Deimos: It’s not just an asteroid. We also have disc-golf.
This week is Episode 10 (yay round numbers!) Wherein your hosts expose the vast piles of ignorance they have on the subject of everybody’s second-favorite artificial life form, Cogs!
♃ 01.00 — Meet the hosts! What would YOUR unnecessary upgrade be? The milkshake dispenser is always a perennial favorite.
♃ 02.20 — Not a heck of a lot new this fortnight on either Radio Free Deimos or the Hc Svnt Dracones line. Instead, we took a brief look at the Kickstarter for Plate Mail Games’ new line of ambient audio loops for the Numenera game. If you’re not familiar, Numenera was the indie darling game on Kickstarter a few years back, one of the best-funded RPG kickstarters ever. It’s a surreal far-future world where the idea of seperating tech and magic is pretty meaningless, we’re in deep sci-fi-weird territory. Numenera’s author Monte Cook goes way back in gaming; he was a major writer for Planescape, a much-loved setting from 2nd edition D&D back in 1993 or so. It’s a little off-topic, but the sci-fi weirdness should work well as HSD background noise. Worth a listen.
♃ 03.35 — Apparently I’ll be talking about John Tynes again. No regrets. “Puppetland” is his dark, dark game set in a puppet show world, where Punch of “Punch and Judy” fame has risen up and killed the puppeteer. “Powerkill” is Tynes’s RPG thought experiment wherein the players explore where the Fun And Excitement (FAE) of tabletop RPGs comes from: barely sublimated criminal deviancy. It’s possible that Powerkill has influenced my gaming more than any other product, definitely more than any product under 5 pages.
♃ 04.40 — Meanwhile, on the HSD Tumblr, author Pierce Fraser has been answering a lot of questions, with a fun little ramble on what happens when you put 1000+ “Followed” vectors on a space ship (spoiler: everybody dies) and some talk about the “Legacy Memory” character trait.
♃ 05.30 — Questions and Opinions: This week’s topic was suggested by the HSD official Discord chat: “Are Cogsunes Sentient?” In the balance, this was kind of a nonquestion for the hosts, since Cogsunes have individuality and creativity—they just can’t grow. Feel free to attempt to enjoy Wikipedia’s article on sentience. But since cogsunes, happy robot research-bots, are created as a sort of slave race, albeit a very high-functioning one, the question seems worth unpacking.
♃ 16.30 — Whines…really likes fennecs. (art art art)
♃ 17.04 — Not quite “actual play,” but we thought it might be useful and fun to unpack last week’s game for just a few minutes, particularly in the ways it lets us look at the evening’s topic. Most recently our characters botched a “heist” mission and fled from one end of Phobos to the other, and encountered the Station of Misfit Cogs. I deleted the section of the pirate captain buyspot manager fox from Pulse, because it just sounded incoherent. Arrr.
♃ 22.25 — Finally, to the topic! Cogs: Hc Svnt Dracones‘s robot race. The Cogs are more human in so many ways than vectors, and perhaps more relatable? A contrast in alien exteriors and very organic spirits.
♃ 25.01 — The play “R.U.R.” by Karel Capek introduced robots to science fiction, and more generally opened up the idea of robots to the world. Whines later added that perhaps the story he was remembering referenced R.U.R.,
♃ 28.12 — 1989 film “The Abyss” was a deep dive into an undersea claustrophobic world. The alien water tentacle scene is a good model for the vector’s flowform water-shaping technology.
♃ 28.21 — Goo girls – an Anime/Manga female monsterish female-figured creature made out of some sort of transparent or mostly transparent semi-liquid. Any more description here and we lose our Itunes “clean” rating.
♃ 32.59 — Name-drop for Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (whew!) who floated the “Theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics.” The classic example of this theory is that because a giraffe stretched its neck as far as it could to reach the top leaves, its child would have a long neck. There’s the old idea that if a mom is, say, scared by a cow when pregnant, her child will…maybe they’ll just like milk. Maybe they’ll have horns. I can’t remember if that idea was related to Lamarckian evolution or not, they seem thematically linked…
♃ 32.59 — Name-drop for Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (whew!) who floated the “Theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics.” The classic example of this theory is that because a giraffe stretched its neck as far as it could to reach the top leaves, its child would have a long neck. There’s the old idea that if a mom is, say, scared by a cow when pregnant, her child will…maybe they’ll just like milk. Maybe they’ll have horns. I can’t remember if that idea was related to Lamarckian evolution or not, they seem thematically linked…
♃ 36.13 — This particular aside calls back to Episode 2, 04.38, where we answer NekojiruSou’s question, “Can a Cog be used as the mind of a living space ship?”
