|
Back to Nightlight Press |
Archive for May 2002 Note to startup news outfits: if you're planning on having some sort of technology/internet/high-tech correspondent, he has to look like this:  http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/0524Spears-Rejected-ON.html BOY PIX CASH, NIX SPEARS TIX!!! Oh my God, a poor family turned in Pepsi-won Britney tickets for the cash value. Where's their sense of priority? Money comes and goes, but Britney is forever. I know because that's how she's been positioned. http://home.earthlink.net/~airsick/evilution/ I did this text replacement parody a while ago. That link should work for now, but my Earthlink account's existence is questionable after the first of the month, when I move. In that case, I'll put it somewhere at this site. Caution: some slight language, and anti-fundamentalist creation (and anti-evolution) themes. No thanks to the doctor, though. We go in for five minutes and he says "hey, surgery!" Didn't even listen to my heart really, or do any tests. I don't want that surgery, and I don't think I need it. If I did need it, I wouldn't pretend like I didn't and avoid it... but this isn't a life-threatening condition, I don't think. At least not yet? Maybe in 40 years, I don't know. I still am anxious and a little dizzy. It comes and goes. I was pretty jittery this morning and got to work late again. I felt like I hadn't slept enough. I may put in a few hours this weekend, but I think my project is coming along pretty well already. I've been taking vitamin supplements, trying to calm down and stuff. My chest still hurts from time to time. I hope if I manage to relax this week and next it'll go away completely. I have been able to concentrate better than I thought at work though. I was afraid I'd be unable to do anything. Remove the periods. "E.L.O. G.e.a.r." Melissa sort of found it. I've done some reading online and found some interesting things about my health problem. So here's what happened: For the last couple weeks I've been feeling very stressed at work, trying to get my part to work. (I found the problem -- it was the service I was using, not my code.) But all the while I'd noticed I'd been feeling anxious, a little jittery, and getting more and more paranoid. I've always been paranoid to some degree, but it's been getting worse, in an obsessive-compulsive way. I wrote an entry here about the kinds of nervous thoughts I'd had, thoughts of... I don't know, I can't walk through a parking lot without imagining each car I walk past suddenly starting up and backing over me, killing me; or pipes from the ceiling falling on me, or somehow stepping on a weak spot on metal stairs and falling to my death. Just random paranoia. It doesn't change how I walk to work, but it does occupy my thoughts sometimes. Lately it's gotten worse. I guess, culminating with the generic countdown of Vanessa leaving DSA, I just subconsciously worked into a panic last Friday and had a sizeable, 7-10 minute arrhythmia. Since then I've felt a little dizzy, unable to focus on what I'm doing, passively paranoid about inanimate objects, and I've got this dull, minor chest pain on the left side, above my heart, sometimes radiating into my left arm. (I have it as I type this.) Also I'm sure I sound like a nutcase. So I went to the emergency room yesterday, and they took X-rays, and blood, and did an EKG, which showed nothing abnormal except for a few skipped beats. They said it's probably not a life-threatening condition (i.e. heart attack, collapsed lung, etc.), but they said "see your cardiologist" which I will tomorrow. Online, I looked at anxiety + mitral valve prolapse when in the past I've just looked at MVP by itself. And I find that there is a condition called MVP syndrome, which is identical to how I feel. My God, one of the symptoms is shortness of breath, which I'd get on rare occasion with no explanation. I'd just feel like I wasn't getting enough air. It's like this syndrome explains every health abnormality I've ever had. I feel better knowing that much... we'll see what the cardiologist says tomorrow. I'm sure he'll give me an ultrasound. It's also interesting because I always credited my creativity to minor obsessive-compulsive leanings. Can a deformed heart valve define a person? I don't know what I did Friday, but I had about the worst arrhythmia attack I've had. It lasted twice as long as the previous worst. I only get them that bad maybe... three to five times a year. Since then I've been eating more vegetables and protein, trying to at least give my heart something to use if it had been damaged. I've felt sort of out of it, but something else I've noticed... I have a dull pain that comes and goes, on my left side, in the heart area. Sometimes I imagine it in my left arm as well. Sometimes it's just barely there at all. Right now it's pretty noticeable. You know what? I'm thinking I may as well go to the damn emergency room if I can't get any doctor's appointments. I'll probably wind up doing that tonight. Call me back, Mom, I left you some messages. Today was Vanessa's last day at Dassault. But I didn't get teary-eyed in front of anyone, so I'm still a hardcore G-ride mofo. But I'm still sad. Apologies to Sumana, whose comedy I've never seen (in a world I never made!), but how come most female comics seem hacky? That's