'm really glad you made the spill his guts joke, I played the old versions so I had pretty much the same thought. This part was fun.
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May 27, 2016 07:11
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Air is lava! posted:Any word on where they get these chatlogs, emails and documents from? 24 hour monitoring staff sounds a wee bit like a totalitarian nightmare . And while protecting children sounds like a noble goal, I bet you'd just have to change a few lines to get a program which checks for political dissidents from early age.. Who are we kidding, that was probably what the program was originally designed for.
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May 28, 2016 01:57
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Zenithe posted:First puzzle I'm almost certain I did the same way. I got Lao to hack the door though. I don't know, 18+ years is a long lead time for building a bomb. Especially if your "undetectable" bombers can be picked up by scanners anyway.
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May 29, 2016 00:14
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inflatablefish posted:I don't know, 18+ years is a long lead time for building a bomb. Especially if your "undetectable" bombers can be picked up by scanners anyway. I like to imagine they're mostly used where they're made, and Texas and the surrounding areas sounds like it's an absolute hell hole in this setting, so they probably don't have wiz bang sensors and such. Also, if they're secessionists and there's some Federal government still trying to assert order they're probably less suicide bombers that sneak into places and just ambulatory IED's.
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May 29, 2016 17:48
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Also, it's possible that they're quickly matured - or that this one is unusually old. Yeah, don't worry, maybe they just make KIDS explode themselves!   Anyway, no prize for determining that Giel not answering his door is a bad sign, but whether that's bad for HIM or for US remains to be seen... THIS TIME!
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May 29, 2016 23:41
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southerners and greens - don't forget collard greens. And okra, though I guess that's not leafy. (I love hush puppies.) Never seen grits with gravy unless the gravy was on a main meat that was being served with the grits.
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May 30, 2016 02:19
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Does messing around with incorrect AI configurations result in any particularly amusing answers? Making the barman a maid seems like it could be entertaining, for example.
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May 30, 2016 02:27
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Hey Bacter, I've sent you a PM.
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May 30, 2016 03:12
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And, in the spirit of giving, I'm now sending that PM on to all of you: Here it is! (button pending) This is probably as good a time as any for a little meditation on the power and danger of future tech. This is (supposedly, Zen says) a hard dialogue to find, but it's a neat little bit of counter-balance to the genbomb guy we talked to earlier. Increasing our power and control over nature offers much in the way of benefits - we can make of ourselves what we want. A century ago, Max wouldn't have had the options she would if she was around today. "Some of the engineering challenges - a sidebar posted:Knowing as I do a bit about genetics, our "somewhat backward" suggestion for how her change was done would involve changing the genetic code of (presumably) every cell in her body - germline and non-germline. If that's an old-fashioned idea, and the state of the art has advanced since we knew about it, we can assume the procedure is even more thorough in the "present" day of TB. But. There are potential trade-offs. If you can change yourself, somebody else can change you too. And sometimes they want you to be a bomb. Power managed badly can have bad results. If you can design an AI to do all your chores and be a sexbot, it needs to be rugged and capable. If you then fail to design it properly, like, say, having NO SAFETY FEATURES, it might rip open your guts.
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May 30, 2016 05:37
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Southern Grits are just made with ground up hominy, so they're not far off. As for gravy, no, but grits go with everything, so I'm sure some place down here puts gravy on their grits. Can't be any weirder then shrimp. I still miss the old sprites for the food service and drink bots. The new ones aren't bad, but I liked the simple nature of the old ones. I like how quick the charger works, though. I can't imagine how hot the cell would be after dumping enough electricity to power an industrial robot into it over a few seconds. Also Jesus the poor CEL forensics team that shows up and has to deal with an ambulatory Cheffie. I had forgotten that part. edit: I almost forgot, but Cheffie also has a good line where she explains how she can make a food Regis just made up if you keep pestering her. What's odd though is that I just googled the food and it does exist, so I don't know if it's a lack of diligence on the writers part, or what. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 12:45 on May 30, 2016 |
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May 30, 2016 12:37
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There was also one line where Max Lao asks whether Cheffie can make some Chinese dish, which leads to a brief exchange in probably badly-pronounced Cantonese. And if you give the maid the bartender personality she begins to speak with a stereotypical Southern US accent. Somehow, there seemed to be too few body parts strewn around to account for all of Giel Van der Wal. No sign of his head, for example. Maybe most of him wound up in the jacuzzi next to Daakarai. Kopijeger fucked around with this message at 15:15 on May 30, 2016 |
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May 30, 2016 14:25
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Chantelle did a poor job disassembling him if she didn't take apart his hand. I also wonder how Max is a cop but unsure of whether an obvious bloodstain is blood or not? Do you think it would it be easier to completely remove & replace the Y chromosome with a new X, or try to 'rewrite' the existing Y into an X?
