Category: Journal

People often misread technological progress because they project today’s rapid acceleration backward onto worlds where development would have been far slower. Middle-earth appears to exist near a late medieval or early modern threshold, where gunpowder and industry are disruptive precisely because warfare and technology had changed so gradually for millennia. Tolkien’s suspicion of industry is not a rejection of invention itself, but a rejection of Sarumanic progress: extraction, domination, militarization, and the reduction of living beings to tools – turning the living world into raw material. Žižek’s critique of progress sharpens this point by showing that every claimed advance must be judged by the hidden damage it produces and by the kind of world it serves. Thus, the essay concludes that the best future is not the fastest one, but one where technological development remains morally answerable to human scale and the living world.

Postmodern and Posthuman;
No certainties;
No futures, no stability;
Only there to laugh…

No real definition as we cannot define anything in the postmodern, everything is relative, everything is unstable and comes off as a spectrum, e.g.: gender. Thus, there are no real building blocks from which people can create their own identities or subjects.
And skibidi or 6-7 represent this quite well, which behave as a spectrum, and which have no true meaning, rather the context provides what these expressions truly mean, be it from nothing at all, to everything.

The feeling and aesthetics: a filthy grey sky, black-and-white nature, dead, cold vegetation, zero panorama, unpleasant weather with a cold that cuts all the way into the soul.

Tolkien’s stories continue to speak to us across generations because his heroes are not distant, flawless figures. They are not great because they never feel fear. They are not worthy of admiration because they are untouched by pain, loss, or doubt. Quite the opposite: in Tolkien’s world, heroism often begins precisely where a person is already tired, wounded, uncertain, and yet still finds the strength to go on.

It has been half a year since I last posted anything on my blog, which may seem like quite a long time in a context like this, but I am not in any particular rush. “Content creation” is not what puts bread on my table. For me, this is a hobby and a space where I can...

From the Ashes goes miles for immersion and it rocks! Mainly, the latest expansion to Frontiers of Pandora does everything right that the base game does wrong and which I criticised before. By providing a more immersive and serious narrative, the game feels more enjoyable, real and intensive as well. As a result, even retrospectively, it elevates and sort of fixes the plot of the base game too, as the narrative provides the missing consequences and ties up the loose ends. With the new ending we even get a glimpse at the possible future of the story as well. In short, the expansion and its narrative are a welcome return to the roots.

Reading, if you think about it, is a strange human activity. An endeavour to experience something that is not really happening to us, at least not at that moment. Or to get to know a mind of another. It is an action to learn, to immerse, to feel, to get lost and to fantasise.

Lately I have been playing Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (2023), and I have to say that gameplay-wise, regarding the mechanisms, systems and player experience, the game totally delivers a complex and enjoyable experience of what James Cameron’s Pandora could be like. However, the story and the writing is so mediocre that it ruins the immersion on many different levels. The unnecessary jokes and forceful insertion of contemporary problems (that are meaningless in the grand scheme of things) make the game too un-serious and while it has its moments, the narrative is wasted on the audience by not being able to convey its complex reflection about the problematized themes of this otherwise wonderful video game. And this is a tendency that can be observed generally in the case of other games as well. However, Frontiers of Pandora is a great case-study of this trend of consumerization and commercialization and their effects on gameplay, narrative and player experience.

Historically and geographically, today’s United Kingdom and, particularly, England, exist on the land that once belonged to the Roman Empire and thus it was once known as the province of Britannia and was also known as Roman Britain. In popular media, Romans and their culture and history are often represented. For example, there are films, books, music and video games made to retell or idealise the story, ideology, society, culture, religion, achievements or even just a tiny historical part of Rome. As it is established by many authors, for example, Robert Philips argues that history is always part of the formation of the national identity (2003, 5), and Roman Britain is part of England’s past. Therefore, the question of this essay is that how are the Roman times still relevant in today’s British culture?

A Seminar Paper written for the East and West in the Antiquity seminar at the University of Szeged, during the Fall of 2023.

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS” (Orwell 2008, 90). George Orwell, who was also in service of the Indian Imperial Police from 1922–1927 and then in 1936 worked for the Left Book Club, where his job was to write about unemployment and the worsening economic situation in the north of England, saw it clearly that despite the rising liberal ideas equality is very far from the ethnicities of the British Isles (Blakeley 1993, 233). Therefore, based on this observation, the aim of this essay is to shed some light upon the various aspects that led to both to Irish independence and the Troubles, which drive the politics of today and the relationship between the British and the Irish. Namely, I put emphasis on the discrimination from both sides, the rising national consciousness and the social rift.