in the long term humans are gonna go extinct, and no amount of money wasted on space exploration is gonna change that lol. Let Mars stay pretty and don't fuck it up and kill a bunch of people trying to settle a wasteland. It is a lot more valuable just sitting there being pretty without a bunch of dead idiots on it XD
The Politics of Tabletop RPGs
- Thread starter mesonoxian
- Start date
Vyslanté
The self is a prison
- Location
- European Union
Yeah, I don't think this is a good comparison at all. Like, I'm broadly agreeing with the general point of "internet science fans are not as bias-free as they imagine" and "the notion of as there's nothing there, we should get it because who care is a value", but you're comparing apples to oranges there. For one, we're actually looking for life, and nothing would make a lot of people happier than actually finding the slightest non-contestable trace; and the field is very much aware that "life as we know it" is quite the geocentric bias.
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Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
Comparing people disappointed that they haven't even been able to find bacterial life on Mars to 1800s colonists actively giggling at the thought of stealing land from brown people and collecting native scalps is certainly an interesting framing. Not a very good one but an interesting one nonetheless.
But Mars is ultimately a barren ball of worthless dust that I don't really get the fuss over. There's nothing of more than purely scientific curiosity derived interest or and certainly nothing of productive use there and the amount of effort that would be needed to make it livable would be better spent on orbitals. You could recreationally nuke mars to get more stock footage of mushroom clouds and that'd be more valuable than any feasible number of arcologies you can put on the barren rust bucket. Like, why are we talking about it as if its a real and pressing imperialism issue when I guarantee you nobody is going to be living there on a permanent basis within this century. It's a distraction based on a science fiction dream that refuses to die when there are people dying of real imperialism right now.
I'm not anti-space travel, I am anti-space hype. It's a negligible investment for equally negligible returns and I quite frankly think it's better off mostly being ignored beyond a "oh hey that's neat".
But Mars is ultimately a barren ball of worthless dust that I don't really get the fuss over. There's nothing of more than purely scientific curiosity derived interest or and certainly nothing of productive use there and the amount of effort that would be needed to make it livable would be better spent on orbitals. You could recreationally nuke mars to get more stock footage of mushroom clouds and that'd be more valuable than any feasible number of arcologies you can put on the barren rust bucket. Like, why are we talking about it as if its a real and pressing imperialism issue when I guarantee you nobody is going to be living there on a permanent basis within this century. It's a distraction based on a science fiction dream that refuses to die when there are people dying of real imperialism right now.
I'm not anti-space travel, I am anti-space hype. It's a negligible investment for equally negligible returns and I quite frankly think it's better off mostly being ignored beyond a "oh hey that's neat".
I'd like to be friends with a talking shapeshifting dragon who can teach me Esperanto but we can't all get what we want, especially not when they're ludicrous wastes of resources. If someone wants to be buried on the Moon, the current expense of getting there makes any reason to grant this request besides having died on the Moon a ridiculous flight of whimsy. Sending a rocket up there is not something done lightly and shouldn't be done frivolously as what amounts to a publicity stunt.
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Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
- Location
- Cookie Jar
I recommend you go reading the link. Basically, everything you said here was addressed there. Hint: The rocket carried actual scientific equipment, ashes were just "extra" that the rocket could carry.
Everything you say here is just kneejerk reaction, assuming what happened and not bothering to check. Like hell, the price of moon burial? Not that different from normal Earth burial. Moon burial is roughly 13k, while average earth burial is between 7k to 12k.
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- Location
- Australia
That is the price for sending 1 quarter teaspoon of ashes into space. You still need to make funeral arrangements on Earth for the rest of the body.
- Location
- Patriarchova
Okay, I see now. I think you kind of slipped into defending someone else's (bad) minor side-point and then conflating it with the main arguments put forward in the articles without realizing it.
Basically, animism has very, very little to do with those indigenous critiques. They certainly aren't lobbying on behalf of invisible moon aliens, or of shamanic moon spirits for that matter. The main thrust of both articles is that the paradigm behind space exploration is rooted in colonial logic and incentives, and that therefore it will only serve to marginalize and dispossess the already marginalized and dispossessed peoples of Earth while further enriching the same people who benefitted from colonialism. Land will be developed, polluted, or strip-mined to build science observatories (at best) or send bullshit billionaire ego trip space projects up (at worst). The kind of pristine natural beauty that's become increasingly rare and precious on Earth will start to vanish from the sky as well as we fill it up with shit. The risks being talked about are all concerning the quality of life of humans on Earth.
