June 29, 2008
Fairly recently I read a few articles about anime and escapism. Since I’m far from being satisfied with the current state of some of my posts, here’s some quick filler
I see what you did there!
June 10, 2008
June 1, 2008
for anyone that saw Mulan when they were a child and were blown away by that “be a man” song and also watched Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. YOU WILL CRY MANLY TEARS!
May 23, 2008
A play about a convict murderer in which the narrator is also the dead brother of the woman who is chastising the convict.
May 20, 2008
Why are so many bloggers obsessed with this stuff?
Hige’s interesting thoughts on convention have got me wondering why I and other anime bloggers even bother?
May 19, 2008
April 29, 2008
This is one brilliant man.
Mushishi is a polarizing show. Most people loved it for its poignant description of the human description and slow moving dramatics. The others hated it for the same reasons; it had some pacing problems, and was admittedly depressing in the way it portrayed every other human besides Ginko. It encompassed a wide variety of the spectrum of human emotion; Greed(ep 6) Love for those long gone(ep 8,16,17, 22) Unrequited love/lust/schoolgirl crush(ep 20) A womans love for a child not technically her own(ep 21) Hatred and fear of the unknown(ep 24) Acceptance of fate (ep 25).
(more…)
April 27, 2008
April 13, 2008
Yeah I just quoted They Live, which I will be referencing in a future post about dystopian fiction including 1984, animal farm, and they live.
Now as far as anime posts go I will have a series on Mushishi and philosophy(since everyone describes this show as so philosophical and deep I’m going to investigate). I will have a post about gundam soon although this cheeky bastard pretty much has the market cornered on intelligent gundam posts. I haven’t been watching any anime in a while although both kaiba and toshokan sensou look brilliant.
As for personal updates I have been watching more movies(Magnolia, and Memento being my favorite), reading more books(Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, and a bunch of poems by T.S. Eliot)
This blog is not dead, merely kicked in the groins by life outside of the blogosphere.
March 28, 2008
Last time in this segment we discussed what determinism is and what free-will is…basically. One of the most interesting facets to this argument is God. The concept of a higher being seems to either irk or tickle our respective fancies more than most topics. God is a polarizing issue. The existence of/morality of God in concept is a topic that splits us into believers or unbelievers.
If god exists, and he is omnipotent, then I believe it is safe to assume that we have no true free-will. Even if we have some moderate free-will in our decisions, if God can see the future we are to assume a determinist faith. Not that theres anything wrong with that, but I like to feel in charge of myself from time to time. If God exists, and he is not omnipotent then I think its only reasonable we assume that he doesn’t already know what we are going to do, therefore we are free to make our own decisions.
Personally speaking I do believe in some sort of Higher being, but certainly not the Judeo-Christian God(far too many holes in the theory). I like to take a deist faith. The thought that God made us and doesn’t mess with us. The greatest gift God gave us was the ability to reason, so I like to stick with the religion that allows me to assert this truth.
So what does all this mean? If God is all-knowing, then what I do matters not? Should I just kill myself to end the cruel joke I’ve been living. No. No one knows if any of this is true or not. What if all our philosophy was wrong, what if the Muslims were right all along? We absolutely have no way to know anything about the afterlife till we get there. Thats the point. We can conjecture and experiment all we want, but in the end all we need to do is pass the time till we die, where either we will be greeted by hell/heave, or nothingness.
next in this series:Causal Determinism, and the monism/dualism/pluralism debate
