Words then and reviews

I just found my way on to a blog, through a blog link on a blog that I found as a link to another blog... Or something! Ahh the ways of the web these days, life can be more interesting if you don't know how you got there. I mean, in the long term you need to know where you've been, it's part of who you are, your identity, but in the short term randomly stumbling across things can be good fun. This from the girl who is a self-professed recluse... E-stumbling then I guess it'll have to be. Which is fun too. I follow one blog and from that I found out about another blog. But I can't remember how I got to the original blog apart from through a list of comments on someone else's blog! And I only went to look because she mentioned starbucks and her blog is named after her favourite starbucks drink! Kristi, if you're reading this - that's you! I was in a starbucks deprived place that day!

So then, e-stumbling is fun, and I stumbled upon the Murderati blog which looks nothing less than intriguing I must say! I've only read the first post but already I'm interested. Oh sweet words... I like to think of myself as a lesser word nerd and I do sometimes get carried away while reading the dictionary I admit but this was a great post and, I'm afraid, I may have to subject you to a similar post in the near future when I go on a binge heehee. I love words, I love knowing about them, how they're made, where they're from, how really peculiar they are and how their peculiarity changes depending on your state of well-being. Haven't you ever had a moment when perhaps you're feeling a bit tired and you say something and you realise it's an odd word but you never would have noticed otherwise? Same goes for being drunk I guess or in fact just any state, depending on your mood then. For example, I was exhausted this morning, really tired. I know, I know, I shouldn't have slept all day yesterday yada yada, but so I was talking with my friend about feeling asleep and I just had this moment of thinking "sleep is a really fricking weird word". Now that I'm marginally more awake and I realise it isn't, not really, just a regular everyday word. Which given they're all made up is saying something. I need to buy me a thesaurus...

Um um um, I've completely lost my train of thought now... Oh well, I'll talk about something different. I may have mentioned before, vaguely, that I am part of an online "book club". I'm a member of a forum and we just have a book that's set for a certain month and whoever remembers to find out what it is, reads it and then we discuss it. So it's slightly more loose than a regular book club but seeing as we're on different continents I guess that's a given. Anyway, I just finished reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It's actually for the end of the month but again that's the other benefit - you can just read the book when you have the time! Or when you can nick it off your dad...

It was a really interesting book, it's the one on which Bladerunner is based, I really enjoyed it. It was one of those make-you-think books that doesn't actually let you know you''re thinking until after you've read it. I found this out when I wrote up my review for the book club. I didn't have much to say beforehand and, as you've seen me do, words just flowed out of my fingers tips and spread across the page. If only that were the case every time I tried writing. That'd be neat! But then it'd just be a stream of conciousness book and only certain, more intellectually refined, people should do that. I'd literally just be talking to myself which isn't cool... unless it's on a blog?

See? Distractions again... In some ways the book was primarily centred around the idea of empathy, I think. There are other issues, many of them, but empathy was a key concept and could be found in the other issues.

Possibly my favourite "discussion" or issue was based on intelligence and how it was related to empathy. For you see the book is set at some point after the so-called World War Terminus. There's some kind of weird dust that has killed most of the animals and a good deal of people have emigrated to colony worlds. And there are androids. This dust has also affected some of the people, rendering them "chicken-heads" which is just a vague term for anyone with an IQ lower than some determined level. So, on earth, we have humans, chicken-heads and escaped androids who killed people in order to get to earth (and who the hero human has to kill). There are a few occasions where the key characters come into contact with various animals, both real and electric. Electric ones are around for people who can't afford real ones. And the characters' reactions are noted. Isidore, the chicken-head, is the most empathic, he feels for every living thing, even spiders. Deckard, the human, is very empathic though in a different way it seems. He believes in the beauty, sanctity and magnificence of animals, all animals to be fair, but mostly he just ones to own one, to take part and share in the joy that comes from owning one of the few animals left in existence. It's not enough for him to know they exist, he wants one, that makes him sound totally selfish but he's not. And then there are the androids. Particularly in this case androids with a Nexus-6 type brain - which means the top level of android at the time of writing ;). These beings are organic, highly intelligent, have needs and desires like another human being. But they're incapable of empathy. They cannot understand the interest humans have in living things. They literally pull apart Nature's work (the spider) to work out whether it really needs eight legs. Science isn't everything, intelligence isn't everything. If we become too intelligent will we forfeit our humanity? That may not be what Philip K. Dick is asking but it seems an interesting question nonetheless.

There you go... the fingers just type, I had no idea what I was going to say today and yet again words just happened!