#Miscellaneous
Spaceship Omega: Puke Bags To The Right.
Holla! Holla holla. Holla holla holla! It’s the Caff-Pow checking in quick in the middle of a mad cap week. There’s a been a particular grind to the past few days, tutoring and TAing and class taking wrapped around a healthy diet of not getting home until 10 pm. I have to beat the traffic tomorrow surfing the highway of concretized existence south for classroom observations and as such I’m about to get my slumber on rather quickly. Things should pick tomorrow when I get home and yeah I’ll actually post the Dexter recap this weekend. Oh! and course tomorrow Rendar is bound to post his alcoholic ramblings sometime tomorrow night in a stunning ode to a batch of hops and the such.
You may have noticed The Dude, friend of ours and frequent commenter currently embarking on his own month-long journey of madness on the pages, and so I hope you’re enjoying them. (It’s also his birthday, happy birfday, Dude!) Not to be outdone, Fauxbot dropped a Rage review for our asses, and we’re the better for it. At least our wallets. If you’re ever interested in participating in the pukey pastiche of madness that is the site with some original content, let me know. It keeps the ship afloat until I can regurgitate a day’s worth of geekdom for us to dissect.
Anyways I’m out, I hope all is well.
Role call in the comments box, ladies and genitals.
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Fear Fest: Death!
OCTOBER 13th, Death
“Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.”
-David Gerrold
You are going to die. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but it’s inevitable.
You. Will. Die.
OCTOBERFEAST – Watchmen
[OCTOBERFEAST is the greatest celebration of the year, a revelry dedicated to pop-culture’s most nutritious Halloween detritus. Plastic screams and artificial sweeteners have never been more bountiful. In the old country, villagers refer to the extended party as Satan’s Snacktime]
Watchmen is a lot of things. A deconstruction of the superhero archetype. An exploration of Cold War tensions. An actualization of the comics medium’s potential. One of the most meticulously-plotted, visually layered, and rewarding narrative experiences ever stuffed into paneled pages.
There’s no denyin’ that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created something special.
However, noticeably absent from discussions about Watchmen are any considerations as to why the creators placed the story within its given time-frame. Sure, everyone is quick to point out that this alternate history’s dark vision of 1985 conjures up all sorts of anxieties about mutually assured destruction and the necessity to avert nuclear holocaust. But the overlooked time-frame is the season in which the tale of middle-aged superheroics unfolds.
Again, it’s easy to remember that Watchmen is a lot of things – deconstruction/exploration/actualization/masterpiece – but let’s not forget that it is a metaphor for autumn itself.
Fear Fest: Hippos!
OCTOBER 12th, Hippos
“Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus, or just a really cool Opotamus?”
-Mitch Hedberg
As we all are hurled through space on this little blue marble, its tough to realize how different we are from some of the other indigenous creatures. On would wonder what a visitor from another world would think if they touched down and took a look around. I can easily say that if they encountered a Hippo, they would climb their intergalactic asses back into their flying machine and haul ass out of dodge. Today’s fear deals with one of the most aggressive animals on the planet … MAN … no actually, its Hippos.
OCTOBERFEAST – Bark at the Moon
[OCTOBERFEAST is the greatest celebration of the year, a revelry dedicated to pop-culture’s most nutritious Halloween detritus. Plastic screams and artificial sweeteners have never been more bountiful. In the old country, villagers refer to the extended party as Satan’s Snacktime]
If the OCTOBERFEAST teaches us nothing else, it’s that every individual must act as both prey and predator of the heart’s darkened recesses. While evading their burdensome remembrances in daily living, one can use this annual masquerade-macabre to unearth the roots of personal anguish. Show them to the world. Chop them to pieces with a fuggin’ axe. Light them on fire.
For as horrifying as it might be to approach our own repressions, it is infinitely more exhilarating to air them out. So no one amongst us, from the most fragile bonfire-stoker to the strongest cask-hurling juggernaut, will escape the revelry without revealing a lost truth, a fact that may begin to be slipping into fiction. Go ahead – turn your head to the sky and just scream what it is that you don’t want to face but can’t bear to forget! There’s no need to be shy!
For even the most evil of our OCTOBERFEAST guests have some black-boned skeletons dancing in their closets.
Tonight, Lord Ozzy is going to get things going for us. Look there he is! And he’s about to Bark at the Moon!
Fear Fest: Germs! Wash Your Hands, Slob.
OCTOBER 11th, Germs
“To perceive things in the germ is intelligence”
-Lao Tzu
Welcome back folks. Yesterday we took a gander at the largest fear in the world, today, in a wonderful, albeit waifishly thin, example of juxtaposition we cover the smallest.
Germs are everywhere. They are on your hands, on your keyboard, on your mouse, everywhere. You’re sitting in a big pile of germs right now. That soda you’re drinking or that bag of chips you’re munching from? You guessed it, germ infested. So what is it about these little microbes that send people into such a frenzy?
OCTOBERFEAST – Your Actual True Hallowe’en Story
[OCTOBERFEAST is the greatest celebration of the year, a revelry dedicated to pop-culture’s most nutritious Halloween detritus. Plastic screams and artificial sweeteners have never been more bountiful. In the old country, villagers refer to the extended party as Satan’s Snacktime]
Hallow’s Eve, the official moment of the OCTOBERFEAST orgasm, is exactly three weeks from today.
Presented for your consumption is a tasty treat cooked up by Warren Ellis, my personal Internet Overlord. What follows is Your Actual True Hallowe’en Story, which I first read in Shivering Sands and tracked down on Ellis’ Livejournal.
Hypertext: A Garden of Forking Clicks.
(I originally wrote this as a blog post for an educational class I’m taking in grad school. A lot of the references make sense only in context of the class, but if you’re bored here’s 1,700 words of me theorizing about our culture in my usual nonsensical way.)
The fact that you’re reading this on the internet, specifically on a blog, means that digital writing has won. The fact that you’ve clicked links, traversed what Jay Bolter calls “hot” text in Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print is more than enough proof of the New World Order. I knew this before I read chapter 3 of his book. A book published in 2001, which means in the world of hypertext and the digital age that is far past being a dinosaur and quickly approaching petroleum. That’s why I signed up for this chapter, why I ventured to blather about it on the internet and in the classroom. I’m a believer. In fact what I found in Bolter’s book wasn’t sage-like insight or futurism, it was an adorable relic of the past. For while there is no doubt that hypertext is involved with the remediation of print, I would argue that hypertext is actually the remediation of text, or more specifically the possibilities of it. So what I’m proposing through these words, translated into bits and bytes, translated into a Blogger document, translated into meaning via your eyes and into your brain is that what Bolter predicted was the paradigm shift in print text, and what it has been swept up in is the hypertextual shift in our own collective consciousness. And since we’re dutiful teachers and future teachers, the question should become how do we use this?, since as I’ve already indicated it’s too late to try and fight it.
Read these words on your computer. It’s already won.
Netflix Drops ‘Qwikster’ Plan. Corporate Comedy, Guys.
Got an email today from Netflix. “We’re dropping Qwikster.” I laughed. I can’t remember a time where a huge company was so obviously running around with its cock out. Completely confused.
Fear Fest: Aquaphobia!
October 10th, Aquaphobia
When you’re drowning, you don’t say ‘I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,’ you just scream.”
-John Lennon
Wow, are we really through one third of the month already? Let us take a moment and look back on the fears we’ve already encountered. They are enough to make a person go mad. However, today we have the largest fear on the planet. Water. Water makes up roughly 70% of the Earth’s surface, and occasionally falls from the sky. Imagine if you were afraid of that? Suddenly your problems don’t seem so big.