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May 30, 2016 18:53
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Honestly, removal and replacement would probably be several orders of magnitude easier. Think of it this way: the DNA in a cell is like a library full of "how-to" books. You're not allowed to check out a book, all you can do is make a copy of a certain page. The page is full of instructions of how to build something, say a ladder or a mailbox. If you need a mailbox, you open the book, make a copy of the relevant page, then construct the item from raw materials using the page as a blueprint. That's the (unbelievably over-simplified) explanation for DNA (the books), RNA (the copies), and proteins (the actual things you make). There IS some DNA that does different stuff, there is some RNA that does different stuff, but 95% of the actual work in a cell is done by proteins. What most viruses do, in this metaphor, is basically sneak a new page into the library, and leave it on the copier, so that new copies are being constantly made. The trick is that what they're making copies of is themselves. Those new pages then get transferred to other libraries, where they're copied on like that. So, in this metaphor, imagine your job is to erase one book from the library, and replace it with another. Just think in terms of books. What would be easier: taking a book and throwing it into a shredder and putting a copy of a different book in its place, or opening the book, scratching out every word, and writing in a different word in its place? What Charlie was suggesting was basically creating a virus that, instead of a few pages (the RNA templates for more viruses) would actually carry an entire book (the X chromosome) into the library. That virus would have to be even a little different than normal. There are a few options. The virus could penetrate the nucleus, where the chromosomes are floating, and then shed its outer layer, letting the new X chromosome float freely around. There's a problem with this, though. You need the virus to touch EVERY CELL in the body, and trust me, that's not gonna happen based off of one injection. What you'd need would be a virus that would penetrate the cell, deposit its genetic cargo, then assemble more of itself and go on to infect other cells. That of course introduces a whole HOST of new problems: 1) You don't want one cell getting "infected" more than once by the virus, so you'd need to make the virus do something to the cell that would keep it from getting re-infected by the virus again, while also not altering other properties by the cell. 2) The virus shouldn't assemble more of itself indefinitely, so you'll need some way to stop the self-assembly at some point. 3) The X chromosomes being assembled for placement into the virus (not the one inside the initial virus) shouldn't be available for transcription (DNA -> RNA), otherwise while the virus was assembling more of itself, you'd have expression levels roughly N times higher than normal, because the cell would be drawing from N chromosomes, instead of the X it's used to. BUT you do want the new X chromosome to be available, so you'd need some way to stop transcription on all the (identical) X chromosomes EXCEPT the initial one. 4) You'd need a very specialized virus to carry a genetic payload equal to an entire human chromosome. Most of those lil' guys just have a little RNA. In fact, now that I think about it, you'd need to use a retrovirus for SURE. Retroviruses are viruses that break the central dogma of molecular biology (which is: information flows in one direction, DNA -> RNA -> protein) by translating RNA back into DNA. Here we need RNA that codes for DNA to assemble more of itself. 5) Mutation is going to be a huge problem. Part of what makes a virus a virus is a high mutation rate. Normally, organisms like to keep their rates of mutation low, because 99.999something percent of mutations are either not helpful or outright harmful to an organism. It's true, most combinations will eventually be tried by an organism, but that takes millions of years. You'll have a few random ones, but big animals generally like to keep their mutation rates low. Viruses are totally different. There are a jillion of them, they don't live long, and they are incentivized to try every genetic possibility, because all you need is a few to survive in order for them to carry on. In fact, if I'm remembering correctly, in most humans with HIV over a several-year period, every possible genetic combination of the virus will exist in their bodes at least for a while. That's beneficial to the virus, because a tiny percentage of these mutations will confer antiviral resistance, or help them evade the immune system, or something like that. But here, since we've designed a virus that intentionally enters every cell of a human, random mutations are unacceptable. What if it mutated and now lost the DNA, and just made more of itself forever? That'd just be a new illness. So, yes, there are tons and tons and tons of hurdles to actually doing something like this. And YET, it's still being investigated, and is literally a cool promising field. I don't think anybody is seriously doing research for sex changes in it, at least not yet. I'd imagine you'd want to do something like this before puberty hit, and then you wonder if pre-pubescent kid would be able to make a decision like this for themselves. There are problems, all'm'sayin' Bacter fucked around with this message at 18:32 on May 31, 2016 |
