When Jupiter or Saturn finally wins some competitions are they going to get their medals in the form of precious metals aersolized into a vapor and stuffed into a mason jar?

Please use foodgrade coconut oil when inserting this update!

TL;DR of course sci-fi couldn’t have imagined how cool juggalos are, scifi is mostly written (and MORE importantly gate-kept) by man-babies with incredibly narrow views of reality, fuck sci-fi let’s go hang out with the juggalos…

Honestly other than just extrapolating out what technologies will facilitate the rise of dystopias (while being weirdly obsessed with the aesthetics of dystopias to the point of it being dysfunctional to the objectives of the narrative and fiction) what have sci-fi writers actually meaningfully imagined about the future in the western canon?

For all the mountains and mountains of sci-fi books and tv shows written I am not sure there is actually much to show for it except endless descriptions of how colonization, war and authoritarian power will be facilitated by future technologies (in a way that superficially claims to be subversive but is really just technology porn, politics be damned).

The only western/European sci-fi series of any significant popularity that I think grapples with anything meaningfully human about positive potentials of the future is Star Trek. Other scifis of course accomplish this in parts of their stories, or in peripheral stories and side series, but almost without fail they all circle back to the same 5 things a boomer dude can imagine a society of boring boomer dudes doing who worship technology and talk over women.

Murderbot is dope tho, I don’t say this critique to attack the wave of sci-fi that is written by diverse new authors that subverts the genre, just to say that the old guard of the genre should be trashed and thrown out the window in favor of these new authors who actually treat envisioning the human condition realistically as important…. to writing books about humans in the future…….

….sigh sorry I really think the classic sci-fi genre gets wayyyyyyyy too much of a pass for being a serious genre of art when it is written by a bunch of clowns who mainly used representations of human beings like action figures and G.I. Joe figurines, bending them in brutal and inhuman ways so that they carry out cool action sequences on the living room floor and reference cool technologies that will make their dad notice them and give them a hug for being smart. None of which is wrong unless you are claiming to write literature that illuminates deep things about the human condition with respect to the breadth of future possibilities.

says Pussy riot in the mirror 3 times as the clock strikes midnight

nervously waits (or excitedly? how big exactly is a riot of pussy? Big enough? How many hectares does the average Pussy Riot engulf?)

sigh meanwhile the cop has still probably got a cushy job and probably goes home every night to get drunk and hit their spouse because that is statistically as far as we can tell what 25-45% of cops do based on difficult to predict statistics that rely on cops snitching on their own illegal behavior (so logically it is probably much higher as hard as that is to wrap your head around).

Unfortuantely, I think just about every fan base these days has to deal with its share of racist Trump supporters who steal scrap metal from construction sites for meth money…

If you live in the US (or UK) you live in a collapsing society being suffocated and held in place by neoliberal austerity politics that purposefully shuts down the possibility of any genuine systematic reform that isn’t in the direction of fascism. The US is run by centrists who will spit in your face (while their Republican drinking buddies cheer them on) for daring to suggest populist leftism reforms that would actually improve the quality of life of the working class and poor of the US.

In that environment people are going to resort to taking meth and stealing scrap to survive, as society is literally trying to kill them off and there is no rational hope to be found for things to change. Are these people druggies, are they sketchy? Are some of them maga heads who turn to pathetic and hateful views? Yes, but I think it is important to always recognize the conditions that lead desperate people to act in desperate ways when we discuss the repulsiveness of said desperate acts of non-violent crime.

Maybe the whole point of Monty Python was to sketch out ways that humans could behave that would confuse and hugely throw off machine learning algorithms.

Talk about “poisoning the well” with AI training, all you have to do is 65% of the time make completely normal and rational intelligent choices and the other 35% be completely illogical and inscrutable. Any algorithm trained on you then, no matter how smart you are or how valuable your knowledge is, will inconsistently and abruptly resort to batshit crazy and unreliable choices and information. :)

The thousands and thousands of years we have nurtured sarcasm and absurdism in the garden of human culture has all been for this one true purpose…

I would say maybe John Cleese is an alien trying to save us, but Cleese is a dick no matter how funny the stuff he was involved in was and I would hope Aliens were much more open minded than he is.

