2014 was forever ago, and Gardner Dozois is no longer with us, but I just finished reading Nancy Kress' award-winning novella in his Year's Best anthology.  Yes, I would go.  The chance of six thousand lifetimes.

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6/6 '20 1 Comment
Noooo! He will be missed.
 
 
 
 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4227879-is-data-human-the-metaphysics-of-star-trek

I gave this book, "Is Data Human? The Metaphysics of Star Trek", to my friend Chris shortly before he died from complications of muscular dystrophy.  I don't know whether he had time to read it.

It ponders a lot of the philosophical conundrums inspired by Star Trek tech, such as androids and transporters.  Our friend Tom B. says that he's chill with the idea of being scanned, destroyed, and re-created as an identical copy.  But what if the process goes awry?  This happens to Commander Will Riker, who winds up with a "twin" eventually named Thomas.  Is the "duplicate" going to be just as sanguine about being destroyed to balance the equations?  What if it's unclear which copy is "excess"?

If you played Rock-Paper-Scissors with yourself to solve this problem, would you keep tying endlessly, or are you already different enough to make different choices?  If you're already different, are you really exact duplicates?

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3/24 '20 1 Comment
this thread is the definitive exploration of the subject:

https://twitter.com/StorySlug/status/1242077170043936769
 

My son and I went to see "No Exit" at the community college theatre. It's a three-person study of the thesis that "Hell is other people."

What would you do in such a room for all eternity?

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2/9 '20 2 Comments
Probably waste time on Twitter.

(I am a poser, I haven't seen the play.)
I'm afraid that your cell phone has most likely been confiscated.

INEZ: Don't worry. I've a glass in my bag. It's gone! They must have taken it from me at the entrance.
 

My trusty steed Ki-Rin-Tin-Tin was killed by a wand of death.
Then I managed to explode my bag of holding, my two primary weapons, and quite a lot of other useful things.
And Ki-Rin-Tin-Tin-Too was disintegrated by a black dragon!
So I limped onward, no longer a mounted knight but determined as ever.
"The guardian Angel of Lugh will not accept the name Cool Hand of Lugh."
I went to my reward with 3285282 points, happy just to have made it.

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11/22 '19 7 Comments
O my stars, they are still iterating on the game
They are iterating both it and several wildly differing variants:
* nethack the original, v3.6.1 and counting.
* unnethack - kitchen sink of additions, harder than vanilla, very actively developed.
* Slash'em/Slash'em Extended/SlashThem - I play this one a lot, basically 3.4.3 with new roles, races, monsters, artifacts, longer dungeon, shorter Gehennom. Kinda hard. Playing as a Vampire wizard is super fun. Playing as a Doppleganger is OP AF. Dev seems stalled for most of these subvariants.
* dNethack - new and actively changing as we speak, new mechanics for almost everything, WAY harder monsters, new roles that are basically impossible to ascend, Elbereth replaced with a series of Wards and spirit bindings that convey an intrinsic but only if you don't break conduct...easily the most complicated and difficult of the current variants. You can play as an android or a convict or a time traveler from the future who doesn't know why he has all these crazy plasma weapons etc.
* FiqHack - mostly UI and QoL improvements...didn't do much for me.
* GruntHack - intended to be harder; can't say, never tried it.

I think that's the major ones? AceHack and NitroHack got folded into one or more of those...NetHack4 became FiqHack I think...NetHack Fourk might be active.

Still a great (set of) game(s).
https://alt.org/nethack/hterm/ has NetHack 3.6.2, using a very convenient interface so you don't have to download or install anything. But now I need to play a time traveller? Aw, man.

https://ascension.run/hterm/ appears to have many of the variants Paul listed.
Hm, getting unstable connectivity to that variant site, it seems.
OH MY STARS AND GARTERS I can watch random people play nethack this is so much better than playing nethack
Oh, and you can send them a scroll of mail with your kibbitzing thoughts. That's fun.
 

There's nothing more dangerous than putting on your blessed greased +2 gray dragon scale mail in the morning and thinking that you're invulnerable.

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11/6 '19 2 Comments
Bag End. I can't believe I'm still in Bag End.
Baaaaaaaaaahahahahahahaha.

I lost a level 24 wiz-elf-mal-cha to a cross-aligned artifact blast last week.

30 years on, the game still catches me being sloppy every. Time.