Jared B.

I hate it, hate it, hate it whenever somebody asks me, "What's your favorite author?"*

It is unbecoming for someone to answer that question with a loud "uhhhh...". Especially if said person is an English major.

Oh sure, I could tell you all the people I've read recently. Heinlein, Vonnegut, Spider Robinson, Dan Gookin. But would I call any of those my favorite? Probably not. I'm like a parent; I never name favorites. With anything. I don't have a favorite game, album, book, author, band, whatever. I could gladly list my Top 5, Top 10, etc. But I couldn't single out something as my absolute favorite.

What to do? I suppose whenever I get asked -- in school, work, whathaveyou -- I suppose I could just pull something out of thin air and buffalo my way through. Either that, or spend more time in the library.

Wait, I think I just figured it out. My favorite author is C.S. Lewis.

...but then again, I thought that the Narnia series was lacking. Bah.

* = I'm serious, Ubik. Don't ask me. :P

I saw WALL-E today and thought it was a most excellent flick. I can't decide if it's my favorite Pixar movie, but it's certainly worthy to bear the name.

MAYBE SPOILERS TO FOLLOW. I can never tell where I'm going to end up when I write these things...

- All I could think about during the short was, "Now you're thinking with portals!"

- Did WALL-E's personality strike anyone else like it did me? He's a collector...enjoys old forms of entertainment...sounds like somebody I know...

- I thought that the "green" message was somewhat laid on thick, but that might've been considering the fact that I went into the theater with that knowledge beforehand. Nevertheless, it didn't bother me as much as I thought it would, since the signifiying message throughout the film is one of hope, not despair.

- Maybe this is my own imagination running away with me, but I thought that there were (at least) three different "messages" that this film was trying to convey:

1. Our wasteful production and habits will make the Earth barren and desolate. Duh, that was pretty obvious.

2. To paraphrase Brave New World, "mending is better than ending". That is, instead of throwing your junk away when it breaks, you should try and fix it up and create less waste in the world. Also, "obsolete" products are still just as good as when they were created. Their usability hasn't changed; just our perception of it. This may also be related to point #1.

3. The emotiveness of the robots such as Wall-E and EVE in this "post-Earth" environment involved a pretty broad spectrum. They were fearful, angry, moving, etc. etc. Whereas the humans were fat lumps who just sat around all day. Therefore, in this aspect, the robots were more human than humans (to borrow a line from Rob Zombie). This could be saying something about technology passing us by, or just merely that we shouldn't rely on technology to do everything for us.

- John Ratzenberger appears in yet another Pixar film. Brilliant.

- I have to admit, I choked up a bit at the end. And the credit sequences (both of them) were very cool. Plus, a new Peter Gabriel song can't be all that bad! 

- "Beverly Hills Chihuahua". I have no words.

A man was traveling cross country to visit his mother who had suddenly fallen ill and was in the hospital. Suddenly he drove into a town that was very unfamiliar to him. Side streets fell into other side streets, avenues looped and roads were met with various dead ends. Swallowing his pride, he drove into the nearest gas station to find directions to get back on his way.

Approaching the gas station clerk, the man scratched his head and hemmed a bit. Finally, he spoke. "I'm kinda ashamed to be saying this, but would you happen to know the nearest way to get back into the interstate heading south?" The clerk behind the counter chuckled a bit, but said, "No, you're perfectly fine. What you want to do is once you pull out of here, go down the street until you come to Angola. Take a left on Angola and go down that street for about 2 miles. Take a right on Attica, and then take the first turn heading towards Leavenworth. Once you get there, hang a right on McNeil.

"Now, once you get to McNeil, you'll see a large amphitheater to your right. You can't miss it. It's actual name is Collins Arena, but everyone calls it 'The Spot' because it's the cultural hangout of this town." He then dropped his voice down low. "You might want to keep your distance, though."

"Why?" the man asked. "Because a couple of days ago, a Communist convention was being held there." the clerk said. "Folks didn't like the idea, but they rented the place and paid for it in full. The cops surrounded the place just as the first day was getting underway. The organizers didn't like it one bit, so they armed themselves and had a shootout. Fortunately, nobody was killed, but the place is now lookin' a little worse for wear." He sighed. "Once you see The Spot, take McNeil all the way around the arena, and then turn left. The I-15 exit should be about a mile from there, and then you'll be on your way."

The man thanked the clerk and drove off. Following the clerk's directions to a T, he soon found himself driving alongside the arena. The sight was everything the clerk said it would be: massive and unkempt. Bullet holes riddled the various windows of the arena, and the walls were now cracked and scarred. A very prominent poster of a famous Communist leader once hung over the entryway to The Spot, but now was shot at, torn, cut, sliced and otherwise destroyed by the resulting gunfight.

