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| "It's not about money, it's about sending a message; everything burns!" - The Joker |
Sometimes I wonder if we aren't all just sitting around a big fire throwing dollar bills into the fire just to see them writhe as they burn. We have a got a zillion channels of communication open, and some people have figured out how to use those channels to their advantage. There are scads of people (for some value of scads) who are making a comfortable living off of social media. There are even a few (for some value of 'a few') who have become wealthy. Some of them impart words of wisdom, some of them are just cute. Some of them are delivering overtly political messages, but all of them have some kind of social context they are coming from, and that social context contains their political affiliation. With some it's more obvious than others, with some it takes the infra-red eyesight of a political Karen to detect it. You can always count on political Karens to sniff out the unreliable ones.
Advertising is pretty gol-dang, horn swaggling weird. Trying to avoid using profanity, though those might be fightin' words in some parts. I detest advertisements. I think it might be because I tend to be focused on whatever I've doing. If I'm working, I'm working, I don't have time this nonsense. If I'm goofing off, I'm goofing off, and I still don't have time for this nonsense.
How so some ever, I have noticed lately when I am very tired, I will look at ads, even read them. And I have to admit I've gone to some click-bait sites just to see. But I only do that when I am really tired. You'd think that when you got tired, you'd go to sleep, but it doesn't always seem to work like that. So sometimes you're awake but you're tired and you can't sleep, so you click on stupid stuff because your brain is stupid, and maybe you buy something. I've never done that, but I have bought a few carefully considered items that are just sitting on the shelf, waiting the eternal wait of the unwanted. They were cheap, like $10 each, but goomba probably sold a zillion of them, enough to finance another round of buy-a-lot-of-do-dads wholesale and sell them retail via Amazon.
Advertising is paying for all this social media, advertising and few zillion subscribers like me who pay not see advertisements. So if we are using the internet, we are contributing to this firestorm, even if we are not looking at the ads, they are still there in your peripheral vision and your brain remembers shit, sorry, stuff, even if you don't consciously remember it.
Some people are fire spirits, they love to jump in the fire and cavort with their brethren. Most people find it exhausting, though given the size of the fire these days you might not think that. There are more people in the fire these days and the fire is bigger, but the crowd around the fire extends out quite a ways. Out on the outer edge of crowd you can barely tell there is a giant fire in the center. Kind of like looking at the sun from Pluto.
My wife went to bed early tonight so I'm looking for something to watch by myself and I'm not finding much. I can watch most anything with her, but not so by myself. I suppose it's kind of weird. I can't really explain it, but here we are. I try a few shows but nothing grabs me and then I remember Tom Cruise. I like his movies, lots of action, not a lot of chit chat, so I do a search on Netflix and it pulls up a couple of his lesser films and then it puts up a bunch of 'similar' ones, and what do we have here? A remake of Total Recall, which was one of the bestest films ever, so why have I never heard of the remake? This one stars Colin Farrell. Anyway, I watched it and it was great.
We have a world a hundred years in the future that has been devastated by chemical warfare. The only places left on the planet that are still habitable are western Europe and Australia. These two places are connected by a gravity train / elevator. Gravity trains might be feasible as long as you don't go too deep, but this one goes through the center of the Earth because in the middle of the trip you are in free fall for a bit before gravity turns around starts pushing you to the ceiling. All fairly realistic except for the temperature. Don't know how you could possibly build a tunnel through the center of the earth where the temperature is a zillion degrees and the pressure is likewise enormous. But hey, it's science fiction, so maybe they've figured it out.
And we have technology, boy do we have technology. We have cars without wheels sliding around on and suspended underneath roads with no visible means of support, reminiscent of Minority Report. We have a dark, crowded city with a lot of Chinese styling clues, reminiscent of Blade Runner. We have armies of soldier robots being built in factories. Boston Dynamics anyone?
We have the hooker with three boobs. We have a complicated method delivering secret messages: we start with a piano with a dead key. Replace the dead key with one he found in a safe deposit box, play a certain tune on the piano and an interactive hologram pops up giving our hero vital information and answering a limited number of well phrased questions. (Can you rephrase that?) We have elevators that travel sideways as well as up and down like the ones on the Enterprise on Star Trek.
Then we have the passport scene, a clever homage to the original. Here is the original scene:
“There are more people in the world who make things than there are people who think of things to make.” — Syd Mead
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| Three Blind Mice |
Anosognosia - A new term to me, but the concept will be familiar to all; you don't know everything that you don't know.For some reason I always confuse the Dunning-Kruger effect with the Voight-Kampff Test from Blade Runner, perhaps because both are compound names made from unfamiliar names, i.e "two weird names coupled together, must be that test from Blade Runner".
"A neurological condition in which a disabled person is unaware of his or her disability. He stated: "If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent ... The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is."Here's a short, fun read: The bad news on human nature, in 10 findings from psychology
...and a more boring WIKi entry [Dunning–Kruger effect] but with a lot of pithy content, like:
"...Cognitive bias evident in the case of McArthur Wheeler, who robbed banks with his face covered with lemon juice, which he believed would make it invisible to the surveillance cameras. This belief was based on his misunderstanding of the chemical properties of lemon juice as an invisible ink..."More [Shall We Serve the Dark Lords? A Meta-Analytic Review of Psychopathy and Leadership] -- we elect jerks who turn out to be destructive jerks:
"After learning their scores, the students were asked to estimate their rank in the class. The competent students underestimated their class rank, and the incompetent students overestimated theirs..."
"Results showed a positive correlation for psychopathic tendencies and leadership emergence, and negative association for psychopathic tendencies and leadership effectiveness..."
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| Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford in Blade Runner |
In the immediate aftermath of 2-3-74, Dick felt reborn. It had been not a breakdown but a breakthrough: for the first time he had stepped behind the scenery and witnessed the truth. Deep peace flooded him as certainty finally conquered doubt and paranoia was replaced with a sense of divine protection.Sounds very similar to something I read about Avicenna who came to believe that the world is an illusion and the reality only appears to you during an ecstatic religious experience.
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| Angela Bassett as Lornette 'Mace' Mason |
| Angela Bassett | Can't say as I recognized her. I have known about her for what seems like forever, but I don't know why. Maybe someone mentioned her to me a thousand years ago. |
| Vincent D'Onofrio | recently famous as Detective Robert Goren on Law & Order: Criminal Intent |
| Richard Edson | Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Platoon |
| William Fichtner | Black Hawk Down, The Dark Knight, Armageddon, Crash |
| Ralph Fiennes | The English Patient, The Constant Gardener, In Bruges, Maid in Manhattan, Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies. |
| Juliette Lewis | The Way of the Gun, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, From Dusk to Dawn |
| Tom Sizemore | Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor, Get Carter, Bringing Out the Dead, Saving Private Ryan, Enemy of the State. |
| Michael Wincott | The Count of Monte Cristo, Seraphim Falls |
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| Webley-Fosbery 1937 |
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| Mateba Unica Model 6 |
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| Blade Runner Blaster |
