Saved! was the first film of hers that I saw after Donnie Darko. It’s a good one. Mandy Moore as the “holier than thou” mean girl was excellent. The film deals with teen pregnancy differently than most. Not as heartwarming as Juno. Pairs well with the documentary film Jesus Camp.

Lady Liberty sure did break bad.

• Surveillance, technological supremacy, TIA

• Militarism — and a monopoly on the use of force

• Tittilation, distraction, marketing, lies

• Jingoism, nationalism, false patriotism

• Domination, ownership, control

Bald-faced lies face bald eagle.

• Institutional blindness

• Old age: 250 years without a successive generation

• Immense size, plus 800 military bases worldwide

• Voicelessness: despite power, held silent, spoken for

• Consumption & movement control

• Identity destruction: defined by the empowered

If I’m seeing stuff that’s not there, well… you did a great job of communicating.

For Doz Dat Slept - Black Sheep (1991)

Lyrics at Genius.com

Adding on: this is one of my favourite diagrams for the flow of carbon through the carbon cycle. It is a predictor for the amount of energy that managed by the Earth’s spheres (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, geosphere) under the greenhouse effect.

You cam read more about this, and very accessibly, in Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. The shape of “the upside-down” world of “alternative facts” and “post-truth” advocates goes a long way toward explaining why people on opposite sides of this divide have literally different realities.

I also recommend The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby. Though dated, it was published in 2007, its merits outweigh its quaint picture of the scale of corruption, ignorance, and deception we now experience.

Oddly, these two movies are both written and directed by Richard Linklater (though A Scanner Darkly is adapted from a novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick)

Oddly, both of these movies employ rotoscoping as their animation method.

Quoting J-Live, “World’s Apart”

Verse 2

They say the old world brought up a new world order

And ran up in the third world and divvied up borders

Tribes were divided by countries that were thought up

Economically held back and never caught up

Power corrupts and the oppressed get slaughtered

Mothers and fathers’ll lose sons and daughters

Brothers and sisters denied human rights

And can’t even guarentee themselves clean drinking water

First world speaker, second world spoken to

Third world who they conversatin’ about

Hardly even got a voice in the conversation

So the words fall on deaf ears and get drowned out

But uh, speaking as the first person, I can’t take it

Speaking to the second person, you on some snake shit

Speaking for the third person, they ain’t gon’ make it

But who are we to talk 'cause it’s really our fault

They say the opposite of love is not hate, it’s apathy

So lack of self-love ain’t self-hate, it’s apathy

We so desensitized by travesty and tragedy

How we supposed to realize humanity’s majesty

Accessed via Genius.com

Right?!

I only recommend to follow your interests. Reading the blurbs will ruin nothing. I saw the Power of Nighmares, then found out about Century of the Self. HyperNormalisation came out soon after I finished those. I have so many more to see.

This was nearing the end of my “predominantly documentaries” phase of viewing films. I was geographically limited in being able to access them as freely.

Now, I’m piling a lot of information into my head from books. My focus is on Canada’s journey toward Reconciliation, the crime of genocide, and the power structures that facilitate crimes against humanity.

Like, I know I should just read Hannah Arendt, but I havent gotten to her yet.

Favourite? Kondiaronk as introduced to me by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything.

I have spent 6 years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that is not inhuman and I generally think this can only be the case as long as you stick to your distinctions of “mine” and “thine.” I affirm that what you call “money” is the devil of devils, the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils, the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one can preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity—of all the world’s worst behavior.

Most … (I don’t even know what to say about this guy except to say I’m surprised he exists): Adrian Carton de Wiart

Just… look him up. Served in six wars including BOTH World Wars.

YouTube videos have titles including, “The Unkillable Soldier”, “The Man Who Would Not Die”, “Invincible”.

Actually, here’s one quote from the top of his Wikipedia page:

He served in the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War. He was shot in the face, head, stomach, groin, ankle, leg, hip, and ear. He was also blinded in his left eye, survived two plane crashes, tunnelled out of a prisoner-of-war camp, and ripped off his own severely injured fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them. Describing his experiences in the First World War, he wrote, “Frankly, I had enjoyed the war.”

