Recorded by Bill Whittle before a live global audience Thursday, March 4, 2021.
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The Stratosphere Lounge Episode 278
Recorded by Bill Whittle before a live global audience Thursday, March 4, 2021.
Recorded by Bill Whittle before a live global audience Thursday, March 4, 2021.
Recorded by Bill Whittle before a live global audience Thursday, March 4, 2021.
11 replies on “The Stratosphere Lounge Episode 278”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDMtfS0L9Ps&t=240s
In 1996, Squaresoft, after seeing great success in the sales of three prior titles, allowed their development team to take up a special project of their own. Two years later Xenogears was born. What you are seeing is the event which lead to the crash into the world in which the whole game takes place, through the lens of a stranded civilization based on survivors that suffer a huge setback in technology.
This military ship in the trailer has come into possession of a biological weapon which they are attempting to activate and analyze. It turns out to be a super AI that begins to take over the ship and begins a translation to the nearest known planet that suits its development into a massive world devouring, terraformed, weapon. The machine is thwarted by the crew, which it begins to annihilate when they, a necessary component, begin to evacuate the ship. The captain, from his bridge, isolated from the rest of the ship, executes a self-destruct sequence that causes the ship to crash land into the planet the adventure takes place in. The AI, which resembles a gigantic brain, survives, but cannot operate at full capacity without the ships power, so it spawns human doppelgangers in its slumber that will power and enable the AI to realize its objective for which it was created.
What we don’t realize until late game is that when the bio-engineered super AI began to initialize it drew so much power from the ships artifact power system that it tore the fabric of reality and actually tapped the energy of God and subsumed the creator. When the ships power failed, that power was trapped inside this machine when it went dormant. Unbeknown to the AI, this trapped entity also created dopplegangers through that same process that would eventually work to destroy this machine and liberate it.
Apart from these 4 original new humanoids, many of the ships AI, normal androids used to service the humans and the ship, also survive, but are corrupted and recruited by the 2 AI dopplegangers. They become the masters of this world, immortal rulers over the mortal humans that come to procreate and fill the planet. The machine bides its time as the technology is recovered and recreated over the ages of its sleep by the agents it created.
The game treats with things that were so alien to this media at this time that it almost never saw release, given to so many of the controversial religious and ethical subject matter, stemming from human biological experimentation, a love story between a human and android, to machines that somehow acquire souls. Some of the androids do not even realize they are created machines. It continues to be the most impressive example to me of artificial intelligence, biological engineering, scheming, and reincarnation I’ve ever known in fiction.
I’m a big fan of the Final Fantasy games. Didn’t realize Squaresoft made Xenogears as well.
A true random number generator can be made by counting radioactive decay events in a sample of something radioactive.
Consider also the book “Control-Alt-Revolt”. In the set-up, AIs decide that creatures that are capable of killing their own unborn children are too dangerous to keep around.
In the Three Body Problem trilogy, the author develops the “Dark Forest” hypothesis, where every alien species is keenly aware that resources are limited and will act ruthlessly to eliminate competition as soon as it becomes aware of any.
I expect science fiction TV shows, and even some books, to get the science wrong. And I refer to the science in a lot of police procedurals as “CSI-ence Fiction”.
There was a mystery show where one of the victims was killed by being sedated, left sitting in his car, and the car was filled with concrete from a handy cement mixer. But this was in the middle of the night. Anyone leaving a mixer filled with concrete some afternoon would come back the next morning to find a solid rock in the mixer. Once cement is mixed with water, it’s going to set and that’s just plain that. A cement mixer is going to be emptied and cleaned out at the end of the shift. Period.
They did the same thing in Season One of The Punisher on Netflix. Started up a concrete pump and mixer at a construction site in the dark of night.
I didn’t post questions on TSL very often, so I might not be representative, but I’ve moved away from Facebook. If I AM representative, then maybe Bill could post the TSL on Parler or MeWe?
Don’t feel like you have to move on my account, but it would be nice to be able to post questions again.
Or maybe I’m not looking in the right place?
I didn’t get a chance to watch live last night but rather as a “podcast” this morning on my wayy to work. I thought Bill’s discussion about what good writing and story telling entails was spot on. Especially at the 23:00 mark where he talks about murder mysteries.
To whomever asked that original question that was great.
I absolutely loved the way Bill talked about the lazy anti-climatic writing of the last few seasons of Vikings.
But if I can suggest to the original person who asked about story telling, and everyone else; go back into the “way back” machine on Hulu and now watch some of the old Columbo episodes.
The Columbo series did everything exactly backwards from a “whodunnit” aspect.
First, they show you (usually in the opening scene) who the victim was, who killed them, how they killed them, and WHY they killed them. And then Columbo comes in with his scruffy appearance and disarming demeanor and you can almost tell from that point HE KNOWS who the perp is. The rest of the episode is this psychological cat-and-mouse between our favorite Lieutenant Inspector and his quarry. The only real suspense is HOW Columbo gets the perpetrator to slip up and usually incriminate themselves.
Absolutely masterful writing that flips typical detective stories on their heads.
I have always wondered if there was a biographical backstory to Columbo. In the first episodes of the show he was a middle aged man. Perhaps too young to have that rank unless he was really THAT good at solving crimes. How did he develop his “shtick”? Did he at one time used to be a starched collar person and accidentally discovered looking like a bum made him more approachable or people would assume him incompetent. In short, did he assume the sort of “hobo persona” because he found it worked for him or has he always been that way: raised in a poor family, etc.
I will further add that there is a Youtube channel called The Critical Drinker and he goes into story telling and character development about as good as anyone I’ve ever seen with the exception of Bill Whittle. Check him out. Especially his “The Drinker Fixes…..” videos. Good stuff.
Steven Hawking expressed the opinion that mankind’s contact with an advanced civilization would not be a good idea. He didn’t expand on that statement as far is I know.
So Cool!