Summary: I have a month of largely nothing to do. It is like Seinfeld, but less funny. Still, car leaks and westerns and horror movies cannot be all bad...
BLOT: (09 Jun 2011 - 11:55:22 AM)
The hazy wastings of Summer. June, to be precise...
For the month of June, I am a mostly free man. I work anywhere from about 12 to 30 hours at the desk, but have no classes, and that makes all the difference. When you have grad school classes, there are rarely any times that you can sit down and go, "I have nothing to do this afternoon." Even a dedicated grad student is probably not going to finish all the readings, look up all the articles, confirm all the cases. The rest of us? We aim for some golden mean, a ratio somewhere around 3/5s and 2/3s, that allows us to get enough done to know our stuff. To do our duty. That sort of thing. Being without classes for the month of June means I don't even have to aim for that level of committment. I have to show up to work, when needed. Rest of the time? I can waste it.
How am I wasting it? Various ways. I've started playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I played the game way back when it first came out (2002? 2003? something like that, right?) but never got that far. I didn't quite get the motif and ended up running around for hours just shooting people and running over people in various cars [not that this isn't a way to play it, it just doesn't go very far]. It ended up with me getting arrested, punching a cop, getting re-arrested, punching another cop, getting shot and killed. Over and over. I found some cheat codes for getting a tank and went around blowing things up. I think I finished maybe four or five missions. A year or so ago I played GTA3, and actually got into it. Sarah might say too much ;). Anyhow, after playing it and "getting" it, I went on and played it's "prequel", Liberty City Stories. Now I'm doing Vice City.
Sometime in a few months I will do Vice City Stories and then finish up with San Adreas. I no longer play videogames like I used to play videogames, meaning things I can fit around audiobook listening or while chatting (see: Plants vs Zombies and Minecraft) get played while longer games get toodled with and then abandoned. Still. There is something about smashing a taxi into the edge of a bridge just to flip it over and land on the ground down below in a hurry. Plus, the world building in the series if really top notch. It gets overshadowed by the game's notorious violence but really is amazing. If you have never experienced, fire one up and just drive around. You end up having to learn the layout of the city to get around in the game and at first it seems impossible but after a bit you learn streets and short cuts and such.
I have also been watching Brisco County, Jr. The old semi-weird Western series starring Bruce Campbell. It's a lot of fun, but I thought the series was going to be a bit more weird. Not that it doesn't have plenty of crazy, the last episode I saw had land pirates complete with Jolly Rogers on their coaches. I just, you know, expected a little more Army of Darkness level insanity. And this is why I don't get to direct my own TV shows.
Last night, watched Jackie Brown, the Elmore Leonard novel (i.e., Rum Punch) turned into a Taratino movie. Saw it last back in theaters, around 1997. Pulp Fiction had made a big splash, with some loving it and some hating it, and so there was a lot of expectation for Brown, which had the quite warm Pam Grier in it in what I guess was a comeback role though I don't know if she ever capitalized on it. I think, at the time, it was treated as an ok movie but weak after after the violent splendor of QT's previous two. I liked it, but I seem to remember the friend that I saw it with being disappointed in it. Watching it again, I'd have to say that while Pulp Fiction is a stronger movie, in dialogue and technical aspects, I think that Jackie Brown is maybe a better in the sense of more natural, human movie. The story isn't a series of little glimpses with only edges of consequence, but actual characters with a proper pulse. There are fewer scenes that have cult status, fewer "gotcha" lines, but that's because it is more evenly keeled. Plus, the Robert Forster with Pam Grier semi-romance angle is perfectly bittersweet. I don't own it (I just watched it through Amazon's streaming video) but I might need to buy a copy. Samuel L. Jackson has some of the best lines of his career in this movie (though, alas, nothing quite as great as his speech in Pulp Fiction).
And well, that wraps up my random un-update. The downside to wasting time is that it is hard to turn that time wasting into a proper post. heh. I'm about to go and play some more Vice City and then finish reading Freaky Deaky.
OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: June 2011
