gothicprep

[gothicprep]

cruel irony that the united states revolutionized railroads back in the 19th century and now we’re like objectively the worst at trains.

[gothicprep]

I mean broadly speaking it seems to be at more expensive schools (not saying that to discredit them). Obvs the private ones like NYU or Emory, but also some state ones like IU or UT Austin. The college I went to is mid cost and just outside a major city with like ~40K students and there’s been nothing going on.

my university has been pretty chill too. but its tuition is definitely on the “I’d be in debt for the rest of my life without the aid and scholarships” side. >10k undergraduates, lot of int’l students among them.

but I do think it matters that it’s advertised to potential students through the framework of “are you a tech nut? do you want to be an engineer or scientist? well, we have incredible equipment here that you will be scared to touch in the case you’ll break it. if you want to go to graduate school for a specific area of physics or chemistry, we have majors where the material you’d be covering otherwise is explored through the lens you’ll be using later. if you perform well enough academically, you may qualify to assist in original research as an undergraduate.”

you sort of end up in an environment where you get a lot of wealthy and incredibly passionate people, but also, nothing ever happens.

#there’s been a months long drama here where like. okay. #there are cork boards all over the place for people to hang things on for whatever reason. promoting something a club is hosting #submission requests for the campus literary magazine. whatever thing the greek life people are doing this week. #casting calls for a boyfriend free girl. provided it’s not obscene you can hang up whatever you want. #but instead of putting these things on the cork boards there are some dipshits who tape their stuff to a wall #and when the custodial staff removes them it rips paint off the wall depending on how old the building is #and we all get a campus-wide email that says ‘whoever is doing this… stop.’ #the first time this happened it came with a request to put your name and .edu address on your posters but they gave up on that #I bring it up to say that the climate here is tepid as shit

[gothicprep]

my best guess is that it has a lot to do with how the institution markets itself to prospective students, and the campus culture is reflected through this.

even if you disregard protests altogether, there’s that whole genre of “lol these nyu kids freaked out about a microaggression” journalism and it’s always about the same schools. and when you poke around the school’s website, you notice that nyu’s outreach is framed in a way that promises a good experience for social justice minded students.

I’m sure it’s a lot of other things but it’s a potential lead.

do you ever wonder why some universities have high profile protests at them, while with others, it’s mostly just a dozen-ish student activists setting up in the quad and handing out brochures a la “here’s why this cause matters and here’s what you can do to help”?

the size of the student body obviously matters, but there’s no way that��s the only thing happening.

[gothicprep]

do you ever wonder why some universities have high profile protests at them, while with others, it’s mostly just a dozen-ish student activists setting up in the quad and handing out brochures a la “here’s why this cause matters and here’s what you can do to help”?

the size of the student body obviously matters, but there’s no way that’s the only thing happening.

[gothicprep]

alright, I’m giving you all some homework. this blog gives homework now. watch mike cheslik’s “hundreds of beavers”. you can rent it on prime. it has a very, very limited theatrical release because they couldn’t land a distributor, but if you can swing it, see it in a theater.

maybe april is too early to make a judgment call, but this is truly something special.

it’s a black and white silent slapstick comedy. the budget was something like $150k, and it really uses those constraints to its advantage. I’ve seen it described as “live action looney tunes” but that’s doing it a massive disservice. even the trailer does a bad job of communicating how brilliant this is. it’s much closer to chaplin and keaton at their best. even though movies without dialogue are an instant “no” for a lot of people, this is incredibly well-paced, both in terms of plot and comedic timing, which makes it really easy to stay engaged with. it’s the perfect length, and the final act is just masterful.

the one thing I will say is that this is a movie that’s meant to be watched with a group of people. watching it with just my wife was fun, but i should have had the foresight to invite a few other people over. “well i don’t have any friends” okay, fine. still watch it with your dog or something. it’s one of those movies that makes you remember why you love movies in the first place.

#I love watching movies with my friends

[gothicprep]

i love how piers morgan’s debate show is just daytime television but the guests aren’t in the same room to physically fight each other. if jerry springer doesn’t exist, society must invent him again.

#like why would you invite crackhead barney on? #her entire shtick is being a public nuisance. #‘Well. It’s a shame crackhead barney didn’t want to have a civil discussion.’

[gothicprep]

imo the kardashian family should buy tiktok. they understand social media arguably better than anyone else.

“what will happen to the politics on the app, though?” well, with a transgender republican lesbian who doesn’t support gay marriage on the board of trustees, anything could happen. pull out a chair, grab a snack, crack a beer open, and enjoy the fireworks.

[gothicprep]

come to think about it, that early 00s era of cartoon network (billy and mandy, courage, ed edd n eddy) is something that mostly gets left out of the conversation entirely when people talk about nostalgia. possibly because nickelodeon really had a monopoly on kids’ entertainment at the time. and i remember a lot of kids i knew in elementary school who would tell me “my mom says I’m not allowed to watch ed edd n eddy”. i couldn’t tell you, though.

but if I revisited those cn shows now, I’d probably laugh at the jokes in them much harder than I would at 2003 era spongebob or fairly odd parents. you get the sense that the former creative environment gave the people more room to be sort of abstract and weird, which produced better comedy. the latter… um…

#invader zim probably should have been on cn but that’s an entirely different discussion

[gothicprep]

yknow, something that surprises me is how the grim adventures of billy and mandy never really got the cultural re-appraisal it probably deserves in cartoon circles. so many of the scenes in it are comedy dynamite.

there’s one scene where grim walks in on billy staring at a wall. he asks him what he’s doing. he says “watching paint dry.” there’s a few second long pause, and then he points at the wall and says “this is the best part”.

it’s the sort of exaggerated, goofy, slapstick-y writing that’s very much at home in animation.

