see oh too.
this post is brought to you by tide. ‘Tide Pods now come in cherry, mango, and tutti frutti!’
i’m just kidding, don’t eat tide pods. that being said, if you do, the rest of us can probably get along without you.
it’s hard not to feel superior as an adult when you read things about the salt challenge, or the whatever challenge that kids are taking on these days, but i think a lot of that is selective memory. that and the hate on that people who’ve spun around the sun as many times as i have, seem to have for the ‘millenials’. it’s funny, cause i think the arguments could have been applied to us, and were. rightly so in some cases, but i remember being labelled a gen x’er, and having been written off by a certain strata of ‘too bored to think’ adults.
i think as we get more comfortable with a 24 hour news cycle, and people have to come up with more to say, they end up write op-ed pieces about this and that. buzz feed created a whole site dedicated to pointlessness, but other outlets are not to be completely out done. so, in the end, we get endless articles about how this new generation, ooooh, what a bunch of ingrates. sometimes it’s true. but not across the board. so far, i’ve met alot of younger people in my biz who’ll at least pretend to listen to my grampa stories about how things were when i was first in the industry. i appreciate the effort, wrap myself in a shawl, suck on a butterscotch, and drink a weak tea till i nod off.
truth be told, i thought i would take the world by storm too. i was going to impress everyone with my energy, my endless opinions, and they would be awed with how well i dealt with fame. only when i got out of my 20s did i realize what an insufferable ass i probably was. so, i try to take younger people now with a grain of salt.
feeling pretty good about this one, only 2 episodes in. definitely worth a watch. it’s a new sci-fi netflix series if you haven’t heard, which gives me a spark of hope that one day i’ll be able to get virgil to the small screen. keep going, netflix. i’ll be in touch shortly.
this isn’t a spoiler, but the one thing that bugs me about it, is a sci-fi gem that goes back as far as i can remember, which is downloading your memory. i’ve never been down with this concept. the idea being that so long as you had a copy of what someone WAS, and you uploaded it into a new body, that would be the same as coming back to life.
the concept relies heavily on this premise, so you either take it on board immediately, or you won’t be able to get very deep into the story. i imagine not many people find it a huge stumbling block, but i think it’s an overused ex machina. if it were brain transplants, i could see it. for all intensive porpoises, your brain is you. but if you carried around a storage device since birth, that soaked up all your thoughts and whims, you wouldn’t have a version of you, you’d have, at best, a blueprint for a predictive algorithm, a concept beautifully illustrated in black mirror’s episode s02e04, ‘white christmas’.
i also thing that backup versions of oneself sets up for lazy plot twists down the road. not that that is happening here, but if you set up the possibility for it now, down the line, after enough main characters cheat death to a degree where they seem immortal, nothing much will have any weight. i don’t know if that feeling has a name, but i think i’ll call it the ‘jon snow paradox’
‘hey jon…. golly, i’m happy to see you’re alive… but…. does death not count anymore? and why did the gods want you to live, but the little girl who got burned at the stake need to go? was she less deserving, or just less of a plot point?’
on a sidenote, some of you may have noticed style…. fluctuations recently with the comic. that’s cause as much as the story is something i’m telling over the course of years, i’m also improving, or in some cases, just changing. all in an effort to hone my craft. i remember seeing other artists doing it in a much less dramatic fashion, wishing they could just stick with something, for gosh sakes. gosh being the dad of jeez, i guess.
point is, this is an epic tale and my sketchbook. one day, things will settle into the look i want, but in a way, i hope it doesn’t. whenever i feel like i’ve nailed the style, i see someone else doing something i feel i can learn from, and try something new. at the very least, it won’t be stagnant. and i’ll try to keep the characters from changing too much, design wise.
In science fiction, there have been a number of stories that used the concept of uploadable memories. In one, travel was by recording your memories (soul), and beaming them to a clone. A grown clone, not a manufactured duplicate body. The plot was a variation on The Prince and the Pauper, where two souls were swapped, and a rich man was made to see what it was like for the lower classes.
Another one had the concept that the earth was vastly overpopulated, and a person was only allowed to live until their early 20’s. At that point, you would be “recorded” and stored. You could be brought out again for a fee, into an available body. But of course the rich found a way around this completely…
AFAIK, we are a product of the biological machine we call our brain. Memories are one thing, but the way we “work” is a product of how our neurons are individually wired. Our memories guide us and are part of us, but we can function without our memories.
