Sword Art Online is Better Than Life. With swords.
After dabbling in Attack on Titan I think I’m steadily getting into anime. AoT was good. Though not very nice. And there was a lot of shouting.
I’m not hooked by any means but Sword Art Online reminds me a lot of cartoons I’d watch as a kid and makes me want to play RPGs!
In possibly related news I’ve found a swordfighting class.
Me: Look, we’re just trying to promote stability.
Martian: On Earth, war makes things more stable?
Me: It’s…complicated. But really, America is a peace-loving culture.
Martian: But you have more wars than anyone. On Mars, this does not seem peaceful.
Me: Okay, but it’s not terrorism. Terrorism is when, you know, you terrorize people.
Martian: But did you not, alone among the peoples of your planet, use atomic weapons against your fellow humans, when you bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Me: Only to end the war.
Barry Eisler on the how you would explain the difference between war and terrorism to a Martian. Well worth a read.
Baudolino is one of my favourite books. Flat out. I’ve read Foucault’s Pendulum, it was too smart for me I think. I’m a pretty clever guy and I enjoyed the book but I know a lot of it will have gone over my head. The Name of the Rose is great, but Baudolino is the one for me.
Books aside I love Eco’s essays and interviews, none moreso than this one, and mostly for this exchange:
INTERVIEWER
Have you read The Da Vinci Code?
ECO
Yes, I am guilty of that too.
INTERVIEWER
That novel seems like a bizarre little offshoot of Foucault’s Pendulum.
ECO
The author, Dan Brown, is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
I like this too:
INTERVIEWER
You once said that semiotics is the theory of lying.
ECO
Instead of “lying,” I should have said, “telling the contrary of the truth.” Human beings can tell fairy tales, imagine new worlds, make mistakes—and we can lie. Language accounts for all those possibilities.
This really does look quite good.
Very sad news to wake up to.
My Dad met him twice when they were both fairly young men, my Dad would’ve been in his early 20s, David in his late 20s. He made my Dad tea while my Dad fixed his answerphone. When my Dad had to go back to fix it again a few months later he remembered how my Dad took his tea.
Might post some more things in the coming days but for now let’s leave you with Helen Green’s wonderful illustrations of Bowie’s reinventions:
