The the most important person of the end of 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. I have been a solid Windows person up until the moment I saw our lead engineer at Lucas use a botcamped mac. I bought an intel based mac and gradually moved onto the mac side. Once i moved into the mac side – I realized it is like playing the piano as supposed to chopping wood.
Mac allows very smooth and fast workflows – if you make a living on a computer – this is the way to go to minimize the time you spend on managing your OS. And not just that – many innovative ways to approach visual interface and put machines in service of people and increase productivity.
And this is what the person who made all this possible has to say on variety of topics. He was a brilliant guy who was the epitome of what Silicon Valley was about. Or is.
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it is also available on Netflix.
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“..there are certain things you can’t make electrons do..”
To be honest I still marvel at the world, the moving images, the technology, the gadgets and all the cosmos that is on the palms of our hands. Many people in New York dislike Times Square – I love it.. not always like it but love the energy there, the intensity of the collective experience of being packed in the greatest city in the world. And my greatest dream is to glimpse 100 years into the future.. or a future when humanity will be much wiser and smarter in using resources for the benefit of all and for becoming true space faring species. I truly don’t care about anything else at all and look at the world through the eyes of this man… I am astonished every day by the amount of miracles and advances all around us, I never get jaded or accustomed to the view of humanity scrolling through all of history and all of the human experience on little flat glowing things tapped by our fingers. It is really amazing and I can’t wait for the future.
Now that I got to see this sequence for a second time – it reminds me of Osaka.. it really looks like Osaka with the barges and the canal and the tall buildings arround it and the electric glow of the billboards.
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“Star Wars deals with the essential problem: Is the machine going to control humanity, or is the machine going to serve humanity? Darth Vader is a man taken over by a machine, he becomes a machine, and the state itself is a machine. There is no humanity in the state. What runs the world is economics and politics, and they have nothing to do with the spiritual life. “So we are left with this void. It’s the job of the artists to create the new myths. Myths come from the artists.”
Joseph Campbell, interviewed by Chris Goodrich, Publisher’s Weekly (1985)
Speaking about the machines – a conversation about the machines in the Matrix Reloaded. It is not really about moving parts… it is about power and control. We truly are godlike thanks to the power machines give us – we stomp the land for resources and run around in space. It is truly sad also that we often unleash machines on each other, as if we have run out of beasts to conquer.. but this is another, and long, conversation.
“Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.”
― William Archer
A tourist is backpacking through the highlands of Scotland, and he stops at a pub to get a drink. And the only people in there is a bartender and an old man nursing a beer. And he orders a pint, and they sit in silence for a while. And suddenly the old man turns to him and goes, “You see this bar? I built this bar with my bare hands from the finest wood in the county. Gave it more love and care than my own child. But do they call me MacGregor the bar builder? No.” Points out the window. “You see that stone wall out there? I built that stone wall with my bare hands. Found every stone, placed them just so through the rain and the cold. But do they call me MacGregor the stone wall builder? No.” Points out the window. “You see that pier on the lake out there? I built that pier with my bare hands. Drove the pilings against the tide of the sand, plank by plank. But do they call me MacGregor the pier builder? No. But you fuck one goat … “
More on WALL-E: WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) — Humanity and Dysfunctional Robots:
Yet throughout the film, robots express much more emotion than the humans. Almost all of the robot characters, from WALL-E to AUTO to MO have personalities, feelings, desires, and prerogatives outside of their simpler tasks. Even simpler robots, like the typing bot outside the Captain’s quarters are shown to have personality and desires, although they might be latent or ignored in favor of their pre-determined purpose. The human characters, on the other hand, are portrayed as dull and almost lifeless; they do nothing for themselves, are perpetually bored, and exhibit none of the creativity or connections that supposedly characterize the human race. They become almost robotic: they have a singular purpose, behave in repetitive ways, and rely on external input to change their actions. In a way, the robotic characters are far more human that the actual human beings because they do exhibit genuine emotions. The “dysfunctional” robots in the ward, for example, seem to feel real relief when WALL-E frees them, and even help her in the ensuing revolution aboard the ship.
If you ever wonder what really is fascinating about the whole Star Wars epic – it is the fact that it was a labor of love for a guy that loved doing exactly that kind of stuff, he was into his work, a perfectionist. Just like any other work of art – the important part of the epic was not the dollar amounts it brought but its genesis, the genesis of the story is closely aligned with George Lucas’s sensibility, and his desire to bring archetypal stories to the screen. The same exact themes he explored in his first film THX 1138.
Th major themes of Star Wars have been around for 2.5 thousand years starting with Greek mythology. Joseph Campbell and his work – The Hero with a thousand faces – explored these themes and connected the dots between myths and stories from different cultures. George Lucas, in his developing of the Star Wars story, was influenced by Joseph Campbell’s work.
Below – Kurt Vonnegut on a similar topic.
“Someone gets into trouble, gets out of it.
People love that kind of story”:
