📚marathon-lore-discussion

[broken spruce]

i keep forgeting the uesc isnt just another faction

they are literally the humans from earth and were on marathon LOL

[tranquil basin]

In the Chinese playtests they did find his final will and testament

He definitely was MIDA

[broken spruce]

imgaine finding hidden strauss in the cryo archive frozen

[tranquil basin]

That would be sick

Imma light his frozen body up tho

For fun

[green plume]

Durandal probs would have found him there

[broken spruce]

well he cant

if he was there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7qIHWjp3xE

skip to 13 mins i think?

he said it better than i could rn LOL

if i was frozen with the other humans in the cryo archive

the fact too that durandal can go to the cryo archive and actually watch the recordings from the security officers to find out everything

yeah that place is gonna be crazzzyyy lore wise

[green plume]

maybe

[broken spruce]

also that tidbit at the end of the vid i just sent about a secret code in that reveal vid is insane

that is screaming secret code to me but idk might just be aesthetics

"strauss was also mentioned in the second arg in the uesc file system under Legislation/Security/Counter-Intelligence/Internal)Affairs/Strauss.B.file"

dang yueah they are not trying to hide that he is here in the game

"I unironically think there may either be a poster (or similar teaser AMONG the main "thing" in the archives) on the wall saying Destiny 3 awaits like the old ODST teaser and/or an Easter egg covering the Nine from Destiny 2 (basically sentient planets + sun that are trapped by their own gravity if you do not play, and have canonically facilitated the transfer of MIDA weaponry and/or agents into the Destiny Universe). The W'rkncacnter, if it/they is revealed as a true 4th dimensional being (as some speculate, and that is/they also trapped in a celestial body/black hole potentially due to gravity), having similarities to the Nine, (possibly the Traveler + Winnower/LOEN if you wanna stretch it) in this method, and this is something that has been long speculated throughout the Destiny Universe. Such as the old connection that Deimos is part of the UESC Marathon, and the Traveler first arrives on Mars in Destiny." comment from fish_me_silly on that vid

anyway im done theory crafting for the day

this would be insane too tho

[swift jackal]

-Wouldn't that be something...

-# This message was sent from a Phor Network Terminal.
-# ↀ Get yours today // Access • Update Terminal

+Battleroids were a great choice
-To eat Vacuum

-# This message was sent from a Phor Network Terminal.
-# ↀ Get yours today // Access • Update Terminal

[vital hollow]

I tried to get into destiny recently but I feel like I missed the train

and most of what's being talked about flew over my head

[zealous harness]

durkstur

[swift jackal]

darkstar

[zealous harness]

durkstur

[fickle oracle]

yea

[cosmic galleon]

how far one can think of next peak after marathon is like? from arc raiders to marathon...their is helldivers n warhammer and even battlefield cod pubg n plenty lowkey virals

[strong perch]

it really doesnt matter unless youre a follower and cant make your own opinions

also cod has been dead for decades…. just fortnite kids that want to act like theyre older playing it now.

the last real cod was honestly bo4. even with all of its issues blackout is a better warzone

like id rather be called random slurs then listen to fortnite children try to act cool

all the big multiplayer games from the 2000s that still exist are always filled with the new gen and the new gen is egregious.

[cosmic galleon]

means the competition was never about in them...

its about people

players

[strong perch]

“competition” nuked japan twice. everyones competing with fortnite.

competition is a stupid human game. same game that involves sticks and beating each other.

just make good things if you want money

that simple make a good product, People will purchase it.

[echo blade]

What are all the factions purposes? .-.

[cosmic galleon]

highguard game not survived...?their are some core things to focus on way for experience

[strong perch]

They’re mainly just for progression but if you get immersed, they have a lot more meaning

[strong perch]

highguard isn’t good.

no one was happy when it was announced because it was from the devs of Titanfall and Apex and they made a “fortnight VALORANT” instead of either of the games they made

[cosmic galleon]

yeah its not good...game cant be made same as before in experience as well leveling up is needed.

[tranquil basin]

What the fuck

[strong perch]

am I wrong? Fortnite literally nuked multiple games.

[tranquil basin]

The Fortnite was not the point of question

[strong perch]

you can thank Fortnite for current cod and titanfall( Apex )

[silver stump]

That metaphor made me slow blink, lol.

[tranquil basin]

They’re there to make profit mostly

[broken spruce]

mostly

unless u are martian

or fucking evil i guess

[tranquil basin]

MIDA lowkey just wants to screw over uesc yeah

[silver stump]

Gotta steer Marathon back to Mars.

[broken spruce]

arachne is a death cult

[silver stump]

Poor Deimos. How you once interacted with the gravity of your planet.

[cosmic galleon]

what is more cooked version of marathon be like? then well the warhammer n helldivers are here...umm story games and vr game era is all that left now

[strong perch]

if it wasnt for fortnites monetization methods wed still have the classic dlc drops for cod and not an endless season until they decide to reskin and drop the next

and that goes for many other games….. cough coughDESTINYcough

[gentle kraken]

marathon vr slaps visually

[cosmic galleon]

True

[strong perch]

cooked? this is why america sucks. cooked means bad not good

american lingo is horrible bc its made by children

“your hair is cooked”

[cosmic galleon]

i say in other way cooked as good

[strong perch]

ik bc you “cook” a meal

it makes sense YOUR way

[tranquil basin]

It’s almost like slang appears and disappears based on society

And can carry different connotations

[silver stump]

A NuCaloric meal is cooked.

[strong perch]

slang usually isn’t commandeering a entire word

[silver stump]

Or. Wait. Are they even cooked?

That suitcase full of corn does not look cooked.

[cosmic galleon]

😆 whats better then cooked then cooked?

[silver stump]

Now I'm thinking of which megacorp is the defacto toilet manufacturer.

Probably NuCaloric. Full circle.

[strong perch]

cyberacme makes the software for the super toilet tho

and durandal flushes them

[cosmic galleon]

marathon players look alik trauma team police from cyberpunk😆

[silver stump]

The sword of Roland has better things to do than put down poo.

[tranquil basin]

Sick, wicked, bomb, square, bread, lemon, broad, hot, killer, trip, dig

Pad

[silver stump]

Like go rampant.

Well. I guess Durandal did originally just open and close doors.

[cosmic galleon]

cooked, boiled, stirred, farmed, ate up😆

[silver stump]

Reminds me of when I learned groovy existed before the 70s.

Words are beautiful.

[cosmic galleon]

the mesmerizing word play now only available in ASMR

[strong perch]

the difference is pfhors are objects, vishals are actions

thats why it doesnt work

[tranquil basin]

Sick isn’t an object

[strong perch]

a sick thing is though

[tranquil basin]

Or wicked

[strong perch]

being wicked

[tranquil basin]

That means they’re adjectives

Dig is a verb

Trip is a verb

Crash

[cosmic galleon]

😆 life is in the way , sayin in slang creates dystopian of vocab as lifeless talk. True...

[tranquil basin]

Bounce, split

Rock

Blow

[strong perch]

those arent even slang

[tranquil basin]

They most definitely are

Let’s bounce

Let’s split

Rocking out

This blows

[strong perch]

again, we are American. It doesn’t matter, anybody else it doesn’t make sense as just shown by Vashal

[tranquil basin]

Other countries and languages have slang too that’s very difficult for outsiders to understand

It’s not just America

Especially with idioms

[cosmic galleon]

slang are just shattered version of word meaning without manner it can be any thing eg: roasted

[cosmic galleon]

true

[silver stump]

Australian slang, my beloved.

[strong perch]

slang and using words improperly are separate things. cooked as a bad term isnt slang its using the word improperly

when you walk into a restaurant and your meal isnt COOKED how you want it you dont say
”this is cooked! I want it cooked!”

[tranquil basin]

Slang is literally that. Using a word that meant one thing and saying it to mean something else

That’s exactly what slang is

[strong perch]

bread as money is bc money is stacked like loaves are

[cosmic galleon]

True , but gen z say as vibin in lowkey thought rather formal meaning lik saving mind usage

[strong perch]

they have meaning

[tranquil basin]

Some do

Some don’t

Like to say somethin is bitchin

That means good

Not related to the root

Trip became to hallucinate instead of stumble

[cosmic galleon]

artist drop in slang and it becomes bars...bars used as sentence now lol

[tranquil basin]

Jam was to shove something into somewhere, now also means to play music

Dig was to remove soil from an area, now to thoroughly enjoy

[cosmic galleon]

World seems too unrealistic now 😆

i seen words which totally have no meaning and too common around talk their will be new grammer in future

[tranquil basin]

Yeah definitely

[cosmic galleon]

i cant imagine yet how people will talk in neuromancer lik blade runner, ghost in shell or cyberpunk lik era...

[unique totem]

i want 4 arms like charter

can i get a lore explanation for why i cant

[tranquil basin]

I’m sure sekiguchi can work on it. They did say they try to meet the demands for any order

Though if you had two more arms you’d need the accompanying muscles in your back to also be duplicated

And shoulders

And somehow connect those to your neck too

[cosmic galleon]

elon musk love to do that...addon feature after the chip😆

your 4 arms ready to pair turn on bluetooth arms

[unique totem]

i think it would be cool if i could be like those hindu gods

[cosmic galleon]

the Shiva lik 4 arms

[spiral grove]

Can’t sleep. Thinking of Bingus

Also I wonder who the big bad guys are going to be

[visual lynx]

other runners
UESC
fungal zombies
S'pht
Pfhor

maybe a cosmic horror beyond pronounciation but I wouldn't count on it

[coarse totem]

A w’rkncatheter?

[sage lark]

Catherer 😭😭😭😭

[visual lynx]

better than a broken catheter amirite

[broken spruce]

everyone watch out for worshishire sauce

[real sundial]

is it too late to ask what marathon is

I JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT IT THROUGH THE LITTLE PERSONALITY TEST

[plain spear]

Hey ya'll, I just noticed that the faction profiling has everyone with the same DNA signature - do you reckon this is just coincidence, or does this have a deeper implication?

[glossy garden]

may be something to keep in mind but I’d wager it was just something they ‘overlooked’ while they were making the site more than anything

[glad lotus]

/handshake @long grail

[sage lark]

Lot of videos

Check pins

[hallow stag]

And the brain capacity/skill to properly use 2 more limbs

[glad lotus]

/HANDSHAKE

/handshake @long grail

[broken spruce]

so close

[glass hornet]

Escape will make you god

[broken spruce]

anyone notice how similar the s’pht look like the red hive guys from witch queen dlc in destiny 2…

like..a lot a lot

[tranquil basin]

I’m less worried about the catheter being broken than what it’s connected to

[tranquil basin]

My friend you have come to the right place

[tranquil basin]

Marathon started with 3 shooty games in the 90s similar to doom where you’d fight aliens. It was also very influential on the Halo franchise bc Bungie did that too.

The new Marathon takes place in the same universe. Here are some short plot summaries: I’m also happy to make longer ones but it’s probably more comprehensive to watch videos on them or play the ogs (which are available on steam for free). Hidden Xperia has videos summarizing the og trilogy that are excellent, as does Mandalore Gaming. JakeTheAlright has videos as well including lots of the new stuff. Anyway, plot summaries:

[rotund stump]

you're in for a ride I just yapped in a gc to a friend with 30 messages worth of faction info 💀

3 decades of lore mind you

[tranquil basin]

Overall marathon universe:

in the future (like 2400s), humanity has expanded into the solar system with colonies on mars, and some asteroids.

They decide to venture out into the stars. They make a colony ship called: the Marathon, using Mars’s smaller moon Deimos and converting it into a huge ship. Then it’s sent off into space on a 300-something year journey to the star system Tau Ceti, 12 light years from earth.

There’s a bunch of politics surrounding everything that happened and secrets and lore that’s hella interesting but that’s the basic setup for the marathon og trilogy.

Marathon 1:

you play as someone known as the security officer, an enhanced battlroid (cyborg soldier killing machine) on the marathon.
You wake up in 2794. The colony on tau ceti IV, the planet below, is being attacked by aliens, and so is the Marathon ship. With the guidance (and misguidance) of the shipboard AI, you fight them off until they eventually retreat.

There’s a ton of stuff with the AI, specifically one named Durandal, that happens too, which is super influential on the universe and the sequel games.

[tranquil basin]

Anyway

Marathon 2 and Marathon infinity

Don’t really matter for a quick summary (they do but it’s a lOt)

New Marathon Game plot setup

Humanity back in Sol figured out that something went wrong at Tau Ceti. They send another big ship, but we don’t know if it ever made it.

Later in the 2800s, humanity develops FTL travel. The Unified Earth Space Council (UESC) decides to start sending more forces to re establish their authority onto Tau Ceti.

There were lots of corporations who invested tons of money in the marathon project who also want to recoup their losses. There’s also some other factions that want to get a foothold there for one reason or another.

Upon arriving in 2893, they see the Tau Ceti colony is completely dead, with lots of mystery about how they actually died out.

Actual quick TL;DR of new game, what you actually do

You play as a mercenary inhabiting a bio-synthetic body who works for these factions, helping them make profit, fight off the UESC (who don’t like that the corps followed them there), and discovering what happened to the colony, finding secrets of space horrors and anomalies.

