Only Ever Yours: A frighteningly accurate portrayal of the pressures for women

Right so it's been a week since I read "Only Ever Yours" by Louise O'Neill and it's only now that I'm able to articulate my thoughts on it. Being the English student that I am, I can't help but pull all manner of things out of this book that I want to discuss forever. Alas, people around me can't quite grasp my enthusiasm and I've had to stop talking so excitedly at them about it. Maybe I'm just being a serious English nerd or maybe, I see just how valuable this book is to us because it makes you think. You might be able to walk around everyday with your eyes shut to what our society is but if you pick up this book then you're going to be beaten over the head with the things you can normally stay happily oblivious to in your daily life.

As you may have gathered, I'm getting a tad bit ahead of myself so I'll leave the nerdy stuff until a little later on.

So a little explanation as to how I came across this book and read it and such. Ordinarily, I steer clear of the Young Adult section thanks to the vast volume of paranormal romances that are still churned out in ridiculous numbers in an effort to rake in cash. Teen and young adult romances, even if only subplots, usually exasperate me beyond measure so I much prefer to look for something with a bit more substance. Speculative fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, that kind of thing. Stuff where someone has thought outside the box or focused on something in society to critique. I just can't resist it.

I didn't happen across this book during an idle perusal of shelves in a bookstore but rather I went looking for it for college. Trying to be ahead of my reading for college, I went looking for my books a little early with the intention of reading as many of them as possible prior to starting back so that I'd have time to do research in the library (ha because that's a realistic goal). So "Only Ever Yours" was on the list and the cover just kept creeping me out.

The cover that still freaks me out

I don't like dolls, okay? I can't pinpoint exactly what it is about them that freaks me out but they freak me out. So of course out of all the books I'd gotten, this cover kept jumping out of me. Once I was looking at it, I found myself reading the words on the front, then I found myself reading the back and some sort of creepy fascination had me opening it up to read. I don't need to have read this for months but I started reading it and the more I read the more hooked--and horrified--by it I became.

Without spoiling things for people who haven't read it (you should read it), this novel delves into the future where women are no longer born naturally but have to be created. The Eves are created for men and spend their lives preparing for their roles as mothers, prostitutes and, for the rare few, a life of chastity in the School. Companions, Concubines and Chastities, as they're officially termed, are trained from the age of 4 up until the time they are assigned their place at the age of 17.

Sound bad? Well, on the surface it may sound horrible but the reality of such a society painted by the book is much worse.

The novel is set in the School during the final year of one group of Eves and is told from the point of view of freida (all Eves have lowercase names, presumably because they're lesser than men). Her life revolves around appearing perfect, maintaining the ideal weight at all costs (bulimia and anorexia being acceptable options) and picking at the flaws of the other girls around her. One of the common slogans in the book is something along the lines of although the Eves are made to be perfect, there is always room for improvement. Sound in any way familiar?

In our society, women--teenage girls in particular--are constantly picked on by the media. They aren't skinny enough, they aren't pretty enough, they're too skinny, they're too pretty and many more impossible ideals that contradict each other. Women are so often defined by their bodies and their is a massive emphasis on how women should look for men. I don't know how many articles you see around the place that talk about what men want in a woman, how to be the ideal woman for your man, etc. Women are defined by men: how they see them, what they expect of them, what they think of them and so on and so forth. "Only Ever Yours" touches on so many of these things and forces you to draw parallels with the world we live in and it's quite frankly terrifying--and it should be.

Just this month, Louise O'Neill has released another novel that deals with another prominent issue in society: rape. As I understand it, "Asking For It" deals with the aftermath of the rape of a girl at a party and how she deals with it and how others perceive her. Now, I haven't read it yet but I believe it is meant to be a powerful novel to do with rape culture, victim blaming and consent. As the title suggests, the victim is considered to be the one at fault rather than the man because she sent out the wrong signals and "invited" the attack.

Unfortunately, as stupid as that idea seems to me, it is the way that society looks at it. Men are not to blame, or not all men are like that. Women are sexualised by men in film, television, magazines and every other medium in between and so it's almost expected that women are around purely for men's benefit. See the connection with the book? Eves are made for men and men think women are here for their benefit. You might deny that that's the view of our society but the evidence is too obvious to deny when it's thrown so blatantly in your face.

While body image is a main focus in "Only Ever Yours", you still get an idea of rape culture. It is pointed out in the novel a few times that the Eves cannot say "no" to a man. A particularly horrifying scene for me is when one of the men come to examine and sample (yes, sample) the girls, attempts to rape freida. He just expects her to have sex with him because he has asked for her and that's what she's there for. Particularly sickening and frighteningly accurate is that when she says no, he tells her that "no can mean yes".

I don't know how often I've heard testimony by rapists that said that their victims didn't mean it when they said no. It's real people. Too real.

