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I saw Sunshine the other day. I also wrote a previous blogpost about wanting to improve my employment chances by using this blog to promote my professional (ha!) activity–so strap yerselves in for some mediocre philosophising. But first, a note on the film: basically, I thought the film was quite good, but the resolution of the mystery was a little bit surprising and disappointing. Specifically, I was expecting that the mystery would involve some sort of crawling Cthonic horror out of the cold, dead vasts of space, or somesuch–sun demons? Probing aliens? Anything? I was expecting it to be a lot more like Event Horizon, a film that many people have told me they found truly horrifying and frightening. I must be numb. The plot involved space madness, and Ren and Stimpy did it so well that it has yet to be beat. (Well, that’s enough discussion of that to satisfy considerations of fair use, surely.)

Less review, more dry theory, as they say… Righty-o…

There’s a scene where the crew are taking a vote as to whether they need to skewer their fellow crew-member, suicidal, who they think sabotaged the vessel. There are four (sane and voting) crew-members, and they agree that the vote has to be unanimous. (A rare moment of consensus decision-making, or something akin to it, in the media?) Anyhow, one of the crew-members is very much a utilitarian, greater-good sort of bloke–check out how he ends up if you want to see just how utilitarian he turns out to be. And I assume that the crew all think that they’re justifying their murdering with a vote, because they have rights that their voting captures, and they want to preserve those rights, hence the vote has to be unanimous. But, of course, one crew-member refuses to be complicit in the murder of her colleague.
‘What happens now’? she asks, in perhaps the least painful passage of dialogue in this somewhat cheesy scene. The utilitarian, as way of response, grabs the electrified scalpel and makes to head off to the infirmary, murder on his mind.

And it struck me that this is why utilitarians and rights-theorists can’t get along (one reason, anyhow)–the utilitarian can say, as a general rule, hey, we ought to believe in rights since it brings about the most good. But then when they don’t get their way they can always undermine their commitment rule-utilitarianism by an act-utilitarian measure, and convince themselves (if they cannot convince others) that whether or not the rule is good in most cases, in this very case–where they’re about to get outvoted–they should use act-considerations and ignore the vote.

Yes, yes, yes, I hear you ask–but what would Cthulhu do?

I’m keen to hear readers’ observations about the following two phenomena. (I was sorely tempted to write, ‘the observations of readers’, since I am uncertain where the apostrophe goes; that’s ten years of tertiary education for you.)
First, the experience of entering a CD store and just forgeting, automatically, every single band you’ve ever liked. Why is that? I sometimes get a similar experience in bookshops, but CD-purchasing brings on the amnesia more than anything else.
Second, and what I assume is a related phenomena, forgetting all of those moments and observations you had catologued under the ‘Must write this up for my blog‘ part of you brain.

[However, this second phenomena is, I assume, distinct from the following two blog-related experiences: (i) being unabe to capture properly the essence and wit of the situation that you’re blogging about (for instance, my failure to capture my amazement and frustration with that Maccas-eating bloke on the train); (ii) mistakenly thinking that what you intend to post is actually worth posting.]

Comments, discussions, appropriate identification and labelling of these phenomena–all v. welcome.

Netstumbled my way across this;

“The top 15 unintentionally funny comic book covers.”
Perhaps those theories about Archie and Jughead in Chasing Amy are correct…

… and the case against.

Update:

It appears that these images were originally posted here...

Hot on the heels of my previous post, concerned in part with food mascots encouraging their own culinary demise, this site was linked on boingboing;

Suicide Food - “Animals that desire to be eaten. Sickening.” A site devoted to such mascots.

My copy of Windows Media Player (v. 10) keeps informing me, ‘A null reference pointer was passed to the stub.’ It seems to happen when I whack in my USB drive. Do any readers know what this means–does it have anything to do with my being unable to click the buttons in ’skin’ mode, and being unable to burn CDs? Any advice on a better, freeware media player that can burn CDs, etc.?

I clicked on the MS web help option–any ideas, readers? … ‘cos Microsoft is fresh out. Quelle sur-fucking-prise, as BWP would say.

I spent this last Easter honouring the death and resurrection of our lord by eating chocolate in a mealy-mouthed commercialised re-enactment of the fertility ceremony which Christianity co-opted in the first place, as usual, and as my gf ate a chocolate frog, the obvious question occurred; why a frog?

Her theory was that it all started with Freddo, while I was of the opinion that Freddo was just taking advantage of the zeitgeist, the eating of chocolate frogs already being popular. After some research, it seems she was right. Freddo traces his origins to 1930, and apparently was the first chocolate frog, invented as a counter-suggestion to the eating of chocolate mice, which it was assumed would frighten housewives and other folks of delicate constitution.

I wonder if Python’s classic ‘Crunchy Frog‘ sketch owes a debt to ol’ Freddo…

Freddo as he appears here is demonstrating another curious aspect of food product mascots everywhere; he seems to be smacking his chops in anticipation of deliciousness, while it would be more appropriate for him to be scared shitless, since it is he who is to be eaten. Perhaps he’s just got a kinky cannibalism thing going on, but even if it’s consensual, that shit ain’t legal.

In case you’re wondering, Freddo’s hat sports the MacRobertson tartan, a reference to Sir Macpherson Robertson, renowned Melbourne philanthropist, and the founder of MacRobertson’s Chocolates, who originally produced the delicious frog.

I was faffing about online the other day–procrastination is the grown-up word for it–and I realized that people can do a lot of cool stuff with the Internet. (Perhaps this is pretty obvious, but I thought it was quite profound.) The example I came up with was role-playing games.

Once upon a time I was a big fan of pen-and-paper RPGs (readers can probably figure out that I am a bit of a Luddite, based solely on my profound revelation vis-a-vis the Internet, above). But when I was a dice-rolling nerd, all of these games cost a lot of pocket money. I must have had about $400-worth of Werewolf: The Apocalypse books. Nowadays, you young kids are spoilt for choice. There seems to have been an upsurge in smal-press companies writing for RPGs, thanks in part to the OGL. I am not sure whether the OGL came about because Wizards of the Coast does lots of interesting and visionary work, or because people got smart about hacker-ethos projects; whatever the reason, it was a smart move, and nerds everywhere are trying to make their socially-awkward hobbies into profitable businesses. (This is not always a good thing.)

There is another way that the Internet has changed RPG distribution: there are now companies that release their rules online, for nothing, or next-to-nothing. (Mathematicians amongst our reading populace: what is next to nothing, exactly?) So, you can now get the 4th edition of Ars Magica here, and MetaScape II here; there are some silly things out there as well.

Damn, I paid $55 for my copy of Ars.

However, these seem to all be changes in distribution patterns and techniques; there is no obvious radical change in the way that RPGs are developed, that can be traced to the Internet. A mate of mine suggested that there is a different field–philosophy–where blogs and the Internet are having a big impact on the way that things get done. So, the J-Stor datatbase has many, many journals online. (That said, my library has some frustrating shortcomings in their subscriptions that J-Stor does not make up for, dammit!) And while some philosophers have blogs that are part philosophy, part information about the philosophy profession, and part social commentary (I read this one a fair bit) there are other blogs where the authors seem to post almost nothing but arguments. It seems to me that this could, if it isn’t doing so already, change the way that the philosophy discipline works. And that’s pretty exciting.

So, do philosophy professionals pay attention to what is going on in the blogosphere? Does this mean that if I want to get ahead professionally, that I should start posting philosophical thoughts and arguments on this page? And will my writing under a nom de plume help or hinder?

– Posted by Rabbit Zero

So apparently one of our categories is ’sholastic pedantry’. In the interests of good scholarship, I should point out that we mean ’scholastic pedantry’. Of course, I am now a bit stuck: can I legitimately place this post into a category which the post itself calls somewhat into question?

NB. See this for ‘irony’ (and heaps of other technical terms you’ve never heard of.)

Harvard Uni Library sure lets you search in a lot of languages, but Lojban ain’t one of them (yet).

– Posted by Rabbit Zero (who still can’t work out how to upload picture-files…)