Robocop PSA

lines from incarnations of "a thousand kisses deep" - leonard cohen

"my mirror twin,

my next of kin,

i'd know you in my sleep.

and who but you would take me in

a thousand kisses deep?

our perfect porn aristocrat,

so elegant and cheap.

i'm old but i'm still into that,

a thousand kisses deep.

i'm good at love,

i'm good at hate,

it's in between i freeze.

been working out but it's too late,

it's been too late for years.

there's no forsaking what you love -

no existential leap -

as witnessed here in time and blood,

a thousand kisses deep.

but you look good

(you really do),

they love you on the street.

if you were here

i'd kneel for you,

a thousand kisses deep"

on last night's soliloquies launch

i wrote this last night:

not crazy about

students who write poetry

just because they're sad

a thought experiment: philosophy's neat!

In The Ethics of Killing Jeff McMahan wonders: 

[You are] a member of a set of identical triplets, all of whom are involved in an accident. While [your] brainstem and various vital organs are irreparably damaged, [your] cerebral hemispheres[, the seat of your consciousness,] are unharmed. In the case of both other triplets, however, their brainstems and bodies are undamaged but their cerebrums are destroyed. Surgeons are able to extract [your] cerebrum intact but, instead of transplanting it whole, they divide it and transplant each hemisphere into the body of one of the two remaining triplets. [Assuming your] hemispheres were symmetrically developed, the two people who are brought to consciousness after the operations are both fully psychologically continuous with [your]self as [you were] before the operations. Both believe themselves to be [you] and both have bodies almost indistinguishable from [your] own (p. 23).

... where does your soul end up?

D9 backstory

Here is what Blomkamp has to say about why the prawns haven't turned on the humans in the 20 years they've been on earth. i'm glad to hear it cause it was a big question during the movie.

The hive mind [concept] is the most important thing to me, because I love the idea of a civilization that can build all of that technology and then, at the same time, just have a massive population that was just drones that needed direction, and were absolutely incapable of building that stuff on their own... individually, they may be feeling oppressed, but they don't have it together enough to form a resistance and back one another.

(I had been thinking that the prawns were just so hungry that they traded all their weapons for catfood. i like this better.)

more of the interview is here. it's very good to read.

District 9

SO GOOD - the best.!

love in two minutes and three seconds

stanley has just become very drunk and given his pregnant wife a roughing-up after tossing her radio out the window. his friendos cart her up to the neighbours' place and toss stan in the shower. he sobers up and staggers around the apartment, then...

shooooot.

a streetcar named desire.