[NGTM-1R]

Back when I still FREDded, I fully intended to have the GTVA reading the Shivans' mail. It would have given the GTVA a desperately needed handle on the Shivan order of battle and maneuvering, but revealed almost nothing of their higher-order thinking.

The mystery is too important, I think, to solve, both from a writing perspective (it gives a writer options) and from a storytelling one.

[General Battuta]

It's solvable in both respects without compromising any of the Shivans' effect. You just gotta stay fly.

[General Battuta]

The art is all in the presentation, the selection of aspects and intimations, the sprezzatura.

[Kestrellius]

Yeah I've never been a fan of the "just don't explain anything" approach either. It sort of worked for Freespace 2, but that's because the series was cut short. If, say, Mass Effect 3 had done that...I know I would have been upset. With something like this, you only have one real option, which is to come up with an explanation that lives up to expectations.

[General Battuta]

Or you can double down on the best parts of FreeSpace 2 and just keep pulling back layers of assumption and human conceit in a terrible excavation towards the Lacanian real, answering nothing, constantly asking more terrifyingly cosmic permutations of Are we ****ed

That'd be dope, I'd write that. It'd be like Ligotti meets Peter Watts.

[NGTM-1R]

Or you can double down on the best parts of FreeSpace 2 and just keep pulling back layers of assumption and human conceit in a terrible excavation towards the Lacanian real, answering nothing, constantly asking more terrifyingly cosmic permutations of Are we ****ed

That'd be dope, I'd write that. It'd be like Ligotti meets Peter Watts.

That's pretty much where I intended to go. Hell, in the campaign where I actually intended to do Shivan POV missions, it was going to be a major theme; they're always so calm about everything, like they're in total control. The GTVA side is over talking about great victories and the Shivan side is "meh, they blew up a couple juggernauts, redeploy the fleet some and we'll sort this out". Everything you find out just leads you further towards the conclusion you're ****ed.

But it's never explicit why the Shivans want us dead. It's never entirely explicit they do want us dead, even.

[General Battuta]

That's pretty much where I intended to go. Hell, in the campaign where I actually intended to do Shivan POV missions, it was going to be a major theme; they're always so calm about everything, like they're in total control. The GTVA side is over talking about great victories and the Shivan side is "meh, they blew up a couple juggernauts, redeploy the fleet some and we'll sort this out". Everything you find out just leads you further towards the conclusion you're ****ed.

But it's never explicit why the Shivans want us dead. It's never entirely explicit they do want us dead, even.

Sounds baller. If you aren't up to speed you should swing by the BP forum and ask the analysts to fill you in, I think you'd like a lot of the stuff they're finding (and I'd be very happy to have your reaction.)

While we are here on this favorite topic of mine here are my thoughts on the basic, seductive Shivan Answers:

Shivans are ancient von Neumann machines executing a program of scouring and supernova: as close as we have to canon, explains Capella and the Ancients. Simple. Allows some decent cosmic horror. But very familiar and leverages neither Bosch's crazy monologues nor the 'symptom of a larger problem' hint from . Can tell a fine story if you present it well.

Shivans are gardeners on ethical or ecological grounds: ugh. Let's set aside the awful 'protecting subspace' variant and go for 'suppress hegemonic species'. Cosmic judgment or diversity protection seems supported by the FS1 outro. Reasonably elegant and believable. Doesn't do a great job with Bosch's motives - why would he think it was necessary to ally with the Shivans and ditch the Vasudans if they like nice people? Doesn't do much to explain Capella, though you could finagle it. Appealing creator/destroyer duality but the presence of clear objectives diminishes menace.

Shivan hostility is the result of a misunderstanding: even attributing individual consciousness to the Shivans softens their menace. I am very wary of any theory which posits common merkwelt or the basis for semiotic exchange. Does nothing in particular to use any of the clues V left for us, which attribute only direct violence and puzzling violence to the Shivans. Makes Bosch seem like a dork nerd.

