Please, greeting card industry, we need these cards. But they’re also for us thick-skulled scientists who have kids doing very different things.
I’m at that age where they’d be handy to send to my children, who are doing things I don’t understand at all.
I saw Blade Runner 2049 last night. I have very complicated feelings about it — I can’t say whether I liked it or not. I mean, I liked it, but it’s not like I can say it was a fun evening, or wheee, let’s get on the roller coaster again, or gosh, I sure wish I could have one of those flying cars. It was also simultaneously unexpected and exactly what I should expect from this movie.
The trailer is not representative. It sets it up as an action movie, when it’s not. Not really.
It is remarkably slow paced. There are fight scenes, but there’s more weight in scenes of Ryan Gosling slowly walking through a bleak dystopian landscape. The Earth is a dead world, and you’re made to feel it. At the same time, there is an ongoing struggle for identity: who is human? What is human? Is that disembodied AI that is present only as a hologram a person? She shows more emotion than many of the “born” humans — Jared Leto plays the head of the evil corporation as a visionary but soulless techno-futurist — and some of the replicants are angry and passionate. Your theory of mind gets a workout in this movie. The key conflicts are all in your head.
Go into the theater in a meditative mood, and you’ll probably enjoy it. Walk in expecting a slam-bang thriller, and you’re going to leave thinking “WTF did I just see?”. Or you’ll fall asleep somewhere in the middle.
Other things of note: the imagery is gorgeously depressing. The world is a high-tech garbage heap where people scavenge like rats in the neon-lit debris. The score is amazing. It’s got echoes of the old Vangelis score, but at times it rises into this industrial howl that has you wondering whether that was music, or a sound effect? It’s effective either way. I noticed that the patriarchy isn’t dead in 2049, either — there are weird landscapes with monumental, crumbling statuary, all of nude women, and roaming the streets are multi-story glowing holograms of, of course, more naked women. I don’t think it passes the Bechdel test, either, unless two women, at least one of whom is a replicant, talking about another replicant, who just happens to be coded male, counts. There’s also a cold-blooded execution of a female replicant for having the wrong eye color, and another newly created replicant, naked, shivering, obedient, and female (of course) is casually stabbed and bleeds to death so Niander Wallace can make a point about the disposability of individuals. I get the point. It’s part of the theme of the movie. But that it is always women who get disposed of so vividly steers it in the direction of misogyny.
Don’t worry, though, lots of men get offed, too — it’s just that they tend to be masked and in uniform or blown away at a distance so you don’t have to think about their humanity. The disparity is distinct enough that I was wondering if it was intentional or just a thoughtless reflection of conventionality. Just like it had me wondering whether the characters were robots pretending to be people, or people who just happened to be robots. It’s the kind of movie where you’ll tie your brain into knots trying to think about what’s going on, and whether you’ll like it or not depends on whether you enjoy that sensation.
Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people don’t like getting their brains twisted up (which is OK, I like a good popcorn movie, too, and this is not a popcorn movie), and the box office is disappointing. I guess it might be a “disaster” or a “flop” if all you count is how many tickets it sold, so the accountants might be unhappy. All I care about is that I bought one ticket and got personally challenged for a few hours by a movie with high ambitions.
On a more personal level, though, oncologist ought to be on the far right, with obstetrician not far behind. When your cancer or your pregnancy makes the local news,
time to panic.
It must be Christmas. Got a pile of packages in the mail all at once today, including some lab stuff (not shown).
I’m looking forward to Twilight of the Gods (maybe this weekend, if I’m a good boy and get my grading done), but does anyone know anything about the Theodora book? I’m always up for learning about Byzantine empresses, but this is one of those things where I didn’t request it, a prescient publisher just thinks I should take a look at it.
Judging by the enthusiastic reactions I’m seeing online, my opinion of Star Trek: Discovery is not going to be a popular one. I didn’t like it. Didn’t like it at all.
I don’t think these are spoilers, but just in case, it’s going below the fold.
Some people don’t get it. They watch Goodfellas and want to grow up to be Henry Hill. They read Lolita and think Humbert Humbert was unjustly condemned. They watch Breaking Bad and believe that Walter White, especially in his Heisenberg persona, was awesome. Isn’t anyone familiar with the concept of the anti-hero anymore?
Here’s another one: people who watch Rick and Morty and come away from it wanting to be just like Rick. I love that show, but jebus…no one in their right mind should admire Rick. He’s the most brilliant scientist in the multiverse, but he’s also a totally messed-up, broken dude, and everyone in his family is damaged, and every week, the show goes out of its way to highlight that fact.
If we’re to believe Rick is admirable for being a cold, misanthropic know-it-all, the show doesn’t do a very good job of selling it. He’s too rich in his emotions, too human in his failings; the show repeatedly finds him dealing with moments of vague tenderness and regret that he then undermines, contributing to the overall tragic arc of his character. Harmon’s much-scrutinized writing ethos involves richly drawn emotional journeys for every character, and as he said, in the recent response to Entertainment Weekly, “I don’t want the show to have a political stance.” It doesn’t. Rick And Morty’s concern is ambiguous, flawed, relatable characters, slowly changing and slowly staying the same. To assume that Rick—or any of them—represents Harmon’s idea of some ethos to aspire to is to misread his intent.
You can only admire Rick if you ignore all the two-by-fours the show repeatedly slams into your face.
However, it’s absurd to claim the show has no political stance. Writing about “ambiguous, flawed, relatable characters, slowly changing and slowly staying the same” at a time when way too many people are latching onto imaginary paragons (even the show’s oblivious fans!) is a political stance. It’s hard to argue against the idea that everything is political.
I’m kind of in to how undifferentiated tissue becomes mature and acquires a specific morphology, so I liked this series of photos of a big hunk of driftwood being shaped into an octopus. It gets from here:
To here:
However, I’m used to development proceeding autonomously. I don’t think it would work if I just put a tree trunk and a chainsaw together in a beaker in my yard, which disappoints me. Is it a matter of getting the salt concentration just right? The temperature?
We’re currently having a major repair and remodel job done on the exterior of our house, and I’m thinking this magnificent work of art would perfectly complement our new color scheme.
If you spot it in a yard sale somewhere, could you ship it off to me? Thanks.
