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Oct. 11th, 2007 01:49 amNowhere girl. You're living in a dream. Nowhere girl. You stay behind the scenes. Nowhere girl. You never come outside. Nowhere girl. Because you prefer to hide. Every day, every night. In that old familiar light...
Washed adrift this morning from some oneiric sea into a dream of reconciliation. Though like some of the best dreams, it was completely indistinguishable from reality (the other category of excellent dreams of course being those that have practically nothing in common with reality). Until of course an Aliens style powerloader exosuit made entirely out of cardboard showed up. When it opened its mouth (yes, I know the powerloader in Aliens doesn't have a mouth. Dream, remember) and began shrieking "BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP" at me, the jig was pretty much up. After trying and failing to induce a coma or a stroke, leaving me stranded in dreamland amid a welcome slurry of misfiring neurons, I resigned myself to face a less desirable reality, albeit one also less populated with malevolent sentient cardboard (If you ignore such luminaries of two dimensional evil as our president (I did specify sentient after all)). To say that I was displeased with how the day began would be an understatement of Brobdingnagian proportions (Or should we leave understatements for the Lilliputians? (I had a sudden wave of depression thinking that it's likely a larger percentage of the internet wielding populace is familiar with lolcatz phenomenology than Jonathan Swift. I've truly outlived my time. I can haz satire?!)). The rest of the day went more or less as expected. Worked. Wandered aimlessly around downtown Berkeley for a while. Chatted with people at the California. Might hit up a preview screening of Darjeeling Limited tomorrow, though that has the unfortunate side effect of me wandering home at 2 am or so. And now, lacking anything of real interest going on, I bring you another edition of Josh Media Watch 2007. Oh the excitement
Books read in the last week: Jeffrey Eugenides The Virgin Suicides (Liked it far more than Middlesex, but that's not surprising considering the increased resonance of the subject matter for me), Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice (This was *great*. I need to read more Lem. Only read Solaris and Cyberiad other than this. Any suggestions on where to go next? Those seem to be the big three.), and just barely started Ryu Murakami's Piercing. Oh, and if we're counting graphic novels in this section, and we might as well, let's toss in the third Exterminators trade paper back. Also, and in a completely different vein, I attempted to read a book on String and M Theory and failed in humiliating manner. I think I'll return with a better math background. I don't suppose anyone has some good group theory books they'd like to recommend? As is about the only thing I get out of the wikipedia page on Calabi-Yau manifolds is "Ooh, pretty". Somehow I doubt I'm the only person who thinks that "It is possible for the first Chern class to vanish as an element of the real cohomology group, so that the manifold has a Ricci-flat metric, yet not as an element of the integral cohomology group, so that the manifold does not have a global nowhere vanishing holomorphic (n,0)-form." is just the tiniest bit abstruse. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I'd kept doing math steadily instead of wandering off to other interests, and I have come to the conclusion that if nothing else, I'd at least be able to speak far better martian.
Recent movies - Not much new in the theater. Saw Vanaja and I think that's about it. Lots coming soon that I want to see though. Looking forward to Control, Lars and The Real Girl, No Country For Old Men (Please let this end the run of fairly blah stuff coming from the Coen brothers for a while. Ladykillers, meh. Intolerable Cruelty, slightly less, but still, meh. Though their bit in Paris Je'Taime was pretty great), Margot at the Wedding (I dig Noah Baumbach. Kicking and Screaming is consistently high on my favorite movies list) and of course the aforementioned Darjeeling Limited, and probably others I'm forgetting. On DVD, been watching old Kenneth Anger and a bunch of random odd animated stuff. Blood Tea and Red String, old Jiri Barta stuff, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (Not actually all that animated really, but it's the Brothers Quay, so it should count), and I'm currently half paying attention to The Beautiful Washing Machine. My DVD collection is getting progressively odder. I was a little bit amused to see that I owned a goodly chunk of the hilariously snobbish (and this is me talking, so...) Amazon list of Films for the bourgeoisie to walk out on
Been all over the map musically. New Mind.In.The.Box, which I'm not actually very taken with yet, Bat for Lashes, developed a fondness for some The Books stuff, though I'm afraid it makes me a horrible hipster, my usual new wave obsession, including the B-Movie song I quoted at the beginning (anyone who uses Metropolis in their music video is ok by me). Boards of Canada, Ulrich Schnauss, Sigur Ros, etc. Yep, definitely a hipster. *sigh* I held out as long as I could. Oh, and the Across The Universe soundtrack. Purty.
And then of course the video games. I think it's a mark of the clear superiority of Japanese video game culture that I went from playing a game in which you're a high school student who alternately spends time participating in clubs/dating your classmates during the day and fighting demons in a several hundred story tower that is also your highschool by shooting yourself in the face with a pistollike "evoker" hence summoning your inner persona, represented by tarot card aspected mythological figures to playing a game that seems to take place entirely in a hallucination of Frederic Chopin as he lay on his death bed.
