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Post by Lightice on May 27, 2012 11:17:43 GMT
I would say Mercury if it wasn't already Reynardine's symbol: Solid, dense, and completely devoid of distinguishing features. That wouldn't be very appropriate when we take the mythology into account. Mercury is a trickster god, the patron of merchants and thieves, quick and unpredictable. And the element he is associated is a metal that runs like water. None of that sounds very Jones-like. |
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Post by GK Sierra on May 27, 2012 17:11:20 GMT
I would say Mercury if it wasn't already Reynardine's symbol: Solid, dense, and completely devoid of distinguishing features. That wouldn't be very appropriate when we take the mythology into account. Mercury is a trickster god, the patron of merchants and thieves, quick and unpredictable. And the element he is associated is a metal that runs like water. None of that sounds very Jones-like. True. Mercury is supposed to be the messenger of the gods, or at least in Greco-Roman tradition. Jones doesn't look like she carries anybodies mail. Ever. |
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Post by TBeholder on May 27, 2012 20:01:51 GMT
I was thinking Pluto for the same reasons. Solid, dense, devoid of distinguishing features... lies at the outskirts and keeps its own erratic orbit. But, uh, that's not a planet anymore. ...came to the Court to sort out this toying around with planet status.  |
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Post by TBeholder on May 28, 2012 7:47:23 GMT
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Kriselia
Junior Member
But she smells wonderful!
Posts: 87
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Post by Kriselia on May 28, 2012 15:46:42 GMT
Like drawing on other beings' etheric energy? Absorbing it or just being coloured by it maybe? It could also explain why she can act as Zimmy's "heat sink" |
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Post by Georgie L on Jun 4, 2012 16:40:01 GMT
I don't know why it took me this long to notice this.
Renardine doll was made by Surma, maybe she planned for Reynard to go in there and Reynard had never thought of actually possessing Annie?
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Post by goldenknots on Jun 4, 2012 18:21:07 GMT
I don't know why it took me this long to notice this. Renardine doll was made by Surma, maybe she planned for Reynard to go in there and Reynard had never thought of actually possessing Annie? Better yet, they planned it that way. |
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Post by Mezzaphor on Jun 5, 2012 4:15:20 GMT
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Post by Georgie L on Jun 5, 2012 19:31:40 GMT
I'll be honest, I didn't want to necro an old thread just because I only just realised a glaringly obvious interpretation.
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Post by warrl on Jun 5, 2012 20:04:29 GMT
I'll be honest, I didn't want to necro an old thread just because I only just realised a glaringly obvious interpretation. This is Gunnerkrigg Court. A glaringly obvious interpretation may sometimes be right, but it isn't the way to bet. Particularly when there are several, mutually contradictory, glaringly obvious interpretations. |
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Post by GK Sierra on Jun 6, 2012 1:35:51 GMT
I'll be honest, I didn't want to necro an old thread just because I only just realised a glaringly obvious interpretation. Don't sweat it, this thread is meant for bumping. One man's glaringly obvious interpretation is another man's incredibly obscure revelation. |
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Post by diztrakted on Jun 14, 2012 3:27:20 GMT
First one is just emotional overload. Maybe the berries had something to do with it. The second one was simply exhaustion/disorientation from using her ether vision in ways she hadn't before. I mean, they disconnected her from her body for the first time ever! Basically, she's human. I am of the opinion that Annie and... well I'm not so sure about Kat anymore, are more human than they are other things. I think this makes sense given Tom's approach to characters: people are complex and not to be summed up or even mainly guided by one unusual characteristic. Long story short, more can be explained by saying someone is human than by saying they're more than human. |
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Post by csj on Jun 15, 2012 5:13:52 GMT
I bet this has been mentioned before. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gunnarren.wiktionary.org/wiki/creag (pronounced kɾeɡ̊) The Court was formed after a large battle (of was the site of a battle) and is situated on top of a rock outcrop (was likely a fort of some kind in its early history). How very apt. |
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Post by GK Sierra on Jun 15, 2012 5:40:33 GMT
I bet this has been mentioned before. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gunnarren.wiktionary.org/wiki/creag (pronounced kɾeɡ̊) The Court was formed after a large battle (of was the site of a battle) and is situated on top of a rock outcrop (was likely a fort of some kind in its early history). How very apt. Hrm. Perhaps said battle is what caused all the men in frilly 17th-century garb that we saw to take such drastic measures in regards to Jeanne? |
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Post by mcbibble on Jun 15, 2012 7:43:39 GMT
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Pig_catapult
Full Member
Keeper of the Devilkitty
Posts: 171
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Post by Pig_catapult on Jun 16, 2012 19:01:39 GMT
Zimmy is actually freaked out in part by Kat's perceived lack of a nose. Also, this totally explains why all robots see an angel when they look at Kat. |
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Post by GK Sierra on Jun 22, 2012 6:45:01 GMT
Let me go out on a limb here a moment.
