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starladyThis whole "work email eating my posts" (by which I mean, user error) has got to stop.
Forty years ago yesterday men from the planet Earth set foot on the face of the Moon. I'm terribly sentimental and unreasonable about manned space exploration, and I have to think that the Apollo program is way up there on the list of Good Things We've Done. I'm using these gendered terms very consciously, since Apollo and NASA (and society) were very much an old boys' club, but I am very much of the mind that we need to send people--men and women--back to the Moon, and then on to Mars, posthaste. Our future is there waiting for us.
Fittingly enough, my sister and I went to see Moon tonight. Short review: One of those rare, smart scifi movies that isn't an action movie in space.
I don't have a whole heck of a lot of comments about it, except that the music by Clint Mansell was pretty great, and I was glad that in the end it was not a non-Asian movie that conformed to the non-Asian vision of robots as our enemies. GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) is Sam's enabler and helpmeet, the closest thing he has to a friend, and Sam couldn't have undertaken his journey without him. I also thought the movie's general vision of the future was appealingly un-rosy eyed, if that makes sense (though of course this sort of "dystopian lite" take is not new--see Gattaca or Minority Report), and for that reason I particularly liked the last line of the movie. I also thought the movie did a good job of not showing its cards too early, as well as avoiding the "good clone/evil clone" fallacy that's practically a stereotype of the genre these days. Yup, I liked it a lot.
Four years late, two years after giving up literally five minutes from the ending of the game and then leaving for Japan, I beat Kingdom Hearts II last night. What an awesome video game--the KH games are some of my all-time favorites, and I thought KH2 did a good job of handling its rather heavy themes lightly, despite the fact that its metaphysics are somewhat confused, as my friend Charles has argued. I especially thought the ending hit all the right notes, though it didn't have quite as much pathos as the ending of the first game. Ah well, happy endings are like that. If future KH games feature Sora, Riku and Kairi, though, I do very much hope that Kairi a) is a playable character and b) wields her own Keyblade (she does briefly in KH2, but only in a cutscene, sadly). In the meantime, I await KH: Birth From Sleep with anticipation.
It might just be that I'm obsessed with the game, but I persistently find the influence of Kingdom Hearts in Cat Valente's online serial novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Chapter 6 was released yesterday, and the fan community![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
onaleopard is in the LJ spotlight this week, so this is a great time to check out the book. Hint, hint. ^_^
Forty years ago yesterday men from the planet Earth set foot on the face of the Moon. I'm terribly sentimental and unreasonable about manned space exploration, and I have to think that the Apollo program is way up there on the list of Good Things We've Done. I'm using these gendered terms very consciously, since Apollo and NASA (and society) were very much an old boys' club, but I am very much of the mind that we need to send people--men and women--back to the Moon, and then on to Mars, posthaste. Our future is there waiting for us.
Fittingly enough, my sister and I went to see Moon tonight. Short review: One of those rare, smart scifi movies that isn't an action movie in space.
I don't have a whole heck of a lot of comments about it, except that the music by Clint Mansell was pretty great, and I was glad that in the end it was not a non-Asian movie that conformed to the non-Asian vision of robots as our enemies. GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) is Sam's enabler and helpmeet, the closest thing he has to a friend, and Sam couldn't have undertaken his journey without him. I also thought the movie's general vision of the future was appealingly un-rosy eyed, if that makes sense (though of course this sort of "dystopian lite" take is not new--see Gattaca or Minority Report), and for that reason I particularly liked the last line of the movie. I also thought the movie did a good job of not showing its cards too early, as well as avoiding the "good clone/evil clone" fallacy that's practically a stereotype of the genre these days. Yup, I liked it a lot.
Four years late, two years after giving up literally five minutes from the ending of the game and then leaving for Japan, I beat Kingdom Hearts II last night. What an awesome video game--the KH games are some of my all-time favorites, and I thought KH2 did a good job of handling its rather heavy themes lightly, despite the fact that its metaphysics are somewhat confused, as my friend Charles has argued. I especially thought the ending hit all the right notes, though it didn't have quite as much pathos as the ending of the first game. Ah well, happy endings are like that. If future KH games feature Sora, Riku and Kairi, though, I do very much hope that Kairi a) is a playable character and b) wields her own Keyblade (she does briefly in KH2, but only in a cutscene, sadly). In the meantime, I await KH: Birth From Sleep with anticipation.
It might just be that I'm obsessed with the game, but I persistently find the influence of Kingdom Hearts in Cat Valente's online serial novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Chapter 6 was released yesterday, and the fan community
onaleopard is in the LJ spotlight this week, so this is a great time to check out the book. Hint, hint. ^_^