Davis Aurini - 20210325 The Romance of Science Fiction

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May 19, 2021 - Davis Aurini

01:59:45

20210325 The Romance of Science Fiction

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	So this looks like it's working, doesn't it?
	Let's see what's going on with the computer interface.
	Still got a title from years ago.
	I know what happens if I hit play.
	There we go.
	So you can, well, I guess you can't tell, can you?
	You saw my tweet.
	It says, this is a test stream.
	But it reloaded a very provocative title from about a year ago, apparently, which is the last time I streamed.
	At least that's what DLive says.
	I don't know.
	Might be a year three months.
	Might be a year 11 months.
	I don't know.
	Don't know how accurate it is.
	Let's see.
	Might as well adjust the lighting.
	Which is a really fancy way of saying moving the lamp.
	There we go.
	Slightly improves the visuals.
	Got the whiskey, got the smoke.
	We will be doing the regular stream tomorrow as well.
	I just want to iron the bugs out before we do that.
	Yes, we're kind of screwing around a little bit.
	Getting everything going.
	You have to install a separate bit of software to stream on your camera.
	Or your stream on your phone.
	So let's see.
	There's the DLive app.
	Right, and it won't let me...
	We're just working out bugs today, folks, so don't expect, uh, no, we've got some topics.
	got some stuff to talk about but yeah geez Okay, we're going to close the app.
	close all the apps?
	This isn't the most powerful tablet in the world.
	Does the job.
	Does the job, which is all I ask for.
	Okay, there we go.
	There I am. If I hit my channel, Elijah.
	Brilliant!
	Seeing the comments?
	Is it just me or is the camera quality far superior to what it used to be?
	At least from where I'm sitting.
	Looking at the tablet, it looks a lot better.
	Also notice that it's putting a little bit of fisheye lens on the camera, I think.
	getting more area covered or maybe just let's remove this Don't knock it on the floor Move this up to that.
	Okay, that's I think the more So now I'm worried it's gonna fall I'm going to put a coffee cup.
	There we go.
	Yeah, I think it was just my placement of it.
	No!
	Well, actually, well, there it is.
	There's, um, because it's no longer the middle of winter.
	Blinds are open.
	I'm getting a little bit of light from there.
	But no, I don't think that's the explanation.
	I think this is just a better video interpreter.
	It's Prism.
	Right, so like DLive is where you guys are right now.
	And that's, I've got the app on my tablet that I'm, you know, watching myself, watch myself.
	But to actually transmit to it, you need another app, which is why I want to do the test stream.
	It's not as simple.
	Twitch, you just open up the app on the phone and you hit stream.
	This one, you have to tell it where it's sending the information.
	You have to put in like a 64-digit channel key and then it broadcasts to DLive.
	So Prism is on my phone, broadcasting on DLive so that you guys can see it.
	So I think...
	Wait, is the picture?
	The picture is reversed.
	Hmm.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Is it?
	Yeah, it is.
	Wait a minute.
	So this, this is my, okay, this is, okay, this is trippy.
	Okay, this is trippy.
	So this should be my left, right here.
	You know, there's my L for left, but the chirality is reversed.
	This is the stuff that really messes with you.
	Like I never, yeah, it's backwards.
	That is.
	Very weird.
	See, with Twitch, I think what Twitch did is the camera on the phone would do the mirror thing.
	Right?
	Which is good because when you're looking at it, you want to see a mirror of what's going on.
	But yeah, I think on the app.
	God, now.
	Let me load my Twitch app.
	I got it.
	See, we're getting the bugs out, man.
	We're getting the bugs out.
	So if I look at my profile, yeah, okay.
	Versus this one.
	Alrighty.
	So yeah, it is reversing for you.
	And so what I was getting is with Twitch, it would mirror on my camera, on my phone, like over there, but it wouldn't be mirrored on the broadcast.
	So that's something I'm going to look into for tomorrow.
	It's not the end of the world, but I've actually strongly practiced.
	Anytime I'm trying to describe a graph, instead of describing how it looks to me, I try and describe it how it would look to you.
	You know, if it's like X is equal to Y.
	It would look like this for me, but it would look like this for you.
	Don't get it 100%, but I put a lot of effort into that, so I don't want to waste that skill.
	Yes, yes, I kept the book title back there.
	Well, in the fact, you can easily read that, can't you?
	I mean, aside from the fact that it's reversed.
	So let's see if I can do it here.
	It's there. I'm facing camera.
	What if I hit this?
	what does this do okay now I've got what the heck is this Oh, that's the exposure level.
	Oh, I ain't that fancy.
	I think this is just going to show you my messy desk.
	Yup.
	Hmm.
	What is this sparkle magic?
	Oh.
	No, I'm not clicking any of those.
	Well, I can do a lot of crap with this.
	What's this?
	This is going to be terrible, guys.
	I apologize in advance.
	Oh, oh, there we go.
	There we go.
	Can you see that?
	A little bit more of a delay on this one.
	There we go.
	Oh, ain't that purdy.
	Ain't that purdy.
	Yeah, I think we'll turn that off.
	There.
	Some of these might...
	What the hell is this?
	Old man Arini playing with the millennial toys.
	Oh, ain't that just ridiculous?
	What do you think?
	Should we keep this one?
	I don't think we should.
	All right, now is there any way to not...
	Oh, what's this?
	Flip front-facing camera?
	There we go.
	There we go.
	Awesome.
	Unfortunately, it's flipped for me as well.
	I can probably deal with that.
	Man, the visuals are fantastic.
	I obsess over this too much, probably.
	Like, for instance, I need to rotate the camera a little bit.
	So that.
	No.
	Oh.
	What I need to do is this.
	No?
	Okay.
	It's not on the regular surface.
	It's a little bit uneven.
	The lines back there are slightly off.
	I don't like that.
	But what are you going to do about it?
	We'll get the regular surface next time to put it on.
	Play some Fortnite.
	Shit.
	I don't know if I'm millennial enough for that.
	Don't even know what that is.
	It's like a first-person shooter or something?
	Oh, man.
	Dude, my tripod got slightly warped during transport at one point.
	And you don't even want to know how much I obsessed over trying to get that stupid thing level.
	Back when I was doing the other videos.
	Although, honest to God, man, look at this.
	Look at this.
	I could quite easily just do videos with my cell phone.
	Not to mention the audio is pretty.
	Now it's the audio, by the way.
	Can I see how many people are viewing?
	Yeah, three people viewing.
	Not bad.
	Not bad.
	It's, uh, you know, last-minute notification.
	Well!
	I'm going to, uh, let the back of my head think about everything with the stream.
	Deal with all those problems.
	Uh, like, my subconscious does most of my thinking for me.
	Audio is excellent, you say.
	Okay, ridiculous, man.
	Absolutely ridiculous that that video camera I have was $1,500.
	And it was just a video camera, and the microphone on it was terrible.
	You know, this, well, it's a fancy cell phone.
	Okay.
	My ex, who hates me and hated me at the time, but, you know, she liked one thing about me.
	Commented I was an early adopter when she saw it.
	She's like, wow, I'm so proud of you.
	You're an early adopter.
	She's been doing all of her socializing through video games.
	VR video games.
	It's hilarious.
	If she didn't hate me so much, we'd be a wonderful couple.
	God MSM.
	But yeah, it's a really good cell phone, but it's a cell phone, right?
	Like the aperture on the lens there is like minuscule.
	Most of this data is just being processed through heuristics to trick it into looking like an actual photo.
	It's like, you wanna talk about something funny, man.
	Like, this photo is 90% made up.
	It's 90% fictitious.
	Right?
	Like, the data that's actually coming in is completely inadequate to take anything close to this good of a video or a photo.
	And yet it takes that limited data and, you know, flips it around to make an incredible simulation of reality.
	A simulation so good that I can't tell the difference.
	Like, I'm here, and this looks like exactly what I'm seeing.
	And yet it's still a simulation.
	Interesting, isn't it?
	So.
	Topic I'm gonna talk about I'm gonna talk about this book.
	I was just reading The Moat in God's Eye.
	And no spoilers.
	Might write a review of it at some point, which will be full of spoilers.
	You know, it's at the bookstore.
	I wanted something to read.
	I was actually looking for the second set of the Earth War series in Orson Scott Card.
	It's the prequels to Ender's Game.
	Which, yeah, don't judge me.
	Orson Scott card is Neanderthal crack.
	Like, it's the world that we all want to live in.
	It's like the Orson Scott Card world.
	It's just this world of a few hyper-intelligent, very, very sensitive, very loving and emotional people that are, it's focused on very small groups that have intense tribal loyalty and honor codes.
	Right?
	It's, if you've got Neanderthal blood in you, it's Neanderthal crack.
	Right?
	This is the world that we want to live in.
	As opposed to the actual world of a Merrimut.
	That's not knocked against America.
	It's like everywhere.
	It's a Merrimut.
	Right?
	You've got the Orson Scott card universe of Ender, the ultimate warrior, and he's the greatest warrior ever because he truly understands his enemy and loves them.
	Versus Marvel superheroes.
	And I was looking for that.
	I guess they were comic books initially.
	Whatever.
	won't judge there's the the earth of fire series and then there's the second part which is the oh I forgot It's about the Bud Wars.
