The short film someone made is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
The short film makes no sense, as the 2 people talking are meat themselves.
You should probably go watch the Terminator movies.
They're made out of meat (1991)
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Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just have to go along with the idea that skin provides no indication of meatiness and that the two aliens are Ford Prefect types, then the short film lands just fine.
I guess. It's still hard to mesh with the idea they don't believe these humans flap their meat at each other, or that they do not communicate exclusively via radio signals. It doesn't match my idea that these are two energy/mechanical beings discussing a faraway planet from their spaceship or whatever, talking theory without actually seeing the beings they are discussing.
You've never encountered, say, a baffling code bug that couldn't possibly be caused by X, spent a day on it, and found out it turns out to be caused by X?
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#53Also by Terry Bisson and one of my favorite stories is Bears Discover Fire 1990 https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fi...
I loved this story when I first read it. I made me feel wistful, like a world was dying and simultaneously being born. I can't explain it, but the idea of bears using fire has stayed with me ever since.
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#54I still remember seeing Terry do a reading of this at Lunacon, I think, shortly after it was published. It was a good reading, he really knew how to land a joke.
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
They only look like meat to blend in. It's the only way to figure out if they're made out of meat.
In the story, the very idea of permanently meat-based beings appals them, and in fact one of them doesn't entirely believe it. So why would they look like meat to "blend in", a priori, if one of them doesn't even fathom the idea? "Blend in" with what? One of them doesn't believe what it's dealing with! Like a sibling comment mentions, they talk about "meat sounds"... using meat sounds! Why would they find it surprisi…
Well, if you think you can do a better job, make it happen. Make the film you want to see.
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#56Is including an iFrame to Terry Bison's website reprinting?
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#57I love this short story, it's one whose memory visits me unbidden from time to time. I blogged about it over 20 years ago[1], and it was already around 15 years old at that time. OMNI magazine was great.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/short-fiction-made-o...
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#58Earlier I found it awe-inspiring. Nowadays I find it funny because we have yet to even remotely approach the complexity of meat.
It's amazing how consciousness remains a mystery given all the scientific progress over the last 100 years
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#59Also by Terry Bisson and one of my favorite stories is Bears Discover Fire 1990 https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fi...
Is it me, or is there a subliminal message in the banner of LightSpeed magazine? No time to look into it, but there appears to be a changing message that flashes on and off to take the place of the "LIGHTSPEED" graphic in the banner. The only one I caught was "RESIST".
Re: They're made out of meat (1991)
#60The short film someone made is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
The short film makes no sense, as the 2 people talking are meat themselves.
I interpreted this in two different ways:
* This is a virtual environment and the "meat actors" are depicting avatars of virtual/not-meat entities inhabiting that world. That's why there's inconsistencies with real life, for example the red guy's clothes. This was what I thought when I first saw this short.
* This was really an exchange of concepts and data in a language not really suitable for humans to understand. So what you are seeing is not what actually took place, but a translation. Some machine took the abstract data interchange and translated it to what it thought would be more appropriate for a meat head to understand, including setting it up in an environment that would make sense to a human. But it made some mistakes (the clothes, the weird behavior of some characters). This could have predicted AI Video slop, in a way.