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The Abstract and Brief Chronicles of the Time

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It may have quite understandably escaped your notice (what with all the mishigas going on around us) but 2025 marked the tenth anniversary of these film nights at the Victoria Park Baptist Church. In truth, there have been a few interruptions here and there. We took a brief hiatus for the occasional global pandemic, and then there was the time when the Church roof collapsed...  ...but even allowing for all that, we've covered a lot of territory since 2015. Now, as we prepare to enter our second decade, I hope you will indulge me if I permit myself a moment of quiet reflection. What I earnestly hope is obvious by now is that these film nights are not primarily about the films. Yes, I screen movies (and I fully intend to screen many more) and I hope everyone enjoys the titles I select. Even the bad films can be important for anthropological reasons... But this isn't just a film club , and my purpose here is not merely to stick a film in the slot, press "play" and sit do...
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The Golem in Suburbia

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(not a real calendar) Well.... so much for 2025. If you're anything like me, you still find it a little jarring to be actually living through years with implausible, futuristic names like "2025" or "2026". It wasn't that long ago that we associated such numbers with pulp science fiction stories about the conquest of Mars, or apocalyptic interplanetary wars. 2026 is supposed to be a far-off destination in speculative stories about time travel, not the "use-by" date on the carton of milk you bought this morning. When did that happen? So yes; 2026 is come. Unfortunately, the reality of this "World of Tomorrow" we find ourselves living through has probably not quite lived up to the grand predictions of yesteryear; especially if you were hoping for flying cars or personal jet packs or world peace. It's certainly true that rather too many unglamourous and archaic relics of Humanity's past are persisting in our everyday lives (the intern...
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Galatea4U

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Gather around, everyone, and make yourselves comfortable. I'm going to tell you a little story. There once was a guy; oh, let's call him "Pygmalion".  He was unhappy with all the women of his community, and refused to have anything to do with them (I'm sure they had their own opinions about him , but whatever they said amongst themselves has not been recorded by posterity) so he decided to take matters into his own hands. To be precise, he took matter into his own hands, and sculpted himself a woman of his very own.  His creation was absolutely everything he wanted in a woman... and nothing he didn't want. She was the perfect companion, the perfect sexual partner; the perfect wife.  But that of course is just the beginning of the story. Because now Pygmalion didn't just have a wife; he had a business model . If he could manufacture a perfect partner for himself, why couldn't he do the same thing for everyone else? So, Pygmalion opened up a little shop,...
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Seaman Envy?

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Last week's Ruby Sparks marked "Week Ten" in this current series ( The Grok, the Glunk and the Golem ) and as a further exploration of the current state of A.I. Large Language Models, I decided to try a little experiment over the weekend. I fed the complete text of everything I have written thus far (weeks one through ten) into several different ChatBots and asked them to "read" through the entire series. I did not tell them I was the author, in the hope that this might curtail their natural tendency towards ebullient sycophancy (with mixed results). Once they had read through everything (and reacted surprisingly thoughtfully in several cases) I asked them a question: "If you were the one programming this little series, what would you pick for Week Eleven , bearing in mind everything that has come before? Where would you go after Ruby Sparks ?" Each of the ChatBots approached this question in their own inimitable way, but (revealingly) they all indep...
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