I don’t think I ever even heard of it. Does it work?
1 Like
I saw it years ago, but I think it was an interesting ( if gimmicky) idea in search of a decent story.
But I’m a sucker for stuff like that, why I like otherwise rubbish DePalma films 
2 Likes
Try Open Windows, it’s gimmicky as all hell but it’s tight tight tight!
In fact, I’m gonna go watch it again.
2 Likes
Have you ever seen Fire Maidens from Outer Space? featuring one lever that controls everything on the ship and a wooden ladder for easy access. And all the casual misogyny, of course.
Fabulous stuff.
1 Like
Oh yeah a painful rip off of Cat Women of the Moon.
The misogyny I think more of is stuff like oh thats just crazy woman talk kind of thing or the obviously smart and qualified woman scientist is always here let me make some coffee and sandwiches. One of the worst lines in the otherwise pretty neat The Creature With The Atom Brain is like ‘The only time my wife talks to me is when I want to go to sleep’, or you know this is man talk honey now run along.
1 Like
I’ve avoided seeing how much those soaps go for on ebay.
hey, wouldn’t it be awesome if we formed a loose organization of sorts which made knockoff Fight Club promotional soaps out of actual human fat and then sold them on the internet?
4 Likes
I have two of these:
It’s Omni Consumer Products, they also sold Brawndo for a bit, which I still have (empty) cans of. It had electrolytes.
5 Likes
for anyone who might be trying to get the original as a collectable, I seem to recall the original promo soap was shrink-wrapped. just puttin’ it out there…
2 Likes
#1 Overrated film I’ve ever seen:
Inception…
BWAAAAAAA, BWAAAAAAA, BWAAAAAAA
It’s the problem of solipsism. I was very surprised so many people had their minds blown trying to understand the nature of reality from the solipsist’s point of view. Of course you can’t prove the world outside your mind exists objectively, if you’re going to limit yourself from provable first principles.
The only way around that is either being satisfied knowing that reality might be an incredibly detailed illusion, or having some kind of faith that there’s a real world out there. They aren’t even mutually exclusive.
I don’t know about anyone else, but as a child, I was separated from my parents in an airport once. I was picked up by a stranger, brought to the administrative desk, and my parents were called. After what seemed to be an eternity, they came by and I went home with them.
The thing is, I had no way of knowing whether the people who picked me up were my actual parents, or just people who looked exactly like my parents. This confounded me for a very long time. But in the end, I saw that I was being taken care of, they seemed to know me, and I couldn’t notice anything different about them, so even if they weren’t my original parents, but some kind of clone, I was still doing fine.
5 Likes
The other way around that is to say that that concept of “knowing” is total BS. If the only thing Socrates knew was that he knew nothing, then I think his definition of knowledge was broken. By that extreme idea of knowing you can’t even know that you know nothing because that supposes there even is a you to know that. Perhaps worse, you can’t even know what it means to “know” something, so talking about knowledge at all is nonsense.
I know that reality really is there, but if one day I encounter overwhelming evidence that it is not, then I will know it is not, and those two things aren’t at all incompatible.
(I assume this is essentially the same thing as what you are saying, I just want to take back take back the word “know”)
2 Likes
I don’t know who makes those charts, but they all suck. I think they intentionally just toss about their “data points” randomly to promote forum rants and drive clicks.
1 Like
eh, some of their placement is not exactly how I’d do it. But the overall point that Cage’s crappy rep is only partly true, and that some of the non-crap is really great stuff was all I was going for.
You’re probably right that it came from some click-bait site, but I saw it posted in a forum and then image searched for it to post here, so… yeah.
1 Like
There’s a long epistemological discussion here, but I pretty much think we’re on the same wave length.
The idea was that the only safe assumption I can make, the only things I could know with much certainty are what I’m thinking at this very moment. I couldn’t objectively know anything about what I see or sense about the outside world other than the responses that said sights generate within me. And since the senses are unreliable, and memory is unreliable, you end up being the The Ruler of the Universe from Douglas Adams The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, in his little shack with his uncertain cat, and possibly imaginary visitors, never able to tell whether anything is real on his little island.
That’s how solipsism works as I understand it.