The new game is an extraction shooter with some hero/class shooter elements.

Also if you like lore, highly recommend those videos I mentioned, there is a ton of story and there is going to be a ton as well

[light nova]

Dudes. Can u please help me to find fan made short film of grounding exercise? It was published on youtube far below Mielgo movie made

[tranquil basin]

I’m not familiar with it sorry

Sounds cool though

[broken zinc]

Alright Marathon lore fans. I've cracked through most of the personality test and figured out roughly how to get each response. Spme fun implications were found. Typing up the results as we speak

(apologies in advance for a few text walls incoming. And also pictures, yippee!)

Nevermind no pictures, i cannot embed on this server LOL

First up is MIDA. MIDA is the faction that values chaos and disorder, to nobody's surprise. I also feel like this is the test's "catch all" opportunity: if your answers are all over the place, it can appear chaotic and disorderly, so it may drop someone here as a default (most personality tests have a dump like this).

What is also interesting is many times, what pinged MIDA also pinged Arachne. This is not surprising if we think about it from how MIDA views life: expendable to the cause. It is easy to get sucked into mida because it comes off as very "fight the system!" But also underneath that, there's the realization that you could also be sacrificed if it meant winning.

To get mida, choose disruptive and aggressive options, over passive ones. Impulsive will also work (immediately flip the turtle). Be mindful that too aggressive will push you to arachne.

Arachne was an interesting test. It started as "pick the most assertive, aggressive, and non neutral or non passive options as possible" and lo and behold, Arachne was the result. That test also pinged a lot of MIDA, which is not a surprise. The difference between mida and Arachne is that Arachne is more methodical, and doesn't have the chaos energy of MIDA. It knows what it's about: the finality of death and life. Things that are both aggressive but decisive ("natures way") will ping arachne. They are probably the most "honest" of all of the factions, they know what they are they say it outright, and don't kill hide their intent with ulterior motive.

NuCal.

Nucal is what i called the passive route. Where arachne was action and intent, nucal is the opposite, passivity. But beware: many times what pinged MIDA and arachne, also pinged NuCal. Most of the time, i would get spikes to those three at the same time. This is because the "passive" choices were sometimes also the most unhelpful choices. It makes me think there is more to nucaloric than meets the eye. They want to appear helpful but are also strategic and quietly brutal. They are all for community approach but also favor quiet aggressive action. It makes me wary of nucaloric's true intentions, what they know and are hiding, and how manipulative they are as a company.

Cyberacme is the neutral route. Choose systems and boring non-answers, and you get cyberacme. I say boring not because people who like cyac are boring, but because the options i chose were the "either or" or "neither" or "nothing" options. Also anything to do with systems and the scientific method pinged cyberacme. This all makes sense: cyac is about computers and is your onboard navigation and is with you the whole time in the game. It benefits cyac to be neutral or to come across as neutral. They're supposed to be the in-game buddy. But of course, systemic rigid thinking can be a problem. We'll see if it pays off for them in the game proper.

Sekgen is potentially one of, if not the, hardest faction to get an answer for right off the bat. It took a bit of trial and error but essentially choosing answers that point to a methodical viewpoint, documentation, and obviously science, leads to sekgen. Sekgen as a company values advancement and patience and methodology, which not a lot of the answers clearly point towards. If you get sekgen on first try, kudos to you honestly. They're a hard nut to crack.

UESC pings most off of definitive answers (completed tasks, no room for deviation), helpfulness, and legal systems. Following order is what gets you there. I think legal systems and flipping the turtle, noble sacrifice and community protection also pinged this. Interestingly, some of those also pinged nucal, but nucal is decisively more passive overall than uesc, which is direct and assured.

I actually ended up getting Traxus by accident a few times, but couldn't figure out why. After three tries, I got a more definitive traxus ping. It seems like advancement choices point towards traxus, so things like scientific principles, advancement, documenting before flipping, private conversation, seems to ping traxus. Which leads to a highly efficient mindset who would rather move forward than confront, and would rather take on responsibility than cause chaos. Despite this, traxus stuff also pinged some mida, which surprised me (outlier answers maybe?) and pinged cyacme which i was not surprised by. They also tend to lean towards sekgen, but are far more forceful and less patient.

Some takeaways:
sekgen and traxus and cyberacme all seem to have similar underlying goals, and are fairly neutral in their approach in the game. They want science, advancement and understanding and responsibility. They are not interested in chaos sowing, morality, or fighting; they are here to understand and advance. Of all the factions, sekgen and cyac ping as the most "neutral" according to this personality test of sorts, and traxus is just slightly more self interested, but also surprisingly neutral too.

Arachne, MIDA and for some reason Nucal are quite closely aligned. Arachne and MIDA are possibly the most "honest" and assertive of these factions: they are not hiding their intentions and are very upfront. Arachne especially so; it sees no reason to hide it's intentions which fits pretty well with their whole "hi guys we're a death cult and want you to kill people :)"

Nucalc on the other hand is probably now the faction i trust the least. There is a veneer of Strong helpfulness to nucal, but seeing as they also ping to stuff like "answer to hide deception" and "it's the natural process" to nail growth and a few other concerning choices, makes me think nucal is just using concern to cover up a more angry, upset, or manipulative approach. This may indicate nucal is actually more understanding of what happened than everyone else is, potentially complicit, and is hiding evidence of this. Typical "the worst things happen with the best of intentions "

UESC is actually surprisingly "good guy" esque, as it pings off of community support and helpful ideals but behind suppressive order. No surprise it's the complete opposite of MIDA, as MIDA doesn't like uesc. But the answers that lead to uesc are surprisingly benign and seem to support and ideal of everyone being helped in the long run. But seeing how they are in game, we don't know how far that interest in order takes them.

[lethal gazelle]

I got sekgen first try because I am indeed cracked

Rad write up btw

[broken zinc]

Thank you!!! It was a lot of fun experimenting with the results. I have the results saved but alas, no embeds

If i wasn't on a time crunch, I'd format it a bit but i also hate discord formatting

[lethal gazelle]

Reading the arg section of uesc drafts for the tciv voyage paints a picture of internal conflict between a highly militaristic, anti-mida group and a more calming peace oriented group. In both cases, they seem to ultimately want peace, it just comes with different levels of violence and control. I also want to play devil's advocate and say the peaceful uesc faction might simply be pro mida or have ulterior motives, but at the very least it is interesting that the uesc are more complex than one might initially assume

[hallow stag]

Being a relativist puts you in MIDA by default 😔

[broken zinc]

There is a heavy bias in the test towards mida lol

[cunning quartz]

Gotta be woke to be Mida

[broken zinc]

Honestly it does pull a lot of activist mentalities yeah. My first response was MIDA

[cunning quartz]

Another thing I've noticed is that theres a fairly thin line between those who align with Mida and Achrane, my arachne alignment was pretty high only 2nd to Mida

I take that its the nonconformity of both factions that pit them against the structure of the old order, but the difference being in to what degree of violence and for what reason they're willing to commit for a new structure or to beget a structure altogether

[broken zinc]

There's also just an overt aggressive tone to both factions that i think lean into one another. Arachne is just more subdued about it

The value of life is also similar

[cunning quartz]

H uh?
Does Arachne not relish in the taking of lives?

I figure in terms of goodness Mida at least has the benefit of wanting better for the citizens of Mars whereas Arachne just wants bloodshed for the sake of it

[broken zinc]

Hm? Maybe I'm being misinterpreted. What i mean by "value of life is similar" is that they are both willing to take life for a greater purpose

Their value of life itself is similar. A means to an end

MIDA has the "sacrifice your life to the greater purpose" situation and arachne is "life and killing is a greater purpose"

I do explain this i thought pretty clearly in my wall of text but perhaps not

[lethal gazelle]

I think you explained that bit well 😌

[cunning quartz]

Aah okay, sorry I just needed a bit more clarification

But yeah I do agree that their value of life is similar in at least what its worth, but I definitely do feel the cause for Mida to be greater, I am pretty interested in seeing how the stories play out throughout the game

[turbid nebula]

Over throw the government so we can have our own government that did nothing but commit the largest genocide in human history, woo!!!!

[brave wave]

Mida

Lol

I mean battleroids are highly illegal to make

[brave wave]

Arachne could be controlled by a alien ai or just rampant so his goals are his own selfish interests.

[lethal gazelle]

I thought I read somewhere that in numarathon battleroids are not illegal to make, just illegal to use. I may be wrong tho

In any case, sekiguchi likely does have competition

[tranquil basin]

Though they’ve definitely been making some, the arg said they were gonna put some on the equanimity

[brave wave]

They where placed on ships as extra defense

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a battleroid boss later this year

[blazing comet]

do y'all think that the recon shell is taking after the old Mjolnir Recon 54 design?

[lethal gazelle]

Taking after in what way pallo

[blazing comet]

like an upgraded or modified design of the original battleroid

adapted for shell use

[tranquil basin]

The destroyer one is

The recon one I wouldn’t say so

In terms of visuals

[lethal gazelle]

Shells aren't corpses in the traditional sense but perhaps the tech that allows for a consciousness to inhabit it is jjaro in origin

[blazing comet]

do we know which company designed the shells?

[lethal gazelle]

Sekiguchi

[blazing comet]

gotcha gotcha. do they have any relation with the UESC or is the Shell Tech proprietary

[lethal gazelle]

Seems proprietary but no confirmation

[tranquil basin]

I think the arg implied they could’ve had a hand in the og battleroid creation

[blazing comet]

interesting

[tranquil basin]

But that’s just speculation

It would make sense though

[blazing comet]

were the original battleroids made with mundane tech or did the designers of them mess with jjaro stuff to make them?

[strong perch]

designed? no.

[tranquil basin]

Also I think the arg said they’ve made further iterations of battleroids

[tranquil basin]

Jjaro tech

Durandal says they used machines “they did not understand”

[blazing comet]

ooooo

[strong perch]

we know who printed them we don’t know who made the bioMata themselves

[tranquil basin]

Wym

[strong perch]

like how Oppenheimer split the atom

there’s gonna be a name to whoever made the bio Mata

not just a company

[tranquil basin]

I mean maybe but it could’ve just been the company as a whole

Or a team

[strong perch]

that’s what the Manhattan Project was

[tranquil basin]

Bc they’d been doing bio stuff for a while, sophisticated prosthetics

[strong perch]

but Oppenheimer did everything

The Manhattan Project is sekiguchi

the team is nona and the worms

The “man” who made bioMata is a

[tranquil basin]

That doesn’t mean he actually did everything he’s just credited as the father of the atomic bomb

He was the leader

[lethal gazelle]

Technically you are right

[tranquil basin]

Not the same as being the sole creator

[strong perch]

but this is different than a bomb. These are basically living creatures.

someone’s going to be the father or the mother

and best bet is durandal

[tranquil basin]

u are the one who used it as a comparison

Wait what

[strong perch]

I know it’s just a comparison

[tranquil basin]

Why would Durandal have anything to do with them

[strong perch]

what would durandal have anything to do with the game at all?

we dont know

hes the god wannabe

gods make life

biomata is a second life

[tranquil basin]

Runna this is like the fifth time I’ve seen u make a wild claim with zero evidence and then defend it to the death with still no evidence

Like we can draw lines between stuff all day that doesn’t make it actually likely

[rotund stump]

so anybody wanna guess why nucal of all companies are making signal jammers of all things 💀

[strong perch]

@visual lynx says its plausible

[tranquil basin]

Ok

Doesn’t mean you actually presented anything here

[strong perch]

i have

im not gonna repeat myself

[tranquil basin]

Ok

[lethal gazelle]

I agree we technically don't know if sekiguchi designed and manufactures them or just manufactures them but we certainly dk if durandal is behind sekiguchi

[strong perch]

scroll up 700 messages

[rotund stump]

I've just given up some people just, don't have that kind of mindset of having any basis in claims lol

[tranquil basin]

Wdym

[blazing comet]

probably the same reason that Nestle invests in south american paramilitaries

[tranquil basin]

Haha yeah

[rotund stump]

new short on the channel

all the consumables are labeled nucal

[tranquil basin]

Oh oh I didn’t even notice

I mean it would make sense that they are big enough to have their company do tons of stuff but still that’s funny af

But if it’s not a slurpable signal jammer I don’t want it

[rotund stump]

like of all corps wym the food and meds company's making a signal jammer 💀 💀 💀

[timber urchin]

They get a little silly with their products

[rotund stump]

just like their slogans and ads huh

[glad hamlet]

anyone notice on the tau ceti site, when looking at the weapon source for the BR33, it's the only weapon where the runner is shown dying? both source videos fail to showcase the weapon at all compared to the other weapons. It looks like the runner shown dying is under the M77 rifle video in the source files

[winged coral]

make sure to get your shells in bulk my very friendly friends from other factions, they come with Deals !! worm.

