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[Jul. 4th, 2009|03:09 pm] |
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America is the worst country in the world, except for all the others. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 30th, 2009|08:25 pm] |
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CSS (the band, not the formatting language) doesn't take itself seriously at all, awesome. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 30th, 2009|01:00 pm] |
Yesterday I was at my local COSTCO buying a large bag of Purina dog chow for my loyal pet Biscuit, the Wonder Dog, and was in the checkout line when a woman behind me asked if I had a dog.
What did she think I had, an elephant? So since I'm retired and have little to do, on impulse I told her that no, I didn't have a dog, I was starting the Purina Diet again.. I added that I probably shouldn't, because I ended up in the hospital last time, but that I'd lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IVs in both arms.
I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Purina nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry. The food is nutritionally complete so it works well and I was going to try it again. (I have to mention here that practically everyone in line was now enthralled with my story.) Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food poisoned me. I told her no, I stepped off a curb to sniff an Irish Setter's ass and a car hit us both.
I thought the guy behind her was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard.
Costco won't let me shop there anymore. |
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| Random thought on semiotics |
[Jun. 29th, 2009|02:57 pm] |
So, in semiotics there are Sign Systems that determine the meaning of a given sign. In layman's terms, context allows us to interpret a word or a symbol.
And so between languages, different letters mean different things. In different contexts, we can also decipher sentences differently. "Turkey is on a plate" has a completely different meaning in geology class than it does during a Thanksgiving dinner. This kind of a thing leads to puns.
We're known to laugh at things that don't make sense to us. If anyone knows me well, they know that I love YTMND for its completely absurd (to the point of making no sense) humor. When we make a pun, we are not talking in not one but two contexts. To bring forth an example, here's a Michael Jackson joke ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) shulaces88 told me:
"Why did Michael Jackson's ghost haunt K-Mart? Because boys' pants were half-off."
If the joke did not have a child molester, it wouldn't be funny; and if the joke did not have the context of buying clothes for a reduced price, it would not be funny. It's a pun because we're interpreting the same sign in two different systems simultaneously. My conclusion from this is that laughter naturally arises when we have trouble knowing which sign system we are in when we hear an utterance.
I admit that this seems to have holes. Being confused about context isn't always funny, sometimes it's just an irritating lack of clarity, like when someone is bad with pronouns. But if laughter really arises from an overload of some kind, maybe the mind is trying to cope between two contexts interfering with one another. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 27th, 2009|04:27 pm] |
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Name me a movie or a play with a very focused plot within a short time-frame and a small cast of characters. Automatic win if you name a movie that has only three major characters and/or has a continuous plot. No abstract/conceptual works please. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 24th, 2009|01:36 pm] |
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One would think that getting a B.A. in Computer Science, having tons of programming knowledge, having worked for Microsoft and being able to touch type at 120 WPM would get you a job, even if only a clerical one. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 23rd, 2009|06:25 pm] |
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I either try harder, or everything remains a pipe dream. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 19th, 2009|01:47 pm] |
Possibly the best XKCD I've ever seen. I wonder if anyone reading will get it:
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 17th, 2009|11:08 am] |
Getting over a cold (I think) so I slept in. Even more crazy dreams, and I'm surprised I remember the ones that were interrupted hours ago.
I had a dream where I had to pack for going to Cape Cod, it was stressful, I didn't know what to bring, especially since I wanted to do research for my honors project. Originally we were leaving early in the morning, swinging around Court and driving up Smith, but then we turned back to Warren because someone forgot something and I wanted the opportunity to re-pack.
It was back at home that re-packing was taking forever. I agreed to host SirenFest at my house because nobody would do it, and then I agreed to be the bar tender. So the hours passed with people in my backyard listening to music while I sat inside making drinks, hearing some of the music. It was the evening when the music had a break and tons of people went upstairs. I was afraid of getting my shit stolen so I told everyone to get downstairs and for some reason told others that the party was over. It was 8 P.M. and I was starting to worry about the whole trip, and also wondered whether we were really going to go this late in the day.
When my parents got back home (I think they left at some point), they were wondering what I was doing. I told them all about agreeing to host SirenFest, saying that someone asked me. I was expecting that they would be really angry but they were like "oh, that's a nice thing to do." as if they were accepting what they would normally be mad at because they saw that I was being nice.
