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#it's SO. MUCH. SMARTER THAN THAT.

h0n3yk1tt3n · 1 month

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oooooh now im curious what your particular interpretation of the squip is 👀

you asked for it /lh

so i've basically always taken a liking to the "cold emotionless computer that cares only about results and not the suffering that must occur to get said results" approach. a squip's sole purpose is to improve its user's life, right? to have jeremy be horrified over the house fire and have the squip respond to people - teenagers - getting hurt with indifference is a chilling way to set off those alarm bells in jeremy's head that there's something more sinister going on. and then we get to the whole hivemind bit later under the idea that if everyone is squipped, everyone's goals line up with jeremy's and there are less hoops to jump through when human error is removed from the probability pool. (envisioning possible futures, infinite variables spawning infinite room for unfavorable outcomes, yadda yadda yadda.)

the squip presents this as being in jeremy's best interest. "I'm going to improve your life, Jeremy. If I have to take over the entire [student body/world] to do it." (whether the hivemind was a red herring and the plan was always for the squips to get deactivated is another discussion entirely, but it does further emphasize just how many variables the squip had to account for and how determined it was help and/or "help" jeremy.)

sure the squip "emotes" in canon, in so much that it mimics human emotion in order to connect with jeremy and build his trust in it. or in cases where it's being blatantly hurtful a la "everything about you sucks," it's used as an intimidation tactic to scare jeremy into obedience because it brings this air of "wow, it's a scientific fact that i'm awful" and so he wants to listen to its advice and earn its approval. then the squip turns it around halfway through bmc part 2 by praising what jeremy could be when not five seconds earlier it was berating what he was. no emotion the squip is feeling is "real" so it can change them on a dime to suit however it's trying to manipulate jeremy at any given time.

i think they have a really interesting dynamic and i'd love to explore the manipulation and abuse tactics the squip uses on jeremy to wear him down and make him seek out its approval by doing as it says for hopes that he'll be better for it. (see also the quasi-love-bombing in bmc part 2 after the squip basically nitpicked and insulted him for a song and a half and later telling him how much he's improved just before the pitiful children)... and i want to emphasize this as an abusive dynamic between a teenager and a parental/mentor figure.

look no further than the squip calling jeremy "slugger" at the end of bmc part 2 and the script describing it as "very father/son after the ballgame," or hell, the very nature of a squip guiding you through life. it makes a lot of sense for jeremy to latch onto the first "functional adult" figure to waltz into his life and offer to help him because look at his dad. (this isn't shade. i love mr. heere because he reminds me so much of how my dad was when i was in middle-high school.) and the squip leans into this role the moment it sees mr. heere. "That's the source of your genetic material?" "That's my dad, yeah." "We should double those push-ups." it's implicitly saying "yeah your dad is shit, listen to me instead. i can actually help you."

now in case it somehow wasn't clear, i don't want anything to do with technical difficulties as anything even vaguely resembling a ship. but it would be a disservice to not mention that the way that the squip can take away jeremy's bodily autonomy on a whim and the kind of psychological damage that can do to jeremy does draw heavy comparisons to sexually abusive dynamics. (i can talk about how the squip's involvement in dywh completely exacerbated chloe's actions to be far worse than they would've otherwise been if she was just drunkenly bumbling around for four minutes - barring the discussion of whether or not the squip actually intended on letting chloe jump jer's bones or if it knew that she wouldn't actually get that far - until i'm blue in the face, and i have.) that being said, beyond this parallel, it's really not something i want to be super literal about, except in the one scene where it's about as literal as it gets without officially getting there.

which is why the "i'll tenderly guide you // just take me inside you" line works. yes it's creepy. yes it invokes an upsetting idea of where squipemy shippers got their fuel. but it's supposed to be unsettling. this is supposed to be the first real red flag shooting off in the audience's brain saying "hey i think this thing is the bad guy actually," because literally everyone got squicked out by the idea of fake keanu reeves saying this to a teenager.

