Chris' Blog

2004-01-26T23:13:00.001-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction - Day 14

I think everything I just wrote for my fourteeth blog entry got deleted somehow so I'm going to add another entry just to be sure. Just for reference, the other one was kind of long and I'd be upset if I had to write it all again. Basically it was talking a little bit about the final project and what I liked and didn't like about it. Didn't like all the definitions or the timeline that we had to construct for it. But I did like researching about Time Travel. Gave me a few extra points to make when arguing if it can or can't exist. I had finished my other blog wishing everybody a happy break before spring semester. Hope everybody gets a lot of rest, cause when school starts up again, we're gonna wish we had more time off.

2004-01-26T23:13:00.000-08:00

2004-01-26T22:59:00.000-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction - Day 14

It suddenly dawned on me here at 2:00 in the moring while I'm putting the finishing touches on my class web page that I had not entered a fourteenth entry to my class blog. I wasn't really sure what to write about in today's entry because we didn't have class today. Instead, we were graced with a snow day and allowed to stay home from school. Hopefully, everybody slept until about 5:00 pm like I did and then went out and played in the snow.

Anyway, since we didn't have anything to write about class today, I wanted to take a few moments to reflect upon our final class project - the science fiction website. First of all I have to say that Dreamweaver is a great tool. Anybody who wants to design websites and is just getting started should really look into this program. It makes designing fast, easy, and efficient. As for the actual class project, there were a few things that I wasn't crazy about putting into this website. I thought it was okay to have a few definitions of science fiction. Everybody should have an understanding of the term, but to look for over 15 different definitions I thought was a little much. It gets to a point where you have so many definitions already that you just don't care anymore. The different websites explaining about your topic is understandable as well. The timeline was just a waste of time in my opinion. I think I had more history on the timeline than I had information about science fiction. And to add a whole page just for that seemed stupid. It also seems like a few other things were thrown in there just to add stuff that each student should have in their project. Overall however, I enjoyed working on it. Gave me a chance to look at a lot of cool websites pertaining to Time Travel, and now I have better points to argue when I'm arguing either for or against it. Can't go wrong with that.

So, having said that, I conclude my final blog entry and hope that I will recieve a good grade on the project and in the class. Everybody else, have a great break! We're going to need it before Spring semester.

2004-01-23T13:05:00.000-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction - Day 13

We spent most of the day working on our short stories in class. Working in a group of five is fairly hard as we all had separate ideas of what to do. However, I think we also got more ideas out there as to what we wanted to do. None of us think that the story is absolutely brilliant, but it's something we enjoy all together. We're proud of it, and hopefully everyone else will enjoy it as well.

On that note, I wish everybody a great weekend.

2004-01-22T13:25:00.000-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction - Day 12

I am still not a fan of William Gibson's writing style and I don't think I ever will be. It's just way to confusing to actually comprehend. Althought I enjoyed the short story we read last night better than Neuromancer, I only credit this to the fact that it was 15 pages long.

On another note, we watched Trekkies in class today. While it was interesting enough to keep my interest for the past hour and a half - I wasn't a fan. I just thought the people in the film went WAY to far with everything they were doing. It's one thing to be a fan, but it's something else to be the person who decorates their entire office dentist office with Star Trek memorobilia. I'll go over it more in my response tonight.

2004-01-21T12:46:00.000-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction - Day 11

Finished reading Neuromancer last night. I thought the story was terrible. It was so incredibly boring that I just couldn't pay attention to it at all. Hopefully I'll never have to read it again. The only other thing we did in class today was talk about The Matrix. This was hard for me as well cause there really aren't any questions I have left about the movie since I've analyzed it for five or six different class now.

Our group is meeting tonight to get a good head start on the short story though. We'll see what we can come up with.

2004-01-20T13:24:00.000-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction - Day 10

After a long three day weekend of reading Neuromancer I have come to one simple conclusion. That is that the book could be one of the most boring I have ever read. Never have I had to read so many paragraphs over again and again, and still I wasn't able to understand the story. After reading it I had to go online to figure out exactly what I had just read. It's a shame, cause the summary makes the book sound incredibly interesting, yet I just can't get past the incredible dullness of the detail added into the book. Everything is described so vividly that it started to drive me up the wall after awhile. Unfortunately I'm going to have to read the rest of the book tonight. Maybe my opinion will change a little bit.

