A Wild Lurker Appears! Hyoi's Random Banter #232

[Hyoi]

...........

[Anonymouswizard]

Sixth!

I need to reorganise my shelves so the books aren't just shoved in there randomly. Maybe I'll go for size offer.....

[DataNinja]

Yep, all seems to be in order. Except for AnonymousWizard's post. That's out of sixth order.

(Bookshelf organizing is satisfying, though, yeah.)

[Rater202]

It confuses me how some people use "boredom" as an argument against immortality.

I mean, the world is constantly changing and after a while, if you play your cards right, you'd be rich enough to just pull up stakes and wonder the planet doing whatever you want, constantly having new adventures and experiences.

[DataNinja]

It confuses me how some people use "boredom" as an argument against immortality.

I mean, the world is constantly changing and after a while, if you play your cards right, you'd be rich enough to just pull up stakes and wonder the planet doing whatever you want, constantly having new adventures and experiences.

Have you never had days where no matter what you do... you just want to do things, and yet nothing you can think of is something you feel you want to do? I feel like that's something that you could easily still run into with immortality.

[Rater202]

Have you never had days where no matter what you do... you just want to do things, and yet nothing you can think of is something you feel you want to do? I feel like that's something that you could easily still run into with immortality.

Yeah, but those usually pass.

The "you'll get bored" argument is always "eventually you'll run out of things to do." But, that's not... That's literally impossible.

I mean, I like learning things. I could spend a hundred years studying all of recorded history... And then I'll have another hundred years worth of history to study.

The only way you'd run out of things to do is if literally all of humanity vanished except for you. Then eventually you'll run out of things becuase people will stop doing things because they're not there.

But you can still do things. Make a record of humanity for whatever comes next. Recreate all of science and build a spaceship to explore the rest of the universe.

[Anonymouswizard]

I mean, eventually there will be no humanity. Heat death and all that.

Strictly speaking what I want isn't immortality, just an extremely long life, the ability to die on my own terms when I'm ready, and to have changes to my body and mind roughly every five hundred years to stop things from being too consistently boring.

[Rater202]

In my opinion, if Heat Death is a problem then you're not immortal enough.

In my opinion, genuine immortality is "if someone goes back in time and kills you before you became immortal, then continues going backward killing each and every one of your ancestors back to the very first rudimentary organic molecule before they can beget that who beget those who beget those who infinite generations later beget you, then blow up the earth back when it had no life for good measure, then comes back to the present they find that you're still there because history corrected for your existence."

Though, at that point, it's less "immortal" and more "reality is bending over backward to keep you around" I suppose.

[Bartmanhomer]

Well once again. I'm starting my diet again.

[Anonymouswizard]

I mean, there's other things I'd like Twitter to bend over backwards for. The procurement of cake for starters.


I believe the new goal is to post fast enough that the other thread doesn't fall past the Necromancy Limit by the time we need it.

EDIT: now I think about it, The Procurement Of Cake would be a great name for a radio drama.

[truemane]

EDIT: now I think about it, The Procurement Of Cake would be a great name for a radio drama.

And it would be nothing but lies.

[Peelee]

You know, if you'd enjoy a deep dive, I don't think I'd mind that at all. You sold the show well, and I'm grasipng for media that can actually hold my attention these days -- my brain is so frazzled from stress recovery, it's like opening a packed fridge and seeing nothing you want to eat or have the energy to cook.

Spoiler: List. I tried to keep it short, which meant it was pretty hard and several deserving episodes got cut, but I feel like I got you a good spread of the change-ups and personalities

Show

Season 1, Episode 3, "The Reaper's Helper"
The OG cast and one of the earliest forays into how murky prosecuting can be, and it's not all black-and-white.

Detectives: Greevy and Logan
Lieutenant: Cragen
ADAs: Stone and Robinette
DA: Schiff

Season 5, Episode 2, "Coma"
One of the best "I really want them to nail this guy" episodes. Plus, season 5 has one of my favorite cast line-ups.

Detectives: Briscoe and Logan
Lieutenant: Van Buren
ADAs: McCoy and Kincaid
DA: Schiff

Season 8, Episode 5, "Nullification"
An.... interesting legal strategy.

Detectives: Briscoe and Curtis
Lieutenant: Van Buren
ADAs: McCoy and Ross
DA: Schiff

Season 8, Episode 8, "Shadow"
Excellent example of McCoy's unorthodox and sometimes extreme methods.

Detectives: Briscoe and Curtis
Lieutenant: Van Buren
ADAs: McCoy and Ross
DA: Schiff

Season 13, Episode 11, "Chosen"
Where you get to see what a good defense lawyer can really do. Do not underestimate Randy Dworkin.

