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Escapism (other)
Escapism is mental diversion from unpleasant aspects of daily life, typically through activities involving imagination or entertainment. Escapism also may be used to occupy one's self away from persistent feelings of depression or general sadness. Perceptions Entire industries have sprung up to foster a growing tendency of people to remove themselves from the rigors of daily life – especially into the digital world. Many activities that are normal parts of a healthy existence (e.g., eating, sleeping, exercise, sexual activity) can also become avenues of escapism when taken to extremes or out of proper context; and as a result the word "escapism" often carries a negative connotation, suggesting that escapists are unhappy, with an inability or unwillingness to connect meaningfully with the world and to take necessary action. Indeed, the '' Oxford English Dictionary'' defined escapism as "The tendency to seek, or the practice of seeking, distraction from what normally has to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Escapology
Escapology is the practice of escaping from restraints or other traps. Escapologists (also classified as escape artists) escape from handcuffs, straitjackets, cages, coffins, steel boxes, barrels, bags, burning buildings, fish-tanks, and other perils, often in combination. History The art of escaping from restraints and confined spaces has been a skill employed by performers for a very long time. It was not originally displayed as an overt act in itself but was instead used secretly to create illusions such as a disappearance or transmutation. In the 1860s, the Davenport Brothers, who were skilled at releasing themselves from rope ties, used the art to convey the impression they were restrained while they created spirit phenomena. Other illusionists, including John Nevil Maskelyne, worked out how the Davenports did their act and re-created the tricks to debunk the brothers' claims of psychic power. However, the re-creations did not involve overt escape, merely a replicatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theodor Fontane
Theodor Fontane (; 30 December 1819 – 20 September 1898) was a German novelist and poet, regarded by many as the most important 19th-century German-language realist author. He published the first of his novels, for which he is best known today, only at age 58 after a career as a journalist. Fontane's novels are known for their complex, often sceptical view of society in the German empire; he shows different social and political parts of society meeting and sometimes clashing. Other trademarks of Fontane's work are their strongly drawn female characters (such as ''Effi Briest'' and ''Frau Jenny Treibel''), tender irony and vivid conversations between characters. Life Youth Fontane was born in Neuruppin, a town 30 miles northwest of Berlin, into a Huguenot family. At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary, his father's profession. He became an apothecary himself and in 1839, at the age of 20, wrote his first work (''Heinrichs IV. erste Liebe'', now lost). His ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Second Life
''Second Life'' is an online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user created content within a multi player online virtual world. Developed and owned by the San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab and launched on June 23, 2003, it saw rapid growth for some years and in 2013 it had approximately one million regular users. Growth eventually stabilized, and by the end of 2017 the active user count had declined to "between 800,000 and 900,000". In many ways, ''Second Life'' is similar to massively multiplayer online role-playing games; nevertheless, Linden Lab is emphatic that their creation is not a game: "There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective". The virtual world can be accessed freely via Linden Lab's own client software or via alternative third-party viewers. ''Second Life'' users, also called ' residents', create virtual representations of themselves, called ''avatars'', and are able to int ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Massively Multiplayer Online Game
A massively multiplayer online game (MMOG or more commonly MMO) is an online video game with a large number of players, often hundreds or thousands, on the same server. MMOs usually feature a huge, persistent world, persistent open world, although there are games that differ. These games can be found for most network-capable platforms, including the personal computer, video game console, or Mobile app, smartphones and other mobile devices. MMOs can enable players to cooperate and compete with each other on a large scale, and sometimes to interact meaningfully with people around the world. They include a variety of gameplay types, representing many video game genres. History The most popular type of MMOG, and the subgenre that pioneered the category, is the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), which descended from university mainframe computer MUD and adventure games such as ''Rogue (video game), Rogue'' and ''Dungeon (video game), Dungeon'' on the PDP-10. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gamer (2009 Film)
''Gamer'' is a 2009 American science fiction action film written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. The film stars Gerard Butler as a participant in an online game in which participants can control human beings as players, and Logan Lerman as the player who controls him. Alongside Butler and Lerman, it also stars Michael C. Hall, Ludacris, Amber Valletta, Terry Crews, Alison Lohman, John Leguizamo, Sam Witwer and Zoë Bell. ''Gamer'' was released in North America on September 4, 2009, receiving generally negative reviews from critics and grossed $43 million worldwide against a production budget of $50 million. Plot In 2034, computer programmer Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) invents self-replicating nanites that replace brain tissue and allow humans to control other humans' actions and see through their eyes. The first application of Castle's "Nanex" technology is a virtual community life simulation game, ''Society'', which allows gamers to manipulate live actors as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Summer Wars
is a 2009 Japanese animated science fiction film directed by Mamoru Hosoda, produced by Madhouse, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film's voice cast includes Ryunosuke Kamiki, Nanami Sakuraba, Mitsuki Tanimura, Sumiko Fuji and Ayumu Saitō. The film tells the story of Kenji Koiso, a timid eleventh-grade math genius who is taken to Ueda by twelfth-grade student, Natsuki Shinohara to celebrate her great-grandmother's 90th birthday. However, he is falsely implicated in the hacking of a virtual world by a self-aware, sadistic artificial intelligence named Love Machine. Kenji must repair the damage done, and find a way to stop the rogue computer program from causing any further chaos. After producing '' The Girl Who Leapt Through Time'', Madhouse was asked to produce something new. Hosoda and writer Satoko Okudera created a story about a social network and a stranger's connection with strange family. The real-life city of Ueda was chosen as the setting for ''Summe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fahrenheit 451
''Fahrenheit 451'' is a 1953 dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury. Often regarded as one of his best works, ''Fahrenheit 451'' presents an American society where books have been personified and outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found. The novel follows Guy Montag, a fireman who becomes disillusioned with his role of censoring literature and destroying knowledge, eventually quitting his job and committing himself to the preservation of literary and cultural writings. ''Fahrenheit 451'' was written by Bradbury during the Second Red Scare and the McCarthy era, who was inspired by the book burnings in Nazi Germany and by ideological repression in the Soviet Union. Bradbury's claimed motivation for writing the novel has changed multiple times. In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury said that he wrote the book because of his concerns about the threat of burning books in the United States. In later years, he described the book as a commentary on how mass media reduces ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for Profit (economics), profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private property, Property rights (economics), property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in Capital market, capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets. Economists, historians, political economists and sociologists have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include ''Laissez-faire capitalism, laissez-faire'' or free-market capitalism, anarcho-capitalism, state capi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Time Machine
''The Time Machine'' is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895. The work is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively forward or backward through time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle or device. Utilizing a frame story set in then-present Victorian England, Wells' text focuses on a recount of the otherwise anonymous Time Traveller's journey into the far future. A work of future history and speculative evolution, ''Time Machine'' is interpreted in modern times as a commentary on the increasing inequality and class divisions of Wells' era, which he projects as giving rise to two separate human species: the fair, childlike Eloi, and the savage, simian Morlocks, distant descendants of the contemporary upper and lower classes respectively. It is believed that Wells' depiction of the Eloi as a rac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ernst Bloch
Ernst Simon Bloch (; July 8, 1885 – August 4, 1977; pseudonyms: Karl Jahraus, Jakob Knerz) was a German Marxist philosopher. Bloch was influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, as well as by apocalyptic and religious thinkers such as Thomas Müntzer, Paracelsus, and Jacob Böhme. He established friendships with György Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Bloch's work focuses on an optimistic teleology of the history of mankind. Life Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, the son of a Jewish railway-employee. After studying philosophy, he married Else von Stritzky, daughter of a Baltic brewer in 1913, who died in 1921. His second marriage with Linda Oppenheimer lasted only a few years. His third wife was Karola Piotrowska, a Polish architect, whom he married in 1934 in Vienna. When the Nazis came to power, the couple had to flee, first into Switzerland, then to Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and finally the United States. He ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bread And Circuses
"Bread and circuses" (or bread and games; from Latin: ''panem et circenses'') is a metonymic phrase referring to superficial appeasement. It is attributed to Juvenal, a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century CE, and is used commonly in cultural, particularly political, contexts. In a political context, the phrase means to generate public approval, not by excellence in public service or public policy, but by diversion, distraction, or by satisfying the most immediate or base requirements of a populace, by offering a palliative: for example food (bread) or entertainment (circuses). Juvenal originally used it to decry the "selfishness" of common people and their neglect of wider concerns. The phrase implies a population's erosion or ignorance of civic duty as a priority. Ancient Rome This phrase originates from Rome in ''Satire X'' of the Roman satirical poet Juvenal (). In context, the Latin ''panem et circenses'' (bread and circuses) identifies the only r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Juvenal
Decimus Junius Juvenalis (), known in English as Juvenal ( ), was a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century CE. He is the author of the collection of satirical poems known as the ''Satires''. The details of Juvenal's life are unclear, although references within his text to known persons of the late first and early second centuries CE fix his earliest date of composition. One recent scholar argues that his first book was published in 100 or 101. A reference to a political figure dates his fifth and final surviving book to sometime after 127. Juvenal wrote at least 16 poems in the verse form dactylic hexameter. These poems cover a range of Roman topics. This follows Lucilius—the originator of the Roman satire genre, and it fits within a poetic tradition that also includes Horace and Persius. The ''Satires'' are a vital source for the study of ancient Rome from a number of perspectives, although their comic mode of expression makes it problematic to acc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
