Before sound reproduction, you had two ways of experiencing a secular piece of notated music. Either you could go to a professional concert - which was an option not open to most people for both financial and geographic reasons (no matter how “popular” an opera was in Vienna, that didn’t help you if you were in…

It’s a terrible, terrible book to foist on teenagers. The plot is very simple, which makes it downright baffling to search for a narrative, which is how basically every teenager approaches reading a novel. It reinforces the idea that older literature is unapproachable and dull, which people carry through their…

Affirmative.

I don’t know that John Brunner predicted the future as much as he predicted the cyberpunk genre.

Well said!

a-MEN-…zing!

“Boisterous” is exactly the word I would use to describe The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, though.

I personally don’t even see the “need” for this series (no matter who is involved in it). Maybe in another decade or so, but Peter Jackson’s trilogy seems definitive enough for now.

Yes! This show was so delightfully weird and funny. After finishing it I spent hours watching YouTube clips of Ana Fabriga and Julio Torres. This was the best one:

Thanks for mentioning the score, which really is brilliant (in every sense of the word – it has a sort of brittle, shimmering quality).

The show is supposed to be set in Númenor, no? A lot of Númenorean names end in -tur (e.g. “Tar-Minyatur” and “Ciryatur”) or -tir (“Tar-Minastir”, “Tar-Palantir”), but apparently no Tyra.

They used her as a reference, and she’s credited as an actor in the film, but what you see in the movie (outside of the archival footage) is not her. It’s a body-double (Loren Peta), with a hand-animated CGI facial performance (“We captured both actresses [Loren and Sean] doing the scene in a controlled facial capture…

Miracleman/Marvelman (which was unrelated to any other Miracle or Marvel-based heroes you may be thinking of).

Alan Moore’s response to the accusation that his comics feature rape too frequently was that rape happens too frequently. In fact happens far more frequently than most of the other kinds of violence his comics also feature.

I don’t have much to add except to say I felt exactly the same on both counts.

Incidentally, in case you missed it, Ted Chiang has a neat story that (in his typically thought-out fashion) explores various self-causing time loops: “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.” It’s included in his recent collection Exhalation (which got a glowing review here), but also easily available online.

But I am not sure what point you are making here.

Because of the prophecy that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother, his father, the King of Thebes, tries to have him killed as a child, but he survives. Raised by the King and Queen of Corinth, Oedipus learns the prophecy from the oracle at Delphi, and (not knowing he is adopted), runs away to Thebes to…

Bester’s original take on that idea

Actually her name was Eliza Day.