Endsong (unmarked SPOILERS)

Funny, I think the book is great. It's not a cliffhanger any more than, you know, the whole setting is.

@xagroth , perhaps you think CB sits on a giant pile of cash and we don't need to support them advancing the storyline. Personally, I buy the books to support the rules development and writing.

Or would you rather pay a subscription fee for Army and access to the rules wiki? Because that's the hard-nosed capitalist answer. That or paying GW-level prices.

Or we could not be cheap and demand things for free, and actually support artists and their work.

 

It is an opinion, others love the books and their writing.

 

I have paid already about 650 CB miniatures (including Aristeia; besides PanO and Ariadna I can field a workable 300pts -or even 400+pts - army list of any faction, sectorials included). I see promises of reviewing and instead get copy-paste. I see claims of playtesting and instead see one poorly developed idea after another. I see Third Offensive, and I prefer go to Fanfiction.net to raise the quality not only of the plot, but of the grammar and composition. I even bought Mary Problems from CB directly at the Freak Wars.

So yes, I'm salty, because CB is a company that looks more and more to me like they are trying to leave from passives they have been leaving off several times already, give less and less attention to quality control (just right now a guy was in the telegram channel asking about his new O-Yoroi... filled with mold lines, rugged parts, and getting two backs instead of two main arms...), while they do all they can to force old customers to buy more copies of the same thing because they make sure to pack new stuff with old sculpts or new sculpts (tell me what can you do with, for example, TEN thorakitai, when the max AVA is six, of the whole Blackwind I got... btw, the tyreos is quite hard to find a use for, the Hoplite is like a cheaper Patroclus without shenanigans and Total Immunity, and the Nadhir and Bokthar I did not have. Four models from the whole box... I bought it for 60€ because with the scenery and Pandora it was somewhat OK but I already had everything else...).
Or with Uhahu in Bakunin, from the whole Bakunin box I get to use... the two cenobites and maybe the S5 (I already have the orphan from the initiates box, and not enough points to fit two in a list). 30 bucks per model I use is certainly quite in the GW price range, even if the box comes with half a kilo of models that don't even have a use for me... so I stop buying.

I will support something I find... deserving. I was quite vocal in the direction things were taken, and time has proven me quite right with the power creep, for example, so now I will keep my monetary investment in the game at a minimum.

 

So far I've only read the first 20 pages of the plot twist, which wasn't bad despite the death of the Spiral, which could have been concluded just so we could talk about it more. There's a problem with the unit stories, which are too recycled. We should switch to codexes where we'd put these unit stories by faction.

The problem with Infinity is that there are too many units and factions, all written by one man, which poses obvious quality problems because it takes time to do everything right (what we saw on defiance). And from memory this man wasn't a writer of novels before he became one, he became one over the years, but without the assistance of an editor and professional literary proofreaders to give him a look at his work, that's what he lacks. But given that Corvus has started to work differently on Warcrow, this could change the way infinity is written, and perhaps lead to the use of a team rather than a single man in the future.

Nevertheless, after having played the AI several times on his texts to find cultural references, I could see that he had done a great deal of documentation work to establish solid story parameters in the cyberpunk theme, despite the fact that it wasn't sufficiently exploited and highlighted. For example, I wrote this article about Panoceania:
http://www.bureau-aegis.org/forum/index.php?topic=17236.0
In summary, I found that in Panoceania, Gutier had applied the worst of what the Panoptic could be, and to spot this concept it was necessary to do some heavy research beforehand, which can be seen through the use by Pano leaders of the cube, maya and Aleph (this is also a criticism sometimes made by nomads). And all of this is covered by a shiny veneer of democracy that conceals the fact that Panoceania is in some aspects comparable to Yu Jing in terms of the surveillance and control of thought in the society.
There's also a Nazi aspect to Pano history, which certainly originates from India's contribution to Panoceania, which today cultivates a certain admiration for German Nazism, as can be seen in the Rommel school. Of course, it could also be seen as an example of the Spanish vision of Rommel, which Gutier transcribes automatically, but this Indian connection somehow reinforces the reason for the rejection of Atek's castes and the racism demonstrated at Helots (also present in the name). And then there's the presence of Viking supremacists, who may have been allowed to flourish by the benevolent will of leaders with this supremacist admiration. And secondly, as most of the miniatures in the wargame are of western origin, this reinforces the faction's hidden supremacist side. I don't know if Gutier has written a Panoceania supremacist plot, but it's possible.

All that to say, 3e Offensive was hard to read, but there are pearls that merit being polished to bring out all the possible darkness of Infinity's cyberpunk universe.

I also think that the arrival of AIs will help Gutier to try out new forms of writing, firstly in terms of style organization, he'll be able to access writing ideas more quickly, and secondly, although AIs deviate a little too much to write short stories on their own, it is nevertheless great for rewriting or helping for rewrite texts in different tones and from different points of view. It can rewrite a text from a nomad point of view, for example. And this point can be very useful when you have to write for 42 factions and sub-factions, and 500 units.

