Funny / Civilization: Beyond Earth

• This faux interview with Hutama. The sheer amount of snark from him is absolutely breathtaking.
• The examples for what the immersive library Deep Memory allows you to do include "see Shakespeare's plays performed in a Globe Theater, by the original actors", "listen to blind Homer recite the Iliad in the original Greek"... and "experience a videogame of Civilization, on a personal computer, at 4 o'clock in the morning".
• The description of the Bytegeist (basically a sentient Facebook/Wikipedia hybrid, with "insufferable chirpy ubiquity" as Élodie describes it) is said AI talking to you and being "helpful", in a somewhat creepy manner. It also gives you your fortune:
  Random gene makes something mean. Splice and dice makes something nice.
• The occasional Future Imperfect.
  • A reference to "St. Tesla of Serbia".
  • The quotes from some of the technologies, wonders and affinity level ups that list five basic things. They all seem fine until you realize that one stands out, sometimes at the end. Often those erroneous ones are funny in context.
    • A list of mythological characters tasked with bringing the seeds of the past with them to new worlds includes Noah, Lutunasobasoba and Degei (from Fijian mythology), and Freeman Lowell.
    • A statement from a scholar that the five mythical creatures of Earth are the dragon, the unicorn, the griffin, the chimera... and the llama.
    • A list of the five greatest encyclopdists of Earth are: Pliny, Diderot... Brown (A child's book series in which the main chararter's nickname is 'Encyclopedia'), Britannica (Britannica is the Latin word for British, with the person clearly mistaking it for a person's name) and Contributor.
    • The five oceans of Earth are: the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Titanic, the Arctic, and the Indian.
    • The first five machines of Earth are: the lever, the screw, the inclined plane, the dynamo, and the wheel.
• Building a Mass Digester gets you the "Tastes Like Cardboard" miniquest. Choosing the production-increasing option has the text say "our people would probably be opposed to eating a paste that doubles as an industrial-strength construction material."
• In the Civilopedia's page on the Station mechanic, CEO Fielding sees them as business subsidiaries and offers the comment that they offer a good opportunity to reduce risk, explore growth opportunities... and securely offload bad assets.
• If you conquer the ARC (Suzanne Fielding) as the Slavic Federation (General Vadim Kozlov), her last words to you are: "Russian dog! You'll never take me alive! Remember the Alamo!"
• In a similar vein, Arshia Kishk of Al Falah has some... choice words when talking about the American Reclamation Corporation:
  "Greetings, I'm Arshia Kishk of Al-Falah. My father told me stories about America. It's… interesting to meet you."
  "Hello again, Chief Executive. Is it true your infrastructure failed because of using precious metals in construction?"
  "Hello again, Chief Executive. I'm curious, why wasn't your country a home for all of the braves?"
  "Hello again, Chief Executive. So, who was this 'Uncle Sam,' and why was he so needy?"
  "Hello again, Chief Executive. Why were your doctors also musicians? And why did they teach you to smoke trees?"
• In Rising Tide, one of the Old Earth Artifacts is a finished Expy Half-Life 3. It took one-tenth of the world's population to complete and the game's launch crashed the economies of Earth, the EISS, and Lunar Base 1 because of the productivity loss.
  • And it is kind of interesting to note that by the time of the Seeding Project, video games have become high art, and Elodie's magnum opus was a volume of literary criticism on the abovementioned Expy of Half-Life 3.
• The "Uncle Nevercloned Stories", who are folk tales made by colonists that syncretize various human mythologies with "modern" science, get used as quotes once in a while.
  "Anansi looked at the man's genome and said 'Messy! Messy! Who can live like this?' He took a broom and swept up the genome, and when the man woke up, he felt much better!"
  "'Well, mebbe you ain't heated it enough yet,' said Paul Bunyan, and he took the plasma out of the hohlraum, rubbed it hard between his hands until the Aleph-field de-resolved itself, and put it back in the Holon Chamber. 'I reckon that'll be warm enough to dry your boots,' he said."
  "Floatstone beat Anansi and Coyote at poker, and won the right to leave the ground. But Floatstone forgot to ask for wings to fly, and so it just sort of hangs around feeling sorry for itself."
  "John Henry pulled out two 5-pound nano-oscillators, one for each side of the fault. They shook and shook, the arth trembling everywhere. Half an hour later, John Henry had shoot himself up a mountain, while the industrial engineers had only managed a tiny hill."