Oh thanks! I didn’t even realize factorio wasn’t real!

facepalm silly me

Thank you for the thoughtful response

It’s also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren’t really a life form, they’re more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?

I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.

Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.

I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.

Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…

The Sea Will Claim Everything

https://store.steampowered.com/app/337720/The_Sea_Will_Claim_Everything/

I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.

I don’t know, it is a small thing, I totally get why people get addicted to factorio’s gameplay loop not disputing how amazing that is it is just the basic premise of the game makes me uncomfortable in it’s disinterest in the planet you are on being anything but a resource to conquered and consumed or in thinking about how you are actually the villain in this situation from the planet’s perspective.

Do it, fucking go crazy, let all your weird fucked up dark fantasies out, as both a very chaotic person but also a very thoughtful and caring person, fucking now is the time to do it.

Linux has gotten really good, drivers are good. You can do it and your headaches will be so much less in the end.

Come over to the bright side.

Let your dark fantasies about doing lots of dirty things through the command line or whatever come true. Install a bunch of open source software and don’t even tell your husband.

It is 2024 do whatever the fuck you want, corporations have completely folded their hands and completely quit even playing the game of providing you (not rich person) with functional visions of products or even functional products. Why? I don’t even know honestly, I mean I am definitely a nerd about open source software and a raging socialist but it is truly astonishing how quick enshittification is in this late stage of 2024, it is the continual experience of standing im front of a massive glacier and watching square kilometer chunks calving and collapsing for no apparent logical reason.

Just make one big enough that you can use billionaires instead of atomic particles

I think this meme might actually be perfect

Oh super cool, yeah checking out your Dokuwiki personal website it just reminds me how much I like the software. The UI of pages is so simple and clean and Dokuwiki is so easy to setup I honestly don’t see the reason to really go with a normal website over using Dokuwiki unless you have very specific needs (especially because with the farm/animal plugin or whatever you can host multiple different wikis on the same website).

I don’t think Dokuwiki is perfect for what you want though but it is so lightweight and customizable that I originally mentioned it to suggest considering if you can tweak your workflow to make it work.

Have you looked at Logseq? It is a free and open source personal wiki/knowledge base with a great mobile app. The structure is every day has its own page that you add notes to, you then link to other pages to create them and move on to editing those pages like a normal wiki. Might be a little closer to what you are looking for.

https://logseq.com/

Hmm, Dokuwiki is a reallllllly underrated wiki software that is extremely lightweight and doesn’t require a database to run on (files are just stored in a folder). Multiple different wikis can be run on the same Dokuwiki server with plugins and in general it is a supremely easy way to host a body of text and images that can be easily edited by multiple people (or be kept private). The media manager for uploading images and managing them is really nice too.

Backing up your wiki on Dokuwiki is also absurdly easy because it is just a folder… that you can backup in any number of ways (git… syncthing… whatever).

https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

Seriously, Dokuwiki needs more love.

I know this is a joke, but for real outdoor domesticated cats kill 1.3-4 billion songbirds a year… and most of those cats are being fed by humans.

They really do need to stop working so hard, and humans really need to start thinking about the ethics of letting their cat out to slaughter the wildlife around their home for no reason.

I don’t know if Microsoft’s choices to drive windows into the ground are going to have an immediate impact on Linux adoption (though you certainly see some governments trialing Linux right now because of it) but in the medium term they basically demand that Linux increase in users by a massive amount.

I know business not gaming is where Microsoft sees the value of Windows (and there is wayyyyyy more money in selling software for business) but I think a strategic defeat is happening right now with the steam deck taking off and more broadly the association in computer nerd’s minds that windows is the operating system to stick with is essentially all but evaporated from the series of bogglingly condescending decisions Microsoft has made about the future development of windows.