	It's about the prequels to Ender's Game.
	Oh, hey, my buddy.
	Sorry, my buddy's coming over.
	Let me just message him.
	Too late to hang out?
	Not at all.
	Just doing a test stream with the new service.
	Please pick up a bottle of rye if you don't mind.
	I bought him drinks last time, so.
	Mind you, his wife also made me dinner.
	Oh, God, it was so good.
	Green curry.
	Oh, oh.
	She made it really spicy.
	And I ate way too much of it and paid for it.
	But, oh, God.
	God, I love green curry.
	Chicken and rice.
	She's the sticky rice, too, you know?
	Like, I do minute rice.
	That's the only rice that's guaranteed I won't screw up.
	I just, I cannot cook rice for the life of me.
	Even with the rice cooker.
	Half the time I screw up the rice with the rice cooker, which shouldn't even be possible.
	You put one part rice, two parts water, hit the button, boom, you have rice.
	Yeah, not me.
	Not me.
	Pasta, I can do.
	Rice, crapshoot, even though I love rice.
	So those Earth of Fire books, those prequels to the Ender's Game series.
	They're written with Aaron Johnston, which I know because actually one of the books is serving as a platform for the cell phone right now.
	I'm not sure who did most of the writing for them.
	But I will tell you, if you like Orson Scott Card, if you like the Ender series, these are 100% Ender series.
	They are same types of characters.
	I kind of consider them a guilty pleasure because I know the world doesn't work like that.
	I know the world is not full of incredibly insightful, sensitive, decent people.
	It's full of Amerimuts.
	But that's part of the reason you read fiction, an escape from this foul year of our Lord, 2021.
	But they didn't have the one I was looking for at the bookstore.
	But they had the moat in God's eye.
	And, yeah, like I've heard of this book so many times.
	It's kind of like in the back of my head.
	It's like, yeah, I really should get around to reading that.
	Nice old Larry Niven.
	Now, all right, so here's the thing about Larry Niffen.
	His short stories are, what does he say?
	Awesome, he's bringing whiskey.
	His short stories are fantastic.
	Beowulf Schaefer, what a great character.
	What a great name, too, Beowulf.
	This was like back in the 70s when science fiction writers had a lot of classical knowledge.
	Right?
	Like, Heinlein waxing poetic about obscure, like, well, at least by modern standards, obscure sculptures.
	I mean, like, all sculptures are obscure by modern standards.
	Nobody knows art.
	Niven, referencing Beowulf in his science fiction novels.
	People had class back then.
	And his short stories, they are just, they are so good.
	The aliens are extremely imaginative, and the plots are just, they are bang on science fiction, man.
	They are just weird ideas.
	Like, they're science mysteries for you to figure out.
	Like, starting with these premises, sort of like the Asimov iRobot book.
	So he starts with the three laws of robotics, which are so simple that any school grader can understand them.
	And then he breaks them.
	Every single book, he finds a way to break those laws of robotics.
	It's fascinating.
	Niven's novels, however, I'm not the biggest fan of his novels.
	In fact, I've got the second world, the second ring world novel, and I've never made it more than like a quarter of the way through.
	And the reason I think that is, is because he's not the best at environmental descriptions.
	If you've read my book, environmental descriptions are huge with me.
	Describing the layout of the tactical layout of the environment.
	What things look like, what they feel like, what's going on.
	And Niven doesn't really cover all of that.
	In his short story, it doesn't matter so much.
	One of his great short stories is basically they find this weird thing and they send Beowulf out to go check it out.
	Now, the spaceships they use in his expanded universe, they're made out of this matter that's completely transparent and immune to all forces.
	Nobody knows how they make them.
	This one alien species makes them and sells them to everybody.
	They are completely transparent to everything except matter, right?
	So you can.
	If an asteroid hits them, well, you might get your brain scrambled when you're sent off flying at a million miles an hour, but the spaceship won't be damaged at all.
	However, they're also transparent to ultraviolet radiation, to gravitational waves, etc.
	And so you've got this one story where they send Beowulf out to go check out this weird phenomenon, this weird object they discovered, and every other crew has come back dead.
	And he realizes at the last minute that this is a degenerate matter, right?
	It's like a neutron star or something like that.
	And so what was killing the crew was the tidal effects.
	Just like ripping them to shreds.
	And so he manages to cram himself into one corner and he survives the thing.
	And then he blackmails the puppeteers at the end.
	He's like, you guys, your home planet must not have a moon if you couldn't figure this out.
	Which absolutely terrifies them because they're a complete coward species.
	So they and they have very worked, well-worked out bribery law, so they bribe him to never speak of it again.
	Great short story.
	He describes how the spaceship, the technology of it, how it works.
	And so the story all makes sense, but he doesn't really describe what it looks like.
	What does the pilot seat look like?
	What does the aft cargo room look like?
	It's not described.
	And for the purpose of a short story, you can just kind of like imagine whatever you want it to look like.
	It doesn't really matter.
	But when you have a longer novel, it becomes really significant.
	If you're going to keep going back to the Starship Enterprise, you want to know the basic layout.
	Where's engineering?
	Where's the Captain's Bridge?
	And so I've never really liked his novels for that reason.
	Which, if you're less visual than me, it'll be fine with you.
	Ian Banks is kind of the same way.
	He doesn't do great descriptions, which for me, especially with the science fiction universe where there's all sorts of crazy stuff happening, I really want a good description of what things look like.
	I think there's an art to that, describing just enough without describing too much.
	So you describe, if you describe too much, you wind up grounding it in 1970s technology, 1970s style.
	like one of the things that kind of jumps out with this one is there's unnecessary explanation about how the tablets work it's um it's all completely it's actually really interesting Written in the 1970s, and he predicts tablets that have a Wi-Fi connection to the ship's computer.
	The interesting thing is that when you look up information on your tablet, it makes a beep sound to tell you it's contacting the Wi-Fi is turning on.
	That's funny.
	completely accurate except he didn't realize how incredibly user-friendly this technology would be.
	But nonetheless very very forward sighting.
	Descriptions are better than this.
	Maybe not quite as good as I'd like, but still very, very good.
	So I immensely enjoyed it.
	And you know what I was saying about the Orson Scott card characters?
	Something very similar with this one.
	The basic plot of the story is that the Human Empire, it's the year 3000, and the Human Empire is spread out, oh, maybe over a dozen planets, something like that.
	And there's this one system, which is, it's on the other, like, you know, here's Sol, it's like on the other side of a nebula that completely blots out like a huge spot of the sky.
	And in fact, it looks almost like a man wearing a cowl with one, there is one star between the inhabited planet and the nebula, which is right where an eye would be.
	And thus the moat in God's eye is coming out of that dark nebula towards the inhabited planet.
	They kind of like they there's the the artist version of it on the front, right?
	You got the darkness, like you've got the regular stars of space, this one dark spot with a red glowing eye.
	And so yeah, nickname God's Eye.
	And then we find out inside the nebula there's an intelligent species of alien, the first alien that humans have met.
	Now the person sent to go do this is a member of the royal family, or like he's nobility.
	I think he's like 22nd in line for the throne or something like that.
	So he's never going to be the emperor.
	But he's fairly high up, but he's in the navy.
	He's young.
	He's 24 years old.
	So he's doing his military career.
	In fact, he absolutely loves his military career.
	By the way, great romance plot as well.
	I'll leave it at that.
	It's no huge spoilers, but a nice little romance story inside of it as well.
	And so he's returning to, I think it's New Scotland, is the name of the planet.
	And right as he arrives is when they find out, he's like, he's flying this ship that just was, like, it just put down a rebellion on one of the exterior planets.
	And he is sent out to go meet the aliens.
	He's the captain of the ship.
	sent out to go figure out what the hell is going on with this intelligent race.
	What are we supposed to do about this?
	You know, and it's this thing.
	It's like, on the one hand, we really, really want to meet another alien species out there.
	And at the same time, it is existentially terrifying because with the human, with different humans, you can definitely find common ground with them.
	Can you do that with an alien species?
	And so that's actually the subtext of the book is from the title there.
	Before you point out the moat in your brother's eye, maybe you should deal with the beam in yours.
	We're still alive, right?
	Just saw it flicker on the screen.
	Got a red box recording the time, though, so that's something.
	Now, this is the subtext.
	book itself this is what I love about this like this is this is really good fiction in that the story is just a really good story about us meeting an alien race with fundamentally different biology from our own Biology that affects their cognition.
	Like, yeah, they're sapient.
	It's not.
	You know, you get like the insect species as a pretty common thing where they like, we don't understand how to talk to outsiders.
	We just use our pheromones.
	That's kind of like the Orson Scott card, the buggers, the plot behind them.
	They didn't even realize that anything else could be sapient when they invaded Earth.
	took them a long time to realize that, oh, geez, those humans are as smart as us.
	I didn't even think that was a... never even occurred to us.
	The aliens in this one, they're far more prosaic, and yet at the same time so incredibly alien that any peaceful commerce is very close to impossible.
	And so you've got this great story about the exploration.
	You've got great characters.
	One of the characters is a bishop, which, yeah, the bishop was actually sent out by the church to figure out: do these beings have souls?
