Today I realized that I’ve become one of those people who argues religion/politics/social justice with YouTube commenters.
Isn’t one supposed to get less invested in the opinions of idiots over time?
And should I really be citing my sources for a person whose username is SuxMyDick69, in an all-caps debate about the Bible?
Just some thoughts.
And yes, I realize Firefly is not on this list. Of course I enjoyed it, but we’ve gotta let that one go, guys.
Campus
Campus is like the weirder, British brother of Community. It’s also a great illustrator of the one reason British television frustrates me: their seasons are like 6 episodes. If Campus had a been an American TV show, it probably would’ve lasted at least ten, seeing as how there weren’t any sci-fi special effects or anything.
The first episode is kind of crap, I’ll admit. But its wacky and bizarre and has people’s inner monologues talking back to them. Everything I love about the last season of Community, taken one step more meta. It was a show that didn’t have to be logical or realistic, it just did. Perhaps the strangest thing about it was how well it worked.
All the episodes are available for free on Hulu, if anybody’s interested.
Tower Prep
This was a show that was on Cartoon Network (although notably, it was not a cartoon). It was plotted by one of my favorite comic writers, Paul Dini, and was about children who mysteriously wake up in a boarding school full of other kids with weird abilities. Cylon-like guards roam the grounds, the stars don’t match up with Earth’s geography, messages are left by prior students, and the last episode concluded with the main characters being met by a robot-like woman who tells them they are ready for “the next phase.”
It was everything I love about sci-fi: crazy plot twists, intrigue, and an ever-deeper plunge down the proverbial rabbit hole. Sure, the writing was stiff and wonky at times, especially on those first few episodes but hey it was made for preteens and the story was awesome regardless.
Cartoon Network canceled all of their live-action shows after one season (methinks the production costs scared a network with “cartoon” in the name), which ended the series on a cliffhanger. There was talk of it coming back with outside financing, but CN said they still wouldn’t show it despite the overall good reviews. Since this is a recent show, I’d love to see it come back with enough support.
Freaks and Geeks
I’ll admit, I’ve only seen a handful of episodes of this show. But what I’ve seen was very good. My guess was that it was one of those shows that appealed to a very narrow window of people. It kind of struck me as a poor man’s Diablo Cody enterprise, and I’d love to see more of it.
Outnumbered
Now, I’ll admit this wasn’t a groundbreaking show. It was a slightly-above-average sitcom about parents with three kids. But it really highlights one of the things I love about British television: there’s always an element of strangeness. In the entirety of the series, there’s not a single joke about female anatomical parts. There’s no laugh track. There is, however, a point where the little girl hands over a drawing of cows killing people with machine guns, drawn because she doesn’t like hamburgers. In fact, throughout the entire series the little girl character will randomly appear psychic or crazy, just for one scene, and it’s awesome. Heck, the teacher dad is in hot water at his school for telling a fat student he “could use Ramadan all year long.” And it was played completely straight–which never would’ve happened if it had shown on NBC.
It wasn’t a show that’ll change your life, but it was awesome to put on while ironing or folding laundry.
American Inventor
Okay, so technically this one had a second season. But with a weird airing schedule and the fact that it was always the show to get pushed out of its timeslot for some special, I (and apparently lots of others) didn’t even know there was a second season.
The reason I liked this show–and I’m going to sound elitist here–was that it was for actual smart people. With six dozen dancing/singing shows on TV, it was so nice to have something interesting on. I really could care less about American Idol or Dancing With the Stars. I just don’t get how on earth the viewing public can support so many versions of the same damn thing.
Interestingly, there is a very similar show in the Arabic world, and its actually as popular over there as Idol is over here. And people wonder how other countries are getting ahead.
I guess what I really want is the Syfy channel to do a serious, crazy sci-fi mystery. *sigh* Like that’s going to happen.
Time for another little writing update! The higher wordcount experiment that I started mid-June is going great.The first two or three days it was actually really hard to get out that last hundred words–I had gotten used to stopping around a certain point and even though 100 words is like three minutes of work it was still a little painful to feel like I was at the end and then still have more to do.
