Skip to main content

Posts

Dune (2021) review by a Dune fanatic

 So, I watched the new Dune movie yesterday, and my mind is conflicted, stirred, perplexed and bewildered, so in order to sort myself out, I decided to write this review. As a film nut I'm going to compare Dune (2021) by Dennis Villeneuve to Dune (1984) by David Lynch ( and definitly not the Alan Smithee version ), and skip the Dune miniseries as I only watched it bitsy and half-heartedly way too long ago to matter now. There will be tons of spoilers, opinions and other dangers ahead. Now, other people have delved into the usual stuff about visuals ( they are lovely ), special effects ( they are great ), cinematography ( it is awesome ), sound ( it is fantastic ) and so forth, but I wanted to focus less on that and more on the story, the point of the book, the characters themselves, and dig into the nitty gritty of how these films cater to a serious Dune nerd like myself. Storytelling Now, the story of the book and how it is told has often been described as un-filmable, especially ...
Recent posts

Is Dune a white saviour story?

 No. There's been some buzz around the internet around the recently launched film Dune , directed by Dennis Villeneuve . I've anticipated and been hungry for this movie for many years now. I'm a huge Dune fanboi, and the book by Frank Herbert , first published (as a series) back in 1965 is a seminal and highly important book to me, one I've read more times than I dare to count. We're talking 30+. Some of that buzz has been about Dune being a white saviour story, where some priviledged white person comes into a native setting and saves them from their ignorance, starts a revolution and captures the princess. There's a lot of these stories thruogh history, and it glorifies the superiority of the white race or white culture, and is aiming to seem kind and ethical while at the same time being snotty and racist. Dune is not that story. Without spoiling anything else about the story, in case you're new to the world of Frank Herbert, it's the opposite of that. ...

Everything is a language game

Language is taught through imprinting in the brain. It is a wholly cultural concept; no language genes, no universal grammar, no abstract truth of objects, no analytical value outside of a descriptive notion of how we go about creating and using it. And every word you know is not the same word that others know. When I say "fish", it is not the same "fish" that you know. Sure, there are lots of similarities, but there are lots of differences. Even the words in between our "important" words, like "and" or "maybe" are not the same. When I say "and", it is not the same "and" that you know. Or that anyone else knows, or the same that anyone throughout the whole of history of human-kind knows. Sure there are similarities, but they are simply not the same. Just similar. Similar enough for us to think we understand each other. Wittgenstein's language games are far more extreme than I think even he thought it was like; it...

Fast supercomputers in your bedroom!

Note : Another message to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe that's disappeared into a black hole. This is a about a news item about a new fast neural net experiment, and my reply in order to bring some reality to the AI hype. --- Just finished the latest great episode and wanted to give some context and insight into the fast simulation of neural networks featured in Science or Fiction (item 1). The technique isn't new, it's based on prior work back when computers were even slower. It's essentially a way to move some data generating/processing from the CPU into the functional GPU space because GPUs are designed to blast through things like rastrums really fast with anonymous functions really really fast, so if you can move your data into procedural buffers directly in the GPU you have a big speed improvement on your hand. To understand why there's some basic software development concepts we need to dig into; A typical (and often the first way people learn) way of d...

Ethics and objectivity

To accept the subjective truth of what the universe is, we must reject objectivity as nothing more than lazy thinking. We need to recognize that Objectivity is a comfortable and easy shortcut we all use to try to stop arguing about what is true and meaningful. And it unfortunately works very effectivly. Even when we know just how much culture shapes the zeitgeist of moral imperatives that form well-trodden path of acceptable steps forward, that path is predictably misleading to any lover of progress. Objective ethics are the inventions of lazy thinkers everywhere.

Religion

There are no subconscious nor unconscious states of consciousness. There is only one conscious gradient of human categorisation from the state of less to a state of much; thought is an exploration of what is possible with what memories and perceptions and biological physicality you've got available. Awareness of the mental and the physical is an eternal journey from the quantum foam of your brain to the edge of the universe. There are no gates, only focus. Our individual perception is the sensory limit of the universe; from when it hits us, we are alone to ponder its importance. We are given hints by our social nature and through our categorical tools, but in our minds we are completely alone. It is tempting in that space - if loneliness scares you or feels uncomfortable - to create a friend, and so we create a voice, and this voice is a vocal representation of your consciousness, with all the limitations of a voice embedded in it. In this lonely space it is also tempting to create...