You have a magic pill, which de-ages you by 20 years. You can take it once in your life only, so long as you are at least 20. What age — past, current or future — do you reckon is best to take it?
I would watch this in an instant. Sisko is, by a wide margin, my favourite Star Trek Captain.
A frontier, postwar Commander. A broken space station.
A crew that actively hates, seeks to misunderstand, and undermine each other.
Oh, and the first stable wormhole/celestial temple of the TimeLords.
Then, a war against a vastly superior force of the ultimate spies.
He takes on the whole impossible thing and makes everyone he meets better people.
A student of history, betrayed by the only woman he loved after the the death of his wife, a single father, a mentor, a detective, and a builder.
Sisko is absolutely amazing. Picard, what, came back from being Borg and lived a lifetime in a few minutes once?
There's a book on this topic, The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman.
Some might say that "your perspective is distorted." things are incredible for the top 10% of the socio-economic scale and getting better by most metrics (do not look at the numbers for maternal and infant mortality).
- The average person in a G7 state today lives better than kings of old.
- We in G7 countries have abundant water, food, and sanitation. In America, food is so subsidized that it is ridiculously cheap by historical standards.
- Your odds of dying to violence or disease have never been lower in all of human history unless you are one of the world's 100 million refugees, live in Africa (pop. 1400 m) or Central America (pop. 52.7 m), or in one of the world's 27 [1] current conflict zones (approx pop. 2800 m)... that's over 4 billion people or half of humanity
- You have all human knowledge at your fingertips, and technology is expected to keep improving our lives in novel ways as long as you can afford it.
- You can visit any place on Earth in a matter of hours if your passport permits you to do so and as long as there is jet fuel and have access to cheap exotic foreign goods which are unreliable, break easily, produce garbage, and are slowly killing the planet and its peoplr.
- Civil rights are protected a lot more today than they were in many/most civilizations of the past unless you're trans-, or black, or a woman, or a black trans-woman.
- Entertainment is abundant and cheap, and takes forms that people of the past could only dream about.
While we certainly have our incredibly massive, systemic challenges to overcome, like climate change (ha!), wealth inequality (ha ha!), and social problems (hahaha!), let's not forget how good we (when you say we, you certainly mean your ingroup) could have it if we tore down this corrupt edifice and built an efficient, sustainable, just world.
The whole Shohei Ohtani fiasco from Toronto's perspective. Wow, people bit hard on that. To be fair, everyone was waiting on confirmation. But, seriously, a writer for the Dodgers makes the first call, then people are checking Flight Aware, there's a restaurant reservation rumoured, and on and on.
Finally, the flight lands and one of the Dragon's Den guys hops out. Word comes down that he's signed with the Dodgers.
Seems to me like it was misreported on purpose, using Toronto as a foil.
It's a long lasting, constantly evolving, multi-versal fluke.
We can't see, experience, or detect most of the universe — read: existence — let alone measure it. That pretty much means, to me anyway, we can't explain it.
Explaining existence, then, is limited to explaining my own perception of existence. To be brief: The things that exist got here the same way we did and use the same materials and rules. Conscious beings stay in the universe by maintaining consciousness; for us, that generally means being alive, awake, and alert — in that order. Upon death, consciousness ends, or departs, or continues (no one knows) and our corporeal form goes back to existing as atoms in other states within the environment. Present existence, then, pregnant by the ghosts of all existences that has gone before and is carrying to term all existences that will exist after. It's an endless, cyclical flow of atoms, energies, and absences. A crossroads of Space and Time culminating in experiential states and chains of causality. Billions of years in a blink.
Other conscious beings may operate or perceive differently. We can't individuall confirm or know. That's another of those rules.
That said, we only get to ride this existence thing for a short time. Build up your XP and use your one and only life doing good. Not necessarily well, but good.
Imagine standing outside of Time and Space and making a divine survey of the grand tapestry of the possible. It would look like math painted onto bubbles that glow from within, I think. That's what Existence may be.
The Way of the Gun (2000), 46% fresh. I really, actually do like this movie. I know, Ryan Phillipe makes things complicated. Like, starting in the first scene with Sarah Silverman.
"There's always cheese at a mousetrap."
The problem that this movie faced was that there was no reward for having a long attention span. Critically panned, the Way of the Gun rewards those who get carried along in the story; those who understand the roles the characters play in each others' lives, the Shakespearean knit in the fabric.
