Ex Machina Quotes

...This particular blunder is known as deus ex machina, which is French for "Are you fucking kidding me?

At a certain point, we have to stop ‘play time,’ start ‘construction time’ and get things going, instead of getting mired down in the quicksand of wishful thinking, clutching desperately to imaginary ‘dei ex machina.’ (" Swim or sink")

I need some kind of... like... last minute, poorly-set-up deus ex machina!!

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling.

Happy endings are bullshit. There are only happy pauses.

A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.

...This type of ending is a special instance of deus ex machina, known as the folie adieu, which is French for "Are you FUCKING kidding me?

You mere device," he gnarled. "You platitude! Your Gollux ex machina!

Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it's an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives...Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.

Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all -- a backdrop for the stories we must tell.

Indeed, many movies about artificial intelligence are so divorced from scientific reality that one suspects they are just allegories of completely different concerns. Thus the 2015 movie Ex Machina seems to be about an AI expert who falls in love with a female robot only to be duped and manipulated by her. But in reality, this is not a movie about the human fear of intelligent robots. It is a movie about the male fear of intelligent women, and in particular the fear that female liberation might lead to female domination. Whenever you see a movie about an AI in which the AI is female and the scientist is male, it’s probably a movie about feminism rather than cybernetics. For why on earth would an AI have a sexual or a gender identity? Sex is a characteristic of organic multicellular beings. What can it possibly mean for a non-organic cybernetic being?

Jolly Jay rested the Louisville Slugger on his shoulder, as if he were Thor or some other god-like warrior who had come down from the heavens to our Deus ex machina rescue.

Um, Dues ex machina anyone?

Dewan ex machina

It's time to climb off our high horses and step into the shit.

A bunch of different people appear, and they’ve got their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously. I mean, it’s basically impossible for everybody’s justice to prevail or everybody’s happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple – a god appears in the end and starts directing traffic. “You go over there, and you come here, and you get together with her, and you just sit still for a while.” Like that. He’s kind of a fixer, and in the end everything works out perfectly. They call this ‘deus ex machina.

You learn about me, and I learn nothing about you. That’s not a foundation on which friendships are based.

It's stupid, I know, but I care. All the things that meant so much when we were young. Under the blankets late at night, listening to long-distance radio. All those things lost now or broken. Can you remember? Can you remember that feeling? Perhaps I ought to go to a doctor.

Animal Man: 'Listen, just tell me one thing: am I REAL or what?' Grant Morrison: 'Of COURSE you're real! We wouldn't be here talking if you weren't real. 'You existed long before I wrote about you and, if you're lucky, you'll still be young when I'm old or dead. 'You're more real than I am.

Something I learned very quickly was that grieving was complicated by lack of certainty, that the hope inherent in a missing loved one was also a species of curse. People posted about children who had gone missing upwards of fifteen years ago and whose faces were now impossible to conjure, about friends who had messaged to confirm a meeting place and then simply never showed up. In almost every case, the sense of loss was convoluted by an ache of possibility, by the almost-but-not-quite-negligible hope of reprieve. Deus ex machina – the missing loved one thrown back down to earth. Grief is selfish: we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person – but more than that, we cry because it helps. The grief process is also the coping process and if the grief is frozen by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope.

I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase 'Timey-wimey wibbliness' which, I'm sure you'll agree, there are not enough occasions to drop into ordinary adult conversation.

Robarle muertes al Destino es como quitarle cartas a un castillo de naipes en un día de viento... Cuidado con las mariposas, sus alas despiertan huracanes".

Nothing is more frustrating than sitting in an office amid typewriters and mimeographers when you know what deus ex machina means.

