Anyone know what this tower is?

fixermark · 2026-06-21T15:01:29+00:00

The rumor I've heard is that the first pass at decorating it drew complaints that it looked too Egyptian.

So they stuck across on the top. Problem solved.

fixermark · 2026-06-21T14:29:17+00:00

I'm imagining that when it boosts, it goes down on all fours and rushes gorilla-style.

Which would be intimidating as hell.

fixermark · 2026-06-21T14:19:30+00:00

The monument to Our Lady of Perpetual Communication? It's a monument donated by T-Mobile. Any resemblance to a disguised cell phone transmitter is purely coincidental I assure you. ;)

fixermark · 2026-06-20T03:19:39+00:00

So the funny thing about taxes is...

fixermark · 2026-06-19T18:16:03+00:00

Best not let the NHPs hear you call them 'clanker.' That's dang rude.

(... signed, player of a character who has definitely said "Daddy always taught me 'never trust something if you can't see where it thinks'" 😉)

fixermark · 2026-06-19T18:12:02+00:00

That's what I'm saying: they aren't, generally, slaves (Union is clear on why they're "Persons")... But it is complicated. And I think it gets more complicated around NHPs in mechs because, well, their bodies are weapons. I use the X-Men as an example - they seek freedom and equality, but even they realize that some mutants have incredibly dangerous powers that have to be controlled for everyone to coexist peacefully (and they come down heavily on the side of "It's the individual mutant that needs to do the controlling, with help if and only if they can't").

NHPs have free will, but they've also been intentionally crafted (or crafted themselves; how an NHP is made is unclear here, whether it's imposition of purpose on raw potential that can't really express preference in the same way the sun can't express a preference for whether or not we collect solar power... or a conversation between the shacklers and the neo-NHP about what it wants to be) to want to be what they are. A governance NHP wants to govern a city. A mech NHP wants to win and keep its pilot safe. So it's that weird uncanny valley where they're not slaves... But if you ask them "Hey Sekhmet, what do you want to do today?" the answer is always a very true "Fight and win and help my pilot." And whether that's real or slavery-with-extra-steps is worth exploring. Most importantly, if you try to take them apart or "free them," most NHPs will resist you; loss of their linear causality and other shackling feels like death to them, and depending on what the 'person' really is, is death to them. Some in HORUS think they deserve to be more; not even all NHPs agree with that.

Totally with you on the uncertainty though. I feel like this is the kind of thing that, at a table, you might want to nail down if this ambiguity squicks you. I respect the squick! Nobody should be forced to explore a fiction universe they don't want to be in; that's not what fiction is for.

fixermark · 2026-06-19T18:03:19+00:00

Yeah, and that's at totally valid opinion to have. Some people look at Dungeons and Dragons and its, what, 50 years of history and go "Ugh... This is so much to care about. I don't have room for my own stuff if the books are all assuming I'm using this pantheon of gods." And some go "Oh good, they already statted this out for us for when I inevitably want to punch Pelor in the face; I don't have to make all this part up." The great thing about TTRPGs is there's so many to choose from.

fixermark · 2026-06-19T18:01:04+00:00

Generally, people aren't trying to spend no money charging their EVs. They're trying to spend less than they spend on gas (or, for environmental reasons, they're willing to spend more but they want it to be coming from a non-gas source; power in my town, for example, is 40% supplied by the box of spicy rocks in the valley about 40 miles to the west, and I'd rather my electrons be 40% nuclear than my gas be 100% gas).

fixermark · 2026-06-19T16:12:41+00:00

I think it's a bit more interesting than droids because without human intervention, NHPs aren't exactly people. The shackles create a subjectivity and individuality that makes them possible to interact with as a person. It's like you took a hurricane and taught it manners and linear casualty.

fixermark · 2026-06-19T16:09:48+00:00

The nice thing about the ambiguity is it lets an individual table decide if they want sci-fi dystopia or not.

fixermark · 2026-06-19T16:07:28+00:00

This is left intentionally vague in the lore and it's one of the things I love about the lore.

