holy fuck, Yud criticizing Banks is fucking exhausting, and I keep getting angry seeing this barely readable shithead try to tear down the work of a sci-fi author he clearly doesn’t like because people keep bringing up the Culture novels as a counter to his horseshit, and because they’re more fun and fulfilling to read than Yud’s nonsense ever will be

so I tapped out early and quote mined the 400 years part:

They live, in perfect health, for generally around four hundred years before choosing to die (I don't quite understand why they would, but this is low-grade transhumanism we're talking about).

yud. buddy. that novel explains why they would in the same chapter that describes a Culture citizen going through with the voluntary decision to die. it’s boredom. the major motive force behind almost everything the Culture does is boredom, because its constituent beings want for nothing. the civilization as a whole knows that existence for human-like beings becomes intensely, painfully boring (just like reading yud’s output!) around the 400 year mark, and the Culture has both removed any stigma around voluntarily ending a painful existence and any reason to prolong it past your own comfort. after that, you can enjoy an afterlife of being acausally pampered by every networked Culture Mind.

there’s even a version of the voluntary death and afterlife process for entire galactic civilizations called Subliming, where every natural and artificial lifeform in your civilization becomes a singular being of pure energy and transitions into another dimension. just like with uploaded organic beings, Sublimed civilizations can still influence our dimension, but almost always don’t care to. the Culture is actually considered somewhat tacky by other galactic civilizations for being at a fairly late stage in its development without Subliming. they know how to do it, so chances are they just aren’t bored enough yet.

yud omits this (probably, I’m not gonna go back and check), but anyone who chooses an infinite existence at the cost of their own sanity is considered a fucking weirdo who should be sneered at. the Culture isn’t gonna end your existence (they don’t do murder, and there’s a possibly even bigger stigma against forcibly altering a sentient being’s mind) but they’re also not gonna actively enable you to self-harm.

But even that was optional right, it was just the cultural standard, nobody forced them to do it.

It gets even odder in a way, iirc the more destructive megolomaniacs (or cult leaders or whatever) who couldn't really accept that they are not allowed to use up massive amounts of resources/lives of other people were kindly suggested to play out these fantasies in VR, which I assume works on standard science fiction logic that it can be sped up, so those 400 years can stretch a long time in the computonium. (So the culture includes the LW virtual lives fantasy).

(I'm also pretty sure Yud is wrong about the Culture, iirc living by your strength certainly is a thing, it just has a fallback where you don't die if you fail via the robots etc of the Culture (And I think even that could be turned off in most cases)).

Anyway the article linked, and the conversation with the straw SF fan (who is heated while he stays calm) says more about Yud than the Culture.

select the Banks extract, pass through wc: 1677

select the yud.....emanation, do same: 13442

at this stage it's likely the basilisk will torture him purely for entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.

What is it with Rats extolling The Player of Games above other Culture novels? It's the one HN likes best too. It's probably the only one I've not re-read. Maybe it's how the main character is kinda seduced by the parody of patriarchal capitalism in the culture he's coerced to infiltrate.

Personally I think Use of Weapons is the best one.