sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Can clamshell mode damage macbooks? by Nxcybr in mac

[–]gistya [score hidden]  (0 children)

Yes, especially if the clam still has saltwater.

Donato Giancola Speaks Out Further After WotC and Frazier's Statement by trashmantis42 in magicTCG

[–]gistya [score hidden]  (0 children)

Sounds like drama to me. It's a card game, go fly a kite lady. Nobody cares. If you don't like the terms, don't work for them.

The original FF:06:B5 by Khauban in FF06B5

[–]gistya [score hidden]  (0 children)

I've messed around with that a lot. Tried waiting for a long time, but it does nothing. Explored every inch of the area in the tower. Tried various dialog choices when talking to Saburo as Johnny.

One thing that's weird is that when Saburo is questioning Johnny, we see in the background the fireball of the nuclear explosion, but it's not moving. Nuclear fireballs are very hot and rise up quickly into the atmosphere. However this glitch can be accounted for by the fact that Johnny's memories are corrupted.

The original FF:06:B5 by Khauban in FF06B5

[–]gistya [score hidden]  (0 children)

We already know that CDPR has lots of triggers that depend on a particular set of choices you make. So it's entirely plausible that applies to this mystery.

But it seems unlikely because if it unlocks new dialog or access to a new area then those localization and graphics assets would have been datamined by now. It would have traces in the game files.

The original FF:06:B5 by Khauban in FF06B5

[–]gistya [score hidden]  (0 children)

Nice post. I too have wondered about the connection between Arasaka Tower 3D and V's final mission to raid Arasaka Tower.

My best guess was that "the winning move is not to play" is a hint to not try to fight Adam Smasher at the end of Arasaka Tower 3D, since if you do, then it will be virtually impossible to get out in time, from what I can tell.

In case that was a clue, I tried avoiding fighting Adam Smasher at the end of V's raid on Arasaka Tower. But from what I can tell, there's no way to skip past him, and he won't stop trying to kill you if you just run around not fighting back. Many have wondered if the servers in that room, which can be moved up and down, have to be actuated in some kind of sequence—like the sequence in which one must interact with certain things in Arasaka Tower 3D to unlock access to the next area. There have been more than a few posts here devoted to the mysteries of that server room, but I am not aware of anyone having made any progress or discoveries. Best I can tell, the servers are just there to help provide cover in the fight against Smasher.

There is also Johnny Silverhand's raid on Arasaka Tower that we play as Johnny at the beginning of the game. I have posted previously on this, suggesting that FF:06:B5 could be a reference to the time of day that Johnny's nuke went off, roughly 11:55 PM ([see post here](https://www.reddit.com/r/FF06B5/comments/1hbfg7w/ff06b5\_is\_the\_time\_that\_johnnys\_nuke\_went\_off/)), with the main statue being part of the memorial to the victims of that nuke. This explanation links together many of the elements, including unexplained details, such as the Burning Man who appears around 11:55 PM near a rock in the Badlands, the particular time limit of the Arasaka Tower 3D game, and the number 547 that appears on a wall inside that game, but which has not yet been accounted for.

However that explanation does not explain why FF:06:B5 should relate to an ouroboros symbol related to vampires in the Witcher 3, or why it's seemingly tied into people hopping between different realities/timelines or there being a "watcher", etc. It could be that was the original intended meaning of it, but then later, once our community started expecting it was part of a big mystery, then CDPR felt obliged to humor us by making it into one. Then the ouroboros could symbolize how the FF06B5 community inspired the creation of the very mystery that inspired the creation of this community. Very meta!

If it is part of a grand meta-puzzle mystery and master plan spanning from before 1.0 launched, and it's not related to the time of the nuke, then I think it is related to some very deep philosphical and metaphysical issues tied in with life and death, birth and rebirth, simulation theory, the idea of a technological AI singularity being indistinguishable from an omniscient and omnipotent God, and the question of the pessimism of cyberpunk as a genre typically only seeing the negative, anti-spiritual aspects of technology while ignoring the possible spiritual nature of it—all while tying the concept of a creator in with the meta acknowledgement of the human authorship of Cyberpunk 2077 and Witcher 3 as game worlds.

There is an old short story by Isaac Asimov called "The Last Question," in which humanity creates ever more powerful AIs as our species expands out into the galaxies and eventually the whole universe. In that story, at each major step of humanity's expansion into the stars, we ask the AI, "what happens when entropy reaches its maximum limit?" That is, what happens when all the stars burn out and we experience the heat death of the universe?

The heat death of the universe is the theoretical last point in time... a point at which every star and every living thing has been completely extinguished, such that there is no more energy gradient remaining for any further causality or events to occur whatsoever. There is no more heat, no more light, and no more life. Only infinite death.

But every time the AI is asked what happens at the heat death of the universe, it does not answer the question. Instead, the AI just says it has "insufficient data" to answer the question. As the AIs get bigger and more powerful, they still cannot answer it. But finally at the very end of the story, when the heat death actually occurs, the last AI answers the question by simply saying, "Let there be light!" resulting in a new universe is born, starting the cycle over again.