Wanted to take this moment however to say that I'm not really sure I did my response paper on Neuromancer correctly. I did not see the email we had recieved and just wrote a typical response. I guess you could say that the theme I wrote about is the dystopia. But I wanted to throw in some questions here on my blog to make sure I did the assignment right. I had already asked a few question, one being why there are so many references to pink items in the story. The second question I wanted to ask was how the Matrix is portrayed exactly in this novel. I understand what it is played like in the movie "The Matrix" but wasn't sure if this was exactly the same thing. Was hoping somebody could enlighten me on it. My third question would have to be why he killed Dean. I know I haven't exactly understood every aspect of the story, but this part really confused me. Wasn't sure why he had to kill him. My final question would have to be what all these events are leading up to. So far in the story, it feels like it has skipped around a lot and I'm not exactly sure what it's all getting up to. Hopefully, I will be able to answer all of these questions either through the rest of the story or during a class discussion.

2004-01-16T12:22:00.000-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction - Day 9

I'm going to spend this entire Blog entry talking about the ideas that we have come up with for our short story. The five of us started by doing exactly what the teacher said. We threw out absolutely every idea that we could come up with (good and bad). Once we had gotten about a list of ideas, we decided to start narrowing them down in a slow process. At the end, we came up with three basic ideas. We were going to go with either Robots created humans, time travel, or the alteration of a historical event. I'm proud to say that we actually didn't use any of these ideas, yet the helped us to get where we wanted to go with this idea. I don't really want to reveal what it's about, so all I can say is that it is about civilization being aliens. Have a great weekend everybody!

2004-01-15T13:29:00.000-08:00

Literatrue of Science Fiction - Day 8

Last night's homework was absolutely awful. The one story we read "Identifying The Object" was terrible. I have never been so confused by a story in my life. And the other one was really too short to even get an emotional feel to it. So I wasn't crazy about the reading.

In class today we watched the movie "Men In Black" which has always been one of my favorite movies. For my discussion paper on it, I wanted to go over the topic of symbolism, or more in general the "neurolizer." The passing of the neurolizer from Kay to Jay was a big deal and represents growth of Jay throughout the movie.

Another thing I wanted to suggest was the possibility of using the movie "Equilibrium" for maybe a future version of this class. I was able to watch this movie for the first time last night and wanted to give it some props. If you haven't seen it before, be sure to check it out.

2004-01-14T13:15:00.000-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction - Day 7

I really enjoyed reading the story "Boobs." It wasn't at all what I expected it was going to be. The title was very misleading. However, I couldn't help but find myself entralled in this story, mostly due to the fact that I'm a big fan of more of the horror type genre than science fiction, and this story plays off "An American Werewolf in Paris" for me. Despite giving the story a 10 out of 10, there was one low point of the story for me. As I have claimed in earlier writings, I am a big fan of following the rules all the way through to the end. This story seems to stray from those rules a little bit. After her first killing of the dog as a wolf, she feels remorse that she made that kill. However, when killing a human being, she had no regrets about it whatsoever. To me, I think I'd be much more disturbed about killing a human than a dog anyway. So, in context, it seemed that she didn't follow through with her own human emotions.

We all know by now that I am definately using Time Travel as my project in this class. However, I feel like I want to concentrate more on the "loop holes" that exist within time travel theory. How things could not happen, and how there must be parallel time frames in order for these to occur. So it's going to be more like looking at the negative aspects that deal with time travel. I'll know a little bit more specifically what those aspects will be and hopefully give some examples tomorrow.

2004-01-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction - Day 6

First I wanted to talk a little about the homework last night - the Star Trek article in particular. I was somewhat upset that we were given this article to read as are homework. In general it might not have been so bad if it wasn't so long, but the overall fact of the matter is that I'm not a Star Trek fan. The article goes into great detail about most of the history of Star Trek, and when making bold similations between the article and political life on Earth, it's hard to always understand the comparisons being made, and I was upset that we were asked to compart items that some of us had no idea in general.

Star Trek: First Contact - the movie we watched in class today, was incredibly good I thought though. On some levels, I wish I knew much more about the Star Trek history and how captain Picard first encountered the Borg. Unfortunately, I still feel like this is a topic I will never fully explore.

2004-01-12T13:17:00.000-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction: Day 5

All we really did in class today was go over the stories we read for the weekend and then work on our web pages. The stories were very good. I liked Blood Music a lot mostly because it had a Michael Crichton feel to it, and I really enjoy his work. The other one was probably my favorite story so far though. Ender's Game was a great read and it made me want to join in the battle games that they were playing. My only real problem with the story is that our advanced military in the future will rely on this 12 year old boy to fight the war for them. This gives me an uneasy feeling about our decisions in war tactics.

