Interesting Links for 25-11-2012

[andrewducker]

• Hermeneutics: The Game
  (tags: game meaning )
• More evidence that Prometheus was all about Space Jesus.
  (tags: movies writing prometheus jesus )
• Blade Runner's Original Ending: Yes, Deckard's A Replicant
  (tags: bladerunner movies )
• Most people have no idea if the content they're downloading is legal or not.
  (tags: uk copyright internet )
• Dave Sim's

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Given the comment thread on the Blade Runner item there is a huge bit of irony in you including the Hermeneutics game on the same list of links.

[andrewducker]

:->

And, to be fair, there are versions of the movie where there's no hint at all, and in _those_ movies he's probably not one!

[bart_calendar]

That's essential true, but most of those commentators are proving the game's point by coming from an already established baseline biased interpretation.

(I say essentially because in ALL versions Rachel asks him if he's taken the test.)

[andrewducker]

Oh yes - people find a position that makes them feel good, and then defend it to the death. It's how debate works!

[bart_calendar]

It's how interpretation works.

This is why I always have problems with people calling a text "problematic" or stating that something is "feminist", "anti-feminist", "pro gay", "homophobic", whatever. And I have the same problem whenever anyone says a text is biased.

I sort of feel like all texts are whatever the reader wants them to be in order to satisfy their experience of how the world works and how they want to react to something at a given moment in time.

It's not that the text is biased, it's that it's human nature to interpret things from a position of bias.

[bart_calendar]

My university thesis was called "Defining The New Defeatism" and was pretty much an argument that the only rational response to post Derridian understanding of the nature of text was to simply give up and agree that text is incapable of communicating any consistent meaning whatsoever, because the meaning is altered and changed by every reader's experience before they encounter the text, during their time encountering the text, how the text was presented to them and whatever happens to them after they encounter the text. A truly limitless number of variables that strip words entirely of any sense of defined meaning.

My thesis board did not consider this argument ironic.

Whether or not my thesis was meant as satire or not, is something I'll leave to the interpretation of others, by the definition of my own thesis.