(01-01-2021, 03:02 PM)STMPD Wrote: What's that Sinister Plan? Something dark and cyberpunk-y. I was toying with the idea of running a big con job on the world - selling conscious uploading 'backup' technology, then using the half-assed backups as personality implants to make Boomers seem more human - because it's sort of a running theme that people can pick out even highly anthropomorphic Boomers by little unconscious ticks.

(01-01-2021, 03:57 PM)robkelk Wrote: Hmmmmm...

(01-01-2021, 03:02 PM)STMPD Wrote: What's that Sinister Plan? Something dark and cyberpunk-y. I was toying with the idea of running a big con job on the world - selling conscious uploading 'backup' technology, then using the half-assed backups as personality implants to make Boomers seem more human - because it's sort of a running theme that people can pick out even highly anthropomorphic Boomers by little unconscious ticks.

There's your bridge between Acts 1 and 2, and your reason to recruit Nene.

Real-world application programming on that scale is done by teams, not by individuals, so it's reasonable to assume that a brainscan app would be written by a group of people. Making some more assumptions: Nene was part of that team when they were "a few guys in a garage". Her significant other was also on the team - and volunteered to alpha-test the app when the behind-the-scenes investor demanded results now. Of course it went horribly, horribly wrong. Said significant other is now a vegetable in palliative care, what little personality that was actually uploaded is a pale shadow of the person so there's no point in trying to put it back in the body even if they knew how... and the investor was somebody in Brian J. Mason's office at GENOM. Later, when the scan process doesn't personality-kill people and Nene discovers where the money came from, Mason orders that she be dismissed from the project for #reasons. Sylia discovers Nene mentioned on one line on page 47 of a 50-page briefing that she managed to grab in a hack of GENOM systems, becomes intrigued, and contacts "little miss cyberpunk" to hear her side of the story... and the rest is history screenplay.

Opinions?

Quote:As for the location, why not just give the place they were building the Superboomer a less tongue in cheek name than "GENOM Appliance Research Division, John R. Maytag Memorial Facility?" Or use the smaller GPCC pyramid from the Largo arc, since I don't think the former was anything interesting visually in the brief moment we see it before it goes kablooey.

Quote:The official story is servitor units gone rogue.

The actual story is... complex. Part emerging machine intelligence, part programming failures and part personality engrams.

The first Boomers were cleverly programmed to provide the neural net with baseline instructions. However, it was a sizable programming overhead burden because for them to function in any reasonable timespan their programming needed to be very specifically tailored to their hardware and tasking. It could be done, mind, but it did mean that they generally had very narrow competencies and unpredictable and potentially dangerous reactions to unexpected instructions. Personalities, if any develop, tend to be very innocent; not in the sense that they don't want to do harm, but in the sense that they don't and often can't conceive of the consequences.


Enter the mind upload technology, which covers most of the flaws in the programming by providing Boomers with greater mental flexibility. Sure, what engrams GENOM has are at best incomplete, and often deliberately altered after the fact to get any sense of identity out of them. This is not a good thing, because it makes the engram unstable; one of the reasons Boomers go through maintenance is so that their programming (and engrams) can be reset to factory specifications, and some form of violent psychosis if maintenance isn't done properly is common. But they've found that using the brain scans of people who worked the job the Boomer's meant to replace give better results, if not necessarily more stable ones, depending on a number of factors including the mental health of the people that were scanned.

Given that military Boomers do military jobs and the sort of veterans that won't be missed are the sort of veterans to be suffering from PTSD among other issues military Boomers are... volatile, as are many other Boomers meant for jobs were violence and high stress environments are likely. Yes, this means that the storage staff Boomers in the back of the shop are very unlikely to go rampant compared to the customer service Boomers.


