The Membranes - "Breathe In, Breathe Out"

 fun song. but also, their other stuff is not bad. bit post rock?

Beth Singler - "Why is the language of transhumanists and religion so similar?" (Aeon magazine)

https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists-and-religion-so-similar

 'Orthogenesis assumes that variation is not random but is directed towards fixed goals.' [Peter Bowles, Evolution: the history of an Idea, 1983] So evolution isn't something that happens to us; rather it is what we make of it, and how we make our selves. Taken a step further, orthogenesis can be read to imply that intention is what brings about change.

This view of human history has a distinctively modern flavour. It stands in contrast to an older, more cyclical model of time, in which 'history waxes and wanes like the moon', as the historian Keith Thoams puts it in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). Because everything moves in cycles, Thomas argues, 'the highest aesthetic and ethical virtue lay in imitation, or rather emulation'. Here an inventor becomes someone who finds what has been lost, not omeone who comes up with something new. But there was a growing grasp of change in Europe from the 16th century onwards, Thomas argues; people developed a fresh awareness of the differences between their world and that of their ancestors, based on data-points as simple as the dates of publication in books, fresh off brand-new printing presses. Such shifts led to the belief that knowledge was cumulative, not cyclical - which is the mindset of the scientist and of the ultra-rationalist. If time marchs on, then of course religion becomes old, vestigial, to be replaced.

Religious worldviews often retain something of the cyclical view of history, where old books are not relics but the foundation stones of knowledge.

A god-like being of infinite knowing (the singularity); an escape of the flesh and this limited world (uploading our minds); a moment of transfiguration or 'end of days' (the singularity as a moment of rapture); prophets (even if they work for Google); demons and hell (even if it's an eternal computer simulation of suffering), and evangelists who wear smart suits (just like the religious ones do). Consciously and unconsciously, religious ideas are at work in the narratives of those discussing, planning, and hoping for a future shaped by AI. 

Occupation

 Scifi about aliens invading a small Australian village. Strange jumping story, not a real plot line, over the top slowmotion.

M. John Harrison - "You Should Come With Me Now"

Some interesting and really strange stories (about the man trying to escape from a prison), some of them less interesting. 

Train From Busan

 amazing zombie film. Gets everything right; the action, the logic, the pathos.

The Fall

 series with Gilliam Anderson as detective

Daniel Mason - "A registry of my passage upon earth"

 Collectin of short(er) stories. Few of them actually grabbed me. 

That, he said, was why he no longer trusted his counselors, who ahd the intelligence of a fiteen-year-old bride, with none of the advantages.

(from "The Miraculous Discovery of Passmetichus I")

Miracle Workers

 fun series with Steve Buscemi and Daniel Ratcliffe about Heaven Inc trying to get two people to fall in love. Based on a book that wasn't so special (based on just the sample I read)

music from iggy pop

• noveller
• myrkur - scandinavian, like death can dance, loreena mckinnit
• messer chaps - (Russian?) instrumental surf-y

Years and Years

six part series by Russel T Davies about the future, from 2024 to 2034, roughly. Pretty dystopian, how Britian gets a terrible prime minister, Vivian Cook, an amazing role from Emma Thompson, creates concentration camps, Trump gets chosen again, the world is on fire.

Of course, it all ends in the usual Russel T. Davies style - gotta make 'm feel good! - as he always shies away from daring to take the final steps (Charlie Brooker from Black Mirror could teach him a thing or two) to make it truly impactful. But oh well. Nice nonetheless. Lots of Mancurian accents.

Peter Schjeldahl - "77 sunset me"

poet and art critic. Wonderful essay in the New Yorker of 2019-12-23, basically a small autobiography, although he described failing writing one.

The Girl with all the gifts

Nice horror film where "second generation" zombies - embryos from zombiefied people - turn out to be different and not completely zombie like. Enjoyable.

Lawrence Wrigth - "Crossroads" (the New Yorker, July 20, 2020)

Before retreating from Caffa, the Tartar general, Khan Jani Beg, ordered the diseased bodies of dead warriors catapulted over the city walls, in one of the first instances of biological warfare. Panicked citizens took to boats [...] A dozen ships made it to Sciliy, in October, 1347.

Sicilians were appalled to find on their shores boats with dead men still at their oars. Other sailors, dead or barely alive, were in their bunks, covered with foul-smelling sores. The horrified Sicilians drove the ships back to sea, but it was too late. Rats and fleas, the carriers of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the [black] plague, quickly infested the port of Messina. By January, Italy was engulfed. Ships arriving in the Venetian vassal sstate of Ragusa - present-day Dubrovnik - were required to sit at anchor for quaranta giorni, or forty days, which is where the term "quarantine" comes from.

War of the Worlds (series, 2019)

Good adaptation. They do a good job keeping the aliens away from the viewer from the most time (as in, the master aliens, because the robo-dog thingies - with their idiosynchronous but strangely mechanical noises - are just the guard)

Jeff Vandermeer - "The Astronauts"

Enjoyable enough short story of the three astronauts in the world of "Borne".  More mythical and abstract.  Some great sentences, but there seems to be little plot.

Behind The Curve

Amazing documentary about flat earthers.  At the end they kind of accidentally prove the earth is round.

The Straight Story

David Lynch tells the story about a man going to visit his brother by traveling on a lawnmower.

Donald Knuth interview

https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knuth-cant-stop-telling-stories-20200416/

A person's success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you ca do something really well but there are other things at which you're failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you've got a good life. And so I try to learn how to get through things that others find unpleasant.

Lilith and the Draconcopes - Maiden-headed tempters from the Talmud to Boccaccio

Interesting enough article about why the snake so often has a woman's head with long blond curls. How Lilith was Adam's first wife, not from his rib, but as equals, thus banished, then became the snake.

hapox legomenon, a word that only occurs once in the Bible

No County For Old Men

Again, good.  Forgot that technically we don't know if the hitman survives.