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.

Very Early Movie

Last night I was watching the first movie ever made, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, which was first shown on 22 March 1895. The film was made by brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere (interestingly, "lumiere" means "light" in French). The film runs less than a minute and just shows workers leaving a factory, but that is where films started. I also saw an 1895 film of a train arriving at a railway station, which became famous because audiences were sent into a panic at the image of a train coming towards them. Apparently, while the film was a sensation it didn't cause anyone to panic, the reason for the story was that the train was also shown in 3D, which the Lumiere brothers experimented with but decided it was less profitable than conventional 2D films. The 3D screening did cause a panic due to the illusion of the train coming out of the screen.

Later on I watched a Doctor Who story from 1966 on DVD called "The War Machines". In the story the First Doctor (played by William Hartnell) arrives in 1966 London and has to confront a powerful computer based in the Post Office Tower which wants to take over the world with the help of it's army of robot "War Machines". It was a pretty entertaining story.

I was out sharp today to get my groceries and then I went along to meet my Mum. We went down to the Jam House, for their Blues Festival. The program lasted nearly four hours and consisted of four acts, the headliner being Lightnin' Willie and the Poor Boys. It was a good show, and we had a couple of beers, because it was like a cabaret setting. After the show I went along to the sales and bought another couple of Doctor Who DVDs and 2001: A Space Odyssey.