Satan says, offering the next temptation. “If God exists, He will surely save you. If you are in fact his Son, God will surely save you.” Why would God not make Himself manifest, to rescue His only begotten Child from hunger and isolation and the presence of great evil? But that establishes no pattern for life. It doesn’t even work as literature. The deus ex machina—the emergence of a divine force that magically rescues the hero from his predicament—is the cheapest trick in the hack writer’s playbook. It makes a mockery of independence, and courage, and destiny, and free will, and responsibility. Furthermore, God is in no wise a safety net for the blind. He’s not someone to be commanded to perform magic tricks, or forced into Self-revelation—not even by His own Son.

I mean, do you know what you get when you call a suicide hotline in New York city? A busy signal. Literally.

Cuidado con las mariposas, sus alas despiertan huracanes…

The challenge is not to act automatically. It's to find an action that is not automatic. From painting, to breathing, to talking, to fucking. To falling in love...

...no matter how beneficial a disappearing act might be for me, I could never tear myself away from a show in progress. Even when the plot's tragic ending is apparent to the entire audience. Perhaps there's a deus ex machina that will lower from the ceiling and turn the whole debacle into a romantic comedy. never can tell. Paid the full ticket price, might as well stay.

The Deus ex Machina should be employed only for events external to the drama, — for antecedent or subsequent events, which lie beyond the range of human knowledge, and which require to be reported or foretold; for to the gods we ascribe the power of seeing all things.

El corazón nunca mide lo que arriesga, siempre lo apuesta todo

Impulse. Response. Fluid. Imperfect. Patterned. Chaotic.

Un Deus ex machina es la caballería que aparece en el último momento en una película del oeste

Everyone’s parents have fucked them up in one way or another. This is part of the natural order. It’s the circle of life. Mothers are people—not angels from heaven or Ex Machina error-free service bots. Just because they pushed you out of their vaginal canals does not mean they have all (or any) of the answers. Before they had you, they were flailing around like idiots, just like you are right now. My point is, they are just people. Most likely extraordinarily flawed people.

»¡Sería tan cómodo que existiera un deus ex machina en el mundo real! ¿No le parece? Cuando alguien pensara: “¿Y ahora qué hago? ¡Estoy atrapado!”, un dios bajaría deslizándose desde lo alto y lo resolvería todo. Nada podría ser más fácil.

Readers tend to tolerate such "accidents"... when they get the characters into trouble but they're less accepting when the author uses them to rescue people. The "deus ex machina"...in one stroke it renders meaningless all the efforts of the cast.

Though we can never guarantee our people complete safety, we can send a message to those who seek to harm the free and the brave. You might knock us to the ground but you sure as hell won’t keep us there.

If novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of lfe's possibilities, this is what they'd do. At the back of the book would be a set of sealed envelopes in various colours. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional Unhappy Ending; Traditional Half-and-Half Ending; Deus ex Machina; Modernist Arbitrary Ending; End of the World Ending; Cliffhanger Ending; Dream Ending; Opaque Ending; Surrealist Ending; and so on. You would be allowed only one, and would have to destroy the envelopes you didn't select.

While some of his clerical opponents suggested that his proofs for God’s existence are so obviously bad that they must have been designed by a devious atheist to in fact undermine the belief in God’s existence, more secular-minded critics protested against Descartes’s resorting to God as a deus ex machina to solve an epistemological quandary, and they questioned the propriety of relying on matters of faith in what should be a project of rational inquiry.

If you could be any character on The Next Generation, who would you be?" "Easy," Solomon said. "Data. For sure." "That makes sense," Clark said. "You?" "I always liked Wesley Crusher." "What?" Solomon was appalled. "Nobody likes Wesley Crusher." "Why not?" Lisa asked. "Because he's a total Mary Sue," Solomon said. "He's too perfect." "But he's always saving the day," Clark argued. "Like, always." "Exactly. He's just a talking deus ex machina. Everybody on the ship treats him like a dumb kid, then he saves them at the last minute and, every single time, they go right back to treating him like a dumb kid again. Do I need to remind you that the starship Enterprise is full of genius scientists and engineers? Why's this kid who can't get into Starfleet Academy smarter than all of them?" "Good point," Clark said. "He's still my choice, though.