And now it is late, so I think I'll do something about that.
Washed adrift this morning from some oneiric sea into a dream of reconciliation. Though like some of the best dreams, it was completely indistinguishable from reality (the other category of excellent dreams of course being those that have practically nothing in common with reality). Until of course an Aliens style powerloader exosuit made entirely out of cardboard showed up. When it opened its mouth (yes, I know the powerloader in Aliens doesn't have a mouth. Dream, remember) and began shrieking "BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP" at me, the jig was pretty much up. After trying and failing to induce a coma or a stroke, leaving me stranded in dreamland amid a welcome slurry of misfiring neurons, I resigned myself to face a less desirable reality, albeit one also less populated with malevolent sentient cardboard (If you ignore such luminaries of two dimensional evil as our president (I did specify sentient after all)). To say that I was displeased with how the day began would be an understatement of Brobdingnagian proportions (Or should we leave understatements for the Lilliputians? (I had a sudden wave of depression thinking that it's likely a larger percentage of the internet wielding populace is familiar with lolcatz phenomenology than Jonathan Swift. I've truly outlived my time. I can haz satire?!)). The rest of the day went more or less as expected. Worked. Wandered aimlessly around downtown Berkeley for a while. Chatted with people at the California. Might hit up a preview screening of Darjeeling Limited tomorrow, though that has the unfortunate side effect of me wandering home at 2 am or so. And now, lacking anything of real interest going on, I bring you another edition of Josh Media Watch 2007. Oh the excitement
Books read in the last week: Jeffrey Eugenides The Virgin Suicides (Liked it far more than Middlesex, but that's not surprising considering the increased resonance of the subject matter for me), Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice (This was *great*. I need to read more Lem. Only read Solaris and Cyberiad other than this. Any suggestions on where to go next? Those seem to be the big three.), and just barely started Ryu Murakami's Piercing. Oh, and if we're counting graphic novels in this section, and we might as well, let's toss in the third Exterminators trade paper back. Also, and in a completely different vein, I attempted to read a book on String and M Theory and failed in humiliating manner. I think I'll return with a better math background. I don't suppose anyone has some good group theory books they'd like to recommend? As is about the only thing I get out of the wikipedia page on Calabi-Yau manifolds is "Ooh, pretty". Somehow I doubt I'm the only person who thinks that "It is possible for the first Chern class to vanish as an element of the real cohomology group, so that the manifold has a Ricci-flat metric, yet not as an element of the integral cohomology group, so that the manifold does not have a global nowhere vanishing holomorphic (n,0)-form." is just the tiniest bit abstruse. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I'd kept doing math steadily instead of wandering off to other interests, and I have come to the conclusion that if nothing else, I'd at least be able to speak far better martian.
Recent movies - Not much new in the theater. Saw Vanaja and I think that's about it. Lots coming soon that I want to see though. Looking forward to Control, Lars and The Real Girl, No Country For Old Men (Please let this end the run of fairly blah stuff coming from the Coen brothers for a while. Ladykillers, meh. Intolerable Cruelty, slightly less, but still, meh. Though their bit in Paris Je'Taime was pretty great), Margot at the Wedding (I dig Noah Baumbach. Kicking and Screaming is consistently high on my favorite movies list) and of course the aforementioned Darjeeling Limited, and probably others I'm forgetting. On DVD, been watching old Kenneth Anger and a bunch of random odd animated stuff. Blood Tea and Red String, old Jiri Barta stuff, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (Not actually all that animated really, but it's the Brothers Quay, so it should count), and I'm currently half paying attention to The Beautiful Washing Machine. My DVD collection is getting progressively odder. I was a little bit amused to see that I owned a goodly chunk of the hilariously snobbish (and this is me talking, so...) Amazon list of Films for the bourgeoisie to walk out on
Been all over the map musically. New Mind.In.The.Box, which I'm not actually very taken with yet, Bat for Lashes, developed a fondness for some The Books stuff, though I'm afraid it makes me a horrible hipster, my usual new wave obsession, including the B-Movie song I quoted at the beginning (anyone who uses Metropolis in their music video is ok by me). Boards of Canada, Ulrich Schnauss, Sigur Ros, etc. Yep, definitely a hipster. *sigh* I held out as long as I could. Oh, and the Across The Universe soundtrack. Purty.
And then of course the video games. I think it's a mark of the clear superiority of Japanese video game culture that I went from playing a game in which you're a high school student who alternately spends time participating in clubs/dating your classmates during the day and fighting demons in a several hundred story tower that is also your highschool by shooting yourself in the face with a pistollike "evoker" hence summoning your inner persona, represented by tarot card aspected mythological figures to playing a game that seems to take place entirely in a hallucination of Frederic Chopin as he lay on his death bed.
And now it is late, so I think I'll do something about that.
