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practical_romantic  2yr ago (text post)   3450 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 21, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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There's a book written by a polish author, Jacek Dukaj - "Ice". I didn't read it yet, but I thought it might interest some of the people here, especially @DaseindustriesLtd. English wikipedia claims there's Russian translation, but I'm not sure. No English translation yet.

The story of the book takes place in an alternate universe where the First World War never occurred and Poland is still under Russian rule. Following the Tunguska event, the Ice, a mysterious form of matter, has covered parts of Siberia in Russia and started expanding outwards, reaching Warsaw. The appearance of Ice results in extreme decrease of temperature, putting the whole continent under constant winter, and is accompanied by Lute, angels of Frost, a strange form of being which seems to be a native inhabitant of Ice. Under the influence of the Ice, iron turns into zimnazo (cold iron), a material with extraordinary physical properties, which results in the creation of a new branch of industry, zimnazo mining and processing, giving birth to large fortunes and new industrial empires. Moreover, the Ice freezes History and Philosophy, preserving the old political regime, affecting human psychology and changing the laws of logic from many-valued logic of "Summer" to two-valued logic of "Winter" with no intermediate steps between True and False.

Dukaj noted that in this book, science in science-fiction stands for the philosophy of history.

Plot section explains what this last sentence means, but it seems too spoiler'y.

Here's a partial (3%) translation[2] of his other book I did read, "Perfect Imperfection". I'm not sure how faithful it is; he uses fancy language structures. It has Russian translation; quote from English wiki: "One of many original twists in the book is the new language, such as new grammar and prefixes that try to describe the posthuman beings (somewhat resembling the concept of gender-neutral language). This language play also makes the book especially challenging for translators. The book's translation to Russian was nominated for a Russian awards for best translations" <yep, trying to translate it with Deepl was a struggle>

I put off reading his other books after I bounced several times from one called "Science Fiction"; IIRC I kept getting lost b/c of how meta it is (and the first time I read Perfect Imperfection I really got it only on second reread due to defamiliarization[1]).

Actually, I just remembered that besides "Perfect Imperfection" I also did read his "Black Oceans". It was good, but not very thought provoking in a way Perfect Imperfection was. But now that I looked at the Wiki, this seems interesting (given it was written in 2001):

Technological trends are far from only ones explored by Dukaj in his book. He portrays the futuristic bureaucracy, political power struggles behind private sector, government and the military, and changes in culture. Dukaj extrapolates from the current trend of increasing lawsuits and political correctness: in his world many people willingly live under constant mass surveillance of the New Etiquette (NEti), which registers all their actions so that they couldn't be falsely accused of some "personal offense crime".

He's apparently switching from writing to making video games. Translated polish article:

Jacek Dukaj has announced that he has established the Nolensum studio, which will produce video games based on his works. The first project will be "Hardware Dreams," a virtual adaptation of the novel " The Old Axolotl." That title has received international acclaim, with two TV series based on it - the Belgian "Into the Night" and the Turkish "Yakamoz S-245". The director of the game, also responsible for its visual side, is Maciej Jackiewicz: art director and co-creator of numerous animations and cinematics for games ("Cyberpunk 2077", "The Witcher")

[Dukaj's quote] You can write on paper and you can write into the world. For many years, I have watched closely as the center of gravity of culture has shifted from forms based on writing to audiovisual media. A technological revolution is advancing that makes it possible to experience the content of these media in direct sensory experiences. Much of my work has described the consequences of such transformations. Until the time came when at least some of these ideas of mine, instead of on paper, I can realize for real, out in the world. The work in which I most fully described the world of metaverses, NFTs, universal guaranteed income, the social credit system and similar phenomena was 2010's "Line of Resistance." From it comes the term "nolensum", meaning the situation when technological civilization meets our needs so well that we have to artificially create identities and goals for ourselves. The need to engineer people's sense of life arises. And the pioneers of engineering the meaning of life are the first practitioners of gamification of the human destiny: computer game developers.

The richness of Dukaj's worlds is of a scale that the budgets of Hollywood blockbusters would not be ashamed of," says Marcin Kobylecki, creative producer. - "Hardware Dreams is distinguished by its universality and scalability. Its plot is set in Tokyo, and the post-apocalyptic vision of life in a computer network is sure to gain the attention of audiences around the world.

The strategic plan is to gradually expand the team and production capacity so that Nolensum simultaneously develops several projects. Not necessarily just games. Nolensum is affiliated (through the Bellwether Rocks fund, in which Dukaj is also a shareholder and board member) with companies involved in NFTs, cryptocurrencies, metaverse and tokenization, among others.

Nolensum has secured full funding for the first year and a half of production. In the near future, Nolensum also intends to work with outside contractors.

Nolensum. Sounds promising.

[1] There are concepts / technologies which are just not explained for sth like first half of the book, in order to immerse reader in post-singularity world by showing it from a perspective of someone from ~near-future. (/u/gwern described his It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World as doing the same thing)

[2] Because I figured I'd try to translate it. Unfortunately I asked for the permission, wrongly expecting I'd just get no response, most likely. In hindsight, that was stupid.

Russian translations, at least, seem to be very easily googled (html, pdf/epub).

The premise sounds like it could be interesting, but the blurb about 'the laws of logic from many-valued logic of "Summer" to two-valued logic of "Winter" with no intermediate steps between True and False.' is concerning. Maybe something got lost in translation there, but this to me has a slight smell of the way artists sometimes take and run with the artistic gestalt of hard-science concepts that they read and failed to understand a top-level description of (in the style of "quantum computing allows you to compute all possible worlds at once!"), and then presume to lecture scientists on the morality of what they are doing based on that faulty understanding.

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