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Ferrinus posted:We both know the alien socioeconomics because they're revealed less than halfway through the first movie: imprisoned humans power the machine civilization, but only if they're kept in a certain kind of dreaming sleep. Well, in that way, we both know the socioeconomics of Victorian-Era Britain: ppl worked in factories or something? Contrast what you're claiming with the movie Sleep Dealer, in which 'outsourcing' is taken to a logical extreme and robotic drones in America are remotely controlled by Mexican workers on the other side of the border in order to circumvent labor laws. So, for the workers, "my energy was being drained, sent far away." It is of course not literally that the company is extracting electricity from their bodies, but that the work of operating the drones is mentally and physically taxing, while the operators are barely paid enough to maintain their health. If Matrix is to be read as similar story of labor and its exploitation, it's rather hopelessly stupid. If the people in the pods are 'Mexicans' and their digital avatars inside the matrix (i.e. America) are the robotic drones, why are the matrix-machines paying the dude in the subway to play-act as a homeless wino? Why are they paying all the babies to go gaga-googoo? Like, sure, let's assume the matrix-pod apparatus is a cost-saving measure to pay the workers as little as possible. What work are they performing? Why is there such a demand for this work? If the claim is that they're just using human brains for the processing power, like they're unconsciously remotely piloting the Sentinels or something, then there's no need for human consciousness at all and the whole matrix setup is redundant and wasteful. Again, the only consistent answer is that your vision of the alien economy is much stranger than you're getting into, because the machines must have an overwhelming demand for performance: 'humans acting like it's 1999' are the hottest commodity in the machine society, and the whole economy is centered around it. They're so concerned with the authenticity of the 1999-simulation that they're paying this guy to play-act as a homeless person. So is this a Truman show? Are they, like, selling tickets? Is Matrix 4 ultimately dangerously close to the point that it's all just a stupid videogame/movie franchise?
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Jan 6, 2022 18:45
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Well, in that way, we both know the socioeconomics of Victorian-Era Britain: ppl worked in factories or something? It seems insightful rather than stupid that the functions and purpose of work are obscured from the perspective of the laborers to the point of incomprehensibility. Any individual role in the Matrix is equivalent to someone on an assembly line soldering a resistor onto a circuit. They don't know how their tools are made or the chemistry by which they operate, they don't know why the resistor goes in that spot or what the circuit does, but their awareness does not change that someone is extracting value/power from their completion of the task. The Matrix posits a sophisticated sci-fi endgame of exploitation such that by merely existing, some kind of value is extracted from you. Which seems fairly prescient for the current state of the Internet in particular, where information about where my eyeballs travel is harvested, packaged and sold for the benefit of obscure machine intelligences. Looking at those websites did not feel like labor to me, the Matrix was invisible, but I was harvested nevertheless.
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Jan 6, 2022 20:15
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The difference is that the audience isn't characters in the matrix. It's not that we're not privy to the big-picture Matrix's machinations - it's that the part we see is kind of stupid and nonsensical. Maybe preventing this couple from dating generates the equivalent of ten hydroelectric dams. But it seems like the robots are just being assholes so we can have a movie. Which, if they owned it, would be better filmmaking than "idk maybe the robots need misery." But in a very hetero-cis white twist, the most profound source of pathos-electric power is the tech bro virgin skulking away from the Chad who's loving his soulmate. Is there a Poe's Law variant for pickup artist propaganda?
