By Umberto Eco - he also wrote The Name of the Rose.

Both fantastic books.

I have a 3rd book by him that I never got around to reading... Travels in Hyperreality I think - nonfiction, essays.

>secrets and secret societies, and specifically the Knights of the
>Templar.

Actually that's just "Knights Templar".

BTW, have you ever read anything by Robert Anton Wilson? Most famous for his fiction - he coauthored The Illuminatus! Trilogy, wrote The Schroedinger's Cat Trilogy, etc, but he has a number of non-fiction books too. He's one of my favorites.

-MegaZone, megazone@megazone.org
Personal Homepage http://www.megazone.org/
Eyrie Productions FanFic http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

I loved the Illuminatus! Trilogy, but I discovered that the only way I could describe it to a friend was to tell him that it was kind of like James Joyce fucked Charles Fort and the baby dropped acid all the time while listening to Timothy Leary.

> wrote The
>Schroedinger's Cat Trilogy,

I've always meant to read this; it's on the list of books that I should read but haven't yet.

-- Sean --

http://www.thebrokenlink.org The Broken Link 4.0 is live!
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein
"It's not easy being green." -- Kermit the Frog

<div style="namedropping">
I had a chat with Timothy Leary once over a beer. It's true. He was really cool.
</div>

-MegaZone, megazone@megazone.org
Personal Homepage http://www.megazone.org/
Eyrie Productions FanFic http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Ummm... wow.

I am truly in awe.

-- Sean --

http://www.thebrokenlink.org The Broken Link 4.0 is live!
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein
"It's not easy being green." -- Kermit the Frog

ah! i should have guessed you'd know it ^_^

>Both fantastic books.

yeah. i loved them both, although i spoiled TNOTR for myself
by reading it when i was too young. both remain two of my
favourite books though.

>I have a 3rd book by him that I never got around to reading...
>Travels in Hyperreality I think - nonfiction, essays.

How To Travel With A Salmon was neat too ..

>Actually that's just "Knights Templar".

hmm? you're probably right there - i could be confusing it
with the KCMG. or maybe just with lain's Knights of the Eastern
Calculus, which was the link in lain that reminded me of FP in
the first place.

>BTW, have you ever read anything by Robert Anton Wilson? Most famous
>for his fiction - he coauthored The Illuminatus! Trilogy, wrote The
>Schroedinger's Cat Trilogy, etc, but he has a number of non-fiction
>books too. He's one of my favorites.

nope. although now, i just may. thanks.

.rugle
"if there is a plan, then it must involve everything" -- diotevelli

(not content with possible misquoting, i may have mispelled his name too. damn)

The "Knights of the Eastern Calculus"? As opposed to the Knights of the Lambda Calculus?

(btw, I think the Templars had a longer name, the Knights of the Temple of Saint So-and-So of Jerusalem or some such, but I've long since forgotten it.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

:grins:

they've probably been around longer than lain has, and they sound
terribly like the Knights in Serial Experiments : Lain. the Knights
of the Eastern Calculus are a meta-group that turn up that exist only
in the wired. the members' real lives are so diverse and un-
conspiratorial it's almost sinister itself.

lain also mentioned Xanadu and sported gratuituous
overuse of imacs. the six second eyecatch with "think different"
written in apple-garamond font during the last dvd was amusing.

>(btw, I think the Templars had a longer name, the Knights of the
>Temple of Saint So-and-So of Jerusalem or some such, but I've long
>since forgotten it.)

you mean i'm not just crazy and confused for sticking the 'of the'
in there? gee, thanks. that just leaves craziness and confusion on
a miriad of other topics :)

and now i get to find out who or what Wolfwood is. life is good.

.rugle
"Eyebrows! I need Eyebrows!" -- FLCL

Okay, I didn't realize that there was something more to the bear suit.

What did I miss?