Since Antimony is using the mask to hide her plagiarism shenanigans, it must be Jones who gave her the idea.
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Post by blahzor on Jun 28, 2012 15:41:47 GMT
due to a question asked correctly by someone and Tom's response. I'm now fully believing that Zimmy IS the courts main thing into fulfilling their goal as stated as "Man attempts to become god" now what my real speculation after that fact is that Zimmy is the result of the Seed being used to build the court. The "husk" if you will and Gamma is a counter balance to the powers Zimmy was born with created by w/e naturalistic balance the forest lives in
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Post by Per on Jun 28, 2012 16:18:28 GMT
Kat is short for Karkat. She is a technocancer.
What
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Post by TBeholder on Jun 29, 2012 13:52:19 GMT
into fulfilling their goal as stated as "Man attempts to become god" . |
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Post by GK Sierra on Jun 29, 2012 16:21:35 GMT
into fulfilling their goal as stated as "Man attempts to become god" . IMHO Transhumanism is not a metaphor or a myth in GC or real life. It is coming, for those of us who are prepared to meet its eventualities. In the end, mankind will become the gods he has been dreaming of for so long.  |
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Post by legion on Jun 29, 2012 17:15:42 GMT
IMHO Transhumanism is not a metaphor or a myth in GC or real life. It is coming, for those of us who are prepared to meet its eventualities. In the end, mankind will become the gods he has been dreaming of for so long. Transhumanists would have more credibility if they didn't sound like crazy evangelicals anouncing the rapture very-soon-now-promess. |
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Post by GK Sierra on Jun 29, 2012 17:40:22 GMT
IMHO Transhumanism is not a metaphor or a myth in GC or real life. It is coming, for those of us who are prepared to meet its eventualities. In the end, mankind will become the gods he has been dreaming of for so long. Transhumanists would have more credibility if they didn't sound like crazy evangelicals anouncing the rapture very-soon-now-promess. That's okay, I don't need to sound sane as long as I have Moore's Law and its corollaries riding shotgun. With those boys at my back, I fear no living man. ;D The reason evangelicals sound so crazy is because you realize what they're talking about has no basis in reality. The same can't be said for the inexorable march of technology. We might not be able to give you a date and time, but's that because we don't have a magic spell-book to interpret any which way we please. It's not really all that far flung if you think about it, and look around you at the advances we've made, and are in the process of making. Wireless data transfer is almost ubiquitous and gets faster by the week, and soon wireless power transfer will provide a reasonable net energy loss to be practical. We can already grow our own organs in grafts, replace almost every sensory input in our bodies including haptic/tactile feedback, the most difficult, and we are well on the way to understanding the architecture and interactions in our brains. The consequences of that last discovery alone, which is no more than a decade or so away (as opposed to the evangelicals 2000 years, I'm not holding my breath), are staggering. |
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Post by goldenknots on Jun 29, 2012 18:42:21 GMT
Could something be done about the page being forced wide, please?
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Post by legion on Jun 29, 2012 18:49:51 GMT
The dangers of extrapolation~
Yes technology has gone consistently forward, so far, the problem is that the technological history of humanity is ridiculously short compared to, say, the history of life, (and I am one of those generous people who make technological history start in the paleolithic —whereas I'm under the impression that for some transhumanists, anything that happened before the Ancient Egyptian historical period is dur dur ooga booga); some people think we're living in the future, but for all we know, we could still be at the dawn of man, the future not actually happening for another few million years, and so extrapolating from this tiny set of data is preposterous.