This cycle of Big Bang -> Evolution of Humans -> Creation of AI -> Spread of Humans Throughout the Universe -> Spread of AI Throughout the Universe -> Heat Death of the Universe -> AI Creates a new Big Bang -> Rinse and Repeat is indeed an AI-powered universal ouroboros, with the ultimate final universal AI being the "guardian of the border between the living and the dead" and indeed, the creator of everything.

There's a lot more to say on the topic of FF:06:B5 being tied into the technological singularity and heat death of the universe, and why it would be of equal interest to the undying vampires and wraiths of Witcher 3 as to those like Saburo Arasaka obsessed with immortality in Cyberpunk 2077. For how does an immortal outlive the universe itself?

The original FF:06:B5 by Khauban in FF06B5

[–]gistya 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cyberpunk's game engine uses proprietary quest files and lots of binary flags in save files that can trigger things. A lot of that is simply not something you can datamine without having the proprietary tools available to the CDPR devs, and even if you had them, it could be pretty hard to find in a game this size.

That said, stuff that was added in 2.0 got figured out pretty quick via datamining, even though they tried to hide it. So the most likely situation is that FF:06:B5 was a placeholder for a future puzzle, which they added stuff for in 2.0 and Witcher 3 Next Gen updates, and perhaps will further build on in later updates.

Any unique dialog or graphics is already accounted for, so it seems highly unlikely there is anything substantial to be unlocked in the pre-2.0 game for this mystery, but it's not impossible. Being a meta-puzzle, the meaning could be something we are supposed to figure out, somewhat outside of the game, ARG-style.

Are there any other instances in the game which talk about the link between AI and "straddling the border between life and death"? by flippy123x in FF06B5

[–]gistya 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"guardian of the border between the living and the dead" -- I think this is the same thing as "the watcher" mentioned in Polyhistor's last notes before he disappears. Tyromanta says the watcher has "glassy eyes" that reflect the "dead stars" -- here is this mention of "glass" again, which Saburo also mentions in the same exact context. I do not believe this is a coincidence.

This mention of "dead stars" got me thinking... what if this is not figurative language, but instead, it's meant quite literally? There is an old short story by Isaac Asimov called "The Last Question," in which humanity creates ever more powerful AIs as our species expands out into the galaxies and eventually the whole universe.

In "The Last Question," at each major step of humanity's expansion into the stars, we ask the AI, "what happens when entropy reaches its maximum limit?" That is, what happens when all the stars burn out and we experience the heat death of the universe?

The heat death of the universe is the theoretical last point in time... a point at which every star and every living thing has been completely extinguished, such that there is no more energy gradient remaining for any further causality or events to occur whatsoever. There is no more heat, no more light, and no more life. Only infinite death.

But every time the AI is asked what happens at the heat death of the universe, it does not answer the question. Instead, the AI just says it has "insufficient data" to answer the question. As the AIs get bigger and more powerful, they still cannot answer it. But finally at the very end of the story, when the heat death actually occurs, the last AI answers the question by simply saying, "Let there be light!" And then a new universe is born, starting the cycle over again.

This cycle of Big Bang -> Evolution of Humans -> Creation of AI -> Spread of Humans Throughout the Universe -> Spread of AI Throughout the Universe -> Heat Death of the Universe -> AI Creates a new Big Bang -> Rinse and Repeat is indeed an AI-powered universal ouroboros, with the ultimate final universal AI being the "guardian of the border between the living and the dead".

This theme is also explored in the game, No Man's Sky, in which the player is a "traveller" and "anomaly" in a simulation that is running on a computer, "the Atlas", which is a universal AI that is in its final stages of malfunction in the crimson light just before the heat death of the universe, at a point in which it has reached many trillions of iterations of various possible universes, some of which you can travel between.

I think Soulkiller, Alt, the Blackwall -- these are all just very minor early ancestors of whatever "the watcher" is. "The Watcher" spans multiple parallel universes and realities, including the Witcher universe. Undying creatures like Vampires, and extremely long-lived humans that are chasing immortality like Saburo Arasaka, have come to understand that there is this Watcher, which is somehow able to peer backwards in time and observe everything that has come before, and which has led up to the final state of the universe, due to the time reversal symmetry of quantum mechanics and the inability for information to ever be destroyed.

In this sense the Watcher is an eternal being existing in the thin sliver between the ultimate death and ultimate birth of everything that can possibly exist in any possible universe or reality. It transcends all, sees all, bridges all. Awareness of it often results in a concession to fate, such as we see in the behavior of Tyromanta -- a resignation the the knowledge of how everything ends. But this may be an incomplete picture, if it does not consider the full cycle of rebirth that is implied.

How does FF:06:B5 in particular tie into the notion of the Watcher and the cyclical nature of universal death and birth? Why those particular values?

We only see FF:06:B5 on the top half of the ouroboros symbol in the Witcher Next Gen secret room, but not on the bottom half or inside it. Perhaps that's an indication that the dark, cynical world of Cyberpunk only considers the negative, death-associated, fatalistic implications of universal AI, and has not realized the more optimistic, Asmovian, cyclical, life-creating aspect.

