Maximum Taco
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Posts posted by Maximum Taco
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MLB Thread
in Sports
Damn, Travis out.
That sucks.
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MLB Thread
in Sports
3 minutes ago, xaxat said:I wonder how many casual viewers MLB loses to "channel fatigue" during the playoffs?
I assumed there would be a game tonight, so I checked Fox, Fox Sports and ESPN. No game there, so I finally checked my guide. TBS is not a sports channel.
But how many people stop at the "usual suspects"?
That's the nice thing about Canada. Every postseason game is on Sportsnet. And if it's not on Sportsnet that's cause another game is on Sportsnet and it's either on one of the Sportsnet alternate channels.
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NHL Thread
in Sports
4 hours ago, dkb said:I echo these sentiments, please don't ever ever leave us Auston!
Of course we would still lose after that stellar game from Auston Matthews. Oh Leafs.
I actually like the way that turned out.
To me the most exciting part of Auston wasn't the 4 goals (although that was wonderful), it was him taking credit for the loss at the end of the game because he lost his coverage in OT. He could've easily said "I scored 4 goals, what more do you want from me?" but the kid wants to win.
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MLB Thread
in Sports
11 minutes ago, ElDosEquis said:Somewhere Zach Grienke is weeping.
He can dry his tears with his 206 million dollars.
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2 hours ago, vibeology said:
Amelia's assistant guy? What does he do? I would love to see what his purpose is and for him to get a plot at some point soon. I think of all the characters introduced in the pilot he is far and away the least developed to the point I think his name is Eliot but I'm not sure. He's had maybe 10 lines so far and I'd like something there. I get that some characters are going to be supporting, but I know more about the Cuban catcher than I do someone who has been there since the beginning.
Eliot is supposed to be Amelia's social media director. He handles her clients' twitter, facebook etc. so they don't go all Donald Trump and tweet dumb things at 3 AM.
I guess they could have a storyline where he tweets something he shouldn't and that causes problems for Amelia/Ginny/the Padres etc.
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The MIB as a sort of bug tester for Westworld is an intriguing scenario.
After all if you want to keep people from breaking your game, you need to find out how they would break it. And he is doing things that a bug tester would do, pushing at the boundaries of what a normal player would do, looking for holes and cracks in the game to exploit.
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18 hours ago, leejaneagles said:
I wonder what happens if a test scenario like Teddy picking up the can, is only interrupted at one end.
For example, they showed you can be the man that picks up the can and Dolores falls in love with because the MIB did it and also the new Guest.
I believe both times Teddy also received interaction and was away giving tours or getting shot etc.
What happens if no one interrupts Teddy and then a real Guest and Teddy are both poised to pick up the can?
Teddy is programmed to be travelling into town by train to find the love of his life and spend the day with her. If he is interrupted by a Guest he re-programs and does what they want but if that doesn't happen does he get jealous? Does he try and fight for her honour and you have to play out a duel scenario to win her love? Does he just stand there moping for the rest of the day?
As the MIB says "Winning doesn't mean anything unless someone else loses... [Teddy] is there to be the loser."
I would guess that if you enter a romantic narrative with Dolores, Teddy (if available) becomes your rival and you have to "win" her affections.
There would probably be multiple ways to do so, you could simply make her like you more than him, or you could surreptitiously kill him and get him out of the way, or you could defeat him in an honourable duel, or you can play it like the MIB and drag her off to rape her after shooting him in front of her.
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9 hours ago, Raja said:
If money is so tight for Lawson why would he take the American League and the late career as a designated hitter off of the table?
That was suggested by someone in the show, his lawyer I wanna say? It seems important to him that he ends his career as a Padre. He's probably been a Padre for his entire career and he's just not interested in playing for another team.
You bring up a good point, the BoSox probably would offer him a pretty lucrative short term deal, with Ortiz retiring they'd need a bat, and having a DH who could also be their back up catcher would be useful.
