- Nov 2016
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archive.ncsa.illinois.edu archive.ncsa.illinois.edu
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"War! Kill the man!"
So maybe they are human?
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Thousands of miles away his audience applauded.
They are all brainwashed subhuman being thingys.
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progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
The machine is sucking the life out of the humans to become a more powerful being, to become sentient!
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Book of the Machine
Oh great, an official Bible for the glorious machine!
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The first of these was the abolition of respirator.
These peoples are now even more confined to their room world things.
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THE HOMELESS
Lol he dead. RIP
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the Mending Apparatus; the Mending Apparatus, was after me.
The 'machine' may be some abstract idea that keeps the people in line, but now it has either manipulated the people to make appendages for itself or made them itself, but now it has a physical form to keep the people in check, also the attendant of the train things.
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that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine?
The machine has become sentient and now is taking life from the people by promising them 'flourishing" lives while taking their energy. But at what extent? If the machine is to kill off all of these people, what will it do? Command a land of nothing? Perhaps it will keep a select few alive to try to have some sense of emotion? Does the machine itself want to "feel" the true bounty of the old world, thus keeping a small part of it alive and well, hidden from others, so that it alone can experience it?
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the peace, the nonchalance, the sense of space, and, brushing my cheek, the roaring fountain of our artificial air
Maybe there is real natural Earth left, it is just hidden from these people either for their 'sanity' or because it could cause them to question the machine.
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If he did not die today he would die tomorrow.
He knows too much! He is too powerful. There's probably some fable that is common-knowledge such as Icarus, though they probably can't relate as well to the sun thing, as to being a nosey person and trying to truly understand the machine, rather than being complacent with it
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The Machine hums! Did you know that? Its hum penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts.
Maybe the machine is some sort of extra-terrestrial being or some spiritual entity that exists indefinitely and is in all aspect of these peoples lives.
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Having paced the platform outside my own room
From the beginning of this story, it seems that these people are used to not moving ever or at least rarely, and with their muscles bring removed at birth it seems that this is what the machine wants. But Kuro has overcome his instincts to stay still, and rather he is pacing, perhaps bringing back some sort of hidden trait of his elders.
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it would have been no true kindness to let an athlete live
Something has happened, it is still not clear as to what, but something has left any traces of the natural Earth unusable, and now these peoples must work around it.
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"Well, the Book"s wrong, for I have been out on my feet."
A hand guide for life to life under the machine.
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"You are beginning to worship the Machine," he said coldly.
Maybe the machine is not an actual machine but some sort of neural infection in which it manipulates the brain functions of people and slowly it is evolving its power within their minds.
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"I found out a way of my own."
The machine controls all aspects of your life and these people do not understand that they are merely existing under its will, expect for Kuro and perhaps a few choice others. He found his own way out, perhaps the mechanics of the machine are not fully exposed though there may be a way to teach oneself?
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Homelessness means death. The victim is exposed to the air, which kills him.
This is a post-industrialization Earth in which man has burned all kind of fossil fuels unchecked and left our Earth an inhabitable desolate place and those who do not conform to the machine are subject to their own doings.
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The sunlight almost touched me
Hey look, they live in false light! Almost as our phones, TVs, and computers do! Are their bodies just not adapted to the sunlight, if she is even referring to The Sun?
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I now think that these people are existing on some sort of elevated surface above that of the natural earth, and that though they could hypothetically, though is seems like it would be something done only out of necessity rather than leisure, visit earth, it seems that they don't.
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Yet the attempt to "defeat the sun" aroused the last common interest that our race experienced about the heavenly bodies, or indeed about anything.
I now see this as the older civilization wanting to play God, wanting to be in complete of their lives and the forces that sculpt their lives. To fully develop their senses of knowing what is to be existing to the maximum of their understanding and then to exceed their limits for infinity.
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Homelessness.
Apparently currency or any form of it does not exist here. Instead, by living in cooperation of the machine, this peoples are guaranteed everything that they would need. By being gifted the gift of life, these people not must adhere by the rules of the Machine.
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To "keep pace with the sun," or even to outstrip it, had been the aim of the civilization preceding this.
Relatively speaking us, as humans, may not be the precedecers of this civilization. But even if we are, what is the purpose of outracing the sun which seems to mean eliminating as much wasted time as possible. More productivity?
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the attendant, who had been careless, generated the light, and pulled down the blinds of pliable metal.
Is this even a real attendant or just a visual representation of the machine that these peoples are able to relate to, while still performing the functions of the machine?
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"O Machine!" she murmured, and caressed her Book, and was comforted.
More allusions that this machine is or want to be referred to as some sort of God-like thing.
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She thought the attendant had been unfair, and spasms of rage shook her.
Are these such serviced beings that they expect the most highest quality of services and goods that when something is not up to par, they freak out and don't know what to do?
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For one thing it smelt - not strongly or unpleasantly, but it did smell, and with her eyes shut she should have known that a new thing was close to her.
Do these beings even have a sense of their senses or are they more conscious beings who can think but almost lack a physical body?
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the first fellow creature she had seen face to face for months
Not even mentioned as another human, it is another creature, are these people even human? They might be terminator machine robot people. At least in her lifetime she has actually seen another being.