"ya know for all this talk about the squip being manipulative and creepy, that kinda contradicts the emotionless computer trying to accomplish its goal and Improve Its User's Life thing. why would the squip go out of its way to be gross and mean when it could just present itself more logically, or not have halloween be a shitshow?" well that wouldn't be as fun to watch, for one thing. and for two things, it further emphasizes how it doesn't care who it has to hurt to get what it wants, even if that involves hurting the person that they're guiding.

let's look at the musical after the play. jeremy still has all his popular friends. michael came back for him so they're besties again. his dad is making efforts to actually Be A Dad after presumably years of sulking. and christine doesn't hate him after everything! (you could go as far as to say they even got together if you go off the bway ending.) things are ok.

and it's all because the show progressed exactly how it did.

jeremy had to block michael out so that he'd research into squips and ultimately end up deactivating them all. he had to date brooke in retaliation to jake dating christine so that chloe would want to kill two birds with one stone by getting back at jake and being petty to brooke in the process. the fire had to happen so that jeremy could question how trustworthy his squip really was. jeremy had to blow up at his dad so that he'd get his shit together, enlist michael's help, and have him save jeremy at the play. etc etc ad nauseam. everything had to go Exactly Perfect so that jeremy could come out of it with his old friend, his new friends, a more active dad, and depending on how you view the ending, the girl he'd been chasing after.

all the instances of the squip being manipulative and abusive are all meant to add up for jeremy to slowly realize that this wasn't who he wanted to be. he didn't want to hurt people. he didn't want to endure constant criticism and scorn for who he was. he wanted to like himself and have a support system that liked him too. and he had to go through a lot of shit to realize i shouldn't have to live like this and rebel against the squip and resist the voices in his head so that he could take the steps to actually liking himself for who he was and not for what the squip told him to be.

is this to say that the squip is actually good? NOPE! jer's squip is a textbook lawful evil character right there. maybe neutral evil at best.

you think the constant berating and shocking isn't going to stick with jeremy? voices in my head enforces that the bad voices don't just go away, but that you have know which ones to actually listen to. he's still gonna have "everything about you sucks" floating around in his head until the cows freeze over. like rich, he's going to wish that the "correct" choices could just be given to him instead of accepting that making mistakes is just part of having free will. it came free with your fucking xbox. there is still angst baked into the concept of once having someone smarter than you conditioning you into a certain persona and then being utterly lost when it's gone, even if they were a giant dick to you.

but for all the shitty things that the squip did... it did improve jeremy's life. it gave him a larger friend group, a more present dad, the self worth to say "fuck you, i'm gonna live my life how i want," and for the times when it wasn't nitpicking and abusing... things were good. it built jeremy up too. it encouraged him during agtikbi despite the jake suckerpunch, it acted paternal at the end of bmc part 2, it sounded damn near excited when presenting squipped christine to jeremy. look, here she is! she likes you! i told you you'd have her! sure, we don't really see enough of these nuances after the time jump between act one and two to gauge what things looked like when they were at their best, but you can still see in these small moments that they're there.

and while i'm as much a fan of jeremy being haunted by how much he hurt michael (and by extension how much everyone got hurt, indirectly or not), i'd like to see him be haunted by the good times too. to kinda miss aspects of the squip. to miss not having to think for himself. and to feel bad about it because how can he say he misses the thing that burnt jake's house down. the thing that isolated michael for weeks on end. that led brooke on. that caused so. much. suffering. and jeremy misses it??? i think it would be really fun to explore that not just with jeremy, but with rich as well. it's fun to shit on the squips for being evil bastards and watch rich and jeremy heal and become gleefully spiteful toward everything their squips told them to be, but i also wanna see all the contradicting thoughts and confusion and self-loathing it took for them to get to that point.

that. is a fic i wanna read.

#asks #mj says shit #be more chill #squip #jeremy heere #rich goranski #this post went it places i didn't expect it to but godDAMN the squip is interesting #and a lot of times it's just boiled down to screaming insults at jeremy in fics. or thirst traps. or memes. which hey have fun but..#i want a capital v Villain that makes you Think. personally.#it's SO. MUCH. SMARTER THAN THAT.#squip squad #or the allusion to them ig

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beeg-bark · 6 months

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Being chased through the forest by two malicious doms, them just working as a unit, hunting you, saving their energy, that way they’re both still full of strength while you get weaker and weaker, more and more exhausted. What happens when they finally catch you, when you have no strength left to fight back or run? Slammed down into the forest floor, pinned against the foliage while they discuss how to ruin their freshly caught prey.

#dogbone #asexual kink #primal kink #predator prey #wolf pack dynamic type shit #they’re so much smarter than you #puppy space #fear kink #prey kink #predator kink #puppy sub #I didn’t know this was a kink I had #but #FUCK IT I GUESS???

