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Doltos posted:I defend Fatt Damon and his right to abuse his digital crew. I see no difference between what he did and what we all did to our Sims growing up.  It's not really Black Mirror that makes you lose faith in humanity so much as reading people's interpretations of it. Lick! The! Whisk! posted:I'm also going to argue that overall his punishment is wildly disproportionate to his worst crime, non-consensual voyeurism. Well yeah (his moral crimes are considerably worse than non-consensual voyeurism, and even that is a generous descriptor of his lesser crime), but "punishment we shouldn't be on board with" is true of almost all of the Black Mirror villains, including in this season. It almost doesn't matter if it's wildly disproportionate to the crime - in a world in which people can inflict real, eternal horror on people, we shouldn't let anyone do it, even in retaliation for those who do it first. Part of what separates my thinking from other people's vastly is any time somebody says "Well, sure, I'm okay with this," when it comes to any of the And I Must Scream level torture-thons.
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Dec 31, 2017 04:51
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Oh also @Bicyclops re: Black Museum: I think BM is supposed to be a metanarrative commentary on metanarrative criticism of Black Mirror, to wit "what if phones, but too much" and people's (wrong and dumb) interpretations of BM as "technology run amok and also everyone is lovely and gets what's coming to them". If we view the story as about a deconstruction of what people say Charlie Brooker is like, then Rolo Haynes is this flabby middle-aged white dude purveying stories, which he is the progenitor-slash-writer of, that solely about technological adaptations being monkey's paws. He is then revealed to be as amoral or moreso than everyone else, a sadist who delights in torturing others because he believes firmly in the amorality of his victims. (It's also why I hardcore disagree with the "Rolo Haynes is racist" interpretation - he enables racism, but his true endgoal is pure capitalism, which sort of plays into accusations that Brooker mistreats his characters or stories for shocking or affecting ends despite them feeling unearned or whatever.) I think the problem with this presentation is that it's inherently a defensive one and sort of reveals the flaws in what people accuse Black Mirror of being. When an episode is almost entirely solely "what if phones, but too much", the show itself suffers, as Black Museum sort of reveals, because there's just no there there. On top of which I feel like once you make an episode of television that's almost entirely reactive to criticism that reaction has to be good to land, and this just wasn't. The "triumphant" monologue of Nish, the supposed slaying of the boogeyman that is An Amoral Showrunner Concerned Entirely With Tech Fetishism just wasn't there. The acting wasn't there, the writing wasn't there, and the episode tries for an ending that destroys technocratic realism that doesn't feel that earned. Again, it's not bad, but if Charlie Brooker was attempting to address criticisms, he shouldn't have done it in this way. He did a more-or-less perfect reaction by literally including "what if phones, but too much" in Hated in the Nation, and San Junipero's mere existence lays to rest that Brooker has no investment in his characters or only has Bad Ends just to have them, or to make a successful tv show, considering how he sort of ruined the ending to one of his best episodes simply because he wanted the two main characters to have a completely unearned and thematically inappropriate pairoff ending. The response to criticism of Brooker already existed, both metatextually and otherwise, by the time Black Museum came out. It needed to be better to justify its existence here.
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Dec 31, 2017 04:55
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:It's not the worst in the series, not by a long shot. (...) What a weird mix of opinions I strongly agree with and opinions I strongly disagree with. The thing I'm going to actually bring up, though, is that I don't think the problem with Black Museum is that it's too morally unambiguous. I think it's just a poorly-structured episode. As you say, the first story has pretty much nothing to do with the rest of the episode, which is a shame, because it's the best-told story present. IMO, if anything, the problem is that it doesn't hammer home the injustice enough - the convict clearly isn't supposed to be guilty, but we're supposed to take this on faith in the narrative; if the episode had clearly shown the convict's innocence rather than just gesturing towards it as a possibility, then it would feel a lot less like a White Bear/Shut Up And Dance "is torture okay even if someone did something really really bad" rehash, and more into the intended territory of "allegory about how black men are railroaded into the legal system so they can serve as slaves-in-all-but-name". IMO the best way to implement this would be to make the guy from the first story the murderer; it ties in his story with the episode's main plot and makes it important while also clarifying that the protagonist's father is innocent before he's even introduced. You could even show Rolo Haynes tampering with evidence in the case onscreen for bonus foreshadowing points.