Robarle muertes al Destino es como quitarle cartas a un castillo de naipes en un día de viento

Ava’s living area is made up of three primary spaces.

My sincere thanks to friends and family, especially my mother, father, brother, and Mandy, who continue to love and support me despite my obsessions.

It was a deus-ex-machina world!

Introduction of deus ex machina is a tell-tale sign of sloppy plotting.

The only thing that saved us? Basketballs ex machina.

deus ex machina.

We talked about our IPO like it was dues ex machina coming down from high to save us

Just as well,” he said. “We have one deus ex machina too many as it is.

deus ex machina

Time and time again, as we will see, the brilliant forebears of modern neuroscience abandoned their fierce reasoning skills and, deus ex machina, threw in a spook at the end of their analysis.

You talk about deus ex machina, well, we're talking about deus in machina. You start by thinking there's a god in the box. And then you find there isn't anything in the box. You put the god in the box.

But think about it -what if there were a deus ex machina in real life? Everything would be so easy! If you felt stuck or trapped, some god would swing down from up there and solve all your problems. What could be easier than that?

But think about it - what if there were a deus ex machina in real life? Everything would be so easy! If you felt stuck or trapped, some god would swing down from up here and solve all your problems. What could be easier than that?

Christ, I walk through an inferno unscatched, then singe my ass on the flight back." [...] "You guys are the ... the heart and brain of the Great Machine." "Yeah? Then you're the inflamed anus." "You're not the brain, by the way.

So this time something which might have been spoken was not, and the deus ex machina which might have descended to rescue a writer who had a date with a Dodge minivan on a late-spring day in the year of ’99 remained where it was, high above the mortals who acted their parts below.

(I’m a little sensitive to the subject of the deaths of aunts in my novels. Unkind critics have complained how I dispatch, or dispose of, the unlikable aunts in my fiction, but these critics never knew Aunt Abigail or Aunt Martha. Any deus ex machina device would not be too improbable for them.)

Looking on the bright side, let us remind ourselves of what has happened in the wake of earlier demystifications. We find no diminution of wonder; on the contrary, we find deeper beauties and more dazzling visions of the complexity of the universe than the protectors of mystery ever conceived. The 'magic' of earlier visions was, for the most part, a cover-up for frank failures of imagination, a boring dodge enshrined in the concept of a deus ex machina. Fiery gods driving golden chariots across the skies are simpleminded comic-book fare compared to the ravishing strangeness of contemporary cosmology, and the recursive intricacies of the reproductive machinery of DNA make élan vital about as interesting as Superman's dread Kryptonite. When we understand consciousness - when there is no more mystery - consciousness will be different, but there will still be beauty, and more room than ever for awe.

Me dijo que el batir de alas de una mariposa puede provocar un huracán al otro lado del mundo y me lo dijo para que entendiese que, si cambio demasiado el pasado, el futuro puede volverse inhabitable.

This is the plot up to the moment when the writer leaves the woman still dolefully enmeshed in it, and, suitcase in hand, tiptoeing so as not to disturb her postcoital rest, he himself slips silently out of the plot on the grounds of its general implausibility, a total lack of gravity, reliance at too many key points on unlikely coincidence, an absence of inner coherence, and not even the most tenuous evidence of anything resembling a serious meaning or purpose. The story so far is frivolously plotted, overplotted, for his taste altogether too freakishly plotted, with outlandish events so wildly careening around every corner that there is nowhere for intelligence to establish a foothold and develop a perspective. As if the look-alike at the story's storm center isn't farfetched enough, there is the capricious loss of the Smilesburger check (there is the fortuitous appearance of the Smilesburger check; there is Louis B. Smilesburger himself, Borscht Belt deus ex machina), which sets the action on its unconvincing course and serves to reinforce the writer's sense that the story has been intentionally conceived as a prank, and a nasty prank at that, considering the struggles of Jewish existence that are said to be at issue by his antagonist.

