Charlie Brooker's BLACK MIRROR

Also yeah weird fetishization of american stereotypes by the british in this show is hilarious bc they’re about half right or something is always off/odd about it

where are people talking about "electric dreams"? 'kill all others' feels like the best black mirror episode in a while

Haven’t watched it

HOOS recommending it?

its hit or miss overall, some great performances mixed in with boring or uncompelling plots, or inventive ideas paired with wooden acting. half very good and half meh. it's generally distinct enough in tone and approach from black mirror but 'kill all others' felt like it could have been a black mirror episode.

a whole episode starring steve buscemi ffs and i could not have been less interested in the outcome

I thought 'The Commuter' was great.

yeah, haunting!

so this choose your own adventure thing then...

Just started the first run-through.

First niggle: when he gets on the bus The Now cassette starts mid-song but the tape is on the run-in because you can see the pink tape.

insufferable

More fucking Brooker crap.

― Damo Suzuki's Parrot, Tuesday, 12 February 2013 01:22 (five years ago) Bookmark

damn this is frumious as hell

I thought it was ok. Not the strongest black mirror but not the worst.

the tree structure allows you five to six endings averaging 90 minutes, but I don't expect anyone's going to get to the other 3.5 hours of footage by the end of the first day

someone post when they figure out how to unlock the next scene by giving the therapist's emergency phone number, we did not get it right. 0451 was of course one number short.

It’s 20541 iirc?

ah! perhaps the secondary fork responds to 20451 instead of 20541

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAtAyycx-uY

I'm more impressed at the ambition and how seamless the experience was than the ~90 min of story/acting/dialogue I watched, which was so-so. I think the concept and the platform narrow a lot of what the story can be, and it felt similar to the Zero Escape video game series, which had more possibilities and a much more interesting story (but, of course, has the freedom of a video game). would love to learn about how they wrote and made the episode tho

the therapist's phone number was completely spelled out in my viewing, not sure if that's always the case. would bet there's some Easter eggs for other numbers but have no desire to try anything out

Yeah i probably won’t return to this. I wonder if it really has staying power as an approach to storytelling. Something tells me it doesn’t—choose your own adventure books never seriously caught on, much as I loved Midnight at Monster Mansion as a seven year old.

Choose Your Own Adventure, as published by Bantam Books, was one of the most popular children's series during the 1980s and 1990s, selling more than 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998

They were no Fighting Fantasy

Popular children’s genre fine

But it didn’t seem to have a lasting impact on fiction, generally

Could say that about almost anything that isn't vanilla Realism tbf

It is strange that no child of the '80s has attempted a literary take on CYOA. Unless they have and I missed it?

dude those books were huge. a friend of mine wrote a Fringe Festival play that was a Choose Your Own Adventure and it sold out most performances.

xpost

I think half the books in my 3rd grade classroom's library were CYOA lol

Although it may have been an influence on e.g. House of Leaves now that I think about it

I loved CYOA. I think we watched 2 hours of this last night. The storyline was ok but it was still kind of fun.

oh shit, i forgot about house of leaves. i should read that again.

I did get annoyed at some of the choices that really had only one correct answer very early on. like the whole "do you make the game on-site or at home" choice. in a real CYOA, you'd never hit a story-ender that fast.

I did intentionally sabotage the computer for LOLs tho

I had to stop watching last night and wondered if it'd save all my choices when I restarted. apparently it does!

this was a semi-literary (half-literary, half-pulpy) attempt at a recent CYOA which was worth a read

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Be-Not-Chooseable-Path-Adventure/dp/0735212198/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1546098189&sr=8-3&keywords=ryan+north

he did "romeo and/or juliet" too
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Romeo-Juliet-Ryan-North/dp/0356508536/ref=pd_sbs_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0356508536&pd_rd_r=742609aa-0b80-11e9-8210-ed08ba772cb1&pd_rd_w=xjzYS&pd_rd_wg=oOt6c&pf_rd_p=18edf98b-139a-41ee-bb40-d725dd59d1d3&pf_rd_r=4N1MK93MDEH9ZV9QSS58&psc=1&refRID=4N1MK93MDEH9ZV9QSS58

There are a few other CYOA for adults. Alina Reyes' Behind Closed Doors and Life's Lottery by Kim Newman come to mind.