	Which is an impossible thing for him to figure out.
	And interestingly enough, the end of the novel actually fits with the current.
	The current what do you call it?
	The church's position on aliens, if aliens exist, is can we proselytize to them?
	Would that be meaningful?
	And there's this implication at the end of the book that yes, it is meaningful.
	In fact, that's exactly how things are going to end.
	With us introducing the aliens to a savior.
	The aliens said they'd had just about every lots of different religious traditions with the aliens.
	Probably the most popular one is a form of Buddhism, essentially, but they've never had a savior religion before.
	And so there's this implication that humans might be able to help bring that savior to them, which is beautiful.
	It's so subtle.
	It's so subtle.
	Anyway, I'm saying you've got this.
	You've got this great story that you can just follow the characters, the challenges.
	You know, friends become enemies, enemies become friends.
	That part's great.
	You've got really interesting science fiction questions about how biology is going to determine motives, perception.
	But then you've got these.
	On top of it all, you've got these layers of religious themes to it.
	And thus the title.
	That neither the humans nor the aliens are in any position to judge or condemn one another.
	Even though there is a fundamental animosity, which I'll say, the book ends with a hopeful stalemate.
	But biologically, there is fundamental animosity between humanity and these aliens.
	And both sides recognize that, yeah, there's this animosity, and we can't really avoid that animosity.
	We currently lack the ability to overcome that animosity.
	But at the same time, neither side condemns the other as evil.
	Like, we, it's like both humans and aliens understand, yeah, we're both just doing what we gotta do.
	We're both just in the situation that we're in.
	Very interesting thing.
	Fantastic book.
	You guys should all read it.
	And it's a nice reminder, too.
	The fact that there's a Catholic bishop is one of the major characters in it.
	This, you know, reminder that, yeah, a thousand years the church is still going to be here, right?
	Too many people talking about the end times right now.
	Do what I sing to a friend.
	Part of the reason the Rad Trads irk me a little bit is that, okay, so right now we are dealing with so many disruptive technologies.
	The birth control pill, chemicals in the water turning the frog ske, instantaneous communication, which, you know, inevitably is used for hookup sites and pornography.
	Extremely efficient travel.
	Like, how do you have, you know, there's that great book, I need to read this book, by Michael E. Jones, Slaughter of the Cities, where he talks about the, like, there was this intentional.
	Maybe intentional is too strong words.
	Sounds like they're just like evil.
	But, you know, there's various profitable reasons for doing this, okay?
	You can, you don't always need to jump to evil.
	Sometimes it's just easy.
	It's easier to do something like this.
	But he talks about the disruption of ethnic enclaves in cities.
	Right?
	You've got the Portuguese district, you got the Italian neighborhood, and how these were disrupted and broken starting in about the 70s, I believe.
	And how when you just like the ethnic enclave provides a lot of non-obvious benefits, higher social trust, wider support networks.
	People help one another find jobs.
	Like there's so many good social things that come out of that that aren't immediately obvious.
	And having broken all of those enclaves, we've become very atomized because of that, which is, you know, not good.
	But a huge part of the reason that happened, the reason that could happen, cheap transport.
	My parents live on the exact opposite end of the city, but I see them fairly often because we all have vehicles.
	Oh, sorry.
	Bye, buddy.
	Sorry, what was I saying?
	Right.
	Transportation.
	So, even if there hadn't been eminent domain, whatever, I have not read Slaughter of the Cities.
	Okay, and I presume he has some excellent arguments about who and why these were disrupted.
	Even without that, you've still got transportation, which, you know, if you're 22 years old, maybe you want to find an apartment near your parents, but you're just going to find the cheapest apartment you can because you've got transportation.
	And in fact, like these days, shoot, when I was growing up, there used to be the joke about, like, if you have a pickup truck, all your friends ask to help, ask you to help them move.
	These days, my buddy was just picking up some furniture, and we just rented a truck.
	I think he paid, what, 70 bucks for it?
	We rented a van to go pick up the furniture.
	It is so simple.
	You don't even need to own a car these days.
	You can public transit, Uber, rent a car when you need one.
	Transport just keeps getting cheaper and cheaper.
	So that, by its very nature, is going to disrupt enclaves within cities.
	And the same for all these other technologies.
	What are we supposed to do about all of this?
	All of these extremely disruptive technologies.
	It's not like we just had one disruptive technology, okay?
	It's like you go to the 16th century, you get the printing press, and that's pretty disruptive, isn't it?
	Well, this one, we've had like a dozen disruptive technologies hit us in the past year.
	And nobody knows what to do about it, right?
	It's.
	It's all well and good to say it'd be better if we didn't have internet pornography.
	It's like, all right, I'll agree with you there, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
	Now can you?
	And so the kind of issue I take with the rad trades is they take a hard line that this stuff is evil while also using it.
	Right?
	of the same technology that allows me to live stream to you guys allows anybody to make their own homemade pornography and post it online.
	So I don't have a solution to all of that.
	The The church.
	I know a lot of people complain that the Pope isn't hard enough on things.
	The church is taking a mostly hands-off approach, reaffirming traditional values that you should be kind, you should be gentle with your wife, that children should listen to their parents.
	But it's not acting like it knows what to do about any of this stuff.
	Whereas the rad trades, like it's too much arrogance.
	And this arrogance leads to this, it's the end times narrative.
	America's going to fall.
	And it's too apocalyptic.
	Apocalypse is a nice science fiction genre, but we're just in a decline right now.
	Huge difference between the two.
	So yeah, I really like that little reminder in the book that I think there have been two dark ages in the future history of that book.
	Between the current year and the year 3000, there have been two dark ages and they're just clawing their way out of the recent dark age at the start of the book.
	So there's a previous empire that actually had way better technology than what they currently had available to them.
	Which actually, come to think of it, dark ages.
	That's a major subtext to the book as well.
	Because the aliens have a similar problem.
	It's like, yeah, there's dark ages, there's periods of decline, but civilization keeps going.
	Very seldom does it completely destroy a people.
	So that's another thing worth worth remembering.
	This too shall pass.
	Alright, let me top off the glass with some ice and read some of the comments.
	I often think about the physics of freezing water when I'm live streaming.
	Yeah, I've complained about my terrible ice cube trays and how Big L, Big L has the thing all figured out.
	He only gets the good stuff.
	But did you guys know that warm water freezes faster than cold water?
	It's actually a high school kid that found that out.
	Rather recently, too, past 10, 20 years, something like that.
	See, I guess everybody just assumed that cold water would freeze faster because it makes sense, right?
	But no, warm water freezes faster.
	And so one of the things I did recently, now, depends what you mean by warm water and cold water, I suppose, doesn't it?
	I haven't heard the specifics.
	How cold is your freezer set to?
	There's going to be so many variables with that.
	Like you've got where your freezer is set to, but then you've got how much cold air falls out and warm air goes in when you open the door, which is based upon the design of your freezer.
	Big L just got a fantastic new fridge and they have the freezer on the bottom with nice like side panels so the cold air doesn't fall out.
	I took my whiskey ball freezer, right?
	It's a little rubber thing like that, hole in the top, and I put really hot water in, like hot enough to burn your hands.
	The most interesting thing happened.
	When I pulled it out, it was actually like a lot of it had evaporated.
	I'm going to have to defrost the freezer because of that.
	A lot of it evaporated, and it actually tilted at an angle, suggesting that the side that was close to the door, right, because I put it in the, like those little trays by the door, side that was close to the door froze faster, kind of pulling water up it as the excess evaporated.
	So it's almost like, maybe it's the hotter that it is, the faster it separates.
	Right?
	Like if it's cold water, it just kind of sits there gradually freezing.
	But if you've got hot water, half of it gets thrown away, which sucks the heat out of the lower half.
	Evaporative cooling is the name of it.
	Where basically, if you think, imagine you've got like a flute, a champagne flute, full of marbles.
	And the marbles would be the atoms.
	And temperature is the average kinetic motion of every molecule in there.
	And they kind of bounce around, and you'll get a few really high-energy particles and some really low-energy particles.
	Most are in the middle.
	Now, what will happen is the really high-energy particles, the bounce, bounce, bounce, it gets really high energy, bounces out of the flute, and takes all that energy with it.
	Thus the evaporative cooling effect.
	The only ones that manage to get over the rim of the flute are super high energy.
	And yeah, that right there explains why the hot water freezes faster than the cold water.
	You lose more of it with the hot water.
	And this is going to be largely, like if you have just, if you have something that doesn't, like it's a contained thing, like there's no way for the water vapor to escape, then that's colder is going to freeze faster there.
	This is why lakes don't freeze all the way through, right?
	But the top layer freezes because of that evaporative cooling effect, but then once it locks all the water in, it's there's nowhere the heat can only transfer through the ice into the air.
	Anyway, there's a physics lecture for you.
	This is the stuff that keeps me up at night.
	Oh, and regarding the lighting, it's pretty dark over there now.
	It's actually pretty dark here.
	It looks brighter on screen than it looks to me.
	So yeah, this is absolutely fantastic.
	Should have made the switch to DLive ages ago.
	Thai food is lovely.
	It really is.
	I absolutely love Thai food.
	Would not eat dog, though.
