vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
I don't think wish Nikki is necessarily a demon, but I don't think she's just Nikki + obsessive love for Bear.
In her first few moments of existing, she misspeaks and says her cat just died instead of Bear's. And while I can buy some of her behaviors as being normal person + overwhelming obsession, I just don't think cooking the cat or even the cat shrine are something a person with common sense would do as a grand gesture for their beloved.
With the way the real Nikki seems to surface and freak out from time to time, I think it is obvious wish Nikki is essentially a separate entity created by the wish.
I also just think that the reactions of the two magic shop employees, and the complaints department guy are a few degrees off from a normal person's. I'm not sure if they're all wish personas submerging a real human, or demons or what, but none of them seemed quite right to me. They were all too blase about the very dangerous product they were selling.
Yeah, I think Bear was a selfish coward, but I'm not sure he had a lot of good options once he had the conversation with customer service and was sure what was happening and how he could end it.
Sacrificing yourself to save someone you essentially accidentally whammied with a wish would be very noble, but it is a tall ask, and I'm not sure most people put in Bear's situation would be able to go through with it. And the other out he is given, when the real Nikki begs him to kill her isn't exactly great either, since he's going to be the prime suspect if her body is ever discovered. So he's got two no win options, his life is over in either option that "fixes" his mistake.
Bear is absolutely selfish and not concerned about the real Nikki at all, and even his actions at the end, trying to get Ian to make it so he had never made a wish can be read as manipulative (sure, it would presumably undo Sarah's murder, and get rid of all the social consequences for Bear and Nikki, but it also probably leaves Bear able to make a new wish, and I don't think that's an accident. Even at the end he was trying to find a way to get an alternate version of his wish granted, knowing full well what it entailed.)
I think Bear's morally bad in a banal way, but I think if he had been "good" but not saintly, I'm not sure how things could have turned out much better for him or Nikki. I guess if Bear had sought out more One Wish Willows before someone died, and tried to calmly explain things to Ian, there's a small chance Ian would take it seriously enough to actually make the wish to undo things, but I have my doubts.
vorpa-glavo
19hr ago
It's just an odd sort of moralizing. Bear was just making a wish on a tacky toy from a New Age store, and it is clear from his own disbelief at Nikki's reaction that night and into the next day that he had expected the One Wish Willow to be about as effective as a birthday wish or a wish on a penny fountain or a falling star.
Maybe it's a bit loser coded to literally wish for someone to fall in love with you, but he had almost no reason to think that he had a genuine wishing artifact. And even if he truly wanted what he wished for, it's not like you want people's free will to be subverted so you can get your wish. If you throw a penny in a fountain and wish for your crush to fall in love with you, you're usually just hoping that they'll organically fall in love with you (however contradictory that is with the action you're taking.) If you wish to get your big promotion on a wishing star, you're not really hoping that your boss will be possessed by a demon and forced to give you a promotion.
Bear factually derailed Nikki's life, but he did so largely in ignorance of what he was doing.
I would chalk it to either an angler fish strategy, or the OWW having a sense of dramatic irony.
Since there are enough OWWs in the world that you can see other people's wishes granted, maybe the OWW lures people in by granting a subset of wishes not touching on human agency in a completely straightforward way. That way, it generates positive word of mouth and gets more people to use it for the kinds of wishes it likes to corrupt.
Alternatively, maybe the OWW just knew with high probability that the guy would never get to use the money because of Nikki, so it was happy to grant the wish for the dramatic irony his death would produce.
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
'anyone in the world' clearly includes psychotic, insane people that do crazy things like killing themselves to further political or religious causes. The magic is entirely about non-consensually shifting the behavior of a regular woman into the most insane possible woman infatuated with main character. You can probably find evidence of separate insane women doing all of the insane things Nikki does in the movie.
While I think there is ambiguity in Bear's wording, I actually interpreted the wish to be for "Nikki to love [him] more than [she loves] anyone [else] in the fucking world" as opposed to for "Nikki to love [him] more than anyone in the fucking world [loves anyone else]."
This is part of why I say it is a monkey's paw, or some other flavor of asshole genie. Almost any wish in plain English is going to have enough ambiguity to ruin the person who makes the wish. (You wish for a million dollars? Okay, it's a million dollars in pennies and falls on your head and kills you.) The sign of a "good" genie, is that you make a wish in plain English, and they interpret in a way you would endorse via coherent extrapolated volition, or they at least make a good faith effort to give you what you asked for with no nasty gotchas.
