Bro of Steel Movie Review

I've posted my review of Man of Steel at my other site.  I try and make the argument that Snyder/Goyer/Nolan diminish and distort the character in much the same way that Nolan did in the Dark Knight Rises by portraying Batman as a guy who isn't all that dedicated to fighting crime.

"When I went to see Man of Steel the other night, I made the same mistake I've made with every blockbuster I've seen the last few years:  I believed the trailer and harbored the faint hope that I would leave the theater not feeling cranky at the current state of storytelling.  Alas, it was not to be.  To be fair, I should have known better.  I've seen this movie before.   Which is a shame, because I was really hoping to see a Superman movie this time"

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Romancing Robots

I can't recommend the the documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis enough.  The premise is that machines have failed to liberate us, and instead have just over-simplified the world in ways that still skew power towards the few.  I don't think this thesis is entirely supported by what he presents here, but the idea that machine logic doesn't take us as far as we want to in the direction we want to go in is worth grappling with.  His perspective on history and historical events is worth a listen as well, although I think it's important to take it all with a pinch of salt.  At the very least, it may serve as a good launching point for some further reading.  Be warned, parts of the third are quite graphic and a little disturbing.  Our love of electronics lends fuel to FAR more problematic situations than sweatshops in China.

I want to review this slightly more in-depth later, but I'm still trying to digest it, especially the culminating punch delivered just before the credits roll.  If you have 3 hours and are interested in this kind of thing, it's well worth your time.

Insecurities

I am not a fan of pick-up artistry or, by extension, the neg, but I have always find the second to last panel of this XKCD comic to be disconcerting, even though it's not aimed directly at me.  It's too close to the heart of my insecurities.  Which is partly what makes it such a brilliant comic of course.  In any case, I find it entirely unsettling.  But clever.

Surviving in the digital age

I love everything about this article by Jaron Lanier, Fixing the Digital Economy.

Ted Nelson was the first person, in the 1960s, to describe how people might use digital networks for collaboration or expression. His work foresaw both the problems we face and the potential solutions to them. A Nelsonian solution might look like this: Institute a universal micropayment system. Keep track of where information came from. Pay people when information that exists because they exist turns out to be valuable, no matter what kind of information is involved or whether a person intended to provide it or not. Let the price be determined by markets.

All Strings Attached

I'm a little surprised at the uproar over the NSA phone record database. It's not like the tech sector has been exactly secretive about the fact they they track just about everything we do online. They've been announcing the many splendid wonders "big data" is going to bring to our lives for months now. Why is anyone surprised the government wants to use the same data to identify potential terrorists?

Was everyone asleep when google established a massive database tracking your every movement, google search, web history and online purchase so as to better deliver you to advertisers who have a few offers they'd like you to consider? If you have a cell phone, and you keep it on you at all times, the government can track your movements for the past couple years without much effort. Not only has it been established that every major corporation is tracking your movements and spending habits (and ANY OTHER trackable activity) to better manipulate you into spending money, but it's also well known they'll happily give the government any of this information on a moment's notice if a big frowny face comes up on screen when the government runs your online history through one of their secret algorithms. But it's just now, when the existence of a not-so-secret 7-year-old NSA program that tracks your phone records becomes public knowledge, that you start to worry about your privacy? Tracking the feature on your phone that you use the least and has the tracked data with the least personal information stored about you?

The ball is on the one-yard line, you're on defense, and some of you have just looked up from your phone and realized you're playing football. Welcome to planet Earth citizens. I sure hope you brought a hell of a defensive line with you on that spaceship.

Infinite Snooze

Forgive me Zod, for I have sinned. I have lived like I have all the time in the universe in infinite supply. I have lived like there will always be tomorrow to begin, another day to start, plenty of time to finish that which I am waiting to begin. I have wasted time, because I believed I had time to waste.

At first I lived as if nothing here mattered except belief, because eternity was a few years away, and I was told my best and lasting contribution to the world would be to convince people to believe what I did about the unknowable. I believed the end of the world was only a few years away, and was out of my control, so what did it matter what I did? And while I knew this was wrong, I felt powerless to oppose the wrongness in philosophy of my friends and family and escape from this worldview. So I chose to play dead.

