Utari's Puppies (Formerly Off-Topic Thread)

Fiction Portal Intergalactic Summit
2342

Do I have to explain the millionth time how I consider nullsec wars to be fought over nothing?
There are public records of capsuleer combat actions. Unless you’re going to tell me all these citadels and titans are attributed to you accidentally or that the records are falsified. And don’t worry, I can back up all of mine with reasons other than “I just wanted to kill.”

It is interesting also how enabling monsters don’t matter when you do it, but you’ll gladly complain about Amarrian capsuleers doing the same.

All you and yours have been doing is make assumptions of my inner workings the past few days, mostly wrong, but there was nothing I could say to make you change your minds, so I didn’t even bother.

Heh. Defensive? Sure. Am I not allowed to be? But I’ve also acknowledged that I’ve been wrong. But even that I’ve apparently done somehow wrong so that it wasn’t accepted.

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2343

Yup. Doesn’t mean I do.

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2344

:face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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2345

Wait what?

The system automatically blocks out the word if we try to say “■■■■ you,” but there’s an emoji for exactly the same sentiment?

… I take it back. I don’t like the emojis anymore.

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2346

Just gotta screw with the fuckin’ filter. It’s pretty crap.

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2347

Yeah but then you run the risk of Aux Aliette taking away your posting privileges.

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2348

… I mean, if they’re not gone by now…

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2349

Tone doesn’t come across very well on this platform, as with most of GalNet, so when you say something like

it sounds as if you are not one such person who is attached to their crews, and moreover, that you’re belittling those who are.

Now, I’m (for once) not trying to pick a fight here, I think the whole ‘picking fights’ thing is done and done here for a good long while; but it sounds as though you’re frustrated that people (such as myself) are misunderstanding you, when in fact you aren’t being wholly clear about your intentions.

This may be why you’re being perceived as “yelling” even though you aren’t intending it that way.

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2350

I’m not attached to my crews. Attachment to almost anything in this life is practically a winning ticket to the looney bin, sooner or later. But that doesn’t mean I want to throw lives away either. Now, you I don’t really know that well, so I can understand people such as you whom I’ve not interacted with much if at all, can get confused. That is why I found it particularly interesting to get ragged on by people whom I assumed knew me at least a little better.

When I said what you quoted, I was emulating the typical capsuleer attitude towards crews or non-capsuleer life in general. You may see a lot of people saying how throwing crew (or other) lives away is baaaad, but they rarely really practice what they say. I do, and go to great pains to do it. If you or anyone looks at my public killl record, I’ve initiated combat exactly six times in the past 6 years, three of those times in Kahah, two in Colelie and once in Yulai. Each and every other time I was fired on first and was acting in self-defence. The same principle applies to pirates and similar entities. I do not fire unless fired upon.

I know I’m terrible at explaining my intentions. It’s just stuff in my head that is plain as day to me, so, part of the human condition - it’s nothing conscious - I assume other people think the same, and I don’t need to explain every nuance out in the open. But I’ve found myself many, many times in arguments because I’ve presented myself poorly. Yes, me. I know the onus is on me to be more clearer and considerate, and I do try to be better, but clearly I’m not very good at that even years later.

So yeah, I wasn’t completely kidding about getting a PR guy.

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2351

While I don’t doubt that last bit…

…I’d like to point out that your words here are very similar to what someone loyal to Sansha’s Nation would write.

:v:

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2352

Well … I can see why you’d think such a thing, Che. Sansha’s Nation is a very “order” and hierarchy-oriented entity. Only…

Traditional feudal rulers and autocrats do business with the human animal, and they do it in a fairly effective way. It’s often not very pleasant for the ruled; it prizes order over fairness at pretty much every turn and doesn’t take individual persons’ concerns all that seriously. But in the end, humans are a hierarchical species. For all the talk I hear about “freedom,” there’s really only one society in New Eden that isn’t pretty autocratic in some way-- and those of us who are loyal to more elitist, hierarchical systems tend to worry a lot that one day that society is going to basically implode into a maddened, slavering mob. (There’s precedent, after all.)

So, yeah, most societies in New Eden are top-down hierarchies of one kind or another: rulers and subjects. I actually think that’s an okay way for people to live; it’s how most people have lived for most of history, after all, and it has the merit of being able to pull off decades of peace, prosperity, and stability if you’re lucky enough to have and maintain good leadership (sadly never a sure thing). I have no qualms about serving a role in an entity like that just because it’s an entity like that.

