Recently I bought Civ for the iPad, because I remember fondly playing Civ 2 back in high school, an unmentionable time ago. I have now had it for a couple of months, long enough to win the game as each of the available civilisations on Emperor, and about half on Deity, and I thought I'd offer some comments.

The main thing is that this game is just ( Read more... )

In my presentation the other day I dropped in a reference to my old drinking pal Baudrillard. What I argued was that in "Fair Play" murder mysteries, there is a disconnection between the criminal act and the criminal reality. The body is simply one sign in the logical system of clues. Or to put the inverse, as Chandler does, murder is just to ( Read more... )

( 4 Months Of My Life )

Umberto Eco is one of the leading scholars in the field of "Semiotics", a term which I barely understand but which in my dummy's terms is about systems of signs. In my sub-specialist field of literary endeavour, these would be better known as "clues", hence my interest.

In part 1 of Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Eco begins to elaborate his ( Read more... )

When you sit down to think about a film which is a screen adaptation of a novel you need to think carefully about the interaction between the versions. In some ways it doesn't matter which came first, because they can both be experienced in parrallel, and indeed, in parrallel with other film adaptations and radio plays and the like. So it is with ( Read more... )

Just following up on my previous post, C and I went to see Midnight in Paris last night. It was quite amusing, but I came away feeling somehow a little unsatisfied. I expressed this immediately afterwards by saying that I thought there was a far better film below the skin of this one, and today I have been gently exploring that intuition.( Alas, spoilers )

One of my favourite jokes is simplicity itself:There are two kinds of people in the world; those that believe there are two kinds of people, and those who don't.
I couldn't tell you exactly what this means to me, aside from being appealingly recursive. It's the sort of thing which aught to be from Kahlog Albran's The Profit, with its "twelve ( Read more... )

I was thinking about the concept that the paradigm shift from the silent film rendered them inaccessible. For a contemporaneous audience, any individual silent film fitted into a frame of reference & stylistic convention. A modern audience lacks almost all of the social and stylistic references which would give the film meaning. Indeed, Metropolis ( Read more... )

I would say that this year there has been a big improvement in my writing technique, both from the point of view of gaming material and from the point of view of academic writing. An improvement that hasn't been without its retrograde moments - my Kim essay for example - but which has sharpened my writing focus and technique immeasurably; perhaps ( Read more... )

My first music purchase was perhaps less edgy than Anarchangel's, but may be even more post-modern. It's an album by an Irish Elvish impersonator named James Brown. He covers songs by dead rockers in the style of Elvis, so it's got an eclectic range of music transmuted into a generally similar style ( Read more... )