2016/11/12

What's wrong with the world and the movie Arrival?

2016 is the year of disappointments it seem and the movie Arrival was among the major ones.
After a really good hard science fiction in the form of Interstellar I really hoped for another good movie, but instead we got a movie so badly written and so many infuriatingly stupid plot elements that not even the plot from the Hugo and Nebula award-winning short story can redeem it.

But since many people haven't seen the movie yet and some of you may still want to (because we live in a desperate age where a movie with a single good idea and 80% horrible stupid apeshit is still among the better movies of the season), I will refrain from spoilers beyond those that are already revealed in the trailer and talk about the first 30m of the movie.

So instead of writing about how badly Arrival treats the interesting topic of cross-cultural linguistic barriers, or about how utterly retarded is the political plot in the movie, let's talk about the first fifteen minutes of the movie. You will find that we can learn quite a lot about what's wrong with our world.


2016/11/09

Trump is not Brexit

Trump won the elections. Okay. If I were an American citizen I would have voted for Clinton and I would be sad. As a European I find the issue a lot more complex (see later), but my views are much closer to Clinton than to Trump so I am disappointed.

But I think that all this outrage that is going over the internet about Trump winning is not appropriate. Lot of people are saying that this is the end of the world, that it is a historical tragedy and so on. It got even more intense reactions than the Brexit! Which is a sad thing because the Brexit is really a historical event and most likely a sad one. Of course it is always easier to direct hatred against a single person like Trump, than against an abstract motion like Brexit.