#horrible an inaccurate ‘improvement’ from the ai

[yandere--stuck]

Heinoustuck!Dirk x Reader

Dirk worked feverishly at his sendificator - which was quite a feat for someone with fuzzy mittens for hands. Or at least, that's what he theorized, though it was just as likely that they simply could be covering up his regular hands. Either way, though, it certainly didn't aid in his attempt to fix up any busted up contraptions Dirk had gathered up to cannibalize into something new.

One of his many inventions being that of trying to improve his life after the drones had snatched up him and Roxy and turned them into… Whatever the hell they were now.

Dirk had long ditched the ridiculously tiny hat placed upon his head upon reawakening. He had grown back the patches of hair that had been ripped or burnt off in the transformation process. He had made sure to clean up and dress his wounds and stitches. He had even developed a mechanical device that allowed him to speak and open and close his mouth, unlike how the drones had left him - open-mouthed and gaping like an abandoned puppet. The routine and efforts to appear somewhat normal made him feel… Surprisingly human.

Warmth filled Dirk's chest suddenly. The only other thing that made him feel human, even before the change, was… You.

"Human. Hah." Red text flashed in Dirk's face, emitting from the screen on the inside of Dirk's fractured glasses. A mechanical voice echoed into his skull. "That's the funniest thing you've ever thought. Or, at the very least, top five."

Dirk's jaw locked up, his teeth baring, as his fist slammed against the sendificator. Out of all the horrible things the drones and the BatterWitch had done - killing off the entire populace, taking over the world, taking his friends from him, changing him into THIS, endangering you… Putting this little robotic asshole inside his head through a bunch of bullshit wiring was pretty goddamn close to the worst.

"You know you love me ;)" Hal teased.

"Fuck off." Dirk hissed, through his teeth. God, he wished that Hal actually had ceased to exist after he woke up to find his glasses shattered after the transformation.

He didn't have time for this…!

Dirk's soft, mittened hands grabbed feebly at the knobs of the machine. Pinpointing the coordinates of someone from the past was hard, but what was harder was doing so with inaccurate and clumsy digits. And even harder than that was expanding upon and adding onto an already existing model of a machine to fit a human person inside with clumsy and inaccurate digits.

A sense of pride and a bit of excitement passed through Dirk. In moments like these, he often wondered how come his personality hadn't changed alongside his friends.

"This is hilarious," Hal had typed to him. "Your brain is so impenetrable that not even transmutation can lighten you up."

Funny. What was even funnier was that Dirk had made a copy of his brain and made it into an AI so that at least his original personality could live on. That venture, just like Hal himself, was pointless.

"Harsh." Hal's text flashed into view.

With that out of the way, Dirk stood back to admire his work. Everything was perfect - just your right size and shape. One of the only good things about living so far in the future was that, for the most part, he had almost all the time in the world. Niw, he just had to synchronize…

Dirk flashed to his computer, leaning on his desk. His eyes ran over your form. You lay, curled up in a ball, in your hideout. You were so perfect… Untouched by the growing numbers of transmutated citizens as The Condesce's influence grew. 

You… Really, you were the only friend he had left.Jane and Jake were lost to the transmutation, and so was Roxy. But, you… You were all he had left. His beloved. His one and only… He'd save you, he'd protect you, he'd keep you safe and loved, like you deserve to be.

"This is rather counterproductive, you know." Hal stated. "You say you want to aace them, yet willingly drag them into a time where they could easily be killed or transformed - just like you."

"I'm not listening." Dirk growled, fiddling with the coordinates - your coordinates. He was so close. So close to you. Your warmth, your body, your humanity, your love.

"You're obsessed, you realize that, right?" Hal asked. "Maybe you did change, after all. Maybe this is how you changed-"

"Get out of my head!" Dirk spat.

He was right on top of you, longitude, latitude, time - everything was perfect.

His heart beat rapidly in his chest. He- he needed you!!!

Red. "God, you really are crazy, huh?"

A fist slammed down on the button.

Okay, maybe Dirk was a little off since his mutation… But, he was doing this all out of love… Love for you. 