Detectives: Briscoe and Green
Lieutenant: Van Buren
ADAs: McCoy and Southerlyn
DA: Branch

Season 16, Episode 18, "Thinking Makes It So"
The glorious return of Dworkin!

Detectives: Fontana and Green
Lieutenant: Van Buren
ADAs: McCoy and Borgia
DA: Branch

Season 20, Episode 24 "Rubber Room"
McCoy's ending monologue is absolutely ****ing terrifying.

Detectives: Lupo and Bernard
Lieutenant: Van Buren
ADAs: Cutter and Rubirosa
DA: McCoy

I'd also be very interested in any L&O UK episodes you recommend.

Bad news: I never got to see a whole lot of it back in the day, so I'm much weaker on it than I am the American version.

Good news (everybody): Looks like the entire series is free on Amazon Prime (with ads, and no option to purchase, sadly), so I know what I'm doing this weekend!

[LaZodiac]

I've been drawing lately, out of desire to respark my creativity and also because I want references for character designs when I commission people. It's all been teaser art for my second novel (so if you're interested in seeing them ding me, hehe) but I am going to directly show this one that I did, of yours truly.

I like it.

[factotum]

In my opinion, if Heat Death is a problem then you're not immortal enough.

"There are not many of them, all things considered: The truly old.

Even on this planet, in this age, when people consider a mere hundred years, or a thousand, to be an unusual span.

There are, for example, less than ten thousand humanoid individuals alive on this planet today who have personal memories of the saber-toothed tiger, the megatherium, the cave bear.

There are today less than a thousand who walked the streets of Atlantis. (The first Atlantis. The other lands that bore that name were shadows, echo-Atlantises, myth lands, and they came later).

There are less than five hundred living humans who remember the human civilizations that predated the great lizards. (There were a few; fossil records are unreliable. Several of them lasted for millions of years.)

There are roughly seventy people walking the earth, human to all appearances (and in a few cases, to all medical tests currently available), who were alive before the earth had begun to congeal from gas and dust."

-- quote from Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" comic, "Brief Lives". Thought it sounded appropriate.

[Bartmanhomer]

I love coffee and tea. I can't choose which is better.

[truemane]

Bad news: I never got to see a whole lot of it back in the day, so I'm much weaker on it than I am the American version.

Good news (everybody): Looks like the entire series is free on Amazon Prime (with ads, and no option to purchase, sadly), so I know what I'm doing this weekend!

Oh, my friend, you are in for a treat. Yes, Minister is the absolute pinnacle of dry British wit. It's the definition of droll. It's a show that has a very clear and very well-defined vision and never wavers just hammers it home episode after episode. It's one of my all-time favourites, second only to Fawlty Towers.

[halfeye]

It confuses me how some people use "boredom" as an argument against immortality.

I mean, the world is constantly changing and after a while, if you play your cards right, you'd be rich enough to just pull up stakes and wonder the planet doing whatever you want, constantly having new adventures and experiences.

I was bored once, for about two weeks, then I got bored of it.

[Rawhide]

It confuses me how some people use "boredom" as an argument against immortality.

I mean, the world is constantly changing and after a while, if you play your cards right, you'd be rich enough to just pull up stakes and wonder the planet doing whatever you want, constantly having new adventures and experiences.

Let's just imagine that somehow the entire universe basically ceases to exist except for an endless void and... you.

Solution: Go insane, create an entirely new universe in your head.

[Peelee]

Oh, my friend, you are in for a treat. Yes, Minister is the absolute pinnacle of dry British wit. It's the definition of droll. It's a show that has a very clear and very well-defined vision and never wavers just hammers it home episode after episode. It's one of my all-time favourites, second only to Fawlty Towers.

Whoops! Deleted the wrong bit of text in that quote. I meant that as a reply to Law & Order UK. I have seen YM/YPM.

[Anonymouswizard]

Let's just imagine that somehow the entire universe basically ceases to exist except for an endless void and... you.

Solution: Go insane, create an entirely new universe in your head.

This was more what I meant by Heat Death being a problem. Sure, you're eternal, but you're in a universe where the least black hope has died and all that remains are spheres of iron (assuming the proton is eternal). You'd love to move, but moving requires energy, energy must be conserved, and it's been a few millennia since you encountered anything not in it's lowest energy state.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter if you're not the one who dies, if the universe dies you lose the ability to act, and even to think, as your body runs out of energy.

Although I suppose that if you can't move and can't think, you're dead in all practical terms. Which gives us a method for getting rid of pesky complete immortals: fire them into a post-heat death universe at a fraction of c large enough to give a gamma of, say, a few trillion and close the door behind them. By the time they've altered their velocity to get back to it they're low on energy and the door has been closed for billions of years.

