Netflix: Engage

Oh man. Just set up netflix account. Star Trek: TNG and Battlestar Galactica in the que. Make it so.

Do The Evolution

Love me some Pearl Jam:

Pearl Jam – Do The Evolution

Archer

Today’s posts have been entirely too serious, so I present Archer the show I wish Hulu would just put online already so I can enjoy it:

Do You Know Your Aliens?

What movie is this thing from? It was the only one I couldn’t identify because “Morbo, from Futurama” was not an option.

["Do you know your aliens?" - New Scientist, via TDW]

Brain Slug Cupcakes

I just started watching the entire run of Futurama again yesterday. I should make these cupcakes to celebrate when I’m finished:

Delicious. Well, at least hypnotoad convinced me they are.

[Craftzine via TDW]

Culture Binge

I’m looking for your help here people, hit me up with some suggestions on what to read, listen to, watch.

I have watched maybe two hours of TV since New Year’s Day, so I’m excited to get back into the soothing tub of mental balm that is the Spring season of television. Fringe and Season 7 of Project Runway are both back in action, Lost comes back on Feb. 2, South Park, The Venture Bros. and Glee are on longer hiatuses, but start soon enough, Archer and Human Target started last week and Caprica starts tonight.

The thing is, very soon I’ll have the opportunity to absorb a good bit more TV culture (also more time for blogging, natch), so I’m debating what else to watch. Here are my top choices of stuff from the Naughties:

1. Battlestar Galactica
2. The Wire/ The Sopranos/ Mad Men (it’s one or the other)
3. Firefly

Beyond that, I’m considering Star Trek: TNG, Doctor Who (I’ve never seen an episode of either) and The Prisoner. Probably re-watching Futurama.I don’t really like anime, but I really enjoyed Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, so that’s getting a re-perusal as well. I’m open to suggestions of other anime (movie or TV) worth watching.

I’m also getting back into comic books/graphic novels. Fables, The Invisibles, and Y: The Last Man, are my current reads. I’ve heard good things about Transmetropolitan and Doktor Sleepless. Any other suggestions?

I have a stack of books waiting for me, so no suggestions there, but anything else (paintings, movies, bands) I need to experience, let me know.

[buy the shirt with the logo above]

Conundrums of the All-Spark

Shia LeZombie?

Proof that I listen to my readers: Here is your post about Transformers, as requested. While I could talk about the fact that the transformers are, allegedly, sentient robots, or that they are also aliens, or that they are symbolic of the dual-edged nature of technology, or that there are seemingly no females, or that some transformers picked up the, uh, nuances, of certain subcultures among American humans, or that they are literally armed with whatever weaponry they want and yet choose to engage in hand-to-hand combat – I am not going to talk about those things.

What I am going to briefly meditate on is the All-Spark, the large (or small, whatevs) cube thing that shoots out electricity that turns your Nokia cellphone (does anyone use those anymore?) into an angry, crab walking robot. It turns out that when you think about it too long (that is, at all) the All Spark has some horrifying capabilities.

Let’s look at it logically:

One starts with the knowledge that the All-Spark created the entire race of the Transformers, as well as Cybertron, and is able to bring earthbound technology to life.

Things that the All-Spark can animate seem to be primarily technological, such as cell phones or boom boxes. These things, it would seem, have what we’ll call animation potential. That is, given an All-Spark, these things can become living, animated things.

So, what do we know about things with animation potential? They are primarily metallic and silicon based, use electricity as a means of energy, and are inert prior to animation. Now, what do we know about things that have been animated by the All-Spark, namely, the Transformers? That their preferred non-hominid condition is a machine that has an internal combustion engine, rubber tires, and an leather interior. Finally, we can think about Jetfire, the graybeard of Transformers, who was an SR-71 Blackbird, a plane built out of carbon-fiber, filled to the brim with top-octane fuel, and minimal circuitry. Weirdly, these statistics imply that the All-Spark can affect materials made of carbon, silicon, most metals and alloys, rubber, and leather.

So? If the All-Spark merely needs structural complexity and some combination of those elements, it would seem the All-Spark is capable of reanimating dead, organic tissue. The All-Spark/Matrix of Leadership is capable of reanimating Optimus Prime, therefore it should be capable of reanimating, oh, I don’t know, Sam Witwicky.

