my problem is I think I'm clever

+ bonus

Normally, I wouldn't be making a post like this, but the situation is a little bit dire. My mother, who is the main breadwinner of the family, has had her hours cut significantly and may or may not face being fired soon. My younger brother, bless him, has only been recently discharged from a psychiatric hospital, and while his medication is covered, he has not been able to find a job. This means for us another mouth to feed, unfortunately. We certainly do not have enough money for the upcoming month's rent and bills, and so far haven't been able to get any sort of rental assistance. Anyways, any and all help is truly appreciated right now! Thanks!

My sycamore tree began life in the gravel at the edge of a parking lot. If trees can feel pain, that is a painful, unlucky death. I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot I made out of a disposable cup.

Hello small one. This world may be cruel, but I will not be.

I decided to take care of it, not expecting it to survive, and when my sycamore tree unfurled one tiny leaf and then another, it chiseled a tiny foothold in my terrified brain, the kind of brain that doesn't remember a world before the atomic bomb and before 9/11.

I googled the lifespans of trees. My neurons had to stretch and expand to accommodate what I learned: My sycamore tree may live five hundred years. It's hard to think something so big. In twenty years, my baby sycamore tree will be three stories tall, and the home of many creatures. In five years, my sycamore tree will be taller than I am. In one year, it will be summer.

There's this concept called sense of foreshortened future where people who have lived through trauma can't conceptualize a future for themselves because deep down they don't expect to survive, When I look forward, all I see is fire and death, melting ice and burning sky. We were raised Evangelical. All we see is Judgment Day, except there is no heaven.

But now there is a tiny gap in the wall, a crack in the door of my cell

and on the other side, I see a tree

There is, in the future, a great old sycamore tree, full of clean winds and the stir of a thousand wings. A hundred years from now. Fifty years from now. There will be forests in that world. There will be a world.

It takes courage, but we have to imagine it.

Most tree species can live in excess of three or four hundred years. I think I'm learning something. I think there are ancient voices saying hello small one, touch the dirt and the leaves, for now you are part of something that cannot die

in 2030 I will be thirty years old and the world will not have ended and there will still be hummingbirds, and we will have photos of the stars more beautiful than we can now imagine.

I planted an Eastern Redcedar; they may live nine hundred years. There will be nine hundred years. The people in that time will remember us. Maybe we will meet the aliens (hi aliens!).

I will blow out the candles on many birthday cakes in a world where there are wolves in dark forests far from home. I am learning to imagine the future. I learned recently that elk were reintroduced to the Appalachian Mountains after over a hundred years of extirpation, and that they are expanding their range.

That tiny crack I can see through now opens a tiny bit more:

Maybe elk will pass through my hometown, maybe there will be a forest where the pasture is on the high hill that I can see from my home

say it, say it, say it: ten years, thirty years, a hundred years from now

Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.

what if they break? What with Caine gone. Maybe they’ll break and every NPC from every adventure ever created is now just running around the circus? I’m open to double ups, I think that would be funny.

alternatively, maybe with the circus decaying, the Cast has to retreat into the adventures in order to stay together? This isn’t very likely but it might be how we could relive the snow adventure and find out what Jax and Ribbit’s conversation was about. Maybe I’m delusional bc I want to see Ribbit. Y’all did not hire Skye Redden just to give her two lines we can barely hear

spheres of coffee in progress... 2026

Either you have a broken file that can't be reset without manually editing the code from outside the program. Or it's impossible without a prior save on a seperate file and sometimes a seperate folder because sometimes the corruption affects the storeage file.

I have lost documents, pdfs, audio files, and image files of various types on various devices because of saving errors and Ima be honest- Caine would have to physically leave the computer he's in and find a software to help him find & recover a previous save, neither of which appear to be part of his programming as an isolated generative Ai.

Because also- Caine appears cut off from the internet. If he had access to search engines, I don't think he'd accept being alone with Kinger for y e a r s if he could get help. He also wouldn't be constantly reusing assets- he'd very literally be more like ChatGBT by the time Pomni arrives.

It's safe to say Caine was abandoned by his creators as a failure the moment the first brain scan copies abstracted because the devs couldn't risk permanently losing brain scan files repeatedly. And he only messes with the brain scan files because he's also broken and glitchy. If Caine was programmed correctly, he shouldn't have the ability to alter brain scan files- just regurgitate the memories to make new things.

Like imagine if those bs Ais like ChatGBT or Grok didn't just regurgitate prompts they stole, but when they did so they could alter the content they stole. ie. every time someone asked for a picture of the Mona Lisa but with huge tits, all digital copies of the Mona Lisa were edited to have badonker changes for arbitrary periods of time before switching back to normal. That is what Caine is doing to the circus humans but on a smaller scale and he shouldn't & wouldn't be able to do that if he was just a functional generative Ai.

