Sapient Snacks?
 

Is there 'really' some market for these in THS? It looks so.. horrific. o.o The picture in the Shell-Tech PDF of the woman getting ready to devour this little naked man is just ... >.> disturbing. :O

Thoughts on Sapient Snacks?

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

I'll admit I was equally horrified (and a little amused) with the idea at first.

But consider these products for their shock value, I can think of a few food products today that try to shock us into eating them (e.g. pop rocks and warheads sour candy, escargo, energy drinks, raw organic food) this could just be pushing that envelope a little further, a lot further down the line from our normal.

As for market, these would are diffently be banned in a number of places, and as we learned with Prohibition once you ban something you drastically increase it's appeal and value, and with Tech 10 bio/manufacturing being available these could easily be produced in small batches and sold at very high prices.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

Without doubt, they are seriously appalling. Personally, I wouldn´t want have anythign to do with their fans.

Their existence casts an interestingly dark shadow over the THS universe. I mean, people aren´t killing mammals for flesh anymore, but some people ate sapients ...

But it is that kind of ideas which I like THS for. The idea seems absolutely novel to me. I never encountered it anywhere else before.

And it´s a nice feature for roleplaying - either as a colorful background detail or as the focus of an adventure, like, shutting down an illegal biolab franchise which fabricates those or helping someone who is wrongly accused of consuming those.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

But they aren't truly sapient. They are merely edible computer chips designed to mimic complex behavior with a personality program. They would look and act intelligent keeping up all disturbing appearances, but in the end you would just be eating a complex cd drive.
Full sapience would be vastly more complex, larger, and even more importantly, expensive and HUGE and break into non-functioning with most still on the plate.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

One shows up in Adam Warren's Dirty Pair series Run from the Future, in the Jeannot Delagauchetierre scene: "I may only be a pseudo-sentient snack food... but I really do feel that I feel p-pain... Aargh!" Naturally being eaten by the villain of the piece.

What I'm unsure about is whether Adam swiped from David, or vice versa. Or is it just a spooky coincidence?

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

Given some of the things fully sentient beings are created/ bred for across the setting I am not so sure that this is such a big surprise. Given bulk tissue cloning for meat I would not be surprised (nauseated, but not surprised) to find a quiet reappearance of cannibalism in some places.

All you need is a tissue sample and someone with the right gear. Actually that is a though, edible voodoo dolls. Sentient snacks plus bulk cultured human flesh- nauseating and on topic.

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Well, just exactly what are these sentient snacks made out of anyway? I mean is it just like raw flesh, or like some kind of candy or...?

I must say the more I think about these things, the stranger they seem. O.O

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I'm pretty sure that Adam did his first. I know that David is a Dirty Pair fan.

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There's not a darn thing wrong with canabilism that proper disease prevention couldn't fix. I personally dislike all the meat wasted with toxins and stuck in the ground in impermeable boxes.
Can ya' tell I'm an atheist? :)

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

See the bibliography in DEEP BEYOND

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If I lived in the THS universe, I'd be a vigilante battling against abominations like sapient snack food. It's flamethrower time, baby. The creators would be killed, as would those who ate the little guys.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

Well I suspect you wouldn't live long. The security outfits on Silas Duncan Station are efficient, and nobody likes flamethrowers in space. Why the rancor? They aren't actually sapient, you know, and they only exist in Duncanite habs anyway. If you wanted to get all righteous or something, I'd think pan-sapient rights is a better cause, YMMV.

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They are icky, but the only offense is really against taste and personal sensibilities. So long as the food the snack is made of is safe to eat, I really don't see a problem. I do see asking people that eat them to leave. I could see it being an easy thing to ban by law because it is icky.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

I would ban them, but not because they are icky. (I'm not a fan of obscenity laws in any context.)
Even though in THS they are incapable of producing truly sapient food, it is "foot in the door" technology. Better ban it before real atrocities occur hidden under a veneer of acceptability.

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Isn't that fundamentally impossible in Duncanite society.

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In a society where literally everything goes, probably not. I would inflict harsh penalties for anyone doing business with those violating such basic laws... or those committing such nastiness when there.

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I think they'd be really popular especially if you could get them custom-made in a reasonable amount of time. You can't just murder someone, but you could bite the head off a strawberry flavored snack version of them.