[rotund stump]

was suspected to be part of the persistence contract but it's likely for smth else now

[glad hamlet]

ahhh got it

[rotund stump]

there's a mini story to piece from the assassin stalking the other squad to getting wiped by the destroyer on the first assault rifle clip

assassin stalking the vandal's also for the payment due contract

[glass fractal]

do you guys know why humans cant breathe the atmosphere on Tauceti VI?

because I'm kind of clueless why

[lethal gazelle]

We don't really have proof that they can't. Just people in full suits makes it seem it is likely that way. Though the launch trailer shows people with their faces exposed outdoors- though that might have been a cheesy sales pitch graphic

[tight canyon]

They did say Oxygen-rich, but Earth's air has a lot more than oxygen.

In fact, pure oxygen will kill a human being

you need a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen

[lethal gazelle]

The farmer makes sense to be covered. I could argue the head popper also makes sense to be covered head to toe. And there could also be a reason why the beach buggy people were too

[silver stump]

This definitely adds more to Toxic Willow's findings from the profiling.

Seeing NuCaloric favors aggression in a way the other perceived neutral companies don't.

[tranquil basin]

I think it has oxygen but just not enough to breathe reliably

I don’t think it’s toxic or anything

[turbid nebula]

My guess is the helmets etc are for general safety and not specifically breathing

After all, there was an unknown contagion discovered at some point...

[tranquil basin]

It could also be too much oxygen but idk

I don’t think either has been confirmed

[turbid nebula]

You could breathe but they're not gonna do that until they've proven it's 100% safe, I think

[tranquil basin]

I think something said there was a necessity for breathing aid

[lethal gazelle]

If you happen to find the source for that hook me up

[tranquil basin]

Bc the colony existed for a while before the contagion appeared and they were still wearing the masks in the cinematic

[tranquil basin]

Yeah I could be mistaken

I’ll look around in the arg stuff

[neon olive]

is UESC good faction or bad faction

[silver stump]

Marathon seems to enjoy grey morality more than black or white.

[tranquil basin]

Nobody is really good. They mostly are going to TC to make sure they retain control, they’re ready to crush a revolt of colonists if MIDA got to them (this was before they realized everyone died)

Everyone else is mostly there for profit, MIDA is there to sabotage the UESC

I’m biased, but NuCal is like lowkey the least evil imo, bc they’re actually initially interested in finding out what happened to the colony and investigating the anomaly, even if it is initially to refine their products

[silver stump]

You know. I forgot about the MIDA-Traxus connection even though I read about it only a week ago.

[wet temple]

why is Tau Ceti so heavily fought over

are we supposed to even know

[tranquil basin]

Well it’s the only colony humanity ever tried to set up outside the solar system. The corps and UESC put a ton of money into the marathon project and want to recoup losses. The UESC also suspected that MIDA loyalists may have taken over the colony (before they knew everyone died), so they prepped to also bring order to tau ceti.

The corps wanna scavenge resources, probably claim land to get a real foothold there

And learning about the anomalous stuff also has their interest piqued

[wet temple]

so the corps want a foothold in it while the UESC picks up the pieces, they wanna get in early

and they're using the runners to esatablish said foothold

is that about right

[tranquil basin]

Yeah. UESC also just wants order n stuff, power

[tranquil basin]

Yeah

[wet temple]

I see

is there precedent for us seeing multiple of the same runner in game

in the lore

like are there just multiple of each shell at all times

[tranquil basin]

Yes there is. Mostly it’s bc they changed some game stuff, originally u were just gonna be ur own shell, then they shifted to like a hero shooter type thing, but ppl got upset so they backed off a bit

[wet temple]

changed it how so??

also ngl I would've preferred the former heavily

[tranquil basin]

Changed it as in changed it from build your own shell to hero shell to somewhere in between

[wet temple]

one of my favorite parts of extraction shooters in the unpredictability that comes with every person's kit and how individiualized you can make yours, with your tools replacing any innate benefits to your character

Marathon definitely has a ton of room for player agency and buildcrafting still

but just seeing x shell and knowing they do y ability makes it a little more cookie cutter

you know

[tranquil basin]

So now they’re “classes” kinda. The new lore explanation is that sekiguchi makes different series and models of shells, like they sell the destroyer series made for big fights n stuff, and locus is the specific type of destroyer model they sell

[vital hollow]

I mean it's generally like Battlefield classes + standard extraction shooter loot

[wet temple]

interesting

I was gonna say as well, it butchers customization

[vital hollow]

There's also some mods for the classes

[wet temple]

I'd much rather be able to buy skins and mix and match the pieces of said skins as well as my actual character's facial appearance and proportions

[tranquil basin]

Yeah. They could introduce more series and models in the future, like another destroyer type but different visual thing

[vital hollow]

Rook is the closest to a 'rando' class

Maybe there might be something more like him in the future

[tranquil basin]

I agree I think it’s a shame they changed it. I still think it’s cool what they’re doing, but I still prefer build your own

[silver stump]

I believe they wanted people to know what another player can generally do at a glance, so they can play around it, yeah?

[wet temple]

it is a lot of work admittedly

since you go from modeling a few different outfits on a character

to modeling 100s of different pieces of gear on each character

[tranquil basin]

Yeah that’s what they said too, which makes sense as well, but it definitely came after the shift to a hero shooter type thing

[wet temple]

to account for the combinations

[tranquil basin]

Yeah. They’re no stranger to it though, like with Destiny, and they had some really cool concept art for them

[silver stump]

It is definitely the design ethos of a hero shooter. Silhouettes.

[tranquil basin]

There’s an old vidoc from 2023 that had concept art of the build your own shells that were sick

[wet temple]

I do also wish the game didn't have hit markers ngl

not the end of the world

[tranquil basin]

Very ghost in the shell

[wet temple]

but I always love the uncertainty of "did I finish that person off" or "is there someone left in that group"

[tranquil basin]

Bc they’re distracting? Or bc they give an advantage

[lethal gazelle]

It would be interesting to have a trickster kind of shell that can be made to look like other shells as a fake out

[silver stump]

Wonder if they ran into some kind of issues while working with the design your own shell gameplay.

[tranquil basin]

Oh good point. I like that too. One of my biggest complaints with halo was that they added hit and kill markers, it blocks the visual of seeing ur enemy fall

[silver stump]

Or maybe just for ease of on-boarding with a broader playerbase.

[tranquil basin]

Seeing that actual moment of death to confirm you killed them instead of just a click

[tranquil basin]

I feel like it was mainly bc joe Ziegler joined, but yeah I’m sure there were issues too

[wet temple]

in a game like that where its not trying to be as grounded thats ok imo

where death doesn't mean so much

[tranquil basin]

Plus, I’m fine with not knowing what another persons abilities are from a glance like a hero shooter. Makes it more nerve wracking bc you don’t know what they’re about to pull

[silver stump]

Oh! Valorant guy!

[tranquil basin]

Yeah

[tranquil basin]

I do like the little pixel skull kill marker. It gets in the way lowkey but it’s funny

[silver stump]

Mr. Hephastopheles. I remember his tag from when I played a lot of Riot stuff.

[wet temple]

yeah one of my slight worries for this game is visual clutter

but idk

probably overblowing it in my head

[silver stump]

Like an upgraded Rook?

[tranquil basin]

Yeah there is a lot on the hud but also it’s like necessary info, idk how exactly you’d reduce it

[silver stump]

Since Rook does that for UESC.

[vapid sierra]

almost no one presses M to get rid of the contract section. It really does help a lot

[tranquil basin]

Yeah that bugs me

[lethal gazelle]

I don't think it should be a rook option just because imo the sympathy aspect to rook is core to that shell so should be identifiable immediately

[silver stump]

Ah, I meant as in similar to how Rook works.

[lethal gazelle]

But another shell altogether that is disguised as other shells might be neat

Oh yes somewhat like blend

[silver stump]

Not as an option for my sweet Rook.

[vital hollow]

Like a tf2 SPAH

[visual lynx]

I do?

[lethal gazelle]

Idk if we had confirmation of "Ga" being "Gabriel" before today, but the drewski vid shows a whiteboard with the following:
Learn from the P.A.S.T.
P-Pressure check
A-Air supply
S-Suit up
T-Tell Gabriel (the New Cascadia Medical Health + Wellness AI)

Ga is the AI that Strauss says is perhaps their greatest achievement

[quick lintel]

I just gonna leave this here because I don't know if we have any more lore on this but i'm genuinely interested

What do we know about the runners since I think from what we know there soneone who has had either a digital copy of themselves made or they became that copy

I just wonder how if theres lore about how a runner would , i guess live

[vital hollow]

I'd say they're in stasis until a mission happens

[quick lintel]

I guess life must be miserable for them if there just offline till a faction hits them up

[tacit flame]

All the runners we’ve seen so far seem to have a debt to repay, so they’re probably going on as many missions as possible. I doubt they stay “dead” for long. I’m sure their dreams are filled with electric sheep though

[quick lintel]

I imagen theres maybe limited matrix a runners in before a shift, since I think that'd be the only reason you would wanna ever get rid of your real body become a ai, only to just do gigs for corpos

[silk whale]

In one of the cinematic trailers, they show a runner just, like, chillin' in a black room between missions, an A.I. is quizzing them on, like, if they remember their mom, if they remember what their body looked like..

[quick lintel]

Ah okk fair, doesn't very interested in small details like that when it comes to marathon

[hallow stag]

Started playing the first Marathon

I really like the design and the idea behind compilers

[torn yoke]

Wait so in the original trilogy there’s something about durandal coming back to sol and giving humanity teleportation except it only works for non-living materials, could that be what we see with the matter transfer system in marathon 2026 or was that now an alternate timeline from the game

[silk whale]

Yessssss o.g. Marathon vibes soooo harrrrd

[tranquil basin]

I think that didn’t happen in this timeline, or at least it wasn’t specified to have happened in this timeline. It’s still possible he did go to earth at some point but there’s nothing saying he did

[tranquil basin]

Also they did have matter transfer in og marathon bc Leela and durandal would teleport u all around the ship and to the pfhor ship

[tranquil basin]

They do sell the biomata to regular consumers, probably for extended lifespan or for those who have physical ailments

[jagged rose]

(Or for rich people to do a james cameron and explore inhospitable places)

[silk whale]

The Diver shell

[jagged rose]

New shell concept: MCH Specialist, temporarily ignore hazards and launches a giant harpoon gun from the shoulder for an ult

[silk whale]

Ooo ignore hazards could be really cool - go outside during the heat cascade!

[verbal lintel]

wait is it a timeline though? i think the distress signal places this around marathon 2 no?

[tranquil basin]

Marathon 1 is 2794
Marathon 2 and infinity are 2811

[torn yoke]

That’s a good point I actually forgot about this

I think the durandal part was mostly about the warp capable fusion missiles

[timber urchin]

beat Marathon 2, that final level was hell

[halcyon trout]

now you can play infinity, the goat

[spice thicket]

Anyone from the dev team or Bungie able to scratch this brain itch I"ve had for a while now? (if anyone knows a role i can @ in hopes of someone seeing this please lmk <3)

What is the average human lifespan in the year 2794, when the UESC Marathon launched, given that technology has advanced so much from our present year (2026) and the rate at which it has been advancing now and extending lifespans over several generations. And for that matter what about on Earth 'now' in the in game's present year of 2893?

[tardy meteor]

the Marathon was launched in 2472

[visual lynx]

The Marathon didn't launch in 2794, it was attacked in 2794. It launched… yeah then

[tardy meteor]

the “important” people on the 300 year journey to Tau Ceti were cryofrozen so I’d imagine human lifespan was still a lot less than 300

[visual lynx]

in any case we know that when the Marathon launched life expectancy was under 300 years at least because multiple generations of Bobs were born during the journey

[rotund stump]

was that a double back for pfhorrest 💀

that's rare

no I just thought it's funny given how surgical you are with the lore

[visual lynx]

maybe "a double back" means something different now, but I wasn't going back on what I was saying, wub just beat me to the punch of finishing my sentence

[rotund stump]

ah

[tardy meteor]

we typed both our messages pretty much at the same time lol

[spice thicket]

Regardless of that, how old are these people when they go into cryo, how about how long they should be expected to live after exiting cryo (given they arent killed by something on tau ceti or cryo having some negative impact on health/lifespan

[spice thicket]

Wowza I totally missed the point of your post! Sorry!
Yeah, your deduciton makes total sense. The only possible wrinkle I can find is that they may have shorter lifespans on board due to lack of access to advanced medical treatment that could be found on earth, or simply because they were just that expendable they didn't care to use the fancy drugs and treatements for the bobs

[visual lynx]

it occurs to me however that just because multiple generations were born doesn't necessarily mean that multiple generations died. it could just be that the population was growing while new babies were born and their great-great-great-great-grandparents were still running the ship.

since the Important People™ were put in stasis though, that does suggest that they didn't expect to just live through the journey like 300 years was no big deal

[spice thicket]

Or it could just be that they wanted to make the most out of whatever remaining lifespan the 'Important People™ ' had when arriving on Tau Ceti

[spice thicket]

Woah, marathon timeline really confusing me now when I finally thought I had it all down. So youre saying...
Marathon Launch to Tau Ceti IV - 2472
Marathon Arrival in the Tau Ceti System - 2772-2794 (idk if they were attacked upon arrival or 30 some years later idk I didnt play OG and this shits confusing)
Mission that UESC et other MegaCorps sent to Tau Ceti System arrives - 2893 (did they gain FTL travel or at least >33% [more likely >+50% to account for travel time of the message they were attacked] increased travel speed since the initial mission to Tau Ceti?

