Black Mirror

[animus]

Black Mirror comes up with some original stuff. Every episode has its own storyline so you can watch them in any order.
Especially the christmas special, S03E00, is worth watching. (Also interesting were S01E03 and S02E01; skip S01E01...not worth the time)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3973198/

Part of the story is about trapping a consciousness (or rather a double of it) in a hand-sized container whose time flow can be controlled by the person owning the container.
length of the special is rather unusual: 73 min


edit: I scratched the "Christmas Special" from the title.

[joeyv23]

I saw the first episode and was intrigued first by the name of the series given discussions here in the forum only a month or so before I saw aired on Netflix and second by the truth of the human condition as portrayed in the episode. I think they really nailed how people would react and then how things would progress after something like that (if you're squeamish, seriously don't watch.. it's beastial) might have happened. I put the series on the back burner but now that I've seen it brought up again I'll move it to the front. Thanks for the reminder!

[Djchrismac]

Black Mirror is excellent, astutely written and the creator Charlie Brooker really knows his stuff. Newswipe, Screenwipe and
Gameswipe are also well worth watching and they should all be available on youtube. Charlie has the mainstream media sussed and does a great job of showing exactly what they are up to while adding some quality humour to the proceedings.

Some of his supporting cast such as Doug Stanhope, Philomena Cunk and Barry Shitpeas often steal the show!

With Dark Mirror billed as "A television anthology series that shows the dark side of life and technology" it does make me wonder if Charlie heard about or maybe even encountered the dark spider-like macrobe beings reported to be at the Sky studios that HKV talked about...



















White Christmas, the special between series 2 and the forthcoming series 3, was particularly good! From blocking a person for real in your augmented reality/social media future life to a digital copy of a person's consciousness trapped in an electrical device. I wonder just how much Charlie really knows?

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/

"White Christmas", the show's Christmas special, received critical acclaim. Ben Beaumont-Thomas of The Guardian praised the comic satire of the episode and noted that "sentimentality is offset with wicked wit, and Brooker’s brio and imagination paper over any gaps in logic".[21] The Daily Telegraph reviewer Mark Monahan gave the episode 4/5 stars, noting that the drama was "thrilling stuff: escapist entertainment with a very real-world sting in its tail." Monahan equated the episode with the stronger of the previous Black Mirror episodes, stating that "it exaggerated present-day technology and obsessions to subtle but infernal effect, a nightmare-before-Christmas reminder that to revere our digital gizmos is to become their pathetic slave".

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Chr ... _Mirror%29

[animus]

Season 3 is out with 6 new episodes. It is a fantastic and thought provoking season to say the least.

Episodes 3 and 6 had some similarities to the 2016 movie Nerve and if one also considers South Park's new story line one gets the feeling that the audience is actively made aware of internet trolling and cybercrime this year. Has anybody else picked up on this lately? It might have been going on for a while now and I just didn't notice, haven't watched much lately. The last movie about social media I remember was Disconnect from 2012. But there will probably be more of these in the future if you consider how big of a role social media plays in today's life. The youngest generation is growing up with it, or rather is exposed to it, before they can even read, or speak!

I really liked this bit from episode 6:
- So they are spying on us.
- This is all classified.
- So what did you do, did you put in a back door and route it through GCHQ? I mean, you do CCTV, you do traffic cams. So what don't you have your fucking noses in? [...] Total nationwide surveillance.
- We tracked suspects for weeks in ways they couldn't dream of. We prevented bombings, mass shootings.
- By spying on the public.
- And keeping them safe, which is what they want.
- Okay! The government's a cunt. We knew that already.

What better way to give the notion of a helpless condition. It perfectly reflects the mindset of one "average Joe" I had a discussion with recently. He was moaning about the current situation in general and all kinds of occurences that happened lately. So I asked him if he had any plans of action to do something about it or if he would rather just keep on whining. His answer was "There is nothing that one can do." He basically accepts it and goes with it, no change in his behavior whatsoever. Just waiting for the next bad news to moan about... Well, that's what I'd call learned helplessness.

[LoneBear]

Just waiting for the next bad news to moan about... Well, that's what I'd call learned helplessness.

Or as we called it in the old days, "You can't fight City Hall," or Star Trek's Borg, "resistance is futile."

I had not realized it has become a psychological study... very interesting, and may explain something I've noticed in children: when confronted with an emergency, they just freeze and make no effort to resolve the situation. (Like deer in car headlights.) It is as though their mind cannot even contemplate any alternatives. A fascinating (and powerful) psychological state for manipulation.

[Obzistian]

animus wrote:

What better way to give the notion of a helpless condition. It perfectly reflects the mindset of one "average Joe" I had a discussion with recently. He was moaning about the current situation in general and all kinds of occurrences that happened lately. So I asked him if he had any plans of action to do something about it or if he would rather just keep on whining. His answer was "There is nothing that one can do." He basically accepts it and goes with it, no change in his behavior whatsoever. Just waiting for the next bad news to moan about... Well, that's what I'd call learned helplessness.

I am thinking this "learned helplessness" may need me to start a new topic for discussion. I have observed this in my step children. I will ponder this a bit more and prepare one soon.
*also have another post to put up soon on recreational drugs, etc.

[Juanter]

My favorite TV series. San Janiperno is really great. The decision of having dying and facing the unknown or allowing our soul to be downloaded in a computer program with seemingly unending happiness. However, they never go into what would occur if the programmer decided to change the program once you are trapped in the program. Some could equate this to a deal with the devil, the digital devil.