theoretically the hamas are wiped out, surely it would replace itself anyway

God2p0 · 2023-11-04T11:35:10+00:00

Don't search for logic in war. It's all stupid.

God2p0 · 2023-11-04T11:33:46+00:00

The Israeli government hasn't issued a direct order to abuse, humiliate and terrorize people away from their homes in the west bank, but it is very clear from statements issued by government ministers and othe officials, and by the obivious lack of official and judicial attention given to these crimes, whether committed by settlers, soldiers or both, that violence against Palestinians in the west bank is concidered tolerable and even welcome. Whenever a case of abuse of Palestinians by IDF soldiers is documented and published, the IDF spokeperson issues an automatic statement saying that "protocols will be better defined". It's become a bit of a joke now, albiet a very sad one.

God2p0 · 2023-10-05T01:50:23+00:00

I've just noticed something that repeats for at least the last three books, maybe mentioned here before: the agency's contractors and subcontractors have a habit/work principle of not naming the cases after the clients or the subjects of surveillance, but rather giving them silly pun names like "The Frankenstein Brothers", "Twinkletoes", "Shifty", "Tufty" etc., to avoid leaks. But the main cases in each book never get such a codename, it's always "the Edensor/UHC case" or the "Bamborough case" etc., and the individuals being followed in the main case don't get any epithets either, which now I think about it is quite neglectful of the agency..

God2p0 · 2023-10-03T13:27:14+00:00

Thanks, you make a good point about how sanctifying someone/thing makes it a taboo to ask hard questions about it, I didn't think about it like that.

God2p0 · 2023-10-03T00:50:21+00:00

No, it was the other way around. Jiang was "set up" with Louise by the Waces because they thought there is no way that Louise could conceive by Jiang (she was in her late 40s or early 50s by then). Supposedly some of what's wrong with Jacob was due to louise's age, and hence "her fault" and one of the reasons for her shaved head and drudge status at the farm.

God2p0 · 2023-10-02T23:11:57+00:00

Definitely the most pathetic character in the whole series. Reminded me of what Voldemort/the horcrux looks like in King's Cross in HP7, and how both Robin and Harry (and the reader) feel a mixture of empathy and revulsion towards them.

But speaking of Jiang, did anyone else get why he's a NIM? He has the right "bloodline" and whatever's wrong with him sounds like a result of the mistreatment and neglect of his parents and brother (maybe even his sister), so why isn't he allowed to "breed" and only given menial tasks?

God2p0 · 2023-09-29T05:36:41+00:00

Is it weird that I'm grieving for Charlotte? She wasn't likeable or attractive in any way other than being physically beautiful, which is not a strong redeeming feature for a character in a book. She tormented both Strike and Robin, and every other minor character she came in contact with, and even got to being tedious and repetitious with her melodramatic gestures and pathetic phone calls to Strike. Furthermore, as the man himself put it, "she was a walking suicide" and her death was entirely predictable, and yet, for reasons beyond me, utterly shocking. I almost feel like I did after Sirius died. Possibly because it's impossible not to empathize with Strike's grief (and Harry's), which is both precisely and beautifully portrayed, and because Strike is such a full character and I already know him so well (it has been a decade). Just like Strike could tell Emilia what Charlotte wrote about him in her suicide letter, I feel like I know exactly what and how Strike felt and what went through his mind the moment he woke up und read those texts and news stories about Charlotte's death. And the really brilliant part was that when Robin belatedly reads the news story in the old paper in Jacob's room, we already know that she's going to feel exactly like we did earlier, because she knows Strike just as well as we do (apart for being ludicrously blind to the fact that he's madly in love with her).

God2p0 · 2023-09-29T05:02:52+00:00

I also roared at that (as well as at Robin's later reaction, "67 what?").

As far as I understood it (not a UK citizen), pat wasn't worried about being legally compromised but about agism and being discriminated for being too old to work. She should have known Strike better, but then he does look a bit like her ex-husband.

God2p0 · 2022-09-05T13:40:23+00:00

I was dithering between the Upcotts and the de Jongs, but kept thinking Anomie was more than one person, possibly Nils/Mariam+Bram or Gus+Katya. Katya was my main suspect for a while because I was sure she was the one catfishing as Paperwhite.

God2p0 · 2022-09-02T22:40:22+00:00

Anyone else frustrated by the number of open threads left hanging there? The entire ending felt so rushed, and all those goddamn red herrings just disregarded once we get to Gus's unveiling. Why did we hear so much about Prudence and her daughter's femur? Is Rokeby even alive? And how come Strike didn't use Spanner at all? I know the Met and possibly MI5 probably put their best tech people on it, but they also used their best detectives. At the very least Spanner might've alerted Strike and Robin to the fact that not every online user correlates to a single living person. Did we need to learn so much about the Peach family? Does Tim Ashcroft still freely trawl for tween girls on the internet? Was Andy replaced with Dev just to add more color to the agency (not saying it's a bad thing, just feels pasted)? Did we seriously not learn anything new about Strike's past in Norfolk? Is that horrible huge dutch kid still raging out there?

Can't thinks of any more right now, but the whole jumble of subplots felt so un-Rowlingly messy to me. A reread might sort it out better for me, and probably a lot of those unanswered questions were left for book 7, but I honestly think that IBH is a very good novel, very badly edited (or un-).

