Finally watching EEAAO
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Pretty good and funny so far, halfway in, but tbh I don’t get the extreme reactions. Live action Rick and Morty seems about right. Similar structural premise as multiverse of madness.
All Chinese main cast is inspired though. Works better somehow.
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Okay done. Some novel features in the last bit, and the detailed plotting across universes was interesting, but I guess I’m too old for this to really hit the way it seems to have hit some people.
Definitely a very fun movie though, and Michelle Yeoh in comic bits was great.
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Better than marvel multiverse, not as good as Rick and Morty, though can’t strictly compare since the mood in the second half is different
The mechanics of the multiverse here weren’t as special as I was led to believe, though I can imagine keeping it all straight was tough
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The intercutting (or whatever the camera/editing techniques are called) between multiverses looked very clever, the way the matrix slo-mo looked very clever in 1999. I’m guessing there was a lot of process innovation there that I’m not film-literate enough to grok
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I like how multiverse fiction is getting a distinct identity different from time travel fiction. Rick and Morty even played that for a macabre laugh in S4E8 redo button episode, though that particular plot device imo was pioneered by The Prestige.
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Multiverses where they occur as adjuncts to ordinarily time travel plots tend to be dull, basic counterfactuals like in Doctor Who. R&M, MCU, and EEAAO all future something more like an uncollapsed superpositions/wave functions of timelines with more interesting logics
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James Gleick wrote a good book on time travel and how it had to be actually invented by H. G. Wells. Ideas don’t seem obvious and familiar until they do. There literally weren’t stories about traveling through time before
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Anyone know what the first true multiverse story was, that did not conflate the concept with time travel?
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Oh yeah I was going to mention but blanking on the name.
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Replying to @vgr
I’m pretty sure it’s not the first, but I feel like “Sliders” was pretty seminal.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliders
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Well Star Trek definitely invented goatee duoverse
Futurama had a pretty clever one, though it was only 1 episode
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This is the multiverse-as-version-control origin theory. There’s also the quantum mechanics origin story. I suspect game trees, choose your own adventures, also played a role. I’d tag Groundhog Day as a transitional story (1 step backtrack time travel was quite clever)
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Replying to @vgr
i wonder if its a result of the comic book format where there is a ton of incentive to have reboots of popular characters. Then you have multiple versions of spider man or whatever, one dude decides to have a crossover episode, and then suddenly you've got a new convention
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🤔 didn’t realize that was that old
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Replying to @vgr
Maybe The garden of f**king paths, written back in 1941. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garde
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I saw one article arguing that Wizard of Oz should be considered a multiverse but I think that’s just 2 distinct universes with vague rhyming. Not a counterfactuals tree.
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An emerging source metaphor for the multiverse is machine learning. A model trained on samples actually learns a multiverse tree consistent with that sample. I call it superhistory.
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Distinct advantages over quantum mechanics or version control source metaphors. To some extent EEAAO utilizes an ML type mental model since characters can learn across timelines. But I think it’s not deliberate. Haven’t seen a proper ML-multiverse yet. Explore latent space etc.
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Another potential source metaphor is Wolfram’s idea of the Ruliad. Shorn of the trademark grandiose woo-with-equations, it’s basically a kind of all-state-histories algorithmic rollup object. Like an infinity stone. writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/11/the-co
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Surprisingly, the blockchain isn’t that fertile a metaphor for multiverses. But it’s an excellent metaphor for the liminal adjacent possible (a sort of epsilon-delta perturbation-deviation band of pseudo-realities that didn’t happen, like near misses band)
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This is my own main interest, and I wrote 1 short story I’m trying to develop into a longer thing. The adjacent possible is kinda distinct from both the multiverse and time travel, with some elements of both.
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Oh and Star Trek TOS did it in the 60s with the Mirror Universe
never went to others ‘multi’ style but I guess it implied them




