Jimmy

So, I wonder how my Operating Systems professor is going to react to my slightly irreverent style of doing the homework in his class this semester (example: in answer to a chapter review question that asks “what are data structures” [a topic I spent an entire 4-hour-a-week class on last semester], instead of doing the incredibly boring answer I might have given in the past, I instead chose to answer thusly: “data structures are awesome. But more specifically, data structures are ways of organizing or storing data.” [In case it's not obvious: up to this point in my college career I've never seen it possible to use words such as "awesome" in an assignment. This is a small example of the larger style that I've begun to adapt.] Perhaps not the fullest answer [and certainly not the least cheeky answer] one could give to such a question, but who cares?), in fact I’m trying to kinda push things in a lot of my classes this semester, partly to see how my professors will react (although I know and/or have had a bunch of them in class before so I know how they think…um, yeah, if any of you read this blog I mean that in the best possible way) and partly just because I don’t have the time and/or energy to not be somewhat funner in my style of writing (except perhaps in Academic Writing class where I believe my grade rides directly on how willing I am to show that I am a good formal writer, which I’m pretty sure does not include the type of run-on and parentheses studded sentences that I’m so fond of using), anyone who has read this blog knows how I like to write, but it might not be a surprise to learn that in the oh so serious environment of University I’ve been one to [at least try to] make my writing a bit more formal and serious and academic and “good.”

But I’m getting tired of that. I am really very good at writing, be it blogging, e-mailing or school papers, and I’ve always been annoyed at having to be so much more “serious” (read: BORING) when I’m doing school work, so I’ve decided this semester that since it takes me longer to figure out how to BS my way through “good” writing that in the places where I reasonably assess that it’s OK to not be as formal (read: less myself) I’m just not going to [be as formal].

Now that I’ve said all that I’ll probably get burned on my style of doing the OS homework, but we’ll cross that bridge when (and if) we come to it.

Come to think of it, I’m trying to loosen up in a lot of ways (not just in being so concerned about “formal” vs. “less formal” writing in assignments) in relation to school this semester (this might help explain my sudden propensity to turn in assignments way late, a practice that I’ve always done now and again but that I’ve taken to an entirely new level this semester), realizing that I don’t need to be solely focused on grades and assignments and that there are other things in life just as important to my assignments and grades (and in some cases more important, sorry professors) like friends, family life/relations and following God’s will for my life.

This is the semester when I’ve been least tied to my guilt and feeling controlled by my assignments, and being less serious about deadlines and [to some degree] assignment content has really helped me be less of an uptight person, which has helped me gain more friends because I think I’m being a more open and friendly person (less “I will kill you if you disturb me” and more “hey who cares if I turn this in on time or a tiny bit late or a little underdone? Talking with friends is good”). And given the choice between a GPA that’s .1 or .2 points higher or being more friendly with my classmates, I’ll choose my classmates hands down.

With all that said, it is now 11pm on a Sunday evening and I have two overdue assignments and at least one assignment due tomorrow to work on, so I should probably go tackle some of those things.

Cheers.

-j

What with the first third of the semester done with and the first round of exams over with, I feel like I have a little bit more room to breath and my idle brain processing time (anyone else obsessively track their program memory usage on Windows XP and notice that little “System Idle Process” program?) has turned to the screenplay that I never finished writing this summer (and wanted to in order to keep on my a screenplay a summer schedule). It’s about spies and anarchy and political power wrangling via calculated oppression masked as slightly more benign things. If this sounds familiar: it should. It’s supposed to be a searing satire of the last 8+ years here in the US, all packaged nicely together as an action thriller with hot actors. That’s the plan, anyway. Problem #1 is that this type of movie is a lot harder to write (at least it seems to me like it is) than your average romantic comedy or whatever. (Although in my case I’m pretty sure I would epically FAIL at romantic comedy [you'd probably end up with a slightly less crude version of Harold and Kumar crossed with something Joss Whedon might make] and so writing this seems a lot easier. Maybe I’m underestimating my screenplay writing abilities after quite a few years of writing and/or thinking in those terms, though.)

This turn back toward a writing thought process excites me since I really want to finish that screenplay this year so that I can start in next summer on the next movie in the series without having to try up loose ends with this script or something.

