FaceDeer

Something similar happened to Babylon 5, it was designed as a 5-season series and then they were told season 4 would be the end. So they hurriedly wrapped everything up for the season 4 finale.

And then they were told they were getting a fifth season after all once that was all locked in, so they had to create a whole season of filler for season 5.

As I recall, the main point of contention was that this was one of the first big “there’s a big mystery and the whole series is one big story to unravel it and we totally have it all planned out, honest” series. And then it turned out that no, they didn’t totally have it planned out, and they were just making crap up as they went and most of the profound “clues” people were trying to cobble together were basically meaningless.

Maybe the show runners managed to cobble something together out of them that was satisfying regardless, but still, it felt like quite the betrayal. History repeated itself with Battlestar Galactica, where the show kept insisting “they have a plan!” When no, they really did not.

I’m not hoping, I know that every possible 1024-character ASCII text file is going to be generated over the course of all this. I’m just hoping that one of them will tell me to do something that will get me out of the loop. If I reach the end of the possible 1024-character text files without escaping, that means that either the solution takes more than 1024 characters to encode or there is no solution at all.

It’s important to increment the count and record it for next time before I read it, just in case one of those 1024-character strings contains an argument that convinces me to do something other than that.

I’d ask why they cared.

And frankly, seeing the mod abuse that goes on in many communities, having AI moderators helping with text moderation would be nice too. At least they’d be more consistent.

If it’s just me; I’d increment it by one at the start of each loop. That is, I’d increment the underlying 8192-bit number that the 1024 bytes represents. On some loops this will form a coherent ASCII text, on most it’ll be gibberish. But I have infinite retries and it doesn’t bother me how many loops I go through. So there will be 2^8192 “initial states” it’s in, or about 10^2467 different states in base ten. If anything is going to get me out of that time loop then I’ll hit on it eventually.

If I see that the integer is maxed out, I think I won’t overflow it back to 0 again. The whole point of this is to avoid trying exactly the same thing over and over again indefinitely. I think I’d have to resort to a leap of faith - that quantum effects are still random. I’d go to random.org and generate something bigger than 1024 bytes to use as “inspiration” instead. Maybe a megabyte? It’d have to be a lot bigger to be on the safe side, since this is the last resort.