He'll make sure to approach you as calmly as possible as to not scare you too much. You'll see. This is for the best. He did this for you...

[aaronheatonwords]

Tacoma

It's difficult to separate a work from its creators, despite the intention of the work itself. While Tacoma isn't a direct sequel to Gone Home, Fullbright's previous release and the breakthrough into the mainstream that these character-oriented experiences have become, it certainly follows in the footsteps of the groundwork that Gone Home has laid in its wake. Where many games would opt for a setting that feels believable enough to be a real place but “gamey” enough to occupy and traverse, Tacoma and other games in this genre trade in a deliberately slow, measured pacing that takes pride in the realism of their settings. Where many games reference and idealize settings for the effect of creating and enjoyable level, Walking Simulators (as much as I hate that term, it isn't entirely inaccurate at this point) trade in environments that are realistic to truly inhabit.

In that regard, Tacoma is a resounding success. By daring to break away from the willfully indulgent nostalgia that many of these games have occupied, whether it's through a time period or a well-established setting like a national forest or a haunted house, Tacoma steps outside of those boundaries in a way that forces the creative boundaries outward. Where the player could before assume the general state of the world, Tacoma raises the challenge of creating an entirely new reality to inhabit, but one that has the same believability as an abandoned mid-90's mansion. There is a tactile, realistic feel to picking up and examining recorded VHS tapes of the X-Files that would be challenging to recreate in a setting that almost literally does not exist, but Tacoma grapples with that problem admirably.

The space station Tacoma, which operates as a glorified shipping and receiving factory, is an incredibly essential character in the game. As it isn't a simple real-world location gone creepy, it requires as much setup as the actual human characters. The player, a third-party contractor named Amy hired to board and investigate the Tacoma, is free to walk and poke around Tacoma as they gain access to new areas. Though only being a setting, it serves as a microcosm of the outside world; before you can begin your adventure proper, you're required to grab a special pair of AR augmentations and sign off on a user agreement which sounds actually pretty scary when you read it closely, though not unlike many of the EULAs we blindly agree to nowadays anyway (use of image in perpetuity across the universe? Really?). From there, the reality of the fiction that Tacoma places itself in becomes horribly real. There is a pervading sense of corporate ownership that runs through the game, hinting at the obsoletion of currency in favour of a system called “Loyalty,” which can be traded between various companies for less than desirable rates that aren't entirely clear to the person making the decision to convert. There are fictional holidays about the advancements (or stagnation, depending on how you view it) of the workforce, which the contractors of space stations take part in. Whether they actually enjoy the holiday or even understand it is played with, and many simply use it as a free day off. Fictional (and real) corporations are named and given histories, and even the technology that powers the station is given realistic uses and limits (try turning a stove or a treadmill on, go for it).

For all of that work, it would have been unfortunate for Tacoma to drop the ball on the human characters which act as the core of the experience. The most realistic space station in the world would be boring to explore if the humanity in the station didn't hold up its end of the bargain. (Mostly) Fortunately, Tacoma delivers the good on its human crew members. Despite being only a couple of hours long, Tacoma boasts six crew members to experience during the journey, and each with their own ambitions, problems, goals, and worries. The amount of characters who seem actually real seems like an odd thing to praise, but in the context of a short video game, it's not something that's seen very often. Fullbright explored plenty of options to bring these characters to life and they're all handled well.

One of the chief ways to explore and learn the characters are the AR recordings, which play out as coloured silhouettes that roam about the environment, almost like a stage play. As you watch these play back, you're presented with a timeline that informs you of how far along in a recording you are, which events of interest are happening, and the ability to scrub through the recording as you see fit. What first seems like a very basic twist on the audio log formula (the ability to manually track your position in a recording) quickly becomes much more complicated, as characters congregate and branch out during the recording. Being a real-time recording of the events of the station in a given area, the recording is not simply of a single character but of whoever was present in the zone during that recording. This leads to many instances of pausing and forwarding tracks to keep up with moving characters, navigating the environment to figure out who was standing where and when, and how to access the AR terminals the game presents.