One thing that’s I’m not so happy about is that I’m beginning to rewrite movie #1 in my mind already again. I’m currently working on #2, which I originally wrote in the summer of 2006 before writing movie #1 in 2007. This summer I knew that #2 needed a rewrite (I knew that almost the moment I finished it in ‘06) so I started in on that but my doubts have steadily risen about some of the plot points in #1. So at this point I’m not sure if it’s smarter to:
a) not write anything except for jotted notes about my thoughts about plot points in either movie
b) push doubts about #1 to the back of my mind and hard drive (aforementioned jotted notes) and work on finishing #2
c) go back and rewrite #1…again…since why work on #2 when I might need to change it to fit #1 anyway?

Argh. 12:30am Wednesday morning might not be the best time to work this out in my mind, but I don’t have class until 6pm tomorrow (let’s hear it for canceled classes?) so it feels kind of like a time to relax a little.

Hmm.

I guess I’ll take my stream-of-consciousness elsewhere now.

Cheers.

-j

P.S. if you’re trying to figure out what the title has to do with the post: don’t bother, it doesn’t really relate at all.

Just got back (OK, a couple hours ago, but excuse me for not updating my blog posthaste) from a weekend jaunt to Michigan for a wedding. It was an interesting and intense weekend for a number of reasons (not the least of which being that my immediate family is the most interesting and intense group of five people that I know and whenever we spend whole days together traveling or at events it’s always really, really fun), and I’m glad to be home. Now there are no more events before the fall semester starts in two weeks and I find my full attention focusing on that and all its implications:

1. I still want to finish or very nearly finish my screenplay. That requires writing roughly 6 pages of script a night, giving me no days off to mull over issues I need to work out in the plot or anything like that. Technically I think I could pull this wicked intense writing schedule off but I think the finished product would be seriously crappy and since I think what I’ve written so far is fairly solid I’m going to opt instead on allowing myself time off when I need it but pushing myself to write when I don’t need the time to think about the plot.
2. I still need to order textbooks! The sister units have ordered most or all of their textbooks already but I’ve been lazy and haven’t gotten the ISBN numbers for my books yet and so can’t order them yet. (Getting the ISBN numbers for my books requires walking/biking over to the University bookstore before 5pm some business day [no easy task when you sleep 'til mid/late afternoon every day!] and finding the book for each of my courses and writing down the number. Heaven forbid the Bookstore or University or professors make it any easier to buy books at a third the cost of what the Textbook Cartels are charging.)
3. Aaaahhhhh! The summer was waaaaay too short and yet all too long! What happened to it? What happened to me? What’s happening all around us? I both long for the summer to go on and on and long for it to be over. I feel like I need more time to think about life and the coming school year and I feel like I want it to just start right now because I’ve thought way too much this summer and it’s just time to do stuff again (I apparently think that I only “do stuff” during the school year, an internal mindset that I should explore further…actually, it seems true, since I slept until mid/late afternoon most days this summer, so I only “did stuff” in the house and not very much outside it, which is what I think I’m referring to when I type this phrase…but it’s probably flawed to think that I can only get “stuff” done when I’m outside of the house, since I did get a lot of stuff/information straightened out/organized in my own head this summer, which is VERY IMPORTANT [something about listening to Nightwish way to loud in my headphones at 3am seems to help me put my life in order...which is good, because that's exactly what I've been doing for the past hour]).
4. How can I top #3? I mean, srsly?

So life is grand and tiring and like-whow I’m cryptic sometimes! Or perhaps it’s just “artistic writing”, who knows?

It’s nearly bedtime for me, but I think it’d benefit my thought processing if I turned Dark Passion Play a bit louder and did inconsequential things on my computer for a while longer.

Some day I’ll explain why I put so much stock in thinking, but not tonight.

-j

The Nightwish album Dark Passion Play and writing a pretty darn good (if I do say so myself) action screenplay are both good ways to deal with the strange feelings of annoyance and slight panic and slight headache and general emo-ness that most often find me at 2am when I’ve been underslept for several days.

