What’s in a Name?
Canon is pretty funny to discuss. For example, what's that lady in white's name? It's Mon Mothma, obviously, and she's about to tell us about how many bothans died to get the plans for the second Death Star. But her name isn't actually used in Return of the Jedi. It is mentioned once in Revenge [...]
de Sade and the Curious Endpoints of Power
The Marquis de Sade isn't the world's best philosopher. He's a fairly good writer and stylist, and has an alright grasp of character dynamics, but his dialogues are worse than Plato's when it comes to having one character give long speeches, and another nod, agree, and say "oh yes, you're right, you're so wise, you've [...]
Color Science
Consider a woman, Mary, who is color blind. She is a neuroscientist, and knows absolutely everything there is to know about color, all the wavelengths and all the effects of light on the eye, etc.. There is nothing she doesn't know about it. But she has never, herself, experienced it. One day, a surgical procedure [...]
A hoax that got out of hand
GET FUCKING VACCINATED YOU IDIOTS
Audio Mixing
How a song is mixed, and the levels at which the different instruments are recorded, edited, etc. produces different effects. Observe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOEIRI5HSuQ Studio version, with rather muddy and otherwise flat mixing. The song is understandable, but so much of the detail is lost. The instruments blend together, the volumes on many things are wrong, and [...]
V.
“A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsicously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: “Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.” It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved upon on it each time, placing emphasis on different words—“events seem”; “seem to be ordered”; [...]
Intellectual Laziness
Something that has existed since, well, probably forever (even though this paragraph originally started 'Something that's become more and more of a problem...', it's almost certainly been an forever), is the problem of intellectual laziness. If you've only glanced at a complicated topic, something that people have doctorates in, have written long books about, have [...]
Apocalypse and Revelation: the Televisualization of Movies
X-Men: Apocalypse is a hot mess of a film, with some lovely action sequences, some well done CGI, fairly good acting, good make-up and costuming, and an overstuffed plot that has a few too many twists and characters to make its nearly 2 1/2 hour run time feel worth it. Compounding the strangeness is that I [...]
“I am Always Late to the Party” by Donna Greenhauser
I'm not one of those people who are glued to book reviews and clamoring to read the latest thing, despite my profession. I prefer to give books a bit of time to age, and to see if it's just going to be a flash in the pan that no one will care about in a [...]
Literal Machines 