My friend, an Adam Curtis festival deserves to happen. I’d be down to help make it happen online.

The views I have done:

• Hypernormalisation

• The Century of Self

• The Power of Nightmares

• The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom

• Everything Is Going According to Plan (Collab with Massive Attack)

The views I have yet to do:

• Bitter Lake

• TraumaZone

• All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

• Shifty

• Pandora’s Box

I wish I had the spare $200 for it. Ill have to pick it up used or from collector in, like, 4 years.

Really, though, my discretionary $200+ spent on a single book — at this point — would go to Le Pater. I dig Alphonse Mucha and Art Nouveau.

Better than the rest

• The Wire & Homicide: Life on the Street (David Simon Box Set)

• Atlanta

• The Expanse

Comedy

• NewsRadio (for Maura Tierney and Dave Foley and Phil Hartman and Khandi Alexander and Vicki Lewis and Stephen Root)
• Schitt’s Creek
• Ted Lasso (Seasons 1 and 2)
• Murphy Brown
• Sex Education

Sci-Fi

• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
• Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009)
• Dark
• Devs
• Altered Carbon (Season 1)

Drama

• The Newsroom
• Law & Order (seasons 1-8)
• Succession
• Severance

Intense Drama (TV-MA and little levity)

• Chernobyl
• Adolescence
• Utopia
• MR. ROBOT
• Luther
• True Detective (Season 1)
• Vince Gilligan Box Set (Better Call Saul & Breaking Bad & Plur1bus (has levity))
• Ozark

Anthology shows

• Black Mirror
• Love Death + Robots

Animated

• Rick and Morty
• Samurai Jack (2001-2004, 2017)
• Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008)
• Gravity Falls
• South Park
• Neon Genesis Evangelion
• Final Space

Perpetually on deck for me

• Fargo
• Andor
• Band of Brothers
• Barry
• Legion
• Letterkenny
• Bojack Horseman
• Scavenger’s Reign
• Fringe

This show. This has one of the greatest poetry readings in TV history built into it. The build up, the absolute crescendo to the end of this show was a feat.

Yes. Yes to devs.

Century of the Self should be required viewing. Adam Curtis made the film/series modernity needs.

It’s a guilty pleasure of mine, too. I’m not ashamed. I like what I like.

You monster.

That movie, in my mind, hinges on the premise, delivered by Stanley Tucci: “but what if we could?”

I know he’s not the first and won’t be the last, but damn if that didn’t annoy me back in '03. It was just so… gutless as a sci-fi explainer.

I think Ill give Northern Lights a try.

Ursula K. LeGuin is one of my favourite authors. I’m dipping into the Hainish Cycle a bit at a time.

In its time, circa 2012‐2013, I enjoyed the book. It was a relief from other things I was reading at the time, the world as it was then. A guilty pleasure.

Now, it does strike as trite, consumer-centred, fan-serving, intertextuality. I may have only thought of the branding and YA-crowd focus at the time. But, then again, I had just finished the Hunger Games the year before. I was primed for it then.

The escapist, pseudo-dystopia that is Ready Player One hits different when you’re living inside of a naked escapist pseudo-dystopia in real life. The journey as a pop-culture “gunter” navigating 80s video games and movies is, essentially, a contemporary subculture. The reward now is a YouTube following, not a multi-billion dollar corporate empire. Even the end prize seems small today.

$240B? Pfft. That’s not a world-dominating tech company. That doesnt even crack the top 100 today.

Funny, I enjoyed this series. Though, I admit, not at first. The prospect of an incoming alien species colonizing the Earth by frustrating any ability to continue our advance in technology, then figuring out a way to defeat them anyway was compelling.

Further, it helped me to think of it as my first novel told by a Chinese author. Cixin Liu’s sci-fi voice is very different to what I am used to. All of the motivations and norms are different. So, I tried to keep an open mind.

Finally, I thought that the Dark Forest made the biggest difference in my understanding of the 2hole story. The reveal in that book stopped me in my tracks. It caught me as hard as the one in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. No spoilers.