u/No-Economics-8239

Wow, I clearly didn't think this through. I was very excited that we were getting style customization for Mizutsune. That long sword was one of the first weapons I managed to get to Grade 10 and has been my primary water weapon for a long time.

But holy hell is it hard to target the special part on the back legs. Targeting the tail was always a pain, but I've been using the dual blade cheat code on that. Now, I've been suffering through fights without even breaking anything.

Do I switch to Rajang HBG and just start blasting and ignore trying to break things? Is there an easier way to try and get a target lock on the slippery bugger?

I am also having similar issues with Paolumu.

Marked spoilers so we can discuss ideas from all the books.

The books seem to go out of their way to focus on the benefits of ‘Real’ and how much more immersive being in a Manny is to being in VR. And I don’t really understand where that is coming from or what to make of it.

I’ve read the short story Manna by Brian Marshall where the transhumans basically choose between going strait to VR and becoming basically a brain in a jar and stayed focused on their physical body and reality. It’s wasn’t really portrayed as one being better than the other, just a series of trade offs and preferences. No real concept of one ‘feeling’ more ‘real’ and my impression was they would both be ‘equally’ real because the ‘realness‘ is happening in our brains. And given the right inputs then either one could produce the same sort of outputs.

Similar to one of the short stories by Ken Liu that inspired the Pantheon animated show. They feature digital intelligence like Bob that started as a scanned human brain. And two such intelligenes can combine to create a CI which I’m not sure stands for Created Intelligence or Combined Intelligence. But it’s basically a mashup of the two minds creating a new digital intelligence that is sort of like a child of the two. It doesn’t start with a past of its own, but it has parts of the knowledge from the two who created it. In the story, a human makes a robot body for the CI to experience the ‘real’ world and spends as much as she can getting the best sensors and actuators. And the CI tries it out and is… not impressed. The CI basically tries and explains how it basically has access to the sum totality of digital knowledge and there are plenty of scans on higher fidelity equipment they can access that have much more depth of flavor or color or smell than the ‘limited’ robotic body they worked so hard to put together.

Then we have Ringworld by Larry Niven which offers us the idea of ‘wireheading’. Basically people get an implant in the pleasure sensors of their brain. And a tiny amount of electrical current can now produce bliss. Which can be so addictive that some people basically become ascetic monks who give up physical reality so long as they can plug into an outlet and just bliss out. Which can lead to them neglecting their body to the point of death.

Which is all part of my background before getting into the Bobiverse. And I don’t really see why a Manny would provide more ‘real’ inputs to a replicant matrix to enjoy that couldn’t also be recorded and synthesized and incorporated into VR such that you could have that same depth (or even more) of sensation and reality or whatever it is that might make ‘reality’ seem more ‘real’ than VR.

So what are your thoughts? Am I missing something? Is DET? Are we both wrong? Is it just a philosophical choice? Do you see Real or Virt being clearly ‘better’ in some way? Is Dennis just trying to avoid the Bobs going down the rabbit hole of living mostly in VR and living out a 'fantasy life' rather than being an immortal spaceship wandering the galaxy and meddling in the affairs of ephemerals?

I've almost just finished another re-listen ahead of the next book. And was looking to explore currency related discussions regarding how it has unfolded in these books and elsewhere. Marked spoilers so we can discuss plot points from all the current books.

As a big fan of the Red Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson I was initially very surprised and a little disappointed when it was mentioned that the new Earth colony sites were already using currency so quickly. Especially since there was no real initial information about where it came from, who issued it, and how it was being managed. In the Mars books, the Arkady character is very vocal about his more fringe ideas on how to manage their new colony and proposed some of the more 'radical' ideas regarding how the new colonists should organize their work/life balance, living and working environments, and how resources should be distributed. With Earth gone and the previous banks basically meaningless now, it seemed they would have a open palette to play with regarding how to manage currency on their new worlds. And with the immortal Bobs seeding the galaxy with Auto Factories, it seemed like humans would be entering... well, if not a post-scarcity society, at least a differently-scarcity society.

And yet, the power and wealth divides have remained story elements in ways that don't seem to follow my own mental gymnastics regarding all the different paths it might have taken. As a refuge from the MMORPG A Tale in the Desert, which didn't start with an in-game currency, but allowed you to unlock the tech to eventually 'print' your own, I was part of a group that tried to do that in the first telling to various degrees of success and failure. It was surprisingly difficult to get people to care or move beyond bartering. Of course, in a crafting based game, that is perhaps an understandable challenge. Why trade if making it yourself is your point in playing? Subsequent telling have basically stuck to a barter based system with a unit of exchanged based around the current scarcity of resources.

