• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Best decision my (now ex) wife and I ever made. Not because we are divorced now. But because

    a) I’m free to live my own life. and

    b) Even back when kids was an option, she and I both kind of saw the world that was coming and decided that we didn’t want to subject our children or grandchildren to the world that was turning to shit.

    Looking around today, I feel absolutely vindicated for taking that stance back in the early 2000’s when I was married.


  • I wouldn’t call this “inconsequential”, but not only is Deckard a Replicant, he’s a very specific Replicant.

    Gaff (played by Eddie Olmos) was the original officer assigned to hunting down the escaped replicants, before Holden and before Deckard. When the escaped Androids originally tried to storm the Tyrell corporation, one of them got “fried” going through an electric fence. And it was either there, or in another encounter, that Gaff was wounded in the leg, forcing Holden to take over the case, and we know where that ended up…

    I posit that the android that got “fried”, didn’t actually get fried. In concert with the Tyrell corporation, they programmed him with Gaff’s memories in order to finish the job, which is why Gaff is chaperoning him, driving him around; to make sure the memory implant holds. It’s why Gaff seems to know what he’s thinking and can make origami to give him hints. It’s why Gaff at the end of the movie says “You’ve done a man’s work”. And it’s why Gaff is such a dick to him. Imagine chaperoning your artificial replacement around that everyone thinks can do just as good a job as you…

    I always watch Blade Runner from that perspective. At least until the sequel came out and ruined it for me.



  • Logic does not rely on assumptions. It relies on making deductions about what is probable when faced with the current knowledge.

    I see what you are meaning, but it’s a misunderstanding of how the scientific method works. Base Assumptions never come into play.

    The hypothesis comes from the existing evidence, not the other way around.

    For example, Eratosthenes didn’t have an “assumption” that the earth was round and then said, “hmmm…how shall we test this?” Rather, he had heard from someone or other that at noon is a certain city, there was no shadow. While in another city, there was a shadow being cast by objects. He started to logically deduce why that could be. He had his evidence, that in one city to the south, no shadow, and in another city, a shadow of 7 degrees at the same time of day. He knew the distance between the two cities and deduced not only that the earth was round, but it’s size as well.

    No gut assumptions necessary.









  • I made a Bluesky account and I’ll generally try to post to it the same amount as my Mastodon account. But despite the so called “exodus” from Twitter, I don’t find Bluesky to have any of the people I’m interested in following any more than Mastodon does. So it’s a wash.

    I’m keeping it around to see if more of my friends show up. But that’s about all.


  • Oh man…I have an entire ten page paper on the go about this topic and it just keeps growing. One day I’ll publish it in a blog or something, but for now it’s just me vomiting up my thoughts about mass market manufacturing and the loss of zeitgeist.

    The examples that I always use are a) Camera Lenses, b) Typewriters, and c) watches.

    Mechanical things age individually, developing a sort of Kami, or personality of their own. Camera lenses wear out differently, develop lens bokehs that are unique. Their apertures breath differently as they age No two old mechanical camera lenses are quite the same. Similarly to typewriters; usage creates individual characteristics, so much so that law enforcement can pinpoint a particular typewriter used in a ransom note.

    It’s something that we’ve lost in a mass produced world. And to me, that’s a loss of unimaginable proportions.

    Consider a pocket watch from the civil war, passed down from generation to generation because it was special both in craftsmanship and in connotation. Who the hell is passing their Apple Watch down from generation to generation? No one…because it’s just plastic and metal junk in two years. Or buying a table from Ikea versus buying one made bespoke by your neighbour down the street who wood works in his garage. Which of those is worthy of being an heirloom?

    If our things are in part what informs the future of our role in the zeitgeist, what do we have except for mounds of plastic scrap.