henripootel
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Posts posted by henripootel
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Anyone else really starting to like Furkat?
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6 hours ago, dr pepper said:
Dumb fake Elon Musk. He should use his supertech to build a bunch of 100T harddrives. Every day, he could download Wikipedia and a few other sources, and put the drive in the capsule. That way they keep outlines of each timeline.
Well, if they were really clever, they'd set up a self-sustaining base sometime deep in the past, say on Hawaii 1000 years before the boat people arrived. Then they could send out time ships to 2016 (or whenever) every day, download Wikipedia, and report home. Anything anybody did up-time would have no effect at all on anyone at Home Base, and it'd be easy enough to spot folks fucking around with time. Find the time anomalies, figure out who changed things, go back into their past and keep the incursion from ever happening. And I don't mean killing, necessarily - go offer 20-year-old Flynn a job in pre-contact Hawaii. Our Motto: time travel solves all problems.
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1 minute ago, Netfoot said:
But her sister did disappear. And if a change to the past can eradicate her sister, why can't it eradicate her journal?
Because the journal is in the possession of a time traveller. Its existence is no longer dependent on a string of events leading up to its creation, so clipping that string changes nothing. Had Lucy's sister been with her in the time capsule, I presume she wouldn't have disappeared either, and would have returned to a 2016 where nobody remembers her except for those in the time capsule.
Heck, this could well happen to any of the Time Team - they could come back from a mission and nobody else remembers them, because the Team did something in the past, it changed things, and they themselves never existed. Doesn't mean they'd just poof out of existence on the spot, but it would be awkward explaining this to security. Also suck to come back and find out everything you knew and everyone you loved never existed, but that's a real risk.
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2 hours ago, dubbel zout said:
These days the Navy SEALs especially want swimmers and wrestlers, athletes that tend to the leaner/sleeker side who have strength and flexibility.
I know a couple of ex-SEALs, and most of them come across as just ... guys. Not especially athletic (looking anyway), not in an obvious way, more like guys who played football in high school but not necessarily college. Wyatt as a SEAL doesn't seem wildly unlikely, I mean we're not talking Keanu Reeves in Point Break (who was supposed to be an ex-college quarterback. Uh, no).
1 hour ago, Cranberry said:The new one could end up different now, I suppose... although that's hard to say without knowing when she wrote the first one.
Might be interesting if the journal says things like 'Hey Past Lucy, this is Future Lucy. Bad as Flynn is, Rittenhouse is worse. You should be helping him.'
Or 'The history you remember was actually shaped by Rittenhouse - Flynn is trying to put history back the way it originally was'. That might be interesting - who's to say which version of history is better?
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3 minutes ago, Raja said:
The necklace is part of the officers uniform of the period. The last vestiges of the knight in shinning armor
I believe you're referring to a gorget. They're making a comeback, by the way. It's still a vulnerable area and advances in body armor have again made them practical.
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26 minutes ago, KaveDweller said:
But we saw that Lucy still has a necklace that contains a picture of her sister. She had it with her, and it didn't change when she changed history. So if Flynn is from the future and got her journal, it shouldn't disappear either. This only makes sense if you're in the Quantam Forking Universe mentioned above.
I agree, and I think this argues for the notion that Flynn no longer needs Lucy to actually write the journal anymore - he has it, it exists even if Lucy never writes it (this time, so to speak).
But why does this mean it must be the Quantam Forking Universe? Couldn't it just be Overwriting? Multiple-Overwriting to be sure, but would the Quantam Forking imply that the 'original' timeline for Lucy's sister still 'exists' (in some sense) out there? Why do we need that? Lucy herself is just an artifact of a timeline (which included her sister) that has now been overwritten. Sister never existed, even though Lucy still does.
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1 minute ago, legaleagle53 said:
He needs her to stay alive long enough to write the journal in the first place.
I should have payed closer attention but I thought he clearly wants Lucy to stay alive for some reason, but not necessarily that he needs her to write the journal. Speculation was that he may be her son or father, so there could be other considerations than just the journal.
