i'm taking a break from syllabus-writing to watch youtube clips, and came across these two which, while not the same performance that i saw in eugene last spring, capture the essence of that performance quite well. the sound is a little wonky halfway through the second one, but if you like guitar, you owe it to yourself to at least watch the first one.
Dec 30, 2009
Dec 27, 2009
Dec 26, 2009
best response to copenhagen...
...i've seen thus far is from ben stewart (greenpeace). it's a sign of the times, i think, that i'm looking to greenpeace for reason, but there it is:
"The most progressive U.S. President in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speakerphone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that might challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation which put a man on the moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantel of a religion.
Then a Chinese Premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Obama’s speech that he refuses to meet – refuses, in fact, to do much of anything beyond sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.
Late in the evening the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs which they call a ‘deal’, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them affixing their signatures to it with great solemnity. Obama’s team then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it seems, understand about as much about global climate politics as our own lobby hacks know about baseball – and before we know it the New York Times and CNN are declaring the birth of a ‘meaningful’ accord.
Meanwhile a friend on an African delegation emails to say that he and many fellow members of the G77 block of developing countries are streaming into the corridors after a long discussion about the perilous state of the talks, only to see Obama on the television announcing that the world has a deal. It’s the first they’ve heard about it, and a few minutes later, as they examine the text, they realise very quickly that it effectively condemns their continent to a century of devastating temperature rises.
By now the European leaders – who know this thing is a farce but have to present it to their publics as progress – have their aides phoning the directors of civil society organisations spinning that the talks have been a success. A success? This deal crosses so many of the red lines laid out by Europe before this summit started that there are scarlet skid marks across the floor of the Bella Centre, and one honest European diplomat tells us this is a ‘shitty shitty deal.’
Quite.
This deal is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they’ll come about. There isn’t even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees C – instead leaders merely ‘recognise the science’ behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it. The only part of this deal anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now becoming apparent that even that’s largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.
Not all of our politicians deserve the opprobrium of a dismayed world. Our own Ed Miliband fought hard on no sleep for a better outcome, while President Lula of Brazil offered to financially assist other developing countries to cope with climate change and put a relatively bold carbon target on the table. But the EU didn’t move on its own commitment (one so weak we’d actually have to work hard not to meet it) while the United States offered nothing and China stood firm.
Before the talks began I was of the opinion that we would only know Copenhagen was a success when plans for new coal-fired power stations across the developed world were dropped. If the giant utilities saw in the outcome of Copenhagen an unmistakable sign that governments were now determined to act, and that coal plants this century would be too expensive to run under the regime agreed at this meeting, then this summit would have succeeded. Instead, as the details of the agreement emerged last night we received reports of Japanese opposition MPs popping champagne corks as they savoured the possible collapse of their new government’s carbon targets. It’s not just that we haven’t got to where we needed to be, we’ve actually ceded huge ground. There is nothing in this deal – nothing – that would persuade an energy utility that the era of dirty coal is over. And the implications for humanity of that simple fact are profound.
I know we greens are partial to hyperbole. We use language as a bludgeon to direct attention to the crisis we’re facing, and you’ll hear much more of it in the coming days and weeks. But really, it’s no exaggeration to describe the outcome of Copenhagen as an historic failure that will live in infamy. In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who have read and understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds - and what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.
I will leave the last word to the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who would have given voice to the insanity of Copenhagen better than I ever could, and whose poem Requiem is perhaps appropriate at this moment: ‘When the last living thing, has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here”.’
a downer of a first blog for after christmas, but there it is.
"The most progressive U.S. President in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speakerphone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that might challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation which put a man on the moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantel of a religion.
Then a Chinese Premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Obama’s speech that he refuses to meet – refuses, in fact, to do much of anything beyond sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.
Late in the evening the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs which they call a ‘deal’, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them affixing their signatures to it with great solemnity. Obama’s team then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it seems, understand about as much about global climate politics as our own lobby hacks know about baseball – and before we know it the New York Times and CNN are declaring the birth of a ‘meaningful’ accord.
Meanwhile a friend on an African delegation emails to say that he and many fellow members of the G77 block of developing countries are streaming into the corridors after a long discussion about the perilous state of the talks, only to see Obama on the television announcing that the world has a deal. It’s the first they’ve heard about it, and a few minutes later, as they examine the text, they realise very quickly that it effectively condemns their continent to a century of devastating temperature rises.
By now the European leaders – who know this thing is a farce but have to present it to their publics as progress – have their aides phoning the directors of civil society organisations spinning that the talks have been a success. A success? This deal crosses so many of the red lines laid out by Europe before this summit started that there are scarlet skid marks across the floor of the Bella Centre, and one honest European diplomat tells us this is a ‘shitty shitty deal.’
Quite.
This deal is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they’ll come about. There isn’t even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees C – instead leaders merely ‘recognise the science’ behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it. The only part of this deal anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now becoming apparent that even that’s largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.
Not all of our politicians deserve the opprobrium of a dismayed world. Our own Ed Miliband fought hard on no sleep for a better outcome, while President Lula of Brazil offered to financially assist other developing countries to cope with climate change and put a relatively bold carbon target on the table. But the EU didn’t move on its own commitment (one so weak we’d actually have to work hard not to meet it) while the United States offered nothing and China stood firm.
Before the talks began I was of the opinion that we would only know Copenhagen was a success when plans for new coal-fired power stations across the developed world were dropped. If the giant utilities saw in the outcome of Copenhagen an unmistakable sign that governments were now determined to act, and that coal plants this century would be too expensive to run under the regime agreed at this meeting, then this summit would have succeeded. Instead, as the details of the agreement emerged last night we received reports of Japanese opposition MPs popping champagne corks as they savoured the possible collapse of their new government’s carbon targets. It’s not just that we haven’t got to where we needed to be, we’ve actually ceded huge ground. There is nothing in this deal – nothing – that would persuade an energy utility that the era of dirty coal is over. And the implications for humanity of that simple fact are profound.
I know we greens are partial to hyperbole. We use language as a bludgeon to direct attention to the crisis we’re facing, and you’ll hear much more of it in the coming days and weeks. But really, it’s no exaggeration to describe the outcome of Copenhagen as an historic failure that will live in infamy. In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who have read and understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds - and what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.
I will leave the last word to the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who would have given voice to the insanity of Copenhagen better than I ever could, and whose poem Requiem is perhaps appropriate at this moment: ‘When the last living thing, has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here”.’
a downer of a first blog for after christmas, but there it is.
Dec 11, 2009
MIXTAPE: yankee hotel foxtrot demos compilation
okay, so i know i promised a new mixtape this week. and i got piled on by work and lack of sleep and i haven't listened to anything new or started piecing tracks together. but one thing i did do was dig into the demo sessions for wilco's yankee hotel foxtrot for the umpteenth time. for some reason, though, this was the first time it really struck me that within the two or three readily available sessions from the recording of the album, there are nine songs that ended up on the cutting room floor. not only is this an album-length number of songs in and of itself, but the quality of the songs all the way around are good enough that, though they might not stand up to the version of YHF that we actually got, they make a solid "album" on their own.
so i figured i'd pick what i thought was the best version of each of these tracks, put them in the order most beseeming a cohesive album, and upload them. this collection actually includes a few of my all-time favorite wilco tracks: "cars can't escape" and "venus stop the train". i also really, really like "not for the season" and "magazine called sunset". to my ears, a lot of these songs actually strike a better balance between pop sensibility and sonic experimentation than the tracks that actually comprise YHF do, which is funny since that's what that album is known for. then there's "venus stop the train", which just stomps on your guts at the end. i included an alternate version of "alone" as a bonus track just because there are three or four versions, and while the one i included earlier in the playlist is most reminiscent of that YHF sound, the other version is also pretty great.
if you're a fan of YHF and haven't heard any of these demos before, i highly recommend getting both sets of demos (one is a 21-track set and i believe the other is an 18-track set). a lot of the tracks that actually ended up on the album are on these demos in multiple incarnations and some are pretty incredibly different ("poor places" comes to mind).
note: the reason i'm making an exception to my usual rule here and uploading more than one song by an artist is because i've seen the sessions these songs are pulled from all over the place online, including a few very well-known wilco trading sites. so i'm assuming this is kosher. if it's not, of course let me know and i'll remove the link to the files right away.
here's the tracklist:
01. Not For the Season (l/k/a Laminated Cat)
02. Magazine Called Sunset
03. Nothing Up My Sleeve
04. Alone
05. Cars Can't Escape
06. Let Me Come Home
07. The Good Part
08. Won't Let You Down
09. Venus Stop the Train
10. Alone (Alternate Version)
here's the tracks.
so i figured i'd pick what i thought was the best version of each of these tracks, put them in the order most beseeming a cohesive album, and upload them. this collection actually includes a few of my all-time favorite wilco tracks: "cars can't escape" and "venus stop the train". i also really, really like "not for the season" and "magazine called sunset". to my ears, a lot of these songs actually strike a better balance between pop sensibility and sonic experimentation than the tracks that actually comprise YHF do, which is funny since that's what that album is known for. then there's "venus stop the train", which just stomps on your guts at the end. i included an alternate version of "alone" as a bonus track just because there are three or four versions, and while the one i included earlier in the playlist is most reminiscent of that YHF sound, the other version is also pretty great.
if you're a fan of YHF and haven't heard any of these demos before, i highly recommend getting both sets of demos (one is a 21-track set and i believe the other is an 18-track set). a lot of the tracks that actually ended up on the album are on these demos in multiple incarnations and some are pretty incredibly different ("poor places" comes to mind).
note: the reason i'm making an exception to my usual rule here and uploading more than one song by an artist is because i've seen the sessions these songs are pulled from all over the place online, including a few very well-known wilco trading sites. so i'm assuming this is kosher. if it's not, of course let me know and i'll remove the link to the files right away.
here's the tracklist:
01. Not For the Season (l/k/a Laminated Cat)
02. Magazine Called Sunset
03. Nothing Up My Sleeve
04. Alone
05. Cars Can't Escape
06. Let Me Come Home
07. The Good Part
08. Won't Let You Down
09. Venus Stop the Train
10. Alone (Alternate Version)
here's the tracks.