There are bound to be people who would read this and think that I'm making this up or that I hate men (I'm transmasculine so self-hatred?) but it is true. Only recently, a girl I know said that she was at a party and that some guy kept hitting on her. She rebuffed him again and again, made it abundantly clear that she didn't want anything to do with her and eventually he gave up. Except that when she was leaving, he asked to talk to her for a moment and once she stepped to one side to speak to him, he started aggressively kissing her. Then when she shoved him away, he was confused and offended.

I may be off on a wee bit of a ramble right now so I'll finish this up before I go off on another one. "Only Ever Yours" is a book that I think everyone should read. You might complain that the characters aren't likable, or that much of the novel is superficial but for the former, that's no excuse considering what the story is driving at and for the latter, it's about superficiality! Hell, it's so superficial, being intelligent or having a nice personality are seen as insults. Read it through and then judge it if that's what you want to do. I'd also recommend reading "Asking For It". Even though I haven't read it, it's a subject that should be read because it's an issue that has to be faced. Maybe I'll write about it when I get around to reading it.

Anyway, that's all from me for the moment. I'll try to come back with more of my ramblings a bit sooner next time.

Max

Always On My Mind

I'm not dead.

This is just something I thought I'd point out. It does not explain why I haven't posted for the last two months, of course and I'm stating the obvious right now but whatever.

I suppose I can run through a brief list of why I've been away.

I had exams. I had days where I was too busy doing something else to even think of blogging. There were times when I wished everyone on the planet would die and I would have been quite happy if the sun extinguished itself and left us to die. Days where I didn't want to get up, where I would much sooner have crawled under my duvet and willed myself out of existence. I've also been rather scatterbrained. Couldn't remember things, couldn't organise my thoughts and just couldn't function properly. Wasn't that bothered about actually trying either so that could certainly have contributed.

So yes, the short version of why I haven't blogged in awhile is that I just haven't, okay?

Hurray and stuff, I'm back now so I can continue to be wonderfully strange through the written word and fling meaningless things out there that some people might be bothered to read.

The title of this post can apply to more than one thing. We can take the song of the same name by the Petshop Boys and say that I've had a person on my mind, which would be true but it's more than that. The brain is a wonderfully inescapable thing that likes to bombard you with unwanted thoughts and decide to follow similar lines of thought quite frequently in order to drive you up the walls. The subjects that are most often occupying my mind are gender.

Why should gender occupy so many of my waking thoughts? I don't believe I've mentioned it previously but I am in fact transgender. In other words, gender and what it is to me is a central part of my life. Central but not simple. I seem to be left in a most uncomfortable position where I have exactly zero idea of what I am on the spectrum of gender.

Maybe you're unaware of gender being a spectrum rather than a binary and aren't aware that sex and gender are not interchangeable. Male and female are considered interchangeable with man and woman respectively, except that they aren't. The former are your possible biological sex, the ones that describe what genitals you have and lead to such announcements at birth of "It's a boy!" or "It's a girl" and which adorn all manner of balloons and other crap that people bring to visit your newborn in the hospital. You've also got intersex there too, where you're born as neither because things didn't develop one way or the other and which parents feel the need to "correct". You won't find many balloons celebrating that inbetween. And then you have the latter, man and woman. Two fixed points of gender that get linked to sex along with boy and girl. Anyone who did mathematics knows that you can draw a line between two fixed points and there can be other points along that line that fall in between male and female. You also have points that aren't on that line, ones that lie outside it and right there you have a better idea of gender. You can fall somewhere on that line or you can be somewhere outside that line completely. Simple enough, right?

Wrong!

People seem to have a hard time grasping the idea of anything being outside two "traditional" genders, in the Western world at least. So instead you can be labelled as a freak, as going through a "phase" or as doing it for the attention. "Oh you're a girl that likes to dress more like a guy? Oh so you're a tomboy. Don't worry, you'll grow out of that." Except you don't grow out of this "phase" but rather you grow into it. You have to feel your way almost blindly while people tell you that you're wrong or you're being silly. It's an identity that you have to find because you need to know who you are and trampling it down and pretending it doesn't exist, solves nothing and causes plenty of problems. It's okay though because if you're the one forced to trample your identity down, you'll be the one going through the pain and the heartbreak! You don't have to worry about upsetting other people with your "silly" notions.

Minor rant/tangent aside, I am transgender. I am in that blind searching phase but I've wandered down the guy end of the spectrum. Born female (I refuse to call myself by the gendered G- and W-words because using them in relation to myself makes me physically ill), going god knows where but the it involves male pronouns (he/his/him) and a wonderful name change to Max. Technically, I've gone with a gender neutral name but it does have more masculine leanings so it suits me just fine.

Aside from being frustrated by people who can't grasp this or don't want to, I actually was getting to a point here somewhere that I'm sure I'll remember in a second if I let my brain kick into gear rather than typing on automatic.