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"I suppose I must see who it is", she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately.
Her chair seems to be some sort of device whose mechanics allow movement with any effort from whoever is sitting in it
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the journey to the northern hemisphere had begun.
I'm still un sure of whether this is Earth, as we know it, or not
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"I will not tell you through the Machine."
Maybe this is all in Vatshi's head and the machine is just the NSA.
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the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people.
This brings imagery of nomadic tribes who migrated where their food sources were, and to think that within this timeline, people have stopped migrating completely and rather have created a stagnant lifestyle.
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an unfamiliar button
Smart idea, push an unknown button, but it's intriguing to notice that though these people where born into the machine, there were aspects of it that they did not understand, yet they (assuming) never bothered to question the machine.
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"O Machine!" and raised the volume to her lips. Thrice she kissed it, thrice inclined her head, thrice she felt the delirium of acquiescence. Her ritual performed, she turned to page 1367,
The machine is now reaching divinity levels where these people are giving praise to it and are reading from its "Bible."
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She glanced round the glowing room as if some one might be watching her.
Is someone/are somebodies watching her?
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urvival from the ages of litter-one book. This was the Book of the Machine.
This seems to be a life guide that is either modeled to life after the inclusion of the machine or perhaps the machine is telling people how to "more productively" live their lives.
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Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes
With her lecture being so short, t seems either the was an event on the old earth where many entries of history were lost due to some catastrophic event (which would also explain the state of the Earth as described earlier) or perhaps the machine is limiting the amount of old history that is allowed to be taught know or shared being these people, thus alluding to the notion that maybe this people are existing at the will of the machine, despite the fact they are probably made the machine.
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Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.
This imagery reminds me of Wall-E.
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The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.
I had jus said this, these people have nothing and yet they have everything at once. Though we are not currently on some weird space-station/other planet we are currently being subjected to alternative forms of communication that allow us to talk to others without being face to face.
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"Do you mean by that, contrary to the Machine?"
It seems that the machine encompasses more than communication of this era, it seems to be shaping the human culture into a isolated world where it seems anyone can be reached in an instant, however this may only provide a false sense of interaction.
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"Mother, you must come, if only to explain to me what is the harm of visiting the surface of the earth."
It seems my suspicions were correct; these peoples do not visit the natural Earth and rather they live or inhabit elsewhere. I am not quite sure yet...
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It only gave a general idea of people
The first thought that comes to my mind is a manual manipulation of these projections of people from the machine. Suppose that Kuno says something that does not please the machine, could the machine manipulate his images and audio transmissions as to not alarm whoever is on the other end?
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the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark
This imagery of a dirty Earth does not provoke pleasant feeling, perhaps there is little contact with the natural Earth with these people, and this is why they talk via this sphere plate machine thing...?
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"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other.
From a purely religious perspective, "God" made man, therefore by consequence, anything that is created by man in a product of God.
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THE MACHINE STOPS
Before I even start to read this short story, the title "The Machine Stops" believes me to think that in Forster's future, machine or I think he more specifically referring to, technology, has a significant role in people's everyday lives, and that stopping this machine not only has a impact on the physical machines, but it impact the people's lives. Stopping the machine also stop the flow of people's daily routines, stopping the machine has a greater affect than most people can imagine.
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URL
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- Sep 2016
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www.villagevoice.com www.villagevoice.com
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In short, the Bungle Affair dares me to explain it to you without resort to dime-store mysticisms, and I fear I may have shape-shifted by the digital moonlight one too many times to be quite up to the task.
So the author is telling us that he is biased, and we may not be able to trust everything he tells us in the story he's beginning.
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not the fictive trappings of voodoo and shapeshifting and wizardry, but the conflation of speech and act that's inevitable in any computer-mediated world
The internet has more power than some would think
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For one thing, the extremely public nature of the living room meant that gagging would spare the victims only from witnessing their own violation, but not from having others witness it.
This comment is interesting in context of legislation that has been written since the article that affects the freedoms of users on the 'web'
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when it comes to sex, perhaps the body in question is not the physical one at all, but its psychic double
So I think here the author is saying that in a way this "virtual rape" can be seen as actual rape, even though it wasn't physical.
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No bodies touched. Whatever physical interaction occurred consisted of a mingling of electronic signals sent from sites spread out between New York City and Sydney, Australia.
How could someone possibly rape someone in New York when they were in Australia
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Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face—a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere playacting.
These virtual reality action left real life emotional damage to a real person.
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he was at the time a fat, oleaginous, Bisquick-faced clown dressed in cum-stained harlequin garb and girdled with a mistletoe-and-hemlock belt whose buckle bore the quaint inscription "KISS ME UNDER THIS, BITCH!"
Sounds like this dude is a pretty big loser
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Yet no position was trickier to maintain than that of the MOO's resident anarchists. Like the technolibbers, the anarchists didn't care much for punishments or policies or power elites.
These servers are filled with a collection of various ideals held by various people and identities.
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speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA
A really thorough magic metaphor here.
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the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn't so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does.
words have power, especially (literally) in virtual environments
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