Episode 24, Urban Conflict, continued…
The second half of a two-parter which went over the 1.5 hour mark. After a week of cliffhanger, you can finally exhale.
♃ 01.57 — Will a corporation ever go to war for moral reasons? Corbeau says ‘maybe,’ Ashtaar says ‘define war.’ It’s hard to imagine war without crazed governments. Maybe Genotype?
♃ 07.28 — Hints have been dropped on this one—transcendent technology opened up a lot of strange religion. In some lights, it IS a strange religion. The dominant arm of TTI seems to be waging war against smaller cults, or “universities.” This seems to be part of the world of 2.0 but we’ll likely learn about it in the Lorebook.
♃ 10.17 — Ashtaar points out, again, that we’ve been trivializing a bit with the running “starbarks vs. doughnut beast” joke. Corporations are such a bedrock part of HSD culture that corporate conflict could take a huge range of forms. Anyway.
♃ 12.39 — See the “Street Smart” monograph, chapter 5/page 51 or so, where Rand uses a metaphor of overlays on a map to illustrate social terrain, economic hurdles, resource targets. At least I think it’s a metaphor, I’m not sure. We’ll make some sort of hand-out on this soon. It’s a neat concept.
♃ 14.56 — Slightly non-intuitive idea. In a town revolving around, say, manufacturing, crippling a manufacturing plant really isn’t a meaningful gesture. Scarcity is a high priority in picking targets. Hmm.
♃ 21.16 — Ashtaar expands on non-city conflicts – Space ports, blueskys, and so on.
♃ 26.43 — Turning the conversation to victory conditions, and what that might mean in an urban context…
32.22 — Related, let’s talk about deception, the whole “trojan horse” scenario. Hiding your force size, misdirecting opponents, and so on.
Much of the following ramble on deception and camouflage was lifted from this article on MentalFloss on wartime decoys. Neat neat stuff.
41.45 — the Tokyo 41 story, a retro-version of a steam game as promotion stunt…
44.20 — What’s awesome this week? Corbeau is taken by an article on welding spider silk to kevlar, but thinks the need for such a technology wasn’t clearly established. Ashtaar reviews the meme of the suicidal robot in DC, Whines talks about the “Nazis against Nazis” campaign (which is an awesome exercise in reverse psychology)
With thanks to Sirius Beat for our intro music, “Future Club,” and outro music, “Tronicles.” Our fun, modular header art is by Absyfield , (Thank you Ashley!) and Whines is our audio engineer.
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