I think the reason why there aren't that many literary CYOA books is because the format is naturally ludic, which doesn't gel with a lot of literature. Even Oulipo's ludic qualities are more to do with creation than reception. Elements that make up CYOA are, however, pretty frequently used in literary & avant-garde fiction: non-linearity, metafic, hypertextuality, etc. There's some interesting stuff on Milorad Pavic and hyperfiction here, though the English is a little stilted.

Anyway, I thought this was a lot of fun. I don't really expect Black Mirror to be anything other than "entertaining dystopian sci-fi" and it still surprises me to see people criticise it for not being more than that. Like, no, Brooker's not even close to being a genius, but this is p fun, right????

in a real CYOA, you'd never hit a story-ender that fast.

Ha, I've definitely experienced 1-choice story-enders in modern IF takes on CYOA. So perhaps not period-appropriate but definitely *a thing*.

Yeah, one of the things I liked was that some choices ended quickly like I remember the books doing.

interesting, emil.y. will read that link.

I have not watched this but as someone who writes choose-your-own-adventure things, as someone who finds Black Mirror a bit too on-the-nose in general, and most importantly as someone who has seen the marvel of interactive cinema that is "I'm Your Man," I am a bit skeptical

(also there is plenty of literary fiction with interactive elements, and plenty of interactive games with literary elements, although not always CYOA as such, and a lot of it is lost to now-outdated technology. most recently, Kate Atkinson's Life After Life so very much wanted to be but wasn't quite there)

basically a lot of the Discourse is starting to strongly resemble old rec.arts.int-fiction arguments, and no one wants that

in a real CYOA, you'd never hit a story-ender that fast.

Dude I remember the "you are a ninja" one where early on in the book if you choose to train exclusively in the dark it ended almost immediately after someone blinds you with a bright light and kills you

lol

Finally got through all the Bandersnatch possibilities.

The "Netflix is controlling me" option was hilarious

first watch culminated in the 'dies on a train with mom' ending. after the acid trip / netflix deconstructions, returning to an ending where you were asked to have emotional investment in the 'character' felt pretty stale

then saw the ending where, after the Netflix/Program-And-Control themes that are ostensibly about your control over the character, the programmer turns around and tells his therapist that his solution to finish the game was to add lots of 'choices' which don't actually branch, increasing the illusion of free will while in fact maximizing the control over the player. then Colin's daughter shows up to design the Netflix game you've just been played by, and that's the only ending where you get a five star review. even with five branched endings, you're in a funnel: as meta-messages go for a TV show, I'm fine with that one

https://www.thewrap.com/black-mirror-bandersnatch-post-credits-scene-secret-ending-easter-egg-tuckersoft-spectrum-bus/

no masterpiece, but the gaming episodes of this show do a fair job of bridging the spectacular divide in popular culture between gamers / non-gamers, so that's my lens for these

as someone who writes choose-your-own-adventure things

I didn't know you did this! Are you a commercial author of such things or is there stuff to try out online?

The tape plays some…rather unpleasant sounds, and the scene ends. You can listen to it here. So that’s weird! For a minute nobody was sure what it meant, but then some enterprising individuals figured out that the sound is actually data, and the tape is for a ZX Spectrum computer — the computer that Stefan was making his game on.

'enterprising' or 'over 40 years old'. i got this 'bonus' first time around, and recognised the quintessential sound of my childhood, but i guess I'm not enterprising as i didn't think it might be real speccy code.

I think it may have tipped their inclusion of this particular Tomita album as well

http://www.isaotomita.net/recordings/bermuda.html

The computer encoded signals found on this album are in a format known as TARBEL. Using this system, messages may be encoded in a recording via audio signals. The TARBEL format was used as a way to save data onto an audio cassette recorder in the mid to late 1970s before the IBM PC and hard disk drives. The sound is familiar to anyone who has used an old tape interface (lots of 'piii's and 'gaaa's!) and can be decoded with a computer programmed to recognise the TARBEL system.

xp -- "commercial" in the sense that I've been paid for it but the specifically CYOA thing is not done/online yet