	Maddie, glad to have you.
	Guys, remember to hit subscribe.
	And you know what?
	I'll bet if you put the app on your phone, you'll get a notification when I start streaming until I get kicked off.
	We'll see.
	We'll see.
	I'm not as big a deal as I used to be.
	What would you recommend to get a good foundation in classical knowledge?
	Books like Dante's Divine Comedy?
	I'll be honest, I've been meaning to read The Divine Comedy for ages.
	I actually borrowed the book from the public library when I was a kid.
	Then I realized it was poetry.
	I would say, go where your interest leads you.
	It's a really hard question, because I constantly feel extremely ignorant in my classical knowledge.
	And yet I'm, you know, Dunning-Kruger effect, you know, I'm pretty sure I'm on that side.
	See, there we go.
	See, I'm doing it for you guys, right?
	A lot of practice goes into that.
	Like, I'm pretty sure I'm at the bleeding edge of classical knowledge on things, and I don't feel like I really know all that much.
	Which is sad.
	They're really ruining the education system.
	Very sad.
	First of all, I have robotics.
	Don't go swimming.
	Shit.
	I'm lucky.
	My mother got me some really good books.
	She'd get me books that I think were just so stupid for Christmas growing up, and I'd read them and I'd love them.
	All creatures great and small.
	That's a lovely book.
	Learning the classics is a lifetime effort.
	Absolutely.
	Man, I'll tell you what I love about science fiction is there's still great science fiction books I haven't read, like this one.
	Right?
	It's not that many.
	I think I've read like at least half of the really great science fiction works.
	So it's harder and harder to find the good ones.
	And also just the matter of personal taste.
	When I say that Niven, that I don't like his novels as much as his short stories, I'm not saying they're bad novels.
	I'm just saying that I personally don't like them because I like vivid descriptions of the environment.
	Other people would probably think that, like with me, I over-describe the environment.
	One of the nice things about Niven, too, is he makes a point of only writing what he knows about.
	So he commented once, I was reading.
	I was reading, I think it was the prologue to the Man Kazin Wars, which was a series of anthologies by different science fiction writers about the Man Kazin Wars in the Expanded Universe, in Niven's Expanded Universe.
	And he commented that he had never written any of the wars because he'd never served in the military.
	And so he didn't feel that he could do it justice.
	Again, you contrast this to the Marvel movies oh God, you know, I ran into interesting observations somewhere.
	I forget where The observation was that all of these like these modern movies are so often about one man facing an army and defeating the army which is actually the exact opposite of how things happen The reality is that the one man gets absolutely crushed by the army
	If you're just one man trying to stand up to societal forces you have to do it in a really smart way You can't get your power glove and your vibro blade and face off against the hordes of Mordor It's not how it works
	And you know another great book I was just rereading I've read this book three or four times I absolutely love this book.
	It is The Forever War Which you know.
	This is another book that has those themes of dark ages, come and go, The Forever War, it was that the guy served in Vietnam.
	I think it might have been the only science fiction novel he wrote, but it's.
	It's kind of a science fiction Vietnam.
	Basically we get into this war with an alien species and because this is space combat, not just regular earth combat which probably a lot of room to expand on this in science fiction, who knows, maybe I'll write one someday.
	But to fight in space, like the AK-47 is designed so that anybody can learn it.
	When you're wearing a power suit on IO and the, the temperature outside is three degrees Kelvin, you AK-47 isn't gonna do it.
	You need people with extremely high IQs.
	So the like that's kind of.
	The irony is that the characters in this book are that all the people that were forcefully recruited into the military conscripted were like the best and brightest of a generation, and it's called the forever war because of time dilation and so every mission that you go on takes about 20 years.
	It's a it's it's three months, six months of your time.
	It's about 20 years back on earth, and so it follows this one one soldier who gets conscripted right at the beginning, I think actually happens pretty close to this year and he actually winds up fighting all the way to the end of the war, which lasts for centuries.
	Just watching the cultural every time he comes home it's a completely different culture.
	Humanity has completely changed and it's uh.
	The author brings up future shock, which was uh a thing going around in this in the 70s about how technology was hitting so fast that people couldn't deal with it.
	For the character it was like a hundred times this okay.
	but you know the the nice thing about the forever war Is it really brings just the arbitrary nature of combat?
	Like they just absolutely nail that.
	That you do everything you can to prepare for it.
	But at the end of the day, going into combat is like running into a 20-car pileup on the highway.
	I mean, if you're a good driver, you've got better chances of surviving.
	But at the end of the day, if somebody drops a nuke on you, they drop a nuke on you.
	And it's that interesting thing about war.
	Why is war so fascinating, so enticing?
	Even though.
	Even though you know any soldier worth assault knows that your survival in the battle is largely beyond your control.
	You can be the most badass ninja on the planet, but if the general has to send you into a position to risk your life, then that's what he's going to do.
	And that's just the way the cookie crumbles.
	And yet, having that fiery desire for battle will also increase your probability of surviving it.
	It's an interesting little conundrum.
	Interesting contradiction right there.
	And by the way, there's no major battle scenes in the Moden Gods.
	There's a few battle scenes.
	I mean, just the Imperial Navy that's in charge of meeting the aliens.
	There's a few battle scenes.
	There's people that die despite doing everything right.
	Making the best choices they can.
	It's fantastic.
	They nail it.
	You know, another thing about this book is I couldn't help thinking this.
	This book reminds me of Star Trek's failures, and yet the failures of Star Trek are something that I don't think there's a solution to them.
	And the failures of Star Trek is number one, the technology, it just, it's so nonsensical.
	The spaceships aren't remotely realistic.
	The timelines aren't realistic.
	Basically, this entire book is something they do one Star Trek episode on.
	And so the Star Trek episodes will just barely scratch the surface.
	When there is so much there.
	Like, you know, Star Trek, it's got like the race of aliens.
	One has black on the left and white on the right.
	The other one has black on the right and white on the left.
	And they hate each other for no reason.
	Yeah, okay, we get it.
	Racism's bad, Gene Roddenberry.
	We get it.
	Barely scratches the surface.
	And this...
	The other thing is Star Trek, the Nambi Pamby military.
	Is Star Trek military?
	Well, Gene Roddenberry insisted that it wasn't.
	Even though it clearly is.
	But they don't have any enlisted men.
	Oh, okay.
	One of my favorite speeches in the book is from an enlisted man to the captain about how he really believes in the monarchy.
	He really believes in the nobility.
	And the fact that the nobility is actually made up of men and women worth following is what makes his life okay.
	And he's actually the captain's in a funk.
	And he's like, so snap the fuck out of it and go act like royalty, you son of a bitch.
	Go act like royalty so that after this is done, I can go back to piloting a freighter.
	That's another thing.
	It's so interesting.
	coming out the 1970s this this book is a very strong argument for for monarchy and the strongest argument for the monarchy comes from somebody that's not a noble You know, they like to say that.
	Everybody likes to imagine, oh, the medieval time was so cool.
	Knights in shining armor.
	But everybody imagines themselves as one of the nobility.
	Well, this book, the strongest argument for a nobility, comes from a commoner, which shows that, like, once again, these guys really get it.
	For American writers to write such a strong defense of monarchy is just, it shows you the quality of minds that you're dealing with.
	Yeah, I was complaining about Star Trek.
	So Star Trek is Nambi-Pamby.
	Is it military?
	Is it not military?
	Amplers.
	It's like civilians LARPing at being military.
	You know, that's another thing that kind of comes up in the book as well.
	It's not in the military.
	It's not just that war is going to be arbitrary.
	It's that you can do everything right and still get court-martialed.
	And, you know, like I often talk about the broken justice system in the civilian world.
	You know, there is no justice.
	There's just us.
	The thing about the justice system in the civilian world is that you can mostly avoid it.
	Right?
	Like, if you keep your nose clean, you mostly stay out of trouble.
	You know where the 4S is.
	Don't do stupid things in stupid places at stupid times with stupid people.
	Keep it down to two of those four.
	And there's a good chance that you will avoid the legal system.
	Not in the military.
	In the military, the moment you swear that oath, the moment the recruiter convinces you to sign on that dotted line, you are subject to the Queen's orders and regulations.
	The military code of conduct.
	24-7, and you can't escape it.
	And you also can't complain about it.
	See, with civilian laws, I didn't write the laws.
	You didn't write the laws.
	Cops don't enforce the laws.
	So, it's all pretty arbitrary.
	You know, just avoid cops, avoid situations that attract cops.
	But the military, you signed up for that.
	Volunteered to be subjected to all of these orders and regulations.
	So, guess what?
	When you're court-martialed, you don't get to complain about it.
	You volunteered for that.
	And now, for the record, I was never court-martialed, but I did participate in a couple of court-martials.
	Right?
	They're ugly affairs.
	And you don't get to be cry afterwards.
	You take your lumps.
	That's it.
	Three, actually.
	Three.
	Well, no, two court-martials.
	Wait, no, no.
	Sorry.
	Sorry.
	I participated in one court-martial.
	The guy was probably guilty.
	I was a witness for that, but I couldn't definitely say that what he did was definitely unsafe.
	I said it was probably unsafe, but I can't 100% say.