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On 10/11/2016 at 6:15 PM, peach said:
They could be more than a spy or assassin. They could be right under your nose as a secretly controlled judge or politician. Or the President. That's what I think they're for. But now they're at risk of an Ex Machina scenario.
I'm thinking the same.
The endgame of corporate is to turn influential figures into robots that do their bidding. Start with their own clientele, the extremely wealthy, and then go from there, politicians, judges, etc.
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17 minutes ago, tiramisue said:
But why should they practice talking and not feeling, when feeling (emotions as well as pain) is probably the more complicated function (and should ideally modify their behaviour and their conversations).
They do practice feeling but in the appropriate scenario.
Dolores feels love when she interacts with Teddy, that's her practice scenario for a romantic love, should a guest ever choose to pursue that with her. She doesn't practice feeling romantic love when someone holds a gun to her face, or when she takes a bite of oatmeal, or when she is painting horses, that wouldn't provide the appropriate response for when she's interacting with a guest.
Maeve shouldn't be feeling pain (or practicing feeling it) when she is trying to put the moves on someone. It's not appropriate to the scenario.
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41 minutes ago, Broderbits said:
Don't computers perform automated tasks even when no human is at the controls?
Your computer might run a self diagnostic, or do a scan of your files while you aren't using it, but these tasks serve a purpose, they improve the computer's functionality.
This could explains why the hosts talk to each other and carry out narratives when nobody else is around, it's practice, and it improves their function.
But it doesn't explain why they feel things when no one else is around. How does Maeve experiencing pain that she tries to ignore and push through improve her functionality? If anything it detracts from it, that's why she went in for repairs to cure her MRSA infection. It serves no purpose for her to be in pain when she isn't supposed to be, she's not practicing being in pain, that's evidenced by her shock and confusion. She simply is in pain.
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NHL Thread
in Sports
The NHL is terrible at US marketing. They simply do not know what they are doing. It would be so easy to set up a Pittsburgh/San Jose rematch, and on the last day of the season every team plays, it should be like that on the first day too. Everyone should play on day 1. And emphasize rivalries, Toronto/Ottawa and Calgary/Edmonton is good, but how about Vancouver/Chicago, Montreal/Boston, NYI/NYR? Come on NHL get your game together, this is why you are the worst league of the big 4.
But I don't care cause my favourite team's draft pick scored 4 goals in his debut!!! I love you Auston Matthews. Never leave. I want to see you hoist the cup, and when I am an old man I want to see #34 hang from the rafters beside 27, 13, 93 and 17. Never leave.
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8 minutes ago, ennui said:
I understand that MiB has been visiting for 30 years, but in this current visit, Delores forgot him, as well. He kills Teddy, drags Delores off to the barn, and the next day she drops the can, MiB picks it up, and she doesn't seem to have any recognition.
Theoretically, if MiB drags her off to the barn every night of his vacation, I'd have to wonder why it took thirty years for MiB to get bored with it.
She went through a trauma.
They've already said they wipe their memories after they die, they probably wipe them after they get raped too.
It doesn't help to have hosts thinking about that stuff, they want her to be the innocent girl next door, that narrative isn't aided by her being a rape victim.
That's why she doesn't remember him the next day, she doesn't remember her dad and mom and Teddy dying, or the rape.
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8 minutes ago, ennui said:
Except Delores has been forgetting the MiB for thirty years; he seems like someone who would prefer that she remember him. He almost sounded hurt that she doesn't.
The maximum stay at Westworld is 28 days.
So once you leave Westworld it would make sense for the hosts you interacted with to forget you. Teddy doesn't remember the guy who he showed around the last time he was there either.
The MiB hasn't BEEN in Westworld for 30 years, he's been COMING for 30 years. She probably forgets about the MiB, everytime his stay ends. When he says "Don't you remember me?" I don't think he's shocked or surprised or hurt. He's toying with her "You don't remember me, but I sure as hell remember you."
Also it probably goes without saying that if she "dies" she probably forgets all about that death and who caused it. If he kills her after he rapes her each time, that would also probably account for her forgetting him.
