rwhitisissle @ rwhitisissle @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Why the gay one?

Because the gay one is hella cute and I'm all about that shit.

The intent of Black Mirror is to make you think about how you use technology

This is the intent of the vast majority of most science fiction. It doesn't make Black Mirror's execution good or insightful. Much of Black Mirror focuses on people "surrendering control" to technology in ways that prove self-destructive or just generally destructive. At their best, many of the stories aren't really about technology. Technology serves as an aesthetic component, but you could still make the stories work without them. The Orville actually has a better version of Black Mirror's Season 3, Episode 1 episode "Nosedive." It actually engages with the underlying themes and ideological basis of a world that operates like that and suggests that the technology isn't really the problem: it's how people elect to perceive and judge one another and the ease with which we condemn one another from a distance. It's not a technological problem, fundamentally, but a cultural one. Technology can facilitate bad behavior or exacerbate negative societal tendencies, but it doesn't sit at the functional center of them. Because, functionally, it's just a Salem Witch Trial story with additional technological flavoring on top. This is something that Black Mirror never seems to "get."

Which is why, and I will stand by this, the best Black Mirror episode is the gay one.

"What if technology was....(wait for it)....bad sometimes."

So thought provoking. I stand by my opinion that the only good episode of Black Mirror is the gay one.

"We have to ensure that America stays a Christian nation, a righteous nation. And sometimes that means helping to hold each other accountable, like two men holding each other in the bathtub after passionately making love with their fists. This means we need to be vigilant in filtering out all the sinful websites from our web browsers. Websites like twinktube.com, blackdickswhitebussies.com, cockgoblins.com, buttholeinvasion.com, footlongdong.com, and so, so many others."

Forty years? Brother, you think this shit just magically started in 1983?!

Gen X is the new Silent Generation because everyone forgot they even fucking existed. I remember when you guys were supposed to burn down cities and bring about full anarchy in the United States because you enjoyed grunge music and flannel. Turns out all of you were just chewed up and spit out by capitalism like the rest of us.

Seems likely. I've seen plenty of people say "Oh, this old-ass Boomer thinks [whatever shitty opinion here]." And this is in direct reference to people in their late forties/early fifties. And if you correct them and say "that person is Gen X - they're the child of Baby Boomers," they'll pivot to "well, Boomer is a mindset, not age group." But it does seem more likely to be an insult for old people or people who appear to be out of touch in some capacity.

2543th

I'm almost guaranteeing that the person you are replying to is making a joke, because of how ludicrous it sounds. "I did not meet women in person, but I heard lots of them just hang out on instagram" implies that the commenter has literally never met a woman in their entire life and only knows about them via a website that they've never even been to themselves, as the information about them being on instagram is itself second hand. Like, it literally makes women sound like cryptids.

Ah, yes, famous expert in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Bill Gates. I'm personally curious what Taylor Swift thinks about Chat GPT 5, myself. That girl's got a lot of money, which means she must be smart and has smart opinions on topics like generative AI and the efficacy of currently undeveloped LLMs.

There's an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark from old school Nickelodeon (1992 to 1996) that had this as the exact premise.

10% of Tennessee is so high on hillbilly heroin they don't know which question they got asked and just said "yes" on the off chance it was "would you like some free oxy?"

Close! It's gonna be called Salvaged.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023-09-29/oceangate-titan-submersible-tragedy-new-movie-salvaged

I can't wait for somebody to make a company that takes rich assholes to go see the site of the Titan submersible implosion in their own piece of shit tin can deathtrap.

This is extreme copium, sorry to say. You have no idea how much shit the average person will eat to prevent having to learn something new. For someone who has never manually installed an OS before, even Windows, the idea of doing that with something like Linux and potentially deleting their existing OS is genuinely frightening. Never underestimate the fact that people will pay through the nose to ensure they don't have to contend with the unknown.

I'm afraid your bingo winnings are going to be confiscated by the government in order to pay for more golden parachutes for the CEOs whose decisions led us here.

That sounds like an interesting book. I really like cybercultural history like that. There's a book with an adjacent topic you might like, actually. It's called The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll. He managed to start this massive investigation into a fairly prolific hacker who had infiltrated Berkeley computer systems in the late eighties and whose only "trail" he left behind was a few cents worth of network usage time. It's a true story. Anyway, just a heads up.

That's good to hear. I've started reading Leonard and Hungry Paul and I like it so far. I've also started reading China Mieville's The City and the City, which is also good, but Mieville has this weird thing where the more plot his novels have the worse they are. He's great at describing a city as a living, breathing thing, though. That's why the best parts of Perdido Street Station were the first 100 pages or so before the actual story really got started. Hopefully this novel doesn't suffer from the same problems.

What about you, what have you been reading?