If the One Wish Willow will just give you a million dollars in a pretty straightforward way, but it creates a demonic persona when you make a love potion wish, that's an entity that is out to get you in some way.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
The creator of the film Obsession, Curry Barker, claims that the One Wish Willow is not a monkey's paw, but I feel like this doesn't make sense, or, if it is true, it undermines the point of the film.
Bear wishes for "Nikki to love [him] more than anyone in the fucking world." An aligned One Wish Willow should not have made her obsessive to the point of murder and cat-cooking. Even if you follow the logic that the real Nikki would never fall in love with him, so it has to create a Freaky Nikki persona who would, that also just isn't what he asked for.
Even if he was more in love with the idea of Nikki, than in her in her full personhood, Freaky Nikki is not Nikki, and not just in the minimal way that his wish should have implied.
I feel like Barker's statement implies that a more evil wish, like, "I wish for Nikki's personality to be completely erased and replaced with a robot persona that carries out my orders exactly as I intend them" would have had better results than Bear's comparatively less evil wish. But since the film is a classic "be careful what you wish for" horror movie, I find it easier to believe that the wish granter is actively malevolent in how it interprets any wish that impacts human agency, and even a wish like that will have a bad outcome somehow.
Like, is the take away really supposed to be that Bear simply should have waited to get a better sense of the limitations and proclivities of his wish-granting artifact, by watching other people use theirs, and then make his wish after running it by a lawyer? Surely not.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
But isn't some of the complaint that even aside from plagiarism and outright lies, Arday's actual function was to be the guy who gave cover for the "destroy whiteness" or "Britain has always had black people" lines of thought that make it harder for anti-immigration people and white Britons to remain equal in their own society?
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
I think being AI skeptical is fine up to a point.
Doubting AI can do things it has been able to do for four months is different from doubting capabilities we haven't seen yet, and might never see. I think there are smart reasons to believe AI might never be significantly more capable than it is (though I don't agree with this position.)
Even from a pure business perspective, I'm open to the idea that AI might be a bubble. But I have forced myself to watch Youtube videos by people confidently predicting that AI will all go away when the bubble pops because it is too expensive to run, and I just feel like they genuinely haven't done the first bit of research on the topic. Like, how hard is it to find out about local models for both text and images?
At the very least, now that these things are out in the wild, there's no way that the open weight LLM and image model genie is ever going back in the bottle. The unit economics of frontier AI may never work, but AI slop is here forever.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I don’t think this will go the way you imagine it will. At least, there’s a lot of room for people to change their minds. I don’t think it will help that the concerns about water and toxins are basically fake news. The challenge that AI will rapidly change society is more serious and I think there are a lot of serious anxieties mixed in with that.
I think the problem is that a good portion of the public has these points precisely backwards. They believe in the stupid water and toxin points, while believing that AI is all empty hype that will surely end in a rapture-like bubble pop that will magic everything away and make all technology revert back to 2021 again.
I've had frustrating discussions with people in my life who say that all the data center build out isn't worth it for "a better search engine." I had to make the point that if it is all hype, then they don't need to worry about the environmental effects of data centers, as we'll have a 5-10 year period of build up and usage and then all the infrastructure will be shut down and put on moth balls. The idea that LLMs and generative AI might actually be something new and interesting is not very widespread.
Heck, my D&D group has people who think that Mythos-tier cybercapabilities literally do not exist, and I still have art friends who act as if bad hands are an inevitability for AI art.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Sadly, I've spoken to enough friends in real life to know that it isn't astroturfed. People are using all sorts of discredited arguments to argue against AI datacenters. It's all the worst parts of NIMBYism come to roost.
I've seen that adaptation, and I think it dropped central themes of the story. Xenia truly is central to that story, and I don't remember it being emphasized at all in the TV movie adaptation.
I think there are valid complaints you could make of how hamfistedly Nolan crammed "Zeus's law"/xenia into the narrative, but his choice to try and include it at least makes it feel more like the original epic in some ways.
(I say that even if I also think Nolan removed a lot of opportunities to emphasize the importance of xenia in the story, like Polyphemus saying his xenia was to eat Odysseus last, or Nausicaa and the Phaeacians finally showing how civilized folk treat Odysseus with hospitality, which also works as a good reminder of what sacred laws the suitors are violating right before the final arc of the epic.)
I will say that I would have liked Odysseus' cunning and trickster tendencies to shine through more. I couldn't really see Matt Damon's Odysseus attempting to lie to Athena-in-disguise, much to the latter's delight.