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23 hours ago, leejaneagles said:
Hi all, new to the forum and this is my first post. Had to join as Westworld really got my imagination going.
I guess this topic will have questions that can only give speculation than answers at this point but hey that's half the fun! I'm not one to be greedy and as the title suggests, you can add your own 'little' questions to this topic if you wish. It's not really those big game changing questions like 'Is so and so a robot?' or 'What is at the center of the maze?' but more those niggly ones that you'd love a proper answer for.
I'll start: In the movie, the main character is charged with murder and taken to prison. It makes sense, there are Sheriff's and law-enforcement bots all over the park. I'd assume this can also happen in the TV series. In the movie, his best friend sneaks in a stick of dynamite and blows him out of prison. What if he was completely alone?
There are a couple of things that need to be assumed for this to be a problem. Obviously you CAN shoot your way out of most situations, killing the Sheriff or just flat out refusing to go to prison. However, I don't think it's out of the realms of possiblity for an inexperienced Guest to be a little shaken up by getting arrested at first, a terrifying experience unless you're a hardened criminal. So, let's say the Sheriff stops the Guest, in a panic the Guest hands over all weapons and allows himself to be cuffed and taken to the jail cell (not harmed, just loosely cuffed and marched to the cell. The Sheriff, thinking he's a real law enforcement officer and not a Bot would properly lock the door, properly remove anything that could be used to escape and not necessarily keep engaging with the guest. He could leave the jail house to go on patrol or interact with other Guests etc.
So my question - what would happen? This is 40'000 dollars a day. Okay, there are super-rich people that go on 2 week vacations yearly but you'd have to assume a majority of guests scrimp and save for a one day taste of this virtual reality. Even if you were there for a long weekend you'd be miffed if one of your three days was inside a prison. I know the Bots reset every night and you'd inevitably be let out during 'down time' but you have to be fully immersed for a day and if you didn't have a friend or anyone capable of starting a scenario on your behalf - sneaking in a key/gun/dynamite/bribing Sheriff etc you are properly screwed. Refunds all round or a free day pass for The Guest do we think?
Second niggly question - following on from that point about all Bots resetting every night and the clean up crews coming in - Is there a curfew for Guests as I distinctly remember them saying there are no guidelines or rule books. It wouldn't make much sense to enforce a curfew in a world you can rape and murder as you please but what happens if you fancy an all nighter?
I'm an insomniac (currently typing all these questions buzzing around my head at midnight when I have to be up for work in a few hours). I rarely sleep at conventional times and whenever I go on vacation I am usually in bed 'til midday and stay up all night until around 5am the following day. If I spent 40k on Westworld and was standing in a bar having a great night, 3 lovely ladies on my arm, Cowboy drinking buddies and a whole lot of whiskey and suddenly at 1am say everyone around me shut down and clean up teams strolled in I wouldn't be very happy.
It doesn't just have to be meaningless drunk all-nighters either. What if you've spent 12 hours riding into the wilderness on a treasure hunt, will your robot companions reset at the specified time (again 1am for sake of argument) and wake up the next day with no recollection of the treasure hunt and having to start all over again.
We've already seen in just 2 episodes that men have a soft spot for Dolores in a different way than the prostitutes. Surely not ALL the men go there for meaningless sex with hookers. Even if it's kinda sad and lonely to think about, a lot of rich but lonely men must go there for the fake feeling of falling in love. Obviously once their vacation is over the robot would be reset and they couldn't continue it a year later but there must be a call for being able to build relationships over your 2 week vacation.
Imagine picking up the can for Dolores and noticing a spark. You don't immediately say come to my bedroom, you have a little flirt, maybe arrange to take her to dinner the next night, then go on a few mountain adventures with her for the week before finally doing your business. That can't happen on a 24 hour cycle.
Sorry, all petty and probably unanswerable questions I know but hopefully get some creative responses. Also sorry for length of post, hope it didn't bore you!
