Jake

Important If True 3: The Power of 45 Brains

Recommended Posts

Important If True 3:

Important If True 3


The Power of 45 Brains
A researcher has determined that by 2025, if you string all our smart devices together—our Amazon Alexas and always-online talking teddy bears, our color-changing light bulbs and remote-controlled doorknobs—they will have the combined thinking power of 45 human brains. But that raises the question: Who exactly are these 45 brains, and what do they want to tell us? Join us as we find the answer or, failing that, make something up.

Important Reference Materials: Morgan Freeman Turkish Airlines ad, CloudPets hack, Furby, Teddy Ruxpin, children loving Alexa, Alexa making questionable choices, Tomes and Talismans, Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis

Chris' Endorsement: The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart

Jake's Endorsement: Witness, starring Harrison Ford (iTunes, free on Amazon Prime)

Nick's Endorsement: Finding and frequenting your local neighborhood bar

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Have you guys ever thought about trying not introducing what the premise of the show is? It always sounds a bit awkward when you try to explain it, and I don't know many other comedy shows that try to explain their approach to humor up top, unless it is something as pithy as "an advice show for the modren era" or something.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm having a hard time listening to this show as I get the impression you guys are talking over each other quite a lot.

It's really uncomfortable to listen to for me ;(

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Multiple ads per show, a Patreon that is making over double the amount you wanted to cover costs, and now paid shout-outs as well? When is enough enough guys?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The real question is whether or not Gone Home can somehow be connected to the brainverse.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
5 hours ago, hyretic said:

Multiple ads per show, a Patreon that is making over double the amount you wanted to cover costs, and now paid shout-outs as well? When is enough enough guys?

 

Theyve been on the store for a year, someone just bought one this week. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I just want to say that this might be my new favorite podcast. You guys are 3 for 3 on great episodes.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Another great ep! The titular discussion was just such a bizarre series of thoughts; I loved that it ended with Jake realizing that you guys were basically describing God.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Now that I've finished I can say this was a really good episode. If the fantasies you guys spin are going to continue to build on each other, might I suggest someone start a wikia for the show? Even someone who started with episode 1 might not catch references to coversations on older Idle Thumbs episodes.

 

Also, Wes Craven was a crazy guy who was really into building metafiction, so there are connections in some of his films that build a Mobius Universe (which is how I always thought of the paradoxes that arise from the St. Elsewhere thing), but will take a lot of time for me to type out.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

This was a really great episode, feels like you guys are really hitting your stride. My partner and I have listened to each episode on car rides, and we turned to each other after this one and both said "That. That was a good episode." 

@Patrick R The Wes Craven thing might make a good letter? 

Also, I kept hearing Tomes and Talismans in my head in the same cadence as Griffin McElroy said Omens & Portents.

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
2 hours ago, Rilen said:


@Patrick R The Wes Craven thing might make a good letter? 

 

 

It's super long and involved, branching out in a lot of directions and involving time paradoxes. I'll make a post here when I have the time but even putting in the work to unpack it all will be a lot.

 

EDIT: I'll just do the broad strokes. Keep in mind I'm excluding comic books, novelizations, the Freddy's Nightmares tv series, and little easter egg gags like the Freddy Glove appearing in Evil Dead 2 or the Hellraiser box appearing in Jason Goes to Hell.

 

1. Jason Voorhees was a guest on the Arsenio Hall show, so all the following is either connected to our own actual universe OR part of a fictional universe that Arsenio Hall was secretly set in the whole time, despite appearing to be a non-fictional talk show.

 

2. Freddy Vs. Jason (and previously, for a moment, Jason Goes to Hell) permanently links the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th universes.

 

3. Freddy Krueger is the janitor of the high school in Scream. YouTube video says it's a lookalike, but it's clearly Freddy Krueger, who was canonically a high school janitor before parents found out he was a serial killer and burned him alive. In Scream Freddy Krueger is played by Wes Craven, director of Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Since this is pre-burn Freddy we can assume that all of the Nightmare on Elm Street series takes place after 1996, which is when Scream is set. Also, the opening scene of Scream confirms that A Nightmare on Elm Street is a fictional movie series in the Scream universe, so there's the first paradox.

 

4. Jay and Silent Bob have a cameo in Scream 3, which links the Scream, Nightmare, and Friday universes to the Kevin Smith Askewniverse. Two side notes: One: in the linked scene, Courtney Cox is leaving the set of Stab 3, which is part of the fictional film series based on the events of Scream 1 & 2, so there's some extra metafictional madness. Two: The tourist with the camcorder in the panama hat is Wes Craven, which means he is either playing Freddy Krueger or himself, which is important because...

 

5. Wes Craven has a cameo in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back as himself, director of a Scream sequel starring Shannon Doherty. Or, I'm just now realizing, because we never see any clapboard or crew jackets that say the word "Scream" on them, this could possibly be Wes Craven directing a Stab sequel instead.

 

6. Wes Craven's A New Nightmare is it's own little eternal spiral inside all this. If you haven't seen it, it's essentially the horror version of Adaptation, where the Nightmare on Elm Street series was a sort of totem that trapped a real demon version of Freddy in the realm of fiction, but once they stopped making Nightmare on Elm Street movies that means the demon was free to escape and kill people in the real world, including the cast of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street. Wes Craven plays himself, Hollywood director who is saving the world by making horror movie sequels, in what must surely be the most self-aggrandizing director cameo of all time.