-- Bob

heh. much as i'd like to play this out and say that the bear suit
was incredibly important to the plot, but i'm not that imaginative.

the pajamas are one of the few things that give lain character
besides her direct actions. there's not a lot of this as she
doesn't really interact with the world much. it's the
"lain of the real world". her room is full of bears. it's her.

it's kind of like the power-lines. the hum of the power-lines are the
presence of the wired. it's everywhere.

just like the hum of the power-lines is changed in the final
episodes, you don't see the bears in the wired until the final
episode, because until that point the "lain of the wired" and
the "lain of the real world" are very different people.

sort of.

it means more than i can give it credit for, but i really didn't mean
all of that when i brought it up. i was just musing to myself that i
didn't realise that they were pajamas when she wore them the
first time and i kept wondering what the bear suit was for. later
though it makes sense because later you see her sleeping
in them. it's not that important really.

i did like lain though. i did really like lain.

.rugle
"go .. somewhere where there are no power lines or telephones" -- tachibana (lain)

My dorm room's ten base-T,
Sweet surfing liberty,
of thee I sing!

Sorry. Now, on to actual subject matter:

Since you poor fellows have diluted my beautiful, pure stream of votes (I got, what, four?) with why you -liked- Lain and Eva, I guess I should rant about why I hate it (short rant, I promise!)

Eva I hated because of it's characters. But, it was looking up. Everything was building to a scene where Shinji would save the day! Snurf, no dice. makes the whole series frikkin useless, and those 'human instrumentality' scenes at the end seemed awfully tacked on, as if to apologize for not explaining the Angels sufficiently.

As for Lain, I hated the way it was vague and uninformative for the sake of being vague and uninformative (I think someone said this better in another post in another forum... about another series, maybe?). The person who made Lain obviously looked very closely at the market and said, 'the people of Japan would really love a good bizarre mystery thing' and, taking advantage of the sudden surge in popular strangeness, made Lain, the ultimate success in writing for your market, but ultimately empty. I especially liked how when they finally established Lain as a character, they tossed her personality away and replaced it at least once.

Phoo, I liked Foucault's Pendulum - although similar on the surface, it not only had a more intelligent and clever exploration of events, it also had a good, solid twisted ending, as opposed to Lain, which I predicted starting from the second DVD.

On the other hand, the Illuminatus Trilogy is only good to read if you want to simply sit through chaos and come out the other end with brain fodder for stranger dreams. Those whole ressurected waterlogged Nazi zombies made the book worth reading... but not if you're in the mood for an actual story.

Lastly, Red Dwarf played today on the British channel for about three hours, and one of the episodes is when they explain exactly how JFK was assassinated, and who the mysterious man behind the grassy knoll was. It was extremely funny, despite my general ignorance in theories about said event (I'm a -story- buff, not a -paranoia- buff...)

Okay, sorry for that long rant. I just think it's interesting that I can agree with so many people on so many things, but then they love some series I can't stand (Like you, Glenn! And Paul, if he reads this! You have NO TASTE!). I was just curious to see if there was a connection between why people liked EVA and Lain and why I disliked them... I guess not, but I'll tell you my criteria;

Neither Lain nor EVA, in my opinion, were written to be stories. One was written to be a soulless, highly successful media phenominon and the other was written as a form of self psychology, at least in the end. I guess it's just me that notices these perhaps imagined things.

-Craig
Need something to read?
http://www.wpi.edu/~perko
Updated daily now that finals are over!

:grin:

It *is* a forum, not a survey

>established Lain as a character, they tossed her personality away and
>replaced it at least once.

I liked Lain the series, and the character. The way she acted in the
wired was a part of who she was, just seldom used; the way other people
saw her in the wired was just bizarre and really not her at all. That's
why I like the bear suit so much - it showed that she *hadn't* been
replaced, no matter how others kept seeing her. While there was the bear
suit, there was the original Lain.

>Phoo, I liked Foucault's Pendulum - although similar on the surface,
>it not only had a more intelligent and clever exploration of events,
>it also had a good, solid twisted ending, as opposed to Lain, which I
>predicted starting from the second DVD.

