DDR 1

It's surprisingly nice to read Desert creole. Normally I gets really annoyed at people imposing accents on writing, but this book does it well- it's as readable as english, with the added layer of the guide's voice. (Also, for some reason, I keep thinking the guide's really feminine, even though her word's aren't exactly gendered.)

I'm really interested by class in this story: if the Desert is Vegas/Dubai, how does it end up with the creole? Is it a Vegas thing where there's the really rich tourists plus the actual residents who aren't actually that well off? It seems to be something like that, which has a lot of implications for language as a socioeconomic symbol in this world.

The guide being extremely vehement about guiding (the part where she slept outside someone’s door) reminds me of a not-really-scam that some people would pull in China where they’d be really friendly and help you carry your bags up like great wall or whatever and give you restaurant recommendations and all that, then try to sell you overpriced water or paper fans or something. I don’t know why I thought of that.

It’s also cool that the Creole is very romance-based. There’s a bit of Korean in there and I know chenji is used in the Chinese season-end way, but the poems pull heavily from Spanish and latin, with an obviously English base. I guess it makes it easier to read, but I think it also plays with our expectations of education- the guide speaks with a very “b” and “m” heavy voice that somehow ends up sounding uneducated, at least to me, in contrast to the stereotypically high-brow latin (no one learns latin anymore unless they’re at least a little bit pretentious).

What makes us human?

Robot stories is totally Asimov, which I'm definitely a fan of.

I think that both movies took something inexplicable human and tried to quantify it in a mechanical or formulaic sort of way-love, relationships, and emotion as mechanics of a set world. 

I think that sci-fi in general either goes balls-to-the-wall bang bang adventure fantasy sort of explorations or goes into some hypothetical future that reveals something about ourselves or the current world. We're reading mostly the latter- the adventure isn't as fun to analyze, probably,- and I think that these stories talk about deeper themes by over-sciencing something. The water story takes lying and adds rules and logic: if it’s a lie, there’s water, if it’s not technically false, you’re good. The movies take childcare and relationships and mortality and quantifies/measures them, and asks, “What does this change? How does this affect the ways we should think about those things?”

(I’m a little bit rambly today. Excuse the terribly informal writing.)

I think it’s also worth noting that the young actors in EBU are youtubers (I think? I remember someone talking about that in class.) With the Oscars, I think there’s been a lot of discussion about minorities in acting (which I’m totally happy for), but there’s also been a lot of backlash. However, I do think that Hollywood, whether or not it does “sympathy-nominate” (a term I have so many problems with but won’t go into right now,) is biased against minorities, just because they’re not cast as often or auditioned to play major roles and a million other small things (most of our biographical action movies are white-centric, your typical ‘suave’ character is white, a director wants to fill an archetype and that archetype is, hey, traditionally white). But there’s actually so many minority internet icons- the most popular makeup artist is Michelle Phan, I think, there’s a ton of POC on Vine, “black twitter” is a whole thing, etc.

I’m not really sure where I was going with that, but I just find it interesting.