Sally posted her fall schedule, and I realized I was starting to forget what classes I'd picked, so here's my schedule:
Tuesday, 8:30a-11:30a: Senior Poetry Workshop.
Wednesday, 12:30p-3:30p: Practical Poetics: A Workshop Seminar (winter only)
Thursday 8:30a-11:30a: Genres of Professional Writing (probably dropping this).
Thursday 2:30p-5:30p: Works & Days.
Long days in cinder-blocky buildings. All of my classes are extremely cinder-blocky this year. That's okay. Last year the only non-cinder-blocky class was my poetry workshop, so I'm pretty used to the blockiness.
Posted by Katherine at 12:01 PM
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I was sitting here all bored and stuff, trying to figure out when I should go to bed so that I can get my clock back on track, when I realized I haven't visited explodingdog.com in a realllllly long time. The new images are just beautiful. I've always thought these were absolutely stunning. Never was able to classify them as a comic or anything really. I love explodingdog.
You know what's funny? O'Malley is basically removing himself from the fandom by selling off a bunch of stuff he got for free, and making a huge bundle by doing so. No one else seems to think this is wrong.
Posted by Katherine at 1:24 AM
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Thursday, July 24
OH MY GOD! Jill just did the coolest thing EVER. She called me and held her phone up to a Dan Bern concert. Cell phones do suck, but that was the coolest thing anyone's ever done for me!! Jill, I lurve you!
Posted by Katherine at 7:21 PM
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WAAAAAAAAANT. That is all.
Posted by Katherine at 5:10 PM
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Huh. I don't remember quoting Magnolia, ever. In fact, I haven't seen Magnolia since late July 2000. But... what a wonderful, wonderful (misspelled) quote. I'm tempted to... um... design something based on it. But I won't.
Posted by Katherine at 4:14 AM
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Wednesday, July 23
Oh dear God in heaven... This is possibly the only reason I could possibly have to wish I lived in Texas.
Posted by Katherine at 10:53 PM
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Bought Prom Night 2 on DVD last night for 8 dollars. 8 dollars! How can you go wrong? I watched it today. It's everything you want from cheesy horror. I'm having dreams of an extensive and obscure collection. Y'all know what to get me for presents :)
Today has been a day of doing nothing and angsting about it. I'm still not dressed. I have to go to work in 3 hours for inventory. Yuck. Must remember to bring lots of CDs and maybe my Discman in case not everyone wants to listen to my crazy "folk" music.
Posted by Katherine at 8:10 PM
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Allow me to a be a film geek for a moment. This may be long. I just finished watching 28 Days Later. The people who compared it to Dawn of the Dead weren't kidding.
(Aside: Someone over at IMDB had a lot of fun with the Genre selection on this one. Just so you know, it's definitely a horror movie. Only sick fucks like me can pretend that the answers to all of the world's questions lie in Dawn of the Dead.)
As we all know, the answers to all of the world's questions lie in Dawn of the Dead. So... why make 28 Days Later? Indeed, why remake Dawn of the Dead itself? Well, here's the answer to the first question, anyway. 28 Days Later... why does it exist? Well, to answer that, you have to consider not just Dawn of the Dead, but also Day of the Dead.
Now, Day of the Dead was a piece of shit. Shiat, to be more precise. It was boring, mysogynistic (but not in that "oh, what an interesting comment on society" kind of way), fragmented, hard to follow, cold, and ultimately hollow. Its only memorable moment happens when a pet zombie turns on its master and shoots him, proving that he can indeed remember mundane tasks from his former life as an army sergeant. Big deal. Whatever. You cheer because the guy died. It's the only touching moment in the movie (much like the moment in Jurassic Park II when the mom raptor lets the kid raptors kill the dude... crappy movie, 1 good scene).
Anyway, Dawn of the Dead is the middle part of a story. And although I really do think it stands alone as a terrific piece of horror filmmaking, most people were probably disappointed by the fact that we're left in the dark at the end. So seven years later Romero makes the piece of shit known as Day of the Dead, presumably to shut these whiny "So what happened next?" fucks the hell up. The problem is, the ideas behind Day of the Dead weren't that terrible. They weren't that *interesting*, but they were... well... likely. The movie portrays human survival the way it probably would happen... messy, violent, male, and very, very depressing.