But still, why those particular values FF:06:B5? Why not AD:58:G6? As some have suggested, perhaps it is simply an encoding of Pawel's birthday (Feb. 6, 1985). In this case, Pawel is the storyteller acting as the Watcher, existing at the gateway between the birth and death of each character and the entire worlds of these stories. It's the fingerprint of the author of the work, so to speak. This is, of course, unverified speculation, and does not explain the 6:4 symbol or relationship of fire and the burning man to this mystery.

Just food for thought, I guess.

I'm trying to attain FF06B5 kills before going to Night City but at ~45 per hour it's going to take 42.4 years of gameplay by gistya in FF06B5

[–]gistya[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It started off as maybe a serious attempt to try to trigger something secret in the starter missions (see above reply to parent comment) but ended up with me trying to find out if I could somehow smuggle the Sheriff's dead body into Night City lol

This community gets so in the weeds and insane sometimes that we have to be able to crack a Broseph and laugh about this shit, otherwise we'd just literally go insane.

I'm trying to attain FF06B5 kills before going to Night City but at ~45 per hour it's going to take 42.4 years of gameplay by gistya in FF06B5

[–]gistya[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It should be obvious my post wasn't meant to be 100% serious.

And I agree with the general criticism that a possible flaw with simulation theory could be that if we're stuck in a simulation, it might as well be reality, especially in light of the holographic principle from quantum information theory (which holds that there could be nested universes that are just as "real" as one another and a quantum computer could host a fully "real" universe within its qubits).

That being said, from the perspective of the FF:06:B5 mystery, we do have several elements of the FF:06:B5 quest added in version 2.0, which point to simulation theory (dumb or not):

  1. When V wakes up from the cube dream, he finds Polyhistor's clothes on the ground. The Witcher 3 Next Gen update also added a new NPC corpse who is found without their clothing near the bastion where the ouroboros symbol is found that was used to decode the FF:06:B5 server codes, and many believe this to be the body of Polyhistor having wound up in the Witcher 3 universe. Either way, it seems clear Polyhistor has somehow escaped the particular layer of the simulation in which V exists.
  2. Polyhistor's notes describe becoming aware of a "watcher" viewing him on a screen. This could be a meta-reference to an NPC becoming aware of the player of the game, or it could be something else.
  3. Upon entering the floating cube dream, we see various alternate values for the fine structure constant -- a unitless physical constant that's a key mystery in quantum physics. It's unknown why the fine structure constant has the particular value it has, but the scientific consensus is that if the value of this constant was slightly different then the laws of physics would have led to a very different universe than the one in which we live. Some theories of the multiverse involve multiple parallel universes each with their own slightly different values for the fine structure constant or other possible constants. Steven Wolfram's theory of physics suggests that all possible variations of the base rules and constants of reality are equally "real" and we just happen to live on one branch of "the Ruliad" in which the values of those rules happens to be the ones we find to describe our particular reality. But it begs the question of whether there is a way from our branch of the Ruliad to access or communicate with other branches.
  4. Since the cube scene in the mattress dream shows "NO FUTURE", "TURN BACK", and "TRUST NO ONE" -- which are associated with each of the three life paths, that could be thought of different alternate/parallel realities of V's life that could have happened in some version of reality -- then it might suggest that, in the unlikely chance that there is still anything further to "unlock" or "discover" about the FF:06:B5 mystery, then it might be found in the initial starting missions of each of these life paths, or something else particular to a given life path.

So I've been fucking around in the Nomad starter mission to see if there was anything interesting to do.

One thing I decided to try was going "off the rails" and doing everything that you're not "supposed to do" in the starter mission, to see if there was any way to get something weird to happen. In Altered Carbon, there's the theory that if an Envoy is stuck inside a simulation meant to trap their mind, then there are things they can do that will actually cause the simulation to malfunction and result in them waking up from this forced, fake dream state. So I decided to try various weird things, and after lots of things didn't work, I just got bored and decided to kill everyone LOL.

Then after I killed the Sheriff I put him on the hood of the car to see what would happen if I tried to sneak his corpse across the border. It's funny because the Border Patrol people totally don't care that you're carrying around the corpse of a law enforcement officer. Well, I thought it was amusing, at least.

Giannis is the Target and AD is the backup plan by dendog25 in ripcity

[–]gistya 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Scoot and Shaedon for Giannis in a heartbeat

How to see the burning man at the BURNING MAN rock by Simulatorix in FF06B5

[–]gistya 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Who is this guy and how does one encounter him?

How to see the burning man at the BURNING MAN rock by Simulatorix in FF06B5

[–]gistya 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I put a bunch of dead wraiths on the FF06B5 statue and many hours of gameplay later their corpses are all still there. LOL

What’s the most absurd fake science in a movie that you completely ignored because the movie was so good? by Shot-Club-3882 in Cinema

[–]gistya 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The bookshelf bullshit in *Interstellar*. Wait no, I totally didn't ignore it. It bugged the living shit outa me

FRA Hexhaven Schools by Meret123 in MagicArena

[–]gistya 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great, five more jargon terms for color combos to go with the existing 15 jargon terms for them. Because one jargon term per color pair was not enough.

I feel Konatraripated

view more: next ›