Nil's Sinister Objectives

In no particular order:

1. Obliterate the subjective and the unknown.

2. Break the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

3. Create a synthetic life-form with conscious evolution to replace humanity.

The Shape of Things

So this evening I went out with Rachel to see a play. She needed to write a critical analysis of a play, and I thought it would be nice to go out with her to a play.

So. Play.

The play's name is "The Shape of Things." From here on out there are massive spoilers that pretty much ruin the play, so if you plan on seeing it, go see it. It's pretty good. And stop reading here.

The play starts out with a young lady stepping over the cord to get closer to a statue. The security guard asks there to step back over, and they have a conversation. She's apparently planning on spray-painting a penis on the statue, as the original penis was plastered over with fig leaves, due to complaints about the nudity. She's an art student.

He doesn't really try to stop her, and gets her phone number, and when his shift is up, he heads off and she presumably spraypaints on the statue.

They get together, and start dating. He starts losing weight for her, changes his hair. Two friends of his are introduced, another young lady and her fiancee, said fiancee being the guy's former roommate and best bud.

Over time, he changes more - stops biting his nails, starts wearing contact lenses instead of glasses, dresses differently, and has his nose modified. He keeps a diary of this all - the decreasing weight, and all various changes.

His best bud's fiancee has had a long-time crush on him, and with him getting cuter by the day, she winds up kissing him and going out to the woods (and then implied sex, apparently).

The young lady confesses kissing him to her fiancee, who talks with the guy's girlfriend, who kisses said fiancee to get back at the other two.

She brings up all of this when the young lady, herself, and the guy go get coffee at a Starbucks together. The young lady goes away almost in tears, and the guy is mad at her. He doesn't want to break up with her, and asks what she wants. She asks him to break all contact with them, giving them no explanation, if he wants to stay with her like he says. He agrees.

The next scene is them at the thesis presentation for the artist girl. The guy runs into his former best bud, and the other girl, who have broken up by this point. They all sit separately.

The Artist girl goes to present her thesis work, and it turns out her presentation, her "sculpture thingie" as she previously referred to it, is her boyfriend, who has proposed to her by this point. She has sculpted him from being pathetic and undesirable into being much "better" by society's standards, using the tools of persuasion and desire, though always leaving the choice up to him. She has improved him cosmetically, and modified all of his relationships. Her entire relationship with him over the semester was all a lie to sculpt him into a different person.

He is outraged, and comes to her after the presentation, and they have an argument over the morality of her actions. To her, everything he did was his own choice - he had chosen to lose weight, he had chosen to abandon his friends for her. To him, he thought that she was completely and horribly unethical, in the deceit of the relationship. But in her eyes, the relationship was real - for him. And the choices he had made, he had made honestly, though perhaps a bit misinformed.

He asks of anything was true, and she says that none of it was true. As she leaves, she tells him that one time, while they were sleeping together, one of the things she had said was true (they both know, though the audience doesn't). He goes to the videos of them in bed (part of the exhibition), and finds the part, playing it over and over, biting his nails and munching on the cookies provided at the exhibit, crying as the lights dim and the play ends.

A number of things concerning this. First, the lady considers what she is doing as amoral. Not moral, not immoral, but rather because she was doing art, the normal rules don't apply. Adam, the guy, when he finds out, finds it morally abhorrent.

Second, the question of subjectivity. It's mentioned quite a bit in the play, and comes up quite large in the conclusion, as the art lady and the guy have been living very different versions of life, and have very different views on things. Was his relationship true? - It certainly had effects on his life.

Third, there is a question of value - what is better, and what is worse, and how it matters. the art lady is apparently quite aware how subjective her changes for the "better" are. But, as she notes rather bitterly during the presentation, as he became better-looking and more self-confident, he also started having more questionable behavior. Getting it on with his best friend's fiancee being a major case in point here. Additionally, at the end of the play, the main character says that he liked who he was, even if he wasn't as "good" then as now. His friend, somewhat earlier in the play, remarks on how his friend is acting more like him, and how the ying-yang of the two doesn't work anymore - he liked the guy for being wildly different from himself.

This provoked interesting conversations after the play, of course, but that's for a different time.

I found it very good, provoking me both emotionally and intellectually.

The government probably isn't listening to your cellphone.

So I recently (in my informatics class) ran across the amount of data that was sent via cell-phones last year (2008). Roughly 15 exabytes.

What is an exabyte? 1000 (or 1024, depending on interpretation) petabytes.

What is a petabyte? 1000 (or 1024, depending on interpretation) terabytes.

What is a terabyte? 1000 (or 1024, depending on interpretation) gigabytes... which is still a billion bytes, each of which is eight bits.

For scale: If they finally convert the library of congress scans into text, the entire Library of Congress (today) would fit on roughly 10 terabytes. Which puts the amount of information conveyed over cell-phones to be one hundred thousand Libraries of Congress.

So can the government go through all that? Sure. Can they go through it in any meaningful way?

Hell no.

NEEDS MORE PIG CANNON!

So I went and saw District 9. I recommend it for everyone. It is not perfect, but it is very, very good in several distinct areas.

Social commentary: One way to put District 9 is "Apartheid with Aliens." It doesn't stop here, though - what happens in the movie are a series of situations that happen in many parts of the world. As a Global Studies major, I recognized a lot of the interactions between slum dwellers and the government. Or them and the people exploiting them. Very much a universal message, though most people do their best to ignore slums and/or xenophobia. The whole first third of the movie is paradise for this. Some of the things that happens are truly horrific. I didn't see anything that humans haven't done to other humans.

Carnage/hilarity/crazy-cool: It's a very, very sobering movie, but sometimes... people explode. Or there is the pig cannon (that must become a meme). And there are so many Really Cool Things...

Characterization/character change: Wikus is, perhaps, one of the most interesting characters I have watched. Very interesting choice for a main character. Over the course of the story, there is much character change/rejection-of-change, and even if most of the character change (or lack of change) is Wikus based... it's still great. Not all the characters change, but some a very intense. A particular man who stays seated, for instance.

Paradigm-changing: Most aliens visiting earth have shiney technology, advanced intellect, and tend to generally have halos. District 9 aliens... not so much. You'll have to see it.

Suspenseful: In hindsight, the movie makes a lot of sense. But during the movie, there's a lot of mystery, and I really had no idea where it was going. Stuff goes down, and it puts people on the edge of their seats, straining to watch what happens next. So please avoid plot summaries, please avoid TvTropes - watch the movie first. Like as soon as you can.

So watch District 9. It's a good movie for people who are not children. If you live in the new BHC, talk to me about it - I plan on watching it again in theaters.