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What the Future Fiction of 2015 Revealed About Humans Today (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: There were a lot of stories told about the future in 2015. More than usual, maybe. Big budget blockbusters, hefty, idea-rich novels, and epic, dystopian video games—there was complex, stirring speculative fiction dripping from every media faucet we've got. And it spoke volumes about our anxieties about the present. In 2015, those anxieties are, apparently, concern the rise of science denial, climate change, total collapse.
tell dramatic stories about a dramatic future. Stories about a future where a guy goes to work and installs software on computers for an insurance company don't get made into movies.
And Hollywood continues to turn out lots of bland, unimaginative, formulaic movies that are less and less compelling relative to TV and video games.
"Watch Us Try to Spin as Many Science Fiction Works as Possible into Supporting All the Progressive Talking Points We Were Planning to Cram Down Your Throat Anyway"
Getting repeatedly called out on thinly-veiled, agenda-driven clickbait like this is exactly why Motherboard Vice censored its comment sections.
Maintain the status quo, that is what people today and people of yesterday are all about.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
"If only they [men] saw us for the filthy creatures we really are." Daisy, 27, told me. "Take me for example" as she lifted up her right pant leg, "I haven't shaved my legs or my pits in 5 years."
How did she get dates, I wonder. Was she married to a blind man?
"I love to live as I really am! In fact, if every feminist were true to themselves they would live as I do. No razor, even if your upper lip sprouts hair." She leaned forward towards me and whispered as if the whole world were listening, "no waxing, not even for my private parts!"
Truly this woman was honest. More honest than any feminist I had ever met. I wondered what she did when she went swimming somewhere.
"Oh I get a lot of looks, a lot!" she laughed. "Mostly curious but it sure does keep the men away." She reached for a coffee mug and pointed to her hairy legs. "This is what we really are! This is how we really should appear. Why hide it?"
Why, indeed. I excused myself and thanked Daisy for her time and honesty.
Finally, I had met a woman. A real woman. "Well, back to the world of lies and perfume on a pig" I told myself, walking out to the street where I hailed a taxi. I looked back at Daisy as she stroked her leg hair. "A reeeeal woman" I blew out through my smiling lips.
That humans today are still terrible at predicting the future?
This one's a given. People overestimate what happens in 50 years, but underestimate what happens in 2. Personally, I would be quite interested to see what 2018 will be like, though I suppose in 24 months I'll find out. After all, just three years ago, we didn't even know about PRISM...
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens was basically a demake of the original Star Wars.
It's not a shot-for-shot remake, obviously, and it's not a reboot. But it is basically the same fucking story and it's got tons of scenes and settings that are found almost identically in the original. Just like Jurassic World, Terminator Genisys, the new Star Trek films, and to a lesser extent Rocky Balboa.
It's like a restaurant selling you a "deconstructed" burger. It's main selling point is that it's a burger, but they've gone and taken the burger you liked, separated the pieces, dressed them differently, and served them up in a manner that's foreign and undesired. It's neither the burger you're familiar with nor something worthy of being on the menu in its own right.
Demakes are a fucking trend now, unfortunately. They have nothing in the tank to do a creative sequel but they know people are sick of remakes and reboots.
> and pointless infra projects
That simply isn't true, if anything the exact opposite is true. America's buildings, bridges and other critical infrastructure is crumbling and falling apart. You're risking millions of lives every day with unmaintained infrastructure.
If anything - you can't manage even the most basic infra projects required to prevent disasters !
Infrastructure projects are not sexy, they aren't politically appealing - and they don't attract donor money. What corporation is going to give you campaign finance because you "promised to patch the crumbling concrete of a bridge in your town" ?
Whatever the reason may be, despite the fact that infrastructure projects would not only have short-term employment benefits but the much more important benefit of actually keeping the stuff your entire economy depends on to function working past the end of the decade - they aren't being done.
I haven't read the book - so I can't say how accurate the rest of your description of it is, nor how much modern America really reflects that - but this claim was simply outright provably and factually incorrect.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
They are not skeptics. Skeptic has a specific definition - and they are literally the opposite of skeptics.
Skeptics are people who believe only that which has evidence, they embrace science and reject pseudo-science, religion and other ideologies not based on evidence.
Skeptics accept climate science as one of the most thoroughly tested scientific theories in the world today (we have more evidence for this theory than we have for the link between tobacco and lung cancer and very nearly more than we have for evolution - and there isn't a shred of scientific evidence against it).
People who refuse to believe something *despite* all the evidence are not skeptics, by definition they are not. The proper term is "deniers" whether what they are denying is evolution, climate change or the holocaust - they are all the same movement intellectually.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *