Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Armchair adventuring


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The rule of cool is not enough

I did not want to write this post.
No, really!
I have better things to do and barely the energy to do them, why then…?
Ah!
Let me get this from the start…

I have watched Army of the Dead.
It’s currently on Netflix, and the whole world and their sister watched it – Zack Snyder’s own take on the zombie apocalypse, featuring David Bautista, and poised to become the start of a new cinematic universe.
An action-adventure movie, more than a horror – that’s what I was expecting, and I was cool with that.
I like action-adventure movies.
And believe me, my expectations were really low.

It was a joyless experience, as somebody already said.
One that made me re-evaluate a lot of other movies – compared to this, the silly fluff of Monster Hunter feels like John Milius working on a script from Karl Edward Wagner.

And I am sure you’ve read the reviews – both those that praise Snyder as god’s gift to the filmic arts, and those that say this is a load of rubbish wrapped in an out-of-focus aesthetic and spiked with dubious morality.
And I stand firmly in the second camp, and yet…

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How I spent my Workers’ Day

Working on a ghostwriting gig is great because it pays the bills, and because it gives me the opportunity to discover, explore and write stuff I would not normally have in my life – business, current affairs, other people’s lives.
It’s a great source of inspiration.
It is also a soul-killing experience, most of the time, because it means working for a boss, and a boss that usually hires a professional to do a certain job, but basically believes they know a lot more about the job at hand that the professional they have hired to do it. The result is, they do not respect the process.
Because they do not know there is a process.
They have this romantic idea of writing, that’s something that comes to you and possesses you like an ancient ghost, and they are quite sure they are the ones possessed … because it’s their book, right?
You are just a hired hand.
It can get tiresome.

But because I was thinking about these things, instead of spending my May Day weekend writing writing writing, I spent some time reading about writing process and writing structure. The fact that I was trying to put some order in my library, tackling the writing shelf, also helped.

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In my previous life

I was on my friend’s G. Facebook profile, a moment ago, and she was posting some old photos of her on some coral reef somewhere, surrounded by brightly colored fish, and diving alongside a shark, and other adventurous things like that, because she’s always been an adventurous woman, and she described these pictures as

memories from another life

And that gave me a strange shiver.
We’ve been knowing each other for something like forty years, and we’ve been in and out of each other’s life, maybe not always there but somehow never gone… what was I doing while my adventurous friend was diving in some hot tropical ocean, I wondered?
Where was I?
What have I to show of my previous lives?
Are they any different from the current one?
Where are my adventures?

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Living in the past…

… for a few days, at least.
It struck me as funny, this morning, the fact that I am spending the Easter weekend reading a game tie-in fantasy novel about a bunch of questing heroes (I’ll post a review as soon as I’m finished), and watching the first two seasons of the old Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-ohki OVAs. And eating ice cream.

My, this is like, what, 1993?

But really, I needed to take a few days off.

Have a happy Easter out there, and stay safe!


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Kingdom of Heaven, the director’s cut (2005)

There’s been a lot of talk about a director’s cut of a superhero film, recently. Everybody’s going on about it. The problem is, I am rarely interested in superhero movies – let’s say I still love the old Christopher Reeve/Margot Kidder Superman movies (well, the first two, at least) and after that … yeah, OK, Michael Keaton as Batman, maybe a few others. But I am not a big superhero fan to start with, and so I am not at all invested in this latest release.
But there are other movies that have come out in a Director’s Cut, and that I would be interested in catching.
So, why not today?

And when one talks about director’s cuts, Ridley Scott must be the world championship holder in the category. How many times did he recut Blade Runner?
And in 2005, his Crusader epic Kingdom of Heaven was distributed with 45 minutes cut after some test audiences groaned, and later re-released as a Director’s Cut.
I saw the theatrical release, and found it boring and unsatisfactory. But up until today, I had missed the Director’s Cut.
So today I watched it.

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World Sleep Day

I just found out today is the international World Sleep Day, a day dedicated – you probably guessed it – to sleep. And as a chronic insomniac, I can really appreciate the need to celebrate this absolute basic human necessity. And had I known before, I would have devoted this day to sleep – in the last few weeks I’ve been able to sleep more or less soundly.

But I’ll make up for that later.
Right now, I think I’ll just devote some room to this idea of first sleep and second sleep – basically the theory (that seems to be confirmed by facts) that the “good eight hours” is a modern invention: people in times of old would sleep four hours, than wake up and do something for two hours, like writing letters or a diary, or reading a book, and then four hours of sleep again.
These are what are called first and second sleep.
And indeed, this seems to be a well-established pattern, verified by experiment: if allowed to follow a natural sleep cycle, a lot of people will fall in the four/two/four sleep and wake pattern. It is called segmented or biphasic sleep.

And I will have to try it sometimes.
But right now, I feel like I could sleep for 36 hours straight.
Good night!