Uncategorized: August 2006 Archives
Today my Media in Society teacher proclaimed a frightening revelation: my generation--the ones who were raised on Nickelodeon, 9/11, Myspace, Pokemon, Full House, Green Day, American Pie, Saddam Hussein, Tamagotchi, Pogs, Will Ferrell, Fruit Roll Ups, The Sims, Froot Loops, N*SYNC, Windows 9x, Columbine, Clueless, Beanie Babies, The Simpsons, South Park, Office Space, Snoop Dogg, AIM, Google, Bill Clinton, iPods, Pagers, cell phones, high gas prices, Ian Thorpe, Jurassic Park, Blink 182, The Beatles 1, Family Guy, Dave Chappelle, the Internet, Starbucks, Starbucks, Starbucks, Weird Al Yankovic, Wikipedia, Radiohead, OJ Simpson, Commander Keen, Britney Spears, VH1, CNN, Martha Stewart, Pulp Fiction, Wal-Mart, Hot Topic, Barnes & Noble, Nine Inch Nails, Target, K-Mart, Tsunamis, Hummers, Zoloft, heroin, MILF Hunter, Sandra Bullock, Batman, DOOM, and other stuff--nearly equals the "baby boomer" generation of the forties and fifties in terms of population. Yes, all said and done, there are about sixty million of us. This means that in about twenty years we will be running the world at large.
This troubles me because, out of this sixty million, I haven't met one person in my age bracket who is fit to run anything aside from a trip to whichever liquor store doesn't card. I may be getting a little bit ahead of myself in terms of predicting the future of the human race, but I really doubt our abilities to handle planet earth.
Take my university, for instance: Law students, in twenty years, will still be reminiscing about their keg stands. Pharmacy students will grow up making six-digit salaries for counting pills and driving SUVs to and from their cookie-cutter plan homes. Everybody in the college of liberal arts will either be teaching, bagging groceries, or unemployed. The science majors will move to Europe and Asia and accomplish some really important feats that I will never hear about. The computer and political science students will secretly run the world. And out of all these people, the eight percent of us with an attention span less than a Swiffer commercial and the overall respect and tact of a fucking ape, will fade into the vast anonymity of a completely networked society of miscommunication and instant gratification, while the rest of us, some chosen at random, will quietly take over and run us into extinction.
I think I had a point here but it was lost in the sea of commas. Listen, what I really want to say is that we're fucked. There's no hope, and the best we can do now is enjoy life while our televisions still provide us with 60 different flavors of the same perverse bullshit. Drink it up, but don't complain if it runs dry.
Thus endeth the first day of classes. Being a commuter this semester, I found it much more difficult to decide when to go home. Well now I'm home and bored as hell. I need to find a balance between my home life and school life, because it's putting me on edge.
I am looking forward to Intro to Film on Thursday night, but aside from that things are pretty dull and straightforward.
As usual.
Last night I watched All About My Mother. Continuing on my Pedrofest, tonight shall be Bad Education. That means I get to watch Gael Garcia Bernal dressed as a woman. I'm not gay, but this week is shaping up to be awesome. I think.
Oh yeah, today I got a new issue of Rolling Stone. I haven't actually read this magazine in six months, and I'm pretty sure my subscription was supposed to expire that long ago, but for some reason they keep sending me issues. I see that Bob Dylan is on the cover of this one. Rolling Stone never ceases to be groundbreaking.
Classes begin on Monday. I'm starting to fight some depression again, but it's not nearly as bad as it was last year. I'll get over it. I can still be entertaining to people who deserve it. Tomorrow there's a Uke Skywalker and Tuba Fett reunion show. That probably means more photographs soon, but no video because my dad broke the video camera. Canon is releasing a new camera. I may go after this one instead of the 20d or 30d, depending on how well-reviewed it is when it's out. It's $250-500 cheaper than the others, and a 10.1 megapixel DIGIC II is nothing to laugh at, so it might be a better buy. I can always get a 5d when I sell my first kilo of coke.
Here's another one for you.
On a lighter note, some pictures of Uke Skywalker and Tuba Fett are up. Where else but on Facebook?
The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.I found this interesting, even it is on wired.
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Today was supposed to be the beginning of the end. Iran had supposedly picked today to launch a nuclear attack against us, the infidels. Well, it's nearly ten o'clock (four in the morning in the Middle East) and I am still alive. This is sorely disappointing. However, it is good to see that Mr. Bush is stepping up on his promise to win the war on terrorism. Knowing this will help me sleep better tonight. I yearn for the day when I awake and tell the world, "I am no longer terrified." Yes, the fist of Liberty is slowly lodging itself ever further up my rectum.
Speaking of Spanish-language filmmakers, Pedro Almodovar is certainly getting some special treatment that will hopefully introduce many to his work. In short, they're bringing eight (the bulk) of his films back to the big screen in New York and Los Angeles. Hopefully they will bring them to Pittsburgh, but that's not very probable. So far I've only seen Talk to Her, which I thought was incredible, but when I learned about Pedrofest 2006 I bumped up the rest of his movies on my queue and added the ones I missed out on. (At first I thought "Viva Pedro" was some sort of documentary, so I wanted to become more familiar with his work before seeing it, but now I've learned otherwise.) Anyone who's looking to get into foreign film (think Amelie without the happy ending) should check him out. Here's a trailer to get you started.