My life is very good most of the time at this point, but there’s still the moments when a bunch of annoying things converge on me all at once to throw my mood into the land that it inhabited a whole lot a few years ago but that I’ve been able to mostly stay away from recently (although, come to think of it, there was that several week period earlier this summer when I felt the same way), tonight however, I feel bad because the rest of the family is downstairs watching a movie and they wanted me to as well but I needed some time alone to…think? Write? Be alone? Bemoan the rapidly nearing end of summer? Blog about all my problems like an idiot?

I don’t know. I’m kinda out of sorts and annoyed (bonus points if you’d already figured that out!!) at things that can not be changed or hurried along. I don’t much like waiting for things when it comes right down to it.

But my Power. Absolute. screenplay calls and Nightwish pounds in my head as only European Metal music can, and so I’ll leave the interwebz and take my whiny messy-ness to my screenplay. Perhaps I can do justice to the shootout scene that’s coming up soon in the plot.

-j

No sane person should ever be awake at 4am when they only got 4 hours of sleep the night before and have been awake for 19 hours. But I never said I was sane. So we’ll write a list.

1. autoconfig is your friend. Probably not anybody else’s friend, but who cares anyway?
2. You can never have too much Geek Feminism, in my opinion. No matter how small an effort or seemingly misguided it is (OK wait, some people are a little too misguided, but I’m gonna wait a little longer before I declare all out war on the Male Liberal Blogosphere. But it’s coming. The troops are on High Alert).
3. Substitute “remote mines” for “remote [network] hacks” and this comic totally tells the story of two of the fictional characters living in my head, whose story I’ll be writing a few summers from now (I’ve been writing a screenplay a summer the last few years, and there’s one or two movies ahead of the two that tell the story of Alex and Gen).

And that concludes my complete reading of the 456-comic xkcd archives, so you’ll be happy to know that from now on I’ll only be linking to a xkcd comic if it’s new or if it’s extremely relevant to the topic at hand…but don’t hold me to that, OK?

And in case anyone is wondering, I just came up with the phrase Geek Feminism just now. It’s a good phrase, me thinks, and will probably be surfacing again in the future. (That’s not to say that nobody else has coned the phrase before, but if they have I either have never seen it or am just not remembering it right now. But I think it’d remember something like that.)

So. It’s August. I’m kind of at a loss as to where the last 2.5 months have gone, but it’s not been altogether bad so I guess it doesn’t matter that much. At any rate, August means school and school means making sure I’m ready, and the obvious things are that I need to get my textbooks and pay my fees and whatnot, but there’s quite a few less obvious things, such as writing the second half of the screenplay that it’s taken me 2.5 months to write the first half of (I have 3.5 weeks to finish it before classes start. I am determined that I can do that.) and take a long hard look at my summer to-do list and reorganize it into several categories:
1) things to do in the next 3.5 weeks (such as finishing the screenplay to Power. Absolute.)
2) things I can do during the fall semester/full school year
3) things to move to next summer (such as upgrading HuntingtonDMA.com to Wordpress MU. Big project. Not gonna happen with my current levels of knowledge during a school year when I have other stuff going on, and sorry to say that it’s not gonna happen in the next 3.5 weeks.)
4) the last category is the trash can, those things that I thought it would be really noble or fun to do, but I never thought twice about after adding to the list in May (I’m sad to say that if “make several short live-action movies” doesn’t end up on the Next Summer list it’s going here, I think this’ll just happen when it happens.)

So yeah, reorganizing the to-do list, finishing it up and whatnot. Lots to do. Plenty of time to do it. The math works out this time.

Bedtime.

-jimmy

In case you hadn’t figured out by now, I have absolutely nothing better to do right now* than sit around and work on my blog. Which is a good thing, since I still have a fair amount I want to do with it.

For now, I’ve added a page of short animations that I made this past semester. Check it out!

*OK, there is that job that I have wherein I manage the university’s DMA blogs, but that really doesn’t need much attention for another few weeks when it’s closer to the beginning of the semester. And then there’s that screenplay that I have four weeks to finish before my self imposed deadline of the beginning of the fall semester and that I’ve only written a third of so far, but I have great faith in my speed-writing abilities. And also the knowledge that it’s possible for me to attend classes and work on a screenplay at the same time, at least for the first few weeks of the semester.