#kleinbergs

[rexwrendraws]

POPCORN PURGATORY 🍿💥 My contribution to the Lost Tales: A Tron Zine ( @losttalestronzine ) featuring my forever favorite program, Ram. Who knows what happens to programs after they derezz?

[astercontrol]

excerpt from WIP... TRON, post-1982

"Hey Alan. You ever wonder, what if programs were alive?"

"Alive, as in, conscious artificial intelligence? I mean, if you've been following the investigation, they're fairly sure the MCP was that, on some level."

"Huh."

Roy was silent for a moment. He had been following, of course, and was aware... but for the first time he found himself considering the implications.

Not the world-rocking news that ENCOM might have created the very first computer capable of real thought. That'd been all over the in-system message boards for weeks now. Technically still just speculation; who knew if it would ever make it into mainstream news... anyway, that wasn't the thought that troubled Roy, right now.

It was the realization that Alan... sweet gentle nerdy Alan, whose office wall enshrined, like a plaque of the Ten Commandments, an old sci-fi movie quote about taming a violent machine with a command to do no harm... had been the one who'd had to kill it.

"Yeah, but I wonder... I mean. You're the one with the AI credentials, so you'd know this a lot better than me... like, in theory, is there any way that intelligence could have... I dunno, spread to other programs?"

"I mean, the MCP was in control of practically everything for a while there. Its processes were running the whole system. I suppose you could argue that there was a period of time when all the software active in our system was running off the MCP's basic... intelligence, if that's what it could be called."

He took off his glasses; brought the end of the bar close to his mouth in that endearing thoughtful way of his. "Of course, not all of it was following the MCP's directives. It all had different goals, including some like mine that was even programmed to sabotage the MCP-- but, well, you could certainly say that it was all using the same processing capacity."

"So, like... if you imagined them as living minds, it'd be almost like the computer was the brain, and all the programs running in it were like... multiple personalities or something?" Many souls in one body, a whole crowd of individual people living in there together...

"I suppose you could, loosely, imagine it that way. Not that simple, because the MCP's programming would've been what gave the computer the ability to have any 'personalities' in the first place. But, as a very crude explanation... I guess it holds up. Sort of."

Roy tilted his head, curious. Alan was answering these questions a little faster, a little more assuredly than he usually spoke.

Just a little. Just barely noticeable, to someone who'd been around him for as long as Roy had. But it was there.

"You given this any thought before?"

Alan shrugged, awkward smile breaking out, lopsided. "I give thought to everything, Roy. I consider all possibilities, it's part of the job."

Roy's eyes followed Alan as he turned back to his monitor. Still such a cheerful voice and stance, no more troubled than Alan usually looked.

...Sure didn't seem like a guy pondering the possibility that he'd massacred a whole society of brand new life forms by wiping out the source of their consciousness.

"Hey..."

"What?" Alan's head turned back, just the lightest note of annoyance.

"I'd like to talk about this some more sometime. I think I'm... interested in learning more about the programming involved in it. Like, just what sort of commands went into the task of erasing the MCP."

Alan laughed and shook his head. "Sure, maybe. But it's not that interesting. Or that simple. I mean, 'erase' is an easy way to say it, if you're trying to give someone a quick overview. But it involved the identification and shutdown of a whole lot of specific individual functions and processes."

"Hmm." A thoughtful nod. "Selectively. The ones that were causing problems, then."

"More or less. But, like I said, it's complicated. I'm sure my explanation would get awfully boring after a while."

"Oh, you never bore me." Roy grinned. "Anyway-- sorry if I'm keeping you from anything. I'm headed off to lunch; you want anything?"

"I'm fine, Roy. Go on, enjoy your lunch."

Roy walked slowly down the corridor, lost in thought. "Klaatu Barada Nikto" indeed.

