Links before dishes

Via everyone and their sister, ephemere's post No country for strangers is eloquent and vital. Go read it now; I'll wait here until you come back.

...Right then! All fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender, check out this post by cedarseed, because you will love it and it is awesome. cedarseed is pretty awesome, actually; I've been reading her journal since 2006 both for her art and for her posts on Lebanese politics.


The rest of these are related to three_weeks_for_dw:  

torachan is hosting a comment fic fest for trans characters. There are a lot of prompts to be filled...

inkstone has revived the Small Fandoms Friending Meme. Add your micro-fandoms to the comments! I put up Their Majesties' Bucketeers already and will shortly go back for more.

kake is making a series of posts on how to read Chinese-language menus. Yes! I will learn how to order the garlic eggplant and mabo doufu (yeah, that's the Japanese pronunciation) and then I will never starve or overpay for a meal in China, ever. Victory!

shareandsharealike is hosting a pan-fandom polyamory comment fic fest. Needs more prompts, written and filled!

[3weeks4DW] In search of time, lost and otherwise

I wrote the following for a course in philosophical theology in November 2006. I should mention at the outset that the paper is a fairly direct attempt to explain the actual physics of time as they are currently understood to my professor, who is a wonderful man and a brilliant philosopher but a very poor physicist (not that I can make any claims to being anything more than an educated layperson in that field). Consequently I wound up talking about Harry Potter and the books of Gene Wolfe in an attempt to illustrate my points comprehensibly. I still enjoy this essay, and I hope readers will too--the suspiciously broad generalizations stop right after the cut, I promise.

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In Search of Time, Lost and Otherwise

Before the modern era there was no distinction between science and philosophy; someone who might today be labeled a scientist would have called him or herself, at most, a “natural philosopher.” Thinkers such as Aristotle and Hypatia discussed the nature and composition of the cosmos as readily as they did morality, ethics and the good life. It was not until the modern scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that science and philosophy parted ways, but today the disjunction between them is nearly as profound as that between science and religion.

This state of affairs is unfortunate on a number of levels. Both science and philosophy are engaged in explaining the nature of existence, but the insights of each field are lost on the other. Nowhere are the pernicious consequences of this situation more evident than in the study of time.

( Time is the one thing you do not have. )

Kiki's Delivery Service

Kiki's Delivery Service | Majo no takkyubin. Dir. Miyazaki Hayao: Studio Ghibli, 1989.

This is the last of the major Studio Ghibli films that I hadn't seen--the only Ghibli films I haven't, in point of fact, are the minor Umi ga kikoeru and Omohide poroporo, (For the record, we don't talk about Gedo senki around here.)

In some ways this movie is the most flight-obsessed of all the Ghibli movies, though of course this is arguable; flight is a central motif in Ghibli, maybe the central motif. I really do enjoy the way Ghibli presents flying, too, and girls' relation to it; in this movie in particular the gender divide is stark, as Tombo notes when he wishes that he had been born into a witch family so that he could fly naturally, rather than only with the aid of ungainly technology. Indeed, Kiki's ontological ease with flying, and the fact that it's her talent and her livelihood, makes the disappearance of her powers of magic and flight all the more wrenching, and the climax all the better; she has found herself again, and won a place in her town's heart doing it. ("Look, up in the sky! That's not a bird, it's a girl! No, it's Kiki!")

In some ways too this movie also seems to be the most female-centric of the Ghibli corpus: Kiki derives her powers from her mother, it's the female baker Osono who gives Kiki her room, Kiki's customers are almost all women, and it's the painter Ursula who helps Kiki deal with her depression when she does lose her power. Even Jiji, a male cat, is voiced by a woman in the Japanese version (as is standard in Japanese animation)--and in the Japanese version Kiki does not regain the ability to talk to him, significantly. Despite Miyazaki putting Kiki on the back of Tombo's bike in that one scene, I really did enjoy the movie's presentation of one girl's struggle to find her independence, and her eventual success at it.