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Our heroes make a real mess of an airship or two, and FINALLY Bodyguard Chris manages to turn the tables and make something of his repeated failures. Emperor Colbert tries not to die before the end.
(This podcast is the finale of our pilot series for Decipher RPG where we play Mirror by Sandy Pug Games with Liam Ginty. Previously: Part 1 | Part 2)
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Wishing there were more of this in popular media.
A review of invisibility technology: spatial, temporal, and spectral light cloaking. Vibranium to the rescue.
Space impactors. Resource
Body armor, stationary armor. Avoiding concussive force. Reactive armor in tanks: shaped explosives that explode at the other thing that’s gonna explode! Molecular springs of carbon for storage of mechanical energy from kinetic. How not to turn into Black Panther jelly when the suit releases its energy (be superhuman).
Bas Rutten for king. Right hoooook.
Killmonger’s scarification and scar damage to the dermis. Sweat patterns around scars.
Remote vehicle control. Light-speed communications delays. AI-assisted remote human driving.
Domestication vs trainability. Extinct war elephants and why we can’t have war rhinos. Dürer’s rhinoceros, drawn from notes on the first rhino seen in Europe since Roman times.
Xhosa! Bantu languages. The possibility of a connection to the earliest human languages.
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Emperor Colbert dresses down and bodyguard Chris rediscovers the joy of the bidet and the German shelf toilet. Then: daring aerial maneuvers!
(This podcast is the second part of our pilot series for Decipher RPG where we play Mirror by Sandy Pug Games with Liam Ginty. Previously: Part 1)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | RSS
This podcast is the first of three episodes of our pilot series for Decipher RPG where we play Mirror by Sandy Pug Games with Liam Ginty. Here is part 2!
After some particular fun with character creation, Emperor Colbert’s coronation is interrupted by a sudden attack. With RPG-Colbert still entranced in his ceremonial mask, his bodyguard Chris rushes him to safety, but… airships!
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Man’s best friend! And one of (many of?) our best technologies. The level to which we can handicap animals for aesthetics if we put our mind to it. Domesticated foxes.
Domestication. Plants and animals. Bending chosen qualities to better human use.
Watermelon as of The Renaissance. Yay selective breeding! We win!
Implicit and explicit communication channels. Dog human body language-reading. Data connections and cloudy signal processing. Adaptation of dog body-design to robots. The small design effort required to get people to treat a robot animal like an animal.
The difference between industrial and military flamethrowers. An unpleasant, sticky material: napalm and napalm-like products!
We have one of those. Pls help.
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Memories of the arcade and the Sega Game Gear. Introduction of Larry the Rat in the Atari Lynx port. How to pick from current social fears for your lazy game plot.
Genetics research in spaaaaaace. CRISPR. Bremen Drop Tower.
Koko the gorilla. Gorilla sign language. Credulity and confirmation bias. Impressive gorilla lexicons. Adventures in signing portmanteus. Yogurt aka “milkfruitcandy food.”
Comparing the gorilla to the grizzly bear. Relative animal size. Grizzly bears as killing machine. Gorilla conflict-avoidance techniques.
The square-cube law! Relative scaling and the race between volume and surface area (volume always wins!). The creation of a bio antenna. The relatively low energy of radio waves.
Gorilla turns into giant gorilla. Lizard turns into mega lizard. Wolf, though, turns into a wolf… with patagia and throwable quills! Possibly resembling the urticating hairs of a tarantula.
How to Make an Elephant Explode with Science by Kurtzgesagt: YouTube
Zero-G Experiments on Earth: The Bremen Drop Tower by Tom Scott: YouTube
Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday by The Onion: YouTube
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Special conditions requiring primary and secondary warnings.
How to tell if you are a robot? New Study Finds Best Way To Determine If You Are Android Still Cutting Open Forearm To Reveal Circuitry Within. Self-delusion and mass self-delusion.
Earth is really well-tuned for our needs (or is it the other way around?), and humans should try to maintain this as a base of operations if at all possible.
Key resources on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system (outside of Earth). Iron for bullets. Rocket fuel.
