2025-11-25 02:41:40
So I’ve been watching Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus on Apple TV and this review from Inkoo Kang resonated with me (emphasis mine):
Millions of offscreen casualties aside, it’s clear that Gilligan is aiming for a lighter — and stranger — outing than his two previous series. (For all that “Pluribus” delights in eerie atmospherics, the Southwestern sunniness keeps things from getting too dark.) The uncanny scenarios he conjures are a source of humor, intrigue, and genuine unease. But the show never adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Carol makes for a maddeningly tunnel-visioned protagonist — one with a shocking lack of curiosity about the entity that’s overtaken the Earth, or even about what the infected do all day when they’re not offering to cater to her whims. Her one-note sullenness means that Seehorn, who was heartbreaking as the repressed Kim on “Saul,” is squandered as the lead of her own show. The contentment and coöperativeness of the hive mind are similarly tough to dramatize.
It was somewhere around the middle of episode two when I started asking myself if I was supposed to care about Carol and what was going to happen to her, which is never a good sign. I like plenty of shows with unlikable protagonists (like Succession & Seinfeld) but I often can’t get past stubborn & incurious ones — it just seems fake to me and breaks my willing suspension of disbelief.
The show has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Pluribus fans, what am I missing here? The premise is good and I want to like it. Presumably many of the critics have seen the whole season and so maybe it picks up as it goes on?
2025-11-25 01:52:19
“The Little Movie That Couldn’t”: ‘Mallrats’ Turns 30. I can’t remember if I was one of the few that saw this in the theater, but I loved this movie on VHS/DVD. Haven’t seen it for, what, 20 years though…
2025-11-25 01:05:58
“Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner’s, or those on a screen. Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison — the ordinary, unposed figures of other people.”
2025-11-25 00:02:08
We’ve talked before about how some people can picture things in their heads quite vividly and others can’t at all. The latter group has a condition called aphantasia.
As soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark underside of my eyelids. I can’t willingly form the faintest of images in my mind.
Larissa MacFarquhar wrote a fascinating article about aphantasia (and its opposite, hyperphantasia) for the New Yorker: Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound.
Naturally, aphantasics usually had a very different experience of reading. Like most people, as they became absorbed, they stopped noticing the visual qualities of the words on the page, and, because their eyes were fully employed in reading, they also stopped noticing the visual world around them. But, because the words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly into their minds.
Aphantasics might skip over descriptive passages in books — since description aroused no images in their minds, they found it dull — or, because of such passages, avoid fiction altogether. Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to imagine. Of course, for people who did have imagery, seeing a book character in a movie was often unsettling — because they already had a sharp mental image of the character which didn’t look like the actor, or because their image was vague but just particular enough that the actor looked wrong, or because their image was barely there at all and the physical solidity of the actor conflicted with that amorphousness.
And also:
When aphantasics recovered from bereavement, or breakups, or trauma, more quickly than others, they worried that they were overly detached or emotionally deficient. When they didn’t see people regularly, even family, they tended not to think about them.
M.L.: “I do not miss people when they are not there. My children and grandchildren are dear to me, in a muffled way. I am fiercely protective of them but am not bothered if they don’t visit or call. … I think that leaves them feeling as if I don’t love them at all. I do, but only when they are with me, when they go away they really cease to exist, except as a ‘story.’”
The bits about hyperphantasia are just as interesting:
Hyperphantasia often seemed to function as an emotional amplifier in mental illness—heightening hypomania, worsening depression, causing intrusive traumatic imagery in P.T.S.D. to be more realistic and disturbing. Reshanne Reeder, a neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool, began interviewing hyperphantasics in 2021 and found that many of them had a fantasy world that they could enter at will. But they were also prone to what she called maladaptive daydreaming. They might become so absorbed while on a walk that they would wander, not noticing their surroundings, and get lost. It was difficult for them to control their imaginations: once they pictured something, it was hard to get rid of it. It was so easy for hyperphantasics to imagine scenes as lifelike as reality that they could later become unsure what had actually happened and what had not.
“I can imagine my hand burning, to the point where it’s painful. I’ve always been curious — if they put me in an fMRI, would that show up? That’s one of the biggest problems in my life: when I feel something, is it real?”
One hyperphantasic told a researcher that he had more than once walked into a wall because he had pictured a doorway.
The more I read about this, the more I think that for those at either end of the phantasic scale, their inability (or extreme ability) to see things in their minds is a major component of what we think of as personality. Even just thinking about myself, there are all sorts of behaviors and traits I can connect to not being able to visualize things in my head that clearly. In some ways, it might be one of the most me things about me. (thx, willy)
Tags: aphantasia · Larissa MacFarquhar · memory · science
2025-11-24 23:20:46
Activists are role-playing ICE raids in games like Fortnite & GTA to teach people what to do IRL situations. “Many people may not have seen an interaction with ICE yet, it’s a way to get folks to know or get used to what that might look like.”
2025-11-24 22:32:34
The World Lost the Climate Gamble. Now It Faces a Dangerous New Reality. “We are heading into ‘overshoot’ within the next few years. The world is going to become more turbulent and more dangerous. So, what comes after failure?”