Tagged: Thoughts
I bet you want to know why I'm watching 'Chocolat'
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The answer is that it's partially because it's on Netflix.
But mostly the answer is because back when I was fresh out of high school I knew a girl named Rae-Annon and it was her favourite movie if I recall correctly. If it wasn't, and I'm wrong, it was damn near her favourite because she talked about it a lot.
Even though she and I went to elementary school together, or maybe it was middle school I'm not sure anymore I knew who she was because she was the weird goth chick that my yuppie friends and I would look at from down the hall with big saucer-like eyes and wonder what could possess someone to dress that way.
(We, however, were dressed in as little as the school would let us get away with wearing without having to wear a garbage bag for a shirt and we were barely on our periods so who were the fucked-up ones, really?)
Anyway after high school we reconnected by chance because we both worked at the same McDonalds in Winnipeg Square where I wiled away a year of the year and a half between when I graduated and when I moved to Ontario.
She was way more self-assured and I didn't realize it at the time but I really looked up to her even though she had slightly hippie-er tendencies than me like not always shaving her armpits and talking about shakras and stuff.
She went to the East Coast for a month and brought me back a small bag of sea glass which I still have and treasure even though we haven't talked in years.
We used to hang out in her parent's basement which was basically her little pad and watch movies like East of Eden and Breakfast at Tiffany's and drink wine from a box and talk about the boys in our lives. She showed me how to paint watercolours and bought me a martini glass set for my 18th birthday and we had stupid made-up words like 'citag' that we used with each other because young girls are dumb that way.
She knew me back when I was still a pretty fucked-up mess and sometimes I feel bad about that.
We've completely lost touch over the years after a nasty falling out that was, largely and unsurprisingly, my fault. But when I think about those years I try not to think about the end, but rather the rest of it which was sweet and amazing and good.
So when I saw Chocolat on Netflix the other day I put in my queue and even though it's not a very good movie (which I didn't expect it to be) it's nice to remember her and my friendship that feels like a lifetime ago.
So hi Rae-Annon, if you're reading this.
Am I angry because of the Internet?
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Brian Fung at the Washington Post published an article stating that the Internet isn't making us dumb, it's making us angry.Which doesn't make me angry per se, but it definitely makes me think of the stuff I say and do online, and how it makes me feel afterward.
From the article:
In a study of 70 million posts on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, Rui Fan and a team of others at Beihan University tracked the spread of joy, sadness, anger and disgust across the social network. According to the MIT Technology Review, they found that angry tweets were far more likely to be retweeted by others — or be the subject of angry responses — up to three degrees away from the original user.
Maybe things are different in China but if you tweet a bunch of negative shit you're getting an unfollow from me.
I don't think that it's the internet is making us angrier, it's that it gives generally negative people a soapbox to broadcast their negativity to everyone else, specifically when it comes to sites like 4chan, Reddit and etc where you have a fairly large degree of anonymity and because of that are able to to disregard regular social conventions and straight-up be a jerk to people.
That kind of behaviour and the negative tweets Fung refers to in his article aren't the products of the Internet, these people would be just as negative, destructive, horrible, disgusting, and whatnot regardless of whether or not the Internet existed. Their bad qualities would simply manifest themselves in a different way.
The one thing that the article neglects to mention is the fact that, before now, we didn't have a global public forum to express ourselves and there was no global public record of it before now.
We can't go back in time and see a timeline of what millions of peasants in the Dark Ages had to say. Though I'm sure it would sound something like this:
Johnny Cash died ten years ago today
- by admin
so let's take a second and listen to some real, quality music.
Sometimes in the wake of Miley Cyruses and Rebecca Blacks and whatever nonsense is being marketed to us because of it's shock value or horribleness or whatever
which ultimately distracts from anything important or relevant at all and are just tricks to make us feel superior to someone else
(because why else would we care, really, about something like this?)
it's nice to listen to music that gets you right down in your core
and makes you really feel something
right deep down in yr gut.
RIP Mr. Cash.
Spent the day at home
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which meant hanging on the couch trolling around on the computer and watching episodes of Lost on Netflix.
That show wasn't as good as I'd remembered.
Back when it was on tv I used to get together with this guy I was kinda seeing on Thursday nights and watch it together.
