tuesday, march 30, 2004
i drown my beliefs
my little sister got a livejournal. now, both of my sisters have livejournals. wow. it’s a good example of the wide-ranging appeal of those things. well, wide-ranging among teenage girls. not quite wide enough to include me, though.
sarah, aka sarajini. she’s 21, in college. since she’s in spain for a semester, without lots of internet access, she doesn’t update much. when she does, she usually describes events.
lizzy, aka melodyofdamaged. she’s 13, in middle school. lots of posts are music lyrics. emotion. etc.
she uses livejournal because “it’s the easiest un-stupidest thing. what else am i going to use? xanga sucks, geocities too. nobody uses blogger.”
for both of them, livejournal is a very social thing. their friends all had livejournals, so they got them too. they’re also naturally social, extroverted people (more so than i am).
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wednesday, march 24, 2004
complaints and ideas and teller headlines
twelve hours of school a day is draining me. regular high school, plus:
computer class. 3:35 - 5:40 pm. the teacher is old and burnt-out on computers. i don’t think she’s kept up with computer-stuff for ten years. she’s teaching maddeningly elemental things. i save my sanity by ssh’ing home and irc’ing the whole time. today, it was two hours of busy-work. blood blood blood. i wonder if i will fail this class out of boredom again.
introductory psychology. 5:45 - 7:30 pm. the teacher is middle-aged, far-leftist, and relatively interesting. he’s quite into freud. i believe that each of my classmates has more life experience than he does. we’re learning about perception and personality. good stuff like that.
but i have little energy left to write about the things that are wandering around in my mind, crashing into themselves and falling over and making my dreams full of frenchmen in archaic high dress outside my house, ringing the doorbell.
similarities between the satanic verses (rushdie) and the master and margarita (bulgakov). just satanic verses in general, awesome book. i love the language, the crazy stories, the religion. same things i love in both books. sarah told me about how rushdie was inspired by bulgakov…need to read more. social networks in russian lit, master and margarita in particular, so cool.
safari’s cool download icon thing; that golden prospects play (go see it); the power of ambition; photo essay on the shrine auditorium; the magnetic fields and radio play.
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sugar is on my desktop
my camera was officially broken, and now it’s officially lost. there are so many interesting things to take pictures of at community college: urban grit, weirdo architecture, students, concrete, trees, the coffee factory next door.
there’s the electrician-dude who drops off his daughter at my school every day. he drives a yellow truck with “baptist electric; your friendly neighborhood electrician; license #[something]; small jobs welcomed” on it in slightly worn, perfectly hand-lettered capital letters.
there’s the jewish school with its name on the side of the building in tastefully serious black painted letters. it has no windows. i want to know what is inside.
i saw a red truck a few days ago, evidently a dairy truck, with its cow mascot, “drifty”, painted on the door in yellow and white. drifter’s milk. it was a happy-looking cow.
i probably won’t be getting a new camera anytime soon. oh well. perhaps i’ll look for some old film in the dusty recesses of my house and take real pictures. i had a lot of fun once with three rolls of somebody’s extra black-and-white film and a rainy weekend. there’s always the little disposable camera in my desk drawer (16 exposures left).
i’m enjoying my imac less and less. it is terribly laggy. i miss the files i have stored in my currently-inaccessible ibook. i miss being able to take the thing upstairs and sit on my bed and design/write/think, free from internet distractions. also, i don’t like how it looks: the little plastic stripes and general bulginess. i dislike the whole embedded-monitor thing. i broke the cd drive. it ate bringing it all back home in the process.
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monday, march 15, 2004
it was terrifically cool
my posts from mediamorphosis, in case you’re curious.
- capturing ideas
- some links
- earlier session
- capturing ideas again
- editorials pov radio magazines paper connectivity writing
- young reporters
- continuing the discussion, i guess
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sunday, march 14, 2004
steve, wonda, and cateye
the world’s two worst variable names. eeeverybody has a story about variable names.
i had some brief programming learning experience at computer camp. c++. weee.
we learned with partners. mine happened to be the only other mac person, and one of two other vegetarians at this camp. anyway, he had some strange ideas about naming variables.
in one of our little programs, there were “steve”, “wonda”, and “cateye”.
when he decided to name something “steve”, i protested, but i let it go. just one variable, right?
later, “wonda” popped up. i corrected it to “wanda”, but he said he liked it better as “wonda”. there were better things to concern myself with.
cateye was picked when we were planning out a different program on paper. i think we used O for a variable name, but then we figured out that we needed two different Os. i drew a vertical slash and there was…cateye. he thought that was really cool.
yeah, we had fun.
