Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1590
The Great Salt Lake is gonna disappear soon, Platner's disqualifying tattoo, Trump BS, my plot for a (better) sequel to Tron: Legacy
Good morning hi hello boy howdy what is UP. Seven fifty-four AM on this twenty-second of October, twenty twenty-five. My finger is still numb been weeks now do not like.
Important correction I am not going to Gresham I am going to Clackamus and Canby this weekend. GMHHAY regrets the error.
I would like to personally thank the pharmaceutical industry because my mood is not at all commensurate with the burning of the world, thanks to David Robertson, David Wong, and Joseph Krushinski, of the Eli Lilly Corporation for inventing the 31st most prescribed drug in the United States, with 18 million people taking it. It was prescribed for pain and that’s why I am taking it, honest, really, but, you know, its main use is as an anti-depressant. And I started taking it about a month ago and while I am still very bent out of shape about the state of the world, I am somewhat less, um, I don’t want to say suicidal but, rather, catatonic than I was previously. So, that is nice.
The president is stealing $200 million right before our eyes, which is just really something. This, I think, is the final moment for the Republicans. If they can’t put their foot down when he literally, blatantly, undeniably and obviously steals $200 million in cash from the United States government, they all need to go to jail.
Also he tore down the White House? Oh sorry, only a third of it. A building he does not own. Without asking anyone for permission.
Amazing. Insane.
Hey did you know the Great Salt Lake is gonna disappear in five years? Well, that is unless the Republican legislature of Utah bothers to put limitations on the Republican farmers of alfalfa that are using up all the water. Hahaha yeah right like that will ever happen. No more Great Salt Lake. That really is something. Just… poof. Gone.
Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!
We are listening to the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack to the Tron: Ares film, which, by all accounts, was not a good film, though this is a bangin’ soundtrack. I am about as much of a Tron fan as anyone and I couldn’t be bothered to go see it, though I now know the general outline of the plot. I am sure it looks awesome, though. But the plot sounded so dumb. And, worse, it just seems to ignore the bulk of the other films? Aside from a, like, Dude cameo?
I spent a good forty minutes last night laying in bed and thinking of a better plot to a sequel to Tron: Legacy. Also, for the record, Tron Legacy was a pretty good film, invented the “soft reboot,” tied in very nicely to the original film, had twists and turns and looked awesome. It gets a bad rap. It was not bad and grossed over four hundred million, or four times the box office of Tron: Ares.
A rare miss for Nine Inch Nails. If you want my opinion, Trent shoulda insisted on a producer credit and script veto power.
Here is my plot to a sequel to Tron: Legacy, at least as far as I got last night. Real-time gap between TL and this new movie, so, been like fifteen years. In that time, Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde have separated. Olivia, you will recall, plays Quorra, a true intelligent artificial lifeform called an Iso that has made it to our world. Garret, aka Sam, and Quorra are seen in the last shot of the film riding off on a motorbike in the real word. This is huge! This has the potential to be an ending like Ex Machina. Quorra is a marvel and she has escaped into the real world and no one knows.
SO. In my film, fifteen years later, Quorra and Sam are separated. They had a good relationship, but Sam was driven by demons worrying about his father inside the grid, and also became more and more invested in an irrational belief that Flynn did not die when he re-integrated with Clu. He has slowly turned away from the real world and focused on the goings-on in the grid.
Quorra, by contrast, has discovered that she, well, she can basically control all computers in our world, can influence and reprogram them all at will. Digitally all powerful. Except it takes a toll on her and she does not like it one bit and she is a good person/being. Thusly she tries to avoid being around computers at all. This is obviously hard in our modern society and it has caused her to withdrawal to that signal-free area in West Virginia, The United States National Radio Quiet Zone.
Of course, even in the USNRQZ, there are computers and she does her best to avoid them, living off grid in a cabin. But she still needs to earn a living (she works at a Food Bank or some shit) and buy groceries and shit like that. It takes a lot of willpower for her to not impact a computer when she, like, goes to the store to buy flour.
As such, a cult of deep-internet researching geeks have developed around her. She is a myth, she is something that they see the flintiest of evidence about in the code of the world. They seek her, they do not know much about her, only rumors and speculation.
And Sam, of course, is aware of them and tries to thwart them.
But they are aware of Sam, and have deep researched him and have discovered his secret and they are slowly getting closer to successfully building their own scanner portals to send them into the Grid, which they only have a dim awareness of. The barriers between the two worlds are about to fall, there will no longer be just the one portal.
All this exists in our world now, on the cusp (supposedly) of general AI, which of course already exists in Tron, has existed since the 70’s in the guise of the MCP and now in a more powerful form of Quorra.
Meanwhile in the grid, they too are aware of the real world’s impending discovery of AGI. They debate it as much as we do, they’re not sure it’s really happening. BUT they know that forces (subroutines planted by the original MCP to keep away the competition) inside the grid have been consistently hampering our AGI efforts for decades, in an cold war-esque effort to ensure we never develop, on the outside, the AGI tech they have on the inside. Because they see that as a threat to their very existence. They know they have the original MCP to thank for this and so he has developed a bit of a more positive reputation through the years. This will have repercussions.
And Tron — the actual character, remember him — survived his drop into the sea at the end of Legacy and it has taken him a while but he is now back in shape and has recovered his memories. He sets out to find the new CluFlynn and win them to his cause of keeping the real world from discovering AGI. He succeeds, but CluFlynn is a mercurial character. Both of his personalities rage within him, never quite sure what he’s gonna do. Tron has been ramping up the Grid’s efforts to hamper our AI progress, hence why we were told three, four, five years ago AGI is just around the corner but it never arrives. Tron is effectively carrying MCP’s torch which of course causes friction all around.
But despite the Grid’s efforts, we in the real world are slowly making progress in AGI nonetheless, so they need to try new approaches.
Their plans focus on a Sam Altman-like svengali character whom they decide if they can stop/kill/discredit (preferred approaches differ), the resulting financial turmoil will kill off AI research in our world for another generation.
And they decide the best tools at their disposal to accomplish this are the estranged Sam and Quorra.
If only they can find them, and convince them to aid their cause.
That’s about as far as I got before I fell asleep.
Look. Being the most generous I can be, I can imagine a misguided dude who does not possess my supreme judgement getting drunk in Croatia and getting a giant Totenkopf tattoo. I mean, hey, the Death in June logo is almost the same thing and back in my younger says I coulda been fooled, I suppose. Though that was pre-internet. BUT ANYWAY. Yes, sure, you got drunk and someone convinced you to get a Nazi tattoo. Maybe that happens to good people, sure, let’s roll with that.
Because then I am forced to reckon with the fact that for, what? Ten years? Twenty? years you never figured out what it meant, and you never got the thing removed or blacked over.
And then you decided to fucking run for the US Senate with a giant Nazi tattoo.
I’m sorry that is a bridge too far for me. That’s not just one-time drunk in Croatia poor judgement, which I can fucking respect. This is a larger, longer, more profound lapse in judgement. And this is the US fucking Senate. This is the big leagues and it is too important.
Also your mom can not know what a Totekopf was but it’s a bridge too far to believe a self-professed Reddit shit-poster had no idea.
ALSO what fucking leg do we, the opposition, even have to stand on with Nazi republican chats and Nazi Trump nominees, and Nazi flags in Republican congressmen’s offices, if we’re just like “yeah it’s cool, our hot new Senator was a Nazi too.”
Platner could have handled this in a way that would have worked. I mean, look, I am not a millennial or anything, but I never had a Nazi phase? It’s not, like, a given that all dudes do! BUT EVEN THEN, had he blacked it out, talked about it like a mistake of his youth, gotten in front of it, held himself up as an inspiration for young men who get embroiled and want out, then yeah, I could probably get behind it.
But now? Nuh uh.
And look, I don’t know anything about Janet Mills other than she is too old to be a US Senator that I can get behind. But you know what? There are eight declared candidates in the Maine US Senate Democratic Primary, one more who has filed paperwork, two more who have declared interest, and one more who everyone thinks might run. And they seem like they have credentials! The guy who ran last time. A former DoD policy writer. A cybersecurity professional. Katie Porter’s former chief of staff (ummmmmm maybe not), the Maine Attorney General, a former state senator and the former Speaker of the Maine House.
Plenty of fish in the sea, boy. The harbor ain’t the whole sea bah duh bump.
Florence and the Machine have a new song, and the chorus refrain says “streetlamps bursting overhead” repeatedly, and as a former member of the seminal 90’s shoegaze band Rockets Burst from the Streetlamps, I would like to welcome Florence to the fold. I assume that she, too, has read Anaïs Nin’s masterful prose poem A Spy in the House of Love. Oh shit wait was it that or House of Incest oh my god my memory is slipping anyway nice job Florence.
Jane Jane Jane but what about Jane she is such a lunatic. So much energy couldn’t sit still at Taco Tuesday dinner yesterday. Even though she got less sleep than I did. Also she has this habit where every time we ask her to do or not do something she immediately does the opposite. Like within a second, without even hesitating. It really is something and I am very tired of it. I am working on it with her but nothing seems to stick. It is exhausting. I try to talk to her directly about it she can offer no explanation. I suspect it is one of those things where I gotta watch a Doctor Becky Tik Tok to figure out what to do but Tik Tok is awful and Doctor Becky wigs me out she is too thin.
So I guess I’ll just keep despairing over this endless rebellion.
All right today we have a playlist of 20 or so songs that have been sitting at the top of my To Investigate playlist for weeks, months, as I like them and keep listening to them before I get to the albums to clear out. But it is time to move on, so I am clearing them out, so here they are for you. All new, all good shit. All over the map stylistically. Not especially sequenced but it works anyway. Enjoy.
Okay byeee.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.