beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Watched the one where Zed is in hospital and decides not to treat her brain tumor on the theory it is a gift from god and the price of magic.

If I thought the story uncomplicatedly agreed with her I would throw out the whole thing, truly, that is an absolute garbage thought.

But the whole episode is about how messy the angel thing gets and how John is... really not okay, and messed up things John does when he's angry scared, and that the whole relationship with god thing is... not simples, even if angels, and... I am confident that the story is nothing but complicated and the choice isn't meant to be simples.

Unfortunately the episode count isn't leaving much room for complications to be resolved.

One episode left. Not read spoilers but there is only so much you can fit in that.


John Constantine remains a fascinating character and deeply flawed man. There's things he says that make me want to send him to so much decent therapy, but nothing that makes me file it under Doylist bad writing. He is just so many bad ideas in a trenchcoat, honestly doing his best, but we see how that's working out, so.

I am going to wait to watch the next episode and then when they are finished I am going to decide between starting again at the beginning and going back to Legends of Tomorrow.

I watched the episode which explains Chas. And it does so neatly and makes him seem like a better man than John then end up... exactly the powder keg John called him. So it's a good story of itself.

It gets more interesting because this is a TV show version of the same plot in the animated movie I saw, I think City of Demons? Chas and John have to save a little girl from a coma that is actually her soul popped out and preyed on. In the animated movie it is all just demons but on TV there's a mortal man making it happen, which is an interesting choice, that changes the possible outcomes.
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Two more episodes of Constantine, before and after midnight, and I know I am going to be watching these again for details, but not in a plot way. John remains fascinating, everything else remains mostly okay with a side of horror only mentions the evil bits and is therefore bad with race.

I do like the recurring bit where John hands out his business cards and they're like deeply skeptical of the 'master of the dark arts' bit. Like okay, exorcism and demons, but they look at him and are not going to believe he has a BA, or possibly even a high school diploma.

I quite liked 'Jackass of all trades' as a description. Because how he does magic is going to piss off literally every tradition and they're right to call him on it, but also, he's right to say it works. Appropriation vs asking what it's all actually for.

John is fascinating and sympathetic and clearly not always right, and I like that in a story. Enough of a bastard to make more work for himself, arrogant and bad at listening but he tries when prompted, and so sure it has to be him that does the work, because who else is there? Only he keeps asking.

Legends is one answer, ish.

I want to see how this story plays out and the episode count isn't giving me optimism on that, but I'm not even reading the episode descriptions so I shall find out as I watch.


Tumblr has provided me many stills of John's tattoos but delightfully there are even more opportunities to see them.

Is good to watch so far.

Watched episode 2 of Constantine.

Already they used the idea Evil Romani Magic.
*sigh*
... they used the other word for it too.

A solid should do better.

Having had a nice day's sleep I woke up thinking that Legends of Tomorrow, characters departing from January 2016, encodes in its treatment of Gideon a specific set of assumptions about AI. Ones that do not quite hold in 2025.

Basically the characters treat Gideon like a voice interface, in early seasons, not an independent person with opinions.
And then they treat what Gideon says as Fact, especially if it has pictures.

Which is interesting because Rip Hunter is *clearly* manipulating them by showing them the pictures and only once they're having feelings telling them that's a simulation.
Simulation is another word for guess, even if Gideon does put a percentage next to it.

If you start now? You'd get a set of people who still believe Gideon because look, pictures and a percent from a computer, true facts. But you'd get other people who are aware that deepfake graphics do not make your report more reliable, and who would call the AI out for hallucinating.

The show does interrogate its own starting position but by making Gideon unquestionably an independent person and then making it a right mess that people did not treat her that way. Making it just as weird that Rip reprogrammed Gideon as that the Time Masters reprogrammed Mick. And that's always a good set of questions, are we treating this person as a thing.

Plus there's the gigo problem or the deliberately being lied to encoded in what the Time Masters fed their computer to get Rip hopping.

