Sternhammer

Nah, your just use your increased intellect to get other people to push the button for themselves, increasing the pool of intelligent potential friends available to you.

Actually this reminds me of a story I read last year where two people are in a race to massively increase their intelligence. Neither can tolerate the potential threat the existence of another hyper-intelligent person holds so it’s a struggle to the death. If I remember correctly they gain there ability to effectively read people’s minds by reading body language, micro expressions, etc., develop new systems of logic and hyper-efficient language to think in and have an entirely mental showdown at the end.

Unfortunately I’m too stupid to remember the title.

Well said.

I’d also point out that dehumanising a subgroup is a powerful technique used to manipulate people. Tell people who to hate and you can get them to go along with anything while they’re focused on the scapegoats. Popular scapegoats include:

• immigrants (taking our jobs while, paradoxically, being a welfare burden)
• religious groups (Jews, Muslims, etc.)
• welfare recipients (dole bludgers, a burden on society)
• criminals (war on drugs, tough on crime)

Any time someone is demonising a group theres a good chance they’re just trying to manipulate you.

I was replying to Tekila’s comment about ‘real life’ cows which I think are best thought of as ‘sentient’ but I appreciate your point.

Sentient: able to perceive or feel things.

Sapient: 1. wise or wanting to appear wise 2. relating to the human species, of the species Homo sapiens.

I think players are desensitised to unnatural dialogue. For example, to my Western ear lots of Asian games seem to have weird dialogue, no doubt due to poor translation. (Kojima is known to insist his dialogue be translated strictly and literally from the Japanese which explains, partially, why his games feel pretty strange. Plus Kojima is bonkers.)

I hope this isn’t Microsoft becoming more Apple-like. That said, if this leads to a restriction on the use of cheat-capable controller accessories such as the Chronos Zen then it could be a significant positive for FPS console gamers.

It reminds me of Apple locking faster charging and data transfer on USB-C to their own proprietary USB cables.

Are you sure of that? It was certainly rumoured before the release of the iPhone 15 Pro that Apple would require MFi cables for high speed data transfer but I don’t think that turned out to be true. As far as I can tell any high speed USB-C cable will allow full speed transfer from an IPhone 15 Pro. It might need to be a Thunderbolt 3 cable, especially for recording to external SSD, not sure, I’m no expert, but I don’t think it needs to be an MFi cable.

I haven’t seen anyone else recommend Prospect (2918).

I think your daughter might really enjoy it because the lead role is a young female, played by Sophie Thatcher, and it has a terrific far-future, hard SF vibe and great production values for an indie feature. Also the ubiquitous Pedro Pascal is very good in it as well. Killer sound track too.

I use Reeder on iOS and have for yonks. I was using it with Feed Wrangler (for synchronisation) until it folded and then I just imported my feeds into Reeder directly so it syncs across all of my devices.

The loss of Google Reader was a blow to RSS but it’s never gone away and a great way of getting your news and information.

I think Brink was game that killed my naive trust in the hype machine. So much anticipation, so much desperation to enjoy it, so much disappointment. From there on I only believed the hyperbole from proven developers but eventually Destiny killed even that. Now I’m a bitter shell of a gamer who lives by the creed, “never pre-order!”

I don’t see any darker-skinned actors playing good guys

Are you forgetting Salvor Hardin, played by Leah Harvey?

… you have to turn off some extra security settings on your Apple ID, and you have to give Beeper your password just once.

If they’re using Apple’s app-specific passwords feature then that’s workable but if it’s your master Apple ID password, no way.

And yet it often leads to more satisfying narratives.

To be fair, Kojima games are primarily vehicles for cut-scene delivery. Gameplay is a bonus.

Sorry, formatting error. Should be clear now.

I’m with you. I’m enjoying the Foundation series and, in a way, the departures from the book keep me guessing. But it’s not Asimov. When it stared I wondered how they were going to handle the constantly changing key characters but it seemed they just couldn’t so we have clones, uploads and hypersleep to keep people around for the long span of the stories. That’s disappointing but I’m still enjoying the ride.

Confession: I re-read the first three Foundation books last year but got bogged down in the fourth. The ideas are wonderful and changed science fiction with their scope but the writing is rather dated and, frankly, they are quite long-winded at times. Apologies for the sacrilege.

Have you read any Iain M Banks’ The Culture novels? Incredible writing. Most of his books have interesting twists in them, some of which will fuck you up. They are the type of books that you wish you could read again for the first time. The author died in 2013 so there are no more coming.

• Consider Phlebas
• The Player of Games
• Use of Weapons
• The State of the Art
• Excession
• Inversions
• Look to Windward
• Matter
• Surface Detail
• The Hydrogen Sonata

Other SF books by Banks:

• Against a Dark Background
• Feersum Endjinn
• The Algebraist

Indeed. I’m Australian and my partner and I did a round-the-world cruise for three months in 2018. We’re not rich, I used my long-service leave to take the time off work. It wasn’t cheap but no regrets, would do it again in a heartbeat.

It’s sounds like Orwellian Newspeak. How double-plus-ungood.