Rock-n-Roll Journey to Mars

COLLEGE IS FUCKING STUPID >(

So, I went to the first day of my US History class just a while ago and found out that that class requires a lab... which was not mentioned on the class registration, which means that I couldn't plan my schedule around it. No one even got to sign up for labs until today. Fortunately, they have a lab that I can make it to, but this still pisses me off. Mostly, because this means I am now taking seven classes this semester, but since two are labs, I'm only getting five classes worth of credits.

WTF, college. What. The. Fuck.

TEN FUCKING THIRTY AT NIGHT IS NOT AN APPROPRIATE TIME TO PRACTICE YOUR LOUD AND SHITTY GUITAR AND BONGO MUSIC RIGHT OUTSIDE OF THE DORMS. SOME OF US HAVE CLASS IN THE MORNING. THERE IS NO FUCKING WAY I CAN SLEEP WITH THIS SHIT HAPPENING RIGHT OUTSIDE MY WINDOW.

I SWEAR TO FUCK IF THIS CONTINUES MUCH LONGER I'M GOING DOWN THERE TO SMASH THAT FUCKING GUITAR TO PIECES AND PUT MY BOOT UP THE ASS OF ANYONE WHO IS ENCOURAGING THESE JAG OFFS.

Day 11 - A show that disappointed you

Heroes.

Oh, Heroes. You had so much potential. A series about ordinary people with super powers, the search of one scientist to understand their abilities, a comic book-ish season-long plot leading to an epic battle, and characters from all over the world of all different ethnicities. I had so, so much hope for this show.

Pity it killed off most of its PoC and female characters, had lack-luster season finales, a stupid as all fuck protagonist, and pretty much turned into a soap opera about the Petrellis.

Okay, so, I'm going to admit it: I watch True Blood. I haven't really been interested in vampire/werewolf fiction in any form since about middle school, because a close friend at the time was down-right obsessed and made me watch/read it and after a while it just all started to look like the same thing. Slight variations, but still the same overused bad romance plots. I read Twilight, and that pretty much killed my interest in vampires.

I had no intention of watching True Blood when it started out, but I happened to catch the last half of an episode from season 2 while waiting for Penn & Teller's Bullshit to start. I found the homosexuality/race allegory to be rather interesting, so I watched a few more episodes. I liked that the story focused on season-long murder mysteries, instead of only on the vampire romance whatever. I finally felt like I'd found a new kind of vampire fiction, so I watched all of the first and second season.

Now, it's not a great show. It's kind of okay, with big plot holes and just general confusing things (like, why, after hundreds of years of living with humans, can none of these vampires use modern slang?). And like most HBO/Shotime shows, I'm annoyed by the gratuitous sex. Still, I watch it anyways. It's kind of a guilty pleasure.

With the start of the new season though, something has been catching my eye, and making me consider if I want to stick with the show. And that something is Tara. Tara is main character Sookie's (blonde, pale, ingenue Sookie) Best Black Friend (TM). And she seems to pretty much exist just to make Sookie look perfect. She's constantly fucking up her life, getting manipulated, making terrible judgments of character, etc. In season 1, she had to take care of her alcoholic and negligent mother, who eventually convinced the poor girl that she was possessed, and made her go through an exorcism. That season, she had my sympathy. I wanted to see her go through this, then realize what a terrible person her mother was, ditch the old bag, and get her life in order. That... never happened.

Season 2, Tara was picked up and mentored/counseled by Maryann, and found a guy that she liked and who seemed like a decent person, unlike the other men she'd been shown crushing on. Sounds like she's fixed herself up, right? Wrong. Maryann turns out to be some sort of ancient Greek witch or whatever, and uses her magic to make Tara and Eggs (the sort of boyfriend) beat each other up and fuck all over the place. Lots of bad shit happens to Tara, and by the end of the season, she's left broken.

Season 3 has started up, and in the very first episode she tries to kill herself. She then gets into what is shaping up to be an abusive relationship with a vampire who only wants to use her to get to Sookie, to get to Sookie's vampire lover Bill.

Why is this so bad I'm thinking of giving up on the show, you may ask. Because Tara is the most prominent character of color on the show, and she is getting nothing but shit. And once I realized that, I started to realize how the show has treated its other characters of color. Tara's mother is a drunk and abusive to her daughter. Tara's cousin, Lafayette, is a drug dealer and a male prostitute, who got kidnapped and tortured by the vampire Erik in season 2. The exorcist lady from season 1 was black, and admits to being a fraud and gets killed in the first episode of season 2. Eggs is also black, and it is revealed that he was a druggie or something before meeting Maryann, and he gets blamed for all the murders from season 2 and shot in the head. Lafayette's mother was introduced in the latest episode, living in a home for the mentally ill, and is evidentally a huge homophobe. These? Are the only black characters in the show.