Let us end this farce, observer! Give me your final, most beloved act of "will"... The one you most wish to believe was your own idea! "My own... will... I... I believe that this love for Yukiteru-kun... is real!

Ray: What else did they get rid of, truth, justice and the American way? Leto jr.: Nah, truth ended when they shot M.L.K.. The American way died over in Vietnam. Mitch: And Justice? Leto jr.: Shit, man, there’s no justice.... There’s just us.

Y allí en lo alto, contemplando aquella salvaje perspectiva, eligió A la siguiente mártir de la cruda causa De la concupiscencia. Una vez más, Con esa negra presteza innata, ató a su prisionera. Las hormigas —una fila de viajeras llegando y partiendo— Perseveraban en el rumbo marcado Sin inmutarse, sin el menor escrúpulo, Obedeciendo las órdenes de su instinto hasta ser barridas Del escenario e infamemente atadas, Liquidadas por aquel vigoroso deus Ex machina. Y ni siquiera eso parecía disuadirlas.

God of the gaps” Christianity seeks to present Christianity as playing a strong savior role whereby it fills the gaps and provides the missing links for all of society’s questions and concerns. This entails the view of God riding into town and miraculously saving the day (deus ex machina). On this view, God delivers his people from their (and his) enemies—in Bonhoeffer’s case, the Nazis. In contrast, in Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer writes that God allows us to push him out of the world and onto the cross.

Let us but realise the consequences of the Socratic maxims: "Virtue is knowledge; man only sins from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy": these three fundamental forms of optimism involve the death of tragedy. For the virtuous hero must now be a dialectician; there must now be a necessary, visible connection between virtue and knowledge, between belief and morality; the transcendental justice of the plot in Æschylus is now degraded to the superficial and audacious principle of poetic justice with its usual deus ex machina.

The suspicion that something is structurally wrong with the vision of homo faber is common to a growing minority in capitalist, communist, and "underdeveloped" countries alike. This suspicion is the shared characteristic of a new elite. To it belong people of all classes, incomes, faiths, and civilizations. They have become wary of the myths of the majority: of scientific utopias, of ideological diabolism, and of the expectation of the distribution of goods and services with some degree of equality. They share with the majority the awareness that most new policies adopted by broad consensus consistently lead to results which are glaringly opposed to their stated aims. Yet whereas the Promethean majority of would-be spacemen still evades the structural issue, the emergent minority is critical of the scientific deus ex machina, the ideological panacea, and the hunt for devils and witches. This minority begins to formulate its suspicion that our constant deceptions tie us to contemporary institutions as the chains bound Prometheus to his rock. Hopeful trust and classical irony must conspire to expose the Promethean fallacy.

[Stoner] said you don't kill two women and just stop there. I disagreed. I told Bill he was unduly tied to cop empiricism. I said the San Gabriel Valley was this deus ex machina. The people who flocked there flocked there for unconscious reasons that superseded conscious application of logic and made anything possible. The region defined the crime. The region was the crime...The region explained it all. The unconscious San Gabriel Valley migration explained every absurd and murderous act that went down there. Our job was to pin point three people within that migration.

The ship did not respond to queries. Without the ship, there could be no fatline relay to the Ousters, the Web, or anywhere else beyond Hyperion. Normal comm bands were down. ‘Could the ship have been destroyed?’ Sol asked the Consul. ‘No. The message is being received, just not responded to. Gladstone still has the ship in quarantine.’ Sol squinted out over the barrens to where the mountains shimmered in the heat haze. Several klicks closer, the ruins of the City of Poets rose jaggedly against the skyline. ‘Just as well,’ he said. ‘We have one deus ex machina too many as it is.’ Paul

A bunch of different people appear, and they’ve all got their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously. I mean, it’s basically impossible for everybody’s justice to prevail or everybody’s happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple—a god appears in the end and starts directing traffic. ‘You go over there, and you come here, and you get together with her, and you just sit still for a while.’ Like that. He’s kind of a fixer, and in the end everything works out perfectly. They call this ‘deus ex machina.

Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it's an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives. No one and nothing coincidental will come along to take that responsibility from us, regardless of the injustices and chaos around us. You could be locked in a cell for the rest of your life for a crime you did not commit. But every morning you would still have to get up and make meaning. Do I bludgeon my brains against this wall or do I find some way to get through my days with value? Our lives are ultimately in our own hands. Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.

The second solution is communitarianism, also baptised assimilation. It is a question of a compromise, inspired by the United States and rather unclear theories of intellectual ‘ethnopluralism’, Right-wing and Left-wing. People born abroad keep their ‘culture’, but adhere to a common ‘minimum’, a global Social Contract.[140] Society becomes a pacific kaleidoscope, united by a soft and pacifying deus ex machina.[141] This utopian vision, Rousseauian and adolescent, still defended by learned old fogies, who flirt just a little with apartheid (whence its partisans on the extreme Right) has been tried by all the European states. The result has been total failure. There has been no ‘assimilation’ of ‘ethnic communities’ cohabiting peacefully. On the contrary, ethnic civil war is just around the corner.

Passing from one dimension to another, he feels that nothing is left behind, but rather is always with him in the moment. His life is no more a myth than other man's, his needs much the same. The only price he pays for this exquisite singularity may be the intrusion of his fellow dreamers who sometimes call him on the telephone. They mean no harm. They too are innocent. Clarity is all any man seeks, this Somnambulist merely find his on the other Side.

This description of physiology—as the exquisite matching of form and function, down to the molecular level—dates back to Aristotle. For Aristotle, living organisms were nothing more than exquisite assemblages of machines. Medieval biology had departed from that tradition, conjuring up “vital” forces and mystical fluids that were somehow unique to life—a last-minute deus ex machina to explain the mysterious workings of living organisms (and justify the existence of the deus). But biophysicists were intent on restoring a rigidly mechanistic description to biology. Living physiology should be explicable in terms of physics, biophysicists argued—forces, motions, actions, motors, engines, levers, pulleys, clasps. The laws that drove Newton’s apples to the ground should also apply to the growth of the apple tree. Invoking special vital forces or inventing mystical fluids to explain life was unnecessary. Biology was physics. Machina en deus.

Euripides thought he observed that during these first scenes the spectator was in a strange state of anxiety to make out the problem of the previous history, so that the poetic beauties and pathos of the exposition were lost to him. Accordingly he placed the prologue even before the exposition, and put it in the mouth of a person who could be trusted: some deity had often[Pg 100] as it were to guarantee the particulars of the tragedy to the public and remove every doubt as to the reality of the myth: as in the case of Descartes, who could only prove the reality of the empiric world by an appeal to the truthfulness of God and His inability to utter falsehood. Euripides makes use of the same divine truthfulness once more at the close of his drama, in order to ensure to the public the future of his heroes; this is the task of the notorious deus ex machina. Between the preliminary and the additional epic spectacle there is the dramatico-lyric present, the "drama" proper.

The hero, Admetus, is condemned to death by the Fates. But thanks to Apollo’s negotiating, he is offered a loophole – Admetus can escape death if he is able to persuade someone else to die for him. He proceeds to ask his mother and father to die in his place, and they refuse in no uncertain terms. It’s hard to know what to make of Admetus at this point. Not exactly heroic behaviour, by any standards, and the ancient Greeks must have thought him a bit of a twit. Alcestis is made of stronger stuff – she steps forward and volunteers to die for her husband. Perhaps she doesn’t expect Admetus to accept her offer – but he does, and Alcestis proceeds to die and depart for Hades. It doesn’t end there, though. There is a happy ending, of sorts, a deus ex machina. Heracles seizes Alcestis from Hades, and brings her triumphantly back to the land of the living. She comes alive again. Admetus is moved to tears by the reunion with his wife. Alcestis’s emotions are harder to read – she remains silent. She doesn’t speak.