♃ 49.30 — Thusfar Whines has not been able to remember the name or author of this short story. He said, “It’s in an anthology somewhere, and probably has a smart-ass title. One of the characters is an undercover fast food additive investigator, and his ninja tools are in a carton of french fries. Also there’s a food additive that turns you into a werewolf.” Surprisingly, I haven’t been able to google this. Anyone?
♃ 55.10 — another gratuitous movie reference drop, this one to “Demon Seed”
♃ 57.49 — I’m pretty sure we’re going to have an episode on vector families four or five episodes from now…
♃ 1.01.15 — Here’s the concept: the AI that secretly controls the Cogsunes, a group which can come up with amazing inventions, can draw from the creative potential of the vast bank of intelligences that is the Cog Afterlife. There is no reason why CogsuneMom would not do this thing, it’s not an ethical creature, and that’s a huge, huge cloud of inspiration…
♃ 1.10.50 — Longbow! A magical wonderland, an asteroid base where animal-shaped vectors go to live a life “red in tooth and claw.” Neither safe nor sane. Also, enjoy “Brave Little Toaster” if you’re not familiar with that Disney masterpiece.
♃ 1.17.17 — Role Playing Public Radio‘s been doling out their HSD campaign “Echoes of the Past” for the last month or so. HSD purists may have some challenges with a new table grappling with the world, but they’ve got some fun ideas! I particularly love their Tank Girl style satire of “Rifts.”
♃ 1.19.39 — The strange world of Skin Horse, beginning with its sentient Apache helicopter…
♃ ?.??.?? — Have we talked about World Tree yet? We must have. World Tree is an indie TRPG from Bard Bloom and Victoria Bloom, a furry game published in 2000. In this game, the gods made a lovely world in a tree of perhaps infinite size, with leaves that can support towns. Each race of World Tree is a slightly different version of “anthro” and a slightly different take on civilization, each race made by their own god in their own image (or at least a reflection of that god’s personality and worldview.) Where the heck in this episode was that…
♃ 1.21.26 — What’s Awesome! This week Whines is interested in Ars Technica’s article on the pneumatic subway that was eaten by rats. I can’t find a reference to the leather train tracks, though.
♃ 1.23.25 — Corbeau wants to bring up a new book: “Furry Fandom Conventions, 1985-2015” below (This Amazon Affiliate gives us a tiny kickback, feel free to use it if you like the podcast!), because 1) it’s interesting, 2) IARP researcher Kathy Gerbasi wrote the intro and she’s pretty awesome, and 3) Corbeau fed the author the information for the section on Texas Furry Fiesta. He’s also the web guy for IARP, so there’s layers of horn-tooting here.
He also wants to talk a bit about the sci-fi film “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” which is by the director of “Fifth Element” and seems to hit on a lot of those notes with a nice tech upgrade.
♃ 1.27.15 — Ashtaar waxes enthusiastic on liquid metallic hydrogen. Neat!
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Personally I think that Cogs and Cogsune represent the two differing approaches to Artificial Intelligence, “bottom-up” vs “top-down”. Cogs grow and develop from a relatively simple algorithm to a very complex one, while Cogsune are programmed to be complete at activation.
Also, I thought it said that the “mechanical womb” was a marketing flop. Cogs and Vectors can interbreed but the kids take more after their mom, Cogs always give birth to Cogs and Vectors always pop out Vectors. And Cogsune don’t breed at all.
That interpretation of AI works for me! Cogsune do learn, but they don’t change much. Cogs evolve constantly.
The “mechanical womb” is one of those places where the friendly and silly tone of the Lore section of HSD doesn’t match with the facts in HSD Extended. In HSD, the womb is thrown in as a joke. In HSDExt it’s given a substantial amount of text, and appears to be how Vectors and Cogs can interbreed–although the text vaguely says it’s an “option.” One problem I’ve always had with the HSD writing is that the author tends to really go the extra mile to include jokes, even when they don’t belong there.
A little later they talk about breeding: Mom Cogs always have little cogs, daddy Cogs *can* (emphasis is mine) have organic offspring if their mother is a Vector. I interpreted that as “flip a coin, it could go either way.” But in context, I’m not entirely sure. If cogs were placental it would make sense that the organic nutrients a mommy vector provides wouldn’t work for a cog offspring. However, cogs are an egg-laying species (no, really, see upper left of HSDExt1.0p61). According to the rules of how Vectors reproduce, if an egg-laying male breeds with a placental female, the female lays an egg. (HSDExt1.0p182) Given that whimsical rule, it’s not 100% out of the question that a female Vector might give birth to a Cog child as an egg (which would to some degree isolate her child from her biology), but since Vectors were built prior to Cogs and wouldn’t be automatically compatible, this may not make sense.
On the other other hand, all vector/cog reproduction requires some sort of accessory to analyze genetics and create compatibility, and once you add in a magic ASR technology product to the mix, I don’t think you an CONCLUSIVELY rule anything out.
All that said, I think the saner approach is what you’ve suggested.