 

--------

Also, the Friday the 13th series has some weirdness with chronology because they kept pumping out a sequel a year but also kept using the "the events of the last film happened many years ago" set-up, so by the end they were set something like 13 years ahead of their release dates.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The 45 brains made up of all the connected devices is terrifying if you consider that not only is it smarter than a single person, but it could probably think faster. How fast who knows? I've heard discussions on AI that an AI with a human level IQ would be able to make decisions so much faster than any human could that a single day for us would be equivalent to 20,000 years to the AI. Even if it was just as smart as us it would be so far ahead. What problems couldn't it think through with that much relative time?

 

TLDR we're doomed

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

@Patrick R hmmm, I wonder if someone in these here parts would help with some UI design for a nifty web/flow chart.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I heartily recommend the mentioned Deep Space Nine episode, "Far Beyond the Stars."

 

https://www.netflix.com/watch/70205942?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C12%2C6d2bf3fa-4593-4499-87d7-1e3b1b914f7f-29722541

 

(I don't really know if netflix links work like this.)

 

It stands alone as a piece of Twilight Zonesque science fiction with a social conscience, and you get to see some capital A Acting. Like, 20 seconds in and Avery Brooks is already playing it to the fucking hilt. Casting him as the main protagonist was just amazing, but I guess it's kind of the Trek MO to go larger than life. Stewart could be pretty reserved, but is also very capable of going big, and Shatner is as big as it gets at all times; not even his girdle could contain him.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
56 minutes ago, Salacious Snake said:

I heartily recommend the mentioned Deep Space Nine episode, "Far Beyond the Stars."

 

https://www.netflix.com/watch/70205942?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C12%2C6d2bf3fa-4593-4499-87d7-1e3b1b914f7f-29722541

 

(I don't really know if netflix links work like this.)

 

It stands alone as a piece of Twilight Zonesque science fiction with a social conscience, and you get to see some capital A Acting. Like, 20 seconds in and Avery Brooks is already playing it to the fucking hilt. Casting him as the main protagonist was just amazing, but I guess it's kind of the Trek MO to go larger than life. Stewart could be pretty reserved, but is also very capable of going big, and Shatner is as big as it gets at all times; not even his girdle could contain him.

 

I was actually just about to come in and recommend "Far Beyond the Stars." The premise, that a black starship captain can't possibly be reality and has to be the fantasy of a struggling black writer in 1950s New York, is an incredibly pointed jab at all the people who claimed that Brooks was a weak or divisive choice to lead Deep Space 9. Also, in general, DS9 has a lot to say about race and gender, albeit behind the facade of idealistic sci-fi, than virtually any other TV show in the nineties, and it's fascinating to rewatch it today looking for that sort of thing (while acknowledging that it fails a lot, for a variety of reasons).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

A secret wonderful thing about Far Beyond the Stars is that the actors who normally are under a bunch of alien makeup are shown without and it's super weird. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The joke about Hamilton and recommendation of a play in NYC made me think of the show Perfect Crime. It's been running since 1987, the lead actress has done over 12,000 performances, and it's widely reviewed as the worst show in New York. That'd be something to see while you're in the city for sure. There was a really nice in depth interview with Catherine Russell about it that I don't think I found in cursory googling.

 

e: looks like I heard about this through the Reply All podcast. That's linked in one of these articles.

 

https://digg.com/2016/perfect-crime-broadway-reply-all

 

http://thebroadwayblog.com/2016/05/23/14721-perfect-crime

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/theater/reviews/still-kicking-after-18-years-of-homicide.html?_r=0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

If it weren't for Patreon and you guys had to do a second Kickstarter, "One of the 45 Brains" would be a really great backer tier name.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
1 hour ago, Mike Danger said:

If it weren't for Patreon and you guys had to do a second Kickstarter, "One of the 45 Brains" would be a really great backer tier name.

 

I wrote in a big long email about the Wold Newton Family/Universe, and at the end proposed a few of the potential brains, and it got me thinking that perhaps one of the recurring segments would be to figure out the ownership of the 45 brains.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

There would have to be some kind of throttle, but the quest to discover the other brains is an excellent long term goal for this cast.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Can anyone link me to the actual study that's referenced here about the IoTs eventually reaching the computational power of 45 human brains? My google-fu and Twitter searching is turning up nothing.

 

Highly suspect.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
30 minutes ago, Sullitude said:

Can anyone link me to the actual study that's referenced here about the IoTs eventually reaching the computational power of 45 human brains? My google-fu and Twitter searching is turning up nothing.

 

Highly suspect.

 

As Jake mentioned in the episode, this is from a talk by this dude Bryan Lunduke at the "Open Internet of Things Summit & Embedded Linux Conference". The talk is real hand wavey, and real silly, and the dude is an author and tech journalist, so you should take the whole thing with a whole shit ton of salt. But it makes for a silly podcast subject. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
1 hour ago, RubixsQube said:

 

As Jake mentioned in the episode, this is from a talk by this dude Bryan Lunduke at the "Open Internet of Things Summit & Embedded Linux Conference". The talk is real hand wavey, and real silly, and the dude is an author and tech journalist, so you should take the whole thing with a whole shit ton of salt. But it makes for a silly podcast subject. 

 

Many thanks! This has inspired me to do something fun ;)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

If, two years from now, the Idle Thumbs office walls are not covered with conspiracy theorist style article clippings and thumbtacks and strings trying to piece together the 45 brains, I will be very disappointed.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now