But if it's just the journal - as detailed above by Cranberry, we don't know what sort of time dealeo they're using, not exactly. I think we do know enough to say it's probably Overwriting or Quantum‐Forking. We know Lucy comes from a timeline where she had a sister and is currently in one where 'she' doesn't (call it LucyB's timeline). Lucy still remembers her sister who now never existed, she didn't become LucyB (which might have been an interesting choice). I would hold that this means things can exist which were created in other timelines, even in the 'future' of other timelines, which now don't have a clear cause -> effect background. If the journal is here, it's here, even if Lucy never writes it at this point. I think this follows from the same reasoning that Lucy's sister now doesn't exist and never will (unless they go back and change things somehow, but that's another issue) but that doesn't change Lucy's memory of her.
The only way this might not be true is if they do some nonsensical Back to the Future thing, where the timeline 'rights itself', meaning Lucy will slowly forget her sister ever existed. Isn't there a locket with her sister's picture? That'll have to fade away like Marty McFly, which is a cute idea but (as far as anything in time travel stories can be called this), that's just ludicrous. If it was even remotely possible, Marty wouldn't fade as the possibility of his existence gets less and less likely, he'd just blink away and nobody would remember him ever being there. Be a cool thing if they did that but they'd have to be simply brilliant writers to pull it off - the Time Team does something and the next time they show a group shot, Lucy is played by a totally different actress. Very cool, but very confusing, although Red Dwarf went there and it worked well.
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59 minutes ago, legaleagle53 said:
Who's going to pilot both it and the mothership back? Anthony's the only trained pilot Flynn's got, just as Rufus is the only trained pilot our team has.
As usual, the answer can be found in 'time machine'. Even if we assume that Max Headroom can't just say 'Okay, I'm gonna get out and you just press this button - see you in 2016', why can't he just train someone else to pilot the machine? 'Because it takes a long time'? Time machine! Send Max back to some point with his trainee, pick him up a minute (and 2 years) later and voila, assistant pilot.
1 hour ago, legaleagle53 said:And Flynn doesn't really want to kill Lucy, since he still needs her to write the journal.
Nope. He has the journal in his possession, it's not gonna just disappear if Lucy dies 'today'. Heck, if it's just about the journal, the smart thing for Flynn to do is to kill Lucy as soon as possible. He would then be in possession of the only version of the journal that will ever be, and even Lucy won't know what's in it.
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9 hours ago, iRarelyWatchTV36 said:
Speaking of the mission, why not just blow up the Lifeboat if you're Flynn, or at least wreck it beyond repair, from the very beginning?
Why not just steal it? It's not like they left it locked up, not that I've seen. Leaving the Time Team alive in the past seems silly, mostly because they did exactly what I thought they'd do - send a message to the future. Heck, they should have sent a bunch of them, carved into rocks and whatnot.
And it's not like time-travel central was in any sort of actual hurry - they had all the time in the world to build another time machine and send it back (I know, this capsule is the rescue capsule). Take a while to train a new Rufus but you have time - the guys are stranded in the past, all the stuff happened to them two centuries ago.
I know, I know - the plan that actually got them home worked, but I'm saying it was a shitty plan from both sides. For the Time Team, Rufus had no way of telling home base exactly when they'd be needing a beacon to guide them in. If they'd have come in too soon, Jiya wouldn't have figured it out in time to guide them in, too late (say a year or two later) and Jiya might well have given up hope and turned the beacon off. Amazing how well everything worked given how little coordination they did.
But then again, Flynn's plan didn't make much sense anyway. Why just strand the Team in the past, why not kill them outright? Stranding them in 1754 is pretty much a death sentence anyway - why not finish the job? He left open the door that they could call out for help, which they did. Heck, just shooting Rufus would have effectively stranded them.
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On 11/19/2016 at 7:39 AM, John Potts said:
("In Theory" would be another example, where Data tries to pursue a romantic relationship with some random Ensign)
I honestly think they did it better back then. They didn't make any bones about the fact that Data's lack of 'humanness' had nothing to do with his being sentient. It was his own goal to be more human (and you can take issues with that notion), but humanity wasn't the beat-out end-all of intellectual attainment.
And not for nothing but I found the end of 'In Theory' simply heart-rending, mostly for the way they drove home that Data really is sentient but really isn't human. When he finds out that the Ensign is no longer interested in a romantic relationship, he simply deletes those subroutines. And that's it, that's the end of it for him, one solid line of dialogue and they demonstrate the stark realities of being a constructed being. Data can simply remove the patterns from himself and move on, totally missing the fact that a big part of being human is being unable to do this very thing, much as we might wish to. This did what all good science fiction does; use a fictional device to throw human nature into sharp relief. I actually think I learned something about people watching this episode.