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Dec 31, 2017 05:00
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Bicyclops posted:
Eh, there's a lot of episodes where people get pretty much exactly what they deserve (or at the very least, they end the episode having made the bed they currently lie in) - Shut Up and Dance, 15MM, Entire History of You, Crocodile, Arkangel, USS Callister.
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Dec 31, 2017 05:01
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metalhead is poo poo, sorely needed more worldbuilding, and is not as rewatachable as other black mirror episodes because it's straight up horror action
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Dec 31, 2017 05:14
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Okay, fine, I'll address the San Junipero thing too because it's bugging me. "San Junipero should end with Kelly following through on her decision not to upload herself" is some dumb "Tangled should end with Flynn dying" criticism and it annoys me every time I see it; it's knee-jerk "how is Black Mirror if not sad" garbage that dresses itself up in faux intellectualism. It's clearly not the intended ending; everything about Kelly's monologue screams "she's desperately trying and failing to convince herself to leave" and what happens next is the logical next narrative beat. It just ending there wouldn't be the right artistic decision at all; it wouldn't fit with or complete the episode. It would still be a decent episode with that ending, but substantially worse; it certainly wouldn't be a series standout. "Even when technology promises immortality, some people won't wind up using it due to personal hangups" is thematically neat, but that's already pretty well-covered by the rest of the episode, and ultimately leaving it hanging over the ending would be a distraction from the real main thrust of the episode, the hanging question at the end of "what will ultimately happen to people who go to technology for immortality?" It's a wide-open question, and we're ultimately left hopeful for the future like our characters but vaguely concerned that it's all fake and/or delicate. The intercut between the sugar-coated romance scenes and the existentially terrifying brutalist Matrix data farm is a perfect summation of the episode and a perfect note to end it on. Seriously, imagine that same scene but with Yorkie crying instead of the romance scenes. It's substantially less effective, it's just Black Mirror Digital Hell #92 and it completely undermines the focus on what a daunting thing San Junipero is for the human race.
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Dec 31, 2017 05:22
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21 Muns posted:the convict clearly isn't supposed to be guilty, but we're supposed to take this on faith in the narrative; if the episode had clearly shown the convict's innocence rather than just gesturing towards it as a possibility, then it would feel a lot less like a White Bear/Shut Up And Dance "is torture okay even if someone did something really really bad" rehash, and more into the intended territory of "allegory about how black men are railroaded into the legal system so they can serve as slaves-in-all-but-name". IMO the best way to implement this would be to make the guy from the first story the murderer; it ties in his story with the episode's main plot and makes it important while also clarifying that the protagonist's father is innocent before he's even introduced. You could even show Rolo Haynes tampering with evidence in the case onscreen for bonus foreshadowing points. Actually I agree that your interpretation would've worked better as well. I think the episode should've, ironically, "chosen a side" and stuck to it, because either way creates a more interesting episode than its barely-there ambiguity.
