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Superbad at IMDb
Funniest mindless movie of the last few years. McLovin is the best, and the other guys grew on me. Michael Cera must go and do some Woddy Allen or Charlie Kaufman stuff; he was great at Arrested Development, and is quite enjoyable at Juno and this movie.
O Cheiro do Ralo at IMDb
In his job he needs to undervalue the suffering of others in order to make more money. Then there’s the smell, the ass and the eye. The degree of objectification of desire is in direct proportion to the self-debasement of the indulger. By degrading the other, he nullifies himself. The very indifference to the overjealous ones, the suppressed recalcitrant losers of the world, is what causes their victims to exist. Great disturbing movie.
The Lathe of Heaven (book) The Lathe of Heaven (1980) at IMDb Deep review on Lathe of Heaven (the movie)
A lost science fiction PBS movie with Taoist undertones is a real find, right? A guy discovers his dreams change reality—when he wakes up he finds himself in a world where the content of his dreams have actually happened. He of course gets scared after a couple of nightmares, seeks relief in drugs, and then, because of them, is lead to a psychiatrist.

It happens the psychiatrist is a positivist type. When finally he gets convinced the guy dreams things that actually do happen, he decides to find a way to control the dreams of his patient to better the world… so easy to see where this leads, right? People should really get into Taoism before discussing politics, sometimes I dream. Well, may this never happen as I wish.

“To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.”Chuang Tzu
Here's for all the sissy Apple lovers out there... This is the ultimate design for my old Duron, which faithfully downloaded well over one terabyte (mostly movies, 1300+) always on 24/7/365 over the last four years. It also runs Apache and is a file and printer server, as well as a router for my home network (with four, also damn old and beautiful computers). Sometimes I dust it off with a vacuum cleaner. click to read the whole text
The Fountain
The Fountain: No-CGI, Cabala, Mogway — not good enough.I really enjoyed Requiem for a Dream, and PI was quite interesting. I may grow to like this one, but for now it just seemed a little too newagy to my tastes. It started a bit boring and I never quite empathized with the characters. On the other hand, some of the visuals (and sounds — by Mogway) are quite appealing (no CGI!), and near the end we have some surprises. Actually, some interpretations may not be that newagy — but pretentiousness still abounds.
Zazen: just sitting.I have read the article on “ditching Buddhism” by John Horgan about one or two years ago and I have found it to be as so filled up with misconceptions as not to be worthy even of bad publicity, yet last week somebody remembered me about it and I decided to answer some of its points. click to read the whole text
10 Item or Less
In imdb a user commented: "Annoying little transition into some sort of regurgitated independent film values finds this shallow project from Brad Silberling offering little and providing less in this embarrassingly exploitive work." I agree, yet it is still watchable — even more so if you understand how clichê is the fabricated spontaneity in it. It is as if independent movie has aquired its own hollywood-like formulaicism. So it kind of becomes an interestingly consumated aesthetic portrail of so many cult-status fabricated stylishness examples we see around. Many people liked Me and You and Everyone We Know, and it is surely a much fresher and pure attempt, but "10 Items or Less" explains all the little (but very much present) annoyances I got with "Me and You..."
Spirals — by mail@corwinlevi.com
• Fuzzy discourse: in-jokes, cryptolects and sandhabhasa; peculiar and gregarious uses of language, informative ambiguity, "serious" double entendre proprieties; simultaneous complementary discourses, the yana idea; Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (weak) and how it relates to tantras and alchemic texts; essentially contested concepts; connections between allegory, metaphor, analogy and isomorphism; secrecy, obscurantism, obfuscation and cryptography; Wittgenstein's criticism on psychological interpretations; Sitz im Leben; jargon, kennings, esotericism, cult brainwashing through language, shibboleth, discourse communities, speech communities, newspeak; interdependency vs. apophenia, paranoiac-critical method.

Game theory connections with aesthetics: musical improvisation, stand-up comedy and the Japanese art of flirtation; proteans, self-ridicule, self-irony, best response, hecklers, trembling hand perfect equilibrium, catharsis/epiphany and self-organized criticality; reason, emotion and body dexterity gestalt; irony, nonsense and deadpan: connections between ethics and aesthetics in humor. Jokes: exactness, synthesis, rhythm; punch line; albur; Verfremdungseffekt; vajra deadpan: seriousness, transcendence and humor.

• Wittgenstein and buddhism, the argument against private language and Prasangika Madhyamika; ahimsa, principle of charity and negation/affirmation as violence, parrhesia; debate (traditional debate rules in Tibetan Buddhism), ludic nature of debate and meaningful communication, language-game, metacommunicative competence; semantic externalism.