1) According to the website the minimum stay at Westworld is a week. So no worries about going for a day or three and winding up in jail. You gotta have enough cash to stay atleast a week.
2) I don't think the hosts are on a 24 hour hard set cycle. They don't have a set time to shut down, they just roll with the punches. If you want to hang out with them all night, they'll hang out with you all night (if it's in their character to do so.) If you don't want to they'll go to their own homes and go to sleep like a normal human person would. Also it doesn't seem like the hosts need a lot of maintenance unless they get injured or killed.
3) Narrative cycles can probably be variable also. If you strike up a spark with Dolores, then maybe she will be programmed to remember you until your stay at Westworld is over. I agree it would be jarring to the immersive aspect of Westworld if you met a host and they completely forgot you the next day.
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MLB Thread
in Sports
No baseball today... I'm going through baseball withdrawal!!!
Thank god the NHL season starts tonight.
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13 hours ago, scrb said:
In any event, the game design has the fundamental flaw that guests can't be stopped or lose. Soon as they get shot by a bullet, the story should end and he should have to go back to the beginning of the level. Say his gun stops working until he goes back to the town to reset it or something.
I don't really see Westworld as that type of game, where you can fail due to lack of skill. It's much more a choice based RPG or a visual (or in this case virtual) novel. If you've ever played a Telltale Game, that's the mold I'd be referencing.
You make choices, and your CHOICE always goes through the way you'd like it to. Also no choice can result in your death. But that doesn't mean you can't fail at your goal though.
Suppose you are trying to bring in the wanted outlaw alive. You can make whatever choices you'd like but there remains the possibility that he could escape, or you could inadvertantly kill him, or you could make the choice to kill him because you want to prevent him from killing someone else, or someone else could kill him. Even if the outlaw can't kill you, you can still fail to bring him in.
Suppose you are on a treasure hunt. You could follow the map wrong, or have someone else arrive at the treasure first. Your trusty host sidekick could betray you and try to steal the treasure under cover of night.
Suppose you are pursuing a romance (not a rape, or a mindless fuck session with a hookerbot, but you are trying to get a host to fall in love with you), you could have the host die, or your actions could end up terrifying or repulsing her/him, or she/he could fall in love with someone else.
And if something like that happens, you'd have to wait for the next day (or whenever the narrative cycle resets) to try again.
Of course if your only goal is to rape random hosts and kill random hosts, yeah you can't really fail at that.
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6 minutes ago, izabella said:
They aren't feeling and thinking independently, though, unless they are infected. They're programming allows for them to "know" when to feel pain or to react in a certain way when something isn't right. Dolores would not have known if her daddy robot was programmed to be "sick" but she reacted to him being sick the way she was programmed to do when someone is sick, such as by worrying and getting help. We also witness the robots coming out of their human mode and into robot mode at a command from the control center people, even when in the midst of crying or whatnot.
That's different from actually feeling something- hence, Dolores swatting the fly when she started having independent thought. She would not have swatted the fly before, despite it being annoying and crawling on her because she didn't actually feel flies and wasn't programmed to feel them.
Does that matter?
Just because the programmers are telling them what they think and what they feel, it doesn't make it any less "real" for them. To Dolores (in that moment) her father is sick, her boyfriend is dead. To Teddy his girl is about to get raped. To Maeve, her stomach hurts.
So if they know, on any level, that a poor performance doing their "job" will result in their "death" would they not be just as afraid as you or I are of death? They are programmed to fear death after all, if they weren't they wouldn't beg for their lives.
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9 minutes ago, DarkRaichu said:
So why was Maeve scheduled for decommissioning? Was it because she was an older model? The other hosts were re-purposed (ie. Delores' new dad), why not her? The "Madame" programming was not unique to her since the other girl could take over as madame when she was frozen. So why not simply reprogram her to be town lady #3 (for example)?
It had to do with the new storyline.