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Dec 31, 2017 05:23
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Bicyclops posted:
I think you're trying a bit too hard to be stodgy
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Dec 31, 2017 05:26
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:Oh also @Bicyclops re: Black Museum: I think BM is supposed to be a metanarrative commentary on metanarrative criticism of Black Mirror, to wit "what if phones, but too much" and people's (wrong and dumb) interpretations of BM as "technology run amok and also everyone is lovely and gets what's coming to them". If we view the story as about a deconstruction of what people say Charlie Brooker is like, then Rolo Haynes is this flabby middle-aged white dude purveying stories, which he is the progenitor-slash-writer of, that solely about technological adaptations being monkey's paws. He is then revealed to be as amoral or moreso than everyone else, a sadist who delights in torturing others because he believes firmly in the amorality of his victims. (It's also why I hardcore disagree with the "Rolo Haynes is racist" interpretation - he enables racism, but his true endgoal is pure capitalism, which sort of plays into accusations that Brooker mistreats his characters or stories for shocking or affecting ends despite them feeling unearned or whatever.) I'm with you on most of the first paragraph, because I feel that it, like White Christmas, is kind of a "hey, Black Mirror fans!" kind of episode, to be taken a little less seriously than most. I think both episodes have similar flaws (the first story in both contains cartoonish gore as meta-commentary that is off-putting and unnecessary, for example). I think you're splitting hairs a little with your Haynes is racist vs. benefits from racism interpretation, though. Only a little, because it's an important distinction, you're definitely right, but a person can be both. One of the things that was so interesting in those email exchanges between Bannon and Milo was Bannon's "Hey, stay away from the more obvious white supremacists - they're bad for business" sort of letters. The curator is a capitalist huckster, sure, and he finds the masturbating Nazis as disgusting as everyone else does, but pure subscribers to the social darwinism of capitalism (particularly those who find pleasure in profiting from it) are almost by definition racist, even if they're smarter and a bit more conflicted about it. From a purely literary perspective, there's an extent to which you're right about some of the mistakes made here, but television is a weird loving medium. There's a reason for an anthology show to make a much more winking address to constant fans and be a bit more up front about deconstructing itself, particularly in an age of binge-watching. It's a sort of forceful palette cleanser. The fact that it "confirms" (ugh  ) the "shared universe" stuff is evidence that this one in particular is about checking boxes on the Black Mirror bingo card. I will agree that does make some of the commentary in the final part of it misplaced, though, and it's one of the few episodes that seems to take a sort of pleasure in the bad guy's eternal suffering. If you're doing a "Congratulations!" victory lap episode, it may not be the best place to let off some steam about the rising tide of fascism. I think it might have been placed there because so many writers right now are struggling to even think about how to address it, but that doesn't excuse it's heavy-handedness. It's not one of the strongest episodes this season, but I don't think it's the actual worst (I think that goes to Metalhead), and I was prepared for it to be actually bad (like, normal TV bad) from a lot of the reviews.
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Dec 31, 2017 05:32
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Doltos posted:I think you're trying a bit too hard to be stodgy lol wtf does this even mean?
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Dec 31, 2017 05:33
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21 Muns posted:Okay, fine, I'll address the San Junipero thing too because it's bugging me. "San Junipero should end with Kelly following through on her decision not to upload herself" is some dumb "Tangled should end with Flynn dying" criticism and it annoys me every time I see it; it's knee-jerk "how is Black Mirror if not sad" garbage that dresses itself up in faux intellectualism. It's clearly not the intended ending; everything about Kelly's monologue screams "she's desperately trying and failing to convince herself to leave" and what happens next is the logical next narrative beat. It just ending there wouldn't be the right artistic decision at all; it wouldn't fit with or complete the episode. It would still be a decent episode with that ending, but substantially worse; it certainly wouldn't be a series standout. "Even when technology promises immortality, some people won't wind up using it due to personal hangups" is thematically neat, but that's already pretty well-covered by the rest of the episode, and ultimately leaving it hanging over the ending would be a distraction from the real main thrust of the episode, the hanging question at the end of "what will ultimately happen to people who go to technology for immortality?" It's a wide-open question, and we're ultimately left hopeful for the future like our characters but vaguely concerned that it's all fake and/or delicate. The intercut between the sugar-coated romance scenes and the existentially terrifying brutalist Matrix data farm is a perfect summation of the episode and a perfect note to end it on. Seriously, imagine