Thoughts & Ramblings of a College Student

What a joy to watch something that was nothing like what you expected... in a good way! The End of the F****** World World was a wonderful series to dive into, as it was easy to consume and the content wasn't as lengthy as some other of the shows, which is very appealing to me. Personally, binge watching is not my favorite form of media consumption, because the information gets jumbled in my brain and sometimes I cant even synthesize the information, or truly understand the intricacies of what is happening in the show. I much rather watch one episode a day for the duration of the series, but I definitely never mix series, meaning I will watch one series at a time, not many different episodes from different series in the same time frame. On the topic of binge watching, long form television, is an identifying quality of our time. With the phase out of common cable broadcasting, and the onset of Netflix, and all its subsequent streaming services, we have started leaning towards co...

Reading comics is a very particular kind of literary experience. For me, a person who hasn't picked up any kind of comic but maybe once in my life and never finished, I found that it is unlike most literary experiences, and that there's a process to how to do it, and what to pay attention to. The imagery in comics informs you just as much as the text if not more, and there's a particular order in which to look at a page and to make sense of it. This, for me, makes it a more confusing experience than simply reading a book, as I have far more practice in that realm. In the world of the graphic narrative, we see the authors voice come through a combination of  the imagery they present, the format of said imagery, and the writing style they pursue. In My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, the imagery and the format are the main factors for me. This pen sketching style on ruled paper, seeming much like an illustrated diary of sorts points to the idea of someone speaking from inside,...

This week I chose to explore Sofia Coppola's work, almost solely based on the tiny fact that she is the wife of  the leading man of a band I thoroughly enjoy, Thomas Mars of Phoenix. I was surprised to realize, I had seen a lot of her work before, actually, MOST of her work before this moment. So I was excited to be able to look at it with a critical eye instead of having to decipher the plot and point of the movie. I watched The Bling Ring Marie Antoinette Somewhere The Virgin Suicides Lost in Translation and for some fun and to see the way her voice might have translated i also watched The Flaming Lips : This Here Giraffe Phoenix: Chloroform I found that the her voice certainly shined through every single movie, and the first element I  noticed make an appearance time and time again was the way sound was used in the movies. More often than not the dialogue was sparse and there was use of a lot of mundane sounds we don't truly pay any attention to in our real live...

Reading screen plays, for me, was an entirely different world. It certainly takes a certain kind of imagination and knowledge to be able to read a screen play and truly make something of it, thus I salute movie makers everywhere for the way in which they bring these fairly vague documents to life. I made the slight mistake of reading a  rather difficult screen play to follow, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  After much confusion and being unable to really piece things fully together, I switched over to reading a screen play for a movie I have even watched and love, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and still had a very hard time with the hypothetical thinking and filling in all the blanks of the people places and visuals involved. After reading the screenplays I certainly  had a new appreciation for all the people and creative power it takes to create a movie and to bring these conversations, essentially, to life. Although i studied costume design very briefly befor...

Ready Player One for me wasn't as interesting or moving (in terms of content directly related to my interests)  as some of the other pieces we have read in the past. Although it certainly brings to light certain ideas about technology and gaming facilitators for escape and building your own alternate reality. I think although we are just discovering the capacities of virtual reality we know enough to create a world around it, like was done here on Ready Player One. I believe it was a successful descriptor of what the creation of that world could mean to many people in real life, and how it could actually affect the real world and doesn't just exist in its digital form. Although I believe we are a a handful of steps removed from reaching the full potential of virtual reality and its impacts in the way they are exposed on Ready Player One, I think Clide does a good job at giving virtual reality a voice in our real world by exposing   Wade's connections and successes withi...

After reading Marriage of a Thousand Lies, I was more than glad to have had that real life Q&A with Sindu. For one, its a given that this novel is relevant to our world today, because Sindu is a contemporary writer of our time, but also because of the issues it deals with within the story. The LGBTQ community, tradition vs the new age, and the issues of the non binary. It is interesting to know that this story is not a "thinly veiled memoir", but a story opposite of Sindus. I, like the people she talks about in her interview, automatically thought she was writing a story about herself. It is interesting to see that she in fact isn't and is going out of her way to write stories not only directly related to her but also doing the active research to find them. However in the same manner I was glad to see that lucky did in fact have some aspects of her personality that came from Sindu and that helped develop the character, which in some ways allows us to know and feel ...

Oh cosmopolis, what a bore,really! In terms of content and storyline anyway. But so much more parallel to real life than many other stories. Cosmopolis certainly shows us a very straightforward depiction of privilege and the privileged and how truly unprivileged they are at certain other aspects of life that, personally, I deem far more important than money and power.  Eric Parker, like the privileged of our world, live in an absolute alternate reality from the rest of society. With their coveted money, come actually very few assets.  The only thing this guy has is money, sex, and luxurious objects. Other than that. He’s literally a zombie. Has barely any sense of emotion other than power or arousal, has no idea how to communicate with a person in a reasonable way, has no sense of how to emotionally connect with someone neither verbally, nor physically.  And in reality, throughout the whole duration of his car ride, he’s got visits and stops with plenty of peop...