I watched SOULM8TE. I'm not sure I *recommend* it -- you've almost certainly seen this movie before, what with a companion robot that gets crazy and violently obsessive and kills a handful of people before ultimately turning against its "master" for perceived infidelity etc. There are zero surprises, right down to the female friend "rival" to the integration with other smart appliances to the final-act disfiguration of the robot and the familiar "it's over... OR IS IT?" conclusion. And if you watch the trailer, you've DEFINITELY seen this movie before, as it pretty much encapsulates the whole film aside from the goriest bits of the kills.

That said, as these sorts of movies go, it was pretty well done? Again, there were zero new ideas here. But the few kills were decent (feminists of a misandrist bent might appreciate the robot's fondness for penis mutilation) and there was subtle commentary on AI and the extent to which uncritically scraping information from the internet can lead to misinformed thinking (at one point the robot confidently states that babies should be fed raw eggs to boost their brain development). It's also a kinda (but not overwhelmingly; think PG-13 plus) horny movie in a way that strikes *me* as strange but might be more relatable to proper humans? It's entirely watchable; it's just a thing that's been done and been done better and more interestingly, if not recently. It's basically adult M3GAN, and it's from the creators of M3GAN, and M3GAN was also a pretty by-the-numbers killer robot movie. (I genuinely enjoyed M3GAN 2.0 -- which really deserved action figures it didn't get -- so I kinda hope there's enough interest for SOULM8TE 2.0 to be a thing.) But if you like killer robot movies, this is maybe one to add to your queue somewhere.

I dreamed I was walking up a hill in a residential neighborhood in my underwear. Somehow this didn't seem an entirely unusual thing for me to be doing, but I became increasingly concerned that I would be underdressed for my destination, so I decided to walk back to my car to get more clothes.

I had much difficulty locating my car. I'd press my key fob, hear it beeping, even see the lights flash -- and then I'd walk down the street, pressing the button, looking and listening, and seeing and hearing nothing. Eventually I located my car, which I had somehow parked *right in front of the garage door of a firehouse* -- which you can imagine is not a great place for a car to be parked, and I couldn't fathom how out of it I must have been to do that. There was a ticket for $472 stuck to the windshield, and an icepick stabbed from my throat through to my bowels when I saw it.

And THEN, somehow, I turned into a private parking garage adjacent to the firehouse when trying to move my car -- and the gate slammed shut behind me with no way for me to get back to the street. So this was a deeply unpleasant series of events and I was thinking dark things as I waited for security to descend the elevator (the garage was monitored via camera from another floor) and let me out or penalize me for trespassing or worse. But I woke up as the security guards approached.

Ann Droid is a bizarre show. S1 is only six half-hour episodes, so I can't rightly tell you not to watch -- it's short and inoffensive and easy enough to work through -- and I almost want to encourage viewing it. It's not good. It's not even consistent -- the show really doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it pro- or anti- AI? Are the characters good people we should root for or terrible people who deserve what they get? And the show (unevenly) splits its time between the elderly widower Sue -- who receives the titular Ann Droid so that she can stay in her home rather than move to an assisted living facility -- and her son Michael, an underemployed ne'er-do-well simping embarrassingly for the self-centered wife that cuckolded him prior to the start of the show's events. So it's kinda two shows, and they're both hella dark if you overthink it.

The show inexplicably encourages you to overthink it. Michael is so pathetic that our *introduction* to this man sees him picking a sandwich up off the floor after Sue drops the ceramic plate it was on, and he continues to crunch -- wincing in pain all the while -- after acknowledging that the sandwich now has bits of plate in it. (And no, Sue is not so doddering that this is an attempt to assure her it's okay -- she stares at her son in bewildered disappointment during the entire scene.) We're told that, prior to her husband's death, Sue's identity was defined by being a homemaker and mother -- but one can't help thinking she did a terrible job (either with guidance or with seeking accommodations for his obvious mental handicap) if this is the result of her mothering. I'm actually not saying more to avoid spoilers (eh, I'm gonna throw you a few to whet your palate), because if you're going to watch you *should* be surprised. The Michael show's resolution is insane. (more...)

Have a couple of reads I found interesting. The anti-AI crowd talks a *lot* about the so-called cognitive decline that results from using GenAI (for particular tasks and in particular ways, not that they much care for nuance) as if it's causing actual brain damage, a point that they'll maintain despite the studies not actually saying *that* and moreover hardly concluding that GenAI should be banned as a result of their dangerous findings. (One might recall the frequent allegations that watching TV "rots" ones brain in a meaningful way and the likely contempt with which we'd view anyone who believed that in a literal sense.) Anyway, these articles touch on the described phenomenon in a more sensible manner.

From singularityhub: Is AI Making Us Dumber? (more...)

So I've finished this season of The Vampire Lestat (aka S3 of Interview With the Vampire) and... meh? I admit that I haven't really been into this show since S1, where I did think the choice to make Louis a black man made for some interesting departures from the source material. (That said, while I think many similar criticisms derive from shallow/racist motivations, I actually do think that some of what I found interesting might have been better explored in a story not yoked to the Vampire Chronicles mythos and story scaffolding -- a "new" story, so to speak. That said, I maintain that every adaptation *is* somehow a "new" story and that these kinds of choices and deviant interpretations are valid whether I approve or not.) I recently noted just how much I hate the character Daniel Molloy, which probably does drive a lot of my dislike in this show even though it's easy to forget he even exists because he's entirely absent during the most significant story beats. And I admit to liking actually a fair number of the songs, and I do think they derive strength from the character relationships and motivations playing out in the music, but they're hardly enough to justify the rest of the show.

Anyway, final episode. The whole season has effectively been setup for Akasha's uprising -- a whole bunch of Lestat on tour, flashbacks with Gabrielle and Nicky and Marius and Akasha, patching things up with Louis, too much being interviewed on the tour bus by Daniel Molloy for no great reason except to shove this character down our throats during filler moments -- moving characters into the places and mental states they need to inhabit to play their parts when all hell breaks loose. Ending the season with Akasha would have been the logical -- and, to my mind, more exciting -- conclusion and cliffhanger. Instead, the season ends with filler. Not just any filler, but bullshit filler. Apparently fans like it? Certainly the kinds of fans who watch After Dark -- basically a half-hour talkback that airs after every episode for viewers who want a deeper dive into the episode -- like it. It annoyed me and the After Dark episode annoyed me even more. (more...)