Right, so another way the game presents characters is through a very indirect method, which is the AR terminals that everyone on board (including Amy herself) has access to. They open in front of characters like a digital book, and have area for email, web browsing, video calls and other computer-like interactions. Any time that a character is using his or her AR terminal during a recording, the player is free to poke around in it as well, though some interactions are locked off as corrupted or otherwise inaccessible. On top of the mostly passive AR recordings and the usual ability to poke and prod and twist and turn every item in the environment, the AR terminals act as a welcome addition to the usual formula of these games and give much needed context to certain characters. Like any media, sometimes there were characters who seemed to be acting entirely irrationally only for me to find well-earned justification in their email log or through a conversation with their partner or child. Adding a layer of context that isn't outright shown is a realistic way to add layers to characters. After all, how many times have you thought someone to be acting irrationally in real life, only to find out later that they were going through trauma or issues in their lives? The AR terminals are a layer of reality, despite being a digital item.

The conventions that Tacoma chooses to engage with and subvert do define a significant portion of my opinion of the game. Being the next entry in the genre from the creators who worked to popularize it, there's a certain notion of conventions being challenged and problems being addressed. With the popularity and advent of this genre, from Firewatch to SOMA to Layers of Fear, comes an expectation of improvement and expansion. Tacoma puts forth ideas that don't always pan out, though a lot of that does come down to individual opinion.

The prevalence of audio logs in the game seems like a very conscious design decision, rather than a creative freedom like Gone Home. Telling a story which has already happened is fascinating in its own right, not entirely disassociated from the strange voyeuristic tendencies that people might have, but because it allows a freedom to explore and inhabit an environment that was very lovingly crafted. While a game like Bioshock (which members of Fullbright have worked on) leans on tension to keep the player moving, games like Gone Home are fully propped up by their narratives and environments. In this case, Tacoma is full of very compelling people who participate in an event which seems equal parts terrifying and thrilling, guided by an AI whose intentions are not entirely clear (as is the case with so many AIs in fiction). Despite the joy of picking through drawers and bookstacks on the space station, I found myself something wishing that I could have inhabited a character who lived through the events of the space station. It speaks to the strength of the dual narrative style that Gone Home and Tacoma utilise that I want to experience both stories, though whether or not your story is the more interesting one is entirely a matter of personal opinion.

Similarly, the world around the Tacoma is so well-realised, even through snippets of emails and advertisements and AR terminals, that there's a part of me which wants to dive deeply into the universe outside of the airlock and find out who the tertiary characters and big players in the ecosystem are. Subtle hints like the faded American flag in a certain character's office or the constant reference to a competing company within the Tacoma stoke the fires of my interests so much that being a passive observer feels like a step back from what could have been. The art design is immaculate and the trail of breadcrumbs left for the player to follow through the station paint such a vivid world that I wish I could have either taken a step down, into the events of the Tacoma itself, or a step up, into a more wide-reaching political thriller.

Despite this, Tacoma succeeds whole-heartedly at what it does. It exposes an extremely believable world in microcosm, one that seems to respect all current avenues of political and social reality while presenting a very real picture of where it might go, and fills that opening with characters who feel motivated and clearly grounded without degenerating into two-dimensional caricatures of what a person in space might look or act like. As a follow-up to Gone Home, it smartly engages and subverts what it needs to by twisting the environmental storytelling model into an interactive and immersive space while ditching what isn't required, which is a faithful recreation of a time that's already passed us by. That's not to say that it diminishes what Gone Home accomplished, but it stands to prove what can be done when you look at a genre as a feeling and an idea, instead of a list of bullet points that need to be hit. I come away from Tacoma disappointed that its world isn't more immediately accessible, but very happy with the story it tells within the confines of its universe.

[sciculture-blog]

Modern Dr. Frankensteins

Rick and Morty

The show follows Rick, an alcoholic mad scientist who moves in with his daughter and her family after his wife dies, and regularly gets his grandson Morty involved in “high-concept sci-fi rigamarole,” to use the show’s phrasing. As a show creator Dan Harmon describes as “liberated from logic,” what we end up with is a fresh look into the mad scientist trope as well as a show that is actually grounded in some real scientific theories/principles, though tremendously exaggerated.

