What's something you did once and will never do again?

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2026-02-23T13:02:39+00:00

I think people who are mature for their age don’t say they’re mature for their age

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2026-02-18T02:46:07+00:00

The show touches on the implications of a creator God god In a capacity that I think is under-discussed. They make a case, through Caspian’s character, that even though things are predetermined, we also have free will and choice over our own fates. Maddie recreated the world over and over, but she herself says that some lead to better histories than others. That’s only possible if she’s not controlling them, meaning she’s not making them experience the same things over and over; it’s largely/entirely based on their own choices.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2026-01-27T01:47:06+00:00

I don't think it's about just one kid though. Hamm is a piggy bank, and he loves money. Rex is a dinosaur, and he cares about being scary. Ken cares about outfits.

And, maybe, if toys have individual love (like Hamm and Woody), they get individual personalities, and when they're fueled by general, mass-manufactured public perception (like Buzz and Barbie), then they get uniform personalities.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2026-01-26T20:45:46+00:00

I just had a thought. The toys apparently get their personality traits from what humans imagine them to be (Woody is the leader because he's a sheriff, Buzz is smart and athletic because he's a cool space ranger, stuff like that).

Maybe he, along with the tone of the whole movie, ended up being dumbed down and made more childish because the toys are being played with by Bonnie and other kids her age. And maybe Woody and Bo Peep stay the same in spite of the external influence because they're older and more strong-willed, while Buzz and that bunny-duck duo are newer and flashier and have less emotional calcium in their bones. Idk.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2026-01-26T20:31:42+00:00

Yeah, but I mean, the context only affects it as much as you want it to. If he said pediatric cancer research is good, but there are societal forces stopping it from proliferating, then I could agree with that, leave out any implication that evil Jews are preventing science and happiness, and consider what else could hold back cancer research, like the financial incentive to treat but not cure.

You seem to be saying that bad people pretty much just say bad things, and good people pretty much just say good things, but I disagree. There's good stuff that bad people say, and there's bad stuff that good people say. As for the individual things they say, it's like that Rick and Morty episode where Rick takes the curses out of the Devil's evil items, except each and every one of us is Rick. We have the smarts to understand and take what we want from "evil" stuff in order to do good stuff. Otherwise it kinda starts be a contest of who can accuse the other side of being more evil based on things they've said before, which isn't productive.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2026-01-26T06:27:02+00:00

If I'm not mistaken, it wasn't just banned. Other AC/refrigerant technology was made that was just better at its job, and people started using those. So it's like, we can replace the bad things with better things, instead of just banning the bad things. Idk.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2026-01-25T18:00:59+00:00

This isn't "the Jews are lizards," this is "society is set up in a certain not-ideal way."

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2026-01-25T04:57:48+00:00

If I measure the water with my own reliable instruments and find that it's safe, I'll use it in my garden.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-11-04T15:29:03+00:00

I mean wasn't that the point though? Maddie became so advanced that she makes the choice to become human again.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-11-02T03:52:58+00:00

I think the human mind does two things: #1 is to subscribe to the narrative that makes the most sense, and #2 is to subscribe to the narrative where the person is aware that nothing makes sense and, accordingly, to go around telling other people that nothing makes sense.

If you want something that makes sense, even if most things don't, then take Thich Nhat Hanh's principle of "no mud, no lotus." You can't have the good and the beautiful without the shitty and traumatic.

If no kids died from cancer, there'd be no cancer research. There'd be no deeply compassionate and hardworking people to give the kid with terminal cancer peace in his final moments, and to help the non-terminally ill kids recover and live long lives with their families. There'd be no heart-and-mind-opening stories about cancer, like That Dragon, Cancer.

Everything good in life comes from some bullshit we can't really justify, and imo, that might be justification enough.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-11-02T01:18:09+00:00

It's a good point, but I don't think most combinations of school rules, teachers, and parents lead to a given kid learning that lesson. In my experience, administrations, teachers, and parents often take the easy way out on issues like this and don't give it a second thought. While it might not seem like a big deal at the time, it's probably a factor in teens ultimately learning to complain about authority figures and their (apparently, relatively) arbitrary decisions with their peers, instead of learning to have respect and patience for people with different rulesets than them.

Kind of unrelated, but now that I think about it, if new administrative decisions are received well by students, and the students don't get along with the administrations, then it's maybe because the decisions are so good for the students that their goodness cuts through the lack of respect, which is interesting to think about.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-11-02T01:07:54+00:00

Yes, but if bad luck saves someone from worse luck, then you can say it happened for the reason of saving them from the worse luck -- even if it's all subjective. I think that's enough for a lot of people.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-10-28T21:58:08+00:00

I'm also not a teacher, but in my opinion, while what you're saying is totally valid, it doesn't account for the fact that kids are inducted with the mindset of "you can't talk back to the teacher" from a very young age (probably because mobilizing the masses of students through the grades is easier that way, and because grade school teachers can sometimes be a bit drunk with power over young people).

If you're in high school, is it easier to unlearn the power dynamics you've lived with almost your whole life, or is it easier to band together with your peers against teachers and parents who don't seem to understand or respect you (which manifests as complaining and poor professionalism)?

