adastra goes to the stars

23 February 2023

Stone and Sky: Andor

I am by no means a Star Wars fangirl – at least not ever since George Lucas sold his soul to Disney. I do love the original trilogy, with Empire Strikes Back being my unrivaled favorite of the Star Wars saga. However, I stopped following most Star Wars content that Disney continues to throw at us after The Last Jedi. I actually enjoyed the latter—it was very funny, perhaps too funny—but I did not even watch The Rise of Skywalker after I heard that it basically retcons all of Last Jedi and seems to overall have made bad plot decisions. […]

21 October 2016

Stamps and Letters

Well… I’m prepared for my retirement, as I have recently unearthed my stamp collection. Though this is probably the most old-man hobby ever, I actually spend some time in my teens collecting, or rather, organizing stamps. At some point back then, I discovered bags and boxes full of stamps in the attic, which apparently my grandmother had collected. Since apparently I had nothing better to do as a kid, I started putting those stamps into a stamp album… and for a while, I collected stamps of the letters we received. I also got a bag of stamps from some store […]

18 August 2013

Farscape: Not sure if good or bad TV show.

Imagine the impossible: coincidentally ending up at the other end of the universe, being unable to ever lay eyes on planet earth again. It happened to John Crichton, protagonist and only human of the TV show Farscape. Farscape is essentially one thing: far. Far away. By far one of the most imaginative shows. Far and wide. So far out there. John Crichton is an astronaut from the good old US of A. He is apparently also a talented engineer or something, since he built a module by the name of Farscape which he volunteered to take out into space. It […]

1 February 2013

Welcome to Babylon 5

There are very few TV shows which send you on an emotional roller coaster beyond compare. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who (2005), Downton Abbey and The Sopranos are among them, but none of the shows currently out there can live up to them. It’s a paradox, actually – we know that all those characters and events are fictional, yet we still invest emotionally and our capability for empathy makes us feel with the characters. I have seen so many shows by now, I daresay I suffer from TV show fatigue – the lack of emotional turmoil as experienced during […]

7 June 2011

Much Ado About David Tennant And Catherine Tate

Back in January, on a boring Sunday while doing the usual nothing on the internet, I got a Twitter pop-up on my screen from David Tennant’s news channel. It had just been announced that David Tennant and Catherine Tate would be performing on stage in a new production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. “Interesting…”, I thought aloud to myself, which alerted my boyfriend who was sitting next to me doing stuff on his own computer. I told him about this discovery, and after about 3 minutes of discussion, we had spontaneously decided that our summer vacation would take place […]

16 December 2010

Of Parallel Universes, Alternate Realities, Realms and Dimensions

As a side effect of the significant amount of Science Fiction I’ve been enjoying lately (most recently having devoured Fringe in no time), I’ve noticed a phenomenon that is almost as inexplicably over-present in fiction as vampires or zombies are: Parallel Universes. There’s just one thing in which Parallel Universes strikingly differ from fiction-favorites vampires and zombies: their existence can not be proven, nor can be proven that they don’t exist. They are the lab cat of science, locked in a box labeled “Schrodinger’s”. Science usually refers to Parallel Universes as the “Multiverse”, which I will also do here, mostly. […]

10 December 2008

The Interior Design Of A Spaceship

When I was watching Serenity the other night, I was wondering why spaceships in the movies and on TV always have such a cold and unfriendly interior design. I’m not much of a Sci-Fi geek, but I have been watching an awful lot of Sci-Fi lately. And I keep noticing the same thing: depressingly gray rooms made of metal and concrete, grills in the floors and zero comfort. How exactly does River Tam handle being barefoot in that thing all the time? And why do spaceships hardly ever have wooden floors, or carpets, or tapestries? Though the Serenity, a Firefly, […]