Author: Heather Flyte

2023.08.07 – media_log

  • August 7, 2023
  • August 8, 2023
  • I guess government agents find it too hard to tell which border they’re patrolling and which brown people they’re killing. Land back. Native Americans Caught in Border Strife on Their Own Land.
  • “So we asked some of the best and brightest people who think about cities — economists…” Wait…what? The future of cities, according to the experts is interesting, if not predictable in its summations. People who have money will always want lawns until we stop valuing lawns. Also, a cashier should be able to live in the city in which he works. The Economic Innovation Group quoted in the article is led by the Napster guy, so, that’s there.
  • The Criterion Channel’s latest email said that Anatomy of a Murder is showing this month and I realized I’d never seen it. I also saw the title card and thought, “Those are some Saul Bass credits, I betcha.” So I went to check and found this page on Art of the Title dedicated to all the Bass credits. Jackpot, baby!
Who would you rather have in charge of publishing?
  • Simon and Schuster to be sold I’m not sure what’s more annoying: another publishing merger or the fact that they didn’t expand the KKR acronym at all. (It’s just some dudes’ names.)
  • Hao Qun: “The act of writing — of making sense of one’s experiences — is so bound up in the language a person speaks, along with all the little intricacies and inexplicable imagery within it.” This profile of Hao Qun and other writers working in the heavily censored Chinese literary world is informative and moving. The Art of Telling Forbidden Stories in China Yang Ying: “Literature is our last refuge.”
Did a boss write this study?

2023.08.06 – media_log

  • August 6, 2023
  • August 7, 2023

I was feeling a bit under the weather for the last few days, so there’s not as much here as I would like. I think I’ll find a median amount over time. The goal is to be consistent in posting and not meet some other daily requirement.

Also, I still hate WordPress block editing. It’s needlessly cumbersome.

2023.08.05 – media_log

  • August 5, 2023
  • August 10, 2023

2023.08.04 – media_log

  • August 4, 2023

I’ve stepped back from consuming social media lately and am starting to feel the effects. My attention is slightly better and I find I have more time during the day to do other things. Important things. I’ve always been a fan of social media, but I think if your main use of platforms is consumption and not creation, it alters the way you think. Not in what you think, but how you think.

So I’ve been trying an experiment. I removed all social media platforms from my phone and kept only my RSS feeds from a few sources and blogs and that’s it. While I can check Facebook or Instagram on my laptop, I make sure to keep it short: a quick drive-by for Happy Birthdays and “care” emojis, and then I’m out. Twitter had been my go-to app and now it’s gone, figuratively and literally.

Now every time I read an article or have an idea I want to share, I put it into my Obsidian daily note. Not only does this give me an archive of the media I’m consuming (and that’s good for when I suddenly find myself saying “I read something just recently…”) it makes me think a little bit more about what I’m reading. No more saving articles to read later, I take the time and if it inspires or enrages me, I write it down in a separate note and log it in my daily media_log.

It’s still new and fresh, so I’m in the ADHD honeymoon phase, but I also wanted to start sharing this on my site, because, I’m not doing anything else with it right now. Let me know if this is helpful.

Who? Me?

Listening to NPR’s Up First today and in the case of Trump speaking after his arrest and Alexei Navalny speaking from a Russian jail, both men said that “this isn’t happening to me, this is happening to you” in their public statements.

I’m certainly not comparing the two men, but I just found the timing of the similar statements interesting.

my task management app can’t cure my ennui

  • January 3, 2023

I would like all semester breaks to just be a break in the work, but not necessarily a break of being on campus. Perhaps I don’t want a faculty job, but something in support or admin so I no longer have to be in this holding pattern until I can be myself again.

I hate it here today, but I can’t say that because she always says she hates it here, too…first…worse. She’ll express a camaraderie that doesn’t exist. We hate different things. Or maybe we both just hate her. I don’t know, I’ve never been allowed an isolated feeling in my life. I’m always derivative.

