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I'm not sure why I made this (spoilers for Player of Games)
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Dec 7, 2021 11:28
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:I'm not sure why I made this (spoilers for Player of Games) because it's brilliant?
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Dec 7, 2021 12:06
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I like the idea that there’s a huge fleet of Azadian warships or whatever with sharp angles and red glowing engines and huge laser turrets and then the culture flies in with a loving mountain on a table top and blows the poo poo out of everything in seconds.
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Dec 7, 2021 14:22
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Had anyone done a render of, say, vavatch?
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Dec 7, 2021 14:44
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Nail Rat posted:Had anyone done a render of, say, vavatch? Yes, in this very thread: MikeJF posted:One of the better culture images I've seen: Masaq' Prolonged Panorama posted:Nice. I just did a mini re-read, Phlebas, Player of Games, Look to Windward. A GIANT PARSNIP fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Dec 8, 2021 |
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Dec 8, 2021 03:59
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I also found this to be helpful when trying to picture the scale: Masaq' and Vavatch Orbitals vs. Earth and the Sun  Vavatch is the larger orbital, a typical Culture O is somewhat smaller and proportionally way thinner. Earth is that little dark speck off to the left. Yeah. Original reddit source here
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Dec 8, 2021 05:26
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Something I was thinking about was that you'd never truly get a dark night on an Orbital. There'd always be a line of light in the sky the same brightness (or brighter!) than the full moon. Having said that, there'd be plenty of places on the Orbital with zero light pollution from "artificial" sources.
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Dec 8, 2021 10:31
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Most art tends to show the orbital too thick. This one's not bad. But even that's a bit exaggerated. You can see the proper proportions in that comparison with the sun. Gravitas Shortfall posted:Something I was thinking about was that you'd never truly get a dark night on an Orbital. There'd always be a line of light in the sky the same brightness (or brighter!) than the full moon. The far side would probably be too small to match the moon, it'd be a line without visible width cutting across the sky. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Dec 8, 2021 |
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Dec 8, 2021 10:37
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MikeJF posted:The far side would probably be too small to match the moon, it'd be a line without visible width cutting across the sky. Edit: no wait I'm an idiot you're right
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Dec 8, 2021 10:44
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I forgot the scale of the Masaq and Vavatch orbitals, holy crap. The craziest thing about Vavatch is it's mostly just supposed to be empty oceans for the stupidly big ships to sail through forever.
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Dec 8, 2021 15:43
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I didn't really understand the scale and why it took so long for the ships to sail through it while reading, but uhh those pictures help explain!
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Dec 9, 2021 02:11
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Wanna see the Morthanveld nest world from Matter now. It's hundreds of millions of km across with trillions of inhabitants instead of billions.
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Dec 9, 2021 02:54
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One of the cool things about Orbitals is that there's a throwaway line in one of the books about how, if the Culture is given enough time to prepare, they can be moved
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Dec 9, 2021 12:25
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Mmm. It's mentioned that each orbital plate is able to hold atmosphere and sustain life standalone, I imagine moving an orbital would involve all the plates dissolving apart and tows hauling them all through hyperspace. (They mention there's engines under-plate but I vaguely recall they were just implying sublight)
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Dec 9, 2021 13:20
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MikeJF posted:Mmm. It's mentioned that each orbital plate is able to hold atmosphere and sustain life standalone, I imagine moving an orbital would involve all the plates dissolving apart and tows hauling them all through hyperspace. Yeah a bunch of Superlifters and GSVs would be the way to go, extend fields out to link with a plate or plates. Hell, the largest GSVs could potentially share an atmospheric bubble. There'd be a LOT of disruption around plate boundaries though, especially around water features. EDIT: The text makes no suggestion of a breakup though
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Dec 9, 2021 13:25
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If I recall there tends to be affordances for that kind of thing already due to the way Orbitals are constructed plate-by-plate, mention is made of multi-kilometre-high features at plate boundaries or Masaq's Great River plunging through tunnels under bulkhead mountain ranges. There'd still be disruption and things you'd have to field-contain (it seems like there are often cases where oceans cross plate boundaries) but for the most part they're already partly divided along those lines in such a way there's no fine features there and moving orbitals isn't something that you do lightly anyway.
