I recently watched Barbarella - a movie that for my taste has no redeeming characteristics. Even the hotness of a young Jane Fonda doesn't make it a palatable experience. As part of trying to understand the movie, I've been reading about "Camp", which seems like a very slippery term. The various sources I've browsed all use the word in a consistent ( Read more... )

In the early phases of his book, Baudrillard thinks a lot about how we interact with reality. A pretty key idea which underpins all of his writing on the topic is that there is a reality. While he believes that it is a reality inaccessible to us, without a reality of some kind, his whole notion of hyperreality strikes one as tautological. On some ( Read more... )

I bumped into stephanie_pegg on the way into this cafe and she said she'd read my last post. Neither cynical, nor sarcastic, nor philosophical? She was basically enquiring: are you okay? And yes folks, yes I am.( Read more... )

Of course, this now opens another array of tricky questions because the series is Science Fiction and so we are voiding a rather large number of our real world laws.

The machine called upon in the Night's Dawn Trilogy is capable of the quasi-magical acts it does, obviously. More important than its actual capabilities is the extent to which we ( Read more... )

I suppose I should tack on a brief personal bit at the front:

I am alive.
I am having fun.
I am learning many interesting things.

Any other "news" will have to wait until I have cleared my current thinking regime.

Warning: indiscriminate spoilerage of a random assortment of stuff.

( Read more... )