	Guy shouldn't have done it, but it wasn't malicious.
	It was just stupid.
	So he got off.
	Another guy that was using my unit.
	The idiot stole a smoke grenade, which you're not allowed to do.
	I mean, it's not the end of the world, I guess.
	Like, nobody cares that much.
	Until you go to a hotel in city when you're on leave and set off the smoke grenade in the hallway, burning the carpet.
	So, yeah, that kid got court-martialed.
	Found guilty, kicked out of the military, dishonorable discharge.
	And I participated in one negligent discharge, but as a court officer, or whatever the term was.
	So, yeah, you don't get to complain in the military when you're.
	You don't get to lie either.
	If you lie to a military court, it is even if you get away with it, nobody's going to respect you afterwards.
	Anyway, Tolkien over-described.
	See, you know what?
	I like.
	I like Tolkien's level of description.
	I remember a blog post commenting on an article complaining how England forced C.S. Lewis to take part in the war because Lewis was an artist.
	Didn't he volunteer?
	The blogger pointed out that even though C.S. Lewis became a man of letters, the experience turned him into the man he became.
	Sometimes you need to be in the group that distracts Soron.
	Okay, so wait, what is this icon right here?
	Let's see.
	Chest requires five lemons, so I can't distribute rewards.
	Okay, I guess you can distribute lemons, which are some sort of crypto.
	Don't really know.
	We'll figure that out as we go along.
	Alright, so back to my complaints about Star Trek.
	So number one, the technology is just absurd.
	Like the gravity inside the spaceships.
	Which, okay, TV budget, I get it.
	All the aliens are just humans with rubber shit on their forehead.
	Okay, TV budget.
	get it the see it see I actually know a fair bit of the Star Trek technology The reason that every ship you see in Star Trek, but human and alien, has the twin nacelles on it, is because the warp bubble needs like two things on either side to create it.
	So every single ship you see has two long things with glowy lights on them.
	Which is consistent in universe, but also completely absurd.
	Like, none of the ships are designed in a sensible manner whatsoever.
	They all use...
	What's the term for it?
	Uh, basically...
	They use zero zero momentum thrust systems.
	It's something like that.
	Like, I was watching this one episode of Voyager, where they land the ship on the planet, and then they take off, and there's no dust being thrown up underneath them.
	And look at this, just think, all of the energy that you're dissipating to launch this 100,000 ton spaceship into air needs to go somewhere.
	And if it's not blasting out the ass of the ship, then it's going to go into heat energy.
	Meaning that ship should be glowing white hot from all the energy being used to lift it.
	But nope, nope, this is magical Star Trek technology where there is no equal opposite reaction for every force that's exerted.
	Constantly violating the laws of entropy, that series.
	And see, it bothers me, because these are some of the most interesting parts of science fiction.
	These are the parts I really love about space science fiction.
	You know, about finding stable orbits, about how close can we get to the corona of the sun.
	The fact that there's no stealth in space.
	Like space combat is going to be about, number one, how many Gs of force can you exert to dodge?
	Right?
	Like you're going to be fighting somebody that's, I don't know, 10 light seconds away.
	So you have to aim where you think they're going to be in 10 seconds.
	Now, the more dodging, A, it applies G-forces on the ship.
	How many G-forces can the ship withstand?
	How many G-forces can the crew withstand?
	But more to the point, it requires fuel.
	And there's an argument, I need to, I can't make this argument.
	I need to dig into mathematics.
	But there's a pretty solid argument that the amount of g-forces that humans can withstand, I think it's about 7 Gs is where we black out.
	That's really close to the reasonable limit of what, fuel-wise, you can afford to do.
	Because again, the bigger your fuel tanks, the more fuel they burn.
	So there actually is, for a given mass of a ship, there's kind of an ideal fuel tank size that, like the bigger you make it, very, very little increased benefit, right?
	Like, yeah, you can make it 10 times the size, but you're only gonna get like a 5% improvement in fuel capacity.
	Because all that extra size, you know, you have to burn more fuel to push that fuel.
	So for a given size of a ship, there's kind of a given optimal fuel capacity.
	And maneuvers that require more than three Gs of force are extremely expensive.
	You get a slope that goes like this for how expensive they are.
	So you might have like a combat drone that you could send out and it does like 20 G's worth of, you know, dodging so that you can't predict where it is in 10 light seconds, but it's going to burn up all of its fuel in about five minutes.
	So for the actual, like the capital ship, and you need a capital ship because you have to be completely self-sufficient in space.
	Like even the warships are going to have to have like oxygen recycling facilities.
	So, like, the difference between a merchant vessel, it's going to have like everything on it.
	It's going to have gardens.
	It's going to have, like, you name it.
	So maybe the warships wouldn't be as self-sufficient.
	You might have like an aircraft carrier type thing that has everything way in the back.
	Whereas your frigates and whatnot would just be bare bones, O2 recycling, pre-made rations, power plant.
	Now, of course, you also need shielding for radiation outside, which, by the way, water makes great shielding.
	But anyway, the point is that, yeah, maneuvers on a manned ship that humans are capable of sustaining would actually probably be pretty close to the maximum feasible maneuver that you could pull.
	Right?
	Because if you maneuver too much in space combat, you run out of fuel and you're dead in the water.
	So it defeats the purpose.
	That's the stuff that really fascinates me.
	Right?
	That's the stuff that makes space combat really, really cool.
	And we get proton torpedoes in Star Trek.
	Okay, okay, I get it.
	It's writing a good action scene is really different.
	why again Star Trek you get all the Vulcan nerve pinch because when you're on a TV budget you do you can't do John Wick on a television budget Okay?
	Even if you had an unlimited budget, trying to write a good action scene that, like, listen, you're writing an action scene.
	It starts off and it ends.
	At the end you want, maybe you want the good guys to beat the bad guys.
	Maybe you want the good guys to be captured and locked in a prison.
	Whatever.
	It's A to B. You already know what B is.
	It's the story of getting there.
	And writing the good action scene, that's the hard part, okay?
	And if you're doing a TV show about exploring strange new worlds, it's not really about the action.
	So, do you want to, even with an unlimited budget, do you want to spend hours and hours and hours agonizing over the action scene to justify they get locked in prison?
	Or do you want to invent the phaser that somehow knocks people out?
	Right?
	Which makes absolutely zero sense how a laser gun knocks you out, but you know, it helps the story along.
	Same thing, transporters.
	Transporters exist so that you don't have to spend special effects sending a shuttle down to every single planet.
	So, okay, I get it.
	It's just there's it just seems to me like a Star Trek, there's the, like, it just scratches the surface of how cool a science fiction story could be.
	You know, I was half thinking that Moden God's Eye, you could do a whole TV series on that book, like 12 episodes, and it would be a fantastic science fiction TV series.
	Whereas Star Trek, they rush through it in 45 minutes.
	It seems like such a loss.
	But at the same time, what else is Star Trek going to be?
	It's an episodic, made-for-TV, pseudo-science fiction show.
	So, I don't blame Star Trek for that.
	It's just that, like, this is what I wish Star Trek was.
	You know, saying what's that movie, Interstellar?
	Interstellar is, oh, God, that's beautiful.
	That is such beautiful science fiction.
	Because the best science fiction, it and this qualifies, best science fiction deals with scientific improbabilities.
	Black holes, aliens with different biology from us, you name it.
	Like, scientific improbabilities, like facts about the universe that bend our understanding of how things work.
	It deals with politics, right?
	Like, all of the great science fiction discusses the challenge of doing things politically.
	Right?
	That's not enough to say that we need to go fight the aliens.
	You need to convince the Senate to go fight the aliens.
	You need to make sure your crew is motivated and optimistic, etc.
	It deals with romance.
	All of the greatest science fiction, it goes back to like what really makes us human.
	I don't just mean like romance and the sexual aspect, but romance as in like what is what gives human life meaning anyway sometimes you need to be in the group that distracts from Sauron.
	Great analogy.
	Like that whole war at what it was at the gate to Mordor was actually completely pointless.
	was just there to distract from the hobbits and what they were up to.
	Yeah I guess I think about Star Trek so much because it was it was such a part of my youth, right?
	I think, Yeah, I must have started watching Star Trek before I stumbled on the really good science fiction.
	Man, I wish I'd had somebody in my life introduce me to like the real classic, Starship Troopers, The Forever War, Moat in God's Eye, Ender's Game.
	I read that in high school you know that's another thing but truly great science fiction includes religion.
	That's one thing I really admire about the Orson Scott card.
	I believe he is Mormon, and yet he typically includes Catholic characters, which is a very realistic assessment of the future and shows a very excellent broad-mindedness to his approach to things.
	So interesting.
	It's of all modern.
	See, I don't want to overstate this, right?
	But science fiction that includes religion within it tends to have a very, very mature approach to it.
	See, the juvenile science fiction often dodges the question.
	And I think this juvenile science fiction, Star Trek, which is they're all effective atheist humanists, has contributed to the fake war between science and religion.
	As Aquinas said, if reason and faith are in disagreement, at least one of them is wrong.
	That's been a strong premise of the Catholic Church for centuries.
	Science and faith cannot disagree.
	If they do, the error is in the mind, not in the universe.
