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Groundhog Day Loops

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40hz:
And lets not forget the classic Monty Python treatment:



 :Thmbsup:

40hz:
An interesting variation on the theme is the Nicholas Cage movie Next.

Deals with a man who can see a very small number of minutes into his own future, allowing him get repeated - albeit immediate - "do-overs". Sort of like Groundhog Day but on steroids. Clever (and refreshingly original) in that the window to repeat keeps moving forward - so if he hesitates to make a revised move, the window of opportunity closes and he moves forward like everyone else. Think walking backwards on an escalator rather than the 'climb 20 flights of stairs - then take an elevator trip back to the lobby' mechanism Groundhog Day uses.

Hangs together remarkably well and makes me wish I had a gift like that. ;D



 :Thmbsup:

TaoPhoenix:
An interesting variation on the theme is the Nicholas Cage movie Next.

Deals with a man who can see a very small number of minutes into his own future, allowing him get repeated - albeit immediate - "do-overs". Sort of like Groundhog Day but on steroids. Clever (and refreshingly original) in that the window to repeat keeps moving forward - so if he hesitates to make a revised move, the window of opportunity closes and he moves forward like everyone else. Think walking backwards on an escalator rather than the 'climb 20 flights of stairs - then take an elevator trip back to the lobby' mechanism Groundhog Day uses.

Hangs together remarkably well and makes me wish I had a gift like that. ;D
-40hz (May 16, 2014, 11:00 AM)
--- End quote ---

Yeah I just watched this. After getting a bit mean in places, that woman agent does a decent job of "looking sideways" when she starts to really lock into her real mission. An interesting subtheme often explord in the X-Men movies is raw talent vs training. So if you have this freaky ability, that's one thing, but if you have worked on it, you get to do the subtle stuff.

The movie does a good job about an hour and 20 min in showing that Cage's character really spent some time practicing. (Dodging bullets, spawning 50 iterations to sweep the floors, and more.) It's also awesome that he is a trained pseudo-cheesy stage magician, because he pulls a couple of psychological tricks along with his real ability. (Maybe one creates the other - if you drop and look shot dead, that's the way out and then you don't get shot dead!)

40hz:
Let's also not leave out Vonjegut's Slaughterhouse Five.

Not so much a loop as being "unstuck" in time. Vonnegut posits that since time is a linear continuum in our reality, what would happen if you could move your consciousness to whatever points on the line you wished.

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is: "So it goes."
--- End quote ---

Billy, the protagonist, ultimately realizes all lives have their moments of light and darkness. So the smart thing to do is to spend all your time in the bright moments of your lifetime and to avoid the rest.

Not a bad philosophy when you think about it.


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And what about games?

It just occurred to me that computer adventure games (and games in general) are prime examples temporal loops. Same goes for simulations. Get it wrong? Reset or go back to a previous save and try again. I must have died a thousand deaths working my way through the Ultima series. Can't loop more than that! ;D

I always found it interesting that even young children have an innate sense that what passes for 'reality' is largely consensus. When a child says "let's pretend" it's an invitation to experience and explore an alternate reality - with a built-in escape clause. And that reality gets repeated (i.e. looped) and usually embellished with repeated play.

Edvard:
Exit Log
Time travel will be invented in 2247.
It is limited to 3 minutes travel into the past.
A "Timedrive" wil become an emergency safety feature on all space vessels.
On activation, the Timedrive resets everything on the ship by 3 minutes.
Everything except the warning message left in the exit log.
--- End quote ---



Very Kafka, I must say...  :Thmbsup:

Found at Short of the Week

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