Ah yes! Point was that my gender identity is on my mind a lot as of late. I had a wonderful time from mid-January to the end of February where everything was new to me and I was so full of optimism and revelling in my newfound freedom of being out to myself and to family and friends. I was dropping a facade for so many people that I'd kept up for so long without being fully aware why I was doing. I've created so many different facades over the years connected to my past that I hadn't even spotted the gender one for a good while. So facades were dropping, I was flinging away pieces of the part I'd played, getting rid of clothes I'd always hated wearing and replacing them with things from the men's section. I could actually look in the mirror without suffering from a feeling of unreality of my reflection not being mine because it was all wrong. Then it started crumbling away while I was building it. Depression started re-establishing roots and trying to pull me back down as a willing victim rather than kicking and screaming.

People don't seem to understand the significance of pronouns or chosen names to trans people. Those people who think it's a phase just stubbornly keep calling you what you've always been called and they don't know what damage they're doing. They don't realise that it's like you're not being accepted by them, which you aren't to be fair. They don't seem to understand that you wouldn't have changed anything at all if it wasn't significant to you. The one that frustrated me beyond measure as I tried again and again to get understanding across, as I pleaded and negotiated and cried over having my chosen name accepted was that Lynda had this idea that names weren't important. She quoted Romeo and Juliet, in fact, to get her point across and show me why I was being "silly".

"What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

That's what I was told and it's true. A name isn't important. Whatever is behind it is the same regardless of what it's called. Except that when a name has always been attached to you but you are no longer the same, it doesn't have to apply anymore. You're still you of course but a truer you. If you're trans it isn't compulsory that you change your name but you can certainly choose to do so. It's like a rebirth, a severing of a cord that was working for your benefit while you were still developing. It's an anchor before you're trans, something that you can use to wrap an identity around, something you can always go back to but it also holds it back. So you choose a new anchor to form your identity around and hold you in the place that you want to be rather than holding you back.

Not only did I have every right to a new name but if names weren't important, what was the big deal about changing it?

My rambling nonsense put to one side, I've had to grapple and put up with a lot of things. If I manage to remove an obstacle or making something a little easier then I keep finding myself running into a bigger wall that I can't find a way around or that things are getting more difficult. It is not good for your mental health, it is exhausting and so many people think that you're getting on great because you throw up a new facade that says, "I'm okay" and they don't try to look past it and you don't try to pull it down because it's easier than trying to explain. You need someone to get it, someone who can help you but those people usually have the same issues and let's face it, you don't want to be the one to add more stress to their lives or dig up their own sensitive issues.

I have gone through the despair of it many times, multiple times a week in fact. It could be triggered by something simple like someone misgendering me when I thought I was presenting as being male. Or it could be triggered by nothing more than catching sight of myself in the mirror at the wrong angle, or the sound of own voice and I go into a tug of war with myself. Do I look male? Can I pass as a guy? I can't see it so surely everyone else is the same? Everyone must see me for what I really am so why bother? That's what it boils down to really. Why bother going to the effort of trying to present the way you feel when it feels like such an obvious facade, like you stand out for what you are underneath it all, what you were to begin with? Such frustration goes with it and I really have wondered if I should revert back, just give in, put on more feminine clothing and present as what I so obviously am, a fact that can be seen by anyone with eyes.

That is where I find myself at present, in a state of frustration and confusion. That is what is always on my mind, what am I and who am I. So yes, I needed to have a wee rant about that for my own benefit. Maybe someone will bother to read this and get it and empathise or maybe someone will read it and learn something. I don't know. I mean, who even reads this nonsense that my brain vomits up? Not the pleasantest of descriptions but I'd call it accurate.

Alas, that is that and I might be able to deal with it at some stage soon and I might talk about it again but for the time being I've said my lot. That's me finished for the time being.

Ciao for now.

My Relationship with the Written Word

In case nobody is aware of the fact, I happen to be a writer. I know, big surprise coming from someone who writes a blog that is composed of words, which I have typed because we live in a digital age and that amounts to the same thing as me saying I've written them. Clarification of the meaning of writing aside, I do write but I prefer the creative side rather than the autobiographical or stream of consciousness styles. Not to say that I don't literally place parts of my personality, my mannerisms and whatnot into my characters but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Yeah so I write things and stuff and that's all I'm saying about that for the moment.

Now we get onto why I consider my writing so important to me. I've always had an adoration for books. I consider one of the best things that my mother ever did for me was get me to join the library when I was 7. Up to that point, my world was fairly limited. I had school to go to of course. I was occasionally, very occasionally allowed to have a friend over. My group of friends was extremely small because I didn't like people as I couldn't mix well with them. I was still allowed outside the house then but I didn't have anyone who lived near me so most of the time I was at home on my own. I used to just have my own thoughts to entertain myself with and that was certainly interesting for me but to have a whole new world opened up by the library!

