As an occasional follower of the TED talks and an old fan of Ze Frank’s web toys I had a kick when I discovered this by pure chance:
May 30, 2010
June 4, 2009
On Blasphemy
Whenever I go to Youtube I have the tendency to end up watching a string of videos that have nothing to do with whatever I intended to watch in the first place. I just cannot stop clicking on random links, thus watching videos I don’t even care for. It was on one of those occasions that I ended up watching a trailer on an upcoming video game, called “Dante’s Inferno”. To put it mildly the game couldn’t be further away from the book, at least judging from the trailer (one can always hope this is a joke and the video game will somehow be completely different). I first thought it must have been made by some hallucinated kid in his basement after a Doritos intoxication, but to my surprise the game is being made by EA (Electronic Arts), a powerhouse in the game industry.
To have chosen a classic that has the mind-blowing complexity and beauty of the Divine Comedy to make this video game can only be defined as blasphemy. What we have here is not exactly the worried Dante humbly following Virgil to the underworld after having lost his path. In a quite free interpretation of the book, we have some kind of Crusader on steroids that kills demons left and right with a scythe. And as if that weren’t enough, it seems Beatrice has been kidnapped by these demons, so he actually has to rescue her. I mean… really? The other way around would have probably been more accurate! For Dante, his beloved Beatrice is as close to being the Messiah himself as any other human being will ever be. As a matter of fact, she is the one touring him through Heaven for instance. So it seems that what we have here is some kind of mix between Conan the Barbarian and Doom with a fancy title. This is the game’s trailer (this one is actually longer than the one I originally watched):
November 26, 2008
Voynich manuscript
Voynich Manuscript
Reading the post my good friend Mansell wrote (on the Vinland Map) I thought immediately of another case of presumed forgery: the Voynich manuscript; which is like the LSD – induced version of the Vinland map. In the case of the Voynich manuscript we have a book written in a language (if it is actually a language) that nobody has ever deciphered, despite the variety of methods (and people) used to break its code. The script (perhaps medieval) looks indeed very aesthetic, and to make things even more puzzling an array of bizarre illustrations accompany the text. People have speculated on the purpose of the book based on the pictures depicted in the manuscript (it has “herbal”, “biological” and “astronomical” sections): perhaps the manuscript deals with medicine, or perhaps with alchemy. The more skeptic have proposed that the whole thing is nothing but a hoax comprised of signs and images that bear no sense whatsoever. Still, this final possibility does not make it any less fascinating. When you look at the illustrations and that esoteric script filling almost every page of the book it does make you wonder who (and why) would come up with such a painstaking hoax
Both, the Vinland map and the Voynich manuscript are at Yale, and scanned images of both documents can be found online at the “Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library” (Yale) web page.
July 8, 2008
Trivia
What do Led Zeppelin’s guitar player (Jimmy Page), Fernando Pessoa and William Butler Yeats have in common?
The answer on my next blog (or someday)
The person that answers this wins a 13th century version of the Iliad with comments by Dante Alighieri. Just kidding.