Monday, January 29, 2018
Dragon Short Story
Wrote this today after it popped into my head during breakfast. A world where dragons rule and men drool.
Monday, January 22, 2018
Seductive GOD of thunder!
"Are you Thor, the god of hammers?"
Watched Thor 2 again at the cheap theater. Although not so cheap with pizza and beer I guess. Anyway, I enjoyed it just as much, if not more.
Still struck by the conversations between Thor and Loki and Thor and Odin. Some of the best character work in the MCU in just a few sentences.
Still love Hela. Would die for Hela. Yes, Hela.
I think the commentary on Asgard's wealth and prosperity built on the blood and tears of a hundred civilizations part is still important. I think the "fuck it, here's scourge dual-wielding M-16s. USA! USA!" kind of undercuts whatever high minded allegory they're trying to make there. It's just kind of brought up and uncomfortably dismissed. To be fair, this is as far as we've gotten with the topic ourselves.
It can't let a heavy moment stand. In the middle of the destruction of Asgard they still have to be cracking wise. I want to say it smacks of emotional immaturity and insecurity on the part of the creators, but I think it's more likely just a lack of faith in the audience to actually care about that moment. I just don't think they struck a good balance between light-hearted and dramatic. Which is to say, it's a funny, light-hearted film, but they probably could have gotten away with letting things land harder.
Overall, still one of the best MCU films to date, although I suspect Black Panther will be a strong contender there as well.
They still should have left him his chest hair.
Watched Thor 2 again at the cheap theater. Although not so cheap with pizza and beer I guess. Anyway, I enjoyed it just as much, if not more.
Still struck by the conversations between Thor and Loki and Thor and Odin. Some of the best character work in the MCU in just a few sentences.
Still love Hela. Would die for Hela. Yes, Hela.
I think the commentary on Asgard's wealth and prosperity built on the blood and tears of a hundred civilizations part is still important. I think the "fuck it, here's scourge dual-wielding M-16s. USA! USA!" kind of undercuts whatever high minded allegory they're trying to make there. It's just kind of brought up and uncomfortably dismissed. To be fair, this is as far as we've gotten with the topic ourselves.
It can't let a heavy moment stand. In the middle of the destruction of Asgard they still have to be cracking wise. I want to say it smacks of emotional immaturity and insecurity on the part of the creators, but I think it's more likely just a lack of faith in the audience to actually care about that moment. I just don't think they struck a good balance between light-hearted and dramatic. Which is to say, it's a funny, light-hearted film, but they probably could have gotten away with letting things land harder.
Overall, still one of the best MCU films to date, although I suspect Black Panther will be a strong contender there as well.
They still should have left him his chest hair.
Wednesday, January 03, 2018
Shower Thoughts
Dissociation is a spectrum from day-dreaming to pathological. No, people day-dreaming shouldn't be be talking about it like it's pathological.
You are more than the sum of your clinical diagnosis and more valuable than you think. But so is everyone else.
People are valuable, even though they are not scarce. An inability to see life as valuable because it is abundant is one of the sins of late capitalism. An economic system that does not value human life and the ecosystem of this planet is not worth keeping.
I'm on the verge of finally falling through the cracks or finally getting some of this stuff together.
That demoralization vs depression article hit me hard. Important reframe. Easy to take it too far and think, "Aha! All the rest of you were the problem after all." but it narrows the focus of this existential investigation.
Consciousness is a fundamental force of organic life. It's what gets this lump of matter moving when it's at rest. Understanding the fuel that drives that consciousness is important.
You are more than the sum of your clinical diagnosis and more valuable than you think. But so is everyone else.
People are valuable, even though they are not scarce. An inability to see life as valuable because it is abundant is one of the sins of late capitalism. An economic system that does not value human life and the ecosystem of this planet is not worth keeping.
I'm on the verge of finally falling through the cracks or finally getting some of this stuff together.
That demoralization vs depression article hit me hard. Important reframe. Easy to take it too far and think, "Aha! All the rest of you were the problem after all." but it narrows the focus of this existential investigation.
Consciousness is a fundamental force of organic life. It's what gets this lump of matter moving when it's at rest. Understanding the fuel that drives that consciousness is important.
Tuesday, January 02, 2018
Blade Runner 2049 brain dump
I saw Blade Runner 2049 tonight and figured I should try writing these things while I'm still thinking about them.
My one good line was the one from the villain (Wallace?). Something about how civilization was built on the backs of a disposable labor force but we lost our taste for slavery. This is something I have been thinking about for a while. We have decided overt slavery is wrong, but have not lost the idea that great men must build cvilization on the backs of disposable labor. So labor practices walk towards slavery as much as they can get away with, meanwhile steadily working on a machine work-force they can use like slaves. I only worry about it in the context of modern society because my distinct impression of the self-styled masters of the universe is not an overwhelming reverence and respect for life and humanity. Everything would be different if that were the case. So what happens when they don't need us anymore? Anyway, I'm putting a pin in this.