Around day 5 I started using a new method and actually started getting 500-600 words without breaking a sweat. It’s pretty simple, actually. Instead of checking my wordcount every time I felt like maybe I’d hit 400, I just left my computer on with the document open all day. I wrote when I could and didn’t even think about wordcount until I was getting ready for bed. The result was that I did more, but I wasn’t obsessing over it.
On the less-than-good hand, two of my current projects have major structural issues I need to fix. There’s a short story that I’m super excited about, but I realized today that I went off the tracks awhile back. More than half of the wordcount needs to be cut. I wasn’t so far in, but just facing going back almost to the beginning makes me sad. On top of that, a novella I’ve been working on on-and-off needs the protagonist to change from male to female. On the grand scale of changes, its not too bad, but its just work that I don’t really want to do.
I also haven’t even submitted once, when my goal is to do it six times by the end of August. And The Horrible Short Story has still not seen a lick of TLC. I think I’ll take two or three days next week and try to knock this stuff out, and get a good start on the editing, at least.
*Sigh* Writing new stuff is fun. Fiddling with what you got isn’t. But at least I’ve written almost a thousand words today.
This is what my novella looks like. Ugh.
So I broke down and bought a Kindle Fire today. My grandmother sent me some money, and I was hoping to not lug around a Macbook and a stack of paperbacks when I’m traveling around this summer. I got a deal on it at Staples and it does look pretty slick. Plus, I found out it has a version of Office, so it could conceivably be used for writing.
Unfortunately, I kind of hate it so far.
I mean, its pretty. And the apps work great (especially Pulse–its awesome). But the internet is painfully slow and the purchasing mechanism is awkward. I was trying to pay for a book with a gift card and it somehow charged it to my credit card instead. Worst of all, I feel like I would rather be using my laptop. Its a little redundant.
I’m going to give it a few more days. Maybe part of it is that I’m new to it. I do really, really like Words With Friends after all 
But if it doesn’t start to make itself feel useful I’m going to go back to books and a laptop. I don’t need a $200 extraneous device.
Usually, the fact that I am both smart and lazy evens out to making it through the day with a minimal amount of effort and a good enough success rate. Sometimes, it screws me over.
I have to get up between 6 and 6:10 to be able to leave by seven. Any later and I either have to skip a shower (thereby feeling gross and sleepy all day) or crawl back under the covers and declare very loudly that I am Much Too Sick to Do Anything–which only works one day a week at most.
I have known for the past ten days that something is wrong with my alarm. Last week I didn’t wake up until 6:45 two days in a row, but I procrastinated on getting a new clock until the weekend. Then the weekend came, and it was no longer a pressing issue, because I could sleep as long as I damn wanted, so I didn’t bother to do anything about it. Then Monday was Memorial Day, and all the stores were closed, so I again didn’t bother with it.
Today I woke up at 6:20, which is slightly too late for me to shower but just early enough for my inner monologue to be filled with profanity instead of sleepy mumblings. And it was also the day I’d promised myself I’d wear a dress (occasionally, I have to be reminded that I am actually feminine) so I ended up putting it on because maybe that would negate the non-shower grossness. Now it’s 1:00 a.m. and I still have yet to get a new alarm.
Honestly, I’m not even sure its the clock’s fault. I don’t get a lot of sleep. I could be waking up just long enough to turn it off.
Also, I tend to throw it across the room a a lot.
The devil.
I think I must have grown up in one of the lulls between periods of Extremely Disturbing, Anti-Drug ads, because lately I keep being surprised by things like dismembered lungs on cigarette packages.
Not that that’s a bad thing, of course. Having seen my grandfather die of lung cancer, smoking was never really a hobby that I wanted to take up (also, my impression has always been that cigarettes take actual effort to get addicted to, since they’re pretty gross). Obviously, sweet little “please don’t smoke!” ads aren’t what scares anyone off of doing them.
But today I finished reading a comic from a few years before I was born, and found THIS in the back of it:
And my first reaction was “NO! NOT JIM GORDON!”
