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Thread: Freefall: DOGGY!
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2014-04-10, 08:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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Freefall: DOGGY!
Wait, there's no Freefall thread? There should be a Freefall thread. I'm going to make one.
Freefall features Sam Starfall, an infamous alien starship captain whose amorality is matched only by his incompetence; Helix, Sam's naive robot sidekick, who specializes in picking up heavy things, moving them, and putting them down; and Florence Ambrose, an engineer (and Bowman's Wolf) who just wanted to make a living designing starship engines. Wacky hijinks, and eventually a plot, ensue.
(Since my summary skills are terrible, I'll let hajo take over from here...)
Updates MWF.Last edited by Math_Mage; 2014-05-05 at 01:03 AM.
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2014-04-10, 09:45 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
The thread keeps dying for some reason.
However, said plot has grown far beyond the confines that your last sentence implies. A recap of stuff up to this point may not go amiss.
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2014-04-10, 09:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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2014-04-11, 01:16 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
Freefall is running since 1998, but the events shown in the comic cover "only" a few weeks.
For the early years, the index has been organized into "chapters", but the current story is all under "2010"
Also, the search for text only covers the first 2441 comics.
There is a forum, and the intro-thread has a short timeline.
The background of the story:
The near future. Mankind has spread to a few dozen worlds, but travel between starsystems is slow and expensive.
The story is happening on Jean, a small human colony-world, that is still being terraformed.
On it are about 20.000 adult humans, and 450 million robots. (Plus one alien, and two genetically engineered persons)
Terraforming and robot-production is done by a big corporation, Ecosystems Unlimited.
Sam is a squid-like member of the only alien race discovered so far, and he got to Jean as a (sort of) stowaway aboard a scout-ship.
The squids have descended from scaveners, and their civilisation is early-industrial.
They are a lot different in their ways of life (also, delicious)
The air on their homeworld has more oxygen, so on Jean, Sam needs to wear an environment-suit at all times.
Despite the culture-shock, Sam has managed to aquire Helix, a "young" warehouse-robot, and an old spaceship (cheap!), they are using as a home.
Florence is one of a few "experimental organic AI" with the body (and nose) of a red wolf, raised by a human family on earth. She is competent as an engineer (as well as hunter and cook) and was travelling (in "cold sleep") to a research-station on another world when Sam needed an engineer to repair hisheap of junkspaceship.
So, Sam bribed some offical to have her unloaded on Jean...
You see - no spoilers, just teasersLast edited by hajo; 2014-04-11 at 07:38 PM.
-HaJo
FLW: Oh, no. We're being rescued. How embarrassing!
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2014-04-17, 07:03 AM (ISO 8601)
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2014-04-17, 11:06 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
Nicely done.
It is interesting to go back and see that Florence had previously commented that "The chimps were intelligent, but sociopaths."
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1200/fv01151.htm
I don't recall if they were discussed at any other point in the series. It leads me to wonder if she was referring to chimpanzees as an earlier effort at bio-engineering organic AIs or not. The answer as to whether or not chimp AIs had been designed would be interesting, as would the question of who was responsible for designing them. Dr. Bowman, the creator of the Bowman's Wolves, does not strike me as a likely candidate ...
The one reference to chimps in the back story provided here suggests that chimps were subject to engineering:
http://home.comcast.net/~ccdesan/Fre...story.html#Top
[Edit] I discovered after posting this that the page hajo linked above answers the one question, but not the other:
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1500/fv01401.htmLast edited by Wort; 2014-04-17 at 11:11 PM.
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2014-04-21, 10:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
As an engineer, I think that Florence is really awesome. The funny thing is that I recently started working with PLCs, and the plc inside clippy looked exactly like the model I have been using.
I love hard sci do.
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2014-04-27, 09:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
Will Blunt interpret Max's comment to mean he shouldn't compromise on his genocide attempt?
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2014-04-27, 10:09 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
Huh, I can't believe I missed this...
First reference to chimps:
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff700/fv00661.htm
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff700/fv00662.htm
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2014-04-27, 06:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
Last edited by Ravens_cry; 2014-04-27 at 06:35 PM.
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2014-05-05, 01:08 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
I put hajo's background summary in the OP. If it looks stupid/redundant that way, let me know and I'll remove it.
Also, thanks for covering for my ineptitude, hajo. I probably shoulda said that sooner.
Spoiler: CurrentWell, everyone's arrived to the debate. Sounds like a good time to cut to Florence.