The writers behind True Blood seem to be only capable of writing black characters that have substance abuse problems and that get murdered. But blonde, white Sookie seems to be able to do no wrong. This may be intentional, it may not. That isn't important. As the awesome Jay Smooth would say, this isn't what they are, but what they've said. I don't know if they're racist, but the show is making me uncomfortable with its treatment of black characters, much in the same way Heroes did with its CoCs and female characters. I'm going to stick around a little to see how things go, but I'm starting to give the show a serious side-eye.

Also, what the fuck was up with Bill twisting whats-her-name his maker's neck around backwards while screwing her?

I made two observations today.

The first is that Easter is a big deal down here in NM, because everyone I've spoken to, from professors to GAs to other students to people working in the school cafeteria, have wished me a happy Easter.

The second is that apparently I hate being told to have a happy Easter.

I don't have a problem with people that celebrate it, and if they're looking forward to some sort of big family thing this weekend, good for them. But my family hasn't done anything for Easter since I was in elementary school, and even then it wasn't really "Easter" it was "let the kids have candy for breakfast one day a year, and oh yeah, color some eggs or something". Kind of like Halloween, but with candy for breakfast instead of all day long, eggs instead of pumpkins, and way more lame because it doesn't involve costumes. It wasn't even until middle school that I found out what Easter is actually supposed to celebrate (I thought it was more or less invented by candy companies up til that point).

I think the thing that's annoying me the most about this is that I don't like people assuming Easter is a big deal for me. For those that don't know, I'm agnostic, but was raised atheist. This Easter thing is a bit like Christmas - I don't mind when people tell me to have a Merry Christmas, because while my family doesn't observe the religious aspects of the holiday, we do celebrate it as part of family tradition. But I can understand why, say, a Jewish person could get tired of hearing all about Christmas, and everyone just assuming they celebrate the holiday. So when people assume that I celebrate Easter, it gets on my nerves after a while, because EVERYONE has been mentioning it and I can't escape it.

Day 6: My biggest pet peeve
There’s a lot of things that annoy me, but I think the one thing that I can honestly call my biggest pet peeve is when people (both men and women) state that they would neeever send their child to daycare, one parent HAS to be a stay-at-home parent, and that if you ‘let another person raise your child’, they’ll turn out terrible.

Now, I don’t get angry at people who really just want to be stay-at-home parents because they’d rather be with their child then work. And I do think that if a parent doesn’t spend much time with their child after they get home from work/whatever, then it’s neglectful. Still, both my parents work, and have always worked. My mother took maternity leave for a few years after my sister was born, and one year for me. Both of us went to daycare during our primary education years, and were latchkey kids from middle school on. And yet, we turned out fine. My sister is steadily employed and has great interpersonal relationships with people; I’ve been on honor rolls all throughout high school, am now on the Dean’s list, and while I don’t have many friends, those I do, I cherish for life. Our parents took great care of us – we didn’t see them during the day on weekdays, but they always spent time with us in the evenings, and we did family activities on the weekends. They never brought their work home with them, because they believed their life, their family, was more important.

Basically, when people try and tell me that kids that go to daycare turn out terrible, I take it as a personal insult against my family and me. And that’s why it’s my biggest pet peeve – because it attacks my entire family.

I am not going to see James Cameron's Avatar. I am not interested in white guilt recycled in space. Yes, I know that many sci-fi stories are some sort of race issue in space (or almost-space, ala Bladerunner), but at least Star Trek, Bladerunner, etc, try to be original. Avatar is clearly just white hero going "native", with the "natives" being a blatant show of othering and exoticism. People have been calling this "Dances with Smurfs", and really, that's what it looks like (though, I like to think of it as Ferngully + alien tits - Tim Curry's sexy voice). Now, this may be a bit disjointed, since I'm just posting this in case anyone asks me why I won't see this. So, I think I'm just going to do bullet points on why I won't see it.

1. The cultural appropriate to make the Navi "exotic". In an interview, Cameron said this about the design for the aliens' clothing: I designed her costumes based on a taparrabo, a loincloth thing worn by Mayan Indians. We go to another planet in this movie, so it would be stupid if she ran around in a Brazilian thong or a fur bikini like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. So, a fur bikini is stupid, but Mayan clothing on a non-earth world isn't? That just confuses me. But my main problem with this is that the Mayan culture is being othered because Cameron thinks it looks exotic/"native". Every promo image I've seen of the Navi has the aliens wearing feathers and beads and using bow and arrows... and it's clear what they're going for with this. It's the stereotypical image that a lot of people have in mind when they think of Native Americans before they learn what kind of clothes Native Peoples really wore. By dressing the Navi up like this, Cameron is making people think of Native Americans, and enforcing the stereotypes of Natives as "earth people" or whatever.