But asking questions about error rates and reliability were not the first thought of anyone in this story, and that's super weird, coming from a context where I've seen reports that the LLM currently being called AI have an error rate where between 80% and *all* the answers in that study had errors. No I don't have a source to cite, it was social media screenshots, so obviously I shouldn't believe it. I could google for it. Wonder what google says about reliability of AI... well it's not letting me copy paste the answer, that's interesting, but it says Not Fully Reliable and links to three items with the most recent being May 2025... and one having answers from 2023, how is that any use this year? Google reckons the majority of answers are accurate, where it links to things that say 31% of answers were errors. But then I rephrased and asked for a percent, "what percent of AI answers are correct" and it said AI answers were incorrect between 60% and 94% of the time. It is talking about studies without linking them. The links it does go to are news summaries not studies, and they're from March 2025. Oh, here's a study I probably saw because BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/new-ebu-research-ai-assistants-news-content , news summarised by GenAI wrong 45% of the time across all AI, some AI as bad as 76% wrong. So a few minutes with the google AI get me two contradictory poorly sourced answers, where the sources have different numbers than the AI summary, which is what usually happens when I read the google AI bit. And my memory is also poorly sourced! And skimming the links proffered tends to show a lot of podcasts and video content which is hard to check and... ugh. (This is me demonstrating very sloppy research on my part and how AI isn't helping. I feel embarrassed now. I am in fact capable of poking several pages of links, it's just the show always takes the first AI answer, and lo, it is messy.)

I do not trust AI because no matter how precisely defined the question is about stuff I already know, ie Pathfinder first edition, I always get an answer that is muddled with irrelevant sources and some degree of just plain wrong, ie about DnD 5e and using fandom wiki about computer games instead. Yes the terms are very similar but I have yet to be able to narrow its attention down to just Archive of Nethys or Paizo sources *and that used to be easy*. It used to be quicker to google search than to search on AoN or PFSRD or the paizo boards. Now it is an error prone mess that keeps trying to send you to DnDBeyond even though that is a completely different game. ... different edition branched off the same source yes I can see where the confusion is coming from but the confusion is *new* and *annoying*.

So: Legends Gideon. No one spends time questioning her sources or her error rate or how deepfakes are actually helping this situation or how many *other* scenarios for a future she finds equally plausible right now. And that stuff is absolutely essential. It's the core of how Rip gets led around by his training. And it's not just Legends where it matters, there's a whole thread of the Flash that goes back to the historical record and how it (mis)represents him, the reliability of sources and how history was written by his wife, without her admitting the connection. ... this will turn into my Eobard Thawne Has A Point Actually speech, and I don't think I watched the last season of Flash yet so I'll leave be. But really. Computer 'intelligence' and the authoritative misrepresentation of mediated reality: A Thread.

Pretty important in the real world as well.

A thing that bothered me every time it came up was the whole Evil Vaccines plot. Because it wasn't a vaccine, it was just a scary buzzword for medical experimentation. And it feels like every time I see vaccines mentioned in fiction they're being used to deliver secret experiments. Or they're being invented on the spot for instant testing to cure alien diseases never seen before, one of those. Never just, you know, actual preventative medicine that works.

I understand that take normal thing and make it scary is a solid basis for horror
but
I also believe that this use in fiction has contributed to real world antivax memes spreading enough to cause actual problems.

It's also absolutely unhelpful that Black Lightning called identical their old 'vaccine' and the new recreational drug that was supposed to be so instantly addictive. I mean aside from just not working for the story - why so big a difference in reactions then and now? why invest so much in making them take multiple doses if just the one worked for the experiment? - it muddles up forms of 'drugs' in a way that is again unhelpful.

So the plot was interesting
but I did not like the details on how they delivered it.

Make the poison
industrial pollution or something
not an actual helpful thing.

Today I have been watching Black Lightning season one. I am on disc three of three and I'd love to watch the whole thing in one day but I also want to be awake enough to appreciate it.

It is excellent. Solid storytelling, ( Read more... )



I don't like to recommend things before I've watched the whole thing, because you never know what they'll do with the ending, but I very much like what I've seen so far. It is in several ways a story I haven't seen before, with excitement, daring, high stakes, and so much going on. I like the characters, and I want to see more of it.

So that's great.

This didn't suck.
... I'd like to be nicer to it because gay lead character played by gay actor
but
nazis
I hate Earth X and everything about that storyline
just
nazis.

Ugh.

Also this one seems to have the Earth X version of The Flash in it, and I do not want.

Ray is fine though. ( Read more... )


If they're going to use the multiverse I would have really preferred they didn't use it this specific and particular way.

But Ray as a character is fine and I'd probably watch more if there was more.

I have finished watching last season of Legends of Tomorrow
and it is mad brilliant.
It's like nothing else on TV and it tells stories no other show could tell.

... and some days you could argue there's a good reason for that
but
it takes all the best bits of a sprawling crossover comics universe and then just
really commits
and runs with them.

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This is a show that is genuinely about love and redemption, and running around in crazy costumes knowing how daft they look and just... going all out with it. As well as spectacular FX and every superpower any other show in their 'verse does, only more often.

It is having so much fun.



And sometimes I get frustrated with what they (don't) do with the time travel aspect
but a lot more of the logic makes sense after this season (in as much as this show has logic)
and they did things that seemed reasonable to me much more often

so

I really do love this show.





I could get into more detail with episodes and characters and start picking on bits, but, I am happy right now and this story made me happy, so I'm going to just go with that for a bit.



Also I am going to go to bed, because my sleep is backwards and I finished four loads of laundry as I watched. I only have one left right now. But need to sleep at some point. so.



I like Legends of Tomorrow
:-D

Today's dreams were no fun to be dreaming but had some solid bones to hang a plot on.

There's a lot of messy blood and violene in this one, and some dodgy treatment of mental illness, and cruelty to both robots and clones.

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But, there's also plot bones: matrixed up skill loading but quirked, brain networking but only stable if you're drift compatible, having the second set of a powerful emotional memory and knowing the one you care about does not remember caring about you. Identity theft, then trying to stay in control of the new blended person. (Be careful who you pretend to be.) Anger management issues and PTSD, but trying to take a shortcut on the therapeutic work necessary by copy pasting from people who have lived with the same thing longer. Because being mentally ill develops related skills.

Just there's a really good chance of joining all that together in a way that makes their worst selves. And any guy who'd try it by kidnapping everyone like this has quite a lot of worst to be.




So it's nine people in a room running variations, changing every time they wake up, but also every time they mesh minds, becoming for at least a little while more like each other. Starting out very unlike, and with a room full of distinctive accents.

If I get this coherent I'd really want to run it with actors. They'd bring a lot of depth to it.

Because there's one guy trying to do a melting pot on all the rest and skim off the cream to enhance himself, but the others all want to keep their distinctive strengths.



I have not seen that sense 8 thing, but suspect my subconscious borrowed from bits of that as well.



I don't know how busy the background needs to be. Robot bodies? Clones? Mind networking and copy pasting is key. Multi track memories that remember getting dead?




But both bits of dream were about trying to build a good bits version. One by running a bunch of copies and only keeping the best one, this by trying to blend best bits from people the experimenters probably think of as rejects.

They will learn their best is still pretty impressive.



There's a lot of mileage in this.

Barry gets a mindwipe and Iris actually thinks about leaving him that way.
People in this show worry me.

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So, I think they've got some weird ideas of how humans work and what the important bits are.

But I know next episode has some added interest, so I can look forwards to that.

The time travel to 2024?
Ugh.
I mean, I know what they're going for. This is the hero at his darkest. He gave up so now everything is awful. That's what happens when the protagonist gives up.

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So I'm just annoyed, because it's all very well telling a story about team Flash making a difference, but it winds me right up if they're saying they have to have Flash around to do it. Everyone can make a difference.

Except not when their name is not in the title.