Slusarczyk on Stranger Things: Series One Episode Six 3/3
Stranger Things is about technology. A thing is an object and the only objects we have that are consistently getting stranger are our technologies. Phones today are crazy compared to phones from 20 years ago.
In this episode, Eleven runs off on her own, and Lucas goes off to try and find Will on his own. Eleven represents technology. We know she is technology because her name is a number. You don’t call people or animals numbers you call things like phones and TV’s numbers. Also, she was created with science, and the only thing science makes is technology.
But she is not good technology. In this episode, she breaks a child’s arm. And we are tricked into thinking it is a good thing because when she breaks a child’s arm, she also saves another child. But isn’t that why we’re told war is ok? The people in charge say we are allowed to murder because other people are trying to murder us. I think murder is always wrong.
So if Eleven is bad technology, then the child Mike must be good technology. We know Mike is technology because his name is the word for microphone. Eleven is bad technology and Mike is good technology.
Before this episode, it seemed that Eleven represented computers. Before this episode, we’d only ever seen her use her powers on technology, and the only technology that controls other technologies is computers. So if Eleven is bad technology and she is a computer, she must be a computer that controls something bad, like a nuclear weapon or a fighter plane.
But in this episode, she used her powers on both water and Mike. She can use her powers on Mike because he is technology, so she is still controlling technology, so she is a computer. But what about the water? We do not have computers that can control water.
We do not have computers that can control water yet.
One day we will have machines that can control water. We will have machines that can make it rain and machines that can stop tsunamis. So if Eleven is technology that can control water, she must be technology from the future when they have computers that can control water.
If Eleven is from the future, it would make sense for Mike to be from the past. And this show is set in the past, so Mike is from the 80s. So Mike is from the past, and Eleven comes from a technologically advanced lab, so she is from the future.
But to someone from the 80s, the future could be the 90s. So Eleven is more technologically advanced than Mike, but that does not mean she is from the past to us. She could be from the future to Mike but still be from the past to us.
Even the most advanced labs in the world in the 80’s still had technology worse than what normal people have today. They didn’t even really have the internet in the 80’s.
If Mike is a good technology and he is from the past, he must be a simple technology that people had in the 80s. He could literally be a microphone because his name is Mike. But what is a microphone? A microphone is a way to communicate with lots of people. And computers are just ways of communicating with lots of people. In this episode of the show, communication breaks down, and the gang splits up and does separate things. And what would they say to each other when they reunited? Each of them would be certain that stranger things had happened to them than had happened to the others.
Slusarczyk on Breaking Bad: Series Four Episode One 2/2
Artworks have to try to answer questions. This series starts with a scene where Gail is setting up the lab. He has tested Walt’s meth and it is way purer than his. He worries that he is not good enough. The first question this series asks us is ‘are you good enough?’
But that is not the end of it. Questions naturally lead to other questions through things called question cascades. We are asked if we are good enough. We were good enough to get into university. We were good enough to convince a woman to marry us. But those things are not important. Getting into university doesn’t matter. Most of the planet gets married, so getting married doesn’t matter. The word ‘good’ when used on its own is just referencing morality. The question ‘are you good enough’ cascades and becomes ‘are you good enough to get an afterlife?’
The second scene is Gail lying dead on the floor of his flat. He died and the world just kept spinning. He died and everyone else just kept living. We will die and the world will move on.
We live such short lives. We get only a few decades. We desperately need to get into Heaven. We live in Heaven for eternity. The problem is: how do we know that God exists? How do we know that whatever we do we won’t just die and disappear? Because if we are going to try to get into Heaven, that will have a huge impact on our lives. We will have to spend our whole life being good. We will have to spend our whole life helping people. And you have to suffer to help people. If you give a homeless man a tenner, you have ten fewer pounds yourself. We have to pay to help other people.
Gus kills someone else because he can’t kill Walt or Jessie. That man’s death is on Walt and Jessie’s hands. Someone died so that they could live. You see, while we pay to help other people, we get paid when other people suffer. If you steal a tenner from someone, they might have ten fewer pounds, but you have ten more. There is so much to gain from being bad.
And this show is about criminals. They are drug dealers. Drugs ruin lives. There are millions of people alive right now who are living terrible lives because of drugs. They are homeless because of drugs. They beg because of drugs. They have spent decades trying to quit, but they just can’t do it. The world is full of people who would have much better lives if they weren’t on drugs. And the drug dealers make all those people’s lives worse just so they can make a little bit of money.
But if God exists, we have so much to gain from being good.
Slusarczyk on Raphael 1: An Analysis of ‘Sistine Madonna’
In this painting, Mary is in the middle holding baby Jesus. But I only think it is Mary because of the title of the painting. I only think it is Jesus because of the title of the painting. To read this painting more accurately, we must acknowledge only what we can see.