that same scene but with Yorkie crying instead of the romance scenes. It's substantially less effective, it's just Black Mirror Digital Hell #92 and it completely undermines the focus on what a daunting thing San Junipero is for the human race. The interpretation that the end of San Junipero's ending is actually secretly Super Bittersweet Technology Is Actually Super Bad And Scary, Maaaaaaaaaaaan stuff is some Room 237-level intellectual yoga that is not reinforced by the thematic thrust or build of the episode as written at all. Sorry, no, just cause there's some shots of a server farm doesn't make the ending Super Scary Actually. It's a 100% happy ending, period, end of story. That was its aims. The problem with SJ isn't that Kelly decides to upload herself after having a wonderful monologue giving a good reason she wouldn't; there's no build, no sequencing from the defense of not uploading to where we see Kelly turn and then decide to upload herself anyways. The ending doesn't land because it's literally, and Charlie Brooker's literal words on the literal subject support this, an episode that builds to a specific ending and then pivots away from that with no justification entirely because the writer of the episode fell too much in love with his characters. It happens all the time, in all fiction, and it happened with SJ. It just happened such that it's super deleterious to the episode as a whole, especially considering Hang the DJ comes out a year later and does the entire build to a happy ending and has it come across as earned and coherent over San Junipero's out of nowhere bullshit. And further I can't really stand people's arguments that because SJ is functional immortality that 1) Kelly's husband was wrong or whatever to not choose it and 2) Kelly would've been stupid to not go for it. There's a gigantic section of SJ that deals solely with the point of how losing death as a constant makes life pointless; there's a subsection of SJ of people who have used SJ as a defense against real emotional human connection or consequence because nothing matters because none of them can die so who the gently caress cares about poo poo like empathy or actual relationships, the only thing that matters is a bacchanalian pursuit of pleasure or feeling over actual interaction. Life is defined by death, as SJ argues, and although you can live a meaningful and mature life without it, it might not be necessarily worth it or a good idea. The years Kelly had with her husband were so meaningful because he died at the end of it, and the show punts on whether or not Kelly can or even should pursue a relationship without that level of reality to influence it. NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Dec 31, 2017 |
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Dec 31, 2017 05:37
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:The interpretation that the end of San Junipero's ending is actually secretly Super Bittersweet Technology Is Actually Super Bad And Scary, Maaaaaaaaaaaan stuff is some Room 237-level intellectual yoga that is not reinforced by the thematic thrust or build of the episode as written at all. Sorry, no, just cause there's some shots of a server farm doesn't make the ending Super Scary Actually. It's a 100% happy ending, period, end of story. That was its aims. I mostly agree with you, although I think the arguments that the two have about the technology (the ones that you feel weaken the episode), have some of the ideas of Ship of Theseus arguments embedded in them without actually uttering them. The episode comes down firmly on the side of that technology being good. Your argument, fairly consistently, seems to be that Kelly's impassioned speech argues too effectively against the tech, both from an individual character perspective and, in terms of how it's presented to the audience, to present it as vanity, and that her choice change her mind comes out of left field. I think that's an unresolvable argument, because the episode, as it's presented to most people, argues fairly effectively why Kelly would change her mind, both in terms of "objectively right" as the universe is presented and as a character. I don't know whether I don't find her (well-written) monologue about her husband less convincing than you do, or whether I just find it more believable that given time and consideration, she'd change her mind by choosing to discard the way she was lettering her previous experiences poison the chance for a new beginning. e: eh, "the ones you feel weaken the episode" in that first sentence sounds petty and self-congratulatory, and it's not really what you say. Apologies, that's poor phrasing on my part. You can ignore it, I just left it there because it felt dishonest to delete it a few minutes later. Bicyclops fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Dec 31, 2017 |
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Dec 31, 2017 05:48
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Chillgamesh posted:I think Hang the DJ might just be the most morally repugnant episode of the series in retrospect. If we accept that perfect digital copies of humans are equivalent to humans, Hang the DJ presents a world where every time you're thinking about banging someone you swipe on an app and a thousand perfect copies of you and the person you're thinking about banging are generated and then purged after living their own separate lives, potentially for years or even decades. At the press of a button you birth and abruptly end two thousand human lives. Yeah but in hang the di the cookies get to do a lot of loving and dining. It’s not like they have unhappy lives and presumably one day the just... don’t wake up cipher posted:I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