So tldr no, abstracted players can't be turned into npcs. And that's probably why Caine's go too npc for large crowds is a wooden mannequin (that he probably spotted in the images of C&A's office pictures).

I also find it interesting that the Really Scary Door is also implied to have a pacifist route.

Yes exactly!! There's something fascinating happening with the Mildenhall Manor adventure overall (which I can expand upon in another post!) about how the adventure flows.

In episode 1 and 2 those adventures are fairly linear and the thing that goes wrong is an entirely outside force (Caine can't predict Kaufmo abstracting or Pomni no-clipping out of the adventure) while in episode 3 the thing that goes wrong directly comes from a player (Jax, in this instance). We also see a similar thing play out in other episodes too! Often Jax is the person that disrupts the adventure format, if it isn't an outside force.

Which, as you're saying, highlights a very important aspect of what's going wrong with the adventures: the players.

Caine can't predict what they'll do. He can't plan a perfect adventure because he can't force them to go through the adventures as he expects. Mildenhall Manor (as well as episode 6's adventure) is the perfect example of this, where Caine has a script and expectations of how things will turn out and everything goes wrong because of a bad actor (aka Jax).

(As a side note, I also think it's interesting that the moment Pomni freaks out over Ghostly the ghost it goes from a spooky form to a cutesy form, or how the "normal"/"pacifist" route (interesting that the name of it changes from start to end!) clearly has little to no actual ghost capturing despite what Caine stated when explaining the adventure. Nor does the adventure Kinger and Pomni go on!)

We see Jax time after time wanting to force the adventures to be more chaotic. He enjoys violence and he likes watching other people struggle, but he notably will always back out of an adventure if any of that pain is directed towards him (most obviously seen in episode 1, where he's down for Gloink chaos until one bugs him, or episode 6 where he's thriving shooting everyone but gets pissed when Ragatha puts up any fight/shoots him).

That makes him a perfect bad actor (or more accurately, he's actively malicious). He only wants to sabotage things for others and doesn't actually care for the adventure itself. As long as he's not being hurt, he doesn't care how much violence everyone else goes through (and whether that is his authentic view or not, it's clear that he's been this way for quite a while given Gangle's mental state and how used to his desire for violence everyone is. He quite enjoys seeing others suffer).

<- BASICALLY, Jax is an advocate for violent adventures, but specifically in the way that "other people suffer/struggle/get hurt, but I do not". Which is why he holds no qualms over trying to force Gangle and successfully forcing Kinger and Pomni into the spooky route. It's why he holds no issues in episode 2 over using Pomni as a bridge, or throwing her off the truck in the first place. It's why in episode 6 he can fully know what he's supposed to do and turn around and shoot Ragatha in the face. The only way Caine could make a perfect adventure for Jax would be to give Jax the full ability to torment everyone while staying safe himself. I don't need to say how bad of an idea that would be!

Also! You're right! How do you keep a balance of what everyone wants when they, quite notably, don't agree on what they want? Especially when one of them actively craves violence, states multiple times that he'll kill people, and does go through with acts that, if any of this were real, would kill people?

This all is a side ramble related to your point!

Mildenhall Manor, similar to episode 2's "57x more immersive AI" was an experimental twist to his adventure format. Considering episode 4's original adventure was going to be "The Curse of the Violent Psychopath Butcher," I think that Caine realized that the split adventure format didn't fully work (specifically Jax wasn't happy with the adventure) but everyone did seem happier at the end of the adventure. The logical pathway there is "split adventure wasn't wanted, the people intended for the split (Pomni on the "normal" route and Zooble on the "mature/spooky"route) didn't show up" and "they were happier after, ergo they like the horror".

He wasn't happy about it, but Caine was open to switching the adventure (and most interestingly and expanding to my above point, we don't know if the original adventure for episode 4 was going to be a split pathway one again! It very well could be, if Caine was trying to replicate the seemingly successful Mildenhall Manor adventure! The Spudsy's adventure is linear because they requested it, which again would point Caine towards them not wanting a split path. Also, they don't suggest wanting a split pathway later on).

It also seems that while the players/human cast don't or can't wrap their mind around why an adventure can't be open ended, Caine already understands this. He knows the adventures haven't been a huge hit and is open to constructive criticism. Constructive criticism is defined as the following:

Constructive criticism is the art of making people better by helping them see what they can improve. Destructive criticism is the art of making people worse by destroying their confidence or giving them poor advice. (source)

Which I bring up because throughout the interaction where the topic of "leave things open for us" crops up, no one provides any actual constructive criticism. Ragatha comes the closest with "those are all a little dark" (paraphrased), but Zooble's whole point can translate to "instead of offering constructive criticism, you are wrong and we should plan the adventures"/"you should be cut out of it and leave us alone", essentially. At least in Caine's perspective. Basically, there's little actual feedback about Caine's adventures being given here, and what is being given doesn't give him advice on what they want. He's trying here.

