Hacker Cinema
Story of Your Life
2022 · Film · short · 19 min
Directed by Salvatore de Chirico
Tommy's entire life flows before us like a movie. Through recorded memories, his own stories, and everything that has stood the test of time. Eighty years of a life that could be anyone's. But whose is it really?
3 positive1 mixed5 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
Certainly when it comes to computer software causing language to change far outside the sphere of computing terms, TikTok takes the cake, with words like "unalive" joining the real-world lexicon: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/08/algospeak-tiktok-le-dollar-bean/ is a fascinating read for those unfamiliar with Gen Z jargon.
But the OP article briefly raises an interesting point by way of linking to and quoting https://www.jstor.org/stable/40171308 :
> Analysis of the screen recording data revealed that students were more apt to make microstructural rather than macrostructural changes to their work and that they continuously revised at all stages of their writing.
The idea that we can easily make non-append-only changes to our text simply by moving a mouse or trackpad may very well change how we think about language.
A less severe version, perhaps, of the phenomenon in the movie Arrival and Ted Chiang's novella Story of Your Life (highly worth a read, and easily accessible with a quick search), where learning an alien language changes a person's entire outlook on - well, to minimize spoilers, every aspect of how life is lived.
Perhaps, insofar as I typed the word "perhaps" after I wrote the rest of the forthcoming sentence... we already live in a world where something like this has transpired.
What kind of books do you like?
Personally, I recommend reading the novella "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, on which the film Arrival was based, because the novel is quite a bit different from the movie and takes the whole topic of non-temporal existence in a much more Slaughterhouse-Five direction.
Mr brain literally hurts when I attempt to imagine the final answer behind the universe. I get to a point where my brain quivers and pushes me back like I'm not meant to be lurking there. Off limits, out of bounds.
It's so annoying not knowing. Where did all this matter come from, and if it's always been here, then how the hell has it always been here, and why is it like it is. What caused the nature of nature?
I bet God doesn't have the answers either. Why would God know the source of God? It wouldn't.
This is why I kind of like that recent movie called "Arrival" or the proper name "Story of your life". A new language delivered from Aliens would be great to tackle the big questions.
I know I should have seen Arrival already, and I am sure I once read or heard that "Story of Your Life" was the basis for the film, but damned if I didn't get halfway through the very spoilery discussion here in the comments without realizing just what I was being spoiled on.
In case there's anyone else out there that, like me: Reads hn comments first to determine if the article is worthwhile, and doesn't really mind being spoiled on the plot of books, but hates being spoiled on the plot of films, beware!
I certainly don't think every discussion about any fictional work needs to be turned into some Simpsons comic book guy analysis of the most minute of flaws.
Most sci-fi or fantasy works have some "gimme" that you just have to accept, because it furthers the story. Fine, anti-gravity, time travel or whatever exists. Nobody's expected to explain how it works.
What makes for lazy writing is introducing some world changing concept that you base your entire story on, and then just conveniently leaving it out in the very next scene for dramatic effect. That goes beyond having a gimme, you're just assuming your audience is dumb at that point.
I think the book "Story of Your Life" is just fine. It's consistent with its premise. As my comment indicates it's the lazy movie adoption I have a problem with.
They depart from the book by making the character capable of changing the future based on her prescience, she's no longer just a puppet playing out future events. She's got a choice. Okey, fine, let's run with that.
But then she can see a future where here young daughter dies from some incurable disease at a young age, but decides to have her anyway. Her partner then leaves her because she went through with that without telling him.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the universe of the movie when they had that conversation. He was probably yelling at her that they could have just spent a couple of thousand dollars on sperm sorting & IVF and say had a boy instead of instead of having their young daughter die at an early age from some statistically improbable disease.
I would recommend to watch Arrival _before_ reading Story of Your Life and this post: I think that Story of Your Life contains spoilers for Arrival which aren't nearly as spoilery the other way around. I found Arrival more emotionally touching, and Story of Your Life more scientifically interesting, so both are worth while.
I don't think it's nearly as good as "Understand" or "Exhalation" or "Hell is the Absence of God" (all discussed in OP). Like "Life Cycle of Software Objects", it seems seriously overrated. But "Story of Your Life" is definitely one of the more confusing stories and I had to read it at least twice before I thought I understood what sort of Chiang-style message Chiang was going for.
What I take him as suggesting is not that the aliens really are tapping into quantum woo to see the future (this is what inferior SF authors might do and maybe have in the movie which I haven't seen), any more than light rays see into the future in order to take the shortest path, but doing something more like Watts's _Blindsight_ in trying to explore different kinds of minds: that given the reversibility of the laws of physics and the arrow of time, there is no logical or privileged reason to have a conscious experience of the universe as time unfolding sequentially and computationally according to a program computing 1 planck-second at a time, rather than as an Einsteinian 4D block universe in which the block universe is the optimal path between boundary conditions and everything unfolds as it must and already has. This is similar to points Drescher makes in _Good and Real_: a brain could try to understand the universe by taking the present and extrapolating forward but it also takes the present and extrapolate backward. You can 'remember' the future as easily as the past.
The aliens could be doing this, and it is as valid a way of cognition as anything else. And then the drama comes from the protagonist slowly adopting this way of thinking herself to come to terms with her grief over her daughter's death by adopting a timeless Lagrangian way of thinking and explaining it to the reader who is still trapped in the algorithmic perspective.
I stumbled upon Ted Chiang's stories completely randomly about 10 years ago -- perhaps it was a periodical like Asimov's or perhaps someone linked a story to me online in an IRC chat. I read 'Understand' and instantly fell in love. Ted Chiang is nowhere as prolific as other writers, but he writes really excellent short stories. It's exciting how 'Story of Your Life' is being made into a film!
Looks like "Story of Your Life" is going to be made into a movie. http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/10/ted-chiang-story-of-your-life-film-adaptation