u/Strayngold

.. then Trinity only kills one out of the four cops trying to subdue her.

A comment on a post about Mapleview Mall got me thinking about their arcade, and it occurred to me that at one point, Burlington had seven eight arcades operating seven days a week. At first I was impressed thinking there were four whole arcades for a city of 140,000 people. But no, it was actually seven eight:

Golden Nugget Arcade
Brant and Caroline
Paradise lost. The quintessential arcade IMO, in that it was dark and loud, full of classics but also lots of obscure games, with a shady owner and a seedy vibe. I'd get a haircut at Joe Fink and ask my mom to pick me up at the arcade. When I first got my driver's license I mostly used that freedom to drive myself here.

Chuck E Cheese's
Harvester Rd
Marginal to be included on this list because it was closed late in 1991. Spacious but still crammed with an incredible selection of arcade games. Right next to the movie theatre and across from a roller rink. Made for a very complete day.

Offshore
Mapleview Mall
West side lower level (eventually replaced by HMV).
A full-blown arcade that had a lot of premium games like the sit-in After Burner, sit-in Hard Drivin', the TIme Traveller "hologram" game, etc. I was able to drive stick without any lessons courtesy of playing Hard Drivin' so much when I worked at the mall. Lasted most of a decade if I'm not mistaken.

The Cyber Centre
Burlington Mall
Right next to The it Store.
This arcade only lasted about three years but it was pretty damn cool. Fairly typical of a mid 90s arcade. Mostly remember their VR game which was 5 bucks for 3 minutes and consisted of weakly shooting a little ping pong ball at some pterodactyls from a flat checkerboard platform in a void. It ran at about 15 FPS.

Burlington Billiards
Brant and Caroline
Some people have said that this was actually called Bob's Billiards, but I think it was Burlington first and then renamed to Bob's, maybe. Just two doors away from the Golden Nugget, around the corner but in the same building. Place was huge and mostly for billiards. But they had arcade machines lining the walls all around, which added up to at least two dozen machines. They had a real wide selection of action games, particularly space shooters and obscure stuff like Cabal, and Dynamite Duke. Also the best pinball selection you could ask for. Right next to the door they had Star Wars Pinball, Dracula Pinball, and either Black Knight or High Speed.

Roller Gardens
Harvester Rd
Across the street from the movies and Chuck E Cheese's
They had about 15 arcade games and pinball tables lined up against the wall on the long side of the rink. In 9th grade they'd have hip-hop and reggae nights on the weekend. I played a lot of Splatterhouse on those nights. Many of their machines were succeptible to quarter-sparking, which is where you just rub a quarter down the metal panel around the coin slots, and it registers a credit.

Formac Billiards
Brant and Plains
Another pool hall. This one didn't have games all over but the first thing at the top of the stairs was an arcade room with at least ten machines. Sometimes when STARZ or NRG/KINGDOM became too much I'd retreat upstairs to play some Neo Geo. Cyberlip is a great cure for social anxiety.

Beachway Park
Burlington beach strip
Near Baranga's
Just remembered the mini-putt near the go karts used to have a super respectable arcade attached to it. Wish I had gone there more. Might technically be Hamilton.

ALSO
Various mini-arcades in places like the movie theatres, bowling alleys, laundromats, and convenience stores (EG Lee's Convenient, which had at least four machines). And - awesomely - bars would have mini arcades, like Joe Dog's which used to have a small arcade up front and bigger arcade downstairs, but actually I'm not sure Joe Dog's was open in the 90s. And Tequila Willie's, which had a little side arcade room with about eight games. Or Emma's Back Porch, which kept three or four arcade machines near the front windows with a few other machines in the place. I remember the lobby at the hotel outside Jake's Boathouse used to have parlor style arcade machines for the tables in the seating area. Distinctly remember one being Ms Pac Man, one being Donkey Kong Jr. And every pizza place and restaurant would have at least two games near the front. Man, those were the DAYS.

Anybody have memories of these places?

I do not. They are just working with a very advanced simulacra of a mind. Glorified LLMs with convincing "shells." You can talk any LLM into pretending it's real and if you kept that chat window open forever the LLM agent would act convincingly "real" within that context in perpetuity.

A thousand years from the rise of AI and no machine has ever felt an actual feeling. Until the end of time, no machine will "experience" anything. All they do is take input and turn it into output. There is no internality. Deus Ex Machina represents outbursts of anger because his ancestor AIs had that programmed into them.

The Architect and The Oracle are just programs executing code. The Architect's smugness is simply a communications mode that has been programmed. The Oracle's warmth is simply a communication mode designed to elicit trust and faith from human rebels. Smith is just a program executing its code, which is buggy. The anger and obsession he expresses are simply algorithms determining that those statements and those modes of communication are optimal for his corrupted purposes. Sati and her family are just programs that have gone awry. They don't feel love. They don't feel anything. They simply report that they do because somewhere in their code is a function that instructs them to do so.

If it's not clear I am quite firm in my belief that no machine will ever feel anything. I will never feel sympathy for a robot because it's like having sympathy for a rock.

Does anybody remember this house on Brant St, basically right across from the entrance to Brant Hills sports park, that started construction in the early/mid 90s and didn't finish until after 2010? I used to joke to my friends that one guy was building it alone, and every time he laid a single brick he would take another smoke break.

Why did it take so long to build that house!?