Until I realized it wasn’t actually part of the comic (something my brain did not immediately grasp, despite the black-and-white) and took a very, very deep breath. I mea, holy crap. If I was a kid reading this comic I think I never would look at a cigarette twice. Or a double cheeseburger for that matter. It’s freakin’ Jim Gordon! Frankly, I can’t even believe DC gave them the license!
Then again, I have always kinda had a crush on Gordon (A tiny one. The guy is like sixty, after all). Deeper than, than though, there’s something innately terrifying about ads like this. Taking someone liked and saying “this is the way it is, for the rest of their life.”
Like this video, that was popping up in the YouTube ads:
That is possibly one of the scariest futures I can imagine. And of course it prompted the usual “This is an extreme case, stop being fear mongers” comments. But the chilly truth is that it could happen to anyone who smokes. And while I’m against wantonly scaring people just for the shock value–even if you’ve got a point–this is damn effective.
Though I’m kind of surprised that Montana’s anti-meth ads are legal to show on primetime television:
Those things are awful. Though I guess there’s not much to do when you live in Montana.
Dear Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (and other authors),
Sir, I greatly respect your books. Love them, in fact. But why on earth, may I ask, do you feel the need to include a scene of urination in every single one of your books? Is it some sort of metaphor for masculinity? Or is peeing just a way more meaningful act when you’re writing about it in Spanish?
I’m trying to get through Love in the Time of Cholera–for some reason I always preferred the magical realism ones–and around 30 pages in I hit a scene where a man convinces his wife that older men pee like a “fountain” to disguise the fact that his aim is crappy now. This discussion of his habits continues for two paragraphs, ending in the strange acknowledgement that now he sits down to pee.
And yes, I realize that a writer such as myself (whose only publishing credits thus far are an honorable mention and a poem in a teen magazine some years back) probably should not be criticizing a Nobel-winning author whose books answer Big Questions. But does almost every book have to have this?
Let’s take my favorite, One Hundred Years of Solitude (and yes, I know I talk about this book all the time. Just go read it already). The character I absolutely adored was Colonel Aureliano Buendia. He was fascinating and wonderful. And he died while peeing on a tree.
Seriously?
While we’re on the topic of bodily functions, let’s switch to Jonathan Franzen, author of the much-lauded Freedom. Sir, I was going along with your book. I actually found it delightful (that word everyone uses when you want to say enjoyable while also feeling Literary). But then there’s that scene where Joey goes through his own excrement–for like three freaking pages–and yes, while I understand the meaning of it: EEW! What on earth were you thinking when you wrote this? Obviously you had to edit it multiple times, possibly even considering the true experience of shit, which is not a cognitive path I wish to follow you down.
I don’t know what it is with lit-fic authors and topics people don’t really like to discuss. What happened to murder and incest? Can we go back to that, instead of talking about farting? Maybe its par for the course–these authors are (I guess) trying to make us confront out cultural idiosyncrasies. But it still grosses me out.
I’ve been trying to expand my horizons lately. Which basically means not rolling my eyes at people who practice homeopathy and trying to read more Literary Fiction instead of stories with spaceships in them. Some of my first forays weren’t that helpful–”meaningful” non-endings, and characters who Never Talked About Their Feelings Because That Is Bad. Then I saw that The Marriage Plot was coming out.
Jeffery Eugenides is the type of author who you always hear about. I hadn’t read Middlesex or The Virigin Suicides yet (though I am going to soon) but I figured that his new one would be a good jumping-on point.
It opens like this:
To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but by date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college course, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-size but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the impactions of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: “Incurably Romantic.”
Was there ever an opening that spoke to a book-lover better? One paragraph, and I was in love.
This isn’t a review. All I can say on the book is that Eugenides deserves every ounce of his reputation (especially for providing an actual honest-to-god satisfying ending) and writes brilliantly. The characters–cliched as it is for me to say, especially about a book that is themed on subverting romantic cliches–breathe. There’s no self-indulgence or pretension or sentences you have to have a doctorate in English to understand grammatically.
The main problem people have had with it is that it is heavy in philosophy and allusions to literary theory. I wasn’t bothered (its what I take classes in, after all) but I think even if I was its integral to the book.
Pick it up. It’ll go quick, but you won’t want it to.