They lost, this period will gone down as a historic unforced error of a tech company undermining the foundation of their profits to make a bit more profits in the near term. They could have kept linux gaming mostly a pipe dream indefinitely if they just made sure windows wasn’t ever tooooo shitty of an experience for gaming, but now the dam is broken and though it might not be a flood all it once, the people leaving windows are never coming back and the movement of users away from windows will erode the levee behind the dam, compromising Microsoft’s basic ability to hold on to users, for gaming or business.

It starts with a trickle, but before we know it in a blink of an eye that trickle is going to cut a channel and slips its fingers back under the dam and destabilize the entire thing, and then it will be a massive rush of users leaving that Microsoft can’t control at all because they ignored the issue until the process was way past a point of no return.

Honestly Wine and Bottles are both pretty great at running windows programs these days, I wouldn’t worry to much about that so long as you check and make sure the critical software you need works.

How did Kirk and Picard and Janeway find themselves on Galaxy Class Starships traversing the deep corners of distant space? Well, first we did a quick global super-holocaust because of genetically engineered racism (don’t ask the finer details of that) and then we just… got better and turned Earth into a Utopia.

Nah actually a crazy guy named Zefram Cochrane creates the first warp drive on earth using an old ICBM as a platform to build his spaceship, he is basically just doing it as a crazy entrepreneur trying to make money. When he launches it to test it for the first time, the use of the warp drive alerts the Vulcans, who come and investigate. Generally, Vulcans did not have a policy of interfering with other planets that had not yet become spacefaring, but since Earth now had developed the warp drive the Vulcans established first contact and then helped usher Earth into a new space age. If it wasn’t for the Vulcans, it is likely that Zefram Cochrane would have still been moderately successful but it is unlikely that the Federation would have arose complete with massive starships.

In the silly mirror universe where everyone is evil what happens is that instead of Zefram shaking hands with the Vulcans when they land and make first contact he and the other people in the camp shoot the Vulcans and steal their technology, eventually building an authoritarian galactic empire called the Terran Empire.

An epic spaceship battle with the Trisolarians is, after all, far sexier to put on screen than a bunch of scientists grappling with the mathematics behind three spheres floating through space. So the old Asimov-style of SciFi as a series of entertaining word problems falls away, to be replaced by the Science Fantasy of Space Wizards and Warp Cores and Time Traveling Monkeys.

I don’t want scifi to only be about the mathematics of spheres though.

I also don’t want my scifi to be just about Space Wizards (ughh Jedi and Sith are the most boring part of Star Wars by far), Warp Cores and Time Traveling Monkeys… I want my scifi to be about people and the positive capacity of humanity. When we look to imagined futures they should remind us that we have the agency of choice to pick what the future is, and that is totally possible for us to pick kindness and empathy. That is why Star Trek is so much more interesting and compelling than 99% of scifi, because while sometimes it is grim it is always concerned with the choices we make and imagining a future where we make better choices. Outside of Star Trek, the feeling of scifi has overwhelming been dystopian futures and though there is good reason to imagine dystopian futures as cautionary tales, I think they are also a drug that when overdosed on makes us believe dystopian futures are inveitable.

For example I wanted to love the scifi show Tales From The Loop, the appeal of Simon Stålenhag’s visions of alternate realities is undeniably captivating. However, all the characters seemed to act like complete sociopaths, the episode that did me in was where the two kids have their bodies swapped and kid who is switched into the body of the kid who has a much nicer life refuses to switch back. He goes on to just live that kids life presumably as an impostor… and I just… like I don’t even remotely believe 99.99% of humanity would make that choice (especially as a child who hasn’t even become comfortable in their own body yet). Some humans might, but that has far more to do with how abnormal those people are than it does to do with how technology might corrupt us with its power. Same thing with a lot of black mirror, it is this repeating vision of dystopian futures that just assumes that everybody will behave like sociopaths and it gets really tiring to me not the least because it fundamentally undermines the plausibility of the imagined future at a basic level. It subconsciously teaches us to deny the possibility of more positive futures since our imagination is a bayesian space defined and bounded by visions of the future provided to us by culture.