All I wanted at first was information to all the questions I had in my head: how the planet came about, the universe, evolution. I ran through books pretty fast and it wasn't long before I started looking at fiction stuff as well as factual. I found that once I started on fiction, I read more of that than anything else. The way someone could string loads of words together and create something that was so different from non-fiction. Images, people, entire worlds! In books I found so many things I couldn't find in real life. People I could understand because I could see the ways they ticked, they weren't closed off to me. Emotions, actions, everything explained. It took me years. and I'm not fully there in all honesty, to understand people in real life to the same degree. It was so much easier and more straightforward to read people in books rather than in real life. So I had that and I had an escape into a more pleasant environment than the one I found myself living in.

I gained an early preference for horror, fantasy and the supernatural. I think it was because more realist novels set in a our world was far from recognisable in comparison to the world that I lived in. It was close enough though that I could see what was wrong with the childhood I was living in and I didn't like that because I couldn't change it. I was aware of it as I was, I was the one living it after all so I went somewhere totally different. Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Goosebumps, horror stories, ghost stories. I absorbed words like a sponge, came to be able to tell a good short story from a mediocre one and had a desire to emulate them. I swear that my imagination grew as I grew older, the desire to create growing with it. My best friend had to put up with goodness knows how many wild plans of mine to stage such and such a play that I'd written or helping me construct stories involving miniature paper figures of Harry, Ron and Hermione that she kept in her pencil case in school.

I can't pinpoint when I started writing but I found it was such an easy way to express myself and to articulate my thoughts. Communicating verbally is a challenge. Either I don't know what to say, I say it wrong or I don't know how to express or explain an idea, an emotion or an argument. Even when I'm talking about something I'm confident about I tend to trip over words. On the other hand, writing words down gives me the chance to better gather my thoughts, to think about what I'm going to say and how I want to construct it. I usually write at speed without revising what I've said but I always find it works out a lot better for me than speaking does. It's like I can think more clearly when I see my thoughts on the page. Everything fits together so much better and in such obvious ways.

Most of the time I don't find what I've written to be particularly good. There are pieces I wrote only a few months ago that make me cringe and what to bury them forever but it was still good for me at the time. It allows me to express myself in ways I can't in everyday life. I learn things about myself in my writing too but more importantly people who want to get to know me can learn so much more from my writing than I'm ever likely to convey in real life. It's very difficult for me to express emotions. It's not that I don't want to, it's just that more often than not I'm not capable of emoting. My best friend who has known for how long? More than 12 years and she's never seen me cry as far as I can remember. Anger and happiness come to me with no problems and sometimes other emotions that are vastly different are expressed in the same ways as those two. That or I show no expression after all. Now try to explain to someone how deeply hurt you are by something when you seem totally impassive or tell something that's deeply upsetting to you while your face decides a smile is an appropriate expression. It's all there in my head but it somehow changes or gets lost as soon as I try to force it out of my mouth. With writing it's quite a different matter. I can get everything across and bring out emotions in myself while I'm writing.

My most recent forays in to writing have involved a site called Mizahar. It's a fantasy site that refers to itself as the Writer's RPG. You can create characters with lives similar to those in the real world with a few differences or have them as far removed from the world of normality as you like. I've been on it for more than a year and a half now, it'll be 2 years come the end of August and I feel as if my writing has flourished on it. What I want to get at though is what my characters express. My first character, Azira who resides in a domain on the site called Wind Reach, has so much of myself in her that it's genuinely terrifying. When I created her, I knew that I was consciously putting some of myself into her. She inherited my temper, the loss of a mother, my extreme distrust of men and some aspects of my past that helped to shape her. Within a few months though I realised that more of myself had come out her than I'd realised. She acquired my sexuality and the uncertainty that it comes with it, the walls I keep up for most people, the extreme desire to put trust in others, the extreme discomfort of being seen as overly feminine and a hatred for being looked down at and laughed about. There's even more of me in there but it'd make quite a long list and that's only one character. She has the most of me in her, good and bad qualities but if you add in the other two, you end up with a more rounded image of me. A penchant for sarcasm and witticisms that I tend to trip over when I try to say them in real life.

The short version of everything I've just written (I can't even remember most of it at this stage) is that the written word is highly important to me. A means of escape, a means of expression and an outlet for creativity. I suppose the written word also allows me to ramble in a somewhat articulate way that sometimes fails me in the world of verbal communication. More often than not though I can still ramble quite successfully writing like this. I mean, my blog posts should really attest to that fact.

And with that I should probably stop with the writing thing. Does anybody want to read this much of my nonsense anyway? If you've got down here then I guess I must be doing something, right?

Until I write again.

Some Thoughts on Consciousness and Robots

So I have been quiet for a number of weeks. Perhaps that is a merciful thing or you may have been inundated with a load of nonsensical posts. As it is you get to put up with my insanity in smaller doses. Hooray for you!

