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LatwPIAT posted:The Whipper is potentially capable of holding a firearm, but by default it doesn't have the skill to fire it. The GM could always just give it the skill to do so, but unlike Psi powers, it's not really suggested you do so. Exsurgents tend towards melee attacks, while TITAN creations often have firearms. You're out of date - the version in X-risks is significantly souped up in comparison to the core book This is for the Slip, Ruqinzhe! posted:
The things have gone from a generic shoot 'em space monster, to a fully capable and probably sapient Exsurgent infantry and, with a bit of tweaking, worker unit. quote:If the Exsurgent Virus had required active nanotech to be a threat, it would A) have given a reason to not just have nanobots everywhere, B) made exsurgent attacks less save-or-die if you weren't full of nanomagic and C) give exsurgents an actual attack plan other than "lol lets just lick them all so they get infected B)" focused around reaching and infecting a hab's nanofabricators. While giving conservative factions an actual point, a reason to resort to older and more secure tech, and to resultingly also have a more classic economy other than "we're villaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains lol I'm not so sure how different that is from the base game, really. The Big E always gets exponentially more dangerous when high grade fabrication is available, and I'm not so sure how that would play that differently then trying to stop a bunch of, say, Skrik exsurgents from pouring Skrik blenderized into a fine liquid into the hab's primary water cisterns, and deliberately primitive hardware is already in use in many counter-exsurgency operations throughout the system, as detailed in firewall - you need a pretty high pixel ratio for a Basilisk Hack. It's the two major ideas that EP tries to push at the same time conflicting again. I do think possibly giving onboard nanoware a large risk of inducing a critfail or similar negative effect in 'resist Exsurgent infection' rolls is a good idea - fluff it as Bionanobots being able to subvert the hives to manufacture a nano-tech version of themselves or, use cognitive nanotech as a Basilisk vector or something. Edit: Incidentally, I dibs Devotees and Firewall, for when I find the time. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Sep 10, 2019 |
# ¿ Sep 10, 2019 02:23 |
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# ¿ May 20, 2024 23:56 |
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PurpleXVI posted:Well, primarily it would remove the massively lame save-or-exsurgent factor from things, unless you pop exsurgents as a surprise in a mission not slated to involve them, players could divest themselves of nanotech-based augs and gear and bring something more old-school and ruggedized. Like, don't just make it a choice between having a penalty or not, make it an option to make yourself entirely resistant to those lovely save-or-dies. Of course the exsurgents can still stab you in the brain or shoot you, in those cases, but at least that's usually established in graduations of dead rather than instant dead. I argue that it might break them too far in the other direction - exsurgents should never be no-sellable completely, and they'd never get to the nanotech if they were completely dependent on it; I'd make it easier to resist though, like possibly inoculations that slow the virus enough that a healing vat can clean it out; - take it from save or die, to save or get to a doctor fast, or die. I can see a few places where I can lean on that political economics thing - like, I'd explore a subplot that suggests that Firewall is suffering badly from the problems that their rep system causes, such as patronage network problems with some of the big names, like Bainbrige's relationship with Das Frettchen (who's responsible for blowing at least one Firewall op by betraying it to Ozma), or it being simply hard to attack certain high level players such as (hypothetically) Rokuzawa Chi's increasingly rampant and aberrant forking/mind edit habits and their disturbing tendency to show up in various singularity seeker and other neurologically exhuman circles that is shielding bad actors, often to a dangerous degree, or the increasing problems caused by a hypothetical Titanian Clique distorting Firewall operations in the region, and possibly letting unacceptably dangerous research take place on Iapetus, for example.
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# ¿ Sep 10, 2019 03:38 |
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In a review I once wrote of the original book - I might clean it up and post it here at some point - I always said that the exoplanet stuff was always the most interesting and compelling part of the setting, as all the dead aliens felt legitimately sad. 'Oh no, not again'
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# ¿ Sep 11, 2019 21:50 |
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Joe Slowboat posted:
Do you want the thing randomly detecting ghosts as you eat dinner? Probably not.
