#kaispeaks

[kaispeakshermind]

So I watched Tombstone for the second time yesterday

[amaranthine-inscriptions]

Send me your favourite songs! I would love to create a playlist that my mutuals suggested! 🤗

[caelestis-star]

Collablr Intro

Hey hey! My name is Kai and I am a 22 year old female. I am new to the whole @collablr thing but I have been roleplaying for about 10 years on different platforms and I’m pretty excited to interact with other collablrs and their characters! Hopefully soon, I’ll have a list of all the characters I have and post a link with them. As for themes I prefer to write about, I’m not too picky. However, I excel in fantasy. My main blog is my writeblr @amaranthine-inscriptions and the worldbuilding side-blog @vennadore (which hasn’t been overly active because worldbuilding takes a lot of time). 

[kaispeakshermind]

Some screenshots of Donnie from that one mini episode because he's just so perfect here for 0 reason

[kaispeakshermind]

Revisited the latest TF2 comic and Demo admiring the Delta demolition person is everything honestly

[kaispeakshermind]

I’m trying to SLEEP but I had a thought so here I am.

(This has only just occurred to me tonight, after the Backrooms have been living in various parts of my brain for the past literal decade)

One of the many things about the Backrooms that I think makes it so interesting for the mind to latch on to is that it’s a bit like playing pretend with some of the “setting” toys many of us may have played with as children.

I’m referring to play kitchens. Mini grocery stores. Toy versions of the front door of one’s house.

This thought came to me when I was thinking of Clark’s little slice of life in the Backrooms. The way the window in the wall just looks out to more… indoors. Something about that took me back to a bit how it felt playing pretend that I had my own domicile… inside the much bigger house my parents owned.

Clark’s little space was like that. It was barebones and incomplete. The essentials were there, but imagination was required to make it feel like it was anything more than it actually was.

It was his own little bubble, where he could be anything he wanted. Do anything he wanted. Perceive himself any way he wanted.

Of course, we all saw he decided to go for the self-destructive choices and end up consumed by the worst parts of him (both literally and figuratively), but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

I’m talking specifically about the feeling of being a child creating a facsimile of something you know isn’t real but fully committing to it anyway because that’s the closest you can get to living life the way it exists around you.

It’s fun. It’s imitation.

(It’s practice.)

You have the sense that there are real things happening around you, things you couldn’t possibly hope to fully comprehend.

But of course you can’t exactly articulate that. So you just stay on the level that your mind can accept, fully buying into this conjured reality.

You cook the pretend eggs.

You sell the pretend tomatoes.

You check the pretend mail.

You stay in character.

Because that’s all your neural pathways can handle… for now.

Our friend Clark here simply seems to have forgotten the importance of the “for now” part.

[kaispeakshermind]

Rocky has a crystalline brain with perfect recall, so he only needs to hear an english word with context once to memorize it. This would have sped up their language learning. We also are not told how long of a time skip it is between each scene (presumably it is days to weeks), and the translator having a voice is a movie-only concession to the fact that it is a movie (Ryan Gosling needed a scene partner to play off of and the audience needed to be able to hear Rocky to keep the pacing going, as they are not spending hours every night studying Eridian like Grace does in the book)

Even with Rocky being able to translate on his own really quickly it doesn’t explain how quickly Grace was able to learn Eridian when he was programming individual words like that. Even several weeks is pretty fast, considering they can’t even assume they have common cultural/linguistic anchors like we do through our shared experience on Earth to serve as a standard reference point between them. Not to mention how difficult it would be to translate intangible, abstract concepts like negation and mathematical systems.

The way they handled it all makes perfect sense from a movie-making perspective, and I want to make it clear I thought it was an amazing movie. It just gets me adding on an extra layer of thinking as a viewer trying to figure out in real-time which parts are realism and which parts are “it’s a movie you’re gonna have to bear with us”.

[kaispeakshermind]

I wonder sometimes, whenever there’s an instance in a movie or something that involves communication between two vastly different cultures, what sort of linguistic baseline assumptions the movie directors/producers are making.

Like in Project Hail Mary when Grace and Rocky were making first contact and Grace gave a thumbs up. How are we to know that Rocky is gonna have any idea what that means. I mean he responded with a thumbs down but that’s just because he was trying to mimic Grace and the appendages on his… arms?? Only went downward.

And then there’s the real-time voice translation; how did the translation database so quickly become so robust as to be able to translate Rocky’s speech into complete English sentences?? And how did Grace discern and program tone changes??? Each word should have sounded exactly the same coming from the voice program every time it was used, and Rocky’s syntax through the translation program should have been pretty rudimentary for quite some time. How on earth did they figure out words for abstract, non-tangible concepts like “remember” and “forget” and “didn’t” so quickly???

Maybe there are some things covered or perhaps explained away in the book, and I’m just not aware because I haven’t read it. Would someone care to chat with me on this