Anyway as promised, I thought I'd share some thoughts I've had of late concerning robots and AI and how we look at the idea of consciousness. Obviously, I went to see Ex Machina last month and that contributed to this way of thinking but I also indulged myself by buying a book of Isaac Asimov's robot short stories. I've read quite a bit of his earlier stuff. I read I, Robot (quite different from the Will Smith I assure you) and The Rest of the Robots ages ago so I'd read a lot of the stories before. That didn't mean that I didn't enjoy them all over again as well as having the wonderful treat of a few new ones in there.

There is a point to this and I'm getting there if you give me a second.

Basically, Asimov set up three laws that the robots in his stories were built with. The First Law being that they couldn't cause harm to humans or allow harm to come to them. In other words, they can't kill humans, harm them in anyway or stand by if anyone else tries to do it. They have to save them from dangerous situations and accidents. The Second Law is that they have to follow all orders given to them by humans unless those orders conflict with the First Law. The Third Law is that the robot should protect itself unless that affects the first two laws. If it causes harm to a human in some way or goes against orders then they can't protect themselves from destruction.

The point is coming now, provided I don't lose the train of thought in the meantime. Just bear with me here, it might turn out to be worth it. What I'm getting at is the fact that they're created, they're restricted in such a way that they should be predictable and incapable of developing consciousness.

What's consciousness? We consider ourselves conscious or sentient but for the most part, we don't consider animals to be on par with us. They might be intelligent, yes but humanity would never consider them as sentient because they'd be somehow equal. We wouldn't go looking for sentient life on other planets if we thought we could find another sentient species at home. Yes, I'm rambling and making assumptions about things but I think I'm right, or I hope I am so try not to judge me.

So consciousness is what? During the Enlightenment, it was discussed that humans possess Reason, something that animals apparently didn't. Unless you're looking at the Houyhnhnhms in Gulliver's Travels, of course. Sentience for us seems to be things like having a sense of self, possessing the capacity for reason or logic, creativity and an idea of abstract concepts. That's what I can think of anyway.

So robots. There was indeed a point to my mention of Asimov's writing, aside from expressing my love for it, and the clue should be in the title of this post. Consciousness and Robots. If we create a robot or AI, we create artificial consciousness. There's an idea that it's limited, unlike our own, the "true" consciousness. There's also an idea that this is not only all right but the way that things should be. We don't want to create a slave class that is truly equal to us after all. If they're less than us then that's perfectly okay. The idea that they might somehow wiggle out of the set parameters that we set for them and reach a level of consciousness equal to our own then we get a bit panicky.

Consciousness+Robots=The doom of humanity

That's the way of thinking. What we create will destroy us and we are afraid of this. There/s a term for it: the Frankenstein Complex. The idea that you're creation will turn upon you and destroy you and everything you love. Are we really as paranoid as all that? Damn right we are! We have Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, we have the robots from the Terminator films, V.I.K.I in I, Robot (the Will Smith film this time) and the list goes on.

Are we justified in this way of thinking? If we create robots,will they inevitably turn upon us? I think if they were sentient, they might. I'm not saying "down with robots", I'm far from a technophobe, I'm just saying that it's a real possibility. If you are a slave but you don't know any difference then are you bothered to rebel? No, probably not. If you're aware of the injustice, that you are no different than your masters and yet are being treated as inferior and forced to work, then might you not get a little bit annoyed and fight back?

I don't know why we have such a great fear of robots. I suppose it's the idea that they will be superior to us physically and therefore more capable of destroying us. We've treated other human beings in the same way and received the same retaliation. Some would argue that we didn't create those humans but many colonies were set up and told that they'd been created by their colonisers. It's a similar situation. We've done the same to humans in the past but robots are pseudo humans, right? They aren't supposed to rise up. If you try to make something like yourself, don't be surprised if you get exactly what you wished for.

And I should probably stop now because this has become highly bizarre.

Ex Machina, or Not Judging a Book (Film) by its Cover

Minor warning that I will most likely ramble a little bit and possibly go slightly off topic but that's a thing that I do fairly often so get used to it. Also a quick note that I have left it totally spoiler free.

Right so I went to see Ex Machina on Wednesday and it took me awhile to fully process what I'd watched and work out what I thought of it. It was only when I told someone about it yesterday that something in my brain finally clicked and I remembered how to form opinions. The film kind of set my brain reeling and I couldn't discuss it afterwards. I forgot adjectives, I forgot emotions, hell, I forgot how to speak English.

When the first advertisements came out for Ex Machina, I missed them. My uncle spotted one, knew it was something I'd like (I fricking love robots!) and then did a wonderful job of having no idea what the name of it was. I actually had to do research to find out about it and was extremely intrigued at the time because Wikipedia only had one line about it and so I got excited. I got really excited. Then it kind of went to the back of my mind what with college things to think about and whatnot but I was still aware of it and I wanted to see it. It wasn't until I decided for definite that I was going to see it in the cinema that I chanced a peek at the reviews and was instantly impressed by the high ratings and mostly glowing reviews.