So we have a woman holding a baby. The woman is likely the baby’s mother. To the woman’s left is an old man, and to her right is a woman kneeling. This woman looks like she is praying. If she is praying, the baby must be Jesus. If the baby is Jesus, the woman must be Mary.
They are on clouds. The world behind them is clouds, and the floor they are standing on is clouds, so the world is clouds. They must be in Heaven. If they are in Heaven, everyone in the painting is dead. So Mary is dead and Jesus is dead. If Jesus is dead, why is he a baby? Jesus died in his 30s, so he should be an adult.
Heaven is paradise, and Mary wanted a baby Jesus, so she got one. But this is a fake Jesus who has been made to please Mary. So the real Jesus is somewhere else and that Jesus is an adult because he was an adult when he died.
But then, if it is not the real Jesus, the woman should not be praying to him. The woman must be praying to Mary because it is the real Mary. And people do pray to Mary. Mary is one of the most popular figures in Christianity. She is probably one of the most famous women ever to live. Mary is worshipped. She must have been holy or God would not have chosen her to bear his son. And what do we really know about Mary? The most important thing about her in the story is the fact that she is a virgin. The whole idea of her character is that she had never had sex
So God thinks having sex is a sin. That is also true in Christianity in other ways. You are not supposed to have sex before marriage. I don’t know why you aren’t supposed to have sex before marriage, but Christians definitely believe that you aren’t supposed to have sex before marriage. If you are waiting until after you are married to have sex, you will marry the first person you are going out with because you want to have sex. That’s what it was like in the olden days. A hundred years ago, people were marrying people they barely knew. They were marrying people they’d only met six months before.
Nowadays, people know each other for years before they get married. You date someone for a decade before marrying them. That would have been unheard of 100 years ago. 100 years ago you met someone, and you were married six months later. You had to get married because you wanted to have sex and you weren’t allowed to have sex before you were married.
This whole no sex before marriage thing must have led to a lot of terrible marriages. To start with, people who weren’t sexually compatible would marry each other. That would lead to a dead bedroom because neither of them are enjoying the sex.
How much can you really know each other after six months? Everyone I know dated for a decade before getting married. I know people who have dated for over a decade and they aren’t even engaged yet.
That is very much normal nowadays. It is normal to date for a long time without getting married. To be honest, marriage itself is becoming less appealing over time. Ultimately, marriage is a religious ceremony, and most people aren’t religious anymore. There are other reasons to get married. I think there are tax benefits or something. But ultimately it is a religious ceremony, so why do it if you don’t believe in God?
Marriage is supposed to be something you do in front of God. It is supposed to be you solidifying your relationship in front of God. Most people don’t believe in God. If you Google it, the internet says the majority of people are religious, but I think that is some religious countries messing with the statistics. Some countries are almost entirely religious. In ‘more progressive’ countries, religion is mainly among old people. The young have started moving on from religion. Why is that?
Maybe young people are just more informed than old people. I do not know much about atheism, to be honest. I am aware that there are books which ‘prove’ that religion is all made up, but I have never read any of those books. I have never cared enough about the topic to even Google it and find out how we know religion is all made up. I know modern religions have parts in older religions, so the belief is that modern religions grew out of those older religions. I can see how people would think the modern religions are made up if that is the case.
Maybe younger people don’t need religion as much as older people. Religion is fear of death when you really get down to it. Death is terrifying. You just stop existing. So many people want death to not be real that they believe in religions that make death not real. Instead of stopping existing, you go and live in a city in the clouds. It is almost obviously nonsense, but it can’t be that obviously nonsense if 50% of the planet believe in it.
So maybe young people don’t need religion because they aren’t scared of death anymore. That would be strange. If the parents are scared of death, why wouldn’t the children be scared of death? Surely if the parents are scared of death they will teach the children to be scared of it.
Maybe the teaching is the problem. If your parents are religious, they teach you religion, and then you are religious. If your parents are atheists, they teach you atheism, and then you are an atheist yourself. But that is if you follow your parents. What happens if you don’t give your parents’ words weight? What happens if you don’t listen to your parents?
Because religion is ‘obvious nonsense’, the only possible way you would believe in it is if people you loved told you it was real. So religion was very popular in the past because people didn’t have many influences. Their main influences were their parents, and if their parents said Jesus was real, they learned to believe it.
But the parents aren’t the main influence anymore. Now everyone has access to the internet. I haven’t Googled and found out how we know religion is made up, but I’m sure a lot of people have. People have stopped believing in religion because people have access to more information nowadays. People don’t believe in religion anymore because they don’t take what their parents say on blind faith. Their parents say Jesus exists, but then later that day they Google it and ask if Jesus exists, and the internet says Jesus probably doesn’t exist.
So the population is becoming less religious because the population is becoming more educated. The children at the bottom of the painting look at the older woman, so they both believe in religion because she does. But the central figures stare out of the painting at us, so they believe in religion only if we do, and neither of them has wings like the bottom figures do. This painting means ‘you are too educated to believe in God’.