Dec 9, 2009
end of more teaching
today is a weird day: the last day of teaching for me for the semester. usually (and especially my first few semesters of teaching) the last day is sort of momentous. i usually feel (even if my students don't, and most could probably likely care less) like we've all sort of come through this long, complicated, unique journey together and it feels sort of awesome to me to reach the end of it. it helps too that all my classes thus far have been portfolio-based, so even the students who participate the least and miss tons of classes or whatever still end up turning in a hefty, significantly involved packet of papers they've written. it's a nice sort of landmark moment in a way and (i'd like to think) even for them it's sort of an encapsulation of everything that they've gone through to get to the end of the class.
as such, usually at the end of a class, as i leave the classroom for the last time, it's a little hard not to reflect a bit on what i've learned and how things have gone. this probably hearkens back to the first time i finished teaching a class for the semester, in 402 bryan hall, and after i turned the lights off i just stood there in the room for about five minutes, just amazed that i'd actually survived. increasingly, though, and especially today, my inclination was to just speed out of the room and get back to my office to start working on the newest project, or paper, or whatever. and, i'll be honest, i find that depressing.
one of the best things about my "year off" two years ago teaching just comp as an instructor here as WSU was the fact that i actually got to experience teaching. it wasn't something that i had to muscle through while taking seminars and worrying about publication and dissertations and theses and, you know, real-life stuff like relationships and making time to cook food. all throughout my master's program, i had enjoyed teaching, but i was also acutely aware that every moment i spent on teaching was a moment taken away from time i could have been working on my own papers. so it was a really great experience to be able to just teach and know that giving a student an extra ten minutes was just cutting into my TV-watching time (which is, obviously, a pretty easy decision to make if you like your job, which i do) and nothing else. i felt the same way about my summer class this past summer...i had some trouble fitting 15 weeks of class into six weeks for sure, but teaching that class was fucking fun. those experiences gave me the evidence to be able to honestly say that yes, i like teaching and i'm extremely lucky to be able to do it as a job. i could not have said that during my master's program. i never had a chance to think about it.
now, as much as i'm loving the ph.d experience, my one great regret is the backstep i've taken from teaching-as-profession back to student-first-work-second. i'm really looking forward to this changing next semester when i have a little bit more time in general. not less work, of course, but at least more freedom to shift that workload around more.
as such, usually at the end of a class, as i leave the classroom for the last time, it's a little hard not to reflect a bit on what i've learned and how things have gone. this probably hearkens back to the first time i finished teaching a class for the semester, in 402 bryan hall, and after i turned the lights off i just stood there in the room for about five minutes, just amazed that i'd actually survived. increasingly, though, and especially today, my inclination was to just speed out of the room and get back to my office to start working on the newest project, or paper, or whatever. and, i'll be honest, i find that depressing.
one of the best things about my "year off" two years ago teaching just comp as an instructor here as WSU was the fact that i actually got to experience teaching. it wasn't something that i had to muscle through while taking seminars and worrying about publication and dissertations and theses and, you know, real-life stuff like relationships and making time to cook food. all throughout my master's program, i had enjoyed teaching, but i was also acutely aware that every moment i spent on teaching was a moment taken away from time i could have been working on my own papers. so it was a really great experience to be able to just teach and know that giving a student an extra ten minutes was just cutting into my TV-watching time (which is, obviously, a pretty easy decision to make if you like your job, which i do) and nothing else. i felt the same way about my summer class this past summer...i had some trouble fitting 15 weeks of class into six weeks for sure, but teaching that class was fucking fun. those experiences gave me the evidence to be able to honestly say that yes, i like teaching and i'm extremely lucky to be able to do it as a job. i could not have said that during my master's program. i never had a chance to think about it.
now, as much as i'm loving the ph.d experience, my one great regret is the backstep i've taken from teaching-as-profession back to student-first-work-second. i'm really looking forward to this changing next semester when i have a little bit more time in general. not less work, of course, but at least more freedom to shift that workload around more.
Dec 7, 2009
lots of music is available for listening in the world
it's true.
i've been so enmeshed in phish- and wilco-land since early summer (tackling wilco's catalog and live shows with a voracity near that of my once-Cardinals obsession, and geeking out on phish after that transcendent Gorge experience) that i think it's ruining my music life. lately i've hardly been listening to music at all. which is pretty much the opposite of every day of my life for the last 15 years. part of it, of course, is just the business of this semester and the fact that now that i have a lot of friends, i don't spend a lot of time alone in my office. i'm often in my office, but there are also usually seventeen other people in here as well. which is generally awesome. but i feel more bad about blaring music in that case.
i've also realized, though, that i'm in a bit of a musical rut. i haven't been writing, i haven't been listening to anything new, i haven't had (or haven't been making) the time for either. so here i sit, day after day, spinning the same wilco and phish discs over and over again and though they are generally all awesome, admittedly, it's all starting to bleed together. the new mason jennings was a good distraction, and i also actually really like the new norah jones record. the new live gogol bordello disc is great, and all the phish shows from the summer tour are interesting. but i want to hear something i haven't heard before. i'm hoping that over christmas i can spread out a little bit, find out about some new bands. how do you find out about new, unique bands now that "indie" has become mainstream? i don't want to listen to the newest grizzly bear impersonator, i want to hear new, interesting stuff, even if it was written in the 70s.
i'm listening to loose fur right now. it's helping a little. maybe i'll throw on some minus 5 next...
i've been so enmeshed in phish- and wilco-land since early summer (tackling wilco's catalog and live shows with a voracity near that of my once-Cardinals obsession, and geeking out on phish after that transcendent Gorge experience) that i think it's ruining my music life. lately i've hardly been listening to music at all. which is pretty much the opposite of every day of my life for the last 15 years. part of it, of course, is just the business of this semester and the fact that now that i have a lot of friends, i don't spend a lot of time alone in my office. i'm often in my office, but there are also usually seventeen other people in here as well. which is generally awesome. but i feel more bad about blaring music in that case.
i've also realized, though, that i'm in a bit of a musical rut. i haven't been writing, i haven't been listening to anything new, i haven't had (or haven't been making) the time for either. so here i sit, day after day, spinning the same wilco and phish discs over and over again and though they are generally all awesome, admittedly, it's all starting to bleed together. the new mason jennings was a good distraction, and i also actually really like the new norah jones record. the new live gogol bordello disc is great, and all the phish shows from the summer tour are interesting. but i want to hear something i haven't heard before. i'm hoping that over christmas i can spread out a little bit, find out about some new bands. how do you find out about new, unique bands now that "indie" has become mainstream? i don't want to listen to the newest grizzly bear impersonator, i want to hear new, interesting stuff, even if it was written in the 70s.
i'm listening to loose fur right now. it's helping a little. maybe i'll throw on some minus 5 next...
Dec 5, 2009
it's christmas time, bitches!
so, i have a new grain of sand to add to the beach of shameful pop culture admissions i've made on this blog throughout the years. every year i listen to a shitload of new christmas albums in the hope of finding sparkles of brilliance. sure, christmas is a huge, mean, nasty, soulless commercial enterprise, but we all have those warm, fuzzy moments of one christmas or another, either as a child or an adult, or else we wouldn't spend years and money and travel thousands of miles at the most dangerous travelling time of the year every year in hopes of resurrecting those warm, fuzzy moments. right? RIGHT?!
well, most of my warm, fuzzy moments involve christmas music, whether it was the listening to, or the caroling of. and even in the 21st century, sometimes hundreds of years after many of these songs were made, occasionally a version of an old song or even more rarely a completely new christmas song ("all i want for christmas is you", anyone?) comes along that is actually worth listening to. besides, i need something to prop up the leaning tower of my sanity come the end of fall semester each year, and what better way than to listen to a shitload of relaxing christmas music?
so this year, i've listened once again to a decent amount (yes, including bob dylan's christmas album, but i'm not ready emotionally to talk about that yet). not as much as i usually do, but that's okay because early in my survey, i've discovered what is undoubtedly 2009's christmas music masterpiece.
even better, you can download it for free.
this. is. so. awesome.
sure, it's christmas tunes rendered as if through a midi synthesizer or an old NES sound chip, but there are tons of brilliant little moments in here that deserve discovery. this wasn't just thrown together as a sheer gimmick; each song shows a lot of interesting touches and more brilliant little details come out with each listen. check out "god rest ye merry gentlemen" if nothing else. it's ridiculously cool (note for young people: the voice isn't auto-tuned, now get off my lawn!).
also, there's a great, moody version of "greensleeves", which is my favorite christmas song. so that doesn't hurt.
well, most of my warm, fuzzy moments involve christmas music, whether it was the listening to, or the caroling of. and even in the 21st century, sometimes hundreds of years after many of these songs were made, occasionally a version of an old song or even more rarely a completely new christmas song ("all i want for christmas is you", anyone?) comes along that is actually worth listening to. besides, i need something to prop up the leaning tower of my sanity come the end of fall semester each year, and what better way than to listen to a shitload of relaxing christmas music?
so this year, i've listened once again to a decent amount (yes, including bob dylan's christmas album, but i'm not ready emotionally to talk about that yet). not as much as i usually do, but that's okay because early in my survey, i've discovered what is undoubtedly 2009's christmas music masterpiece.
even better, you can download it for free.
this. is. so. awesome.
sure, it's christmas tunes rendered as if through a midi synthesizer or an old NES sound chip, but there are tons of brilliant little moments in here that deserve discovery. this wasn't just thrown together as a sheer gimmick; each song shows a lot of interesting touches and more brilliant little details come out with each listen. check out "god rest ye merry gentlemen" if nothing else. it's ridiculously cool (note for young people: the voice isn't auto-tuned, now get off my lawn!).
also, there's a great, moody version of "greensleeves", which is my favorite christmas song. so that doesn't hurt.
Dec 3, 2009
mother(fucking) nature!
so it's been a really nice, mild winter so far in pullman. and for that, i'm grateful. however, in the last three days, the sudden massive drop in temperature has coincided perfectly with the hours and hours i've been spending outside scouting locations for University of Death...and it's freaking cold. it was coincidental enough that i felt compelled to whine about it. in other news, working on the game is way more fun than working on my other papers/projects. in fact, it's quite possibly my favorite thing i've ever done in grad school. it's going to be fun. hopefully it'll be fun for people to play, too. that's sort of the point.
if you want to check it out, click here.
if you want to check it out, click here.
Dec 2, 2009
tweetblog!
it's oddly foggy tonight. i forgot that happens in winter in pullman. i have sad feelings. mike prewett clone is following me home.