In other words, there was an awful lot of build up for me and so when I actually saw it, it didn't match up with the way I'd imagined it. I'm not saying it wasn't good, in fact I found it immensely enjoyable to see and found it chillingly thought provoking afterwards.

If you're one of those people like my grandfather who believe some manner of violent action should occur every few moments in a film then Ex Machina is probably not for you. There is a small bit but it's only a few minutes worth altogether, which certainly wouldn't be enough for any of those bloodthirsty people. If however, you like having little clues presented to you for over an hour and trying to piece them together before the big reveal towards the end then you will most definitely enjoy Ex Machina.

So the actual film!

Basically, Caleb wins a lottery at work that means he gets to spend a week on the estate of his employer, Nathan. Lo and behold when he gets there he discovers that he's not there for a little holiday but rather to test an android that possesses what Nathan believes is true Artificial Intelligence. After signing the mother of all Confidentiality Agreements, Caleb gets to meet the android, Ava, in the flesh (ha ha, I'm so funny!). There are a lot of things that I think you see coming in this film. You know there's something not quite right going on, that there's some sinister reason behind the need for secrecy and you also know that Caleb's going to end up with a thing for Ava. I'm sorry that's not even a spoiler. It's that obvious you can see it coming from a mile away.

You go through the whole film and you form opinions about Nathan and you form opinions about Ava. Some assumptions I made turned out to be right but it turned out I'd been viewing something in a better light than they turned out to be. You've got a few moments of horror when Caleb finds everything out then you've got a whole other twist afterwards that I don't think anyone saw coming, one that probably freaked me out more than the reveal did.

I've never studied film or anything so for anyone who has, you'll have to excuse any ridiculously stupid things I might come out with and bear with my brief comments on things that stuck out for me.

The special effects for this film are damn good. Alicia Vikander looks fabulous as an android and the blending of real flesh with the metallic body is quite excellent. The way the android body moves and the sound of the mechanisms within are just so right. I cannot fault the robot effects. Robots are perfect! Also full frontal female nudity, wonderful! And before I head off on some weird little sidetrack, more film technique related things.

Continuing with visuals, there is so much beautiful scenery in Ex Machina. There was filming done in Norway and they just want to keep throwing it in your face by going outside a lot, or sticking the outside world in the background. There's a very strong contrast with this beautiful colourful outside world that Caleb and Nathan get to inhabit and the windowless, grey one where Ava dwells. You have to think about these things, compare things and see what you come up with. Thinking and seeing is what this film is all about as far as I'm concerned. You have to look for the little details as well as the big ones, remember them and consider the whole film in light of all those pieces. One of the biggest questions that could arise is the definition of human and what can pass as human. Appearance is everything in this film, how we view everyone in it, whether we see them as good or bad based on how they act and how they seem.

What was I doing again? Visuals, right. You've your standard way of shooting of "I am pointing this camera here and it is not a shaky camcorder or other mode of recording where you are made hyper aware of the fact that a camera is involved." I know, I shouldn't name things like that but screw it. There are also a number of CCTV style shots. Pure voyeurism! Anyway, they also play around with the lighting. When everything goes dark red, you know that something shady is going on. It's a bit obvious but it is film and it's supposed to be a visual medium. Also the soundtrack is killer.

To sum things up, I liked it. If you like films that actually require some thought rather than mindless consumption then you might well like it too. The pacing might seem a little unusual but if you bear with it, I consider it entirely worth it. Also there's a few highly amusing parts in it including a dance scene that is just unreal.

If you want more detailed robot related ranting then I will likely be turning out one or two posts about robots and consciousness, some ideas that have been thrown around concerning robots and of course, fangirl moments over Isaac Asimov and his writing because I just can't help it.

Ciao for now.

Things you might be interested to know about me

Well, aside from the fact that I can't decide whether to treat the post titles as proper titles with appropriate capitalisation or write normally, I thought I'd share a few things that spring to mind that people might be interested to know about me. Maybe you know me and you already know about them. All well and good. Maybe you'll be surprised by something I list or perhaps you'll say you know at least forty other people that share the same thing. Whatever, it's my list and you may make of it what you will.

1. Cotton wool freaks me out. I mean, it seriously freaks me out. I don't like the texture, I don't like the sounds it makes when you tear it or rub it off something or anything like that. Some people consider it weird but it's a very real thing.

2. I have a surprisingly selective sense of smell. What in hell does this mean, you might be wondering? Well, my sense of smell is abysmal for the most part. Usually, if someone asks me if I can smell something the answer is no. Things I can smell are normally very pungent and/or I don't like them. Onions, especially if microwaved, are something I can't stand raw or partly cooked so of course, I seem to be able to smell them. Plus they do the whole making me cry thing to the point where I can hardly open my eyes and it looks as if I've been bawling my eyes out. Yay!

