Axiom 1: We are living in the future.

[darkling@mstdn.social]

@cstross We are already post-singularity (depending on whose reference frame we define the singularity by).

[driusan@doomscroller.social]

@cstross@wandering.shop I've been pondering that question for 6 years now and reality always teaches me that I'm not imaginative enough

[keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca]

@cstross Next step: the failsons of Bond villains? The inbred aristocracy of Bond villains?

[illuminatus@mstdn.social]

@cstross Fucking Hell, Charlie, as Friday night thoughts go, this can go pretty awesome or pretty fucked. Or both.

[michaelgemar@cosocial.ca]

@cstross "Today is worse than yesterday, but at least it’s better than tomorrow." - Russian proverb

[jredlund@social.linux.pizza]

@cstross The Bond villains are very uncool though. Lame as a one-legged duck and twice as unloved. There's that.

[lazarou@mastodon.social]

@michaelgemar @cstross very Russian!

[gnaddrig@mastodon.social]

@WenhamToo @cstross
Enter "84K" by Claire North.

[icing@chaos.social]

@cstross
H.G. Wells: „It [his 1923 novel Men like Gods] did not horrify or frighten, was not much of a success, and by that time, I had tired of talking in playful parables to a world engaged in destroying itself."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Like_Gods

[joshsusser@autistics.life]

@cstross a world where everyone is a Bond villain?

[thias@mastodon.social]

@cstross By induction, the past was better…

[graydon@canada.masto.host]

@cstross In the bleak even more capitalist future, Soylent Green is the good stuff.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@lauren

I KNOW, I KNOW: someone with more money than sense uses CRISPR to rapidly adapt Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi to a new environment—the *human* rectum! And to be resistant to all known vermifuges. A plentiful habitat for a very persistent pest ...

They then market this as a sales pitch for colonic irrigation with bleach.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@graydon A corollary nobody seems to have noted is that if Soylent Green was real, it'd be an amazingly effective tool for amplifying an nvCJD pandemic.

[lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org]

@cstross Universe: "I see you're a glass-half-full kind of guy ..."

[wolf@helvede.net]

@cstross At least the past was worse.

[gyrosgeier@hachyderm.io]

@cstross Warhammer 40k already exists though, and there's a lot of chuds who think they'd be the elite soldiers, same as they think of themselves as temporarily embarrassed billionaires right now.

What we need more of is a hopeful vision of the future, one where wasting dwindling resources isn't a status symbol.

[srdas@mastodon.online]

@Illuminatus @cstross I need to reread LRH's Battlefield Earth. I remember reading that in college long long ago and it was a wild romp.
#FridayNightThought #AwesomeOrFucked

(I haven't seen the movie that came years later, don't intend to)

[mattly@hachyderm.io]

@joshsusser @cstross over a decade ago when staying in the Rioplatense area, a friend told me of the Argentinian mindset: it's all about scams, everyone's running scams constantly. When they see someone with a fancy house and car, it's not “oh they must be successful, I wonder what they do" it's “I wonder who they scammed that from"

now, I'm sure that was a bit overblown, but I've been reminded of that a lot lately

[illuminatus@mstdn.social]

@SRDas @cstross Watching the movie, at the time, was one of those 'Rocky Horror Picture Show' where it was the audience interactions and laughters at the ridiculousness of it all what made it really funny. What an utter disaster.