A thought experiment. Let us presume that Sam was riding around in Bumblebee while he was in auto-mode. Suddenly, Megatron shows up and starts launching nukes. What does the autobot do?

A grisly accident, but irreversible? Perhaps Sam’s head, or hand, was preserved. Bumblebee, traumatized and fearful of Optimus’ righteous retribution, thinks frantically. Is there enough intact order/material to use the All-Spark to resurrect it? What will it become? He doesn’t know, but in an act of blind grief and fear, he uses the enigmatic cube to re-invest the remaining bits of LadiesMan247 with life.

What comes back, however, is not Sam Witwicky.

Instead, it is  some sort of ever-mutating, organic, soulless shape-shifting monstrosity, with one grotesque thought permeating every cell of its unholy body: survive. Bumblebee, horrified with his own demented error first contains his vile misdeed, and then scrambles for a new plan. He remembers Megatron’s internment in Antarctica and, turning into a yellow military helicopter, races off to the continent of ice. Upon landing, he blasts an epic crater in the ice pack, into which he hurls the Lovecraftian thing he has spawned, and buries it under seven tons of ice and shame.

Little does Bumblebee realize that years later some Norwegians would dig up the ostensible corpse of Witwikey, releasing havoc upon both their own scientific team and that of the Americans, only to be (maybe???) killed by Snake Plisskin and Keith David.

Footage of the reanimated Witwikey (not for the faint of heart). And that, my friends, is the horrible truth behind the allegedly benevolent All-Spark.

Artie’s Wheels

I really, really like the show Glee. I like it because it stops pretending that people who live in small cities in western and mid-western states are somehow more wholesome than their metropolitan counterparts. I like it because it exposes the high school ruling class for the terrified, soon-to-be-townie losers they usually are. I like it because it admits high schoolers have sex and drink and smoke weed and still manage to function. I like it because it obliterates the myth that marrying your high school sweet heart is a good idea. I like it because it is the sunshiniest, saccharine dark comedy I’ve ever seen.

I also like it because instead of taking a stab at diversity, it actually has it. The caveat is that the diversity is totally unrealistic: somehow there are at least three Jews going to the same school in Lima, Ohio, which is actually more impossible than a lot of other things that happen on the show, but whatever. That the wheel-chair bound kid, Artie, isn’t some super hot chick missing a leg (looking at you Deuce Bigalow), but instead a nerdy, sweater-vest-and-glasses-wearing, paraplegic with a molasses smooth voice, is great. That the writers of Glee devoted an entire episode to showing what Artie’s daily struggles are like is, well, something I don’t know if I’ve seen on prime time television.

When I was initially writing this post, I kept using the word “disabled” to describe Artie, but the whole point of “Wheels” was to show Artie isn’t disabled. Except for walk, Artie does everything the other glee club kids do: sing, dance, play instruments, battle wits, go on dates, and maintain some level of self respect. My favorite moment in the episode is when Artie blurts out, “I wanna be very clear: I still have the use of my penis.” The act is so human, so basic, and so central to his life as a paraplegic it reminds us that he is simultaneously a person in a wheel chair and a teenage boy. Artie’s ability to walk away from Tina when she admits she’s faking her stutter shows he is, alternatively, confident enough in himself to prefer being alone to being with a fraud. He’s great.

In The Future of Human Nature Habermas writes that, “Since individuation is achieved through the socializing medium of thick linguistic communication, the integrity of individuals is particularly dependent on the respect underlying their dealings with one another.” What he is blathering about is that our sense of self is in large part formed around our interactions with our friends, peers, and society at large. He then goes on to discuss how this individuation relates to one’s sense of bodily (phenomenological) self, “Bodily existence enables the person to distinguish between these only on the condition that she identifies with her body. For the person to feel at one with her body, it seems that this body has to be experienced as something natural – as a continuation of the organic, self-regenerative life from which this person is born.” Emphasis mine. If a person’s body feels unnatural to her, then she has a fractured identity. What I disagree with is Habermas’ assertion that what constitutes a person’s body must actually be “natural” and/or “organic” and must link with what that person was at birth. To say Habermas is discounting or ignoring amputees and the paralyzed, among a multitude of other bodily changes that can occur after birth, is an understatement.

Artie’s dancing and countenance in a wheel chair, not to mention his confidence and honesty about his difference, disprove Habermas’ claim. I would argue that the body must not feel like something “natural” but like something contiguous and familiar. The body must feel as though it responds to one’s mind in conjunction with what is expected. Artie’s adaptation to life post-car crash at the age of eight, a situation that borders on normal, demonstrates the ability for the phenomenological body to incorporate (literally) non-natural and non-organic objects into the self. If Habermas had deigned to read Merleau-Ponty or Lacan he would have known these things. But, as we know from another lesson Glee bashes us over the head with: no one is perfect.

Oh, and Artie is singing Billy freaking Idol. The song choice couldn’t be more perfect. Artie’s identity and sense of self is heightened by his difference, hence the song “Dancing with myself.” Thus, Artie Abrams from Glee disproves Habermas’ thesis on phenomenological self requiring a “natural” and “organic” body. Enjoy the refutation:

Muppet. Bohemian. Rhapsody.

[via The Nerdist]

The Venture Bros. & Clones

The Venture Bros. is one of those shows I don’t really laugh out loud at until the third or forth time I watch an episode. It isn’t because the jokes aren’t hilarious the first time, it’s just that there is so much awesome compressed into every moment I don’t have time to laugh. “The Grand Inquisitor” “Twenty Years to Midnight” is one of the few exclusions: the Grand Galactic Inquisitor’s  ridiculous interjections still make me tear up from laughing so hard. My larger point is that there is so much going on in any given episode, some stuff can get lost in the mix.

One long narrative thread that gets drawn from the first episode of season 2 all the way to the end of season 3 is that the boys, Hank and Dean, can be cloned when they die. Their beds record their memories, so the clones have almost no memory break between death and waking up the next morning. A classic ethical problem of cloning technology has always been “would the clone be a new person or the same one?” There are two versions of the answer to the metaphysical/ontological aspect of this question: the religious and the secular answers.

In the religious version, the answer is that the soul cannot continue on, despite the “memories” being implanted in the new cloned substrate. Basically this results in a soulless zombie thing that is not the same person. So the answer is no.

In the secular version, the answer is that the original person really did die, so his or her consciousness is no longer continuous, meaning he or she is gone. The clone, despite having the same memories and not perceiving a gap in time, thus having a contiguous conscious experience, is still a different person. Again, we come to the answer of no.

Normally, this would be a bit of a problem, as The Venture Bros. is a show watched by nerds who undoubtedly would have figured out this conundrum and become upset that their favorite characters were now, well, not the same as the ones from the first season (despite that the Hank and Dean from the first season were also clones, but nerds are good at cherry picking when we’re being cranky). But, you see, thanks to the metaphysical footwork of Dr. Orpheus, the Venture’s necromancer neighbor, getting into an argument with Venture, we’re presented with a strange workaround to the problem of a clones’ consciousness.

Orpheus, guilt-ridden that he was a terrible babysitter and let the boys die, seeks to find their souls in the underworld. After a failed search, he realizes the boys’ souls are “trapped” in a machine. Dr. Venture starts arguing with Orpheus that the mumbo-jumbo about “souls” and “resurrection” is no different from using clone slugs and recorded memories. The strange implication of all of this is, when we accept the rules of the Venture world for a moment, are actually forced to agree with Venture in that Orpheus detects the souls of the boys in the computer storing their memories.

Thus, the resolution that Jason Publick and Doc Hammer come up with is: your soul is your memories, can be stored for future usage and ultimately put into a new body. The religious and secular problems are overcome.

Ok ok, I know this isn’t exactly a rigorous philosophical or theological examination of the implications of clones with implanted memories. I think Moon probably does a better job of handling that than The Venture Bros. But it is the only effort I’ve seen to combine the secular and religious argument and, in the process, reverse the conclusion of both. Oh, and it means we get the “aborted clone desperate to live up to the original” episode to boot. Everybody wins.