And also (in-universe) already established characters. We know Jonathan. We've met Warren. We haven't met Andrew, but he's (repeatedly) introduced as the brother of someone we have met. They're outsiders, but they're not from the outside.
Dawn's vampire boyfriend
Not that the concept of vampire boyfriends is all that new to the story.
a second-rate druggy-magic dealer
...who's even played by an actor who's been on the show before. (OK, that's probably not intentional, but still.)
in which Glory is a bit of a perpetual motion machine, feeding her way through humans
Interesting choice of words; Glory is absolute opposite of any villain in s6, absolutely, but a true perpetuum mobile is one that doesn't need energy from outside - ie one that keeps operating within a closed system in defiance of entropy. Which is why it's seemingly impossible. Glory needs a constant feed of external energy (in the form of brains/sanity - information!) to survive. Without it, she descends into chaos. Likewise, cut off all the outside lines and s6 descends... not into chaos at first, but into dysfunctional stagnation that needs chaos. Buffy always worked within the confines of Sunnydale, but in season 6 it turns into a pressure cooker with the lid bolted on. When Buffy meets Angel it happens offscreen, and despite Giles' talk of only being a phonecall away, once he's gone for the second time nobody tries to contact him. The first villains of the season - the noseless bikers - come from out of town, and when they kick them out it's not in triumph; after that, they're left with what they've got, and the system they've put in place to fight outside threats starts grinding gears and eating itself.
Which means that the higher the entropy, the more possible orientations. It's right in the definition that more entropy means more "possibilities," even as there's less order.
Exactly. Hayles uses a very good analogy to explain why information is only information if it's distinct - which it isn't if it's already perfectly ordered and predefined. She teaches, among other things, literature. If she gives her students a reading list consisting of one single book - Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow - then (assuming the students read, understand, and remember that list) she can't add any more information by telling them later on that they're supposed to read Gravity's Rainbow. They already know that; she's just making noise. But if the list contains both Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland, and she later orders half the class to read one book and the other half the other, this is brand new information since it takes a state of many possibilities and narrows it down. (Of course, in picking Pynchon she's already thrown them into complete chaos with endless possibilities of interpretation, but that's another story.)
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Date: 2011-03-31 09:05 am (UTC)And also (in-universe) already established characters. We know Jonathan. We've met Warren. We haven't met Andrew, but he's (repeatedly) introduced as the brother of someone we have met. They're outsiders, but they're not from the outside.
Dawn's vampire boyfriend
Not that the concept of vampire boyfriends is all that new to the story.
a second-rate druggy-magic dealer
...who's even played by an actor who's been on the show before. (OK, that's probably not intentional, but still.)
in which Glory is a bit of a perpetual motion machine, feeding her way through humans
Interesting choice of words; Glory is absolute opposite of any villain in s6, absolutely, but a true perpetuum mobile is one that doesn't need energy from outside - ie one that keeps operating within a closed system in defiance of entropy. Which is why it's seemingly impossible. Glory needs a constant feed of external energy (in the form of brains/sanity - information!) to survive. Without it, she descends into chaos. Likewise, cut off all the outside lines and s6 descends... not into chaos at first, but into dysfunctional stagnation that needs chaos. Buffy always worked within the confines of Sunnydale, but in season 6 it turns into a pressure cooker with the lid bolted on. When Buffy meets Angel it happens offscreen, and despite Giles' talk of only being a phonecall away, once he's gone for the second time nobody tries to contact him. The first villains of the season - the noseless bikers - come from out of town, and when they kick them out it's not in triumph; after that, they're left with what they've got, and the system they've put in place to fight outside threats starts grinding gears and eating itself.
Which means that the higher the entropy, the more possible orientations. It's right in the definition that more entropy means more "possibilities," even as there's less order.
Exactly. Hayles uses a very good analogy to explain why information is only information if it's distinct - which it isn't if it's already perfectly ordered and predefined. She teaches, among other things, literature. If she gives her students a reading list consisting of one single book - Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow - then (assuming the students read, understand, and remember that list) she can't add any more information by telling them later on that they're supposed to read Gravity's Rainbow. They already know that; she's just making noise. But if the list contains both Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland, and she later orders half the class to read one book and the other half the other, this is brand new information since it takes a state of many possibilities and narrows it down. (Of course, in picking Pynchon she's already thrown them into complete chaos with endless possibilities of interpretation, but that's another story.)