Review of "Sketch"

Since "Sketch" is from Angel, I was wondering what a studio known for (almost toxically) positive, uplifting, and usually religious movies was doing making a monster movie, even if a somewhat comic one.

It's not about horror.  It's about grief.

The points aren't exactly surprising, and mostly get buried.  But the movie should probably get more attention than it has.

Faith is good.

Hard to hug, though ...

Signed, Sealed, Delivered: The Vows We Have Made

Psalm 142:4

Look and see, there is no one at my right hand;

    no one is concerned for me.

I have no refuge;

    no one cares for my life. 

The final lines of "Sorry, Baby"

When you grow up, you can tell me whatever.  Like, if you have a thought, and you're like, that's a bad thought, I probably had that same thought.  But, like, ten times worse.  So you can just tell me.  I'll never be scared by that.

If someone does something bad to you, if someone says something scary, if you want to kill yourself with like a pencil or a knife or whatever, you can just tell me.  I'll never tell you you're scaring me.  I'll just say yeah.  I know.  It's just like that sometimes.  Yeah.  I'm sorry that bad things are going to happen to you.  I hope they don't.  If I can ever stop anything from being bad let me know.

But sometimes bad stuff just happens.

That's why I feel bad for you.  In a way.  That you're alive and you don't know that yet.  But I can still listen and not be scared.  So that's good.  Or that's something, at least.

******

I'm not a fan of art films.  I'm not a fan of "relationship" films, where the characters stumble around, not really understanding their own feelings.

Even so, you have to see this film all the way through to get the real power of the final scene.  Even though it is turgidly slow, and you don't see how carefully it is done until the end.

But the final lines are an incredibly powerful statement about loss, and the inability of our society to accept the pain of those who have suffered a major trauma or distress.

Black Heart

Elon (or Grok: it's hard to tell the difference) has created a little video valentine for us.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1970744420522996204

But I wonder how many people realize that the "heart," in the video, starts out as a black hole ...

Resistance is futile.  You will be absorbed ...

Generative Enlightenment

Some recent research notes that the LLM/genAI model Claude, when talking to itself, eventually comes to produce something that looks like eastern mysticism.

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/claude-finds-god

This has led to excitement, in some quarters, that AI has "found God," or, at least, enlightenment.

However, I wonder if this is not yet another case of taking perfectly good data and drawing precisely the wrong conclusions from it.  I'm rather an AI cynic, and my own research into eastern mysticism tends to indicate that it contains some truths (such as that suffering arises from desire, and that eliminating desire would remove suffering) that are demonstrably true, but not particularly helpful.  So I can't help but wonder if this result doesn't indicate not that AI has been enlightened, but that eastern mysticism, with its self-referential and self-reflective processes, has, over a longer period of time, reached the same point that large language models have reached much faster.

And with similarly unhelpful conclusions ...

Illuminati

For years I have heard vague tales of the Illuminati, a secret cabal that rules the world. I have, of course dismissed this as antisemitic nonsense, the province of the tin-foil hat crowd: the utterings of those who, dissatisfied that they are not as important as they think they have a right to be, imagine that there is some mythical opposing force that is keeping them from their deserved power and wealth.

I was, apparently, in error.

Recently, I have received a number of email messages inviting me to join the Illuminati. (How did they get my email address? Of *course* they have my email address! They're the Illuminati!) So, I will be taking my proper place among those of rank and consequence, ruling the world, and will no longer have time for dealing with rabble like you lot. (Just wanted to let you know before I supposedly disappear.)


(I am a little surprised that is has taken the advanced fee fraudsters this long to get around to this particular variation on the 419/Spanish Prisoner scam, even though I suppose that it takes an oddly convoluted mind to invert a conspiracy theory and make it a hustle. Probably an effective one, of course, since conspiracy theorists are unlikely to have the analytical skills necessary to realize that they are being taken ...)