The man turned as per the directions, and saw the I-15 exit in front of him. He turned back over his shoulder to see the arena shrink from his rear view mirror. "I guess that clerk was right," the man said. "Ex-Marx The Spot!"
 

Quick question:

Would you let your son, who, in this case is no more than 12 years old, wear a T-shirt that had uncensored offensive language proudly displayed on it, especially in public? (By "offensive", I'm talking about one of The Seven Dirty Words here). Or do you believe that he is mature enough to wear such an item (and handle any comments that might come his way about it)?

Discuss.

For those of you who haven't read my latest epoch, you can find it here: http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?t=118089

I bring that up to mention that I played a game called Alter Ego just recently. For those of you who've never heard of it, Alter Ego is basically a life simulator. You are given a choice of questions at the beginning of the game and you can answer these truthfully (or not) in order to set up your personality. You are then placed in one situation after another, from the beginning of your birth to your dying day (those of you who would not rather not go whole hog can pick a suitable stage in life later on and start from there). Each situation you are placed in (and there are many, many, many to go through during the course of the game) effects your emotional, physical and societal aspects of your life. Want to be a good child and dutifiully obey your parents? You can do it. Do you want to grow up as a little monster and torment everyone you come in contact with? You can do that, too. It was quite groundbreaking for its time, and still has very few peers to compare it to in the modern day.

So I was playing this game, and I was having a fairly unassuming childhood. I had reached the age of about 8 years old when I came across a situation where I was playing outside by myself and a man drove by in a car and asked me to come with him and help him out. Now, I knew this was probably bad news, so I tried to resist and run away. My efforts were in vain, however, as the man kidnapped me, and then later tortured and killed me.

Now I'm feeling kinda depressed. It's still a great game, though. 

EDIT: See for yourself; play it here! (For the ladies, choose this version instead.)

When it comes to cell phones, some people are like my brother. Glued to the screen, they text their BFF OMG at all hours of the day, or use any other function of their phone constantly besides the phone itself (which I doubt they even realize that they can actually call people with it).* And then there are people like myself, who couldn't care less about what kind of features a phone comes with; they just use it to call the occasional person and/or business and to have a sense of security when traveling, unless they leave their phone in the car for weeks until the battery dies when they finally need to use it (so much for the sense of security).

I wrote all that to say that I just got a new phone this week.

* = In my brother's defense, I have not seen him in a year or so, so I do not know if this behavior still persists.

Lately I've been playing around with a program titled GlitchDS. It's a program that takes an intuitive design to creating music. It bills itself as a "cellular automaton music sequencer", and it's somewhat hard to explain how it works, so I'll try my best: You place both sequence points and trigger points on a screen, which each trigger point loaded with a certain sound or sample. The sequence points move across the screen according to Conway's Game Of Life, and each time a sequence point hits a trigger point, the sound is created. You can even further customize the way sounds are used by modulating each sample higher or lower, and even adding distortion or a different tempo. If the idea still remains fuzzy, there's videos of the program in action on its web site.

Although the program isn't really meant to create actual songs, that didn't stop me from trying! Here's a couple I whipped up (sound was recorded directly from the DS to the PC):

Untitled #1
Untitled #2

The music kind of reminds of me of composers like Morton Subotnick or Edgard Varese, who were early pioneers in the field of electronic music. Simple? Yes. But also very complex, and with the ability to add your own samples on the horizon, there's no telling what might come out of this program in the future.

I was just thinking about this recently while reading other LJ friends' posts and aided by an experience I had tonight:

What restaurant has the best background music? Or do you not really notice it at all when you eat? I went to a place called Cheddar's to eat tonight, which is a chain that started out east but has seemed to crawl towards the western states. The music they had in the background was a very nice mix of good songs ("Steppin' Out", previously mentioned in this blog), bad songs ("Brass In Pocket"....ugh), mixed in with modern, current songs ("Chasing Cars", I swear, you can't get away from that song ever). Anyways, it was a nice selection, and I liked it. But what say you?

(If anybody says "Red Lobster", I'm going to find you and kick you in the shin. I know where you all live. >_> )

As of 12:45 PM today, I am offically done with this semester of college.

(I hope I passed everything.)

So what do you do when you finish one semester? You start thinking about the next semester! I'll be taking Beginning Japanese I, Writing And Res English, Fundamentals of Physical Science (a daily class :x ) and British Literature I. 4 classes and 14 credit hours means that it's the lightest semester I've taken so far, but I'll still have enough credit hours be on track to graduate in 4 years. I'll also be reunited with my crazy English teacher from English 101, so that'll be interesting to see...

One down, three to go.

Sometimes I think that I don't really need to go to college or get a degree to get a better job. Sometimes I just think that all I need is my good work ethic to get a great career, because there's a serious dearth of it everywhere that I see.

Or I could just be pissed that I didn't get any frickin' Oreo Balls.

