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September 26, 2007

Not Dead Yet...

Mostly.

In any case, as some of you may know, September 25th, 2007, was the official launch date for Bungie's Halo 3 game. If you're not familiar with the Halo franchise, here's a quick primer.

In Halo, you play as this guy, "Master Chief":

Who runs around killing these things:

On these halo-shaped ring worlds, hence the game's name:

And, there's a story in there about an alien invasion, but mostly people just run around and kill each other in multiplayer deathmatch.

What you may not know is that Halo 3 is only the beginning.

Yes, yes, I know. This is, obviously, derivative of Epic 2014/15, but it's still pretty good.

Posted by reparent at 3:44 PM

September 17, 2007

Home Economics

Good friend Sster tagged (rather indiscriminately, I might add) me with the following blog meme. And so, due to the gentle provocations of Attic Man's Baby Mamma, here's a peek into the domestic side of Digital Digressions.

What does a typical day look like at your house?

• 6 - "Wake." If you could call it that. It's more like a terrible pain at the core of your being, a tearing of the very fabric of your soul. Waking up is not a good thing.
• 6-6:30 - I shower while The Spouse eats breakfast.
• 6:30-7:30 - I give the cats their various medications, make lunches for The Spouse and myself, and eat breakfast. The Spouse showers.
• 7:30-8:00 - Depending on whether we have to shave or not, we leave for work earlier or later in this range. We carpool. It's nice.
• 8-5 - The Spouse does HR stuff at the hospital. I don't really know what that entails. I teach, meet with students, work on my own research, advise grad students on their Ph.D. program applications, meet with colleagues for department stuff, fill out department/university paperwork, prep for classes, etc.
• 5-5:30 - The Spouse and I leave work and drive home.
• 5:30-8 - The cats get fivesies. (We have refused their petitions to give them elevensies.) In the upstairs study, The Spouse checks his work e-mail and does work. At the downstairs dining room table, I check my work e-mail and do work.
• 8 - Exhausted and somewhat dejected, we regroup and attempt to find something quick and easy to make for dinner.
• 8:30-9:30 - Exhausted, somewhat dejected, but now with food-like substances in hand, we collapse in front of the TV and watch episodes of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report our DVR has recorded for us.
• 9:30-10 - Exhausted, somewhat dejected, but now fed and mildly entertained, we give the cats their evening meds, feed them dinner, and then collapse into bed. Rinse and repeat.

How do you divide up household responsibilities?

We try to be egalitarian, but it doesn't always work. The Spouse is really very good about litter box patrol duties, and I dispense the morning cat medications and make lunches for us (economical and it allows -- sigh -- us both to continue working at our desks). We try to share grocery shopping, dinner-preparation, and laundry duties. The cleaning happens when it happens. And when one of us can no longer stand the (un)hygenic state of our domicile.

The Spouse is the financial overseer (because numbers give me crying fits), and I'm responsible for all home decor and redecorating (much, much more of which is needed) duties. I'm also the tech support staff. I, for instance, bought The Spouse a spiffy new 22" flat-screen monitor last week and installed it with new desktop art (which I had to Photoshop first to remove some really ugly labels). I'll also be buying The Spouse a new computer some day in the near future. That installation project will take significantly more time. The Spouse, meanwhile, inquires politely about the bizarre PayPal charges that sometimes appear on our online credit card statement when I'm trying to work up new (or ongoing/undying) research projects.

How do your ideals inform your choices? How do your choices fall short of them?

I don't want to be an anarcho-marxist, but The Man makes it so dang hard not to be! We've adopted the "From Each According To His Ability, To Each According To His Need" motto. I need financial help ("Did I pay that?" "No, you didn't. Again.") and The Spouse wasn't born with the gay color-sense genes. He also wasn't born with the patience to deal with tech support. Ideally, we complement each other and present, as a team, almost a fully-functioning human individual.

It's easy, though, to infantalize yourself with a split responsibility schema. Since I don't have to deal with the finances, it's easy for me to just let that part of my brain rot away. I'm not sure, now 11 1/2 years later) whether I even could balance and maintain my own checkbook anymore. And if I'm not around or able to take the time (the long, long time it takes) to deal with tech support, tech issues don't get resolved and The Spouse's life is immeasurably poorer for it.

Do you have a secret weapon? If so, what is it?

I have recently learned that I have a secret weapon: LEMON BARS. I had no idea citrus fruit and sugar had such power. The Spouse and I went to a brunch at some friends' home and my lemon bars were a big hit. Several brunchers announced that they were going to marry the pastry chef who brought those delectable confections into their life. It was kinda creepy. (And boy were they disappointed when they learned it was yours truly.) But in the words of The Spouse: "Mmmm, lemony!" I need to learn how to harness the power of my lemon bars to take over the world.

And yes, I did get that Kelis song stuck in my head...

My lemon bars bring all the boys to the yard,
And they're like, it's better than yours.
Damn right, it's better than yours.
I can teach you, but I'd have to charge.

