#Sister Miriam Godwinson

[every1sno1fangirl]

something i neglected to mention about zakharov and miriam is that nothing about their beliefs really fundamentally changes even!!! they're very much still Themselves at the end of it all, who believe (mostly) the same things they started with. Engaging with The Planet (and how that happens is beautiful. The world itself being its own character and the way that is expressed both figuratively and literally is fantastic) has just changed them irrevocably. Earth has been left behind. Everything they have ever known is well and truly gone and buried in the dust of time. Society and the world around them has fundamentally become alien and increasingly less grounded in prior human experience and when they stand at the precipice of what (just) humans can still even perceive and understand is when they hit the heights of their arcs.

Zakharov prostrates himself before an Alien God and expends his and his followers' remaining humanity to burn himself into being but one part of the consciousnesses of it's True Apotheosis. If you don't know anything about SMAC, without getting into too much detail, The Planet would die without his (and others. Canonically, it's implied Lal and Deidre joined) decision to do it. The God would blossom but would be unable to sustain itself and fade into no consciousness once more for another millions of years. All humans would die in this event—but by taking this action, he and all humans have chosen to kill themselves as well.

“Imagine the entire contents of the planetary datalinks, the sum total of human knowledge, blasted into the Planetmind’s fragile neural network with the full power of every reactor on the planet. Thousands of years of civilization compressed into a single searing burst of revelation. That is our last-ditch attempt to win humanity a reprieve from extinction at the hands of an awakening alien god.”

Miriam, seeing what is about to become before even he does, chooses instead to walk into a Psi-Gate (think like a Stargate or Transporter from Star Trek). This is what she thought about something similar, the Bulk Matter Transmitter:

“And what of the immortal soul in such transactions? Can this machine transmit and reattach it as well? Or is it lost forever, leaving a soulless body to wander the world in despair?”

She wasn't sure whether or not you were still yourself at the end of it.

“Go through, my children! The time of miracles is upon us. Let us cast off sin and walk together to the Garden of the Lord. With God’s mercy we shall meet again on the other side.”

In the face of what is to come—before even the realization of the Gaian's beliefs proving correct (I won't get sidetracked here but SMAC's take on religion in the future and how genuinely it is portrayed is also fascinating)—Miriam knows that her ideas are well and truly dead. There is no more Dissent from the Horrors. Only an embrace to grow beyond them.

“Go through, my children! The time of miracles is upon us. Let us cast off sin and walk together to the Garden of the Lord. With God’s mercy we shall meet again on the other side.”

These are her last words. Her and her followers step into a Psi-Gate with no destination. She doesn't even know for sure if the soul is preserved by this action and her physical form is being utterly annihilated at the atomic level. Her actions are that of defeat—a mass suicide in the face of what she knows is the end of her one way or another. She just has her faith (and a nuanced one at that).

And she's completely and totally right. From a ludonarrative standpoint, the player knows that the game is about to end. We're at the end of the tech tree—we're at the end of things humans can identify with and even conceptualize. She is the last, pure human. She could have chosen to eat from the fruit of life and join the others in immortality as a new alien god. It would have cost her her very soul. It would have meant she was no longer human.

Both Zakharov and Miriam choose suicide in the end.

Zakharov (and others, and I'll talk about them eventually probably Zakharov and Miriam are just the easiest and most important parallels IMO) commit suicide via total subsumption into the world. He discards the last of his humanity and kills himself in the hopes that enough of his being will leave enough an impression on the Alien God he is hoping to truly manifest into the world and become something greater than he is.

Miriam commits suicide by embracing the last thing that could truly be said to be of humanity; a form of transportation used so one person can go from one place to another. She doesn't even know for sure what will happen to her soul if she destroys the rest of her being. But she knew it would be complete; she has opted for what is well and truly a final death, trusting in the promise of Heaven to the very last to hold onto the humanity she had left.

And I think both choices are beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. I condemn neither one—I love and sympathize with Zakharov and Miriam.

Before even it being the best 4X game, Brian Reynolds made the best Sci-Fi game of all time.

resisting the urge to Post about SMAC because I will become utterly and completely insufferable with my infodumping about how it is by far the best 4X game of all time and it isn't even close

[ronqueesha]

"And what of the immortal soul in such transactions? Can this machine transmit and reattach it as well? Or is it lost forever, leaving a soulless body to wander the world in despair?" Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We must Dissent"

[nhaneh]

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, man that brings back some memories. 😁😛 I played that so much when I was younger. I think I liked it more than Civilization 5. I think my favorite faction was the environmentalist faction. I think there was also an expansion to Alpha Centauri? I think there was a faction that used the fungal growths?