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Jan 6, 2022 20:56
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Butternubs posted:It would even make more sense why giving people constant anxiety/depression makes them better, More stress = more brain activity or something. I think this is exactly the implication in the fourth movie, such that the Analyst's speech serves to synthesize the "humans are batteries" idea from the first movie and the "humans are processors" idea from the first script. There's a quote from the Wachowskis somewhere earlier in this thread wherein they double down on the power plant idea and specifically point out that the pods were designed to look and act like spark plugs. So, human brain activity is used in some way to provide the catalyzing jolt to a much bigger and more powerful energy source, one that's presumably so complicated or delicate that you can't just turn it on and watch it run forever or trivially automate its moderation. SuperMechagodzilla posted:Well, in that way, we both know the socioeconomics of Victorian-Era Britain: ppl worked in factories or something? The matrix is a prison, and the agitation of the prisoners is used to drive a fusion reaction. The machines don't their inmates any more than we pay ours. I don't know why you're feigning all this confusion; it's like watching Bram Stoker's Dracula and pausing the movie to demand someone explain why everyone in it is using steam trains instead of high-speed light rail. I mean, all the materials required are right there! Is everyone just too stupid to build a hypersonic jet? Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Jan 6, 2022 |
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Jan 6, 2022 21:02
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Halloween Jack posted:I haven't done the reading to keep up with the conversation, so this is just a random observation: Neo gets his noodles from the kitchen at the noodle place. The noodle chef gets them from a Sysco truck. Sysco gets them from a food factory, which gets ingredients from the farms. At what point does the supply chain vanish, and the Machines are just manifesting goods in the Matrix? Given that the Matrix seems to be made up of discrete, vague locations like "The City" and "The Mountains," I imagine that they're not simulating wheat fields and rice paddies. At the peak of our civilization, all that obscene labour is carefully hidden. It's easiest to assume that the Matrix is a simulation of the entire world.
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Jan 7, 2022 01:24
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HorseLord posted:It's easiest to assume that the Matrix is a simulation of the entire world. It’s not though, we know it’s not. The city they live in is “the city” and has like, the Himalayan mountains within 500 miles and at least one European castle.
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Jan 7, 2022 01:44
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It’s not though, we know it’s not. The city they live in is “the city” and has like, the Himalayan mountains within 500 miles and at least one European castle. As the world does, yes
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Jan 7, 2022 02:35
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It’s not though, we know it’s not. The city they live in is “the city” and has like, the Himalayan mountains within 500 miles and at least one European castle. Maybe I'm not understanding the conversation here and it was probably more true in the original trilogy, but in matrix 4 it's pretty drat clear it's san francisco
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Jan 7, 2022 02:45
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It’s not though, we know it’s not. No we don't. quote:The city they live in is “the city” and has like, the Himalayan mountains within 500 miles and at least one European castle. I live next to a city in real life, Nijmegen. It is normal for people to refer to "the city" in conversations, because we have the shared context that "the city" is Nijmegen. It doesn't mean that only one city exists. Like how if you have children, and you tell a creepy man to "get away from 'my son'". It doesn't mean you only have one son, it means that the creepy man should get away from the specific son he's creepying at. I don't understand why you would reach for this unusual interpretation of normal English speech and use it to theory craft that only one city exists, especially when the very first time we see Neo we learn that Morpheus is an internationally wanted criminal who has been identified in heathrow airport. Which is in London, which is not the city that the movie takes place in, and is also in a different country. And also that later everyone goes to Japan, a third country. On a bullet train, which is a special kind of train that goes between major cities. Routes which go through rural areas, which is where people farm things. Understanding movies is much easier if you just pay attention to what goes on in them. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Jan 7, 2022 |
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Jan 7, 2022 03:56
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I don't know if there's some errata that specifies the whole "it's one city thing" but that would make zero sense considering the idea behind The Matrix is that the real actual world is a simulation. It doesn't exactly make sense to shift that to "uh actually it's one place."
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Jan 7, 2022 04:05
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I remember now that they had to make an origin story movie for those data tapes darth vader was mad about at the beginning of the first star wars movie. At first, I thought that it was a shameless cash grab. Now I realize that, for a significant part of the audience, "someone stole them and gave them to her" was too hard to figure out.
