Assassin Mykros

Yes, and it drove me nuts because that’s a great premise! But it was totally wasted in a way that I found extra frustrating, because they only needed to slightly reshuffle the existing pieces and give the love interest some kind of coherent characterization, and they just. did not do that.

So like. The premise of the movie is that Jack, the main character, is a struggling musician who gets hit by a car and knocked unconscious at the exact moment of a mysterious global blackout. When he wakes up in the hospital, he discovers that he is the only person on Earth who remembers the existence of the Beatles.

It takes him a bit to realize this: he quotes When I’m Sixty-Four to his best friend Ellie at the hospital and she just gives him a weird look. When he plays a bit of Yesterday while hanging out with friends, they all freak out about how good his new song is, and he realizes that something is Weird.

There’s a fun scene where he frantically googles Beatles-related terms and comes up empty. “Beatles” turns up bugs and cars. Ringo Starr? Never heard of him. We find out that the band Oasis never existed either, and over the course of the movie there are a few more disappearances thrown in as jokes: Coca-Cola, cigarettes, and Harry Potter have also ceased to exist, or never were.

So Jack, who knows most of the Beatles catalogue by heart, and is a decent musician, decides to re-record them. And they’re instant hits, and he starts getting money and fame and record deals thrown at him, and hanging out with Ed Sheeran (played by Ed Sheeran), and going on talk shows and so on. The movie rapidly turns into a parable about the cost of fame, not letting success change you, remembering what’s more important than money and power, etc etc.

It’s just like. kind of lazy about it? and the romance plot feels both incoherent and slapdash, because Ellie has no personality and no comprehensible motivations.

Like, she’s been Jack’s music manager since they were teenagers, and she’s been convinced he was destined for greatness since she saw him play Wonderwall at a school talent show, but she also is weirdly convinced that she’s not good enough for him even before he becomes super famous. But Jack never actually stops being into her, even at the Peak Hubris part of the plot, and he eventually gives it all up and tells the world he didn’t write any of the songs as part of a big dramatic love confession. Except it’s never really clear what was holding either of them back in the first place, or why a dramatic love confession was even necessary.

So, here is how I would fix the movie.

First, the romance plot feels super tacked on anyway so let’s just resolve it earlier and give the poor girl an actual job in the plot. I’d have Jack sit Ellie down fairly early, after he’s released the first few songs and they’ve blown up but before the Fame Spiral starts, and say:

okay. look. I know this sounds nuts but either that accident caused the most specific brain damage in the history of the world, or I remember a different version of reality than everyone else, because I did not write these songs. I just remember them, and no one else does.

And the movie did actually set up a way for him to prove this, but they never used it! for some fucking reason! Because Wonderwall is the song that convinced Ellie that Jack was destined for musical greatness, and Wonderwall has also been erased. Which creates an opportunity, which the movie did not take, for a really effective scene where Jack asks Ellie what song he sang at the talent show. And she can’t answer him, which freaks her out because that’s a core memory! Thats the reason she’s so devoted to Jack in the first place!

So he starts playing her the song. And she knows she’s never heard it before, but she also knows that on some level, she recognizes it.

So from that point onwards, Ellie and Jack can be in cahoots, sharing the secret, which allows the romance to develop a lot more effectively and convincingly, and puts Ellie in a better position to talk Jack down from Fame Hubris, and allows Jack to remind Ellie that he’s not actually too good or too famous for her, because she knows he’s actually just the beneficiary of a deeply weird cosmic accident.

Also, there’s a better way to resolve the romance plot. Ellie has bafflingly low self-esteem, for reasons that are never explained, so like. please explain that, movie. But since half the romance plot is just Ellie going “I’m not good enough for you!” I do have a better resolution than what the movie did.

The only Big Dramatic Gesture Jack does comes at the very end of the movie, and it’s boring and doesn’t actually have anything much to do with Ellie — he already hates being famous by then, he wants out regardless. He needs a gesture that’s actually about Ellie, and allows them to be together and in cahoots again for the rest of the Price of Fame plot.

Which, again, the movie laid the groundwork for at the beginning, and never used.

I’d have Jack tell Ellie that he knows — is baffled by? but knows — that she thinks she ought to leave him for his own good, and that she thinks his music career is more important than her. To prove it’s not, he’s going to give her a song. A Beatles song he’s never going to record, never going to play, for anyone but her. A song that used to be one of the most famous songs in the world, but is only ever going to be theirs, hers and his, from now on.

He plays her When I’m Sixty-Four.

That does the trick: they’re together through the rest of the movie, and decide how to get Jack out of the Fame Trap together, and retire into happy obscurity together.

