I just finished watching The Mist and I can’t help but write about it.
I can’t believe I wasted my time on this… I don’t even know how to define it, it’s just one wrong letter away from the perfect anagram. I must confess it is definitely not my favourite genre, but this is so lame it’s hardly bearable. 7.4 out of 10? Are you serious, IMDb? This may not be the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but goes straight into my Top Ten, and I get the feeling that if I ever have the guts to watch it again, which is unlikely, it might end up at a close second place.
But the real mistery is that it’s been directed by Frank Darabont, just like The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, both also based on novels by King. Maybe the man needs prisons to make good movies, so let’s throw him into one, just to make sure he doesn’t get lost in The Mist again.
Am I the only one in the world thinking that nothing is going to change anyway?
Poor, silly, deluded me.
“But aren’t you the one who’s always saying there is no right and wrong, it’s a duality, and dualities are an illusion?”
“How does that apply?”
“You tell me! I don’t even know what it means!!”
Dharma & Greg – Good Cop Bad Daughter (3×14)
The big news is that finally Google has a competitor.
But they don’t seem to have a high self-esteem.
UPDATE 20080825:
They seem more self-confident by now. Too bad for them I took a screenshot back then.
And to those of you argumenting that their not showing on the first page may have been a testament to the fairness of the search results… well, if you ever show up… I guess you’d probably be right.
My friend Simone points me to an insightful article about a matter which interests me a great deal: can machines be conscious? By chance, this comes just a couple of days after Rough Type pointed me to an interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter, a very important and well-known cognitive scientist and, dare I say it, one of my personal heroes.
Being a cognitive science, mind philosophy, AI, whatever mind stuff junkie, I’ve read a lot of interesting things about this subject and its whereabouts. I tend to disagree with the general statement that nobody really knows exactly what consciousness is; I think I’m a little more in line with Hofstadter’s view you can find at the start of the interview. But I believe this may not interest you as much as the fact that, among all the things I’ve heard about the subject, the one that I found the most suggestive is the dialogue between Neo and Rama-Kandra in the movie Matrix: Revolutions:
R: I am Rama-Kandra. This is my wife, Kamala. My daughter, Sati. We are most honored to meet you.
N: You are programs.
R: Oh, yes. I am the power-plant systems manager for recycling operations. My wife is an interactive software programmer. She is highly creative.
K: What are you doing here? You do not belong here.
R: Kamala! Goodness, I apologize. My wife can be very direct.
N: It’s okay. I don’t have an answer. I don’t even know where “here” is.
R: This place is nowhere. It is between your world and our world.
[...]
N: Is that what you’re doing here?
K: Rama, please.
R: I do not want to be cruel, Kamala. He may never see another face for the rest of his life.
R: I’m sorry.
N: You don’t have to answer that question.
R: No, I don’t mind. The answer is simple. I love my daughter very much. I find her to be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. But where we are from, that is not enough. Every program that is created must have a purpose. If it does not, it is deleted. I went to the Frenchman to save my daughter.
R: You do not understand.
N: I just have never…
R: Heard a program speak of love.
N: It is a human emotion.
R: No, it is a word. What matters is the connection the word implies.
R: I see that you are in love. Can you tell me what you would give to hold on to that connection?
N: Anything.
R: Then perhaps the reason you are here is not so different than the reason I am here.
cat >/dev/null is 