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Jan 7, 2022 04:15
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ImpAtom posted:I don't know if there's some errata that specifies the whole "it's one city thing" but that would make zero sense considering the idea behind The Matrix is that the real actual world is a simulation. It doesn't exactly make sense to shift that to "uh actually it's one place." It's always been the entire world in the movies. The city in the first one is meant to be Chicago though they don't mention it by name because like others pointed out it's normal to just say "the city" when talking about the major city you live in or around. I think people miss out on it being a simulation and what that means regarding how it's run compared to something like Dark City's city where it's a very very very intimately crafted and smaller space. And as others mentioned miss out on how, like, other places are clearly a thing in the Matrix since they talked about and travelled to throughout the movies.
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Jan 7, 2022 04:25
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HorseLord posted:I remember now that they had to make an origin story movie for those data tapes darth vader was mad about at the beginning of the first star wars movie. At first, I thought that it was a shameless cash grab. Now I realize that, for a significant part of the audience, "someone stole them and gave them to her" was too hard to figure out. that movie is like the best movie of the series! for reminding folk the 'wars' part of the title, whilst chiding them for focusing on the who-gives-a-poo poo 'star' part. "many, many people died to give them to her" was a necessary gently caress you to many an audience member
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Jan 7, 2022 07:42
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Eh, I got the feeling that in the second and third films there was a subtle retcon that the matrix was just the one mega-city, with it also being implied that being in the very centre of the city meant you were in the 'core network' that you can't directly hack in/out of. I think graphic implied that the Merovingian's castle was literally 'map edge'. That's obviously been reversed in 4.
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Jan 7, 2022 10:43
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Butternubs posted:It's still very dumb to me that they went with the "humans make energy" explanation and not the "humans make good computer chips" explanation. Our big brains are the only really special thing about us. It's even more dumb when you think about all of the other ways the Machines could have harvested energy; geothermal, hydro, fusion. The machines winning the war to enslave humanity to use our brains as co-processors is definitely a much better angle. Why not just enslave all animal life on the planet and tap them into the Matrix as well? A bear is going to provide them with more BTUs and not start a revolution. Neo Rasa posted:It's always been the entire world in the movies. The city in the first one is meant to be Chicago though they don't mention it by name because like others pointed out it's normal to just say "the city" when talking about the major city you live in or around. When they're on the Bullet Train in 4, and you see the awfully rendered Mt. Fuji and Sakura Trees doesn't someone say they're in Japan? The Matrix is just a giant MMO because the Wachowskis are nerds and gamers (or were), it's no surprise they made an MMO either.
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Jan 7, 2022 11:22
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The energy thing makes sense in the context of a fairy tale: "The fairies fed on lost love" makes sense. It's magic, they're magic, feeding is an abstraction, and it makes the whole thing kind of tragic. That just doesn't translate into scifi technobabble, for all the reasons we saw in Resurrections.
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Jan 7, 2022 11:56
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sigher posted:When they're on the Bullet Train in 4, and you see the awfully rendered Mt. Fuji and Sakura Trees doesn't someone say they're in Japan? Tokyo specifically
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Jan 7, 2022 13:17
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I definitely got the sense in the matrix 1,2,3 that "the city" was portrayed as a kind of anycity megapolis. And in 4 when it starts becoming obviously San Francisco and then Explicitly-Tokyo that was meant to be an indication that this updated version of the matrix is superior, along with not being obviously green tinted. I mean if you start considering the in universe logic of it then the idea that everyone lives in this generic city and never questions the outside world is absurd. But in terms of the imagery we're shown the city definitely seems to be deliberately portrayed as artificial and nameless as possible. Really the only reference to a specific place I can think of is the newspaper article that mentions Heathrow, but its so incongruous with the rest of the movie it feels like a goof. massive spider fucked around with this message at 13:36 on Jan 7, 2022 |
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Jan 7, 2022 13:32
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“The city” isn’t just people talking casually, the city is named “the city” and you see it written on stuff constantly
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Jan 7, 2022 14:16
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It doesn't seem hard to believe or really worth a conversation that an entire planet is simulated and the machines can adjust weather, scale, quantity of goods, crops, whatever they want. They had a lot of time and they're pretty smart so I don't expect there are people in The City running into an invisible wall because the map ran out.
