I’m not sure how to describe this movie. It’s a Brazilian film coming in September of this year that looks beautiful, seems to have a wonderful, heartwarming story, and a lot of deep questions about the human condition. And…it’s fantasy (plus an adaptation of this). It looks amazing and I can’t wait to see it.
See the trailer here (after the fold):
Thanks to SF Signal for the discovery!
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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9 Responses
This book is amazing and the movie looks nice. But the most interesting thing is that this book was dictated by a disembodied spirit, that is, a dead person.
The descriptions of the astral city is the first-hand experience of someone who was in fact there.
Anon: Do you mean it is narrated by a character who is a disembodied spirit, or are you saying that the premise of the book is that it is told by someone who is a disembodied spirit…literally?
The premise of the book is that it's literally written (well, dictated) by a spirit. It's all very new-agey, even though it was written decades ago.
No, it's really dictated by a dead person. The author is Chico Xavier, a famous medium who wrote more than 400 books dictated by spirits.
He was a simple man, almost illiterate, he couldn't have written so sophisticated stories by himself.
There is an interesting movie about his life, look at the trailler at
Loopdilou: Ah, I see.
Anonymous: Well, it's believed to have been dictated by a dead person, but I'm not one to believe in such things. It's a curious story, that's for sure.
Try to read more about chico xavier. he is a amazing person ! i believe …
I probably will at some point in the future.
Soon everyone will have a chance to see this movie. It will be released on DVD in Dec. 2011, by Strand Releasing.
The film is a fantastic production. Captivating and inspiring, it really gives viewers a glimpse into all the treasures of knowledge found in the amazing science and philosophy of Spiritism.
Check out this quote from the introduction of the book, "Nosso Lar" ("Our Home") on which this movie is based:
"In this very personal account, André Luiz reveals his identity as a medical doctor who practiced in southeastern Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century, and who left his physical body a few years prior to the beginning of World War Two. A true skeptic at the time of his demise, he is initially shocked at the discovery that death is nothing more than a doorway to a new and richer life. As time progresses, however, he undergoes inevitable experiences and lessons in the spirit realm which lead him to a better understanding of life's meaning."
Thanks for the info, Anon!