Visually spectactular. Dreamy. Moody with a matching soundtrack that sets the action in a soothing bed of sound. I felt no real attachment to the main character but did not care. I greatly enjoyed the experience even though I feel like the message was muddled and it may more or less have failed to get at what it was trying to get at. Maybe it's brilliant and I'm stupid, I don't know. It at the very least gives me a lot to chew on.
The gaze is very male, if that's important to you. I don't have any big thoughts about it, just noted it.
The carved or origami figure trope in this series is iconic at this point. My sole thought on it tonight was the contrast of past and future. When we were a young species, we carved crude creatures we did not understand well but were fresh and alive all around us. Here, we carve fine and intricately understood recreations of a living, breathing world we have long since killed. The characters carve crude figures as a sort of memory of the lost world and a sort of therapy in the new one.
It is still crudely dystopian in grand PKD fashion. We've advanced in cleverness but not kindness and have long since poisoned the world. The world itself is dead and gray, a mass of rock and mud lit by the occasional neon lights. Presumably, life is grand on the offworld colonies, but if Earth is representative of the spiritual stagnation of the human race, one can't feel too optimistic about their future. Why wouldn't they poison those worlds the same way they poisoned earth eventually, especially with men like Wallace at the helm of their grand design?
Robin Wright is great as always. As is Ford. Gosling is handsome and muted as usual.
They are all insane. The central replicant is in love with an software girlfriend. Replicants cry as they kill, kiss as they murder you. Replicants can clearly feel, but they are taught to keep emotions baseline or they will be murdered. This sets up a repression that you might expect will explode violently. It is almost comically stupid on the part of humanity to create this state of affairs, but maybe therein lies the realism? There is ostensibly monitoring of replicants to detect the development of emotions, at which point they will be killed. "Hmmm, why is this robot with feelings so angry?" they might later say.
Who is sane in a world where creatures that seem impossibly human are murdered publicly more or less regularly? The replicants are built to look like us, and are set to soon overthrow and surpass us if this story is any indication, but they are not sane by our standards. Everything about them exists in the uncanny valley. It makes me wonder about a future for a society like ours, that consciously and unconsciously seems to worship machines as more human than human. Would that future society be sane by today's standards? Could evolution on technological lines with no concurrent sanctity for human lives and bodies lead to descendants we would consider deranged? Are we deranged by the standards of our ancestors, all walled up in concrete jungles, wrapped up in productivity and progress at the expense of human health and happiness?
To what end, replicants? I wonder even what PKD was trying to get at. Why decide slavery is wrong but then build a new race of slaves that are so human it becomes wrong again to enslave them? In a world where AI cannot, and will not ever exist, robot slaves is more about centralization of power and what to do with an excess human "work force" who is now no longer needed to drive the great engine of civilization. In in a world where we can replicate human beings so perfectly we essentially recreate them, why recreate the original problem so perfectly? Was the original problem that slaves would rise up and kill you if you kept enslaving them, or that it was intrinsically wrong to enslave creatures with "souls," whatever you define that to be? In either case, why create replicants who are physically superior to you, recreating the "slave revolt" problem. And why give them a soul, recreating the "it's wrong to enslave 'people'" problem. Is the human race of Blade Runner unfathomably cruel or just stupid. Why not both?
Another thing I think about a lot is the satisfaction of accomplishment. If danger and creation and accomplishment are some of the core components of human satisfaction, why are we so intent to hand them over to machines like replicatns? We can't be simultaneously trying to create a world where people don't do work and a world where people find satisfaction and accomplishment. I believe the line of thinking goes that we will find new and more satisfying work to accomplish. But what specifically? And are we really happier the farther we remove ourselves for natural environments? Shouldn't we at least think about whether some of the work we do might be necessary for the ideal human happiness? I'm putting a pin in this too for now, but I think about it a lot.
Back to the movie. I wish more films worked as a visual meditation like this one. Big, moody moments. Long shots, lingering pans. It's not quite a David Lynch acid trip, but I greatly appreciate the attempt to create atmosphere. The music really does work for me. Something about the wall of bass that sets a lot of the scenes is soothing to me. I wish I had cared more about the plot, but the score and cinematography work so well by themselves that you can just sit there and wallow in it, letting the melancholy beauty and aching sadness of this fallen world sink in.
Okay, that's all I got. Good movie in terms of asking questions. Poor in terms of answers. Not necessarily a bad thing. If answers were easy to come by we wouldn't create so much art looking for them.