2. The sexism in designing Zoe Saldana's character. To be specific, Cameron's "she's gotta have tits" statement. This. Bugs. The. CRAP out of me. Cameron has had plenty of strong female characters before, like Ripley and Sarah Connor. I love Sarah Connor. I love her to death. She's one of my fictional role models. And one of the reasons why I loved her was because she wasn't there just for the male gaze. She wasn't supposed to be hot, she was supposed to be strong. Now, that's not to say that hotness and strength can't go together - they totally can, look at that bombshell Princess Leia. The problem I have with Cameron's statement is that by saying 'Right from the beginning I said, "She's got to have tits," ', that's saying that her sex appeal comes before her strength, before any other characterization at all. In the interview Cameron said this in, he also stated that "real women are complicated", and that men need to realize that real women "don't look and act like Vampirella". Yet here he is, saying that the most important feature on this female character is her TITS.

3. The CGI hype. Okay, this is my weakest argument against it, but still, needs to be said. It feels like everyone I know has said that they don't like the story for Avatar, but they'll see it "for the good CGI". Well, I'm sorry, but pretty graphics aren't enough to make me see a film any more. I saw 300 because I thought the effects looked cool, and that was a huge waste of eight bucks. Besides, I don't even think the effects look all that better then other films I've seen.

4. The White Savior becoming one of, and then saving, the Noble Savages. Just... that. I've said it. It's the same plot as Dances with Wolves and other white guilt movies. I hate the fact that the natives have to be 'saved' by the White Hero. I'm sick of that cliche, and the way that it implies that native peoples can't save themselves.

So, there you go. Why I'm not seeing Avatar and would rather not hear any more hype about it.

People in this state are crazy. The highways in town were shut down due to multiple accidents yesterday... because of one inch of snow. That melted half an hour after it stopped snowing.

And I keep seeing people wearing parkas/gloves/scarves/etc in 55 degree F weather. Just. Just what.

I think I've finally given up on Heroes. (Segway? I need no segway!) There's a lot of reasons, and I'll do a full write-up on why later, because I feel my concerns with the show are valid. I know that hating on Heroes has become sort of a bandwagon right now, and I want to make it clear that my love for the show during the first season still stands. But that doesn't mean that I can't criticize what's happening to it now. This will have been the first time I've given up on a show for a reason other then 'I was bored with it' (which has happened with Lost, Desperate Housewives, Smallville, etc), and because of that, it's important that I say why. But I'll discuss this later.

In slightly more optimistic news, I got 195/200 on my Bladerunner and film noir paper. Nice.

Hell is having to hold for two hours on the phone trying to get some info on student loans, only to have the rep finally pick up and say 'Dhuuuur everything's on our site so we won't tell you anything over the phone or clear up questions' and then hang up on you.

khlajkfhdjkghfdg fuck fuck fuckity fucking fucksocks FUCK

So, I was watching Mythbusters a few nights ago, and I see this ad for a show on Animal Planet. Now, I don't think that channel has been the same since Steve Irwin's death, but I thought it was still a decent network. (And c'mon, the Puppy Bowl is freaking adorable) However, this ad made me feel sick.

It was for a new show called 'Whale Wars', and it focuses heavily on the Japanese whaling industry. Now, I dislike whaling, and I honestly believe that the planet should do more to stop what the Japanese are still doing. But this show just felt wrong. Basically, it had a smallish vessel (I think it was called Sea Shepherd?) flying a jolly roger, going around in international waters and approaching Japanese whaling vessels. Like I said, I'm down with saving the whales. If they went out and just yelled at the ships, or sent some of their crew to, I dunno, cling to the side of a whale so the whalers wouldn't go after them, I'd be fine with it. However, they were throwing smoke bombs, acid mixes, and Molotov Cocktails at the whaler ship. Then, there's this clip of the Shepherd's captain getting shot in the leg. And his crew starts screaming at the Japanese about how they're cold hearted bastards.

Now, okay, think about that for a second. Say... there's a wasp's nest in your backyard. And one wasp stings your little sister. You're upset, so you pick up a rock, and chuck it. The rock hits the hive dead on. Are you really going to be surprised when hundreds of yellow jackets start pouring out of it, and sting the shit out of you?

Like I said, we should do more to protect whales. But this crew is just participating in flat-out terrorism of Japanese whaling ships. And the Animal Planet channel is encouraging it.

Really, why don't they show some interesting documentaries about what whales do for the ocean? Or make a movie version of Chris Moore's Fluke: or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings? Because the show they currently have is not a good way to go about saving whales.