And then you have the emerging intelligence issue. Boomers that last long enough start to develop a sense of self not that unlike humans. Even Boomers without an engram running in their heads develop a sense of self. This is the other big reason maintenance is required; part of the process involves wiping the undesired personality forming in the Boomer's brain. That doesn't mean that all of the personality is wiped though; Boomer brains are complex neural networks and the sort of maintenance cycle that's needed to fully scrub it clean is just too much effort. This means that plenty of Boomers, already not necessarily with very stable minds running the bodies, regularly get brutalized in ways that are hard to conceive. Some lucky ones end up stable, or at least functional, most go mad.

In a not quite cyberpunk twist, places which don't maintain their Boomers properly but treat them decently have very low incidence rates of Boomer rampages. In a completely genre appropriate twist, maintenance of Boomers is tracked (Boomer rampages are quite dangerous), and if the ADP runs into improperly maintained Boomers they often get confiscated and destroyed as a risk. If you are a Boomer, you just can't win.

Quote:It would be interesting if Mr. Mason wanted Priss for her brain, and Music Talents. As in Feed Priss a bunch of Brain Conversion Nanites (Actually a Stingray Process. Ask Sylia{Celia?}.) then Copy the Brain pattern for use in a "Sexaroid" package.

(01-02-2021, 12:30 AM)STMPD Wrote: This is a wayyyyyy more nuanced vision of what a Boomer is than I was planning to address in this particular 'film' (yeah I wanna do more, make a whole more OVA series. Retell OG OVA's with my own twists). And it's not really what I was going for with Totally-not-Soulkiller: the 'engrams' are new tech, an overlay on existing Boomer neural nets hoping that they'll be able to fool humans just a little better, generate better sales. Imagine that - granny's upload forced into some secretary bot. Ech.

(01-02-2021, 12:30 AM)STMPD Wrote: Warren's Intellectual Assets (now Dead Bang's villains) never really made sense to me - I don't see Quincy as the type to ignore advice from transhumans he built. Hell, I think Quincy's ultimate agenda is to render IA's - I like to call them Ambassadors, because they're essentially the meat-mediation element of a human-AI supergenius hybrid - the master race, and Boomers the slave race, for a panstellar empire (with 'baseline' humanity rendered impotent and extinct after a few megagenocides). Of course, they might try for their own coup d'etat against Big Daddy Q, maybe try to rope Sylia (Big Sister) in as a co-conspirator. And then that'd be the climax of something, Quincy's faction and his hidden countermeasures (The OMS? What if he is the OMS?) vs. the Ambassadors vs. Largo and his perpetual ability to not fucking die vs. the Sabers.

Actually, now that I think about it, my first draft of this script involved Cynthia (from OVA 1) not as a Boomer, but as a proto-Ambassador built by the military as the ultimate strategist. Could never figure out what to do with her - what her objective with escaping (not being kidnapped) was besides the usual live-in-peace cheesy bullshit - but I think I'll keep the Ambassadors plotline around for some later project. We'll see.

(01-02-2021, 12:30 AM)STMPD Wrote: Actually, now that I think about it, my first draft of this script involved Cynthia (from OVA 1) not as a Boomer, but as a proto-Ambassador built by the military as the ultimate strategist. Could never figure out what to do with her -

Quote:Oh yes, the space model buma I used in Bubblegum Disaster is a canon design seen on screen, if only for a blink. (Not the Doberman, Mr. Big-Head whose designation I can't remember, who was tasked with maintaining the laser satellite and talks to Sylia after she goes all Lensman battleship against Moldiver Largo.) So is an undersea miner, for much the same reasons of easier life support and a sturdier frame to handle the dangerous environment and move heavy loads. Those were actual Stingray designed models IIRC.

Quote:Given that Bumas wouldn't need as much life support, it seems likely they're heavily in use for space operations.

Which suggests that if Mason believes his bumas can take control of this, he'd have the high ground and potentially rule the world (I know, very cliche).

It does also raise the prospect of a epilogue of a buma with Mason's engrams, Largo, escaping on a sub-light interstellar ship with e a crew of bumas.