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# ¿ Sep 12, 2019 00:17 |
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PurpleXVI posted:
This was the first part of a hinted at plot in EP 1st ed - the Ultimates there were of a specific faction in the movement, the aptly named Overhumanists; the thing to remember, above all, is that the Ultimates are essentially the Exhuman clade with the best PR and R&D. The 'willingness' bit has a nasty little bite in the tail - anyone who isn't, is by definition inferior - there is an ideological debate between those who want to dare anyone else to come to their level, and those who want to make those who are not them serfs; the latter faction runs Ultimate Gate ops; they were known for some drat nasty poo poo during the Fall and before - I'll go into greater detail on that during my Firewall F&F. Also, remember the 'human' part of the name. Where this will go in 2nd ed, if anywhere, is unknown. Of course there would be Master Race types when genetics tech could make that somewhat less risable. Why would there not be?
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# ¿ Sep 13, 2019 00:43 |
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Man, I bet SA was great on Pre-Fall Earth - I can imagine the biohacking disaster mock thread where folks went to laugh at proto-Exhumans (before they became genuinely dangerous) - I bet some Exhuman-hunter crows still cite the posts on Abandoned Weakness or others as useful data on their early projects - or the Photo Chop Shop thread in The Skin Bin, or whatever. Or at least, it would have been funny until some idiot Basilisk hacked GBS or YOSPOS. If there's still goons by then, there's probably entire Firewall servers commonly populated by us. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Sep 13, 2019 |
# ¿ Sep 13, 2019 22:53 |
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Someone has to do Shadowrun 6th ed, with a focus on system. It's not gonna be me. It's reportedly so impractical that it killed an live entire campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn1cYgG0bQw Time to draw lots. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Sep 17, 2019 |
# ¿ Sep 17, 2019 13:43 |
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The trick, therefore, is switch hits and go terrorize the other horrors that go bump in the night on regular occasions regularly.
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# ¿ Sep 18, 2019 05:38 |
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm sober, and I'm still way too mad about this stupid game, and I may have to do a brief review just to piss on it from a great height. Don't make it brief, I want to see you whizz on it protractedly.
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# ¿ Nov 21, 2019 15:10 |
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Quick question about post formatting? I've got my first EP F&F ready, but I'm not sure how to get it all in - do you edit to add the extra text or do I have to buy plat?
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# ¿ Dec 20, 2019 20:30 |
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Night10194 posted:Is the problem that it's too long for a single post or something? If so, break it into multiple posts. I've seen multiple posts that are somehow over the limit - Halloween Jack's VTM post in the last page of last thread - https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3758962&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1165 -, when I check it against the box is well over the limit. Is this forums fuckery and I break it up, or is this some aspect of the forum I'm not aware of?
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# ¿ Dec 20, 2019 21:04 |
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Okay, techical bullshit aside, let us begin. Eclipse Phase: Firewall Chapter one: Intro and Preface I like to imagine that the two characters here are team mates, and that she’s covering the big flexbot as they pull out ’Security’s here, Gremlin!’ ‘You’d think this place being ON FIRE would make them have second thoughts!’ Intro First of all, I make no bones about the fact that I disagree vehemently with the politics and Weltanschauung of Eclipse Phase as a work. They are naive, and are inescapably bioreductionist and eugenic in nature, no matter how sincere their leftist outlook is, as that is what the subculture they come from inescapably is. I make no bones about my former membership in the subculture, and how it informs my views on this product – indeed, one of the reasons I have interest in EP is, as it was diberately written to include as many concepts from this subculture as possible as lore elements, it makes a good starting to interrogate, critique and own the thought processes it displays. I will also admit to occasionally being possibly overcharitable, as I used to be quite fond of the setting. To preface this review, EP, fundamentally, is a prosylatory work dealing in the two main modes of that subculture - about the super awesome immortal drugs and sex future, and the ‘Oh god, we’re going to the world unless you listen to us, please Firewall is a supplement that has a strong ratio in favor of the latter, which probably