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Jan 7, 2022 14:42
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They go to Tokyo in the fourth movie, London is mentioned in the first movie, the architect shows footage from people in all sorts of different places around the world and refers to them as people "in this world", referring to the Matrix. In the first movie Agent Smith says there are billions of people in the Matrix, which heavily implies it's not just a single city. e: also if I'm not mistaken, because it's been a very long time, the Animatrix shows other locations. a7m2 fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Jan 7, 2022 |
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Jan 7, 2022 15:15
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HorseLord posted:I live next to a city in real life, Nijmegen. It is normal for people to refer to "the city" in conversations, because we have the shared context that "the city" is Nijmegen. It doesn't mean that only one city exists. (I haven't seen the sequels for a while, but I believe there are shots of Neo flying over an impossibly vast urban skyline.)
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Jan 7, 2022 15:16
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:“The city” isn’t just people talking casually, the city is named “the city” and you see it written on stuff constantly yeah i don't remember where but i'm like 99.9999999999% sure that it's canon that "the city" was the only city in the matrix, that the simulation was simplified down to like repo man levels where the beer just says "BEER" etc etc that was like the whole point AFAIK IIRC ITT
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Jan 7, 2022 15:18
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Everyone exists in the same endlessly repeating city map with different skins and hapazardly placed cherry blossom trees, Mt. Fujis or Big Bens.
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Jan 7, 2022 15:34
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precision posted:yeah i don't remember where but i'm like 99.9999999999% sure that it's canon that "the city" was the only city in the matrix, that the simulation was simplified down to like repo man levels where the beer just says "BEER" etc etc Brands aren't generic in the matrix. Neo uses a samsung syncmaster computer monitor and panasonic headphones and gets a Nokia phone delivered to him by FedEx. Trinity rides a Triumph. Morpheus has a Radiola TV in his construct program. That they don't have a city name appear on screen isn't proof that there's only one city. That only proves that the film makers chose to obscure what city it's meant to be, for their own convenience. The city that we see in the Matrix is American, but a large part of it was filmed in Sidney, Australia. You're also ignoring the fact Morpheus was in London, which has already been brought up. People in the matrix know that cities are named things like "London" and that there is more than one of them, and there are people there. The whole idea collapses here. I really don't understand why people make such unnecessary and complicated theories based on half remembrances, misremembrances, and trying to scrape elaborate meanings out of nonspecific street signage that's on screen for 2 frames. The trucks the camera goes under in the freeway chase have placeholder graphics where the chassis should be. Does that imply something about how cars work in the matrix? No! it means the movie is nearly 20 years old and the CGI is sometimes very poo poo! Or maybe now we can extend this "understanding" of these movies to other media. Every newspaper prop in every episode of every tv show is identical going back decades, unless it is specifically relevant to the plot. This must mean that Every epsiode of every tv show that doesn't use a newspaper article as a plot element must all secretly be in a shared canon and all take place on the same day. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Jan 7, 2022 |
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Jan 7, 2022 15:54
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The city just being a single city named "megacity" with a tokyo district is canon in the games which is offically canon. But even in the movie the merovingian lives in a rural castle and the Himalayan mountains are explicitly defined as 500 miles away. It's clearly not supposed to be a 1:1 recreation of real earth. I bet you can go to american city, tokyo, the part of paris around the eiffel tower, the pyramids and probably the moon. The places a videogame level would capture. Like the movie is very specific that these places are specifically 500 miles from the city. And heavily imply that it's basically the world bounds.   I don't think you are supposed to understand that he lives in a normal place just normal 500 miles from a regular chicago or generic american city.
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Jan 7, 2022 16:10
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 Link literally scrolls to the corner edge of the map to find the castle.
