My only 2 consecutive all-nighters ever were Alpha Centauri related, shortly after it’s release.
This is somewhat unrelated but, thinking back at my very young self I can’t help but wonder how loaded Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri is with memes that made me comfortable accepting LW thinking more than a decade later. Many of the same ideas and shibboleths are nearly omnipresent in science fiction but a certain attitude as well as a way of comparing and thinking about values and how one goes about “picking” them (prompted by the dystopian and utopian possibilities of nearly all the original faction’s value system), where things I suspect I originally picked up there:
We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?
-Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Looking God in the Eye”
or
Why do you insist that the human genetic code is “sacred” or “taboo”? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter -we- are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.
-Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Looking God in the Eye”
This is somewhat unrelated but, thinking back at my very young self I can’t help but wonder how loaded Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri is with memes that made me comfortable accepting LW thinking more than a decade later. Many of the same ideas and shibboleths are nearly omnipresent in science fiction but a certain attitude as well as a way of comparing and thinking about values and how one goes about “picking” them (prompted by the dystopian and utopian possibilities of nearly all the original faction’s value system), where things I suspect I originally picked up there:
and
or