There is one other optional change, but it would require buy-in from Paul McCartney.

There’s already a scene in the movie — one of the best bits of the whole thing, honestly — where Jack meets an elderly John Lennon, who has never been famous and is perfectly content with his life. I think a nice epilogue would have Jack track down Paul, and find him in his back garden, planting flowers and beatifically happy.

After a short conversation in which Paul appears to have no memory of ever ever having been a Beatle, Jack leaves Paul to enjoy his retirement.

[youtube link for HD viewing]

After nearly two years of on-again off-again work here it is, the animatic that’s been stuck in my head ever since I first heard this song back in 2018!! Finishing this behemoth was my big goal for the year and that was even before I decided to fully illustrate it, but somehow here we are!

I honestly wasn’t ever sure if I’d be able to make this a reality since the song is a mix of fast paced with slower portions and I didn’t think static images would fit very well, but rather than give up on it I was super inspired by @siruoa​‘s brilliant greedling artvid over here, and decided to give that style a shot myself with just the best results I could’ve hoped for!

Anyways thanks to all of ya’ll that have been so patient and encouraging since I dropped the sketch version last spring, I hope you all enjoy my love letter to this character and this banging song as much as I do~

(Additional project details under the cut)

My adaptation of the God of Arepo short story, which was originally up at ShortBox Comics Fair for charity. You can get a copy of the DRM-free ebook here for free - and I'd encourage you to donate to Mighty Writers or The Ministry of Stories in exchange.

My adaptation of the God of Arepo short story, which was originally up at ShortBox Comics Fair for charity. You can get a copy of the DRM-free ebook here for free - and I'd encourage you to donate to Mighty Writers or The Ministry of Stories in exchange.

You don’t know how he does stuff like this. What does this even mean? It’s nonsense. Is it even syntactically viable?? Are you allowed to color text like that??? ARGH. Maybe you should ask him about it some time.

…hm.

You see, at first glance, this code does look syntactically viable, but only if we don’t pair the brackets in the way the coloring implies. If we write the code like this:

Then it’s a loop bound to the lifespan of Universe 1. Inside that main loop, it’s running a loop bound to the inverse of Universe 2′s lifespan - my guess being that this loop only runs while Universe 2 is dead.

If Universe 2 is ever registered as ‘alive’, the program waits for the blue THIS to die, and then continues. And when the main Universe 1 loop ends, it will wait for the red THIS to die, and finally exits. 

In other words: This program will exit when U1 is dead, U2 is alive, and both ‘bifurcated’ iterations of THIS are dead. 

However, the red/blue coloring implies that the brackets are paired in a completely nonsensical way. 

I’m with Karkat here, This is nonsense. You can’t put the top half of one code block inside another - at least, not in any language I’ve worked with. I’m sure there are weird, esoteric languages that do it, but it’s definitely not the syntax du jour.

This ‘merged bracket’ interpretation is probably the correct one, though, since the colors match up. The reason this compiles at all is probably due to the special behavior of bifurcate THIS[], which we’re not privy to. 

I do have a theory about what bifurcate is doing here, but… oh my god , guys, this is so silly. Will I post it? I’m going to post it. 

TA wears 3D glasses, right?

What if we’re meant to do the same?

If we view these two loops as not inside each other, but adjacent to each other in 3D space, then this code makes a lot more sense. Suddenly we’re just looking at two simple death loops - one which which exits when U1 dies, and one which exits when U2 lives. 

They’re not blocking each other, because they’re probably executing on different threads, which may be the true function of bifurcate. Viewed like this, this code becomes a simple, multithreaded script that works similarly to my original interpretation - the difference being that now, the colors match up properly. It’s kind of beautiful, to be honest. 

Now that I’m viewing this program as two threads, it seems as if the blue loop waits for the red thread to die before it can exit, and vice versa. 

If I’m right about this, it means that this program is deadlocked - neither thread can exit, because it’s waiting for the other one. The two threads are back to blocking each other, and this program will never exit.  

This code, when executed, immediately causes the user’s computer to explode, and places a curse on the user forever, along with everyone he knows, and everyone he’ll ever meet.

Not surprisingly, later on you would run this code in a fit of stupidity.

None of this, however, explains why it curses the user. 

"Oh? Where'd you get it?"

"Spirits and Such Consulting."

"Eh? Seriously? I never took you for the type to believe in that kind of thing."

"Oh, I don't. The dude is a total fraud but he's a miracle worker with neck and shoulder pain, you just have to tell him it's ghosts."

"What."