In fact if we look on the long run, technological history knows two kinds of period: revolution periods (where entirely new fields and techniques are invented) and enhancement periods (where existing techniques are enhanced, but no new field is created).
We have had three revolution periods so far:
—The paleolithic revolution (stone tool making, hunting-gathering, fire, clothing, artificial shelter, behaviourial modernity, religion, art, artificial shelters, rafting, weapons, textile thread, language...)
—The neolithic revolution (agriculture, domestication, metalurgy, pottery, writing)
—The industrial revolution (steam, electricity, numerisation, computers, internet [skipping a bit])
Maybe we're still in the industrial revolution period, but it could as well be over and we'd effectively have entered the next enhancement periods. The last great innovation was networking, and now we're just making our computers smaller and more powerful, but at the core they're still fancy differential engines, we're not creating new tools, we're enhancing a 175 years old tool.
Maybe the singularity will happen, not in 10 or 50 years, but in 10,000, 100,000 years, 10 million years.
Maybe it will never happen. Maybe at some point we will find out that we've discovered anything that could be discovered, and can't go further (fun fact: physicists' hopes of finding a unified theory of physics are becoming smaller everyday, in only a few decades, the point of time where "we will know ALL science" as gone from "very soon now" to "maybe never").
Maybe things will happen exactly as transhumanists predict it.
But there are many possibilities, all very likely for a variety of reason, and in the meantime we're just doing speculation. What makes transhumanists ridiculous is not the content of what they predict. It's the baseless certainty with which they assert the 100% reliable accuracy of their predictions.
For all we know, a meteor the size of Texas will destroy civilization in 10 years, or a flare from a neutron star will wipe out all life on Earth in 50 years, or the whole universe is actually in a false vacuum that will resorb itself in 150 years, thus instantly ending all energy and matter as we know it.
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Post by Lightice on Jun 29, 2012 19:20:33 GMT
Transhumanists would have more credibility if they didn't sound like crazy evangelicals anouncing the rapture very-soon-now-promess. A transhumanist who believes that all the problems of the world will be cured through technology is just talking out of his ass, but under the circumstances it is highly likely that technology will be used to greatly boost human intelligence, lifespan and abilities in the coming decades. Just how it all manifests itself, and what effects it will have on the society is a matter of speculation -- they dont't call it the Singularity for nothing. I identify as a transhumanist, in that I see the expansion of human limitations through technology to be a desirable and beneficial path for us to take, and quite possibly the only one that can keep us alive as a species, or at least as a culture, but I'm not going to pretend that the development is all sunshine and daisies, or already mapped through. Though I expect to see some applications manifest during my unextended lifetime. No chance. Either we get things right now, or there won't be a second chance. We've spent all the easily available fossil fuels, and have to use advanced technology to benefit from the rest while we wait for more sustainable forms of energy to become economically feasible. If we get stuck to our current level of technology or go backwards, our culture will collapse in less than a century, with no hope of a new, equally advanced society ever coming to being because those aforementioned easily available fossil fuels are gone. The term "Singularity" gets thrown around a bit too much like it was an actual thing, some kind of techno-Rapture which will lead us all into cyber-heaven as uploaded spirits, rather than simply an intellectual abstraction of technological and social development to a point of unpredictability. We most likely won't even notice the whole thing until decades later, when we get some contemporary historians arguing whether it started with this or that particular event. Fat chance. The deeper we've gone, the more complex physics has gotten, not simpler as the physicists would have hoped. Many savvy physicists have started to doubt the basic concept of a unified theory itself. Maybe it's just as insubstantial as the search for the True God? We're quite unlikely to ever know ALL science, and even if we did, it would still have a potentially infinite amount of applications to explore. |
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Post by legion on Jun 29, 2012 19:45:11 GMT
Why won't we get a second chance? There's been plenty of missed opportunities, plenty of large scale civilization collapse, and, fortunately plenty of second chances. The Ancient Greeks nearly entered the industrial revolution. And missed it, then their civilization collapsed. But the industrial revolution still eventually happenned. Humanity went *nearly* extinct at some point of its history, plenty of technologies and techniques have been lost at many point of history (before the neolotithic, we sometimes see very advanced stone cutting industries surfacing in some places, then suddenly disappearing without trace, their techniques not being found again for thousands of years).