I can't say I predicted Lain, but it was different from FP. I just liked
the similarity between both sets of Knights.

>they explain exactly how JFK was assassinated, and who the mysterious

I liked the Ace Rimmer one after it, myself. The look on the two
German's faces after they get beaned with the crocodile was a classic

>connection between why people liked EVA and Lain and why I disliked
>them... I guess not, but I'll tell you my criteria;

Has anyone else seen Key - The Metal Idol? If so, and you didn't
really like Eva and Lain, did you prefer Key?

>Neither Lain nor EVA, in my opinion, were written to be stories. One

Eva more so than Lain. Lain had a very clever story - but it wasn't so
much about Lain finding herself, as Lain trying not to lose Alice.

I have this strange fixation on stories. When you write a story, you
should give people something to aspire to, not just feel 'good' about.
If people want to feel good, then there're many other things that they
can do to be satisfied. A story should show them something desirable
in themselves. I hated 'seven', for the same reasons Eva annoyed me -
there was nothing redeeming about anything I saw there. A tragedy
needs Catharsis.

>end. I guess it's just me that notices these perhaps imagined things.

Nup. I took Eva embarrassingly seriously for way too long.

But don't go slappin' cut on da lain ^_^

.ruguel
"not another fricking angel?!" -- friend, after rugle's typo

I would argue that Somerset was redeemed at the end of Seven in that Mills' 'destruction' caused him to rethink why he was retireing, and possibly causing him to gain back some of the more noble reasons for why he did the job in the first place, although part of that is inferred and not directly stated. The catharsis in the film is his. Admittedly, it's a little bit of redemption for a whole boatload of pain and suffering, but I still see it as being there.

Keep in mind as well that I'm a confirmed David Fincher fan, and my comments are tainted as such. :)

------------------------------
"You're a louse, Roger Smith."
------------------------------
Chad Collier
Digital Bitch
J. Random VFX Company

wow. i never thought of it like that. i just put it down to
compassion on his part for his partner. but you're right on
both points - it's definitely catharsis of a sort, but it's not
enough to make me feel good about watching it.

thanks though. you've made that couple of hours of my life
marginally less of a waste of time ^_^

.rugle
"in the moment after the picture was taken .. the building didn't fall" -- tataki

I liked Key and Gatekeepers up until the 'end'. No, they have no similarities at all to each other, not even on the surface, except that their 'endings' really weren't. I hear there's a Key movie I have to watch for the real ending, while Gatekeepers' 'ending' -was- the last episode, and extremely irritating due to insufficient character development (ooh, look, ten characters with actual emotions and pasts that we've spent all this time developing! Let's completely ignore them!)

-Craig
Need something to read?
http://www.wpi.edu/~perko

>that their 'endings' really weren't. I hear there's a Key movie I have

Key had thirteen episodes and two movie-length episodes. The
first movie-length episode was something of an explanation (cue
Ms Fresnjue) which turned a lot of people off because it consisted
mainly of people narrating. I didn't mind this because the story held
me the whole way. There is a lot you can only find out in that
episode.

The last movie rocked. It was sad, it was happy, it was uplifting,
and most of all, I kept wondering how much of the Third Impact
scene was affected by it. Key was apparently a very powerful show
for its time, and its influence seems to have showed up in both
Eva and Lain.

If you haven't seen the two movie-length episodes, you've really
missed out. You've even missed out on the full length version of
In The Night which is shown at the beginning of the second
movie. It's still one of my favourite songs (does that intro. remind
anyone else of that bg music from the Matrix that never made the
soundtrack?)

.rugle
"It read: Beryl, just borrowing your generals for a bit ^_^
signed Genaku McTome." -- Insertion (Carrotglace)

> phenomina. Gatekeepers had the piano-playing mecha, and

Only blink can I, seeing have not I seen, of this show, this much.

.rugle
"rooftop ethernet was obviously the go" -- describing Cafe Le Net