As such, I've since gained some degrees of appreciation and understanding on the difficulties around managing a currency, and have done my own arm chair research, especially since the advent of the age of cryptocurrency tool kits that basically now allow anyone to start one for virtually no time or effort, and trying to discuss ideas with some more Libertarian minded individuals, including those who think switching off a gold economy was a bad idea.

As such, I'm a keen enjoyer of seeing how other MMORPGs manage their economies, and take note whenever the sci-fi or fantasy books I enjoy make it a plot point. I've been very fascinated by the economics of games like EVE Online and Entropia Universe or Second Life and greatly enjoyed the research papers I've found on them.

All this has contributed to my... confusion regarding how it seems to be handled in the Bobiverse. It gets fleshed out more in Book 4, and the PAM has been discussed in other posts here. So I'm less interested in that, and more interested in your own initial takes on currency in the Bobiverse, and other recommendations of books or games where it plays an interesting role and you found it interesting or novel or had thoughtful explorations on the topic. But I'm also happy to discuss whatever currency related ideas you might have as we sample whatever Jeeves currently has on virtual tap.

The Bobs seem certain that ‘something’ is happening with Replicative Drift. Which seems the hypothesis that every time you create a new copy of yourself something in the copy gets 'randomized' making them 'different' than the original. We seem to get more insight into this from Hugh in book 4 where he claims to have done experiments around replication using ‘personality tests’ and posits that if you shut down, make a backup, and then make a copy of the backup, whichever matrix powers up first will be the ‘same’ person without any drift.

I’ve long been interested in the ideas of identify, consciousness, and the transhumanism explored in cyberpunk. But every time I listen to Heaven’s River again, I’m more confused about whatever DET is trying to do with Replicative Drift. Original Bob was around 31 when he was scanned. By the events of Heaven’s River, Bob has had 200 years of additional life and experiences. And each Bob will have different total amounts of subjective time due to relativity and frame jacking. But this still seems to make a huge balance of time spent as a replicant versus whoever the long dead Bob might have been.

Which is to say, whatever makes us into us isn’t just some randomly assigned biology and personality traits. We are products of our environments. When we are born, who are parents are, how we are raised, and accumulated life experiences all shape who we are to some degree. I’m not the same person I am now in my 50s as I was in the previous decades. My opinions and personality and ideas have changed over time as I learned more and gained new life experiences.

And I identify with Bobness. I’m a career software engineer and relate to many of the personality traits that Bob seems to display and points to as evidence of who ‘Bob’ is ‘supposed’ to be before ‘drifting’ away in different directions. But I will certainly defer to the Bobs as being the best experts on what Bobness is supposed to be and how best to define and identify it. But that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? There isn’t just one Bob. Every new Bob adds yet another opinion into what that means and ‘should’ be. But the early cohorts of Bob all seem to develop very specific ideas on who Bob is or is not across the events of book 4. But I don’t really understand where they are coming from.

Take the conversation between Will and Gandalf after our first glimpse of the gamers running a session in VR. Bill seems confused why Gandalf and the gamers are now ‘finished’ with the Heaven’s River exploration now that the expedition is underway. Gandalf tries to explain that they set out to do what they wanted to accomplish. The Bobs themselves seem to understand that the Bobiverse community is entirely voluntary. But Will remarks ‘less and less Bob’ after the exchange, seeming to take it as more evidence of replicative drift.

So… uh… what would the Bobiverse look like without Replicative Drift? How should the Bobs all be spending their immortality? As they gain more subjective experience and catch up on the elapsed human culture that went on before their replication and that has continued to grow since, how ‘Bob’ will they remain? What new media will they enjoy that adds to their collection of pop culture references? What new technology will fascinate them? What new interests and pastimes will occupy their attention? Is the expectation that they would all be drawn to the exact same things? That there would be no ‘drift’ as they make new relationships and connections and attachments from ‘original’ Bob?

Take the exchange earlier in book 4 where the Bobs remark on how Bridget's time with Howard means she not only understands the Bobs more, but that she has begun to display some of their personality traits leading to chants of 'one of us'. Isn't that just a natural example of how we change over time based on what we experience and who we spend time with? Wouldn't the Bobs be naturally drifting apart over hundreds of years of lived experiences?

So, where do you think DET is going with Replicative Drift? How do you see it as different than how people might naturally change over time? Are you as confused as me on the Bobs attitudes towards Bobness? Is there some element I'm missing?