Also, this weekend I hosted 3 German engineering Ph.Ds. Which was somewhat odd, since I don’t really hang out much in engineering circles (well, I’m going to be hanging out in software engineering circles, but this was Chemical engineering of some sort, I think. They’d been to a conference in Lund and had a weekend [...]
You probably have to read the Economist to understand all of it.
I guess it was just a matter of time before the growing field of ludology began using games themselves as a way to explore its boundaries. Finnish ludologist Aki Järvinen has made a game about games which he obviously had to call Game Game. He says that it is the same kind of meta-referential use [...]
This week, I’ve had time – or, rather, taken time – to go to the cinema twice. On Sunday, I went to see the new Danish documentary, Guerilla Girl. Two young Danish filmmakers were allowed access to one of the secret training camps of the Colombian Marxist Guerilla known as the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces [...]
LUKE: No, my father didn’t fight in the wars. He was a navigator on a spice freighter. BEN: That’s what your uncle told you. He didn’t hold with your father’s ideals. Thought he should have stayed here and not gotten involved. LUKE: You fought in the Clone Wars? BEN: Yes, I was once a Jedi [...]
George Lucas finally admits to the political undertones in Star Wars: Asked whether Star Wars Episode III openly alluded to the Iraq war, he said: “When I wrote it Iraq didn’t exist. We were funding Saddam Hussein and giving him weapons of mass destruction. We were going after Iran. But the parallels between what we [...]
As I said before, I’ve seen several films that made me want to change the world, and with that I mean in a change for the better, obviously. The list looks like this at the moment: The Corporation – an extremely thorough documentary on the history and influence of the modern multinational corporation. With several [...]
This evening I saw a film that made want to change the world. This is not the first time that a film has made me feel this way, yet this was the first that didn’t leave me with feeling of total impotence. And that is indeed some achievement. The film is German and is called [...]
Yesterday, I went to see Hotel Rwanda, a heartbreakingly sad account of the massacres of the Rwandan civil war of 1994. The film evokes such intensely raw emotion in order to convey the horrors suffered and the lack of intervention from the UN, that I doubt anyone would be unaffected by it. The film focuses [...]
Yesterday, I saw Wim Wenders’ documentary about the Buena Vista Social Club, the record made by a rag tag collection of old Cuban musicians and singers under the gentle supervision of travelling musician and producer, Ry Cooder. The film contains concert and studio footage, interviews with the musicians and atmospheric footage from the streets of [...]