Wanna know what’s been on my mind for the last eight months or so? Hint: It’s the big one.
Category: Obsessions
Go ahead. Sign up for Urban Dead. I dare you!
I’m gonna eat your brains.
I never talked about Sad and Happy Movie Day! Sad and Happy Movie Day was great! In attendance were myself, Maria, Lisa, Scott and Will; Maria’s brother Michael showed up for the second movie. We watched City of God and Shaolin Soccer, as was foretold by the ancients–first one subbed, second dubbed, but the dubbing actually worked really well for SS. It added to the goofiness of a film that takes its goofiness very seriously. City of God was appropriately poverty-stricken and filled with violence by and against children. The ending was not actually sad, but maybe that was for the best. We are still testing our toes in this format.
The next SAHMD will probably be in two or three weeks, whatever’s best for most of us. Hackers has been pretty thoroughly shot down, because all my friends are worthless Philistines, but I don’t think anybody objected to What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Are there any strong objections to that? What about suggestions for happy movies? Information access protocol!
Sometimes not even Sigurdur Petursson’s cousin can save you.
Grokster comes down tomorrow morning. Today morning, actually.
Not that this is the end any which way. But there are a whole lot of breaths holding, tonight, out here in the electric dark.
Two months in a row, on the back of National Geographic for petesakes
Let’s zoom in on that, shall we?
Please tell me they did that on purpose. I need you to tell me that they did that on purpose.
I am an elitist asshole
I want a t-shirt that says
FIGHT THE
MIDDLEMAN
I stated in an Anacrusis LJ feed comment-thread, last week, that Memento had more structural influence on my writing than basically anything ever. I realized later that that’s not exactly true; it did have a lot of influence, but before I saw Memento I was reading Margaret Atwood. Cat’s Eye, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake and Lady Oracle are all shuffle-structured books, although they tend to start at middle / beginning and finish at end / middle (whereas Memento starts at the beginning / end and ends at middle / middle). Orson Scott Card does a lot of shuffling within the corpus of The Worthing Saga, too; I actually read that in high school, so I guess it was really my first exposure to the style.
Of course, that’s omitting the randomly jumbled reruns of cartoons I watched as a kid, which seemed to come from different seasons at random–not that Thundercats drove a terribly epic tale, but the cast (to my perception) did expand and shrink on a daily basis. They weren’t doing it on purpose, though.
I’m not sure what single factor determines my fascination with these stories. My borderline ADD is certainly involved, which doesn’t imply a negative context: there’s something important and powerful about screwing with linearity, about building a narrative out of noncontiguous events. It makes individual elements of a story stronger, for one thing; there’s no room for laziness when every page has to give you something to take back to the larger structure. (Note that this is also one of the big reasons I like word-count fiction so much.)
I’m about a week late on this, but as somebody who’s been singing the “Clear Channel Sucks” song since 2001, I was fascinated to learn that they actually created a fake “anti-corporate” station in order to win back the listeners they lost by… being corporate. If there is any more flagrant evidence of a harmful and necrotic monopoly extant, I’d love to see it. What’s next? Ticketmaster sponsoring fake scalpers?
It occurs to me that they might already do that.
Anyway, there’s always Indy if you want your own interweb radio station that learns what you like. I can’t give it a glowing-eyes four-thumbs recommendation because, well, most of the music it plays is by people who wanted to get signed and couldn’t. Not all, but most. Still, I’m going to keep using it and see how good its collaborative filter gets; I’ll let you know if it does ever cross that golden threshold.