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lacquerware · 4 years ago

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2020 Recap - My Year in Gaming

2020. What a year for video games. I had big plans for last year, but in the end I did very little besides play video games, and I don’t think I’m alone there since we were all stuck at home looking for a way out of reality. I wanted to do a year-end recap as I’ve done sporadically in past years, but this one will be different than the typical “Games of the Year” format because despite all the games I played in 2020, almost none of them came out in 2020, and some of the things that defined my year in gaming weren't even games.

Resident Evil 3 Remake (PS4)

RE3 was one of the only games I played in 2020 that didn’t coincide with the deadly pandemic's spread across the US. RE3 is, of course, a game about the spread of a deadly virus in Anytown, USA. It was an appetizer, I guess.

When the Resident Evil 2 remake dropped in 2019, there were some things I loved about it, and a few things that felt like steps back from the original. I feel much the same about RE3. I had also theorized that a Resident Evil 3 remake would be better off as RE2 DLC than as a separate full-length game, and considering how short RE3 turned out, with some of the best sections of hte original cut entirely (namely, the clock tower), I stand by my theory.

Oh well, at least Jill gets this rad gun, which for the time being is the closest thing to a new Lost Planet we can hope for anytime soon.

Sekiro (PS4)

Sekiro is the first video game I ever Platinumed. This is partly because conquering the base game was such a spartan exercise that going the extra mile to get the Platinum didn’t seem so bad, but it’s also surely a result of the pandemic. I needed a project and a big win. Who didn't?

I wrote at length about why I like Sekiro more than every other modern FromSoft game, and also about the game’s cherry-on-top moment that reminded me of blowing up Hitler’s face in Bionic Commando. Please read them!

Death Stranding (PS4)

Release date notwithstanding, this was obviously the Game of 2020. I wrote about it here, here, and here. This game bears the distinction of being the second one I ever Platinumed. It took 150 hours. Only then did I learn I had a hoverboard.

Streets of Rage 4 (PS4)

This is the only 2020 game I played for more than a few hours. In fact, I cleared the entire game at least five times. I still don’t think it captures the gritty aesthetic of the prior Streets of Rages (nor even tries to), but this is probably the best-feeling bup I've played. Huge bonus points for finally bringing back Adam, but in the end I found it hard not to pick Blaze every time.

Blaster Master Zero 2 (Switch)

What impressed me about this sequel from Inti Creates was that it wasn’t just more of the same, even though that would've been fine. BMZ2 builds on its already excellent predecessor with a catchy new format where players can freely cruise the cosmos and stages take the varied form of planets—some big and sprawling, others short and sweet. Hopping at will from planet to planet without ever knowing what experiences and treasure each one held felt like system jumping in No Man’s Sky and island hopping in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, both of which felt like opening presents.

Dragon Force (Saturn)

Charming, satisfying, and addictive as a bag of chips. Unlike a bag of chips, when it’s over, you can do it all again. And again. And it’ll be different each time! This might be the first strategy game I've truly loved. Better late than never.

The PC Engine Mini

The PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 Mini seems a particularly justifiable mini-console for people outside Japan because so many missed these consoles entirely, the games are hard to obtain, and the lineup includes titles spanning the entire convoluted Turbo/PC Engine ecosystem—the TurboGrafx-CD/CD-ROM², Super CD-ROM², Arcade CD-ROM² and SuperGrafx, in addition to plain, old standard HuCard games. I myself didn’t know the first thing about these systems before. It’s like reliving the nineties again for the first time.

Most of the titles included are simple action games that don't require a command of Japanese, but make no mistake: being able to understand Snatcher and TokiMemo does make me feel like an elite special person worth more than many of you.

(Side note: From a gender representation perspective, the difference between Snatcher and Death Stranding is stark. Virtually every interaction with every woman or girl in Snatcher is decorated with ways to sexually harass her. Guess someone finally had a conversation with our favorite auteur.)

A Gaming PC

I’d threatened to transition to PC gaming for years after beholding the framerate difference between the console and PC versions of DmC in 2012, and last July I finally took the leap, buying an ASUS “Republic of Gamers” (ugh) laptop with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q GPU. It seems like consoles are getting more PC-like all the time, especially with all these half-step iterations that splinter performance and sometimes even the feature set (à la the New 3DS and Switch Lite), so with the impending new generation seemed like a fine time to change course.

In the half-year since, I’ve barely played a single PC game more recent than 2013, but just replaying PS3-era games at high settings has been like rediscovering them for the first time.

I also finally experienced keyboard-and-mouse shooting and understand now why PC gamers think they're better than everyone else. Max Payne is a completely different game with a mouse. Are all shooters like this??

The USPS

Early in the year, I rediscovered my childhood game shop, Starland, which is now an online hub known as eStarland.com with a brick-and-mortar showroom. To my delight, it has become one of the best and most modestly priced sources for import Saturn games in the country, and I scored Shining Force III’s second and third episodes, long missing from my collection, for a mere ten bucks each!

In June, I treated myself to a trio of Saturn imports from eStarland: the tactics-meets-dating-sim mashup Sakura Taisen 2, the nicely presented RTS space opera Quo Vadis 2, and beloved gothic dungeon crawler Baroque. Miraculously, this haul amounted to just around thirty dollars total. Less miraculously, they never arrived. This was the second time I’d had something lost in the mail in my entire life, and also the second time that month. Something was wrong with the USPS, and it wasn’t just COVID pains. We would soon learn Trump had been actively working to sabotage one of the nation’s oldest and most reliable institutions in a plot to compromise the upcoming presidential election.

Frankly it’s a miracle there’s still such a thing as “delivery” at all, and a few missing video games is the last of my worries considering what caused it, but nevertheless this was an experience in my gaming life that could not have happened any other year. I won’t forget it.

*By the way, USPS reimbursed me for the insured value of the missing order, which was fifty bucks. So I actually profited a little off the experience.

Mega Everdrive Pro

I love collecting for the Genesis and Mega Drive, but I will not pay hundreds of dollars for a video game that retailed for about sixty. The publishers never asked for that, and the developers won’t see a (ragna)cent of the money. I'm also far less inclined to start collecting for Sega CD, since the hardware is notoriously breakable, the cases are huge and also breakable, and the library just isn't that good.

Still, I'd been increasingly curious about the add-on as an interesting piece of Sega history, so when I learned Ukranian mad scientist KRIKzz had released a new Mega Everdrive that doubled as a Sega CD FPGA, I finally took the plunge into the world of flash carts. This has proven a great way to play some of the Mega Drive’s big-ticket rarities I will never buy—namely shmups like Advanced Busterhawk Gley Lancer and Eliminate Down—as well as try out prospective additions to the collection. I never would have discovered the phenomenal marvel of engineering and synth composition that is Star Cruiser without this thing, but now that I have, it’s high on the shopping list.

The Mega Everdrive Pro is functionally nearly identical to TerraOnion’s “Mega SD” cartridge, but slightly less expensive, comes in a “normal” cartridge shell instead of the larger Virtua Racing-style one, and supports a single hardworking dude in Ukraine rather than a company with reportedly iffy customer service.

Twitch

Getting a PC also resolved issues that had long prevented me from achieving a real streaming setup, and much of my gaming life in 2020 was about ramping up my streaming efforts. I even made Affiliate in about a month. Streaming has been a great creative outlet and distraction, as well as a way to connect with other people during the COVID depression and structure my gaming time. Find me every Monday through Thursday 8-11pm Eastern at twitch.tv/lacquerware.

Metroid: Other M (Dolphin)

PC ownership also gave me access to the versatile Dolphin emulator, liberating a handful of great Wii exclusives from their disposable battery-powered prison.

One of the Wii games I fired up on Dolphin was Metroid: Other M, a game I’d always wanted to try but had been dissuaded by years of bad publicity and the fact that I never had any goddamn batteries. I know I should temper what I’m about to say by acknowledging that I was playing at 1080p/60fps on a PS4 controller so my experience was automatically a vast improvement over that of all Wii players, but I’m increasingly confident Metroid: Other M was the most fun I’ve ever had playing a Metroid game. I haven’t decided yet if I’m willing to die on this hill, but I will just say that if you like the Metroidvania genre in general and aren’t particularly attached to the Metroid series’ story or its habit of making you wander aimlessly for hours, there’s a very high chance you will enjoy Other M—especially if you play it on Dolphin.

Don't Starve Together (PC)

Don't Starve is the only game my friend Jason plays, so last year I tried to get into it with him. I respect this game's singular devotion to the concept of survival, but make no mistake: every session of Don't Starve ends with you starving to death. Or freezing. Or getting stomped by a giant deity of the forest. The entire game is staving off death until it inevitably comes. Even when death comes, you can revive infinitely (in whatever mode we were playing), which means even death is not an end goal. There is no end goal. You don't even have the leeway to "play" and create your own meaning as you do in similarly zen games like Dead Rising.

Don't Starve is a game for people for whom hard work is the ultimate reward in and of itself. Don't Starve told me something about Jason.

G-Darius (PS1)

In the early fall, Sony announced they were dropping PS3, PSP, and Vita support from the browser and mobile versions of their PSN Store, and since the PS3 version of the store app runs like a solar-powered parking meter in Seattle, I decided this was my last chance to stock up on Japanese PSN gems.

Among my final haul, the PS1 port of G-Darius proved an instant favorite. Take down the usual cast of mechanized fish in a vibrant, chunky, low-poly style that perfectly inhabits the constraints of the original PlayStation hardware. I believe this is the first Darius game that lets you get into giant beam duels with the bosses, which is quite definitely one of the coolest things a video game has ever let you do. The PS1 port is also surprisingly feature-rich, including some easier difficulty levels that present an actually surmountable challenge for non-savants.

This one’s coming to the upcoming Darius Cozmic Revelation collection on Switch alongside DARIUSBURST, a good-ass romp in its own right.

Red Entertainment

In my effort to shine a tiny spotlight on some of the unsung Interesting Games of gaming, I found myself drawn again and again to the work of Red Entertainment. First there were cavechild headbutt simulator Bonk’s Adventure and twin shmups Gates of Thunder and Lords of Thunder on the PC Engine Mini. Then I streamed full playthroughs of the PS2’s best samurai-era, off-brand 3D Castlevania, Blood Will Tell and the Trigun-adjacent stand-‘n-gun, Gungrave: Overdose. Then I was dazzled by Bonk’s Adventure’s futuristic spin-off cute-‘em-up, Air Zonk, which was also sneakily tucked away on my PC Engine Mini in the “TurboGrafx-16” section. It turned out all these games were made by the same miracle developer responsible for Bujingai, the stylish PS2 wushu game starring Gackt and a household name here at the Lacquerware estate. How prolific can one team be???

Month of Cyberpunk

In November, I started toying with the idea of themed months on my Twitch channel with “Cyberpunk month.” It was supposed to be a build-up to Cyberpunk 2077’s highly anticipated November release, but holy shit that didn’t happen, did it? Still, I always find myself gravitating toward this genre in November, I guess because I associate November with gloom (even though this year it was sunny almost every day). A month is a long time to adhere to a single theme, but cyberpunk is such a well-served niche in gaming that I could easily start an all-cyberpunk Twitch channel. The fact that we’re so spoiled with choice makes Cyberpunk 2077’s terrible launch all the more embarrassing. Here are just some of the games I played (and streamed!) in November:

Ghostrunner Shadowrun (Genesis) RUINER Remember Me Transistor Rise of the Dragon (Sega CD) Shadowrun (Mega CD) Cyber Doll (Saturn) Binary Domain Shadowrun Returns Blade Runner (PC) Deus Ex: Human Revolution Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Observer

Shadowrun on the Genesis gets my top pick, but the two most recent Deus Ex games are great alternatives for those looking for something in the vein of 2077 that isn’t infested with termites.

Lost Planet 2

Every year. I played through it twice in 2020.

Dead Rising 4

I slept on this one too long. While it's a far cry from the original game, it's easily the most fun I've had with a Christmas game since Christmas NiGHTS. This is the game a lot of people thought they were getting when they bought the original Dead Rising with their new Xbox 360--goofy, indulgent, and pressure-free.

Devil May Cry 5: Vergil (PS4)

Vergil dropped for last-gen consoles in December and breathed a whole lot of life into a game that was already at the head of its class.

Nioh 2

I’ve only played a few hours of Nioh 2 because I promised my friend I’d co-op it with him and wouldn’t play ahead. But he’s a grad student with two small children. Nevertheless, Nioh 2 is my Game of 2020.

And that's it! Guess I'll spend 2021 playing games that came out last year, and maybe eventually getting vaccinated? Please?

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insidious-intent · 4 years ago

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Hey! Hope you're having a good day! 🤗 I would like to hear your thoughts on the RNM finale!

Alright! I have my morning breakfast food and beverage here, so let’s do this! Everything is under a cut because this got long.

- This entire finale was somehow excruciatingly boring? Did anyone else feel that. There was 0 action, -1 adventure, and we didn’t even get Max cosplaying Thor level of entertainment this time.

- The first minute and a half resolves EVERY SINGLE PLOT THREAD FROM LAST WEEK. No bomb goes off, Liz saves the day, Jesse Manes is officially canceled.

- And then immediately we jump to “a week later” and everyone is fine, no one is worried about physical injuries or how they all almost died. Liz is supposedly taking care of Maria but that can’t be seen because 2 women cannot be shown together for more than 3 seconds at a time. No one else has visited Maria? Her own mother isn’t glued to a chair in her room? Sheriff Valenti isn’t investigating any of this? ANYWAYS. But Michael is there after a week to talk about how he felt. So at least the romance is still alive.

- So what is a guy to do after having a deeply emotional 1-on-1 with your “could have been dead” girlfriend? Why visit his ex, of course! Malex destroy the toolshed, which bless, at least we can stop talking about that one torture source. But ya know that shed had to also further the plot, skeletons and key and all.

- Also shoutout to @frenziedblaze for noting how malex had their first time over a shallow grave. I will never unsee that.

- Max somehow manages to have the same emotional vibes with his girlfriend and his sister. Except he only makes out with one of them.

- Max manages to be real cute with Jenna (idk how I started supporting this brotp) and gets her to do “undercover” work for him to see what the real handsome ex-fiance wants with Liz.

- Turns out Diego might be ready to steal Liz’s research instead of convincing her to work with him. So instead of, idk, confronting the guy, or telling Jenna to stall him, or IDK, ASKING ALEX FOR HELP, Max says “blow it all up.” The real upbeat soundtrack to Max physically destroying everything Liz worked on, was a choice.

- Please note that ep 12 had 3 bombs, which were in play in the first minute of ep 13. And yet, the only space without a bomb (Liz’s lab) is the one that blows up.

- Meanwhile, in Guerinland, New Mexico - Michael Guerin confesses his love to a woman he has apparently been dating for a year. Said woman ALSO reciprocates his feelings. However, Maria would like to use her powers, which now canonically will no longer make her sick, but Michael cannot sit back and watch Maria fade away (for unknown reasons). So here must the beloveds depart. Ok.

- On the other side of the set, Michael and Alex are reading a diary written by Secretly Good Guy Tripp Manes, and for some reason Isobel Evans. Please note that Isobel Evans has used about 6 opportunities to comment on the eternal love and joy between Michael and Maria, yet for some reason she’s back on Team Malex, with 0 conversation about wtf happened. Ok.

- Tripp Manes, much like his future descendant Alex, fell for shiny aliens with great cheekbones and full lips. Can’t blame them. Tripp talks about their connection being “cosmic” and a high pitched scream resonates from malex fandom as Michael and Alex look at each other for a single second. This is all fine. Also Jason Behr in a suit and hat is a sight to behold.

- And we find out nothing about what Nora was building in that shed, but something about the “stowaway” on their ship. Cool.

- The best and most emotional beat of the episode was the Cameron sisters reuniting. I was sobbing during their conversation. I love them both a lot. Also here’s to Charlie being Isobel’s next love interest.