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2014-05-05, 08:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
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2014-05-05, 09:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
*sigh* As an anthrophile, I feel Blunt makes a very good point. Not that I agree with his Final Solution approach, but it is a real can of worms nonetheless.
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2014-05-05, 10:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
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2014-05-06, 12:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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2014-05-06, 01:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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2014-05-07, 10:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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2014-05-07, 10:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
Sam abused the ignorance of his mark to con them into doing something for him (in this case, serving ice-cream). Fairly standard MO for Sam, really.
If he tried it on anyone else, he could not get away with it, since Sam is wanted dead by pretty much everyone, including everyone that redacts the laws, but Blunt has a combination of sheltered, simplistic obedience to the law and slow thinking that makes him easy target. Sam may or may not be the squid species he claims. The species may or may not be protected. And the penalty may or may not be to serve ice-cream (take your pick). But Blunt doesn't know the answer to those either, and he is more willing than most to accept other people's word at face value.
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2014-05-07, 10:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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2014-05-08, 12:12 AM (ISO 8601)
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2014-05-08, 12:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
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2014-05-08, 07:48 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
I feel sad for today's youth.
Sam just pulled a CLASSIC Bugs Bunny routine!
http://fan.tcm.com/_Duck-Rabbit-Duck...tePassive=true
Member of the Giants in the Playground Forum Chapter for the Movement to Reunite Gondwana!
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2014-05-09, 09:37 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
Interested in MitD? Join us in MitD's thread.There is a world of imagination
Deep in the corners of your mind
Where reality is an intruder
And myth and legend thrive
Ceterum autem censeo Hilgya malefica est
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2014-05-20, 10:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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2014-05-20, 10:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
Spoiler
He's a partially broken robot who has gained sophont status due to the machinations of a deranged chimp who was too brilliant for the humans to put down while the humans were also too lazy to actually understand the protocols before they used them.
There's bound to be a few areas where things fall apart, given that.
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2014-05-20, 10:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
yeah, thanks Blunt for shooting yourself in the foot, care to aim for your head next?
I think he thinks that humans WANT to work and toil all day, be brave and face danger and such....was he raised in isolation the same way as Edge? or similarly? he might've gotten the notion from watching too many "humans triumph against robots with pure human courage and determination" movies....
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2014-05-20, 10:31 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
You joke, but I've seen exactly that attitude in topics about transhumanisim and post scarcity societies. If the machines are in charge and keep humans as pampered pets, what meaning does a human life have? Better to struggle with our destiny, because it is -our- destiny.
...I dont understand it either.
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2014-05-20, 10:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
No, he's referring to the death of humans when they basically become pampered pets that never think or do anything for themselves until they die out due to their creations no longer caring to truck with them or humans having become so lazy and anemic that they stop breeding. It's a trope that comes up from time to time. Saturn's Children covers one version of that variety of human extinction because robots(though global warming and poisoning the biosphere helped humanity along), that Dresden Codak story linked to earlier covers it partially, though it also involves a malevolent-to-callous-to-uncaring MACHINE GOD(TM) that was actively mindraping and absorbing the humans it got addicted to cyber existence.
He just doesn't use fancy words or spin or the ability to communicate the danger intelligibly.
Transhumanism and post-scarcity are one thing. Giving your society over to Mother Brain is quite another.
It's one thing to want to have a much better society and better people to populate that society. It's another thing to willingly choose to destroy that society via obsolescence.
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2014-05-20, 11:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
if it comes up in transhuman discussions, then it probably doesn't matter all that much, because at the point of transhuman technology becoming widespread, it becomes unclear what *really* is a robot/machine/person or whatever, and what it means to be human if your in a robotic body etc etc.....
I mean, I don't see the difference between robot rulers and human rulers, except that one is flesh, one is steel, but that really shouldn't impact any of their actual thoughts (programming and exponential growth into a singularity AI on the other hand...), so you might as well argue against government in general and what meaning human life has if we're all just say, corporate drones or something, and that maybe its better to struggle on as hunter-gatherers with no government because its our destiny or whatever.
and then Hobbes comes along and facepalms at the extreme bioconservatives* and goes "have I taught any of you nothing!?" and proceeds to retread the whole "war of all against the all" thing to teach them a lesson.
*a term from Eclipse Phase to refer to people who believe in keeping themselves completely human and shunning access to more advanced technology.
Edit: the more accurate Eclipse Phase term for people who shun technology altogether would be Neo-Primitivists, and is what I meant.Last edited by Lord Raziere; 2014-05-21 at 07:13 PM.
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2014-05-28, 11:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Freefall: DOGGY!
Alternate last line: "I did say 'advances'."