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A Sally Into the Uncanny Valley


seneschal

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I don’t want to derail the Monster Creation thread.  But I do want to discuss what monsters you find disturbing and why.  As I mentioned earlier, some critters scare me more than others. Gollum, The Stepford Wives, and the Pod People from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” are creepier to me than, say, the Universal Monsters or King Kong.  Maybe it is because the threat is more personal than Godzilla, who will stomp anybody, or a horde of zombies, who will eat anybody.  In the former case, they’re coming after YOU specifically.  In the same vein (pun intended), the modern day vampire from the original “The Night Stalker” TV movie scared me more than any version of Dracula I’ve seen.  He drove a car, raided a blood bank for supplies, kidnapped and kept a woman prisoner as a potential snack (after casually strangling her attack dog), and lived in a rental house that could be just across the street from yours. Yikes! 

Somehow, the vicious orcs from “The Two Towers” or the titular apes from the original “Planet of the” series didn’t affect me the same way.  Sure, I wouldn’t want to meet them in a dark alley (or in a daylit street) but the fear factor, the eerie chill down one’s spine, wasn’t the same.  Likewise, the assorted androids from the original Star Trek (or the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica, or Doctor Who’s Daleks) weren’t nearly as terrifying to me as the Borg.  The others merely want to kill or enslave you.  The Borg want to make you one of them.

Why do you think this is so?  What monsters scare you particularly and what makes them so eerie?

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Monsters that are HIDDEN most of the time and INFECT scare me the most. The Borg, as you mention. Also, The Thing From Another World/Who Goes There?/John Carpenter's The Thing.

I think it comes down to the primal fear of imprisonment (even if metaphoric) and loss of the privilege to not be yourself. Plus, there isn't much you can do to avoid highly infectious threats. So, there is a loss of choice element as well.

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Monsters which can pass as human are the most terrifying. I mean some slimy thing with tentacles, as long as you figure out how to hurt it, its just a bug hunt - people might die, but that's just combat stress.

But give me a deadly disease with a symptom free infectious period, or a world threatening monster which can slip past your defences, which can pass as human, like The Thing, or the beautiful woman out of Species, now that's scary.

I once accepted a very large sum of money to provide software consultancy in a viral hot zone, during the middle of an outbreak. They chose me because I was the only one crazy enough to do it. I've never drunk so much grapefruit juice in my life, every morning in the hotel lobby a government doctor was there to check my temperature, if my temperature had been even slightly elevated they would have whisked me off to a quarantine facility. There were thermal imaging cameras everywhere, and lots of billboards advising people what to do in multiple languages.

The journey back was a little shocking. At the time I lived in England. In Hong Kong there were a few desultory people with thermometers, nobody bothered me, even though I'd come straight from the hot zone. In the Amsterdam stop (I was flying KLM) there was no interest in people's health. In London Gatwick that evening they weren't even checking passports, there was a p*ssed off guy reading a newspaper in one of the passport booths. I could have been carrying a contagious deadly disease straight back from a hotzone into Europe and nobody would have known.

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31 minutes ago, EricW said:

I could have been carrying a contagious deadly disease straight back from a hotzone into Europe and nobody would have known.

That is one of the things I try not to think of.  But then everytime they try to quarantine anything they get all the hue and cry. 

I'm guessing that a pandemic will be what wipes us out in the end.  

By the time the bureaucracy allows the medical side of things to react, it will be too late.

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The SARS outbreak thankfully wasn't as contagious as initially feared, though it was very deadly - a lot of people who contracted it died. If it was as contagious as say Smallpox the entire world would have been scr*wed. 

I learned something about how people behave in such situations, by my personal experience. I had a packet of paracetamol, I had a mad plan in my head that if I got a fever, I would use the paracetamol to suppress the symptoms as much as I could until I made it back to safe ground. I don't know if I would have done something that selfish for real, I hope not - but I was very frightened that if I ended up in an Asian quarantine facility and the epidemic spiralled out of control, my health wouldn't have been the top of their list of priorities. 

It was also a lesson on how poorly prepared governments are. For example there is an Ebola outbreak raging on Congo now, close to out of control because of cultural beliefs that foreign doctors want to kill them off, so a lot of health workers are getting attacked.

The thing about Ebola is, some of the survivors become carriers - there was a case recently where a woman infected her husband with Ebola a year after she recovered

My point is people who feel in danger can act very selfishly - I know this because I experienced these feelings. They won't necessarily tell health workers they are worried, especially if they are afraid of being deported if they are discovered to be infected with something nasty.