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May 30, 2016 23:46
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Don't know why it hasn't been posted already, but part 8 has been up on Youtube for a couple of days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2AIb4L7VWE
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Jun 6, 2016 11:30
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Bacter posted:There are problems, all'm'sayin' There's another problem even, and it's a problem that is literally bigger. Chromosomes are stonking huge. Most viruses can carry DNA (well, RNA that becomes DNA) that is somewhere from 1500 to 3000 base pairs long. In Bacter's books/pages analogy, this is a page or two, with about 2000 letters of text. A quick run to wikipedia reminds me that the X chromosome is  156,040,895 base pairs long. This is a giant encyclopedia set. Once you get up to these sizes, basically all the machinery that a virus uses to sneak its DNA into the host cell just flat out doesn't work anymore. You have to package DNA this size in a bunch of proteins that stabilize and organize it (called histones) or else the enormous molecule flops all over the place, tangles up on itself, has all sorts of complicated chemical reactions with itself, and generally self-destructs into an unusable wad of chemicals in seconds. Even if they didn't, the chemical gateways that viruses use to get their DNA into the cell to begin with aren't even remotely big enough to accept such a large molecule. Even if that worked, trying to integrate something that size into an existing nucleus without destroying it is impractical at best, you'd be killing 999 out of every 1000 affected cells. Ironically a failure rate of this size probably wouldn't kill the patient, you'd just get a tiny bump of necrosis at the injection site as all the viruses you injected infected one cell, killed it, and then failed to spread to damage the host further. Long story short (ha ha), this is the chemical equivalent of burning down a wing of the library of congress and quickly rebuilding it without anyone noticing.
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Jun 6, 2016 19:23
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Speaking as somebody who actually worked in a lab studying genetic engineering once, I would think the easier way to adjust sex wouldn't involve a full body rewrite of the genetic code per se. First off, that's an crazy amount of work to change every drat cell no matter what vector you use. Viruses run the terrible risk of severe immune response (this in fact infamously killed Jesse Gelsinger, the first person to die in a clinical gene therapy trial) even when you aren't trying to use the insane viral loadout required for taking care of every single cell. Granted for Technobabylon here they have nanotechnology available which could probably be tolerated better, but I'd still think trying to change every cell to XX or vice versa would be more danger than it's worth. Second, it's not technically necessary to remove the Y chromosome to generate a female phenotype. It's not XX that makes someone female so much as certain sex determination genes on Y that turn the "default" female template to male. In fact female cells are designed to randomly deactivate one of their two X chromosomes (producing something known as a Barr body) so they don't have excessive activation of X-linked genes. There are in fact many women out there with an XY genotype thanks to issues with Y function; they're not fertile normally I believe (and IIRC there can be ovarian cancer issues) but they are physically female in every other way. Third, the real big issue is it's not just having the right genes but having them turned on the right way and the right time. I would think just swapping the gene code would not actually change the phenotype of a post pubescent human enough to do a full gender swap on its own, the genitalia structures and secondary sex characteristics already grew the way they were. Knocking out the Y chromosome might make a penis non-functional but the thing wouldn't just magically fall off and get replaced with a vagina. Based on those considerations and my understanding of the tech in Technobabylon, I would assume the easiest way to perform transsexual change would be to clone the appropriate sex organs using the patient's DNA (and a donor/artificial Y chromosome for female to male transition) and surgically implant. Some genetic alteration would probably be required to deal with things like hormonal reactions (men have very real health risks if exposed to excess estrogen; not just enlarged breasts but thing like type 2 diabetes), but in general I don't see any benefit of going full XX/XY outside of the actual testes/ovaries vs. just editing areas to remove unwanted reactions to the changes in organs. Truth be told given just the technical challenges of getting a fertile transition vs a purely structural one I'd almost think it would be easier to just create functional but infertile genitalia and deal with the infertility with in vitro fertilization, but Technobabylon has crazy enough genetic tech that I could see them going all the way there.