I'm well set on most of my ideas for time travel, however, I'd still appreciate any feedback on other great films or stories.

2004-01-09T13:13:00.000-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction: Day 4

First, I wanted to talk a little bit about the homework last night. I really enjoyed the story of "Bloodchild," and I wanted to mention something that we didn't really go over in class. I may be alone in thinking this, but I thought she was very persistant about women having to be the ones that have to bare child birth. It seemed to me that she was placing the grubs inside a "man" and using explicit detail to try and show the pain of child birth. I, like most people, have seen "The Miracle of Birth" and was disturbed by it, but you still really don't get a feel of how painful child birth is until the author talks about these grubs eating a way at the man's flest. It gives a much more painful view of this is how child birth goes, and aren't you lucky that you won't ever have to go through with it.

Then I wanted to talk a lot about the movie Blade Runner. I was not a fan of this movie at all. First of all, it was much too dark for me. There was barely a bright seen in the whole movie and it started to hurt my eyes, so it's hard to enjoy a movie when it's hard to watch it.

The second thing that bothered me was the fact that I don't think the movie really played upon its own rules. We were told in the beginning that the replicants were like humans in every way except they did not have any emotions. Yet throughout the movie, both Pris and Roy seem to have emotions. They seem to have developed a bond with each other, and Roy is definately sad when she dies. Roy also seems scarred of death, otherwise he wouldn't be looking for a way to prolong his life. Also, Pris laughed at several different points in the movie, and to me, laughter is an emotion as well.

Another thing I was upset about was the fact that Harrison Ford and Rachel fell in love with each other. I'm big on the whole love thing and I don't think it is something you can just play around with. However, our main characters seem to fall in love in two or three days without really spending time with each other, and that bothers me a lot. Just one of those little things that turns me against the movie.

My final complaint is that the movie didn't really seem to have a climactic ending. The whole plot was parallel for me the entire movie and I was expecting more of a bigger ending to be considered one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time. I'll have to go over more of my opinions in my write up paper in this class.

2004-01-08T12:40:00.000-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction: Day 3

Homework was much easier than the first night. I really enjoyed the stories of "Robbie" and "There Will Come Soft Rains." Hopefully the homework will get even shorter though. I don't mind reading about the stories, but they're very time consuming.

I am also really looking forward to the movie "Blade Runner" tomorrow in class. Although I wish the critical article we had read last night had night spoiled the entire plot for me. However, it still looks like it is going to be a very good movie.

Still definately want to work with Time Travel as a basis for my project in this class. Movies and stories I am considering using are "Timeline", "The Time Machine", "The Butterfly Effect", "Back To The Future", "Event Horizon", and "The Planet of the Apes." Hopefully I will have several other movies I could possibly use by tomorrow. If any body has any other suggestions, please let me know.

2004-01-07T12:44:00.000-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction: Day 2

The first night of homework was very depressing. There is going to be a lot more homework than I originally intended there would be for this class. The stories are fun to talk about though.

I thoroughly enjoyed "The Mortale Immortal: A Tale" by Mary Shelley. I felt that I could connect to the story in our narrator's quest for love, as most people probably can. And for the story to show what a bleak outcome can occur from taking the Elixir of life was very well written as well. I think that if offered the same oppurtunity, I would surely decline.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe was an awful story however. Or at least, this is what I felt before I got to understand a possibility in the background. Until we discussed the possibility of incest, the story did not make sense. However, when this characteristic is added in, his sister's desire for revenge and his burrying her alive mean so much more. I still felt like most of the story was wasted on the detail of the house however, instead of getting to know the characters better.

I have started trying to determine what I want to do my class project on. Without a doubt, I would love to work with the possibility of Time Travel, as I think that I personally have found many loop holes in this theory, especially with the recent edition of "Timeline."

2004-01-06T11:36:00.001-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction: Day 1

The first day of class was spent discussing what we will be doing over the course of the next 14 class periods. I was glad to hear that we would not just be watching movies, but rather discussing theories of science fiction in general. I hope this will be a very interesting conversation and possibly allow me to think about the world in some way that I haven't thought about before.

2004-01-06T11:36:00.000-08:00

Literature of Science Fiction: Day 1