Yeah. I'd argue Alpha Centauri is probably tied with the first Civilization game for me in terms of which I have the most fond memories and nostalgia associated with; the interface definitely has its issues and it's crying out for some kind of remaster that basically just updates the UI and controls and gives you a little bit more camera control to make the map topography a little bit easier to read and literally nothing else.

There was an expansion yeah, called Alien Crossfire - it had some really out there faction ideas even ignoring the two alien ones, like the literal planet-worshipping cult and the one that literally goes "actually the ideal human society is sea piracy". I always found the original factions more compelling, but fortunately the expansion gives you that option (or even offers a mix between them)

GOG has both of them combined into one bundle, though its compatibility with windowed mode is... debatable; you can use a tool like DxWnd to help with this, though there's also a fan update called PRACX which helps a lot more still and adds some UI improvements to boot, though it doesn't necessarily fix the clunkiness necessarily.

Honestly it's still worth playing even today, provided you can deal with the datedness of the interface. There's some pretty compelling story bits scattered in various quotes and such associated with technologies, buildings, and wonders - even Sister Miriam Godwinson, the christian fundamentalist leader who tends to be the primary antagonist of most players really, gets some good (and haunting!) quotes in the latter stages of the game.

[samueldays]

Or Sister Miriam Godwinson, whom I suppose might also be considered a space liberal (vaguely Christian-flavored). Did you know her backstory has her working for the UN as chaplain and psychologist?

The SMAC leaders are generally remembered for their most bonkers quotes, so I find that the overall collections are less bonkers as a whole. On the more reasonable side:

The Morgans fear what may not be purchased, for a trader cannot comprehend a thing that is priceless. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil. Already we have turned all of our critical industries, all of our material resources, over to these...things...these lumps of silver and paste we call nanorobots. And now we propose to teach them intelligence? What, pray tell, will we do when these little homunculi awaken one day and announce that they have no further need for us?

I think Miriam has a valid concern there.

Well, fuck, I'm going to end up talking like a character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri at this rate, aren't I.

[jiskblr]

ML Face generators can’t do “weird” - SMAC as test set

I made a quasi-wallpaper with the seven SMAC headshots and a background image from Civ: Beyond Earth, and meant to get around to trying to depixelate the headshots to make it scale up better. Well, I used a depixeler, and unfortunately it did not.

You hear a fair amount about ‘ML face generators can’t do race’, and this is true. But it’s a subset of a bigger problem: They can’t do weird. Sister Miriam Godwinson is a standard white woman, but she has short hair and a scowl, so she registers as a man with visible stubble. Lady Deirdre Skye is a slightly-hippy white woman and she registers as a Hispanic woman at least a decade older. Academician Prokhor Zakhorov is a white man - a very noticeably Slavic one - but his signature weird glasses and headset vanish.

The four nonwhite characters all get cast to white, but Commissioner Pravin Lal gets done worst: not only does he become white, his head covering disappears.  (Is he Sikh? Sounds plausible.)

It is a wide-ranging sample of ways headshots can be slightly off-model and completely failed by the modeling. Maybe this should be a standard test set?

[stephen-aaron-shepard]

"Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: Why would a perfect God create a universe at all?" ~ Sister Miriam Godwinson https://www.instagram.com/p/B2_L93nnK0-/?igshid=6tearsmk8kdo

[karpad]

The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.

Sister Miriam Godwinson, "The Blessed Struggle"

Over the past few weeks, Facebook and Elon Musk’s Neuralink have announced that they’re building tech to read your mind — literally.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company is funding research on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that can pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words. The researchers say they’ve already built an algorithm that can decode words from brain activity in real time.

And Musk’s company has created flexible “threads” that can be implanted into a brain and could one day allow you to control your smartphone or computer with just your thoughts. Musk wants to start testing in humans by the end of next year.

hm! bad.

[hoiistart]

stylized Miriam Godwinson w/Comparison 

[hoiist]

Oringal 7 as Tarot Cards

This has been the only things I have been drawing for the month of March.

I am happy to see 7/22 done

[chirondreams]

flower crown icon to share with all you mortal enemies