#ars paradoxica

houndstar:

aristoteliancomplacency:

Podcasts:

Soooooooo.@houndstar and I listened to the first episode of Ars Paradoxica and…

We had to pause it several times just to say ‘wtf???’ To each other, or generally communicate how unbelievable it was. Especially the soldier and the Director character. ‘We’re involved in a top secret military project which we’re just going to tell you, stranger, who appeared on our boat out of nowhere, about. Even though we suspect you of being a spy. Oh wait, no. We don’t suspect you of being a spy anymore for reasons not disclosed and despite the fact that we could easily have checked whether you had graduated from MIT and seen that there was no record of such a person graduating from MIT. MINOR DETAIL. Also we’re going to threaten to torture you like someone who’s literally never done any research on torture in the military might think this works if they literally know nothing at all about the subject.’

Also behold the brilliant genius scientist who’s plot-conveniently really dumb when building a device and not following safety procedures or actually not even thinking that huh, maybe we need to factor in dampening vibrations into the design of his device, given that we need stuff to NOT LITERALLY VIBRATE OFF IT.

When time travel is more believable than your scientist and military character trying to portray actual real world behaviour, you done fucked up.

If you care about how believable science and military jargon is, historical accuracy… anything like that. If you care about a military behaving like an actual military organisation, if you prefer not to have gaping plot holes in your media then… give this one a skip.

It was truly awful. 

I made my partner listen to it, fully anticipating him to be irritated by exactly the same things as me. At the end, I asked him what he thought and he said ‘yeah, could be fun’ and I was like… whaaaaaat?

And the lack of realism in the science/military interaction aspects just… hadn’t bothered him. Once I’d explained what I was bothered by, and we’d laughed and agreed that those things were indeed stupid, he jokingly said he was embarrassed that he hadn’t been bothered by those things. 

But it got me thinking… my dad tried to read the Harry Potter books once, and I’m not sure he even got as far as Harry getting to Hogwarts, because he just couldn’t deal with what to him was a major miss-match in style and content. He was super bothered by the fact that there were apparently no adults in Harry’s life who noticed or cared that he was clearly being abused. My dad just wanted to know when someone was going to call social services already. And this really, really bothered him. But like, he’s fine with something like Roald Dahl’s Matildawhich also has child abuse, I guess because the style of the writing makes it clear than this is not going to be the realistic grimdark telling of abuse. And he just didn’t get the right signals from Harry Potter about what the tone was and how he should take this account of Harry’s abuse.

And I thought maybe that’s what happened here - the style of the podcast did not match up to the content for us. For my own part, given the amount I’ve read about American military torture I think it was probably inevitable that I would find the depiction of the threat of torture risible… but maybe if someone had said ‘hey, imagine this as being like a kid’s story, with extra swearing’ I’d have just bemusedly rolled my eyes at that stuff and not been so bothered with it that I had to actually pause the podcast to go what the fuuuuck?

‘I have a PhD in physics from MIT’

'I mean… I’ve read -books- about going into the past, changing small things… I just don’t want to pull anyone away from anything that was going to have an impact on my history.’

Truly how someone with a PhD in physics talks having just discovered they accidentally time-travelled.

Podcasts:

Soooooooo.@houndstar and I listened to the first episode of Ars Paradoxica and…

We had to pause it several times just to say ‘wtf???’ To each other, or generally communicate how unbelievable it was. Especially the soldier and the Director character. 'We’re involved in a top secret military project which we’re just going to tell you, stranger, who appeared on our boat out of nowhere, about. Even though we suspect you of being a spy. Oh wait, no. We don’t suspect you of being a spy anymore for reasons not disclosed and despite the fact that we could easily have checked whether you had graduated from MIT and seen that there was no record of such a person graduating from MIT. MINOR DETAIL. Also we’re going to threaten to torture you like someone who’s literally never done any research on torture in the military might think this works if they literally know nothing at all about the subject.’

Also behold the brilliant genius scientist who’s plot-conveniently really dumb when building a device and not following safety procedures or actually not even thinking that huh, maybe we need to factor in dampening vibrations into the design of his device, given that we need stuff to NOT LITERALLY VIBRATE OFF IT.

When time travel is more believable than your scientist and military character trying to portray actual real world behaviour, you done fucked up.

If you care about how believable science and military jargon is, historical accuracy… anything like that. If you care about a military behaving like an actual military organisation, if you prefer not to have gaping plot holes in your media then… give this one a skip.

The lack of anything but beamingly positive reviews about Ars Paradoxica is baffling.

browncoatparadox:

Sally could hear laughter through the door as she walked up to the cabin. Shifting her bag of groceries to her opposite arm, she knocked. “Sally Prime, checking in,” she said.

Inside, someone stood up and cracked the door open slightly. “What’s the password?” said the person on the other side.

She sighed. “Petra, it’s me. You know it’s me.”

“How do I know you’re not an evil clone of the real Dr. Grissom?” Petra said through the door, a teasing tone in her voice.

“Because the evil clone is inside, let me in!” She drove her shoulder into the door, realizing too late that Petra had prepared for that and unlatched it. Sally fell through and landed on a suspiciously conveniently placed pillow.

She groaned, picking herself up off the ground. After a few moments, it turned out to be more literal than expected when their other housemate arrived to help her.

Sally (or Virginia, or Dr. Grissom, or evil clone, or whatever other distinguishing nicknames the three of them had come up with over the years) pulled Sally to her feet and started to pick up the groceries. “You didn’t have any eggs in here, right?”

“Nope. I’ve got corn chips, Cheez-its, the stuff to make that bean dip we like, and-“ she rummaged through the bag for a moment, “I had gotten these to share, but now I think they’re mine.” She triumphantly held up a box of Pop Tarts.

Sally startled as she stared at her younger double. “Wait, have we finally reached the point where they’re making frosted Pop Tarts?” Sally nodded smugly as she held the box over her head and waved it. “No fair, I helped you!” Sally cried out, reaching for the pastries as Sally leaned back and extended her arms. “Petra was the one who wanted to mess with you!”

“And you were the one who was prepared enough for it to make a landing spot!”

As they grappled over the sweets, Petra slunk behind them with the grace of someone who had been trained in spycraft since early childhood and snatched the box. She took off towards the living room as the Sallys stopped to exchange a look. They didn’t say anything, but knew that they were thinking of the same plan. They split up, Sally following Petra’s trail and Sally going out the front door and towards the back porch.

The look on Petra’s face as she “So this is what those Soviet agents felt like when they fought me,” she said, reluctantly surrendering her prize. She was quickly pinned between the two other women and marched into the kitchen.

It had taken them time to find their peace. Even after almost twenty years, it still surprised Sally every time she turned around to see herself, clearly the same person but older, the weight of a million abandoned timelines weighing on her back. Sally and Petra had references that no one else understood, not even Sally. She knew by now that there were certain names to keep an ear open for, people that meant practically nothing to her but that made her future self choke up when they were mentioned. She still remembered when Sally had almost crashed the car after hearing a song by one Helen Partridge come on the radio.

They were all missing things, all had time stolen from them. But they had built something new in its place.

Sally took the second box of Pop Tarts she had bought and tucked it in the back of a cabinet while the other two were turned away. She looked back at them and smiled. They were shoving each other good-naturedly, competing for the pastries that had just come out of the toaster. It was a far cry from the tension they had after fishing her out from the cold waters of Philadelphia. She smiled. Maybe it wasn’t how she had planned her life to go, but she had something good here.

lawrence-kansas-22-years-ago:

Why are we still here? Just to suffer? Every day I think about Anthony Partridge