3. I am somewhat afraid of dolls and ventriloquist dummies (the people sort, not animals). It's the eyes, I just can't look at them. Well in terms of ventriloquist dummies, it's probably the whole face with that fixed grin and- *shudders* I once cleverly chose a film for us to watch at home called "Dead Silence" because I knew it was about ventriloquist dummies. I wanted a horror film and I knew it'd freak me out. It succeeded because it damn well stuck in my brain. I can't get rid of it, it's horrible because I still have a sort of perverse fascination with it. Clearly I hate myself.

4. I am an alien that has arrived on this planet by accident. Seriously though, that's what Asperger's is like. Everyone else seems like they should be aliens but yet they fit into the environment so obviously you're the alien because it's the only thing that makes sense. In my eyes, most people are unfathomable. I can't read facial expressions very well although I can learn them for specific people eventually. Also I can't pick up on tones well either so I can't always pick up on sarcasm, irony, etc. That's the tip of the iceberg but I'll probably discuss my Asperger's at some point in the future.

5. I don't like skirts and dresses. To my knowledge, I have not worn a dress since I was about 8 and my willingness to wear skirts died about that time too. I had to wear a skirt for school for 9 years after that but I avoided wearing skirts for the most part until I was forced to wear one for my Confirmation (totally pointless ceremony all things considered) and I only own one skirt now. The origins of the skirt in question is a mystery and if I wore it, my brain has blocked the memory as being too painful.

6. I know a lot about cats. I've owned quite a few cats but I also had an obsession (Asperger's, yay!) with factual cat books from about the age of 7 until 9 or 10. As a result, I know a fair bit about cats from the average gestation period (56-63 days) to the fact that the O gene causes a ginger coat in males and tortoiseshell coats in females in normal circumstances. Yes, I am that cool. I also identified a family friend's cat as being pregnant without having seen the cat before. I am that good.

7. I really like sci-fi. Surprise! Yeah that isn't anything new to be honest as I had a whole post concerning the origins of my love of sci-fi. I've watched a ridiculous amount of sci-fi shows and I'm getting good at reading it too. I'm a very big fan of Isaac Asimov's robot stories.

8. I know Pi to about 20 decimal places. Why do I know this? Because why not? I sometimes do things just because I can. To be honest, I was supposed to be studying and my brain had the bright idea to learn Pi because it was a distraction from what I was supposed to be doing. I probably could have learned more but I got bored/distracted again.

9. I can't swim or ride a bicycle. What?! You can't do these things? Everyone can do them! Yeah, well guess what? I can't, end of story.

10. I've never seen any Star Wars films. Yeah, that's another one of those things that everyone but me has done. I have not watched Star Wars because... well, I don't have a good excuse but I suppose I'll get around to it at some stage. Along with the other films I want to see.

11. I really like the Sims. I don't know what it is but I seem to derive great pleasure from controlling the lives of (virtual) people. What does that say about me?

12. I once wrote a play about Stargate SG-1 and designed a video game of it. It is immensely cringeworthy in hindsight but I wrote a play, designed a set, tried to work out how to stage the thing and chose a musical accompaniments from pop CDs my best friend had. I also designed a number of mission levels and worked out fun things you could do if you didn't want to go off killing aliens. I had lots of ideas as a child.

13. I used to make clay models of animals. They weren't very good, I was 8 at the time but I made pigs and what not that could serve as pen or pencil holders by putting depressions in their backs. I can't even stand the feel of clay anymore.

14. I met a ghost when I was 3. I had a Victorian gentleman called George in my bedroom over in England who I told my mum was sad. Turned out he'd hung himself in that room when he'd lived there.

15. I'm an only child. I'm fairly sure I mentioned this before but maybe you missed it? My mother wasn't supposed to be able to have children but I happened along just before she turned 40.

16. I really love board games. I used to have loads of board games that I played on my own because I didn't have anyone to play with me.

17. I adore everything to do with space. I've always been fascinated by different planets, by stars, by the size of the universe, all that jazz. When are we going to go live on the moon?

18. I know the capital city of Taiwan is Taipei. I fact successfully drummed into my head by my dear uncle Paul.

19. I had a racing snail. It had a black and yellow shell, the snail itself was pink and its shell was maybe an inch in diameter. I liked that snail.

20. I'm interested in mythology. Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Celtic, no matter what culture it's from I'm interested. I have a good few books on it.

21. I'm useless at keeping plants alive. I try really hard but I either love it too much and give it too much water or I forget to water it and it dies of thirst. Poor plants.

22. I used to call one of my uncle's Auntie. I assumed that he was my Auntie too because his wife was and they thought it was cute so I wasn't corrected until after I screamed it in public.

23. I couldn't pronounce the letter L properly until I was about 5. I used to love reciting Baa Baa Black Sheep which inevitably used to end something like "And one for the yittle boy that yived down the yane".