I think the problem is that Hollywood thinks that everything needs to be "improved" -- not sure when this happened
The nature of storytelling is that new retellings emphasize different things than the original.
Almost no Westerner retelling the Prodigal Son story ever mentions the famine that happens in the middle of the story. The Song of Hiawatha emphasizes different things than the original Indian version of the story. Sir Orpheo gives the Orpheus myth a happy ending.
Hollywood didn't invent changing stories.
I was personally pretty lukewarm on Frankenstein. (Spoilers below for GDT's adaptation.)
I feel like making the monster immortal undermined the way Frankenstein actually overcame death (by animating a creature made out of dead people), and while I thought it did a good job highlighting parts of the original novel I hadn't picked up on the first time I read it (such as the implicit comparison between the polar expedition and Frankenstein's experiments), I also just think it made a lot of del-Toro-esque changes that actually undermined many strengths of the original story.
Having no aborted female creature, and making Frankenstein kill his fiancee instead of the monster, actually felt like weird attempts by del Toro to minimize some of the worst things the monster does in the story, but it makes the monster less human not more. In the original story, the monster is a true tabula rasa, and it is because he is treated like a monster by most of the world that he lashes out and kills people around Frankenstein. But in del Toro's telling, the monster is a sort of living embodiment of the trauma of the war that killed the people he is a composite of, and not truly a blank slate. And he doesn't do bad things like kill Frankenstein's relatives, because del Toro thinks monsters shouldn't do bad things or something.
Like I get it, this is the guy who saw Creature from the Black Lagoon, and sympathised with the woman-kidnapping creature instead of the woman, but does he not see how Frankenstein's monster is actually more compellingly human if he does horrible things?
I guess some of the problem is, has the Odyssey actually ever been faithfully adapted? Has most of Greek myth?
It is hard to say that Hollywood has recently gotten bad at adaptations, if they've never been very good at adaptations.
I enjoyed the movie Jason and the Argonauts, but I wouldn't say it is the most faithful adaptation of the Argonautica. I enjoyed Troy, but I wouldn't say it was a totally faithful retelling of the Illiad.
While I agree that Nolan's Odyssey was unfaithful in various ways, I actually thought it was more faithful than a lot of past attempts, since it at least tried to do something with the themes of xenia that almost all modern adaptations adapt out.
I almost wonder if a "faithful" adaptation of something like the Odyssey or Illiad wouldn't use a framing device similar to the Princess Bride. Maybe an opening scene with Homer as a bard, telling the poem to an audience, and then you could include abbreviated versions of the catalogue of ships in the Illiad and other parts that always get dropped in adaptations, while showing how the audience at the time reacted to those sections.
Maybe you could make it so it is not a single bard telling the story, but a series of bards and scholars all adding their own bits. Have the segment where Odysseus first lands back on Ithaca told with a framing story of the neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry telling all of the supposed symbolism of the cave of the nymphs (which gets dropped in almost every adaptation, as a supposedly totally superfluous scene.) Maybe add some of the bits that happen after the Odyssey ends, from the Greek dramas, using the plays as the framing device for that part of the story.
Now granted, my proposed adaptation has the potential to be the most boring and meandering version of the story of the Trojan war ever put to film (people want faithful, but does anyone actually want catalogue-of-ships faithful?), but I think it would at least be a different take some could appreciate.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I can't think of any adaptations that are very different to the source material but still good, but I suspect in those cases the film/TV adaptation could end up eclipsing the original, which fades from public memory.
What about Green Knight? I read the original for fun in high school, and I enjoyed it as a film despite it not being a very faithful adaptation.
I have more mixed feelings about them but Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio and Frankenstein were at least interesting films, even if some of the changes were quite baffling.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
If a person inexcusably takes life, that itself, for no other considerations, is sufficient grounds to lock that person in a box until they die.
What sort of work is "inexcusably" doing here? You don't consider being in a psychotic state to be an excuse, so what excuses do you find acceptable?
It seems like most of the excuses you might accept would be in a similar camp to things you dismiss as irrelevant like recidivism, deterrence for others, etc.
