Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > Roleplaying in General

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 06-27-2018, 06:47 AM   #1
Alonsua
Banned
 
Join Date: May 2017
Default Years of Dreams

Party Animals.

"Her face was very beautiful and she possessed one of those bodies that arouse immediate sexual desires in men who look at them. She was young, too, her name was Angela Abernathy and she danced beautifully. I was as young as she was and I was also passionate about dancing, especially urban and ballroom dancing.

It was then fashionable in Las Vegas a legendary and originally New York lounge called Studio 54, which would later become a restaurant. In Studio 54, on weekends at night, they played the best music of the American music scene.

Angela and I knew all of each other. We did not ask questions to each other. We did not try to find out anything personal. We went both each weekend at night to Studio 54. She was accompanied by a couple of boyfriends, and I by a couple of girlfriends. We looked trying to find each other with our eyes and once we met we started waiting for the couple's dances.

As if it were an unappealable signal, as soon as the announcer announced the title of the appropriate piece, Angela went theatrically to where I was. I, pending her, suddenly came out to meet her. And we would dance. And it seemed that we were born to dance together.

Often, people crowded around us to contemplate and gape. If there really is supreme happiness, we had it dancing with exceptional mastery. Perfect the synchronicity of our steps, the combinations, the pirouettes, the expressive stops. There was telepathy among us. While we danced the souls were connected, our bodies were coupled to perfection. We never talked during the dance, not afterwards. We always separated with a small one: "Thank you". She would go back then with her friends and me with my friends.

One weekend after months of having repeated the above, Angela was not in Studio 54, but her friends were there. An immediate restlessness, a great restlessness, a suspicion that a misfortune could have happened to her devoured me. I went to where his friends were and I asked them:

Has anything happened to Angela that she has not come tonight with you?

The boy I had just asked gave me a furious look full of sadness, reproach, hatred, and he answered:

Angela left this morning on her way back to Pasadena. She will never come back.

I stood for a moment hesitant, bewildered, with a sharp pain in my chest. And I asked them a question that then seemed to me incredibly stupid.

Why is Angela gone?

The boy looked at me as if he thought me an imbecile and finally accused me with anger:

It was your fault, cretin. She has always been crazy about you and you never wanted to declare yourself. Angela waits, not seeing you, to forget you.

I felt an overwhelming desire to scream and went out to the street so that no one could see me do it. I do not know if Angela will have discovered it. What I do know is that I've never been able to forget that that was the moment I decided that I would make her my wife."


Excerpts from Adam Sepherd's diary.

Last edited by Alonsua; 07-01-2018 at 12:51 AM.
Alonsua is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-27-2018, 07:53 AM   #2
Alonsua
Banned
 
Join Date: May 2017
Default Re: Years of Dreams

Parasitism.

"I joined Dr. Angela Abernathy's laboratories in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, barely five years after Abernathy revolutionized the computer industry.

I had obtained very good grades in my PhD program and her company had given me a full scholarship to develop my work in their laboratories. The university had totally disappointed me, the people who taught the classes did not have the slightest idea what they explained and, what was worse, they were not ashamed of it.

The only interesting thing in recent years was that Abernathy's laboratories had taught me to program in several avant-garde languages ​​and I was phenomenal. My parents, even having said it ignorantly, were right: In the end I had finished doing computer stuff.

Abernathy's laboratories worked on computer design and artificial intelligence development, which many believed would replace human intelligence and make life much easier for everyone.

Dr. Abernathy's approach was stupidly simple and great and made use of what was called agent technologies. In essence, it was based on having several computers in parallel and interconnected which were then given a program pattern subdividing global tasks according to the size of the memory and the resources of each one. If, for example, the objective was to calculate the square root of a very high number, the tasks were distributed so that the addition and subtraction were made by a first computer with little memory, and the multiplications and divisions by a second computer with more memory.

As if it were a team effort, dividing the work among several people would lead to the same results more quickly, and the idea was to make that the first computer, clumsier and slower since it had less memory, learned in its constant interconnections with the second computer to make multiplications by additions. Learning to multiply by adding, something that we all learn when we are kids but that, nevertheless, was not so easy to implement in software.

