Fopling

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Maduros are so good I just ate four plantains worth of them all as soon as they are done cooking.

Discovering that The Church was originally written to be the third film in Lamberto Bava's Demons series suddenly makes so much click into place.

Weird that the Michele Soavi film The Church posits that demon possession is spread the same way as zombie infection.

Unfortunate that C.H.U.D. isn't a good movie given its linguistic legacy. At least the core of present usage is there in the film. A Chud is something you become. The Chud problem is largely the result of bad governance and a corporate media unable to investigate what's literally under their noses.

Much like a lion, if a rock could speak we wouldn't be able to understand it. The fact that an LLM generates comprehensible text is as good a reason as any to believe it is not and cannot be a thinking entity.

A circle of hell called "the details" because after all, that's where the devil is.

Working with kids is the most tiring job I've ever had. I helped chaperone a sixth grade sleep away camp trip this week. After getting back I slept for eleven hours. I had a great time, but a couple more 18 hour days of being "on" all the time would have killed me.

I thought teaming up with professor Schrodinger in the physics department would help get IRB approval for my metaphysics of quantum states experiment, but they seemed really caught up on the welfare of the cat.

I had a dream that I was teaching Adam Smith to a class of sixth graders (clearly already a nightmare). When we got to the invisible hand I said "Imagine a giant hand that's invisible and it's shaking everything around you." Just the worst explanation.

The IRB actually signed off on my philosophical experiment, but the university refused to give me the money to buy all the ship pieces I needed.

"I've only read two books in my life. One I didn't finish, the other was the phone book." - Francesco, Cemetery Man

Thinking about the guy who once replied to a joke (not mine) in a philosophy discord server with, "Not funny. Have you read Heidegger?" I still haven't figured out how much Heidegger is required to make one funny, I guess I'll keep reading.

The IRB was overreacting to my latest philosophy experiment they said, "You can't drown children." The kid was never in any real danger of drowning in such a shallow pond. The only real casualties were the suede shoes of that nice passerby who waded in to help.

I have tried to carve the killer from Stage Fright into a jack o'lantern. It doesn't look like much now, but with a light inside it should be pretty cool.

It's been really difficult to get IRB approval for experimental philosophy ever since the incident with that poor violinist.

It's really difficult to get IRB approval for experimental philosophy. They really hate the idea of tying people to trolley tracks.

It's really difficult to get IRB approval for experimental philosophy ever since we discovered the long term health impacts of intuition pumps.

Stage Fright is the most beautiful slasher ever made. If you are looking for a great horror movie you haven't seen before, I highly recommend that one! There is a lot of giallo in its DNA, hence how good it looks, but by genre convention it is very firmly a slasher.

I'm buying a movie theater where I will show only the most alienating Italian films of the 70s.

Of course all my favorite philosophers are wrong. If I thought they were right about everything there would be no point in continuing to do philosophy.

The hard problem reduces to the easy problem, but the easy problem is insoluble

The Man with the Fir Tree for Tax Purposes A History of Violence for Tax Purposes The Adopted Son for Tax Purposes A Cat in the Brain for Tax Purposes His Days are Numbered for Tax Purposes Sorry, for only listing one commonly recognizable film. The obscure ones just work so well.

Making a point of saying GUATTARI and Deleuze to emphasize who had more influence over their collaborative writing

The outcry against AI is stronger than against other new forms of fixed capital because it's so much more obvious that it is just an accumulation of dead labor made to approximate the living. It is diffuse enough you can actually pick out the individual pieces of dead labor which compose it.

The FT is the only British newspaper worth reading for a leftist. I'll die on that hill.

Not the point of any recent news involving The Verdurin Society, but it's baffling to name your outré art collective after Proust characters who were famously frauds with bad taste. It's like naming your child welfare charity the Humbert Humbert Group (perhaps more accurate to the Verdurin Society)

I asked a group chat of people mostly unfamiliar with philosophy to give me their answers to Newcomb's problem. Thus far I have received zero actual answers. So it seems like the actual most popular solution to the problem is: "shut up nerd"

Developing niche beef about tea processing. I don't like the stuff that's been run through a CTC machine, not because it's worse processing (some is very good) but because the smaller pieces are impossible to brew in a gaiwan.

You can totally have a masterpiece film with no plot, dialogue, characters, or sound, but it's rare and difficult to achieve. All those things can turn a film lacking in visual dynamism into a masterpiece if done well (Twelve Angry Men for example), without them there is nowhere to hide.

My take on plot in film is that it isn't strictly necessary, but if you are going to have one I'm going to judge the quality of the plot as a core feature of the film. Same for music, dialogue, or anything else not strictly required by the medium.

Nothing quite as Armenian as having a man emerge from a cocoon made of illuminated manuscripts as the opening shot of your film.

To get more specific but without spoilers, I think the reflexive criticism the film wields undermines its own reason to exist. I find myself questioning why I should have watched it at all after internalizing its themes.

I'm torn on my opinion of Digger. It's a well made and attractive film with pretty good performances. As I was leaving the theater I was extremely impressed! I still think it's one of the most interesting climate films made so far, but it has continued to sour in my mind over the last couple days.

I think georgism is extremely funny because the idea that land value taxes are good is pretty empirically sound. They do in fact lead to more development, denser development, and higher housing supply. Yet georgists are all cranks. They double down on utopianism rather than take the small win.

Picturing a ball turret strapped to the back of a Toyota Hilux with wings. I now desperately need to get in contact with George Miller.

Field zoologist, studying animal behavior in Africa.