Budgetary Woes: The Crazy World of Grad School and My Stupid Ideas
(This post is a temporary aside. Don’t worry. You’ll have science fiction and fantasy nonsense again soon. I promise. Three manga reviews are coming up, plus my thoughts on the first three episodes of A Game of Thrones from HBO will hit the waves next week. For now, enjoy this random nonsense about my life.) […]
A Disturbing Vision of Womanhood
Teaching is a strange thing. Last semester, I taught a small unit on the women’s rights movement, during the course of which I discovered some rather strange and/or disturbing things about how young people (in Florida, I should add) view women’s rights and women in general. Most views are understandable: they don’t quite understand […]
In Defense of Signs (That Shyamalan Alien Invasion Flick)
Every few months someone says something to the effect of: “Signs is such a dumb movie. Why would aliens invade a planet covered in stuff they’re allergic to?” Why, indeed. John Scalzi is the latest in a sea of Signs haters. In a recent AMC column, Scalzi talked about the numerous alien invasion movies we’ve seen over […]
An Addendum: “Colonizing Space” — It Really Is That Bad
Several days ago I wrote a post called “‘Colonizing Space’ is a Dirty Word: Stop Using It,” which sparked a handful of amusing debates. io9, for instance, essentially plagiarized me on Facebook by not providing attribution for the problematic I initially set up. I say that jokingly, of course. The more interesting response, however, came […]
My Post-Oscars Thoughts
The short version of my thoughts would be “grave disappointment, with a side of expected.” I knew before turning the show on that the Academy’s bias against innovative filmmaking would persist. Even the inclusion of special awards for animated pictures only highlights the fact that the Academy is completely unwilling to consider great works of […]
Dastroyanish: A New Boredom-Induced Fantasy Language
Things I do when I get bored: Play stupid flash games on the Interwebs Argue with people about literary conventions and subgenres, like New Weird or Scifi Strange Invent languages on the spot. Thus comes Dastroyanish, a new fantasy language with a current vocabulary of about fifteen words. The funny thing about the language is […]