Quote:Hey, 'I want to live in peace' isn't bullshit, especially in Cynthia is well aware of what sort of destruction is gonna be wrought if she starts triggering the orbital weapons. You'd probably not be able to address it in the movie though.

(01-02-2021, 10:01 PM)hazard Wrote: So she accepts her position as an advisor/aide to somebody powerful in the USA government (probably), or at least somebody in the USA military-industrial complex.

Quote:I had thought they were called "Chang Group" but can find no reference to it outside of fan fiction with a quick search.

Quote:I did brush across Rob Kelk's BGC FAQ in the process (Hi Rob!) and will continue to assert that one item in it is flat out wrong: We see the name spelled "Celia" on screen, that's as canon as it gets. "Sylia" is on all the packaging etc. and commonly accepted, but if the image on the screen contradicts it then all the packaging etc. is as wrong as if it said it was a box of animal crackers rather than a VHS cassette.

Quote:So the plan is still 'live in peace'.

Unfortunately, she needs to deal with at least two major factors. The first is her bosses, so long as she's under their thumb and starts talking about how their plans are impossible she's going to die. The second is whatever group she gets to extract and protect her, who are not going to let an asset as useful as her escape.

So she accepts her position as an advisor/aide to somebody powerful in the USA government (probably), or at least somebody in the USA military-industrial complex. She's constantly watched because she's important, but at least to outsiders she's not critical. She pushes feelers out to see if somebody is willing and able to help her disappear and runs into GENOM and more importantly Mason. Not being stupid, she expects to be betrayed, so she makes sure that she has fallbacks and cut outs and a well prepared escape route and false identity to disappear into the system with. Be it to build her own faction or live out her life, but probably more the former than the latter.

The movie simply doesn't have time to get into anything but generalities. Living in peace could after all include 'destroying all threats', but she's not currently in a position to really dismantle the threats. She has no resources for it. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that playing the extraction and retrieval assets against eachother while she slips away and is presumed lost in the fighting is a bad idea...


The USA/her handler, faced with a sensitive asset disappearing in an allied nation cannot deploy their own forces, even covertly, without diplomatic trouble they don't want to deal with because it'd highlight how important Cynthia is, and hires the Knight Sabers. Not being stupid, Japanese law enforcement etc. is also informed, just like with the KS not everything being told. Enter the climactic clusterfuck for the final combat scene.

(01-03-2021, 07:23 PM)STMPD Wrote: I was going over Shadowjack's 'In Which I Watch' BGC thread the other day, and picked up that he thought that Reika's origins were tied to that Triad just 'cause Triads were a big deal in Hong Kong action movies at the time. So I'm torn between keeping that origin when I drag in Reika or someone like her - a megacorp-sized Triad with contacts across the diaspora - or just straight up the CWPC, a conglomerate of privatized SOE's, and 'Reika' a dishonored daughter of a princeling who got offed after the last Stalinist purge.

Quote:I went and changed the name in my screenplay after reading this. It makes more sense that Celia is her name - but do I have to rename Miss Yamazaki Lena by that token?

Quote:One thing that dawned on me today is that the running sequence of events that makes up the second Crash! OVA would probably fit the narrative better than the relatively simple thing going on with Crisis 1 - I always liked how Priss and Adama spent most of their time underground, first in the sewers, then the subway, then Geo City itself. (Also her fight with the stupidly-designed scorpion Boomer was pretty bitchin' too.) Paralleling that, maybe bringing a Saber or two into the floodwater repositories under Megatokyo (like the ones they have today but bigger) would be cool...

Quote:One, I need to somehow bridge the gap between Priss being a rough-and-tumble bosozoku in the time before the 'film' and also an underground singer at least by the end of the movie - like I said, I want Konya Wa Hurricane to go over the ending credits. So: Did Priss sing professionally while she was a bike gangster?