What would possess someone to drive in the middle of a tornado warning and go out to eat? What would possess someone to enter a restaurant while tornado sirens blare outside?

At what point do you just say, "I love you, Mom, but I think we're just going to have to wait until another day to celebrate."?

Call me a coward, but I think I would do that a lot sooner than that point.

*ahem*


This may very well be the last post I place here. If I don't come back after tomorrow -- well, you know what happened to me. Sometimes I wish I had a job that allowed me to take holidays off like regular people do.

Greatest. Cartoon. Ever.

(okay so that may be a bit of hyperbole but it's still pretty dang good)

Everybody on campus has an iPod. This isn't an estimation, it's pretty much fact. I think it's on the entrance exam. Doesn't matter what type it is, everybody has some sort of iPod with music on it.

How do I know this? Because 99% of people use those earbuds to listen to their iPod with (I say 99% because I'm the only person I know who actually uses external headphones that cover the whole ear. I'd rather not go deaf in the next 5 years, kthx). Oh sure, it may be those third-party "glittery" earbuds or something that's just a different color, but they're still earbuds.

(This post is actually going somewhere. I think.)

I wonder what people listen to between classes. You know, while they're walking from one class to another. I'd like to conduct a poll and randomly ask people what they listen to, or maybe shuffle through their playlist to get an idea of what they have. Of course, I probably couldn't get away with it unless I said I was doing it for the school paper or something, but since I'm not actually with the paper, that would not be good. Still, it intrigues me.

On the way to school, I trailed behind a car that had "BLONDD" as the license plate. Make of that what you will.

So, I just got off the phone with a faculty member from my school's English department. Apparently I've won a contest.

The English department was holding a Freshman Writing Contest, in which essays written in the first semester of college could be submitted to be judged. I submitted the last paper I wrote that semester for my English Comp. class (in fact, the only paper which earned at least an A- in that class) about the importance of learning a second language. And I guess it won.

The only thing is that I don't know how much I won. I know that I'm least in the top 3, but the exact placing I recieved won't be revealed until the day of the English awards ceremony (Thursday). And, hey, I didn't even mention the best part. There's a cash prize to go along with it; 3rd place gets $25, 2nd place gets $50 and 1st nabs $75. So I'm feeling pretty stoked.

More to come Thursday.

Today was Peer Review day in my English class, which basically means that you have one final day to show off your essay for any problems or corrections before handing it in to the teacher.

Here is where I learned something about my major: I like it. I mean, I've always liked it, but I like correcting papers. One unwritten law seems to be that if you choose English as a major, you must be involved in at least a facet of teaching a class (something I'm trying my best to avoid). But I was looking over a classmate of mine's paper, and while it was fundamentally good, she had some problems with grammar, citation and sentence structure, which I pointed. I was afraid that I was being too hard on her, but she didn't criticize (the last paper I corrected actually thanked me for being tough). 

"So, what major are you taking?" she asked me. I replied with English. "I thought so." she said. "I'm going to be a Business major, so take that." I thought about cracking a joke about the fact that with our majors, I would look smarter but she would be making more money, but I figured I was walking on eggshells already, so I shut my mouth.

On the other hand, my paper came back without any corrections. It's not because it was perfect (I found a few faults just perusing through it now), but because my classmates couldn't see anything that was wrong with it. And I don't want to sound like I'm bragging or anything, but I guess that my English skills are just so advanced at this point in time compared to what's expected, that the only good source of objectivism comes from myself. Which makes things a bit harder, let me tell you.

I could be rambling now, but the main reason why I chose English as a major is not because I have an good grasp on the language and in writing, but because I'd rather not see a nation of people who know how to type in "omg wtf this sux" into a cell phone but can barely write and comphrehend past 3rd grade language skills. I figure if at least a few people choose to study a language that this nation calls its own, we can stave off illiteracy for just a bit longer.  

Found out something interesting tonight.

If you go to Google Image Search and type in "Famicom Twin", you might see something that's familiar. Yep, it's the pictures of the titular console that I took way back when I displayed my video game collection at the library about nine months ago (!!), right smack dab on the first page. If you decide to search by "Twin Famicom" which is actually the console's proper name (something I didn't realize until after the fact), the pictures are still there, but you have to mosey on over to page 2 to find them. This brings me to this conclusion:

1. I got way more hits on that blog post than I realize

either/or/and:

2. There's a dearth of good Twin Famicom pictures on the Internet. Which is a shame if that's the case. It's probably the most aesthetically pleasing video game console I own. I'm in love with that design.

---

 More spam because I'm stuck at school bored.

I'm pretty sure I've done this before, but whatever...

Wow, 2005 sucked. Where's The White Stripes? David Gray? Kaiser Chiefs? Meh.

On another note, this post made me realize that it's been 3 years already since I graduated high school. I'm feeling older every day.