Category Archives: arts

exporting transcendence

In the film and TV series Limitless, a drug makes the protagonist temporarily super-intelligent. In the episodes I’ve seen, it’s not established whether any skills learned with the drug remain when it wears off. I imagine that you’d want to … Continue reading

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Use of Symbols

In Marvel/Netflix Daredevil episode 11 “The Path of the Righteous”, [spoiler] drugs [spoiler] and takes her to a secret place. When she wakes up, he sits facing her and puts a large pistol on the table between them, “to get … Continue reading

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cross-drafting

Gail Simone asks: Question of the day: if you could have one piece of art drawn by any living comics artist, not to sell, what artist and what character? I haven’t followed (paper) comics in a long time, but several … Continue reading

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Neptune’s Gulch

In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt invented a radical new engine and (according to folklore) emigrated to Atlantis to keep his invention out of the hands of parasites. Charles Stross’s novel Neptune’s Brood is about uncovering the true history of the … Continue reading

Posted in prose | 3 Comments

I’ve seen such changes

How old do you need to be to understand this gag from 1978?

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pseudohistorical linguistics

I can’t remember how much I knew of Elvish languages before The Silmarillion, with a glossary, appeared in 1978. Can you tell from the text of The Lord of the Rings (not counting the Appendices) that Quenya and Sindarin are … Continue reading

Posted in fandom, language, prose | 3 Comments

sic transiverunt webcomics

About a dozen years ago I made a page of links to my favorite webcomics. Looking at that list now, I find that twelve that are still going (though a few are very sporadic), ten have stopped but remain accessible … Continue reading

Posted in cartoons | 2 Comments