Making "but what if the moon does have life and you're just too white to see it tho" the main focus of the discussion is painting over these very legitimate and practical critiques with infantilizing noble savage shit.
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samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
Coyote and Crow is certainly not without issues. But it's trying, which is more than many other games can say.
Things like "There isn't capitalism, because capitalism is when private ownership of the means of production is used to extract surplus labor, and the more extraction, the more capitalism it is. Anyways, here's how the powerful of Cahokia use their private control over the means of production to accumulate more resources and political power via the exploitation of surplus labor."
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
Frankly 90% of this discussion is rooted in the idea that indigenous cultures = against doing science and using resources is entirely bullshit and just founded on the racist assumption that these people are primitive. These cultures do want development and advancing science. They just don't want multinational companies coming in to tear everything up recklessly and cart the value of the resources away from their communities.
It reminds me of that story of the Vancouver Squamish community wanting to build a skyscraper and the settle NIMBY fuckers being all like "WAAAH WHY DON'T AREN'T YOU BUILDING WIGWAMS AND DANCING AROUND FIRES".
The vast majority of the time when development is stymied it's not because of the uppity natives. It's because of the post-colonial suburban-rural apes who don't want shit built there where it would effect their property values, or because they're fixated on sucking on the oil teat above everything else and have brainwashed themselves into thinking renewable energy is hippie-commie bullshit. Something like that.
Allowing new cultural perspectives into development and science will make those things better, more adaptable. Clinging to the post-colonial culture and society as the one true path that will lead us to advancement is how we end up cavemen living in the basements of what used to be single family homes put up in the middle of buttfuck nowhere.
You can't drop space rocks from Polynesia onto the rest of the planet if the EarthGov doesn't pander to colonialist space libertarian bullshit. Just or that reason alone it's perfectly valid to take the evils of colonialism as something to specifically avoid repeating in space.
And frankly by the same measure that I think history might have been at least a little bit better if the Santa Maria and the Mayflower just fuckin' keeled over and sank I think that the best timeline for space travel is one where the first rugged, gun toting wannabe space colonists end up marooned on an asteroid or something and have to be carted back to Earth lesson learned. Not for what they're going to do out there, but what they're going to do here if their colonial ventures don't work out for them.
Space colonialism is stupid but this is flat out wrong too. The scientific value of Mars is far more than curiosity. It's a second dataset for the conditions of a planet that might have been habitable. If we want to advance our understanding of what makes planets livable we need to be studying Mars. How oceans form, how they dry up, how planets gain a thick atmosphere and how they lose them. etc etc.
We don't want to end up in a situation a couple centuries from now when our planet's magnetic field is mysteriously weakening and the only answers we have is "Uh... uh... uh..." because the people researching Mars' core didn't get enough research money.
And being dismissive of lifeless planets as "barren rocks" is incredibly dumb just for the fact that that describes 99.9% of all planets in the universe. Life is the exception and thus treating harm to life as the one true barometer of the harm of our actions is ape-brained nonsense that doesn't belong in space. I don't want humanity to go through this same stupid-ass argument every time we discover a new never before seen type of planet but all the space-corps want to do is start dropping rocks to make room for strip mining.
It reminds me of that story of the Vancouver Squamish community wanting to build a skyscraper and the settle NIMBY fuckers being all like "WAAAH WHY DON'T AREN'T YOU BUILDING WIGWAMS AND DANCING AROUND FIRES".
The vast majority of the time when development is stymied it's not because of the uppity natives. It's because of the post-colonial suburban-rural apes who don't want shit built there where it would effect their property values, or because they're fixated on sucking on the oil teat above everything else and have brainwashed themselves into thinking renewable energy is hippie-commie bullshit. Something like that.
Allowing new cultural perspectives into development and science will make those things better, more adaptable. Clinging to the post-colonial culture and society as the one true path that will lead us to advancement is how we end up cavemen living in the basements of what used to be single family homes put up in the middle of buttfuck nowhere.
You can't drop space rocks from Polynesia onto the rest of the planet if the EarthGov doesn't pander to colonialist space libertarian bullshit. Just or that reason alone it's perfectly valid to take the evils of colonialism as something to specifically avoid repeating in space.