Nov 30, 2009
warcraft 3: the frozen my-ass in the computer chair for a long, long time
so, as i've mentioned a few times previously, despite being mega-busy this year, i've still managed to get some pretty fantastic game-playing done after midnight on the nights i can spare a few hours of sleep. this trend has more recently manifested in my manic consumption of Warcraft 3 and it's attendant expansion pack, The Frozen Throne. Having been a huge fan of Orcs and Humans (ah, the old days), Tides of Darkness (even more fun), and of course Starcraft (which is currently my #1 game of all time), i really can't explain why Warcraft 3 came out in 2002 and i'm just now, seven years later, getting around to playing it.
i think part of the problem was that, at the time, i wasn't even that into Starcraft yet. i was, at the time, more obsessed with civ-building games like Medieval: Total War and shoot-and-destroy games like Unreal Tournament and Serious Sam, and mostly i was completely fucking obsessed with Jedi Outcast. actually, i still am. and why not?!
also, what really made me love Starcraft (at the time) was that the battles were so much bigger (actually, everything was much bigger) than in previous Blizzard strategy games. when the marketing push for Warcraft 3 became basically "this is sort of like Diablo, and sort of like Starcraft with smaller battles", i think i just lost interest. i've never liked Diablo and otherwise it sounded like Warcraft 3 would be a regression.
so in a way, i think it's probably better that i came to it when i did, now that i'm a bit better equipped to appreciate nuance in game design, and especially in RTS games. now that there have been enough RTS games released on the PC to (literally) build a second moon for the Earth out of, i've had time to figure out what makes an RTS really worth playing to me. and generally that means i will play Blizzard-made RTS games and not really much else (though i liked Ground Control and Kohan a lot). i can't really articulate what it is about their RTS games that make them so much more fun than others; it's just an immutable law of life, like gravity.
anyway, i really, really liked both Warcraft 3 and the expansion, and am now looking forward even more than before to Starcraft 2. it's also going to be really difficult to not go back and try to beat both games on the Hard difficulty setting instead of doing the work that will allow me to keep my job. but somehow i will persevere.
for now i'm playing the original japanese non-dumbed-down version of Final Fantasy IV, which has a free downloadable fan translation. it's pretty freaking good. considering it's really the game that solidified my obsession with video games, all those years ago the fact that i find a different version of it even more entertaining almost 20 years later (yikes, i'm getting old) is pretty great.
i think part of the problem was that, at the time, i wasn't even that into Starcraft yet. i was, at the time, more obsessed with civ-building games like Medieval: Total War and shoot-and-destroy games like Unreal Tournament and Serious Sam, and mostly i was completely fucking obsessed with Jedi Outcast. actually, i still am. and why not?!
also, what really made me love Starcraft (at the time) was that the battles were so much bigger (actually, everything was much bigger) than in previous Blizzard strategy games. when the marketing push for Warcraft 3 became basically "this is sort of like Diablo, and sort of like Starcraft with smaller battles", i think i just lost interest. i've never liked Diablo and otherwise it sounded like Warcraft 3 would be a regression.
so in a way, i think it's probably better that i came to it when i did, now that i'm a bit better equipped to appreciate nuance in game design, and especially in RTS games. now that there have been enough RTS games released on the PC to (literally) build a second moon for the Earth out of, i've had time to figure out what makes an RTS really worth playing to me. and generally that means i will play Blizzard-made RTS games and not really much else (though i liked Ground Control and Kohan a lot). i can't really articulate what it is about their RTS games that make them so much more fun than others; it's just an immutable law of life, like gravity.
anyway, i really, really liked both Warcraft 3 and the expansion, and am now looking forward even more than before to Starcraft 2. it's also going to be really difficult to not go back and try to beat both games on the Hard difficulty setting instead of doing the work that will allow me to keep my job. but somehow i will persevere.
for now i'm playing the original japanese non-dumbed-down version of Final Fantasy IV, which has a free downloadable fan translation. it's pretty freaking good. considering it's really the game that solidified my obsession with video games, all those years ago the fact that i find a different version of it even more entertaining almost 20 years later (yikes, i'm getting old) is pretty great.
Nov 29, 2009
finals "week"
"week" in quotation marks of course because the last three weeks of pretty much every semester all glom together into one horrific jack-bauer-esque day wherein the standard human ideals of linear time and cause-and-effect become indiscernible and perhaps even non-existent thanks to lack of sleep and overabundance of brain-paralyzing work.
that said, i realized today that this is one of my favorite times of the semester, quite the opposite of the beginning of the semester, which is always my least favorite part. starts of semesters always involve tons of inane paperwork that you've filled out thousands of times before, getting to know your students' names and going through the whole process of introducing them to your class(es) - which you've also done hundreds of times before - memorizing your schedule, buying books, etc. the minutae is enough to drive me absolutely fucking bonkers every time. i mean, i end up with a to-do list with about 25-30 things on it a day, and each of those things takes about 10 minutes to do. that's pretty much my worst nightmare. end-of-the-semester, on the other hand, (or "EotS, OTOH") means there's one thing on the to-do list, and it takes about 3 weeks. sure, it's stressful to have all your grades basically come down to 20 page papers, and to have to write 3-4 of them in a three week period every semester, but there's something calming for me in knowing that (for the most part) i can come into my office every day for the next three weeks and have very little between me and a huge pile of books and notes that i need to transform into seminar papers through sheer force of effort and clever outlining. it's fun. the writing part is the part i like absolutely the best, better than teaching, or reading, or anything. it's why i became an english major in undergrad in the first place. it's just hard to find time for while you're doing a million other things and i have to be forced to do it even when everything else is done. that doesn't mean i don't love it.
maybe it's my long history of playing video games, but i like the idea of just having one last, huge, all-encompassing obstacle in my way. if i'd been in jurassic park, i would have died like nedry, not like gennaro: the tiny, swarming things eating me alive instead of the huge, lumbering t-rex.
i feel like i should be more stressed, but it's hard for me to get stressed about big things, just little things. i mean, ultimately, what happens if i do a shitty job on a paper, or don't finish on time? i mean, the absolute worst thing that could happen at some point would be that i don't graduate. and even that, on a larger holistic-life scale, is pretty insignificant. i mean, i fully intend right now to do this job for the rest of my life, but in reality it probably won't happen that way. i've lived (if i'm lucky) less than half my life at this point. i can't imagine i'll be doing the same thing 30 years from now that i'm doing now. the world just doesn't stay still for that long. so if i have to get a different job, i don't see how that's a completely life-crushing happenstance.
of course, i don't see getting fired or anything actually happening in reality, i'm just talking hypothetically, from the "why get stressed because what's really going to happen if you don't come through?" standpoint. i want to come through, i fully intend to, but if i don't...what? the world won't explode.
not for another 3 years, at least.
and even if it does, we can rest in peace knowing that john cusack survives.
that said, i realized today that this is one of my favorite times of the semester, quite the opposite of the beginning of the semester, which is always my least favorite part. starts of semesters always involve tons of inane paperwork that you've filled out thousands of times before, getting to know your students' names and going through the whole process of introducing them to your class(es) - which you've also done hundreds of times before - memorizing your schedule, buying books, etc. the minutae is enough to drive me absolutely fucking bonkers every time. i mean, i end up with a to-do list with about 25-30 things on it a day, and each of those things takes about 10 minutes to do. that's pretty much my worst nightmare. end-of-the-semester, on the other hand, (or "EotS, OTOH") means there's one thing on the to-do list, and it takes about 3 weeks. sure, it's stressful to have all your grades basically come down to 20 page papers, and to have to write 3-4 of them in a three week period every semester, but there's something calming for me in knowing that (for the most part) i can come into my office every day for the next three weeks and have very little between me and a huge pile of books and notes that i need to transform into seminar papers through sheer force of effort and clever outlining. it's fun. the writing part is the part i like absolutely the best, better than teaching, or reading, or anything. it's why i became an english major in undergrad in the first place. it's just hard to find time for while you're doing a million other things and i have to be forced to do it even when everything else is done. that doesn't mean i don't love it.
maybe it's my long history of playing video games, but i like the idea of just having one last, huge, all-encompassing obstacle in my way. if i'd been in jurassic park, i would have died like nedry, not like gennaro: the tiny, swarming things eating me alive instead of the huge, lumbering t-rex.
i feel like i should be more stressed, but it's hard for me to get stressed about big things, just little things. i mean, ultimately, what happens if i do a shitty job on a paper, or don't finish on time? i mean, the absolute worst thing that could happen at some point would be that i don't graduate. and even that, on a larger holistic-life scale, is pretty insignificant. i mean, i fully intend right now to do this job for the rest of my life, but in reality it probably won't happen that way. i've lived (if i'm lucky) less than half my life at this point. i can't imagine i'll be doing the same thing 30 years from now that i'm doing now. the world just doesn't stay still for that long. so if i have to get a different job, i don't see how that's a completely life-crushing happenstance.
of course, i don't see getting fired or anything actually happening in reality, i'm just talking hypothetically, from the "why get stressed because what's really going to happen if you don't come through?" standpoint. i want to come through, i fully intend to, but if i don't...what? the world won't explode.
not for another 3 years, at least.
and even if it does, we can rest in peace knowing that john cusack survives.
Nov 27, 2009
why everyone not using twitter is dumb.
okay, that's obviously a slight exaggeration. slight. but, people seem to be realizing the usefulness of the twitter platform more and more widely as time goes on. what i've seen with people's reaction to twitter is, i think, the exact same phenomenon that you see whenever a new form of popular media takes hold in the culture: whether it's the cinema, jazz music, the record player, video games, internet chat rooms, etc. there's also a mass of people who explode in consternation and condemnation of this new technology, usually linking it to the devil, or moral decline, or just sheer cussed laziness.
there's always a variant of this more general reaction with new social networking/information aggregating phenomena: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, (to a lesser degree) RSS. there's this idea that these things don't actually serve any useful purpose, that they're usually just abused by people who have problems interacting in the real world, as a way to cushion the impact of real life, or to overly-aggrandize their small accomplishments. sometimes there's some merit to these assertions, just like there's merit to most stereotypes, i'll admit that (okay, do we really need to see 110 pictures of your new baby on facebook? i mean, i want to see one, sure, but the others are probably fine just on your hard drive, just for you). but, what's at the core of these new technologies, what has always been at the core of them, is the development of a new way to aggregate, network, view, and share information. i mean, MySpace (although a bit anachronistic now) helped revolutionize the way companies advertised online, and more specifically the way artists made their music available electronically. facebook accomplishes a lot of the same things, but over an even wider (and less neon-colored) spectrum. RSS and twitter strip away the expectation for you to "put yourself out there" at all. you can just tune in to the stream of information and avoid the egoizing (if that's how you want to see it) completely.
sure, there are always bad, silly things that these technologies are used for, and often they're used for these bad, silly things but the majority of the people who use them. but how is that new? has that facet of human nature (i.e. give someone a soapbox and a megaphone and they'll probably use them, and stupidly) just sudden come to be thanks to the internet? i'm guilty myself of sharing lots of pointless, potentially self-aggrandizing things online that nobody cares about, i'm sure. but at the same time, MySpace let me share a bunch of music online when i was just starting out that allowed me to get feedback and get in touch with other starting musicians that i never would have met otherwise. it let me learn about bands i wouldn't have heard of by reading even independent local magazines. facebook straight up makes it easy to organize social events. i type up what i want to do, where i want to do it, who i want to invite, and BAM, the whole conversation can take place live, right there, much more fluidly and simply than even over email. twitter is just fantastic, like RSS in a tiny box that just gives me pop-up notices and if i don't think that "telling everyone what i ate for lunch" is important (it's usually not, unless it's gourmet grilled cheese) then i DON'T HAVE TO WRITE ANYTHING. if i'm following someone who tweets inanely 21 times a day THEN I CAN STOP FOLLOWING THEM. the information flow control is entirely in your hands, and it's pretty damn easy to learn how to use (except occasionally in the case of facebook, but that's another story), so you can filter out the bad and you can use the good to make you aware of everything you actually want to know. how many of those links you follow and how many twitpics you look at are then entirely up to you within the time constraints you have.
