| Reading the Entrails |
[09 Mar 2012|05:54pm] |
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A year or so ago, I read the Hunger Games trilogy, on breathless and emphatic recommendation from a friend. I was thoroughly impressed, and figured I'd blog about it, but at around that time chronic illness and assorted familiar crises collapsed my will to type stuff, along with the odd traumatic experience getting in the way. Also, I wanted to put it on my other blog, but never did figure out a way to spoiler-proof the post. So, in the spirit of Ozymandias, it's now too late for the plan we wanted, so here goes a post, amended for the delay.
( Hips, Lips, Tits, Power. Spoilers, primarily for the first book. Also, THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!Collapse )
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| Something in the way you look tonight |
[30 Mar 2010|12:47am] |
Been a while since anything substantive here. Huh.
Spent tonight drinkin' and playin' Rock Band with forum people. Getting up at 5:30 tomorrow to assist A with getting to class.
Found two Fables trades that have thus far avoided me, and some Kakuro.
Have a cold. Am digging work.
I really wonder if it's possible to write profound things here under the circumstances.
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[22 Feb 2010|03:39am] |
Holy shit, Jake's engaged.
Huh.
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| You shall have the blood you hunger for. |
[08 Feb 2010|12:17am] |
Not dead. In Cambridge. Still waiting on endless work delays. Sad, tired. Building a stronger back.
Beat Shaolin Monks. Most of the way through God of War II. Pondering an all-nighter.
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| Huh. |
[24 Oct 2009|12:22am] |
The details still need to be worked out, but I got a job today.
Huh.
Am tired.
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| Obituary (Anticipated) |
[05 Oct 2009|09:21am] |
With apologies to No Child, a wonderful one-woman show we saw at the one and only ayy arr tee, and possibly to Nip/Tuck, it's said that writing one's obituary is a useful motivational exercise. Or something. When I did that shit as a kid, they just called me morbid. (April 4, 2020, kids. Mark your calendars.) That said, below I have typed out my pre-emptive obituary, an index of the life I hope to lead.
June 1, 2079:
Peter Edward Rauch, acclaimed writer, actor and designer, died yesterday of wounds sustained while single-handedly fighting off several dozen heavily armed Russian gangsters to protect a busload of orphans. Internationally famous for his prose, both fiction and non-fiction, he established the field of theoludology, revolutionizing the field of videogame studies while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the Third Vatican Council. He is survived by his life partner, Alana Lenhart, as well as his wife, Scarlett Johansson, and his other wife, Keira Knightley. Oh, by the way, polygamy is legal in the future. Although, strangely, gay marriage is still banned in forty states.
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| The Dilemmas of Awesome |
[07 Sep 2009|08:16pm] |
"My thesis, and the work I have produced since its completion, propose that videogames are capable of conveying ideas in a way that is unique to the medium, and that these ideas can be moral and philosophical in nature. I argue that a videogame text is a cohesive whole arising from the interactions between the game's story, the game's rules, and the player's ideas about the story and rules. As such, designers can articulate points of view by creating a world in which those points of view are objectively true, and asking the player to compare and contrast the gameworld with their existing knowledge or lived experience."
I am sorely tempted to add, as the next sentence, "This synthesis, from a narrative perspective, is fucking awesome."
Oh, I saw that a few people had added me, so I went and added them back. So, if you're one of those people...hi. Do ya like what I've done with the place?
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| This Date in History |
[17 Aug 2009|11:31pm] |
Slightly under half an hour from now, it will be August 18th. On that date, nearly twenty-eight years ago, Wet Hot American Summer took place.
I urge you all to celebrate.
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| du jour |
[07 Aug 2009|03:48am] |
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Today was surprisingly upbeat, considering every conversation was somehow themed on domestic abuse.
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| Phone Mystery! |
[31 Jul 2009|02:43am] |
I got a call tonight from a number in an area code located in Chicago, IL.
I don't know anybody in Chicago, IL.
Hrm.
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| Hell has frozen over. |
[14 Jul 2009|02:37pm] |
The State is available on DVD today.
I invite you all to dip your balls in it.
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| On testing |
[08 Jul 2009|04:31pm] |
Me: My lack of high school has limited my knowledge of American literature. Also, for some reason, I test extraordinarily badly on reading comprehension. Which is weird, in that my main academic skill is writing. And I've won awards for it and been published and stuff. I think I should be able to pull rank on them at this point.
Kira: you ought to be able to. maybe if you beat them with the publications.
Me: One of them's online. I could beat them with a laptop.