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Dec 31, 2017 05:54
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Bicyclops posted:lol wtf does this even mean? It means not everyone thinks the shows are completely cut and dry. Some villains can have sympathetic parts else they wouldn't be believable. Doltos fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Dec 31, 2017 |
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Dec 31, 2017 05:57
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Bicyclops posted:I mostly agree with you, although I think the arguments that the two have about the technology (the ones that you feel weaken the episode), have some of the ideas of Ship of Theseus arguments embedded in them without actually uttering them. The episode comes down firmly on the side of that technology being good. Your argument, fairly consistently, seems to be that Kelly's impassioned speech argues too effectively against the tech, both from an individual character perspective and, in terms of how it's presented to the audience, to present it as vanity, and that her choice change her mind comes out of left field. I think that's an unresolvable argument, because the episode, as it's presented to most people, argues fairly effectively why Kelly would change her mind, both in terms of "objectively right" as the universe is presented and as a character. I don't know whether I don't find her (well-written) monologue about her husband less convincing than you do, or whether I just find it more believable that given time and consideration, she'd change her mind by choosing to discard the way she was lettering her previous experiences poison the chance for a new beginning. I mostly agree, but I think point is made within SJ with the inclusion of the partiers that although they specifically aren't morally repugnant or "bad people", they are meant to come across as technological Lost Boys, in the sense that they've retreated from meaningful connection into pure fantasy and escapism solely because SJ allows that and they've had no reason to not do so, because nothing they do matters, because they can't die. It's not Charlie Brooker trying to malign or judge SJ as a concept - Yorkie's entire existence and character highlights how valuable SJ is to people who got a bad beat in the real world - but it's him making a very clear point on how and in what ways SJ can go wrong for you. Not in the sense that you are bad, but more in the sense that you've lost your humanity. Like, SJ works completely without the partiers. To me their inclusion only exists because Charlie Brooker wanted to reinforce Kelly's monologue and show an in-SJ example of what she was arguing in the first place, which reinforces her argument to not be there at all.
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Dec 31, 2017 05:57
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Mantis42 posted:The tablet from episode 2 is also in the museum, along with one of costumes from White Bear. P. sure I saw one of the robot bees, posed behind a magnifying glass.
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Dec 31, 2017 06:06
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maskenfreiheit posted:The woman at the front desk was using the rating app Also there is zero chance that the CEO or CTO wouldn't get a notification if an underling downvoted them.
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Dec 31, 2017 06:07
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withak posted:Also there is zero chance that the CEO or CTO wouldn't get a notification if an underling downvoted them. Yeah that’s the problem- a collective of these sullen Eastern Europeans could form a union of downvotes to punish the boss. Very harmful to innovation and productivity if workers can retaliate against a CTO who doesn’t violate the non aggression principle Thus he’s basically forced to create an illegal according to the UN cookie torture ken doll house
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Dec 31, 2017 06:13
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:The interpretation that the end of San Junipero's ending is actually secretly Super Bittersweet Technology Is Actually Super Bad And Scary, Maaaaaaaaaaaan stuff is some Room 237-level intellectual yoga that is not reinforced by the thematic thrust or build of the episode as written at all. Sorry, no, just cause there's some shots of a server farm doesn't make the ending Super Scary Actually. It's a 100% happy ending, period, end of story. That was its aims. Why are the shots of the server farm there? On some level the audience was already silently aware that that was what was happening, so why does the ending use visuals to hammer that home? I'm not saying the episode has a flatly anti-technology perspective; I'm saying that ultimately, amidst all of the happiness, we are still supposed to feel deeply unsettled. "If you became immortal, you'd wind up losing people who mattered to you who are still mortal" is a well-trod trope for a reason, but ultimately it's not what San Junipero exists to do. I could hardly care less what Brooker has to say on the matter; he makes writing mistakes all the time and we just disagree about what stage he was mistaken about here, so Death Of The Author is pretty easy to invoke. The point of San Junipero is much simpler and broader: "technology can make us all immortal! ...right?" What's going to happen to Yorkie and Kelly? In the context of Black Mirror, it's a happy ending, because we don't see them facing cookie torture, they're in an