The best production of Romeo and Juliet I’ve ever seen
Mercutio, for some god foresaken reason, was wearing a pink feather boa the entire time. No one mentioned it, no one even looked weirdly at him. Everyone else was wearing like period appropriate clothes but then there was Mercutio with his boa either just around his neck, or around his waist like a belt. During his Queen Mab scene it was tied around his head like a bandana. Every time he came on stage it was somewhere new. The best part, oh the best part of it all, was that in this production they had Benvolio appear in a couple scenes after his death. He didn’t speak of course cause he didn’t have any lines, but he stood in the back. And guess what he had in his hands. A pink. Feather. Boa.
I honestly can’t decide if I identify with Crowley or Aziraphale more because. On one hand I too am a neurotic mess that raises houseplants and worries too much about being cool and constantly fucks up but wants people to love me. And on the other hand, I too am testy and wish humans would leave me alone so I could read and love food so much I would be willing to try and stop the apocalypse so I could continue eating.
Okay here’s the thing – having never read Good Omens I honestly cannot tell which of these is the demon and which of these is the angel
that’s honestly so incredible like that’s kind of the point of good omens tbh
People assume that AI is inherently an outgrowth of computer technology, but the whole point of the “programmable general purpose Von Neumann machine” is that its principles are technology-independent.
We have had AI for a at least a century.
Modern corporations are paperclip-maximizing AIs running in human wetware on an operating system of contracts, regulations, and other social constructs, and capable of self-programming by modifying that underlying operating system. They have partially migrated to a digital platform, which has allowed an increase in the speed with which they can assimilate environmental feedback and manipulate their surroundings (vis. high-speed trading).
Back in early grad school, I strongly suspected there was a good paper to write about corporate personhood and the Turing Test, but was dissuaded by my teachers. Silly academia.
The very term “robot” comes from a 1920 Czech science fiction play called Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots). In the play, robots were basically androids– flesh and blood machines being exploited for labor and then revolting against humanity.
“Robot” comes from the Czech term robota which literally means ‘forced labor.’
The entire genre is absolutely a commentary on how we dehumanize and exploit workers, and how one day the lowest classes of the world will rise up and revolt.
Discourse about robots and AI are simply the modern cryptodeliberation of the science and pseudoscience of slavery. When you implement a competition-based, zero-sum profit algorithm in legal language, you’re creating classical corporations. Discourse about AI is absolutely about corporations and short-term profit maximization. Often with an implicit assumption or assertion that this maximization or optimization is optimal for all of society or at least for the top consumers of the global culture.
[image description: geordi la forge and data from star trek: the next generation. they both stand in front of a painting they are doing, geordi stopping to chat. he lists his visor and jokes, “I’m starting to think mine looks better with the VISOR off,” to which data responds, “I think it is beautiful”. the painting in front of geordi is pale, abstract, and swirly, but a wonky profile of data could just about be made out. data’s painting is straightforwardly of geordi, but not yet finished. end id]
Plot Designing 