Decipher SciFi

Creepy body horror. Fingers in holes. This is kinda hot.

Gaming in film. Brainscan. The video game bubble. E.T. The Video Game landfill debacle. AAA Game budgets before people took the industry seriously. AAA Auteur creators of the past. Auteur creators in indie games now.

Wooden cannons! Wow! Harvesting ammunition from people’s mouths. Bio-based squirt guns as a reasonable alternative. Blood-squirting lizards.

Biological computing: mechanical, electrical, and chemical. Quantum supremacy. Nipple interfaces and umbilicals.

Neural interface placements. Spinal connections and how to interact with the sensory loop. Bodily orifice security defenses. Sphincters vs meatuses.

But how do we tell what is real anyway!? The power of storytelling, even when you know it’s not real. Railroading. Milgram experiment the game.

Keeping the peace when independent operations can make their own giant robots. Staying somewhat prepared for returning existential threats.

Stowing expensive purpose-built machinery. Aircraft graveyards. The economics of storing and securing out-of-production technology for later use.

Avoiding trouble with the square-cube law by building smaller robots. Boston Dynamics and the inevitable impression of the coming robot apocalypse. Parkour Atlas. Robot kumite.

Securing mobile war machines. EMPs. Resistance to signal-jamming. Broad attack surfaces.

IRL progress towards a brain in a jar: human brain organoids implanted on a mouse brain. Sensory apparatus and feeling pain. Getting (ethically) hairy.

Actually: not so rare! But a pain in the ass to extract. The Japanese rare earth ocean-bottom treasure trove and how it will be difficult to access. Mining rare earth elements from spaaaaaaaace and how we probably need a new colloquial name for these materials. Underwater volcanoes.

Magical Jaeger blood rocker fuel. Gravity gun space race. Keeping Earth as a farm for kaiju blood, fueling our expansion into the entire solar system. Throwing rocks at things for fun and profit.

Sloppy orbital mechanics and the value of science-adjacent entertainment.

Forever the voice of Mission Control.

Almost as scary as the ocean.

NASA’s MMU. The new tiny one: SAFER! Giant rectal rectangle jet chairs?

Earth-orbital distances. Where different kinds of man-made satellites operation and how they are not likely to run into each other roughly ever. The utility of geostationary orbits. Earth orbits.

Relative velocities. Could you dodge a sniper bullet? IRL ISS escape procedures. Soyuz escape plans.

Glowing blood and possible alien infections. Human sensitivity to positive and negative g-forces. Trying to push more blood to your head for mental superpowers.

And impromptu deorbiting. How to crash a probe into mars (by accident).

Chinese space stations, then and now. Station entrance and exit procedures. Finally the Star Trek balloon analogy comes in handy! Decompression sickness/the bends during EVA. Portable life support systems. Sokol and ACES, and their insufficiency for extra-vehicular activities.

…in spaaaaaace. Carbon dioxide. Water. Super soakers. Fire emergency procedures.

Past designs and modern designs. Future EVA suit developments. Constrictive suits directly against the skin rather than creating an atmosphere around the body: the biosuit. The NASA Z Suit that looks like Buzz Lightyear, and operating EVA suits at the same pressure as your space station.

Soyuz reentry angles. Heat shielding. Trying to point in a particular direction.

The complete obviousness that heavy compound weight lifting is the major solution to muscle and bone loss in space. Bro do you even lift? Vacuum-based space squat rack.

History. The industrialization at scale of steel. The state of things. Future heights. Arcologies.

Vertical cities

Hong Kong’s real estate problem. Urban verticality and resource efficiency. Living in coffin pods and sharing utilities.

IRL holodeck technology. Projecting images for multiple . Your own personal Dyson display cloud. Frickin lasers directly in your eyes. CastAR.

Sand as a rubbish base for huge buildings. Building deep foundations in the desert. Wooden skyscrapers!? Sand in concrete and sand shortages. Varieties of sand. Engineered sand.

Fire suppression! Overheated air and air pressure for aircraft.

Elevator cable lengths and limits. Maglev elevators. High-speed elevators.

PORK CHOP SANDWICHES

Doom! Nostalgia.

Crappy moons that can barely form a potato. Phobos and Deimos. Delineating between moons, planets, and all the other stuff. The likely origin of the Martian moons.

Corporate space settlement and operations. Space Force. Josh reviews space marines; again. Martian weaponry.

Where to build? The cost of scratch settlement construction. Caves and lava tubes. Teleporting resources changes the game.

The Prometheus Problem, again. Doom humans-on-mars hypotheses: aliens developed humans on Mars vs humans originated on Mars. Species resurrection. Gene therapy. Chromosomal addition and subtraction.

Nano walls! Water on Mars! Telefragging!

Naive vs machine-intelligent image enhancement. “Photorealistic hallucination” and honest technical names. Reconsidering the absurdity of fictional image enhancement in the age of clever neural nets. Creative, artistic “enhancement” vs rigor.

Well, breaking your spinal chord sure seems to suck. Spinal breaks and the autonomic nervous system. Bodily control via brain-machine interface.

Extension of human functionality by implanted technology! Increasing neural communication speed, or shortening signal distance. Gun arms. Gun arms! Vocal device command by subvocalization.

Self-serving artificial intelligence. Yudkowsky’s AI  box test. Callback to Ex Machina. Additional stipulations. The true power of a goon with a wrench. How easy are humans to fool? Very.

Our heroes make a real mess of an airship or two, and FINALLY Bodyguard Chris manages to turn the tables and make something of his repeated failures. Emperor Colbert tries not to die before the end.

(This podcast is the finale of our pilot series for Decipher RPG where we play Mirror by Sandy Pug Games with Liam Ginty.

Previously: Part 1 & Part 2)

Wishing there were more of this in popular media.

A review of invisibility technology: spatial, temporal, and spectral light cloaking. Vibranium to the rescue.

Space impactors. Resource

Body armor, stationary armor. Avoiding concussive force. Reactive armor in tanks: shaped explosives that explode at the other thing that’s gonna explode! Molecular springs of carbon for storage of mechanical energy from kinetic. How not to turn into Black Panther jelly when the suit releases its energy (be superhuman).

Bas Rutten for king. Right hoooook.

Killmonger’s scarification and scar damage to the dermis. Sweat patterns around scars.

Remote vehicle control. Light-speed communications delays. AI-assisted remote human driving.

Domestication vs trainability. Extinct war elephants and why we can’t have war rhinos. Dürer’s rhinoceros, drawn from notes on the first rhino seen in Europe since Roman times.

Xhosa! Bantu languages. The possibility of a connection to the earliest human languages.

Emperor Colbert dresses down and bodyguard Chris rediscovers the joy of the bidet and the German shelf toilet. Then: daring aerial maneuvers!

(This podcast is the second part of our pilot series for Decipher RPG where we play Mirror by Sandy Pug Games with Liam Ginty. Previously: Part 1)

This podcast is the first of three episodes of our pilot series for Decipher RPG where we play Mirror by Sandy Pug Games with Liam Ginty. Here is part 2!

After some particular fun with character creation, Emperor Colbert’s coronation is interrupted by a sudden attack. With RPG-Colbert still entranced in his ceremonial mask, his bodyguard Chris rushes him to safety, but… airships!