[gothicprep]

I saw a snippet of a poll today about “most regretted majors” and someone commenting “how could anyone regret studying math or physics? it’s like regretting climbing a mountain :’(”

i can give you. um. a lot of potential explanations.

the big one is that there isn’t a lot you can do with an undergraduate physics degree. unless you go to grad school and specialize, you’ll wind up in data analytics or something. great recipe right there for feeling like you’ve wasted your effort.

the other one is that even if you do go down the specialization route, the ratio of cost of education to pay is sort of dreary. it really has to be a labor of love, or else.

#Love ending a sentence with ‘or else’ because it sounds ominous #but you probably have a good idea of where I’m going with this

[gothicprep]

anyone know why, on the title screen for the sonic games, he’s wagging his finger at you like you’re a cat who won’t stop hopping on the dinner table? like damn what did I do?

[gothicprep]

since I was talking about alex garland today, I strongly recommend devs, the miniseries he did for fx on hulu. it’s incredibly underrated, partially because it was airing during feb-march 2020 and uh. understandable that people had bigger things on their minds back then. understandable they missed that one. but it’s worth your time either way.

[gothicprep]

also, since I finally watched civil war, i finally have license to roast this insanely dumb polygon article that’s been sitting in my notes app for four months. it’s basically a long, whiny, rage post about the map that was released as promotional material for the film. which was not out yet.

the sub-genre of article that sprung up in the clickbait era that’s basically “here’s a review of something i didn’t watch” really is striking. but you’d think that if you’re paid to write about, you’d have a bit more working literacy about this stuff. if you have a loose familiarity with alex garland’s work, you wouldn’t write an angry rant about how he didn’t make this hypothetical movie that would be incredibly out of character for him to write.

[gothicprep]

i finally got around to seeing alex garland’s civil war and I didnt dislike it, but I was admittedly a bit frustrated with it. I really love alex garland’s work, so maybe I just went in with my expectations in a certain place. it was very visually striking, but the dialogue is kind of… really bad. especially in the first half hour. i think what he was going for with this was invoking cliches about journalists, but I don’t think it worked. but can i forgive it on the basis of how powerful the imagery is? I don’t know. i just know that it hasn’t wormed its way out of my brain.

a lot of the discourse around this movie has been about garland’s decision to keep the contours of the war vague. it’s not that it’s an apolitical movie. it’s very explicitly anti war, but it doesn’t go about this in a way where you cleanly can map it onto us politics. I could go either way on that as an artistic decision. i think garland chose to do this for a few reasons. one of them being that he doesn’t want the movie to be turned into a political football. another probably being that Very Topical media has a tendency to age poorly. I think the main one, though, is that garland is most interested in telling stories about how people behave in a world where rules and expectations we take for granted have been suspended. he plays with this in 28 days later, devs, and annihilation, although these are all very different takes on that idea. that’s his obsession as a writer, and things like policy planks are ultimately secondary to what he’s trying to do.

at the same time, i do think it’s a bit of a dodge. putting california and texas together is intentionally meant to be jarring, but it does sort of beg the “how did that happen” question. it makes it sort of a difficult movie to discuss.

and, as a side note: a24 does this thing I hate in how they advertise the films they distribute, where the trailers are just completely unfaithful representations of the movies they’re for. their horror movie trailers are sooooo bad with this lmfao. they’ll make something like the vvitch look like a conventional horror movie, and then someone will yell in the theater when the credits roll “what the hell was that arthouse piece of garbage! i want my money back!” they did this with civil war as well, so you get an audience of moviegoers who seemed to be expecting Op-Ed: The Movie and are mad they didn’t get that. and imo a24 doesn’t get nearly enough shit for facilitating this.

uh, anyway. i don’t know how i felt about it. and i kind of love that I don’t know how I felt about it. alex garland has a way of getting your into your head in a way that a lot of writer-directors can’t.

#Jesse plemons’ performance in this is also fantastic in this. It’s so casually creepy. #I love watching movies with my friends

[gothicprep]

#the world is fake

[gothicprep]

there’s a type of vocal affectation you hear often in talk radio and podcasting that I think is modeled after ira glass, but I’m not sure. I’m picturing that scene in rise of skywalker with all the snoke clones floating in pickle juice, but with ira glass.

I’ve always sort of mentally classified this as radio thing exclusively, but every so often i meet someone who just speaks like this in person. i will never find it any less jarring. the conversation feels like you’re trying not to wake up a baby.

[gothicprep]

my data is probably the most useless commodity in the world. my search history is just insanely stupid questions rife with typos, like, “do squireels hiss?”