Out of boredom and curiosity, I decided to look at the coding for my favorite internet webcomic The Oatmeal, and was pleasantly surprised!

Kewl!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!

As you fill yourself with delicious food today, here is some food for thought, a wonderful video of Stephen Fry explaining the difference between American vs. British sense of humor!

Invisible monsters on weekend update!

This post takes the idea from this amazing article by Ben Branstetter and applies it to one of my favorite contemporary authors. Hope you enjoy!


Seth Myers: It’s Halloween, and families all across the country are planning visits to the city. Here with some tips on the best locales is Weekend Update’s City Correspondent, Chuck Palahniuk!

Chuck Palahniuk: This is your life and it’s ending one moment at a time.

SM: Ohh… Okkkay. So do you have any advice for things to do for people flocking to the city for Halloween?

CP: The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.

SM: …Alright. Do you have any more concrete suggestions of things for people to do? Like things that should not be missed in the city for Halloween?

CP: No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice.

SM: Uh, so what are maybe some concrete ideas for things tourists can do here in the city if they aren't sure what they want?

CP: If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.

SM: Chuck Palahniuk everyone!

This.

Barack Obama "I'm sexy and I know it" Mashup

"Ted Talk" Write-up

The number for the learning co-op (to make appointments for the writing center) is

(802)-656-4075!

Quick recap:

REASONS TO GO TO WRITING CENTER:

1. Free Candy
2. Get ideas/inspiration
3. Get praise on your paper
4. Get fresh insight on your paper
5. Improve your paper
6. Prattle on about writing with someone else who loves writing
7. Give Gabbie something to read!

REASONS TO WORK FOR THE WRITING CENTER:

1. Free Candy
2. The class is awesome
3. Sue is awesome
4. Learn about writing in general
5. Improve your own writing style/process
6. Tutoring is an enriching experience
7. Read AMAZING papers!

A Write-Up of my "Ted Talk"

I’ve had a smartphone for four years now, and last week, I lost it. I was phoneless for five days while I waited for my replacement. And during those five days I realized that I’m terrible at talking to people. I’m terrible at saying, “hey what are you doing tonight?” I’m terrible at asking, “wanna hang out this weekend?” I’m terrible at coming home at the end of the day and telling my roommates about how my day was. I’m so used to having something happen to me, texting about it, and then forgetting it. I never give an event time to process, I never think about it, let it develop into a story, let it develop into anything: maybe self-reflection, maybe realizations about the world, maybe ideas. I’m not used to retaining my observations.

It’s very hard to reflect in the digital world. Everything happens so fast.

Today, you can express happiness with a colon and a parenthesis. 

:) 

When you see that do you know just how happy I am? Do you know anything about me? 

What if I make it a D.

:D

Does that help? The answer should be no. That is punctuation. You can’t know the intricacies of a human person through punctuation.

I’ve been noticing a trend lately, of people posting statuses on facebook, and, either as their whole status, or to augment their status, they also post a link to a meme, a gif, a video, a song, a comic, in order to better express themselves. I am no enemy to sharing art. If I find something on the internet I like, you better believe I share it. What bothers me is when people start to replace their own expression with other people’s. It bothers me when people spend a long time searching the internet for something that will help them say what they want to, rather than creating it themselves.

So the reason I’m giving this presentation is to convince you to create. In this class we’ve been creating so much: redesigns, mashups, nameplate pages, web comics, blog posts, product sites, you name it. And all I want to say is keep doing that. Because through creating you find yourself. I’m an actor, a filmmaker, and a writer, and I am very happy to say that I know who I am. I didn’t before I began creating. I was diagnosed with OCD in seventh grade and for about a year it consumed me. I was not Shannon Ward I was OCD. But then I began writing I began playing saxophone I began singing and acting and I found myself. I discovered my identity, and my identity is stronger than OCD. I overcame my mental illness through creating.

But in order to create in this digital age we have to resist the easy way outs. Resist letting your observations melt away with your texts. Resist only expressing yourself through punctuation. Resist rushing everywhere and not giving yourself time to think. Resist using other people’s words more than your own.

  

It doesn’t have to be art: you can create business, you can create political platforms, you can create organizations, you can create movements.

You can create anything, just make sure that you do. 

delayed post; "the room" took longer to digest then I thought

I apologize, dear readers, for this post being a week later then I promised. I could give some legitimate reasons about how busy this past week has been for me, but I that would be a misleading as to the real reason of why it's late. The true reason is a fact that has made me question my faith in myself.

This movie was just that bad.

Watching The Room, written, directed, and starring Tommy Wiseau, is like watching a movie made by aliens who are able to adopt a humanoid physical form and who base their impressions of humans of shitty soap operas. It's actually shocking that enough people working in the film industry were desperate enough to attach themselves to this project. Wiseau, claims that the film was intended as "a black comedy"; a claim that is universally seen as a way to justify why audiences laughed through initial screenings. Certain cast members and crew members have publicly confirmed this suspicion.

This film is a hot mess. It has more scattered plot lines than Wiseau has luscious locks on his head. In the first half hour alone there are three lengthy and very very awkward sex scenes all set to horrific 80's music. Scenes with dialogue seem as though they are taken from multiple conversations and were then spliced together with complete disregard for any coherency. An outlandish percentage of lines were dubbed over and sounded like they were added in by a seventh grader working on a video project for class.

There are many scenes that seem to have no reason to be included. Why do we need to watch Wiseau's character Johnny buy flowers and make brief inane small talk with the florist for his adulterous fiance Lisa? What does it contribute to include Lisa ordering pizza?

These anomalies are not limited to banal moments either. Scenes of heavy emotional weight are featured and then never mentioned again. For example, early in the movie Lisa's mother, Claudette, tells her daughter she has breast cancer, which she inexplicably brushes off with indifference. This is never again mentioned.

The question you may be asking is why this film, released in 2003, has not completely disappeared? Why do people watch it?

It's because this is not just that this movie is bad, it's that it is soooooooo bad that it's terribleness has given it a staying power it would not have achieved if it was just another mediocre, or perhaps even thoughtful, drama. Nearly two decades later, viewers continue to marvel that a movie this bad could actually be made.

The film has attracted a cult fan-base both in the United States and internationally. It is still screened in certain theaters in the US, the UK, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand. A la Rocky Horror Picture Show, fans dress up as characters, and yell out certain prime lines. It has gained the respect of certain celebrities who publicly and privately endorse it, including David Cross, Will Arnett, and Paul Rudd. Wiseau, far from feeling ashamed, relishes any popularity the film achieved and encourages his cult of fans by setting up screenings himself.

I think that there is an important lesson here about embracing unintended responses to our creative work. Perhaps Wiseau is more wise then he is a good filmmaker, and recognizes that had this film been any better, it would not have the same hold on audiences! So the moral of this movie is clear even if everything else about it is indecipherable. If you're going to do something poorly, do it soooo exaggeratedly poorly that it is so awful as to be awesome.

for those of you who love ....

....horribly made movies that become cult classics:

THE ROOM

I'm getting my hands on a copy and will post a review by the end of the weekend. Stay tuned.