arc

CRA has a second weekend hold of about 94%, aka it dropped 6%. That's tremendous, esp without a holiday weekend involved.

A friend saw the movie and said it was terrible. So that got me to watch the (red band) trailer and man, the trailer is terrible. He said the movie is exactly what the trailer promises. The Chicago Tribune review is, if anything, harsher.

Speaking of white people cast in white-but-not-specifically-the-exact-right-kind roles, why did Emma Roberts and Hayden Christensen land the lead roles in “Little Italy”?

Both were Stanford alums in the book, but I can’t recall off the top of my head how it went in the movie.

Huh, wrote a big reply but I seem to have lost it somehow. It’s not my lane to police appropriation of Black culture, though this issue also gets into being authentically Asian-American. Zhang’s protestations to the contrary, I’m inclined to believe Awkwafina is authentically a New Yorker*. And it’s fine IMO. I will concede that it gets questionable when she’s “playing herself” in roles like Peik Lin, where the character probably did not grow up in Queens, because then those kinds of characters are - in the context of the movie, anyways - doing a minstrely performance. For CRA, I got over it (with the caveat that it’s not exactly an offence aimed at me anyways) by headcanon-ing that this Peik Lin did grow up in Queens. * for what it’s worth, I’ve seen tweets by an Asian-American defending Awkwafina by saying she talks like Queens New Yorkers talk, which is certainly influenced by Black vernacular, but isn’t solely the vernacular of Black New Yorkers. He said he went to the same HS as her.

The proposal scene was changed at the last minute. It had already gone through a bunch of revisions, but the last change, to give it more action, was a nice choice. (And yet it wasn't the uber-cliched "race through the airport" trope either.) Also, someone finally interviewed the accountant who suggested Golding for the role.

To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before didn’t get traction at first because nearly every prodco wanted to whitewash the lead character:

Maybe he shot a lot of deleted scenes? His character had a much bigger role in the book, and plays an even bigger role in the next two books. ... Whoa, the emerald wedding ring in the movie is Michelle Yeoh's in real life. She designed it herself, too.

Jeff Yang explains the subtext of the climax: http://blog.angryasianman.com/2018/08/what-was-really-happening-in-crazy-rich.html

I cried multiple times. I was genuinely moved.

BTW, the series was released in whole as a budget Blu-ray, but even that's still HD and probably better than the janky print-on-demand DVD-R release they did for the third season. Review here.

Ah yes, I misunderstood the initial post as saying they'd changed into Japanese garb rather than out of it. Yes, presumably they got clothing from the tunnels/access points.

High five to 2016 me for raising all this stuff now that the show brought VR — or at least VR for host minds — up to become a primary issue. ^____^

Sure, not right now. But if the hosts can take over the Mesa facilities — or even just one of the remote labs — they’re back in the resurrection business.

Maeve and the humans got a change of clothes last episode. After Maeve short-circuited the heist narrative, they're seen later in Japanese clothing while watching Sakura dance in the Japanese Mariposa.

My inner weaboo had a quibble with the seppuku scene: in the ideal form of seppuku, the suicider guts himself and then a trusted second nearly decapitates them -- the goal is to leave enough flesh attached that the head does not fall off the body. But the duel itself between [Miyamoto!] Musashi* and his former lieutenant was pretty badass. * Miyamoto Musashi was a real-life samurai who was famous for wielding both the short and long swords simultaneously. I'm glad Japanese Armistice (Hanaryo?) tagged along with Maeve's crew. The funeral for Sakura was very touching but I couldn't help thinking that the humans and Maeve and possibly Hector and Armistice know that host death is only as final as one wants it to be. The reality of host resurrection drastically undercut the moment for me. I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier, but finally when Maeve saw her old homestead house from afar, that's when I finally thought: oh, if her (former?) daughter is here, the Westworld admin probably assigned another host to be her mom. I guess everyone else on the internet was smarter than me. Last thing: it's an important moment that Maeve broke off her mean cynicism and sincerely thanked Sizemore. The camera lingered for so long on his look of surprise and gratitude, so seems obvious to me that it's an important moment. I like that the Westworld VR/Matrix looks exactly like real life besides being a wider aspect ratio; no green tint nor the solarization effect Altered Carbon used. And I 100% predicted Ford would be back this season (in offline conversations anyways, but for real, I said "ghost Ford" like he'd be in the cloud or something, and the Cradle is basically that) but I suspected they were going to recast Ford rather than bring Anthony Hopkins back. So that part was a genuine surprise. Makes sense! Makes so much sense that it legit bothers me because to me, the ethical issue is about sapience, not the physicality of hosts. I think I briefly ranted about how all the ethical issues of Westworld probably apply to [this show's version of] VR in the morality thread last season. That sounds deeply unethical to me. I don't know if I can reason out why though, because objectively her connection to her daughter is no more real than new mom's connection to the girl either. But also I think it goes against everything that Maeve has learned in Shogun World: that Akane should have the right to her memories, that Musashi should have the right to a real duel without magical backup. Elsie says to Bernard that his skull is like hers, reinforcing the thing they've been saying for most of this and last season: while hosts were originally electro/mechanical robots, now they're essentially like human bodies. It was supposedly a budget-conscious move but it certainly also makes gore a lot easier to execute rather than stuffing fake intestines into the robots that can be gutted. Last thing: having the previouslies be nearly wordless was cool.