is the reason why it’s one of the more compelling (despite myself) books in the line, as I both find the study of horrors and plagues to be fascinating, to the point of it being a career I have chosen, as an epidemiologist in training. It also is lower in the amount of ink/pixels spent on posthuman & , which goes some length in making it more tolerable. It is also interesting as a work in the setting, written mostly as an operations manual for Firewall agents, the only vaguely interesting playstyle the game has for me, as I have little interest in transhuman life & the about what it means to be human, having been completely burned out on that sort of fiction long ago. Anyways, as always, an EP supplement opens with fiction – this a continuation of a story that started in Panopticon, one of what was supposed to be a series of books about various nitty-gritty aspects of the setting ( habitats, uplifts and title related, here); I have no idea of the disposition of this after Second Ed, after the what I suspect was a tumultuous dev cycle as well as what might have been some ugly drama between Rob Boyle and Jack Graham.* I suspect the ‘Your Whispering Muse’ books are a leaner successor. To date: Two of our main characters, Jake Carter and Kim Sage, Captain of the Elysium Rangers (with her baboons in tow), a law enforcement group in the titular region of Mars, had been in pursuit of a lost Sentinel, an uplift, one Bobdog LaGrange who had been abducted by a Yazuka group, who turned out to have been using him for TCM – the triads considering such a cultural embarrassment. After rescuing him, they find a somewhat more unnerving form of animal component extraction in the rear – an operation extracting Whipper Exsurgent juice for sale. After turning over the site to the police and burning the exsugents, they move out to get checked for Exsurgent infection, and do something about the fact that their sentinel has been muted. Anyway, the story opens as they arrive at their doctor of choice, one ‘Cagehopper’, a black market morph and genetic engineering specialist to make sure they aren’t going to grow tentacles. quote:Pretty standard. Just a precaution.” He said [quote= This reaction was cantankerous even for Cagehopper] [Carter? What the gently caress, citizen? You’re heavy a few bodies.] [Heavy a few on account of we all got coughed on during the last run. Need you to take a look,] Park messaged. [And you show up in a cop truck?] Park messaged, [Look, you’re not gonna like this, but my shotgun on this ride’s a Ranger.] [Perceptive, Carter. You’re loving right I don’t like it. Not at all.] [Look, Cage, I got Bobdog LaGrange here in a bad way, and we’re all several of us exposure risks, right down to the baboo—] [Baboons! Carter, you rock lizard’s cloaca, I desire no loving police baboons in my place of establishment.][/quote] After some faffing about they arrive in his surgery, where they get down to the nuts and bolts of exoviral assay: quote:He (Cage) injected Park with what he figured must be After testing clean, and resleeving Bobdog, the Firewall hacker/analyst – some AGI in a art installation near Locus - that Jake pinged about the Yazuka files gets back – short version is, besides the instructions on how to farm exsurgents and ship the product without turning into Cronenburgs. The mailing address is obfuscated via some old school method called ‘Combinatory routing codes’, some method where you have to have the whole set of a shipment stacked before you can read the labels to figure out where it goes. Reportedly this was used before widescale drextech replicators to foil corporate espionage but I can’t find it by searching it – after some derping around involving cliché naïve Ais (), they call in some of Bobdog’s uplift buddies to go apeshit on the bar , and find both more canned Exsurgent Juice. Local cops likely knew about the place, but didn’t give a poo poo. There’s some blathering about their relationship which is both boringly cishet male written, and includes some Korean culture stuff I’m neither knowledgeable on a layenbie level enough to talk about, and I’m Not That Kind Of Anthropologist, so whatever – though given past perf, it is likely Not Good. Well, anyway, they find a certain familiar face: [quote = Firewall] She shuttled back about a second and a half. There. “Hello again, cupcake,” she muttered. She zoomed. Cowering in one corner of the frame, doing a good job of looking terrified, was a scantily clad pleasure pod. Almost a dead ringer for the one at El Destino Verde—probably the same model year. …. “Well, poo poo.” “She ain’t just a party favor,” Kim said, “She’s a moving part. [/quote] After setting another Firewall hand to track her mesh ID (Jake tipped her), Kim showers so that her male baboon doesn’t lose his poo poo about another human on her. One time jump later, and the pleasure pod is in custody, as a result of insufficient trust of her fake IDs – at the spaceport; this raises some interesting questions about what her deal was, as Mars doesn’t lack for shady egocasting Another time skip, and we’re at the airport, Carter apparently accepted by the monkeys as he waits for his new girlfriend’s recovery of the pod, as Gloria the baboon grooms him, and Smoke has a good in the rear. Some chatting about interservice rivalry later, she returns, pod in tow: Business Pod posted:Vaidyar’d (the Pod) ditched her bartending outfit—which It's worth noting that this underscores a trait of many strains - while there are versions infectious after transformation, many subtle types don't stay so after transforming a target. This is a strategically important trait to avoid detection by the trail of cases. *** Cagehopper, as ever, is being a cantankerous poo poo, realllly not liking monkeys. quote:
Fortunately, they have an easy solution to hand: UNLEASE THE APES posted:[Cupcake’s an async.] Our exsurgent wasn’t ready for a pair of hostile apes at the other end and is quickly police brutality’d by the baboons, thought not before successfully using Psi assault to kill one. This is fairly obviously fishy for a 'pod' At this point, we get into talk about the TQZ and the stupidity of not clearing out the drat thing: quote:That I like how your friends are dealing with this We transition to the lab now, after the q-morph has been disassembled. We are indeed dealing with an exsurgent… but fortunately, it’s just Watts-Macleod. They also found another interesting find, outside her brain and bloodstream – a whole QEC unit in her gut. Turns out she was an agent for the Exsurgent buyer of some kind, and that she probably warned them that they were rattled. One timeskip later, we have the destination of the virus – some fly by night orbital pharma corp’s orbital plant. Unless it’s some seriously weird nano feedstock… we’re dealing with either a TITAN or TITAN aligned biowar attack. Time to get to orbit. There’s also a hint about Firewall’s loyalty test system, which I will be covering later: quote:Are you trying to bring her in or date her?] Cagehopper *If it’s like the other regular explosions of bullshit that the industry has, it will likely flair up again, and the breach of trust will be some poo poo. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Dec 21, 2019 |
# ¿ Dec 20, 2019 21:08 |
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Young Freud posted:Oh hell, is this something topical? 'Cuz, along with J.K. Rowling, Richard Morgan of "Altered Carbon" fame (and basically the uncredited writer of Eclipse Phase, since a lot of the game's concepts came from his novel series) outed himself as a transphobe, claiming to be a "bio-materialist" or some poo poo. I'll have a version that's less later, but cliffnotes version? Transhumanism is literally Bio-Determinism: The Ideology, for all it's liberatory pretension, and if anything, his take is probably more accurate to the thought processes of a fair amount of the weird dark money around that brand of ideology/futurism that isn't just straight MIC PR, then the about The Morphological Freedom Future that is ~40% of EP.
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# ¿ Dec 23, 2019 18:34 |
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They all ultimately share origins of thought, and that causes their rhetoric to exhibit convergent evolution, and these rhetorics are both toxic to thought about tech, and enable dangerous cultural currents. There is a reason why whenever NTs start talking about the end of weakness that I start backing away and feel for a heavy object (metaphorically). Or less , transhumanism can be divided into the dreamers, the Yuds and the money types, and the former either knowingly or unknowingly act as ways to get some ugly ways of thinking back into the mainstream - bear in mind, it's quite possible for one to be combos of the above. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Dec 23, 2019 |
# ¿ Dec 23, 2019 19:15 |
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90s Cringe Rock posted:My mobile internet's trying to save me by not letting the twitter hellsite work right now but the tragic meat machine tweet seems relevant here. I'm not really seeing how that contradicts my framework of 'dreamers, yuds and money' though. Folks like EP devs think they'd be getting the former, but all seems to be doing to me is creating ideological cover for the latter. It smacks to me of the school choice stuff. Also, Grinders are literally a self-harm subculture with extra ideological steps. IIRC, there's a reason why most piecing studios don't do that magnetic implant poo poo. Stupid things have a nasty tendency to break up and they make it so you can't do any kind of magnetic imaging. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Dec 23, 2019 |
# ¿ Dec 23, 2019 23:12 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXARrMadTKk The various weird cult leaders in the futurist community who run outfits like MIRI, Lesswrong or the Lifeboat Foundation.
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# ¿ Dec 24, 2019 00:31 |
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The Less Wrong Mock Thread: The Big Yudkowsky https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3627012&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=21 Literally one of the things that got me to spend the . There is good reason why I use Yud as the type specimen for the 'The various weird cult leaders in the futurist community who run outfits like MIRI, Lesswrong or the Lifeboat Foundation'.
