Maniac (2023) is a series you might like. Despite the name, its more of a cassette futurism cyberpunk world with a scary amount of dystopian parallels to our own.

But I remember we did it. “Okay, Brian, the record’s five. The record’s five… Okay ready? Go!”

Because nobody made a Steam Deck until 2020. Everyone plays video games now and have for years, and unless you have a console, the only way to play 99% of video games is using Steam’s windows version or a specially adapted Linux .

Don’t get me wrong, the moment that Windows 11/12/etc. outright requires logging into a Microsoft account (Protip: As of this writing, using the email “no@thankyou.com” and submitting a blank password forces Windows 11 to let you make/log into a local user account) to use it, I’ll be installing Steam OS on my OneXFly, and it’s why I don’t use my “free” upgrade to 11 on my Windows 10 gaming desktop. I just don’t think you realize how big a deal compatibility really is for gaming.

Yes, but that’s because it motivated them to strike. That’s basically the less violent version of a riot.

NO! That poor kitty! 3 :<

Or breaks the glass on the Brownian flux capacitor.

…actually, what is the flux capacitor for, really? My theory is that it IS a real capacitor and thus related to energy storage/discharge.

I swear they should have run a virus scan or CCleaner or something on that thing. Even the Glitch Techs don’t have a holodeck THAT buggy!

I tailored my answers to that assumption. It’s a reality, even if a heavily-manipulated one, and the person(s) inside the simulation are as real as we are, given the description of “perfect simulation”.

So you’d created a clone slave of yourself. Ehrm… I’m not sure how to tell you this but…

Well, at least you actually want to have a beneficial legacy. That’s better than we can say about Zuckerberg, Trump or Musk.

Calculating… 404, problem “Entropy” not found. Please check the new information from the James Web Space telescope for possible reasons.

(look up “Trillion Year Old Universe” and realize that if true, that’s just how old the currently observable universe is, and reality as it is could be eternally going through cycles of stellar death and birth and would have always existed with no beginning)

Was going to mention this, I see you beat me to it.

The one that led to McBling and Reality TV. I wouldn’t try to force fashion to remain shiny bubblegum pop grafittipunk/shibiyapunk futurism to stick around or anything, I just think it had more staying power under normal conditions that was lost solely due to the nature of life from 2001-2008.

People don’t change fashion at the drop of a hat for financial crises, that just strengthens counterculture and futurism. They change their tastes suddenly when innocent people die in a new and unexpected way. That’s why art from the time period just before and during the Black Death is filled with more cynicism than even the past 7 years (roughly since Trump was elected), why an Oriental symbol of peace was ruined by the Nazis, and why the climate crisis has made FairPhone the only smartphone brand that survives without shoving ads down your throat.

Or at least, so it seems to me, I’m not a sociologist. What I also am not is petty or authoritarian, I’m not trying to make everyone wear 30 year old clothes or check their emails on an iLamp computer. I just know I’d like to see a world where people don’t have to rely on mass production to provide the things we need to live, because then you’re required to change your stuff out the moment it’s broken or obsolete.

My point is, I was trying to say your idea would make planned obsolescence and obsolescence in general themselves a relic of early civilization, so limiting such a world to one genre or style of product that only remains popular for ~10 years before becoming nothing but zeitgeist and nostalgia feels needlessly restrictive. I can see how it could be taken the opposite way, sorry about that!

Simulate one human life, from beginning to end, in a way that allows unethical experiments to be dismissed as recurring nightmares by the individual, and not cause permanent damage to this simulated person. When their life ends, I’d arrange to talk to them, explain everything, apologize for the necessity of the experiments, and offer him immortality and/or freedom with no strings attached. He can get a biological or robot body, or stay virtual, but it’s not up to anyone but him/her/? at that point.

I’d be fine with my life being an experiment under those circumstances as long as the results were put mostly to saving or improving lives, but I’d never be willing to put someone else in that position if I didn’t; if you couldn’t find a person like myself in real life with that opinion on the possibility, it’s unjustifiable. If, however, you engineered their life just enough to strongly encourage that level of altruism, and made it comfortable and not dehumanizing when not involved in an experiment as well as having a ban on cruelty and gaslighting in doing the experiments, and apologize for having to resort to these measures at all, I could see the person not being overly upset.

Whether it meets the code of ethics for scientific research is another matter.

Only if I get to live in a treehouse that’s bigger on the inside, become my persona character, and dress like 9/11 never happened and Y2K aesthetic continued until '08 or longer.

I’d upload everyone. I’d also give them something for their trouble, since apparently all religious people and all hardcore atheists hate the sci-fi story I wrote where humanity’s descendants resurrect everyone who ever died that was ever part of the Homo genus; the body their heart truly desires would be their VR avatar, though with delicious ironic caveats because if what your heart truly desires is money or power or fame over all other aspects, and that’s been detrimental to others, deserves to be trapped as a virtual solid gold statue or somesuch forever for being a selfish fuck.

Basically, what if heaven and hell were not places, but literally whether being your true self truly makes you happy? That hell is if you needed to rethink your shallow, fake or otherwise hollow-feeling lifestyle but didn’t do so soon enough and now you’re stuck looking and feeling like what you slowly come to hate about yourself or at least who you were when you died.

And they were nice enough to leave the unit they gifted to us locked inside, safely and visibly trapped in the bars of a cage where they can’t stab us with the pointy fork they invented!

I like both, but Spotify has far more tracks available these days. I’ve found songs on Spotify that just aren’t on iTunes at all.

Digimon World 2003. I never owned a PlayStation (was a Nintendo-only fanboy for years until I bought a PS2 in the mid-00s a year before the Xbox 360 was announced) and tried to run an emulator of it for over a decade before it was fully supported. I also had trouble because I found out the only English version that didn’t have that stupid “once you start fighting the final boss, you can’t explore the game world anymore” thing they used to do in JRPGs was the European version. Now I can actually play it, even using gameshark codes, easily… if I could only find the time to play it!