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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I get that the environmental impacts are pretty significant. I looked it up and it seems like aviation is like ~3% of worldwide emissions and while that’s not really the biggest number I’ve ever seen, it is pretty significant.
    I just think it’s equally unreasonable to condemn air travel in general when the alternatives are equally unreasonable. If somebody wants to go on a trip, what should they do? Months-long zero-emission backpacking journey? Never visit anywhere your whole life? Wait for your country to build high speed rail?









  • So often I have friends read a book or watch a movie and say “I don’t really get it, it doesn’t make sense, I didn’t really like it” and then some time later they’ll come back and say “actually, I read the Wikipedia article about it and now I understand. The author actually intended it to be about [xyz]”
    Um, what? If those themes and ideas were not evident in the original story, then what does it matter what the author intended? Surely the author also intended to write a cohesive and understandable story (and evidently failed, for you). Surely the author intended to convey those themes in the story itself. You didn’t enjoy the movie, you enjoyed reading the Wikipedia article about the movie.
    If author intention actually matters to non-meta media analysis, then that totally undermines anything the author actually does to convey the ideas in the work itself.
    If (to make a specific example) my friend watches Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg and concludes only from the Wikipedia article about it that it’s abstractly about Oshii’s loss of religion, then that totally ignores everything in the movie that does or doesn’t convey those themes just to create a shallow interpretation based on what the author was allegedly trying to do.



  • Yeah but it depends.
    An elementary school near me recently replaced their chest-height chain-link fence with a 10ft steel bar fence with spikes on top. There’s some benefits to a fence, but the spikes just make it seem menacing. And I guess more abstractly, it communicates that school is a dangerous place that’s walled-off from the rest of the world rather than a place that’s just like any other part of society. This is in the USA, I should mention, so maybe the cynical message is more accurate.


  • Blade Runner.

    Maybe it was more impressive when it came out, but I watched it for the first time a few months ago and it was shockingly below my expectations for the reputation it has. Confusing plot, forgettable characters, a (very cool! yet) shallow, uninteresting setting.
    I had heard that famous “tears in the rain” monologue some time before watching the movie and thought “wow, that was awesome. I can’t imagine how much better it is with all the depth and context that the movie will add.” Nah, it’s from a character who we know basically nothing about and comes out of nowhere with no connection to any part of the story-- if anything, the context of the movie detracts from the cool monologue by turning it into a “what is this guy even talking about” moment.
    Thematically it had potential with questioning the line between the humans and human-like robots, but they don’t go anywhere interesting with it. When it’s a theme that’s been explored by everything from Ghost in the Shell to Fallout 4 to Asimov, I’m gonna need at least a molecule of interesting development to happen before my jaw drops.
    2/10, not recommended.





  • I met a somewhat old man on a Greyhound a few years ago who was pretty delirious and drifting in and out of sleep. Turns out he had been traveling non-stop for three days, heading from Georgia to his home in Oakland. He had been on a roadtrip with his friends in (what he described as) a cursed Mitsubishi which broke down a final time some 2500 miles from home. All his friends took flights back, but our protagonist did not bring any kind of ID with him and couldn’t take a plane. So there he was, having not slept much at all in 3 days, on the i-10 between Tucson and Phoenix.
    He also borrowed my phone to call his wife, who it seemed had not sanctioned his roadtrip at all and was very mad at him. She eventually hung up on him. Handing my phone back to me, he assured me that she wouldn’t stay mad at him after seeing his baby-blue eyes upon his arrival in Oakland.

    I don’t remember so many of the details, but hearing this guy’s life story and about his impulsive cross-country roadtrip was kinda strangely inspiring.



  • “designed to be sung to the tune of ‘Home on the Range.’”
    (1) Oh, give me a clone
    Of my own flesh and bone
    With its Y chromosome changed to X
    And after it’s grown
    Then my own little clone
    Will be of the opposite sex.
    (Chorus) Clone, clone of my own
    With its Y chromosome changed to X
    And when I’m alone
    With my own little clone
    We will both think of nothing but sex.
    (2) Oh, give me a clone
    Is my sorrowful moan,
    A clone that is wholly my own.
    And if she’s X-X
    And the feminine sex
    Oh, what fun we will have when we’re prone.
    (3) My heart’s not of stone,
    As I’ve frequently shown
    When alone with my own little X
    And after we’ve dined,
    I am sure we will find
    Better incest than Oedipus Rex.
    (4) Why should such sex vex
    Or disturb or perplex
    Or induce a disparaging tone?
    After all, don’t you see
    Since we’re both of us me
    When we’re having sex, I’m alone.
    (5) And after I’m done
    She will still have her fun
    For I’ll clone myself twice ere I die.
    And this time without fail
    They’ll be both of them male
    And they’ll each ravage her by and by.

    Source: autobiography of Isaac Asimov