Views : 556,196
Genre: Entertainment
Date of upload: Mar 1, 2024 ^^
Rating : 4.965 (301/33,678 LTDR)
RYD date created : 2024-05-10T05:50:41.200571Z
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Top Comments of this video!! :3
Perhaps this is an apt time for me to speak about a science fiction story I read well over forty years ago. It was in a book in our secondary school library, a science fiction anthology whose title may have been generic, but is now long forgotten, along with that of the story.
Told from the viewpoint of the scientist in an exploratory team of four, it starts with the team falling into a gelatinous mass. We are then told that space exploration, and surveying new planets, has turned into something like a game of GO, a Chinese board game. This is why one of the team members is what is called a 'loyalty monitor', placed within the team to ensure everyone sticks to the rules laid down by the company funding the team.
We learn that the gelatinous mass has digested everything but the brains and spinal cords of the humans, and uses the thought processes to make body parts that will enable it to better survive its environment. Each Team member comes up with different body parts- legs, arms, eyes, ears and so on. The four still have to work together to survive, though, and it soon becomes clear that the Loyalty Monitor is a threat to the protagonist and the third team member, having persuaded the fourth to side with her.
When the organism divides into two, the Loyalty Monitor takes the opportunity try to kill or otherwise remove the protagonist from his half of the creature, but he survives. Now divided, he shares his half with the fourth team member, another scientist, who as per the LM's instructions, tries to kill him. Instead, No 4 is killed when a large rock falls on his half of the creature, crushing his brain and spinal cord to pulp. The protagonist recovers and goes in search of the other creature, to find that one of the brains and nervous systems is lying on the ground a short way from it. He discovers that the third team member, a female civilian secretary, is still alive and in sole control of the organism. She tells him that she grew bony armour to protect her brain and spinal cord when the LM tried to attack her- basically, she grew a skull and spinal column. At this point, the LM's brain and nerves were ejected from the body, she'd been excreted as waste detrimental to the survival of the creature.
The story ends with the Protagonist and the secretary attempting to shape their gelatinous forms into something more pleasing. All this time, the protagonist has been trying to name this creature, using his surname as the species name, until he comes up with an entirely new name for the creature. I can't recall what the scientific name was, but I do recall its translation into ordinary English, which was 'Man's hope'.
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1:08 Praise be to the Omnissiah
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I’ve always found fleshy diseases and mutations incredibly interesting because for me lots of it comes off as an allegory for cancer wether it’s intentional or not. Cancer cells mutate and rapidly spread throughout the body, avoiding detection and causing only destruction, and often times these shambling masses of flesh in fiction do a similar thing. I guess why it’s so scary is not only because of a heavily mutated and fleshy human, but the fact that something like this exists in real life, albeit on a cellular level.
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Honestly, modern audiences in general have become divorced from the horrors of pathogens.
The black death is obvious, but in 1800s Europe, approximately a quarter of all people died from Tuberculosis.
Smallpox is another great example. We don't think of it in the same plague sense, but in a span of three years, a plague of smallpox killed 1/3 of the population of Japan.
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3:33 sir, that cut was epic.
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It is far too common for entertainment to rely on "Beautiful = Good" and "Disfigured = Evil" and that sadly seems to go far beyond the examples mentioned here. So it is good when a work pushes back against that visual language, still compared to other works that do the same, "Humanity Lost" seems both unique and extreme.
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I created a Warhammer 40k faction called "The Covenant of the Flesh" in it they subscribe to the notion of evolution and modular Tyranid design but also pure unadulterated chaos. They would by all means be branded as heretics and their faction would be close to being snuffed out. They are not worshippers of the four (Chaos gods Khorne, Slanesh, Nurgle, and Tzeentch ) but worship the idea of Chaos itself. On the other side of that is the Chronus Mechanicus who are former Necrons, T'au and Adeptus Mechanicus. They subscribe to the purity of the machine. They would also be branded as heretics but not as much as the other faction would.
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the indomitable human spirit against the face of many threats, including the IRS and utterly phallic spaceships. joking aside, this video does give me that glimmer of hope for tomorrow, even if that tomorrow ends up being either painfully mundane, samey-samey, painfully tragic, and sometimes actually great tomorrows. the feeling of longing for the distant horizons always reminds me that, for all the emptiness there is between each dot in the sky, and for all the discourse wedged between miles and miles of people and concrete forest, i'm kinda glad i still feel something.
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@danielhavens8819
2 months ago
the Belisarius Saga is an example of a story that says "I'm joining the war on human body horror on the side of the human body horror" and it's soooo good
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