i'm trying not to just whine in the post (even though i'm failing), but things like twitter are (i believe) revolutionizing the way we interact with information, which is more and more becoming a foundational part of our day-to-day lives as more information becomes available and as we (professionally at the very least, if not otherwise) will become more and more responsible for that information. this is why i got into a lot of the stuff i'm currently studying, because it's not going to go away, it's just going to become more and more ubiquitous, and more and more the people who refuse to take part in things like twitter as they come into being are the people who end up having to (not choosing to) give up and join in a few years down the road when it becomes obvious that this stuff isn't going away.
i guess i'm also just naturally curious and figure you might as well get in on the ground floor when something cool comes along.
also, as an unrelated note, i am honest-to-god certain that the sangria's tofu vegetarian burrito is the best food i've ever eaten in my life.
there's always a variant of this more general reaction with new social networking/information aggregating phenomena: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, (to a lesser degree) RSS. there's this idea that these things don't actually serve any useful purpose, that they're usually just abused by people who have problems interacting in the real world, as a way to cushion the impact of real life, or to overly-aggrandize their small accomplishments. sometimes there's some merit to these assertions, just like there's merit to most stereotypes, i'll admit that (okay, do we really need to see 110 pictures of your new baby on facebook? i mean, i want to see one, sure, but the others are probably fine just on your hard drive, just for you). but, what's at the core of these new technologies, what has always been at the core of them, is the development of a new way to aggregate, network, view, and share information. i mean, MySpace (although a bit anachronistic now) helped revolutionize the way companies advertised online, and more specifically the way artists made their music available electronically. facebook accomplishes a lot of the same things, but over an even wider (and less neon-colored) spectrum. RSS and twitter strip away the expectation for you to "put yourself out there" at all. you can just tune in to the stream of information and avoid the egoizing (if that's how you want to see it) completely.
sure, there are always bad, silly things that these technologies are used for, and often they're used for these bad, silly things but the majority of the people who use them. but how is that new? has that facet of human nature (i.e. give someone a soapbox and a megaphone and they'll probably use them, and stupidly) just sudden come to be thanks to the internet? i'm guilty myself of sharing lots of pointless, potentially self-aggrandizing things online that nobody cares about, i'm sure. but at the same time, MySpace let me share a bunch of music online when i was just starting out that allowed me to get feedback and get in touch with other starting musicians that i never would have met otherwise. it let me learn about bands i wouldn't have heard of by reading even independent local magazines. facebook straight up makes it easy to organize social events. i type up what i want to do, where i want to do it, who i want to invite, and BAM, the whole conversation can take place live, right there, much more fluidly and simply than even over email. twitter is just fantastic, like RSS in a tiny box that just gives me pop-up notices and if i don't think that "telling everyone what i ate for lunch" is important (it's usually not, unless it's gourmet grilled cheese) then i DON'T HAVE TO WRITE ANYTHING. if i'm following someone who tweets inanely 21 times a day THEN I CAN STOP FOLLOWING THEM. the information flow control is entirely in your hands, and it's pretty damn easy to learn how to use (except occasionally in the case of facebook, but that's another story), so you can filter out the bad and you can use the good to make you aware of everything you actually want to know. how many of those links you follow and how many twitpics you look at are then entirely up to you within the time constraints you have.
i'm trying not to just whine in the post (even though i'm failing), but things like twitter are (i believe) revolutionizing the way we interact with information, which is more and more becoming a foundational part of our day-to-day lives as more information becomes available and as we (professionally at the very least, if not otherwise) will become more and more responsible for that information. this is why i got into a lot of the stuff i'm currently studying, because it's not going to go away, it's just going to become more and more ubiquitous, and more and more the people who refuse to take part in things like twitter as they come into being are the people who end up having to (not choosing to) give up and join in a few years down the road when it becomes obvious that this stuff isn't going away.
i guess i'm also just naturally curious and figure you might as well get in on the ground floor when something cool comes along.
also, as an unrelated note, i am honest-to-god certain that the sangria's tofu vegetarian burrito is the best food i've ever eaten in my life.
Nov 24, 2009
reading NOOOOOOOOOOW!!!
i'm finally teaching a lit class (sort of) in the spring. it's a reading/discussion based class, and the curriculum seems pretty open (basically i have to use books published after my students were born, so post-1990ish). anyway, i've tried to sprinkle the reading list with a lot of things that will inspire talk about some of (what i see as being) the prominent cultural concerns of the last two decades, like:
1. globalization (and what this does to our ideas of place, race, class, gender, etc.)
2. apocalypse and environment
3. the intarwebs
yes, that's a really freaking broad list, but the way i understand this class, i'm not supposed to be lecturing, but mostly just facilitating discussion; so i want to start broad and only narrow down when/if necessary.
anyway, i just sent my booklist off, so here's what we're going to be reading:
1. globalization (and what this does to our ideas of place, race, class, gender, etc.)
2. apocalypse and environment
3. the intarwebs
yes, that's a really freaking broad list, but the way i understand this class, i'm not supposed to be lecturing, but mostly just facilitating discussion; so i want to start broad and only narrow down when/if necessary.
anyway, i just sent my booklist off, so here's what we're going to be reading:
Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens (Novel)
Neil Gaiman, American Gods, (Novel)
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (Novel)
Peter Chilson, Disturbance-Loving Species (Short stories)
Frank Miller, 300 (Graphic novel and film)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Novel and film)
Max Brooks, World War Z (Novel)
John Krakauer, Into the Wild (Novel and film)
Note: The film version of The Road may be cut from the schedule due to time constraints and depending on when it becomes available on DVD.
Note 2: I'm really pumped about using WWZ to talk about politics and cultural assumptions, etc. And also zombies.
I'm really excited to teach the class, though at the same time I had to sort of throw this booklist together when in reality there were about 20 more books I wanted to read before choosing which ones I wanted to teach. Apparently they usually offer the class in the fall only, which would have given me the entire summer to decide on books, but instead I got about two weeks. So I'm hoping my choices will work out. I'm just glad to actually be teaching about books. more on this later.
oh my GOD, who left this blog laying here?
i just found this old thing and dusted it off. seems to work okay.
it's thanksgiving break, which means instead of working 16 hours a day, i'm working like 8-10 hours a day. which means i might get to blog a few times. i spent the weekend in post falls at lindsey's parents house, which was really fun. that place always makes me think of rivendell, for some reason. maybe it's because every time i go there, it's on the heels of some sort of utter madness (the first time it was after the ohio-northwest crossing of 2009, the second time after an 8-day sinus infection). it might also be because there's a sort of relaxingly predictable rhythm to life there, which goes something like this:
1. wake up earlier than usual and eat breakfast (actual breakfast, not just cereal)
2. sit around for a bit and work on my own work (usually grading or something)
3. go do something outside that involves strenuous physical activity
4. return from said activity and make a huge heaping dinner of some sort (eating dinner at actual dinner time)
5. continue working (alternating with watching the history channel) in front of the fireplace
6. at some point in the late evening, go scrounging for food because i ate dinner at actual dinner time
7. eventually fall asleep in front of the fire, wake up, drag self to bed.
it's pretty elven (or elfish, if you want to make tolkien spin in his grave).
other than that, i've been pretty much just working on grad school stuff all semester. in the small breaks that i do have, i've been going out to dinner with people, or watching that 70s show in its entirety with lindsey, or playing some video game because i'm too exhausted to do anything smart. which means i haven't made any progress on any outside interests such as book-writing or song-playing, but i'm willing to put that on the back burner for the moment, as the end of classes is in sight (i only have to take ONE class next semester and teach one, and while i'll be doing diss stuff as well, i certainly won't be as busy as i've been for the last 1 1/2 years).
i'm getting some next effects pedals and such for my tube amp, so i'm hoping that'll inspire me to write some more songs, once i finally have time to sit down and think straight.
in geek-hobby land, it has in fact been a pretty awesome semester though, as i've gotten the chance to play a lot of games i hadn't previously played, like KoToR 1 and 2, all three prince of persia games (minus the new one, which i don't yet), and all three homeworld games. my new obsession is warcraft 3, which i somehow didn't play when it came out in 2002. i'm just now at the point of finishing up the expansion campaign, and am looking forward to playing the whole thing over again on the higher difficulty setting once i decompress from RTS land for a month or two. hanging high over my head also is the fact that i've still NEVER finished brood war, despite having played it for no doubt hundreds of hours in the last 10 years. but i think the next thing on the time-wasting, fun-having plate is a run through final fantasy 4-6, and 9-12. which will probably take the entirety of my whole life. i'm skipping 7 and 8 out of principle because, although i love both games, i hate replaying them because there are WAY too many "stop and level up here for 5-10 hours" sections in both of them. i've never played 10 or 12 before, so that should be a good time.
i'm teaching a (potentially) awesome class in the spring. but more about that in a minute.
it's thanksgiving break, which means instead of working 16 hours a day, i'm working like 8-10 hours a day. which means i might get to blog a few times. i spent the weekend in post falls at lindsey's parents house, which was really fun. that place always makes me think of rivendell, for some reason. maybe it's because every time i go there, it's on the heels of some sort of utter madness (the first time it was after the ohio-northwest crossing of 2009, the second time after an 8-day sinus infection). it might also be because there's a sort of relaxingly predictable rhythm to life there, which goes something like this:
1. wake up earlier than usual and eat breakfast (actual breakfast, not just cereal)
2. sit around for a bit and work on my own work (usually grading or something)
3. go do something outside that involves strenuous physical activity
4. return from said activity and make a huge heaping dinner of some sort (eating dinner at actual dinner time)
5. continue working (alternating with watching the history channel) in front of the fireplace
6. at some point in the late evening, go scrounging for food because i ate dinner at actual dinner time
7. eventually fall asleep in front of the fire, wake up, drag self to bed.
it's pretty elven (or elfish, if you want to make tolkien spin in his grave).
other than that, i've been pretty much just working on grad school stuff all semester. in the small breaks that i do have, i've been going out to dinner with people, or watching that 70s show in its entirety with lindsey, or playing some video game because i'm too exhausted to do anything smart. which means i haven't made any progress on any outside interests such as book-writing or song-playing, but i'm willing to put that on the back burner for the moment, as the end of classes is in sight (i only have to take ONE class next semester and teach one, and while i'll be doing diss stuff as well, i certainly won't be as busy as i've been for the last 1 1/2 years).
i'm getting some next effects pedals and such for my tube amp, so i'm hoping that'll inspire me to write some more songs, once i finally have time to sit down and think straight.
in geek-hobby land, it has in fact been a pretty awesome semester though, as i've gotten the chance to play a lot of games i hadn't previously played, like KoToR 1 and 2, all three prince of persia games (minus the new one, which i don't yet), and all three homeworld games. my new obsession is warcraft 3, which i somehow didn't play when it came out in 2002. i'm just now at the point of finishing up the expansion campaign, and am looking forward to playing the whole thing over again on the higher difficulty setting once i decompress from RTS land for a month or two. hanging high over my head also is the fact that i've still NEVER finished brood war, despite having played it for no doubt hundreds of hours in the last 10 years. but i think the next thing on the time-wasting, fun-having plate is a run through final fantasy 4-6, and 9-12. which will probably take the entirety of my whole life. i'm skipping 7 and 8 out of principle because, although i love both games, i hate replaying them because there are WAY too many "stop and level up here for 5-10 hours" sections in both of them. i've never played 10 or 12 before, so that should be a good time.
i'm teaching a (potentially) awesome class in the spring. but more about that in a minute.
