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Akratic Method posted:I forget what the conclusion was, but I know there was a muslim astronaut (Malaysian, I think?) up on the ISS at one point, and there was a debate among muslim scholars about the qibla and what the meaning of instructions like "starting at sundown" are while in orbit. So there are definitely people thinking about these issues! I definitely remember this, because I remember the conclusion was that even if you are orbiting the Earth every few minutes, stuff that is done "daily" is to be done once per Earth day. There was speculation that this might have implications for astronauts traveling at relativistic speeds. Would Al Falah have to be concerned about this? Well, Barnard's Star is 6 light-years away, and Ms. Kiahk was a fifth-generation spaceborn. Let's call that a transit time of 150-200 years. Let's take the low end. 6 ly / 150 y = a speed of 0.04c. That produces a time dilation factor of 1/sqrt(1 - (v/c)^2) = 1/sqrt(1-.0016) = 1/sqrt(.9984)= 1.0008. That works out to a 24-hour day on Earth taking 23 hours, 58 minutes, and 51 seconds onboard the Seedships. That is not really noticable day to day, but it does add up. The Muslim population has a duty ("salah") to pray five times a day, and ship and Earth time desync by about 70 seconds each day. So, while in transit, every eight months or so, a sixth daily prayer would then be performed. Upon arrival at Al-Jalidia, the flow of time relative to Earth was restored to normal, but the colonists continued to mark eight-month anniversaries with a small celebration to honor the journey from Old Earth as well as Earth herself.
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Aug 16, 2019 05:42
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Supremacy - Purity. Al Falah was forged from a people that were discarded by the rest of the world, and they proved themselves the equals of the mightiest. Together, they know they can do anything. But then, their primary cultural directive on the generation ships was that they must not forget where they came from. I would expect a strong cishumanism streak within our culture. Alien doggos are cute! We should be kind to alien doggos. They are our neighbors. But we are not alien doggos. We are their neighbors. Cythereal posted:Oh, I know. Every single affinity can be read in a negative way, and I myself noted that I couldn't think of a positive fictional portrayal of any of the hybrid affinities - the best example of Supremacy-Harmony I can think of (or Harmony-Supremacy, as you prefer) is the tabletop setting Eclipse Phase, which is, uh... not an optimistic view of the future. There are two sayings about transhumanist fiction and cyberpunk that I've carried with me for a long time. Both seem relevant to the core debate behind the Affinities.
So call this a vote for an optimistic post-cyberpunk society that eventually will turn its eyes back to Earth... Servetus posted:I feel that it should be pointed out that this means Send Armies through to conquer Earth and forcibly upload the inhabitants into robot bodies I must admit that this is one of the things I was hoping Rising Tide changed, though I do recall noting ruefully at the time how we seem to have devolved from "humanity transforms into immaterial godlike energy beings" to more material godlike energy beings like the Planetmind and eventually we just sort of shrug and go "gently caress it, cyborging for everyone." That said, now I want a "sequel" that is a global-scale RTS set on Earth after multiple factions across the local cluster achieve Supremacy and Purity victories and are battling with each other over the fate of the Terran Remnant.
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Aug 18, 2019 07:32
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Randalor posted:Well obviously it's because all of those colony ships were using cryo-technology to keep everyone in stasis until the ships landed. Our ship was the only one that had people awake at the helm. The only other survivors are the ones that are not-very-secretly XCOM, right? The Providence Discovery was a trap 
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Aug 20, 2019 06:02
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It's interesting that "chitin" is a resource. In Terrestrial life, not only is it part of beetles and the like, but also part of fishscales and is a defining feature of fungal cells. It's almost like they were picking a biological resource that would make sense on multiple possible world types.
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Aug 21, 2019 07:38
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At least Elodie got to become queen.
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Aug 22, 2019 05:01
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Cythereal posted:'Earth' isn't what our planet is called in Arabic. The Arabic name for our world is in fact 'Al-Ard.' I assume it's a coincidence or a side effect of the Silk Road or something -- since Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language and not Indo-European -- but that word is awful close to the Germanic languages names for "Earth". Dutch, in particular, has "aarde" for "earth" both as the substance and the planet. As for English, the other of the initial refugee languages taken in in Ard, and one that other factions might use when whispering to each other about the Al Falah... someone may have retained enough of Tolkien's work to remember the name "Arda".
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Aug 26, 2019 08:49
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I'm convinced by the argument that Al Falah has, and thus must, become the salvation they were sent to find amongst the stars.GunnerJ posted:I liked how aware of the possibility of getting conquered by aliens the advocate for forcibly liberating Earth from its backwardness was. The djinn, as full synthetic intelligences, are prone to some of the same cognitive biases we once thought were the weaknesses of flesh... but the Muses don't let you hide from the implications of your positions. 
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Sep 1, 2019 01:06
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Cythereal posted:No one is getting uplifted against their will. But in light of Earth's conditions, people will flock to the return of Al Falah in the hopes of joining them. Cultural Victory!
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Sep 1, 2019 16:00
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Cythereal posted:Americans, and a megacorp. I cannot think of any way to write them as good guys. Given their sponsor ability, and their logo, I would find it difficult to write ARC as anything other than as a group intentionally basing themselves on the Bavarian Illuminati. Given how much was lost in the Mistake, their idea of the Bavarian Illuminati may have come from the card games. Yes, that's supposed to be the Great Seal there. Yes. Of course it is. Nothing to see here.