[sarcopod]

Poison Ivy Rorschach post performance at the Muddclub, 1979

[fights4users]

“Safety dance” by Men without Hats is Flynn’s personal mambo no 5 moment. He’s played it so many times that Alan is considering corporate murder. Roy is the only one keeping him from doing this. Lora doesn’t see what the big deal is, the songs catchy. But she’s all the way in a sub basement she doesn’t have to hear it 24/7.

[graedari]

Disney said what? No one but Flynn got to go in the Grid? Nah- I talked to Mickey himself- he said that Jordan, Lora, AND Roy all joined him at some point. Yes, Michael the Mouse told me himself-

[Image ID in alt]

[haveyouseenthistoku]

[chicinsilk]

US Vogue September 1986

Paulina Porizkova wears a sage green wool jersey dress, belted with black suede. By Geoffrey Beene. Earrings, Martha Sturdy, handbag, Kleinberg Sherrill, tights, Flash Legs for Stilnovo. Ezel hairdresser, makeup, François Nars.

Paulina Porizkova porte une robe en jersey de laine vert sauge, ceinturé de daim noir. Par Geoffrey Beene. Boucles d'oreilles, Martha Sturdy, sac à main, Kleinberg Sherrill, collants, Flash Legs pour Stilnovo. Coiffure Ezel, maquillage, François Nars. Photo Irving Penn vogue archive

[90smovies]

[mwwy]

6 Bullet to Binary, Part 2 5:12

mewithoutYou It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All a Dream! It's Alright (2009)

[thedreadpiratebroberts]

Say hello to my favorite Tron OCs! They're Roy Kleinberg’s three daughters. Rachel (the ER nurse), Rebecca (the mechanical engineer and crossfit queen), and Riley (a coder and video game developer like her dad). Thanks to agave for the amazing art! 

[rexwrendraws]

Sneak preview of my contribution to LOST TALES: A Tron Fanzine ( @losttalestronzine ), feat. my favorite program who I haven't drawn enough, Ram!! 🍿💥

It's been an absolute blast getting to run such an ambitious project, and I'm super, super excited to say that PRE-ORDERS ARE NOW OPEN until March 1!!

🔸️You can check the various zine + merch bundles and get them for yourself at losttalestronzine.bigcartel.com/ !!

🔸️For more info and contributor links, check out losttalestronzine.carrd.co/ !!

[astercontrol]

One of the exercises my pattern recognition loves, for some reason, is to take widely accepted ideas in fandom, things that are basically considered obvious from canon, and figure out ways that the truth could actually be something else.

This is an obnoxious thing to do, sometimes.

I get annoyed at my pattern recognition routines for this.

Especially when I don't even have any particular reason to want the new interpretation.

And especially when (like a lot of my sudden weird inspirations) it happens in the middle of the night.

----

But it is difficult to fight against.

Because whenever there is "proof" that something isn't true in canon, a creative enough mind will find ways around it.

If the proof is "no character ever mentioned that, and they would have mentioned it if it were true"…. all it takes is a plausible reason for someone to keep something secret, or even just not to bring it up in a particular context.

If the proof is "a character literally SAID that was not true"… likewise, all it takes is a plausible reason for someone to lie.

If the proof is "it involves a character who is dead in canon," we just need a reason why the character is believed to be dead but is actually not. (This is especially feasible in canons where there is a potential in-universe mechanism for someone to be copied, resurrected, etc.)

If the proof is "we saw something happen onscreen that is extremely incompatible with the new interpretation," then there's always the possibility of that onscreen event being some type of illusion (especially in canons with magic or technology that make that very feasible).

And I am especially irritated with my Recognizer… (I think that's what I'm going to call it from now on-- Recognizer, an annoying little Pattern Recognizer that buzzes around my head like a tireless insect, looking for puzzles to solve that absolutely nobody needs solved)…

…for becoming fixated, lately, on the question:

What is it, exactly, that makes TRON 2.0 incompatible with Legacy?

(Thank goodness the Recognizer isn't trying to take the comics into account… yet, at least. If I had to watch it try to reconcile Betrayal and Ghost in the Machine with the other canon and with each other, I'd probably eat my computer.)