Oct 19, 2009
old livejournal link
in case you're ever bored and looking for something to make you feel better about yourself, you should check out the level of craziness on regular display here. it's my old livejournal blog (2004-2007), and it's fantastically old school.
ruminations on careerism
so i've been mulling over this for a bit, as lindsey and i were talking about it on the way home...and by "it" i mean the whole question(s) of "why do you do what you do?" and "what should i do for the rest of my life?" and i've realized that my own attitude has changed pretty significantly since i last considered those questions seriously, but my justification for the new attitude hasn't really been thought through at length.
i want to argue that a lot of people do what they do for the wrong reasons. and i fully accept that this will potentially start a comment war amongst a few particular readers. if they still read this blog. but anyway, i have a pretty strong opinion on careers and professional motivation, so i'd be happy to belabor my points if anyone wants to discuss.
as i see it, the two main problems with the typical cultural answer to "what do you want to do with your life?" are these:
1. "i want to help people" is an unreasonable desire, based on a whole lot of assumptions that you can't reasonably make about other people and their situations.
for the first 25 years of my life, this was what i wanted to do. and from the time i entered college as a computer scientist, then changed to an english major (neither of which are very "people-helpy" professions), i felt guilty that i wasn't a doctor, or a vet, or an army sergeant. but at some point along the road, i realized that wanting to help people, while noble, is also silly.
we all want to help other people (unless we're sociopaths), at the very least just because if we're nice to them, or give the appearance of being nice to them, they'll be nice to us and we'll get stuff. however, i don't think you can honestly know when you're helping or not. people lie (to you and you to yourself, if expedient) all the time. now, if life were really black-and-white, like a lot of people like to think it is, then sure, "helping people" would be awesome. however, let's take a look at "doctor" for example to see where the "help" starts to fall apart...
okay, so you're a doctor. you keep people's hearts beating. you keep people from dying of infections. people tell you how happy they are that you saved their lives. that's pretty badass. however, you also probably occasionally don't help people. people you can't fix, who come to the hospital assuming that they're going to get fixed. people who come to the hospital and actually get worse. in the worst case, which hopefully happens very seldom to never, you kill someone. maybe someone who would have been okay otherwise. this is why doctors have huge insurance premiums. not because they help people, but because occasionally one of them (or the hospital) kills someone. of course, you can chalk this up to ben parker's mantra all you want, but the fact is that "helping people" is complicated and relies on a TON of assumptions on your part, assumptions that you often don't or can't share with the person you're supposedly helping. sure, you save a kid's life who has a broken leg that otherwise would have resulted in infection. that's nice (it really is). but, you could also look at the same act from this (extremely cynical) angle: the very health system and hospital your job and your "helping" is built on propagates a medical system that has widespread negative economic, environmental, cultural, etc. effects all across the globe. most likely, people in other, poorer countries died indirectly so that your medical machinery could be built to save the kid you saved. am i inferring that doctors should go to work everyday feeling guilty because they made some third world country a little poorer so we can keep americans alive? of course not. but at the same time, that's the reality of the situation...and from that you begin, maybe, to see how difficult it is to help someone with no strings attached. you simply can't trace the chain of causality far enough to know you're only helping. on some level, you're lying to yourself. which sort of leads into my other point...
2. ...which is "when did we decide that the only time you can make a difference in other people's lives is the 8 hours a day you're getting paid?". if you are the charitable type and you want to help people, why does it have to be during your job? can't you help just as much if not more in your day-to-day non-work life? i think a very significant part of this problem is that we're so obsessed with creating concrete identities for ourselves that we'll jump at the chance to be able to say "i'm a teacher" or "i'm a musician" or "i'm a sculptor" and the dark side to that is then we believe that that particular sub-identity is the only one of worth, simultaneously putting too much pressure on what we are at work and devaluing what we do with the rest of our lives.
so what do we do then? i believe the only thing that really makes sense is to find something that makes each of us happy, and do that for a job. you're the only one you can be completely sure that you're helping, and if you're happy and content with a significant portion of your life, that's going to bleed over into how you interact with other people. work on improving yourself and the rest will follow. at least that's the theory i've been trying to work under. and it seems to be working, mostly. at least as much as it can be expected to, considering how little i actually have control over. i mean, we have the ability in this country to be well-off enough in a global sense to have a measure of control over "what we want to be when we grow up". unfortunately, this creates a situation similar to the one that Pollan addresses in In Defense of Food; we have so many kinds of food and as a result so many layers of confusion about which foods do what, that we've literally forgotten how to feed ourselves as a culture. given simple, raw produce, or a plain old dead animal, the vast majority of our country wouldn't even know how to prepare it to save themselves from starving. similarly, we have so many choices in terms of careers that we're making it harder than it has to be, believing that if we choose "the one" that we'll be able to singlehandedly better humanity...when in reality the point of having a job should just be to find something you feel relatively satisfied doing each day in a personal sense, and which earns you enough money to keep food in your mouth and a roof over your head. i'm not saving the world being an english teacher, but i became a much better and happier person when i realized that i didn't actually have to.
note: i'm still a little sad that i'm not a doctor. doctors are awesome. i only ripped on them because they're the poster-children for the whole "get a job that helps someone" idea.
note 2: i was reading my old livejournal today. hilarious.
note 3: HOW AM I STILL HUNGRY?!
note 4: i will try to blog more soon. it really IS fun, just time-consuming and not as fun/meaningful/expedient as tweeting, playing with friends, doing homework, reading shit that's not homework just to learn about the world, writing poetry and/or music, watching good TV/movies, playing video games, eating, or sleeping.
i want to argue that a lot of people do what they do for the wrong reasons. and i fully accept that this will potentially start a comment war amongst a few particular readers. if they still read this blog. but anyway, i have a pretty strong opinion on careers and professional motivation, so i'd be happy to belabor my points if anyone wants to discuss.
as i see it, the two main problems with the typical cultural answer to "what do you want to do with your life?" are these:
1. "i want to help people" is an unreasonable desire, based on a whole lot of assumptions that you can't reasonably make about other people and their situations.
for the first 25 years of my life, this was what i wanted to do. and from the time i entered college as a computer scientist, then changed to an english major (neither of which are very "people-helpy" professions), i felt guilty that i wasn't a doctor, or a vet, or an army sergeant. but at some point along the road, i realized that wanting to help people, while noble, is also silly.
we all want to help other people (unless we're sociopaths), at the very least just because if we're nice to them, or give the appearance of being nice to them, they'll be nice to us and we'll get stuff. however, i don't think you can honestly know when you're helping or not. people lie (to you and you to yourself, if expedient) all the time. now, if life were really black-and-white, like a lot of people like to think it is, then sure, "helping people" would be awesome. however, let's take a look at "doctor" for example to see where the "help" starts to fall apart...
okay, so you're a doctor. you keep people's hearts beating. you keep people from dying of infections. people tell you how happy they are that you saved their lives. that's pretty badass. however, you also probably occasionally don't help people. people you can't fix, who come to the hospital assuming that they're going to get fixed. people who come to the hospital and actually get worse. in the worst case, which hopefully happens very seldom to never, you kill someone. maybe someone who would have been okay otherwise. this is why doctors have huge insurance premiums. not because they help people, but because occasionally one of them (or the hospital) kills someone. of course, you can chalk this up to ben parker's mantra all you want, but the fact is that "helping people" is complicated and relies on a TON of assumptions on your part, assumptions that you often don't or can't share with the person you're supposedly helping. sure, you save a kid's life who has a broken leg that otherwise would have resulted in infection. that's nice (it really is). but, you could also look at the same act from this (extremely cynical) angle: the very health system and hospital your job and your "helping" is built on propagates a medical system that has widespread negative economic, environmental, cultural, etc. effects all across the globe. most likely, people in other, poorer countries died indirectly so that your medical machinery could be built to save the kid you saved. am i inferring that doctors should go to work everyday feeling guilty because they made some third world country a little poorer so we can keep americans alive? of course not. but at the same time, that's the reality of the situation...and from that you begin, maybe, to see how difficult it is to help someone with no strings attached. you simply can't trace the chain of causality far enough to know you're only helping. on some level, you're lying to yourself. which sort of leads into my other point...
2. ...which is "when did we decide that the only time you can make a difference in other people's lives is the 8 hours a day you're getting paid?". if you are the charitable type and you want to help people, why does it have to be during your job? can't you help just as much if not more in your day-to-day non-work life? i think a very significant part of this problem is that we're so obsessed with creating concrete identities for ourselves that we'll jump at the chance to be able to say "i'm a teacher" or "i'm a musician" or "i'm a sculptor" and the dark side to that is then we believe that that particular sub-identity is the only one of worth, simultaneously putting too much pressure on what we are at work and devaluing what we do with the rest of our lives.
so what do we do then? i believe the only thing that really makes sense is to find something that makes each of us happy, and do that for a job. you're the only one you can be completely sure that you're helping, and if you're happy and content with a significant portion of your life, that's going to bleed over into how you interact with other people. work on improving yourself and the rest will follow. at least that's the theory i've been trying to work under. and it seems to be working, mostly. at least as much as it can be expected to, considering how little i actually have control over. i mean, we have the ability in this country to be well-off enough in a global sense to have a measure of control over "what we want to be when we grow up". unfortunately, this creates a situation similar to the one that Pollan addresses in In Defense of Food; we have so many kinds of food and as a result so many layers of confusion about which foods do what, that we've literally forgotten how to feed ourselves as a culture. given simple, raw produce, or a plain old dead animal, the vast majority of our country wouldn't even know how to prepare it to save themselves from starving. similarly, we have so many choices in terms of careers that we're making it harder than it has to be, believing that if we choose "the one" that we'll be able to singlehandedly better humanity...when in reality the point of having a job should just be to find something you feel relatively satisfied doing each day in a personal sense, and which earns you enough money to keep food in your mouth and a roof over your head. i'm not saving the world being an english teacher, but i became a much better and happier person when i realized that i didn't actually have to.
