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On Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 805
Now, topics of the Supernatural that are of interest, and I wrote the headline before I gave it any thought, and because there are a lot of related things of interest I'll be brief...
Starting with Zombies, no explaining their popularity, or there is, it's Everyman's call to the Hero's journey, the realization of the mindless disorder of society that puts him at odds with it and allows him the liberty of war. That death here is more horrific than a natural death is because there's the realization that one could become one of them, the contagion of bad or diseased thought, another mindless shopper, consumer, citizen, and the death, the reanimation of the corpse, implies a loss of spirituality - that one has fallen into a deep and dire well of materialism. There is, surprisingly, a lot in common with this contemporary myth and virtually every major religion on earth, but those are thoughts I'll let you examine for yourself...
Vampires, the Undead come back to suck the blood of the living, are a curious thing as well, popular again across all cultures and times, and to explain the myth (I'll let go the reality for the moment) - I'd start with they are the memories of the deceased, come to haunt the living. Ghosts, a similar idea, are more fleeting, harmless; Vampires are by their nature malevolent and bent on corporeal harm. Vampires might be memories of the deceased that interfere with the survivors continuing on in the world, memories of violence or abuse, or a particularly gruesome disease or death, and the ceremonies designed to prevent the reanimation of the Vampires corpse, generally involving violence, might be a way to visit upon the corpse some portion of the abuse or violence they, in life, inflicted on the living. Consider Vlad the Impaler. The reality of Vampires - prematurely buried victims of disease or illness, that might through their rising infect others, might more pragmatically explain the pains taken to lay the Vampire more permanently to rest.
And finally there are Werewolves, or any of a number of their night-crawling and shape-shifting kin, on the surface, clearly rabies, underneath however a warning to beware the savagery of otherwise normal people in the evening. People who appear, by day, to be one thing, then by the evening turn into something completely different. The personification of Mans more bestial nature.
Now these are just a few fleeting thoughts to get you started, but the prevalence of the myths across cultures suggests that they carry a value or meaning, you might interpret them differently...
A Quiet Place
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 802
Which was just silly, really, and I was too annoyed with the grotesquely flawed internal logic to give a damn about the characters. Just a lot of silly effects thrown thoughtlessly around a hastily written plot. Silly.
The Post-Holocene Geology
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 790
Now this is an idea that intrigues me.
Geology, we think of it as "static", the earth is the earth and that's it, rocks, minerals, gems, they're all there, we (almost) know everything, it's just a matter of finding it.
But, imagine, after the Anthropocene, the post-holocene, how in hundreds of millions of years the geology will changed. We've combined minerals and elements in thousands of new and unexpected ways, and as the continents subduct and boil beneath the oceans those combinations will give rise to hundreds, if not thousands of new and unimagined minerals. Skyscrapers of concrete and steel and filled with glass will form pegmatites lined with giant shards of quartz, included with golden and silver phantoms and rutile needles, percolating toxic hydrocarbons and fluids melted from landfills will fill them with new minerals and gems, to be recognized, excavated and mined by creatures as far from our thinking as ours is from the dinosaurs.
Which kind of excites me, as an exercise of the imagination, but for the moment I'll have to content myself with finding those gems already here, which is proving troublesome enough. Only 4 or 5 months until Summer...
Purdue Pharmaceuticals
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Link of the day
- Hits: 749
Know people that have died as a result of the Opioid Epidemic? Chances are it wasn't Heroin. In fact, chances are the blame could be directly laid at the door of the Purdue Family of Pharmaceuticals.
Addiction is only legal if it's monopolized by Big Pharma:
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/08/the-making-of-an-opioid-epidemic
and: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain
and, with patents about to expire, you extend your lease by creating the competition: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/after-illegally-pushing-oxycontin-super-rich-family-set-up-2nd-opioid-company/
What do you do when tens of thousands of people die yearly to support your Billionaire lifestyle? You patent a cure: https://www.ft.com/content/a3a53ae8-b1e3-11e8-8d14-6f049d06439c
While their being sued, this is the endgame of Capitalism, and money doesn't bring anyone back from the grave.
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