I loved the work and very soon I began to develop my first programs with the languages ​​of the Abernathy's laboratories. During the first steps, the first computer made its own calculations of addition and subtraction very slowly, but as soon as it observed carefully how the second one multiplied, and it "discovered" that it was exactly what it had to do, it increased the speed very much.

Like a human baby who is learning to crawl, take things, walk and vocalize, at first everything happened very slowly, but as soon as its "brain" began to "speak", the development became exponential and really fast.

In the last stages of my work, the first computer was even able to appropriate the resources of the second to multiply by adding, giving rise to the first known case of parasitism between computers..."


Nick D’Aloisio, founder of Summly.

Last edited by Alonsua; 07-01-2018 at 12:35 AM.
Alonsua is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-27-2018, 08:59 AM   #3
Alonsua
Banned
 
Join Date: May 2017
Default Re: Years of Dreams

When I saw him, he was on the ground.

"And yes, thatīs moment when you realize that you need that person. That person with whom you gave and showed all your feelings. And it's that moment when you cry and you ask yourself: Did he really care at all?

You get to think of all the moments lived, in those endless conversations that lasted for hours, on the brutal day when by first time you saw him, he was on the ground and unconscious with a very bad looking open injury in his head after having to climb a building to rescue a stupid child that hung from a balcony while you was just trying to concentrate on playing the keys of your piano... And there, right at that moment, you start crying because you are invaded by the good memories that are now only ashes.

You cry and cry knowing that it will not help because nothing will be fixed. You clean your tears and promise to forget him while you try to prepare your doctoral presentation before the Caltech faculty ... But you never fulfill it.

Days, weeks and months go by, and you realize that that person surely already shares his life with other girls. That there is no going back. That nothing will be like before. That you should have stayed at MIT and never left Cambridge. That maybe it's that stupid blue-eyed blonde girl with whom you have seen him.

And you cry, like from the day you left and everything changed. You realize that you will always be that little and unadapted genius girl in a world of men.

Then you start thinking positive. "Look forward as if no one had ever passed". "Believe in a future that will be better on your own alone". And there, at the moment of maximum self-deception, you smile shyly."


Excerpts from Angela Abernathyīs private blog.

Last edited by Alonsua; 07-01-2018 at 12:52 AM.
Alonsua is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-27-2018, 09:58 AM   #4
Alonsua
Banned
 
Join Date: May 2017
Default Re: Years of Dreams

Time does not heal all wounds.

"If the salamanders regenerate their legs after an amputation, why should not we be able to do the same for humans?"

The question, seemingly fraught with ingenuity, is not made by any child, but by one of the brightest young medical researchers in the world. It was raised and answered by Dr. Adam Sepherd, who says that mammals are not really that different from amphibians.

"The cells of our body die and regenerate all the time, so as humans we are also able to repair ourselves, but we do it too slowly and that slowness kills us when the diseases attack us."

Said the celebrated scientist.

"What Dr. Sepherd is looking for is to get his hands on genetic engineering to, through science, create new and better organs with our own cells so we can solve the biggest problem that regenerative medicine faces in our age: That there are far fewer donors than sick people."

Said Dr. Maria Grazia Roncarolo from the Stanford School of Medicine.

Dr. Sepherd is the founder, major shareholder and head researcher of the company International Genetics, with more than five hundred researchers and support staff working under his close supervision. And if his titles are extensive, much longer is the list of his achievements, discoveries and lives that he has saved and improved in the last decade.

"I am glad when something works, but I do not really celebrate it because there is still more work to do until we get our final solution. We solve a challenge and we immediately need to face the next. Just like time does not heal all wounds, in the future of our species death will not be the ultimate form of healing anymore."

New York Times by Austin Frakt and Aaron E. Carroll.