I loved that shit.
But then the finale happened and I was all 'wtf'.
It didn't make sense. Total bs.
It's funny how the ending can spoil an entire experience
and how that can apply to other situations as well.
Luckily there's a lot of tv out there.
Re: the fast-food walk out on August 29th
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When I was a youth I worked a string of minimum-wage jobs in fast food joints, most noticably when I worked for McDonalds full-time the year after I graduated high school.I hated that job.
I was treated like shit, the hours were shit, the customers were (largely) shit, management was shit... everything about it sucked except my coworkers, most of which were young people like me.
Except Maria, our older badass morning lady. Who showed up at 5am like a boss Mon-Fri even though she had two kids who she never got to see between her full-time McJob and her other part-time gig somewhere else.
We all respected her in a work-mom kind of way.
One day not too long after I started working there she came in to work late, which was unusual, and looked like she'd been crying.
She told us that one of her kids had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Her little baby. She was heartbroken.
Luckily though, she said, she lives in Canada where a lot of that stuff is paid for or subsidized so she and her husband could afford to pay for all the doctor's visits and insulin and etc her little one would need for the rest of their life.
She thanked her lucky stars that she had a husband who had a job and contributed all he could and that she lived somewhere where the combination of her minimum-wage job and universal health care would be able to provide for her family even with this new burden.
I thought about Maria when I read the Washington Post article about the scheduled fast-food walk out on August 29th.
I thought about
all those people who get paid less than she did back in '05/06 even though it's 2013
who don't have any health care at all
who are working to support their families
sometimes without any help
working way too many hours to try and make ends meet
and
who really, really need things to change.
I hope they're able to get what they want.
*image via Salon
Yes we are eating popcorn in bed
- by admin
One of the great things about being an adult is getting to do what you want.
What I want at the end of most nights is to sit around in my underpants with the laptop in bed with my significant other and maybe the cats and usually tea and sometimes a snack.
Tonight for instance we are eating popcorn with sour cream n onion seasoning.
Which is wonderful for me because I was working on university stuff all night and forgot to have dinner and didn't realize till we were halfway through our evening when my tummy was all
wtf put food in me you dummy
and I was like
shit. I'd better get on that.
So here I am writing this drinking tea and eating popcorn with my significant other which is crazy to me because a few years ago I was dating someone who picked a fight with me over this very thing.
I've only ever really seriously cohabited with one person and pretty early on after moving in together I was reading a book having a snack in bed and he flipped out.
I was all
It's not big deal. Just some cheese n crackers and I'm holding the plate.
But he flipped the heck out and we had this big crazy fight and it boggled my mind because who doesn't have a lazy snack in their own bed once and a while?
The reason I thought of that was because as we were both reaching for more popcorn my hand hit Tyrone's and some popcorn got on the bed and instead of flipping out we cleaned it like it was no biggie
which it wasn't.
So now I'm sitting here blogging about it and he's reading and we're about to go turn the lights down
and I'm thinking about how funny it is that people can be so different
and how I really want some cheese n crackers.
I can see why people are kinda hating on Bioshock: Infinite
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which isn't to say that I don't absolutely effing love it for those exact same reasons.
some of the themes that people don't like in the game are:
- racism
- extreme religious behaviour
- zealots
- exploiting others
- ideological societies
- crazy-go-nuts American nationalism
- extreme violence
among other things which I think is total BS.
What it is, is that the game is exposing and discussing things
(particularly about American society)
that make people
(particularly Americans)
uncomfortable.
It's shitty when someone points at you and goes "these are the ways you're fucked up, this is what you could be/are becoming" which the game really does.
And that hurts, I get it.
But what I think is shitty is that we have games like Call of Duty which totally demonize other countries/cultures
(okay some are about Nazis but not all of them)
which are perfectly okay even though they're just as violent and graphic
and we let little kids play them.
But when a
(beautiful, stunning)
thoughtful
video game comes out that makes a statement
and ruffles feathers
(as a good piece of art/creativity should)
people get upset
because it doesn't demonize the people they want
it points to them and says
"you're fucked up, too"
now go fight this giant mechanical monster.
I still wanna see The Great Gatsby
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Even though it's not doing super hot in theaters and it's only got a 51% rating on rotten tomatoes.