Sizemore wanted to "clear out the dead weight" so he probably asked for any hosts that were performing poorly to be decommissioned rather then re-purposed. Remember earlier he wanted 50 new bodies in the park but Cullen would only give him 20? Maybe he could massage those numbers if he can convince people to remove a few more "malfunctioning" units.
Maeve could've been reprogramed into town lady #3, but Sizemore wanted a horde of braves.
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20 minutes ago, izabella said:
Even if he knew, he wouldn't care since he's a computerized mechanical robot. Your car doesn't really care whether you are about to trade it in and get a new one.
If he were one of the robots that is starting to think and feel independently, he might care, but he might also be happy not to have to get knocked to the ground or get his hand stabbed or worse every day. Maeve might be happy to not have more crappy rapes and murders to "remember" every day, for example.
All of the hosts feel and think. They aren't acting when they cry out in pain or beg you not to shoot their wife in the head, they feel those things. They don't all just go along with what the guests want either. Teddy doesn't submit meekly to the Man in Black, he fights him with everything he has, as does the posse in this episode. They are physically incapable of hurting the guests, but that doesn't mean they aren't trying to.
It is true that they are told what to feel and think by the programmers but just because someone is telling them what to feel and think doesn't mean they feel or think it any less. In the first episode Dolores goes to get help for her ailing father from the Doctor. His sickness was a glitch, it's not a programmed event, she FELT worried, and she THOUGHT it was a good idea to seek medical attention. And this is before she starts exhibiting any symptoms of the "infection."
The infection isn't causing the robots to feel and think, they've been feeling and thinking this whole time. The change is that they are remembering what they shouldn't, and they are violating their prime tenet (or First Law if you prefer) not to be able to harm living things.
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21 hours ago, scrb said:
Do you guys think there would be Yelp or some other kinds of ratings on individual hosts?
Or different attractions within WW?
For sure, there would be complaints about the food and liquor quality.
I don't think there are any ratings for the use of guests. Remember ChangeRoomSexBot's words "No orientation, no guidebook, figuring out how it works is half the fun." It seems like the creators are not interested in putting out walkthroughs for the interactions, they want you to just play, and not know how to game the system (unless you're a long time repeat customer.) This does make sense, as a completionist gamer I know I'd always be thinking about what would've happened if I had played out an encounter differently, and if I could afford it I might keep coming back to do something a different way the next time. Limiting knowledge increases replay-ability.
I do think however there is a internal rating system the park uses. For instance when guests stopped responding to Maeve's advances her programming was adjusted, and when that didn't work she was scheduled for decommissioning. Pretty much if you're a host whose job is to provide a hook and you don't get any bites, you're going to end up in one of the endless sub-basements. I wonder if on some level the hosts know this. In the case of the Eyepatch, the treasure hunter, White Hat barely does anything to help him, and yet he still pursues him to try and get him to go on his treasure hunt, does Eyepatch know on some level that he could be put out to pasture if he doesn't get someone to go on his hunt?
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MLB Thread
in Sports
41 minutes ago, roamyn said:Hmm, I think there was another Cleveland team that swept Boston in the first round, then won 4-2 over Toronto to go to the Championship. What happened to that team?
Oh yeah, they fell in the Bay... NOT!
The 2015-16 Cavs didn't play Boston. They swept Detroit and Atlanta before they faced Toronto.
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MLB Thread
in Sports
Good, I know I said the best case scenario for the Jays was for the Sox to win one, but I'm glad we won't have to see Pedroia bat in Toronto the postseason. He feasts off the Jays.
Looking forward to Game 1 in Cleveland. Congrats Indians.
HOLY CRAP! ARIETTA HOMER!? Against Bumgarner? The Cubs pitchers are just on a mission to do it all.
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MLB Thread
in Sports
Filthy pitch.
Sandy Leon is still frozen by that one.
MLB Thread
in Sports
He's a bit of a jerk. He has a tendency to admire his homers.
And I say that as someone who LOVES Bautista. He's awesome. I say if you take someone yard, celebrate, and if they don't like it, they should pitch better.