note: i'm still a little sad that i'm not a doctor. doctors are awesome. i only ripped on them because they're the poster-children for the whole "get a job that helps someone" idea.
note 2: i was reading my old livejournal today. hilarious.
note 3: HOW AM I STILL HUNGRY?!
note 4: i will try to blog more soon. it really IS fun, just time-consuming and not as fun/meaningful/expedient as tweeting, playing with friends, doing homework, reading shit that's not homework just to learn about the world, writing poetry and/or music, watching good TV/movies, playing video games, eating, or sleeping.
been a long time...
so i've obviously been pretty busy lately. this is my last semester taking classes, and i'm taking 3 while teaching 2 and trying to juggle a few conferences and the requisite paperwork, random school functions and social obligations. also, the small amount of free time that i do have is more and more often spent hanging around with friends and having weekend get-togethers, hikes, and those sorts of things. this weekend, for instance, it was a jam session on friday, conference all day saturday, wrapped up by a rico's night last night and then working on presentations for this week all night and day today. i find there is much less time and desire to blog when i'm increasingly out and about doing, you know, fun real-life stuff.
also, twitter is actually pretty badass and it's easy to get enmeshed in it. usually the things that have in the past flowered into 1000 word posts on here have started from a sudden idea or two that popped into my head while i was out walking around or grading papers or whatever. with twitter, i can just hammer out that idea in a sentence, hit send, and not only save time, but also get the idea out to a wider audience (which isn't really my primary goal, but still a draw for sure). i can easily post links to youtube videos, new music downloads, interesting news stories, etc. there (and in a much easier way that i can on blogger or even tumblr). and i hear back from 50+ others on a day-to-day basis, in a way that's easier and quicker to read than a whole blog post, and in a way that's easier to access than RSS (twhirl just sits in my sidebar). so i guess what i'm saying is that mini-blogging has really put how much "unnecessary" time i've spent blogging for years into perspective (i put "unnecessary" in quotes because i'm not entirely convinced it was unnecessary, but i digress) and it's really hard with my current schedule to say to myself "well, i'd really like to comment about how i feel about the current administration's handling of organic foods" and then follow it up with a context-heavy 1000 word post that takes me 30 minutes to write when i could just hammer "new administration's organic food policy problematic? [link]" instead and move on with my life while being reasonably sure that that tweet will get me some feedback and possibly more related links from my peers.
having said that, i could have probably also expressed this entire post as "long-form blogs dying off due to popularity/access/efficiency of twitter?"
but i didn't. and now there go 10 minutes i'll never get back.
also, twitter is actually pretty badass and it's easy to get enmeshed in it. usually the things that have in the past flowered into 1000 word posts on here have started from a sudden idea or two that popped into my head while i was out walking around or grading papers or whatever. with twitter, i can just hammer out that idea in a sentence, hit send, and not only save time, but also get the idea out to a wider audience (which isn't really my primary goal, but still a draw for sure). i can easily post links to youtube videos, new music downloads, interesting news stories, etc. there (and in a much easier way that i can on blogger or even tumblr). and i hear back from 50+ others on a day-to-day basis, in a way that's easier and quicker to read than a whole blog post, and in a way that's easier to access than RSS (twhirl just sits in my sidebar). so i guess what i'm saying is that mini-blogging has really put how much "unnecessary" time i've spent blogging for years into perspective (i put "unnecessary" in quotes because i'm not entirely convinced it was unnecessary, but i digress) and it's really hard with my current schedule to say to myself "well, i'd really like to comment about how i feel about the current administration's handling of organic foods" and then follow it up with a context-heavy 1000 word post that takes me 30 minutes to write when i could just hammer "new administration's organic food policy problematic? [link]" instead and move on with my life while being reasonably sure that that tweet will get me some feedback and possibly more related links from my peers.
having said that, i could have probably also expressed this entire post as "long-form blogs dying off due to popularity/access/efficiency of twitter?"
but i didn't. and now there go 10 minutes i'll never get back.
Oct 2, 2009
the count so far
i've gotten something like seven or eight responses so far regarding which songs i should play at open mic (thanks guys!), and here's how things are lookin':
3 votes for millie
3 votes for not california
2 votes for molly
1 vote for palace
1 vote for the melody
1 vote for sunshine
2 votes for better to be loved
especially interesting because i figured people would think "better to be loved" was boring. and because i like "love song in d" and apparently nobody else does :)
keep voting! DO IT!
3 votes for millie
3 votes for not california
2 votes for molly
1 vote for palace
1 vote for the melody
1 vote for sunshine
2 votes for better to be loved
especially interesting because i figured people would think "better to be loved" was boring. and because i like "love song in d" and apparently nobody else does :)
keep voting! DO IT!
for any twits (or, as @rainnwilson calls them, "twacolytes")
from now on, when i tweet anything marginally interesting and germane to this blog (so, basically anything), i'm going to attach a #defiantlymaybe hashtag. not that anyone cares, but hell, the hashtag isn't being used, so why not?
dreams
i've been having pretty rad/intense dreams the last few weeks. i think it has something to do with the fact that i've been sleeping in 3-4 hour shifts, and when i do that, i tend to remember dreams better than when i sleep longer at once. my most recent hilarious dream notwithstanding (which i'm not going to talk about because it would probably be retroactively embarrassing to a certain person...though still hilarious), most of my dreams have been pretty intense.
i have this one special kind of dream from time to time, and i thought i'd post about it to see if there are any fellow "sufferers" out there...it goes like this: basically it's a dream about being really really happy. for some reason or another, there's a situation in the dream in which i'm just really goddamn happy, and this continues throughout the dream. then i wake up, and in this weird way, it's actually sort of a sad dream, because in the dream i'm literally happier than i've ever been in my actual life (sometimes over really dumb shit, too). which isn't to say, like, "aww...i'm actually not happy in life" because of course that's not it at all. it's this super-cheesy happiness that actually probably couldn't happen in real life unless you were like on E or hydros or something.
i always have this urge to put an exclamation point after the E. "hey guys, y'all want to do some E! Entertainment Network tonight?!"
anyway, this most recent dream was about a girl i sort of briefly dated a long time ago, who for some reason i was thinking about a lot yesterday anyway (and not in a particularly wistful way or anything, just being curious about what she was up to). in the dream we were just doing sort of mundane things like wandering around one of the old parks i used to frequent back home in ohio and, i think at one point, getting groceries. and for the entire thing i was just SO FUCKING HAPPY. so much so that waking up was disorienting.
these sorts of dreams always sort of weird me out. i mean, it wasn't even like a "wow, i'm with the girl i should actually have been with!" dream or anything relevatory or important, either. it's just always a really stupidly pleasant dream for no discernible reason (when i have this type of dream)...i guess maybe it's frustrating because on some level, i still think that dreams might contain some kind of crazy space message that we're supposed to learn from (although that's obviously pretty silly). and there is no message in these happy dreams. it's like...YOU'RE SUPER HAPPY...BECAUSE THIS IS A DREAM!
and that's it.
i guess maybe this is a good thing...so many people i know have constant nightmares that probably relate to their subconscious being all stressed and wonked out and shit...i guess if i'm having dreams where i'm just obnoxiously happy i should be happy.
UPDATE: i was going to attach a video of the whiskeytown cover of fleetwood mac's "dreams" because it seemed appropriate, but youtube has failed. so i blipped it. if you want to hear it, just search the #defiantlymaybe hashtag on twitter. god, social networking is so weird. why do we do it?
now THERE'S a series of neverending posts...
i have this one special kind of dream from time to time, and i thought i'd post about it to see if there are any fellow "sufferers" out there...it goes like this: basically it's a dream about being really really happy. for some reason or another, there's a situation in the dream in which i'm just really goddamn happy, and this continues throughout the dream. then i wake up, and in this weird way, it's actually sort of a sad dream, because in the dream i'm literally happier than i've ever been in my actual life (sometimes over really dumb shit, too). which isn't to say, like, "aww...i'm actually not happy in life" because of course that's not it at all. it's this super-cheesy happiness that actually probably couldn't happen in real life unless you were like on E or hydros or something.
i always have this urge to put an exclamation point after the E. "hey guys, y'all want to do some E! Entertainment Network tonight?!"
anyway, this most recent dream was about a girl i sort of briefly dated a long time ago, who for some reason i was thinking about a lot yesterday anyway (and not in a particularly wistful way or anything, just being curious about what she was up to). in the dream we were just doing sort of mundane things like wandering around one of the old parks i used to frequent back home in ohio and, i think at one point, getting groceries. and for the entire thing i was just SO FUCKING HAPPY. so much so that waking up was disorienting.
these sorts of dreams always sort of weird me out. i mean, it wasn't even like a "wow, i'm with the girl i should actually have been with!" dream or anything relevatory or important, either. it's just always a really stupidly pleasant dream for no discernible reason (when i have this type of dream)...i guess maybe it's frustrating because on some level, i still think that dreams might contain some kind of crazy space message that we're supposed to learn from (although that's obviously pretty silly). and there is no message in these happy dreams. it's like...YOU'RE SUPER HAPPY...BECAUSE THIS IS A DREAM!
and that's it.
i guess maybe this is a good thing...so many people i know have constant nightmares that probably relate to their subconscious being all stressed and wonked out and shit...i guess if i'm having dreams where i'm just obnoxiously happy i should be happy.
UPDATE: i was going to attach a video of the whiskeytown cover of fleetwood mac's "dreams" because it seemed appropriate, but youtube has failed. so i blipped it. if you want to hear it, just search the #defiantlymaybe hashtag on twitter. god, social networking is so weird. why do we do it?
now THERE'S a series of neverending posts...