There is no stealth in space. Trying to hide from Earth (on Mars). Difficulties in hiding propulsion, light-blocking, and infrared emission. Hiding “in” the sun.
Shock and awe vs the impossibility of stealth. Why a nuclear EMP attack might not be a great idea. Throw a rock at it.
Evolved consciousness in Earth life. The possibility of consciousness emerging in “artificial” life. Attention Schema Theory. Central processing of separate signal enhancement.
Real Quick: LSG Media
What is Consciousness? by Vsauce: YouTube
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Josh from LSG MediaLove! For James Cameron and Aliens. And the great utilitarian design of the spaceship interiors. Great world-building.
Cryosleep? Ice sublimation and mummified Sigourney Weaver. Hibernation. How to shove pine cones up your butt, chug some Nyquil, and turn into a bear. Cryogenic specimen preservations: sperm! DIY fecal plugs for hibernation.
The rise of private space industry. Going dystopian.
Planet? Moon? The delineation between planets and moons and looking forward to the future when we get confused again. Demoting Pluto to planetoid. Terraforming Mars. Sad news on Martian CO2 supplies for atmosphere creation. Crater settlements and whether or not you need a roof. Atmospheric density limits for human comfort and thriving.
But are they really called Xenomorphs? The throwaway line in Aliens that spawned decades of confusion.
Send the robots
Always send the robots. Unless you are an evil corporation with shady goals. Milk robots…?
Blade Runner and Aliens are the same universe. The separate lines of technological development that yielded replicants and Aliens’ “synthetics.” Blade Runner 2049’s anime prequel and how that informs the universe crossover.
Aliens: iTunes | Amazon
Josh’s shows on LSG Media: Science Fiction Film Podcast | The X-Files Podcast
Josh’s escape room in Massachusetts: Mass Escape
Jurassic World, Jurassic Values by Mike Hill: YouTube
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The economics of leaving Earth. Settling the inner and outer solar system. The Expanse. Space cattle and other space resources (water, mineral).
Garbage in space aka space junk. Cleaning up space junk. Giant nets as a major cleanup strategy.
Modern waste management. What to do with municipal solid waste. Leachate. The difference between dumps and landfills and the interesting energy-reclamation technology involved in cutting edge WTE facilities.
Massive plastic appreciation. How plastics ushered in the modern world. A lament for wasteful use of “disposable” plastic products. Microplastics in the water. Biodegradable plastics. The discovery of plastic-eating bacteria. Speeding up nature to digest plastic now. The coming plague of plastic-eating bacteria.
This isn’t a thing! There’s no end point that is being retreated from – life just adapts to pressures, ongoing.
Revisiting our past failures. Combating cynicism by just kind of ignoring it.
Wall-E: iTunes | Amazon
The Water Fountain You Pee In: YouTube
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Featuring guest co-host
Jolene Creighton
Identity according to interests. Fiction as personal and social mirror. Cultures and subcultures and super-niches.
Ad-hoc city large-scale construction. Kowloon Walled City.
VR treadmills vs slippy-feet (Virtuix Omni). Looking silly. Scaling and translation from real-world input to virtual worlds. Manual and body haptics. Simulating moistness. Nard-stimulation for good and ill.
Directional trickery in virtual reality. Tricking people into experiencing smaller real-world spaces as much larger in virtual reality. Saccade-driven Redirected Walking for VR.
Pixel densities and optical foci. Continuity of experience and detection of the difference between virtual and simulated worlds. Finding the clever “hacks” that will enable us to more deeply immerse ourselves in VR experiences.
Virtual world scale and sharding vs mon-worlds.Virtu
Real virtual economies and responsibility.
Ready Player One iTunes | Amazon
Ready Player One (book) by Ernest Cline iTunes | Amazon
Saccade-driven Redirected Walking for VR YouTube
A Real Life Haptic Glove (Ready Player One Technology Today) by Smarter Every Day YouTube
The Infinadeck Omnidirectional Treadmill by Smarter Every Day YouTube
Kowloon Walled City interactive feature WSJ
The Brookhaven Experiment Steam