	But Gene Rodberry, and hey, God bless the man, okay?
	Gene Roddenberry was actually a pretty cool guy.
	He got, the reason he wrote Star Trek, I think he was a pilot.
	He was a pilot that his plane developed problems over the desert of Egypt, and he had to crash land and then like hike back to civilization to save everybody on his plane.
	And he did it.
	And after that, after that life-changing experience, he said, you know what?
	I'm going to go make that science fiction series I've been dreaming about.
	So God bless Gene Roddenberry.
	Was he perfect?
	No, nobody's perfect, but the guy was heroic.
	That being said, though, Star Trek really did contribute to this concept that in the future there will be no God.
	There will be no religion.
	That religion is a primitive superstition that man needs to overcome.
	Yeah, and those characters in Star Trek are just so self-assured about their place in the universe.
	Which is ridiculous, as if anybody's that self-assured about their place in the universe.
	We all have our bouts of nihilism.
	You know, maybe for the faithful, our bouts of nihilism are, I don't know why God put me here and I probably deserve hell.
	For the atheists, the bouts of nihilism are like this whole ugly charade is is just pointless suffering going nowhere.
	One of the things I like about Modent God's Eye is that the the captain, who it is, is pretty much the protagonist.
	Although it's one of those, again, like Star Trek, you've got a bunch of different characters that it follows.
	The protagonist, he constantly.
	There's one bit where they're blessing the ship.
	And the crew responds, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end.
	And the captain, he says it automatically and then reflects, do I really believe that?
	I really don't know if I believe that or not.
	I don't not believe it.
	Like, you're on this potentially fatal journey to go meet another alien race, which is itself existentially terrifying.
	Are you really so certain about your place in the universe on that mission?
	Or, you know what, maybe I don't, I'm not sure if I believe in it.
	But I'll take any edge we can get.
	Yeah, let's bless this ship.
	I'll take that blessing.
	if I'm not sure what the status of my faith is, I will take any advantage that's offered.
	Really it's unfortunate that so much science fiction became a platform for atheism.
	I'm not saying that atheism shouldn't be excluded or should be excluded from science fiction.
	Absolutely not one of the things you got to give Dawkins is He came up like a like a 0 to 10 a 1 to 10 scale for religiosity And I think he said like 10 is absolutely convinced atheist.
	And he said, I'm a nine.
	I'm not completely sure.
	You know, there's definitely a place for, you know, radical atheist works.
	Atlas Shrugged is a fantastic one.
	And there's a place for works that are completely convicted of religious tenets.
	But there's a lot of middle ground where really interesting conversations happen.
	And the issue with Star Trek is that, like I've been saying, Star Trek is not that deep.
	Yeah, I remember that episode where they had the huge debate about the Prime Directive.
	By the way, the Prime Directive in this book is that the humanity and the empire must survive.
	That is the prime directive.
	Above all else, we must not become extinct.
	That's a good prime directive.
	But I remember that episode in The Next Generation where they're debating the Prime Directive, which in Star Trek is don't interfere with pre-warp civilizations or internal matters of other civilizations.
	Which, you know, given that we've just come out of Vietnam, not a bad idea.
	Colonialism, Vietnam, yeah.
	It's not a bad directive.
	But the next generation has just this utterly facile conversation about the Prime Directive.
	And if you contrast that conversation, I can't name the episode, you'll have to forgive me.
	If you contrast that conversation to the conversation on ethics and what it means to be a citizen in Starship Troopers, it's like night and day.
	And so the issue I think with Star Trek is that the original had this tongue-in-cheek quality.
	It was a little bit silly.
	It's a bit cheesy.
	It's like the Twilight Zone, right?
	Like the Twilight Zone.
	Suspension of disbelief.
	Right?
	When you watch an episode of The Twilight Zone, you understand it's going to be like a bit of a moral parable.
	You got to accept some ridiculous implausibilities.
	But, you know, it's like, you know, go along for the ride and you have some fun.
	Whereas The Next Generation took itself, I think it took itself too seriously.
	It had this smug surety about its morals.
	It very much needed DS9 to come flip those morals on their head.
	Because it's one thing for Starship Troopers, which has a it's maybe not Plato's Republic, but it's got like two or three chapters.
	There he is.
	Perfect time, too.
	Hey, buddy.
	Good.
	We're just finishing up the live stream, and we are discussing ethics.
	Oh, you're beautiful.
	I love you.
	Ah, my favorite brand.
	Thank you.
	What about that ethics?
	Well, we're discussing science fiction and ethics.
	So you go grab yourself a glass and eavesdrop and jump in if you've got anything to say.
	Big L is here, and he's going to judge me harshly on my shitty ice cube trays.
	I've told the audience about how you're like the expert at buying stuff for the house.
	I am.
	I obsess over it.
	To good effect, like you can tell.
	Well, if I don't, then my wife will.
	Oh, God.
	Yeah, she obsesses too much.
	You gotta pick up some of that burden, man.
	She obsesses, and then she gets frustrated and is fierce, whatever.
	Oh, that's, yeah, that's what I do, actually.
	That's choleric for you.
	Yep.
	It's hilarious.
	His wife is very, very choleric, and sometimes we get into, like, choleric headbutting conscious.
	Okay, so what I was saying is, so, okay, Starship Troopers has, like, two or three chapters dedicated to the philosophy of being a citizen.
	What it means to take on that moral responsibility.
	And as far as books go, I mean, you'd be hard-pressed to find a book with more philosophy in it without going back to Dostoevsky.
	To find a novel without that much philosophy in it.
	And yet, Starship Troopers.
	It's funny.
	Okay, so the history of how Starship Troopers was written is Hein Wen was writing the book that became the symbol for the hippie movement, Stranger in a Strange Land.
	And then halfway through the book, people were protesting Vietnam and shitting all over the soldiers.
	Oh, thank you.
	And so he said, fuck this, I'm going to write a novel about how being a soldier is awesome.
	So he stops the hippie novel to write a book about how the only people that deserve any respect are those that serve in the infantry.
	And then he goes back to writing the peace and love hippie book, Stranger in a Strange Land.
	So the takeaway being that even though he argues really strongly for the morality of the military in Starship Troopers, it's meant to be taken as an argument, not the be-all-end-all of philosophy.
	And that is a thousand times as deep as any moral argument ever presented on Star Trek.
	Yep.
	And yet Star Trek has so much smugness about the atheistic humanism.
	And what I was saying is that I think Star Trek contributed to the idea that you believe in science or you believe in God.
	And you can't believe in God and write science fiction or read science fiction.
	Yep.
	I remember that being the big question when I was in high school: science versus religion.
	Oh, God, exactly.
	And very few people would say that they don't have to be opposed.
	Which was a quantity.
	And I said earlier, Aquinas stated: if your reason and your faith are in disagreement, the problem is you.
	Reason and faith never disagree with each other.
	And it's like, I don't know which one is wrong.
	Maybe you're wrong about both of them.
	But the two never disagree with each other.
	So sort yourself out, bucko.
	Yeah, plus, it's not supposed to be a faith in science, right?
	Without faith, you don't get to science.
	Actually, to come to think of it, War Ember 40K is great in that question about faith and science, right?
	Basically, you have the Emperor's way, which is like scientism, basically, faith in science.
	And then it devolves into worshiping the Emperor or worshiping Satan, basically.
	Which is quite interesting.
	You know what?
	It's actually funny.
	With the death of the Emperor, you get the worst of both worlds in 40K.
	You do, yeah.
	Worship of science and blind culty faith in the emperor.
	Yep.
	And it's interesting too, because the main thing that puts Horace over the edge is he chaos basically Satan shows him this vision of the future, which happens to be the vision if he sides with chaos, but he doesn't know anything about chaos, so he's like, these guys seem okay.
	And that vision of the future is people worshiping, blindly worshiping the emperor.
	Yeah.
	Which the emperor would have hated.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I was just talking to my brother about that, and it's because I was saying that how Horace is deceived is quite well done, but it's also, it's like friggin' an Dyke Skywalker.
	He just turns the dark side on a, you know, on a dime.
	And it's just like, oh, if they just had put in like a seed of doubt and then let that grow, it would have been perfect.
	But it is really jarring how he just wakes up basically from a fever dream and is like, I like chaos and people now.
	Yeah, that must be.
	Well, that must be a really hard thing to write.
	Yeah.
	Is that to be my fantasy about the prequels before they came out?
	No.
	I fantasize.
	They mentioned the Clone Wars.
	I imagine them being a mix of World War I, where World War I just throw people over the trenches.
	Past 20 attacks accomplished nothing and resulted in 17-year-old kids screaming in pain for 16 hours before dying.
	Yep.
	But yeah, let's just send another one over the trenches.
	Why the fuck not?
	And that would be the Clone Wars aspect.
	That we keep just cloning soldiers and sending them into this meat grinder.
	and, like, okay, they're clones, but they're still people, man, and this is horrific, mixed with, what's that?
	The Canadian general wrote that book, The Shake Hands with the Devil.
	Yeah, I think you've told me about that before, yeah.
	About the Rwandan genocide.
	Yeah.
	And he was basically he was stationed.
	Oh, geez, battery just died.
	Sorry, folks.
	I'm gonna plug her in.