- Aliens can’t seem to stop setting Liz’s lab on fire. This time she responds with walking away from Max, who does nothing to stop her or follow up with an apology. Cool. She ends up watching the ocean, and I gotta say I still stan Liz Ortecho.

- Rosa Ortecho owns my whole heart. And I’m very proud of her telling her mom to screw off, and for deciding to go back to rehab.

- SPEAKING OF HELENA ORTECHO. The woman who was supposedly scheming since episode 1, and managed to kidnap not 1 but 3 people with no problem whatsoever, was suddenly completely irrelevant again. She was mad that Jesse’s murder coverup will turn him into a hero (and I have some things to say about that considering Rosa’s murder coverup did the opposite). So instead of idk, going back to scheming with Mimi Deluca, Helena is just going to drink her troubles away. Super cool.

- All of this leading to a beautiful yet tragically brief Kylex moment where Alex confirms that Kyle is his bff, and that Flint is ok and can be redeemed (hear hear).

- AND THEN WE GET ALEX SINGING. lkajsdflkasdfkjahsdflkjasdlfkjasdf. I was slayed. Tyler’s voice, the face, MICHAEL AND ISOBEL COMING IN TO WATCH. IT WAS EVERYTHING I WANTED FOR MALEX.

- So of course Michael was like, this sucks, our romance is a tragedy, I don’t even like the song, goodbye. I can’t believe this dude broke up with Alex every single episode of this season, including breaking up with Alex TO HIS DAD, while he was ‘napped.

- BUT ON THE OTHER HAND. GREGORY “LIBERTY” MANES, the bestest brother on the planet, who liberated Alex from his abuser (get it?) sat and watched Alex perform and then clapped when Alex finally made the move and bagged his tiny, blue haired nerd. It was beautiful. I may have cried.

- FORLEX.

- BUT WE STILL AREN’T DONE. So the full season long chanting of The Power of Three finally comes to fruition. And even though Isobel is like maybe we should do more research, her 2 bros are like it’s cool! and open the door lock thing. We find out Nora was building a prison(?) for the “stowaway” and the pod squad accidentally release him, only to realize he’s...Max Evans with a better groomed beard. I just. I-

And now we have a potential year and a half wait to see how the 82 other plot threads will be resolved (@booksmartstreetstupid has an amazing list)

So let us all collectively turn to fanfics to help our sanity, and pray that we all return next year.

#responses #anonymous #inigo chats #roswell new mexico #rnm spoilers #this got long lol #Anonymous

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screensirenfic · 4 years ago

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Menthol Cigarettes - Chapter 35

I barely slept a wink that night; too busy tossing and turning as I tried to come up with a reason why this had happened. Why he had done this to me.

I mean; it wasn’t like she actually saw him doing anything, and El insisted that he was fully dressed, but still; it was pretty obvious what was going on.

She liked to believe that that girl was in trouble; that somehow, for some reason Billy was hurting her, even after I tried to explain the ‘other’ possibilities that seemed much more likely.

I don’t know if I’d have preferred it; honestly?!

I mean; sometimes Billy acted a total psycho, and I knew that it wasn’t always aimed at me, but was I really gonna talk myself into this instead of just accepting he was cheating?!

So, that was why we were here, marching up to Max’s house, because El honestly believed that girl was in trouble, and I was too much of a paranoid bitch to leave everything to chance.

“It’s going to start pouring soon. We should be at the mall, or watching a movie, or something...” Said Max, for once being the naysayer in the situation.

“You don’t believe me?” Eleven asked; still set on confirming her vision with her own two eyes.

“I believe you saw some super weird stuff; totally!” Max reassured her; unwilling to come across as the skeptic, no matter what the reality was.

“But you said Mike’s senses you in there before, right?” Max asked, trying her best to sound reasonable.

“So maybe it was just like that. Maybe Billy sensed you somehow.”

Maybe she’d like to think that was true, but needless to say, it had Eleven’s hackles up; mine too, although that was for an entirely different reason.

I mean; could he really be that much of a scumbag?!

I thought we’d gotten over this months ago; Billy finally realising that just because he had a reputation as a ladies man, didn’t mean he had to keep it up when he was in a relationship.

Of course; this wasn’t just a simple case of harmless flirting.

This was a full on, hardcore fu-

“His car’s not here.”

Max stated; her and El having managed to trail ahead of all my fretting as we now stood in front of the house.

“Are you sure you both wanna do this?” She asked, to which both nodded resolutely.

Whatever laid in wait inside Billy’s room; I could handle it.

I’d already had to deal with much worse.

——————————————————-

Sometimes I was grateful my upbringing hadn’t been exactly conventional, and this was one of those times…

Some girl’s dads taught them to change a tire, or put up a shelf, but mine had taught me to shoot rifles, throw punches, and in this case; pick locks.

Not to say it was an easy task, especially with two teenagers breathing down your neck like this was an episode of Jeopardy!

“Almost got it…” I said; thankful that my bobby pin hadn’t decided to break on me yet.

A click sounded, and the pin turned.

“There…” I smiled, turning the handle and pushing the door open wide.

“Why do I get the feeling we’re gonna find all kinds of wrong in here?” Max asked, lingering by the doorway whilst I walked straight in, already intimately familiar with the room in question.

I don’t exactly know what we were planning to find in here.

I mean; I’m pretty sure we all had very different explanations of Billy’s weird behaviour; some wilder than others.

El was expecting to find a body, or something; too many late nights spent watching cop shows with dad to have any real grasp on what to expect in an investigation.

Max was…

Well; I’m not entirely sure what Max was looking for. Probably something to prove her brothers innocence; as weird as that sounded when referring to a boy like Billy Hargrove.

And I wanted to find… Well; nothing.

I wanted to find the place exactly how I’d left it in the vain hope that it would put my anxiety to bed, and I could go on living like I had before; with one dedicated, if a little over-possessive boyfriend, who’d never dream of hurting me.

El launched straight into investigator mode, heading over to his closet to sort through hanger after hanger of double denim and cotton shirts, whilst I stuck to the edges of the room; eyes and fingertips skimming over the culmination of my boyfriend’s existence.

It didn’t look like the room of a cheater.

Not with copious amounts of photographs of us together plastered on whatever surface they’d stick to.

Whether it be cute little polaroids of us in the Camaro when the sun hit just right and made us look like movie stars; or dumb photo booth print outs where we’d pull faces that he’d never let see the light of day outside his safe space; he kept them all.

My hand lingered over a particularly memorable one; a polaroid just bordering on decent of the pair of us in bed together, my bare chest barely covered by the sheet as Billy held the camera high in the air, grinning up at it whilst I buried my face in his neck.

I remembered the day he took that photo;

I’d just bought him that camera as a late birthday present, and he was complaining that I could’ve got him something more fun; “fun” being the key word here that usually translated as “obscene” to Billy.

I’d insisted that we could have plenty of “fun” with his polaroid camera, which proceeded in him coercing me into letting him take a couple of “artistic” shots; cuing the start of his little photograph collection that he was so keen on expanding.

After he’d finished, and taken liberties to indulging in a near dizzying amount of birthday sex, he’d reached across to take “one last photo”; this being one he could keep on his wall, despite my insistence otherwise.

I’d been nervous and embarrassed of it back then; not wanting him to get in trouble if his dad happened to find it taped to his mirror of something, but now; I could finally see the beauty in it.

Billy looked so relaxed and carefree; like it was honestly one of the happiest moments in his life, and even with my face half hidden against his skin, I was smiling too; a clear sign that despite my protests, I was loving every minute of-

“Ugh! Gag me with a spoon!”

Max groaned; having stumbled across Billy’s so-called “underwear” drawer in his nightstand, which was actually filled with girlie magazines and “souvenir” pairs of my panties.

“Hey; Lo. This has got your name on it-“

I darted over to her, snatching the labelled envelope from her hand, absolutely adamant that the kid should never be exposed to its contents.

“Trust me. You do not want to see that.” I warned, watching as the kid’s face crinkled in disgust; probably already guessing exactly what Billy would keep in there.

I shoved the envelope back in the drawer, slamming it shut; because who knew what else Billy kept in there, and with that Max took the opportunity to further the parameters of her search to the bathroom, El following behind.

———————————

It was weird being here without Billy, looking at his things with a strange sort of detachment which I couldn’t quite grasp.

Everything in this room held so many memories for me; whether it be the spicy scent of his cologne triggering flashbacks of his arms around me, or the sight of his leather jacket slumped on a chair; my mind racing bak to all the times I’d seen him in it before and felt my heartbeat pick up.

I walked over to it, picking it up and just holding it for a minute, thumbs running over all the bumps and creases in the worn leather, reminding me of the first time he’d asked me to dance; a once bittersweet memory gotten sweeter with time and circumstance.

He’d been such an ass back then.

Still was, if I was being honest; but I’d learnt to love that about him, even when he drove me crazy half the time.

I wondered if he’d known back then?

That beneath all that macho horse crap, and maschoist sadism, that he’d seen the possibilities of what this really could be.

I lifted his jacket to my face, inhaling the scent of cigarette smoke and stale cologne that always seemed to put my mind at ease.

“Lola; I think you’re gonna want to see this…”

———————————

I walked into Billy’s bathroom, fully expecting my world to come tumbling down at the inevitable evidence of his cheating.

Instead; my heart dropped for another reason;

“Where did you find that?”

My eyes fell upon the red and yellow form of a lifeguard whistle; blood bright against the yellow plastic as it hand from Max’s hand.

“From the trash.” Max replied; picking up the dread in my tone.

“Do you think it could be-“

I opened my mouth to express denial, when Eleven interrupted;

“No. It’s hers.”

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doomedandstoned · 4 years ago

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The Bog Wizard Sees All!

~Doomed & Stoned Debuts~

Review by Billy Goate

Album art by Al Seamer

Michigan's BOG WIZARD was introduced to us in last year's Doomed & Stoned in Detroit compilation when they shared "The Wizard in the Bog." The lyrics carry a similar sentiment to "The Troll" by Saint Vitus, though arguably the latter was a more sympathetic character than this:

In the bog, he plies Dark and twisted blackened sorcery

He shapes, he knows Never ending hatred for humanity

Their lies, death throes Neverending fuel for his treachery

Now following the EP, 'Campaign' (2018), which was the culmination of more than a decade of casual jam sessions, the Ludington trio of Ben Lombard (guitar, vox), Harlen Linke (drums, synth, vox), and Colby Lowman (bass) have battened down the hatches to bring us an ambitious 12-track album approximately an hour and five-minutes in length.

I suppose it is fair to say that 'From The Mire' (2020) does not behave like the typical album, but its episodic quality sure would make it an attractive soundtrack to an indie film.

They'd make one hell of a good pairing with Psychic Dose, too. Both are fascinated by the swamp as a setting for mythical lore, both have a similar lo-fi production epic, and both have some of the meanest growls and nastiest riffs in the entire marsh.

The record opens by sampling a preacher sharing his laundry list "dangers" that Dungeons and Dragons portends, undoubtedly from one of those scarey Christian video tapes that got passed around to concerned parents (mine included) in the '80s. "Is this dangerous? You decide."

Right on the heels of that statement the Bog Wizard comes stomping out of the muck and into your earspace in classic doom fashion, accented by sludgy southern riffing and vocal harmonies reminiscent of Brimstone Coven.

"Submission In Defiance" is a promising beginning and bleeds right into "Tarrasque" (a dragon-like creature from the D&D universe), which is presented with epic doom bravado. "City in the Mountain" follows in like manner and its forlorn quality gave me flashbacks of the late, great Rhode Island doom outfit Pilgrim (another band that incorporated fantasy RPG themes in their music).

Doomed & Stoned · Bog Wizard - From The Mire(2020)

Without these programmatic elements to guide me, my first listen got a little bogged down in the album's mid-section, particularly with some of the instrumentals (e.g. "Gnarled Cane," though that bass does eventually get down and dirty like we're used to hearing from Missoula's Swamp Ritual). Second listen had me better acclimated.

It's worth noting that when you hear clean singing alternating with much grittier strains on a song like "Shapeshifter," that's not two people, it's just one: Ben Lombard. I found his vocal performance pretty darned convincing on the whole. His range isn't operatic, but it can soar when he wants to and his "dark side" vox are achieve the tone and pitch that Lamb of God frontman Randy Blythe might reach if he could, you know, sing.

Overall, the album is a grower, with a good handful of songs that will grab you right from the get-go and others that will probably take a time or two to fully digest (like the grand finisher, "Swamp Golem"). Then again, you just might be in the mood to slow headbang all the way through.

Bog Wizard's From The Mire surfaces from the swamp waters of doom this Friday, July 3rd (pre-order here). Today, Doomed & Stoned is bringing you its world premiere.

Give ear...

From the Mire by Bog Wizard

A Listener's Guide To Bog Wizard

By Harlen Linke

The album was put together earlier this year, self recorded and produced in our drummers basement, where we usually practice. We sound-treated the space, dividing it off from the rest of the basement, placing the guitar cabs outside of the drum area, and recorded directly on bass, so we could get away with playing everything live together without much bleed between mics. We tend to have a fair amount of tempo changes and it would be a nightmare to try to record every part separately, our music is very go-with-the-flow.

We worked with Max Schoenlein of MAS Audio (who also does shows with us, doing lighting usually) who ran the board. We worked with him on our original EP as a two-piece a few years ago. Our bassist Colby used to own a recording studio, and I've had experience mixing music, as I've dabbled a bunch in the past on various projects and mixed/ mastered our EP, so collectively we had all the pieces to self produce this full length album.

We recorded the whole thing over the course of 4 weekends in January 2020, and Colby and I passed a few early mixes of one song back and forth for awhile before settling in on a rough template to apply to the rest of the album, doing a massive amount of iterating and adjusting over the next few months, finishing the process of mixing and mastering in May. It was a pretty great learning experience, and I think the end result turned out great for what was a pretty thrown together studio. We're very proud of it.

Our bassist joined in November of 2018, and we've been working on writing this album since then, in addition to learning some covers and doing live shows locally. Ben and I tend to split the writing between the two of us, with one of us coming up with a few cool riffs and concepts, and jamming on it to figure out where it takes us. We tend to improv jam a lot of our new ideas and record everything we do, going back and listening to what we did and picking out the good parts to apply to a more structured song that we refine over time.

Thematically, we have a focus on fantasy/Dungeons & Dragons, as well as spoofing off of the '80s Satanic Panic era, but role playing games have a pretty big influence on how we go about writing our lyrics as well. I'm credited in the liner notes as "DM" or Dungeon Master, which in D&D context is the person who runs the game and story that plays out, with the players interacting with it. And while I do usually handle running our games outside of the music, we also apply this dynamic to our lyrical writing process.

Often I'll lay out a rough idea or story we want to make our song about, and Ben and I will talk through where it heads, with me leading the narrative and Ben refining it, and eventually writing the lyrics to fit the idea. While not all of our songs are handled this way, the ones that are end up as very linear story based songs.

One example, the song "City in the Mountain" tells a tale of a visitor experiencing the wonder of a sprawling underground city, with the lyrics seeming to be from almost a tour guide describing the city to them as they enter. The song has this looming theme of misearned wealth and power accumulated in the city, culminating in the reveal of an ancient magical creature contained under it that is driving it's growth, and the sacrifice of the listener being the final step of their trip deeper into the city, to placate the creature.

Or "Submission in Defiance," which the first act of the song is about an adventurer setting out to confront a highly intelligent mind-controlling enemy, and their realization that the only way to get close is to allow this creature to take control of them, and the existential struggle that a decision like that requires. However, the second half of the song describes their new mental state after this happens, which is complete submission to the enemy, doing the entities rage-filled bidding as almost part of a hive mind, with an implied complete failure of their original intended goal.

