Notes

==ALERT: CONTAINS SPOILERS== Watched "Lethe" last night and was blown away by the character development in the episode. Sarek had seemed like such a good bloke when we had seen him in earlier episodes. But this episode reminds us once again that he is a difficult person. It makes us realise how Spock had so many problems with him growing up. Here he was doing the same thing to Michael, piling all these impossible expectations on her and making her feel inferior for not measuring up. Like most Vulcans, he suppresses his own emotions. But also, like a proud person, he suppresses his own failings. He clearly has a sense of shame about what happened with the Vulcan Expeditionary Fleet, and he chose his own pride over revealing the truth of what happened to his daughter. That was why he let her live with the shame of thinking that she had not met his expectations. And after the mind meld, still suppressing what shames him, he pretends not to remember it. I also liked the sc...

I’m definitely enjoying Star Trek: Discovery so far. The production values of course are fabulous, and the performances are fine. Having already seen Sonequa Martin-Green in The Walking Dead I knew she would be awesome, and she so is. I’m reminded of something a guy said to me at Sutekh , at the University of Sydney. This was in the days when The Next Generation was still airing. He said that TNG was not good, because the way that they solved problems on the show was a Deus ex machina each week. I asked him how many of the episodes he’d seen and he said, all of them. I said that that was strange, because the show had already been running for two years by then. I asked why he would have seen all the episodes if he did not think it was a good show and he said, “Because it’s Star Trek !” I knew what he meant. It was easy to find fault with just about any episode you could think of, but you just kept on watching it because of this experience that you got from it. The Star Trek Exp...

It's been a long time since I last posted here. To think that it all began because I was conducting my own personal philosophical research, since I used to study philosophy at university. It all culminated in the decision that I had nothing to contribute. I had original contributions that had been recognised in my Honours and Masters theses. But I think you need to be in that sort of thing full-time in order to contribute, and employment prospects in that field are bleak. At least they were when I enquired near the end of my Masters thesis, and I can only assume they still are now. It helps me justify the time I spend reading and watching videos online if I write something about it. Writing something about it will help me know what I think of it. It's easy for me to love something but then have no defence against it when other people start talking about how bad it is. There are other things that I find are very popular but I cannot justify the high rating some websites give...