Do you treat negligence the same way as outright killing? Should a parent who accidentally suffocates their child while co-sleeping with them, or a parent whose child drowns because the child wandered to the background swimming pool unattended be put into a box for the rest of their lives? If not, what do you think distinguishes the two cases, since you seem a-okay with locking up a murder virus carrier or a schizophrenic, even if we're sure they'll never do it again.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I would challenge you to identify 3 individuals who (1) are straight white men; (2) are or were professors at mainstream universities; (3) had publicly spun tall tales roughly equivalent to those of Jason Arday (i.e. numerous and highly suspect on their face); and (4) were nonetheless hired and/or promoted in spite of their autobiographical tall tales.
I don't really think it meets all your criteria, but closest I could search up was Prof. Joseph Ellis back in 2001, who not only lied about Vietnam vet service (including being a platoon leader) and civil rights activism, but also about scoring the winning touchdown during the last game of senior year for his high school football team (which he was not a part of.)
The problem is, those are all sort of plausible lies, even if it is a little weird to be an accomplished academic and still telling stories about your amazing high school football glory days. Honestly, he seems more like the type who is actually quite accomplished, but feels the psychological need to make up more grand and socially legible accomplishments to get the praise he feels he deserves, but isn't getting. A bit like Elon Musk getting caught lying about his video game accomplishments.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Then there's also distinctions that could be made between platforms that aim to service "specific communities" or are meant for "everyone". Facebook and Twitter at large, ignoring specific Facebook groups, are marketing themselves as social media for everyone. Then from there you could distiguish that hte platform is Facebook, or Reddit, not /r/DnD, and so while /r/DnD could enjoy the moderation they want, Reddit could not without risking their Section 230 protection ban someone from making /r/DnDAISlop.
I'm not sure the sites actually want to be for everyone, though. Reddit admin eliminated /r/CreepShots, because they didn't want to deal with the bad publicity of their website encouraging people to take candid photos of women out in public. Even if we assume a world where they could limit /r/CreepShots to such jurisdictions where taking photos of strangers in public without their permission was legal, do you think that Reddit's section 230 protection should be contingent upon Reddit admin allowing /r/CreepShots to exist whether they want it to or not?
Should Reddit have been forced to keep up /r/jailbait, which was "just" provocative images of fully clothed teenage girls?
Should Tumblr have been forbidden from banning porn from their platform back in 2019? Or is your expectation that all of social media should basically be a porn free for all, if sites want to keep their section 230 protections?
I just think that platform owners will legitimately have visions for how they would like their platforms to be used. And there will obvious, easy to put into writing criteria, like, "We don't want spam on this site", and there will be more nebulous, vibes based things like, "We don't want anything that would make it hard for advertisers to advertise on our site", or "We don't want anything that will reduce shareholder price or affect our brand image", and I personally think those are legitimate concerns for platforms to consider. They need to make money to keep operating, and I'm not sure the government forcing them to become common carriers will actually be the best way to keep these large sites operating in the long term.
Don't get me wrong, I find it extremely frustrating when run of the mill monetary concerns diminish a site I enjoy. I remember when TV Tropes Wiki had to disallow certain kinds of adult tropes and content, because the advertisers the site needed to stay afloat wouldn't advertise if those pages existed. But should TV Tropes Wiki really have been forced to choose between A) having the advertising revenue they needed to stay afloat but opening themselves up to being sued due to losing section 230 protections, or B) having to shut down the site because they couldn't find advertisers willing to advertise on their platform?
Heck, even if you want to argue that in a social-media-as-common-carrier world, everything will work out, and advertisers will make deals to only be shown on certain subreddits and never on others, do you really think platforms will want to devote database space, server cost, etc. to subreddits or accounts they can never get advertising revenue off of? They'll ban them for some other pretense, because who wants to be forced to have 10 Pentabytes of creepshots and jailbait photos that you can't even make any advertising money off of taking up space on your platform?
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I mean, in the United States, ADOS African Americans are here to stay, and there's not really a good alternative. We're not going to deport them all to Liberia or something, and if a president started doing that (or worse), I would consider that a cure worse than the disease.
Why isn't the de facto segregation of some people being able to live in expensive suburbs and some people being unable to live in expensive suburbs enough for you? It operates with the cold efficiency of capitalism, instead of requiring any actual interpersonal discrimination on anyone's parts. And the police actually do a good job policing suburbs, so it will be harder for any malefactor to step a toe out of line, white or black.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
I actually think you're getting the logic of the Golden Rule backwards. It isn't:
Do unto others → done unto you.
It's:
Wish done unto you → do unto others
It is a necessary component of justice and a simple extension of the golden rule: as a person harms another, so too they also shall be harmed.
