Ley Lines Issue #4: Desert Heat
Greetings, Wanderer.
Welcome back to Ley Lines.
This time we’re talking about some of my favourite topics: Sci-Fi. Space. Photos. Stick around.
4.1 The Absolute Vastness Of It All When I started this series on my blog I wanted it to be a catch-all of my interests and curiosities, and I sometimes worry that over the past few issues I’ve strayed into the moor mundane or topical of these: advertising, technology, music.
When I saw the image below somewhere on my cyber-wanderings I was instantly reminded of just what I wanted these posts to be. It’s this kind of thing that makes me think about the absolutely fear-inducing vastness of the known universe.
4.2 HEAT Photos Apparently Michael Mann has been dropping behind the scenes photos from HEAT for the film’s 30th Anniversary.
I previously wrote about Michael Mann (and his earlier version of HEAT (called LA Takedown) here.
4.3 My Friend The Photographer
My friend Kirsten is an all-around rad lady: She’s a killer snowboarder, adventuress, and drone pilot/photographer.
Her latest photos from a trip to Peru are amazing. See all of them on her Instagram.
4.4 NEMESIS On Saturday my friends and I sat down for a game of NEMESIS: A board game that is 100% as close as you can get to a realistic experience of the ALIENS movies without being officially licensed.
The game starts with the players in the cryo-sleep room, having just been woken up after something goes wrong on the ship. Amnesia means that they don’t know the layout (the rooms are revealed by flipping over tiles).
What I loved about it:
Individual and secret objectives make it feel like the characters all have their own individual motives and creates more intrigue or dynamics between you and the other players. You’re allowed to talk about your objective, but you can’t show the card.
The tension ratchets up at a very good pass.
The minis that come with the game are small for the player characters and massive for the aliens. This physicality makes them feel like the big dangerous baddies that they are.
The game is DEEP! There are whole areas and aspects of it that we didn’t get a chance to explore. Things like research trees, the alien nest, and crafting weapons and tools.
We played with 3 people and it was very good. I would LOVE to play with 5 people. Just that many more people running around on the ship would create more chaos and create more intrigue between the players who might have competing objectives.
I play games with the same group of guys pretty regularly, and this was the first time in a LONG time that I won, so maybe I’m a bit partial to the game. But the ending also felt very cinematic: I managed to exit out via an escape pod with my objective items just before the ship exploded. And a last-minute scan also revealed that I wasn’t contaminated .
Honourable Mention: If NEMESIS is like ALIEN or ROMULUS, then Level 7 Omega Protocol is like ALIENS. It’s got great battles between space marines and aliens (and lots of great tactical choices), but less sneaking.
4.5 Iain Banks & AI One of my favourite places of the internet is the R/PrintSf sub reddit. The other day there was a great thread about Iain Banks and his mentions of AI and art. I liked this comment which extracts part of the book Look To Windward:
A composer asks a Mind (a kind of super advanced sentient AI) if it could create a symphony as good as what he himself creates. The Mind confirms that it can.
"So what," the Chelgrian asked, "is the point of me or anybody else writing a symphony, or anything else?"
The avatar raised its brows in surprise. "Well, for one thing, you do it, it's you who gets the feeling of achievement."
"Ignoring the subjective. What would be the point for those listening to it?"
"They'd know it was one of their own species, not a Mind, who created it."
"Ignoring that, too; suppose they weren't told it was by an AI, or didn't care."
"If they hadn't been told then the comparison isn't complete; information is being concealed. If they don't care, then they're unlike any group of humans I've ever encountered."
"But if you can—"
"Ziller, are you concerned that Minds—AIs, if you like—can create, or even just appear to create, original works of art?"
"Frankly, when they're the sort of original works of art that I create, yes."
"Ziller, it doesn't matter. You have to think like a mountain climber."
"Oh, do I?"
"Yes. Some people take days, sweat buckets, endure pain and cold and risk injury and—in some cases—permanent death to achieve the summit of a mountain only to discover there a party of their peers freshly arrived by aircraft and enjoying a light picnic."
"If I was one of those climbers I'd be pretty damned annoyed."
"Well, it is considered rather impolite to land an aircraft on a summit which people are at that moment struggling up to the hard way, but it can and does happen. Good manners indicate that the picnic ought to be shared and that those who arrived by aircraft express awe and respect for the accomplishment of the climbers.
"The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they'd wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages."
I read Look To Windward probably a decade after it first came out. And then again and again afterwards and like most of The Culture books it has kept its nuanced hooks in my grey matter.
I likely didn’t think much of that passage above when I first read it: the concept of generative AI was still years and years away, and it was just another interesting conversation between among many interesting and meandering conversations about life and creation and death and art in the book.
But re-reading it now hits particularly hard. And it made me re-open my blog so that I could write this. Not because I needed to share something about AI or random stuff I found online but because I wanted to stretch my mind and fingers, to type, to think, to write, to make.
That’s it for this edition of Ley Lines. Thanks for reading. Or you’re welcome for the content.
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Heatwave and poison