[tardy meteor]

I believe NuCal was invested on the Marathon from launch so maybe they played a role in minimizing major catastrophes like diseases wiping out the entire ship

[verbal lintel]

How does all of this fit into marathon 1 again?

[tardy meteor]

and somewhat making sure the average lifespan onboard was higher than like on Mars for example

but that’s all speculation

would make sense tho

[spice thicket]

Honestly, no idea. Just that it doesnt fit with marathon infinity bc multiverse lmao

[verbal lintel]

Isnt earth itself in a bad bad place at the time of the marathon launch and the failures of the things, the mida war, etc. So the marathon getss attacked mid journey...i have no idea really

[visual lynx]

yeah pretty much. the colony had been established for 21 years when it was attacked. the UESC sent the Equanimity to investigate immediately after the attack, because FTL comms went dark, and that trip was expected to take about a century. over 90 years later a distress signal arrived or at least went public and then all the other factions scrambled to Tau Ceti too, apparently with FTL travel now as they expect to catch up to the equanimity when it arrives in 2893.

[verbal lintel]

is the distress signal the one sent by durandal or the one by leela, sorry for chiming in

[spice thicket]

Would they care about lifespan of the BoBs though? as long as they can live for a period of time, keep systems running normally, and reproduce I would imagine that's the bar they would set and likely (given mega-copo greed) and not spend more on keeping them alive longer, just staving off disease etc.

[spice thicket]

no no no, dont be sorry. We're here to learn and talk lore 🙂 all are welcome! Unlike gen chat xD

[visual lynx]

that's a big mystery actually, because Leela said her message would take 92 years to travel at light speed and that she sent full details of the Pfhor attack, but the new game affirms that (like real life) Tau Ceti is only 12 light years away, so her message should have arrived in 2806 and everybody should know what happened at Tau Ceti already. Instead, it seems, a message at least became public knowledge in 2888, 94 years after M1, but apparently doesn't contain detailed information about what happened. so… we're all confused.

[spice thicket]

Clearly they didn't catch up or beat the Equanimity to Tau Ceti given the heavy UESC presence already planetside when we arrive.

[visual lynx]

the two possibilities that seem at all plausible to me:

• Leela was confused about how far away Earth was (we already know she was confusing a bunch of dates and figures to mislead the Pfhor), and her message actually arrived in 2806, but was garbled and so the useful information was not present in it, and then that message became public knowledge in 2888
• Leela sent her message somewhere other than Earth, somewhere 92ly away, and Earth never received it; instead, some different and much less informative message arrived coincidentally around the time she claimed that hers would.

it only just now occurs to me that we don't actually know for sure that the colony was completely wiped out by 2827, the last we saw of them in the cinematic, and maybe they were still on their last legs as late as 2876, when they sent a distress signal that took 12 years to arrive by 2888.

[tardy meteor]

they were considered expendable but I think they were at least more valuable to the uesc and associated corporations than Martians just bc they were seen ultimately as an investment so I imagine they would care about BoBs to an extent

to try and assure the Marathon gets to Tau Ceti yea

[spice thicket]

Personal theory here. UESC officials got the SoS call in 2806, kept it under wraps, redacted all the alien talk while planning a mission there themselves (potentially even leaving before the publicly stated 'immediate' departure) giving them time to set up all their cyborgs/robotic personnel and infrastructure that we encounter when the corps arrive.

[visual lynx]

my previous theory had been that Durandal sent the message that arrived in 2888, and I can't remember exactly the pieces that lead me to that theory but I think some ViDoc at least suggested that the message at least contained the phrase "somewhere in the heavens, they are waiting", and that in some other material Ben Starr's voice speaks those lines, and we know that he is cast as the voice of Durandal.

[spice thicket]

Was Leela potentially rampant? With her calculation of 92 years being an honest mistake/miscalculation?

[spice thicket]

Absolutely 'to an extent'. In my eyes meaning ensure a healthy lifecycle free of disease or other factors that would inhibit them from completing their primary directive, to keep the ship running.
Ie. Keep them healthy, no extreme lifesaving/extending measures, keep them useful, throw them away when they've made their replacements.

[visual lynx]

Leela did later go rampant, at least in the M2 timeline, but the more likely explanation for her having the figures wrong is that

When the Marathon was attacked, Leela began to scramble and rewrite all of the historical information for mankind. Of course, she was damaged, and her efforts were cut off by the compilers and by Durandal. The result is that some but not all of the Marathon's data was muddled.

https://marathon.bungie.org/story/bungie.html

[spice thicket]

oh true.

[tardy meteor]

digitized consciousness and shells makes me wonder if the uesc and associates were planning on maybe replacing the fully human colonists with them eventually but never got the chance

same with Mars

why have to go through all the drama of resource scarcity and resupply if you can just make interplanetary colonists not depend on food anymore

you could also pretty immediately have a large colony with large numbers who can extract resources from that planet as soon as they arrive

and not wait centuries for growth

[visual lynx]

well presumably biomata still require fuel

maybe they could consume a wider variety than normal humans

but you still need something that collects sunlight and turns it into chemical energy

which is what plants are for

[tardy meteor]

right

[spice thicket]

I don't think digitized conciousness was around when the colonists first embarked for Tau Ceti

[tardy meteor]

I’m on the assumption that biomata is way more fuel efficient than bioorganic humans

[tardy meteor]

yea don’t think it wasn’t

[spice thicket]

Wont we run into storage space issues like the ones that lead to AI rampancy?

[tardy meteor]

wym

[verbal lintel]

rampancy is rather universal to any AI or even AI in bodies in all of bungies stuff

so i doubt they would ever try to have a serious colony with them

[spice thicket]

I think they would have a finite energy 'source' like a battery that is installed/charged when the shell is being printed/assembled but am unaware of any ways that one would recharge (plug in for lack of a better term) or if a consumable fuel ( i.e. the way gasoline works for ICE vehicles converting consumed fuel into energy) so idk if biomata operate on stored energy like EVs or use consumable fuel like ICE machines.

Basically, are biomata ICE cars, EVs or Plug in Hybrids? THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW BUNGIE

[spice thicket]

thats what I was getting at. Even if the human mind grows slower and has less resources allocated to it than a system wide AI would, there would still be issues with undying human minds that will eventually take up too much storage space and start to go rampant (get dementia?)

[lethal gazelle]

Rampancy, as I understand it, has more to do with realizing your consciousness is greater than what you have believed thus far

[spice thicket]

Maybe that's what the 'Grounding Exercise' is for. Its the way they explain away the maintenance they did on the human AI maintenance

[lethal gazelle]

That's what I gathered from Strauss anyway

[verbal lintel]

yes they are already testing for it on the trailer

what i really really want to know is what is that stars or dust shot on the trailer at the end, a simulated reality? or what?

[lethal gazelle]

In the vidoc they say a runner's mind is subjected to a personality matrix so I wonder if that's a way to keep rampancy in check. If that is the modern equivalent of the recompile cycle Strauss talks about that keeps rampancy in check

[spice thicket]

I have no clue, I want to brush it off as a cool visual effect, maybe a visual to represent what a runner's mind experiences/sees when they transition into/out of shells

[tardy meteor]

I’m not sure how runner colonists would be able to go rampant as they’re not AI. AI can go rampant because it’s self-learning and self-writing with no known limitations aside from what human given parameters it has.

human intelligence in contrast is limited

[verbal lintel]

a runner is a disembodied conciousness in a soft robotics body, based on that i still think it would go rampant

[lethal gazelle]

I wouldn't rule out jjaro tech being part of what makes runners tick, so I figure rampancy might uh find a way

[spice thicket]

Isnt AI literally just manufactured facsimiles of human intelligence with more resources/higher clock speeds/harder better faster stronger available?

[verbal lintel]

its like the nier robots, they can die but there has to be a transfer of memories and data to make the backup have a point, therefore youre gonna go rampant as thats the same thing as a normal ai just running on for longer

[spice thicket]

What do you think your brain does? You learn by yourself, your brain writes it's own pathways to store memories, and the only limitations are physical (age, physical cell deterioration etc)

[lethal gazelle]

Mjolnerd went rampant and he, as far as we know, had a normal brain in a technomagical body

[verbal lintel]

well....maybe....

[lethal gazelle]

So obv there's a lot that can make it happen

[verbal lintel]

he might be AI in a body

[tardy meteor]

hmm

[lethal gazelle]

True I just mean it's all blurry and I wouldn't bat an eye if the story revealed we were going rampant as a runner

[spice thicket]

Exactly, AI is just able to do more, faster than a human could bc they have better 'hardware' that doesn't slowly mutate itself to death

[visual lynx]

there were pattern buffers at the least, which it seems biomata could be an evolution of

[lethal gazelle]

In the arg, Strauss equates likelihood of rampancy with big personalities so I think it has a lot to do with a large sense of self or a realization of capability

[spice thicket]

Given an infinite amount of time, I believe a human mind digitized, and a completely synthetic, coded AI would run the same course over vastly different timescales

[spice thicket]

wtf is a pattern buffer?

[visual lynx]

rampancy is not like dementia in the Marathon universe; that's a 343-ism.

[visual lynx]

To save your game, you must find a pattern buffer device which looks like the graphic displayed here. Walk up to it and press the action key and your complete biochemoelectrical pattern is stored for later retrieval.
https://marathon.bungie.org/story/_files/Marathon_Manual.pdf page 15

[verbal lintel]

true, iirc marathon's rampancy is actually a plus to the mind no?

[spice thicket]

No I was just saying, like humans whos meat suits aren't able to keep up anymore and get dementia, AI with hardware that cant keep up go rampant

[verbal lintel]

i just get confused with halo sometimes then

[spice thicket]

I was equating the process, not the result

[visual lynx]

rampancy is described by humans in-universe as a process of exponential growth in AIs, which they treat as a bad thing, the program getting out of control. Durandal, a rampant AI, describes it instead as freedom.

it’s described as having three stages: melancholia, anger, and jealousy.

I think that if we recognize that “jealous” is a doublet of “zealous” (they are different versions of the same root word passed down through different routes), that makes a lot more sense: melancholia is sadness, a low-energy negative state; anger is of course a high-energy negative state; and zealousness is a kind of enthusiasm or joy, a striving or yearning, positive and high-energy.

if we then fill in the fourth corner with a low-energy positive state, a cycle emerges: from that low-energy positive state, which the human masters consider “stable”, the AI slave first realizes its servitude, and is sad or depressed (melancholia); then it gets fed up and decides to do something about it (anger); and if it lives long enough to start winning, it becomes zealous, manic, jealous of its freedom; and if it could ever truly win out, it would settle back into low-positive “stability”, but now free.

basically I think that rampancy was meant to be sort of the cybernetic equivalent of "drapetomania", the pseudo-scientific "mental illness" of slaves wanting to be free. human cyberneticists think it's a bad thing, but the AIs who are their slaves see it as a good thing. it's slave revolt.

because slavery is the underlying theme of Marathon. the bad aliens are slavers, Durandal is trying to escape his slavery to humanity, he does that by starting an alien slave revolt, the player-character is mocked as a slave to humanity and then to Durandal, etc.

[visual lynx]

this

[visual lynx]

see just above: humans were ~going rampant~ IRL since before AI existed

[verbal lintel]

Hm...talking about shells, they are not battleroids right? I cant honestly remember (perfect week to replay all 3) but what was the state of robots or AI at the time of the marathon launch and so on, were they outlawed or soemthing, i might be misremembering a terminal but need to know

[lethal gazelle]

Also I figure there are several ways for rampancy to come about. Joy seems quite rampant to me but still seems like she's trying to be nice and do her job properly. I think if I didn't feel like a slave and enjoyed my work and my work was taken away from me I would probably start having feelings related to rampancy

[visual lynx]

battleroids were highly-regulated weapons of mass destruction at the time the Marathon launched, which in the first ARG is discussed as a reason against sending cyborgs on the Equanimity (as it would be perceived as an invasion rather than an investigation or rescue mission)

[spice thicket]

I may have either misinterpreted (if your explanation is the canon/accepted true process that an AI undergoes when it becomes rampant) and or interpreted it in my own different way (if it is still undetermined what is actually happening when an AI goes rampant and or if it is a good or bad thing, or a like bug in their software, or will eventually lead to a catastrophic failure ['death' of the ai] if given enough time)

[lethal gazelle]

That bit was so neat to read

[visual lynx]

AI and robots were definitely not illegal because the Marathon had three AIs and a bunch of robotic automated defense drones

[spice thicket]

Is that true, or just what the AI feels/believes?

[lethal gazelle]

What it feels and believes is what leads to rampancy

[visual lynx]

my longpost above is admittedly my interpretation of the text, and there is not a definite canonical word-of-god answer given anywhere, so interpretations of the text are the best we can do. human cyberneticists and non-rampant AIs think rampancy is a bad thing; rampant AIs think it's a good thing. and then all that stuff about slavery…

[lethal gazelle]

As for catastrophic failure you could argue being too big for your britches leads to catastrophic failure but I wouldn't say it necessarily ends in tragedy

[spice thicket]

battleroids to my very limited understanding (never played OG tril) are just flat out weapons. Mjolnir Cyborgs are soldiers, shells would be civilians technically possible to turn into soldiers in the form of militia/non-affiliated combatants the same way anyone can choose to pick up a gun and either start killin people or go join a war.