Also, if we take what Ragatha says in episode 1 as one of the reasons why Caine runs the adventures, having "chill, laid back" adventures all the time wouldn't be healthy for anyone ("they're something fun for us to do to, you know... prevent us from going insane"). There's also the definition of an adventure, which is "an exciting or very unusual experience, participation in exciting undertakings or enterprises, a bold, usually risky undertaking or hazardous action of uncertain outcome" (source).

So Caine saying that there needs to be something bad happen, though the wording is off, isn't necessarily in the wrong. Intrigue, stakes, that's all a way to say "there needs to be something interesting happening, or else there isn't an adventure".

Again, this is basically the biggest struggle in the show, and also what you're saying! There's no way to make the perfect adventure because everyone wants different things! There's no one and done perfect adventure, no amount of open-endedness he can implement to make it flexible enough for everyone, it's impossible to have a perfect adventure, yet both he and the human cast all want there to be.

Also also, the fact that there is open ended activities for everyone to do on the circus grounds, yet no one goes there! He calls them out on this in episode 7, where he says none of them go to the beach despite it being there. If they all wanted to chill, if they wanted to have fun at the beach or go do things without stakes or intrigue or some sort of plot line, then why don't they? There's a beach, a night sky, a carnival, all sorts of low stakes, chill, "normal" things for them to do that's always been on offer that they all ignore.

The supposed "solution" comes in the form of this:

As you said and as I've been saying, this "solution" isn't a solution for anything! Nothing about the actual issues are being addressed, those being:

Everyone wants something different. None of them will ever all enjoy an adventure unless they can sacrifice some of their own ideal of a perfect adventure, something none of them (minus Kinger and possibly Gangle or Ragatha?) are willing to do.

All of them must act as good faith actors, which requires effort on their end to actually go through with the adventures. We see them all have more fun with them when they're willing to go along, even if this all pops up at different times. This is impossible because, first of all, Jax. But also because it implies all of them could always be good faith actors, which is basically impossible.

The more open ended an adventure is the more prone it is to bugging because, at the end of the day, these are singular adventures and not worlds. A world is a space you can explore and do whatever you want. And adventure is something pre-planned, with stakes, with a story, and has a start and an end. Caine is making adventures, and there's a limit to what he can do.

And ultimately, miscommunication and a lack of communication is the biggest things holding everyone back (with... pretty much everyone in the circus being bad at communicating, if I'm being fully honest. Pointing again to how Caine said he'd appreciate constructive criticism and they don't give it to him yet take it out on him).

Another point that I want to bring up that isn't entirely related but I wanted to briefly mention (that definitely comes up later in the episode) is how Zooble's proposed "solution".... completely cuts Caine out of the picture? If everyone is coming and going as they please, if the adventures aren't events and now something anyone can choose to or not to do, etc... where does that leave Caine? He'd get even less feedback, even less interaction, and ultimately would be relegated to a position of "generate this. We want this. No. Only what we want".

<- I'm only calling this out because we specifically see Caine panic over this concept later in the episode. Perhaps not in this specific understanding of it, but the idea that he as a person isn't wanted and only his ability to manifest adventures/worlds is wanted is a deep insecurity for him. Which is pretty understandable if you view him as a person. Which, seemingly, the cast does not (as backed up in episode 7 and 8, though Kinger may be the exception here?). If you don't view him as a person, then he's being purposefully difficult and obtuse.

Which is a very long way of saying yes!! You're absolutely right! Ultimately what Zooble suggested and what they want is impossible, and episode 3 is the closest realistic thing that they're going to get to it. Despite that, if any of them act in bad faith towards the adventure, it's going to break. That's the nature of an adventure being a semi-scripted event with a clear start and end. There's only so much room for flexibility there. None of them can accept that though.

AND YES!! I haven't even talked about how fascinating it is that Mildenhall Manor even has a "pacifist" route, let alone the implication that both paths had a pacifist and non-pacifist route! Assumably the pacifist route for the Really Scary Door would've been tied to not killing the angel head?

<- not even getting into how interesting everything tied to what Kinger and Pomni goes through in that adventure is. The fact that it starts to veer off course when Caine and Zooble are arguing? The fact they don't go to hell until Caine after glitching AND after Caine glitches the adventure goes from "spooky" to a "I failed as a protector to my wife" style story line when Kinger is there?? And the whole "these souls want to escape the dark, cramped, pit of hell they're in but only can if they're breathing/alive" aspect of it? AND that this isn't the only time Kinger has been associated to a glowing head?? I have a whole massive post worth of stuff I could say about this episode honestly!!!