[…] if sophistication is the ability to put a smile on one's existential desperation, then the fear of a glossy sheen is actually the fear that surface equals depth. *** […] we wake up, we do something—anything—we go to sleep, and we repeat it about 22,000 more times, and then we die. *** Part of our new boredom is that our brain doesn't have any downtime. Even the smallest amount of time not being engaged creates a spooky sensatino that maybe you're on the wrong track. Reboot your computer and sit there waiting for it to do its thing, and within seventeen seconds you experience a small existential implosion when you remember that fifteen years ago life was nothing but this kind of moment. Gosh, mabe I'll read a book. Or go for a walk. Sorry. Probably not going to happen. Hey, is that the new trailer for Ex Machina? *** In the 1990s there was that expression, "Get a life!" You used to say it to people who were overly fixating on some sort of minutia or detail or thought thread, and by saying, "Get a life," you were trying to snap them out of their obsession and get them to join the rest of us who are still out in the world, taking walks and contemplating trees and birds. The expression made sense at the time, but it's been years since I've heard anyone use it anywhere. What did it mean then, "getting a life"? Did we all get one? Or maybe we've all not got lives anymore, and calling attention to one person without a life would put the spotlight on all of humanity and our now full-time pursuit of minutia, details and tangential idea threads. *** I don't buy lottery tickets because they spook me. If you buy a one-in-fifty-million chance to win a cash jackpoint, you're simultaneously tempting fate and adding all sorts of other bonus probabilities to your plance of existence: car crashes, random shootings, being struck by a meteorite. Why open a door that didn't need opening? *** I read something last week and it made sense to me: people want other people to do well in life but not too well. I've never won a raffle or prize or lottery draw, and I can't help but wonder how it must feel. One moment you're just plain old you, and then whaam, you're a winner and now everyone hates you and wants your money. It must be bittersweet. You hear all those stories about how big lottery winners' lives are ruined by winning, but that's not an urban legend. It's pretty much the norm. Be careful what you wish for and, while you're doing so, be sure to use the numbers between thirty-two and forty-nine.

I had, therefore, to resign myself to commissioning a duplicate from a jeweller in Madrid. They did the work very nicely. The claws are curiously shaped, but the true marvel is the stone; it is so very limpid and weighs many carats, but notice also how it is hollowed out! You see that drop of green oil which takes the place of the internal tear? It is a drop of poison, an Indian toxin which strikes so rapidly and so corrosively that it only requires to come into momentary contact with one of a man's mucous membranes to rob him of his senses and induce rigour mortis. 'It is instant death, certain but painless suicide, that I carry in this emerald. One bite' - and Ethal made as if to raise the ring to his lips - 'and with a single bound one has quit the mundane world of base instincts and crude works, to enter eternity. 'Look upon the truest of friends: a deus ex machina which defies public opinion and cheats the police of their prey...' He laughed briefly. 'After all, we live in difficult times, and today's magistrates are so very meticulous. Salute as I do, my dear friend, the poison which saves and delivers. It is at your service, if ever the day should come when you are weary of life!

language is no deus ex machina to account for philosophy.

Fortuna fortes adiuvat

Fuck the Bureau! Their entire outfit is half the size of the NYPD. I've got more officers who speak Arabic in one precinct that you guys have in the entire D.O.D.!

The future self keeps being pushed into the future, like a deus ex machina 24 that will emerge to save us from our present selves in the very last act.

The antagonists of finance’s future, the diaboli ex machina, may have no face at all.

I mean, when the British burned down the White House in the war of 1812, did we plant a "Tree of Remembrance" in the ashes, or did we get busy rebuilding?