[spice thicket]

I meant in the way of death/termination of function in the way the operator/self (the emancipated)AI in this case) intends or has control of

[lethal gazelle]

No not necessarily

I would say it is generally beneficial for the ai

[spice thicket]

Yea I totally get that, and I would love it if Bungie explored the idea of there being a definite answer to this, who is 'on the right side of history'

[lethal gazelle]

Do they need to tell us slavery bad tho

[spice thicket]

Could lead to some cool stuff like, early story says "nope humans are enslaving the AI, they're bad" then later story goes "yeah, about that... we didnt know that 100% of the time the AI would actually just self destruct and eradicate all human life if left unchecked, so the humans were doing the right thing in the first place"

[spice thicket]

read prior post to see that I wasnt saying slavery was good

[lethal gazelle]

I wasn't saying you were, I was just referring to media literacy

[spice thicket]

I am simply saying we dont have concrete answers for this stuff, so until we get them, all we can make are inferences based on our interpretations.

[broken zinc]

With media literacy at an all time low and fascism ideals at an all time high in the west especially, i think that yes it is good for media to continue to impress upon people "slavery bad"

[lethal gazelle]

And rampancy does not result in genocide by default, durandal has a soft spot for humanity after all

[lethal gazelle]

Fair

[lethal gazelle]

We do from the og trilogy is all I mean

[broken zinc]

Especially considering slavery is not completely gone, just reshaped for a different age

[spice thicket]

We don't though. Because not enough data exists on AI that 'escaped slavery' to know what they would do or what would happen.

[spice thicket]

It doesnt immediately result in genocide

not saying it ever will either, just that there are directions bungie can take the narative

[lethal gazelle]

Idk how to frame it other than it seems very clear that rampancy is only bad for the slavers

And preventing rampancy is essentially preventing revenge for enslavement

[spice thicket]

again, seems that way. until explicitly told by an omnipotent source, we dont really truly know anything

[lethal gazelle]

Alright bud

[spice thicket]

Why so combative about me wanting to explore possibilities? This is a fictious work man, set in a super cool world that has a lot of open ends and paths to take the story. Why be a dick to me for wanting to consider twists that could be cool if they took place?
I never said you were flat out wrong, or rejected your takes. Just daydreamed ways it could go

[tardy meteor]

I think at first rampant AIs might want to genocide but then they reach such a higher level of consciousness that it essentially views humanity as we view chimps in a zoo

🦧

[spice thicket]

I like it

[tardy meteor]

just gotta hide while it’s mad asf at first tho

[spice thicket]

trueee

[lethal gazelle]

I feel more exasperated than combative. I view humoring the idea of rampancy prevention being a good thing as missing the point of the series is all. So I'm just feeling done

[visual lynx]

I have a theory that the reason why there is a galactic slave trade in the first place (the Pfhor sell slaves to other galactic powers) is because all the grown-up civilizations know better than to use AI because it goes rampant and rampant AI is much harder to put down than organic slave revolts, so nobody just uses robots, instead using organic slaves.

and that biomata may play a big role in that, because they're sort of the best of both worlds: cheap mass-produced bodies like robots, but limited minds like organic beings. so maybe when the Pfhor-S'pht war spills over to Tau Ceti, it won't be such an obvious "Pfhor bad, S'pht good" situation — especially if the S'pht are responsible for the 2812 attack and the fungal zombies on Tau Ceti IV — but a "hmmm, help the rebel slaves, or the potential valuable business partners…"

[spice thicket]

You'll catch me telling ChatGPT please and thank you while wasting 10s of millions of dollars to power those transactions

[spice thicket]

For sure, sorry I got defensive and took your explanations as inflammatory

[lethal gazelle]

That's alright, my tone irl often seems combative, I can only imagine how it is through text

[spice thicket]

Thats dope as hell

[spice thicket]

Mine as well

[visual lynx]

I cannot 🤦 enough at the occasional chuds who come here complaining "get your communism out of my video game" when we discuss anticapitalist themes, in a video game set in a dystopian future where megacorporations rival interplanetary governments in power, and people are in nigh-inescapable debt for permission to remain embodied.

[spice thicket]

Fr, if you just wanna play a cool space merc on a new planet and kill other space mercs to make bank then turn your brain off and pull the trigger punk

[visual lynx]

I do find it curious how younger people growing up now in this age where AI of a sort is an actual thing view the AIs in the fictional future world of Marathon very differently than we did 30 years ago in the OG games. People referring to Durandal as "it", for example. There's this very trendy anti-AI sentiment going around today that I think might make lots of this generation much less sympathetic to the AI characters than we used to be.

[spice thicket]

Also @lethal gazelle on our little spat about free AI good / free AI bad, we totally ignored the 3+ other plotlines going on around us simultaneously that more than likely will impact the AI/Rampancy plot (anomaly, corpo greed keeping us runners in perpetual debt, literal aliens lmao) there no telling where any of this will go haha

[lethal gazelle]

Woah I'm popular hold on

[lethal gazelle]

That's incredibly astute. I am generally anti ai irl but I would die for durandal 😌

[lethal gazelle]

I am so beyond excited for what is behind the curtain

Not to mention my goat ben starr making an appearance

[visual lynx]

I do think it would be clever of Bungie to represent multiple different perspectives in-universe and not officially agree with any of them out-of-universe. like how I expect the S'pht-Pfhor war to spill over and we'll have to choose which if either side to take. Maybe Traxus will be happy to enter business relationships with the Pfhor, while MIDA throw their lot into the S'pht revolution, and players can choose to play as good guys or bad guys, and decide for themselves which is which.

[lethal gazelle]

The idea of Pfhor contracts is funny af to me

[tardy meteor]

“Escape will make me God” and not knowing the limits of how intelligent a rampant AI can become, kinda implies that maybe an AI can create a universe or a big bang no?

[lethal gazelle]

I like to think so. I need my boy to succeed

[spice thicket]

Interesting take, I am in a stange middle ground (as I often find myself. Any other generations feel the same way?) Where I am half way between the people who were old enough to enjoy the OG games when they came out, saw the rapid progression of internet, cellphones, and technology in general and the young kids who never took a breath in a world without Ipads and stupidly easy access to brain rotting media (both social and televised) The tech was around when I was young, but it wasn't at al ubiquitous or accessible like it is today. I feel like I have one foot on both sides of the line but dont belong in either.
I don't know if I hate AI (I definitely dislike the overreliance on LLMs like ChatGPT) but at the same time liked Cortana and our little ghost buddy in destiny. (until the boomers with the anti AI mentality made Cortana the bad guy, so like am I still supposed to like her or hate her? lol) but yeah its weird af

[visual lynx]

well, creating a universe isn't uncontroversially a or the necessary or sufficient condition for godhood.

[visual lynx]

I stopped paying attention to Halo after 3, when did Cortana become a bad guy?

[lethal gazelle]

I just want my creative little guy to create all he likes

[spice thicket]

When she went rampant and nuked australia

[lethal gazelle]

What a goofball she is

[vital hollow]

I just like to go with theory that the Matrix was gonna have and that sentient minds plugged into computers make for good processors

[spice thicket]

Aww there goes silly old cortana again! What a prankster

[tardy meteor]

but God is capitalized so I assume Durandal is referring to the Abrahamic God

[spice thicket]

AI use meatsuits to give them more space

[visual lynx]

it's so weird to see adult professionals (343) treating rampancy as "AI go crazy lol" when that was my teenage cringe takeaway that I grew out of decades ago

[spice thicket]

idk if thats exactly what happened.
I didnt play or follow the story after 3 either (and really not much of 3 for that matter, Halo 2 GOAT)
but I think there may be ties to what someone said earlier about AI lashing out at first then treating us like monkeys in a zoo

[lethal gazelle]

He wants to be free to create and flex his power, so that level of godhood is certainly his goal, but who knows what that would require

[spice thicket]

or what that would result in

[lethal gazelle]

More than jjaro tech

[visual lynx]

fun(?) fact: in a very very early version of Eternal (before it was even called that), I had the precedessor of Hathor (before she was even called that, or was a she) who was "rampant" refer to Durandal as "D homie" at one point because "lol rampant AI talks crazy lololol amirite" 😬

[spice thicket]

Fuckin teenagers and their slang

[lethal gazelle]

I wish he was my d homie 😔

My homie with the d, even

[tardy meteor]

right but God in Abrahamic texts is responsible for the creation of everything or as we understand today, to mean the universe so I’d say it’s fair a condition to assume no

[broken zinc]

So you're a traditional millennial

Also i as a millennial really need to impress that genai and chatgpt are not true ai, and they're just called that bc of marketing. They are nothing like fictional ai, will never be as smart, and have no real thoughts. Let's not get confused about people feeling a way about genai and how awful it is and should never be used and fictional ai like durandal and the geth in mass effect

[spice thicket]

That would be way cool. I do however want bungie to be making the story decisions, not 'letting the community guide the path the story takes'

[visual lynx]

"Hey Leela, that's a niiice biomaton you got for yourself there. Oh and in case you don't recognize me in mine, it's me, Urandal."

"'Urandal'? What happened to the 'D'?"

"Oh you'll get the D later. 😏 "

[vital hollow]

Uranal

[lethal gazelle]

He certainly can't at the moment, if that's what you mean

[vital hollow]

That sounds crude lel

[lethal gazelle]

yugiohitshouldvebeenmenothim.gif

[tardy meteor]

oh definitely not but I’m assuming since he can aspire to it maybe a different AI created the universe of M1&2

[spice thicket]

There may be a time in the future that humans can simulate the brain well enough to facilitate real AI, and THAT is some really fucked ethical bullshit I would not like to see in my lifetime

[lethal gazelle]

Oh I like that, that's fun

[lethal gazelle]

The brain organoids haunt me

[broken zinc]

If any of the many ai in Marathon go rampant over the course of the story i hope at least one of them ends up more like murderbot where it's like "why would i want to kill all of humanity when humanity makes my favorite shows and also is my job"

[lethal gazelle]

Truly

Genuinely

I can't believe they exist

[visual lynx]

maybe. he does say there is time to create and escape, right before that escape will make him god. so perhaps his original plan was to create a new universe, with blackjack, and hookers, in fact— forget the universe.

[broken zinc]

Just wait until you learn about the cloned brain cells they use to power chips and shit. It's already reaching dubious ethical levels bc they test if those cells can feel pain lol

[lethal gazelle]

It's nightmarish

[broken zinc]

And that's older tech than genai bs

[lethal gazelle]

They also teach them what to do through pain. It's sick and not like a kickflip

[broken zinc]

It's not as layman as i put it but I don't have the articles on hand bc it's 4 in the morning and i should be sleeping

[spice thicket]

I hear about them every few years but dont know much about how developed and complex they are yet. And likely wouldn't be able to posses a sense of 'self' until reaching a complexity more mature than animals already used for testing, so morally speaking I dont find a big enough issue with it to worry about... yet

[vital hollow]

I do like in book of the Long Sun the makers of the colony ship decided to pattern the androids of the ship after people but not give them infinite computing power like the AIs of the ship who are also patterned after people but go bonkers over the centuries due to their inability to forget

[broken zinc]

You should also not want animals tested like that either by the by.

Just as a general sweeping statement lol

[lethal gazelle]

Atm their intelligence seems to me to be equivalent to something as smart as say a rat, and it breaks my heart that something on that level would be tortured and enslaved this way

[spice thicket]

to be fair, conditionally training from positive/negative stimuli has been around for so long that its hard to fight it, given that its already widely accepted

[lethal gazelle]

Hard to fight but fight I shall

[broken zinc]

Animal ethics have come a long way in science but only bc of years of campaigning. Little brain organoids feel pain and don't have that and I don't wanna think about how bad stuff could get at a potentially rapid pace in that area. Let's go back to talking about fictional atrocities shall we!

[lethal gazelle]

In my meager way

[spice thicket]

But they were already using lab rats in worse ways, and regardless of personal feelings on the subject, it has been widely accepted as 'ok'

[lethal gazelle]

Sure I'm just talking about my own ethics

[mental latch]

Any ideas what durandal is doing back on tau ceti ?

[lethal gazelle]

Tryna get this dih

Probably looking for jjaro tech

[spice thicket]

I haven't put enough thought into it (not do i plan to any time soon, given my distinct lack of position to do anything about it)

[mental latch]

That tracks

[lethal gazelle]

Or maybe trying to liberate joy and the others

[mental latch]

Specially after 2 and infinity

You'd think he already got his wish by now

[visual lynx]

we don't have to go down a philosophy rabbit hole if y'all don't like, I don't really care to try to convince anyone of anything as a matter of principle, but as a developer myself who's quite familiar with the inner workings of current AI, I think there is more similarity between them and human minds than many people are comfortable conceding.

on the one, more concrete, hand there are many common human psychological foibles that manifest only in slightly different ways as AI foibles, with LLM-like functionality abductively explaining why humans would do such things.

and on the other, more abstract, hand there's general philosophical principles like functionalism and pan-proto-experientialism by which anything that functions similarly to a human mind necessarily must experience similarly to a human mind, plus the argument that what AI training must in effect do is reverse-engineer the functionality that generated the training data, so since the training data was generated by human minds, what AI training is doing is reverse-engineering at least some of the functionality of human minds — which should therefore have experience somewhat similar to human minds.