And frankly by the same measure that I think history might have been at least a little bit better if the Santa Maria and the Mayflower just fuckin' keeled over and sank I think that the best timeline for space travel is one where the first rugged, gun toting wannabe space colonists end up marooned on an asteroid or something and have to be carted back to Earth lesson learned. Not for what they're going to do out there, but what they're going to do here if their colonial ventures don't work out for them.
Space colonialism is stupid but this is flat out wrong too. The scientific value of Mars is far more than curiosity. It's a second dataset for the conditions of a planet that might have been habitable. If we want to advance our understanding of what makes planets livable we need to be studying Mars. How oceans form, how they dry up, how planets gain a thick atmosphere and how they lose them. etc etc.
We don't want to end up in a situation a couple centuries from now when our planet's magnetic field is mysteriously weakening and the only answers we have is "Uh... uh... uh..." because the people researching Mars' core didn't get enough research money.
And being dismissive of lifeless planets as "barren rocks" is incredibly dumb just for the fact that that describes 99.9% of all planets in the universe. Life is the exception and thus treating harm to life as the one true barometer of the harm of our actions is ape-brained nonsense that doesn't belong in space. I don't want humanity to go through this same stupid-ass argument every time we discover a new never before seen type of planet but all the space-corps want to do is start dropping rocks to make room for strip mining.
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
I quite frankly don't care, it's a pointless extravagance when the only reason someone should ever have remains on the moon is if they died on it. They can puff up however much sentiment they want into it, its ultimately infantile whimsy that shouldn't be indulged in and should instead be scorned for its sheer wastefulness. My 34 month old elder daughter asking to go to the Ice Cream dimension is more respectable because it at least costs nothing to pretend to take her there.
My policy towards lifeless planets isn't strip mining because Asteroids are much easier to collect resources from if you actually want resources and aren't operating at Total Annihilation grade mass harvesting for gigaprojects. It's ignoring them beyond whatever scientific intrigue they might have. There's no good reason to live on them or otherwise interact with them besides low impact observation and note taking. But the more we go "why would you ever want to put boots on that? Get a life nerd." the less we have to deal with said nerds who want to live out their Rimworld fantasies on an uninhabitbale wasteland.
As for space corpos, if we're dealing with the profit motive at that point I'd say we'd have definitively made a major and perhaps irreversible misstep as a species and the existence of such corporations is the highest priority to ensure the immediate cessation of.
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Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
- Location
- Cookie Jar
"I don't care about facts, I want to rail against my strawman!" is not a winning argument you seem to think it is.
- Location
- Australia
You are the one attacking a strawman. It is not contradictory to believe that littering the moon with a fragment of your corpse is a wasteful vanity project and that Earth burial (with the plot of land, coffin, tombstone and funeral service) is comparable in price. Cremation + throwing a grams worth of your ashes into space is still much more expensive than cremation alone. The launching into space plan also involves a much greater carbon footprint and waste of natural resources.
Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
- Location
- Cookie Jar
Let me remind you that arguments so far has been that
1) It's rich people being jerks
2) Entire bodies are being dumped there
3) Entire rocket was launched just to deposit the remains
When all three have been shown to be false, reaction has been "don't care, i want to rail against this".
Queshire
Wants a pink flamingo for their lawn.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
So the open playtest for Daggerheart has come out. Honestly I'm still on the fence about it?
I don't know why, but calling the Turtle people Galapa throws me more than D&D calling them Tortles.
I do like what they've done to de-couple race & culture, or rather Ancestry & Community though. Even if you all play Dwarves coming from the same kingdom it's still really easy to imagine one with the Underborne community, one with Highborne (for a noble), one with Loreborne (for a scholarly Dwarf mage) and so on.
I don't know why, but calling the Turtle people Galapa throws me more than D&D calling them Tortles.
I do like what they've done to de-couple race & culture, or rather Ancestry & Community though. Even if you all play Dwarves coming from the same kingdom it's still really easy to imagine one with the Underborne community, one with Highborne (for a noble), one with Loreborne (for a scholarly Dwarf mage) and so on.
I really don't think it's that big a deal if a few people who devoted their life to space shit wanna devote a portion of their will to making sure part of them is out in space? No special trips are being made, so what's the problem?
- Location
- Australia
The important argument raised is the waste, extravagance and ego stroking.
1) Whether they are rich jerks or middle class jerks is irrelevant. The important part is the being jerks wasting resources and littering the Moon to satisfy their ego.
