Advanced Film Criticism, Monday, Period 1

[usedtowhizz.livejournal.com]

"This is the last week of the session, right? Or is that next week?" James asked in case somebody paid better attention to things like calendars than him. "Well, if it's this week, then I'm sending you out into the world with a treat. Nicolas Cage once again, this time in his magnum opus, meta for The Wicker Man."

"Watch as he - the hero - beats up several women, one time while dressed as a bear! Be amazed by how he steals masks right off the faces of children! Wonder how the hell he got paid actual money to act like that when the director told him to pretend that he was being killed or tortured or whatever with bees to the face. I'm pretty sure any of you could do better than 'NOT THE BEES!'"

"It's garbage and it's wonderful and have fun, especially since if we do have a workshop next week, I'm out of fun bad movies and you're gonna get the worst thing I can torrent."

Practical Philosophy, Monday

[endsthegame]

"Let's get away from the moral philosophy for once," Ender said. He sat on the lawn with his legs crossed underneath him, enjoying the outside in a way that seemed almost Zen if you didn't know there was a voice whispering news and snark in his ear roughly every dozen seconds or so.

"The multiverse. We all have to deal with it by pure virtue of being here at all," he continued. "Some of us were ripped out of our universes against our will. Some of us were brought here by other parties. Some of us simply opened up a brochure and saw a neat blurb about a school and enrolled, only to show up here and find things weren't as we thought they were.

"I've had a younger version of my older brother show up," he added wryly. "My partner has a long history of seeing various relatives from various time periods show up. Sometimes the line of events in one person's history meshes up neatly with that of another, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes we have to sit back and watch as different versions of people we know go through events we already know the outcome of - sometimes we even live in fear of that. Sometimes we try and change it."

He smiled a little.

"Today I'd like to invite you all to talk about how you think this works. About how it's affected you, if it has at all, and how you handle that," he said. "Have you had other people from your world show up? How did you get here? How do you think this mess of timelines and universes really works? Is there a method to the madness, or is it a hodgepodge, working differently from one universe to the next, and are we just lucky nothing bumps into each other and explodes?"