That's kinda my problem with Humans - they're not really shedding any light on what it means to be human. The synths are so obviously sentient (and obviously human) that you'd have to be a bit of a monster to deny them this. They take offense at things humans do, they feel loyalty, they're attracted to hunky guys. What's left to explore? That humans can be assholes to other 'humans'? It's not an uninteresting point but I was hoping for more here. Just to draw a contrast, I'd highly recommend watching the series this was taken from, äkta människor, which is vastly more complicated in this regard.
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7 minutes ago, ALenore said:
as well as malaria, various kinds of flu
There's no vaccine for malaria, only prophylaxis (pills you have to take regularly), and the flu changes so fast that any shot you got this year wouldn't be worth much in 2 years, to say nothing of 200.
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12 minutes ago, withanaich said:
That's not always the case, but it's certainly the way it works on this show. Remember the picture of Lucy's sister? She had it with her in the time machine while the timeline was being changed and the sister wiped from existence, so it still exists. The sister is no longer in the photo in Lucy's mother's house, but she's still in the photo Lucy had with her.
I should have been clearer - I was referring to 'reality' as perceived by our heroes (and by extension, us). The picture of Lucy still exists because it is in the possession of one of our heroes, but if she'd left it home that day, it too would have ceased to exist (like her actual sister). I guess in some sense, Lucy's sister still exists somewhere, maybe, but for our purposes she does not. But anything that's held in the possession of the time travelers - that's exempt. This is what I meant by 'if it exists, it exists', meaning to separate this notion from any Marty-McFly-slowly-fades-from-existence nonsense. In a world with time travel, you can exist even if your parents never met or had you, if you go back in time and make sure they marry other folks.
This show seems roughly faithful to this idea, although it does skim over some other unpleasant parts. For instance, as noted in previous episodes, the version of Lucy who actually got engaged (and never had a sister) is just ... gone. She got into her time machine (as far as we know) and just vanished, and our Lucy came back. Where'd she go? She had a whole lifetime of experiences not dissimilar to our Lucy but definitely different, and now she's just gone, and a look-alike (our Lucy) is now living in her apartment, kissing her fiancée. It's kind of horrifying if you think about it.
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7 minutes ago, JackONeill said:
Isn't that one of those things we sort of have to hand wave in a time travel show?
Actually, the smart thing to do is what Flynn does. He doesn't seem to try to pretend he's one of the locals, he's clearly a gentleman from 'somewhere else'. Like as not, this is because they hired Goran Visnjic and don't want him to use a fake american accent, but it's still the right answer. People expect a 'foreigner' to be different, so they hand wave for you.
One of the things I like about this show is that they pull no punches about how difficult it would be for a time traveller to blend in. First thing I thought when Rufus tried to bullshit the civil war soldiers (that he was one himself) was 'they're not gonna buy that for a second', and to my delight, they didn't. If the Time Team was smart, they wouldn't even try to pretend too much, just have a plausible explanation the locals will buy. A really clever super-historian (like Lucy's supposed to be) would probably know that.
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46 minutes ago, Chaos Theory said:
Time just wants certain things to happen so they will happen one way or another. You can change the events leading up to it and you might not know how and why but certain things are going to happen...because they have already happened.
I've always disliked the 'time wants things to happen' trope, mostly because it ends up being used lazily too much. It just reeks of magic, and I'm not against magical time travel, just stay consistent. 11.22.63 did a nice job with this (guy went back in time to keep Kennedy from being assassinated and time started to push back a bit) but so few others do.
If there is a logic to time travel, I think it's this: once something exists, it exists. There's no reason Lucy has to write the journal at all at this point as it exists, much like her memories of a sister who now 'never was'. Lucy doesn't need to go manufacture a sister in order to keep that memory, Lucy exists (from that timeline) so the memory of the sister exists. That all the events leading up to Lucy's sister (her parents having sex, kid being born, etc) never happened in this timeline is irrelevant, as things can obviously exist without a 'past', so to speak. This seems to be the logic the show is using, so I hope they stick with it.
44 minutes ago, legaleagle53 said:(the Parisian French that I took for three years in high school didn't have a unit on how to proposition desired sex partners. Shameful, n'est-ce pas?)
