Essays, Not Rants! 316: Star Wars As An Anti-Capitalist Discourse Oh you thought I was kidding? Here we go. Star Wars takes a lot of cues from Westerns. Characters like Han Solo and places like Mos Eisley’s cantina make it pretty obvious. But it’s also apparent in where it takes place: the fringes of society. Be they remote planets desert or frozen, these stories take place away from economic and cultural hubs. Which, given that we follow the good guys, makes sense: implicit in the Star Wars
Essays, Not Rants! 032: Storytelling and Parables Remember: This post is about storytelling, not the veracity of any religion Doesn’t matter what you think of Jesus, gotta admit the guy could tell a story. Or the people who recorded them spiffed them up. Either way, Jesus often communicated (religious and otherwise) points through stories in ways that were not heavy handed yet still managed to tell a good story. See, Jesus knew his audience. He knew that some people were inherently opposed t
Warning: Grown Up Rant/Tirade/Ramble Approaching I've been keeping a budget via spreadsheet for the last couple years. A basic one where I've money set aside for various categories (food, transport, entertainment, misc, alcohol, bills), note down how much I get in paychecks and put in savings (then categorize what I'm saving up for). Now, I'm in the market for a good app to do it for me, because I can be lazy with this budget thing. And there are a lot of great budget apps out there, but the
Essays, Not Rants! 208: Of Zootopia Stories are often a reflection of reality. Star Wars was a reflection of the existential threat posed by the Cold War. The Hurt Locker was, quite obviously, a discussion of the human cost of war. The Revenant reflected Leonardo DiCaprio’s all-consuming want for an Oscar. And then there’s Zootopia. Which holds an unrelenting, condemning-yet-hopeful mirror to modern America. Which you wouldn’t exactly expect, because it’s a major Disney movie. Nonetheless,
Essays, Not Rants! 354: Ahistoricism I went into The Favourite like I do with many movies: knowing very little and having seen maybe a part of a trailer. I knew it was a period piece (duh) and there was a Queen in it (also: duh). Anyway, after watching the movie I read up on it on Wikipedia and found, to my immense surprise, that it was somewhat based on actual historical fact. It makes sense enough that I thought this movie was fabricated wholesale: there’s a Queen in power, nobles are vying
Another RPG session tomorrow! Unlike last time, this time I've got a detailed plan moving forward (I'm currently writing Page 4). The party finds an abandoned Old Republic military ship in the middle of nowhere. There's gonna be battle droids, droidekas, and a fight on foot against a vulture droid all while taking part in an old fashioned dungeon crawl through an Acclamator. Which, it turns out, due to a hyperdrive malfunction kinda time travelled! So Clone Troopers! Who were recently give
Essays, Not Rants! 120: It’s All In The Pacing Time is relative. Some scientist said that at some point. For my purposes, it means that one minute can seem longer or shorter depending on the context. That minute in traffic is far longer than that minute playing video games before work that got you stuck in traffic in the first place. Naturally, this applies to stuff like movies too. A two hour movie can feel incredibly long or it can flash by in an instant. Why? Pacing. Pacing is important.
Essays, Not Rants! 113: A Real Swell Guy Let’s talk about Chuck, because it’s a fantastic show that you should watch if you haven’t. And not just ‘cuz Chuck and I are basically the same person, but because it’s a well put together show with a lot of fun stories and great characters. But those characters are a big reason. You’ve got Chuck and his two spy handlers and their dynamic and interactions, but they’re not who this is post is about. This post it about one of the supporting character
Essays, Not Rants! 047: The Unnecessity of Dialogue I’m in a filmmaking class here at NYU that focuses on visual storytelling. That is, no dialogue. At first that sounds like quite a challenge since it’s the script and speaking that tend to carry a story. So that got me thinking: what’re the benefits when we don’t have dialogue? Anyone remember the video game LEGO Star Wars that came out several years ago? It’s a retelling of (obviously) the Star Wars movies only with LEGO. There’s no dialog
Essays, Not Rants! 209: Fear of the Unknown One of the wonderful agonies I found when I started watching Lost years and years ago was the show’s tendency to show a character’s reaction to a revelation/object/monster rather than the revelation/object/monster itself. It became characteristic of the show, and something emblematic of Abrams’ style. Granted, J.J. Abrams had little involvement with Lost past the pilot, but he did work with Damon Lidelof to lay much of the show’s groundwork. Inclu
Essays, Not Rants! 097: Gamey Education For some reason, my high school World History teacher saw it fit to skip over the entire Ottoman and Byzantine Empires. This thus left me with the general feel that those empires were a completely disposable era of history. That’s high school in South Carolina for you. This all changed when I begun playing Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. The basic conceit of the Assassin’s Creed series is built around genetic memories; that is the idea that your DNA
...doesn't mean i get to be Tony Stark. Or does it? Some other stuff I need to finish up too (see below post). Hurry up May 4th! (Also, details on the metal (bar) thing can be found in older blog posts, if you're so inclined. It's probably named something to the effect of TMD VS Heart Disease.)
Essays, Not Rants! 366: Thursday Nights I don’t know if you heard, but getting tickets for Avengers: Endgame was quite the trip. AMC Theaters’ website full-on crashed and they shut down their (also overloaded app). Other websites, like Fandango were showing errors if you tried to access showings for an AMC. As someone with that fancy-shmancy A-List subscription, this was a real pain (I ended up going to the theater in person to buy my tickets). This isn’t the first time there’s been a mad da
So Amazon has this thing where groups can crowdsource menial tasks to folks for menial pay. As a broke college kid (who desperately wants to be able to buy books, movie tickets, and Iron Man 3 Legos), it is my duty to perform these tasks. ...while watching TV in another window, of course.
Last night, the power went out. Shortly thereafter the Freedom Tower went out. In our dorm we have no power, no water, but we do have wifi. Planning on venturing to other NYU buildings today for charging and food. And exploration. Because this is the closest I'm coming to a post-apocalyptic scenario with an internet connection.
"Hey, wanna take over one of the study rooms and get some homework done?" "Yeah, sounds good." "Man, I've got Astronomy, Creative Writing, and a mess of reading to get through." "Try French philosophy." "Touche. Alright: Reading time!" One Hour Later... Because that cartoon is so much cooler than analytical papers. And probably more intelligent.