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Jan 7, 2022 16:23
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HorseLord posted:I really don't understand why people make such unnecessary and complicated theories based on half remembrances, misremembrances, and trying to scrape elaborate meanings out of nonspecific street signage that's on screen for 2 frames. The trucks the camera goes under in the freeway chase have placeholder graphics where the chassis should be. Does that imply something about how cars work in the matrix? No! it means the movie is nearly 20 years old and the CGI is sometimes very poo poo! In the process of making the film, they deliberately kept some references to specific places (Heathrow Airport, Wabash Avenue, etc.) but expunged the actual features of the territory. One set designer mentioned that, as is standard, they made fake decals for trucks so that they couldn't get sued by some business. Cream of Wheat was changed to Tasty Wheat. But there's no purely practical reason to hide a Chicago Transit Authority sign. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jan 7, 2022 |
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Jan 7, 2022 16:25
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Like, this doesn't actually matter, the Matrix is the world but they also blur the details when convenient for the sake of the story because you don't need to question why everything that is important is located in this one generic mega-city.
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Jan 7, 2022 16:28
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https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-09-17-the-matrix-online-interview-ben-chamberlain The Matrix Online is probably not canon. I can't find anything about the directors saying it's canon, though there are some internet comments saying they did. I think it's fine to ignore the video game that the directors had only a little input into when it comes to interpreting the movies.
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Jan 7, 2022 16:28
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Yeah, or, orrrr maybe it's somewhere in the middle and there are multiple countries and an entire planet's worth of matrix but most of the areas are incorrect or generic, and that's a deliberate choice of the creative team. Big cities are accurately named but inaccurately mapped, some cities are just "The City", chunks of the globe are probably just missing, everything's been created from scratch by machines to mimic a human being's habitat. It's a giant, world-sized zoo for humans after all. It's not one big city, but there is one big city. There are also other cities and other countries. Come to scenic Torkyo, Jopon. Or visit Landen, Ungland, home of Large Brent. See the Statue of Emancipation in New Yonk!
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Jan 7, 2022 16:35
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:The city just being a single city named "megacity" with a tokyo district is canon in the games which is offically canon. The MMO isn't canon. It's story contradicts and is ignored by all other matrix media including Ressurections. Even treating it as canon, you are interpreting technical and budgetry limitations of a niche videogame with the authorial intent of a completely different group of people, years earlier. Owlofcreamcheese posted:But even in the movie the merovingian lives in a rural castle and the Himalayan mountains are explicitly defined as 500 miles away. The Merovinigan lives in a rural castle in an unknown mountain range, which are explicitly defined as 500 miles away from the unknown american city where the story takes place. The Himalayans aren't mentioned. It's just "the mountains". Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's clearly not supposed to be a 1:1 recreation of real earth.I bet you can go to american city, tokyo, the part of paris around the eiffel tower, the pyramids and probably the moon. The places a videogame level would capture.[/b] That is never implied in the movie. It's just where the Merv built his rural retreat.
