The issue you sometimes see with LLMs is that they’re trained off basically all the text humans have ever produced, so when we ask them questions they just repeat our own scifi anxieties back to us. (I think we’ll need more than the LLM paradigm to get to AGI, we’ll need something more reinforcement learning-ish…

It’s hard to say, because people have been growing up with fantasy, scifi and superheroes since the 30s at least. There was basically a generation raised by comic books. What may have helped LotR is that instead of always having been a fairy tale for children, it got popular with adult hippies and post-hippies, who…

Lol, he uses the term “cache-sexe” in Flowers since it’s more decorous than “banana-hammock,” but yes. Swanwick’s stuff doesn’t have a lot of fucking, but I think what is there is often intended to be a bit challenging to the reader, particularly if the reader is a typical 80s science fiction fan.

See, I see Google as more like Gibson’s zaibatsus. It started out with a sort of corporate identity and ethos, but it’s carcinised to become a pretty standard corporation, regardless of the founders’ intentions. The defining quality of the TA’s I read in the book is quixotic failure; they’re egomaniacs who tried to…

Swanwick is trippy, but the psychosexual stuff he puts in Stations of the Tide would probably both scare off any streaming executive and piss off essentially every political persuasion of activist, it might make more sense as an A24 movie or something. Vacuum Flowers could probably work pretty well, although they’d…

Some of the recent stuff with LLMs and people’s anxieties around them could dovetail nicely with “Turing cops” and “limited Swiss citizenship,” and they could probably analogize the Tessier-Ashpools (and the ultimate failure of their ambitions) to some of the more culty Silicon Valley VC circles.

It had to have been pretty weird for Alexandra Daddario, getting cast in The White Lotus as “preternaturally hot woman admitting to herself that her talent will never take her further as a writer than her looks will take her as a trophy wife” and then acting the shit out of the part. 

I think you can interpret a deeper joke on the audience in Robocop insofar as the movie is framed as having a happy ending, but it really just reveals that instead of being an extrajudicial murder machine controlled by one of Omnicorp’s directors, he’s just an extrajudicial murder machine controlled by its chairman.…

HOLT: “Alright detective, what’s this all about? You have 70 seconds.”

Asked myself the same thing about whether I was watching a 3d version, and I also had trouble discerning some of the voiceovers with the weird echo it had.

Do the decadent shit whenever you feel like it, and then be low key and down-to-earth on the publicly known important dates when you know the masses will be watching.

James Cameron was basically the closest thing to the lesbian gaze in blockbuster cinema for decades, lol

Oh, she has tons of characterization, I just mean that the show sometimes costumes and shoots her in a way that makes sense for the character but has the side effect of being hot.

Shiv’s a little thirst trappy, at times.

In this case, it’s probably a bit of a design crutch. You’d think they could get creepy peekaboo humanoid shapes using the shoggoths, anyway.

Yeah, but he goes into their history and how their downfall came from not enough eugenics causing the more recent Elder Things to be weaker and dumber than the original ones.

Humans are wired to recognize and respond to the human form and distortions thereof. Most of the more recent Lovecraftian monsters I’ve seen tend to use the “alien monster emergent from a ruined human (or Garfield) form” template because it’s hard to make a sea anemone scary.

Carpenter’s The Thing was pretty faithful to the actual plot of the short story as well, though. There’s a shape-shifting alien they dig out of the Antarctic ice, it infects the dogs first, they can only kill it with fire, they can detect it by heating a blood sample since the alien’s cells will act to protect their…

“A dark presence uses a well-intentioned alcoholic’s own demons to turn him against his loved ones” versus “Jack Nicholson finally gets the excuse he’s been looking for to kill his family.”

Some of these guys (Trump, Dominique Strauss-Kahn) probably think they’re god’s gift to women, but some of the others are clearly getting off on how repulsed their victims are.