Messages

One of those insipid sci-fi cautionary tales about new technology and not playing god (ie. things like "Frankenstein", "Jurassic Park", "Event Horizon", "The Lazarus Effect", "Forbidden Planet", and any movie where a sentient AI computer takes control of the world's nukes), except about some already existing and well established and more-or-less uncontroversial technology (such as air travel, or blood transfusions, or motion pictures) that everyone already knows to have no such issues, but which is presented as having serious and omnipervasive moral and safety issues of a highly dubious nature. A recipient of a blood transfusion might start exhibiting all of the donor's negative personality traits for example, or an airplane might somehow leave the atmosphere and drift off helplessly into space, or somethong like that.

Religion tells everyone what to do with their bodies. That's why the jews practice circumcision.

A few days ago I had an insight, and the insight was this: "Radio broadcasts of sporting events are the ultimate form of absurdist storytelling"

There is a conflict in the story that the announcer tells, but it is a wholly meaningless and largely abstract conflict. It generally concerns movement or posession some kind of macguffin such as a ball or shuttlecock that has no other purpose than to be the macguffin of this conflict. And if the game happens to be soccer (or some other low scoring game that can end in ties), it often ends without the conflict being resolved.  People are injured or risk injury in pursuit of abstraxt points that disappear at the end of the game. In the cheers of the crowd is literally sound and fury signifying nothing.

What do you think of this interpretation?

Much like positing a creator deity*, positing a non-physical element of consciousness merely hides the problem at hand somewhere where its continued presence is not immediately apparent. Because regardless of whether the mind is composed of flesh and nerve impulses or if it's made out of ectoplasm/pnuema/n-rays/P.K.E./vibrations/positive-and-negative-furies/massacred-space-aliens/monads/aether/any other kind of woo-woo BS, that doesn't change the fact that there must be some mechanism by which it performs its function; so all dualism does is  add epicycles and multiplies assumptions needlessly.



*Which raises the question of where the creator deity came from and therefore merely makes the question of origin more complex rather than answering it

Ready Player 1, which is basically a cyberpunk retelling of the golden ticket contest portion of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

You're wasting your time here
Remember that you will die
Life could be better used
It's later than you think
Be glad you're healthy now
Bugs living in my body
Bugs climbing from the drain
The toilet is working backwards
Sewage drips from the ceiling
It's like haiku, but stupid

The TPP still isn't dead

Thinking about the Soverign Citizen and Tea Party movements gave me the idea - though I don't have any details worked out yet - for a story about an an evil, paralell-universe version of Robin Hood and the Merry Men (not just a version where they're merely regular bandits and tax cheats, one where they border on supervillany and retain an active anti-tax agenda). Again, no idea what the details of the story would be.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/

Fun little read about (I guess) the difference between the mind and the body and how that divide relates to those trying to find 'enlightenment' and the difficulties of quantifying such things.

It was entertaining, but ultimately I felt it was pointless.

There is no mind/body divide, the idea that there is is merely an artifact of consciousness, which is an emergent property driven by the complex interactions of our nervous system.

I totally agree.

Also, the whole premise of the story (in regard to the factorizations) seems somewhat derivative of "The Subjugation of a Ghost"*, except that this story has a ludicrous but funny ending (and an arguably weaker test), whereas Subjugation of A Ghost has a locical but serious one


*Link to alternate copy

I think they're voting on this shit again soon

Idea for short comedy skit: Dorian Gray has difficulty purchasing beer because the picture on his driver's license has aged but he himself hasn't

One of those fantasy novels where a little boy has a vision of heaven during a near-death experience (like Heaven is for Real or The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven), except instead of Heaven, he goes to Hell.

Game mods cost money now

I left the milk out

It's one solid chunk now

A "biography" of BOB Dobbs or some similar discordiosubgenius figure stylistically parodying the Christian gospels; Written in the voice and idiom of the King James Bible and containing incidents such as BOB retreating into the desert for forty days during which time he stays at various Las Vegas resorts , BOB driving off demons and reconditioning them to harass scientologists, BOB driving proslytizers out of a shopping mall, opening the eyes of the blind with medicinal marijuana, feeding a multitude of 5000 people with Dominos pizzas that miraculously arrive late are thus free, turning water into urine, wine transfusions, yelling at trees, and finally BOB being scourged and crucified at a hardcore BDSM club.


EDIT:
A n incident similar to the "I bring not peace but a sword" line from Matthew 10:34 abruptly turns into a sales pitch for replica katanas