Since then, I have entertained a number of contradictory notions that I have known not to be true from any philosophical angle. The foremost and most pernicious of these is that I will be granted infinite and special dispensation of time, so I can wait as long as I want to before growing/waking/shaping/perking up and taking the first step on finding the path before me.

This idea is, of course, irrational and unsupportable, but I believe it anyway. It is, in fact, on of my deepest beliefs. It is a spectacular delusion born of my cowardice in the face of the challenges presented by my fellow man and my refusal to admit to my own mortality. And a special and strange delusion it is, that I should not grapple with the world as it is, but take my leisure and wait for a better world to present itself to me, the insane prince of null-time.

It has been a profound disservice to myself to entertain the notion of special dispensation. I frequently blame the people around me for this. I lament that no one asks more of me, while asking very little of myself. While there is a certain rightness to the idea that people need to speak up when I am not meeting their needs, it is transparent bullshit that it is on other people to motivate me or prod me to join the world of the living. Is is, in fact, MY job to find my own purpose and decide what is and isn't wasting time. It is not the job of other people to monitor my time for me. It is not the job of other people to define my motivation for me. It is not the job of other people to remind me that time is always passing, falling and slipping away. My time is the only meaningful currency I am given, it is up to me to guard it from those who would take it without asking, and to spend it well.

I am the only one grasping this part of the elephant. I am the only one who can describe the view from my position. I am the only one who can try to address the cracks in the world no one else can see from way over there in their own heads.

The only thing that matters in the face of my morality is using my time well, in pursuit of what I understand to be important. The sense of panic, denial and shame in the face of mortality all stem from the knowledge that I don't do as much as I know could, that the time I spend is too frequently on activities that I know to be unimportant to me or anyone else. It is the knowledge that my response to my inevitable end and the inevitable obstacles placed between me and my goals has been, since I was young, to do the bare minimum it takes to get by, and then to sit back, and let time slip away, in the hopes that a better universe with more time would present itself. Presented with a mountain to climb, I set up a hammock at the bottom and took a 30-year nap.

If I want to die at peace, that needs to stop.

I don't fear dying with my work incomplete, I fear dying with my work not begun. I fear dying not having tried at all. I fear dying after a lifetime of hitting the snooze button, when I could have just woken up.

Meta Monday

Building a personality entirely around opposition to crowds, and the "the thing that is popular" is not necessarily a recipe for happiness.  I enjoy feeling superior, inferior, independent and weird, but at some point denying fun that is popular is counterproductive to having fun, is it not?

Which is to say, the problem with standing apart, is it doesn't make one popular at parties.  And problems which require a group effort and a good network become substantially more problematic.  Which is to say, the problem with standing apart, is that I am standing apart.  The problem is this is also the awesome thing about standing apart.

At what point does the meta-analysis of a thing consume any enjoyment of the thing?  At what point does a world-view focused on the abstractions of life diminish, detract from and otherwise overshadow the actual lived experience of life?  Is it possible to enjoy a story while deconstructing it down to its forms and shapes?  Do I like Community because it is funny or because it is ironically telling me that it is inhabiting the forms that the masses typically think is funny.  *wink*  Is a milkshake best consumed ingredient by ingredient or processed into a pleasing sludge?  I intend to bring a centrifuge to the malt shop and test this theory.  My hypothesis is that my hypothesis is flawed.

I was a hipster before it was hip.  We just called it "being a loner" and "socially awkward" and "wildly projecting our insecurities onto outwardly happy people" and "unable or unwilling to distinguish between reading the story and diagramming the plot."   I would say "you wouldn't get it," but you probably do.  Breathing is so passé', I only drink water through my ear.  I'm afraid I'm going to skip spring and go straight to summer, unlike the rest of you sheeple, this year.  Wake up sheeple people.  The seasons were invented by invisible, angular forces mean to keep your head tilted off-axis.

The problem with ironic distance is that the inability to enjoy an experience is not an improvement on the human experience.  It's just the refusal to have one.