My uncle Paul and my love of science fiction and other things

Right at this moment, I feel very much in need of my uncle Paul. Paul was my mum's younger brother. Funnily enough when I was younger, I used to be terrified of him. He never moved out of my Nana and Grandad's house and he had his room at one end of the hall and for some reason that room was a scary place. My younger cousins went through this phase as well for some reason. Maybe it was scary because he usually kept his curtains closed so his room was always pretty dark. It could have been because the door was normally shut and you had to knock and wait for permission before you went in and that was scary. Hell, for all I know it was the beard and the deep, growly voice. We all got over the fear bit. I was first of course because I was older but my other cousins came to invade it as well after a few years. Paul used to say, "I didn't have children so how is it I always seem to have them?"

My parents weren't the best really so home was never a great place to be. I used to read a lot because having a different world was usually a better alternative. My mother was wise enough to get me membership for the library when I was seven so I always had more books to read. I was really interested in the universe at the time and I had five million questions (probably not an exaggeration) and I didn't have an answer to them. Then one day, I braved the knock on the door and discovered that my uncle Paul seemed to know lots of stuff. I ended up finding that he wasn't scary at all so why had I been so silly to think that he was going to eat me or something before that? I still have no idea.

I think a certain German Shepherd dog helped to bridge the gap though. Paul got a puppy from someone he knew over in England. He ended up calling him Valco (my mother could never get this and always called him Velcro) and of course, he needed walking and Paul decided that I should come on these walks. I suppose he wanted to get out of my house and away from my parents, even if it was only for a little bit. We used to go for walks on the grounds of a castle nearby until they brought in these restrictions to do with muzzling dangerous dogs but he wouldn't do it because he thought it was too cruel. We ended up walking on the beach instead. The beach was better to be honest because he could draw in the sand, which was great when I wanted things like planetary orbits explained to me. 

I ended up in my Nana and Grandad's house more often and I never really wanted to talk to them. I'd always say hello, head straight to Paul's room and then say goodbye when I was going. Why on earth did I want to sit with my grandparents while they talked about things that I wasn't interested in when I could be eating shortbread biscuits and drinking Diet Coke? He gave me more books to read from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and I ended up totally hooked on them. At some stage, I came in while he was watching Battlestar Galactica and ended up glued to it. Spaceships, androids, space, what wasn't to like?

One day, an episode of Stargate SG-1 ended up in the DVD player and that was even better. After that I was completely hooked. He had most of them and then ones he didn't have, he got for me. At first, the DVDs weren't allowed leave the room but when he realised the rate I was powering through them, he started lending them to me. It was as good as the library. I'd caught up by the time the last episodes were coming out in 2007 and I didn't want it to come to an end! It'd watched 10 years worth of Daniel Jackson and Jack O'Neill butting heads, the Sam Carter and Jack thing and then you had Teal'c and well... everything! 

A disc of Babylon 5 episodes was added to my last few episodes of Stargate and so when I finished one, I moved onto the other. 5 seasons later that'd come to an end too and then I ended up watching all of Stargate again. I ended up rewatching B5 as well until I was I was given the first few episodes of Sanctuary when it was still only a web series. Firefly was added to the collection too, the disappointment of it being cancelled after one season something we shared, even if a film was released too. He'd started me on the X-Files when everything went downhill.

I used to like to gabble on about whatever crossed my mind so he was forced to sit through hour long monologues that usually had to do with Harry Potter until he went and read them so that he'd be able to talk back. We both puzzled over the mysteries of the sixth book while we waited for the seventh. He got me into Tomb Raider and let me play GTA: Vice City. He used to make 3D models on his computer, buildings usually, and show me the way he could make doors open and close on them or rotate them. He hammered into my head that the capital of Taiwan was Taipei until I remembered it because why not know it? My best friend used to be able to have a debate with him for hours on end. He was always so sarcastic and one day she told him that "sarcasm was the lowest form of wit" and he replied that "Oscar Wilde said that so he was probably being sarcastic at the time". 

There were just so many little things that all came together to make him my best friend. My real best friend because he always seemed to know what I was thinking, always seemed to understand me when everybody else thought I was completely bonkers. In hindsight, there were so many things about him that my family think that he had Asperger's Syndrome too. If that's true then he's the only person in my family who actually how differently I saw everything around me.

Last week, February 6th would have been his 50th birthday. The week before that January 28th marked the fifth anniversary of his death. Before that he went through 11 months of driving my Nana and Grandad in and out of the hospital where his sister, my aunt Maura, was slowly dying until he had a massive heart attack after coming back one night. Maura spent her last few days thinking that he hadn't been to see her because he'd gotten a new job. She died on February 5th, just 8 days after he did without ever knowing what had really happened to him.

There are so many things I have to remember him by now. I have all my memories, all the things we used to watch together, so much of my desire for knowledge and my openmindedness. I had Valco as a living reminder of so many happy days, someone who grieved for him too, until he had to be put down last August. I've so much of him stored away in my head but it's really not the same.

To Paul.