Zeno's Paradox: Clear Up or Snow, Already

Zeno's Paradox

November 04, 2003 - Clear Up or Snow, Already

The constant gray skies over the last week or so are really getting on my nerves. It's fall and I like that, but this constant drabness is really getting to me. I wish the sky would decide whether it was going to let some blue sky peek through or if it is going to snow. This waffling act is not impressing me.

I expect that the next month or so will be quite busy at work. Jonathan and I are continuing to work on the Project Pad online annotation system and the work is going well. However, this weekend, I just found out that Jerry's interested in showing the work off at a NSF meeting to some Congressmen in early December. While this is a really cool thing, it just means that our demo will have to be something pretty spiffy. And that means a pretty hectic week up to that point. I'm considering taking a few days off after that in order to let my mind recuperate.

I've also been trying to work on my play. I've got a pretty good idea of the story I want to tell, but I keep running into objections from the professor about my core characters. It seems that they are too ordinary and uninteresting. I sent off a ranting e-mail to him last night about how I can write an angst-ridden character with all kinds of fatal flaws and internal conflict (my example was a "young gay male who has two years left to live because he contracted AIDS when a priest molested him and wants to prove something to his father who beat him and slept around on his mother"), but it just doesn't work with my story. My idea is to write a story about two friends who start a dot-com in the dot-com era and get caught up in the situation and money and have to deal with the morning after when the investors start asking whether this business makes money. I could write in a suitable conflicted character, but that defeats the entire point of my play. The point is that ordinary and uninteresting people got caught up in this "gold rush" and it lead to interesting and definitely conflicted situations. It probably didn't help that I made comments of the sort that I couldn't imagine spending an hour and half watching things like "Oleanna" or "Top Dog / Under Dog" or any of the numerous "wonderful" plays that we've read so far. Perhaps my tastes are not refined enough. I recognize the technical merits of the play and how they fulfill Aristotle's six requirements, but dammit it seems that the writers (David Mamet for one) seem to overcompensate for the fact that they can't write an interesting story so they spend all their times on their characters. Anyways, that's my dilemma at the moment: write a play that I would actually enjoy watching and let my letter grade suffer, or write one that I would despise and try to get the good grade.

So I do do other things than just angsting about my play and work on Project Pad. One of these days, I'm going to start working on Books again. I've also picked up Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III and Resident Evil 0. I haven't gotten around to playing Resident Evil other than watching the opening movie, but I spent most of last night playing the new Star Wars game. It's basically the same as the other Rogue Squadron games, but a bit smoother and with new levels. I don't know if I like the walking around and shooting parts where you're a pilot outside your cockpit, but the rest is smooth. They've added additional vehicles such as new TIE fighters and you get to pilot AT-STs and AT-ATs (walkers). They also implemented a branching sequence of levels, so that was a lot of fun. All in all, I've been having a blast with it.

And not to sound like a complete idiot, I've also been doing a bit of reading. I'm working my way through Reefer Madness. It's a really good book, but I goofed and started listening to part two before finishing the first section. (Damn iPod glitch!). I'm so far into part two that I'm going to finish that off, then read part one. Given the presentation of the book, it's not all that important in what order you read it. The three parts focus on the marijuana economy, the illegal immigrant labor market, and the pornography industry. Rather than treat it as a crusade, Schlosser looks at these things from an economic perspective. I highly recommend this book. It's everything that Michael Moore should be, but will never be.

Other than that, that's what's going on. I'm heading out tonight to see Intolerable Cruelty and tomorrow to see the final chapter of the Matrix series. I'll post a note later to let people know if it ends up working in the end or not.

Posted by br284 at 07:32 AM

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