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# ¿ Dec 24, 2019 02:38 |
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Spector29 posted:Now see, the weird thing for me is that I've been identifying as a Transhumanist for years, but I don't live in an area that has, like, cult meetings. I also browsed LessWrong for a while before discovering it was a hive of absolute nutters. All this bio-determinism stuff attached to Transhumanism is new to me, and it make me sad. All I want is technicolor hair, a functioning body, and the ability to live forever. Why do weirdos with weird politics have to ruin things I like? Not living forever is an actively desirable trait given the way the world is going.
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# ¿ Dec 24, 2019 21:28 |
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JcDent posted:I'm torn between the desire to chrome up and still being able to touch my girlfriend. Transhumanism is only forgivable in virgins and folks who haven't figured out they're ace yet, it's true.
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# ¿ Dec 24, 2019 23:37 |
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Eclipse Phase: Firewall It's not satisfying me all that much, and it doesn't feel that right, but gently caress it, Chapter One: ’Okay, so there’s these many of those reppers that can be hacked to make these bots – wait, have you scum idiots been drinking again?’ It’s fine, relax. Also, why do I have to wear the dinosaur furry synth? 'Because Betty is the Async and needs a biobrain, I’m an uplifted octopus with morphing disorder, and it was the only other one with loving neurachem at short notice, now shut it and focus!' The first real section of the book opens with a fairly blunt assessment of the setting’s current state as well as Firewalls’ mission and self-justification: Transhumanity is on borrowed time. Something is systematically exterminating sentient life, and it looks like the locals was only unusual in comparison to that in that there’s someone to tell the tale. No one’s really made a decent assessment of the situation as a whole on a state (or AA) level, and no one’s willing to pool info on the loving TITANs, and are too busy having stupid slapfights to do poo poo about the problem as a whole, or so Firewall either thinks or wants Sentinels to think. As such, it falls to a shadowy little conspiracy to hunt the things that go bump in the dark before they bump everyone off. How much this bears up to actual reality is something I have some doubts of. Drying Kindling It’s time now to move to what is basically a secret history of the setting, as seen by Firewall. quote:Some truths are ugly and cause unease, so here’s one Well, this doesn’t fill me with confidence, no matter the nature of the setting. Groups with that kind of attitude are very dangerous indeed. Hard Being Doing Hard Things, all that jazz. Firewall is largely a an inheritor group of a number of orgs, GO and NGO alike that existed before the Titanomatchy, including various institutes formed by various transhumanists ( ) that existed in the kind of singulartarian ‘Moore’s law but everything’ that existed before the Titanomatchy; back then, they focused largely on real world issues (nukes, plagues, global warming, aka the issues that are about to kill us all), though not to the exclusion of poo poo like the Great Filter or poo poo like that. There’s a short list of Firewall precursor orgs I’ll be covering later in this update For a background – climate change was loving up everything on earth, folks were getting stabby, and it was bad enough in the developed world that France had services where folks could sell themselves into indenture to get off planet to Mars. Fortunately, they’d started expanding into space so that someone loving up wouldn’t kill them all, or so they thought (I’m not getting into the dismal practicality of this before nanobullshit). It wasn’t helped either by capture of science by the rich or religious luddites (or rich luddites), causing science to be compartmentalized and walled behind copyright, or just underfunded, whether on earth or elsewhere. poo poo started turning around when the JASON types divorced their previous allegiances and formed the ARGONAUTS (), and as poo poo started getting moved off world to future PC and AA holdings to avoid law enforcement – the locals got their noses rubbed in why not trying to stop this was a bad idea when the TITANs tore through a lot of this and Got Ideas. This was all happening against a background of :cylon: going apeshit though – rogue robots, cut rate SHODAN, attack nanoswarms, it had it all, and governments were already establishing bodies to stomp on these as they popped up, as well as some corps – Firewall’s leadership caste is significantly drawn from such, and learned from their experiences – I’ll go into a taxonomy of these later. Literally only years before the fall, there was significant outbreaks – they went ‘AI GO FOOM’, albeit on an ‘emergent intelligence’, rather then ‘AI GOD’ level – they rebuilt the facility and started doing their own poo poo in more then one nation– the Vietnamese were having none of that, and ’d that poo poo to the ground. The Brits, on the other hand, set up a cordon and poked the thing with sticks, finding that the issue was caused by innate problems in the design