Sea of Solitude vs. Muppet Christmas Carol

This past week I played Sea of Solitude (2019) and watched The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992). Sea of Solitude is a surrealistic game about loneliness and sadness. The Muppet Christmas Carol is… A Christmas Carol… with Muppets. On the surface, these two artworks would seem to have little to do with each other, but I found a significant thematic dissonance between them.

Everything in Sea of Solitude is an unsubtle metaphor for chronically sad people, their emotional states, or the triggers for those states. It uses environment and character designs that embody feelings of sorrow and emptiness to tell the story of Kay, a young woman with a troubled family life. While there are unique aspects to Sea, what struck me about it was this similarity it shares many other contemporary artworks: it does a good job describing sorrow, but it does not suggest any real remedy for it.

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Mimics, Bullies

The movie The Thing features a monster that can flawlessly mimic human beings. It can replace anyone, and there is no way to tell the monstrous mimic from the real person… until the mimic suddenly attacks you and tears you to pieces.

Killing a mimic is obviously justified self-defense… but there is no way to be sure who is a mimic. Is it justified to kill a person who might be a mimic? In a world infested with such creatures, would it be justifiable to kill a stranger, just in case? Even if not, it is certainly justifiable to treat any stranger with intense suspicion. If there is no way to tell for sure who is a mimic, then trusting anyone you don’t know is human is obvious folly.

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Re: Race Realism

Corresponding with the rise of the “alt-right” in recent years has been the rise in popularity of what its proponents call “race realism.”

Race realism is the idea that since differences between races are scientifically quantifiable, it is only rational that these differences should be taken into account when creating policies. If [race] people are known to have [qualities] (the argument goes), then it would be foolish to craft policies that did account for this. Policies should match the people they govern, surely? That’s just being efficient and practical!

This argument isn’t functionally any different from the “scientific racism” of the 20th century eugenicists, or of the Europeans in Darwin’s era who judged that other races were “less evolved.” Like their forebears, race realists believe that it is possible to make deep and accurate judgements about a person from a quick glance at select body parts, and that it is only sensible that society should act upon these judgements.

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Life on […]

Whenever any sort of discovery is made in space, it is always viewed through the lens of a search for life.

Organic compounds on Churyumov-Gerasimenko? The building blocks of life! An ocean on Europa? Great place to look for life! Water on Mars? That could mean life!

Screenshot from news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150928-mars-liquid-water-life-space-astronomy (altered)
Screenshot from news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150928-mars-liquid-water-life-space-astronomy (altered)

I wonder how these discoveries might have been received 50 years ago, back when America was actually working to put humans on other worlds. Would we have thrilled over Martian water because of the prospect of finding microbes? I wasn’t there, but I think we would have been more interested in water because of its usefulness to humans. Whether or not there were microbes would have been a secondary consideration, viewed through the lens of human exploration. Continue reading Life on […]

Attempting Honesty

It is always dangerous to claim that something about yourself is unique, because it probably isn’t. There is almost always someone who is just as adjective as you are or has done just as much gerund as you have. Nonetheless, I suspect that I might actually be unique when I name Redwall as a formative influence on my philosophy.

Millions of people have read Redwall, and nearly all of them have liked it. I found it deeply horrifying. Twenty years later, there is still no other work that has affected me as intensely. I didn’t immediately understand why, but in time I figured it out: Redwall was horrifying because its characters were dishonest. I do not mean that the characters told lies–to the contrary, telling lies was something which they sternly frowned upon–I mean that their perception of their world and the facts of their world were virtually unrelated to each other. Continue reading Attempting Honesty

No One Ever Finds True Love

My car has an eighth-inch audio jack so I can listen to Rdio when I drive it, but the minivan is old; FM is its only option.

The other day when I was on my way to pick up a van-load of children, I flipped on the radio and found myself listening to a top 40 pop song. Just from hearing the opening measures and noting what station it was playing on, I guessed what the lyrics would be. I went ahead and listened to the whole thing, mostly to see if my prediction was correct. It was.

“There are no surprises on hit radio,” I thought. “I haven’t listened to this station for over a year, and I can still guess the lyrics of whatever comes on. Are pop songs really that predictable, that homogeneous?” Continue reading No One Ever Finds True Love

How to Win at Democracy

This is probably the most important article you will ever read: it will teach you how to conquer a democracy. Not in the traditional supervillainous sense–the people you conquer probably won’t even realize what you’ve done to them–but you will rule them nonetheless. The method is very simple; it has only two steps, and everyone already knows them. They are expressed in two famous aphorisms: Continue reading How to Win at Democracy

Cook the Courageous

It is impossible to eliminate all risk in life, but we can do things to minimize it. For instance, you can minimize the risk of breathing toxic gas by staying on the surface of the Earth instead of digging beneath it. Staying on the surface does not guarantee good air, but it makes good air likely. Dig very deep, and the chances of the next breath being toxic increase with every foot. Continue reading Cook the Courageous

The Wrath of Thor

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There is an episode of Dragons: Riders of Berk in which the town is plagued by lighting. The frequency of lightning strikes has suddenly increased, from being rare to being almost constant. The Berkians are Vikings; they attribute their problem to the wrath of Thor, and the story follows their blundering attempts to appease him. Eventually they realize that the iron dragon perches they had installed around town at the beginning of the episode are what is attracting the lightning. They remove these perches, and the lightning stops.

From this experience, the Berkians learn a valuable lesson: Thor disapproves of tall metal objects.

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