environment designed to be pleasant and ultimately they seem to be enjoying it. ("Yorkie winds up immortal but alone" would be a simpler story that doesn't force us to confront this fact because we can dismiss her fate as bad luck and circumstance that she might get over some day.) But the server farm forces us to confront that this Heaven is on Earth. They're all still physical beings. They're not haunted by the bad experiences in the "real world" that they need to learn to get past now; they're haunted by the continued existence of the real world that they still exist in. They're better off alive than dead, but sooner or later something is going to give way. They're alive, but they're not safe. I don't know about you, but when I upload data to a Google server or whatever, I don't think "oh, good, now it'll still exist for time and all eternity". In a normal Black Mirror Digital Hell storyline, "well, it's not quite real and it can't last forever anyway" is what you tell yourself to feel better. In San Junipero, it's the deep nagging discomfort that makes the episode, and drowning it out with ancient mythological "oh no, I'm stuck in Heaven without my wife" tropes would be foolish. IMO San Junipero has the best possible ending as a self-contained episode, and I mean that in a writing sense, not in a "feels good" sense. If the point really needs to be hammered in harder because people don't like subtlety, then stick a "power surge in San Junipero facility kills thousands" news ticker in the background of a future episode, or make a full-on sequel episode where the company goes bankrupt and all of the residents are "relocated to a longer-term facility", IE, repurposed as Infinity monsters. The rest of Black Mirror is the sword of Damocles hanging over San Junipero's ending, which is why I don't recommend it to people as a first episode. All of the buildup about how immortality might not be a good idea for reasons that'd be just as explored in any ancient myth on the subject are a bait-and-switch; ultimately everything goes right, it's a best-case scenario, and you're left spinning as you realize "wait a minute, I've escaped the jaws of death and despair, I have an idyllic existence that's everything I've always dreamed of, but all of that continuing relies on computers working as advertised and people respecting human life in Black Mirror, forever". I've seen a lot of stories about how eternal life could be depressing; everyone has because it's been a running theme throughout stories for all of human history. I've never seen a story before about a "Heaven" that will fall apart in the future if any of the still-living people gently caress up the required rituals or fail to complete them at all. That's the unique Black Mirror angle here, the thing that elevates it from a (well-executed!) fairy tale to amazing science fiction. "What if you lived forever, but, like, some other people didn't, and you were sad about it" is old news, and is basically a dodge of the episode's central premise, which is "what if we tried to create Heaven for uploaded copies of people inside a computer". If it falls apart for all of the same reasons everyone's been suggesting for thousands of years, that's not interesting. If all of that goes off without a hitch, so we can isolate the problems that come with this specific implementation of Heaven, then we do what Black Mirror generally tries to do, which is raise questions about technology. You can easily save things for a very long time, things that you couldn't save before. Can you really save something forever? You can try, but will other people go along with it?
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Dec 31, 2017 06:18
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Chillgamesh posted:I think Hang the DJ might just be the most morally repugnant episode of the series in retrospect. If we accept that perfect digital copies of humans are equivalent to humans, Hang the DJ presents a world where every time you're thinking about banging someone you swipe on an app and a thousand perfect copies of you and the person you're thinking about banging are generated and then purged after living their own separate lives, potentially for years or even decades. At the press of a button you birth and abruptly end two thousand human lives. Hang the DJ: The two people matching up because the computer told them to isn't the success. the success is the two people breaking away from the system, deciding they are good for each other on their own and attempting to run away. It demonstrates that even when told who to date, these two people will still find each other and run away. That proves they are truly compatible.
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Dec 31, 2017 06:23
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Cojawfee posted:Hang the DJ: The two people matching up because the computer told them to isn't the success. the success is the two people breaking away from the system, deciding they are good for each other on their own and attempting to run away. It demonstrates that even when told who to date, these two people will still find each other and run away. That proves they are truly compatible. The system just has to murder 1000 instances of each of them to make this happen.
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Dec 31, 2017 06:27
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Hang the DJ: Are they murdered? We see dozens of copies of Frank and Georgia at the simulation's endpoint, and none react negatively to being vaporized or deleted or whatever. For a show that delights in depicting the ability of an AI to feel pain, they don't feel any.
