Shallow Introspections

I am one of those people that can have deep introspective insights and yet manage to remain completely shallow.

For example, I was thinking the other day about fandoms, more specifically my favorite characters. Other than just saying, "well, I like him/her best" I started to ask myself, why? Why do I like this individual, this personality, over another? Then I realized something. The characters, personas and personalities I am attracted to are either 1) people that are like myself, or 2) people that have a trait that I desire to emulate.

Take Spock from Star Trek. At a first glance, you would think that Spock is quite possibly the complete anti-thesis of me. He is quiet, reserved and analytical while I am much more like Scotty or Captain Kirk. The more I thought about it however, I realized that there are some core facets of Spock that are identical to mine. For example, Spock is stuck between two worlds, Vulcan and human, so to speak. Like him, I am stuck between two very different cultures, Turkish and American. The various cultures have extremely different values and sometimes it is very difficult to balance them.

On the other hand we have characters that I wish I could be more like, Orphen, Black Jack, Sherlock Holmes, Utena, Haruka, Lina Inverse, etc. These characters are always effortlessly "cool" while managing to also be intelligent, spirited and deep. Of course, when you don't have to eat, sleep or go to the bathroom it's easy to be perfect.

What about you? Why do you like the personalities you do?

New Web site

My Web site, Raccoon Thief is up. Have a look. Drop a line if something is off ^.^

Pandorum

I just got back from Pandorum and I gotta say, I really enjoyed it. You can check out the trailer here.

Now, I am not a fan of idiotic films. I especially can't stand sci-fi films that don't even follow the laws of physics (I am looking at you Sunshine.) While it definitely had elements of the typical "crappy video game" sci-fi thriller, Pandorum just seemed to work.

I don't want to say too much about the plot, suffice to say that humanity had ruined Earth and has now sent people out in generation ships to a planet called Tanis to repopulate. During the trip something goes horribly wrong (typically in these types of films, the plot.) The main character then wakes up from hypersleep and finds out he has to reach the nuclear reactor and stop the ship from shutting down. And that's just one tiny portion of what happens in this film.

There are some great special effects. There are some really creepy Resident Evil/Final Fantasy type concepts and there are a couple of nice twists and turns. There are also unnecessary time wasting scenes thrown in just for "excitement" (cannibal crewmen, wtf?) And some even more obvious plot devices. Still, I never felt as if I wanted to put the popcorn bag over my head in disgust.

I wish I could say the same about the trailers. The film, The Fourth Kind, made me want to vomit into my popcorn. I'm sorry but someone please tell me why an super advanced civilization that has mastered time and space would travel millions of light years only to hide out in Alaska disguised as owls and insert anal probes into the local residence? What are the hoping to find? Seriously, other than being an insane Twin peaks rip-off, this POS was made simply to scare people. It has absolutely no basis in reality or logic.

Anyway, enough ranting. Go see Pandorum. Aside of being substantially less stupid the main character looks like Tom Felton. ^.^