• Non-violent "protocols": paraconsistent logics and the possibility of valid information mining on contradictory systems: databases, Buddhist dialectics, game theory, software rot, software brittle, japanese aesthetics of incompleteness, self-organized criticality; hidden premises and ipsedixitism, koans, ambiguity tolerance, autism. Proprieties of dialog: glitches, hazards, mind kipple, protocol entropy, race condition, deadlocks, synchronization, no-win situations, satisficing, double bind, zugzwang, mamihlapinatapai, Bohm Dialogue, Occam's razor applied to protocols, dialogism, game semantics.

• Personal ontology (computer science) and mind mapping, computer aided brainstorming, expert systems, houses of cards vs. ikebana approaches to knowledge representation, deep blogging, public mind mapping; terminology extraction, folksonomy, dynamic taxonomy, semantic network, semantic relationships formalization; graphic modeling of mind maps using virtual physics; grok, flow, intelligence amplification and metacognition; infornography, consciousness of death and intellectual production.

Anti-patterns: transposition of software engineering themes to philosophical methodology and writing in general.

• Japanese aesthetics of incompleteness and programming: featuritis, reinventing the wheel, quick-and-dirty, worse is better.

Cybernetics, Crowd psychology, charisma, professional amateurs, the long tail, semantic web, "cybershamanism", viral marketing and meme design, buzzwords. Net anonymity, darknets, crypto-anarchism, dining cryptographers protocol, "cybermandala"; butterfly effect, decision theory, catastrophe theory, complexity theory and strategy; wikis, collective intelligence; haragei vs. pluralistic ignorance; Umwelt, Weltanschauung.

Spiritual materialism, self-deception, doublethink, sophistry, cognitive dissonance, wishful thinking, magical thought, lying, point of no return, lie, indoctrination, propaganda, big lie, brainwashing, groupthink, illusion of control, clustering illusion, pareidolia, apophenia; political correctness, psychobabble, technobabble.

• The lifes of the 84 Mahasiddhas, yeshe chölwa, idiossincratic spiritual teachers; personality, individuality and Buddhism; daimon, genius.

Philosophy of mind, definition of consciousness, possibility of artificial consciousness; connections with the incompleteness theorem, externalism, problem of other minds; self-reference; sentience, qualia, hard problem of consciousness; arguments against epiphenomenalism, emergentism and anomalous monism; artificial intelligence (weak and strong), pattern recognition, machine learning, symbol grounding, cognitive architecture; embodied philosophy; artificial consciousness rights, animal rights, bioethics; mind and suffering, first person science, meditation, rigpa.

• Concepts of property and intellectual property; Buddhism and property, anti-copyright, infoanarchism, micropatronage; "Property is theft!" Essentialism and property, differences between possession and property, the problem of originality; arguments against self-ownership; allemansrätten; inalienable right of copy.

Greco-buddhism, mutual influences between Greek and Buddhist civilizations. Interpretatio graeca, cultural imperialism, syncretism. Transition from sudhamma to mahayana.

Elite theory, Iron Law of Oligarchy, hacker culture, conspiracy theory, radical transparency, direct democracy, e-democracy, inclusive democracy; anti-corporate activism, anti-consumerism, corporate personhood; direct action, Walden, simple living, frugality, freeganism, civil disobedience, conscientious objector, deep ecology; friendship, style, personal boycott to smokers and those who indulge in other similarly barbaric habits.

Mandala, Indra's net, autopoiesis, system theory, Avatamsaka Sutra, ikebana, fractals, complexity, diamond-like mind, recursion, strange loops, self-similarity, symmetry, endless knot, coemergence, subject-object problem.
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dharma centers
This is a list of good and reliable dharma teachers and places.

Chagdud Gonpa, pure lineage holders of the highest teachings of Vajrayana.

Chagdud Rinpoche, his compassion, courage and strenght will never cease to amaze us.

Siddharta's Intent, organization connected with the maverick dharma teacher Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche.

Lama Tsering, Lama Tsering Everest, intense and kind dharma teacher.

Caminho do Meio, NGO and Buddhist community founded by Lama Padma Samten, great meditator, physicist and popular dharma teacher. (in portuguese)

Alan Wallace, gentle scholar and meditation teacher.

Tokuda Igarashi, great zen master, his humbleness and erudition are insurpassable.

Dharma Centre, Directed by Ji Do Poep Sa Nin, kind and puzzling south-african teacher of koan.

There's also a Yahoogroup on Buddhism (in portuguese), bodisatva.
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