Longbaugh and Parker are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern witnessing the collapse of the house of and unborn Hamlet, whose supposed parents are a mob underboss and his trophy wife. His actual parents are at the shootout where he was born.
This is a good movie. Watch it.
This is basically what I told people when I started to watch some of the most amazing international and documentary cinema in the early 00s. Ciudade de Deus, La Cité d'enfants Perdus, Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain, La Vita è Bella, Der Untergang, Lola Rennt, 올드 보이, Mononoke Hime, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Whale Rider. Documentaries by Adam Curtis or Errol Morris. So many people just don't know.
I could hate on the Dark Knight all day. The month it came out, my brother put it best, "It's two movies. A good, short, Joker movie and a bad, long, Batman movie."
When you watch this film and only the Joker scenes, its 10x better.
I've given this a re-watch.
The opening credits were great.
The settings and costumes were good even if the actors weren't. If you want to see Dane DeHaan in his element, see Chronicle. Cara Delevigne ... um...
Except Clive Owen. He's a treasure. Any actor who can convincingly win a gunfight with a carrot has got the chops.
The attack over planet Mül was objectively well done and the crash scene was impressive.
It's a good bit of fun in much the same way as The Fifth Element.
Reminds me of El Salvadoran prisoners.
I'd be all about a prequel series for Morgan Freeman's character in Se7en. Only if David Fincher returned to direct through.
Lilo and Stitch is the best Disney movie.
Many, many spoilers below. But, seriously, this movie is 21 years old. Get over yourselves.
Check it: a young girl adopts an illegal alien (killing machine from deep space) and protects him from the U.S. (and galactic) government (Military-Industrial complexes), while keeping her incredibly depressed sister (slices both ways) from giving up completely as they keep their Indigenous Hawaiian family together in their co-opted homeland. One sister works a series of dead-end tourism jobs; the other has anger issues. The hate each other and love each other fiercely, though they are about 12 years apart in age.
Oh, yeah, and their parents are dead.
Meanwhile, the alien is a political refugee and freedom fighter fleeing from his own people who want him dead for —get this— existing. A lab-grown, indestructible terrorist, he seeks asylum on an island — but he can't swim.
He does learn to surf.
The only downside to this film is that Disney produced it. And Elvis.
"Ohana means family. Nobody gets left behind or forgotten."
I'd like to know if there is a sci-fi source for this; I've wanted — what I call — infinifabric for a long time. Basically a cross between:
- the microbots in Big Hero 6,
- the symbiote from Spider-Man (sans sentience), and
- programmable matter from Star Trek: Discovery
One fabric layer that can reshape itself into any and every conceivable article of clothing. Perfectly regulates body temperature, water loss, and environmental challenges.
From Altered Carbon: an Oni. Built-in telecommunications. Seems way closer to fruition than DHF stacks. Though, is the stack worn so much as is part of oneself? In universe, it seems that the stack IS the person.
From Dune, Foundation, and that one episode of Star Trek: TNG: a personal shield.
This topic makes me wonder if prosthetic devices count as "wearables", per se, or not. If anyone out there is in the know — you or someone you're close to have (has)/wear(s) a prosthesis — please let me know.
From the TV adaptation of Asimov's Foundation
Cleon XIII: Orders the deaths of 1551 innocent people to make an example of one person.
Cleon XVI: Oversees the destruction of the Foundation in truly spectacular fashion.
Take it from a die-hard cynical realist, Ted Lasso is heartwarming and inspiring in just the right measure without being terribly saccharine or campy. Very well written as well. The third season faltered a bit in the beginning, I thought, but it ended well.
Best finale of any series.
Unsaid so far: Samurai Jack.
My first full run of DS9 is going so well. What's amazing is the amount of single fatherhood in the show.
Key question here. I'd take it at 37 and go back to being 17 with the skills, knowledge, and experiences and most importantly income of my 37 year-old self. But, I'd pass myself off as 18. Unless, of course, it's not a secret. In which case the strategy totally changes.
If it's known and knowable that I took this drug, then I'd take it at 55 and de-age to 35. Then, when my kids are in their teens and tweens, I'll have the energy for their B.S. Also, when I retire at 95 (b/c seriously, retirement wont be a thing for me), I'll only be 75 and I'll still be able to fight off some of the horde of lawyer-bots, advertisclones, and chain letters that are coming after my pension.