Nor did mine, but the months I spent living with a french girlfriend or two did. But there's the rub - as time has past, I've gotten a bit fuzzy on where I learned what, and now I'm reluctant to bust out my french for fear of sounding too ... intimate. I remember the slang, I'm just a bit hazy on with whom it'd be appropriate to use it.
Just to stay on topic, Lucy's french sounded a bit schoolboy to me. Any thoughts on how she'd have sounded to a french speaker 200 years ago?
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After watching Free Birds this weekend, all I could think of was Rufus and team need to install a clocking device on The Flying Eyeball.
I know this is a typo but a clocking device might actually solve a lot of their problems. Cloaking might involve a ton of technological innovations they just don't have but a simple solution to keeping the eyeball safe might be just to set a clock and if they're not back in 24 hours, have it move itself, say, 3 miles directly south. This'd help if they eyeball is surrounded by the assembled Hoards of Genghis Kahn, who might not be able to get inside but could certainly make getting into it rather difficult.
And not to be a pedant, but is it possible to set off C4 with a gunshot? I thought that was one of it's great virtues, that it's practically impossible to set it off accidentally.
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45 minutes ago, Driad said:
1754 is a bit late for the first American UFO sighting. Try 1639.
Try 1492
http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case487.htm
I'm still surprised by how much I'm enjoying this show. The Time Team isn't particularly good at their job, they dealt with the fact that their ship is just sitting there unprotected, and (unless I misunderstood) acknowledged that Lucy may now never write her journal, nor does she need to - if it exists from another time line, it exists. They're also getting a lot out of their CGI budget - very cool seeing the historical sites recreated.
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2 minutes ago, DarkRaichu said:
Maeve never met William. Clementine met William several times, but not Maeve
If it was original-flavor Clementine (and not the new one - hi Lili Simmons, glad to see you getting work after Banshee), then we know William and Meave are in the same timeline. We saw Original Clementine get permanently retired, and Meave witnessed it. Ergo, Meave started her rebellion 30 years before the current MiB stuff.
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11 hours ago, Lingo said:
One problem I have with the MiB=William theory is that the MiB has previously mentioned that when it looked like the park was going to go all to hell after Arnold died, he helped save it. Yet William is merely some schlub in Logan's family's business.
Another is that I was sure Meave and William were in the same timeline (although now I'm not so sure). If they are, then it was odd that we saw the MiB tip Meave over the edge by killing her child when he looks like the MiB already, at least in his own memory. I thought Meave's rebellion was set 30 years in the past, from the MiB's perspective, so how is that possible? We did see Meave interacting with Ford so unless the Ford we saw her talking to was a Host (or like 100 years old), her rebellion was in the past. I'm left to conclude that in his own recollection, the MiB sees himself as he is now, not as he was then, like William.
Or I'm just confused. I'm still stuck that much of this isn't making a lick of sense. It's easy to overlook this in a show rife with really great performances and actors, but we're 8 episodes in and I'm still scratching my head way too much. For instance, still not sure why I should be all invested in the MiB's quest for the maze. Seems to me like he's basically uncovering easter eggs, stuff left in 'the game' for clever guests to find, which is cool but the MiB seems to think it has some deeper meaning. William too seems to think he's having some sort of revelatory experience, meaningful and fraught with peril, when the truth is he's basically in an obscure corner of Disneyland. Anything he finds was put there for him to find, and he knows that, but also seems to be acting like he doesn't know that. I'm still confused by why William finds so much weight in his fake adventure, even if he does have a genuine boner for Dolores.
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5 hours ago, Which Tyler said:
It's not trying to show that she's a psychopath, but that she's sentient and emotional, but thinks that human babies are ugly little shrivelled things, with no particular connection to her or her emotions.
But this is predicated on the notion that 'sentient' and 'emotional' go hand in hand, and having some sort of emotional reaction would be an indication of sentience. On top of this, that she'd have an emotional reaction to things humans are built to have emotional reactions to, and that the reactions would be measurable in a way that works with human subjects. They're simply testing to see if she's a carbon-copy (albeit an flawed one) of a human, not that she's sentient and deserving of some consideration reserved for sentient beings. It's par for the course for bad science fiction but that doesn't mean it makes a lick of sense.
Might as well just have a guy in a while lab coat hand her a puppy while a voice asks 'would you like to pet this puppy? All hoo-mans love puppy', and when she says 'well, I'm more of a cat person ...', flash up NOT HOO-MAN! in big red letters. It'd be just as 'scientific'.
