1000 Book List

And to think I told myself that when I started this blog I would keep up with it and be "professional." Hah. But here goes again.

About a year ago, a friend of mine and I were discussing how poorly read we were for being English majors. I think most English majors have that discussion at some point or another; you read all those books and feel terribly smug around all your non-English major friends, and then you read some journal article or blog post that compares eighteen different "essential" works that you've never read and you realize that you're ignorant and should just give up and work in fast food for a living, because you'd probably end up making more money anyway and would be more fun at parties. But anyway. We had that talk, and we decided that in order to correct the situation we would start working our way through Editor Eric's "The Greatest Literature of All Time" list of 1000 important works.

Well, she decided to work her way through that list. I decided to spend days trawling the internet for all the "Greatest of All Time" lists I could find, combine them all into a database, and create new lists that would compensate for the biases of the editors of the individual lists (honestly guys, D.H. Lawrence is good, but he's not that great), and work my way through that. Because that's how I roll.

All that is to say, I'm going to be talking about pretentious books on here for awhile, because I spend all my time now a) watching two year olds make a mess (turns out my degree really wasn't good for anything) b) reading pretentious books, and c) stalking people on the internet. And neither a nor c seem like good things to blog about.

Televisionland

This is interesting because it was made in the sixties--by an actual advertising company lampooning its own practices.


This clip is especially interesting for me because I found it at In Media Res, a site which is apparently dedicated to the scholarly analysis of youtube videos. Every week they pick a subject (this week was toys, apparently), and five professors/scholars of different disciplines write short essays analyzing a video/videos that have to do with that topic, and then other scholars comment and respond to the same videos. So you can read about the collectible toy phenomenon and the shift from play to consumerism, or, alternately, how the collection of toys can offer new kinds of "play." If that's not your cup of tea, you can read about the Disney "Princess" fascination, with feminist responses, psychological responses, Marxist responses, etc. etc.

It's probably not fair to call them Marxist, actually. I guess it would be closer to anti-capitalist, though I'm not sure if that's the term for the actual school of thought. There's precedent: Ludwig Mises used the term in his book "The Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (note: Ludwig Mises was a very staunch supporter of capitalism, in the Austrian school of economics.) But he was talking about Socialism, and near as I can tell the people I'm labeling "anti-capitalist" aren't advocating socialism. It's closer to the Marxist/Feminist argument, with the idea that the capitalists (well, companies) are closely tied to the white patriarchy, and are selling ideologies as much as they are products. But there is little discussion about class structure, and it's oddly reversed: the Marxist criticism I've read tends to see money/product as a means of maintaining power; this argument sees the dissemination of these ideologies and the power contained there-in as a means of gaining money. Power is the means, not the goal. The "capitalists" are thus "bad," not because their ultimate goal is bad, but because the byproducts of their attempts at that goal are damaging. (I'm inferring all of this. They never actually used the term capitalism or evil or anything). It reminds me a little bit of one of the themes of White Noise, actually. I'm sure there's a scholarly term for it (and it may actually be a new/newer than what I've covered version of Marxist criticism, for all I know. I'm woefully deficient in my theoretical studies...)

Whatever you want to call it, it's a view that I have been seeing more and more. It seems particularly interesting to me because its proponents, as near as I can tell, are not advocating an alternate economic theory (as was the case with earlier Marxist or Socialist criticism). They seem more interested in analyzing how the current system is working (or not working, as the case may be).

Home made musical intstruments

I like the musical instrument made of slime. That's creativity right there.

Buttersafe

I found this comic a few days ago, and enjoyed it a lot (the whole archive, that is). I know the whole absurd thing has been done, but this one appealed to me. Perhaps it's the recurring "saddest turtle in the world" character.

And that's what sets it apart from a lot of the other "absurd" comics I have read--it's absurd with its own interior logic that is evolving over time. The saddest turtle reappears, and gradually a "plot" develops: "plot," because there is no real dramatic arc, just a sense of place and character that reveals itself in tiny bits and pieces. There isn't much to Buttersafe so far, but it looks promising.

Steam Trek

A revisioning of Star Trek, done in a sort of steampunk silent movie style. It drags on a bit towards the end, but it was silly enough to be funny.

PMOG

I've never been able to get into mmorpgs, mostly for the multiplayer side of things. So I'm always intrigued when someone comes up with something that is a mmorpg, only not: Kingdom of Loathing, for example, which was massively single player and hillarious, and whose only flaw is deleting your account after thirty days. I got tired of restarting.

So I'm intriguied by PMOG--which bills itself as a Passively multiplayer online game. Clever. Points off on the terrible pun. But PMOG is interesting in that it's game "world" is actually the internet. You get points for going to new webpages. You use those points to lay traps for people, or, if you're nicer, to leave treasure chests for them to find. You can sabotage other people's trap laying, or leave "portals" that link to other sites. Using different tools affiliates you with different classes, and you can level up and earn badges.

It's obviously not a very in-depth game, and certainly not "immersive." It's not something you kill hours worth of time on. But, in the little while I've been playing it, it adds a certain amount of spice to my random internet binges. And I like the steampunk theme.

It does have a few flaws (of course, it's still in beta). The server keeps timing out, which can get very frustrating. The "missions" (actually collections of links you follow devoted to a particular topic) were an interesting idea, but feel kind of gimmicky--nothing really sets them apart from the other social link crawls that have been around for awhile. I wish they would have taken the name a little more seriously; some kind of puzzle or search element and a reward for completion might have made it more interesting. That said, some of the missions, when they were working, actually pointed to some interesting sites. The steampunk theme is cute, but there doesn't seem to be any effort to tie that in to a cohesive story or world. Some kind of back story would have been nice. Also, the help pages were not as helpful as they could have been.

All the same, I probably won't be deleting the firefox extension for a little while, at least.