I can't help it, I think it's because Leonardo DiCaprio is in it.
Scratch that. I know it's Leonardo DiCaprio is in it.
A few weeks ago the cat was bugging me at like 4am and I couldn't get back to sleep. So since it was Saturday I decided to go hang on the couch and see if I was going to fall back to sleep eventually, or what, and wound up watching Titanic, which I haven't seen in a few yrs.
It was actually better than my youthful self remembers. Though that might be because I could pause it and go pee halfway through without having to push past an aisle full of peeps just trying to enjoy the movie, dammit.
Anyway.
Leo was great in it. I always forget what an amazing actor he is until I'm watching one of his movies. Then I'm all
"holy shit, he's handsome and talented"
which is why I want to see Gatsby, even though from what I know there isn't any nudity à la Kate Winslet's fabulous boobs like in Titanic.
But I can deal. Plus Carey Mulligan is pretty effin cute.
The thing that puzzles me still is this:
Why did people expect the movie to be so great?
It's a mediocre movie based on a mediocre book
except the movie has a zebra in a fountain.
I really liked the first Iron Man
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I don't remember seeing it or who I saw it with but I know that I enjoyed it more than most people because I'm really not familiar with the franchise beyond the movies. iron man wasn't one of the comic books I was into as a lass so I got to enjoy it purely for it's over-the-top fight scenes and also how tasty Robert Downey Jr. is.
when the second Iron Man was in theatres I saw it kinda by accident. Tyrone and I were in Toronto after being in Montreal for MUTEK for a week with all of our friends, and we were staying with my aunt & uncle for a few days before going home.
we had been walking around and didn't want to go back to my aunts house just yet so we figured
fuck it, let's go see iron man 2
it was okay from what I remember. we were both wiped and I think Tyrone dozed off but I stayed relatively alert due to an infusion of cola and sugary snacks.
anyway.
I didn't expect the 3rd one to look like anything I'd want to see because the 2nd one wasn't really anything that I wanted to see
filler. action. hot girls. RDJ.
topical stuff perfect to watch after a week of nonstop partying, adventuring and memory-making.
though I have to say this trailer looks better than I thought a 3rd instalment would.
but I'm still way more excited for star trek.
I think the most telling thing about Das Weisse Band
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is the difference between how it we received in Germany, where it was produced:
In Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, Julia Evers called the film "an oppressive and impressive moral painting, in which neither the audience nor the people in the village find an escape valve from the web of authority, hierarchy and violence. [...] Everything in The White Ribbon is true. And that is why it is so difficult to bear."[20] Markus Keuschnigg of Die Presse praised the "sober cinematography" along with the pacing of the narrative. Keuschnigg opposed any claims about the director being cold and cynical, instead hailing him as uncompromising and sincerely humanistic.[21] Die Welt's Peter Zander compared The White Ribbon to Haneke's previous films Benny's Video and Funny Games, both centering around the theme of violence. Zander concluded that while the violence in the previous films had seemed distant and constructed, The White Ribbon demonstrates how it is a part of our reality. Zander also applauded the "perfectly cast children", whom he held as "the real stars of this film".[22] "Mighty, monolithic and fearsome it stands in the cinema landscape. A horror drama, free from horror images", Christian Buß wrote in Der Spiegel, and expressed delight in how the film deviates from the conventions of contemporary German cinema: "Director Michael Haneke forces us to learn how to see again". Buß suggested references in the name of the fictitious village, "Eichwald", to the Nazi Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann and the Buchenwald concentration camp.[23] Eichwald is however a common German place name, meaning the "Oak Forest".
and by US media:
Critics such as Claudia Puig of USA Today praised the film's cinematography and performances while criticizing its "glacial pace" and "lack [of] the satisfaction of a resolution or catharsis."[24] Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post wrote that trying to locate the seeds of fascism in religious hypocrisy and authoritarianism is "a simplistic notion, disturbing not in its surprise or profundity, but in the sadistic trouble the filmmaker has taken to advance it."[25] Philip Maher at allmovie.com found the director "ham-handed" and "in the end his attempt at lucidity inevitably draws us further from the essential nature of fascism".[26] [via wikipedia]
some people just don't get it.
(also, watch this movie)
