Interesting Links for 28-10-2022

[andrewducker]

1. I have no idea how Meta spent this much money on VR nonsense

(tags:vr Facebook MarkZuckerberg wtf )

2. AI generated Warhammer figures of politicians is as glorious and horrifying as you'd hope!

(tags:viaMyBrotherMike Warhammer politics ai awesome )

3. What Do Blind People Dream About?

(tags:dreams blindness )

4. Coverage of the debate on the Scottish Gender Recognition Act (reforming how transgender people can get a gender recognition certificate)

(tags:Scotland transgender law politics )

5. You may have heard of Stanislav Petrov, but have you heard of the *other* Russian whose choices averted World War Three?

(tags:nuclearweapons history Russia USA epicwin viaPatrickHadfield )

Comments

[simont]

#3: in my head, Philip K Dick is suggesting "invisible sheep".

[andrewducker]

I like that!

[simont]

Mind you, I never thought that title made much sense in the first place. The usual association of sheep with sleep is surely that you count them in order to get to sleep, not that you dream of them once you do fall asleep.

Marvin's hum in H2G2 "now I lay me down to sleep, try to count electric sheep" always struck me as making more sense than PKD's title. (Which is odd, because when Douglas Adams is the one making the most sense, you feel that surely someone's not doing their job!)

[andrewducker]

It's amazing how much sense Adams made, by trying to exaggerate things for effect :-)

[original_aj]

In the book, the pseudo religion they follow requires care for animals (mostly killed off by then) so everyone has to keep a pet to be seen to be doing this. Real animals are too expensive so the protagonist has a fake, electric, sheep but dreams of owning a real one. Hence the title. Given they removed the religious aspects for the film version they had to change the title too as it would no longer have made sense.

[andrewducker]

Thank you, I've long wondered!

Edit: Although clearly not hard enough to actually go and look it up!

[original_aj]

It 's worth a read, it's very different to (and much weirder than) the film. They essentially took some of the background and key concepts and wrote a different story with different characters.

[calimac]

About 15 years ago (things may be different now, with subsequently released movies) I was on a convention panel that concluded that there were movies that were more like adaptations of PKD books than anything that actually was an adaptation of a PKD book: I remember Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Man Facing Southeast cited in particular.

[alithea]

Yeah, I enjoyed the both but they are really nothing alike. I don't think I'd have guessed the film was an adaptation if I hadn't known (I saw the film years before I read the book, my High school Geography teacher used it as part of his urban geography curriculum)