Watching Simoun, one of the characters one will come across is Yun, who among most people who have seen the show seems to engender a tremendous amount of affection and respect. It's interesting that this should be the case for a character who was created essentially to plug a gap in a minor aspect of the plot of an early episode and ended up with a ( Read more... )

So, a few hours ago, I had a discussion with Maya about Aoi Hana. In this discussion, one interesting thing that we had decided to do was to reopen the topic of Chizu, the character who many of you will remember from my disgusted rant about her and how despicable she is a while back. In this discussion, we discounted a lot of our previous ( Read more... )

The first thing to establish is that Aoi Hana admits of being defined as a fairy tale despite its lack of any supernatural or even particularly unusual elements, due to its use of a setting (all-girls high school) and setting-specific tropes that carry defined readings, associations, and references within them, within the context of Japanese media ( Read more... )

For all the talk about Santa/Father Christmas as a harbinger of a total commercialisation of Christmas, I'd like to actually take some time to talk about what I think this figure means. I think that Santa fills an important role in the Feast of the Nativity in that he is in effect the tutelary deity or prime spirit involved in what amounts to a ( Read more... )

Thoughts on the current state of the Congressional and state-level Democratic Party.

• Nancy Pelosi (CA) was an effective Speaker and will make a far better Minority Leader than somebody like Steny Hoyer (MD) would. Since we probably won't get a Minority Leader Weiner (NY) or Minority Leader Blumenauer (OR), I say keep her.
• Keep Clyburn (SC) as Whip.
• ( Read more... )

(Some parts of this are reposted from elsewhere or other things I've said over the years; some of it is new.)

We live in a culture of dehumanisation. The right wing of our political spectrum relentlessly dehumanises the Other and some of the more hedonistic aspects of our culture do not outright, but definitely flirt dangerously with the idea of ( Read more... )

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Sorba's hilarious rant about 'natural rights' here is based upon what I think is an incredibly dangerous and disgusting position that takes human beings for just an especially advanced type of animal--which, of course, we are. Biologically speaking. This position comes from one of two positions: a pernicious overextension of the modern synthesis of ( Read more... )

Some of you may be aware that for the past five years the main composer for most of the music heard in Doctor Who has been a man named Murray Gold. Some may also be aware that the music in 'The Eleventh Hour' sounded a bit different to the music heard during most of Russell T Davies' tenure.

( Read more... )

For the past few weeks I've been re-reading C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) for the first time in quite a while. The last time I read these books I was eleven years old and on a plane from Dublin to Newark so I don't remember much. I got through the first two books double-quick but like ( Read more... )

This one

My response:

'Davies's work on Doctor Who and Torchwood is known to some for being overall fairly self-serving. He's definitely evidenced a focus on ratings and market popularity (which has, to be fair, paid off IN SPADES) rather than making long-term fans happy, but he's done it in such a way that he opens himself to accusations of ( Read more... )