Shivans are a space bug hive mind with queens and ****: get out

Shivans are a Nash equilibrium in a game between civilization strategies: hellll yeah now we're getting places. I mean this doesn't explain **** but it's not lazy and it doesn't lean on habits of anthropocentrism.

Shivans are an irreconciliably alien force whose role in the narrative is to corrode the deep assumptions of human primacy: yes but it's cheating to stop there

I dunno, what did I miss.

So would you be okay with me PMing you my ideas? I would love to talk to someone about it.

NGTM-1R: That actually sounds really cool.

Yeah hit me up, or both of us. Also I just ran the Installer on Blue Planet/Blue Planet 2 and it worked fine! Try it. Go to custom, select those two and the 2014 MVPs if you don't have them.

[General Battuta]

I have an obvious bias towards treating as much of the canonical material as possible as meaningful and clue-rich. If you want to treat Bosch as a knob and get rid of 'symptom of a larger problem', that simplifies things a bit.

[Kestrellius]

Yeah I much prefer Bosch being right the whole time. For some reason it's just very compelling to think that we were on the wrong side for the entirety of FS2.

Okay, so the installer says that it installed all the mods it's supposed to, including AoA and a bunch of others. But I don't have them in my folder. I do have War in Heaven, as well as some other mods. The only thing I can think of is that a while back, I tried several times to install the SCP, but didn't know what I was doing. I currently have seven or so copies of everything. However, the first couple times, I remember that some of the mods failed to download. Later on they all worked, but if those early failures somehow made the launcher think they were installed when they weren't...

[General Battuta]

Sure you picked the right target folder? You might need to figure out where the installer's log file lives and delete that.

You can always do a manual install, it's pretty easy. Make sure all the files here end up in /blueplanet/. If you've already got War in Heaven you're set there. Make sure they're in the same folder.

Make sure you have the 2014 MVPs in the same folder too, with its default filename.

I think learning about how real bugs work is much more useful to writing good Shivans than any science fictional bugs.

[General Battuta]

Here are some things people value in decisionmaking and organization:

Efficient, top-down application of resources. Build a model of the problem. Figure out how to solve it. Don't waste time on trial and error.
Low latency.
Hierarchical networks of decision. Information flows up. Decisions flow down. Territories of choice are delineated cleanly.
Economy of labor. Economy of risk.
Seek safety when securing gains. Accept risk when avoiding losses.
Use past trends to evaluate future outcomes. When you're beaten, figure out what went wrong. Fix it.

[niffiwan]

Sure you picked the right target folder? You might need to figure out where the installer's log file lives and delete that.

I think you want to delete this file to make the installer "forget everything".

Code: [Select]

c:\users\NAME\fsoinstaller.properties


[Kestrellius]

I think learning about how real bugs work is much more useful to writing good Shivans than any science fictional bugs.

I can't even tell if you're talking about insects or glitches

Also, I'm not entirely certain what your point is with the "how to run a business" thing. I mean...not to be rude.

[Goober5000]

Here are some things people value in decisionmaking and organization:

Who is leaning on habits of anthropocentrism now?

Case in point:

Efficient, top-down application of resources. Build a model of the problem. Figure out how to solve it. Don't waste time on trial and error.

Alternatively, devote all your time to trial and error.  Throw every single possible thing at the problem and see what works and what doesn't.  For the things that work, explore variations.  This approach to problem-solving can be found in neural network programming, genetic algorithms, and even emergent behavior in chaotic systems such as ants foraging for food.  (Hey look, a colony with a queen!)

It's also why SpaceX has been so successful designing rockets: they went back to the drawing board on everything.  This may be why some people contend that Elon Musk is actually an alien.

[General Battuta]

[The E]

Here are some things people value in decisionmaking and organization:

Who is leaning on habits of anthropocentrism now?

Question is, are Shivans people? Is their cognitive model one that uses those structures?

What Batts wrote was a recognizably human method of decisionmaking. But what if Shivans are not using something similar?

Case in point:

Efficient, top-down application of resources. Build a model of the problem. Figure out how to solve it. Don't waste time on trial and error.