Overall, our From the Mire takes heavy fantasy influence, a few songs being straight up retellings of D&D games we have played together in the past ("Shapeshifter" being the most notable example of that, which is actually a game that had a character my daughter ended up getting named after), but we do sprinkle in our fair share of social commentary and deeper thoughts about the world applied to the setting.

From the Mire by Bog Wizard

The Bog Wizard himself is a recurring character in the album, a crotchety old bastard of wizard, living in isolation in his swamp, who doesn't take kindly to trespassers. Our single "Swamp Golem" is a song about the conjuring of a massive hulking creature created from swamp muck (featured on the cover of the album and CD itself, drawn by Al Seamer) to enact revenge on a nearby village for that very sin. He's a very "get off my lawn" type, taken to the extreme.

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#D&S Debuts #Bog Wizard #Michigan #Doom #Metal #Fantasy #Doom Metal #Sludge #Dungeons and Dragons #D&D #D&S Reviews #Doomed & Stoned

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actuallylorelaigilmore · 7 years ago

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the ultimate citation list for Schneider of ODAAT, volume 1

A reference collection of quotes and details, organized chronologically, for the first 26 episodes of One Day At A Time. Used to create this character guide.

“Can you believe it's only been 10 months since you moved in? I remember 'cause I got my five year sober chip and your mom baked me that cake. I enjoyed watching you guys eat it." 1x01

"You're 40 and you look stupid." “I'll have you know, I was invited to several Pride parades." 1x01

Uses a “very expensive” Damascus steel hammer. 1x01

"I've been doing some outreach down at the rec center, talking to at-risk youth. You guys wanna start takin' bets? Actually, scratch that. I'm addicted to gambling.” 1x01

"Love isn't even real. It's just something your nanny says sometimes to your dad." 1x02

"Hey, I may have money in the bank and two living parents, and four living stepmothers but there is a hole in here. We never had family meals. I ate alone in front of the TV. Oh, don't get me wrong. It was a massive TV. Sometimes my nanny would join me, but only if I agreed to watch telenovelas. This one time, Rosa got jealous of the housekeeper 'cause she was makin' a move on her man, so she threatened to throw live scorpions on her while she slept. Rosa was my nanny. Ex-nanny. Now, stepmother." 1x03

[Lydia and Pen fighting] “It's startin' to feel kinda like home in here.” 1x03

Schneider cooks fancy hipster food. "Nutted quinoa, wilted broccolini with radish micro-greens, and venison carpaccio on a bed of nettles. Grab a cedar plank and dig in." 1x04

"Always interesting to be the sober one at a dinner party." 1x05

"I immigrated here illegally. I'm a Canadian. But yeah, born in the 'Couve, overstayed my student visa, forced to live in the shadows of Pepperdine University. Anyway, it's fine now. My lawyers made it all okay." 1x05

Uses sheet masks, knows about chauffeurs, butlers, estates. 1x06

“The kids barely touched my black olive tapenade.” “Thanks for helping out, but maybe next time pick a food a kid would wanna eat or has heard of.” “Yeah, and maybe next time, don't hand out masks with my face on them.” 1x07

"The members of my college band have finally put aside our differences and we're reuniting to play at the fair this afternoon. My band, Full Sail, plays yacht rock. These guys were like family. I used to show up at their dorm rooms unannounced and just hang out for hours and hours and hours." 1x07

"We were setting up for the show and our keytarist threw a decorative anchor at me. This is why Full Sail broke up in the first place. Too many passionate personalities." 1x07

Has a magnifying glass in his costume trunk. 1x07

"I know nothing about my grandparents and I never will. And they live in Pasadena!" (but he goes to 'the depot' in Pasadena) 1x09

"I have never seen such un-professionalism. This is why I don't work!" 1x09

"I need to find a new place to get my eyebrows threaded." 1x10

Has a safe. 1x10

"Well, Father believed it's best to have this kinda discussion in a car because you don't have to make eye contact. Plus, you're traveling in the same direction, which fosters intimacy. So we're in the Bentley with our chauffeur, Paco. Father said it's time to have the talk. We came to the next stoplight. He hopped out, Paco told me everything." 1x10

"I didn't get the period talk till I was 12. Paco just called it 'Shark Week.'" 1x10

"When I was a kid, there was an adult section in the back of the video store. Behind the beads. I'd always chicken out and just rent a Jane Fonda workout tape. Still worked. Still works." 1x10

"You'd be surprised how many of my hookups started with 'Ugh!' ...When I was 15, I told Father I wanted to be a professional tap dancer. He laughed. It was that lack of support that contributed to my drinking and drug problem. Oh, do you find that amusing? Because 15-year-old Schneider's drinking peach schnapps out of an unused tap shoe right now." 1x11

"You have a girl over here and you were offering to have sex with me?" - "Yes, Penelope. That's the kind of friend I am." 1x11

"My dad never came to my games. All he ever did was put me through rehab six times and buy me this building." 2x01

"Maroon 5 is the best." 2x01

"Okay, I decided to take a break from dating. See, I realized that women were just another one of my addictions, like alcohol, drugs, gambling, cigarettes, snow globes. The point is, I've broken the cycle of addiction with spinning. Five hours a day, every single day. I have to do it! Plus, it's the perfect substitute for dating, 'cause it burns a lot of energy and also numbs my junk!" 2x02

“Snow globes? Is this one of our family?” 2x02

"I come over, tell him to do stuff to me, he does it, I go home. You should get one." "I think what Nikki was kinda dancing around is that you don't always have to have a relationship with a capital "R." Sometimes all you need is what the great poets of the Renaissance called a junk buddy." "Exactly. You don't even have to like them." 2x03

"See, the great thing about having a green card is you get to live here without having to do all the stuff Americans have to, like vote or serve jury duty or become obese."

"Okay, but at least you vote in Canadian elections." "Mmm. No. Even in Canada, nothing ever changes. Clean air, sensible gun control, free health care. The system's rigged." 2x04

Can picture himself “doing it” with Elizabeth Warren, was Stephen Hawking for Halloween. 2x04

"You have to pay taxes with a green card? I just texted my accountant, and he said 'cause I'm in the highest income bracket, I don't have to pay taxes." 2x04

Keeps on hand: panic room, gas mask, water purification pills, MREs, enough cash to get to Cape Verde by boat. Followed Max on Instagram. Would be honored to be Penelope's maid of honor. 2x05

"I'm very patriotic. Look in that basket. There's a bald eagle thong." 2x06

All Elena's video game equipment belongs to him. 2x06

"Penelope, tell my third stepmother I loved her! Not the second one, though. She was kind of a jerk." 2x06

"Hummer limo's downstairs. My third stepmother used to take me to the racetrack to spy on Father. For the longest time, I thought she was saying, 'Your father is with Rebecca, that horse!' It's like I'm back at the racetrack with my stepmom. What's next? Throw a mint julep in his face?” 2x07

"I love Cuba! I've been there four times. Property manager, job's just temporary. My father owns the building. I'm really a musician. Play a lot of rap-rock-ska. I'm like a male Gwen Stefani. When you're hiring a nanny, make sure she's not too hot. That's how I met my fifth mom. I had four nannies and look at the results." 2x08

Did not speak a word of Spanish when he first met them, is interested in single moms. 2x08

"If you joined an adult kickball team after saying you were too busy to join mine, you are on a long road to forgiveness." 2x09

"Your idea of stress is when your chest-waxer goes out of town." "Roberto is the only one who doesn't make it sting!" 2x09

"I shouldn't have to need these either, but I do. To see. So it's Fourth of July, 2011. I'd been sober for a while, so I thought I'd celebrate with a beer. Woke up three days later in an alley. Then the bowling ball hit me. I was in the gutter for a long time. It's really slippery without the shoes. That was the day I truly accepted that I can't have alcohol or drugs, ever. Not a beer, not a glass of wine, not even six hits of acid at a Grateful Dead show, no matter how well it makes me dance. I kinda get where you're coming from. There's something I want that I can't have for the rest of my life." 2x09

He and Pen are best friends. Also considers Max his bestie. Wants to Netflix and chill with them both, together. 2x09

"My abuelita used to put Vicodin in her coffee. And her lemonade and her sandwiches. Maybe she had a problem. As my father said to me on my ninth birthday, 'You don't need me anymore.' I use my garage for pickling and sea horse breeding." 2x10

Loves puns. "This is Elena Alvarez, my handyman mentee. Or handy-manatee." "The toilet is a cruel mistress. She is flush with complications." 2x10

"Herb and Sherb McGurb. Her real name is Sheryl, but she gets a kick out of Sherb." 2x10

"Bonsai's for dorks. This is penjing. The gentle Chinese art of tray scenery. Now that you're working for me, I finally have some leisure time." "Oh, look, there's little people. Wait, is that my family?" "Could be any Cuban family." 2x10

"I may only look two or three years older than you, but I have the wisdom of that ancient bonsai!" 2x10

"Always take the lemonade. That's Handyman 101! So you watched Jeopardy with them and then what? Well, now we know what your problem is! You fixed their toilet, but you didn't fix their souls. Elena, growing up, I had everything. But I was always alone. I don't want my tenants to feel that way, so I do more than just fix stuff. Apartment 306, macrame with Mrs. Watson. 201, lose at chess to Mr. Roth. 402, listen to all their Cuban nonsense. That's the job. That's what takes four hours. That's the difference between being a handyman and a super." 2x10

Has heard 'you're fired' a lot. 2x10

"After a grueling 30 minutes of thought, Nikki, will you be my starter wife? You're on the rebound. That's the best time to get married. You don't have time to think. So you were never thinking about me? My emotions? My feelings? You used me, Nikki, Finn's mom! And not in the way I like! And that's not all, Sister Barbara. We knew each other. Biblically. And while we were doing it, she took the Lord's name in vain. A lot!" 2x11

"Last night, I was testing the pH of the water in my seahorse ranch and, as I looked at those vomiting little guys, I realized I suck at tests. All tests. Drug, sobriety, vision, IQ, smog. You name it, I fail it!" 2x12

"Have you ever been arrested?” “Does public nudity at a hockey game count?” “There is, uh, no mention of a public nudity charge in your file.” “Oh, you just go to YouTube and type in 'Zam-boner.'" 2x12

"Yeah, they didn't specifically ask if I got drunk and tried to ride a moose, so after that I was golden." 2x12

"How important is having kids to you?" "Never really thought about it." 2x12

"I'll have you know I babysat my babysitter's kids while she was babysitting my dad, so, yeah, I got a little experience under my belt. Oh, it's my cousin Gordy. He still thinks I'm full-on Canadian. All right, good news is Gordo bought it. Bad news is I'm judging a poutine festival in Saskatoon next week." 2x12

"You're the single greatest mother I know." "Thank you. That means a lot coming from a guy with five moms." 2x12

"Fuzzy Afghan she likes, picture of the Pope, picture of a different Pope, picture of your dad, picture of the family, picture of me with the family, picture of me by a waterfall. I'm just gonna keep talking 'cause I'm not good in crisis situations." 2x13

"It's so crazy how we're both immigrants. I mean, I would never compare my story to yours, but the parallels are spooky. You were 18, I was 18. You left your family behind. I left four step-families, a maid, a butler, a chauffeur, and a horse groomer who really got me. But Father was expanding his business to the US and so I had to go. I remember, at the airport, I was crying. But Father put his arm around me and he said, 'Son, only losers cry.' So that was a long flight. You don't know how dirty a dirty look can get until you're crying for a whole plane ride and you're not a baby. I really didn't wanna be in America. So I drank. And I recreated the snowy plains of Canada with cocaine. I'm told I attended classes at Pepperdine University, but I will have to take that on faith. So, I'm in a detox center in El Segundo. This was my fourth rehab. My re-re-re-rehab. I thought I'd been doing a kickass job keeping my drug stuff a secret from all the tenants and then you showed up in my room at that clinic. You brought me sopa de pollo and said it's Cuban penicillin. You told me, 'You eat this, you get some sleep, and tomorrow, you try again.' And then you tucked me in and kissed me good night on my forehead. Forehead kisses are wildly underrated. Just something really comforting about 'em. Then again, it might just be you. Dad never did that. Or my horse groomer. After I got out of rehab, I started hanging around your apartment a lot more, 'cause it helped. Back then, it must have felt like you had this annoying, intrusive guy over. Not like now. 'Cause now you're my family. Don't worry. I haven't legally changed my last name to Alvarez. My lawyer said it was a whole thing, so... Anyway, Pen said no crying, so I'm not gonna. Actually, for once, I agree with Father. Only losers cry. And we're not losing anybody today. Let's hit that oath ceremony soon, okay?" 2x13

#schneider #reference #odaat #one day at a time

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dipulb3 · 4 years ago

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HBO Max review: Great TV and theatrical movies, but not the best streaming value

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/hbo-max-review-great-tv-and-theatrical-movies-but-not-the-best-streaming-value/

HBO Max review: Great TV and theatrical movies, but not the best streaming value

Sarah Tew/CNET

HBO Max, HBO’s entry into the streaming wars, is a slick app chock-full of popular TV shows and movies. It’s got HBO’s entire catalog, along with favorites such as Friends, Rick and Morty, Sesame Street, the Lord of the Rings movies and almost every Studio Ghibli film. It’s also the only service to debut first-run movies, including in 2021 Godzilla vs. Kong, Dune and Matrix 4, the same day they’re available in theaters for no extra charge. And HBO Max has a solid streaming collection for children too, with the ability to control ratings on kids’ profiles better than most other services.

Large, varied content catalog that includes all of HBO

New theatrical releases from Warner Bros. Studios

Simple, easy-to-navigate interface

Lots of children’s shows and customizable rating settings

Don’t Like

High price

Few original series beyond standard HBO

Can’t import watch history or personalized recommendations

If you already subscribe to HBO, HBO Max is a no-brainer upgrade that gives you a shiny new interface and loads more content for the same $15 per month. But if you’re a brand-new subscriber, that price is at the high end — especially if you already pay for Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus or all of the above.

At launch HBO Max lacked compatibility with the popular Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices and 4K HDR streaming, but now apps for Roku and Amazon are now easily available and the 2021 Warner Bros. theatrical slate is premiering on the platform in 4K HDR (as are other titles, such as Zack Snyder’s Justice League).

Read more: Everything you need to know about HBO Max

Aside from HBO’s original series, the Max slate of exclusives remains relatively thin, especially with the delay of the highly anticipated Friends reunion special and no breakout hit such as Disney Plus’ The Mandalorian and WandaVision. That shortcoming will likely change over time, but for now, it remains the service’s biggest disadvantage.

If you’re a big fan of HBO, Elmo or Friends, or are simply running out of good stuff to watch during lockdown, HBO Max is probably worth your money. But if you’re looking to save money on streaming, its high monthly fee makes it easier to cut than many of its tough competitors.

Streaming compared

HBO Max Netflix Disney Plus Hulu Monthly price $15 Starts at $9 $7 Basic $6 with ads, Ad-free for $12, Live TV for $65 Ads No No No Yes, with basic tier Top titles Entire HBO catalog, Studio Ghibli films, DC films Stranger Things, The Crown, Breaking Bad, The Queen’s Gambit The Mandalorian, WandaVision, Avengers Endgame, Toy Story, The Simpsons Handmaid’s Tale, Catch-22, Lost, Bob’s Burgers Mobile downloads Yes Yes Yes Yes (on Ad-free plan only) 4K available Yes Yes (on Premium plan) Yes Yes HDR available Yes Yes (on Premium plan) Yes No Number of streams 3 1 (2 for Standard, 4 on Premium) 4 2 (Unlimited with Live TV and a $10 add-on)

A high price ripe for sharing

HBO Max costs $15 a month, the same as HBO’s traditional channel when you get it through most pay-TV providers. At some point HBO says the service will expand to include another tier that includes advertising. We don’t know anything about when that would happen or what it would look like, but it would likely be cheaper, or even free.