This is not the end of times, we are not in a fantasy novel at the dawn of the ultimate battle of order and enthropy, the great conjunction is not coming; singularity or not, human history will not suddenly come to an halt. See it's what I was saying, you are not sounding silly by saying "singularity will happen and it will imply this and this", but because you say "SINGULARITY MUST HAPPEN THIS CENTURY OR ELSE" which makes you sound like Nostradamus.
As for your third paragraph, you've just rephrased exactly what I said, so I'm not sure what the contradiction is.
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Post by Lightice on Jun 29, 2012 19:59:46 GMT
Why won't we get a second chance? There's been plenty of missed opportunities, plenty of large scale civilization collapse, and, fortunately plenty of second chances. The Ancient Greeks nearly entered the industrial revolution. And missed it, then their civilization collapsed. But the industrial revolution still eventually happenned. Humanity went *nearly* extinct at some point of its history, plenty of technologies and techniques have been lost at many point of history (before the neolotithic, we sometimes see very advanced stone cutting industries surfacing in some places, then suddenly disappearing without trace, their techniques not being found again for thousands of years). Because as I said, the all-important fuel source which pushed us through the Industrial Revolution is all but gone. Sure, with our current technology we still have plenty to go around, but if we had to start over with Victorian tech, we could barely keep the world running a few years before we run out of juice. That's why it's now or never. It's next to impossible for as wide-scale energy civilization to develop even if the current one doesn't end in a nuclear armageddon or some other near-extinction event. And without a worldwide energy civilization up and running, transhumanism and extraplanetary expansion have no chance. So, the choice is the same it was the whole 20th century: keep going forward or go down for good. The civilization would have already collapsed several times over if not for fairly mundane innovations in food and energy production during those decades. |
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Post by GK Sierra on Jun 29, 2012 20:27:36 GMT
Yes technology has gone consistently forward, so far, the problem is that the technological history of humanity is ridiculously short compared to, say, the history of life... ...extrapolating from this tiny set of data is preposterous. Yes, and it's the fact that it is an eyeblink in geologic time is the reason it has such power. In fifty years, less than a single human lifetime, our patterns of behavior, culture, communication, living habits, population density, and our conflicts have been completely upended by technology's most recent steps. Before such swings took hundreds of years, and before that they took hundreds of thousands. Now there are new inventions with the capability to change our lives instantly being discovered every week. Just this week an ISP announced that it had discovered a new method of bending light to transmit twice the amount of data through an internet connection. It's been three days, and this is now expected to become standard within 18 months. Skepticism at any kind of prediction making or scheduling is perfectly warranted. People always assume the singularity, or whatever you want to call it, will happen in an instant. That's probably not a realistic assumption, however, the exponential rate of growth (the "hockey stick" as it were) extends beyond Moore's paradigm of shrinking semiconductors in both directions. Perhaps Quantum Computing is the next step, who knows, but I wouldn't bet against that curve. In fact if we look on the long run, technological history knows two kinds of period: revolution periods (where entirely new fields and techniques are invented) and enhancement periods (where existing techniques are enhanced, but no new field is created). We have had three revolution periods so far: —The paleolithic revolution (stone tool making, hunting-gathering, fire, clothing, artificial shelter, behaviourial modernity, religion, art, artificial shelters, rafting, weapons, textile thread, language...) —The neolithic revolution (agriculture, domestication, metalurgy, pottery, writing) —The industrial revolution (steam, electricity, numerisation, computers, internet [skipping a bit]) Maybe we're still in the industrial revolution period, but it could as well be over and we'd effectively have entered the next enhancement periods. The last great innovation was networking, and now we're just making our computers smaller and more powerful, but at the core they're still fancy differential engines, we're not creating new tools, we're enhancing a 175 years old tool. And notice the frequency at which these paradigm shifts are happening, more and more frequently, and with greatly reduced time to adoption of the new technologies at every step. I would argue that there have been several more important shifts since what people