2) Whether it is a little bit or a lot doesn't matter. The issue is that it is being done at all.
3) Arranging to attach secondary payloads to a commercial rocket is cheaper than sending up a separate rocket but that still doesn't mean it is free.
If you make a statuette of yourself out of poached ivory it isn't fine if you made it out of a small relatively affordable piece of ivory, you are middle class or you got it for cheap.
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
I think the fact that it's being done at all is childish and none of them deserve to have literally anything on the moon due to not having actually died there. Our respect for the dead can only go so far and "I want my ashes on the Moon" is something serious people should go "that's nice honey, I want a unicorn but we can't all have what we want" to. I was wrong about it earlier, but now that I understand it I still hate it. They should have been told "that's cool but we're not the make a wish foundation and even they should tell you to aim for something less outlandishly extravagant."
Every gram wasted on indulging a childish fantasy is a gram that could have gone to more important scientific equipment when these expeditions have costs measured in tens of thousands of dollars per gram just to get into LEO, nevermind a Lunar landing. It's grotesquely indulgent, not cute.
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Could it? Like, citation needed. You're making a positive claim that they removed important equipment to make room, rather than, when they had everything accounted for, went "by the way, if you pay the cost and then some, we'll take some ashes up too".
If everything that was going up there got up there, plus some ashes people paid the fuel cost for...what's the problem?
- Location
- Australia
IMO people shouldn't be littering the Moon with corpse parts for the sake of it even if dumping ashes there suddenly became very cheap due to alternative fuels or something.
Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
- Location
- Cookie Jar
All those "arguments" were addressed in the original thread. I recommend reading it, unless you care more about shouting at the clouds. Furthermore, pretty sure this is off topic, if someone wants to continue this I recommend going back to it.
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Alert: Let's get things back on topic please
- Location
- Ireland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
let's get things back on topic please
While understandably a thread about the politics of TTRPGs is going to swing in topics a bunch, I think this particular derail has gone on for long enough that a light reminder that this thread is about the politics of TTRPGs is warranted.
If people would like to continue the previous discussions, I'd advise them to make a thread specifically for those discussions.
If people would like to continue the previous discussions, I'd advise them to make a thread specifically for those discussions.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So how are you? The studio Larian has announced that they cut ties with WOTC and not so any more development on Baldur's Gate 3. Considering Hasbro hiring Pinkertons over trading cards, firing workers in their most profitable department, and the OGL thing good call.
Hasbro is not trustworthy.
On another note I despise the common notion online that you have to buy games and Animated shows to "support the creators" the creators are paid a salary and typically don't receive royalties.
Hasbro is not trustworthy.
On another note I despise the common notion online that you have to buy games and Animated shows to "support the creators" the creators are paid a salary and typically don't receive royalties.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It really is astounding how much Wizards embody the worst excesses of American brand hyper-capitalism, those stupid motherfuckers had one of the best selling and beloved new RPG in decades and they threw it all away. The stupidity is awe inspiring.
I have sympathy for people who wanted more good DnD CRPG content but I can't help but look at this event with grim amusement. If an anti-capitalist wrote this into a story we'd be accused of strawmanning capitalism
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The past few years in media especially have shown the Investment capital is a poison pill, where the promised riches flow upwards to investors while everyone else is abused then discarded.
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
Okay, now I'm eagerly awaiting if Hasbro is going to try some legal brinkmanship with Larian. Not just because of the fan blowback but also because Larian is a Dutch company and European Union companies aren't quite as quick to roll over and show their belly to American corporates.
Might put the game in awkward territory. It's a straight up DnD Forgotten Realms property not just a game using 5e rules. It's not likely, but at worst case scenario I can see Baldur's Gate 3 being the biggest example in history of a game getting thrown into the shadow realm due to legal complications. Which might cause some interesting blowback on its own.
Hey, maybe Disco Elysium was just a prophetic prelude to a much larger and much more impactful legal dispute over video games. Exciting stuff? Wishful thinking? Why not both?
Might put the game in awkward territory. It's a straight up DnD Forgotten Realms property not just a game using 5e rules. It's not likely, but at worst case scenario I can see Baldur's Gate 3 being the biggest example in history of a game getting thrown into the shadow realm due to legal complications. Which might cause some interesting blowback on its own.
Hey, maybe Disco Elysium was just a prophetic prelude to a much larger and much more impactful legal dispute over video games. Exciting stuff? Wishful thinking? Why not both?
