Consumerism

[kniedzw]

My ongoing adventures in consumerism:

First off, Amazon.com has finally broken me. They ship out of multiple warehouses, so when you tell them to combine packages, sometimes it takes them far longer than you would expect, as they have to move the stuff between warehouses before it can be sent out to you. This meant that my last-minute order of

Comments

[schenker28]

Wow -- you have a 2007 hybrid car-of-the future (it's not even 2007 yet, you time-traveler!) *and* you are one of the Elite Amazon Prime People. Scary!

[moonandserpent]

He's a powerful man, this Dark Scorpion man called "Kyle".

Fear him and his Illuminati-loving ways!

[kniedzw]

I'm ready for my cybernetic implants, now!

[sapphohestia]

Whoa. That's pretty cool. Does it parallel park itself too?

[kadnkadnk]

or fold itself up to fit in your pocket? :)

-k

[kniedzw]

No, although I believe that the Japanese model actually has that as an option.

I kid you not.

[kitsune_zen]

Actually, I've heard that Happy Feet is blatant conformist anti-religion propoganda thinly disguised as granola-crunching pseudo-enviromentalism that ignores both the complexity of spiritual belief systems and of sustainable ecosystems.

[kniedzw]

On the charge of oversimplifying sustainable ecosystems, you're completely right. It is pseudo-environmentalism, though there's a distinct lack of granola, and I'm not precisely certain what you are implying by tagging it "granola-crunching." That said, I'm not exactly looking for scientific rigor from mass-marketed animated movies

[sarcastibich]

My friend Jen summed it up as "This movie shows how a dancing penguin can save the world environment. He dances, the humans think it is cute, so they save the artic environment/habitat and stop the overhunting/fishing/pollution."

[kniedzw]

Except I didn't want to spoil the plot that significantly, so I didn't put it that way.

Since it's been said, however, that's a reasonable assessment of the movie, though kitsune_zen had a valid point on the anti-religious message. The makers of the film didn't handle that nearly as well as they could have, and the concerns she expressed are very valid, if ... bluntly worded. I was able to ignore much of that subtext because I could rationalize their intent as being benign, but they certainly could have approached the problem differently or avoided it by removing the religious subtext and replacing it with a crotchety, myopic elder subtext.

[unforth]

From what I've heard, Amazon is making a killing on the Prime memberships precisely because it's too late for most of their regular shipping options to work. They got my brother, too. ;)