Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Spring Break is coming soon.

Toothpaste For Dinner
www.toothpastefordinner.com

A couple weeks ago my mind checked out from college a few months in advance of my graduation.
This morning I realized that it checked out to a really bad place - the real world - where there are things like hiring freezes, unemployment, and living with my mom.

I have a paper due tomorrow that I haven't started yet. If I fail this class, I won't be able to graduate and I'll be able to stay in college. Except I'll be even deeper in debt when I eventually do graduate. So I guess I have to write this paper. Damn.

Married To The Sea
www.marriedtothesea.com

Saturday, February 21, 2009

X marks the box in the hole in your head

The weather's kinda lousy today
So what oh what oh what'll we play?
- "Guitar Hero" by Amanda Palmer

My family's first video game system was a Sega Genesis. Man, we looooved that Sega Genesis! (Still do!) My siblings and I spent countless hours playing Sonic the Hedgehog 2. We also played a whole lot of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, but we, like everyone else in the world, got stuck on that godawful barrel in Carnival Night, and lost interest. We also had Vectorman, Madden '9something, a Toy Story game, and some stupid Kirby game where he kept slipping on a skateboard and dying in the first minute of the game.

When we upgraded to N64, it was a big deal. We got it as a Chanukah present, and it stands out in my mind as the most excited I'd ever been for any Chanukah present ever. (Though not quite as excited as N64 kid.) Our first three games were Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, and Buck Bumble. Goldeneye is still my favorite FPS (though I haven't played all that many.) Despite having the Ocarina of Time guidebook, my brother and I got stuck in the water temple. I think we used a key in the wrong place or something. Buck Bumble was about a bumblebee with sunglasses and guns who flew around shooting evil mutant bugs in the garden. It would have been pretty unremarkable were it not for the kickass theme song. We got a whole bunch of other N64 games as time went on, mostly my brother's sports games, I think. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater stands out because it had an awesome soundtrack. Alas, N64's biggest weakness, in my eyes, was that it had no Sonic games.

Enter the Gamecube. The Gamecube was (is!) an awesome little system. My favorite Gamecube game is Sonic Adventure 2. I love it. I would only embarass myself to go into detail about how much I love it. I also have Sonic Adventure DX, Sonic Mega Collection, and Sonic Heroes. Those were pretty much the only games I ever played on the Gamecube, though, again, my brother had more.

Then came the Wii. I bought myself a Wii two years ago. It was the first gaming system that was mine. The main reason I bought it was because of this video. I think it's hilarious, what can I say? I started off with Wii Sports (of course) and Twilight Princess. I bought Sonic and the Secret Rings, and was sorely disappointed. But I didn't give up on Sonic and bought Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. It's more fun watching people play that game than it is to play it. I got Wii Play for the extra wiimote. I also bought the port of RE4. Disaster struck at the end of last spring semester, when my wiimotes, charger, carrying case, and RE4 were stolen right out of my dorm. I still haven't replaced everything that was stolen. My next Wii acquisition was Smash Brothers Brawl. Now THAT is what I call a video game! (Sonic is my character of choice, naturally). Unfortunately, I kind of suck at it. My friend stopped playing it with me because it got too boring for him.

Then there was a lull. The video games I wanted (Left 4 Dead, Mirror's Edge) weren't for the Wii. Was the Wii's accessability, the very thing that made it so popular, also it's biggest drawback? My Wii sat mostly unused. Until last week.

As a birthday present for myself, I bought House of the Dead: Overkill and the Nyko Perfect Shot gun attachment. This. Game. Is. Awesome! It's a rail-shooter - like the arcade game. The graphics are really neat, as is the whole grindhouse motif they got goin'. It's totally over the top. I've had it for less than a week, but it looks like it will have plenty of replay value. And best of all? It's kind of easy. I like games that I can beat. In Overkill, the challenge isn't in getting through the game as much as it is in achieving certain goals - high accuracy rate, long combos, collecting all the golden brains, etc.

The Perfect Shot gun I got was defective, but Amazon sent me a replacement the next day. It's a little big for my hands, but I like it a lot.

It looks like there are a bunch of games coming up for the Wii that should appeal to a more adult gaming set, such as Mad World and Dead Rising.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Skincare takes smarts!!

Sarah Haskins' latest installment of Target: Women is relevant to my latest post! Hurrah!


Saturday, February 14, 2009

So Vain

I just managed to spend about $50.00 at CVS even though they didn't have what I went there for.
I hate going down the aisles at places like that because it makes me feel like there's so much I should be doing to make myself look better - all these creams and serums and whatnot. I did need some anti-frizz stuff. But not only are there about a dozen different brands of hair products, each brand has two or three variations on each line of anti-frizz products in order to take up more shelf space. And even though I know that there isn't any significant difference between them, I'll still spend some minutes debating which product to buy.

While I was in the store, Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" was playing. The chorus, "You're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you" is mind-boggling to me. Is it about that person or not? It's a paradox!!

Did I mention that I woke up before 7am today? Yeah.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Derrida? More like Derri-duh!

I just finished the Derrida reading that I was assigned to read for tomorrow. I started Monday. I read 30 pages every day. I rapped the last four pages aloud to myself. Here is a list of the words I had to look up:
invagination
exergue
ternary
lemmatic
stela
mediacy
copula
hypotyposis
Dasein
callistics
architectonics
prolegomenon
sachem
supererogatory
quoins
equivocity
aleatory
syntagm
appurtenant
striction
involution
involucrum
conceptacle
embouchure
cise
sublation
irruption
noumenal

Spell check does not recognize most of them.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Attack of the Facebook!

Recently, some hackers stole the personal information of a few hundred students at my school through a university database. A few days ago, while I was eating lunch, a TV news crew came by and interviewed me about the theft. I told them I had a friend whose identity was stolen. After the interview (Yes, I was on TV that night. No, I'm not posting a link), I sent this friend a message on Facebook to give him a head's up. Apparently, the reporter also contacted him via Facebook. My friend wrote to me, "Don't you find it odd that reporters are now using facebook as a means to uncover their stories????" Weird, right?

Oh, Facebook. The staff writers at the Boston Globe love to write about Facebook, and how it's changing our lives.
"Facebook broke my heart" is the headline of this November 25, 2008 article about how Facebook affects relationships and cheating.
This article from November 30, 2008 is all about the 35+ crowd and Facebook as "a never-ending high school reunion."
That article is not to be confused with this one, from November 29th, 2008 (also found here with a slightly different headline, for some reason), about how Facebook will render high-school reunions obsolete.
There's this article from December 14, 2008 about how students and universities are using Facebook in the college admissions process.
And most recently, on January 11th, an article about how the police are increasingly using Facebook to track down suspects and witnesses.
There was also a recent one (more recent than this one) about Facebook and boss/employee relations.

It's not just the Globe that finds Facebook to be such fascinating news fodder - just do a Google news search and you'll find all sorts of fluff pieces about Facebook.

Facebook can be very useful for keeping in touch with friends, sharing information, and spreading awareness about events and such. But it can also be a black hole.


In other, completely unrelated, news, I've been listening to a lot of female-fronted '90s punk/rock/ska: Letters to Cleo, Save Ferris, and No Doubt, mostly. Good shit.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Who needs love when there's Law & Order?

Law & Order is my TV vice.
Yesterday I realized that it is also my brand of soap opera.
"Law & Order? A soap opera?" You ask incredulously.

I know, it seems like L&O doesn't have much in common with ubiquitous daytime TV fare such as The Bold & The Beautiful, Days of Our Lives, or All My Children. Yes, the structures and formulae are different. Soap operas are serialized - each episode picks up where the last left off. L&O is episodic - each episode is a self-contained story. (L&O does have serial strands from time to time, such as the storyline around Olivia's mother in SVU, but is by and large episodic.)

The most obvious difference, of course, seems to be one of genre. Soap operas deal in complicated romances and family secrets. Law & Order is a hybrid of crime and courtroom dramas. Both, however, are melodramas. In her essay "Melodrama Revisted," Linda Williams argues that melodrama is not a proper genre, but a trans-generic mode. The melodramatic mode, whether as it is manifest in a 1940s' Douglas Sirk pic or in Sylvester Stallone's Rambo, is largely about morality and righteous suffering. Law & Order has both of those themes in common with soap operas.

The settings of Law & Order and soap operas are also vastly different. Soap operas are set in the domestic sphere; L&O is set in the public sphere - whether the urban space of the streets of NYC or government buildings such as the police station and the courtroom. But in both instances the setting is very important. The details of the mise en scene form a shorthand for viewers. These shorthands work across series (in the case of the soap opera) and spinoffs (in the case of L&O). Props, and costumes give us familiar character types - the oily boyfriend and the scheming mother, the edgy cop and the virtuous ADA.

Formal and structural techniques are very similar between soap operas and Law & Order. Intense dialogue-driven scenes are shot with shot-reverse shot close-ups of expressive faces. Dramatic music comes in at crucial moments in both, driving up the tension.

Finally, the way the two are shown on TV are pretty similar: they're both always on.

To close, I leave you with this video of Amanda Palmer's "Leeds United," the source of this post's title:

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Lists!

Chanukah Haul:
- A 2009 Little Prince calendar
- A grow your own venus flytrap kit
- Slippers
- A book about fairytales and feminism
- 4 new bras
- A book of Anne Taintor collages
- Chocolates
- A periscope (from my Secret Santa)
- Cash

New Year's resolutions are dumb. Here are mine.
I resolve to:
- Floss my teeth every night
- Make schoolwork a priority
- Go to the gym more
- Not obsess (as much) about things beyond my control
- Not use most of my meal plan on holiday cookies
- Spend less time on Facebook

Favorite movies of 2008:
Teeth
Baby Mama
Mongol
The Wackness
Sukiyaki Western Django
Dance of the Dead

Famous people whose deaths made me go "Awww":
George Carlin
Michael Crichton
Bobby Fischer
Eartha Kitt
Paul Newman
Bettie Page
Roy Scheider
Heath Ledger
Charlton Heston

Favorite albums of 2008:
"Vampire Weekend" Vampire Weekend
"Afterparty Babies" Cadence Weapon
"Alopecia" Why?
"Arm's Way" Islands
"Who Killed Amanda Palmer?" Amanda Palmer
"Paper Crane" Walri

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Chanukah Miracle 2008

Last night my external hard drive fell down the stairs. It is still okay. Praise Gob!

Yesterday, my dog had diarrhea all over the kitchen floor. Cleaning it up was the least fun I've had all vacation.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

All I want for Chanukah

Tonight is the first night of Chanukah. I'm still in Rochester until tomorrow morning. I should be packing, but instead I'm blogging. ("Blogging.....is such a subversively naughty sounding word. Like everyone knows what it means and yet it still sounds dirty." - J.)

Here is my Chanukah wish list:






The first thing I want is the Dresden Dolls' Virginia Companion songbook. It has the lyrics and sheet music for all the songs off the albums "Yes, Virginia" and "No, Virginia," as well as lots of pictures and other cool things.












I need a new electric hand mixer. My trusty old (and I mean really old) Toastmaster 3-speed mixer broke. I don't really need something as fancy as this Kitchen Aid 9-speed professional mixer, but it's yellow!















This scarf is beautiful. I don't really wear scarves like this, but I'd wear this one! It's really expensive, though. The design on it brings me to the next item...
















I want this illustration tattooed on either the inside of my left bicep or on the side of my ribs.















I also would like a new digital camera and also a digital camcorder. I don't have any particular models in mind, though. I really like the Canon Rebel series of DSRL cameras, but I don't know if I really need something that heavy-duty.

Non-material things I want:
- My room to be magically clean
- Obama to appoint more women to high positions than he has been doing
- Better yet - a feminist revolution
- Someone to cuddle and make out with
- Straight 'A's
- The Patriots to win the Superbowl