If you can't tell by my intermittent posts, I am drowning in the amount of work I have to do. I will be back to normal next week for sure, but until then I'm going to have to drop off the face of the planet.
To tide you over, here are two of my favorite moments from Absolutely Fabulous, a British series that I recently acquired and have started from the beginning.
Don't forget you can ask me shiz at formspring.me/adamantfire. I will have enough time to respond to questions starting next week, so now's the time.
Here is Jim Henson's Academy Award nominated short film Time Piece. Very weird, very creative, and, at times, very fun. It's nearly 9 minutes - well worth the time.
Recently I was looking up the word "raconteur" when I came across the Wikipedia article for storytelling. The picture used to illustrate the article was Millais's The Boyhood of Sir Walter Raleigh, which depicts a seafarer or sailor telling Raleigh tales about the sea.
This is something that is in general taken for granted, but is actually a really interesting and cool thing that Wikipedia does. If asked what I would use to illustrate a concept like storytelling, it might take me a while to come up with something half as good as the Millais painting, but because of the power of crowds, an illustration was found that really struck at the heart of what storytelling means.
So I decided to perform a little experiment. I came up with a list of words, random at first, then increasingly thematic, and tried to answer the question "What illustration was used to best evoke the epitome of the abstract concepts at hand?" In each case, I have used the first picture displayed next to first summary text on each page. The results are below the fold.
I'm too bogged down to do anything meaningful tonight, but I do have some ideas for the next time around. For now - my favorite of the Drunk History videos on YouTube. There are a good handful on there. If you decide you like, my suggestion is to start from the first (with Michael Cera as Alexander Hamilton) and work your through.
The next two videos are for the video games I'll be playing for the next few weeks (once my head is above water) - at least until my one true love in the third video comes out.
I listen to music a lot. I am one of those people who does not consider a day successful without music, and I constantly have something going in the background or (when I can) full blast. I have diverse tastes, but I have a tendency to listen to songs over and over again that I love or hit that part of the brain that loves addiction. I thought I would show a window into that part of my brain and show you the 13 songs in my entire library that are rated five stars (through an external program that rates on frequency and number of plays) and have more than 75 plays since July 2009 (which makes most of these songs recent discoveries, which in turn actually skews these results a lot). Each song is listed in ascending order.
I am a history grad school major, and I’m currently in a research class in which we’re reading the daily journals of a semi-prominent Mississippi pastor who wrote between 1851 and 1902. I am responsible for reading the journals covering years 1891 through 1902. This podcast covers one very specific but very interesting and revealing event that takes place in 1891.
This is my first podcast ever!
It runs rather long (around 19 minutes), but it's because I got into it and had some fun.
Gays and lesbians committing suicide isn't really a new thing, but the current level of exposure kind of is. We've entered a more-than-likely short-lived era where people at the margins committing suicide means something to the mainstream. It's hard to tell if it is spectacle, sympathy, or shock, but getting the images of suffering young men (and perhaps women, though this current news cycle has few if any) into the heads of those who mistake design for choice, psychology for stubbornness, is a good thing.
Yet there is always a reactionary pull that would rather put us in the stone age than endeavor to understand our fellow man. That pull is gaining strength, tensing, ready to spring. A devastating high-exposure hate crime in New York, where nine men tortured one man and two teenagers because they were gay, has been revealed to the nation, and the nation is taken aback. But is the nation flinching? Is there any sense of responsibility among those who have helped perpetrate the kind of thinking that would lead to such a crime being possible?
Perhaps in the case of Zach Harrington, a 19-year-old who stood up for something and could not bear to live knowing what had risen to meet him, a direct line of cause and effect can be seen by those who have refused to see much else. As in the case of the men who committed a hate crime and the man who committed suicide, no one made them do what they did. No one forced them to the point of harm. But to disown the rhetoric that helped to justify what has happened is in many ways as dangerous.
There are at least two movements that will result, or at least gain force, from what has happened. One is positive. People are banding together, trying to give a support net to those who feel they are alone and trapped in a hostile world. Athletes are speaking out against bullying. Hundreds of people have dedicated videos to those needing to hear a supportive voice. These are good things - one seeks to remove the reasoning for some of these suicides, while the other seeks to help those unsure of the value of their existence.
But the other, more sinister movement is one that thrives on misanthropy. This is the one that feeds off of deplorable hate crimes and the thought of less like-minded individuals on earth, even if it results from an unbearable suffering. This is where exposure and escalation meet, with each extending in opposite directions. Time will tell the effects, but we will see at least a few more waves as a result of what has happened, both negative and positive, before the media's waters lie still again.
It's hard knowing that it always gets worse before it gets better, that there will always be suicidal actions borne out of feelings of anguish and self-hatred, that not everyone will change. But we can hope that out of the tragedies and sick actions taken against people who seek only to be themselves, good can come.
Until Wednesday.
Update: This is one of the best "It Gets Better" videos I've seen, and it illustrates my point about disowning rhetoric.
Working hard on grad school work. I've written 26 pages in two days, and I'm only a little over halfway done. If only I won some sort of prize for hitting 40 pages in three days. Listening to Michael Jackson on repeat has simultaneously done wonders for my productivity and ensured that his songs are still playing on a loop in my head even if I don't have the music on.
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