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On 11/14/2016 at 10:22 AM, NorthstarATL said:
I can get behind the whole "caring for" thing because there are emotional and intellectual reasons for attachments, but the "falling in love" thing calls into question the fact that there are biological reasons as to why we react sexually to each other, and I don't see how triggering consciousness somehow adds that component. It just seems "off" to me.
This has been my problem from the start. One of big reasons I'm finding this show less than spell-binding is that there's essentially one flavor of being here - human. The presumption seems to be, as it so often is, that 'intelligence' basically means 'human intelligence', if imperfectly in Mia (who lacks experience is thus a 'human child'), Odie (who's damaged and so a 'mentally-handicapped human'), or Niska (who's murderous, so obviously a 'human psychopath').
The only real source of drama here is that some actual humans miss the point that the conscious synths are obviously 'human', if constructed. They're so human they don't even qualify for the old "Is this what you Hoo-mans call ... 'love'?" trope. They're smart so they must be subject to the same 'feelings' that all humans are, right? I think the writers took the easy path here and it's to the show's detriment.
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9 hours ago, arc said:
William knows all that and yet he fully suspended disbelief in this episode.
See, I don't think he is. He's perfectly well aware of Dolores' nature, he just, for the moment, prefers it. This is not a huge stretch psychologically - there are already folks who prefer the company of inanimate or barely-animate human dolls. And if you think this is the fringe-end of human weirdness, remember too that tons of pet owners anthropomorphize their relationships with their animals, ascribing to them feelings and attitudes they're unlikely to actually possess. I mean I'm sure your cat likes you, but it's as a fellow cat, not like a fellow human would. I know plenty of folks who actually prefer this relationship to most all others, and I think William is like this. It isn't that he's kidding himself about Dolores, it's just that the dynamics of this relationship appeal to him. He did say that he feels like he's been pretending all his life right up to the moment when he came to this fake world of manufactured beings. That's kinda fucked up, and finally (thank god), a bit interesting. Willam and Dolores' relationship hasn't been nearly as spellbinding as I think they're supposed to be.
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10 hours ago, KimberStormer said:
I think this will have to go down as one of the all-time worst-played seasons, to the extent that I almost start to get that @henripootel feelin' like they are being forced to do ridiculous illogical #blindsides every tribal.
I really wish I could weigh in on this but I've barely been paying attention this season. Nothing seems to make much sense to me - who was allied with whom, what was at stake. I'm guessing they're having trouble cribbing this season into something coherent, let alone interesting. I think I'll see you guys next season.
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2 hours ago, green said:
Ah but leaving behind moral judgement and ethics raises the point of what exactly is Wyatt trying to save.
I agree, and I think this is at the heart of the matter. Who's to say what is worth preserving, this person or that, one way of life or another. If you have a time machine and don't mind fucking with history, you not only can make these decisions, you are making these decisions. You can decide to let random chance take its course or choose the path. I think we're going to find out that this what the Rittenhouse people are doing - not preserving history, molding it.
2 hours ago, green said:Also he was described as a coder wasn't he? Not a physicist type. More a computer software engineer.
It's all math, and I think what Rufus was trying to do by writing down that equation was show von Braun in no uncertain terms that he was talking to a fellow scientist. And I don't think he detested von Braun, just was repelled by the notion that von Braun, just like himself, was using his mind and work to help unsavory people, in von Braun's case literally Nazis.
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6 hours ago, officetemp said:
Speaking of journals, shouldn't Lucy have started her journal by now? She'd have to have it on/near her person at all times to make sure it didn't change when they altered the past.
Well, 'now' she may never start it. She may have done so in some other timeline, the remnants of which aren't even familiar to us. Be interesting if the journal told the story of how the Nazis developed time travel because they won WWII under Chancellor Rommel (who wisely invested in nukes, and used them), and were taken over by a crazy guy in a position to actually accomplish the Final Solution. Luka was / is a partisan who stole the tech and changed the past, putting Germany in the hands of an idiot named 'Hitler'. Bad as our WWII was, original-WWII might well have been worse, and Luka saved us all from it.
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S03.E02: Episode 2
in The Affair
Furkat seems just the kind of douchebag Whitney needs to learn about, so she can grow the fuck up and find out why you move past attractive sleazebags. I think Helen's biggest problem is that she married her Furkat - she should give her daughter the chance to avoid this.