I need your help #bookstodon. One of the classes I'm taking at the graduate level this semester is Religion & Science Fiction. I read more fantasy, and would like to do my research paper on something that's not obvious (like ST/BS5/Matrix/etc.) & I'd love to use more modern sf rather than the golden age classics.
Anyone have any interesting ideas for my research paper on regarding the intersection of religion and science fiction?
I'll mention #DouglasAdams as well. But point you toward Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It's goofy and fun and not terribly deep, but the conceit that Earth was built as a computer to figure out the ultimate question strikes me as an answer to religion.
"Die Pläne für die Hyperraum-Expressroute lagen 50 Erdenjahre in dem für die Erde zuständigen Planungsamt auf Alpha Centauri aus, so dass genug Zeit für eine formelle Beschwerde gewesen wäre. Doch die Erdlinge kümmerten sich nicht darum, obwohl es doch nur vier Lichtjahre entfernt liegt."
-- Douglas Adams - Per Anhalter durch die Galaxis
I don't normally share prompts, but I wondered what #StableDiffusion
would do with an indirect quote from The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy...
The prompt was:"a movie still of alien space ships of the Vogon destructor fleet that look more like they have been congealed than constructed, hanging in the air in much the same way that bricks don't, above Los Angeles,"
I don't normally share prompts, but I wondered what #StableDiffusion
would do with an indirect quote from The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy...
The prompt was:"a movie still of alien space ships of the Vogon destructor fleet that look more like they have been congealed than constructed, hanging in the air in much the same way that bricks don't, above Los Angeles,"
From Strata:
'People had always dreamed of a unified world. We thought it would be a richer one. It wasn't. It meant that the Eskimo got educated and learned cost accountancy, but it didn't mean that the German learned to hunt whales with a spear. It meant everyone learned how to press buttons, and no one remembered how to dive for pearls.' (pub. 1981!)
Would be a shame, if this post somehow went “viral” and tons of people left a nice rating to “ruin” this for me wink 😜😏 So, please refrain from boosting this! cough
Oh I totally get that man.... Though I my case I'm too lazy to do calculations in my head... 🤣
"For a moment or two the old man didn’t reply. He was staring at the instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in his head whilst his house is burning down."
These lines from #therestaurantattheendoftheuniverse by #douglasadams are a satire on the extent of selfishness and shortsightedness we as humans can be sometimes prone to, as seen all too commonly around us.
"The essay was based on a hunch. Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless. What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it? Certainly you meet people now and then who seem to feel their jobs are pointless and unnecessary. Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed—that was simply a waste of time or resources, or that even made the world worse? Would this not be a terrible psychic wound running across our society? "
I can't help but think of the telephone sanitizers from planet Golgafrincham in #Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy whenever someone makes the claim that a class of jobs is useless
There's a cheat-code in US #antitrustm it's been increasingly used since the #Reagan administration, when the "#ConsumerWelfare" theory ("#monopolies are fine, so long as the lower prices") shoved aside the long-established idea that antitrust law existed to prevent monopolies from forming at all.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Amazon's burying of this vital information will be familiar to #DouglasAdams readers, as the "#BewareOfTheLeopard" tactic. It's not even the first time Amazon's deployed it:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide was famously written by correspondents like Ford Prefect. It wasn’t an #AI that made shit up based on some random sub-ether drivel. As a result, it was useful.
Curiously enough, an edition of The Guide that fell through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the executive board of X as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came”.
@opencage You forgot to credit Slartibartfast for his award-winning design:
“Did you ever go to a place… I think it was called #Norway?”
“No,” said Arthur, “no, I didn’t.”
“Pity,” said Slartibartfast, “that was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges. I was most upset to hear of its destruction.”
— ‘The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy’ by #DouglasAdams