This weekend, I started reading the Illuminatus! Trilogy and watched this movie. So, is this how the Sixties are remembered by people who experienced it? Is it all one hazy psychedelic blur?

I didn’t make it to the end of the movie. The music would have been great, if not for all the annoying vocoding. But I knew the songs were going to be good going into it. I just really don’t like musicals. And “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” is the last song I would put in a movie.

Illuminatus! makes me wish I was alive during the sixties. Across the Universe makes me wonder if Paul McCartney is rolling over in his grave.

Sometime in college, an acquaintance told me that the main Ender series sucked, and that I should skip straight to Ender’s Shadow. I just finished the latest installment in the Shadow Saga (Shadow of the Giant) and was blown away by what an ethically challenging book it was. I had never seen such big issues (future human interactions with alien species) effortlessly mingled with “medium sized” issues (a three-way war between Islam, China, and India) and “small” issues (a mother’s love for her children)

I was especially affected by this passage:

Mine mine mine. That was the curse and power of human beings—that what they saw and loved, they had to have. The could share it with other people but only if they conceived of those people as being somehow their own. What we own is ours. What you own should also be ours. In fact, you own nothing, if we want it. Because you are nothing. We are the real people, you are only posing as people in order to try to deprive us of what God means us to have.

Speaker for the Dead introduces a concept of categorizing things that are foreign to us. “Framlings” are humans of a foreign culture. “Varelse” are animals or non-intelligent alien species. We could probably include dogs or chimps as varelse. Although harming them is frowned upon, under specific circumstances we might sacrifice varelse for research or population control. “Raman” are intelligent aliens that we could possibly communicate with and achieve peace.

Humans do not have a good track record dealing with framlings. I don’t have to belabor the point that when two human cultures meet, it usually does not take long for things to degenerate into bloodshed. We don’t seem wired to accept humans of other cultures as real full members of our same species. Which is inherently ridiculous, as we are all biologically equivalent.

We can only imagine the culture shock that comes with meeting telepathic insects, or plant/animal hybrids (as in these books). The challenge for humanity to establish a dialog with a truly alien culture is daunting, and even a bit depressing. We can’t even achieve peace on our own planet.

In Speaker, Card uses a mean-spirited alcoholic abusive father as a parallel for his aliens. Here is a man, even of the same culture as his neighbors, who becomes varelse in their eyes. The people avoid him and are afraid of him. But they do not reprimand him, because as an animal, they have no moral expectations of him.

Similarly, we do not need to look to things like the Holocaust to find examples of dehumanization, of people being turned to varelse. It happens at any time we are prejudiced or afraid of someone foreign. In the last week, this book has colored how I view all human interaction around me, especially at the hospital. (just search “hospital dehumanizing” on google. ) I see this especially with the elderly.

Basically, I think the whole book is an extension of the Parable of the Good Samaritan . One must ignore prejudices between groups and take action to help others. I think in all interactions with people of different cultures, I must ask myself, “am I treating this person as a neighbor, or as a varelse? If I have lost sight of this person’s inherent humanity, what am I stumbling on? What can I do to regain the common ground?”

In Ender’s Game, the first time humans made contact with an alien species, we destroyed them completely. Hopefully, if we ever do meet extraterrestrials, we will be at a point in our history where we can all survive the encounter.

During our last trip to Universal Studios’ “Halloween Horror Nights,” Missy and I were commenting on how the holiday has changed over the years.

Traditionally, the scary stuff was ghosts, goblins, witches, vampires. It was all about the supernatural. Now the seasonal movies are slasher flicks like Saw. It all seems to be about serial killers and violence for violence’s sake. We miss the old-school Halloween.

Then, a friend lent me Dark Harvest. This is a novel that is dark, mysterious, violent and ruthlessly suspenseful. It is hip, literate, and relevant. It sweats ‘60s teenage machismo, B-movie attitude and small-town desperation. The villian is truly original, truly horrifying, and is a freakin’ JACK O’ LANTERN!

Finally, someone out there has the cojones to spin a good scary yarn with an honest-to-God Halloween monster! The story is unashamedly supernatural, undeniably frightening, and had me smiling the whole time.

