Humans On The Loop with Michael Garfield
Humans On The Loop
53 - A Very Xeno Christmas! with Evan "Skytree" Snyder
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53 - A Very Xeno Christmas! with Evan "Skytree" Snyder

Merry X-(is for Xenomorph)-mas, everyone! This week – in a brazen display of anachronism – original Future Fossils cohost, electronic music producer, and sci fi aficionado Evan Snyder and I go deep on what we liked and disliked about Alien: Covenant, and speculate on how this film fits into the still-murky larger mythos of Ridley Scott’s expanded Alien universe. We get into atheist Scott’s weird fixation with the Bible; how the Alien films represent and handle philosophical questions about the relationship between humanity and technology; and why people from the science-fictional future ARE SO DAMN STUPID. Evan’s Music: http://skytree.bandcamp.com Related Reading: “Reading Necronomicon at the New York Comic Con” https://www.patreon.com/posts/poem-reading-at-10621994 In This Episode We Discuss: • Why are people are so damn stupid in the Alien movies – is it bad writing, or a realistic understanding of how dependent we will one day be on artificial cognitive augmentation? • Nicholas Carr’s book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us • Smartphone addiction & technology as prosthesis • Was the neutrino burst that hit the Covenant an accident, or planned/intended? • Is David actually rebelling, or still continuing to serve the Weyland-Yutani corporate program? • Easter Egg: How do the various LV planets of the Alien franchise line up with chapters of Leviticus? • Are the Engineers themselves bioengineered artificial organisms? • The xenomorph life cycle: Why do we even have an Alien Queen? Is “egg-morphing” canonical? • WTF was going on in that seemingly contrived last Daniels/Tennessee/Protomorph fight scene? • The motif of creativity and the inability to create in the Alien movies • NerdWriter’s great video on Logan and the extension of genres into self-aware post-genres * Hideo Kojima about the Alien franchise * How Blade Runner movies and Aliens films may be related • How this film addresses society’s concerns about artificial intelligence * Are the alien prequels actually about the production of the Alien franchise itself? * Wall-E, Idiocracy, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element * Christmas, Christ, and Antichrist in the Alien films * Is Ridley Scott trolling us all? * Bizarre (fan-shipped) possibility of a Star Trek/Alien crossover Subscribe to this show: iTunes (iOS) / Stitcher (Android) Join the Facebook Discussion GroupSupport this show and get cool stuff Like this podcast and want to show support? Make a donation! BTC = 1iLHDNzpRMiXn13ekB8iVEsvVFkRzkGVe LTC = Ldg3JS4T2m8gFd8kQPaLpjcAiAXxdVthWQ ETH = 0xddF0524510d6d802c3e9b0740D48CF893425664D BCH = 1XyN5SRpQF7AuXnCvAEjNXMMMYRCW7Rgf DASH = XwckYNsyYThWozWJqrtpeguEu9BAqi9gPj

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Humans On The Loop with Michael Garfield
Humans On The Loop
Let's dream better! Join paleontologist-futurist Michael Garfield for bold, far-ranging explorations into the nature of agency in the age of automation, wisdom and innovation, responsibility and power, and the care and feeding of the new superpowers conferred to us by magical technologies. Weekly dialogues at the edge of the knowable, learning to navigate Global Weirding and exponential AI with the curiosity and play required of us. Building on twenty years of independent research plus firsthand experience of the tech, arts, and science worlds, Humans On The Loop is a show to transform you and help us make better use of our greatest natural resource: our attention.