Gabriel Bodeen @gabe@qoto.org

@androiddreams - I hope this involves lucid dreaming after careful meditative preparation

@dnc - I briefly thought it was a brain 😁

@fatsam - Interesting, thanks for the link!

I just learned today about the Vito Russo test for LGBTQ representation in film. It's similar to the Bechdel test for representation of women. Both are really low bars to step over, and very simple to apply. So they miss lots of nuance, but they're a reasonable start. Neat!
https://glaad.org/sri/2014/vitorusso/

@AnnaAnthro
I haven't read it - But who's the "we" in "we are not captains of our ships"? Speaking as an ex-neuroscientist, I've come to expect low quality arguments about free will from neuroscientists as they too often seem to feel no need to get acquainted with the relevant philosophy!

@dx
Yeah, something like that seems a good idea, though I'd make it more gentle. It can easily get too trigger happy with expulsions. Maybe the bad actor started out OK then changed. Or maybe the person who brought them in trusted them for "good enough" reason, but was wrong.

A gentler approach, after expelling the bad actor, might put the whole chain (the one who brought in the bad actor, the one who brought that one in, etc) on a warning list. Then leave it to human judgment. 🤷‍♂️

Hot hot 2024! It was the hottest year on record, as I'm sure you heard. These graphs stuck out to me.
https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2024/

Hot hot 2024! It was the hottest year on record, as I'm sure you heard. These graphs that stuck out to me.
https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2024/

@knittingknots2 - Yikes!

It looks clearly like they're testing the limits of what they can get away with.

@olives
That could be very nifty. What's an improvement it could use in your opinion?

@pluralistic
That's a really strange criterion. Whose rights are they if they're not human rights?

It should be! (Though I don't know how the courts have ruled.)

I'm tempted to call my representatives about this case. They're all GOP, I don't believe they care, but their staff will at least politely listen. 🤷‍♂️

Dream sequences in TV shows are invariably extremely bad. Dream sequences in movies are usually also bad.

Bad writing of dreams treats them as "easy mode": anything goes, there are no consequences, and it doesn't even make sense. But in good writing, dreams are "hard mode"! Most importantly, the writer needs to justify the dream's inclusion in the story by making it achieve something in a way that's better than a lucid scene could provide. Then additionally, the writer needs to creatively supply their own limits, consequences, order, and coherence, which is genuinely difficult.

Season 2, episode 1 fell flat.

Much of it was wasted on a meaningless dream sequence with everyone's least favorite character (Seldon's broken ghost). Someday I hope that TV writers will realize dream sequences are self-indulgent and invariably *suck* for audiences, but sadly that day has not yet come.

The remaining scenes were better but still didn't make any progress or develop any characters. It felt like they were just rushing through a few obligatory scenes to get to something more important. Whatever it is that's more important to the story though, that also has not yet come.

Foundation, the TV adaptation of Isaac Asimov's famous sci-fi books, had a surprisingly moving and beautiful first season. It departed from the books in many ways, but it worked. Its intimate arc about the Emperors was especially well crafted. Overall: a strong show, highly recommended.

This summer so far I enjoyed a Facebook group for nostalgic memes from our youth. Sadly it got taken over by two people (out of thousands) having a bitter political argument on an unrelated subject that started in various comment threads, as Internet arguments often do.

It's not the first time I've seen the admin role on Facebook groups get infiltrated & taken over. It makes me wish they had a democratic system. (Though they might have to limit it to users they've managed to authenticate are real human beings.)

Yes it's a trivial issue. But it's also kind of a funny way to be reminded of the power of democracy to better guard against self-serving leadership. 🙂

@henryfarrell
The discussion of adversarial collaboration and its uses reminds me of an activity I facilitated this week at a philosophy meetup. Two volunteers with quite divergent views agreed to discuss under the following rules:

• They took turns proposing statements that they thought the other person would agree with. Each turn, the other person first clearly indicated whether or not they agreed, then they moved on to a natural discussion for a little while explaining themselves and asking questions.
• When they found a statement they both accepted, they wrote it down on a shared piece of paper as one of their points of agreement. The goal of this discussion was to get as many interesting & valuable statements on the list as possible.

I wanted to see whether this could lead to greater convergence of opinion in philosophy than we normally see. It did not! As an observer I was disappointed. But the volunteers, in contrast, said it was wonderful and insisted on doing it again next time.

Despite the dearth of interesting & valuable points of agreement, it appears the process of thinking together was qualitatively different than trying to be persuasive about one's own view. We didn't test this method on political arguments but I'm keen to do so soon.