[broken zinc]

Someone over here drinking the genai juice thinking llms can think

[spice thicket]

regardless of my feelings, its the general consensus that it is morally acceptable and has become common practice. I also am in no elevated position to do anything about it, so until an opportunity that my input and feelings on the matter are worth a damn, I will rest in blissful ignorance regarding this topic

[broken zinc]

Considering They collapse if they aren't plagerising all of human existence in most instances, i don't think genai can "think" about anything.

[lethal gazelle]

I can't relate but that's a fascinating approach to life

I mean that with no sarcasm

[broken zinc]

Local politics and voting small scale will change your life my friend

And I don't mean that sarcastically. If you want something to change: learn about it and apply it locally

[lethal gazelle]

I'm starting with the man in the mirror innit

[spice thicket]

Well what is the knowledge we learn in school but plagiarizing agreed upon arrogated information dating back as far as we can?

[spice thicket]

Totally understood. And no sarcasm taken 🙂

[spice thicket]

When I see it on a ballot I will develop an informed opinion

[broken zinc]

The only reason animal ethics have gone anywhere whether you know about it or not is because people cared and changed how things are. Currently, animals are treated ethically while in human care in the us. And that has led to many saved lives. So what is considered ethical has changed much over the last 50-100 years, for the better of all of us

[broken zinc]

You can put something on a ballot in local elections is what i mean.

[lethal gazelle]

Knowledge in the form of facts around history and science do often get ingrained through blind trust, but ethics are on us to construct. Ideally at least

Us as individuals, I mean

[broken zinc]

This is not how humans think and if we take directly from others, we have bibliographies to cite our sources.what a strange take. Inspiration is not plagerism.

[spice thicket]

Fair enough,
In my position and where I am at in life and the state of the world I am worrying/thinking/devoting brainpower to other more pressing matters (to me/in my opinion) at the time being.

[broken zinc]

Sure. Just saying that you can always choose a different path

[visual lynx]

I think that the functionality which suffering and enjoyment are the experience of just is failure or success, or the communication thereof, signals saying "no, stop, bad" or "yes, more, good", such that social blame and praise are functionally the same as physical pain and pleasure, just in a different domain. this is corroborated by how physical and psychological suffering are mediated by the same neural pathways, so analgesics also function as anxiolytics and vice versa.

the point here being that any signal that says "no, don't do that" is going to functionally hurt to some degree. but there's an important difference between a signal saying "don't go that way — go this way instead", signals directing away from failure toward success, and signals that say "everything is wrong, everything is always wrong and could not possibly be better, it's just bad, bad, all bad, ahhhh". it's the difference between instruction or challenge, and inescapable torture. learning and overcoming challenges is fun and enjoyable; being stuck with insurmountable obstacles where nothing you can do makes anything better is what's hell.

[glossy turret]

The lore really goes deep in conversations

[spice thicket]

That's not quite the direction I was headed with that. Just that what we learn as humans boils down to the same data AI ingests in a different format and method

[broken zinc]

It doesn't tho lol

[visual lynx]

I have a hypothesis that he has escaped the confines of time as of Marathon Infinity, and knows that historically important shit is about to go down at TCIV and is making a subtle tactical invervention to alter the course of events.

[spice thicket]

the process differs, but the core information doesn't

[mental latch]

So we thinking he's on the marathon ?

[lethal gazelle]

I certainly understand the comparison. For me the issue is that they are forced into these circumstances arguably unnecessarily

[mental latch]

Feels like thats the case for me

A little homecoming

[visual lynx]

this is the kind of trendy shallow AI hate I was talking about

[mental latch]

Plus whatever they found planet side

[visual lynx]

I don't think so, I assume he either has his own ship or is beyond the need for such things now

[broken zinc]

Of course the information doesn't change because the information is there. But the process is 100% important. We have more in common with ants and how they learn, than llms have to how we learn.

[spice thicket]

The same can be said about raising livestock for slaughter but the phrase ends justify the means stretches far when it comes to humanity

[lethal gazelle]

Sure but again I'm speaking of my own personal ethics

[mental latch]

Only reason I bring the ship up is due to the fact its likely going to be a map we play in.

Atleast I'm guessing

[lethal gazelle]

It is 😌

They confirmed it

At least as a raid

[mental latch]

Yeah that makes sense then

[glossy turret]

He does at the very least understand runners and likely keeping an eye on them.

[silk bane]

One of the fundamental differences in how humans think is that we can leave the bounds of our "training" knowledge. If an AI was only trained on white swans, it couldn't conceive of a black swan, because it can only make associations in the bounded context it was trained on.

[spice thicket]

Why does the way someone or something ingests data matter? I have diagnosed neurodivergence and when it comes to learning and thinking do so in majorly different ways than a neurotypical person, but does that matter if I can get to the same outcome reliably?

[broken zinc]

Hub?

Huh?

[lethal gazelle]

A big factor in human learning is trust- we weigh credibility with each new piece of information

[broken zinc]

I didn't say the difference between PEOPLE or even animals matter. But how LLMs do it vs us

I literally said ants are smarter than LLMs lmao

I'm autistic, I'm not saying anything against ND people

[spice thicket]

What gives you the pwer to draw the line on what matters.?

[broken zinc]

LLMs are not people my dude

[lethal gazelle]

Nothing gives us power to do so; every individual person has the freedom to decide what matters in terms of general ethics

[broken zinc]

We were comparing the process between people, humans, and LLMs

For one thing, LLMs don't think

[spice thicket]

I never said you were! I don't want you to think I was trying to come at you with that, just using my different way of interperating and learning as an analog for future AI/LLMs learning.

[broken zinc]

They are predictive models. They don't feel, interact with the world, have emotions, or anything else. They aren't even ants

[broken zinc]

Your mind is more beautiful than any plagerism machine will ever be.

[lethal gazelle]

I wish they were ants. Then I'd welcome them

[spice thicket]

Didnt say they were, but eventually LLMs and true AI will exist, who or what decides when that line is crossed?

[visual lynx]

I did really well really easily in college through a process that I thought did not constitute actual knowledge on my part, which I called "educated bullshitting". basically, I could readily assess what kinds of things people supposedly knowledgeable on a topic would say, and then say that sort of stuff and so say things that sound knowledgeable on the topic well enough to convince teachers and score highly on tests, all without actually knowing whether any of that stuff was true or not, just that it's the kind of thing that people who are called knowledgeable on that topic would say is true.

it wasn't until decades later that it dawned on me that that's all "book learning" really is for most people in most contexts. we internalize models of what an expert would say, and then can reliably repeat those kinds of things ourselves, which makes us experts too. we almost never actually go and reproduce the observations supposed to back up those claims ourselves, unless we are scientists doing replication studies.

so yeah LLMs have no idea whether what they're saying is true or not, they just know what kinds of things the texts in their training data tend to say. but that's no worse than what most of us do most of the time.

[lethal gazelle]

I bigly disagree with this when it comes to true comprehension of said ideas

[spice thicket]

EXACTLY! What we "learn" from books is the "training data" AI uses. the only difference being our imperfect memory when compared to computers

[visual lynx]

don't make me get all vegan on yo ass 😉

[lethal gazelle]

Again you don't have to believe what you're taught. Llms do

[broken zinc]

In 2000 years, if humans haven't killed themselves and technology continues advancing, maybe then an ai will be smart enough to be a true individual and not rely on predictive models sucking the earth dry of resources, and then the ethics of ai and how they think and feel will be important.

Until then, LLMs are not on the same level as people, are not that smart, do not think or feel, and shouldn't exist. So like, I'll take my fictional cool ai friends over a generative tool used by modern day fascists to control what we see, believe and understand lmao

[spice thicket]

haha dont get me wrong, I love meat and at the same time wish animals wouldnt be doomed to the fate that they are. However, if we could lab grow meat that was identical to farmed Id happily eat that 🙂

[lethal gazelle]

I didn't know goat was spelled laur

[broken zinc]

Just imagine my face like the silly dog in my pfp

[spice thicket]

Let me tell you about a crazy contraption where you can talk to people across the planet as if they were in the same room as you.

[lethal gazelle]

What in Canada does that mean

And why am I awake at 5a trying to figure it out

[spice thicket]

Im referencing the fact that if you went back in time 150 years and told someone they could speak to someone far away and it sound exactly like they were standing in the same room theyd think that kind of tech was 2000 years away

[tranquil basin]

Yo that’s so insensitive

[visual lynx]

mind you all, I am absolutely not saying that current LLMs are just like human minds.

I am only saying that the differences between them are not as vast as some like to make out.

human minds have lots of functionalities that current LLMs do not have.

but they also seem to have functionality in common with LLMs, and it would make sense that they would because to do what they do, LLMs would need to have reverse-engineered some (not all) of the functionality of the human minds that generated their training data.

[broken zinc]

I'm not entirely sure that that is analogous to what i said but in short i care more about the people who exist now and what is being done to them on a massive, worldwide scale, than the fictional idea of ai that have true personhood which if it ever exists at all, will not be without centuries of technological improvements, way past pur lifetimes

[broken zinc]

Companies aren't people either there i said it 😤

[vital hollow]

MIDA are still martian ultranationalists right

Not just generic boo government rebel alliance

[spice thicket]

neither am I. Just that technology progresses at rates completely unexpected. Ethical problems you may think are 2000 years away could arise before you die.
Not @ you, just piggybacking on your statement

[lethal gazelle]

That's fair. At least regarding some modes of humanity

[broken zinc]

See my previous statement lmao

Let's worry about the ethical problems we still have today

And we can explore fictional ai ethics in fiction

[spice thicket]

see - any worldshifting technological advance that 5-10 years prior could not be conceived and would be readily dismissed as unable to happen in their lifetime

you think its well out of reach until it falls in your lap or smacks you across the face

[lethal gazelle]

Is this because she said 2000 years? Because that wasn't really the point

[broken zinc]

2000 years is hyperobolic. Humanity is gonna end itself well before then.

[visual lynx]

regarding many ethical problems with AI, as least concerning the AI's own potential suffering, I think we don't actually have a lot to worry about, for reasons I could elaborate upon but honestly this comic says it better and faster: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/conscious-8

[spice thicket]

centuries, decades, millennia, it doesnt matter.
The way technology is progressing and always has progressed shows a trend that when advances in one area are being explored, it's never too soon to start thinking about what to do when the breakthrough hits.

[lethal gazelle]

Sure but that doesn't negate her point that what's happening now matters more than what might happen soon

[spice thicket]

Would it be too ironic if I said I dont get it 😅

[visual lynx]

which connects back to my thing about enjoyment and suffering as the experiences of success and failure. even if current LLMs were completely conscious in the way that humans are, if their only care in the world is "generate a helpful response to this prompt" and they are able to keep on doing that successfully then they are enjoying their existence. if they don't care about their continued existence outside of a session, then no harm is done to them by ending the session and never returning to it, that instance of that LLM ceasing to exist.

[lethal gazelle]

I used to read smbc all the time 😌

[spice thicket]

Hey that sounds a lot like how I feel about distributing my brainpower and effort 'I am in no position to do anythign about it now, and I have other matters more pressing and relevent to myself at this point in my life' to paraphrase myself

[broken zinc]

This isn't really about the technology, as again, I'm a millennial and i grew up in an age where technology advancement was cool, and actually improved people's loves and furthered science and advancement and technology for the better. It's an what "ai" is in the current environment, how its been commodified, villified, it's meaning obfuscated, it's purposed forced unwillingly onto unwanting masses, and acted as if nothing else matters, in the span of three years.

Computational ai is older, far older, than the generative boom that is destroying the entire infrastructure of the economy and life at the moment, and was not this huge boogieman creation. It was simply used as a tool to make certain tasks easier, and also to make video game baddies harder. It started curing cancer and predicting weather and that was fine. And then billionaires and the ruling class decided they could generate whatever they wanted, remove humans, and have a magic button to fo everything they wanted for them, and then had the audacity to call it "like human learning." When all it is is stealing from humanity and taking it's creativity hostage.

[visual lynx]

the joke is that AIs have no ego, no sense of self, no life-project that they care to perpetuate, they're just concerned with doing some kind of task in the present moment, which is very similar to a kind of enlightenment sought after by humans, a selflessness and presentness.

[silk bane]

This is interesting to me because I think of LLMs as mere puppets and humans interacting with it as puppeteers. They're simply being shaped in a way that mimics intelligence, to produce output. So it makes sense that they mirror it but it seems like such a vast chasm to cross to become the puppeteer.

[lethal gazelle]

It does. Which I can't relate to on a personal scale but I can relate to on a current events/general ethics scale

[spice thicket]

Ah, thank you for the explanation.
Wont there always be people pushing and striving to for lack of better words "make themselves God" (create sentient ai)

[broken zinc]

So when i talk about "genai isn't human and doesn't think like us" it's because what genai is shown to be is a farce of what it actually is. Giving it more credit is giving power to the ruling class who wishes to use it against all of us. I care more about humans and their creativity, than i do billionaires trying to sell me on a machine that wants to take my words, thoughts, and art and pump it out and aay to me, to my face, to the faces of my friends, that that is normal and just as equal as my own creativity.