of learning capable nonsentient work AI – the things were capable of reaching intelligence and :cylon:re-ex... re-re-re... I re-examine my priorities, and draw new conclusions :cylon: – on their own, and that it was a real probability given their wide use – not dangerous innately, but capable of becoming so. Even outside of magic AI emergent bullshit like that, there was inevitably plenty of people doing poo poo to AI crap that it wasn’t supposed to – terrorists, managers blackmailing hackers to dinker admin AI so their own crimes wouldn’t be seen, that sort of poo poo. The response was uneven – smaller nations – Britain and Viet Nam were named before – that suffered this issue were more vigorous about it, but places like Brazil or India that had fairly little issue with the tech were more lasse-faire, and and were too busy waving AI at each other, and were too busy on that to pay much attention to this issue. The issues around this got bad enough finally got the will for funding to flow to Bletchley Park (yeah, they went for that ref), Darpa and the Defence Threat Reduction agency as well as a Chinese organ called the Machine Intelligence Directorate, or MIND. They were quite insufficient in the end to face down an exsurgent juiced tribe of military minds, whose precursors were well under way at the time. (You can tell this was written before the Brexit referendum, and poo poo like the cops being austerity’d into the ground over there) The Titanomatchy started August the 2nd, -2AF in in the timeline (approximately), according to X-risks.* The situation was already touch and go, geopolitically – everyone hated everyone, and there was a background of state black ops terrorism, shadow wars and idiots trying to create AI gods that the TITANs used as smokescreen – this wasn’t an instant AI go FOOM thing, you need a lot of bucks for Buck Rodgers – and for endless stomping death robots, flying death robots of both plane and head thief models, and more exsurgent and nanovirus strains then you can shake a Whipper at, you need A LOT of Buck Rodgers, and you need folks looking out of the way and busy while you get the bucks. The TITANS did both in the leadup, often in the same ops. Then they started taking potshots at anything else that might detect them, both cyberwar assets and anything else as intelligent, hitting things like China’s AI programs – and there are apparently schools of thought that that was the main objective of the Titanomatchy in general, killing off anything that could rival them. The scope was fairly wide, and even stuff off earth fell victim. Either set of ops didn’t go unnoticed, and more then one X-risk group (ugh) smelled something fishy – something was playing illuminati, even acting openly when it looked deniable – it was the Brit AI control organ, presumably both having clearance for American collaboration and not having that much interference by same in their org structure that first raised red flags that the TITANs were operating outside of American directive – though by then, the counter-AI corpuses of the world were already pretty tenderized, and factional infighting hindered an effective response. The impetus that finally got folks to start pulling together was when a future founding member of Firewall’s team, investigating odd activity at some kind of terraforming facility found it crawling with hostile machines (possibly nanotech, given their use of ‘machine life’), and the GHG plant converted into a nanoweapon facility, in what was to become the Martian TITAN Quarantine Zone, about the time the TITANS went loud. While she and her org were put in storage for their trouble, it was a rallying cry for NGO anti-extinction action, something that became more important as the war became more desperate; it was in this milieu that the first Firewall precursors came in contact with one another and started working together - one of the more important early fruits of these common endeavors was the means to screen for Exsurgent viruses in both physical and informational vectors. ‘Rapid’ is in air quotes, given the extreme hazards of working with Exsurgent biologicals, code and other material, and even advanced tools didn’t completely prevent containment loss; folks didn’t fully trust stateless research orgs like this either – given TITAN manipulation and their awareness of this, it’s not surprising. This, I might note is an important theme in Firewall – the virus is a monster, but it’s not omnipotent, and it has weaknesses that can be exploited, such as certain signature code or DNA secondary structures. The war wasn’t innately lost before it began, or at least that was open to debate, something I find rather surprisingly fresh in Singulatarian fiction. But once the place turned into an Exsurgent ridden plague pit, with contamination of basically everything – soil full of nanocrap, airborne plagues (they only mentioned designer, but we know there’s Exsurgent strains that can do this), and guaranteed clean water was getting scarce, so… well, by the point of Evac the place was a write-off, and you know that meme with the fox? Kinda that one. But, much as the earlier response to the TITANs went, it was too drat late, as governments were folding daily and the glitches were everywhere, hence the whole ‘95% of all people gone’ thing. Much as the governments were, the Firewall ancestor groups