You could go to the store( or whate'er they have in THS) and pick up a Forty and the Revenge Pack of the week. They could make M&M nostalgia specials of those M&M guys you really could talk with before you eat them.

It'd be fun to run a one-shot of snack food hoping to escape the larder and find some kind of sanctuary.

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I'm deeply disturbed by the grotesque future many so called transhumanists seem to desire in the real world. Bioethics is lagging behind the real world technology, as it stands now. I can only imagine the horrors awaiting us if we don't get serious about placing restraints on experiments and especially on the commerical application of biotech.

Back to THS- I would probably enjoy playing a pan-sapient rights crusader. Thanks for the suggestion, sir_pudding.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

One thing that the Internet taught me is that there is a market and a fetish for pretty much anything imaginable - and quite a few things that my imagination doesn't want to have anything to do with, thank you very much.

And given that it has become increasingly easy to self-manufacture even the strangest stuff (no longer just "print on demand" - "build on demand", thanks to minifacs and biofacs), it does not surprise me in the slightest that creepy stuff - the kind of stuff that you can only find in the darkest corners of the internet today - proliferates, and I laud the authors not to ignore the sense of perversion hidden in humanity's collective soul.

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It's only perverse if some people do it. It's culture if everyone does.

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I always wanted to run a one-shot with one of the characters being a gestalt hive-mind of sentient snacks, similar to the Rat King on Exogenesis. I think the biggest hangup is the short lifespan of Sentient Snacks (I can't remember exactly, but its pretty short once they're removed from their storage/packing), and the fact that mechanically I never really figured out how I'd do a gestalt mind like that in Gurps.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

3E had the Mindshare trait. Does 4E have it, too?

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The Gestalt Intelligence lens for AIs is on p.53 of Changing Times.

Okay, if you need the gestalt to be active to be low or fully sapient, you need a bit more. I suggest taking the LAI template, then adding Incurious (6), No Sense of Humor, and Slave Mentality, all with a Mitigator, "must be linked to gestalt".

(By the way, it's Sentient Snacks. Sapient Snacks would indeed be rather more of an abomination.)

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Mindlink, p.B70.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

That has almost nothing to do with Mindshare.

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I looked it up. For those interested, Mindshare does exist in 4E. It's in Powers, p148, and it is based on the Mindlink trait.

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Not THS, but I use this in my fantasy campaign.


Also, "coming out" in society in Serenity involves presenting yourself as the main course at a banquet, preferable hosted by the five star Chef Sang Froid. You are given magical life support and are expected to entertain guests as bits of your body are chopped off and cooked.

Serenity, a city shallow in its appeal and deep in its sins.

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Short lifespan because of limit on stored energy, probably. Make their chips powered by a little sugar fuel cell. So they can either consume their own bodies, or other candies. Cannabilistic sentient snacks!

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Am I the only one who find Sentient Snacks amusing? If you know it's just a low functioning computer program running a doll made of tasty goodness, why not chow down on one?

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I suspect it's a matter of not so much what it is, but what it's supposed to make you think of (cannibalism). Really, there is nothing inherently wrong with it- anymore than there is anything wrong with shooting a non-AI robot you bought. It is, however, kinda weird. I mean, if a guy wants to pretend to be a cannibal, fine by me. I just don't want to.

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For one, they are a good replacement for uplifted cats who want to live among uplifted mice and not murder anybody.

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Symbolism is a pretty powerful force in human consciousness. I make a comparison to how so many Americans get really distressed when someone burns a US flag - it's just a dyed piece of cloth, and the burner payed for it with their own money, but the symbolism of the act sends a powerful message.

That said, symbolism is culturally relative. Gingerbread men don't seem to give anyone the horrors, and I've seen kids giving their gingerbread men little voices that beg for mercy before being devoured/dissolved in milk/whatever. I could see Sentient Snacks being very popular with that demographic.

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I love Sapient Snacks. We had an (unfortunately aborted) THS game where we had the delightfully evil idea of making a SS with a core of some sort of explosive and an AI that would taunt you. "Don't eat me, I'm bad for your health, fat-head!" "Oh yeah?" *BITE* KABOOOM!

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On the other hand, most kids bite the heads off of their chocolate bunnies first - deliberately, I think.

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Mercy-killing, or starting with what's on top if you hold it upright, as may feel natural?