It does an end-run around nearly all those tough philosophical problems and replaces them with a single completely intractable problem instead, that itself is still open to being crushed under its own assumptions.
2 Likes
Finally got around to Frank. Glad I got it from the library.
I enjoyed the first half, then it tailed off rapidly. I ended up just feeling bad for Domhnall Gleeson.
Really would have preferred a film about Frank Sidebottom.
It was, at least, a step up from the awful The Men Who Stare at Goats. I’m not sure what Ronson’s writing is like, but I don’t much care for the film adaptations.
1 Like
So one I watched recently that turned out much better than expected and totally worth seeing is Whoever Slew Auntie Roo. Shelly Winters does her crazy schtick well in this US/UK co-production. A fun Hansel and Gretel story where you are not sure who is evil till the end, the kids who are kidnapped and held prisoner or Auntie Roo who is starting to go completely over the bend.
2 Likes
I got Sorcerer from the library on a whim and enjoyed it quite a bit. Criminals of various sorts living in some backwater village in South America sign up to haul unstable dynamite to a mine fire across 200 miles of jungle and quite a bit better than I expected. It bombed at the box office mostly due this film called Star Wars opening a week later.
I had heard good about the original film The Wages Of Fear so I have now just finished watching that. No backstory on why they are all in exile but still men being manly and taking chances with death for a ticket out of their situation.
Not sure how over/underrated they are but totally worth seeing.
3 Likes
Having studied Plato with a very very good teacher, I always cringe when people try to quote Socrates and say that he believed this. In almost all the dialogues, Socrates plays a devil’s advocate, positing one ridiculous hypothesis after the next, until somehow in reading his arguments you grasp the thing he not saying, which is true, but hard to put into words, and he himself has never put what he really meant into words either.
3 Likes
Well, I am talking about a character in fiction that was invented to demonstrate certain ideas and has become something much more in popular conception than his author made him. But I don’t really buy that reading for two reasons.
First, I find that Plato usually sets up the dialogues between Socrates and a dupe. The dupe throws out the slow pitch and Socrates hits them out of the park. For example, if Plato’s intention was not to have us believe that Socrates thought that no one knowingly did evil, why did he make Meno look so much the fool for believing the opposite?
Second, having been taught Plato by several different professors and having read commentaries on Plato’s work I haven’t come across the idea that Plato didn’t think that knowing you knew nothing was part of being wise. I mean, did Plato not believe in Platonic ideals? Constructing the metaphor of the cave to explain an intentionally absurd hypothesis that is meant to be disregarded would seem awfully sneaky.
I’m not being uncharitable to Plato here. I’m not saying, “Hey, that’s tautologically false” and walking away from it. I think the best version of what Plato was getting at as a recognition that there’s no bottom to our possibility of misunderstanding - that we should never be unwilling to consider that we may be wrong. What I don’t like is that people try to use that to invalidate “knowing.” If you ask me,
the kind of “knowing” that is vulnerable to the possibility of being mistaken
is to
what we are trying to get at when we talk about “knowing”
as
Phlogiston
was to
what we are trying to get at when we talk about “heat”
Just as we’ve gotten closer to whatever-it-is-in-the-real-world-we-want-to-mean-when-we-say-“heat” over the past two-thousand years we’ve gotten closer to whatever-it-is-in-the-real-world-we-want-to-mean-when-we-say-“know”. When people say, “You can’t really know that” they might as well be saying that heat is fluid. I reference Socrates as the mouthpiece of the wisdom of a bygone era that knew less than we know now. After all, if we should be ready to realize that we could always, always be wrong, we should be ready to accept that we might even be wrong about that.
3 Likes
All I know is that we actually can know things, and that the idea of knowledge, if it’s to have any power or meaning in the real world, can’t be contingent upon absolute certainty.
That’s how I pulled myself out of solipsism when I was a kid. I had to realize that the real world is interesting, even if it could entirely be illusory. And I can know things about it, even if my knowledge isn’t actually true. But I also recognized that it’s better to know true things than false things. Following that logic I came to science and mathematics, and eventually disabused myself of religion, because science taught me the value in discarding beliefs that didn’t have testable consequences.
2 Likes
Some cool ideas - letting them percolate. It’s been ages since I read Plato.
2 Likes
