Ed Arno, a major cartoon contributor to the New Yorker, died this week. The original article in the NYTimes said he died at 83 AND at 92, so that was a fitting comic exit. (Unfortunately, they have fixed the erratum).
ALT: Joel Kinnaman as Tak Kovacs in a dark, strange world, wearing a blue coat and shirt; he's looking around in wonder. Oh god, I didn't know whether I could get past the first episode: I love dystopian futures, but this seemed hackneyed... Altered Carbon has the feel of sometimes The Hunger Games , sometimes Harry Potter , often Repo! The Genetic Opera or Gotham City or Narcopolis .There's martial arts, comic booky treatments, digital effects and story content. Some of it is dumb, and the names for things in the future are lazy: The Array is the internet, a sleeve is a host, ONIs are basically smartphones, Poe is like TNG's Data, Meths are the 1%, and paying my chip-implanted fingers is technology that's already here. The "strong, independent woman cop" is the lamest character attempt/trope out there, and the actress is terrible. The producers seem to be trying to appease audiences on every front rather than trying to make a solid, consistent produ...
Photo: http://codices.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/machr.jpg I just finished ripping through the 369-page The Martian by debut novelist Andy Weir, self-confessed science nerd. This year, I have read more fantasy/sci-fi than ever, and several books have been about scientific disasters and/or space, but I tend to go for the more blockbuster and less techie stories, having practically failed science every year after intro biology. We won't even discuss maths. I'm a luddite, and I don't want to be scratching my head during my precious escapism hours. So books that go into thrust and scientific measurements and velocity and the nightmare-inducing periodic table of elements are a little intimidating for me. The story, if you haven't heard yet about the book or the upcoming Matt Damon movie, is about an astronaut named Mark Watney who gets stranded on Mars after a mission mishap. That's all I'll say in the interest of avoiding spoilers à la "Who Shot...
~ From Bauhaus to Beinhaus I tripped up on The Charnel-House through six degrees of social-media-postings-separation and was interested to see something so intellectually challenging in the blogosphere. Ross Wolfe is a post-grad student whose blog examines history, art, philosophy and architecture, amongst other things. To be honest, some of his posted art is a little macabre for my taste (and I love Kurelek's apocalyptic religious art!) and there is some political criticism that is not of interest to me , but I appreciated the breadth of his posts. I also found he was hearing, in his contact area, from people from very discrete backgrounds and was stimulating feedback that is not the usual blue and white thumbs up or expletive-loaded abuse hurled by some posts' readers. You can read more about him here and check out his posts here .
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