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Jan 7, 2022 16:40
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Vanilla Bison posted:Which seems fairly prescient for the current state of the Internet in particular, where information about where my eyeballs travel is harvested, packaged and sold for the benefit of obscure machine intelligences. But we do know why that’s done: the information is sold to companies looking to increase engagement, customer retention, and/or ad revenue. So this analogy depends on the existence of an alien advertising industry - in a world without any buying or selling. Ferrinus posted:I don't know why you're feigning all this confusion; it's like watching Bram Stoker's Dracula and pausing the movie to demand someone explain why everyone in it is using steam trains instead of high-speed light rail. I mean, all the materials required are right there! Is everyone just too stupid to build a hypersonic jet? There are many fairly obvious reasons for why hypersonic jets aren’t deployed for shipping. It’s not just a matter of technological determination, like ‘oh they hadn’t invented planes yet’. In this case, you seem to be implying that the matrix is dumb because the technology is ‘new’, and the alien machines simply haven’t developed a better system. Of course, the matrix has actually been running for over one hundred years. And the machines have already got a system for creating sapient, emotional programs that they can “exile” into the harsh world of the matrix. So if they literally feed off fear, anxiety, and other emotions, then the entire human life-support system is again redundant. They could just harvest “artificial” emotions. The biggest cost of doing business is pretty much always labor. This is why companies are always striving to implement new forms of automation. In the world of the Matrix films, you consequently do need a very good explanation for why the machines keep billions of people around. It’s not just ‘natural’ that they would do so. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Jan 7, 2022 |
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Jan 7, 2022 16:42
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King Vidiot posted:Yeah, or, orrrr maybe it's somewhere in the middle and there are multiple countries and an entire planet's worth of matrix but most of the areas are incorrect or generic, and that's a deliberate choice of the creative team. Big cities are accurately named but inaccurately mapped, some cities are just "The City", chunks of the globe are probably just missing, everything's been created from scratch by machines to mimic a human being's habitat. It's a giant, world-sized zoo for humans after all. It's not one big city, but there is one big city. There are also other cities and other countries. 35% of matrix residents are named dwigt rortugal
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Jan 7, 2022 16:45
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Halloween Jack posted:You're going back and forth and saying that we should make a very strict reading of some things onscreen but not others. I'm not going back and forth at all. I'm pointing out that some things are having meaning attributed to them where there is none. There's this big fuss made of street signs or branding not saying the specific name of the city on it. I'm telling you that this doesn't mean anything because it isn't nessecary for those things to explicity call out the name of whatever the city they're in is called. Again, I live in Nijmegen. You don't see the name plastered everywhere. It's not on busses, it's not on trains or police cars, or street signs. The University is not "Nijmegen University", it's Radboud Univeristy. The hospital isn't called Nijmegen hospital either. When I look at a street sign it will just say something like "Centrum, 2km" on it. I'm not actually sure where I would see the city name. I have never once taken this to mean Nijmegen doesn't have a name or that it's the only city that exists. The matrix is not filmed in Chicago. It was filmed in Sidney Australia, San Fransisco and Nashville. So there are no Chicago specific signs because Chicago isn't in the movie. The job of the production company is to make all three locations look like one location, which they successfully did. That they didn't make it look like one specific city you could name doesn't mean that no other city exists. It means that which city it is doesn't matter. The movie is being nonspecific on that detail. If they'd chosen to call it "chicago", "new york" or whatever, all that would've been gained is that nerds would go "but that's such and such a building! they don't have such and such a building in Chicago!" or "New York subway stations don't have green wooden ticket booths" or something. It has no utility to the story being told. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Jan 7, 2022 |
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Jan 7, 2022 17:02
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HorseLord posted:
It’s an American mountain range that is in America right next to Chicago, that seems like both where a rich European lives in a very alps like villa that also has a bunch of Tibetan spiritualism stuff like it’s the Himalayan mountains. Like it’s clearly just mountain zone the way the city is the city.
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Jan 7, 2022 17:04
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It’s an American mountain range that is in America right next to Chicago, that seems like both where a rich European lives in a very alps like villa that also has a bunch of Tibetan spiritualism stuff like it’s the Himalayan mountains. I've never said that the city in the matrix corrisponds to Chigago. I said "unknown american city". There are mountains within 500 miles of some American cities, and rich people can decorate however they want, because they are rich.
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Jan 7, 2022 17:07
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Agent Smith: Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Owlofcreamcheese: they must all live in the same city. a random guy's house is the edge of the world boundry. heathrow airport must be ignored
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Jan 7, 2022 17:11
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Owlofcreamcheese read The Da Vinci Code and thought that Langdon waking up in his bed in the epilogue meant that it was all a dream
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Jan 7, 2022 17:13
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here is the highway system of a totally normal and not simulated city
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Jan 7, 2022 17:16
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