 

I would like to remind contemporary politics are not allowed in the forum, and I would rather not see the discussion of what the above says to be discussed and debated...

 

As far as AI writers and frankly anything "AI" goes for me its a trend, I am not convinced by them they are useful "fill static/ crate something random" tools but need extensive custody and post process work by someone who knows what they are doing to be refined (or salvaged) to a serviceable form, I am not sure the effort put into them in post processing is worth the time saved by generating the bulk of the work by them.

 

I think Gutier studied history as a career, and the cyberpunk genre was quite present when he started designing Infinity. Bear in mind we would be, at best, in a Post-Cyberpunk, and more likely in a mere sci-fi with some transhumanist parts ("posthumans", and the Evolved Intelligence... which incidentally is -in my opinion- really based on the Hyperion Cantos' book series, the cruciform and the AI's there using "free" human brainpower for self-computing).

To be fair, ChatGPT is quite capable of producing short works of passable quality (cheap fast food quality, but usually gramatically and syntactically correct, which is kinda impressive for, essentially, a statistically-fuelled generator), but I think his idea is more in the line of a curator/organizer for a "product bible", so you can ask it about whatever regarding Infinity, and it can produce from art to fluff to rules from its database, which would be as easy to compile as "feeding" it the texts/file names.

I think it's overkill, since google has been doing that for years, but it certainly will help those 'verses with huge bibles.

 

I'm happy with most of the fluff content. What I have longed for since the first infinity book I've read is for CB to get a decent editor/translator. I cannot speak for the Spanish versions, but the English versions are 3rd grade writing from a professional standpoint, and could be improved massively by hiring even just a decent editor with some background in fiction writing. The stylistic and grammatical errors are egregious. But like I said, the fluff is mostly great.

 

I think this is intended as when I read about the structure of PanO democracy in the old Humans Sphere book it never struck me as that democratic once you got under the veneer since politicians elected by representative interests are nominally there to counter corporate interests and having corporations run the show without politicians to counter their interests, by convincing the people that the lobby system was more democratic since they would have the power and influence to astroturf the system to ridiculous degrees, is a pathway to a corporatocracy, and the reason those corporations can stay in power without any rebellion against them is that they've tricked the common people into believing that they have an equal share of the power in the system if they just come together. Any corporation would be able to bribe or blackmail the right people within a lobby to throw the fight to the corporations, and if the people are recalcitrant just "accident" a few of them, and the rest fall into line awfully quickly. This is the reality of unregulated, hyper-capitalism. Something we see today where powerful corporations have embedded themselves within a powerless country and "accidented" local opposition.

The best way to manipulate people is never to force them to believe anything like Yu Jing does, the best way to manipulate people is to give them the illusion of a choice, that way they convince themselves, and once people have convinced themselves it's extremely difficult to change their stance without having them change it themselves.

 

To further elaborate, it's ridiculously easy to "accident" people in the PanO sphere due to the dependency on augmented reality. All one would have to do would be to mess with what the AR shows. Want someone to have an "accident" in an office building? Fiddle with the elevator, make the "out of order" sign invisible to them, create an image of the elevator room, show it to them, have them walk into the void, and then delete the meddled files so it shows that their AR device works flawlessly and that they must have been preoccupied and suffered a fatal accident. Cook the people reporting on it so they report it was an accident as well.

 

Well, PanO people are lazy and may be too relaxed because of their technological cradle, but they are not stupid. But of course some tricks are possible. Wip 12 isn’t that bad
To talk about other things, on Bakunin people are living with AR not less, and may be even more visually polluted by this. But of course kids are learning from young ages to deal with it. After all even we are used to live with different advertising banners and form resistance to them very fast. New things that appears could be integrated the same way and be... harmless, I guess. AR would be not that problematic, I guess.

But ok, may be I am digging where should not x)

 

For advertisement? No, AR would be good for that since it would par down the visual clutter significantly and would be aesthetically pleasing since if everything looked like Times Square around Christmas I would scream.

For road signs and such? Huge danger, just plain no, it should never happen. There was a story in the old Human Sphere book that highlighted this where some Ateks drove themselves into a ditch (fatal accident) because they were unable to afford to get the latest pack of road signs and as a result, their AR showed nothing, including the "Danger, road work ahead, large dig," warning.

 

Author didn’t like PanO... for sure x)
Let’s think that story was an article from some yellow press (May be not even YJ’s)

 

PanOceania background has the issue of been "plain" it looks too similar to what we experience as "the western world" for most readers to overcome their experience bias and see what an alien and bizarre entity PanOceania nation is, how weird it works and how unreasonable living in it would be for us.

All nations, and their cultures, in Infinity have their positive and negative sides and PanO has its darker side and the dependence on technology is one serious dark side PanOceanian society has.