I've been watching a new show on Netflix called Altered Carbon. It's based on a book by Richard K. Morgan and takes place in a futuristic society where rich people can live for hundreds of years (or possibly forever). A new technology has allowed people to be implanted with a disk called a "stack" in the back of their neck which stores their personality and memories. When your body dies, as long as your stack is still intact, it can be put into another body. When someone is put in prison, their stack is removed and put in storage and their body is given to someone else. Rich people can afford the best bodies and some can even have clones of themselves made. But if your stack is destroyed there is no coming back. Then you're really gone forever. The main character, Takeshi Kovacs, was something called an envoy. Envoys have incredible instincts and fighting skills. They were all killed off except for him. He was arrested and put in prison until 250 years later when a rich man named…
> "Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen." -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Lord of Montaigne What a strange topic for a product recommendation list, and yet what strange creatures we are. We do indeed invent gods by the dozen, so let's pour one out for Montaigne, arguably history's first "blogger." Not only do we invent gods and ways to worship them, we even do it for a goof, just to be silly. Even the joke deities tend to get taken seriously over time, which provokes the question: How do religions get rolling, anyway? Apparently, all we need are rumors which become legend, legends which become myths, and then the myth gets a church and a 501(c)(3) tax status. The pantheon of parody religions is a fascinating one. The Hacker's Dictionary makes reference to "Ha ha only serious," a characteristic of geeks taking an ironic joke and applying it with a grain of truth within. That applies to parody religions: Even the joke ones have a point, which is…
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