	Give me like more than...
	Probably did warn me earlier.
	I'm just an asshole.
	So I will try and get back to the comments we will see how it this is a twitch so the comments will probably still be there Yeah.
	It's gotta charge for a bit, though.
	Shake Hands with the Devil.
	He was stationed by the United Nations in Rwanda, during the Rwandan genocide, and forbidden from doing anything about it.
	And so what I imagined with Anakin Skywalker is that the Jedi Council was like this enlightened United Nations.
	It's like, no, we can't intervene in the Clone War.
	It's a da-da-ba-da.
	And Anakin's just looking at, like, all of the evil being done.
	And the good people, they're too conservative to do anything about it.
	Yeah.
	Fuck it, dark side.
	No more genocides, no more warfare, no more fucking infants crying while their parents are murdered.
	Iron Fist on the galaxy.
	And man, him, that emotional scene he has with Obi-Wan, which is totally faggy in the movie.
	You make Griffins dead.
	Imagine him emoting like, and by the way, I think the actor did a good job.
	Somebody pointed out recently, the guy that played Darth Emo in the recent movies.
	Yeah.
	He did a fantastic job with awful dialogue.
	Yeah.
	I think so.
	So imagine like, I'm going to say Darth Emo.
	Imagine Darth Emo playing Anakin.
	But he's Emo because he just saw a child get butchered.
	And he's now furious at Yoda and Obi-Wan.
	Not because his girlfriend is dying, but because he saw a child get butchered and the Jedi Council did nothing.
	Yep.
	Instead, how'd it go?
	Basically, Palpatino's like, hey, I got some cool tricks to teach you, but you got to murder a bunch of kids first.
	Oh, good.
	Okay.
	Yeah, you just, and it's like what you're saying about Horace, where he's like, oh, I had a vision, now I'm evil.
	You got to justify the evil.
	You got to.
	And like I say, the seed of doubt was so well written, but then he basically just wakes up and he's like, guess I'm evil now.
	Whereas he just went on and they had maybe a conflict and he saw something and he's like, I don't like where this is going.
	Like, I can see what's going to happen in the future.
	like battles with himself you know that he has some loyalty left for the emperor instead he's just kind of like fuck it you know every they're saying everybody's the protagonist of their own story And you, especially with villains, if you want to write a good villain, you need to understand why they're doing what they're doing.
	Yep.
	By the way, so I've mostly been reviewing this book during the live stream.
	You need to read this.
	This book is fantastic.
	Okay.
	Well, and the reason I was talking about Star Trek is that it's humanity discovering another alien race.
	Yeah.
	And they send out the Imperial Navy.
	Right?
	With a bunch of annoying civilian scientists on board.
	So it's almost like a Star Trek episode, except not shitty.
	Yep.
	And it's.
	Oh, because it's just the smugness of Star Trek The Next Generation.
	They are so absolutely certain of themselves.
	Yeah, this is what I hate about it.
	I hate it so much.
	We get a long talk about a lot of long talks about that, haven't we?
	Yeah, because my brother loves Next Generation.
	Although he watched it again, you know, cover to cover or whatever first episode, last episode, and he doesn't like it nearly as much anymore.
	By the way, guys, if you've never seen Star Trek Next Generation, start with season three.
	Do not watch the first two seasons.
	They are fucking terrible.
	Like, once you get into season three and you get into it, then you can watch the first two seasons.
	Okay?
	figure out what's good about season three before you go back because the first two seasons are oh my god There's an episode.
	I think it's the second episode.
	They go to the planet of the black people.
	Yeah.
	And this.
	Oh my fucking god, it's so racist, dude.
	Yeah.
	If you read the script, they were actually intended to be Mongolians.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Like, so it's like a warrior culture, and they basically kidnap Tasha Yarr because she's a strong warrior woman.
	And that's what you do.
	And like, they kind of take it from like Native Americans.
	They'd like go kidnap brides.
	Not to rape them, but to it's like to prove that you're a real man, you have to kidnap your bride.
	And after you've kidnapped her successfully, then you can ask her to marry you.
	Yep.
	Right?
	So there's honor to the whole thing.
	But you get a bunch of.
	They write the African.
	They're all Africans.
	They don't even have rubber foreheads, man.
	They're just black people.
	They kidnap Tasha Yar.
	They kidnap the blonde white woman.
	Yep.
	And they act like complete savages the entire time.
	And it's just like it is.
	This is really racist.
	I was just thinking about Star Wars versus Star Trek and how last time we were talking about Star Trek, how the original series was great because it's like a hopeful adventurer.
	And the hopefulness is still there in The Next Generation, which I appreciate, right?
	Because we're comparing it to Deep Space Nine, where it's hopeless, but also very good.
	Well, that's.
	Deep Space Nine is the first time they actually put religion in Star Trek.
	Yeah.
	Now, it's a science fiction-y religion where it's not technically a religion because technically they're time-traveling aliens.
	But it's religion.
	It's just they.
	That's the unfortunate thing.
	They still need this veneer of science on top of religion when religion is about the unknowable.
	And so because they're wormhole aliens that are outside of time, they become unknowable because they can see the future.
	But you shouldn't need that sci-fi excuse for religion, you know?
	But I was just thinking about the parallel there between Star Wars and Star Trek and how it's like bureaucratic.
	You know, the next generation became kind of bureaucratic instead of adventure-focused.
	You know what?
	Bureaucratic?
	Without admitting that bureaucracy is evil.
	Yeah.
	It's just interesting, like, when you look at the prequels, that was the big complaint, valid complaint.
	It's like, it's so bureaucratic.
	Where's the adventurism?
	Where's the adventurous spirit going?
	Yeah.
	You know, I was saying to you, my favorite line in.
	No, to be just a Not to pump up the first Star Trek so much, because near the end of it, it started to go that way.
	Like, the Prime Directive wasn't introduced until something like the fifth last episode.
	The original.
	Not the original, yeah.
	Which I was saying earlier, the original.
	It's almost like Twilight Zone.
	It was really silly.
	You didn't really take it seriously.
	No.
	Right?
	It's like, this time, we visit the planet of the 1920s gangsters.
	It's like, okay, like, it's not completely realistic.
	It's a little bit silly.
	It's going to have a moral lesson at the end.
	And I'm, hey, I'm on board for the ride, man.
	Go punch that alien, Kirk.
	Yeah.
	Whereas the Next Generation took itself extremely seriously.
	Yeah.
	But philosophically, it was extremely juvenile and childish.
	And it was a giant space bureaucracy that called themselves heroes.
	Yep.
	Yep.
	Let's see.
	The next generation had the magical negro and everything.
	Yeah, the magical Negro is not a bad character.
	It's pretty tedious, though.
	morpheus is a great character yeah i suppose so but he's i don't know i don't know if he'd be the magical negro Oh, no, he absolutely.
	In fact, well, my friend's sister F loved the Magical Negro.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	My experience, which is not, you know, definitive or anything, black people actually really like the Magical Negro.
	I think there's a lot of truth to that archetype.
	Well, I mean, in my mind, the Magical Negro boils down to the humble guy that doesn't get listened to a lot, but actually can solve a lot of problems if you actually listen to them.
	When it's done well, it can be a very compelling story.
	And even if it's not a black character, but of course it's traditional.
	Well, something blacks lend themselves extremely well to that character.
	They like that character.
	I think that's some insight on the human condition.
	I didn't like Wikipedia Goldberg, though.
	She was terrible.
	She'd always just have some stupid platitude that's like, oh, wow, you're so wise.
	Like, no, no, no, that was a stupid platitude.
	You remember that?
	She was the worst character in that.
	All of the platitudes were bad.
	Yeah, that's true.
	She was for Star Trek The Next Generation.
	She was a wonderful magical negress.
	Yeah.
	She was as good as Picard's speeches.
	Actually, Picard had some really good speeches.
	The Drumhead was a great episode.
	Although, again, it's like, even the Drumhead is a really baby's first military court-martial.
	Yeah.
	You know?
	Yeah.
	So.
	You know what?
	I'm not even gonna touch on the topic.
	All I'm gonna say is not all fans of Star Trek are pedophiles.
	Yeah, okay.
	But 99% of pedophiles are Star Trek fans.
	Oh, wow.
	And our discussions about the moral servitude and moral simplicity, even juvenile morality of Star Trek, I think there's some dots to be connected there.
	Right?
	I'm going to leave it at that.
	Not exactly a topic.
	Yeah, wonderful topic for people to quote you out of context, ain't it?
	Yep.
	Let's see.
	So I got all the comments back.
	It has to plug into the top.
	Yeah.
	Oh wait, let's see if it'll flip.
	Nope, the app won't flip.
	The bloody thing's designed back.
	And here's the button to turn the screen off.
	So that when you put it like this, it turns the screen off when you put it in your lap.
	Starship Proopers would make an excellent miniseries.
	I've been meaning to watch the second and third movie.
	I heard the second was awful, but the third was really good.
	Oh, they were both pretty bad, but, like, B-movie good, you know what I mean?
	Duo is actually surprisingly good.
	Did you see the kids series based off of Starship Troopers?
	No.
	Around 2003 or thereabouts.
	Yeah.
	They came out with a CGI kid series.
