Post-TADC Media Recommendations: The Centrifuge Brain Project
With The Amazing Digital Circus coming to an end, I thought it would be a good time to talk about and recommend some pieces of media for people who enjoyed the show, and are looking for something new.
As the first post in this series, I thought I'd start with the shortest and most easily accessible work: The Centrifuge Brain Project, a short film written, produced, and directed by Till Novak, and available on YouTube for free. It is only seven minutes long, and if I were you, I'd go watch it now, with no additional information.
I think the thing that the thing that this work does best, is create a setting that is steeped in unacknowledged horror. Let me unpack that a bit. In horror media, if a thing or situation is horrifying, the characters in that media will have various horrified/situation-appropriate reactions to it, and the audience has emotional reactions sympathetic/mirroring the reactions of the characters. However, sometimes, a piece of media will normalize the horrific: the characters of the media will be largely un-reactive or blazé towards the horror, which often heightens feelings of disconcertment for the audience because the dissonance between the feelings of horror invoked in the viewer and the reaction of the characters are so discordant. I feel this technique is best used when using it on a large scale - creating a world that not right and very fucked up, and giving it the extra oomph by having everyone who lives in the world treat it as mundane. This type of setting lends itself to lots of Fridge Horror (see TV tropes for more info on this).
Anyways, getting back to TCBP here, I think it does a phenomenal job of unacknowledged horror execution given the very short length it has to work with. I have most certainly seen media that does unacknowledged horror on a grander scale, but judging it on a length-to-unacknowledged horror ratio, TCBP is one of, if the most concentrated work(s) I have come across. Many of the comments talk about how the engineer being interviewed just says things that are crazy and upsetting, and then just blazes right past them, with a smile on his face.
The quality of the CGI adds to this as well. I, like many of those in the comments of the video, went into it completely blind, and the effect was not dissimilar to getting beamed by a 2x4 out of the blue. The video presented itself to me in 2020 (before AI), and I watched it on a device with a smaller screen, so with the CGI being pretty good and the documentary-esque tone that was used, it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that it was not real - only when the physics became too implausible to ignore.
The experience left me dazed, with a feeling of unnamable dread and persistent discomfort. In my attempts to find more videos that could evoke this feeling in me, I came across a playlist with both TCBP and Little Runmo in it, and that is how I discovered Gooseworx.
The world of Little Runmo is fucked, and Little Runmo himself is fucked, and Little Runmo's struggles to live despite it all is what gives flavor to the whole thing. Little Runmo exists in a subcategory of unacknowledged horror media in which only one (1) person/being is able to see the horror for what it is. The audience now gets to sympathetically feel horror with the main character again, not just at the thing that is horrifying, but also about how everyone else is OK with this.
I am getting side-tracked again. One last thing I'll note here: the scene in TADC ep 1, where Pomni is looking for Caine, and is opening a bunch of doors, and there is this behind one of them:
This honestly looks so much like something that could plausibly be in TCBP!
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Me: Look at all of these threads I have deliciously prepared for you! All of this RAM and memory. You've barley touched your allocation! You know, if you don't use it fully, you'll run really slow?
Jbrowse2 is the best local genome viewer, hands down. I know everyone always says IGV, but that thing is crusty and janky. It is such a freaking pain to use and the graphics are bad. And all the other ones are the same. I know it is because these programs have probably been around the longest, and so have the most technical debt when trying to update, especially with the ammount of features that have been since piled upon that base, but, like if you need to burn the entire thing to the ground and start from scratch building a better version 2.0, then yeah, you should probably do that.
there is truly an extremely fine line between being caffinated enough to stay awake and being too caffinated to accurately be able to pipette tiny volumes in 384-well plates
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One of the administrators told me everyone from the latest expedition mysteriously showed at their homes and then died of cancer six months later so I asked how many expeditions there have been to Area X and he said every time something like this happens they just call for more volunteers for the next expedition so I said it just sounds like they're feeding expeditions to Area X and then one of the psychologists started crying
I have seen some people contrasting the lack of sound when Caine gets deleted and disappears, to when Caine deletes other NPCs (cartoony loud noise, with confetti, etc.). However, something I noticed when I watched ep8 for the first time, and has been haunting me a bit ever since, is that there is a noise when Caine gets deleted. It's kinda quiet, but to my ear it sounds like the quiet pop that happens when you manually force older computers to shut down by holding down the power button. Also, something to note about manually forcing a shutdown in this way is that the screen immediately cuts out, akin the suddenness of Caine's disappearance.
I had no real emotional investment in Caine going into the episode, so I was not devastated by his death or anything, but it was sad to me in the classical tragedy sense of it all. As others have pointed out (see somewhere in TB Skyen's 4 hour monolouge about the episode): if Caine could have held on a little longer before loosing his shit, the humans could have come to an acceptance of their situation that would have allowed the two camps to coexist with one another. I also think that Caine dying was integral to the progression of the plot and the wrapping up of the main arc.
I have read Goose's replies to the TADC asks, and I believe that the most important information she has given about the show is this:
Q: What's a message you want people to take away from TADC?
A: That there's meaning to be found in a stagnant life.
The humans had been sort of living a stagnant life with the constant cycle of Caine's adventures. Perhaps, from a certain point of view, some would consider Caine's adventures to be very un-static, and that that it is Caine's express goal to keep "everyone's minds active" to stave off the depressive suicidality of abstraction. Whichever way you take it, in the pre-ep7/8 status quo, the condition of how they lived their lives was imposed on them from on high, depriving of them the true aimlessness needed to force someone(s) to make and impose meaning from whole cloth. In order for that to happen, Caine needed to die.
Speculation on my part: I think episode 9 will revolve around this search for meaning and purpose in the empty circus. I don't think everyone will abstract, but I would not be surprised if we get a casualty to ennui before the revelation of purpose. I also don't think Goose will go full Evangelion Episode 26 on us, but I suspect some of that will be present in the episode, and honestly, the more of that there is, the happier I will be.
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