Alternatively, devote all your time to trial and error.  Throw every single possible thing at the problem and see what works and what doesn't.  For the things that work, explore variations.  This approach to problem-solving can be found in neural network programming, genetic algorithms, and even emergent behavior in chaotic systems such as ants foraging for food.  (Hey look, a colony with a queen!)

Well, hello there significant plot point of BP2.

[Phantom Hoover]

Alternatively, devote all your time to trial and error.  Throw every single possible thing at the problem and see what works and what doesn't.  For the things that work, explore variations.  This approach to problem-solving can be found in neural network programming, genetic algorithms, and even emergent behavior in chaotic systems such as ants foraging for food.  (Hey look, a colony with a queen!)

It's also why SpaceX has been so successful designing rockets: they went back to the drawing board on everything.  This may be why some people contend that Elon Musk is actually an alien.

Your first paragraph describes something almost diametrically opposed to your second, yet you're trying to use them as examples of the same approach to decisionmaking. That casts serious doubt on your understanding of the topic at hand, especially compared to some of the other people discussing it.

[General Battuta]

That post is a list of things

people value

in decisionmaking and organization. These are anthropocentric assumptions that you should challenge in writing Shivans!

For the past two and a half years, across the span of Tenebra and several thousand words of fiction, the Blue Planet team has been laying out alternatives! We've been lucky to work with neural net designers, decision theorists, and evolutionary biologists to come up with some crazy **** about space economics, Steele tactics, subspace cognition, and how alien modes of thought might fight each other. It all started with messages hidden in UV maps way back in 2010's BP2 release, then really blew up after Tenebra. If you like Shivans, play Tenebra! (or you could cheat and watch this)

The important thing when writing aliens is to challenge assumptions. Remember -

I think learning about how real bugs work is much more useful to writing good Shivans than any science fictional bugs.

An ant colony or a bee hive functions on an internal logic that's much weirder and more complicated than laypeople assume. Check it out. It'll amp up your writing.

This is one of my favorite machine learning stories, about an evolutionary algorithm designing computer chips.

s predicted, the principle of natural selection could successfully produce specialized circuits using a fraction of the resources a human would have required. And no one had the foggiest notion how it worked.


Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest-- with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output-- yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.

2 spooky

On SpaceX and rapid prototyping, if you're into grungy space engineering you should read Seveneves.

[General Battuta]

Here are some things people value in decisionmaking and organization:

Efficient, top-down application of resources. Build a model of the problem. Figure out how to solve it. Don't waste time on trial and error.
Low latency.
Hierarchical networks of decision. Information flows up. Decisions flow down. Territories of choice are delineated cleanly.
Economy of labor. Economy of risk.
Seek safety when securing gains. Accept risk when avoiding losses.
Use past trends to evaluate future outcomes. When you're beaten, figure out what went wrong. Fix it.

What do Shivans value in decisionmaking and organization, based on what we see in FS1 and FS2? Do these values change between the games? Why might that be?

[Goober5000]

Here are some things people value in decisionmaking and organization:

Who is leaning on habits of anthropocentrism now?

Question is, are Shivans people? Is their cognitive model one that uses those structures?

What Batts wrote was a recognizably human method of decisionmaking. But what if Shivans are not using something similar?

Yes, that was what I was driving at.  I found it odd that Battuta left such an obvious assumption in his post, since I know he's done a great deal of thinking about Shivan thought processes.  Though perhaps he was intentionally leaving a gap that he would come back to fill in later (such as this post).

Well, hello there significant plot point of BP2.

Is it?  I confess it's been quite a while since I've played BP2, and I haven't yet played Tenebra.

Your first paragraph describes something almost diametrically opposed to your second, yet you're trying to use them as examples of the same approach to decisionmaking. That casts serious doubt on your understanding of the topic at hand, especially compared to some of the other people discussing it.

You must not be very familiar with SpaceX's design processes.  They don't have a "process" as such, and they don't do systems integration.  Instead, they test and test and test.

If you like Shivans, play Tenebra!

I keep reminding myself that I have to do that.