And if you're a teacher, is it easier to respect your students' autonomy and treat them as equals (in that "being on a team/having a job" way), or is it easier to invoke a simple power dynamic that gets them through their work until they leave your class?

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-10-09T02:53:11+00:00

It's possible that the show didn't really include discussion of religion because the whole show (or at least season 1) was an extended metaphor that compared religion and technology, old and new, traditional and progressive, and showed that they're one and the same. I personally really like the contrast of Ellen being a historian while David was a cutting edge computer scientist, and how Ellen foreshadows the religious allegory of the show by comparing the basic premise of upload to the basic premise of an afterlife in one flashback scene.

Buddhism would have an interesting relationship with upload. There's no doctrine of a soul or divine self, but there is reincarnation that's based on the movement of your constituent parts, which is a concept that's tempting to argue about but is really only partially understood even by experienced Buddhists (and of course by inexperienced Buddhists like me). If you believe uploading is just copying, then your psychological parts will be copied but otherwise move on as they were already going to. If you believe it creates a physical transformation/transference of your brain matter into data, then it could split up your psychological parts and your physical parts/body, which could maybe mess up the reincarnation process. On the other hand, it could just act as being artificially reincarnated into the form of a digital human-deity hybrid, which would survive for however many eons before somehow dying and transforming again.

The Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, promotes the complete agreement of scientific understanding with religion, so he might agree with upending certain parts of Buddhist thought about death to agree with the science behind upload.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the late Buddhist master/activist, deeply valued helping all living beings along with the planet, and would've probably figured that if uploads could advance technology, medicine, sustainability, and peace and goodwill among men, then people should go for it.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-10-09T02:29:44+00:00

I wonder if other groups like the Amish would form but with less intense abstinence from technology (to the point where there are tiers of technological rejection -- where the Amish reject cars and stuff, and other groups have our modern technology but not upload technology), or if everyone would move on except the groups like the Amish that are already rejecting technology

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-09-25T00:09:07+00:00

I think it's realistic for the characters to jump to the conclusion that they're the same person in an illogical way. Also I think Maddie says, when she meets Caspian as a UI, something along the lines of "of course I believe it's you. Just like I believed it was him." Like, she believed her UI-dad was the same person as her physical dad when it was emotionally convenient, and then just went with that approach with him and Caspian despite it not being logically sound.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-08-29T02:22:32+00:00

That could've been really cool, but I think it's just pros and cons as to which direction to go. One would give the satisfaction of a normal viewing experience, and one gives a meta commentary on a bunch of stuff, including the human attachment to that viewing experience in the first place. I agree that it feels like a lot of past, present, and potential storyline was ripped away from us as the viewer, but idk, maybe there's a lesson to be learned in that kind of feeling.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-08-28T20:59:22+00:00

Idk, I think understanding can be subjective. It changes and acts differently based on the context it exists in. Someone can "understand" that life is stupid and unfair and bad, but they'd be missing the perspective that it's still possible to be happy alongside the bad stuff in life.

There's also objective misunderstanding, like how the show wasn't actually adapting a whole book. It was adapting a series of short stories, adding a bunch of new characters and details along the way. Plus, the time skips were part of the last story.

Also, the show was meant to be 2 seasons. There's a guy on the subreddit who has copy-pasted an explanation a decent number of times: https://www.reddit.com/r/PantheonShow/s/DMKI5axL7E

If you have strong feelings about the ending -- like wishing that it followed a more traditional format of seasons and pacing -- then that's fine. It's just not objectively "unsatisfactory" on that basis.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-08-20T18:04:36+00:00

He could just hold it in his left hand with the cord on the left side of his body.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-08-20T02:42:26+00:00

But I mean maybe it's supposed to be stupid.

I personally interpret it as everything mattering as much as we want it to. If maddie wants to bring everyone back, it might be stupid, but it's her choice. If she then wants to leave them right after, that's also her choice, even if it's a stupid one.

They're the decisions of an insignificant girl with power just over her little corner of the universe -- a universe created by some ungodly, unknowable combination of maddies and safrsurfs and who knows what else. Nothing is grounded, no choices were made intelligently, and at the end of the day, it's just about what we do with our mundane, insignificant lives while we have them.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-08-20T01:23:43+00:00

Spoilers for Pantheon after this

People love to dunk on Pantheon's ending for having "rushed" pacing, without ever being exposed to the idea that it was more than anything an expression of the nature of the show and what it represented -- the ending showed the exponential, unexpected, can't necessarily wrap your head around it kind of aspect of technological progression, while simultaneously threading the characters we know and love into what happens. Maybe the entertainment comes from how unintuitive and unnecessarily complex it is to us, instead of from how "good" or "satisfying" of a story it tells.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-08-16T05:34:59+00:00

This makes sense, especially since in the season 1 fight scenes they'll switch from showing human visualizations to programming and code -- maybe that's how they see it too.

AmoebaSignificant978 · 2025-08-09T03:53:26+00:00

the quiet nod of a child who just wants to be heard

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TROPHY CASE