Sster ends her post with a great clip from HBO's new-ish show The Angelika before La Vie En Rose, which was awesome), and the preview looked AWFUL. What is it with previews that suck? I saw a looooong preview for Knocked Up (before 300) that made me want to rip my eyes out of my head to stop the pain... and I likeKatherine Heigl! Anyway, in honor of La Vie En Rose and Edith Piaf, here's another formidable Conchords clip:

Posted by reparent at 8:07 PM | Comments (3)

September 12, 2007

One... Last... Duty... to Perform...

I am, to put it mildly, too busy to even breathe at this point. It's not a fun sensation. There's a substantive (really!) post coming, but I won't be able to get to it before Friday. So, until then, here's a picture of Havanna, the German Shepard puppy with her adopted big brother/sister Tahoe (darn those modern genderless names!):

And, to help you to forget all about the tension and trauma of the so-called "Petraeus Report," I give you Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industry's awesome flash narrative, "Operation Nukorea." Turn on your speakers, click the link, and be amazed.

Posted by reparent at 6:21 PM | Comments (0)

September 1, 2007

Time to Find a New Life Coach

This evening, The Spouse and I are going to a small dinner party thrown by the former chair of my department. This afternoon's fortune cookie fortune (from last night's take-out):

Today, be civil, but don't go out of your way to be over friendly.

I'm not sure that the fortune cookies are aware that I don't have tenure yet...

Posted by reparent at 5:14 PM | Comments (0)

There is a House in New Orleans...

UPDATE: I've replaced the old viewer client for "The Saints are Coming (Version 2)" with the same clip from YouTube. The quality isn't as high, but The Spouse informs me that the AOL viewer gives Internet Explorer fits.

It's the second anniversary of the debacle and the horror of Hurricane Katrina, and I still don't have much to say about it.

As I mentioned in posts from 2005 (here, here, and here), this isn't a political blog, but as the various waves of feminist theory and praxis have insisted, sometimes the political is personal, and the personal is political. And, for me, it's all tied up in the ways we imagine (literally, how we construct our own "image" of the event, and how the media "images" it for us) what happened then, what is still happening now, and what it means to us.

I haven't been back to New Orleans since the MLA conference of 2001, so I'm not in a very good place to pontificate on the state of the city. But one of my former students came by my office to talk about VOIP and mobile phones (as you do), and mentioned that he'd spent time this summer in Central City rebuilding houses. He said that he was glad that he'd been a part of that effort, but that at the end of the day, he wondered whether it was really worth it after what had happened, and the state that the entire area is still in now.

But this post isn't about the reality on the ground, it's about the image of the reality on the ground, and the possibilities for the past, present, and future of New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and I guess, of the rest of the world.

Back in 2006, U2 and Green Day covered The Skids' song, "The Saints Are Coming" during the reopening of the Louisiana Superdome as part of a charity effort "to bring instruments and music programs back to New Orleans."

The video for the song blends studio footage, concert footage from the Superdome performance, and a reimagining of the aftermath of the storm. The second-half of the video has been further refined and re-edited, and that "second version" is the one I'm linking to below:

Scott brought my attention to "Version 2," and as with the first version, he's absolutely right: "Tell me if you get chills up your spine like I did the first time they sing the chorus lyric 'the saints are coming' and the jets streak across the sky." Every time I watch the video, I do.

It is, I think, "shock and awe" as it should be. It is shocking to see military planes flying in purposeful formation over U.S. airspace. And it is awe-inspiring to think of what the combined might of the U.S. armed forces could have accomplished over here.

I'd like to contrast that with another music video that uses military footage to make a point about what is, was, and what could be -- Linkin Park's "What I've Become Done" (thanks, Coeurlion):

Here's the bulk of the lyrics for the song:

So let mercy come
And wash away
What I’ve done

I'll face myself
To cross out what i’ve become
Erase myself
And let go of what i’ve done

[. . .] For what I’ve done
I start again
And whatever pain may come
Today this ends
I’m forgiving what I’ve done

It seems to me that Linkin Park is attempting to express the sentiment that no matter how terrible one's actions and/or feelings might be, that self-reconciliation is always a possibility, and that no life is beyond hope. The emphasis is on the hyperbolic nature of angry teenager self-understanding. You may feel, Linkin Park tells us, like a neo-nazi, but you can move past this and become a green growing sprout of positivity.

But what comes across because of the strength and terror of the images they've chosen to use, is that all of these atrocities are forgivable. That if an actual klansman forgives himself, that he'll be okay. That the military industrial complex can "cross out what they've become" and move on to a happier time "somewhere that's green."

I know I'm asking too much of Linkin Park here, but when images of above-ground nuclear testing, race riots, police squads moving against protesters, deforestation, the slaughter of elephants for black-market ivory harvests, industrial pollution, third-world starvation and first-world anorexia, Mussolini, the Klan, neo-nazis, the fall of the WTC, injecting heroin, an oil tanker wrecked upon a shore and spilling millions of gallons of oil, Chernobyl, and children with assault rifles (to name just a few) become mere stock footage used to illustrate an excessively emo wallow in self-hatred, then we have a problem.

Posted by reparent at 11:40 AM | Comments (3)