"I went to see this at Film Forum (thankfully not defunct) with my husband, Ira, and my mother several years ago. Before she died, the three of us used to go to the movies together, which was in and of itself a white-knuckle experience. My mom was a vocal spectator at the movies. Sighing, gasping, moaning, even uttering words of advice or disdain to the screen were not beyond her. It was often embarrassing. Even the most vapid milquetoast piece of crap could get a rise out of her. (She had discerning taste—after all, she loved Buñuel—but movies just made her emotional.) This film is not vapid, milquetoast, or remotely crappy—far from it. Between her and the movie, I was a wreck."

""The clearest book I’ve come across that makes the case that the so-called ‘control problem’ — the problem of building human-level and beyond artificial intelligence that we can control, that we can know in advance will converge with our interests — is a truly difficult and important task, because we will end up building this stuff by happenstance if we simply keep going in the direction we’re headed. Unless we can solve this problem in advance and have good reason to believe that the machines we are building are benign and their behavior predictable — even when they exceed us in intelligence a thousand-, a million-, or a billion-fold — this is going to be a catastrophic intrusion into our lives that we may not survive.""

"Apart from increasing the level of actual synchronicity in my real life, reading Carl Jung's Synchronicity has been a pleasant stroll down subjectivity lane. In it, Jung subtly introduces the concept of a woven fabric of time and space that brings us together — past the laws of causality and the physical world — a mutual resonance between individuals beyond our understanding. As we each reflect the grandiose forces of the universe on a micro level, repelling and attracting events and other individuals, the solar system simultaneously plays the backdrop to our personal dramas on this planet, sweeping us up in greater cycles. All I gotta say is I'm a fan of attributing meaning to this process; I'll take Jung's ‘meaningful synchronicity’ over ‘pointless coincidence’ any day."

"Growing up, I had a poster of the mid-nineties Tony Todd remake of Night of the Living Dead hanging on my bedroom wall that I had gotten it from the local video store when they were planning on tossing it. I love the remake, but it was the original George Romero black-and-white film that made me want to be a storyteller. It made me want to be a horror movie makeup artist. Making movies looked like fun! And looking back, aside from all that, the film has a racial and social component that I think elevated it beyond the typical horror film. And it was cool to see a Latino last name in the credits, quite frankly."