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5 minutes ago, EricW said:

My point is people who feel in danger can act very selfishly

No argument on that point.   But that doesn't take in account the various nutballs of various flavor that will avoid medical assistance for one reason or another. Not to mention that the various agencies will delay early response because they will be afraid if they act early and are wrong they will be committing political/legal suicide.  I expect that if, no when it happens, any hope of containment will be lost because they will be caught up in worrying about who they might offend and pi$$ away the opportunity.  But I guess that is just my natural pessimism 🤪

 

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Shin Godzilla played on the fear of an unprepared bureaucracy.

EricW’s fears remind me of the silent film ”Nosferateau.”  When Count Orloff (aka Dracula) comes to London he brings plague with him, in addition to killing whomever he snacks on.  The outbreak doesn’t subside until the vampire is vanquished.

Edited by seneschal
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On 7/8/2019 at 8:09 PM, seneschal said:

Shin Godzilla played on the fear of an unprepared bureaucracy.

EricW’s fears remind me of the silent film ”Nosferateau.”  When Count Orloff (aka Dracula) comes to London he brings plague with him, in addition to killing whomever he snacks on.  The outbreak doesn’t subside until the vampire is vanquished.

I don't think we can begin to imagine the horrors of the plague. Mothers driving out their infected toddler children, to try to save the rest of their family. Infected people with nothing to lose indulging their darkest most bestial passions, because for them there are no consequences, they will be dead within days. Entire cities depopulated. Survivors and refugees being hunted and killed, lest they infect new regions. And everywhere, death and dying, starvation, war, insanity, civil breakdown.

The rise of Cthulhu would be worse, but not by much.

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But the plague is alive and well today in the once beautiful cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco — brought by sick illegal aliens and nourished by armies of the homeless who pee and poop on the pavement and cover their waste with used needles (given them by town hall to somehow reduce drug use or something).  Who needs Cthulhu or World War Z?  The authorities are too politically correct to deal with these real dangers and instead focus on banning plastic drinking straws and soft drinks.  It would be as if Godzilla were wading out of Tokyo Bay and the authorities ran around issuing parking tickets and arresting anyone who engaged in “hate speech” against the big lizard.  Indigenous mutated sea creatures have rights, too!

Oh, and giant rats (and their attendant plague-carrying fleas) have taken over the basement of the Los Angeles main police station and the cops can’t get rid of them.  Where is Willard now that we need him?

 

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On 7/7/2019 at 11:22 PM, EricW said:

Monsters which can pass as human are the most terrifying. … I could have been carrying a contagious deadly disease straight back from a hotzone into Europe and nobody would have known.

And there you have described institutional incompetence. A terrifying beast lurking in the worst, yet perfectly normal, aspects of the human condition. It can eviscerate economies, stigmatise racial groups, poison populations with poorly tested pollutants, lead to the naysaying of efficacious preventative treatments, and the promotion of useless alternatives. At its whim wars have been won and lost and history changed, warnings not acted upon in time and proven solutions to dire problems not implemented. It lacks self-awareness, it bears no malice, it just wants an easy life. It is mindless and often unseen, hiding as it does behind many other names, kept alive by denial, wilful or wishful. 

That’s what makes me turn uneasily in my bed of a night. 

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14 hours ago, Cloud64 said:

And there you have described institutional incompetence. A terrifying beast lurking in the worst, yet perfectly normal, aspects of the human condition. It can eviscerate economies, stigmatise racial groups, poison populations with poorly tested pollutants, lead to the naysaying of efficacious preventative treatments, and the promotion of useless alternatives. At its whim wars have been won and lost and history changed, warnings not acted upon in time and proven solutions to dire problems not implemented. It lacks self-awareness, it bears no malice, it just wants an easy life. It is mindless and often unseen, hiding as it does behind many other names, kept alive by denial, wilful or wishful. 

That’s what makes me turn uneasily in my bed of a night. 

Its not like it would have taken a significant effort, the monitoring of inbound passengers could have been almost completely automated.

The airport in Taipei had a thermal imaging camera set up to ping if someone registered an elevated temperature, the first symptom of the SARS illness. Airport security was also watching the monitor, but the camera equipment itself would have let them know if there was a problem with one of the passengers.

How much effort would it have taken to set up a camera, and ping the guards if they need to have a closer look at one of the passengers queuing up at the passport control gate? We're only talking about maybe $5-10,000 dollars worth of equipment at every entry point.

Ah what am I talking about - as I said, the airport in the UK wasn't even checking passports. 

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