It was recommended to me because I introduced my friend to American Gods. It is very much in the same vein as that book. I think any Gaiman fan would enjoy Dark Harvest

I’m halfway through the last installment of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty/Fifty/Sixty trilogy. I love this author, and this may be his masterpiece. A couple morsels of food for thought:

The Department of Energy has an Intelligence Office. You couldn’t make this stuff up. Also, a quote from a homeless biology professor talking with a common homeless Vietnam vet:

“You should be a Buddhist,” Frank said. “You should talk to my Buddhist friends.”
“Yeah right. I don’t go in for that hippie shit.”
“It’s not hippie shit.”
“Yeah it is. How would you know.”
“I talk to them is how I know. I lived with them.”
“Oh. Well. That explains it then. But it also proves my point about them being hippies. I mean you don’t just live with people, do you.”

(posted from All Consuming)

A. It was really, really funny.

B. I laughed my head off.

C. It kept me laughing for 2 hours.

D. It didn’t really leave an impression on me.

I was hoping for one of those movies that is so amazing, it’s in my thoughts for days to come. It was two hours of classic Simpsons humor, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But as Homer said, I paid $8 for something I could have gotten for free on TV.

The best parodies make fun of a genre, yet are also an entertaining work within that genre. Examples include Shaun of the Dead (of course), the South Park Movie (musicals), and to a lesser extent Galaxy Quest.

Hot Fuzz was an amazing action movie. I’m a bigger fan of action than horror, so I liked it even more than Shaun. It does crack me up that nerdy little Simon Pegg has gone from ironic accidental badass to unabashed badass.

This entry is crazy, a combination of a GIP and an allconsuming post. This book is the sequel to Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson. In the first book, there was some discussion of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a game theory problem that looks at strategies chosen by two prisoners asked to rat each other out. The game becomes interesting when computers are used to run through this game repeatedly.

If you cooperate, you both get a small punishment. If you both chose to defect (against your cellmate), you get a moderate punishment. If you choose to defect and your partner chooses to cooperate, you get no punishment and your partner gets a huge punishment. This hypothetical choice is given repeatedly, and you have a memory.

The “rational” choice would be always-cooperate, but this guarantees a small punishment in the best case. If your partner defects, you get screwed. If play always-defect, you will never get screwed and never get the worst punishment, but this will piss off your partner, causing them to never cooperate. Simulations have been made into the best way to play, and it is to always copy your partner’s previous move, with some random extra cooperates thrown in. (Tit-for-Tat with forgiveness)

This game has shown similarities to real-world behavior like arms races and sports. (See the Wikipedia link, it’s really interesting)

In Fifty Degrees Below a character looks at a huge gas guzzling SUV and notes how driving one is like playing environmental always-defect. This struck me as so true, I decided to make an icon.

While I’d like to consider myself an environmentalist, I’m really just a hypocrite. I don’t really make any effort to conserve anything. When I was a teenager, I got a huge gas-guzzling truck. At the time, gas was 90 cents and I didn’t really think about these things. I could have traded it in sometime the last ten years, especially after college when I was no longer transporting a bass drum section (drums and players included). But I like the comfort of sitting in a large vehicle (I’m 6’4”), I move to new apartments a lot, I’m emotionally attached to it, and I can afford the gas. Although I don’t openly say “I’m a hypocrite who loves my big vehicle,” I’ll acknowledge this to anyone who asks. Sadly, I’ve been playing a defect game for years; I just didn’t know the terminology.

I’m re-reading Watchmen, so I decided to make an icon.

(Posted from All Consuming)

Brick is by far the most engaging movie I’ve seen this year. I’ve seen a lot of fun stuff, and a lot of fluff lately. Serious movies have lately either depressed or disappointed me.

We had seen trailers for this in other DVD’s we rented, and wanted desperately to see it. I think we’ve checked every week for a month to see if Blockbuster had it in.

This is a bit of a concept movie. It’s a gritty noir whodunnit set in a present-day high school. The setting of a high school is a bit arbitrary, in the same way that mysteries are sometimes set in the 40’s, or 18th Century France, or Space. By having this mystery play out at a high school, it gave a set up for the needed social strata, complex relationships, and arbitrary limits.

At the same time, this was not a teen drama. The diologue was fast paced, hard to follow, and straight out of the 30’s. These teens didn’t really go to class, or have parents, or really even exist in the “real world.” It was a vehicle for a cool mystery and a WHOLE LOT of style. The style was completely engrossing for the whole duration of the movie.

(Posted from Allconsuming )

Missy and I saw Snakes on a Plane last night, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had at a movie. The theatre was huge, but only half full. Still the crowd was really into it, lots of cheering and yelling.

Everything about SOAP was pure fun.