I've been in Gettysburg since yesterday and I won't be back in Pittsburgh until Sunday.
Gettysburg is a pretty depressing place—well, at least "historical" Gettysburg is. It's basically a crossroads full of cars. The streets are lined with plaques, cheap museums full of ugly wax statues, boring restaurants, and stores that all sell the same t-shirt in a different color. I think this place stopped evolving when the Civil War ended, and they've only modernized in areas where they could scalp money from tourists. Even though my hotel has (horrible) internet access, I'm still feeling pretty isolated from society...and if one more person asks me if I'm interested in a ghost walk, I'll probably snap.
This isn't the first time I've been to Gettysburg, so I was prepared to be bored with life. I'm still looking forward to getting back to civilization. I like my overpriced lattes. Until then I guess I'll watch Boyz N the Hood on DVD.
I'm in the process of hacking my wordpress template and some things are broken. When it's all done I'll delete this post. It is nearly finished but the other pages, archives, comments, etc are broken, so go away until it works. The biggest caveat right now is getting it to work with Internet Shitsplorer.
[EDIT] Okay so it's 2AM and I'm inching ever closer to completing this template thing. If you're viewing it with Internet Explorer then the little image at the top probably won't show up. That's because IE doesn't support PNG images and it sucks ass. Maybe you should consider switching to Firefox.
[EDIT 2] Chumbawumba sucks.
My friends Eric and Alex have formed a group called "Uke Skywalker and Tuba Fett." As you've probably guessed, Eric plays the ukelele and Alex plays the tuba. They cover various songs, from The Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" to Madonna's "Like a Prayer." Last Saturday they performed at the Modern Formations art gallery and I was charged with the task of photographing and videotaping them. A cut of the video is now available online. It's in Quicktime format, roughly 14 minutes long and 11mb in size. Get it here.
This guy turns 43 today. You may know him as the director of such incredible films as Amores Perros ("Love's a Bitch"), 21 Grams, and the upcoming Babel. If you haven't heard of Alejandro, then I am happy to introduce you to him. His films put their characters at the forefront and the raw emotion he brings to the screen is pretty uncommon in a world full of Da Vinci Codes and Jack Sparrows. I'm very happy to see that he is bringing his art to a more mainstream audience; Babel will have a nation-wide release and stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who I'm sure you uncultured bastards have heard of. Hooray for Alejandro!
More movies to check out in the upcoming months/years:
- Michel Gondry, The Science of Sleep
- Spike Jonze, Where the Wild Things Are
- Sofia Coppola, Marie Antoinette
- Stephen Soderberg, Guerrilla
- Kevin Macdonald, The Last King of Scotland
That's all I can think of at the moment.
A group of high school kids campaign to have Firefox (yes, the web browser) run for prom queen at their school. The advertising is incredible, and they're almost successful--until the school bans browser candidates.Dondé esta in le bibliotheke!?
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I'm writing this on Microsoft's Windows Live Writer, a beta program that will publish directly to your Microsoft Space or another custom blog. It features a nifty layout and editing features similar to Office. It copies my current Wordpress layout and allows me to write this post as it would look on the website. It will even fetch older posts and let me to edit them. After constantly reading about the impending disappointment that is Windows Vista, this seems like a welcome change.
Now why can't Apple come up with something this cool? The closest thing they have to internet blogging software is iWeb, and it leaves much to be desired. For starters, it only works well with a hideously overpriced .Mac account, it doesn't allow for live or dynamic web pages, and it's a little lacking on the customizability. It has some pretty lame themes, too.
Looks like Microsoft may have won this battle. The program seems pretty stable and well-featured, even though it's still in beta.
[EDIT] Turns out there is a Mac-equivalent floating around called Ecto. It's pretty neat and features tight integration with iPhoto, iTunes, etc, but it comes with an $18 price tag. Cool app but I wouldn't pay for it, especially to maintain a blog that nobody reads.
As always, I like to have other people speak for me. So without further ado I shall link you to a website talking about the new leaked Paris Hilton album. I'm currently downloading it and expect it to be a fully gratifying piece of art.
[LATER] This album is terrible, but you should download it anyway. Support musical piracy! Fuck the RIAA!
and the colored girls say
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do!
do do!
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do!
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do do!
do do do!
do,
do do
do ! do do do!
do! do do!
do!
do do do!
dooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Yesterday I conquered the English and French. After that Japan asked me to help them conquer the Persians, so I did. Later on they decided to stop fighting so I had to destroy the Persians all by myself. With one less nation on the map, the Japanese decided to get all indignant on me, so I decided to attack them next. It took a while but I managed to whittle their empire down to one measly city on an island. Before I could crush them, the game ended and I won a time victory; undoubtedly the pussiest victory ever. I was 0.05% of the world landmass away from winning a domination victory. I should have gone after the Egyptians! Gosh, my life is full of excitement.
When I'm playing Civilization IV I like to be the Americans. Not because I appreciate being born into that particular corner of the world, but because they can out-produce pretty much anybody else in the game. At least in my experiences. I still haven't been able to conquer the entire map, but I'm working on it.
[EDIT] This is "part 4 or whatever the fuck" of my Killnick blog. Before this I used Blogger for a few months to write bad sarcasatic things. I've imported the old posts into Wordpress. Just a heads up in case anybody reads this.
