Category: Mediaphilism
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Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”
The Blank Slate I love books that shake up my preconceptions, and reading Pinker’s book was like experiencing one big personal iconoclasm. The thoroughness with which he engaged gender, violence, intelligence, and other aspects of our social understandings unsettled my positions on much of the whole “Nature VS Nurture” debate. While it did not convince…
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Beowulf: Not Out of the Uncanny Valley Yet
Saw Beowulf Friday night, not a classic tale I’m particularly fond of, but I was curious about this being the first attempt to make a film with as-real-as-possible human characters since Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within belly-flopped in 2001 (not counting mixture CGI/live action films like The Matrix, which also failed). The film still failed…
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Movie You Should See: Quest for Fire
Rae Dawn Chong in Quest for Fire While 10,000 BC was an over-hyped, glamorized, film that simultaneously gave too much credit to primitive humans and, at the same time, not enough, Quest for Fire takes place in 80,000 BC, at a time when there are scattered tribes of humans all at different levels of cultural…
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Movies You Can Skip: 10,000 B.C.
10,000 B.C. tells the story of a tribe of people living in what is, to my mother’s best guess, the Himalayas. All year long, the tribe looks forward to when the mammoths come migrating through their land, so they can hold their great hunt. This is actually right about the time Mammoths went extinct due…
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The Declining Environment’s Impact on Humans in Billy Joel Songs
Billy Joel has written two of the most moving environmental songs ever, but they are not easily recognized as such. That’s because we are used to Environmentalism focusing on the non-human elements, such as the decline of other species and changes to the landscape, but environmentalism is ultimately about maintaining our human quality of life.…
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Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science”
A New Kind of Science Many books I like to read with a yellow highlighter, reading Stephen Wolfram’s ANKOS I was compelled to whip out a red pen. While his 1,000-plus page field-guide to cellular automata and complexity theory is brimming with fantastic examples of all shapes, sizes, and dimensions, Wolfram’s writing and failure to…
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What a Wonderful Trip It’s Been: Y the Last Man
Y the Last Man I would love to go back and read through all the graphic novels I’ve bought collecting this series from its beginnings, but they’ve all been loaned out to people who loaned them out to other people and so on and so on. I did recently have the time to review my…
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Carl Sagan Appears in Atomic Robo!!!
Note: I’m getting a lot of hits on this post, so visitors might like to know that Carl Sagan made a second bad-ass appearance in “Atomic Robo” a little more recently too. In issue #4 Robo gets knocked out and has a dream where Carl “Cosmos” Sagan asks Robo to fly shotgun on the Viking…
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Dr. Jay Hosler’s “Clan Apis”
Clan Apis Clan Apis chronicles the life and times of a single worker honey bee, Nyuki, who’s delightfully wise-ass and wholly enchanted with her life in a hive where her personal experiences are no different from those of the her thousands of neighbors. Dr. Jay Hosler’s understanding of entomology, evolution, and natural science allows him…
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Cloverfield Creeped Me Out
Saw Clovefield this morning and the film has been haunting me all day. It’s abstractness, catching glimpses of the monster here and there, trying to figure it out, has left me distracted and scouring the Web for more information. A commenter I read at one site said to watch the ocean carefully in the background…
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A Tale of Two Flatland Movies
Flatland the Movie VS Flatland the Film I really enjoyed and appreciated Edwin Abott’s 1884 classic book Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions, which tells the story of Square, a lawyer living in Flatland, a two-dimensional world that has height and width, but not length. It’s in the public domain and free to download at…
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Mind Webs: 49 hours Worth of Speculative Fiction Radio
Mind Webs CD Cover Here’s an online treasure trove of audio files brought to you by the Internet Archive of the 1970s radio series Mind Webs. The show featured the greatest speculative fiction stories from top-notch authors of the day. You can find a summary of plotlines here. I’ve been listening to the shows for…