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Oct. 12th, 2007 03:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
goldenmeanDarjeeling Limited was incredibly satisfying. I just felt everyone should know that before I go to sleep for four hours and wake up in quite possibly an entirely different mood about the cost/benefit ratio of seeing movies that start past midnight when your alarm goes off at 7:30. If you're planning on seeing it, you might want to watch Hotel Chevalier first. It's a prequel of sorts, which I was unaware of before walking into the movie, but there was a brief blurb for it. Also, the first previews I've seen for Juno and The Savages, both of which look relatively great.
Other events of the day: Needed to kill time before Darjeeling, so I watched Outsourced at the Shattuck beforehand. Formulaic, but enjoyable, and it seemed to fit. In two of the three movies set in India I've watched recently, the Indian characters bobbed their heads from side to side, in a gesture that seems to be used interchangeably in a positive and negative sense. How is it I've never encountered this up until now? I've lived in a major metropolitan area for well over a decade. I watch a lot of foreign movies. I have many coworkers from that area. Is it a regional thing? Specific to a particular culture there? Relatively uncommon? Am I just completely oblivious to have not noticed it until now? I find it incredibly charming, and if it weren't for the typical white liberal guilt at cultural appropriation, I'd be tempted to put it into use myself.
Finished Piercing and started reading Number Nine Dream, which is really, really, really great, and unless it goes rapidly downhill past page 70 or so, I think I like it more than Cloud Atlas, which I liked a lot. Any book that involves the mockery and subsequent annihilation of Belgium in the first chapter can't possibly be bad. =BM=. Man, there are maybe five of you who read this that will get that. The rest will just have to get by thinking I'm an asshole. Or I suppose you could ask.
Had an interesting wikipedia browse session today when I decided that my overuse of the word really and other fillers in my writing constitutes a form of Speech Disfluency, which is odd, because the mechanisms associated with speech disfluency don't really seem to serve a purpose in written work. Is there a more appropriate terminology used when it's written? From there, I wikisurfed through Valley Speak, California English (Ooh, look at the pretty vowel shift diagrams), through to Hyphy. Some days I just really love the internet. Hideously tempted to steal the phrase "Ghost Riding The Whip" as some lewd sexual innuendo, white liberal guilt or no.
I also decided on a rudimentary theory as to why internet memes annoy me more and more. Among other factors, I have decided that there exists a certain ever decreasing lifespan for every meme, which I have chosen to refer to as TTG (time to glue), after which that horse is well and truly beaten, and can be beaten no more, and should please oh please just vanish from my percept space already. The TTG is obviously inversely proportional to the number of people involved in the mutation of the meme, and directly proportional to a variable that I have dubbed the Herreshoff-Seabiscuit factor, which roughly speaking measures the inherent susceptibility of an individual to memetic transmission. Because there is an ever increasing number of people on the internet, the TTG for memes is ever-decreasing. I believe that there is an interesting interaction that occurs in people with exceptionally high Hs factors (which I have dubbed The Sleipnir Inversion), wherein the TTG actually becomes negative, and things are rendered unfunny long before the subject is actually exposed to them (Tangent quote from Max in Kicking and Screaming "I'm too nostalgic, I admit it". Skippy - "We graduated four months ago. What can you possibly be nostalgic for?" Max - "I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I'm reminiscing this right now. I can't go to the bar because I've already looked back on it in my memory... and I didn't have a good time"). Further research is obviously needed.
In other news, a crazy and/or mentally challenged person on the bus today hit me three times in the neck and upper back before his minder noticed and dragged him away telling me "It's ok man, you don't need to beat him up". The mental picture this engendered in me almost made the pain in my neck most of the day worthwhile. Mornings are really sucking for me lately. But at least I didn't have my house accidentally destroyed by a foul tempered giant this morning like the spider whose web I walked into on the way out my door, so everything in perspective I guess.
Sleep now. Alarm in less than four hours. Woot!
Other events of the day: Needed to kill time before Darjeeling, so I watched Outsourced at the Shattuck beforehand. Formulaic, but enjoyable, and it seemed to fit. In two of the three movies set in India I've watched recently, the Indian characters bobbed their heads from side to side, in a gesture that seems to be used interchangeably in a positive and negative sense. How is it I've never encountered this up until now? I've lived in a major metropolitan area for well over a decade. I watch a lot of foreign movies. I have many coworkers from that area. Is it a regional thing? Specific to a particular culture there? Relatively uncommon? Am I just completely oblivious to have not noticed it until now? I find it incredibly charming, and if it weren't for the typical white liberal guilt at cultural appropriation, I'd be tempted to put it into use myself.
Finished Piercing and started reading Number Nine Dream, which is really, really, really great, and unless it goes rapidly downhill past page 70 or so, I think I like it more than Cloud Atlas, which I liked a lot. Any book that involves the mockery and subsequent annihilation of Belgium in the first chapter can't possibly be bad. =BM=. Man, there are maybe five of you who read this that will get that. The rest will just have to get by thinking I'm an asshole. Or I suppose you could ask.
Had an interesting wikipedia browse session today when I decided that my overuse of the word really and other fillers in my writing constitutes a form of Speech Disfluency, which is odd, because the mechanisms associated with speech disfluency don't really seem to serve a purpose in written work. Is there a more appropriate terminology used when it's written? From there, I wikisurfed through Valley Speak, California English (Ooh, look at the pretty vowel shift diagrams), through to Hyphy. Some days I just really love the internet. Hideously tempted to steal the phrase "Ghost Riding The Whip" as some lewd sexual innuendo, white liberal guilt or no.
I also decided on a rudimentary theory as to why internet memes annoy me more and more. Among other factors, I have decided that there exists a certain ever decreasing lifespan for every meme, which I have chosen to refer to as TTG (time to glue), after which that horse is well and truly beaten, and can be beaten no more, and should please oh please just vanish from my percept space already. The TTG is obviously inversely proportional to the number of people involved in the mutation of the meme, and directly proportional to a variable that I have dubbed the Herreshoff-Seabiscuit factor, which roughly speaking measures the inherent susceptibility of an individual to memetic transmission. Because there is an ever increasing number of people on the internet, the TTG for memes is ever-decreasing. I believe that there is an interesting interaction that occurs in people with exceptionally high Hs factors (which I have dubbed The Sleipnir Inversion), wherein the TTG actually becomes negative, and things are rendered unfunny long before the subject is actually exposed to them (Tangent quote from Max in Kicking and Screaming "I'm too nostalgic, I admit it". Skippy - "We graduated four months ago. What can you possibly be nostalgic for?" Max - "I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I'm reminiscing this right now. I can't go to the bar because I've already looked back on it in my memory... and I didn't have a good time"). Further research is obviously needed.
In other news, a crazy and/or mentally challenged person on the bus today hit me three times in the neck and upper back before his minder noticed and dragged him away telling me "It's ok man, you don't need to beat him up". The mental picture this engendered in me almost made the pain in my neck most of the day worthwhile. Mornings are really sucking for me lately. But at least I didn't have my house accidentally destroyed by a foul tempered giant this morning like the spider whose web I walked into on the way out my door, so everything in perspective I guess.
Sleep now. Alarm in less than four hours. Woot!
