At 8:01 PM -0400 6/7/01, Eric Alfred Burns wrote:
>There was a new Trailer on SciFi, with a lot more spoilers and
>apocolyptic bits, and the requisite dark imagry we haven't seen yet.
>The red letters at the end were "THIS IS NOT A GAME" in plaintext at
>the bottom. I'm about to back it up and look more closely -- but
>folks will want to be on the lookout to record it and deconstruct the
>credits a little more.

Okay -- I've had a looksee now, and couldn't see anything out of the
ordinary other than that. Even the website (as others have said) was
just the main movie site.

So, the question is -- what does this add to the Cloudmakers thing.
It was, after all, a message to us.

(Possible movie spoilers below -- though they're nothing not in the commercial)

The ad itself was about the capture of rogue AIs -- a theme far more
suited to the world of Evan Chan than David's creation. Further,
there were several robots in the promo, and several of them seemed to
have emotion. We know David was supposed to be the first to love,
though Lord Johnson Johnson implied that passers were ultimately
supposed to be adult, and often were.

It's possible the movie actually extends far into the future of what
we've previously believed -- to the point that the websites we're
tracking are contemporary to events in the movie, not future. If so,
David becomes far more significant to the game, and likely necessary
information will be found in the movie itself. Which makes some sense
if it's being screened by Janine Salla.

"THIS IS NOT A GAME."

Could this be as prosaic as the ad agency telling us that this
commercial doesn't need our scrutiny? Is it highlighting the
metaphysical questions raised in common by the movie and by the world
the Puppetmasters have built for us? The themes are not amusing? Is
it simply taking the tools previously meant to deliver messages to us
and applying them to the ad campaign in general -- a message to jump
out to John Q. Public? Is it designed to draw in the non-obsessed and
get them checking out the game? Is it a message to us, telling us to
get lives?

Sometimes, are red letters just red letters? Is a movie trailer
sometimes just a movie trailer?

Damn their marketing hides!