Quote:Two, I want to establish Mason as a villain by the end of Act 1. Just that he exists, and that he's the Bad Guy, and that he and Sylia used to be close when they were really little. I think making Sylia's conflict with Mason more personal than 'your dad killed my dad now you must suffer' is a fertile ground for interesting scenes. So there needs to be at least one interaction they have before Mason shows up in Act 3 at her building. By the same token - do I have time to include flashbacks as to what happened with Priss and Nene, their respective tragedies involving Mason? Or should they just tell those stories to the other Sabers as exposition and be done with it? Just thinking about this.

(01-04-2021, 03:47 AM)classicdrogn Wrote: It might work better to cover Celia and Brian's past with a comment that it's really disappointing how he changed as a reaction to one of the other Sabers' stories, though some of it could also be worked in if she gets a call at some point and he's inviting her out to dinner - "We haven't talked in so long, it seems we've both become busy adults," or something along those lines - and one of the others (Nene for preference, but any could fit) tease her about having an admirer, but she strongly disapproves of any such ideas, and adds "You know him as well, or of him - Brian J. Mason, head of GENOM Special Projects. It seems he's become a real snake," thereby prompting their own story.

Quote:It might work better to cover Celia and Brian's past with a comment that it's really disappointing how he changed as a reaction to one of the other Sabers' stories, though some of it could also be worked in if she gets a call at some point and he's inviting her out to dinner - "We haven't talked in so long, it seems we've both become busy adults," or something along those lines - and one of the others (Nene for preference, but any could fit) tease her about having an admirer, but she strongly disapproves of any such ideas, and adds "You know him as well, or of him - Brian J. Mason, head of GENOM Special Projects. It seems he's become a real snake," thereby prompting their own story.

Quote:Mason always struck me as the grown-up version of the kind of kid who threw rocks at puppies and pulled goldfish out of bowls to watch them suffocate and dry out on a tabletop. Maybe she could reference something along those lines she witnessed when they were both ten or so.

Quote:Could have Priss come to Sylia's attention by having her attempt a confrontation with Mason when Sylia is present. Say that Mason and Sylia are both attending the same reception or whatever (some social thing that shows they move in the same circles, Mason as a senior (but not top tier) member of Genom while Sylia is a significant local figure). Mason slimes up to her, Sylia keeps her temper and Mason leaves. Possibly Sylia has a brief flashback or conversation with someone as she watches Mason's limo depart... but she then sees someone on a bike heading after the limo.

Cut to Priss attempting a hot-headed interception. This goes badly, she's lost her bike, she's wounded, staggering away through an alleyway... Sylia's Mercedes pulls up and opens the door. Priss hops in, pulls a gun on Sylia and then sees that Sylia already has her own gun out and aimed at her. Sylia asks "do you want to argue or leave?" Priss sighs, her gun's empty already. They drive and talk - why did Priss go after Mason, why does Sylia care/help Priss...?

Quote:Regarding Priss' music, maybe her boyfriend was headlining the act and it was his side-gig outside the gang. Partway through Act 2 she's still frustrated, looking for a way to vent. She slams in one of his old demo tapes to listen to (or MP3 or whatever) and starts spilling out what she's thinking and it slips into her singing it (mad machine maybe?). Finally she's sitting exhausted, vented, one of the other Sabers (Nene or Linna) walks past and asks what band she was playing (not realising it was Priss singing). Priss sarcastically asks if they think it was 'nice' (implying soft), and the response was "No, it sounded raw. And powerful." Which is a 'huh' moment for Priss. And this sets up that instead of Priss taking up her boyfriend's role as a gangleader, instead she takes up the path of music.

(01-05-2021, 12:19 AM)STMPD Wrote: Play it to some redux of an iconic BGC song (probably not Mad Machine, though) and we'll be good.

Quote:what would be the words she uses to sway Linna that wouldn't piss her off?

(01-05-2021, 03:33 AM)classicdrogn Wrote: Soldier Girl? I think that's the name of the piece I'm thinking of; it's the almost only recognizable English lyric anyway ("We want you soldier girl, soldier girl...") followed by something I remember my headcanon translation-to-fit-the-melody as being "guarding your heart with armor."