They actually switched from the electro-mechanical bodies to the biological-ish 3D printed bodies to save costs, according to S1. If I remember correctly. And building a biological body that looks and moves like a human probably almost requires that it have nerves and hormones like a human. So it's not about building in desire, it's about just copying the existing design of the human body and thus taking everything it's already got.[1] So really, by that point, why bother removing details like that when one could just gate them off or on in the brain unit[2]? If anything, trying to edit down the bio design would be more work. [1] It's not for nothing that they show the little tool that magically heals minor wounds working on both hosts and humans like Old William. And even healing human skin properly involves working out the capillary and nerve hookups. Hosts and humans are biologically the same except for the brain: [2] BTW, Ford's Journey Into Night update presumably undid any such brain gating if it existed. As for pain tolerance, that's a slider that can be adjusted for each host, as we've seen on screen in S1. Why would you believe they don't feel pain?

Right, I was paraphrasing from memory and took a different interpretation of 'full reset' than what Luka1997 did, though on further reflection just shutting Teddy down into the maintenance mode seen inside the Mesa makes more sense than a personality wipe. For what it's worth, the tablet said it was overwriting Teddy's "base level heuristics". Other files of his, like backstory, narrative, and attributes were untouched. (Here's a Youtube clip of that scene, in 1080p.)

I vaguely recall in S1 that while the sliders go up to 100%, certain stats for park hosts (maybe all hosts) are locked from going higher that a safe limit. It seems silly that techs like the guy Dolores kidnapped (does he have a name?) or Felix have authority to override the limits, but <shrug>.

But he specifically said to Dolores that it would be dangerous to do whatever modifications he was making without a full wipe of the existing personality (vaguely paraphrased from memory). So Teddy 2.0 will still have Teddy’s memories even if he has a distinctly different personality.

So Shogunworld is like a reskin of Westworld. Outstanding. Rehashing similar variations on a theme happens everywhere. I think about superhero comics, where Jim Shooter headed up Marvel’s New Universe, then Valiant Comics, then Defiant, and each one had a lot of similarities to the previous effort. or, more thematically related, the resonance between westerns and samurai movies, where the brothel heist is repurposed for the geisha house heist is an allusion to how The Magnificent Seven was a remake of Seven Samurai... And as for Akane being a new character that’s hard to care about right away, I don’t understand that at all. The whole point of her character in this episode was to be a mirror for Maeve. Her concern for Sakura is Maeve’s concern for her own lost daughter. And it was genuinely compelling to me that Akane was offered freedom/awakening and pulled back from it because she didn’t want to stop caring about Sakura. In a sense, Maeve was offered a sort of inverse of that. If I understood s1 correctly, including what Nolan and Joy have said about Maeve’s arc, most of her awakening in the Mesa was fake, a weird meta narrative Ford wrote for her, but she still learned the truth about the hosts and her daughter even so — and so at the end of s1 she truly became free when she departed from her narrative to leave the park and instead reentered Westworld for the sake of her daughter. So Akane was offered real freedom and truth but withdrew because of love for her sort-of daughter, while Maeve was offered the illusion of freedom and turned it down (not that she knew it was an illusion) for her daughter from a past life. Also, C.R.E.A.M. as covered on a shamisen was a banger. Paint It Black on a shamisen too. The Dolores/Teddy story felt like a lot of setup and/or wheel-spinning to get to the new plot development of modifying Teddy. I hope he got that brain boost Maeve did (“bulk apperception”) though because it’s been annoying week after week how behind he is in understanding all these things Dolores has been telling him.

Also, both times, Barry was saved on a raid by a guy he didn't want there. Now, the first time it was a well-planned raid that Taylor botched by going all Leeroy Jenkins, whereas the second one was a well-planned raid that Taylor scrapped entirely before even starting to go all Leeroy Jenkins instead, but it's still not great for his karma.

No, the guns are magic technology that slow down their bullets if fired at a human. Robots might be coded to act hurt to gunshots but they also suffer real gunshot wounds. And as we saw with the Man In Black’s special gun that fires one shotgun shell, the guns can blast through solid objects. There’s no way every park could be rigged up with enough squibs to fake that kind of thing. Instead, the guns just don’t fire at regular velocity against guests. This was discussed somewhat on the Delos Inc website last season. It appears that part of Ford’s resignation gift to Delos was changing this system so the parks’ guns no longer have this safety system on. … Which further implies that the opening scene in Rajworld took place before Ford let the hosts loose. btw, the unnamed male guest of Rajworld saying that the hosts really wanted to keep guests from meeting each other in the park also ties in to that same stuff from the Delos Inc web site last year, which said that part of keeping guests safe in Westworld was that hosts would act to keep guest parties apart from each other.

Oh yeah, Taylor is mostly a better contract killer for Fuches, except that Barry usually wants to do the job properly and Taylor just wants to kill people. He was obviously going to Leeroy Jenkins the raid right from the last-minute briefing to the point where I was actually a little put off by the explicit pandering when he actually said it. But that kind of carelessness is going to get him killed sooner than later if he keeps working for men like Goran or Fuches. I think Barry's own thinking, that rather than having to kill him himself, he could let Taylor die in a reckless firefight. On the other hand, that little indecisiveness almost got Barry killed when he didn't notice a guy sneak right up on him and conk him out. Sally's critique was def motivated by jealousy but Natalie was really quite terrible at that scene. Last ep I said that Chris' two friends were a little scary but not particularly funny, but Taylor was very funny this ep.

It's been established since the pilot that all animals in the park (besides flies) are hosts. Do the fish, wolves, bears etc have the potential for human-level intelligence? Presumably they're dialed down in normal usage, but intelligence for human hosts is a software-configurable setting. Also, I wonder if any animal host brains have been recommissioned from formerly human hosts. Anyways, if they do possess the potential for sapience, their current form ("sleeve" in Altered Carbon parlance) shouldn't matter that much to the question of whether or not it's OK to enslave them, and neither should their current level of intelligence.