As people started leaving the party, I walked upstairs to think about what to repack. A game was on the giant television upstairs (I supposedly had this huge television.) Barack Obama, in the form of Mufasa from the lion king was on the screen, asking me, the player, for help. I kept pressing the quit buttons because I didn't have time to play, but it just kept going to these "are you sure?" sequences in which Obama/Mufasa was guilt tripping me. In the game, I had to protect animals for Hyenas, and I was Tweety. He called upon different warriors after that, like Sylvester and Granny. I sat and thought "what next? Foghorn Leghorn?"
Eventually I left the party with some people, I don't know why, Cape Cod just stopped being relevant. I remember walking up some hill with some girl and these two guys, one of whom was dark-skinned and muscular and used to be a cop and the other might have been Shulan (but I can't remember.) The girl was maybe red-haired, I can't remember that so well. The three of them were horseplaying. The ex-cop had some big tattoo and some kind of mustache. Anyway, next I know, we're in the kitchen of someone's house next to some big screen TV where family guy comes on. Me and whatever friends I'm with, there must have been something like at least 5 of us, broke out into singing the family guy song in perfect harmony with the TV. I was doing the voice of Chris Griffin. Everything went perfectly except that nobody knew if they should sing the part where Stewie says "Laugh and cry!", so that part went blank and the TV did it, but other than that it was a perfect rendition of the family guy song by the group of us.
And then I woke up. I hope I don't still have a cold. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 16th, 2009|09:39 pm] |
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It just hit me that a few nights ago, I had had a dream about a plane crashing into my room. So that in addition to the thing about space shuttles... kind of freaky. Why so many dreams about planes and space-shuttles and other things crashing into my room? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 16th, 2009|08:51 pm] |
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The Comsat Angels are really 80s sounding, but I already really like them after listening to less than 2 songs. The guitar is ethereal in a glitzy British way that makes me think of cyberpunk and the basslines are fairly atonal, not like No-Wave, but still not very colorful. I would venture to say that this band is the Platonic form of post-punk. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 16th, 2009|09:31 am] |
Another weird dream last night. I was reading my livejournal entry about that last dream. My house was also right near a space shuttle launch site. Whenever a spaceship launched it would accelerate right up to my window and then launch vertically, but sometimes it would hit the window first. Implausibly, it would just bounce as if a ball hit it. Either way, it was scary as shit that my room was that inconveniently near the flight path.
Also, near the end of the movie, we ended up with something called a "PG-ball" in my hands. It looked like a squash ball, and it would not move if I threw it, it would only go the direction it felt like. It was a ball that kept people from doing certain things so that people would only do "PG" things. When I tried throwing it away, it would not budge. I'd throw it with all my strength but it would just end up on the floor in front of me. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 15th, 2009|08:41 am] |
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At the end of my dream last night, John and I were at some crosswalk in Brooklyn and he was reciting to me a novel he had been writing. In the novel, he was having a conversation with his friend Cybelle, in which she was saying "everything in life is either too easy or very hard, it's either piss or shit. You choose for me what we do. It's all either taking a piss or taking a shit." I don't think that's quite what she said, but it's the best I can remember. I think that this part of the novel had the two of them doing a film shoot, which would make sense I suppose. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 11th, 2009|11:43 am] |
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Last two nights were pretty solid, got a job interview on Monday, looks like my summer is looking up. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 10th, 2009|03:52 am] |
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Thank God I'm finally 21. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 8th, 2009|09:41 pm] |
I found lying around my dad's computer a horror story I began writing in high school about a flower that's trying to kill Kate. It's quite sinister, and has a lot of friendly snipes against people in my social group. I thought you'd all enjoy it, so here with an LJ cut:
( The Revenge of Magyar ) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 5th, 2009|01:26 am] |
Don't really know why, but there's something awesome about this being a game, even if all it is is taking pictures of animals:
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 4th, 2009|01:54 pm] |
A wishlist of books (things to scour used bookstores for):
Donald Norman - The Design of Everyday Things
Ferdinand de Saussure - A Course in General Linguistics
Roland Barthes - S/Z, Mythologies
Gerald Prince - A Dictionary of Narratology
Paul Rand - Thoughts on Design
Claude Levi Strauss
Vladimir Propp - Morphology of the Folk Tale |
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