Greta:
Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy?
Aren't we all! In my more insular moments I do often feel a sense of irrational resentment that there are almost no situations during the day when I am not in the presence of another human face. One of the few places is the toilet/bathroom/restroom! Maybe this can be related in some way to -1-'s point about toilets being the last remnants remaining when all other physical traces of our civilization have been eroded by the sands of time.
Yes, we want to encapsulate our own memories, not someone else's (which are now a dime a dozen), even if inferior. It's an interesting thing, this transference or delegation of our individual stuff to the usually-much-more-capable collective. Human specialisation is fast accelerating due to automation greatly reducing the number and scope of human employment opportunities. Basically, most individuals seem to be increasingly becoming dumb terminal (although not so much for those in high level, specialised fields), with almost all of their perceptions being that of a collective rather than unique.
This could branch off into the topic of alienation caused by that specialisation. It is indeed a sad fact that the efficiencies and material comforts of our civilizations are not possible without this increasing specialisation, but that the more we specialise - the smaller a cog we become in an increasingly big machine - the less easy it is to keep sight of the point of it all. I guess it's why so many people yearn for a life in which their efforts are directly related to their survival, even if that life is hard. It's a thought that I had continuously while driving across the beautiful high plains of Wyoming to see the eclipse and imagining the wagon trains of yesteryear travelling west across that wilderness, entirely dependant on their own resources and those of the land around them. I tried to convey it to the kids but they were glued to their laptop computers playing some kind of virtual reality game. Even when the batteries gave out they couldn't be persuded to take an interest. Maybe when they're older I'll try again.
Look at social media and how people parrot each other. It seems that "Monkey see, monkey do" over enough iterations becomes, well, humanity. Notice that, maybe for the first time, you seriously considered not preserving your memories and relying on those of others. While your own expression won out this time, it was less compelling than before, with Google Images ensuring you can always access photos to help revisit your memories.
Yes, and it was partly about the inability to preserve my own memories because of the technical limitations of cameras. It appears to be true what they say about eclipses. No photograph can do it justice. You have to either attempt to burn it into your memory or accept that the experience at the time was enough, without it having to persist.
Yes, it was Arrival. I came in partway through and rather baked so I found the temporal aspects hard to deal with at the time. I did like that for once the aliens we not like us yet also not mindless killers that would have about as much capacity to build and fly spacecraft over interstellar distances as a honey badger.
I also, at the time, misunderstood the key twist of the film (spoiler alert): that the memories she thought she was having of her daughter dying were actually premonitions of the death of a daughter who had not yet been born.
Heh, you are right - the dangerous nasties. Worst IMO are things like bobbit worms and centipedes - voracious, mindless and effective killing machines of much more sentient, feeling and sophisticated creatures. At least vicious reptiles and mammals tend to kill and then spend a long time relaxing and digesting - unlike those simpler, nastier things. I also find hagfish rather hard to love.
Funny thing, isn't it? Revulsion of the primal. Bacterial and fungal slimes, creepy crawlies and slime and goo-ridden critters, usually small. Ironically (or obviously) they are almost identical to our internals, which also disgust us. I suppose if we were more aquatic and slimier, we might feel a little differently.
Maybe. Or maybe we wouldn't feel at all. Maybe this empathy for our fellow furry creatures is unique to us mammals.
Australia may have much nature, but nearly everyone here lives in busy cities that are more or less like any other.
Yes, I hadn't considered that. A similar situation exists in the US, I presume. I guess few people have the time to properly explore their own wild backyard/outback. But I guess it does at least exist as a genuine wilderness. In Britain (or at least in England), there really isn't any genuine wilderness. Even the National Parks, like the Lake District, are the products of humans and their livestock.
My attitude appears to be pretty singular and I suspect to do with the impatience with non-fun nonsense that seems to come with age. I was very human centric even just a decade ago. I had a gradual dawning, maybe finally stepping back a little, and what I saw was an awful lot of innocent, and often vaguely well-intentioned, inauthenticity in myself and others - an approval-seeking overtipping of the balance between authentic expression and consideration for others. I suppose that's probably just experience observing youth to some extent.
Interesting point about the perils of approval-seeking. It's something I still suffer from myself.
-- Updated Sat Aug 26, 2017 2:07 pm to add the following --
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-1-:
Great simile! Reminds me of that famous song by Prince, "Acid Rain." Or was it titled "Purple Haze".
Purple raspberry little red corvet beret rain? He did like songs about various shades of red, didn't he?
Once I had been engaged in a discussion of what human artifacts would stand up to 100 million years of erosion. Because we talked how some dinosaurs must have reached some intelligence level comparable to human's, yet we see no remnants of their heritage. Interestingly, the upshot was that the only things that may remain intact in existence of all human-made products after a billion years are urinals and toilets. Now I see that's because they were created in the first place to withstand and to conduit washing away things.
I love that idea that toilets and urinals will be the last remnants of humanity, because they are specifically designed to withstand erosion by the noxious substances that are disposed of in them.
It's also interesting to consider the longevity of two types of information: information that is preserved by writing it in stone - i.e. by recording it in a durable static medium, and information that is preserved by continuously copying it - digital information in computer hard drives and DNA.
DNA and computer hard drives break relatively quickly. Much more quickly than stone. Yet the copying technique wins in the end. Information in our DNA has survived for up to hundreds of millions of years. Even the great pyramids will be long gone in that time. (I don't know about the great urinals). The dynamic is more durable than the static.
-- Updated Sat Aug 26, 2017 2:39 pm to add the following --
-1-:
Here in London I never looked up, but the sunshine's intensity was decreased to about 70 percent of normal, which was both weird and welcome. My eyes are bothered by too much light.
I was momentarily confused there because the eclipse wasn't visible at all from London, except very slightly just before sunset. Then I realized that you mean London, Ontario. In which case, if you're still there on April 8th 2024 I think you'll get the total eclipse as it plows through the Great Lakes.
Steve, please tell us lusty tales of your adventure as you reached up with your arms from the top of the Rockies in Wyoming, and brushed the dark, rocky and dusty underside of the moon with it as it passed over you making its legendary proprietous and trademarked "Whoooosh...!" sound.
Sadly I was on a small grassy knoll on the campus of Casper College so couldn't reach it. I love the image though. It might make a good painting (with a small written disclaimer at the bottom stating "Warning. Do not attempt this. Moon is a quarter of a million miles away.")
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-- Updated Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:15 am to add the following --
, as though they were the only important life on Earth. Maybe it's an Australian thing - rooting for the underdog?