MikeJF fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Dec 9, 2021 |
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Dec 9, 2021 14:36
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Just finished State of the Art - it was ok, but I feel like Banks leaned too hard into “The Earth is special!” The short stores were a mixed bag - Descendant was good, Piece was probably better in 1989, and the rest were either pretty forgettable or downright bad. Similar to Consider Phlebas it was worth a read but wasn’t great. Too bad, since the premise could have been great or awful and it landed squarely on “meh”.
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Dec 10, 2021 19:20
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Just finished State of the Art - it was ok, but I feel like Banks leaned too hard into “The Earth is special!” The short stores were a mixed bag - Descendant was good, Piece was probably better in 1989, and the rest were either pretty forgettable or downright bad. I think it was written specifically as a kind of appeal to a non-culture-familiar audience to appreciate the good in our flawed world.
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Dec 11, 2021 07:04
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If I reallllly go out on a limb I could see the character’s responses originating from them never seeing a culture at our current stage of development in person before. The mind obviously knows what’s up but the story does a good job of presenting the Contact team as the mind and then people who are somewhere between a different type of drone and a pet.
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Dec 11, 2021 19:20
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The point of State of the Art isn't that Earth is exceptional, it's that it's exceptionally average. Sure the Contact people get hype about Earth art and music and stuff but they love new stuff, that's why they're in Contact in the first place. The only outlier is the weird guy that guy gets too into religion . That's why ultimately the GSV decides not to contact Earth. It's so unexceptional it's a perfect control
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Dec 11, 2021 22:57
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I really like State of the Art. The description of New York as a filthy cesspool is just perfect, in fact that one whole passage of describing different cities through metaphors is great.
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Dec 11, 2021 23:25
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Just finished Excession. I really enjoyed myself for most of the book but I was underwhelmed by the ending. The Sleeper Service did the right thing by not using its combat fleet but I sure was looking forward to it shredding the affront. I was disappointed that the plot involving the last ship to interact with the excession went nowhere, because “everyone seemed fine but they actually all went mad” was interesting. The human characters were forgettable but maybe that was the point since this is a book about the minds and humans are basically their pets? The epilogue was underwhelming - it would have been far more interesting for the excession to be something completely different than what the minds were hypothesizing. Overall still an enjoyable read!
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Jan 10, 2022 04:16
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I also just finished Excession and now I want an Interesting Times Gang gangtag
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Jan 24, 2022 19:47
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ITG is simultaneously cool and a great name for a bunch of meddlers, but also terrifying because it's basically like what if (US bias) Hoover, Kissinger, and Cheney were immortal and could show up and take charge whenever they saw a need/opportunity to advance the best interests of society (on their own view with no oversight other than each other). The Culture may be a utopia and "the good guys" most of the time, but SC is exactly as bad as lot of people think it is, even if it's only via unofficial groups and proxies. Common culture citizens as well as the ulterior and "peace faction" etc. benefit just as much from this stuff even though they are overtly against it, which has a lot of fun real world parallels that Banks pointedly alludes to from time to time.
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Jan 24, 2022 20:34
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I think if I were a Culture citizen I would develop an extreme amount of mental illness wondering if all of our political and social developments have already been gamed out and manipulated by Mind cabals playing 100 moves in advance from micro-universe sims
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Jan 24, 2022 20:42
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SixFigureSandwich posted:I also just finished Excession and now I want an Interesting Times Gang gangtag I made one ages ago for some reason but it isn't that great  EDIT: No Dignity posted:I think if I were a Culture citizen I would develop an extreme amount of mental illness wondering if all of our political and social developments have already been gamed out and manipulated by Mind cabals playing 100 moves in advance from micro-universe sims Gravitas Shortfall fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jan 24, 2022 |
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Jan 24, 2022 22:33
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It seems that The Culture (at least through Excession) has mostly decided against subliming basically just to meddle with other species. I also enjoy the fact that any AI that isn't at least a little hosed up instantly sublimes and what The Culture is left with is a bunch of amazingly powerful minds that are somewhere between slightly eccentric and downright nutty. SixFigureSandwich posted:I also just finished Excession and now I want an Interesting Times Gang gangtag I also want this.
