Thariinye [he/him]

Not confirmed, but I've heard that those barricades did not go up tonight for this - rather, they went up a week ago, after the climate activist self-immolated on Earth Day...

probably the best entry point for UC is in fact the original Mobile Suit Gundam in one form or another, followed by the Zeta TV series, since those two are really the touchstones of UC gundam and gundam in general. Though MSG in particular can be a bit uneven, it and Zeta are really what set the tropes and story beats that so many other gundam series have riffed on. One reason that a lot of modern gundam series have been uneven is their desire to redo story beats from either MSG or Zeta gundam, or just to redo those series whole cloth.

https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/671510.html is a link to a Chinese-language article about it. Hearing from others (and looking at google translate), several things pop out.

The presenter specifically calls out games like Onmyoji, Arknights, Azur Lane, and Genshin Impact for differing reasons, saying that new games featuring elements in those games might be considered to be going over the line.

I think the presenter called out post-apocalytic scenarios as a problem (and that fantasy scenarios won't get you away from red lines either).

Azur Lane was called out specifically because of the anthropomorphization of IJN Ships - specifically, 'Kaga is my waifu' as a thing may be a problem going forward. This is especially hilarious as Azur Lane is much less problematic than Kantai Collection, the OTHER ship girl game which is made in Japan, because that game is much more explicitly an IJN lost-causer right-wing ideology game, whereas Azur Lane is just very very horny.

BL was explicitly prohibited, and BL-adjacent stuff was also considered a problem. Furthermore, characters that couldn't be immediately ID'd as male or female by the reviewers would also be a problem -- specifically calling out Venti from Genshin Impact. I think the presenter also called out Xianxia (the very popular genre with works like The Untamed/ Mo Dao Zu Shi) because I see 'cultivation,' which represents a technique/concept for powering up in Xianxia stories, getting called out as bad.

Other stuff - don't glorify Japanese history or culture, don't be 'inaccurate' with depictions of Chinese historical and mythical figures. This seems to be what caused a big stir with Fate/Grand Order in China, because FGO often takes significant creative license (though usually with some reason) with many of its characters. Most of the characters representing Chinese figures have had their images totally removed in game menus in the Chinese version of the game, and their names have also been excised completely, with them being referred to only by their 'class' and ID, which leads to some 'interesting 'problems in the story (which features an arc taking place in an alternate universe China.

Overall there's some maybe good stuff about restricting gacha (though as a gacha player myself I have mixed feelings), but a lot of significantly bad socially conservative stuff here. If this presentation is accurate as to what China will allow in games, we should expect significant restrictions in what is allowed to be depicted in games (and media in general), because many companies are trying to release games in China (and Chinese games are getting much better in quality and coming overseas). Don't know how else to say it, but it's pretty damn bad if you're into gaming and any kind of social justice.

Yeah, that's kind of more like it. We can't really estimate the intelligence of extinct species that well aside from looking at brain size and other physical circumstantial evidence, but I'm extrapolating from our current and growing understanding of intelligence in non-human animals like dolphins and corvids. We're increasingly realizing that these species are much smarter than we had previously thought, and the toolmaking, memory, and self-recognition displayed specifically by magpies (I think) means that these traits can evolve outside of mammals.

I'm of the opinion that 'being human-level smart' is not something that's only popped up in humans, but merely that our hominid ancestors were the first to combine that with other relatively rare features like opposable thumbs to allow for unprecedented tool use, and then things just happened from there.

I've got a similar opinion, although I think it's more likely that "technological" life is less common. We know that life arose on Earth just about as soon as it was viable for life to arise, but the evolution of eukaryotes took over a billion years, and that event may have only ever happened once. After that, multicellular life took another billion or so years to start evolving. If we imagine that those two evolutionary events are in fact not 'inevitable' consequences but instead infinitesimally unlikely chances, it feels like there's probably a whole lot of prokaryotes in the universe, but significantly less multicellular life.

Adding on to that, there's been a bit over 100 million years of large terrestrial lifeforms before evolution finally rolled a species that had the qualities to do the kinds of things that humans have done. We're already seeing how intelligence does not inevitably lead to development of human-analogue technology (Corvids, Cetaceans, other great apes). Many species through land evolutionary history have likely had human-level intelligence, but due to other circumstances didn't go along a path that led to space exploration. So I think that there are still planets that have complex multicellular and even intelligent life, but no agriculture or other stuff that would lead to industrial-level societies.

I agree that it's depressingly likely that FTL just doesn't exist in a meaningful sense, which would form the biggest difficulty in creating interstellar communities.