Monthly Archives: October 2011

Fair Trade?

Although anthropology does not explicitly train for “first contact” with extraterrestrials, it does prepare one for dealing with an alien culture. Lilith, as a student of the discipline, is well-suited to the task of understanding intelligent beings that have a different orientation to reality whether that being is human or something else. She has probably […]

Uncanny Canine

This is BigDog, a robot designed to carry heavy loads over rough terrain. It’s…grotesque. The way it tries to balance itself (at the 0:35 and 1:25 second marks) is truly uncanny—recognizable but repulsively strange at the same time. The buzzing, the stilted gait, and the lack of a head is a little creepy. It’s as if a […]

Comment on “Man’s New Best Friend”

This post is the comment posted in response to Rich Borean’s post. Why rats? Good question. The creators could have just as easily used a cuter creature like the hamster, which would have heightened for the reader the emotional impact (i.e. empathy towards the animal and fury at the scientists) that p.25 is meant to evoke. However, […]

Psyched about WE3

Matthew Miller makes a fascinating connection between WE3 and Freudian psychology here. Grant Morrison is pretty big into psychology.  I had a friend tell me about his use of Jungian psychology or something along those lines in his comics…The three main characters can somewhat be ascribed to the Freudian ideas of the id, ego, and superego. […]

The Molly Millions Mystique: The case for MM as feminist symbol

In her book, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that women were expected to “find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love” (2001, p. 92). This view was perpetuated by “stories and articles that showed women as either happy housewives or unhappy, neurotic careerists, thus creating the ‘feminine mystique’” (“Feminine Mystique”). Friedan […]