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Jan 25, 2022 02:31
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:I know, but there's something about the art that's not getting across the scale. And there's a lot to be desired in the details. The flythrough of the canyon of massive apartment blocks is all well and good... but the last thing I'd expect to see in a GSV's interior architecture is a right angle. And they're missing detail, those skyscrapers would be downright rococo with balconies, vertical parks and the like. If I ever get back into 3d art it'll be to spend 10 years on a 7 second clip of that same scene, lavishly detailed just right.
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Jan 25, 2022 04:34
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:It seems that The Culture (at least through Excession) has mostly decided against subliming basically just to meddle with other species. I also enjoy the fact that any AI that isn't at least a little hosed up instantly sublimes and what The Culture is left with is a bunch of amazingly powerful minds that are somewhere between slightly eccentric and downright nutty. Not only do I want an interesting times gang2tag, I deserve one.
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Jan 25, 2022 21:05
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:
This is real bleak though, and basically conceeding that regular humans have as little political agency in the Culture as they do in liberal democracies now. And I thought the conclusion to the simulation problem was 'okay fine we'll keep running their little universes indefinitely so we can keep doing our future-telling'?
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Jan 25, 2022 21:14
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I thought they didn't sim that deeply because they felt it was unethical to create consciousness just for that E: yeah, some civilizations will Sim and then leave them running to soothe their conscience, but Minds just don't Sim at the individual level. quote:The sims it was setting up and letting run were all trying to answer the relatively simple question, How much difference will it make if the Gzilt find out the Book of Truth is a fake? MikeJF fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Jan 25, 2022 |
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Jan 25, 2022 21:54
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MikeJF posted:I thought they didn't sim that deeply because they felt it was unethical to create consciousness just for that Solution Reactivate the last mind-state backup of the GCU MeatFucker before it vanished and have that pervy freak deal with with all nonsense about scanning individual mindstates and the ethics of simming at that level.
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Jan 25, 2022 22:59
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No Dignity posted:This is real bleak though, and basically conceeding that regular humans have as little political agency in the Culture as they do in liberal democracies now. At least through Excession this is clearly the case and humans are somewhere between tools and pets. Sure they're allowed to mostly do as they please and can wonder in and out of The Culture like feral cats on a farm, but when SC needs a particular cat it's getting caught and brought where it's needed post haste.
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Jan 26, 2022 02:14
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:when SC needs a particular cat it's getting caught and brought where it's needed post haste. This is true, but they also trust the cat enough to do the job, when they could just create a completely controlled synthetic being and send that instead. They also will take no for an answer (eventually). So there's more respect/reverence/something than "pet/tool" implies. It's mostly amused tolerance on the part of the Minds, for sure, but tinted with something else too, to give that much agency at the tip of the spear. The political question is an interesting one, but I'm having trouble imagining what a current citizen of a liberal democracy would want to do, individually or collectively, that a Culture citizen(s) would be barred from. I guess if your position is that the Minds control things so much that the scope of possible desires is limited only to what the Minds find useful it makes sense to say they're only as "free" as people are now, but 1) The Minds aren't a monolith, so there isn't a single will to ascribe to them, and 2) The Culture is fine with people (and Minds!) renouncing it and leaving. If the Minds were as unified/powerful/sinister/cynical as the "bleak" interpretation implies, no people, drones, ships, Minds, or Orbitals would have been allowed to break away to form the Peace Faction that sat out the Idiran War, the most consequential single event described in the series. e: maybe a better question is: what does politics mean in a setting where every material need is satisfied, nobody is oppressed or elevated, and everyone is free to associate however they please? Prolonged Panorama fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Jan 26, 2022 |
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Jan 26, 2022 05:03
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Intervention.