Anyway. So far I've got:

The structure of ENCOM. I need to look more closely through all those emails from 2.0… they show the power balance of the company changing in ways that seem to diverge from what we see at the beginning of Legacy. (At least Flynn seems to have disappeared in both? Though the times may not line up.)

However, I imagine a lot could change at ENCOM between 2003 and 2010. And we have to remember that not everything said in every email has to be true. Some might even be spoofed emails, sent by FCon for whatever deceptive reasons they might have. We can theoretically disregard any 2.0 canon that comes from the contents of an email, if we can explain it on those grounds.

Alan's family. In 2.0, Lora is apparently dead from a digitization accident, and she and Alan have a son. Neither of these were mentioned in Legacy (although lack of mention isn't proof in itself). Also I believe Lora appears, alive, in some of the supplemental Legacy material.

Going from what I saw of the game's plot, we could imagine that Lora was somehow recovered, later on, from the data that became Ma3a. (If I recall correctly she was eaten by a Seeker? But that doesn't necessarily mean destroyed?) Anyway, if enough of her ended up being recoverable, she could theoretically have been found and rerezzed back into the User world, sometime between then and the events of Legacy.

And, of course, possibly the biggest obstacle: In 2.0, Alan is aware of the world inside the computer.

He got digitized in there as part of FCon's sabotage attempt. It appears (though it doesn't seem absolutely certain?) that this was the first time he'd been digitized into the computer, or even knew it was possible. But after the events of 2.0 he definitely knows about it.

If Alan knew this could happen, it would be… challenging, at the least, to explain a lot of how he acted in Legacy.

---

(And this line of speculation, I think, is really what my Recognizer is focusing on.

See, I don't think it even cares all that much about reconciling 2.0 into the canon. I think it mainly just wants to believe there were some early days when Flynn and Alan and Lora and Roy had fun together exploring the world inside Encom and meeting their programs.

If it were a rational being, it would just make up an AU for this.

But it is not a rational being. It's a deranged pattern recognition subroutine, and its entire obnoxious goal in life is to find or force connections between things, until it can figure out a way everything makes SENSE together.

Sometimes the most nonsensical thing you can possibly do is try to make everything make sense, Recognizer.)

---

First issue: If he knew that people could be digitized into computers, why did Alan not find out what had happened to Flynn?

Well… maybe he did know. Or had good reason to suspect. After all, someone's been paying the electric bill at that arcade to keep the computer running all these years.

If so, though-- why had Alan not tried to get Flynn out of there?

Maybe Flynn had specifically requested for him not to, not unless he paged asking for help.

Or: maybe Alan had tried. Maybe he'd even gone in! Maybe he barely made it back out with his life, without even being able to confirm Flynn was in there somewhere. Maybe he looked through the code trying to fix things from the outside, but realized there was no totally safe way to extract Flynn at this point or even identify him for sure.

Or: Maybe he did extract Flynn from there, time after time. Maybe Flynn kept going back in, and getting his stupid ass in trouble again and again. And the more it conflicted with his job, and the more stress it put on Alan… the more Alan decided, I am too damn old for this, this is a job for someone young and crazy and reckless like Sam, but even Sam is gonna have to wait until Flynn actually admits he needs help and actually pages me asking for it, the stubborn idiot.

In any of these scenarios, though, there's the further question: why did Alan not tell Sam more about what he was getting into?

And there, again, we can only speculate:

Maybe Alan reasoned that Sam has had many years to file away his dad's old stories firmly under the heading of "made-up tall tales," and if he told Sam the whole truth, Sam would refuse to believe it and just be angry.

This may or may not be actually true about Sam… but if Alan thought it, he may have refrained from telling him to increase the chance Sam would actually take on the task.

In any case, Alan sending Sam in there is… an ethically questionable decision at best.

