BLADE RUNNER revisited >3.6 gigapixels from françois vautier on Vimeo.

@JoshuaACNewman!

I post there when a comment doesn’t warrant a blog post.

Not that this warranted a blog post.

I think it’s probably still too scary for my niece, who’s excited about Totoro and the nonscary parts of Spirited Away, but I look forward to being able to watch this with her soon.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to do this before: if you own Shock:, send an email to humancontactbundle@glyphpress.com and I’ll send you freed PDFs of the two Human Contact preview editions, both the January one I made for Dreamation and the March one I made for PAX East!

Human Contact is inspired by Iain M. Banks’ Culture Novels — most notably, Player of Games, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Ekumen novels, in particular The Telling.

It’s about what happens when a liberal, democratic society (called the Academy, in the game) encounters another one that probably doesn’t have its values. What do they explorers do when one of their core values is the inherent value of all cultures? What happens on the ground, between individuals, some inconceivably far from home, the others with a sudden new appreciation of the scale of the Universe?

The PAX edition is about black ops anthropology: the colony being visited will be irretrievably damaged if they Academy just shows up from the sky. Maybe they’ll attack the Contactor, or maybe they’ll attack each other. Maybe their economy will collapse catastrophically. Maybe they’ll spread disease or quarantine the Academics in a single society, preventing them from seeing what the cultures of the world are truly like. It’s the job of three select individuals to change the society as little as possible while subtly preparing it for the arrival of the Academy’s Contactor, seven years later.

If you’re going to be at PAX Prime, talk to Joel Shempert and Joe Macdaldno! They’ll be in room 304 at at The Dreaming in booth 1440!

I’m really excited to get to see this. $30000 of funding made this entire series (of which $27k+ has been raised — if you like it, donate!).

This is the future of media, everyone. Artists making money making art. I hope it works. I might just fire up Kickstarter to make sure I can afford to make Human Contact the thing I want it to be.

Edit: Not bad! Now I want to see the rest of the series!

I’ve read a good number of books leading up to the creation of Human Contact. They’re all about the challenges of interacting between cultures. If you like these books, you’ll probably like the game!

• The Telling, by Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Left Hand of Darkness, ibid.
• The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
• Use of Weapons, ibid.
• Foundation, Isaac Asimov
• Foundation and Empire, ibid.
• Second Foundation, ibid.

But you probably (if irate emails and forum posts are any indication) think that I’m grossly negligent because I haven’t read your favorite book.  This is your big chance! I’ve started keeping an Amazon wish list of the books that I obviously ought to have read, according to Shock: enthusiasts.

Put your money where your mouth is! Recommend me some books, I’ll put them on the list, and if you really care, you’ll spend a couple of dollars to send it to me. I’ll at least start reading them. If they suck, I won’t finish them! If it winds up influencing the book, I’ll enthusiastically thank you in the credits to Human Contact when it’s a real thing. Please buy me cheap, used versions, as long as they’re legible, unless you’re really keen to spend money or you feel the cover illustration is really beautiful or something.  I think there’s even a way to just send one as a gift, without it being on a list, though I’m not sure. If you have to search, I’m the Joshua Newman in Florence, MA.

If you didn’t send it to me, don’t complain that I haven’t read it. If you sent it to me and I didn’t read it, you can complain.

Sound like a good deal?

The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.

These bots are making 56,000 offers a second. It sure looks to me like something not-human is actually happening here, though it could be the result of gross incompetence, I suppose. Or maybe that was a test run.

But it looks to me kinda like an attempt at saying “hello.”

The Jank Cast crew played Shock: and really dug it. Their game was Human Cloning vs. Aging and Reproduction. It got good and gnarly.

After Granther torturing Granther torturing Granther, I kinda needed a shower.

—Todd

Brilliant scene there, guys. I’m glad you enjoyed it.

I’m just now writing the Quantum Computation section of Human Contact, and lo and behold, there’s a really weird article on io9 today about a novel — and frankly paradigm-reshaking — use of the (still impractical) technology.

Quantum computing is interesting for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that it can solve mathematically Complex problems in non-eschatonic amounts of time. For instance, let’s say you’re traveling the world. You want to see 50 sights, then come back home, and you want to travel the minimum distance to do it. Solving this problem with a computer like the one you’re reading this on right now would take an impractical amount of time — it would have to try 3*10⁶⁴ routes. That’s 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. If each simulated route took 1,000th of a second to calculate, it would take 10⁵⁷ years to have proven that the shortest route is found. (For perspective, that’s well past any prediction of the end of the Universe.) A quantum computer operating at the same computational speed, would take about .061 seconds, or the dark half of a blink.

For problems that involve Complexity like that one — simple systems whose interactions depend on other interactions — quantum computers straight up solve the problem, assuming there’s a single best answer (and greatly reduce the complexity to knowable probabilities otherwise). That means that most forms of encryption are immediately decryptable. It also means that those with quantum computation capabilities have otherwise provably unbreakable encryption. And it also means that, if someone tries to break the code, they leave indelible fingerprints that show that someone tried to tamper with it. With such a thing, you could predict weather with great accuracy, herd behaviors, probably even culture shifts — all assuming you knew what all the parts were in such a system.

In Human Contact, the Contactors (the starship/institutions that meet new civilizations) possess a single, multi-node quantum computer, required for making last-femtosecond calculations when passing through a Bridge to another star system. It’s integrated into the structure of the craft itself to maximize use of the radiation shielding of the vessel (radiation being made of quanta) and reduce error with redundancy. The ubiquitous computation and networking of Academics in the field can access the quantum computer, but their clothing, tools, vehicles, and food lacks the capabilities for that kind of computing by itself.

So, make sure your network connection is up if you want to predict the spread of a meme through the society, huh?