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Jun 6, 2016 21:27
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Kopijeger posted:Don't know why it hasn't been posted already, but part 8 has been up on Youtube for a couple of days: That's because I hadn't reviewed it to make sure there wasn't some audio issue - sorry folks! I'll get the graphic up soon.
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Jun 7, 2016 04:50
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quote:Cheffie quote:Lao is kind of a sociopath. Kicking a person who died less than a minute ago isn't really nice. lllllllllllllllllll fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Jun 8, 2016 |
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Jun 8, 2016 21:08
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Howdy y'all! Thanks for your patience as I looked for a dang job to keep the bacterhaus from going underwater. I'm happy to say things worked out swimmingly, which means, yes, MORE TECHNOBABYLON! Let's celebrate Canada Day, and then also the Fourth of July, with some AWKWARD INTERACTIONS! Here's the link to the old one...  And the new!  In this cracking update, we begin to tie together the diverse threads of plot!
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Jul 2, 2016 05:38
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I'd wondered if there were any biological connection between Mandala and Charlie, considering conservation of detail/the fact that we only saw four embryos despite the IDs implying five/her complexion and age. I guess her discussion with Quince mostly denies that theory, though it would make for a fine motive for Baxter to engineer things against her. "Salam" is one derivation of the (relatively) famous triliteral SLM, which at its core refers to wholeness and safety. The general idea in Semitic languages (those being Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) is that the roots of most verbs and nouns are constructed from a sequence of consonants, and then variations on vowels and auxiliary consonants clarify the specific meaning as derived from that root. This is why Hebrew uses "shalom" and Maltese uses "sliem" as a greeting in similar ways. And thus what's interesting here is that Jinsil says "Ahlan wa sahlan", with an N at the end rather than an M. Either they're putting on an act by speaking fake Arabic (which seems unlikely given their background and the game's stance towards worldbuilding), or they're speaking a language related to Arabic that nonetheless isn't Semitic. Obvious candidates here include various other Afro-Asiatic languages like something in the Berber (so few vowels) or Chadic (lots of folks in Niger or Nigeria) categories, though other things that took loanwords from Arabic like Turkish or Farsi would also work. Edit: Apparently Jinsil is a female Korean name? Now I'm really wondering about what language she's using. Don't mind me, I'm a bit of a trivia buff. NGDBSS fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Jul 2, 2016 |
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Jul 2, 2016 07:24
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Holy poo poo you are observant NGDBSS.
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Jul 2, 2016 08:23
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Yeah that might get front page'd - that's the kind of detail stuff I love to see!
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Jul 2, 2016 08:49
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At least according to google (which is a caveat that I have to state, because I definitely do not know this myself) it appears to be an Arabic phrase. quote:Literal Meaning 'ahlan wasahlan أهلا وسهلا comes from an old saying that shows Arab hospitality to strangers; 'ahlan أهلا means "family," as in "You've come to stay with family," and sahlan سهلا here means a flat land or plain where grass/food is abundant and to be shared with visitors. quote:Everyone knows that ahlan wa sahlan أهلا وسهلا means ‘welcome’ in Arabic, but as with many phrases in the language, the more linguistically-minded student might ask what the story behind it is.
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Jul 2, 2016 17:24
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That makes sense, at least. I guess that the phrase just was using a different form of welcome with moderately different connotations (since "ahlan wa sahlan" is, as above, explicitly meant for strangers). Apparently Saudi Arabian Airlines even uses it as the name of their inflight magazine.
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Jul 2, 2016 17:31
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It strikes me that the concept of internationalization is something I should probably talk about at some point, especially because the game does seem to be presenting us with both its advantages and disadvantages pretty strongly. I might want to do a short recording about it or some such, but as a little seed of an idea, I'd suggest that we think about how Carlie and Mandala would both epitomize a certain kind of "worldwide citizen". Ha! So vague. Anyway, he's the next chapter where we cause major international incidents that are instantly thrown under the plot and forgotten instantly. We also meet the dumbest subculture in the world!  (Incidentally, sorry for the skippin' early on. It resolves later in the video!)
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Jul 8, 2016 05:18
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