My one good line was the one from the villain (Wallace?). Something about how civilization was built on the backs of a disposable labor force but we lost our taste for slavery. This is something I have been thinking about for a while. We have decided overt slavery is wrong, but have not lost the idea that great men must build cvilization on the backs of disposable labor. So labor practices walk towards slavery as much as they can get away with, meanwhile steadily working on a machine work-force they can use like slaves. I only worry about it in the context of modern society because my distinct impression of the self-styled masters of the universe is not an overwhelming reverence and respect for life and humanity. Everything would be different if that were the case. So what happens when they don't need us anymore? Anyway, I'm putting a pin in this.
Visually spectactular. Dreamy. Moody with a matching soundtrack that sets the action in a soothing bed of sound. I felt no real attachment to the main character but did not care. I greatly enjoyed the experience even though I feel like the message was muddled and it may more or less have failed to get at what it was trying to get at. Maybe it's brilliant and I'm stupid, I don't know. It at the very least gives me a lot to chew on.
The gaze is very male, if that's important to you. I don't have any big thoughts about it, just noted it.
The carved or origami figure trope in this series is iconic at this point. My sole thought on it tonight was the contrast of past and future. When we were a young species, we carved crude creatures we did not understand well but were fresh and alive all around us. Here, we carve fine and intricately understood recreations of a living, breathing world we have long since killed. The characters carve crude figures as a sort of memory of the lost world and a sort of therapy in the new one.
It is still crudely dystopian in grand PKD fashion. We've advanced in cleverness but not kindness and have long since poisoned the world. The world itself is dead and gray, a mass of rock and mud lit by the occasional neon lights. Presumably, life is grand on the offworld colonies, but if Earth is representative of the spiritual stagnation of the human race, one can't feel too optimistic about their future. Why wouldn't they poison those worlds the same way they poisoned earth eventually, especially with men like Wallace at the helm of their grand design?
Robin Wright is great as always. As is Ford. Gosling is handsome and muted as usual.
They are all insane. The central replicant is in love with an software girlfriend. Replicants cry as they kill, kiss as they murder you. Replicants can clearly feel, but they are taught to keep emotions baseline or they will be murdered. This sets up a repression that you might expect will explode violently. It is almost comically stupid on the part of humanity to create this state of affairs, but maybe therein lies the realism? There is ostensibly monitoring of replicants to detect the development of emotions, at which point they will be killed. "Hmmm, why is this robot with feelings so angry?" they might later say.
Who is sane in a world where creatures that seem impossibly human are murdered publicly more or less regularly? The replicants are built to look like us, and are set to soon overthrow and surpass us if this story is any indication, but they are not sane by our standards. Everything about them exists in the uncanny valley. It makes me wonder about a future for a society like ours, that consciously and unconsciously seems to worship machines as more human than human. Would that future society be sane by today's standards? Could evolution on technological lines with no concurrent sanctity for human lives and bodies lead to descendants we would consider deranged? Are we deranged by the standards of our ancestors, all walled up in concrete jungles, wrapped up in productivity and progress at the expense of human health and happiness?
To what end, replicants? I wonder even what PKD was trying to get at. Why decide slavery is wrong but then build a new race of slaves that are so human it becomes wrong again to enslave them? In a world where AI cannot, and will not ever exist, robot slaves is more about centralization of power and what to do with an excess human "work force" who is now no longer needed to drive the great engine of civilization. In in a world where we can replicate human beings so perfectly we essentially recreate them, why recreate the original problem so perfectly? Was the original problem that slaves would rise up and kill you if you kept enslaving them, or that it was intrinsically wrong to enslave creatures with "souls," whatever you define that to be? In either case, why create replicants who are physically superior to you, recreating the "slave revolt" problem. And why give them a soul, recreating the "it's wrong to enslave 'people'" problem. Is the human race of Blade Runner unfathomably cruel or just stupid. Why not both?
Another thing I think about a lot is the satisfaction of accomplishment. If danger and creation and accomplishment are some of the core components of human satisfaction, why are we so intent to hand them over to machines like replicatns? We can't be simultaneously trying to create a world where people don't do work and a world where people find satisfaction and accomplishment. I believe the line of thinking goes that we will find new and more satisfying work to accomplish. But what specifically? And are we really happier the farther we remove ourselves for natural environments? Shouldn't we at least think about whether some of the work we do might be necessary for the ideal human happiness? I'm putting a pin in this too for now, but I think about it a lot.
Back to the movie. I wish more films worked as a visual meditation like this one. Big, moody moments. Long shots, lingering pans. It's not quite a David Lynch acid trip, but I greatly appreciate the attempt to create atmosphere. The music really does work for me. Something about the wall of bass that sets a lot of the scenes is soothing to me. I wish I had cared more about the plot, but the score and cinematography work so well by themselves that you can just sit there and wallow in it, letting the melancholy beauty and aching sadness of this fallen world sink in.
Okay, that's all I got. Good movie in terms of asking questions. Poor in terms of answers. Not necessarily a bad thing. If answers were easy to come by we wouldn't create so much art looking for them.
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