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Sep 5, 2019 08:42
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I was referring to Illuminati: The Game of Conspiracy. The historical Illuminati were an overtly anarchist offshoot of Freemasonry that splintered off and were swiftly crushed in the early 19th century, where it lived on forever in the fever dreams of conspiracy theorists as the Deepest of Deep States, which was hilarious in the 1990s and is grimly infuriating today.
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Sep 6, 2019 04:57
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Do population units represent anything in particular in CBE? Do we have an estimate for the human (or at least human-template) population of Al-Jalidia?
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Sep 6, 2019 08:00
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No matter how subtle the entirely non-supernatural techno-wizard, 10kg of iron to the face will seriously cramp their style.
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Sep 7, 2019 04:51
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Spuzzz posted:I wouldn't want to play catch with that dad. His dad managed to hit himself in the throat with a fastball he threw overhand.
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Sep 8, 2019 10:04
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Yeah, this was a great read and I enjoyed seeing CBE portrayed as a game worth playing instead of merely enduring. The only part that wasn't clear to me as someone with only passing knowledge of Civ V and basically zero knowledge of CBE was that I couldn't tell which parts of the game were the broken parts and which parts were just the result of the rewards of baseline-sensible strategies and a low difficulty level. And that isn't really a fault of the writing, since this wasn't a dissection LP.
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Sep 9, 2019 00:47
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As usual the thread blasts off long before I can get around to checking in, but this looks like a fun setup to me. I'm also glad we got Atlantean and not water landings, because really, it would just be embarassing to have INTEGR leading humanity to its new destiny from a floating point.
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Sep 13, 2019 06:37
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Cythereal posted:Huh. I was under the impression genealogy stuff was a weirdly American thing. Duly noted. There are two America-specific things I can think of in my experience as one:
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Sep 16, 2019 02:24
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Cythereal posted:Al Falah at the end of the previous playthrough would be judging others based on their production output, how advanced their orbital units if any are, and their number of international trade routes. Man. No wonder Earth was so laughable.
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Sep 19, 2019 08:42
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Cythereal posted:Honestly, Purity's been frustrating as hell to write, and I think it's contributed to how my heart's not in this like it was in the Al Falah game. Purity is more about what it is not than what it is, and plays badly with the tech based affinity stuff. Most Supremacy and Harmony techs, sure I could readily imagine how they'd impact and change society. Thinking about those changes was something I really loved about the Al Falah game. But what does advanced hover tech have to do with Purity? Or ballistics? Or alien genetics? Or transcendental mathematics? I characterized Purity as being the Star Trek affinity, but the truth is that an awful lot of Star Trek is commentary on real-world issues, thinly veiled through the lens of science fiction. This is no bad thing, it's been an essential function of science fiction from the beginning, and many of Trek's best episodes like Errand of Mercy, The Drumhead, Duet, and Living Witness are about taking on real-world issues in precisely that fashion. There is, I think, an echo to modern political attitudes in this, but it's only tangentially touching on how you're writing INTEGR and it doesn't come across as criticism because you're not writing them as antagonists. Positively stated: The core agreement between Supremacy and Harmony is that baseline humanity is actually insufficient to meet the challenges that it faces. Humanity was a parasite that killed its first host, Earth; if it doesn't want to do the same beyond Earth it needs to either alter its nature such that it can coexist with its host, and maybe even advance from parasite to symbiote (Harmony), or alter itself to the point that it may stand alone and treat the worlds as independent organisms that are helpful but something truly apart (Supremacy). Purity rejects this. Purity says that we just have to stop loving up. Purity says that the way you end atrocities is by not committing atrocities. There are disasters enough to cause hardship on their own. In the positively stated version of this, which both CBE and Star Trek do (and Star Control 1 & 2, while we're at it), it is generally acknowledged that this isn't something humanity just wakes up one day and does. There's some enormous disaster in the past -- a global war in Star Trek and Star Control, and the broader Mistake in CBE -- and this results in humanity as a whole getting scared onto the straight and narrow path. If your heart's not in it, perhaps you reject this vision of humanity as being able to set aside the worst of the human condition at will.  (The negatively-stated version of it, which you have not been commenting on and which CBE's entire premise kind of negates, describes political movements where maximalist adherence to their agenda is taken as the very least anybody can do, worth exactly zero credit, praise, or acknowledgement as alliance or accomplishment, and falling short of it is condemned as willful villainy. This is a no-dystopia zone, so I leave mapping that to real or fictional organizations and movements as an exercise for the reader.)
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Sep 28, 2019 22:13
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I'm going to vote Exodus both for the historical relevance to INTEGR's remit and out of pure, personal, petty spite about making it to Earth before Matunde Barrow does.
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Sep 29, 2019 03:13
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Cythereal posted:It's not my favorite quote from that game, but it felt appropriate and feels more prescient all the time. Things have definitely changed since the 90s, though. I imagine this quote at the top of Facebook's privacy settings page.
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Oct 5, 2019 23:07
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Ashsaber posted:A lot of my problem was just the thought of Purity Pete decrying from inside a sealed dome that transhumanism may never work and they shouldn't bet on it when Harmony Harry is running through the Miasma without a suit as a morning jog and Supremacy Susie may not even need to breathe at all. I couldn't really get that in my head as the latter two shouldn't exist to the former rather than just being 'meh, not my thing'. And even then, Purity Pete can don his environment suit and join them, confident in the knowledge that he can get the suit upgraded without a extended hospital visit.
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Oct 8, 2019 08:40
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