Sep 26, 2009
help!/pick some songs for me to play at open mics in pullman
an open request to my fans (and to-be fans, hopefully):
i want to try to start playing some open mics and short shows around pullman and moscow because i haven't played or written music in six months and i'm about to lose my freaking mind as a result.
that said, i've never actually played less than 10 songs or so at a show and so i don't know how to best concentrate entertainment awesomeness into a 15 minute time slot. that's where you come in. i just posted ten of what i think are my most "popular" (if there is such a thing) of my songs on my reverbnation page. three of them have two different versions posted, for variety's sake. if you have the time and interest, i'd really appreciate it if you took a listen to the songs and let me know which three or four you think are the best for potential open-mic-ing.
i'm going to mirror this post on my blog and on facebook, so you can reply at either of those places or i guess just email me.
of course, if you aren't at all interested in this or don't have the time to listen, that's cool too. i'm just sending this out to as many people as possible to maximize feedback. so if this is all the further you go, thanks just as much for coming this far.
best,
ben
i want to try to start playing some open mics and short shows around pullman and moscow because i haven't played or written music in six months and i'm about to lose my freaking mind as a result.
that said, i've never actually played less than 10 songs or so at a show and so i don't know how to best concentrate entertainment awesomeness into a 15 minute time slot. that's where you come in. i just posted ten of what i think are my most "popular" (if there is such a thing) of my songs on my reverbnation page. three of them have two different versions posted, for variety's sake. if you have the time and interest, i'd really appreciate it if you took a listen to the songs and let me know which three or four you think are the best for potential open-mic-ing.
i'm going to mirror this post on my blog and on facebook, so you can reply at either of those places or i guess just email me.
songs can be heard at:
www.reverbnation.com/benbunting or just search for "lazy blazers" on facebook and listen there.
there are probably ways to get to the songs from my blog and my facebook page, if you're especially enterprising.
of course, if you aren't at all interested in this or don't have the time to listen, that's cool too. i'm just sending this out to as many people as possible to maximize feedback. so if this is all the further you go, thanks just as much for coming this far.
best,
ben
Sep 25, 2009
tweedy/adams massacre
as a side project whilst reading and grading and doing my normal insane amounts of work, i've been working on collecting 128kbps mp3s of every studio track (official albums, unofficial albums, unreleased sessions, singles, b-sides, etc.) of wilco and wilco-related stuff and ryan adams and ryan adams-related stuff into on place on my hard drive. i'm short a few tracks and sessions for each band, but not many (i'm a little music-nerd proud of that). so here's how things stand right now:
3.48gb of RA
3.27gb of wilco
1545 tracks total
81 hours, 45 minutes, and 24 seconds of music total
i'm currently listening to a lot of good new stuff (avett bros., monsters of folk, and stuff), but it's nice to be able to put 81 hours of my favorite two bands on shuffle whenever i want.
also, this (sadly) doesn't include any live stuff not officially released...and of course i have about 250 shows (500 hours?) of RA and 50 shows (100 hours?)...
god, i'm a nerd. but it's funny.
btw, my current favorites of all 1545 tracks are the california and rescue blues 7" vinyls from RA.
EDIT: i feel like i should clarify that i had pretty much all of these tracks somewhere already, it was just a matter of gathering them into one place. i didn't specifically find each and every track painstakingly over the last week or two...
Sep 22, 2009
more people chastising us about the environment (good), and radiohead sings about the apocalypse
just saw the trailer for the new-ish quasi-documentary "age of stupid". not that anything like this would ever grace a movie screen in eastern washington, but i definitely want to see it in some other way ASAP.
and since this wouldn't be my blog without a music video tie-in, here's thom yorke performing "reckoner" at the international premiere of the film:
this song seems to come up a lot in connection with apocalypses (?)...check out the fan-made video for the studio version of the song (which i know i've posted before; watch it anyway):
Sep 17, 2009
theologians
since i'm on a kick lately of posting lyrics and song videos, i wanted to pass this one along. one of my favorite wilco songs, off of one of the best albums of the 2000s, yankee hotel foxtrot be damned :)
theologians
Theologians
They don't know nothing
About my soul
About my soul
I'm an ocean
An abyss in motion
Slow motion
Slow motion
Illitterati lumen fidei
God is with us everyday
That illiterate light
Is with us every night
Theologians
That don't know nothing
About my soul
Oh they don't know
They thin my heart with little things
And my life with change
Oh in so many ways
I find more missing every day
Theologians
I'm going away
Where you will look for me
Where I'm going you cannot come
No one's ever gonna take my life from me
I lay it down
A ghost is born
A ghost is born
A ghost is born
I'm an ocean
I'm all emotion
I'm a cherry ghost
Cherry ghost
Hey I'm a cherry ghost
A cherry ghost
They don't know nothing
About my soul
About my soul
I'm an ocean
An abyss in motion
Slow motion
Slow motion
Illitterati lumen fidei
God is with us everyday
That illiterate light
Is with us every night
Theologians
That don't know nothing
About my soul
Oh they don't know
They thin my heart with little things
And my life with change
Oh in so many ways
I find more missing every day
Theologians
I'm going away
Where you will look for me
Where I'm going you cannot come
No one's ever gonna take my life from me
I lay it down
A ghost is born
A ghost is born
A ghost is born
I'm an ocean
I'm all emotion
I'm a cherry ghost
Cherry ghost
Hey I'm a cherry ghost
A cherry ghost
Sep 16, 2009
mason sings about the environment
this is a great song...he played it at the knitting factory last year, but it's unreleased officially. i was happy to find a lot of good quality videos of it on youtube.
bought the new album today. i only listened once, so i'm hesitant to write a review yet. but i like it so far.
EDIT: here are the lyrics to the song, courtesy of birdwingsbeat.com:
Dam the rivers and damn ourselves
Clearcuttin’, watch another tree fall
The situation is bigger than us
But the solutions are all temporary
Ice age information age
Distracted, living life on the phone
We try to live in the present now
But the future won’t leave us alone
It keeps coming
Don’t let the world go black
I am the man with a choice at hand
Stuck in traffic on the streets of the Earth
We are the mind running out of time
With the power to decide what it’s worth
God help us
This is the heart trying to make a new start
Choosing love in the shadow of doubt
In trouble as the bubble fills with rubble
Digging in is the only way out
Keep digging in
Don’t let the world go black
Keep singing
Oh is this the last hour of life
One more chance to make it right
Darkness is close at hand
Help us to understand
Volcano in the town of Chatham
Hot ash raining from the sky
Earthquake in the Golden State
Everybody’s asking why
I’ll tell you
The story changes but the author remains
Mother Earth’s gonna do what she will
On top of a spinning top
Still acting like we’re standing still
Start spinning
Don’t let the world go black
Keep singing
Oh is this the last hour of life
One more chance to make it right
Darkness is close at hand
Help us to understand
Don’t let the world go black
the return of the PC
around june or so, i decided to forego my usual TV-watching as my sole form of solo relaxation and to try to get back into playing video games. this is somewhat complicated as the fanciest console out there that i own is a PS2 (for which i have 2 games), and i have no money, and my computer is 5 years old. this is in addition to the fact that i currently have something like 11 shows on my "to check out" list. but anyway...
i spent most of the summer and now early fall wallowing in some serious gaming goodness. it's certainly more fun than watching TV, but unfortunately it also results on me staying up too late on work nights.
i started off with some serious platforming magic by playing through both lego star wars games and then the lego indy game (which was surprisingly good; i think i liked it better than the star wars ones). from there i revisited the first two prince of persia games, and FINALLY played through the third one for the first time. it was much better than i'd been led to believe, and did a good job of tying the stories of part one and part two together for a believable and satisfying ending (that's coming from one of the few who LOVED part two).
more recently, i tried to play dungeon siege, which i've never finished, only to find that it pretty much only runs on XP. this was part of the reason that i tried to roll my computers back to XP and eventually ended up destroying all my hard drives and having to upgrade to 7 (note: dungeon siege still doesn't work). so those two games are on the backburner.
then i was completely devoured by knights of the old republic 1 and 2. part one might well be the best game i've played in a few years, and while two expanded the first on a more epic scale (a la baldur's gate vs. baldur's gate 2), the rushed end and dropped subplots just sort of pissed me off and made me feel like i had just essentially played 60 hours of star wars RPG goodness, invested myself in the story and the characters, and then been treated to a conclusion that was thrown together in 25 minutes. i'd still recommend both games, though.
now it's on to 1999's homeworld and it's assorted sequels, and from there warcraft 3 (which i've also never played). i'm not sure after that. maybe back to TV. i also have final fantasy 9, 10, and 12 in a closet or box somewhere around here...though i'm sort of afraid to start in on those while i still have, you know, a job and a social life.
Sep 14, 2009
i done lost my food memory
i've been writing and thinking and teaching about (and eating) food a lot lately. so it keeps bringing to mind a conundrum i've pondered for a few years now: how the hell did i not starve to death in college?
i seriously do not remember how i fed myself on a day to day basis. i remember eating each of my meals in a fairly regular way before i left my parents house after high school, and ever since i moved into my first rental house in 2002, i've cooked, etc. a decent amount and otherwise bought my own groceries. however, during that middle period for about 3 years wherein i didn't have ready access to a grocery store or a kitchen...how the hell did i live?
i mean, sure, i remember pretty regularly getting breakfast or dinner or something with my friends. i remember my fair share of burrito runs, and pizza deliveries, and trying to turn midnight on-campus snack store food into a meal often enough, but not enough to account for EVERY SINGLE MEAL i ate for years. for some reason it just really unsettles me that i can't remember any of this.
new video re: new mason jennings album
i'm really excited about this album, even though there are 11dy different versions coming out and i don't know which one to buy. goddammit, this is why people just steal music. obviously, i would never steal from mason. watch the video about the music, then buy the music, then listen to the music. enjoy.
Sep 12, 2009
this is the shit.
how did i miss this before? trey playing the entirety of "time turns elastic" (the 13 minute phish arrangement, not the 42 minute orchestra one) on acoustic guitar at (i assume) the barn.
Sep 9, 2009
went to kamiak again this weekend...
why i love ecocriticism
"Regardless of what name it goes by, most ecocritical work shares a common motivation: the troubling awareness that we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the consequences of human actions are damaging the planet's basic life support systems. We are there. Either we change our ways or we face global catastrophe, destroying much beauty and exterminating countless fellow species in our headling race to apocalypse." (Cheryll Glotfelty, The Ecocriticism Reader, xx)
Sep 8, 2009
Sep 6, 2009
remember the mountain bed
a song this epic and simultaneously simple, beautiful, and sad could only have been written before the 1970s. "remember the mountain bed" is one of my all-time favorites, both as a poem and as a song (woody guthrie wrote the words, but never set them to music, then wilco and billy bragg added some chords for their album mermaid avenue vol. 2). in the last year, this has become one of my absolute favorite songs, and i still can't listen to it without getting that throat-lumping, arm-hair-raising sensation normal people would call "feelings". ironically, it was the first song i ever heard wilco play live (before i had ever heard it or really listened to the lyrics, so i didn't have the ability to really appreciate my luck). i hope i'll be able to hear them play it again sometime down the road.
Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves?
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds?
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves
Face, breast, hips, and thighs
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes
Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled wood vines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me
Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky
Your fingers played with grassy moss, as limber you did lie
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots as you lay thinking there
Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away
The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go
There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life's reason why
The people laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die
The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees where singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim but plain, there on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head...
I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands
I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears
I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here
My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.
All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed, my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
(lyrics from bemydemon.org):
Remember the Mountain BedDo you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves?
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds?
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves
Face, breast, hips, and thighs
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes
Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled wood vines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me
Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky
Your fingers played with grassy moss, as limber you did lie
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots as you lay thinking there
Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away
The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go
There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life's reason why
The people laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die
The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees where singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim but plain, there on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head...
I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands
I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears
I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here
My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.
