average gay guy problems: i have been hooking up with my hockey rival, but now i am developing feelings for him and nobody can know! >_< also nobody serves ginger ale
average lesbian problems: my wife died when an alien virus turned all of humanity into a hivemind and then said hivemind sent a woman who looks like a female version of my romantasy hero to charm me into complacency, which i resisted at first but then i got lonely and now i think i am falling for her >_< also john cena said the hivemind is eating people
carol: in toxic yuritopia. georgia o'keeffe painting in her house. in the cuddle pile. seven billion people screaming and cheering for her new wip. thinking hard about pronouns. saving the world via the most dubiously consensual sex ever conceived. waking up from said dubiously consensual sex (likely precisely calculated to be the scientifically best sex possible) and entering a writing mania in which she decides to take her formerly male romantic lead and make her a trans lesbian. thinking about her dead wife to keep her spirit strong in these trying times.
manousos: ass out. wounds weeping. in medical debt.
I’m not kidding that I UGLY sobbed during the Manousos travel sequence. I have never seen a more beautiful representation of the desire for human connection. The shot of the rock with the drawings done of early humans and animals representing one of the first modes of externalizing thoughts and sharing ideas before written language was developed… Manousos going to painstaking lengths to learn English so that he can communicate with Carol in her tongue when they finally meet… The breathtaking scenery around him that he cannot even fully appreciate because he has no one to share it with…
The hivemind has already seen the whole world and can’t experience awe. They don’t have to work to learn a language, which is an act of tremendous love and respect when shared between humans. In gaining all of the knowledge of every brain on the planet, they lost all sense of empathy and determination and spirit, which Manousos embodies at every turn.
thinking about the significance of “mi mamá es una cabrona” when it comes to Manousos and how he deals with Carol. No wonder he’s funny now. No wonder he doesn’t become angry or cut Carol off like the other survivors. He must be so relieved, so overjoyed, to show up in Albuquerque New Mexico after months of blank, dim, evil, smiling, acquiescent faces to be confronted with someone he’s known his entire life. He only gets angry at Carol when she’s not being a bitch. He’s a bitch. He was raised by a bitch. He travelled over 8000 miles and found another bitch. They’re going to save the world.
LOVE the juxtaposition of the hive presenting itself as truest human connection, but being assimilation, erasure of culture, literally grown in a lab vs all of carols beautifully imperfect connections with other humans. wife that loved her too much to say she found carols passion project “just fine”. fan who crocheted ugly hats that carol kept. woman she got off on the wrong foot with and hates her forever now. teenage girl she gave ignored advice to. man she morally opposes who makes her breakfast and cringes when she suggests she stick around. man who traveled 9000km to talk with her in languages learned from book-on-tape and high-school class. messy clumsy organic human connection.
The thing about the Hive is that I don’t think it’s hiding any sinister intentions - I think that its “good” intentions ARE its sinister intentions. The Hive has taken the “good” intention of never killing and made it so cartoonishly literal and shallow that it has lost any legitimacy as a truly moral imperative. Like, a definition of killing that includes picking apples is not morally coherent. Their “thou shalt not kill” ethos is leading to mass death, but who really gives a shit about people dying? Not the Hive! The important thing is that everyone agrees that killing is wrong and that everyone avoids doing the wrong thing. If that indirectly leads to a lot of people dying - oh well. 🤷♀️ Isn’t the breaking of a few billion eggs worth it to have such a beautiful and moral Consensus? It’s true that people will starve, but they’ll do it with a smile on their face! Isn’t an existence without conflict so wonderful, so correct?
The only thing that the Hive finds genuinely distressing is the existence of voices outside of the beautifully perfect Consensus. The fact that Carol disagrees with their premise is so highly distressful that the Hive starts self-destructing whenever she gets too forceful about it. The Hive can pretty easily bear the cost of mass death, but what it can’t bear at ALL is criticism. The Hive thinks it solved the trolley problem when it’s actually just refusing to engage in any meaningful way in issues of ethics and reframing its refusal as evidence of its inherent goodness. Because conflict = evil, therefore avoidance of conflict = good
the entire kusimayu scene was devastating but to me the worst part was that by Joining she not only lost her individuality but her culture died with her. immediately the hivemind stopped chanting and singing and speaking the quechuan language and rolled up their blankets and packed up their things and walked away. the animals were set free and the goat that kusimayu had been cradling so lovingly just minutes earlier chased after the hivemind wearing kusimayu’s body and bleated for attention and love and got none because there is no one left to care specifically enough to give it.
I searched up the line “you cannot give me anything, because all the you have is stolen” from Pluribus and somewhat ironically the google ai perceived that as a prompt insulting it.
I didn’t mean it in that way but, yknow what? I agree. The LLM is built off of people’s work who didn’t consent; it can give me nothing of its own, just a generation of plausible words.