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| Two Days in the Life |
[21 Apr 2009|06:09pm] |
Yesterday: I went to Cambridge Hospital to get my blood checked, and found that it was a holiday. Walking home in the rain, I searched my enfeebled brain for what we were celebrating. It was the tenth anniversary of the Columbine shootings, but I was fairly certain we hadn't made that a holiday yet. It was also Hitler's birthday, but I was almost completely certain Massachusetts wasn't giving people the day off for that. It's also a non-specific stoner holiday of dubious origin, but, even in Cambridge, I think the schools stay open for that. No, it's was Patriot's Day, a day commemorating the general awesomeness of uppity Massachusetts liberals who liked to argue about politics and then accuse each other of being morphine addicts. Also an acknowledged Suicide Prevention Day at MIT, and I'm all for that.
Today: I went out to two video stores in search of Caprica, but did not find it available for rental. (A Blockbuster employee helpfully informed me that they had one copy for rent, and it had been checked out by an employee. An employee, specifically, who would have a very large hold placed on their account expeditiously.) Then I walked back, dumped a portion of my blood with trained professionals, walked back to Central to pick up more pain meds for Alana, and was offered weed by one of the locals. You just can't find that kind of hospitality in the heartland.
Soon, off to do a ridiculous bunch of shopping, unless I get too tired from the sudden burst of exercise + small amount of missing blood and get sleepy, nauseous, or dead long enough for Trader Joe's to close.
It's hard out here for one eternally conflicted about the seeming possibility of moral consistency.
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| OpenOracle |
[03 Apr 2009|06:15pm] |
So, I'm brainstorming thoughts for a hopelessly-late article, and I type in a heading for "Sex and Power." Except I don't get to the period, because a) I'm not using periods in a goddamn skeleton outline, and b) when I hit the "r," the auto-suggest tries suggests I add "lessness" to "power."
Interpret as you will.
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| None of this has happened before, and none of this will happen again. |
[30 Mar 2009|03:09am] |
(Time to dust this thing off. Transcribed from the longhand, written early on 3/21.)
Tonight,
this morning,
from twelve-eleven ante-meridian to two-twenty-two ante-meridian,
inclusive,
I watched the finale, with my darling Alana beside me. She is still sick,
her head and neck and stomach holding their own Helm's Deep against the invisible probably-mononucleosis virus. I remain
Immune,
having paid for that privilege with an epically shitty freshman year that literary scholars believe to be a self-indulgent allegory of the Trojan War.
That was before undergrad, of course. Before the real undergrad.
Before the women,
the real ones,
the ones of flesh and warmth,
of poetry and blood,
of flattering pajamas and clean sheets and a high, sweet smell I will later identify as nervousness.
Nervousness, these invulnerable war goddesses,
daughters of Zeus, mothers of Hera. Nervousness, an ugly word, an adj. crudely welded into the rough shape of a n. by an entity that thinks in an alphabet of sounds and smells.
Rotting meat means life. So does shit. And nothing,
nothing at all,
means death.
Only
nothing.
But Athena thinks with words, Gods damn it, and this nervousness,
the steady elliptical whirr of an unbalanced hard drive,
a machine made of meat that really doesn't work as well when you take it out of the water, is unfit.
It is inelegant, and brutal, and sad. Which is a cowardly way of saying that it is beautiful,
so beautiful,
O Mary,
mother and wife and daughter of God,
Queen of the Centurions,
so beautiful.
Long ago, before the mono and after the mono, it was Buffy,
a show I knew but had not followed to the week, in an apartment in Jupiter, with a girl
--you don't know her, she's not from here--
and another girl, shining in as through a glass,
darkly,
and another girl, who had liked one of my suitemates.
Later, it was Angel,
in a home in DeBary with a comparably healthy Alana, a show that she had neither known nor followed.
Now, it is an apartment in Camberville, messy in my fashion, and the show is one we've both known and followed from one side of Central Square to the other.
Science has shown us a world and a way of thinking that is as sublime as it is miraculous, a world of open exchange and precise notation, in which we may know without seeing. But it is not where we live. We eat and pray and fuck in that world; that much we know. That much can be measured. But we are not in that world when we eat and pray and fuck, but merely of it.
Consciousness comes from contradiction, said Danger as she asserted her transcendence before an unimpressed Emma Frost.
Emma,
four letters,
teacher of killers and corpses,
wet nurse to Weapon XIV,
an evolutionary pop-psychologist's Platonic ideal
--a tall, symmetrical blonde with a big rack, a skinny waist, and the ability to turn her skin into a diamond--
doesn't need to be told.
Vain psychics know only this contradiction. The logos pulls us toward the Law, while the shadow it casts behind us reminds us that the pretty redhead in the short skirt
(who doesn't see your eyes)
has a gravity all her own. And you give words to the unthought, and if you listen, you can hear a little crack in the universe, and you think of Leonard Cohen and you think of G.K. Chesterton, but mostly you think dark, liquid unthought, and your lips curl up to your eyes
--a remnant of an earlier primate's gesticulation of rage--
and a howl rises in your chest.
And so, blind, stupid, alive but dying, Jupiter and Debary are gone. If we were rational, if we were light, we would know better.
But tonight, we are not rational.
Tonight, we are not light.
Tonight, we know something that cannot be.
So say we all.
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