amacbride wrote: "Um, in the very first sentence..."

You're right and fixed. Thank you! It's the only spelling error of the man's name in the essay. Copyedit errors happen.

"Furthermore, I think 2001 the film works precisely because of the tension between Clarke's fundamentally optimistic view of human nature, and Kubrick's pessimistic one."

Read on and I think you'll find we're very much in agreement on that point. -M

globaljustin wrote: "(when he bothers to try and summarize)"

That's a fair point. I could cut the word count down significantly and recast several of the ideas into separate academic papers. But I was shooting for a more general audience, one who might need a breakdown of the film scene by scene. Those who haven't seen the film more than once. But I could have done better. Every piece of work has its warts.

I'm on to other projects now, but may one day revisit the work and attempt a more concise revision.

OK, so I get it now. Timothy linked to a /. review of that book in the submission intro, and you linked to an Amazon review of that book as well. But the book wasn't written by me. I got confused.

However, I read the Amazon review and thought - beyond her criticisms of a book I haven't read - some of what she said about the movie was very interesting. I'd love to read her essay on 2001 and will definitely do a google search and look for it. I suspect she'd trash my work, but also believe that in her criticisms I'd learn many interesting new things.

On the fence here over whether I'd prefer she review my essay. Woman got a harsh tonue. Lol. -M

I own many of Clarke's books, including 2001. I'm sorry to say, but I think you should check your sources on that one. See here. Further, I checked the essay source and found 26 instances of the name "Clarke" and no misspellings of "Clark". Can you quote a portion of text where you found the error? If so, I'll fix it. -M

AC Wrote: "I think maynard needs a girlfriend."

My wife disagrees. -M

I wrote the 2001 essay featured here, but I didn't write or read the book you linked to at Amazon. Nor did I write the review comment.

Welp, I didn't write or read that book. I didn't write the review. And I didn't comment to the reviewer either, though there was one note written by a "James M" who wasn't me.

(scratches head)

Can't say much else here. Sorry.

Ligeti is pretty avant-garde stuff. He makes extensive use of polyrhythm and chromatic polyharmony. His stuff is meant to be difficult listening. Clashing sounds that evoke discomfort and disturbed emotions. I won't say that my interpretation is an 'explanation' for why Kubrick chose that kind of music for his score, but I do think it's fair to say that he chose it on purpose.

Glad you liked the read!

(scrunches up face in consideration)

Hadn't thought of that. Kindof a marginal adaptation of a cool book. Would love to see a remake though.

Uhhh. Hi folks!

I'm in Aussieland, where everything that moves is poisonous, and it's past 11pm. If there are any questions, I'll try to answer as timely as I can. But the wifey has dibs too.

Pretty fracking cool /. and thanks timothy! And it's aright if you think there's better words out there on the film. Damn thing has embossed more ink on paper than just about any flick in existence. I just couldn't help myself 'cause I love the movie. So I wanted my say too.

Whoa.

Forward me a copy or a link to a google doc. I absolutely will not share it or violate your copyright in any way, and will do my best to offer a helpful and honest critique with the hope it will improve the work. PM me and I'll forward you a gdocs link to a short story I'm working on that's currently in the critters.org queue.

Hope you enjoyed it! And thanks, even if you disagreed with the premise I'm happy enough to know it was worth a read.

This is a vast amount of storage. Obviously, the puzzle they've bought a data palace of a storage facility to assemble doesn't require indefinite storage for everyone. They're looking to cache everything they can get and then filter what's interesting. Maybe they have a range of target levels from indefinite storage of everything collected for one group, a year for another group, a month for a third group, a week for another, all the way down to a day or hours for the entire slush.

They don't need it all. They just need to run whatever algorithms they care about so they can toss whatever they think doesn't matter and keep what does.

Oh yeah. This is very bad. One of the cornerstones of the Republic at its founding was the institution of a public mail service. Because transferring documents and contracts with legal force is crucial to performing business.

What we're seeing here is the dismantling of a public service that the entire Main Street economy is reliant upon to perform day-to-day operations. It's so short sighted, one must wonder if these guys running our country want it to fail.