Hell, even if Alan didn't know about the world inside the computer, sending Sam in was a questionable decision. He didn't know what would be waiting there at the arcade for whoever answered the page, and for all he knew it could be something dangerous. For all he knew, whoever answered the page could be walking into some hostage situation, with the mafia holding Flynn captive and demanding company secrets or something.

But… I can see his reasoning, even if I side-eye its ethics a bit.

Whatever he knows or doesn't know about the computer system, Alan knows he's not cut out to handle danger nearly as well as Sam is.

And he knows Sam, of all people, would want the closure of doing this, finding out Dad's secrets on his own.

And, if Alan knew something about those secrets already-- that even explains why he kept this solely between himself and Sam, instead of involving anyone else who might be better equipped than either of them to handle ordinary, real-world dangers.

But… all this notwithstanding, there are probably still some hangups for my Recognizer to deal with.

The one it's gotten stuck on now-- perhaps even stuck enough to let me go back to sleep-- is in the Next Day short.

Specifically, the very end, when Alan and Roy are alone together.

Everything up to that, the Recognizer can disregard any statements it doesn't like, because they could have been lies or omissions for the benefit of the public.

But assuming Roy and Alan both have been inside the computer-- as the Recognizer stubbornly wants to believe-- they don't have any reason to lie about it to each other.

So Roy's very last line-- "Why do you think Flynn gave you the cool nickname?" makes no sense, if they've both met their programs and know they were named after them.

But honestly… nothing about that last line makes sense, in any interpretation.

Namely:

Even if they hadn't ever met their programs as living personifications, they know they wrote their programs... and presumably Roy's program was also named Ram outside the system.

Alan (from the earlier interviews in the short) clearly knows he was nicknamed after the program he wrote, so I can't see why Roy wouldn't already know the same.

Ram is an obviously cooler nickname than Tron.

So…. shut up, Recognizer.

Stay stuck.

For now, at least.

[picturebookshelf]

Poky and Friends: Lucky Ducks (1999)

Story: Naomi Kleinberg & Bruce Talkington -- Art: DRi Artworks (unknown) & Don Williams

[fights4users]

We all know Flynn’s one to give nicknames around the office, like how Alan and Roy were known as ‘Tron’ and ‘Ram’.

All December he refuses to refer to Alan and Lora as anything but ‘Todd and Margot’

[solar-siren]

Angstpril Day Fifteen: Lost In My Mind

“Alan?” Roy pops his head into the next cubicle over. “Have you seen—Alan? Hey!”

Alan startles when Roy raps on his desk. His face turns red when he finally looks up.

“Sorry,” he says.

Roy snorts. He starts to ask what had him so distracted in the first place, but then he hears it—Lora and Flynn laughing together from somewhere down the hall. 

He bites back a frown.

Roy knows that Alan likes Lora. He’d planned on asking her out before Flynn beat him to it. ENCOM’s latest happy couple has been together for months now—and Alan is miserable.

“You’ve gotta stop torturing yourself,” Roy says.

“Yeah.” Alan looks at the screen instead of him. “I’m pathetic.”

“You’re not pathetic. You’re human, like the rest of us.”

As if that’s supposed to make him feel better.

“Did you need something?” Alan asks, eager to change the subject. 

“Uh, it can wait,” Roy says, looking at something to his left. Then, before Alan can respond, he escapes back to his own cube. 

Moments later, another face appears in the doorway.

“Good morning, Alan,” Lora greets. She leans against the partition, all casual grace, her hands cradling a coffee mug. 

She does this sometimes—stops by for just a moment before heading back downstairs. Alan smiles. It’s far too easy to smile at her.

“Good morning, Dr. Baines.” 

Her own smile warms as she watches him over the rim of her drink. 

“You can call me Lora, Alan.” 

“Good morning, Lora,” he says softly. She grins again, and then she’s gone. 

Alan waits until he hears her retreating footsteps to thunk his head against the desk. 

He’s in so much trouble.