Though Rick would prefer not to, and even shows that sees it as a weakness in one episode, he does actually care about his family. He puts their lives in peril in almost every episode, as mad scientists do, but is also begrudgingly attached to his family - forcing the viewer to consider our own emotional attachments to others and how/whether we see these as assets or liabilities.

As a ridiculous, seemingly nonsensical sci-fi romp, Rick and Morty at first glance would seem to just be entertainment for entertainment’s sake. And while a lot of the science in the show is inaccurate and fantastical, there are small grains of truth that give the show new value to those who know what they’re looking at, and is still extremely entertaining for the rest of us.

For example, the entire premise of the show is based on the theory of multiple dimensions, all of which vary slightly or completely compared to our own. This is based on the real-life Many Worlds Interpretation, which has been a topic of study in the scientific community since the 1950s.

The most obvious, which is prevalent throughout the series, is the Many Worlds Theory, which suggests that every time a new event occurs, multiple universes are created to reflect all of the possible outcomes.

In the episode Rick Potion No.9, Rick tries to make a potion that will make Jessica fall in love with Morty which of course goes horribly wrong and turns everyone into monsters. This episode plays with the extreme complexity of DNA, a language of its own that we continue to study and experiment with today. And when you think about it from a scientific, biological perspective, love really is a chemical concoction in the body that pushes animals to breed.

The the episode A Rickle in Time, Rick, Morty and Summer essentially get removed from time and split reality into multiple pieces. The entirety of this episode makes reference to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. In the same episode, Rick opens the garage door to reveal the house floating in space surrounded by cats, which is a little nod to Schrodinger’s cat.

In Raising Gazorpazorp, Morty impregnates a sex robot, who then gives birth to a half-human, half-gazorpian baby. As weird as that all sounds, AI sex robots are a real thing, which asks use to question what qualifies as real physical intimacy, and if one were to have sex with a robot, would it be considered cheating?

Throughout the show, we find that Rick’s spaceship runs on dark matter. In 2009, scientists theorized that dark matter engines may be the key to distant space travel in the future, and there’s tons of real-world research out there now on dark matter.

Rick and Morty loves to play with the concept of reality, which in this case is highly flexible and manipulable. In the episode, M. Night Shaym-Aliens!, Rick and Jerry try to navigate their way out of various simulated realities. This is a nod to a theory from British philosopher Nick Bostrom, who hypothesized that our world could simply be a computer-generated reality controlled by an alien species, a la The Matrix.

Breaking Bad

Enter the infamous Walter White, a timid chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin and meth manufacturer when he gets diagnosed with terminal cancer. Though his new business venture was at first an attempt to make enough money to leave behind for his family when he died, he eventually goes into remission and keeps cooking. Initially, White seems to be in it just for the tremendous wealth it brings them, but by season 4, money is no longer White’s motivating factor - now he’s in it for power.

Another highly interesting aspect to the show is the role of science, and what motivators underlie each character’s raison d’etre as they do science. Walter White has a legitimate love of chemistry, but he’s not the classic Frankenstein, a man desperately searching for the meaning of life without considering the consequences of his work. White is a more modern Frankenstein, looking to use science to take over the world using his blue meth. But much like Frankenstein, Walt doesn’t think at all about the effect his chemistry is having on the world; Walt only measures his work as a method of his own survival and as a tool to get him ahead in the drug industry.

Another character, Gale Boetticher, displays a similar, cavalier lack of regard for the effects his work has on others. Gale’s interest in meth making is aesthetic - that is, he does it for the art of it, and looks at his work as an attempt to master such an art. When the meth leaves the lab, it no longer exists to him, nor do the consumers.

It’s important to understand that Breaking Bad concerns the evil behind individual motivations, but it doesn’t condemn the science as inherently evil - meth is simply a product of chemistry, but those using and improving upon it for personal gain are to blame rather than the science itself.