Is it possible to do 'living machines' as monster concept well?

If you want to do it well, think about exactly why the machine was made to be living and why it 'broke' enough to be a monster.

A living loom would have the brain of an old weaver inside that would otherwise be wasted by old age, with the knowledge and ability to weave cloth endlessly day and night.
It could grow insane over time after endlessly refilling itself and realizing that they've run out of material...luckily skin makes a perfect replacement!

>I am so enlightened by sniffing my own farts the post

Interesting book but shits it's self half way through and lacks an ending. Don't give the author money, it's a full on SJW.

You're presupposing a whole fucking lot about the development of machinery and magic there. You're assuming a) that magic would not create simpler machines than the simple machines, or even just more efficient versions b) magic is in no way connected to some ineffable quality possessed by 'organic' matter than inorganic matter lacks, and are also thus assuming c) none of the incredible, far reaching, and world-changing developmental reactions caused by EITHER of these would happen.

You narrow minded chucklefuck.

>Don't give the author money, it's a full on SJW.
What did he mean by this?

he probobly means the author has left wing indeas and he dose not like it so he throws around a buzzword to make the author look like a faggit

No, you gibbering moron, I'm saying you need to establish those conditions as part of your setting. That is to say, some retarded monstrosity of flesh doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you shoved it in Harry Potter where they can make a piece of wood halfway sentient. You have to bake the situation that would lead to flesh machines into the foundation of the setting.

>Don't give the author money, it's a full on SJW.
Well damn, now I have to buy it. Since alt-right is now mainstream, gotta support the small people against the machine.

You seem to be under the inane impression that all innovators, or literally anyone, both have perfect knowledge and are perfect actors who also, through the exact kind of inane miracle you pretend to decry, have access to perfect resources.

To whit, you are an idiot.

Watts probably is left-leaning. Most cynical intellectual types are. But actual identity politics bullshit is largely absent from his writing.

The book recommended literally has a tranny in it.. Are you retarded? Being left leaning is different from being a SJW. Go check their social media yourself and see what's up there. It's easy enough to research an author.

He made no such claim. The question is why the fuck would you build a table out of human flesh when you could build it out of wood or metal? Outside of very extreme cases of mental illness this isn't something any rational person would do.

Again, no, you twat. If your explanation for it is "See here our man Dave the Lich, he's so fucking stupid he thinks he bone makes for a better combustion engine than metal" then that's the explanation, but that has the built in limitation that it's Dave and maybe some particular fans of Dave's work that are making them. If you want it to be a widespread fundamental part of the setting, it can't just be that everyone thinks Dave got it right in one go and never considered the options.

No one in this thread has said word one about human flesh other than you.

A table is not a machine, and the implementation of moving parts, especially as they interact with magic, is literally the point of the thread, so the distinction is not only relevant but crucial.

Also, people make tables out of all kinds of shit. Drums of human skin absolutely exist. Hell, pants of human flesh exist. You make presupposition layered on cognitive bias layered on contextual ignorance. A tiramisu of willful abdication of critical thought.

Who said anything about widespread or fundamental? Again, presuppositions. Throughout. The query was directed towards the idea of a flesh monster; I'd argue that any kind of monster is, definitively, not considered the norm. Even a goblin is abnormal.

But let's not pretend. Let's not prevaricate. You don't give two fucks about realism. All you care about is your own personal version of verisimilitude, which you will cling to, tooth and nail, defending every inch of fallacious morass til your dying breath.

Is this thread a fucking meme? Why are you shitposting in my spooky enemy brainstorming thread?

Stop it. Go away.

Okay.

>Who said anything about widespread or fundamental?
I did, you idiot, and it was to make a point which has seemingly swung right past you. I'm saying you need to examine what degree to which you plan on using "flesh machines" and build around it. If you want it to be some singular instance created by a lunatic with nothing better to do with his hands, or other people's hands for that matter, then you can do it that way. To do it "well", you need to plan it out beforehand and integrate it seamlessly within the setting so that it makes internal sense, rather than just because the idea of a bicycle with eyes struck your fancy, and that comes with knowing what constraints the execution of that plan carry with them.

You have drawn the attention of the fart sniffing pseudo intellectual. He is some high off of his own sources that he cannot even comprehend fear any more. Fear is but a 4 letter word and he won't accept anything less than 7.

Is your idea of a good read just the fucking Thesaurus back to front? You somehow seem to have missed the definition of "concise" or any synonyms thereof.

Says the faggot.

>But actual identity politics bullshit is largely absent from his writing.

What, no preferred pronouns even?

Look at the faggot try to defend himself. It's pathetic.

>The book recommended literally has a tranny in it.

What's wrong with that? A transsexual actually seems like a great protagonist for a body horror story. There are a lot of metaphors you could work with.

You mad that all the long words are hard to read?

Poor tad/pol/e

It's not hard to read, it's just painful to watch.

I know. Those long words really hurt your head to read. Don't worry, it's good for you to learn.