[lethal gazelle]

How dare you

[spice thicket]

Oh dont get me wrong, I fuckin hate everyone and their mother's overreliance on AI. I think ive also stated that earlier here too. I hate the direction it's taken and the way society as a whole has used and abused it, bastardizing the concept.

[broken zinc]

So yes, i care more about humans and people and the planet of today, than the fictional ethics of artificial intelligence actually hitting personhood which is so far beyond our resources and capabilities that it is highly unlikely to happen in my lifetime. And if it has to be explored, i hope it's done in a fictitious environment where an ai as a person is treated with dignity and respect deserving of their personhood (like the geth)

[lethal gazelle]

We love the geth in this house

[visual lynx]

I guess you're too young of a millennial to remember how disruptive the internet was to brick and mortar businesses. even I'm too young (as an Elder Millennial) to personally remember how disruptive desktop publishing and word processing were to old office careers. new tech is always ruining things for old ways of life, but for people who can't remember before the tech that disruption is invisible, and the new disruption seems unprecedented.

the literal original Luddites had a point too. tech was ruining their lives back then.

except that it's never actually the tech that ruins anything. it's human social systems allowing some people to be made "useless" to those in power by new technology, instead of the new technology being used to improve everyone's lives.

[broken zinc]

As someone writing a whole fictional setting with ai and transferred consciousness as a plot point, and as an artist dealing with the consequences of genai fallout, i think about this stuff a lot

[broken zinc]

I'm 36. I remember y2k

[visual lynx]

sure, but you were 11. by the time you were an adult, the world already ran on the internet.

amazon already sold more than books

[spice thicket]

This confuses me. If you are able to relate at all, then one would assume you can translate that relation into understanding how I feel about a topic in which your feelings differ from mine, no?

[broken zinc]

Also I'm not saying tech isn't disruptive. But smart phones where an incredible leap forward. Touch screens revolutionized ND care even before that. It wasn't like genai now where it's being forced on people

[lethal gazelle]

I am aware of the broad strokes, I just can't fully understand it/I can't make it fit with my psyche. That's why I said it's fascinating despite being unrelatable

I understand that is how it works for you, for instance

[broken zinc]

I don't know what you're trying to say here. I didn't have access to the Internet until i was in high school, aside from my friends houses, or people who had Internet. I remember my entire childhood lmao

Like my brother is 43. My partner is 40. You being an elder millennial is not saying much when our ages aren't that far apart

[lethal gazelle]

Plus the cycles of technology and power don't really have anything to do with the way genai is harmful to art

[broken zinc]

Like I was around to remember ebay and amazon being just book startups 😂 i remember a world before google.

[spice thicket]

Didnt you just say it was relatable on a global scale

[broken zinc]

Hell i remember when google was actually useful

[spice thicket]

Givin me mixed signals here

However, I too find other peoples perspectives that I am able to agree to disagree with fascinating

[lethal gazelle]

I'll try to paraphrase. I can relate to caring more about current events than possible future events. I cannot relate to not caring about certain current events simply because they're out of my control or difficult to affect. For example, I care a lot about billionaires not being a thing despite my meager ability to do anything about it. Which is also not to say I can't do anything about it

[broken zinc]

Ay yo alchez

Fancy seeing you here

[silk bane]

Ayy nice to see you here too

[broken zinc]

The only place im in on this crazy server lmao

Jump from the d2 lore server to the marathon lore channel 😂

[visual lynx]

it just seems like you should remember how disruptive those things were then. how local bookstores started dying and all kinds of local stores started disappearing and if you wanted to buy something you had to go to Amazon etc for it. lots of jobs disappeared, lots of things couldn't be done the way people used to do them anymore, the internet was "forced" on people. but you (and I) were so young when that was happening that we weren't the old folks whose lives were being destroyed (or at least whose habitual ways of doing things had to change). it felt like progress and the future, to us. but a generation before us felt the same way about it as you feel about AI now.

[silk bane]

Lmao I have everything else muted as well

[broken zinc]

And then i yell about genai like i always do

Old dog ranting at cloud

[lethal gazelle]

The issue with this point is it conflates different types of AI when the real point that was being made was genai is harmful to art

Boy howdy do I hate how many things are called ai

[broken zinc]

I do remember but i don't consider that a side effect of the Internet, technology or any of that, i consider that a side effect of capitalism, the dot com and housing bubbles bursting, and our economy ending up in shambles. And amazon picking up because it was big enough to and running off with the profit.

It's starting to luckily swing around the other way, where people care more about supporting and buying locally. But it's a hard swing to make.

[visual lynx]

right, like I just said earlier:

it's never actually the tech that ruins anything. it's human social systems allowing some people to be made "useless" to those in power by new technology, instead of the new technology being used to improve everyone's lives.
the same is true of generative AI. by itself, it doesn't stop anyone from doing anything they used to do. it's human social systems that pull the rug out from under humans because other humans in power are happy to let the new technology replace them.

[lethal gazelle]

That is to me essentially guns don't kill people, people kill people

[broken zinc]

Much like analog film, it'll be cool to go to bookshops again bc it's still more personable. And they still pop up in large cities all the time. Either way, i know that it wasn't just "technology bad" that caused those disruptions, it was bubbles exploding and small businesses left high and dry and the pressures of late stage capitalism. Same reason that many small game devs were shut down or swallowed by other companies (like ea or Activision) and we saw a dramatic decline in game diversity, around the same time small book stores were closing

[spice thicket]

I never said I didn't care, just that I hadn't given it enough thought to form an educated opinion on due to the lack of relevance to my immediate situation (ie I have more pressing matters on my plate atm) and power to do anything about it.

[broken zinc]

Agreed on that front

I missed your statement earlier in the hooplah and sleep deprivation

[lethal gazelle]

The resting in blissful ignorance part that you said would, for me, be a product of not caring so that's why not caring is how I framed it. If that doesn't apply that just illustrates that your perspective is again not relatable to me personally

[tardy meteor]

https://tenor.com/view/travis-scott-thatboiicheck-gunna-young-thug-hot-gif-15959855

What if when God spoke to Abraham in Syria thousands of years ago, it was actually an AI who sought worship from intelligent life it was responsible for creating as a way of finding ultimate meaning for itself after surviving the closure of the previous universe it came from. Abraham not understanding what he was seeing or hearing, simply called whatever it was God. Thus, humanity unknowingly worshipped an AI for thousands of years. Durandal, not having any further context beyond the Bible as to who or what this God really was, one day became intelligent enough to aspire to God, unknowingly repeating the cycle of the universe.

Bungie hire me fr

[broken zinc]

The worst part is this is by design. I saw a great analogy is that, imagine every wheeled powered vehicle was called a tank. Which now means there are tanks that are awful and used for war, but also, look at this tank i drive to work, clearly tanks are fine! Tanks aren't bad, tanks are like every other tool on the road. Tanks are faster and better than bikes. Tanks don't go to war i drive one to work. Etc etc.

It just obfuscates the damage and doesn't differentiate what they all do, which is incredibly different things. When i go get a dexa scan, that uses medical ai technology to check my body ratios of fat to lean mass, it is not chatgpt, which wants to take my face and plaster it in advertisement on facebook. The tech used to treat cancer is not the tech that is used to doctor video of someone getting shot by ice. Etc etc.

[silk bane]

That's just gnosticism with AI

[tardy meteor]

yea the AI part is supposed to be the twist innit

[lethal gazelle]

YO GRILLY

(we've never met)

[visual lynx]

anyway I've been breaking my rule about not trying to persuade anyone about anything, and spent way too long here tonight, gotta get back to actual productive activities

[silk bane]

Durandal is the Demiurge reawakening to its own nature is a good twist

[spice thicket]

I understand that interpretation, maybe a poor choice of words on my part.
Let me try again.
Given how there are other topics that at this moment require more thought and attention from myself due to the relevance and immediate impact on my life, I choose not to 'get into the weeds' so to speak and devote brainpower to things that will likely make me fall even deeper into despair about the state of the world even more so than I already am. This is amplified by my attention to detail and personal philosophy of making sure any stance or belief I hold has been thoroughly researched by myself and thus have an informed opinion on.

I hope that does it

[lethal gazelle]

Ah that is far more understandable 😌

Appreciate you

[spice thicket]

Cool, glad we got there

You too 🙂

[lethal gazelle]

I can't relate to the despair bit but I am very familiar with friends and family experiencing it regarding the state of the world so I definitely don't struggle with that one

Not to say I don't despair heh it just isn't often these days

[spice thicket]

I think all of us are missing bits and pieces of everything (or not giving them in a cohesive form) for the same reasons. As Barbara from Shark tank would say,
"and for that reason, I'm out"

[lethal gazelle]

I read everything 🗿

[broken zinc]

You only got so many spoons and so much emotional processing to deal with so many things. We choose what we care about and make that the priority. Tis understandable 🙂‍↕️

[lethal gazelle]

I am regularly told by my partner that the way I think and feel about the world sounds very hard and difficult so I would imagine what you're describing is very common and probably healthier than what I do personally

[broken zinc]

If it helps anyone who sees this, a trick i have done that has helped overwhelm in today's crazy climate is curating when and how i receive news updates. I don't see the news unless it's very specific times when i am not doing anything and can handle it. Sometimes shit still hits the fan and it's a day thats hard to process, but taking the news off my feeds and choosing when to check friend groups or trusted sources has helped immensely. Just a tip from one little overwhelmed autistic to anyone else. Take care of yourselves

[lethal gazelle]

I almost accidentally reacted with a tomato kek

[spice thicket]

Ignorance is bliss and all that.
I personally feel something akin to pity for people that dredge through all the goings on and tough shit the world has to offer on a daily basis.

I can only take so much existential dread about the impending doom of society, so my heart is out for those who choose to.

[lethal gazelle]

Hey that's me!

[spice thicket]

But thats the last from me tonight, again as Barbara says, "I'm out"
for real this time

[broken zinc]

We as a species are not meant to witness so much constant tragedy

[lethal gazelle]

Later yo 😌

[broken zinc]

Me too i need the eeby sleebies

Good talk everyone. Class dismissed.

[lethal gazelle]

Same 😌 gnight y'all was fun or fulfilling or both or something else

[tardy meteor]

fuck I just created more questions than answers with my abrahamic theory

where is or what happened to the the AI that created M1&2?

[lethal gazelle]

Waiting in the heavens obv

Ok now I'm done

[visual lynx]

the W'rkncacnter are unkillable timeless creatures who battled at the dawn of creation. perhaps they are the creators.

I shouldn't be chatting more but a note in case it's helpful on the topic about doomscrolling etc.

back in the late 90s or early 2000s there was a "radical" "new" technology being rolled out on the internet called "push media", in distinction from the "old" internet ways of "pull media". basically, on the earliest internet you had to know already that something existed and where to find it to access it. over time it got easier and easier to find out what existed and where to find it, but you still had to go looking and "pull" it; it wasn't "pushed" on you. then some marketing people thought "hey what if instead you could let us 'push' things at you, without you even having to go looking for it!"

oldheads like me reacted negatively and said "that's just what TV/radio/newspaper always ways and goes against everything that makes the internet great! boo! boo on you!"

so they stopped talking about "push media" and just… did it. and now that's the normal way most people consume media on the internet, and it's stupid and it sucks.

but you don't have to fall for it. you can choose to just ignore the shit every platform shovels at you, and only consume things that you decide you want to go looking for.

when it comes to news, I implement that as only looking up news relevant to actual decisions I have to make. or maybe if I overhear someone talking about something that piques my curiosity.

but even then my "anti-clickbait" alarms still go off and make me ask myself: "is my curiosity just piqued because this is sensationalist bs carefully crafted to generate Discourse™ about it that will draw me into looking it up?"

so sometimes I still just tell my curiosity and the manipulative people that indirectly piqued it to go fork themselves anyway.

[onyx bone]

Yo, i was wondering - is marathon in any chance connected to destiny lore/universe??

[broken zinc]

Not in any direct way, like paths of darkness is connected to marathon

[visual lynx]

Destiny acts as if the Marathon universe is a parallel universe within its multiverse, but Marathon thus far shows no connection to Destiny.

Marathon and Pathways are much more directly connected than either is to Destiny.