Some people who already have a regular HBO subscription or HBO Now will get Max for no extra cost — but not everyone. It’s confusing, but you can check out our full HBO Max FAQ for more information on how it all works.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Despite the large catalog of movies and shows, HBO Max is at the expensive end of streaming services — Netflix’s basic plan costs $9 a month, Hulu’s plan with ads is $6 a month and Disney Plus costs $7 a month (soon to be $8 per month). Lots of people I know share account access with friends or family members and HBO Max executive Tony Goncalves told CNET that it will take a “fairly balanced approach” to this issue.

With HBO Max you can have up to three simultaneous streams going at the same time. Plus, the addition of up to five user profiles, a feature not available on the HBO Now or HBO Go apps, makes it easier to share an account.

HBO Max is available on Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Apple TV). It’s also on gear that runs Google’s Android operating system for phones and tablets, as well as Android TV devices, Chromebooks, Google Chromecast and Chromecast built-in devices like Vizio TVs. Xbox and PlayStation consoles and recent Samsung smart TVs are also on board. As mentioned, Amazon Fire TV and Roku apps are now available.

A strong stable of shows and movies

HBO Max’s biggest strength is its large, varied TV and movie catalog, with content for adults and kids. At launch, it had 10,000 hours of content to stream, including everything on HBO, plus a selection of high-profile TV shows like Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Rick and Morty and South Park.

HBO Max currently has just a handful Max Originals and the biggest are probably the romantic series Love Life starring Anna Kendrick and dark comedy The Flight Attendant starring Kaley Cuoco. Even a year after launch, nothing has stuck out or made the same pop-culture impact as Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit or Disney Plus’s WandaVision. And unlike Netflix, it will typically drop its originals once per week, the way regular cable HBO does. A number of originals — including the Friends reunion special, a spinoff of The Suicide Squad with John Cena called Peacemaker, a reboot of Gossip Girl and a revival of Sex and the City — are among the many titles in the works, so there should be more to choose from later in the year or in early 2022.

HBO Max has six original series at launch — but the highly anticipated Friends reunion special has been delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Sarah Tew/CNET

In the meantime, there are lots of movies, some new and many older. HBO Max has the full sets of The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings trilogies (though only two of The Hobbits), DC movies like Joker and Wonder Woman, classic films like The Wizard of Oz and Casablanca, and newer hits like A Star is Born and Crazy Rich Asians. Not to mention almost the entire catalog of Studio Ghibli anime films that have never been released for streaming in the US before. And if you’ve been clamoring for more of 2017’s Justice League, HBO Max will be the home of director Zach Snyder’s cut on March 18.

Though HBO is known for its adult content, Max has a lot to offer kids too, including new Looney Tunes cartoons and Sesame Street episodes, and the Cartoon Network catalog. It’s also home to Doctor Who and the Lego movies.

Parental controls are robust. You can customize kids’ profiles to decide which rating levels they can access, and create a passcode that locks them into their account, so they can’t jump over to their parents’ to watch anything inappropriate. (Your kid might be savvy enough to figure that passcode out, but it’s something.)

Studio Ghibli films are available to stream in the US for the first time on the platform.

Sarah Tew/CNET

A visually appealing interface…

Scrolling through HBO Max is similar to the experience on Netflix, Hulu and other streaming services. When you open your profile, you’ll find Continue Watching and My List at the top of the page, followed by topics like Featured Series, Featured Movies and HBO Series: Editors’ Picks.

I like the look of the menus better than many other streaming services. It has a dark purple and black theme that allows the text and images to pop, and shows fewer tiles on the screen at once with more breaks between them, to give your eye a rest. One downside, however, is that it can be tough to figure out at first what text is highlighted in the menus so you can make selections.

In the middle of the page you’ll see a mini hub where you can access movies and shows from each of its properties: HBO, DC, Sesame Workshop, Turner Classic Movies, Studio Ghibli, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, CrunchyRoll and Looney Tunes. It looks kind of like Disney Plus’s hub at the top of its page, but with less familiar names than Disney’s Star Wars and Marvel.

The HBO Max mini hub, where you can access content from different networks and studios.

Sarah Tew/CNET

You’ll also find curated collections of movies around a theme sprinkled through your homepage, like rom-com favorites and blockbuster franchises. Hit Browse at the top left corner and you’ll have the option to search by categories such as Series, Movies, Originals, Just Added, Last Chance and Coming Soon, along with genres like Action, Comedy, Crime and Documentaries. You’ll also find the mini hubs in this panel, too.

Unlike on Netflix, you can easily see what’s coming and going on the platform and watch accordingly. Mobile downloads are also available, and the app’s format is largely the same across TVs, phones and tablets.

When it comes to searching, HBO Max lets you use abbreviations (like “GOT” instead of “Game of Thrones”). On my Apple TV, voice search worked pretty well — when I said, “Watch Rick and Morty,” HBO Max opened the series landing page, giving me the option to choose which episode I want. After starting an episode of Game of Thrones and closing out, when I said, “Watch GOT,” it jumped me back into the episode where I had left off. When I said, “Watch Jaws,” the Apple TV opened all of the different options across other streaming platforms at the bottom of the screen as well.

Selecting a show will take you to its landing page, where you can find every episode available in a clean format, and have the ability to add it to your list. When you start a show, the rating appears in the upper left corner.

…but human recommendations are still MIA

One of HBO Max’s promises was that instead of solely using a recommendation engine to surface new content for users, it would also have curated content from celebrities, to bring a more human touch. These recommendations are still not available, however. It does curate content in ways that can be helpful — for example, highlighting the episodes of Friends that track Ross and Rachel’s relationship so you don’t have to go digging for them.

You’ll find every HBO show on HBO Max — but you can’t yet stream them in 4K HDR.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Should you get HBO Max?

If you already subscribe to HBO Now (or, you know, have someone else’s login), the automatic free upgrade to HBO Now is a no-brainer — it’s lots more content for the same monthly price. Plus, you can make your own profiles now, which you couldn’t do on HBO Go or HBO Now.

For brand-new subscribers, HBO Max is at the pricey end of the streaming service spectrum. But if you have $15 a month to burn and want to binge Friends, Game of Thrones or all of the Studio Ghibli movies, you’ll have plenty to choose from.

Here’s what HBO Max looks like on TVs, phones and tablets

See all photos

First published May 29, 2020.

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kimlovesgrahamscott · 7 years ago

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Pricescott drabble, #81?

So this is supposed to take place when Chloe’s like 16 and still going to Blackwell. It’s also probably way too cute and sweet but dammmit, they both suffered enough.

Chloe didn’t know what hurt worse: her leg or her pride. She felt like an idiot wiping out in front of Justin and Trevor and she knew they’d never let her live it down. It didn’t matter that she was better at skateboarding than them, that Trevor ended up hitting himself in the nuts on almost a daily basis. Her fuckup was the basis of a remark that “Girls can’t skate,” or some bullshit like that. It was the least she could do to pretend that she wasn’t hurt. It took everything in her to act like it didn’t hurt, to continue hanging around until it started raining and then forced herself not to limp as they walked back to the dorms.

As she looked up the stairs she had to climb, she couldn’t deny the throbbing any longer. It was a pretty gnarly scrape, not deep enough to be of any real concern but enough that there was blood seeping down her leg. It hurt with every beat of her pulse. The thought of her lower leg flexing as she walked up the stairs seemed like torture, not to mention just another thing to cause the bleeding to worsen.

“Holy shit Chloe, what happened?” a voice asked, shaking Chloe from her stupor. It was Nathan Prescott. She didn’t know much about him, other than the name, that he came from money, and that he was one of Rachel’s good friends. Because of that, Chloe had always at least been pleasant towards him but she didn’t know if she was comfortable admitting she was in any sort of pain to him.

“I just hella fucked up while skating. It’s no big deal.” She could tell from the look Nathan was giving her that he knew she was full of shit. She was bleeding, for fucks sake, and the scrape did span a good portion of her calf and shin.

“You’re bleeding all over the God damn carpet. You should go clean that up.” When Chloe froze and averted his gaze, Nathan realized that she wasn’t going to do such things. Nathan groaned, rolling his eyes, before grabbing her hand and dragging him to his room. He had a rather fancy first aid kit in there. He told her to sit down on the couch while he grabbed it.

“Why do you have all this shit?” Chloe asked as Nathan grabbed all the things that were needed to properly clean and disinfect the wound. She flinched as he pressed a cold wipe to her leg.

“Hold still.” Nathan’s voice was gentle, calm, like he had absolutely no qualms about the blood. Chloe always assumed little rich bitches would be squeamish. Hell, even she didn’t like the sight of blood. She was fairly desensitized to it after all the cuts and scrapes she’d enduring as a child, climbing trees and being pirates with Max, but she still didn’t think she could handle blood on a regular basis and be a nurse or something. However, from how carefully Nathan treated the wound and how expertly he wrapped it in gauze, it appeared that he might make a fine nurse someday.

“Why are you so good at this?” Chloe asked as she further inspected the wrapping on her leg.

Nathan shrugged, hoping that would be a sufficient answer. He didn’t want to get into it; he was starting to regret helping Chloe in the first place. He couldn’t help it, though. He knew all too well how much scrapes hurt, and the pain would be especially bad since it was on her leg and she had stairs to climb. Anyone with an ounce of compassion would’ve offered to help.

Of course, he didn’t count on her actually asking him why he’d learned first aid skills.

“Nah, dude, really. Where’d you learn how to do this? It would be a useful skill to have.” Because that wasn’t the first time Chloe ate pavement while skateboarding and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Plus, she and Rachel had gotten quite a few nasty looking cuts while trying to clear out and customize that tiny abandoned building in American Rust. When she had to doctor Rachel, she’d ended up using a forth of a tube of Neosporin and like six Band-aids.

Again, Nathan shrugged. “My dad made me take a first-aid class.” He wished he’d come up with the lie sooner because it certainly would rouse suspicion that he hadn’t outright said it. Most people didn’t care to ask, or, like in the case of Victoria and Rachel, they already knew the real reason he was good at that stuff. He’d had no choice but to get good.

And of course Chloe asked him why he hadn’t just outright told her because it wasn’t like first-aid courses were something to be embarrassed about. It wasn’t like she could have known the real reason. She couldn’t know that he’d gotten good at cleaning cuts and scrapes because of how angry his dad got. She couldn’t know that he’d been taught by Kristine, and had gotten exponentially better at that care after she left. What Chloe did know was that Nathan Prescott was sitting on his bed, crying.

“Oh God -please don’t- I’m sorry, I don’t know what I did but I’m sorry,” Chloe stammered out. She was never good with tears, her own nor that of others, and she felt her pulse racing. She hadn’t meant to upset him, however she’d done it, but she had to of done something awful if she was making Nathan-fucking-Prescott cry.

“Just go away…” Nathan attempted to command but his voice sounded so meek and fragile.

Chloe was conflicted. She was sure that leaving was the one thing a person wasn’t supposed to do when someone was crying. Plus, Nathan didn’t really act like he wanted to be alone; she knew she absolutely hated being alone when she was crying. It just made her feel worse. So she did for Nathan what she knew she’d want if she was crying. She got on the bed beside him and wrapped her arms around him.

“I’m sorry, Nathan, I’m sorry I’m such a fuck up…” She really felt that way because, fuck, someone tried to help her and she made him cry without even meaning to! Nathan responded by leaning into her, letting her wrap her arms around him as he buried his head in her shoulder. He hated that he appeared so weak in front of someone he hadn’t really known that well, but he was actually very happy that he wasn’t alone.

Chloe lingered around Nathan’s room long after he’d stopped crying. They both pretended like it hadn’t happened and just transitioned from cuddling on the bed to watching Netflix like it was something they always did. It was far less awkward than addressing what had happened.

At some point, Nathan ordered Chinese food to be delivered to his dorm room and asked Chloe if she wanted anything. Chloe felt like she’d overstayed her welcome, but her leg was bruising and it felt so sore. She also wasn’t going to turn down free food, especially since it was late enough that the cafeteria would be closed and she was famished. It wasn’t like Nathan was acting in any way to make her feel like he didn’t want her around. He seemed to be enjoying her company. Surprisingly, she was enjoying his as well.

The Netflix marathon continued well after they finished their Chinese food. It was mostly because they’d decided on watching Bob’s Burgers and Chloe was appalled that he’d only seen a few episodes. He cited the art style being so weird that it turned him off of the show but she promised that if he ignored that he’d find the show hilarious. Three episodes turned into six, twelve, and by midnight Chloe had fallen asleep on Nathan’s bed.

When she woke up the next morning, she found Nathan sleeping on his couch in a flannel pajama set. She was surprised that he hadn’t woke her up and told her to get the hell out of his room; that’s what she would’ve done regardless of who it was that had fallen asleep on her bed. She sat up and stretched before deciding she needed to take the gauze off her leg to assess the damage.

She carefully unwrapped the gauze and removed the tape, trying not to make a mess as she did so. She still wondered how Nathan managed to wrap it so expertly, doing a good enough job that the wrapping didn’t fall off or even move during the night. There were gradients of purples and yellows on her leg and the scrape had scabbed over. There were bits of dried blood caked on that she would wash off in her morning shower.

She was only relaxing on the bed for a moment, playing on her phone and wondering if it would be more awkward if she just left or if Nathan found her still on his bed when he woke, before Nathan began to stir. He rolled onto his back, giving her a sleepy smile as he wished her a good morning. A light blush tinted her cheeks when the thought that he looked rather adorable entered her mind. She didn’t need to be thinking about the Prescott kid like that. They were pretty much as opposite as could be.

Though, as she saw him go to his desk draw and not-so-sneakily take some pills out of orange prescription bottles, she thought that maybe they weren’t so different. She’d glanced at his movie collection the night before and they liked all of the same things. She approved of a lot of the things on his Netflix Watch List. Plus, they were both artists in their own ways.

“I had a good time with you last night. Maybe we could do it again sometime?” Nathan was trying to hold eye contact with Chloe but found himself looking past her while he picked at his cuticles. Again, Chloe found that he looked adorable. Fuck.

“Hell yeah. Gotta make sure you keep watching Bob’s Burgers! How about tomorrow night we get some burgers from Two Whales and watch more?” Because watching Bob’s Burgers while eating burgers was one of the few simple pleasures in life that made Chloe really happy.

“Yeah, sounds good.”

Chloe knew Nathan was watching her as she put her skater shoes on, which she didn’t find entirely unpleasant. It just made her face brighten. She was hyperaware of her movements as she made her way to the door. She turned back to face him, smiling as she told him she’d see him later.

It was then that Nathan moved towards her, pressing his lips against hers. It was gentle, sweet, with a chasteness she found herself liking a lot more than she thought she would. She normally liked things rough, with lots of raw emotion but it seemed fitting with how little they knew one another. They needed to test one another a bit more before that could happen. For the meantime, a cute little kiss was enough.

Chloe found herself smiling as she walked out of Nathan’s dorm room, curious as to what the future might hold for them.

#pricescott #drabble challenge #Kim writes #Nathan Prescott

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readingsanctuary · 6 years ago

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This months haul is a little out of control. I knew it would possibly be higher than normal because I always buy books while I’m on holiday, but this time it’s worse because I started panic buying books to take with me, because it felt like a good way to fix my reading slump. It only sort of worked, in that I managed to read a few graphic novels. I didn’t do so well with full length books.

Giant Days – volumes 2 & 3

Susan, Esther, and Daisy started at university three weeks ago and became fast friends. Now, away from home for the first time, all three want to reinvent themselves. But in the face of handwringing boys, “personal experimentation,” influenza, mystery-mold, nu-chauvinism, and the willful, unwanted intrusion of “academia,” they may be lucky just to make it to spring alive. Going off to university is always a time of change and growth, but for Esther, Susan, and Daisy, things are about to get a little weird.