Last edited by Alonsua; 07-01-2018 at 12:51 AM.
Alonsua is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-28-2018, 10:10 AM   #5
ericthered
Hero of Democracy
 
ericthered's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
Default Re: Years of Dreams

are you reciting? are you posting a solo game? what is the intent here?
__________________
Be helpful, not pedantic

Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog

Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one!
ericthered is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 06-28-2018, 12:41 PM   #6
Alonsua
Banned
 
Join Date: May 2017
Default Re: Years of Dreams

Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered View Post
are you reciting? are you posting a solo game? what is the intent here?
Just making background
Alonsua is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-28-2018, 12:56 PM   #7
Alonsua
Banned
 
Join Date: May 2017
Default Re: Years of Dreams

Poetic Justice.

"No one could feel more as an experiment than me. One of archeology and reproductive engineering. That's what I get. That is what I am. Only an experiment and nothing else. A combination of specially selected genes in a zygote implanted in a surrogate mother. And if thatīs what I am, am I the only one involved? No. Obviously not. All the others are also part of the experiment. I am just the most important part of it, the directress of the experiment, but the rest also participate. Will my position be guaranteed as a fundamental part or should I be careful? My instinct warns me of the second. That is the price of supremacy. The most beautiful works of art should not be done hastily, and a new and better world needs time. Time and effort to be perfect. And it will be. I feel that I am capable of being honest. The love of justice is at the center of my Nature. And the love of beauty. It would not be acceptable to settle for a world designed by other people."

Audio-Diary of Eve Medici, first part.

"I love the moon. It's so pretty and cold. I would not tire of lying in the snow to contemplate it. The stars also have their appeal. I would love to put them all in my hair. I suppose it must be difficult. I cried a little. What isnīt anything but natural in someone of my age. Then I wanted to break the whole world. If I had polar bear skins I would make a beautiful coat. Tomorrow I will do another experiment. My father will be the human guinea pig. Poetic justice, I suppose."

Audio-Diary of Eve Medici, second part.

Last edited by Alonsua; 07-01-2018 at 12:37 AM.
Alonsua is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-28-2018, 01:09 PM   #8
Alonsua
Banned
 
Join Date: May 2017
Default Re: Years of Dreams

An answer to that question.

"Aging is dispensable, it is not programmed or necessary in living beings."

Affirms dr. Eve Medici, executive director and principal shareholder of deCODE Genetics.

"Why would we have to accept growing old if we do not settle for suffering from viruses, diseases and infections?"

Dr. Ashford explains to us showing several graphs of up to ten thousand years ago that show that the average life expectancy at that time was around fifteen. She points out the Neolithic.

"Here people did not age. Neither suffered diseases. People died without living enough to suffer any of those things. Many tell me that death is something natural, inevitable. And they use the "natural" word as if Nature was divine. Natural? Nature has no place for old age. Humanity does. But we have barely begun to transcend the limits of Nature."

Most scientists still do not have clear answers about the mechanisms of old age. They are in it. Dr. Ashford already has an answer to that question.

"The longer the telomeres, the greater the length of our lives. By increasing telomerase in adults, I can prolong life and keep the human being healthy much longer. And it is not only about extending life, but also youth. I want to be one hundred years old with the vitality and appearance of the fifties."

Could the youth pill be hidden in the Molecular Pharmacy? A few months ago the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the North American Drug Agency (FDA) believed that it was and authorized the first clinical trials in several thousand volunteers. In the next decade we will know the results.



USA Today article written by A.J. Tiarsmith.

Last edited by Alonsua; 07-01-2018 at 12:37 AM.
Alonsua is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-29-2018, 11:09 AM   #9
tHEhERETIC
 
tHEhERETIC's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: Life imitates art--I'm in Pohang
Default Re: Years of Dreams

It reminds me a little bit of Only Lovers Left Alive. Now you have to find a way to invite players into this little tango.
__________________
Criminy...these two have enough issues, they can sell subscriptions! (ladyarcana55, in a PM)
tHEhERETIC is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-29-2018, 12:50 PM   #10
Alonsua
Banned
 
Join Date: May 2017
Default Re: Years of Dreams

Yes, Iīm not good on that subject though. I will write a book with the whole history and setting once Iīve got enough of it.
Alonsua is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 11:58 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.