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sunday, march 07, 2004
mine isn’t on sunset boulevard, though
The return of breathtaking sunsets is welcomed back by this kid just off Sunset Blvd.
one of the blogging.la guys took a pretty picture of one of the recent sunsets around here.
this one’s mine from a couple weeks ago. that’s the bell tower at usc.
according to something i heard a long time ago, the tower didn’t always have that globe thing on top of it. the tower was the tallest thing on campus until the education building was built next door. to regain its tallest-building status, they added the globe.
i distinctly remember wondering, when i was about seven, how they stuck it up there.
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saturday, march 06, 2004
mediamorphosis
susan mernit has invited me to be part of the “blog squad” (as she put it) at mediamorphosis, this media/technology/society conference, on wednesday-friday. it will be incredibly cool.
susan posts more coherently about it.
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hey, pendejo!
glossary of a small public high school in los angeles.
- county
- the school-issued food. derogatory.
- damn joe
- general exclamation. an in-joke designed to piss off teachers (esp. the spanish teacher).
- eighth period
- mostly whitespace.
- morning announcements
- lengthy speeches delivered by the principal. provokes groans from students and teachers alike.
- nutrition
- the mid-morning 20-minute break.
- off
- to the nearby food places for lunch. as in, “you gonna go off?”
- journalism
- news discussion sharply slanted left, in the form of a class.
- service
- a free period in which one is assigned to help a teacher grade/file/sweep/etc.
- time in the cia
- usually a sardonic reference to one of the math teacher’s many embellished anecdotes.
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thursday, march 04, 2004
sat sat sat
on the way to volunteering at kusc, i played around with my camera and captured some little movies. i planned to add music to them later. (i took pictures on the way home.)
i did several of these music/movie things a while ago - zap, paz, smiley - but i used copyrighted music for each one. this time, i decided to use a piece of creative-commons-licensed music that i was actually allowed to use.
clyde federal’s “staten island ferry”, from the copy me remix me cd, fit one of the little movies in this coincidental, eerie way i was looking for. the middle where the song changes is especially neat.
my finished music-movie is a bit long (two and a half minutes) and gets boring in parts. the song is slow/choral at the beginning but turns faster/rockish. the movie is of driving through downtown los angeles at twilight. i made it with imovie 3.
blah blah etc. here it is: sat.mov (3.85 mb). licensed under the attribution-noncommercial-share alike creative commons license.
the moving image contest winners over at creative commons are pretty awesome.
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they were very formal-looking
from a daily trojan article:
i walked past those people on my way home from school yesterday. they were inconsiderately blocking the sidewalk. i had to walk in the street.
i could hear the protestors from my window at home. it was a nice warm day and i had to close it because they were interfering with my music-listening.
politics is like, so annoying.
i mean…it was cool how the news directly intersected with my experiences.
the la times article doesn’t mention the supporters/protestors outside. i guess that’s more of a what-bush-said article, though, for a different audience.
i used to dislike my journalism class, but it’s a lot better this semester. we’re using the textbook and i find myself actually interested in what i’m learning. i like the idea of going in-depth on things that happen, of harvesting events and people for recorded information and insight. i like how can i read some article and imagine the process that created it.
at my school, so many things flash by without people thinking about them. it was the same with my old school - that’s why i tried to start a little underground newspaper thing. of course, it didn’t work, and it would work equally at this school.
there, it failed because everyone else was too busy being good, hard-working, complacent citizens of a great school. it already had a bland, awful newspaper; no room for dissatisfied publications. at this school, it would fail because everyone else is too busy socializing and doing as little work as possible.
and i don’t want to do it by myself, so it will stay scribbled in corners of my binder and the web.
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tuesday, march 02, 2004
small signs
this collection inspired by sky hi: small signs.
when you download and install the latest version of acquisition, this is in the background of that mounted-volume folder thing.
an advertisement.
from tomcosgrave.
in the preferences of firefox.