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Jan 26, 2022 05:26
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That's the core question the culture books try and answer
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Jan 26, 2022 05:27
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 I was talking internally (like people on a Plate voting for something), but you're absolutely right.
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Jan 26, 2022 06:01
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No Dignity posted:This is real bleak though, and basically conceeding that regular humans have as little political agency in the Culture as they do in liberal democracies now. Yes, this is one of the underlying sinister things about The Culture - it could be argued that any citizen below Mind level is more like a pet than anything else. The Culture does practice a form of direct democracy on things like "should we go to war" and "should this eccentric guy be allowed to build a huge cablecar system in a wilderness designated area", but this also raises the question "why have the Minds let things get to the stage where a vote is necessary, and how much are they manipulating the outcome". EDIT: Of course the other question re: The Culture is "what right does this civilisation have to meddle in the affairs of less technologically advanced worlds" which boils down to "because they can and want to" no matter their noble intentions and simulated projections. Surface Detail posted:Even the most urbanely sophisticated, scrupulously empathic and excruciatingly polite civilisation, it had been suggested, was just a hegswarm with a sense of proportion. Gravitas Shortfall fucked around with this message at 10:31 on Jan 26, 2022 |
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Jan 26, 2022 10:24
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MikeJF posted:The far side would probably be too small to match the moon, it'd be a line without visible width cutting across the sky. I did some rough calculations for this - the Moon is 384,000 km from Earth on average, has a diameter of 3,475 km, giving an angular diameter of .52 degrees (the same as the sun incidentally). A Culture orbital with a total diameter of 3,000,000 km and a width of 1,000 km would cover .02 degrees at its thinnest, or 26x less. That's about one arc minute, so roughly the size of Venus at its closest approach as seen from Earth. Thicker than a star, for sure, but pretty close to just a bright, featureless line. Although you'd be able to pick out majority cloud/land/water portions by their color. mllaneza posted:And there's a lot to be desired in the details. The flythrough of the canyon of massive apartment blocks is all well and good... but the last thing I'd expect to see in a GSV's interior architecture is a right angle. And they're missing detail, those skyscrapers would be downright rococo with balconies, vertical parks and the like. Yeah, someday I'd like to make some images that get the scale and look close to correct. For context here's the dimensions of a Plate class GSV (53km x 22km) overlaid on NYC.  Now put 250 million (or more) people on it, and leave most of the top surface as park/wilderness. It's one of the few settings that could justify the truly huge megacities common in visual sci-fi - the population of a country packed in to an urban area about the size of the borough of Manhattan. Here are some images that get parts of the vibe right (scale, verticality, organic architecture, green spaces/gardens), but these are just partial references.        For the more wild parts of a GSV or a plate, "lonely megastructure" gets most of the vibe:   Lastly here's one of the few images that I can take as a depiction of the Culture completely as-is.   
Prolonged Panorama fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Jan 30, 2022 |
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Jan 30, 2022 00:55
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I just finished Look to Windward. I enjoyed the characters here and connected with them more than I did in Excession. I know some people like Excession because it shows how the minds work and think, but I actually feel that Look to Windward does a better job here. I also enjoyed the overall feeling of melancholy, as it helps cut through the general sense of “everyone is happy and can do anything” you can get from the average culture citizen’s life. The ending was solid too and I feel that Banks landed this one better than many of his other Culture books up to this point - I especially enjoyed the whale dude getting resurrected 230 million years after he was murdered, and the reveal that the copilot backup was a Special Circumstances agent from the start. There’s also more flirting with the sublimed here, along with the tantalizing whispers that The Culture has some sublimed contacts too. Overall very enjoyable. I did Matter out of order so Surface Detail is next. I’ve skipped Inversions for now since I’m not a big fantasy fan and it seems the book is a lot more fantasy than sci fi, but I may come back to it after Surface Detail or Hydrogen Sonata.
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Feb 11, 2022 19:51
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