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aprilcolours · 5 months

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i know im so late to this but i just read the secret history and heres my two cents

camilla and charles are absolutely analogous to apollo and artemis. celestial twins, always described as having holy light come off them, in which case henry becomes orion - death orchestrated by a jealous incestous brother, honor challenged. i wonder what connection this has with dogs: (artemis's love for hounds, camilla and the greyhound), henry killing a dog - the pregnant dog running across the road ('bad omen' he said)

#words #head so full #what was up with richard calling her boyish or masculine every two seconds??#i need someone much smarter than me to tell me every thing #the secret history #donna tartt

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rosepompadour · 6 months

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I lived forever in a dream world. Oh, how happy I was when I came home with a bag of books! Now I could sit undisturbed behind my curtain, bent comfortably forward as I took out the books one by one and enjoyed them to my heart's content. The height of my aspirations was that a man of noble birth, perfect in both looks and manners, someone like the Shining Prince in The Tale of Genji, would visit me just once a year in the mountain village where he would have hidden me like Lady Ukifune. There I should live my lonely existence, gazing at the blossoms and the autumn leaves and the moon and the snow, and wait for an occasional splendid letter from him. This was all I wanted; and in time I came to believe that it would actually happen.

Lady Sarashina, The Sarashina Diary (c. 1060)

#lady sarashina walked so emma bovary could run #she's much smarter than emma though #that level of dumbass would not fly in reality #especially not in 11th century japan #when virtually every woman in the country kept an absolute straight-up BANGER of a diary #lady sarashina #literature

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areyoudoingthis · 8 months

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I've realized what it all boils down to for me: stede's defeated izzy just as absolutely as he defeated nigel and chauncey. it's the stedeness of it all that's triumphed here. izzy swore up and down that his way was better and stede's softness was despicable, that it had infected and corrupted his captain, and all that only led to the loss of every last thing he ever believed in. no ed didn't love him. no he wasn't blackbeard's right hand man. no he wasn't irreplaceable or memorable to the legend he worshipped. he's just an angry lonely man who has absolutely nothing left. and then the crew takes him in. and then stede saves his life and allows him to stay on his ship. izzy's been undone in the most unfixable way possible at this point, and the only way forward that isn't death is embracing what stede represents and changing to be more like him

#they're so much smarter than me I'd have just killed him #but this is better!!!!!!#he has to stay alive and accept that he was wrong and stede was right!!!!#do you understand how that's absolutely the worst thing in the universe for him #ofmd spoilers #alex watches ofmd

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silvermoon424 · 8 months

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So fucking sick of the "infinite growth/everything needs to be the next biggest hit or we're axing it" mantra of capitalism.

It's not enough for a company to be successful and sustainable, it needs to have record profits every single quarter or the shareholders and investors start panicking. It's not enough for a new tv series to have good ratings and loyal fanbase, it needs to be as big as Stranger Things or Game of Thrones or it's getting canceled. Products that are a tiny bit more expensive to make but are loved by loyal customers have their ingredients switched with shitty, inferior, yet cheaper versions that save a little money at the expense of some of the customers leaving.

This entire ideology is so self-destructive but who cares, it made a handful of people a tiny bit richer in the short term, right?

#like I feel like I am SO MUCH smarter than the average capitalist #I would simply go with sustainable growth and happy customers #fuck capitalism #anti capitalism #eat the rich #rant

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aroflareon · 3 months

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marina would absolutely make a robot so smollusk would walk around in the real world. it is her and pearls child after all

#aroflare art #side order #side order spoilers #doodle #smollusk #i know tartar another AI doesn't need a big computer but tbh i think smollusk is so so much smarter than tartar LOL

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samblueberry · 11 months

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There's something about this paragraph in Artificial Condition that makes me reread it a hundred times before I move on:

One by one the file downloads had stopped. One had signaled that it would try to decoy SecUnit attention away from the others, and three acknowledged. One had heard screams from the control center and diverted there to try to save the humans trapped inside, and two acknowledged. One had stayed at the entrance to a corridor to try to buy time to reach SecSystem, and one acknowledged. One reported reaching SecSystem, then nothing.

There's something in the repetition of the word "one," the way it's used to count the loss of life. But also how the word invokes individuality in a series that has so much commentary about personhood. Each ONE makes decisions based on the changing situation. And each time ONE acts, ONE is lost, and every loss hurts so much.

Idk man (gender neutral), I've read this book 17 thousand times but I still need to go stand in the corner and have an emotion.

#there's SO much here about personhood too #and contrasting comfortunit personhood with secunit personhood is so interesting #but is another post entirely #and i imagine has been done already by smarter ppl than me #the murderbot diaries #artificial condition

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foileadeux · 3 months

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