In one of the anime Ghost in the Shell episodes, the Tachikoma machines were uploading people’s memories to cloud storage, in order to “save” them. But of course, those are just memories, and only the memories in their e-brain storage. It’s not the person themselves. There is no “backup” feature for us. Like one scientist said, “a clone is not a copy.”
i suppose uploadable and downloadable memory isn’t that big a leap. it’s basically the plot of total recall too. i think we’re all in agreement. we’re more than just a recording of our memories.
i don’t remember the gits episode, but it seems likely that that is how a machine might see it. then again, that would only be the savegame, not the program.
I always found it funny that it’s possible to interpret Star Trek as a universe in which suicide is considered a convenient method of travelling; especially given that there are transporter duplicates.
that’s exactly what I mean. the transporter is really just a suicide/cloner. they broached that on the episode where there’s 2 rikers, but not in any depth where they face the fact that a pattern is a disintegrated original. meaning Picard drank the same cup of earl grey thousands of times.
I mean, just once I wish he’d slipped up and instead of “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot,” he’d have said “Earl Grey. Hot,” and Second Earl Charles Grey would be standing there in a Speedo. But I have never claimed to be normal. Now I’m gonna spend all morning wishing for a poster of that image, possibly with Q snickering behind his hand in the background. Heeeeeyyyyy…you still taking requests?! *Laughs* Happy Heart Day everyone!
sounds like erotic fan fiction time. write it up! who knows, it’ll probably find a devouted audience.
Haha… “intensive porpoises”, “gosh being the dad of jeez”… I have to say, your subtle but sharp sense of humor is a sight to see (along with the excellent comic), thanks.
I’ve also been bothered for some time by the “download yourself” trope, because reasons, even though my favorite video game (EVE Online) has that as a prominent plot pivot. How in the name of video game not-so-realism do you keep coming back after you die? BINGO! A clone that gets fed all your memories as you go about your spaceship-y business and gets activated after you’re blasted into the cold void of the interstellar.
If you’re so inclined, the short film “The Final Moments of Karl Brant” about the subject of downloading yourself is excellent. It’s got Paul Reubens(!), and the woman who plays the main character’s wife does the best damn “act like you’re acting badly” schtick I’ve ever seen. The end is predictable, but it’s a short film, so it gets a pass.
I don’t mind when webcomics change styles over time, it’s just evidence of natural growth and curiosity. Check out early Gunnerkrigg Court compared to today. Thom’s sense of perspective and depth have remained fairly consistent, but his style has definitely changed.
You keep drawing, I’ll keep reading, deal?
sharp and subtle? You describe me like one talks about cheese. haha
yeah, and that’s what I mean. it becomes a device to escape actual mortality in a game. in a narrative it can be fairly weak. I’ve never seen that short, but I’ll look it up when I get a chance. thanks!
deal! glad you’re enjoying it.
that was pretty good. the short i mean. too bad it wasn’t more than just. thanks for the recommendation!
You’re very welcome. Glad you liked it. I had to look it up and re-watch after mentioning it, and found out the maker has plans in the works to expand it to a feature-length entitled “Digital State”, and it’s meant to be the sci-fi legal thriller the short only hinted at. I think the title is a bit cliché, but hey, it’s his film he can do what he wants.
I also found out he did a comic series for Heavy Metal called “Fluorescent Black”, so he’s got that going for him. I’ll be watching…
i’ve never heard of fluorescent black, but i look it up, and it’s very ‘heavy metalish’. looks pretty old school for being relatively new.
… and for the record, I love cheese.
Your style is perfect. Do what you need to in order to make the story live for us. I actually like the trope of downloading memories, but not a whole person. Ever seen The Final Cut? Robin Williams? I like that take on the whole deal. And as for the differences in us and “kids today,” I think my youngest said it best when he came to me with this gem: “If I had a dollar for every time you grown ups complained about my generation, I could afford to buy a house in the economy you destroyed for us.”
ah, well thanks, but i disagree. when you start thinking what you’re doing is ‘perfect’, there’s no room for improvement. and there’s always room for that.
i haven’t seen that one. and memories are different than downloading your ‘self’. strange days was all about memory playback, as was brainstorm. and those made for interesting story devices.
and yeah, that’s funny. but it goes to the point, we aren’t responsible for everything our generation did and neither are millennials. i certainly wasn’t in charge of anything high finance.