Danny Boyle's film 28 Days Later takes the very same ideas (with a few slight tweaks), but creates a faster, more exciting film by squeezing basically the entire (not so much copied, as borrowed) plot of Dawn and Day into one two hour movie. That said, the similarities are astounding. Obviously this is some sort of extreme hommage. We've got scenes of store looting set to happy music. We've got a guy killing an infected kid in a gas station. We've got a good guy transforming into a bad guy before our very eyes and begging his friends to kill him before he infects them. We've got a renegade army of manly men (which still manages to lose my interest in this film). We've got manly men looking to rape beautiful women in order to perpetuate the human race. We've got a pet zombie, or a pet infected, as they're called in this movie.
I'm not sure if I'd recommend it. It's probably the best zombie movie made in the last 20 or so years... but Dawn of the Dead is still just so much better.
So, to recap: Dawn is just far and away the best ever. Day sucks major balls. This is somewhere in the middle. My suggestion for viewing? Watch Dawn of the Dead. Then skip Day and just watch 28 Days Later. It's not exactly the same, but you'll get a good idea of what happens in the more long-term regarding zombie invasion, and you'll have the added bonus of actually being entertained, as opposed to bored out of your mind looking at grey concrete walls which is all Day of the Dead's sets were: just grey concrete walls and one zombie-holding-pen-type-thing which could have been a chain-link fence lit with a single light for all I know. That. Movie. Is. So. Dreary. *falls asleep*
I'm sorry. You don't care. I won't keep you any longer.
Posted by Katherine at 3:34 AM
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Thanks to some marvellous resources that explained to me just what it is about Netscape that makes it so stupid, I have made the redesign compatible with both browsers. So, just in time for all of the people I know to go to FRFF and not care about my lame-ass site design, I am locked in a redesign. Woo. Go, me.
Posted by Katherine at 12:29 AM
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Tuesday, July 22
Seriously, guys. If no one answers my question about this redesign (link) I might just change this website to a giant mess of frames, blink tags and embedded midis.
Posted by Katherine at 4:34 PM
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Remember, I have a test page here that's waiting for you.
Please tell me what you think.
Posted by Katherine at 1:07 PM
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Hm. I just checked. Only 8% of people who view my website use Netscape. Also, I'm probably 91% of the people who view my website. Me, and everyone who wants to know about Aaron Carter's underwear.
Posted by Katherine at 3:23 AM
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This is a link to a test page.
Tell me what you think of the test page. Yes, I want to redesign. I keep trying to make more compact websites with less stuff on them. I keep ending up with more complicated stuff. Anyway. I know it's not perfect. It doesn't work in Netscape at all. Help me out. Do you like the idea? Does anyone even use Netscape who would be bothered by this or would no one have noticed had I not pointed it out? If the website was just for me I'd go ahead and upload this baby today, because it looks great on my screen, but it would be nice to know that I'm not alienating people.
:)
Day off tomorrow! I'll be online A LOT. Expect a redesign by the end of the day. If not this exact design, then something, anyway.
Posted by Katherine at 3:21 AM
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Monday, July 21
Adam wants to know what Red vs. Blue is. My first instinct is that I can't explain it. I want to tell you to just follow all my links. :D
OK, maybe I can explain it... It's a 26-episode serial made entirely from screen shots of Halo: Combat Extreme (the XBox game). It's like watching M*A*S*H*. On crack. And computer-generated. We're on Episode 13 right now (it was posted today) and the public archive is temporarily down in order to make more bandwidth for the high demand on the new Episode. But when you have a chance (say, tomorrow or Tuesday) and if you have the space, I definitely recommend downloading the first 12 episodes. And the trailer and the PSA, which are also quite entertaining.
Posted by Katherine at 2:10 AM
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Sunday, July 20
Please make everyone else lose interest so that my download of the new RvB episode goes faster? Thank you.
So, yes. Pain, much pain. On Wednesday when I was out with Fiona finding an indie tape, I big my tongue pretty far back, on the side. It hurt at the time, but immediately started healing and I didn't feel it very much after that. Until yesterday. Now I've got some weird sore throat-fever-bleargh thing and I guess the infection is hurting the wound in my tongue because I can hardly talk. The entire left side of my tongue is swollen and very painful. ARrrrr.
But, I'm happy, because I went to the new corner store for salt to rinse my mouth out with, and it's really, really nice there, and so's the guy that runs it (although I was probably completely zombie-like... having just woken up unable to speak properly) and this big huge box of salt was like $0.99, which is a *normal* price, not an incredibly expensive corner store price. Now I'm sad because I'm thinking they won't be around for very long. But what a nice store.
*sigh*
Oooh! 3% to go on Episode 13 of Red vs. Blue (this is a link, AJ)! Off to watch Tex and Church's relationship be recounted from the great beyond! :D
Posted by Katherine at 3:13 PM
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