I’ve been kicking myself for only buying the first volume for months, so when I finally had the chance, I picked up these from one of my favourite indie comic book stores. I’ve already read both of these and I really enjoyed them. I love the episodic, slice of life format, and the humour that works really well with the fun art style.

The Backstagers – volume 1

All the world’s a stage . . . but what happens behind the curtain is pure magic literally!

When Jory transfers to an all-boys private high school, he’s taken in by the only ones who don’t treat him like a new kid, the lowly stage crew known as the Backstagers. Not only does he gain great, lifetime friends, Jory is also introduced to an entire magical world that lives beyond the curtain. With the unpredictable twists and turns of the underground world, the Backstagers venture into the unknown, determined to put together the best play their high school has ever seen.

I’ve been wanting to pick this up ever since I read and reviewed the first issue from Netgalley, and loved it. The only reason it’s taken me so long to get to it is that I’ve struggled to find a copy in stores, and I prefer to support physical stores wherever I can. I’ve already read this and I’m in love with the series. I need to get my hands on the second volume soon.

The Ancient Magus Bride volumes 2, 3, 5, 6, & 7

Her name is Chise Hatori, a penniless orphan troubled by visions. Sold as a slave to an inhuman mage, she is about to begin a strange new life, filled with magic, fairies, and other beings of a fantastical nature.

So, I clearly have a problem. This series has sucked me in, in a big way. I loved the anime, and I’m planning on slowly making my way through the manga. I’m having slight difficulty locating volume four in stores, so I might have to order it online.

Bruja Born – by Zoraida Cordova

Three sisters. One spell. Countless dead.

Lula Mortiz feels like an outsider. Her sister’s newfound Encantrix powers have wounded her in ways that Lula’s bruja healing powers can’t fix, and she longs for the comfort her family once brought her. Thank the Deos for Maks, her sweet, steady boyfriend who sees the beauty within her and brings light to her life.

Then a bus crash turns Lula’s world upside down. Her classmates are all dead, including Maks. But Lula was born to heal, to fix. She can bring Maks back, even if it means seeking help from her sisters and defying Death herself. But magic that defies the laws of the deos is dangerous. Unpredictable. And when the dust settles, Maks isn’t the only one who’s been brought back…

This was a last-minute purchase before I went on holiday because I started panicking about what books to take with me, due to my reading slump making me ridiculously fickle. I mean, I was planning to wait and put it on my birthday wishlist, but I am glad to have this in my hands, even if I haven’t managed to read it just yet.

Lumberjanes: volume 1

FRIENDSHIP TO THE MAX!

At Miss Qiunzilla Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s camp for hard-core lady-types, things are not what they seem. Three-eyed foxes. Secret caves. Anagrams. Luckily, Jo, April, Mal, Molly, and Ripley are five rad, butt-kicking best pals determined to have an awesome summer together… And they’re not gonna let a magical quest or an array of supernatural critters get in their way! The mystery keeps getting bigger, and it all begins here.

Collects Lumberjanes No. 1-4.

I am always seeing this series recommended, and have been meaning to check it out for a while now. Since I’ve been reading more graphic novels this month, I decided to pick this first volume up and see why so many people love it. I have already started reading this and so far I’m enjoying it. Hopefully this becomes a series that I love, and want to continue on with.

Spinning Silver – by Naomi Novik

Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders… but her father isn’t a very good one. Free to lend and reluctant to collect, he has loaned out most of his wife’s dowry and left the family on the edge of poverty–until Miryem steps in. Hardening her heart against her fellow villagers’ pleas, she sets out to collect what is owed–and finds herself more than up to the task. When her grandfather loans her a pouch of silver pennies, she brings it back full of gold.

But having the reputation of being able to change silver to gold can be more trouble than it’s worth–especially when her fate becomes tangled with the cold creatures that haunt the wood, and whose king has learned of her reputation and wants to exploit it for reasons Miryem cannot understand.

I simply could not resist this stunning hardcover when I saw a signed copy in the bookstore. I’ve seen so many glowing reviews, that I’m confident I’ll enjoy it. I’m even more excited to get to it now that I’ve finally read (and adored) Uprooted. I just hope I don’t wait another three years before reading this one.

The Accident Season – by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

A bewitching, dark and beautiful debut novel about a girl living in the shadow of a mysterious curse.

It’s the accident season, the same time every year. Bones break, skin tears, bruises bloom.

The accident season has been part of seventeen-year-old Cara’s life for as long as she can remember. Towards the end of October, foreshadowed by the deaths of many relatives before them, Cara’s family becomes inexplicably accident-prone. They banish knives to locked drawers, cover sharp table edges with padding, switch off electrical items – but injuries follow wherever they go, and the accident season becomes an ever-growing obsession and fear.

But why are they so cursed? And how can they break free?

I’ve been intrigued by the idea of the book for years, so when I saw it in a second-hand book store while I was on holiday, I didn’t think twice. I feel like this is a very autumnal book, so I’m hoping to read it in a few months time, possibly in October, since that’s when this book takes place.

Love Letters to the Dead – by Ava Dellaira

It begins as an assignment for English class: Write a letter to a dead person. Laurel chooses Kurt Cobain because her sister, May, loved him. And he died young, just like May did. Soon, Laurel has a notebook full of letters to people like Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Amelia Earhart, Heath Ledger, and more — though she never gives a single one of them to her teacher. She writes about starting high school, navigating new friendships, falling in love for the first time, learning to live with her splintering family. And, finally, about the abuse she suffered while May was supposed to be looking out for her. Only then, once Laurel has written down the truth about what happened to herself, can she truly begin to accept what happened to May. And only when Laurel has begun to see her sister as the person she was — lovely and amazing and deeply flawed — can she begin to discover her own path in this stunning debut from Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead.

This was another second hand book store find, it was more of an impulse purchase than the other books I’ve bouhgt this month. I don’t know too much about it, but it caught my eye, and after reading the first few lines, I was interested enough to want to keep reading. I have no idea what to expect from this, or how I’ll feel about it, and if I’m honest, I’m quite looking forward to going in to it blind.

S.T.A.G.S. – by M.A. Bennett

Nine students. Three bloodsports. One deadly weekend.

It is the autumn term and Greer MacDonald is struggling to settle into the sixth form at the exclusive St. Aidan the Great boarding school, known to its privileged pupils as S.T.A.G.S. Just when she despairs of making friends Greer receives a mysterious invitation with three words embossed upon on it: huntin’ shootin’ fishin’. When Greer learns that the invitation is to spend the half term weekend at the country manor of Henry de Warlencourt, the most popular and wealthy boy at S.T.A.G.S., she is as surprised as she is flattered.

But when Greer joins the other chosen few at the ancient and sprawling Longcross Hall, she realises that Henry’s parents are not at home; the only adults present are a cohort of eerily compliant servants. The students are at the mercy of their capricious host, and, over the next three days, as the three bloodsports – hunting, shooting and fishing – become increasingly dark and twisted, Greer comes to the horrifying realisation that those being hunted are not wild game, but the very misfits Henry has brought with him from school…

This book I bought out of curiosity. I’ve seen some quite mixed reviews that have only made me more intrigued about this book. I’m not sure I would have paid full price to try this book out, but since it was cheap in a second hand book store, I decided to give it a go.

Record of a Spaceborn Few – by Becky Chambers

From the ground, we stand. From our ship, we live. By the stars, we hope

The incredible new novel by Becky Chambers, author of the belovedThe Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

Centuries after the last humans left Earth, the Exodus Fleet is a living relic, a place many are from but few outsiders have seen. Humanity has finally been accepted into the galactic community, but while this has opened doors for many, those who have not yet left for alien cities fear that their carefully cultivated way of life is under threat.

Tessa chose to stay home when her brother Ashby left for the stars, but has to question that decision when her position in the Fleet is threatened.

Kip, a reluctant young apprentice, itches for change but doesn’t know where to find it.

Sawyer, a lost and lonely newcomer, is just looking for a place to belong.

When a disaster rocks this already fragile community, those Exodans who still call the Fleet their home can no longer avoid the inescapable question:

What is the purpose of a ship that has reached its destination?

I finally have this book in my hands! I can’t even tell you how happy I am that I finally have a copy of this book. It is my most anticipated book of the entire year, and I am so excited to read it, although I do feel compelled to take things slow and savour it. I’m just so very, very happy that this book is in my life!

So, that’s my excessive book haul for the month. I have no idea where most of these books are going to live, I’m kind of overrun by books at the moment. What books are you excited about this month? Have you read any of the books that I’ve hauled this month? What did you think of them? I love hearing from you in the comments!

Want to chat, about books or anything else, here are some other places you can find me:

Twitter @reading_escape

Instagram: @readingsanctuary

Goodreads

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July Book Haul This months haul is a little out of control. I knew it would possibly be higher than normal because I always buy books while I'm on holiday, but this time it's worse because I started panic buying books to take with me, because it felt like a good way to fix my reading slump.

#book blog #book blogger #book haul #book recommendations #bookish #books #graphic novels #July Book Haul #YA #ya books #young adult #young adult books

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zeebartels · 7 years ago

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First & most importantly –

All my love and thanks to my family, who know how much/little to check in on me and not ask too many/too few questions – DeeDee, Tins, Curtis, Manon, Chants, Casey

Zain – for being my hospital Saviour and just my favourite Pakistani ever! Chad – for trying your best to lie to the parents when KB ask the 2 questions you weren’t allowed to answer truthfully – that is what cousins are for. KB – you are my heroin and without knowing it guided me through this – WWKBD!

Elisha + Nico – for being the best big Sister + Brother a girl could need. There are no words to express how much I love you and appreciate you. Sis! looks like I will live to meet yuh man and you are the best secret keeper.

And, The NHS for existing [you can take all the National Insurance you want from me], King’s College Hospital & my multi-disciplinary team of docs for being absolute stars and sorting me out real quick.

So… it’s been a fucking mad end of this year.

I hate this time of year, it’s never felt happy or joyous and honestly I just see the loneliness in the world in this ‘festive’ season, and now compounded by the loss of my father on Boxing Day 2013 – this time of year I’m always thinking – where is the highest mountain or deepest hidey hole I can find until this is all over. But I think this year has taken the cake!

So I had this cough since end of July, no biggie – it’s a cough.

In October, I was inexplicably breathless speed walking to the boarding gate in Amsterdam with Court.

November 19th, I had the craziest fever – trying to sleep, laying naked in my living room with my windows and sliding doors open in the middle of winter and I still felt I was in Trinidad in midday hot sun.

Chaddy boy came over the next day and seeing I couldn’t say one word without having to catch my breath – emergency doctor’s appointment became mandatory. Now I am the worst patien if I can walk and not screaming in pain – I good, dancer habits die hard. So you know shit was real at this point.

Doc Wedgwood tells me to go directly to A&E 1st thing in the morning, She means – DO NOT pass go, DO NOT collect £200 [which would have been damn handy seeing I just quit my 2nd job for the year on Halloween – that’s another story though].

Of course, I was like “listen, give me some drugs so I stop this violent coughing business and could breathe cause I have a job interview tomorrow that not only do I really want to go to but shit! I need to be able to pay rent in 2018 and there is nothing that will make me move from the best flat in the world.”

We had a bit of a back and forth and this woman was not playing but no chest infection is going to affect my plan. Cue – an interview reschedule and I head to King’s College Hospital bright and early the next morning.

Give some blood and x-ray my chest. Then @ 8:50am the lovely good looking Isiah made everything a little more concerning. He asked me to stick around and started asking me a bunch of questions and after trying to be slick, I got him to eventually admit to me that, “My Chest X-ray is concerning, and I need to go to my GP 1st thing tomorrow to discuss the results”

Fuck me! So not a straightforward chest x-ray, not a simple case of a really bad chest infection. But you know I’m on a mission, cause I can’t tell my mother I quit another job this year without having sorted another, so I have interviews to get my ass too.

Fast Forward to that afternoon, and my Doc Wedgwood left 2 voicemails and emailed me about my early morning results appointment – slight panic set in, so I called in the reinforcements for this appointment – enter Nicholai from Stage Right.

So much changed in a couple sentences that Wednesday morning.

“Your chest x-ray isn’t good. We have to do more tests to fully diagnose, but it’s 1 of 3 things –

Lung cancer [WTF?!?!], Lymphoma [this woman crazy!?!?] or Sarcoidosis [I know she crazy cause only people on House or Greys’ Anatomy have that, and those are TV shows].

Your heart rate is 160 – it’s working too hard and your lymph nodes are inflamed around 400%”

If Nico didn’t say respond – I woulda tell you – that was the most vivid dream I ever had. My Big Brother [as he introduced himself to Doc Wedgwood] asked the sensible questions. I said – how the hell do I tell my mother & sister?!!?

The Bartels Soldier surfaced [I am the child of KB – the Original Gangster] and I needed to make a plan. I started my “I’m dying” folder in my Notes.

What needs doing…

What are the next steps to diagnosis?

Who needs to or should know?

Do I change my pension beneficiaries from my Godchildren to my mother and sister [the original plan of them being gone by the time I die may not be the same]?

If it’s a cancer – do I do the fucked up chemo thing or just make sure I enjoy the rest of my time?

Sweet! I lost 10lbs in 2 weeks and I didn’t even make an effort – this could definitely be a good thing!!

Who needs access to my business if shit goes downhill from here.

Answers…

Kings’ College Chest Clinic will call me with my next appointments and instructions

Nico [he was there], Elisha [she’s my person], Chaddy [he knows something is up]. KB + the rest will know when I know what is what

Diagnosis 1st then change beneficiaries if need be

Stage 1 – we will try ah ting & KB will have to come and mind her chile in London. Late Stage 2 and beyond – I’mma just ride this out and see what happens

I have 50lbs I need to lose and hate exercising so this is a real good thing & I’m going to ride this train as much as I can [so far -20lbs + counting in the last month]

Elisha – all of it. Nico – my hospital details.

So here is what followed:

My symptoms got worse –

I can’t walk 1 flight of stairs without being winded, I have to plan all my journeys around tube stations that have escalators and leave enough time to catch my breath before I have to speak to someone. And keep those to a bare minimum

Talking too much is difficult – not a problem for me, I’m not the biggest fan of people

Eating is tiring and takes my breath away – so most things become blended, good thing I had a bunch of already made frozen soup

I have violent coughing episodes that make anyone in my vicinity think I’m dying from the plague – They just gonna have to deal with that

My ribs are sore from all the coughing, so inhaling is painful

No matter how much water I drink (we are talking 3-4 litres a day) I still wake up at least 4 times every night coughing because my throat is so dry

I started sleeping on top of towels so my bed doesn’t get soaked from my night sweats

I decided on a hospital uniform – my fav GAP grey sweatpants & large quilted super cosy GAP jumper & NikexLiberty Air Max 90’s

Another 3 blood tests – 1 of which I had to tell a very fass phlebotomist about herself and that I do not need a husband nor define myself by the presence of a man & I still don’t know my blood type

A CT Scan – Yes you really do feel like you’ve pee’d yourself in your swimsuit and that cosy warmth stays with you for a couple seconds

A result appointments that only said more tests to come – Doc Turner didn’t seem too impressed to hear about my “I’m Dying” folder and whatever other snarky comments I made

A bronchoscopy – My body was not happy about the invasion and started bucking like I was possessed and thus a punctured lung (more Grey’s Anatomyy drama), I woke up, or more specifically, regained memory whilst in mid sentence to the nurse.

A week later – I found a bunch of druggie selfies and pics of bloody liquids [I assume came from me], and videos of my canula removal – no memory performing these actions and I doubt the nurse used my phone.

A PET Scan – preceded by a semi breakdown in the waiting room, it kicked off because they go my appointment times wrong, I was real tired and it was my 2nd day of fasting for a procedure. So a very unhappy Zara came to visit shouting for my doctor and threatening to start breaking things led to a coughing episode and was completed by my pee-ing myself while I’m trying to cuss them about their time fuck up. Eventually – they made me radioactive and I went home to my bed.

