I don’t understand why I keep seeing memes about the Oxford Comma. It’s a nerdy thing to meme about, but it’s also, I suppose, a sign of health that people care that much about quality. But this is the 21st century, and we will have our stupid Hot Takes. Here’s the Federalist, an online mag… Read More The Oxford Comma is Actually Useful – A Fisking
If you define fantasy as “a story that cannot occur in the real world”, as this web site does, then you can include sci-fi in that, as sci-fi takes places in worlds unseen and with technology uninvented, and any technology sufficiently advanced functions more or less like magic in the minds of many people. But… Read More Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Space Opera
In the last issue of UJ, I penned an essay about how I felt regarding the end of Game of Thrones. In that essay, I argued that the spirit of Martin’s work is essentially pagan, and the influence of Robert Howard is far more present than that of Tolkein, who filled his work with a Catholic… Read More George R.R. Martin is Seriously Starting to Bore Me
I was inspired by my earlier post to think about aesthetics – the philosophy of art, beauty, etc. And I did a brief perusal of the related article on the topic on Infogalactic and discovered something: In ancient and medieval world, specific things were called out as being beautiful: order, form, harmony, unity, etc. This was… Read More On Aesthetics
As this is a good quote, I shamelessly reblog it. (https://pixabay.com) “One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.” C. S. Lewis (https://en.wikipedia.org) “Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically; mediocre fantasy fiction… Read More Quotations on Fantasy Literature — charles french words reading and writing
Since I mentioned it the other day, you can pick up a copy of Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful on Kindle for 99 cents. It looks, based on the sample, to be properly formatted, too. Additionally, the micro-press whose podcast I’ve been following, Dead Rabbit… Read More Some Books to Check Out
First, the rumor mill: reshoots, secret cameos, six different endings, a bunch of “sources say” folderol. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. There’s really no way to know. Even after the movie’s out, we don’t get a lot of facts about what actually goes on in a movie shoot. Until the last Blu-Ray sale, no one… Read More And Now, More Mindlessly Speculative Guff about Star Wars
That may be unfair. Caroline Calloway isn’t the first person who couldn’t make a book deadline. But the disconnect between reality and InstaReality is as vast: Caroline Calloway knew she was not who she had made the world believe she was. She had created a public image that was essentially false and, when she was… Read More A “One-Woman Fyre Festival”
All aesthetic positions are going to offend someone, because concepts of the beautiful are perpetually wrapped up in concepts of the true, and that makes sense in poets’ vomitings but not as an ontological baseline. Whether the beautiful and the true are connected in some way doesn’t really help us to define the beautiful. The… Read More Originality is not Art.
I find it interesting how “podcast” has evolved from “micro-radio show on your iPhone” to “people talking into a microphone on YouTube”. Now this is a satrical podcast, but what it’s satirizing is very real. There are in fact, entire YouTube channels that exist for 30-year-olds to talk like children about popcorn movies under the… Read More Merry Podcasting
Content Blues 