Thoughts From the Hive Ward of Sigil

...Because there's never a wrong time to use a Planescape reference. That means "random", for those of you who've never played a Xaositect. Just be thankful I didn't write something in scramblespeak, nobody that because wants, am right I?

• So, been reading up on Analytic and Continental philosophy, for my book—behold how I suffer for my art!—and thought I'd point out, they've elevated false advertising to a capital crime. See, they're not philosophers. They're the other faction Socrates dealt with.


• Speaking of crappy philosophy, has anyone noticed how every movement after Descartes puts whole swaths of ideas beyond the reach of reason? Medieval Scholastics thought you could reason about absolutely everything that you could meaningfully think about—and even things you couldn't, albeit only by analogy. But Descartes and Kant and their ilk say you can only reason about math and science...so how come they're the ones we call Rationalists? Personally I consider that a good way to judge the value of a system of thought: how many things does it forbid you to think about?


• I realized another Halo-Niven connection: the destruction of Forerunner civilization is like the Thrintun telepathically killing all their slaves (except the whitefoods/Bandersnatchi, since they're immune) after the tnuctipun rebelled. Yes I'm a nerd!


• On a more critical note regarding Niven, how come the Kzinti use the names of herbivores as insults? I can see using "sthondat" that way (they've got an addictive secretion that grants Kzinti telepathy, but makes them into junkies), but no hunter-culture has contempt for its prey like that.


• Watched part of the second series of Lodoss War (can't find the first one), and noticed: fantasy anime are always actually set in Edo-period Japan. Medieval Europe didn't have regularly-levied taxes (taxation was usually done the way we do bond-issues, on an as-needed basis). Unless either the writer or the translator was confusing rents—owed by tenants to a lord—with taxes. Rent didn't work the same in Europe as in Japan, either, though, since (among other things) it was very hard for a European lord to raise the rates—serfs had rent-control.


• A quick explanation for how Europe changed between the Fall of Rome and the Middle Ages can be found in that word, serf. In Medieval Latin serf is "servus", and a lord is "dominus". But in Classical Latin "servus" means "slave", and "dominus" means "owner".


• So, Tegami Bachi is, as I've said, awesome. But it occurs to me, it's really just the manga version of Costner's The Postman. Except, again, awesome.


• It is perhaps not a surprise to you, O Reader, that I consider Avatar to be ill-thought-out science fiction and ham-fisted, simplistic political preaching. But I realized, actually, everything Cameron's done is that way (except Titanic's not SF). Dark Angel seems to be based on the idea that the entirety of the sciences of economics, anthropology, and sociology can be summed up in the phrase "Fat Cats Bad"; what could've been a fairly intelligent exploration of a post-apocalyptic world is just Socialist Realism without the artistry (or the understanding of economics). The Alien series...yeah, let's not even talk about the problems with Xenomorph biology, or the economics (space-prisons? Uh, no?). And then there's Terminator: aside from how AI is impossible (Lucas-Penrose Argument), needing "living tissue" to send back in the time machine is just straight up vitalism. And then there's the question, "What idiot would put a machine like that in charge of the nukes? What idiot would give the machine in charge of the nukes any autonomy when it comes to using them?"


• Come to think of it, there's a lot of vitalism in Cameron's work; Avatar is basically one big paean to vitalism from end to end. Then again, vitalism, in the form of the Gaia Hypothesis, is pretty damned popular with a lot of environmentalists.


• Speaking of the Gaia Hypothesis, am I the only one who noticed that The Happening is just Blue Gender, only even less plausible?