All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed, my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again
Aug 30, 2009
how it should be
great weekend. got to head over to post falls on friday night for lindsey's family birthday party, then it was back to pullman and klemgard park yesterday for the department picnic (football, baseball, wiffleball, frisbee, tightrope walking, eat, repeat). finally a fun (except for a specific 10 minute period) night last night at rico's with most of the cohort to celebrate lindsey's birthday.
also i got to give presents this weekend. i'm a huge fan of present-giving (though not necessarily present-buying). so that was fun as well. today is all about reading and printing and grading, but after the last two days, i hesitate to complain. and, in fact, i won't.
also i got to give presents this weekend. i'm a huge fan of present-giving (though not necessarily present-buying). so that was fun as well. today is all about reading and printing and grading, but after the last two days, i hesitate to complain. and, in fact, i won't.
Aug 25, 2009
Aug 24, 2009
new conor oberst videos
just found these on youtube...look to be from a BBC performance from last year.
dr. horrible
tonie just told me about this. it's pretty awesome. you should watch it. yes, i realize i'm like six months behind on being on the internet.
i has a semi-stupid
at least since i got out of high school and largely stopped giving a shit about what other people thought of me (except in obvious, socially necessary ways like making sure i wear clothes in public and speak english), i've rarely been troubled by thoughts of inadequacy as far as academia goes. this isn't because i think i'm really freaking smart or anything; it's more just because i've always figured i'll try as hard as i can and regardless of the outcome i'll learn to happy with that as the central fact through which i define my academic usefulness. you can control how hard you try, even if you can't necessarily control the response to that effort from others.
i'm sure i've spent the requisite grad-school student amount of time being amazed at how smart other people are and how much better they are at my job than me, and i've occasionally felt inadequate as a result, but hardly to the degree that a lot of my peers seem to (ironically, a lot of the same people who worry about being awesome enough are the people i idolize for being awesome). i think i'm decent at what i do, and i don't worry about being better for other people's sake, generally. i do, however, worry about being better for my own sake.
ever since i was in college i remember being jealous of a certain kind of person. a few of my roommates at the time fit into this category, and now a decent amount of my grad school cohort does as well, including a few of my better friends: the type of person i like to think of as "terminally interested".
this is the type of person who is always reading, always learning, always finding connections in things, always somehow finding the time to do everything. if they go home and watch TV after work at night, they can regale you the next morning with the ways in which that TV show sync up with derrida's or heidegger's theories. they can accomplish more in a day than i can accomplish in a week, and yet they can be very laid-back about it, and provide you with a theoretical meta-analysis of everything that's happened to them.
my response to people who can do this isn't so much any sort of guilt over not being that interested myself, but more like a jealousy. i like to read. i like to write. i like to have other hobbies and go on crazy adventures and exercise and watch good TV shows and movies and do a million other things. but usually at some point in the night (around 8-9pm usually) my brain just shuts down and it's all i can do to find something brainless to keep my occupied until i can feed myself and go to sleep. i wish i could spend that time directing my higher brain functions at some issue or some form of art, but i just can't. i only have so much energy for taking in new things and learning each day, and it's hard sometimes to see people who have more and not be angry at myself for not being like them. again, not because i feel obligated, but because there is just so much great stuff out there to absorb and experience and i miss so much of it in those lazy hours of the day when i'm doing nothing. i also have preternaturally bad retention skills, so it's especially bad when someone i'm studying with can read 10 articles and summarize each of them in 3 hours, where i'll have to read one article 3 or 4 times before i can even remember the general gist of the thesis in connection with the name.
i've always been this way, and it's frustrating. because i'm interested, and i care. but for some reason i can't transform that into this all-encompassing ability to treat the world like a buffet of knowledge like some people apparently can. it makes me wonder if that kind of ability really is genetic. or if maybe i have some weird diet deficiency that makes a certain part of my brain not work as well as some others. it also makes me frustrated. i want to be more interested, but my brain doesn't want to cooperate.
i'm sure i've spent the requisite grad-school student amount of time being amazed at how smart other people are and how much better they are at my job than me, and i've occasionally felt inadequate as a result, but hardly to the degree that a lot of my peers seem to (ironically, a lot of the same people who worry about being awesome enough are the people i idolize for being awesome). i think i'm decent at what i do, and i don't worry about being better for other people's sake, generally. i do, however, worry about being better for my own sake.
ever since i was in college i remember being jealous of a certain kind of person. a few of my roommates at the time fit into this category, and now a decent amount of my grad school cohort does as well, including a few of my better friends: the type of person i like to think of as "terminally interested".
this is the type of person who is always reading, always learning, always finding connections in things, always somehow finding the time to do everything. if they go home and watch TV after work at night, they can regale you the next morning with the ways in which that TV show sync up with derrida's or heidegger's theories. they can accomplish more in a day than i can accomplish in a week, and yet they can be very laid-back about it, and provide you with a theoretical meta-analysis of everything that's happened to them.
my response to people who can do this isn't so much any sort of guilt over not being that interested myself, but more like a jealousy. i like to read. i like to write. i like to have other hobbies and go on crazy adventures and exercise and watch good TV shows and movies and do a million other things. but usually at some point in the night (around 8-9pm usually) my brain just shuts down and it's all i can do to find something brainless to keep my occupied until i can feed myself and go to sleep. i wish i could spend that time directing my higher brain functions at some issue or some form of art, but i just can't. i only have so much energy for taking in new things and learning each day, and it's hard sometimes to see people who have more and not be angry at myself for not being like them. again, not because i feel obligated, but because there is just so much great stuff out there to absorb and experience and i miss so much of it in those lazy hours of the day when i'm doing nothing. i also have preternaturally bad retention skills, so it's especially bad when someone i'm studying with can read 10 articles and summarize each of them in 3 hours, where i'll have to read one article 3 or 4 times before i can even remember the general gist of the thesis in connection with the name.
i've always been this way, and it's frustrating. because i'm interested, and i care. but for some reason i can't transform that into this all-encompassing ability to treat the world like a buffet of knowledge like some people apparently can. it makes me wonder if that kind of ability really is genetic. or if maybe i have some weird diet deficiency that makes a certain part of my brain not work as well as some others. it also makes me frustrated. i want to be more interested, but my brain doesn't want to cooperate.
opening day
so today is the first day of the academic year, and i just finished teaching my first round of research writing; another round is scheduled for 1pm. it was fun. it was also business as usual. odd that sometimes those two things are the same thing.
it's funny: as a kid i used to dream about what it would be like to be a touring musician. how great it would be to wake up, day after day, and realize that all you had to do to make a living was write songs and play guitar. of course it isn't really that simple, but at that age, in my brain, it was. i remember being aghast the first time that i read an interview in which a rock star complained that they were tired of playing shows and needed a break (i don't remember the particular rock star). it seemed egregiously arrogant to me that somehow being a rock star wasn't enough for this guy, that somehow he was so ungrateful that he was unable to be completely happy all the time.
then i grew up, and i realized (as i've often stated before) that jobs are like relationships. even if you have the best relationship in the world, sometimes you need to sit in a room by yourself all night, eating ice cream and watching TV and being unkempt and dirty and basking in the fact that you don't have to talk to anyone for a few hours. or sometimes you need to complain to your friend about how your significant other has this one personality trait that just ENRAGES you, ignoring for a moment the fact that you're happy 98 percent of the time with said person. it's just human nature.
so, way back in 2002 i passed on a potentially lucrative computer science career and instead chose almost a decade more of school and the attendant poverty, constant total lack of job security, and the total absence of a chance to do Something Important with my life to get some English degrees and teach writing. this gamble worked out well; i like my job. i like it enough to offset all of the horrible things about it (i.e. i'll be below the poverty line forever, i'll probably not be able to get a job right after finishing my ph.d and have to revert to doing something menial for possibly years, etc.). but because of some of the sacrifices i've made to get to where i am, there are times that i have to remind myself that i don't need to jump out of bed every day, blabbering with joy because i get to teach writing. i made a good choice, but it doesn't have to have been (great tense use) the perfect choice.
like today, for example. realizing that summer was over and that i had to go back to work literally made me want to murder myself and everyone else on the planet. but put into perspective, yes, teaching 20 hours a week during the summer and then doing what you want is of course more fun than teaching 20 hours a week during the fall on top of doing classwork for 60-80 hours. of course i'd rather work a little than a lot. i mean, i like having a job for the structure it provides, but i could "work" 20 hours a week and be happy, because there's always 800 other things that i want to do on my own that are constructive (i.e. not watching TV and playing video games) and i'd love to have time for them. but...being depressed because i have to work a lot and hating my job are two different things. sometimes i have to remind myself of that.
presuming that i have to do something to feed myself, this is definitely the best something. well other than being a rock star.
it's funny: as a kid i used to dream about what it would be like to be a touring musician. how great it would be to wake up, day after day, and realize that all you had to do to make a living was write songs and play guitar. of course it isn't really that simple, but at that age, in my brain, it was. i remember being aghast the first time that i read an interview in which a rock star complained that they were tired of playing shows and needed a break (i don't remember the particular rock star). it seemed egregiously arrogant to me that somehow being a rock star wasn't enough for this guy, that somehow he was so ungrateful that he was unable to be completely happy all the time.
then i grew up, and i realized (as i've often stated before) that jobs are like relationships. even if you have the best relationship in the world, sometimes you need to sit in a room by yourself all night, eating ice cream and watching TV and being unkempt and dirty and basking in the fact that you don't have to talk to anyone for a few hours. or sometimes you need to complain to your friend about how your significant other has this one personality trait that just ENRAGES you, ignoring for a moment the fact that you're happy 98 percent of the time with said person. it's just human nature.
so, way back in 2002 i passed on a potentially lucrative computer science career and instead chose almost a decade more of school and the attendant poverty, constant total lack of job security, and the total absence of a chance to do Something Important with my life to get some English degrees and teach writing. this gamble worked out well; i like my job. i like it enough to offset all of the horrible things about it (i.e. i'll be below the poverty line forever, i'll probably not be able to get a job right after finishing my ph.d and have to revert to doing something menial for possibly years, etc.). but because of some of the sacrifices i've made to get to where i am, there are times that i have to remind myself that i don't need to jump out of bed every day, blabbering with joy because i get to teach writing. i made a good choice, but it doesn't have to have been (great tense use) the perfect choice.
like today, for example. realizing that summer was over and that i had to go back to work literally made me want to murder myself and everyone else on the planet. but put into perspective, yes, teaching 20 hours a week during the summer and then doing what you want is of course more fun than teaching 20 hours a week during the fall on top of doing classwork for 60-80 hours. of course i'd rather work a little than a lot. i mean, i like having a job for the structure it provides, but i could "work" 20 hours a week and be happy, because there's always 800 other things that i want to do on my own that are constructive (i.e. not watching TV and playing video games) and i'd love to have time for them. but...being depressed because i have to work a lot and hating my job are two different things. sometimes i have to remind myself of that.
presuming that i have to do something to feed myself, this is definitely the best something. well other than being a rock star.
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