Sunday, June 13, 2010

An Electric Ant

Last night was really quiet. I finished reading Human Is?: A Philip K. Dick Reader by Philip K. Dick. The final three stories I read in it were "An Electric Ant" in which a man is shocked to discover he is in fact a robot and, when he discovers that his reality is artificially generated, decides to experiment with his own perception of reality. That was followed by "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts" in which the USA's first time travellers arrive in the future a few days after they supposedly died returning to their own time. The final story was "The Pre-persons" in which children up to the age of 12 can be legally executed.

I was also watching a few epsiodes of Blake's 7 on DVD. Blake's 7 was a British science-fiction TV show which ran for 52 episodes over four seasons from 1977 to 1980. It was kind of a blend of Star Trek and Star Wars and concerned a rag-tag group of bickering revolutionaries and criminals who travel around space in a derelict alien spacecraft fighting against the totalitarian Galactic Federation. These days the show is often made fun of due to the often really bad (by modern standards) special effects and production values. However, the show was usually well-written and clever. It was also a lot grittier and bleaker than most science-fiction shows with a strong vein of dark humour.

Today I went out and got some postcards to send to a friend and I also got a CD called Dirty House Blues by Lightnin' Hopkins and a book called The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami. on my way home I stopped off in a bar and had a couple of drinks and read my book.

It's been a good weekend mostly, but it has been marred by the fact that I've been feeling really kind of depressed recently about the fact that I really am a complete loser (mainly the facts that I am kind of stupid, I'm ugly, I've never really had a girlfriend and I have never achieved anything). It does happen fairly frequently.

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