Author: Electric Baa

A red smartie and a blue smartie (candy coated chocolate buttons) sit on a plate with a chocolate chip cookie.

Red pill, blue pill – revisiting The Matrix

On By Electric BaaIn Film Reviews2 Comments

I remember going to see The Matrix when it first hit cinemas. Keanu Reeves, tick. Wuxia, tick. Cyberpunk–– Yeah, nah. Hard to respect a grunge aesthetic that so blatantly screams slick corporate-blockbuster. I never did get around to watching any of the sequels.
 
Still, there’s no denying the impact the films had on popular culture. And so, when my family was recently choosing a Saturday night couch-bonding film, I decided it was time to introduce the Resident Digital Native – my RDN – to The Matrix. What would RDN make of this cult classic? And what would I make of the film, 24 years on?

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Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

On By Electric BaaIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

For years, I’ve avoided Ian McEwan’s novel, Machines Like Me, partly out of ambivalence about other McEwan novels I’d read, but mainly in response to an interview in The Guardian, where McEwan was quoted as saying, ‘There could be an opening … for novelists to explore this future, not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas of being close up to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you.’

To anyone engaged with science fiction’s rich tradition of exploring ethical and societal dilemmas, comments like these read as wilfully ignorant and snobbish.

Lately, however, I’ve been asking myself – do I really want to be the blogger who avoids reading an on-theme book just because of a quote that may (may) have been taken out of context? No, I do not want to be that blogger.

And so, I borrowed Machines Like Me from my local library, and I read it from cover to cover. Here’s what I made of it––

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B2EMO tugging at my heart strings

On By Electric BaaIn Other ThoughtsLeave a comment

When Andor came to Disney+ in September 2022, there was a clear divide between die-hard Jedi fans who felt cheated by the lack of light sabres and the folk who were captivated by the new level of grit that Andor brought to the Star Wars canon.

One thing that wasn’t contentious about the new series was the heart appeal of B2EMO

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