Sansha’s Nation’s a little different, though.

Rather than doing business with the human animal, Sansha Kuvakei thinks it’s possible to “fix” humanity by tinkering with it directly. More than that, he thinks he’s qualified to do the job. That, to me, pretty much makes him arrogance incarnate, and I feel that the consequences flowing from his efforts pretty much confirm: it’s a terrible idea, or maybe just the execution’s horrible, or else its marketing is horrifying, or, most likely, it’s a terrible idea, badly executed, that also suffers from bad PR.

In any of those cases, “The Master’s” judgment is questionable at best, and I’d rather be shot in the head (or, for that matter, the gut, so long as it’s fatal) than join his “Nation” of aggressively-edited victims.

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2353

You say it as if it’s unique in that. Quite literally all of our nations successfully did it. In many cases better and for longer. The longest recorded period of peace was Matari, ended only when the Empire committed the worst recorded crime of New Eden, and none of the other successful nations needed to resort to slavery and subjugation of the other nations to do so. Endowing the nation infested by homegrown Sani Sabik, countless splinter cults and sects, antagonizing the rest of the cluster with vile barbaric practices, constant internal power struggle and strife between houses, and as has been mentioned many a time: An integral and core part of their identity shackled to the subjugation and enslavement of all of humanity… with some sort of unique capacity for “civilization”?

That’s nonsensical and you know it.

The entity that you serve is an enemy of civilization for the absolute great majority of people. The privileged and powerful can do so most certainly, but only at the cost of the majority’s suffering and subjugation. If that’s the peak of civilization you aspire to, you have closed your eyes real hard on your sojourns elsewhere.

They all have their flaws. This one? It’s got flaws that cancel out and negate every last scrap of “civlization” they lay claim to, because their core practices are nothing short of barbaric.

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2354

Talk to me again when the Empire outlaws TCMCs as a means of compelling obedience.

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2355

Yeah, most of the Amarr I know aren’t all that cheerful about those. How can you honestly bring someone to accept a place in God’s kingdom when their mind is fogged up with such a thing? What’s worse, the TCMC seems to be a workable counter to Deathglow, so they might go into wider use.

It’s a little different in kind, though, Arrendis. As I understand it the TCMC is a perception filter more than a straight mind-control device. It manipulates inputs, doing stuff like making a day’s hard labor in unpleasant conditions feel like a pleasant day’s work in moderate temperatures and a sunny sky. Although … I’m not 100% on whether that’s a limit to the technology and, if not, whether people actually stop at that, or whether that’s just the rationale given.

Either way, with Kuvakei it’s more like … well. CONCORD recorded a pretty chilling incident-- not rare, either, apparently-- where an isolated Nation outpost starved to death in hiding because the residents hadn’t received instruction to forage for food. No matter how hungry they got, they just outright lacked the initiative to look for food to save their lives. I don’t know whether they were allowed to experience the suffering their bodies went through as a result, but considering the carelessness needed to let such a thing happen in the first place …

… to me, that’s the closest thing to Nauplius’s “Hell” I believe in, and I really hope the claim that “There is no death in Nation,” is just marketing, because if it’s true? Spending forever trapped in a maimed version of my own mind, edited by some careless genius who’d do that to me and then congratulate himself on helping me find peace?

Yeah, that’d be “Hell” for real.

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2356

You realize that saying that “Sansha are slightly worse” may be the absolutely faintest praise to ever damn the common as crap practice you’re trying to defend? And Arrendis’ point remains unchallenged, as none of this changes the fact that the Empire is using TCMCs to “fix” enslaved human beings, even going as far as literally shackling their damn minds.

Edit: Every to ever. I always do that.

2357

They can be programmed to have you live the exact same day every day of your life. That’s pretty far into what I’d define as ‘mind control’.

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2358

Yea. Well. You want to know exactly how much a TCMC can change your feelings, ideas, preferences and experiences? Go to a Fed style chip orgy sometime.

Just saying.

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2359

That is the lewdest thing I have ever seen Elsebeth Rhiannon write on the IGS.

L
E
W
D

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2360

Your spelling of “LEWD” vertically looks like a phallus.

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2361

Okay, hold on.

“Chip orgy?”

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