call the "Industrial Revolution" occurred, but that's neither here nor there. Perhaps its a matter of perspective, but I just don't see the current period we are in as transitioning to something slower, where we don't go after new types of fission, artificial polymers, and materials. Sure, we're refining our technology, but unlike the neolithic man we can do that and also reach for better things at the same time due to the massive surplus of energy and computing power that modern humans enjoy comparatively. Maybe the singularity will happen, not in 10 or 50 years, but in 10,000, 100,000 years, 10 million years. Maybe it will never happen. Maybe at some point we will find out that we've discovered anything that could be discovered, and can't go further I'd say about a quarter of the time when I'm staring off into space and somebody asks me what I'm thinking about, it's this. I agree, trying to predict dates is a slippery slope, but there is a not insignificant body of data to suggest that this will be an issue in our lifetimes. I think we should be ready for it, because it will make the divide between the people who can afford it and the ones who can't even bigger, and possibly irreconcilable. The two sides just wont be able to communicate anymore and we'll have reached some weird divergence in the species. Maybe things will happen exactly as transhumanists predict it. But there are many possibilities, all very likely for a variety of reason, and in the meantime we're just doing speculation. What makes transhumanists ridiculous is not the content of what they predict. It's the baseless certainty with which they assert the 100% reliable accuracy of their predictions. For all we know, a meteor the size of Texas will destroy civilization in 10 years, or a flare from a neutron star will wipe out all life on Earth in 50 years, or the whole universe is actually in a false vacuum that will resorb itself in 150 years, thus instantly ending all energy and matter as we know it. For all I know, I'm going to win the Power-Lotto next time I go into QuickStop. Still a longshot though. But say you've got an inexorable force coming after you. In our case that's one of two things, death or taxes. The IRS isn't going to bust your door down tomorrow (probably), but it will happen some time in the future. Technology has consistently shown itself to be an inexorable force, and humanity, despite it's own protest, has never once declined to take advantage of it once it was discovered. Not even when it could destroy the entire earth. |
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Post by GK Sierra on Jun 29, 2012 20:37:00 GMT
Why won't we get a second chance? There's been plenty of missed opportunities, plenty of large scale civilization collapse, and, fortunately plenty of second chances. The Ancient Greeks nearly entered the industrial revolution. And missed it, then their civilization collapsed. But the industrial revolution still eventually happenned. Humanity went *nearly* extinct at some point of its history, plenty of technologies and techniques have been lost at many point of history (before the neolotithic, we sometimes see very advanced stone cutting industries surfacing in some places, then suddenly disappearing without trace, their techniques not being found again for thousands of years). Because as I said, the all-important fuel source which pushed us through the Industrial Revolution is all but gone. Sure, with our current technology we still have plenty to go around, but if we had to start over with Victorian tech, we could barely keep the world running a few years before we run out of juice. That's why it's now or never. It's next to impossible for as wide-scale energy civilization to develop even if the current one doesn't end in a nuclear armageddon or some other near-extinction event. And without a worldwide energy civilization up and running, transhumanism and extraplanetary expansion have no chance. So, the choice is the same it was the whole 20th century: keep going forward or go down for good. The civilization would have already collapsed several times over if not for fairly mundane innovations in food and energy production during those decades. I tend to agree with this perspective. Some people would call it alarmist, but I think it's just realistic. We're about to be fucked six ways from Sunday, to put not too fine a point on it. We've got a possible massive methane release causing a chain reaction climate shift event that might have already happened (it's certainly too late to stop whatever effects global climate change is going to have in the near term), pretty much all the mineral reserves on earth have reached their peak output rate and are declining in purity and efficiency, oil is going the way of the dinosaurs unless we want to scar our landscape with shale goop, and to top it all off our economy has just smashed it's porky little face through a brick wall. It really is now or never. We have to stop dipping our feet in the pool and jump in, before the flames catch up with us. |
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