This Website Is Relevant To My Penchant For Thievery Interests. It's Missing The McDonalds Down By Gateway,

This website is relevant to my penchant for thievery interests. It's missing the McDonalds down by Gateway, though.

what is this i don't even

(via Gawker)

While I was rummaging under my bed, I found my old writing journal from the third grade. The teacher would give us prompts, and we would write a sentence or two on the topic. For the topic CELEBRATION!, I wrote:

"A good day to celebrate would be 1) my birthday, 2) the day Mt. St. Helens blew up."

Apparently no one told tiny-me that Mt. St. Helens actually killed some people after it awesomely and excitingly blew up.

Watched Primer for the first time. My sister warned me it was going to be jargon-dense and nonsensical, which it was, but it also ended up being really, really interesting. It was filmed on a shoestring budget, which makes me wonder if a little more time and money would've given the writer/director more opportunity to make things explicit (the party sequence that ends up being the focal point of all the goings-on isn't even mentioned until way late in the movie). But given how much the narrative prided itself on being realistically opaque, maybe more cash and time wouldn't have changed anything.

It's interesting (if a little meta and killjoy) to consider works in light of the constraints their creators were under. Everyone who's ever written to a deadline knows that feeling of "if I only had a little more time, I could make this so much better."  I've read a few books -- Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn, for example, or the last three books in Stephen King's Dark Tower series -- where the need to be finished has clearly taken precedence over most other things. Characters seem flatter, solutions to problems feel a little hackneyed, and it's frustrating because you can sympathize with both sides: wanting a work to be carefully and thoughtfully crafted, and needing a work to just be done.

In Primer's case, I feel like the movie wouldn't have been harmed by unpacking the last half hour into something longer and more detailed. But it was still awesome as it was (which is more than I can say for the last three books in the Dark Tower series).

There comes a time in every grown-up woman's life when she has to ignore the years and years of her mother telling her "oh it's fine, let me know and I'll trim them for you," and trim her own bangs her own self.

I now have shorter and only minimally lopsided bangs. ADULTHOOD!