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Dec 31, 2017 06:36
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Mameluke posted:Hang the DJ: Are they murdered? We see dozens of copies of Frank and Georgia at the simulation's endpoint, and none react negatively to being vaporized or deleted or whatever. For a show that delights in depicting the ability of an AI to feel pain, they don't feel any. Death isn’t inherently painful IRL either
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Dec 31, 2017 06:39
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Mameluke posted:Hang the DJ: Are they murdered? We see dozens of copies of Frank and Georgia at the simulation's endpoint, and none react negatively to being vaporized or deleted or whatever. For a show that delights in depicting the ability of an AI to feel pain, they don't feel any. How often in Black Mirror, exactly, does an AI feel pain when it's not being expressly used as a way to torture them? The residents of San Junipero were able to dull pain or even turn it off entirely; it stands to reason that an AI being deleted for basic indifferent reasons would be deleted painlessly.
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Dec 31, 2017 06:40
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21 Muns posted:How often in Black Mirror, exactly, does an AI feel pain when it's not being expressly used as a way to torture them? The residents of San Junipero were able to dull pain or even turn it off entirely; it stands to reason that an AI being deleted for basic indifferent reasons would be deleted painlessly. So that just undermines the reveal even more I feel. The app tells me this lady would be my ideal partner, as long as we didn't need to feel pain, or work, or encounter any prejudices based on our love, or etc. etc.
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Dec 31, 2017 06:44
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Related to AI but for Black Museum: I was surprised that when they pause the AI person, they experience no continuity. In earlier instances of something like this, when you ignore the Cookie person, they still exist in nothingness until you come back. In this instance, they are actually paused. I fully expected when he "paused" his wife, that it would all just go black and she's stuck in a void for 8 weeks.
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Dec 31, 2017 06:47
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Mameluke posted:So that just undermines the reveal even more I feel. The app tells me this lady would be my ideal partner, as long as we didn't need to feel pain, or work, or encounter any prejudices based on our love, or etc. etc. No, I'm saying there's no reason for the app to inflict any pain it doesn't need to. Like, say, the pain of being vaporized at the end of the simulation seriously what the gently caress why would they do that
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Dec 31, 2017 06:50
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Cojawfee posted:Hang the DJ: The two people matching up because the computer told them to isn't the success. the success is the two people breaking away from the system, deciding they are good for each other on their own and attempting to run away. It demonstrates that even when told who to date, these two people will still find each other and run away. That proves they are truly compatible. Yeah exactly It's not that the system failed. The system worked perfectly. Those two matched up because they fell in love in the sim dating pool over and over again with the same common outcome of rebelling against the system. For every one of them there were other couples that found each other through the sim and had the same outcomes of believing in the system. There's probably a ton of other different outcomes then simple obeying/rebelling against the system. Maybe there's couples that found each other 998 times out of 1000 because they both enjoy sitting quietly next to each other reading a book. The systems just a dating app that runs those digital consciousnesses that were in the other episodes against each other a 1000 times.
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Dec 31, 2017 06:52
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I liked metalhead. Just a short thriller about a cute little murder machine. I'm glad they cut the drone aspect because it would have raised more questions for me than answered.
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Dec 31, 2017 06:58
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Pretty sure you are all cookies.
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Dec 31, 2017 07:00
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To be clear: I would sign up for the stochastic dating simulation app in an instant if it really existed.
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Dec 31, 2017 07:02
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Gaunab posted:I liked metalhead. Just a short thriller about a cute little murder machine. I'm glad they cut the drone aspect because it would have raised more questions for me than answered. I kept expecting to see an automated robodog charging station in the house that she broke into.
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Dec 31, 2017 07:04
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Cojawfee posted:Related to AI but for Black Museum: I was surprised that when they pause the AI person, they experience no continuity. In earlier instances of something like this, when you ignore the Cookie person, they still exist in nothingness until you come back. In this instance, they are actually paused. I fully expected when he "paused" his wife, that it would all just go black and she's stuck in a void for 8 weeks. I think it's related to the "meatspace" storage rather than being a digital simulation of a person in a computer. When you go to sleep, do you "experience" the full 8 hours that you're asleep? Have you ever been under anesthesia? If not, it's very much a "blink and suddenly it's 4 hours later" kind of experience. When she goes on pause, it's turning off the parts of the brain that are being used to "run" her consciousness. In a White Christmas style cookie, meanwhile, the computer is always running - when it's running normally (i.e. in realtime), it's actually running at much lower capacity than what it's capable of. When they speed up their perception of time, they aren't putting them on pause, they're putting them on overdrive.
