Watched 22–24 April 2021
Once again this show attempts to strike a good balance between People Drama and Society Drama, but this season’s timeskip tilted the scales and made it clear that the long game is always going to be about the societal outcomes first. Character moments are less emotionally effective as a result, but boy is the spectacle of the alternate timeline geopolitics worth the tradeoff. Season 1 got me invested. But now I’m excited.
Watched 19–22 April 2021
I’m super into this space trauma and societal progress nerdfest.
It may sometimes feel predictable and clichéd but I just want to engross myself in this alternate history, and the level of realism is more than good enough to support that by my standards.
Watched 21 April 2021
Like leafing through a big coffee table book. Not particularly insightful, but very nice pictures.
This terrific short story by qntm contemplates the hellish potential consequences of brain uploading, in the form of a typically impassive Wikipedia entry:
MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Álvarez Acevedo (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031.
Rewatched 8 April 2021
The uncanny valley between the ponderous Godzilla 2014 and the bombastically campy Godzilla vs. Kong. I’m sorry but if you want to make a serious movie you have to stick to the serious monsters, you can’t put on the three-headed electric dragon and big moth. Pokémon aren’t scary.
Found this wonderful YouTube channel on Kottke.org. I have to admit I wasn’t expecting it to be so thought-provoking:
Our brains play tricks on us to make us believe the world looks one way, but the world looks different at night than in the day, and both of those things have more to do with the physiology of our eyes and brains than with objective reality. Asking what a microbe actually looks like is, to some extent, forcing our own experience onto something that is beyond it.
If, like me, you somehow recognize the narrator’s voice, that’s because it’s Hank Green (!).
Watched 31 March 2021
Silly as heck. No hesitation. This movie delivers.