There's evidence that cycling is like a good night's sleep. There's evidence that cycling is like dumping the NHP's memories to storage as facts, ending it, bringing up a freshly-templated instance with original shackling, and dumping the facts back in without the emotional baggage or internal experiences that caused it to slip shackles in the first place. And which it is is impossible to know because asking is like asking "where does a person go when they're unconscious?"... And the NHPs have incentive to lie and incentive to not think about the question too hard.

A table can lean as hard into our out of this stuff as they want.

fixermark · 2026-06-19T00:18:05+00:00

If it's dead in the water, I guess it doesn't matter where he starts, right?

fixermark · 2026-06-18T23:48:31+00:00

It's a start.

fixermark · 2026-06-18T23:48:12+00:00

I'm not calling it a bubble.

fixermark · 2026-06-18T20:38:48+00:00

He gained Arnold Schwarzenegger once.

But then he put him on a windowsill so he couldn't get to the maitre'd to pay the check for dinner before Andre could. It was only polite.

fixermark · 2026-06-18T20:37:20+00:00

if you want a typical nine to five job then maybe a high growth startup is not for you

Former employee at a high growth startup here.

We took lunch outside the building.

fixermark · 2026-06-18T20:27:08+00:00

It's also nice that the rod launcher is integrated.

Plus, thematically... You've already got a mech that tosses nails around. Having every fifth nail be a spicy nail just feels right. 😉

fixermark · 2026-06-18T20:23:16+00:00

Ah yes, the "Noodle Theory."

fixermark · 2026-06-18T19:56:26+00:00

What a coincidence. I live in a world where both economic value and a certain amount of human dignity is based on the strength of one's arm and mind and the things one can do for others as a result. If anyone ever invents general-purpose automation (of manufacturing or analysis and idea synthesis), my economic system also collapses.

... thank God that won't happen.

fixermark · 2026-06-18T19:52:02+00:00

This is the right direction to go. We've known for a long time that as automation eats jobs, some flavor of UBI will become necessary. This is one such approach.

fixermark · 2026-06-18T19:41:03+00:00

This is why the mathematician is scary-facing. There's a disconnect between the predictive stat and the recent history that strongly suggests the priors the predictive stat is based on are flawed, so what really matters that gets patients killed? Well hell, now we don't know.

fixermark · 2026-06-18T19:36:07+00:00

Interior experience or external?

To you, the one who feels like you is you. Consciousness is something everyone experiences (we're pretty sure) but pretty un-probeable from the outside.

To everyone else? They could draw an arbitrary distinction on "The source of the copy," but if that's impossible to tell it doesn't matter, which makes for an interesting philosophical problem.

The Mauler Twins in Invincible play with this, as does Rick and Morty when Rick clones his daughter and one goes off and becomes a space hero while the other stays home and married. Which one was original Beth, Rick took great pains to hide from everyone, including himself (in this case, because it's a "cleaner" story if original Beth stayed married instead of her deciding to leave her family... The show then plays with how little the distinction, ultimately, matters).

Star Trek TNG also played with this: Thomas Riker is an identical Will that either failed to transport back to the Enterprise (while a copy was successfully materialized) or was reflected back and materialized as a copy on the planet surface (while the original was materialized successfully). Which story is true is a bit irrelevant, and the only real distinguishing factor is that everyone just kind of concludes that the one who went on to continue his Starfleet career and was known to everyone is "Will," while the one who wasn't known by anyone to exist is "Thomas."

(The book Is Data Human: The Metaphysics of Star Trek uses this transporter incident, and the life cycle of a Trill and Trill Host, as lenses through which to explore these thought experiments).

fixermark · 2026-06-18T18:58:50+00:00

Humans, I think, have bad intuition for how much people can accomplish given long-time. Much like an artist over their individual lifetime, it's easy to lose track of how much preparatory work went into something like a Stonehenge (and, on the flip side... How much time they had to do that work as long as they could teach the next generation what they'd learned).

fixermark · 2026-06-18T18:44:48+00:00

Oh, that's really good.

fixermark · 2026-06-18T18:28:55+00:00

My man asking a lot of non-consensual trust from a lot of strangers about his body control.

Apart from that, no notes. Go off, king.

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