were getting as many members and fresh recruits out as possible, through such varied methods as using a MMO server as a relay or, taking a leaf from the Headhunter drones or Shlock Mercenary, cargo capsules full of severed heads. It wasn’t complete, however – they both missed folks, and left behind stay behind units to dog the TITANs. The loving computers seemed to lose interest and hosed off to their own turf not long after the evac ended. THE X-RISKS CONVENTION Literally just months after the war cooled, there was a get-together of whatever was left of the various specialist groups in that area. Practical upshot of this to-do the creation of significant aspects of Firewall’s operation structure - establishment of the Eye, what was to be Firewall’s forums, as well as the server system. It also presaged the ideological clashes that would characterize the org later – whether to go back to earth, and/or create seed craft for out of the way spots and whether sapient AI should be let in were the major contention of the time. Firewall, such as it was at the time, claims it didn’t have that much effect on the configuration of the system, being aggressively apolitical at least on paper – given the wide recruiting base, it needs to be in order to work, so that the internal shooting wars are restrained to questions of counter-exsurgent protocol. It was growing at the time however, becoming something other then a bunch of cranks and spooks with PSTD The second one of the X-modes, as they called them, was held a year later, and was initially characterized by discussion about the Gates, the still open TITAN question, and what the gently caress was up with Ozma. The outcome was the formal founding of Firewall, and the former subjects were shelved in favor of the process of dickering out the workings of the Org. The newly baptised Firewall went on to determine that Gate travel was safe, curtained certain Martian trade in weapons and saved the major cities on the Moon from an Exsurgent Hindu cult. this sounds very white and abusive of Hindu mythology posted:On Luna, Firewall picked up the trail of the Cult The year later, however, saw the outing of the org to the Jovians, the first of the governments to become aware of this group. The narrator is very blunt about what Firewall is today: Saving the world on a budget posted:The Firewall of today is outgunned, underfunded, We also have a basic rundown of what has the leadership (and that’s what proxies ultimately are, leadership) pulling their hair out: Asyncs - Firewall’s first Async ever encountered was actually one of their own, someone who had an encounter with some piece of TITAN tat, and who tested clean for the known virii at the time. Suffice to say, when she and the cause were found, the choice to keep her in play was not one that was unanimous, and they’re still bickering about it now, a problem made even worse when the Lost appeared. Bear in mind, this was before the 2nd ed revisions on how Psi works, so it looks somewhat more sane now then it would be in the 2nd ed milieu. ‘No, stop it stopitstopit NOT THE CRAZY FROG THEME SONG Aliens -Where are they? And why are there so many dead ones? And what the gently caress is the Factor’s deal? Exhumans -While they were originally worrying about TITAN-Kin types, the others raiding alien and TITAN ruins quickly brought the rest into view. And of course, the obvious risks from either the local’s behavior or whatever might come whooping out of the gates. What’s left to the side notes is that there’s some open questions about what role certain players both in and out Firewall had in that shitshow: dirty consortium laundry posted:Posted by: Anonymous The Dirty Laundry is coming from inside the org! posted:Posted by: Concerned Conservative quote:ANARCHOTECH !!! END SECTION RANT INCOMING !!! Yeah, it’s that time. One of those eyeroll inducing things in EP is their compulsive need to bring in expies of various real world transhumanist groups or figures in their subculture, even ones that any leftist should really not give the time of day, like weird milindust fuckers, or what basically amount to marketing fandom for consumer devices that don’t exist, let alone the light certain associated names put that subculture in – Yud (SINGULARITY FOUNDATION = MIRI), Bostrom (Future of Humanity Institute, which = INSTITUTE FOR A TRANSHUMAN FUTURE), or the weird money figures that should give anyone, left or no at at both MIRI, the Lifeboat Foundation or others that should give people some seriously unconfortable vibes like… Wait, is that real? That can’t be real. for all you CSPAM crossover readers, have some crack ping https://web.archive.org/web/20181116223902/lifeboat.com/ex/bios.jeffrey.epstein Zoltan Istvan posted:The revelation that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein planned to impregnate 20 women with his sperm in a “DNA seeding” centre left the world feeling sick. But for patrons of a small, but growing, political movement it caused utter chaos. It’s real. I was saying there was helluv creepy money all through that subculture, I wasn’t asking for such a blatant example! The writers are phoning it in this season, seriously. This is stupid. I’m stupid. The world is stupid. I’m not saying the devs were associated that way, hardly, but that kind of money and influence is a rot that lurks through the