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NeilNjae
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Thanks for explaining that. And yes, I agree with the privileged place violence has in RPGs (and culture more generally). In another RPG community I'm in, someone ran a game of First Responders (emergency response people). Some people were surpris…
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I came across this article on the disagreements about "what is artificial general intelligence?" : https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/agi-may-be-impossible-to-define-and-thats-a-multibillion-dollar-problem/
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(Quote) The Third Class passengers were still passengers, not servants working their passage. And all passengers were subservient to the crew on the train. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. It's a steam-era train, so of course it will have diff…
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One major failing with the technical part of the writing. I share @Apocryphal 's opinion that the characters weren't clearly distinguished on the page. The characters were all different people (to me), but the voice in the chapters wasn't distinct. …
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I also thought the ending was weak. It was the literary equivalent of the "fade to silence" way some pop songs end. The train just ... carried on going, and the Wastelands change just carried on. I'd have liked a more definitive end to the…
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I was disappointed that she set up these different ways of understanding the world, but didn't interrogate or challenge them. I don't know whether she had something to say about them, then ducked the issue, or just added people like Petrovitch becau…
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(Quote) But do our perceptions of people change when their name (or the name we use) changes? Do we think about Suzuki differently from the Cartographer? Do we think about the Professor differently from Artemis? When is their role more important tha…
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Yes, things were carrying regardless. The train was moving, the ecology was asserting itself, the future and adulthood were coming anyway. But most of the people there chose to open themselves to those experiences, and they chose how they behaved in…
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I also picked up on the similarities with The Girl with all the Gifts, but didn't mention it mainly because I couldn't remember the title! As for the different metaphors, do you think any of the alternatives are worthwhile to consider? Does the boo…
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That's a question I was considering asking: is the idea of "found family" and community a significant element of the narrative? People in the book are often doing things for others, not themselves. The Crows and Dr Grey are exceptions, and…
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Questions posted for The Curious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands. I had a lot of thoughts!
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How are people doing with Cautious Traveller ? I'm planning to post some questions in the next few days.
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(Quote) I'm not using "qualia" in any controversial way. My point is that we have no way (at present) to connect a subjective experience of something to an organic state in a brain, and certainly can't relate any of that to a collection of…
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(Quote) LLMs don't "think" like humans. Yes, LLMs generate text by creating one word at a time. But which word to generate is determined by the context of that word. That includes all the words that have come before, the prompt, and what …
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(Quote) I don't. The whole thing is an ill-defined mess. Philosophers of mind use introspection to build castles in the air about what mental phenomena are. But things like qualia don't exist in any observable, physical form. They can't be the subje…
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(Quote) A "language model" is something that is a representation of language. You can use it to understand or generate language. The "large language models" underlying things like ChatGPT use neural networks as an underlying tech…
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(Quote) That's pretty much synonymous with "life": bacteria will move from areas of "discomfort" to "comfort". If "sentience" has a useful meaning, it needs to be something more specific than that. Most AI re…
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I'm sorry, but this was another book I just couldn't finish. I found it very dull and formulaic, with all the characters acting at the surface level and not the slightest hint of any three-dimensionality. It was so bad, it was almost as bad as the f…
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Yes, thank you. I appreciate the notion that there are multiple, conflicting versions of "the truth" co-existing. That reflects the notion of the various Chosen Once in the book.
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> @Apocryphal said: > Every so often this book flips into the first person present. I haven’t wrapped my head around this yet. > “The Perfect and Kind is not looking at Fetter. He’s looking at me. He can’t see me - it’s not possible - but…
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(Quote) Thanks for this. As I said elsewhere, I'm ignorant of the schools of thought in this part of the world. That meant I missed a lot, and I appreciate having these references made explicit. Feel free to espouse more!
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> @BarnerCobblewood said: > This inability to communicate (aphasia) becoming a social problem would make a great theme for a highly relevant SF novel. I think _Blindsight_ does this. I'm that book, a team of disparate experts investigate …
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There's some interesting world-building there, even if it's mostly ignored in the book. There's the portal fantasy of the Bright Doors, and perhaps the associated devils that come through them. Religion is a big thing, with so many sects and so man…
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I think the characters were mainly in the mould of "people doing their best in the midst of a vast, uncaring, social system." Most of them were following their expected roles, even Fetter. Fetter tried to move out of his mother's influenc…
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I'm with Richard. I found the doors and the devils pretty irrelevant to the story. They had no effect on the story. Are they part of the wider Buddhist mythology and therefore a standard part of fantasy stories, much like elves and dwarves are in Eu…
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I don't think the story format was anything unusual. It was a fairly chronological retelling of a sequence of events in Fetter's life. The biggest surprise was the change from third-person to first-person narration at the end. I liked that it overtu…
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I didn't pick up that it was close to Buddhism, but it's obvious now you mention it. I think the standard view of Buddhism in British pop culture is all about monks and meditation, and we get to hear almost nothing about what Buddhism is like as an …
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I also liked it. It had a real sense of South Asia that was refreshingly alien to my jaded Eurocentric experience. But that's probably for another question. The book didn't prompt deeper thoughts in me, or change my world-view: the concerns of the …
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How about The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks for June? It's from last year, it's had good reviews, and is on my TBR pile already.
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Yes, the idea of a stable of NPCs that illustrate different lives. That's good for a game. The notion of "us Vs them" for the gap between nobles and commoners was the central point of the novel. But generally, I thought the action was too …