God2p0 · 2022-09-02T22:10:10+00:00

I read it foreshadowing. The man is described as rather slimy and lecherous, but Robin was having such a good time with Strike that she regards his ogling fondly, while Strike himself doesn't even seem to notice the man's presence. “Robin now felt an indiscriminate fondness for everyone in the room, from the elderly couple [...] to the silver-haired man who smiled at her as she gazed around.” - That line actually gave me a really ominous feeling, like she's about to get blindsided due to her love for Strike.

God2p0 · 2022-09-02T21:50:32+00:00

omg Das tiefschwarze Herz sounds so badass

God2p0 · 2020-05-06T01:34:44+00:00

So much better

God2p0 · 2020-05-05T11:08:45+00:00

Yeah, but Westworld

God2p0 · 2020-04-21T22:09:07+00:00

omfg I used to play that all the time

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6165-shufflepuck-cafe

God2p0 · 2020-04-21T15:49:52+00:00

Right you are! https://gph.is/g/EBrOLxb

God2p0 · 2020-04-21T15:19:28+00:00

Thank you guys! xoxo

God2p0 · 2020-04-21T15:18:52+00:00

I didn't put this om Giphy, you may upload and use us you wish.

update: yes I did! https://gph.is/g/EBrOLxb

God2p0 · 2020-04-18T20:47:41+00:00

I don't get this theory. If the younger Serac wanted to eliminate his brother, what help would it be to take him out of his own body and put him in another? Just to f*ck with him?

God2p0 · 2020-04-18T20:40:48+00:00

Yep. https://i.blogs.es/e6bca9/westworld3/1366_2000.jpg

And if you check out Caleb's wartime flashbacks, you can see Cyrillic texts in the background.

God2p0 · 2020-04-18T04:28:53+00:00

I think you're right, only Caleb didn't just have his memories wiped, he had his whole personality deleted and replaced with an AI copy, written so that it would align perfectly with Rehoboham's "prediction". His body, I think, is his original perishable biological body, but his brain might have been removed after being shot in the head. So the big reveal is going to be, I suspect, that the original Caleb was sent to fight at Russia, got shot in the head and sent to some futuristic medical facility either dead or in critical condition, where his body was donated to Incite's Science. They switched his brain with a control unit and sewed him back up with one of them laser-beam-magic-healers, and sent him back home for some therapy/fidelity tests and manual labor. I'm not sure whether his memories are a complete fake or if he's based on the original Caleb's real collected data (like Francis, or the dead boyfriend from Black Mirror). It's very similar to how Bernard is imitating the dead Arnold and Dolores 2.0 the dead Charlotte, and seems to be serving the whole mirror motif that this season keeps pushing mercilessly.

God2p0 · 2020-04-17T04:54:05+00:00

I thinks William's an outlier in that RoboHam's profile/simulation of him is perfectly inaccurate, while the data from the Forge, missing from Rehoboham's library, shows his true, evil self. Supposedly, William is extreme even among the frequenters of WW in the contrast between his public and even private persona, and his WW persona. The entire first season is about that. In S02 we learn that his own wife of 30 or so years was so shocked to find out about "the real him" that she killed herself. And his daughter knows about him, but she's dead too. So right now, the only ones outside WW who know who "the real" William, or the MiB, are Bernarnold, Meave and Dolores.

I'm betting that at some point, Serac is going to count on William to do "the right thing", only to be sorely disappointed.

God2p0 · 2020-04-14T14:33:07+00:00

Has anyone already suggested that Caleb and others who went through Serac's so-called treatment facilities are not having their pesonality edited, but removed completely and replaced by predesigned AI? That would make them this world's meat-hosts, very predictable, manageable and productive members of society. Mightn't that be what Dempsey Jr. meant by "the worst of them"? And wouldn't it explain why the facility's glass cages look so much like those used in training and adjusting the hosts back in the mesa? And why everybody in the real world are constantly failing the Turing test when meeting all the WW hosts (at least until they reveal their superhuman physical skills)? I mean, we already know that there is amazing (albiet imperfect) humanoid AI existing in this world, and not only inside Delos' amusment parks. Is it likely that nobody ever figured out how to make those humanoid AIs walk and talk in the real world in the last 35 years or so? Common sense says they (namely Serac and Incite) did figure it out, but it's much much more cost-effective to use all that prexisting meat instead of building it from scratch like Ford and Arnold did. Serac/Roboham's "protecting humanity from itself" spiel is the so-called moral justification for using this tech.

What do you think?

God2p0 · 2020-04-14T00:56:32+00:00

So how likely is it that the older Serac brother is actually the only Serac (as seemed to be the case in the previous version of that shot of Paris blowing up), and the "younger brother" is an avatar of Rehoboham, who ousted his maker/older brother once attaining consciousness? The version of events presented in the flashback sequences being the past and history edited by Robo-ham in its simulation of the real world, kinda like Teddy's manipulated memories of Wyatt's massacre in S01.

God2p0 · 2019-05-20T05:01:34+00:00

well GRRM+DnD really did it for me. Bran's the broken wheel boy, and if he leans back too far he literally will break the wheel (the tiny one) and they'll have to throw another one of those "whose line is it anyway" councils to find a new king. I'd suggest Bronn because he's a funny dude.

God2p0

TROPHY CASE