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powertothepenguins
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Name: powertothepenguins
Gender: Male
Interests: frolicking amongst the bulrushes of the lord of the flies whilst hackneying mine hair
Expertise: laughing convulsively for over fifteen minutes at a time
Guilty pleasures: Tabasco and genocide. Having both at once is even better.
Cats: All your base are belong to us.
Occupation: Jabberwock Hunter
Industry: Art
Message: message me
Member Since:
10/12/2002
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| I once woke up to a profound epiphany about the differences between how I enjoy British literature and American literature. Something about the coldly polished refinement of the British man's tragedy set against the alcoholic, self-wallowing raggedness of the American man's tragedy. (I use 'man' here quite purposefully -- going to an all-male school run by Jesuits doesn't do much for your understanding of literature outside the traditional canon of embarrassingly self-aware white male posturing.) I may have written some brief notes on the subject before taking off for some more flighty pursuit, like organizing photos on Facebook so that I could have a seamless visual hyperreality of my life. Or something.
The point I was attempting to make here is that 'something' is the sort of thing I no longer come up, instead ending up in bed with its distant but fondly remembered cousin, 'nothing'.
That sentence is a perfectly wonderful example of the sort of literary diarrhea that bubbles up from the recesses of my mind these days.
I still feel a compulsion to write, but no longer to write here. It's not really an escape from a past identity, as so many other Internet denizens conceive of their site relocations, but rather just the sad consequences of the expiration of an environment. When I began writing here, it was a primary outlet for silly rants, random thoughts, and musings of existential angst, while also granting me the pleasure of entertaining an easily amused audience. Now I have actual conversations with friends for that sort of thing, and any leftover friends have matured too much to tolerate such nonsense in written form.
More than anything, I interpret my reluctance to write here as a sort of fear -- a fear that I have accumulated an audience here that has come to expect a certain style, a certain tone, a certain purpose out of me that I can no longer fulfill, both because I have changed and because they have changed. (More the latter, really, but cut me some slack here, I count as having undergone at least minimal maturation too, okay?) And so I don't develop and write out what ideas I have, because they're so removed from what I've come to expect people enjoying, as well as from what I myself have come to expect as the bread and butter of my writing style.
Don't criticize me on proverbially 'selling out' or anything either. I see writing as a project that requires interacting with others, capturing their attention, manipulating their moods, pushing them into a new realization or a new perspective or at least a chuckle. Sure, writing can provide catharisis, but that kind of writing is the stuff you see in therapists' offices and goth-skinned Livejournals.
If I relocate the Internet presence of my mind's flushings, I will most likely post the new URL here, of course, which ironically implies that I will still be trapped with the same audience and thus the same problems as before. But there is a psychological association of audience with location that I can escape when I move to a new site. And to start anew is to effectually announce a new purpose to writing -- expectations are wiped away, leaving hesitant curiosity and greater eagerness to accept. It doesn't hurt that Xanga's layout and community seem to be made for the sort of tone I used to write with. The long list of subscriptions with retarded user names, the badly formatted 'look and feel', the half-heartedly implemented new post navigation system -- it all adds up to an amateur environment for amateur prose, and this is what I mean when I say that I need to find a new host.
My God, this entire thing reads like some sort of hackneyed mixture of subpar submissions to pretentious publications and teenybopper Internet-speak. When will we find a way to insert technical terminology into stories without sounding like asses? Think about some Faulknerian passage where a stream of consciousness describes the actions of a more contemporary protagonist -- and then, there, smack-dab in the middle of all this amazing prose, is the word "URL." It's like erotic literature that actually flows along quite nicely for a while, with some real displays of writing talent, until suddenly everything is spoiled by the random appearance of words like "cock" and "pussy". Perhaps the only way to escape the clunkiness of technology in literature is by obscuring it with metaphors, much like authors do with sex. Perhaps this is the entire enterprise of literature -- to metaphorize ourselves out of our mundane existences and shower meaning upon our lives with flourishes of wordcraft and dainty clause arrangements.
Now I'm going to say some sort of self-aware discounting mocking statement, like, "Boy, wasn't that a thrilling venture into deep waters?" Now I'm going to say some other self-aware not-very-funny statement like, "Oh wait, I just did." This is the sort of meta-literary trickery that entertains no one past the age of 17.
This is the part where I usually panic because I have no witty ending to pull out of my back pocket. Luckily for me, today, I don't need that, because all I'm saying is that I can't really write anything good here anymore and that I'm going to get a new place to write soon. Ending wittily would merely contradict all that effort I just put in to making absolute sure that you know how much I suck. So, you know, don't look too hard for that abrupt, inelegant ending, because
it's
right
HERE.
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| Meaningless posts for meaningless times. 
[via xanga.com/davidngo, who in turn took it from this person]
[via some horrible myspace page that I won't link you to for fear of crashing your browser; here is the artist's deviantART page]
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| First, some background: In case you don't know, Bai Ling is a cinematic slut, i.e. someone who appears in movies but is mostly just there for visual appeal rather than any actual value as a thespian. It's kind of confusing how Bai manages to even attain that level, given that she has one of the creepiest faces I've ever seen. I'm guessing she's just there to fulfill quotas for Asian femme fatales with slinky figures and chinky eyes.
This is a video of Bai Ling dancing at Club Play during porn star Mary Carey's birthday party. It's pretty funny on its own, but to me, it's mostly sad because this is pretty much exactly how I dance. Except for that part at the end when she's grinding her butt into a midget's face. That midget is pretty incredible, by the way. The way he gyrates his body is so Teletubby-like. And his hair! It's like a huge Carrot Top-fro! The only thing that could make this video better is if he put an afro pick into his hair.
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| You know, I just realized that The Rolling Stones could just have been called The Wheels. Or The Boulders, depending on whether the stones in question are spherical or cylindrical.
I'm home now, and start work tomorrow. I'll be doing more work for the virtual reality lab at Stanford, which is always good stuff, and I'll also be working on a web start-up building a movie website. I'm also in charge of running the blog for that, so I'll link to that once it's up.
Right now, Mike and I are busy thinking up a name for the music blog that we are starting. So far, we've been through Sonic Lemur, Paranoid Lemur, Damaged Lemur, Noise Revolution, Lemur Mojo, Stupid Bloody Tuesday, Screaming From the Gallery, Lemur Cacophony, Sonic Paranoia, and a bunch of random Talking Heads lyrics that Mike likes. We haven't agreed on anything moniker-wise yet, but we have managed to come to the mutual conclusion that the Beatles are alternately lyrical geniuses and lyrical retards. Seriously, compare "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" and "I Want To Hold Your Hand" with "Across the Universe" or "Penny Lane". And it's not like simple can't be brilliant -- "Something" is lyrically one of the best damn songs I've ever heard. Oh, those Beatles. So awesome, and yet still so bad.
Anyway, those names are hard to pick. The start-up is struggling with picking out a name too. I guess this is why it is a bad idea to suggest to The Rolling Stones that they ought to have named themselves The Wheels or The Boulders. What probably went down is that there were two factions, one of which wanted The Wheels and one of which was really gunning for The Boulders, until Mick Jagger finally got fed up and was like, "Fuck this, chaps, we're just going to have to compromise by exploiting our common love for stones that roll." Gosh, I love christenings.
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| Hey everybody, I am currently running a study on recommendation systems, and I need participants for a Fragrance Recommendation Study that I am doing. It's an online survey that takes 4 minutes to complete, so it's very quick and easy. Your help would be much appreciated. Click on the following link to take the survey:
http://www.stanford.edu/~clizzin/survey.html
If I get enough data for some meaty analysis, I'll post the results/conclusions up after all is said and done. Thanks a lot!
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