Documentaries Worth Watching
I watched a lot of documentaries, especially of artists and people who are driven into magnificient madness towards something greater than themselves.
“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
Art, especially the greatest of art, is not of utility but an expression of the human spirit.
“We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.” ― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
The uncompromising artist can be a rebel genius.
Some of these documentaries are about such people, some are simply about more and less. I have friends who have watched some these and asked “how do you find these things?” My reply is always the same, there are always wonders for those who have eyes open to seeing them. Pause, look around, stop to wonder and be is awe.
Stop to be amused and meander a little longer in a cabinet of curiosities.
- The Thinking Game
“Everybody’s realized what Shane and I have known for over 20 years. AI is the most important technology humanity’s going to invent. […] This is the moment I have been living my whole life for." ~ Demis Hassabis
“After the acquisition [of Deepmind by Google], and just listening to him. This is a person [Demis Hassabis] who is fundamentally a scientist and a natural scientist. He wants science to solve every problem in the world and he believes it can do so. That’s not a normal person to find in a tech company.” ~ Eric Schmidt, The Thinking Game
This movie is both about AI and Demis Hassabis in many ways. Most importantly it is about his magnificient obsession with one big question. It is clear from his work and his thinking that this is a game to him. People assume games are about winning, which especially for his background as a chess player that’s plausible, but it’s bigger than that. He believes this game, and the meta-problem of intelligence, is more than that. It’s the most important question and problem he can solve in his lifetime.
“I don’t believe is setting limits, I find them.” ~ Dave Crosland
This is the story of a very large man trying to get larger, joking.
This is the story of someone trying one last time to reach his goals with a lot riding on it for him personally.
It’s a brutal and realistic documentary of the day in the life of his journey. I preferred it to others because it is more gritty, brutal, and real. He has a lot of demons and similar to Dorian Yates does not live in a glamorous area.
This is a story about a genius architect. Another such genius whose quiet unknown is Beksinski with a tragic story.
“Art must say something” ~Szukalski
A true artistic genius, perhaps driven to the brink of madness by his art being destroyed.
A backstory and tremendous regret. The story of someone who could change and realize his mistakes.
One of the greatest cinephiles ever. Magnificient taste. A tragic ending.
“Does God exist? My answer is not yet.” ~ Ray Kurzweil. It’s not easy to convey to people how far outside the overton window, the window is which “respectable” public discourse takes places, the concept of the Singularity was when Ray Kurzweil predicted it back in 1999 in the Age of Spiritual Machines book.s
He believes machines will gain the intelligence of a human being by 2029. Saying such a thing in 1999 was a recipe for being scoffed at. The documentary trailer opens with him being called a “highly sophisticated crackpot” by someone on national television.
This is the story of someone who stuck to his convictions about where artificial intelligence is going and his transhumanist views of the world.
A world renowned inventor, futurist, and visionary thinker. My favorite part of this story is that his job title is a single sentence at Google. The title is “to bring natural language understanding to Google”.
Best ship of all time or strangest clown car or circus? You decide.
In all seriousness, this is the story about a movie that was never made but changed many peoples careers. The creative team behind this movie were some of the great artistic geniuses of their time including HR Giger of Alien.
Many of the team members went onto create many magnificient motion pictures that may not have existed without him.
Claymation, movies like starship troopers, and numerous other works are the product of Phil Tippet’s work.
He is a master of his creative craft, most importantly his specialty was animating “living” things that he created and simulating them. His movie Mad God is an expression of this. Everything in that movie is gooey.
“Renowned academic and author Noam Chomsky elucidates 10 principles of concentration of wealth and power that have led to unprecedented inequality and the hollowing out of the American middle class.”
More importantly Chomsky is discussing what’s at the center of the current rot in the United States. Including Plutocratic interests, turning wealth and general economic structures into financialization of all structures abstracting away labor and value from the everyday Americans life. This has vast implications, but mostly it turns the American dream into a fantasy. A nightmare into a reality because debt, wealth, and other factors are at the whims of the select few.
Or at least that’s what he believes.
“Quitting my day job and starting my life as a writer was a tremendous risk. It was a fool’s leap. A shot in the dark. But, anything of any value in our lives, whether that be a career, a work of art, a relationship, will always start with such a leap. And in order to be able to make it, you have to put aside the fear of failing and the DESIRE of SUCCEEDING. You have to do these things completely purely, without fear, without desire. Because things that we do without lust of result are the purest actions that we shall ever take.” ~ Alan Moore
Alan Moore is both of the most seemingly stable and bananas individuals I have come across in the comic industry. He refers to himself as a magician and a maker of magic. This sounds like a trivial point but it is everything. He understands that words are power over others. Influence over them. The foundation of persuasion and past power.
This is the story of Neil Gaiman’s writing and work.
I thought about whether or not to include it then I remembered that anyones whose going to judge 9 year old me for enjoying Sandman and his stories growing is a moral puritan. I am not excusing anybody.
“Love as at the root of everything. All learning. All relationships. Love or the lack of it."
“Children have very deep feelings just the way everybody does.”
“The greatest thing that we can do is to help somebody know that they’re loved and capable of loving.”
“When I say it’s you I like, I’m talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.”
“I believe that appreciation is a holy thing, that when we look for what’s best in the person we happen to be with at the moment, we’re doing what God does; so in appreciating our neighbor, we’re participating in something truly sacred.”
“Children are to be respected and I respect them deeply. They’ve taught me an awful lot.” ~ Fred Rogers
A true Christian. What I can say about this movie is that is covers his impact on the world and why he matters. The most important part is that he helped so many with kindness. Hatred and anger don’t provide a medium for constructive change.
- Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin “We read books to find out who we are.” ~ Ursula Le Guin
“I’d like this not to be resigned but to be rebellious. I want to see science fiction step over the old walls and head right into the next wall and start to break it down too.” ~ Ursula Le Guin
“Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don’t know they want and don’t think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.”
“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.” ~ Ursula Le Guin
“Ursula set herself up as a giver of answers, but she is one of the very finest explorer of questions”
The writer that most influenced my life to this day.
She’s is a badass.
Is he happy? So important, much wow.
Joking, this is a the story about how linguistics and perception function. It’s many things, but mostly an ode to my time in the cognitive neuroscience department which I hold so dear. Although, I was more of a computational person but Chomsky’s writing on politics is more fascinating to many.
For me, his foundational work on linguistics, cognitive science, and general concepts of universal grammar are central to my life.
One of my favorite thought experiments from this movie is the Ship of Theseus and the Willow Tree. I will skip the details a bit, but the idea is whether continuity exists in objective reality or is it simply a way to perceive things?
On the same topic, how many holes does a pair of pants have? This is not as trivial as you may think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_of_pants_(mathematics)