Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
I haven't watched a new Bond movie in many years but I'd watch the hell out of the next one if you wrote the screenplay based on this idea.

Funny you should say that since that idea was spawned from a game I like to play called the Bond Supervillain Game. The object of the game is to come up with apocalyptic or near apocalyptic scenarios (which seem... er.... plausible enough) that CANNOT BE TRACED TO A SOURCE. Another idea: a fake communications satellite housing an ultradense metal ball (like a giant bullet) and either slighshotting it around the Moon or dropping it from orbit onto a bedrock of shale or some material that would create a cloud of dust that would envelop the Earth for, say, 10 years. Timing here is the key so you get a direct hit.
 

droid

Well-known member
You know this thought has crept into my head from time to time over the past couple years: What if a landlocked bad actor in the East (China, Russia, N Korea if we have a falling out) dropped nukes on the blue ice in Greenland when it is exposed in the Summer? Wouldn't this trigger a cascading melt effect that would instantly submerge the eastern seaboard of the US and most of Western Europe? And isn't Greenland unrestricted airspace or at least unmonitored for nuclear subs and the like? You might not even need nukes, and it would hit so fast no one would know who was responsible.

Ha! I have an unfinished short story along those lines except its radical environmentalists attempting to trigger a breakdown in the gulfstream by detonating nuclear material in the defunct US greenland base, resulting in a mini ice age in the US and Western Europe followed by an increase in albedo and refreezing of the arctic, thus saving the world from climate change and forcing the worst offenders to face the consequences of their (in)actions.

Scary thing is there is a not 0% chance that this may happen anyway. It happened before when breaches in ice walls in Canada and the US sent a deluge of fresh water into the north atlantic, resulting in the rapid freezing of Northern Europe.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Fair point.

I like the idea of:

* inserting DNA from liberty caps into cultivated mushrooms so they make a fuckton of psilocybin but look and taste normal
* infiltrate the North American mushroom farming business and get all mushroom farmers using this new GM spawn
* promote a 'National Pizza Day' or similar
* enough people are now tripping balls to send the USA into total meltdown
* at this point your forces strike, and within a week you've declared yourself Dictator
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
I don't know. That many people tripping simultaneously on mushrooms might create some kind of indestructible hive mind. I just envision everyone falling into a collective trance, humming at some weird insect/alien frequency, and being welcomed into like a benevolent galactic ecosystem of intelligent beings.

But back to the original question. Yes. Yes I am scared. Of myself. My last three Google searches were "blockchain money laundering", "what does heart meat taste like?," and "what does human meat taste like?" My last box from Amazon contained two 7.5" meat hooks, two hand wraps, and a bottle of PG solution.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I don't know. That many people tripping simultaneously on mushrooms might create some kind of indestructible hive mind. I just envision everyone falling into a collective trance, humming at some weird insect/alien frequency, and being welcomed into like a benevolent galactic ecosystem of intelligent beings.

Hmm, that could be how the would-be supervillain's plan backfires. Or maybe it's what the mushrooms had in mind all along, and he was just a tool in their grand cosmic plan?

But back to the original question. Yes. Yes I am scared. Of myself. My last three Google searches were "blockchain money laundering", "what does heart meat taste like?," and "what does human meat taste like?" My last box from Amazon contained two 7.5" meat hooks, two hand wraps, and a bottle of PG solution.

Please never stop being weird.
 

luka

Well-known member
What's changed over the last few summers is that climate change has shifted from an abstract hypothesis to something inescapably real, something you can feel burning your skin. Summer temperatures ten degrees hotter than those of childhood. It's not a question of reading newspaper reports of polar ice caps melting or Pacific atolls shrinking. It's a question of your brain frying in the skull pan. This adds a huge current of latent hysteria to daily life and extinction rebellion was able to start harvesting that barely suppressed state of panic and others will continue to do so. That there has been no action to address the issue merely adds to the hysteria and this I expect to continue to boiling point. I think we are frightened.
 

version

Well-known member
Are we all, without realising it, taking part in a vast witness protection programme? Did we observe, at some time in the distant past, a deeply disturbing event in which we were closely implicated? Were we then assigned new identities, new personalities, fears and dreams so convincing that we have forgotten who we really are?

-- Ballard, 2005.
 

luka

Well-known member
Are we all, without realising it, taking part in a vast witness protection programme? Did we observe, at some time in the distant past, a deeply disturbing event in which we were closely implicated? Were we then assigned new identities, new personalities, fears and dreams so convincing that we have forgotten who we really are?

-- Ballard, 2005.

I think that the unconscious conceals a universal trauma it is our job to uncover, piece by piece.
 

version

Well-known member
Are we all, without realising it, taking part in a vast witness protection programme? Did we observe, at some time in the distant past, a deeply disturbing event in which we were closely implicated? Were we then assigned new identities, new personalities, fears and dreams so convincing that we have forgotten who we really are?

-- Ballard, 2005.

That unpleasantness, needless to say, is ourselves, a damp bundle of passions, needs and neuroses that conceal our secret nature. The disturbing event we witnessed in the past is the experience of being alive, a state of affairs that Cronenberg most definitely does not take at face value.

Existence, in Cronenberg's eyes, is the ultimate pathological state. He sees us as fragile creatures with only a sketchy idea of who we are, nervous of testing our physical and mental limits. The characters in Cronenberg's films behave as if they are inhabiting their minds and bodies for the first time at the moment we observe them, fumbling with the controls like drivers in a strange vehicle. Will it rise vertically into the air, invert itself, or suddenly self-destruct?

-- also Ballard, 2005.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Apparently some people are angry about this Franzen thing on the inevitability of the "climate apocalypse."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending

What If We Stopped Pretending?

The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.

I can see why people might not like the message, but it has the cold ring of truth to it, I think.

Perhaps a denial that catastrophic change in the next few decades is now inevitable has become another sort of 'climate change denialism' for some greens?
 

version

Well-known member
You also have to take into account that it's Franzen and people love to hate him. He has a history of making statements which are either tone deaf or deliberately provocative.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
You also have to take into account that it's Franzen and people love to hate him. He has a history of making statements which are either tone deaf or deliberately provocative.
I read that the other day and it was so confused... not sure about the overall message but the piece was shit.
 

version

Well-known member
His comment about not wanting to write about race because he'd "never been in love with a black woman" is the one that sticks out as the weirdest to me.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/...versation_with_novelist_jonathan_franzen.html

Have you ever considered writing a book about race?

I have thought about it, but—this is an embarrassing confession—I don’t have very many black friends. I have never been in love with a black woman. I feel like if I had, I might dare.

[I adjust the microphone, which he stares at for a moment.] Good, good, good. The mic. Got the mic pointed toward me. I am doing all the talking here. [Pauses.]

You were saying you have never been in love with a black woman.

Right. Didn’t marry into a black family. I write about characters, and I have to love the character to write about the character. If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person—a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people—I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
His comment about not wanting to write about race because he'd "never been in love with a black woman" is the one that sticks out as the weirdest to me.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/...versation_with_novelist_jonathan_franzen.html

Have you ever considered writing a book about race?

I have thought about it, but—this is an embarrassing confession—I don’t have very many black friends. I have never been in love with a black woman. I feel like if I had, I might dare.

[I adjust the microphone, which he stares at for a moment.] Good, good, good. The mic. Got the mic pointed toward me. I am doing all the talking here. [Pauses.]

You were saying you have never been in love with a black woman.

Right. Didn’t marry into a black family. I write about characters, and I have to love the character to write about the character. If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person—a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people—I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.
Right...
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
ironically that position is the logical consequence of idpol but when they get a taste of their own medicine they hate it. i mean they say the browns should write about the browns and white people should merely affirm.

as for whether I'm frightened? no, 50 degrees temperatures have been standard in Southern turkey for centuries. English just love a good panic because they are vacuous people.
 
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