Weeeaaak sauce

Ok, I did have a very long blog post here about the role of Motorville in Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. But that turned into an idea bigger than I thought it would be, and I think I'd like to sit on that for a while longer. It might turn into a publication of some sort, and as such, I'd like to keep it in reserve. So instead... something shorter. I'm sorry about this--I absolutely don't think about the blog as a place to put my "b" material, but sometimes, I need to consider the best venue for the piece at hand. Medium is important. And then I started writing a sequel of sorts to the earlier Deep Space Nine post, but that got too long too, and so I've decided to finish/save it for tomorrow.

If nothing else, it's already proved the value of my "blog a day" exercise, as it's gotten some writing juices flowing.

So here's what I've got for today.
Here's what happened to me today, and happens on a regular basis:
Get out of the shower. Look at steam-covered mirror. Goddammit, Person of Consequence. Shave, THEN shower. The other way around doesn't work. You've had fifteen years to learn this lesson. Get it together.

The worst thing is, I'm so near-sighted, I need my glasses to do an accurate shave. So I'm staring through and at steam-covered glass.

Later Days.

I find your lack of faith...frustrating as hell.

Sometimes, when I'm particularly upset, I visualize what I'm upset at, and me standing in front of it shooting lighting bolts, ala Emperor Palpatine.

That's the stuff.

Later Days.

It happens most frequently with high heels. I don't want to think too much about what that means.

If I'm walking behind someone, I almost always start to unconsciously echo (literally, in this case) the pace of their walking with my own, and if I do manage to notice it, it's always requires a bit of effort to break away.

Later Days.

They'll Pry the Paragraphs on Battletoads from my cold, dead fingers

It took real determination today to exorcise the phrase "from whence Oscar the Grouch came" from my dissertation.

Later Days

My roommate uses "irregardless" for similar purposes

Sometimes, I say "For all intensive purposes" just to watch fellow English people wince.

Later Days.

Women Will Like What I Tell Them To Like

I've seen some Simpsons episodes so many times at this point that I start laughing before the joke.  It makes watching them in mixed company an odd experience.

Later Days.

Brand Recognition

After reading dozens of Mario-related instruction manuals, I can finally spell piranha plant correctly on the first try.  Still working on moustach though.

Later Days.

It's Not Your Fault, It's Mayan.

I must be tired. I just typed out "The Lost Myna City in South America." And now I'm picturing a massive empire composed entirely of twigs, where tiny birds sacrificed other tiny birds to appease their tiny bird gods.

Later Days.

It's unfortunate, since they have almost, almost opposite meanings.

I mix up decisive and divisive.

Later Days.

Super Orphans

Why is it that both comic book superheroes and Disney characters are marked by a distinct lack of parental figures and marriages?

Later Days.

Because if your life's more nuanced than single sentence phrase, however will you tweet it?

A year or two back, I posted the single sentence quotation that sums up my approach to ethics. Here's one that sums up my personal research strategy, and academia in general: "Eventually, you read everything." It's got a nice world-weary naivety to it. Now there's a combination you don't see every day.

Later Days.

My Confessions: Word Smash

I was very disappointed today to learn that the word "comprendium," a mash-up of comprehend and compendium, does not actually exist. Portmontage, make it so!

*UPDATE* I am also very disappointed to learn that the word is "portmanteau," not "portmontage."

Later Days.

My Confessions: I Enable Illegal Behavior

I mix up the words "elicit" and "illicit."

Later Days.

Sometimes I Don't Want to Do a Real Post

I chose the frames for my new glasses purely on the basis that they better matched the Scott Pilgrim avatar I made last August.


Later Days.

"Andy Capp" is a variation on the same theme

I just got the title pun on the "Sally Forth" comic strip.

...Still isn't funny, though.

Later Days.

Here Lies Jon Smith. That Jerk.

I mix up epithet and epitaph.

This is NOT a post about my comps

I'm experimenting with false titles.

I haven't been very prolific postwise recently. Generally, as I'm sure you have all noticed, my posts are either about whatever aspects of my personal life I feel willing to share, how my school research is doing, and various pop culture investigations.

My personal life has been preempted by comps. My school work is comps. My TV show schedule is preempted by comps. And I decided I'm not going to talk about comps on my blog. So not much to post about. Okay, that was all a slight exaggeration; I'm still fitting most of that stuff in, but... frankly it's all really boring of late. The comps stuff, on the other hand, is really interesting.

Here's an example: I've had to read multiple essays by Jacques Derrida. For those who don't know Derrida--I envy you greatly. Derrida is a French literary theorist who specializes in revealing complexities. He's often been named as the main figure of the deconstructionist movement, though he himself would probably deny that. (And if you don't know what deconstructionism is, again, I envy you. The short version is that it's about taking the most obvious readings of a text and tearing them apart. The long version is the same as the short, but to get there, you need to spend about an hour explaining why the short version contradicts itself.)

The text I'm reading at the moment of his is about truth and literature: whether truth is something that exists, and, if it does, what literature's relationship to it is. He's making his mark on a long strand of literary discussion that dates back to ancient Greece. Basically, it boils down to Aristotle and Plato saying that the purpose of literature is to imitate reality. In order to deal with this mimetic relationship, Derrida discusses Mallarme (another French critic) and what Mallarme said about "Peirrot Murderer of His Wife." Peirrott is a stock name for a mime, and miming is about imitating reality, so we have one level of representation. This particular scene was invented by the actor Paul Marguette. Marguette was later accused of plagiarising another actor's scene by a similar name, which would have been a representation of a representation of the "real" murder. He DID write a book about it, and asked one of the people who saw the performance to write the foreward. His book, then, is a representation of the performance of the murder, and the foreword is representation of someone observing the the performance of the murder. Mallarme read the second edition, with a new foreword by Marguette about writing the original book. So the second edition is an imitation of the representation of the performance of the murder. Then, finally, Mallarme writes about his version of this, which makes it an interpretation of an imitation of a representation of the performance of the murder.

Derrida lives for this kind of stuff.

Finally, Big D gets his hands on the text, and in great, yet vague, detail, outlines that this is his interpretation of an interpretation of an imitation of a representation of the performance of the murder. And after that, *I* got a hold of it, took down a set of notes, then used this set to write this blog. So: you're reading an outline of a summary of an interpretation of an interpretation of an imitation of a representation of a performance of a murder. That's seven levels of imitation between you and the murder--now remember that the murder was imaginary. What is the "real" here?

If you are in any way confused, then I have succeeded in conveying the reality of how it feels to read Derrida. To add to all the confusion, I had originally mistaken "Peirrot" for "Poirot" and spent most of the essay waiting for everything to turn into an Agatha Christie murder mystery. Which would have made it so much better.

Later Days.

No Wonder I Never Understood Binaries

Apparently, I've been reading dyadic as didactic for years now.

Because really, what's the difference between an ancient Greek satirist and a 20th century archetypal psychoanalysist?

I mix up Lucian and Lucan.

Later Days.

*edit* By Lucan, I mean Lacan. Because apparently, to add a third element, I mix up 20th century archetypal pyschoanalysists with first century Roman historians.

One's a rock.

I mix up antimony and antinomy.

Later Days.