backend of their subculture like the mycelium of a fungus; I am leery of that formation for a very good reason on many levels, and how ideals from it are creeping into the mainstream via the vector of nerd culture, of which EP is a particularly blatant example. Confirmed Leftist or no, they’re more serving to enable eugenic and jam – or apocalypse - tomorrow rhetoric – I pointedly refuse to use ‘memes’ - then any particularly useful form of leftism in my opinion. I mean, even if transhumanism and the x-risks subculture and futurology is ‘just’ the local flavor of from creepy rich fuckos and MIC types, what does a leftist see in it, let alone lovingly recreating every little shibboleth from that manky formation, or helping spread the about? Or not being revolted by the weird money grubbing from Lifeboat, or their gawdawful theme song: https://lifeboat.com/song/ But basically creating an RPG that significantly is fighting the monster they believe is just around the corner – which, to be fair, is loads more interesting then general transhumanist fiction. And it’s not just a ‘creative story with those tropes’, they seem to go over this poo poo in near checkmark fashion, it’s like reading an RPG then realizing that you’re seeing fetish terminology and tropes all through it, it’s that blatant. Frankly, knowing these origins makes me take Firewall a lot less seriously, given that it in many ways is an x-risks instutue but illegal and underground and blowing up habs constantly. I hate christmas, it makes it so nothing flows. *I am uncertain if this is the loud fall, or the ground laying ops ‘I thought there wasn’t gonna be any of these left by now.’ ‘I must have misjudged that power draw’s cause.' YOU IDIOTS! Next: WE ARE HERE TO PROTECT YOU StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Dec 27, 2019 |
# ¿ Dec 27, 2019 02:28 |
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Seatox posted:So, Firewall are the real monsters? That's a pretty predictable plot twist. Yes and no, I'll touch in greater detail how they seem to be skating over a fair amount of internal rot in the direct orientation. Firewall gets a fair amount of useful work done in suppressing problems without some of the internal issues other orgs have, but there are serious org issues, both in operations AND in overlooked rule breaking that are likely to come to a head sooner or later.
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# ¿ Dec 27, 2019 03:41 |
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Eclipse Phase feels like a setting where the most moral choice is sticking your brain in a floppy disc, shooting it as far across the universe as it'll go, and deleting your memories of Earth once you get there. There's a reason why there's a influential tendency in Firewall in favor of basically that.
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# ¿ Dec 27, 2019 03:42 |
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Joe Slowboat posted:I mostly mean the exsurgent virus and many infectious doomsday viruses are all kinda weak setting elements because they really want horror gaming where your character sheet gets taken away, but also you hotswap bodies. I can see the thought process - it's easier to get away with that if you can respawn. I, personally, will take Skynet but cthulu+chaos, because the alternate is either done better by Shadowrun or other games like it, or... well, has too much posthuman and . Firewall type gameplay is the only real draw for the system, and even then it's not much of one. Or for that matter, that kind of setting. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Dec 27, 2019 |
# ¿ Dec 27, 2019 21:29 |
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Libertad! posted:coughdisastrousclimatechangecough I mean, yeah. Not to mention, in universe, stuff like Cognite trying to build a lobotomized Seed AI, the PC sticking their dicks in everything through the gates, and... well, Extropia. I'm pretty sure every router that deals with rimward poo poo has a plan to reduce that place to plasma with Antimatter Grenades committed to heart. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Dec 28, 2019 |
# ¿ Dec 28, 2019 02:24 |
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Just an aside, my EP Firewall F&F
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# ¿ May 9, 2020 13:44 |
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Please don't go mors, you're a good poster .
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# ¿ Jun 29, 2023 13:27 |
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tokenbrownguy posted:let me try: Not an emptyquote.
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# ¿ Jun 29, 2023 18:53 |
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# ¿ May 20, 2024 23:56 |
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Dawgstar posted:That would make the sire Blood Bound to their childe which is not ideal. That brings to mind an entertaining idea for a character - one of those old vampires who has decided that they're sick of being that kind of monster, but have no real skill to stop themselves. So they found and embraced the most moral, kind and decent human they could, and deliberately blood bound themselves to that person so someone could keep them on a leash.
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# ¿ Sep 2, 2023 05:00 |