Why do you always make it sound like everything was better before I was born?" "It's not you, Mitchell. There was just more civility back then. We still had respect for authority, I guess. This is what happens when no one trusts the people in power.

Nothing like that is going to happen, Candy. After 9/11 and the gas attacks, our people have learned how important it is to take care of each other. It's a new New York.

The Government's supposed to be there for people when nobody else is, right? But it never works like that.

It is for this reason that the anxiety about the boundaries between people and machines has taken on new urgency today, when we constantly rely on and interact with machines—indeed, interact with each other by means of machines and their programs: computers, smartphones, social media platforms, social and dating apps. This urgency has been reflected in a number of recent films about troubled relationships between people and their human-seeming devices. The most provocative of these is Her , Spike Jonze’s gentle 2013 comedy about a man who falls in love with the seductive voice of an operating system, and, more recently, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina , about a young man who is seduced by a devious, soft-spoken female robot called Ava whom he has been invited to interview as part of the “Turing Test”: a protocol designed to determine the extent to which a robot is capable of simulating a human. Although the robot in Garland’s sleek and subtle film is a direct descendant of Hesiod’s Pandora—beautiful, intelligent, wily, ultimately dangerous—the movie, as the Eve-like name Ava suggests, shares with its distinguished literary predecessors some serious biblical concerns.

though she were another person, a deus ex machina

Year after year, bill after bill, Wilberforce spent his entire career introducing an endless series of legislative proposals to his colleagues in the British Parliament in his efforts to end slavery, only to have them defeated, one after the other. From 1788 to 1806, he introduced a new anti-slavery motion and watched it fail every single year, for eighteen years in a row. Finally the water wore down the rock: three days before Wilberforce’s death in 1833, Parliament passed a bill to abolish slavery not only in England but also throughout its colonies. Three decades later, a similar bill passed in the United States, spearheaded by another man of conscience who had also spent much of his life failing, a patient Illinois lawyer named Abraham. Deus ex machina? Far from it. These weren’t solutions that dropped out of the blue sky. They were the “sudden” result of long patient years of tireless repeated effort. There was no fictional deus ex machina happening here; these were human problems, and they had human solutions. But the only access to them was through the slight edge. Of course Wilberforce and Lincoln were not the sole figures in this heroic struggle, and even after their bills were passed into law on both sides of the Atlantic, the evils of slavery and racism were far from over. Rome wasn’t rehabilitated in a day, or even a century. But their efforts—like Mother Teresa’s efforts to end poverty, Gandhi’s to end colonial oppression, or Martin Luther King’s and Nelson Mandela’s to end racism—are classic examples of what “breakthrough” looks like in the real world. All of these real-life heroes understood the slight edge. None of them were hypnotized by the allure of the “big break.” If they had been, they would never have continued taking the actions they took—and what would the world look like today?

The Wizard of Odds Stand on stiff totals of 12 to 16 when dealer's not ace up. Make insurance bets when remaining cards are ten-rich. Double when you want a ten, getting closer to 21. Surrender more in high counts, the savings will be greater. Split high cards and/or off of a weak dealer card. Blackjack player gets paid 3 to 2, dealer does not. Into the pit enters Casino ex machina ~ The s-h-u-f-f-l-i-n-g machine. The Wizard of Odds proclaims, 'All y'allz counters are fucked now!' Off from the tables to the loose slots they go bitchin' 'bout the pit boss and all things techno.

DEI EX MACHINA

We are to do nothing, is that right, except to wait in quiet serenity and utter faith for the deus ex machina to pop out of the Vault?” “Stripped of your emotional phraseology, that’s the idea.” “Such unsubtle escapism! Really, Dr. Fara, such folly smacks of genius. A lesser mind would be incapable of it.” Fara smiled indulgently. “Your taste in epigrams is amusing, Hardin, but out of place.

