I've recently been watching The Midnight Gospel with one of my spouses, and it has direct relevance to the concepts that created the Optimalverse.

The basic scenario of this adult Netflix based animated miniseries by Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time) is this:

A person by the name of Clancy Gilroy lives in a pocket universe called 'The Chromatic Ribbon'. In this universe, most folks are Simulation Farmers. They have sapient organic supercomputers called 'multiverse simulators' that generate hundreds or thousands of simulated worlds - many are alternate versions of earth. They enter these simulations by means of computer generated avatar bodies in order to harvest new technologies invented by the emulated inhabitants of the simulated worlds. By this, I mean they can literally materialize physical representations of the digital artifacts they... harvest.

The basic plot - without giving anything much away - is that Clancy, for reasons, is using an illegal multiverse simulator inside his shabby little trailer in order to interview the simulated people so he can 'make big bucks' becoming famous as a 'spacecaster' - think vlogger or blogger or Youtube star all rolled into a single, holographic whole.

The show is constructed from actual interviews with real people, adapted to the scenario above. The interviews focus mainly on subjects like mediation, ritual magic, and the nature of self - often very woo-woo stuff, but always interesting.

But, here's where our Venn diagram overlaps - the ontology of The Midnight Gospel gives us a very intriguing look at just why a super-advanced humanity might choose to run ancestor simulations, Bostrom simulations. Indeed not just a few - they've made an entire, fairly wretched industry of the entire thing.

What other Simulation Farmers we see in the show are not nice people. They do their job as any small, impoverished farmer might cope with pigs and wheat. They are emulating billions of pre-singularity humans only to steal stuff and ideas from them, with zero compassion for their virtual charges. Their simulated worlds are a cash crop, and they are kept running only because they are profitable. The suffering of virtual trillions is accepted the same way we, right now, turn a blind eye to the horrific suffering of factory farmed chickens, pigs, and other animals. Just meat. Just a crop. Their screams mean nothing, this is business.

I find this explains our own world, if we are indeed within a Bostrom simulation, perfectly!

The animation is a bit simplistic, and the look is Yellow Submarine on all the drugs. Which... is saying something. It is gory as hell and beyond the fringe of Absolute Weirdness.

I take a personal pleasure in the fact that the Chromatic Ribbon universe looks unmistakably like my own webcomic universe of Ktlikitkak from my own Pastel Defender Heliotrope. Which... also deals with artificial intelligence and a multiverse of discrete universes and worlds within them.

In any case, I thought I would alert folks to The Midnight Gospel!

super-advanced humanity

- well, may be humanity as 'dominant humans of today on steroids' simply all die (for the World) before they reach their fantasy world of interstellar arseholes everywhere, OR seemingly-simpler computer-simulated thing ... Not sure if anyone will consider this positive thought ..

But I think there is also problem for simulated beings - not unlike humans in space - they apparently can't live outside of their specialized environments ..... so, they can't just walk 'outside' of their simulator, without their equivalent of spaceship/life (computational) support .... Even if those simulators somewhat connected to each other, or this connection can be made - transfer itself might be quite big engineering problem .... just as big as manned interstellar flight is today.

But yeah, I also have this bad feeling our world was pushed into overdrive, so a lot of discovery was made in short years ..with tons of negative sideeffects.. one of them being ANY new discovery today is harder to make and use (outside of very big conglomerates of humans, with their own problems)....?

Thanks for alert anyway, and thanks for thoughts

Thanks for the heads-up! I hadn't heard about this!

Thank you.

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You are welcome - myself, I am loving the hell out of this series.

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OMFG, I love this show so much!

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I know, right? My only real complaint is that one of the songs became an earworm and it took me days to get it out of my head. I gained many things from watching Midnight Gospel, it made a positive difference for me.

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Looked up some trailer - top of comments sections sounds ....different. (So, our dear resident unicorn as always saw it from unusual perspective :} )

There is also article in NY times floating atop. Considering NY was hit quite hard by all this real-life and death thing ..... yeah, meta-meta.

“Midnight Gospel” is also nominally a sci-fi series involving artificial universes. Clancy (Trussell), a “simulation farmer,” uses a beat-up, womb-like biocomputer to visit alternative worlds and interview their weird denizens for his “spacecast.” But there is thankfully no pseudoscientific fig leaf justifying how this all works: The show simply asks you to drink from its bottle, Alice-like, and shrink or expand to its level.

...You know what I somewhat dislike? If humans really started to not give a damn about dying, and leaving others to die. Should not happen, but with humans today .....

as further comment - I think those news can be considered positive, but because basically anything positive requires some effort to stay up....

Why Euthanasia Rates at Animal Shelters Have Plummeted - by Alicia Parlapiano (NY times - this time they forced me to create their account for reading this) Published Sept. 3, 2019 Updated Sept. 4, 2019

By the 1970s, the Humane Society estimated that 25 percent of the nation’s dogs were out on the streets and that 13.5 million animals were euthanized in shelters each year (some argue that number was much higher). In 1971, Los Angeles’s shelter alone euthanized more than 110,000 animals, or 300 per day on average.

Since then, large-scale activism, industry professionalization and shifting cultural attitudes have helped limit euthanasia to fewer than two million shelter animals per year. In 2018, the Los Angeles city shelter euthanized an average of 10 animals per day, less than 10 percent of its intake.

- but this article specifically deals with 2010 (2012) -2018 data ... Why I recall this? Because it was and still is much easier to just say 'oh, I have reasons to kill you, so I'll kill you' and whistle away from it ... Even if some says human doctor's burn rate in recent pandemic was as high as combatants in WW2 ..... Amounts of excuses humans like to do is amazing, and not in nice way... :/ And putting 'English-speaking N. America' and 'spirituality' in same sentence doesn't make me feel ...happy and safe. Due to amazing history.

PS: in somewhat surprizing (or not) turn of events PETA now in advocating for 'elimination' of companion animals?! Yes, not on frontpage, but such comments definitely were heard (references even reached Wikipedia ). And HSUS is 'huh' at best ..... like many modern NGOs .... It all very sad for me, because only thing I learned way too well - humans may learn to talk nice talk, but what they do still shit. And because in most cases I only can read/hear words .....

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I gave it a watch.
To the first episode, anyway.
I can agree to your discurse regarding the deeper meaning behind running simulations: the people are real inside them, yet the simulators take what they want, then pull the plug (committing genocide) without a second thought.
Nonetheless, watching this was like trying to have a serious discussion with my hippie / stoner cousin. I'll give it a pass.