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Feeling blamed and deceived: Latinos who voted for Trump rebel against the Republican Party (english.elpais.com)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/leopardsatemyface@lemmy.world
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[–] 4 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Yeah, for a character like that, sure.

But, I mean, if 'everything I wanted' included a library of good books, I think I'd be happy for a few years at least.

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  • [–] 2 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

    Watch the episode, it's a lot more clear than listening to a one line summary.

    Imagine if every book you picked up had the exact story you were thinking of. There would be zero surprise, zero imagination in the writing. You wouldn't learn anything because it's only what you expect.

    Now you want some food, it's the most intensely rich, perfect food you want. But the exact same of your favorite food every time. No variation, no imperfections.

    You go to play a video game and you win with no effort having only clicked the absolute minimum needed to solve every step of the way.

    That's what the story is about.

    On the surface, it seems like it would be great, and maybe it would be for an afternoon, but very quickly it would become a nightmare.

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  • [–] 1 point 18 hours ago (1 child)

    Imagine if every book you picked up had the exact story you were thinking of. There would be zero surprise, zero imagination in the writing. You wouldn’t learn anything because it’s only what you expect.

    So, what if I wanted to read The Lord of the Rings trilogy? Plenty of actually existing books out there I could ask for as part of 'everything I wanted'. And the content of those books shouldn't change. If they did, then those wouldn't be the books I wanted. And if I get tired of the books I'm already familiar with, well, I sure could add 'a list of all books in my old local library' as a thing I want, and then I know a bunch more books to ask for.

    And what kind of 3rd-rate dystopia is this if 'everything I wanted' can't include a specific book I asked for?

    Now you want some food, it’s the most intensely rich, perfect food you want. But the exact same of your favorite food every time. No variation, no imperfections.

    Only one kind of food? That's not 'everything I wanted' -- I already want more than one type of food, and I haven't even had my 'perfect' food yet!

    No imperfections is fine, but 'everything I wanted' will have to include quite a bit of variation, because I want variety.

    You go to play a video game and you win with no effort

    Video games I'll give you, I guess. In this kind of world, video games might be so easy they're boring ... even if I asked for a specific, already-existing game, there would still never be any challenge in beating it because I just magically play it perfectly every time.

    But, hey, lots of boredom-abolishing entertainment out there that doesn't require audience participation the way video games do. Not just books, but movies, TV shows, art, maybe even stage plays, the works. Pretty sure I could keep myself amused for decades at least, given free access to all of that. There's no way to 'instantly win' reading a book or watching a TV show. The experience of it will have to be pretty much the same as it is now ... except that I've got literally all the time in the world for it, and no barriers to access. Ooh -- you know what? I think I'll start with the lost Doctor Who episodes, the ones that have never been seen since they first aired decades ago. That should be interesting.

    Honestly, seems to be trying too hard to make this scenario sound awful when, really, it could be pretty great for someone with a bit of imagination.

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  • [–] 1 point 16 hours ago

    You don't get it. It's literally hell.

    It's tailored specifically to torture you. You can't game it, you can't use your imagination to make it better. The more you try, the more you lose by thinking you can win.

    They control everything, because it's literally magic designed to make you suffer.

    It's fiction.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    But, I mean, if 'everything I wanted' included a library of good books, I think I'd be happy for a few years at least.

    Probably. This is something I thought a lot about when considering "Heaven" and its eternity: you eventually know everything there is to know about anything you could possibly interested in, and you eventually have all the conversations you could have. But this version of Hell makes it "worse" (not technically, because any finite time against eternity is infinitesimal, but you get the point).

    If you've ever read the fairytale "The Magic Thread", you know what the problem is. Namely that you could learn the contents of any book in an instant. You could skip any boring chapter you wanted and still be able to recite it word for word. Any boring paragraph even. Boring sentence. You could know everything there ever was to know in a nanosecond. There's nothing stopping you, and you don't even have to wish for it aloud or anything.

    Pretty much inevitably, a human will start to optimize the fun out of reading, because they'll be a little bit bored and skip to the exciting part with all the requisite knowledge. Without material barriers, this will keep snowballing.

    And, of course, probably one of the few things you can't do is just reset yourself to forget, since that goes against the torture.

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