Of course you run into problems if they can turn mass into energy.

[Tvtyrant]

It confuses me how some people use "boredom" as an argument against immortality.

I mean, the world is constantly changing and after a while, if you play your cards right, you'd be rich enough to just pull up stakes and wonder the planet doing whatever you want, constantly having new adventures and experiences.

R. Scott Bakker does the best "draw backs of immortality" story, although like all things he does it is dripping with edge.

You know how you remember the bad stuff from high school frequently and the good stuff much less frequently, and the boring stuff almost never? Like 90% of the time you were just in a desk drawing cubes, but few of us look back on high school as being the cube drawing period of our lives. We remember the teacher that sucked, the prom date that dumped us on prom night, etc. And then speckled in is good times, which were more frequent then bad but less memorable.

Repeat that infinitely. 99% of your immortality will be boring, unimportant stuff and a tiny percent will be actively good or bad. But you are built to remember bad experiences, so the amount of your immortality spent dwelling on those will slowly absorb the others.

[Bartmanhomer]

I don't understand why other people get so upset when other people don't agree with their opinion and they resort to nasty name-calling and insults and they block people on all social media for not agreeing with them. I seriously don't get it.

[Rater202]

Let's just imagine that somehow the entire universe basically ceases to exist except for an endless void and... you.

Solution: Go insane, create an entirely new universe in your head.

Exactly.

If you're immortal then you can't starve to death, which would indicate that you have some ability to generate energy ex nilho.

Nor can you suffocate to death, indicating that you either don't need oxygen to function or have some ability to generate it ex nilho.

Even if you're just floating around in empty space... I mean, at this point you're billions of years old. I imagine that you've learned to lucid dream at some point.

If You're lucky, it'll end up being a Professor Paradox situation where you go insane for a few eons, then get bored of it, go sane again, and learn how to manipulate the fabric of time and space and then you can just go screwing around in infinite parallel timelines.

[Anonymouswizard]

Isn't this kind of thing how you get all those annoying extradimensional entities that keep going around consuming realities? They don't need to go back to the door you kicked them through, they just need to get enough of a communication line going to start a doomsday cult around bringing them back. For all you know, they might have done that before you even kick them through the door.

Hence the significance of getting them as close to c as possible, we want lots of time dilation so that by the time cults are forming o or descendants view 'eldeitch abomination' as another term for 'target practice'. As well as us, assuming we're ageless, uploaded, or in replacement/rejuvenated bodies. Ideally by the time they've found the universe again we've built a Dyson sphere around the supermassive black hole in the center of th galaxy and used the energy to move everybody into a younger universe.

[enderlord99]

Dyson sphere around the supermassive black hole

If it's around a black hole it's not a "Dyson sphere" it's a "Penrose-process Generator"

[Bartmanhomer]

I'm trying to prove my social cues with a little effort. So that has to mean something here.

[Anonymouswizard]

If it's around a black hole it's not a "Dyson sphere" it's a "Penrose-process Generator"

Eh, I was on a train, I don't always have the time to google specific terminology.

[Fyraltari]

"There are not many of them, all things considered: The truly old.

Even on this planet, in this age, when people consider a mere hundred years, or a thousand, to be an unusual span.

There are, for example, less than ten thousand humanoid individuals alive on this planet today who have personal memories of the saber-toothed tiger, the megatherium, the cave bear.

There are today less than a thousand who walked the streets of Atlantis. (The first Atlantis. The other lands that bore that name were shadows, echo-Atlantises, myth lands, and they came later).

There are less than five hundred living humans who remember the human civilizations that predated the great lizards. (There were a few; fossil records are unreliable. Several of them lasted for millions of years.)

There are roughly seventy people walking the earth, human to all appearances (and in a few cases, to all medical tests currently available), who were alive before the earth had begun to congeal from gas and dust."

-- quote from Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" comic, "Brief Lives". Thought it sounded appropriate.

Sandman is the rare kind of story where Death is presented very positively but at the same time the immortal characters very like living forever.

[Mastikator]

It confuses me how some people use "boredom" as an argument against immortality.

I mean, the world is constantly changing and after a while, if you play your cards right, you'd be rich enough to just pull up stakes and wonder the planet doing whatever you want, constantly having new adventures and experiences.

My favorite kind of immortality is the one where you get to finally die by your own choice. When you decide that there's nothing more for you to experience or do. For me it would be many thousands of years. Leaving behind my loved ones would make me sad, but like.... that's already a thing I'm going to do. I've already outlived my grandparents. I will outlive my parents. Seeing people I love die will happen whether I'm immortal or not.

[Fyraltari]

I will outlive my parents.

Hopefully.