Ended that day with my cancelling an interview, receiving confirmation of 2 different job offers coming to my inbox within the next couple day and a late evening voicemail from Doc Turner “It’s good news – all things considered. I’ll see you on Monday and we’ll discuss treatment and long-term”

Well thank fuck for that! At least I don’t have to inject my self with poison. I can deal with that – and I can tell KB.

Monday 18th December – Final results appointment + diagnosis =

CONGRATULATIONS!! You’re a winner!!!

You only have a rare autoimmune disease that we don’t know much about but we can give you mood altering weight gaining steroids for symptoms but not much else. We don’t know what causes it, your symptoms can disappear as quickly as they appeared and never reappear, or you could get lung damage. You’ll have to come to the hospital once a month for a full workup.

BTW – how are your eyes feeling? Tired? Warm? Cause this could affect your eyes and your brain too.

Sarcoidosis is now your long time companion.

Gee! Thanks Doc Turner – you’re my hero.

Everything was made right literally in one afternoon, an afternoon where I felt so shitty, couldn’t catch my breath, breathing was painful and my constant coughing made me want to die.

I get to call my mother and tell her – it kinda went like this

[Me -ZB] Hey KB, so I have something to tell you. I quit my job on Halloween… [KB] Oh Shit man Zara! That was 2 months ago [ZB] yeah but I just had 2 offer conversations with 2 companies & I’ll decide on one of them later today, so the job situ is in hand. [KB] mmm hmmm [ZB] Annnnddd, I was being tested for Lung Cancer, Lymphoma & Sarcoidosis, but I only have Sarcoidosis. The best of the 3. [KB] What you saying? [ZB] {Long version as above} [KB] OK, well good thing you there and not here. You are my special child. First it’s your special mouth disease [that is another story – missing some jaw bone]

Ma asked some really good questions and we lime for a lil while on the Skype.

Hardest part done – So now, we sort shit out.

The job is decided on, I’m now the Head of People for a Games Company.

New Meds –

Getting my steroids via inhaler – straight to the lungs, minimise the side effects of steroids in the blood. I know the steroids would have given me a real reason to be fat but the mood swing business, I wasn’t really in the mood for nah!

More Codeine = more constipation – so increase on the prunes and keep on with the greens.

True Story – I’ve been on some form of codeine for the last month – A couple weeks ago, I’m sitting on my toilet for 20 minutes, my legs are numb and I’m crying with frustration cause really I’m a 36 yr old constipated woman, and all I want is for this shit to no longer be a turtle and become a drowned log. I have a coughing episode and all that shit comes barrelling out! The biggest most literal F-ough (fart+cough) that ever existed!!

So now it’s the road to getting right, I have to be a bridesmaid in Court’s wedding and I’ve got 3 months to be able to breathe while I walk down her aisle.

I’m thrilled that I don’t have to tell my mother + sister that I have cancer at the same time of year we found out and lost my father to cancer.

I get to be on a special list for people with Special Diseases. I call it “exotic”.

I’ll lose the next 30lbs probably without much annoying exercise simply because I have to cut out all inflammatory foods and my body seems to be on that trajectory, once the vaporise steroids don’t get in the way.

And I get to learn more about this odd disease and I won’t be receiving a ridiculous hospital bill.

Everyone is now caught up and I wish you all a brilliant year and all the good things.

2018 is setting up to be a smash hit! I’m pretty excited.

Walk good

xoxo.

I am a patient on House + Greys’ Anatomy First & most importantly - All my love and thanks to my family, who know how much/little to check in on me and not ask too many/too few questions - DeeDee, Tins, Curtis, Manon, Chants, Casey…

#2018 #dealwithit #health #life #sarcoidosis #shithappens

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techscopic · 7 years ago

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Voices in AI – Episode 16: A Conversation with Robert J. Sawyer

Today’s leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese

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In this episode, Byron and Robert talk about human life extension, conscious computers, the future of jobs and more.

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Voices in AI

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Byron Reese: This is voices in AI, brought to you by Gigaom. I’m Byron Reese. Our guest today is Robert Sawyer. Robert is a science fiction author, is both a Hugo and a Nebula winner. He’s the author of twenty-three books, many of which explore themes we talk about on this show. Robert, welcome to the show.

Tell me a little bit about your past, how you got into science fiction, and how you choose the themes that you write about?

Robert Sawyer: Well, I think apropos of this particular podcast, the most salient thing to mention is that when I was eight years old, 2001: A Space Odyssey was in theaters, and my father took me to see that film.

I happen to have been born in 1960, so the math was easy. I was obviously eight in ’68, but I would be 41 in 2001, and my dad, when he took me to see the film, was already older than that… which meant that before I was my dad’s age, talking computers [and] intelligent machines would be a part of my life. This was promised. It was in the title, 2001, and that really caught my imagination.

I had already been exposed to science fiction through Star Trek, which obviously premiered two years earlier, [in] ’66. But I was a little young to really absorb it. Heck, I may be a little young right now, at 57, to really absorb all that in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it was definitely the visual world of science fiction, as opposed to the books… I came to them later.

But again, apropos of this podcast, the first real science fiction books I read… My dad packed me off to summer camp, and he got me two: one was just a space adventure, and the other was a collection of Isaac Asimov’s Robot Stories. Actually the second one [was] The Rest of the Robots, as it was titled in Britain, and I didn’t understand that title at all.

I thought it was about exhausted mechanical men having a nap—the rest of the robots—because I didn’t know there was an earlier volume when I first read it. But right from the very beginning, one of the things that fascinated me most was artificial intelligence, and my first novel, Golden Fleece, is very much my response to 2001… after having mulled it over from the time I was eight years old until the time my first novel came out.

I started writing it when I was twenty-eight, and it came out when I was thirty. So twenty years of mulling over, “What’s the psychology behind an artificial intelligence, HAL, actually deciding to commit murder?” So psychology of non-human beings, whether it’s aliens or AIs—and certainly the whole theme of artificial intelligence—has been right core in my work from the very beginning, and 2001 was definitely what sparked that.

Although many of your books are set in Canada, they are not all in the same fictional universe, correct?

That’s right, and I actually think… you know, I mentioned Isaac Asimov’s [writing] as one of my first exposures to science fiction, and of course still a man I enormously admire. I was lucky enough to meet him during his lifetime. But I think it was a fool’s errand that he spent a great deal of his creative energies, near the later part of his life, trying to fuse his foundation universe with his robot universe to come up with this master plan.

I think, a) it’s just ridiculous, it constrains you as writer; and b) it takes away the power of science fiction. Science fiction is a test bed for new ideas. It’s not about trying to predict the future. It’s about predicting a smorgasbord of possible futures. And if you get constrained into, “every work I did has to be coherent and consistent,” when it’s something I did ten, twenty, thirty, forty—in Asimov’s case, fifty or sixty years—in my past, that’s ridiculous. You’re not expanding the range of possibilities you’re exploring. You’re narrowing down instead of opening up.

So yeah, I have a trilogy about artificial intelligence: Wake, Watch, and Wonder. I have two other trilogies that are on different topics, but out of my twenty-three novels, the bulk of them are standalone, and in no way are meant to be thought of as being in a coherent, same universe. Each one is a fresh—that phrase I like—fresh test bed for a new idea.

That’s Robert Sawyer the author. What do you, Robert Sawyer the person, think the future is going to be like?

I don’t think there’s a distinction, in terms of my outlook. I’m an optimist. I’m known as an optimistic person, a techno-optimist, in that I do think, despite all the obvious downsides of technology—human-caused global climate change didn’t happen because of cow farts, it happened because of coal-burning machines, and so forth—despite that, I’m optimistic, very optimistic, generally as a person, and certainly most of my fiction…

Although my most recent book, my twenty-third, Quantum Night, is almost a deliberate step back, because there had been those that had said I’m almost Pollyanna-ish in my optimism, some have even said possibly naïve. And I don’t think I am. I think I rigorously interrogate the ideas in my fiction, and also in politics and day-to-day life. I’m a skeptic by nature, and I’m not easily swayed to think, “Oh, somebody solved all of our problems.”

Nonetheless, the arrow of progress, through both my personal history and the history of the planet, seems definitely to be pointing in a positive direction.

I’m an optimist as well, and the kind of arguments I get against that viewpoint, the first one invariably is, “Did you not read the paper this morning?”

Yeah.

People look around them, and they see that technology increases our ability to destroy faster than it increases our ability to create. That asymmetry is on the rise, meaning fewer and fewer people can cause more and more havoc; that the magnitude of the kinds of things that can happen due to technology—like genetically-engineered superbugs and what not—are both accessible and real. And when people give you series of that sort of view, what do you say?

Well you know, it’s funny that you should say that… I had to present those views just yesterday. I happen to be involved with developing a TV show here in Canada. I’m the head writer, and I was having a production meeting, and the producer was actually saying, “Well, you know, I don’t think that there is any way that we have to really worry about the planet being destroyed by a rogue operator.”

I said, “No, no, no, man, you have no idea the amount of destructive power that the arrow of history is clearly showing is devolving down into smaller and smaller hands.”

A thousand years ago, the best one person could do is probably kill one or two other people. A hundred years ago they could kill several people. Once we add machine guns, they could kill a whole bunch of people in the shopping mall. Then we found atomic bombs, and so forth, it was only nations we had to worry about, big nations.

And we saw clearly in the Cuban missile crisis, when it comes to big, essentially responsible nations—the USSR and the United States, responsible to their populations and also to their role on the world stage—they weren’t going to do it. It came so close, but Khrushchev and Kennedy backed away. Okay, we don’t have to worry about it.

Well, now rogue states, much smaller states, like North Korea, are pursuing atomic weapons. And before you know it, it’s going to be terrorist groups like the Taliban that will have atomic weapons, and it’s actually a terrifying thought.

If there’s a second theme that permeates my writing, besides my interest in artificial intelligence, it’s my interest in SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. And one of the big conundrums… My friends who work at the SETI Institute, Seth Shostak and others, of course are also optimists. And they honestly think, in the defiance of any evidence whatsoever, that the universe actually is teeming with aliens, and they will respond, or at least be sending out—proactively and altruistically—messages for others to pick up.

Enrico Fermi asked, actually, way back in the days of the Manhattan Project—ironically: “Well if the universe is supposed to be teeming with aliens, where are they?” And the most likely response, given the plethora of exoplanets and the banality of the biology of life and so forth, is, “Well, they probably emerge at a steady pace, extra-terrestrial civilizations, and then, you know, they reach a point where they develop atomic weapons. Fifty years later they invent radio that’s the range for us, or fifty years earlier—1945 for atomic weapons, 1895 for radio. That’s half a century during which they can broadcast before they have the ability to destroy themselves.”

Do they survive five-hundred years, five-thousand years, you know, five-hundred-thousand years? All of that is the blink of an eye in terms of the fourteen-billion-year age of the universe. The chances of any two advanced civilizations that haven’t yet destroyed themselves with their own technology existing simultaneously, whatever that means in a relativistic universe, becomes almost nil. That’s a very good possible answer to Fermi, and bodes not well at all for our technological future.

Sagan said something like that. He said that his guess was civilizations had a hundred years after they got radio, to either destroy themselves, or overcome that tendency and go on to live on a timescale of billions of years.

Right, and, you know, when you talk about round numbers—and of course based on our particular orbit… the year is the orbital duration of the Earth—yeah, he’s probably right. It’s on the right order of magnitude. Clearly, we didn’t solve the problem by 1995. But by 2095, which is the same order magnitude, a century plus or minus, I think he’s right. If we don’t solve the problem by 2095, the bicentennial of radio, we’re doomed.

We have to deal with it, because it is within that range of time, a century or two after you develop radio, that you either have to find a way to make sure you’re never going to destroy yourself, or you’re destroyed. So, in that sense he’s right. And then it will be: Will we survive for billions… ‘Billions’ is an awfully long time, but hundreds of millions, you know… We’re quibbling about an order of magnitude on the high-end, there. But basically, yes, I believe in [terms of] round numbers and proximate orders of magnitude, he is absolutely right.

The window is very small to avoid the existential threats that come with radio. The line through the engineering and the physics from radio, and understanding how radio waves work, and so forth, leads directly to atomic power, leads directly to atomic weapons, blah, blah, blah, and leads conceivably directly to the destruction of the planet.

The artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky said, “Lately, I’ve been inspired by ideas from Robert Sawyer.” What was he talking about, and what ideas in particular, do you think?

Well, Marvin is a wonderful guy, and after he wrote that I had the lovely opportunity to meet him. And, actually ironically, my most significant work about artificial intelligence, Wake, Watch, and Wonder came out after Marvin said that. I went to visit Marvin, who was now professor emeritus by the time I went to visit him at the AI Lab at MIT, when I was researching that trilogy.

So he was talking mostly about my book Mindscan, which was about whether or not we would eventually be able to copy and duplicate human consciousness—or a good simulacrum thereof—in an artificial substrate. He was certainly intrigued by my work, which was—what a flattering thing. I mean, oh my God, you know, Minsky is one of those names science fiction writers conjure with, you named another, Carl Sagan.

These are the people who we voraciously read—science fiction writers, science fiction fans—and to know that you turned around, and they were inspired to some degree… that there was a reciprocity—that they were inspired by what we science fiction writers were doing—is in general a wonderful concept. And the specificity of that, that Marvin Minsky had read and been excited and energized intellectually by things I was writing was, you know, pretty much the biggest compliment I’ve ever had in my life.

What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence. Do you think we’re going to build an AGI, and when? Will it be good for us, and all of that? What’s your view on that?

So, you used the word ‘build’, which is a proactive verb, and honestly I don’t think… Well first, of course, we have a muddying of terms. We all knew what artificial intelligence meant in the 1960s—it meant HAL 9000. Or in the 1980s, it meant Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It meant, as HAL said, any self-aware entity could ever hope to be. It meant self-awareness, what we meant by artificial intelligence.

Not really were we talking about intelligence, in terms of the ability to really rapidly play chess, although that is something that HAL did in 2001: A Space Odyssey. We weren’t talking about the ability to recognize faces, although that is something HAL did, in fact. In the film, he manages to recognize specific faces based on an amateur sketch artist’s sketch, right? “Oh, that’s Dr. Hunter, isn’t it?” in a sketch that one of the astronauts has done.

We didn’t mean that. We didn’t mean any of these algorithmic things; we meant the other part of HAL’s name, the heuristic part of HAL: heuristically-programmed algorithmic computer, HAL. We meant something even beyond that; we meant consciousness, self-awareness… And that term has disappeared.

When you ask an AI guy, somebody pounding away at a keyboard in Lisp, “When is it going to say, ‘Cogito ergo sum’?” he looks at you like you’re a moron. So we’ve dulled the term, and I don’t think anybody anywhere has come even remotely close to simulating or generating self-awareness in a computer.

Garry Kasparov was rightly miffed, and possibly humiliated, when he was beaten at the thing he devoted his life to, grandmaster-level chess, by Deep Blue. Deep Blue did not even know that it was playing chess. Watson had no idea that it was playing Jeopardy. It had no inner life, no inner satisfaction, that it had beat Ken Jennings—the best human player at this game. It just crunched numbers, the way my old Texas Instruments 35 calculator from the 1970s crunched numbers.

So in that sense, I don’t think we’ve made any progress at all. Does that mean that I don’t think AI is just around the corner? Not at all; I think it actually is. But I think it’s going to be an emergent property from sufficiently complex systems. The existing proof of that is our own consciousness and self-awareness, which clearly emerged from no design—there’s no teleology to evolution, no divine intervention, if that’s your worldview.

