Category: Culture & Media
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Babel, or Goodbye to All That
Sadly, Osamu Dazai has to step aside now that Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by RF Kuang has replaced The Flowers of Buffoonery as my favourite novel. I have long been partial to fantasy stories since I was a little kid, but it’s not just the…
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Cyberpsycho: A Horror Story
Recently I made a post about AI, and someone responded by saying that my blog “scared” them. To be honest, as part of Gen Z, the onset of a dystopian reality feels pretty par for the course at this point. If I hear “once in a lifetime event” once more in my lifetime, I may…
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When the World Ends
I’ve been neglecting this topic for a while—not because I don’t care, but because I didn’t want to add to the noise. Everyone seems to have some big opinion about AI, most of them either vaguely utopian or vaguely apocalyptic, and honestly, I wasn’t interested in either. But lately, I’ve been feeling this quiet unease…
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Universal Healthcare: An American Sci Fi
The movie Elysium makes a very obvious critique of class systems. The premise of the film—that the wealthy live in luxury in space while the poor suffer on Earth—isn’t subtle about this at all. Quite literally, the two opposed classes live on different worlds, made obvious by the contrast between the clean white palettes of…
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invisible ink
I was having a chat with a bartender friend of mine who has a particularly lovely tattoo of the serenity prayer on her forearm. It’s my favourite prayer, so I asked her why she got it. “Honestly, anxiety,” she told me. I said I loved her answer. That’s precisely why I love that prayer: it’s…
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ethics personified
What is ethics? Often people assume that it’s something that’s rule-based. “Do this, don’t do that, it doesn’t matter either way, etc.” Certainly, that’s how many ethical systems have been constructed, going all the way back to the Ten Commandments—and even before then! While they can be burdensome, on some level it cannot be denied…
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the timeless bard
My mum and I have a tradition where we’ll go down to Stratford (Ontario) two or three times a year to watch Shakespeare in the theatre. We’ve seen some great ones: Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and (a wonderful parody of Shakespeare) Something Rotten. Personally, I’ve always loved Shakespeare’s tragedies the best, but I’ve come…
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get real
Rick and Morty is one of my favourite shows—definitely in the top-three—and this is why. It’s like Doctor Who on crack—I love it! Amidst the ridiculousness and the sci-fi level grossness of it all (not to mention the adult humour), it also succeeds in grappling with some interesting ideas. Case in point is this soliloquy…
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no-scoping narratives 🎯
I’m a big fan of video essays. They’re my podcasts, if I’m honest—a soundtrack to my day. And I saw a few in my recommended the other day that were about Halo. You know, the game? It was one of my favourites growing up. I had to play a bootlegged copy on my PC—no Xbox…