https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7kbq/palmer-luckey-made-a-vr-headset-that-kills-the-user-if-they-die-in-the-game
“The good news is that we are halfway to making a true NerveGear. The bad news is that so far, I have only figured out the half that kills you,”
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
There was a link in a previous thread on this where the guy had a custom Sword Art Online cake topper on his wedding cake. :soypoint-1: The Real Torment Nexus :soypoint-2: 100%
spoiler
Tsukasa being a girl IRL is probably too "political" for chuds.
SAO is such an overrated piece of shit, it's not even in the top 5 in the subgenre of the subgenre that is full dive VR MMO anime/manga
Palmer Luckey is a super chud that started a defense company that makes surveillance equipment to catch people crossing the border illegally and sells ai powered drone systems to the US government. And uhh i just saw it basically says that in the article too. I doubt the device is any more than a picture of a prop and it was just a publicity stunt to increase headset sales.
The article said he's been working himself up to using it himself, likely because everything else life has to offer has lost it's shine. Gotta support him booting up Battletoads/Double Dragon or the Ninja Turtles game for the NES.
Lmao awesome. What a world that would be. Critical support for Palmer exploding his brain on Battle Toads level 3.
One of my most favorite cherished childhood memories was going to this pizza place with these 2 brothers and they spent the entire car ride talking about Battle Toads. Then we got there, headed for the arcade, and in like seven minutes they were out of quarters. Fuckin' Battle Toads just deflated those two boys. Poor guys. Still laugh about it.
I played it with my sister on the NES and got to the speeder bike stage I think before hitting a wall. I tried playing it on a rom a few years back and couldn't get past the first stage.
I think it's Battletoads where one of the levels is legitimately impossible on co-op mode
It's also almost impossible to do solo, the bosses are tuned for two players for the most part.
Those old games were brutal. Battle Toads, Contra, Double Dragon, fuckin' Bubble Bobble.
I'm not sure it's possible to beat Contra without the extra lives cheat code.
lol multiplayer BT/DD had a mode with friendly fire on SNES.
It was seriously only last year that I realized Battletoads was probably created as something to benefit off the popularity of Ninja Turtles; it’s right there in the name and I was completely oblivious.
I don’t think we had that one growing up, but we definitely rented it a few times
The headset's advanced NerveGear setup is just a gun that is wired into the headgear itself so that if you die in the game, the gun shoots you in the head
was just thinking about the suicide helmet i saw someone make on the old internet.
cw: graphic description
spoiler
it was a hardhat (or maybe fake hardhat) with like a dozen shotgun shells glued to the outside, facing towards the wearer, and he also set up a trigger system so they'd all go off at once. iirc, the user was terrified of failing in their suicide attempt so they wanted to guarantee they were good and dead. afaik mission accomplished
just want to put an extra NSFL on this i saw the pic on 4chan over a decade ago and still think about it from time to time
Luckey said that he used three explosive charges he usually uses for a “different project.” Luckey didn’t specify which project, but he is also the founder of Anduril, a weapons and defense contractor which has won massive contracts with the government, and that is already developing loitering munitions, anti-drone tech for U.S. special forces, and underwater drones.
Oh great. He has a drone company called Anduril, Thiel (I think?) has a surveillance company called Palantir, any other too-on-the-nose LOTR metaphors these ghouls want to use?
loitering munitions
Neat, this is my first time hearing what we call our suicide drones to differentiate them from the dastardly Iranian and Russian ones
Democracies have loitering munitions
Regimes have kamikaze drones
100% he's making facial recognition based homing suicide drones a la that slaughterbots video someone made a few years ago
That's what I've been wondering, if facial dazzle camo would disrupt the recognition software. I guess it's moot if they declare people trying to evade it as a "legitimate target" or whatever
Can't this dork just get off on auto-erotic asphyxiation like all the other rich assholes?
KIRITOOOOOOOOOOO
seriously, that took less than 10 years
why do i get the feeling these explosives are from a slaughterbot prototype especially if he's so confident in their ability to destroy the brain
ah fuck I can imagine it now. "Why are you wearing a helmet, slaughterbots only attack the bad people! Some innocents get caught in the crossfire, sure, but what's the alternative? Shut down the economy until we deal with this threat? You probably think China's zero drone strategy is the way to go!"
I mean, I think the confidence is probably warranted given the proximity to the headal-region on display here.
Literally all I know about Sword Art Online is
spoiler
a certain sentence that includes the phrase "glopping noise."
SAO is absolutely problematic slop, but really tasty slop that inadvertently does really fucking funny things.
It's also, astoundingly, politically better than the guy who made that helmet since (latest arc spoilers)
The latest arc revolved around military engineers trying to make sapient murder drone pilots out of literal synthetic human souls and the story made it explicit both narratively and textually that that was actually an insane, evil thing to do to such an extent that even the guy behind the program says "actually yeah this is awful and we have to both stop the weaponization of synthetic human souls and save all of these synthetic human souls from being tortured or exterminated." The second season villains are also an American PMC made up of serial killers, who want to steal these literal human souls so the US can make sapient murder bots with them, too.
It's still gross and creepy, though, so don't take this as a recommendation. Although that's also the funniest season because it almost reaches the point of self-parody with some of the shit it pulls.
literal synthetic human souls
Isn't that just a roundabout way of saying "an A.I."?
No, it's literally some technobabble about "we discovered the literal stuff of the human soul" and a project to turn synthetic copies of those into usable AIs, which was confounded by the fact that a simple copy of a human would immediately come apart and die on realizing that it was the copy and it was trapped inside a machine. I wanted to emphasize the part where it was quite literally defining this thing not as a simple brainscan or neural network imitating humans, but rather canonically the very core of their being in a form bordering on literal magic.
spoiler
The actual program to do so entailed creating sort of blank copies to be raised in an accelerated simulation generation over generation until they started developing full human consciousness. Note there's no good reason given for this, the goal was just to get humanlike intelligence and not some vague idea about free-will and self-determination which, it has to be noted, would in fact be actively detrimental to their mad plan to create disposable drone pilots. The whole plan was stupid and awful and the story at least had the decency to textually acknowledge that fact.
I think at least some of the stupidity was explained by the researchers being just awful, and one of them actively trying to sabotage the project because he was an American spy or something and also was really into making the simulation a really stupid video game and collaborating with one of the residents to make her into a literal god inside it or some nonsense like that, but none of that explains the entire rest of the team just sitting around doing literally nothing and not noticing this.
Like I said, it's one of the most inadvertently funny arcs of SAO because the whole thing is just such completely absurd nonsense that's punctuated by highlights such as Kirito being in a coma inside a coma so the protagonist of the first half of the second season is just carting his withered husk around in a wheelchair the whole time while he stares into space and drools, which she does after having known him for all of 10 minutes before the coma thing happened. It's just so absurd while also keeping him out of the story, so it's a win/win there.
Oh, I almost forgot one of the funniest elements of it, which is that within the simulation there's "magic" which is just saying console commands out loud to edit the world around themselves.
They should strap one of these to the President and then give the detonator to a random American. It goes to a new person every two years.
This is a classic case of "Americans inventing zero-g pen, when they could've just used a pencil."
Russian Roulette already fuckin exists, my dude, just play that.
That's actually a misconception. Graphite dust is conductive and in zero g it can float around and potentially short something. So a space pen is not useless