And I don’t mean you, personally—as we talked here—but the listener. Well, we have nothing in common to base a conversation around this about. It emerged because, at some point, there was sufficient synaptic complexity within our brains, and sufficient interpersonal complexity within our social structures, to require self-reflection. I suspect—and in fact I posit in Wake, Watch, and Wonder—that we will get that eventually from the most complex thing we’ve ever built, which is the interconnectivity of the Internet. So many synapse analogues in links—which are both hyperlinks, and links that are physical cable, or fiber-optic, or microwave links—that at some point the same thing will happen… that intelligence and consciousness, true consciousness, [and] self-awareness, are an emergent property of sufficient complexity.

Let’s talk about that for a minute: There are two kinds of emergence… There is what is [known as] ‘weak emergence’, which is, “Hey, I did this thing and something came out of it, and man I wasn’t expecting that to happen.” So, you might study hydrogen, and you might study oxygen, and you put them together and there’s water, and you’re like, “Whoa!”…

And the water is wet, right? Which you cannot possibly [have] perceived that… There’s nothing in the chemistry of hydrogen or oxygen that would make the quality of a human perceiving it as being wet, and pair it to that… It’s an emergent property. Absolutely.

But upon reflection you can say, “Okay, I see how that happened.” And then there is ‘strong emergence’, which many people say doesn’t exist; and if it does exist, there may only be one example of it, which is consciousness itself. And strong emergence is… Now, you did all the stuff… Let’s take a human, you know—you’re made of a trillion cells who don’t know you or anything.

None of those cells have a sense of humor, and yet you have a sense of humor. And so a strong emergent would be something where you can look at what comes out if… And it can’t actually be derived from the ingredients. What do you think consciousness is? Is it a ‘weak emergent’?

So I am lucky enough to be good friends with Stuart Hameroff, and a friendly acquaintance with Hameroff’s partner, Roger Penrose—who is a physicist, of course, who collaborates with Stephen Hawking on black holes. They both think that consciousness is a strong emergent property; that it is not something that, in retrospect, we in fact—at least in terms of classical physics—can say, “Okay, I get what happened”; you know, the way we do about water and wetness, right?

I am quite a proponent of their orchestrated objective reduction model of consciousness. Penrose’s position, first put forward in The Emperor’s New Mind, and later—after he had actually met Hameroff—expounded upon at more length in Shadows of the Mind… so, twenty-year-old ideas now—that human consciousness must be quantum-mechanical in nature.

And I freely admit that a lot of the mathematics that Hameroff and Penrose argue is over my head. But the fundamental notion that the system itself transcends the ability of classical mathematics and classical physics to fully describe it. They have some truly recondite arguments for why that would be the case. The most compelling seems to come from Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, that there’s simply no way you can actually, in classical physics and classical mathematics, derive a system that will be self-reflective.

But from quantum physics, and superposition, perhaps you actually can come up with an explanation for consciousness.

Now, that said, my job as a science fiction writer is not to pick the most likely explanation for any given phenomenon that I turn my auctorial gaze on. Rather, it is to pick the most entertaining or most provocative or most intriguing one that can’t easily be gainsaid by what we already know. So is consciousness, in that sense, an emergent quantum-mechanical property? That’s a fascinating question; we can’t easily gainsay it because we don’t know.

We certainly don’t have a classical model that gives rise to that non-strong, that trivial emergence that we talked about in terms of hydrogen and oxygen. We don’t have any classical model that actually gives rise to an inner life. We have people who want to… you know, the famous book, Consciousness Explained (Dennett), which many of its critics would say is consciousness explained away.

We have the astonishing hypothesis of Crick, which is really, again, explaining away… You think you have consciousness in a sophisticated way, well you don’t really. That clearly flies as much in the face of our own personal experience as somebody saying, “‘Cognito ergo sum‘—nah, you’re actually not thinking, you’re not self-aware.” I can’t buy that.

So in that sense, I do think that consciousness is emergent, but it is not necessarily emergent from classical physics, and therefore not necessarily emergent on any platform that anybody is building at Google at the moment.

Penrose concluded, in the end, that you cannot build a conscious computer. Would you go all that far, or do you have an opinion on that?

You cannot build a conscious classical computer. Absolutely; I think Penrose is probably right. Given the amount of effort we have been trying, and that Moore’s Law gives us a boost to our effort every eighteen months or whatever figure you want to plug into it these days, and that we haven’t attained it yet, I think he’s probably right. A quantum computer is a whole different kettle of fish. I was lucky enough to visit D-Wave computing on my last book tour, a year ago, where it was very gratifying.

You mentioned the lovely thing that Marvin Minsky said… When I went to D-Wave, which is the only commercial company shipping quantum computers—Google has bought from them, NASA has bought from them… When I went there, they asked me to come and give a talk as well, [and] I said, “Well that’s lovely, how come?” And they said, “Everybody at D-Wave reads Robert J. Sawyer.”

I thought, “Oh my God, wow, what a great compliment.” But because I’m a proponent—and they’re certainly intrigued by the notion—that quantum physics may be what underlies the self-reflective ability—which is what we define consciousness as—I do think that if there is going to be a computer in AI, that it is going to be a quantum computer, quantumly-entangled, that gives rise to anything that we would actually say, “Yep, that’s as conscious as we are.”

So, when I started off asking you about an AGI, you kind of looped consciousness in. To be clear, those are two very different things, right? An AGI is something that is intelligent, and can do a list of tasks a human could do. A consciousness… it may have nothing, maybe not be intelligent at all, but it’s a feeling… it’s an inner-feeling.

But see, this is again… but it’s a conflation of terms, right? ‘Intelligence’, until Garry Kasparov was beaten at chess, intelligence was not just the ability to really rapidly crunch numbers, which is all… I’m sorry, no matter what algorithm you put into a computer, a computer is still a Turing machine. It can add a symbol, it can subtract a symbol. It can move left, it can move right—there’s no computer that isn’t a Turing machine.

The general applicability of a Turing machine to simulating a thing that we call intelligence, isn’t, in fact, what the man on the street or the woman on the street means by intelligence. So we say, “Well, we’ve got an artificially-intelligent algorithm for picking stocks.”

“Oh, well, if it picks stocks, which tie should I wear today?”

Any intelligent person would tell you, don’t wear the brown tie with the blue suit, [but] the stock-picking algorithm has no way to crunch that. It is not intelligent, it’s just math. And so when we take a word like ‘intelligence’… And either because it gets us a better stock option, right, we say, “Our company’s going public, and we’re in AI”—not in rapid number crunching—our stock market valuation is way higher… It isn’t intelligence as you and I understand it at all, full stop. Not one wit.

Where did you come down on the uploading-your-consciousness possibility?

So, I actually have a degree in broadcasting… And I can, with absolutely perfect fidelity, go find your favorite symphony orchestra performing Beethoven’s Fifth, let’s say, and give you an absolutely perfect copy of that, without me personally being able to hold a tune—I’m tone deaf—without me personally having the single slightest insight into musical genius.

Nonetheless, technically, I can reproduce musical genius to whatever bitrate of fidelity you require, if it’s a digital recording, or in perfect analog recording, if you give me the proper equipment—equipment that already is well available.

Given that analogy, we don’t have to understand consciousness; all we have to do is vacuum up everything that is between our ears, and find analog or digital ways to reproduce it on another substrate. I think fundamentally there is no barrier to doing that. Whether we’re anywhere near that level of fidelity in recording the data—or the patterns, or whatever it is—that is the domain of consciousness, within our own biological substrate… We may be years away from that, but we’re not centuries away from that.

It’s something we will have the ability to record and simulate and duplicate this century, absolutely. So in terms of uploading ‘consciousness’—again, we play a slippery slope word with language… In terms of making an exact duplicate of my consciousness on another substrate… Absolutely, it’ll be done; it’ll be done this century, no question in my mind.

Is it the same person? That’s where we play these games with words. Uploading consciousness… Well, you know what—I’ve never once uploaded a picture of myself to Facebook, never once— [but] the picture is still on my hard drive; [and] I’ve copied it, and sent it to Facebook servers, too. There’s another version of that picture, and you know what? You upload a high-resolution picture to Facebook, put it up as your profile photo… Facebook compresses it, and reduces the resolution for their purposes at their end.

So, did they really get it? They don’t have the original; it’s not the same picture. But at first blush, it looks like I uploaded something to the vast hive that is Facebook… I have done nothing of the sort. I have duplicated data at a different location.

One of the themes that you write about is human life extension. What do you think of the possibilities there? Is mortality a problem that we can solve, and what not?

This is very interesting… Again, I’m working on this TV project, and this is one of our themes… And yes, I think, absolutely. I do not think that there’s any biological determinism that says all life forms have to die at a certain point. It seems an eminently-tractable problem. Remember, it was only [in] the 1950s that we figured out the double-helix nature of DNA. Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick and James Watson figured it out, and we have it now.

That’s a blip, right? We’ve had a basic understanding of the structure of the genetic molecule, and the genetic code, and [we’re] only beginning to understand… And every time we think we’ve solved it—”Oh, we’ve got it. We now understand the code for that particular amino acid…” But then we forgot about epigenetics. We thought, in our hubris and arrogance, “Oh, it’s all junk DNA”—when after all, actually they’re these regulatory things that turn it on and off, as is required.

So we’re still quite some significant distance away from totally solving why it is we age… arresting that first, and [then] conceivably reversing that problem. But is it an intractable problem? Is it unsolvable by its nature? Absolutely not. Of course, we will have, again, this century-radical life prolongation—effective practical immortality, barring grotesque bodily accident. Absolutely, without question.

I don’t think it is coming as fast as my friend Aubrey De Grey thinks it’s coming. You know, Aubrey… I just sent him a birthday wish on Facebook; turns out, he’s younger than me… He looks a fair bit older. His partner smokes, and she says, “I don’t worry about it, because we’re going to solve that before the cancers can become an issue.”

I lost my younger brother to lung cancer, and my whole life, people have been saying, “Cancer, we’ll have that solved in twenty years,” and it’s always been twenty years down the road. So I don’t think… I honestly think I’m… you and I, probably, are about the same age I imagine— [we] are at a juncture here. We’re either part of the last generation to live a normal, kind of biblical—threescore and ten, plus or minus a decade or two—lifespan; or we’re the first generation that’s going to live a radically-prolonged lifespan. Who knows which side of that divide you and I happen to be on. I think there are people alive already, the children born in the early—certainly in the second decade, and possibly the first—part of the century who absolutely will live to see not just the next century—twenty-second—but some will live to see beyond that, Kirk’s twenty-third century.

Putting all that together, are you worried about, as our computers get better—get better at crunching numbers, as you say—are you among the camp that worries that automation is going to create an epic-sized social problem in the US, or in the world, because it eliminates too many jobs too quickly?

Yes. You know, everybody is the crucible of their upbringing, and I think it’s always important to interrogate where you came from. I mentioned [that] my father took me to 2001. Well, he took a day off, or had some time off, from his job—which was a professor of economics at the University of Toronto—so that we could go to a movie. So I come from a background… My mother was a statistician, my father an economist…

I come from a background of understanding the science of scarcity, and understanding labor in the marketplace, and capitalism. It’s in my DNA, and it’s in the environment I grew up [in]. I had to do a pie chart to get my allowance as a kid. “Here’s your scarce resources, your $0.75… You want a raise to a dollar? Show me a pie chart of where you’re spending your money now, and how you might usefully spend the additional amount.” That’s the economy of scarcity. That’s the economy of jobs and careers.

My father set out to get his career. He did his PhD at the University of Chicago, and you go through assistant professor, associate professor, professor, now professor emeritus at ninety-two years old—there’s a path. All of that has been disrupted by automation. There’s absolutely no question it’s already upon us in huge parts of the environment, the ecosystem that we live in. And not just in terms of automotive line workers—which, of course, were the first big industrial robots, on the automobile assembly lines…

But, you know, I have friends who are librarians, who are trying to justify why their job should still exist, in a world where they’ve been disintermediated… where the whole world’s knowledge—way more than any physical library ever contained—is at my fingertips the moment I sit down in front of my computer. They’re being automated out of a job, and [although] not replaced by a robot worker, they’re certainly being replaced by the bounty that computers have made possible.

So yeah, absolutely. We’re going to face a seismic shift, and whether we survive it or not is a very interesting sociological question, and one I’m hugely interested in… both as an engaged human being, and definitely as a science fiction writer.

What do you mean survive it?

Survive it recognizably, with the culture and society and individual nation-states that have defined, let’s say, the post-World War II peaceful world order. You know, you look back at why Great Britain has chosen to step out of the European Union.

[The] European Union—one can argue all kind of things about it… but one of the things it basically said was, “Man, that was really dumb, World War I. World War II, that was even worse. All of us guys who live within spitting distance of each other fighting, and now we’ve got atomic weapons. Let’s not do that anymore. In fact, let’s knock down the borders and let’s just get along.”

And then, one of the things that happen to Great Britain… And you see the far right party saying, “Well, immigration is stealing our jobs.” Well, no. You know, immigration is a fact of life in an open world where people travel. And I happen to be—in fact, just parenthetically—I’m a member of the Order of Canada, Canada’s highest civilian honor. One of the perks that comes with that is I’m empowered to, and take great pride in, administering the oath of Canadian citizenship at Canadian citizenship ceremonies.

I’m very much pro-immigration. Immigrants are not what’s causing jobs to disappear, but it’s way easier to point to that guy who looks a bit different, or talks a bit different than you do, and say that he’s the cause, and not that the whole economic sector that you used to work in is being obviated out of existence. Whether it was factory workers, or whether it was stock market traders, the fact is that the AIG, and all of that AGI that we’ve been talking about here, is disappearing those jobs. It’s making those jobs cease to exist, and we’re looking around now, and seeing a great deal of social unrest trying to find another person to blame for that.

I guess implicit in what you’re saying is, yes, technology is going to dislocate people from employment. But what about the corollary, that it will or won’t create new jobs at the same essential rate?

So, clearly it has not created jobs at the same essential rate, and clearly the sad truth is that not everybody can do the new jobs. We used to have a pretty full employment no matter where you fell, you know… as Mr. Spock famously said, “—as with all living things, each according to his gifts.” Now it’s a reality that there is a whole bunch of people who did blue-collar labor, because that was all that was available to them…

And of course, as you know, Neil Degrasse Tyson and others have famously said, “I’m not particularly fascinated by Einstein’s brain per se… I’m mortified by the fact that there were a million ‘Einsteins’ in Africa, or the poorest parts of the United States, or wherever, who never got to give the world what the benefits of their great brains could have, because the economic circumstances didn’t exist for them to do that in.”

What jobs are going to appear… that are going to appear… that aren’t going to be obviated out of existence?

I was actually reading an interesting article, and talking at a pub last night with the gentleman—who was an archaeologist—and an article I read quite recently, about top ten jobs that aren’t soon going to be automated out of existence… and archaeologist was one of them. Why?

One, there’s no particular economic incentive… In fact, archaeologists these days tend to be an impediment to economic growth. That is, they’re the guys to show up when ground has been broken for new skyscrapers and say, “Hang on a minute… indigenous Canadian or Native American remains here… you’ve got a slow down until we collect this stuff,” right?

So no businesses say, “Oh my God, if only archaeologists were even better at finding things, that would stop us from our economic expansion.” And it has such a broadly-based skill set. You have to be able to identify completely unique potsherds, each one is different from another… not something that usually fits a pattern like a defective shoe going down an assembly line: “Oh, not the right number of eyelets on that shoe, reject it.”

So will we come up with job after job after job, that Moore’s Law, hopscotching ahead of us, isn’t going to obviate out of existence ad infinitum? No, we’re not going to do it, even for the next twenty years. There will be massive, massive, massive unemployment… That’s a game changer, a societal shift.

You know, the reality is… Why is it I mentioned World War I? Why do all these countries habitually—and going right back to tribal culture—habitually make war on a routine basis? Because unoccupied young men—and it’s mostly men that are the problem—have always been a detriment to society. And so we ship them off to war to get rid of the surplus.

