Category Archives: arts

And so it reiterates

Posted on Tuesday, 2017 June 20 by Anton

In the last couple of years I’ve looked at thousands of webcomics. Sometimes I wish I’d kept a list of those whose first page is captioned “It begins” or “So it begins” or “And so it begins.”

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less than fifty years later

Posted on Saturday, 2017 May 27 by Anton

I’ve read Heinlein’s Red Planet three times, starting at age seven or eight, and each time I soon forgot most of the plot. One thing that stuck with me was that the school’s new head signaled his evil by ordering … Continue reading →

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questions of emphasis

Posted on Tuesday, 2017 May 23 by Anton

In Sherlock episode “The Lying Detective”, the phrase serial killer is uttered many times, always stressing the first word – as if the second were a given, even when (for the speakers) any killings are hypothetical. That impaired my enjoyment of … Continue reading →

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a sort of conlang

Posted on Friday, 2017 March 17 by Anton

I’m re-reading Strugatsky’s Hard to Be a God. (I read it thirty-odd years ago and forgot nearly everything.) This is a newer translation, by Olena Bormashenko. At one point the protagonist eavesdrops on conspirators, who say: “The chonted will shlake, … Continue reading →

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exporting transcendence

Posted on Thursday, 2017 January 05 by Anton

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

Posted on Saturday, 2016 December 17 by Anton

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

Posted on Sunday, 2016 February 28 by Anton

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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