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Dec 31, 2017 07:07
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Chillgamesh posted:I think Hang the DJ might just be the most morally repugnant episode of the series in retrospect. If we accept that perfect digital copies of humans are equivalent to humans, Hang the DJ presents a world where every time you're thinking about banging someone you swipe on an app and a thousand perfect copies of you and the person you're thinking about banging are generated and then purged after living their own separate lives, potentially for years or even decades. At the press of a button you birth and abruptly end two thousand human lives. Hang the DJ I think the program only puts people together who it thinks are a match in the first place? So the couple at the part would always say 99.8% and the simulation was a success if 998 or 1000 rebel at the end?
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Dec 31, 2017 09:28
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Cojawfee posted:Callister: I don't really get why he wasn't able to exit his game. I'll ignore that he'd let his mod be deleted by a patch, but what mechanism prevented him from even exiting the game? I suppose they needed a "danger of technology" that somehow kept him locked inside an endless void forever so he couldn't immediately get out and start over. Just seems weird that there's no failsafe in that thing to prevent people from being locked in. I am having a hard time with this issue too. they said it was because the mod was deleted so all his authorities were removed too. So wait, the ability to exit the game isnt built into the program at all and it had to be MODDED in? Or the ability of the user to exit the game requires a certain authority level that by default Infinity users don't have? Other thoughts: Tommy can't die either. His dad was scared that Tommy would be brought back over and over to torture him but... like the one that was is floating in space for how long now living a frozen oxygen-less living hell and daddy doesn't seem to be bothered by that as much? He was able to manipulate the world at will with some hand gesture apparently, but later on his abilities are tied to his comm device? Like he didnt need that do coding because he doesn't back out to do that stuff to them or execute programs or whatever. So it basically just lets him know when stuff is happening in the outside world. But he loses the ability to manipulate the world when he loses the padd. Also they say his authority was taken away with the mod deletion not 'he lost his authority when we took the padd' so I think its supposed to be tied to him not an in-game object. All the buttons do the same thing, they are props basically. But when hes gone they actually become working computers? Like not when his mod was removed and they are wandering space, while they are trapped in his bubble universe. This is nitpicky but I hate it when a story establishes rules and builds a universe and then ignores those things when its inconvenient.
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Dec 31, 2017 09:57
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Blackchamber posted:
dying is "developer" controlled, so apparently, he was human enough to let Tommy die.
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Dec 31, 2017 10:12
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George H.W. oval office posted:The new ReBoot looking good in Callister I would subscribe to whatever streaming service that decided to reboot ReBoot.
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Dec 31, 2017 10:36
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Cojawfee posted:It's because he played Todd in Breaking Bad, a show about meth. He sort of looks like Matt Damon so people on the internet called him Meth Damon. Ooooh okay. I've never watched BB so that went totally over my head. Thanks!
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Dec 31, 2017 10:59
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Also maybe I’m thinking about this too much but re: I feel like 1000 simulations is not a lot/not enough. That’s like when my students tell me that their simulations took “forever” on the order of “like 2 hours to run.” I can’t help but think that’s cute as I check the progress of my simulations which run for days at a time on dedicated computing clusters. Even then I would not even consider a few days of runtime to be a “long time.” But either way, 1000 data points seems like nothing. Also, I wonder how consistent their simulations were? If I simulate it for 2000 cycles do I get the same pairing? 5000 cycles? Because it feels like they fix the simulations to stop whenever a couple is paired/escapes but don’t bother checking if other combinations can be better. It’s very possible in the way they portrayed things, that if they would have run it for 1001 simulations with a different starting partner that maybe we’d have ended up with a different pairing. Ok sorry, you guys can go back to torture talk. e: sorry wrong episode Boris Galerkin fucked around with this message at 12:44 on Dec 31, 2017 |
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Dec 31, 2017 10:59
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| # ? Apr 20, 2024 10:19 |
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Uh, are you talking about USS Callister?
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Dec 31, 2017 11:28
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