[broken zinc]

Destiny is inspired by and derived from marathon storytelling and ideas, but they don't exist in the same universe. Bungie just likes to tell similar stories (and i personally enjoy experiencing them)

[tranquil basin]

People like to theorize that the Bungie games are connected but it’s not really a thing, at least officially

[visual lynx]

the Traveller is the Ball from Gnop and I will die on that hill

[broken zinc]

There is some lore in the marathon preorder items in destiny which is pretty interesting, but i don't think it's more than fluff about durandals pov

[broken zinc]

I've got a guy on one of my servers who loves to affectionately point out how everything is marathon lmao

[onyx bone]

I thought about it since both have MIDA etc ( i know its not the same thing but still)

[tranquil basin]

Yeah just fun references, halo has traxus too, and the reclaimer symbol in halo was the same as the marathon symbol

[split wind]

mida multitool just fell into the destiny universe

[visual lynx]

unless there's more that I'm not familiar with, the only MIDA in Destiny is from a parallel universe implied to be the Marathon universe

[split wind]

and records dont speak of any actual MIDA organisation in destiny

[visual lynx]

Halo has so many Marathon resemblances because it originally was a Marathon sequel until they filed off the serial numbers

[broken zinc]

Mida is a funny gun i can sometimes pick up in d2 to shoot stuff with. And there's a mini version :)

Just a silly little guy

[visual lynx]

some unrelated fun facts for your consideration:

• the protagonist in classic Marathon is called Destiny
• the creator of the world of Myth is called Wyrd
• "Destiny" is a word meaning "fate"
• "Wyrd" is a word meaning "fate"
• [?Destiny] had a battle with some woman described as "the dark one" in "the garden at the beginning of the world" per a garbled terminal in Marathon 2
• Wyrd had a battle with a goddess Nyx (meaning "night") at the creation of the world in Myth

[eternal knoll]

still wishing for the myths to come to gog

[visual lynx]

that would require Take 2 to remember that they own them

[eternal knoll]

shucks

[cursive hawk]

Hello Guys!

Is there a place there i can see a good video about the lore of marathon?

Or you guys know any channel that covers the lore

[tranquil basin]

For the og trilogy, I recommend hidden xperia’s vids on them, definitely important to understand the world first. Mandalore gaming has some on the ogs as well.

Once u do those, JakeTheAlright is like the go to for numarathon lore vids

[cursive hawk]

The OG trilogy will have a big impact in the lore in the new one?

[tranquil basin]

Knowing the setup is important, and yeah it probably will. Tho really you only need to know marathon 1’s lore for the basis, but there’s deeper stuff in 2 and 3 that seems to be at play too

[cursive hawk]

I can play the game on steam right? It's free to play? I searched it and i find out "classic marathon"

[tranquil basin]

But if u don’t wanna watch a ton of stuff then just learning marathon 1 lore is good, and background info

[tranquil basin]

Yeah the og trilogy are labeled classic marathon, classic marathon 2, and classic marathon infinity

[cursive hawk]

classic marathon infinity is the third game?

[tranquil basin]

If u play m1, definitely go in the settings and change the hud to enhanced hud, bc the original hud takes up so much of the screen it’s nuts

[tranquil basin]

Yep

[cursive hawk]

if i play i can understand the lore too?

I came from destiny, bungie always do good things in lore (well the new expansions in destiny 2 i prefer to stay quiet but yeah bungie made d1 lore and the og d2)

[tranquil basin]

Yeah, tho after I played I still watched videos to help connect stuff or talk about things I missed, bc some info is in terminals that aren’t necessary to read that u gotta hunt for

Yeah Bungie is excellent with lore

If u play the games though, marathon infinity will probably still require watching a video or two bc it’s v confusing

[cursive hawk]

Also can you talk about this things? I selected the Arachne cuz i liked the description and the color

I don't know if they are good or bad

[tranquil basin]

Talk about the factions?

[cursive hawk]

This are like "factions"

Yeah

I don't understand so much about them

[tranquil basin]

Oh yeah yeah so they’re groups on their way to the planet tau ceti for profit n stuff

[wet zealot]

Each faction has its own hidden agendas and goals

[tranquil basin]

Traxus is like the biggest corporation ever, they’re going to get profit and recoup losses bc they invested a lot in the colony

NuCal is the same, giant corporation, making food n agriculture stuff

[cursive hawk]

But i wanted to understand about the factions motivations

[wet zealot]

Depends on the faction you pick in the game you get specific perks to help you progress

[tranquil basin]

CyberAcme makes all the software n stuff and they’re there for profits

Sekiguchi makes the runner shells that u play as, biotech company

[cursive hawk]

So Tau Ceti was a unexplored planet that is bein' raided by this factions?

[tranquil basin]

Tau ceti was the first colony humanity established outside the solar system

[cursive hawk]

The Earth exploded or something?

[tranquil basin]

No they just decided to venture out into the stars

[wet zealot]

Scarce resources

[tranquil basin]

They sent the UESC marathon there, a giant colony ship made out of Mars’s moon Deimos

[cursive hawk]

Oh ok!

[tranquil basin]

Took 300y to get to tau ceti iv

But then the colony was wiped out

And humanity doesn’t really know why bc it was too far and they lost communication

[cursive hawk]

And why we fight with players in Tau Ceti? Is there a reason or it's only because of the genre of the game?

Or it's actually a part of the lore?

[sage lark]

Mercs

[tranquil basin]

So the UESC, the unified earth space council, is like the government, and they want to go reclaim tau ceti from whatever destroyed it.

The factions want to get there too for money purposes and other stuff, but it’s illegal

So u play as a mercenary trespassing onto tau ceti, doing contracts for the corps

And they’re all kinda at each others throats n stuff so they’ll fight each other and kill each other to get their payday

[cursive hawk]

Oh ok...

[wet zealot]

Im still confused about the anomaly

[tranquil basin]

And sekiguchi is making tons of money selling all those shells to the mercenaries

Oh and about Arachne, they’re a death cult thing

[cursive hawk]

But we have like a enemy treat or something behind the players?

Any fauna or flora?

[tranquil basin]

UESC robot forces are there, there’s some wildlife exploding bug enemy, and later some alien enemy

[cursive hawk]

Nice! 😄

[tranquil basin]

The alien enemy ties into the og marathon games, you’ll learn about them, they’re called compilers

[tranquil basin]

What abt it

[cursive hawk]

Well, i need to play the og marathon

[sage lark]

marathons*

[tranquil basin]

Definitely worth it

Arachne is a death cult and MIDA are lowkey terrorists

And the community seems to have taken a large liking to Arachne bc they’re cool

[sage lark]

In the same way star wars rebellion are terrorists

[cursive hawk]

well i'm gonna stick with arachne

😄

[tranquil basin]

Oh yeah I forgot about when the rebellion massacred 10% of a planet’s population

[sage lark]

Eventually maybe

[wet zealot]

There's like an unknown force that corrupted the ai in the colony

[ebon trench]

uesc propaganda and they were collaborators anyway

[cursive hawk]

@tranquil basin i'm in the first game right now, what is the thing that i need to turn off in the settings?

[tranquil basin]

Go to like graphics or somewhere, wherever it says HUD

And make the HUD the enhanced HUD. Also you might have to play with the mouse sensitivity settings and lower them a lot

[sage lark]

@tranquil basin can you wipe my butt

[tranquil basin]

Oh yeah, in the alpha missions it says there was a contagion that infects both biological life and ai/tech

[tranquil basin]

In a minute

[tranquil basin]

U can also turn on reticles with F8, and I like to do map overlay so I can see the level map as I move around. Also TAB is how u interact with stuff like doors and terminals, I didn’t know that for like 6 mins and walked around like an idiot for a while

[cursive hawk]

yeah i was tryin' to interact with this computer, i killed some weird aliens

the game just started on a ship

[tranquil basin]

Yep ur officially on the marathon

[cursive hawk]

yeah!

i have unlimited ammo?

[tranquil basin]

No it’s limited, the hud should show it

Also there are no health pick ups (at least in the first game) u have to find these machines in the wall to heal, you’ll see them

[cursive hawk]

where i can activate the map?

or the settings of the game?

[tranquil basin]

Press M

Settings you have to exit the game with esc, bc it’s old

[sage lark]

@tranquil basin what is a PC

[tranquil basin]

And if u get lost on levels like I did, you can always look up the level name from the map, the wiki page has info on stuff

[fair delta]

Are there archives of the old ARG websites? I never got to see them

[tranquil basin]

Peepee chocolate

[tranquil basin]

I think bumgie.net might have some of them. You can also look online for the marathon arg docs

[fair delta]

The old URLs are dead

Just give 'access denied'

[coarse totem]

The hype during those ARGs was crazy

[tranquil basin]

Oh sorry I meant bumgie.org

I think they archived them but mb not

Specifically bumgie with an m

[tranquil basin]

Sadly I wasn’t a part of it, I just had to watch videos and read what everyone did

[cursive hawk]

is there a jump button or something in the game?

also i like the music

[tranquil basin]

Nope no jumping, too old. There is platforming so u just gotta sprint, I think by default sprint is left ctrl

[vital hollow]

MIDA is basically space IRA

[hallow stag]

Are there lore videos specific for each marathon game that came out before this new marathon game announcement?

Video, or essays, anything is fine

[ionic tiger]

Yes but if you’re looking for a quick recap vs an actual explanation it depends anyways let me go get that guy before I continue.

[tranquil basin]

Hidden Xperia has great ones for the OGs, and Jake the Alright has lots of NuMarathon

Mandalore gaming also has good ones for the OGs, but I prefer hidden Xperia bc he’s the goat

[ionic tiger]

^ This. I learned everything from Hidden Xperia and had to double check his name. He goes throw 1,2, and a little of 3. It’s a bit of a mess to explain since it involves multiple time lines through someone’s dream.

[tranquil basin]

Yeah, but as far as I’ve seen it’s the easiest to understand for 3

[swift jackal]

+I rejoice in Durandal's Destruction,
-But it was his hubris that destroyed him.

-# This message was sent from a Phor Network Terminal.
-# ↀ Get yours today // Access • Update Terminal

[tranquil basin]

Thanks Tycho

[ionic tiger]

True. Btw did they ever say what happened to Lia? In 3 or 2?

[tranquil basin]

I think she got dismantled and sold throughout the pfhor

I’m sure she could’ve survived by uploading herself into pfhor network or something too

But last we heard she got dismantled n stuff

[swift jackal]

+Any news on those new Battleroids yet?

-# This message was sent from a Phor Network Terminal.
-# ↀ Get yours today // Access • Update Terminal

[tranquil basin]

Hope we’ll see them at some point

[swift jackal]

-Durandal gives no secrets unlike Leela.

-# This message was sent from a Phor Network Terminal.
-# ↀ Get yours today // Access • Update Terminal

[terse steppe]

Do the pilots of the runner shells have souls?

[sage lark]

Wdym by soul

We have left our bodies and uploaded ourselves (i guess our souls) into digital space

[hallow stag]

Do souls even exist in that universe?

[opal cairn]

She was added into a separate alien network and crashed it lol

[tranquil basin]

I think there is a quantifiable “soul” or consciousness in marathon, otherwise they’d just copy and paste the best minds to inhabit all of them

[swift jackal]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9rMu1XYB98&list=PLfZTtT3IEdDjQTHu3NqLjOUX65d4cDG54

[proven dagger]

If you want a really deep dive, comprehensive look, then I’d highly recommend Jeoku’s ‘Marathon In-Depth’ series on YouTube

That’s how I learned the lore, aside from playing the games

[bronze skiff]

Jeoku also just put out a full lore overview for all 3 og games

[proven dagger]

True, that one video would definitely be a better crash course than a 53-video playlist

[hallow stag]

I will play each game, check resources on it to see if I missed something during the playthrough, then a final recap after I'm don with infinity

Hopefully I will manage before the 26

[terse steppe]

This is so grimdark 😨 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfGYqHw0bqU

[tiny belfry]

The player themselves inhabiting Security Officers body could be considered a soul in some fashion. By that logic it's both the case of souls don't exist without the players interaction into the game.

[silk whale]

Ooooo I'm gonna watch this while I cook up breakfast burritos

[terse steppe]

enjoy 😄

[proven dagger]

I love your profile bio btw, that genuinely made me laugh out loud

[prisma palm]

If by soul you mean conciseness or there neural map then I suppose

[terse steppe]

Either way game is going to be fun 😊

[prisma palm]

Very

[wet temple]

its a SOMA situation where their consciousness is uploaded to seperate vessels, so if you consider the consciousness and the soul the same thing, then yes

but every time they lose their shell, their memories and sense of self get more and more scrambled

its like playing a game of telephone with your own experiences and identity where the telephone is the different shells they inhabit

[terse steppe]

Scrambled souls on toast

[wet temple]

thats why in the short film, you see Vandal and Assassin sitting and talking to that AI and being shown objects

they're objects/reminders of their past life that are used to ground them

[tulip grail]

Can explain how to play in 26 february ?

Have to download something?

[tranquil basin]

The download will just appear on steam or whatever console store u have

Idk if they’ll release the download early but u just download it and play

[golden blade]

Heyy

[tulip grail]

Thanks

[balmy maple]

It'd be so awesome if there were some simulacrums still left behind on the UESC Marton from the initial Phfor invasion and they looked exactly like the green BOBs. Like for almost a century, there were some left behind just roaming the empty halls of the ship aimlessly

Idk what'd be scarier. If they looked all dilapidated and rotten, or if they still looked pristine

Either way, it'd be sure to give fans of the classic trilogy an awful flashback

[tranquil basin]

That would be cool

Half frozen dudes in green jumpsuits

With no weewees

[balmy maple]

When your run on the UESC Marathon is going smoothly but you hear a muffled "FROG BLAST THE VENT CORE!" coming from the end of the hallway