Even in a future of body-swapping, we still need rubber tubes to breathe underwater.

Netflix’s Altered Carbon is an A+ sci-fi premise in the body of a B+ TV drama, but make no mistake, this is a compliment.

Yes, the performances occasionally feel stilted, the dialogue sometimes drifts into corny; a writing shortcut here or an egregious nude scene there hold it back from the Blade Runner heights it aspires to. But the show builds a fascinating world at such a high level of production, it’s hard to look away. And by setting a pulpy detective story in such a complex future — where identity is fluid and mortality is negotiable — the philosophical questions it raises are so much more mind-bending than the mystery it exposes.

In Carbon‘s vision of the future, each individual’s consciousness is stored in a “stack”, a mini-disc-sized data device embedded at the base of the brain; while bodies are referred to as “sleeves”, mere containers for the individuals who inhabit them. Some characters have inhabited a number of sleeves in their lifetimes. Some use other sleeves temporarily for subterfuge. The richest upper classes have their sleeves cloned and their stacks backed up to the cloud, so they can live for hundreds of years, cycling through body after rejuvenated body, in an uninterrupted aristocracy — with predictably dystopian results.

Throw in a few other weighty ideas like the humanity of AI (consciousnesses who never even get a sleeve), the potential for virtual manipulation (consciousnesses ripped out of their sleeves against their will), or the fragmentation of the individual (copying one consciousness to multiple sleeves) and the implications of this technology alone make the show a worthwhile speculation.

This only scratches the surface, as the show continues to find thought-provoking new implications to explore, amid a murder mystery filled with gun fights, flashbacks, grimy fantasies and brutal violence. It’s existential dilemma wrapped in guilty pleasure, but don’t let appearances fool you.

If you could transplant your consciousness into a new body instead of dying, would you?

Would you want a fresh copy of your own body, in peak condition, at whatever age you prefer? What would you choose?

Or would you experiment with living in totally different bodies? Which ones? Why?

Eat it, Nike. Now, brands proudly appeal to the saddest parts of us.

Who among us isn’t guilty of posting the same verdict on the same tv show watched on the same service to the same social network via the same phone while ordering the same food through the same app sitting in your same comfy pants in your roughly-the-same furnished apartments.

It’s so easy!

This piece on the tyranny of convenience takes a look at the trade-offs between convenience and meaningful effort, and raises some points about our choices worth examining.

Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.

Convenience, he argues, can be a trap. When the convenient becomes the unthinking default, it leads us to make the same choices, and in sanding off the rough edges of life, leaves us without texture.

How is a life of convenience making you more boring than you might be otherwise?

What are the least-convenient things you do that keep you from being boring?

Indefensible.

No jokes or clever anecdotes on this one.

Just another day where people fight over how to end rampant mass shootings.

A fact, not an opinion: we cannot reduce guns in the United States until at least some people are willing to give up at least some of the rights they currently enjoy.

An opinion/hypothesis: maybe it isn’t 100% fair that only gun owners should sacrifice something for a safer country. (not 100% sure if I agree with this myself, but it is a popular argument with some merit.)

So.

What rights would you give up — whether you’re a gun owner, a 2nd Amendment supporter, or neither of those — if it meant fewer gun fatalities? 

The only legendary actor brave enough to let his final role involve serious bowel trauma.

Phantom Thread: didn’t love it. I’m sorry! Lots of people did, and that’s cool. It was certainly pretty.

Generally I’d rather not try to review a movie that didn’t do it for me. But okay, just a little.

Maybe because in a love story where the love feels unmotivated, it undercuts my investment in the whole story –like The Shape of Water, but from a darker perspective.

Maybe because the movie seemed to both celebrate and have contempt for its main character, portraying him as a foolish blowhard but also lovingly praising his brilliance, which left me confused and even a bit angry — much like Wolf of Wall Street. (Man, I do not like that movie.)

In fact, that made me think that in particular, I’m pretty well over movies about terrible men that we are supposed to be entertained by, and that the films seem to glamorize for the majority of their stories, but that, *wink*, all us smart viewers know in our hearts are awful, so it’s ok to spend hours laughing at their misdeeds. I’m not really buying that argument.

So instead of talking about the deep themes of a movie I didn’t like, a simpler question:

Who’s more over-rated, Martin Scorsese or Paul Thomas Anderson?

You can answer this even if you love both! I personally like several of the movies by both of them. But… definitely not all, nor would I call either “The Best Living…” anything, based on my tastes.

Controversial!

Terminators? Ha. Any AI worth its microchips knows: they never see the cute ones coming.

As computing power rises exponentially, the singularity approaches. In our lifetimes, it’s very possible an artificial super-intelligence could essentially become a god on earth — our fates bound to the hope that new god we’ve created is a benevolent one.

Meanwhile, due to centuries of man-made destruction to the earth’s climate, temperatures rise and water reserves dwindle, while mass migration and war over resources lay just over the horizon.

Which end-of-the-world scenario would you rather face, AI takeover or climate catastrophe?

Assume you are indeed going to live through it, not die immediately as it kicks off. (Nice try.)

Bonus question: if this toss-up is too easy a choice, which two doomsday scenarios would be harder to choose between?