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obeying the simple laws of physics
Saturday, December 3 2016
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Gretchen was elsewhere most of the day, so I spent it recreationally. I drank some kratom tea and did some work at my computer. Eventually I painted a picture. In 2006 while visiting Antigua, Guatemala, I'd photographed a scrawny white dog against a concrete background, a scene I've long wanted to paint. Unfortunately, the textures of the concrete and details of dog were impossible to capture in the tiny credit-card-sized format I've been working in. I produced a painting, but it wasn't what I had in mind. It's terribly overworked, so some things that had once been good have been lost in a swamp of subsequent layers and interventions. I felt bad about destroying a background that was never captured, so I thought ahead to scan the painting before undoing (as best I could) that mistake. This allowed me to incorporate an over-colorized interim version into the double-flip version.
This afternoon I got in the Subaru and drove out to my favorite retail establishment, the Tibetan Center thrift store. I wanted to go on a Saturday because I like the staff better on those days. Today there was a plump youngish woman with green hair running the register, though she kept saying things that the nice skinny guy kept interpreting as confessions of a hangover. Eventually he told her she could go, so by the time I'd found what I wanted, the nice skinny guy was the only one working there. The only thing I found to buy was a stethoscope with a strange funnel-shaped opening that seemed to work as a highly-directional acoustic spy microphone. It was mine for a dollar.
Back at the house, I watched a few episodes of the new HBO series Westworld, based on a novel by Michæl Crichton written in the early 1970s. As with other novels by Michæl Crichton, Westworld concerns an immersive park where things go awry. Having recently binge-watched all of Black Mirror, I found Westworld to deeply unsatisfying. Not only was it poorly-acted (at times the hurried delivery of exposition felt like a scene from Law and Order) and wooden, it also expended way too much energy on sadism and utterly-predictable gunplay and not all that much on fun stuff (like the meaning and significance of consciousness and freewill). I also kept having to remind myself that Westworld is presented as a place in the real world, not something happening in a computer simulation (as in Black Mirror's "San Junipero"). Westworld functions as a place for good-natured fun because it is largely peopled with robots so advanced that they are indistinguishable from real humans (and have all the traits necessary to be sympathetic characters). I know Crichton came up with Westworld back when human-like robots were easier to imagine than fully-immersive virtual reality, but the notion of building an actual world for the purposes of entertainment (given the limitations and expense of such a place) seems ridiculously dated from the perspective of 2016. Those limitations, expenses, and dangers become obvious when you have sadistic fratboys turned loose with guns in a world peopled by robots. They can shoot and kill the robots just like one can in Grand Theft Auto. But unlike in Grand Theft Auto, there are real bullets flying around, obeying the simple laws of physics. How do they know to only hit robots, epecially after hitting a rock? And once robots are shot full of holes and buildings are burnt to the ground, replacing them a lot more trouble than it is in a virtual world. The whole thing makes so little sense that I had trouble enjoying what I was seeing. But I kept at it anyway. My colleague Ca had told me I have to give it a few episodes.
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