In the United States, they just lowered the bar on drug possession rules, to define an ability to get the largest incarcerated population of people, who otherwise might just [have] been up to general mischief—not any seismic threat, just general mischief. And societies have always had a problem dealing with surplus young men. Now we have surplus young men, surplus plus young women, surplus old men, surplus old women, surplus everybody.

And there’s no way in hell—and you must know this, if you just stop and think about it—no way in hell that we’re going to generate satisfactory jobs, for the panoply that is humanity, out of ever-accelerating automation. It can’t possibly be true.

Let’s take a minute and go a little deeper in that. You say it in such finality, and such conviction, but you have to start off by saying… There is not, among people in that world… there isn’t universal consensus on the question.

Well, for sure. My job is not to have to say, “Here’s what the consensus is.” My job, as a prognosticator, is to say, “Look. Here is, after decades of thinking about it…”—and, you know, there was Marvin Minsky saying, “Look. This guy is worth listening to”… So no, there isn’t universal consensus. When you ask the guy who’s like, “I had a factory job. I don’t have that anymore, but I drive for Uber.”

Yeah, well, five years from now Uber will have no drivers. Uber is at the cutting edge of automating cars. So after you’ve lost your factory job, and then, “Okay, well I could drive a car.” What’s the next one? It’s going be some high-level diagnostician of arcane psychiatric disorders? That ain’t the career path.

The jobs that are automated out of existence are going to be automated out of existence in a serial fashion… the one that if your skill set was fairly low—a factory worker—then you can hopscotch into [another] fairly low one—driving a car—you tell me what the next fairly low-skillset job, that magically is going to appear, that’s going to be cheaper and easier for corporations to deploy to human beings.

It ain’t counter help at McDonald’s; that’s disappearing. It ain’t cash registers at grocery stores, that’s disappearing. It ain’t bank teller, that already disappeared. It ain’t teaching fundamental primary school. So you give me an example of why the consensus, that there is a consensus… Here you show me. Don’t tell me that the people disagree with me… Tell me how their plot and plan for this actually makes any sense, that bares any scrutiny.

Let’s do that, because of… My only observation was not that you had an opinion, but that [it] was bereft of the word ‘maybe’. Like you just said ATM, bank tellers… but the fact of the matter is—the fact on the ground is—that the number of bank tellers we have today is higher than pre-ATM days.

And the economics that happened, actually, were that by making ATMs, you lowered the cost of building new bank branches. So what banks did was they just put lots more branches everywhere, and each of those needed some number of tellers.

So here’s an interesting question for you… Walk into your bank… I did this recently. And the person I was with was astonished, because every single bank teller was a man, and he hadn’t been into a bank for awhile, and they used to all be women. Now, there’s no fundamental difference between the skill set of men and women; but there is a reality in the glass ceiling of the finance sector.

And you cannot dispute that it exists… that the higher-level jobs were always held by men, and lower-level jobs were held by women. And the reality is… What you call a bank teller is now a guy who doesn’t count out tens and twenties; he is a guy who provides much higher-level financial services… And it’s not that we upgraded the skill set of the displaced.

We didn’t turn all of those counter help people at McDonald’s into Cordon Bleu chefs, either. We simply obviated them out of existence. And the niches, the interstices, in the economy that do exist, that supplement or replace the automation, are not comparably low-level jobs. You do not fill a bank with tellers who are doing routine counting out of money, taking a check and moving it over to the vault. That is not the function.

And they don’t even call them tellers anymore, they call them personal financial advisors or whatever. So, again, your example simply doesn’t bear scrutiny. It doesn’t bear scrutiny that we are taking low-level jobs… And guess what now we have… Show me the automotive plant that has thousands and thousands of more people working on the assembly line, because that particular job over there—spraying the final coat of paint—was done to finer tolerance by a machine… But oh my God, well, let’s move them…

No, that’s not happening. It’s obfuscation to say that we now have many more people involved in bank telling. This is the whole problem that we’ve been talking about here… Let’s take terminology and redefine it, as we go along to avoid facing the harsh reality. We have automated telling machines because we don’t have human telling individuals anymore.

So the challenge with your argument, though, is it is kind of the old one that has been used for centuries. And each time it’s used, it’s due to a lack of imagination.

My business, bucko, is imagination. I have no lack thereof, believe me. Seriously. And it hasn’t been used for generations. Name a single Industrial Revolution argument that invoked Moore’s Law. Name one. Name one that said the invention of the loom will outpace the invention of…

Human inventiveness was always the constraint, and we now do not have human inventiveness as the constraint. Artificial intelligence, whether you define it your way or my way, is something that was not invoked for centuries. We wouldn’t be having this conversation via Skype or whatever, like—Zoom, we’re using here—these are game changers that were not predicted by anybody but science fiction writers.

You can go back and look at Jules Verne, and his novel that he couldn’t get published in his lifetime, Paris in the Twentieth Century, that is incredibly prophetic about television, and so forth, and nobody believed it. Me and my colleagues are the ones that give rise to—not just me, but again that example: “Lately, I’m inspired by Robert J. Sawyer,” says Marvin Minsky. Lately I’m inspired by science fiction… I’m saying belatedly, much of the business world is finally looking and taking seriously science fiction.

I go and give talks worldwide—at Garanti Bank, the second largest bank in Istanbul, awhile ago—about inculcating the science fiction extrapolative and imaginative mindset in business thinkers… Because no, this argument, as we’re framing it today, has not been invoked for centuries.

And to pretend that the advent of the loom, or the printing press, somehow gave rise to people saying, “The seismic shift that’s coming from artificial intelligence, we dealt with that centuries ago, and blah, blah, blah… it’s the same old thing” is to have absolute blinders on, my friend. And you know it well. You wouldn’t be doing a podcast about artificial intelligence if you thought, “Here we are at podcast ‘Loom version 45.2’; we’re gonna have the Loom argument about weaving again for the umpteenth time.” You know the landscape is fundamentally, qualitatively different today.

So that’s a little disingenuous. I never mentioned the loom.

Let’s not be disingenuous. What is your specific example, of the debate related to the automation out of existence—without the replacement of the workers—with comparable skillset jobs from centuries ago? I won’t put an example [in] your mouth; you put one on the table.

I will put two on the table. The first is the electrification of industry. It happened with lightning speed, it was pervasive, it eliminated enormous numbers of jobs… And people at that point said, “What are we going to do with these people?”

I’ll give you a second one… It took twenty years for the US to go from generating five percent of its power with coal, to eighty percent. So in [the span of] twenty years, we started artificially generating our power.

The third one I’d like to give you is the mechanization of the industry… [which] happened so fast, and replaced all of the millions and millions and millions of draft animals that had been used in the past.

So let’s take that one. Where are the draft animals in our economy today? They’re the only life forms in our economy that can be replaced. The draft animals that can be replaced by machines, and the humans that operated them. Now we’ve eliminated draft animals, so the only biology in our economy is Homo sapiens. We are eliminating the Homo sapiens. You’re not gonna find new jobs for the Homo sapiens any more, than except maybe at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, where we found a job for a jackass.

Are you going to find a place to put a draft animal on the payroll today? And you’re not going to find a place to put Homo sapiens, the last biology in the equation, on the payroll tomorrow, except in a vanishing few economic niches.

So the challenge with that view is that in the history of this country, unemployment has been between four and nine percent the entire time, with the exception of the Depression… [between] four and nine percent.

Now, ‘this country’ meaning United States of America, which is not where I am.

Oh I’m sorry. Yes, in the United States of America, four to nine percent, with [the] exception of the Depression. During that time, of course, you had an incredible economic upheaval… But, say from 1790 to 1910, or something like that, [unemployment] never moved [from] four to nine percent.

Meanwhile, after World War II, [we] started adding a million new people, out of the blue, to the workforce. You had a million women a year come into the workforce, year after year, for forty years. So you had forty million new people, between 1945 and 1985, come into the workplace… and unemployment never bumped.

So what it suggests is, that jobs are not these things that kind of magically appear as we go through time, saying “Oh, there’s a job. Oh, that’s an unskilled one, great. Or that’s a job…” It just doesn’t happen that way—

—When women entered into the workforce—and I speak as the son of a woman who was a child prodigy, and was the only woman in her economics class at the University of California at Berkeley, who taught at a prestigious university—I have no doubt that there were occasional high-level jobs. But the jobs that were created, that women came in and filled—and are still butting against the glass ceiling of—were low-level jobs.

It wasn’t, “Oh my God, we suddenly need thousands of new computer programmers.” No, we’ve created a niche that no longer exists for keypunch operators, as an example; or for telephone operators, as an example; or for bank tellers, as an example. And those jobs, to a person, have been obviated out of existence, or will be in the next decade or two.

Yes, I mean, you make an interesting metric about the size of unemployment. But remember, too, that the unemployment figure is a slippery slope, when you say ‘the number of people actively looking for employment’. Now you ask, how many people have just given up any hope of being employed meaningfully, respectfully, in dignity? Again, that number has gone up, as a straight line graph, through automation evolution.

No, I disagree with that. If you’re talking about workforce utilization, or the percentage of people who have gainful employment, there has been a dip over the last… It’s been repeatedly dissected by any number of people, and it seems there’s three things going on with it.

One is, Baby Boomers are retiring, and they’re this lump that passes through the economy, so you get that. Then there’s seasonality baked into that number. So they think the amount of people who have ‘given up’ is about one quarter of one percent, so sure… one in four hundred.

So what I would say is that ’95, ’96, ’97 we have the Internet come along, right? And if you look, between ’97 and the last twenty years, at the literal trillions—not an exaggeration, trillions upon trillions upon trillions of dollars of wealth that it created—you get your Googles, you get your eBays, you get your Amazons… these trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth. Nobody would have seen that [coming] in 1997.

Nobody says, “Oh yes, the connecting of various computers together, through TCP/IP, and allowing them to communicate with hypertext, is going to create trillions upon trillions upon trillions of dollars’ worth of value, and therefore jobs.” And yet it did. Unemployment is still between four and nine percent, it never budges.

So it suggests that jobs are not magically coming out of the air, that what happens is you take any person at any skill level… they can take anything, and apply some amount of work to it, and some amount of intellectual property to it, and make something worth more. And the value that they added, that’s known as a wage, and whatever they can add to that, whatever they meaningfully add to it, well that just created a job.

It doesn’t matter if it is a low-skill person, or a high-skill person, or what have you; and that’s why people maintain the unemployment rate never moves, because there’s an infinite amount of jobs, they exist kind of in the air… just go outside tomorrow, and knock on somebody’s door, and offer to do something for money, and you just made a job.

So go outside and offer to do what, and make a job? Because there are tons of things that I used to pay people to do that I don’t anymore. My Roomba cleans my floor, as opposed to a cleaning lady, is a hypothetical example.

But don’t you spend that money now on something else, which ergo is a job.

Spending money is a job?

Well spending money definitely, yes, creates employment.

Well that’s a very interesting discussion that we could have here, because certainly I used to have to spend money if I wanted something. Now if I want to watch—as we saw this past week, as we record this… The new season of Orange is the New Black, before the intellectual property creators want to deploy it to me, and collect money for it… Oh, guess what? It’s been pirated, and that’s online for free.

If I want to read, or somebody listening to this wants to read any of my twenty-three novels, they could go and buy the ebook edition, it’s true; but there’s an enormous amount of people who are also pirating them, and also the audio books. So this notion that somehow technology has made sure that we buy things with our money, I think a lot of people would take economic exception with that.

In fact, technology has made sure that there are now ways in which you can steal without… And it comes back to the discussion we’re having about AI: “Oh, I now have a copy, you still have the original. In what possible, meaningful way have I stolen from you?” So we actually have game-changers that I think you’re alighting over. But setting aside that, okay, obviously we disagree on this point. Fine, let’s touch base in fifty years, if either of us still has a job, and discuss it.

The easy thing is to always say there’s no consensus. Then you don’t have to go out on a limb, and nobody can ever come back to you and say you’re wrong. What we do in politics these days is, we don’t want people to change their ideas. Sadly, we say, “Forty years ago, you said so-and-so, you must still hold that view.” No, a science fiction writer is like a scientist; we are open, all the time, to new information and new data. And we’re constantly revising our worldview.

Look at the treatment of artificial intelligence, our subject matter today, from my first novel in 1990, to the most recent one I treated the topic, in which would be Wonder, that came out in 2011—and there’s definitely an evolution of thought there. But it’s a mug’s game to say, “There’s no consensus, I’m not gonna make a prediction.”

And it actually is a job, my friend, and one that turns out to be fairly lucrative—at least in my case—to make a prediction, to look at the data, and say… You know, I synthesize it, look at it this way, and here’s where I think it’s going. And if you want to obviate that job out of existence, by saying yeah but other people disagree with you, I suppose that’s your privilege in this particular economic paradigm.

Well, thank you very much. Tell us what you’re working on in closing?

It’s interesting, because when we talk a lot about AI… But I’m really… AI, and the relationship between us and AI, is a subset, in some ways, of transhumanism. In that you can look at artificial intelligence as a separate thing, but really the reality is that we’re going to find way more effective ways to merge ourselves and artificial intelligence than looking in through the five-inch glass window on your smartphone, right?

So what I’m working on is actually developing a TV series on a transhumanist theme, and one of the key things we’re looking at is really that fundamental question of how much of your biology—one of the things we’ve talked about here—you can give up and still retain your fundamental humanity. And I don’t want to get into too much specifics about that, but I think that is, you know, really comes thematically right back to what we’ve been talking about here, and what Alan Turing was getting at with the Turing test.

A hundred years from now, have I uploaded my consciousness? Have I so infused my body with nanotechnology, am I so constantly plugged into a greater electronic global brain… am I still Homo sapient sapiens? I don’t know, but I hope I’ll have that double dose of wisdom that goes with sapient sapiens by that time. And that’s what I’m working on, is really exploring the human-machine proportionality that still results in individuality and human dignity. And I’m doing it in a science fiction television project that I currently have a development contract for.

Awesome. Alright, well thank you so much.

It was a spirited discussion, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, because one of the things that will never be obviated out of existence, I hope, my friend, is spirited and polite disagreement between human beings. I think that is—if there’s something we’ve come nowhere close to emulating on an artificial platform, it’s that. And if there’s any reason that AI’s will keep us around, I’ve often said, it’s because of our unpredictability, our spontaneity, our creativity, and our good sense of humor.

Absolutely. Thank you very much.

My pleasure, take care.

Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his upcoming book The Fourth Age, to be published in April by Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Pre-order a copy here.

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clarenceomoore · 7 years ago

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Voices in AI – Episode 16: A Conversation with Robert J. Sawyer

Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese

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In this episode, Byron and Robert talk about human life extension, conscious computers, the future of jobs and more.

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.voice-in-ai-link-back-embed { font-size: 1.4rem; background: url(https://voicesinai.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/cropped-voices-background.jpg) black; background-position: center; background-size: cover; color: white; padding: 1rem 1.5rem; font-weight: 200; text-transform: uppercase; margin-bottom: 1.5rem; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed:last-of-type { margin-bottom: 0; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed .logo { margin-top: .25rem; display: block; background: url(https://voicesinai.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/voices-in-ai-logo-light-768x264.png) center left no-repeat; background-size: contain; width: 100%; padding-bottom: 30%; text-indent: -9999rem; margin-bottom: 1.5rem } @media (min-width: 960px) { .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed .logo { width: 262px; height: 90px; float: left; margin-right: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0; padding-bottom: 0; } } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed a:link, .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed a:visited { color: #FF6B00; } .voice-in-ai-link-back a:hover { color: #ff4f00; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links { margin-left: 0 !important; margin-right: 0 !important; margin-bottom: 0.25rem; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:link, .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:visited { background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.77); } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:hover { background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.63); } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links .stitcher .stitcher-logo { display: inline; width: auto; fill: currentColor; height: 1em; margin-bottom: -.15em; }