Hacker Cinema
The Midnight Gospel
2020 · TV series · 1 season
Created by Pendleton Ward, Duncan Trussell
AnimationComedyScience FictionFantasyMystery
Traversing trippy worlds inside his universe simulator, Clancy the space caster explores existential questions about life, death and everything in between.
6 positive4 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
> But do explore as many philosophies as you can.
I am currently on this path as well. Here are a couple of sources that I like to recommend:
The TV show Midnight Gospel touches on a particular existential philosophy in each episode and includes a lot of interesting perspectives.
Alan Watts produced a lot of entertaining discussion that bridges the differences between Eastern and Western philosophies, primarily Zen, Dao, and Advaita Vedanta.
Well I don’t write blogs. Or read much. Or write literary reviews. But let’s pick two.
The odyssey is a very old classic. The framework of the adventure is still great. But Odysseus is a supremacist dick. He’s pretty similar to MCU Iron Man in terms of narrative and depth. We get the sense that it’s ok to kill the people in his home at the end because he is mighty Odysseus but I think that’s pretty lame. I could go on but it’s been too long to cite examples from memory.
A tale of two cities was another one I enjoyed a lot as a teen. The sloppy romanticism of the dude who devotes his life to a love he will never have seemed really quaint, but now seems just pathetic. I’m actually really annoyed when I see behavior like this in fiction now. It’s very frequent in token gay characters because a lot of writers seem to assume that gay people fall in love with straight people and can never get over it.
Stuff that’s resonated with me at a more thematic level recently… let’s say Parasite (Korean film), Mob Psycho 100 (anime, season 1), Over the Garden Wall, Bojack Horseman, and the midnight gospel. Not very universal, but they felt more relevant and more profound. The last one cheating a bit as it’s literally philosophical interviews.
Good literature is entertaining and conveys some greater meaning. Classics tend to do a pretty good job on this, but entertainment and thematic relevance she over time quite a bit.
The original SpongeBob SquarePants movie was a copy of the odyssey’s plot for entertainment but focused on a coming of age theme of what it means to be an adult and whether it was something to strive for. Dare I ask which of the SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and the Odyssey is a better piece of literature for a 21st century kid?
I think it’s a harder question than many would give credit. But I think regardless we should be more eager to discuss thematic comprehension of art with children for the stuff they watch. Because I spent a few years in school writing essays about how every book contained the theme of “Caring” and man that was fucking dumb.
There’s a great episode with Blake Lemoine on the Duncan Trussel podcast (Duncan created the Midnight Gospel on Netflix) - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0NXNvJtRQSuWl4HM1MvhD0?si=VAdJhs94SMmPQApZYbtqAw
Listening to that it seems clear Blake knew he was likely to be fired but in his eyes it’s some kind of a duty to tell the world.
One interesting point he makes in the Podcast is Lamda is not one thing like GPT-3 but a bunch of different systems across Google interacting as one and he argues the interaction of the whole is what makes sentience.
It’s a pretty “far out there” podcast but worth the time IMO
Midnight Gospel is one of my favorite TV shows. I've never heard of Psychomagic, but I'll check it out. Thank you for the recommendations!
Thanks for the reply, I'm only about 6 episodes into R&M so my view might change. What is "deep" is probably a better question, The Simpsons is pretty deep if you choose to look at it that way. I'm sure many people have written PHD thesis on this kind of thing. Personally I found the Midnight Gospel pretty deep as it basically rehashes a lot of Buddhist philosophies which Duncan Trussell is very fond of.
> in most western cultures it has become a huge tabu ... Death should be something that we accept and welcome, not something that we fear and reject.
I don't love every part of "Midnight Gospel" - There's a lot of pseudoscience in it - But I liked episode 7 [1] when he interviewed Caitlin Doughty. [2]
"Caitlin Marie Doughty (born August 19, 1984) is an American mortician, author, blogger, and YouTube personality known for advocating death acceptance and the reform of Western funeral industry practices"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_gospel#Episodes
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caitlin_Doughty
I had a very similar experience. Do you know which episode of Midnight Gospel that was?
I once had an experience of "time-looping" on acid where I returned to the beginning of the same scene over and over. After four or so rewinds I would say the words of whoever's turn it was to talk before they said it. I'm a pretty rational guy but that experience shook me to the core. There's a Midnight Gospel episode I saw recently that portrayed it in animation dead-on. So I can't be the only one.
The Midnight Gospel is insanely good. It's the best thing I've watched in a long time.
I'm a huge fan of Adventure Time so I was really excited when I heard about it, but the trailer is just full of gross imagery and I expected it to be just another stupid gross-for-gross-sake cartoon that I'd probably stop watching after a few episodes. So wrong.
That's from a specific experience I had with bad management, where decisions weren't being made and the responsibility for the decision making kept getting shunted around. In that situation, it would have been better to start in a direction, review the progress and outcomes, then re-align as necessary.
It doesn't apply in all scenarios, but it would be rare when an at least somewhat reasoned decision is entirely the wrong direction.
I just watched the first episode of Midnight Gospel last night: "It all depends on the circumstances!"