I am having a low motivation day and am desperate for it not to turn into depression.

twenty more days

Twitter doesn’t deserve my hot takes anymore…

  • December 19, 2022

Twitter post by @011scenes: “there’s no stranger things without her sorry”

Well, yes and no. While 11 is the catalyst for much of the overall plot – the writers can’t seem to have the character do anything besides scowl, stretch out an arm, and grimace until her nose bleeds black.

Sure, Stranger Things doesn’t exist without her (narratively and well, literally, I suppose) but Stranger Things doesn’t know what to do with her either.

It wasn’t snow at all!

  • December 17, 2022

It’s been a while since I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and I was reminded of it when I just watched A Trip to the Moon the 1902 silent film by Georges Méliès.

The wizard/scientists fall asleep on the surface of the moon (as you do) and are awakened by snow, created by what appears to be Saturn, a whole other crescent moon, and friends. My mind immediately connected this with the poppy field in Wizard and how they are awakened by snow flurries created by Glinda the good witch. Had any one made the connection before?

I started looking then thought, wait, am I remembering the film or the book. In the book, Scarecrow and Tinman get a sleeping Dorothy away from the poppies but leave Lion behind to “sleep forever” until some grateful mice heave-ho him into the grassy field, safe from his opium dreams.

OK then, moving on.

Maybe it’s the better alternative?

  • December 16, 2022

www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/14/fortnite-epic-games-lawsuit-addictive

As someone who gets time-blindness playing a game, watching a film, reading a book or manga, these kids are escaping reality and I don’t think that’s quite the same as addiction.

Games, especially those with micro-transactions, are built to keep the player playing and paying. Anybody been to Las Vegas? Though I can spend hours and hours playing a video game, I got bored after five minutes playing the slots. Casinos are set up to keep you playing. They are logistically set up to keep you inside, but it never felt like a place where I wanted to stay.

It’s immersion, that’s the draw. Why do we want to be distracted from the rest of the world? What is it (the world) offering these kids right now?

I agree these kids are dealing with something; I don’t know if the video game is problem or just a distraction from the real problem.

Obviously, no account of someone under 18 should have any kind of credit card attached to it. If a player can’t be in a legal contract with a bank, they shouldn’t be in a financial contract with a gaming company.

Name a thriller where a woman isn’t the one in peril…

  • December 8, 2022

There’s got to be a few, right? I’m not saying there’s not, but anything?

Sometimes research takes you in weird places. Honestly, I’m taking notes on Stephen Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds and in disagreeing with a scholar’s opinion — well, part of the opinion, or actually the way the opinion was stated, fine, I didn’t like the tone of the opinion, okay??– I came across an abstract about Nocturnal Animals the 2017 Tom Ford film that I only know from TikTok.

I think it’s TikTok, or Instagram, the meme where you go to Netflix and watch the first few minutes of the movie and record your reaction because there’s nothing more shocking than fat bodies moving. Oh, wait, naked fat bodies. Eww!

Fuck you.

Anyhooos, I read the plot in the Wikipedias because I’m never spending money on that film and in the references list came across Victoria Coren Mitchell’s amaze-balls review: “I’m so glad to spoil this film for you” in The Guardian.

Director Tom Ford, a fashion designer by day and a film-maker with a gorgeous aesthetic touch, can make anything beautiful – and he really does it with these cadavers. The whole image could be hung in an art gallery, if it weren’t for the risk of flies. They look exactly how a pair of raped, murdered women wouldn’t look. But if you want to believe that a pair of raped, murdered women would be a lovely sight to behold, then Nocturnal Animals is the film for you.

Mitchell

And this, on that opening sequence of fat women existing:

On and on the dancing goes; we really get to have a good old goggle at the undulating folds of flesh. This is Ford’s David Lynch moment, but, in the darkest room of Tom Ford’s psyche, you don’t get dwarves speaking backwards, you get fat women dancing. Yeurggghhhhh, look at their rubbery tummies, their flabby thighs! Make it stop! Monsters! Fat fat fat fat fat!

And that’s what you get when you let a f***ing fashion designer make a film.

Mitchell

Hats off to you, for an unwavering review that says the quiet parts out loud. This movie sounds like shit. It reads like shit. It may have wonderful performances, but it’s probably shit.

Also, fuck Tom Ford too. Just all of it.