	Like, this is like, you remember Reboot?
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	God, if you guys don't know Reboot, look this shit up.
	Yeah.
	And here's a scary thing that actually looked pretty cool back then.
	They did a CGI series of Starship Troopers, which was actually really good.
	Even though it had none of the gore.
	It was shockingly good.
	And they brought the skinnies in from the books as well.
	Oh, the skinnies, yeah.
	Yeah.
	No one ever talks about the skinnies.
	Yeah, I know.
	The skinnies are the worst, man.
	The bugs are bad enough, but we can dominate them.
	The skinnies?
	Those SOBs have tactical nukes.
	The bugs have tactical nukes too.
	The bugs in the book are presumed to use rifles the same way humans use them, right?
	They're not running around naked like they are in the movie.
	Do they?
	I forget.
	I mean, they weren't long ago, but I thought that they were like the movie.
	They are fully advanced.
	In fact, you know what?
	One of my biggest complaints about the movie?
	That the aliens launched an asteroid at Earth from the other end of the galaxy.
	How the fuck does that work?
	Yeah.
	It's actually strongly implied they didn't.
	Because that is physically impossible.
	Yeah.
	And the human government in the movie allowed that to happen to justify a war with the bugs.
	Oh.
	Well, I love the movie, but it's completely different, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	It's.
	like I said to somebody else that basically the movie is trying to make fun of the book and fails and becomes a good movie.
	That's the thing is that everybody is like oh this one girl is dating the military we love watching We love that movie.
	We knew it was an anti-military movie, but we didn't fucking care.
	We loved it.
	It's an anti-fascist movie that makes fascism look great.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Let's see.
	The thing I hate about Atlas Shrugged was Hank Reardon barely contained hatred for his family, including a soon-to-be ex-wife.
	Yeah, oh, yeah, you're absolutely right.
	Oh, and Dagny is an early version of Daenerys Targaryen, who, while smart and confident, got her position because it is her family's company.
	She didn't work her way up.
	Oh, God.
	Is the complaint about how she needs to come from nothing, though?
	Because I think that it's hard to go from, you know, to do the Elon Musk.
	I think he came from nothing, didn't he?
	Like, that's super rare.
	Most people are the Donald Trump types that get a small loan of a million dollars and they make billions from it.
	I think if you dig into Elon Musk, you'll find the same thing.
	Yeah, probably.
	I don't know.
	I don't think rags to riches actually happens.
	Yeah.
	I'm not saying that to bat.
	Like, Elon Musk started out good, but made great.
	And so, you know, that guy's heroic.
	Yeah, like, usually there's a generation between rags to millions and then millions to billions, right?
	There's a saying in the Bible that the sins of the father will be visited onto the son for seven generations.
	And if you actually study the rise and fall of family names, it's about seven generations.
	Like what you need to do as you know as a father is it's the long game man.
	Yep.
	Right?
	Like you want you want your great-grandkids to be in the upper class.
	Or you could completely screw up your marriage and screw up your kids and you know drive them down for seven generations.
	Have you read Alice Shruck?
	I've got no good for it.
	I'm not too good for it, but I haven't read it.
	The book is wonderful because of how childish it is.
	What I love about like all of the villains in the books in the book are just these completely cynical moochers and looters.
	Just these pathetic little men that can't invent anything, so they just drag everybody else down.
	And they know that they're doing it.
	And it seems cartoony at first until that's on the one hand, you get older and you're like, shit, there are so many of these bug men everywhere.
	There really, really are.
	Like, it's not an exaggeration that these people are that evil.
	She's a self-serving narcissistic cunt who thinks she's a hero.
	Who, and God bless Ayn Rand, You know, I'm going to end the sentence there.
	Ayn Rand destroyed her objectivist movement by sleeping with whoever she felt like at the time.
	Yeah.
	So there's a lot of overlap there.
	Let's see.
	Shakespeare's Hamlet is a great story of the descent into evil.
	Or am I thinking with that?
	No, I think I'm thinking of Hamlet.
	Well, like, Hamlet descends into nihilism, I'd say.
	Yeah.
	He starts off with justified revenge, but revenge takes him to the point where there's no recovery.
	And his redemption at the end of Hamlet is recognizing that his greatest enemy is also his closest friend.
	And they kill one another in noble combat.
	And then the foreign troops arrive and remark on the tragedy and then take over the kingdom.
	Oh yeah.
	I actually haven't read that one.
	I've only read a couple of the Shakespeare ones.
	Like Romeo and Juliet and Merchant of Venice, which I really loved.
	I hate to still haven't read that one.
	You'd think a racist like me would know Merchant of Venice.
	Yep.
	I loved Hamlet so much when I was 20.
	Dyed my hair white.
	Wow.
	There's that version of it that was released where he had like the goatee and white hair and it was like so edgy and he dressed like Luke Skywalker the whole time.
	Like it's so cool, man.
	Then I tried to watch.
	I tried to re-watch it when I was like 25 or 27 or something.
	I'm like, holy shit, this movie's emo.
	Yeah.
	I love The Merchant of Venice because it was when we were reading it in high school, our teacher didn't shove any interpretations down our throat.
	But I mean, looking at modern stories, the revenge narrative of Shylock being justified would totally fit into like he would be the hero nowadays.
	But if you look at it, like, no, he is the fucking villain.
	Like, they abuse him and they, you know, they shit on him all the time.
	But at the same time, when he gets a chance to exact his revenge, it's like so beyond the pale, unjustified.
	That's interesting.
	You can take it both ways.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's a great villain, isn't it?
	It's somebody that you can...
	You can empathize with, yeah.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yep.
	Let's see.
	Thinking of Macbeth.
	Okay, funny story about Macbeth.
	Guys, go over to SF Debris after this and go check out his review of Gargoyles, the cartoon show from the 90s, because the version of Macbeth in the Gargoyles cartoon show for kids is actually the most historically accurate one.
	The Shakespearean one is flipped on its head because Queen Victoria was a descendant of Duncan.
	Is it Duncan who fights Macbeth?
	I think it's Duncan.
	Sounds right from the cartoon.
	Anyway, the good guy in the Macbeth story was actually the backstabbing piece of shit.
	And Macbeth was a good man that kept his word.
	And so Shakespeare flipped it on his head so as not to offend the monarch.
	And so the kids cartoon show involving magic and sentient gargoyles and Macbeth is a mercenary in the 21st century is actually more historically accurate than it's extremely like.
	Yeah, just go watch S.F. Debris' review of it, and now you know the real history, except without magical gargoyles.
	Actually, I think Macbeth is the better descent into evil, because, sorry, it's not Anakin.
	I was going to say Macbeth.
	Hamlet!
	Hamlet and Anakin, by the way, that's the same character.
	Oh, yeah.
	Except that Hamlet's done well, and Anakin's done horribly.
	Yeah, Hamlet doesn't.
	He descends into self-destruction but not evil, whereas Macbeth descends into evil, all right, so Elijah headed out.
	We got three, three viewers still.
	Um oh, we got that, we got this thing working.
	Oh man, the visuals with this app are so much better.
	What app is it?
	This it?
	Well, it's called Prism, but it's transmitting through D-Live.
	Look at, look at those visuals man, how sharp and crisp.
	That is cool.
	Like you can, you can read the titles on the books behind me.
	You could not do that on Twitch and you know we haven't had the stream drop.
	That's pretty fantastic cool.
	So you know what I'll before we head out, I'll.
	I'll share one of my favorite scenes from DS9.
	Do you got any any last thoughts for the folk?
	I know you came over to drink with me, not live stream, but no, I'm done.
	So my favorite scene from DS9, which is actually the most hated scene by the people that really love the Next Generation, it's when essentially the the, the Federation, knows that the Dominion is going to invade the Alpha quadrant.
	Yeah right, and they're playing a divide and conquer strategy with all the different empires in the Alpha quadrant because they, the dominion, owns the Delta Quadrant.
	Everybody works for them.
	Yeah and um, what happens is that Kept, and Sisko has to engage Galdicott the spy to try and fake evidence of a Dominion plot to get the cock, to get the Romulans to side with them.
	But the Romulan diplomat figures out that the evidence is fake and so Galdecott plants a bomb on the guy's shuttle and uh, makes it look like the dominion did it, murders him and now Sisko is party to murder.
	And Galdecott at the end, Cisco is just like, how the fuck dare you?
	How dare you do that?
	Yep.
	And Galdecott says, Cisco, we just saved the Alpha Quadrant.
	Yep.
	And all it cost was 10 pounds of TNT, the life of one Romulan diplomat, and the self-respect of one Starfleet officer.
	I'd call that a pretty good bargain in my books.
	DS9 was very much needed after the smugness of the next generation.
	Yep.
	Anyway, folks, we will be back tomorrow.
	I will, anyway.
	We got this sorted out.
	I think I'm going to have to do a little clip on Twitch to tell everyone to come over here.
	So we're still figuring things out.
	We're still figuring things out here, but we've got the basics.
	So, Carpet Futurum, Dene Traditum.
	Now, how do we end the damn?
	There's a button.
	Arena out.
	Did that work?
	No, we're still live.
	Do I have to hold it down?
	I think that ended it.
	Ending live broadcast.

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