No, no, I'm just being forced to imagine how much all this posturing must hurt your back.

It's not a body horror story. It's about aliens who use the nano seconds between your eyes refresh rate to move around. Then OH SHIT VAMPIRES because fucking Vampires am I right?

Don't engage the fart sniffer.

Happy to hear you are suffering. :^)

Thing is it doesn't have a tranny in it. I don't even know what character he's talking about. Maybe he means the translator character who has cybernetically enhanced DID. The characters are all posthumans in one way or another. Comparing them to genderfag trends which became popular a decade after the book's publishing is completely off the mark.

Well said.

Ah, so once again, /pol/lution cares about memes more than facts.

posthumans? sound SJW. Who would want that instead of good, old fashioned conservative scoliosis!

Wells can't talk.

I imagine not, he's been dead since the 40s.

Thing is it does have a tranny in it. There is literally male and female personalities in the same body. That is by definition a tranny.

Do you think this tranny shit just popped up 2 years ago? This has been around forever but never hit the main stream until recently. You're completely detaching now from then. Nothing is a vacuum.

Do eyes even have a refresh rate? I thought they worked like light-activated electro-chemical inksplooshes that shifted colour-code constantly and sent an unbroken stream of information to the brain without downtime.

I need a biologist for this and not some 13yo tech nerd with bad biology thinking that eyes work in frames-per-second.

>necromancy

>There is literally male and female personalities in the same body. That is by definition a tranny.

No, that's "genderfluid", I think, or Dissociative Identity Disorder, if it's two distinct personalities.

>Fear is but a 4 letter word and he won't accept anything less than 7
and just like that, i'm dead

>if it's two distinct personalities.

It is. Actually about four distinct personalities. The character is quite honestly a good skip and a hop away from modern identity politics crap.

So you admit it's gender bullshit. Great, point proven.

Eyes do have a frame rate but it's a bit deeper than that in the story. It's eyes + brain interface time.

>So you admit it's gender bullshit. Great, point proven.

According to , no, actually.

thesaurus.com/browse/fear

I've read the book retard. I'm quite aware of the content of it and how each character acts.

Would you like to discuss how the ending is "and lol vampires took over Earth"?

Why are "alt-right" or anti-sjw literally worse than bronies when it comes to inserting their shit into every topic?

>Fear is but a 4 letter word and he won't accept anything less than 7.
Disquietude? Closest I can think of greater than 7 but not quite right. Terrors is 7 but feels wrong for the situation.

That's kind of besides the point. All of it is actually kind of besides the point. Maybe this should get back onto the subject of a wheelbarrow made of fingers or something?

Homie, concede the first point before you try to argue a second.

Because they use their own farts as perfume.

>"male and female personalities in the same body"
>tranny

There's a difference between a dysmorphic disorder (people who think their body isn't their own or isn't "correct", GID) and a dissociative disorder (fractured/compartmentalized personality traits).

I just came into this thread because I needed a fact check on eyeballs.

>and lol vampires took over Earth
They only sort of did. The second book Echopraxia is whats going down on earth.

Any concept can be done well, but it's all about context. Does this living machine exist because some crazy wizard made it? Is it the product of some sort of collective organism which builds things out of its own flesh and bone? Were these machines built out of necessity due to more traditional building materials not being available? If it exists just because 'lol it does', then reconsider it.

Yes, but it requires a higher IQ than what the average le Veeky Forumser (about 70 to 80) has.

>caring about IQ

Dude, catch up

The first few written works with steampunk aesthetics had fictional restrictive caste systems in them and a pretty shitty society to be fought against. It was punk, you punk.

Sure.

How is having a monster be a singular existence not doing it well?

The terminology has evolved and has more then one use now. Adding the -punk suffix to a word implies a technological period piece filled with fictional technology. Steampunk has steam-powered machines that are not possible in real life, Atompunk implies a sort of Fallout aesthetic with everything being like 1950s atomic power. Coconutpunk would be Giligan's Isle tier. Biopunk would be machines made of flesh to be relevant to the thread, etc.

I agree with what you're saying, I just wanted to fuck with that other user, because he's a cunt.

As for living machines as monsters, I'd personally go for more biopunk-ish stuff. Reanimated horses, weaponized parasites. There's this one webserial called Twig with these nifty body horror spiders that painlessly sting you with a tranquilizer, so you don't notice them, and then they flay and stitch your skin together to restrict your limbs. Spending a week with them, they still wouldn't manage to kill you, but the horror of having them be released in an otherwise defensible position and realizing too late that you're not going to be able to get up to go get your replacement for night watch because you didn't notice a big ass spider stitch your feet to the chair is pretty good, desu.

In biopunk, fear is a weapon.

I can see how the wording was confusing there. I wasn't dividing "a singular instance" and "doing it well", just saying that you need to plan around it. Doing a single instance of the monster well takes a different set of circumstances than doing an entire class of them well.

Conveniently, pdf related.