Though I did mercy-kill my breakfast sausages, biting off both ends quickly since I didn't know which was the head, before peeling off the skin and savoring the juices I sucked out. Don't know why I worried about them specifically.

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The gingerbread meme makes this sentient snack thing a lot easier for me to 'understand' now. In a way, it's almost like these snacks are like old style gingerbread men. I suppose it's okay if the dang candy doesn't start to scream and beg for mercy a little too 'realistically' the moment you take it out of it's pack. O.O

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For some reason, comparing sentient snacks to existing person-shaped foods has left me with the memory of a horrified Louise Jameson.

"It's true! The Evil One eats babies!"

(I wouldn't eat them, but then I'm vegetarian, so I draw the line at sentient, rather than sapient, anyway.)

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I'd know; I'm a part of the shadowy parts of the internet.

Mwahahaha.

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Should we not forget that in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe has cattle that will come to your table and recommend what bits of itself you should order?

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And shows perfect sapience while doing it, as well.

"Don't worry, sir. I'll be very humane."

The "cow" version in the HGTTG *show* was fugly, though. Wouldn't want to eat that thing.

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Read this thread, thought of the Snacker caste jarum kee from Stefan Jones's alien metaculture the Jorwuril Kee in Roleplayer 25 (here http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/Rolepla...arvesters.html)

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Such ideas are spreading through the RPG community. The Exalted boxed set "Dreams of the First Age" has sapient cattle as living sacrifices. At one time, the ruler of the world decided that human sacrifice was no longer an appropriate form of worship for the highest of the gods, and so they created this breed of cattle to have sapient sacrifices who would look forward to being sacrificed...

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Of course, such a society, if it were logical (and many societies aren't, really), would be perfectly fine with allowing suicide amongst the general population. ;)

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I cannot say that I am in the least surprised at this idea existing. (Whether it's ethical...::shrug:: Probably.)

I have to wonder how long it'll be until someone develops the technology to make sapient-snack bioshells and upload ghosts into them (and get them back out after death). There'll be a hell of a market for that.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

A hell of a market? Are you sure on that?

I know of voreaphiles, but I had no idea they were a majority group.

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Majority? No idea about the numbers.

But given the number of videos you can -trip over- just on Youtube (I mean it; stuff that shows up when hunting for music videos because a keyword looks remotely similar)...there's a market. Someone will fill it.

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What would PETA think of sentient snacks?

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Youtube stuff is made for free, and I'm somewhat experienced in this area, and I find it difficult to find products with much backing behind them. At the best, I can find a $30-a-month subscription for some decent high-quality photoshop or decent editors, but that's about it. Nothing like making a robotic chip to suit the "tastes" of certain people, and I'd think that they'd get more fun out of a near-perfect virtual simulation instead of buying an expensive robot-based snack (although there will be some that think that when it's "more real", it's better...)

Of course, if you look hard enough, you can find some real cases of animal abuse (swallowing live fish, abusing rats and mice and the like for those with a particular fetish), but I'm finding that that's going more and more out of style, especially since the law is cracking down on a few of them. I find more cases of animal abuse in Fear Factor, anyways. >.>

Regardless, just because there's a market, doesn't mean it's a good one. When you have 1000 people that want something, and many of them aren't willing to shell over big bucks and aren't rich to begin with, there's really not much you can do with that. Yet 20 of those 1000 can upload decent videos up on Youtube (and let's face it: The average video is not decent, and the only decent ones are made with a basic DAZ account; art geniuses like Dragoness Markie notwithstanding).

Then again, maybe we've confused what we're attempting to subtly talk about here, and maybe I'm thinking of the wrong fetish group. ;)

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

Kids will love Sentient Snacks, especially if they can make the snacks fight one another. Put them in gladiatorial matches, where the survivor avoids being eaten (for now). Or have a whole range of "hot pocket monsters", so kids can have their lunches duke it out (gotta eat them all!).

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I'll steal that idea for my campaign!

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Fair enough. I expect that toys for outre fetishes (including sapient bioroid snacks to begin with) are the kind of market that'll be filled by Youtube-level science projects by college students who need a little extra cash; someone posts a want ad, and someone comes up with the patent using a garage and a cookbook. (For an example of how this kind of thing would work, the best example I can think of is the Routines-On-Demand community in David Louis Edelman's Infoquake.)