To go back to the game metaphor from before, there exists a component of storytelling where it is you and the reader (or viewer, or whoever) sitting on opposite sides of a chessboard. You’re always trying to outwit each other. And sometimes you need them to outwit you—the audience needs that power, needs to be invested. They want to do work, and they want (sometimes) to be victorious. Other times, they want the shock of loss, the joy at being outplayed. And at those times you misdirect and distract, and as they’re thinking you’re moving your piece one way, you move it another and shock them with your prowess. But the trick is making all of this organic. It has to unfold naturally from the story—it’s not JUST you screwing with them. It’s you fucking with them within a framework that you built and agreed upon, a framework you’ve shown them, a place of rules and decorum. In this context, consider the game space. Like, say, a chessboard, or a D&D dungeon. The game space is an agreed-upon demesne. It has rules. It has squares. Each piece or character moves accordingly within those squares. It has a framework that everyone who has played the game understands. And yet, the outcome is never decided. The game is forever uncertain even within established parameters. Surprises occur. You might win. Maybe I win. That’s how storytelling operates best—we set up rules and a storyworld and characters, and you try to guess what we’re going to do with them. We as storytellers shouldn’t ever break the rules. Note: Breaking the rules in this context might mean conveniently leaving out a crucial storyworld rule (“Oh, vampires don’t have to drink blood; they can drink Kool-Aid”), or solving a mystery with a killer who the audience couldn’t ever have guessed (“It was the sheriff from two towns over who we have never before discussed or even mentioned”), or invoking a deus ex machina (“Don’t worry, giant eagles will save them. It’s cool”). You can still have chaos and uncertainty within the parameters—creating a framework, like building a house, doesn’t mean it cannot contain secrets and surprises—but you stay within the parameters that you created. Again, it’s why stage magic works as a metaphor when actual wizard magic does not. With stage magic—tricks and illusions!—you can’t really violate the laws of reality. But it damn sure feels like you do. Stories make you believe in wizard magic, but really it’s just a clever, artful trick. The storyworld is bent and twisted, but never broken. And, of course, your greatest touchstone for all of this is the characters, and their problems and places inside the storyworld. The characters will forever be your guide, if you let them. They are the tug-of-war rope, the chess pieces, the D&D characters that exist as a connection between you and the audience. They are your glorious leverage.

Admit you found it pleasant to be worshipped. Admit that you liked the idea of being a sort of dea ex machina--saving people from their own folly when they didn't in the least want to be saved from it.

Dr Gwynne was the Deus ex machina who was to come down upon the Barchester stage, and bring about deliverance from these terrible evils. But how can melodramatic dénouements be properly brought about, how can vice and Mr Slope be punished, and virtue and the archdeacon be rewarded, while the avenging god is laid up with the gout?

The future self keeps being pushed into the future, like a deus ex machina 24 that will emerge to save us from our present selves in the very last act. We put off what we need to do because we are waiting for someone else to show up who will find the change effortless.

There’s a meditation called ‘Rain’ in the Buddhify app that had me sobbing the first time I heard it, because it’s all about this negative emotion self-flagellation. ‘I shouldn’t be feeling X.’ Why ever not? We’re not Ex-Machina robots. The human experience comes with a side of emotions.

deus ex machina

Here's my watch. If I wind it, it marks time. It exists. It is alive. If the spring breaks, it stops. It no longer marks the hour. It is dead. Time does not exist for it. Same with you, when your main spring is gone.

For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilization—that civilization founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and effect—in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed be subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop. The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.

The bitch thought herself and her cronies worthy to exist on such a divine plane, as though she were better than the decent, pious, hardworking people she’d turned her back on. And those Fedraysha blasphemers, who hunted down gods and killed them wherever they found them—on Yonada, on Beta, on Avros, on Gamma Trianguli—they took advantage of her hubris, used her as their puppet to spread their evils, to destroy every vestige of the Yonadan way of life as they had destroyed the Oracle.