Coffee table knight, Watts is amazing. I don't agree with entire philosophical backbone of his Blightsight/Firefall cycle, because I went back to Metzinger's Being No One, from which Watts admitted to take inspiration, and read it myself, and came to different conclusions entirely. But man does have style. The Freeze-Frame Revolution is awesome... Coming to think about it, now that I remember it, I kinda see where 42 might be going with the plot of our episode. lol.

And my personal favorite is Rifters. As youth of today says, Watts was cooking with that trilogy, cooking hard.

I never even heard about it.

I'm not talking about millions-of-years spanning galactic higway project
I'm about benevolent AI making sure that you behave well in his doll house 

Last edited by space cowboy (2024-07-03 23:37:20)

Well, he is not hiding that he is an AI, at least not from the reader. And it IS his dollhouse, he has spent a lot of time building it! So please, have some respect for the good ol' Gov'nor

Coffee table knight, nah-nah-nah, Being No One you don't need. It's a dense 700 page book on phenomenology of neurobiology, written by a German philosopher and later translated into English. It's fascinating, but it's, like, "tungsten cube that cures mortality" levels of density. So have fun with Blightsight, and later take a stab at Starfish (first one of Rifters)

As a reader, I'm naught but compassion. but Iariah, well, he'll be sort of non-lenient about whole "doll house" stuff

That's why I usually don't play rainbows and unicorns (aka things that people usually play) and eventually add some... horror aspect to it?
Or trying to do so, at least.

Last edited by Moon Presence (2024-07-03 23:46:36)

space cowboy
Talking about sci-fi, have you heard of Revelation Space? It's hard to call it "hard sci-fi", it's more like "all hell break loose sci-fi", but it has a lot of interesting concepts.

You have the Governor's gratitude

Well, if you insist, Being No One can be found online in pdf, and Metzinger does us a favor by having entire chapter in the end dedicated to "TL;DR" of his work, where you can glimpse a bird-view of his concepts. Dense, but graspable for a laymen like us. It can be read standalone

No, I haven't seen it before you mentioned it in your file
I might check it out

Y'see, after reading Watts circa 2016, and revisiting him later when Firefall dropped, I shifted my gaze to slice of life novels, and non-fiction. Somewhere in 2022 I got thru Murderbot Diaries, but they're pretty bland, but there, too, an interesting bit of worldbuilding to be found. And now I'm taking a break from reading Azimov's Foundation series. I read first three books in, like, two weeks, and I decided to slow down with some Chernyshevsky.

Last edited by space cowboy (2024-07-03 23:55:20)

space cowboy
I listened to the first couple of Murderbot Diaries, and I totally agree, they are bland. Almost like "The Long Flight to a Small Angry Planet" or whatever was the name of that book everyone was talking about for a time...
Asimov... I must admit, I could not read it. I have very complicated relationship with the old sci-fi, it feels too naive from the modern point of view. The only exception would be the Hyperion series. That was interesting.
Ok, digging up more classics... have you read Necronomicon (or something else of Shephenson)?

Last edited by 42 (2024-07-04 00:08:23)

space cowboy
I was going to say Cryptonomicon, but I'm playing fantasy on another forum, and you can see how it affects me 

Have not heard of it. Googling...

Upd. Ok, found it, got on the wait list in my library

Last edited by 42 (2024-07-04 00:17:18)

/googles/ Ah. Looks interesting!

Psst! Wanna know more about chaos theory, or information? James Gleick has you covered! His Chaos, and Information: History, Theory, Flood are some of my beloved non-fiction

For example?

Huhuhu, yes, but I like it this way.
Yikes forever... (c)

Anyway...

There's always a basilisk under the school toilet or giant spider in the woods, but... y'know, they're more cute than scary.
The only terrifying things there are dementors, but because they are made this way - to be scary hooded mfs, pulling you right out of comfort zone.

Last edited by Moon Presence (2024-07-04 00:38:53)

space cowboy
It is. Stephenson is a good hard sci-fi writer. Probably one of my favourite.