That's not the Golden Rule, that's the lex talionis ("Eye for an eye") principle. An ancient and venerable principle of justice to be sure, but not the same principle at all.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
And he's right. All the rest were willing to censor, and censor heavily, on behalf of the deep state.
Even Grok doesn't believe that claptrap. Elon Musk is just as willing to censor for the government as all the other big tech CEO's, he just talks a better game about it.
I do think there is a weirdly totalizing way that some people think about intelligence and moral worth in humans.
Like, come on, do people who fall prey to this kind of thinking really not have any dumb people who they respect for the virtues they do have?
Even in history, I look back and find less intelligent people I admire. One of my favorite Stoics is Cleanthes. He had a reputation for being a slow learner and a dullard, and he made his money fetching water, digging ditches and generally doing all the little odd jobs people would pay him for. And yet he was humble, loyal, hard-working, thick-skinned when insulted (by the Athenian public at large, or by his fellow Stoic pupils), and just seems to have been an all around good guy. I don't think it is an accident that he was made the second scholarch of the Stoics, even though Zeno had many worthy pupils who were much smarter than him. I also just admire a guy who managed to get into the history books by being virtuous and hard-working.
@Chi_Wara - I'm putting this additional response here, but I'm really responding to a post you made 2 years ago, since it relates to this discussion.
I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient. How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?
I don't think we can close the book on any of those things. There are definitely factors that make some of these things worse that can potentially be mitigated with the right social interventions. Drugs and alcohol really do make black communities worse, increasing violent crime and potentially reducing black IQ (in the case of certain drugs.) The War on Drugs might have been misguided, and harm reduction might have been misguided, but there is a world of social interventions we could try that might improve the situation and have more black people clean and off drugs, and gainfully and lawfully employed.
As far as poverty goes, a rising tide raises all boats. If groceries get cheaper in the US, they get cheaper for black people as well. If entertainment or consumer goods get cheaper in the US, they get cheaper for black people as well. Nothing about the situation suggests that black poverty is intransigent.
And as far as ignorance goes, I think we should be trying to achieve ultrahumanism: every human as capable and free as he or she reasonably can be in society, each person achieving their own individualized highest potential. The potentials might be different for a 115 IQ black man and an 85 IQ black man, but there's no reason to assume that we can't arrange society in a way that educates them both to the limits of their abilities, and successfully integrates them as valued members of the community, doing whatever job they are best suited for. And take heart, if the singularity ever happens, all humans will be basically obsolete anyways, whether smart or dumb, and the plight of an 85 IQ black man, and a 175 IQ Asian man will likely be one and the same.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
Because what I want to say in response is that that isn't good enough because your premise was supposed to wrong! The edifice that was used to justify anti-blackness for centuries was supposed to be completely discredited, put into the dustbin of history. You can’t enslave, discriminate, oppress, and demean a people based on the assumption that they’re inferior and then…turn out to be right. That’s not fair!
I just think we're quick to forget. Abraham Lincoln was essentially in the group you criticize, he didn't think black people would turn out as capable as white people, but he didn't think they should be slaves.
Even if black people have an average IQ of 85, we would still predict there to be an IQ 145 black person in the United States who is not an outlier (he's perfectly on the bell curve.) Why should he be treated like a murderer, thief or criminal before he has actually committed a crime? Why should he not be allowed to live in a nice suburb if he can afford to live there? Why should he not have a colorblind chance of getting into a school based on his own hard work?
I really do think that a lot of the emotions people feel around 13/50 statistics are about as irrational as the women who would rather encounter a bear than a man when walking in the wilderness. Some men are rapists, but that doesn't mean that an average man is particularly likely to rape you. So too, some black people are violent criminals, but it doesn't mean that the average black person is particularly likely to commit a violet crime against you (especially when you're talking something like a college or professional environment which is more likely to be pulling from the upper end of the distribution of black people.)
I don't dispute that the OWW occasionally grants wishes in a straightforward way.
The male shopkeeper at the magic shop made a wish, and it is implied he is perfectly satisfied with it. And Ian's wish for a million dollars is fulfilled with no gotchas.
But there are elements like the female shopkeeper's utter unhelpfulness. (Oh, you've gotten complaints from OWW customers who have died or wanted to die because of their wishes, maybe give a little bit more of a warning to the next customer then instead of saying it in a way that implies it is no big deal so he thinks you're joking?)
Whether they're literally demons or not, the two shopkeepers and the OWW customer service guy are definitely malevolent entities.
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