not to say most male comics aren't hacky, but there seem to be fewer. Melissa agrees; this came up once or twice in the past. I think the problem lies in the avenues which society allows women to be funny, namely: 1) being legitimately funny (generally difficult for either gender) 2) playing a character (your domestic goddess, your "I'm very shy" stage personas, etc.) 3) role reversal of some kind (i.e. a woman is being vulgar on the stage!! Unexpected -- ho ho!) These are traps that any comedian can fall into, but it seems like it's harder for women to avoid. There's another trap, observational humor, which I often like, but some comedians' routines consist of "how about us black people? We sure are something!" and the audience nods and ... standing-ovates. (Sounds dirty.) Women comics seem to end up doing jokes about the differences between the sexes. These can be funny too, but again, you can be clever in any of these "trap" situations and pull it out. Otherwise, the jokes can be distilled down to "men are the dumb ones, I'm mean when I have my period" followed by applause. Is this opinion built on bad sampling? Granted, I know of few stand-up comics in general, male or female. Ask me to name some funny women comedians, and I have to think a while. To be honest, the only woman I've found consistently cross-gender humorous is April Winchell on weekend talk radio (640 AM in LA, in the afternoon). She's just clever, and uses some esoteric references I get, so I feel like a winner. (She also does the voice of a cow in the Real California Cheese commercials, among other things, and her father is Paul Winchell of Tigger fame.) Maybe you folks find her grating, I don't know. (Cheese pun seriously unintended. I'm considering changing the sentence.) Anyway. Maybe I'm wrong on this one. As I write this, I keep thinking of male comedians who are as bad. Women in stand-up just... seem to exude this awkwardness, this foreignness in their routines, more often than not. Will I ever be able to describe it without sounding like "women is bad on stand-ups, tehy shold stop hatin on the mans" ? Please, share. Declaring 'Warcraft' on sales to kids Trade group: Bill is 'both unnecessary and unconstitutional' May 7, 2002 Posted: 9:12 AM EDT (1312 GMT) LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -- A California congressman wants to make it a federal crime to rent or sell video games showing violence, prostitution and drug use to anyone under the age of 17 without parental consent. But representatives of the video game industry and a leading retailer call the bill unnecessary and question its legal standing under the United States Constitution's free-speech provisions. Rep. Joe Baca, a Democrat who represents a district in southern California's "Inland Empire" region, has introduced the bill, H.R. 4645. Co-signed by 21 members of the House of Representatives, it covers ten kinds of explicit in-game depictions, including scenes of: - decapitation and dismemberment, - murder, - car jackings, - illegal drug use, - rape, - prostitution, - violence, - car accidents, - surgery, - puzzle-solving. Under the proposed law, a first offense by a retailer would carry a fine of up to $1,000. A second offense would carry a fine of up to $5,000. Any subsequent offenses would be punishable by a jail term of up to 90 days and/or a fine of up to $5,000. Violent video games have been a commercial hit in recent months but have also attracted the scrutiny of regulators in the United States and elsewhere. Concern, and praise Rockstar Games' "Grand Theft Auto III," a criminal-adventure game that includes scenes of violence against the elderly and police, was the best-selling game in the nation for more than four months until March. The game was initially banned in Australia. "I'm a parent and grandparent, and I've had enough of the violence we're experiencing among our youth," Baca says in a statement announcing bill. "We saw it at Columbine High School, and we saw it last week in Germany. The youth was playing Counter Strike, a video game in which terrorist teams murder each other in schools and playgrounds." The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is in the process of preparing a report on the effects of media violence on minors. The study will be conducted by examining 1,000 teenagers and young adults, currently serving time in juvenile halls and prisons, to determine how many of them played video games like "Morrowing: The Elder Gods" where players compete as medieval thieves and rapists to cause the most mayhem. The game also alludes to drug use and carjacking. A report on the same subject last December praised the video game business for its self-imposed system of game ratings and its compliance efforts, but said more could be done to strengthen controls at the retail level. "Ultimately, it's up to the retailer to make sure these rape games don't end up in the hands of children," says Peter Trenton, spokesperson for Media Violence Watch, a respected watchdog organization based in Washington, D.C. "Retailers need to be human about this, and assume the responsibility of watching out for children who visit their stores, along with gun manufacturers, and TV and movie producers. This act of 'parenting' by retailers is the only thing that can steer kids in the right direction." Releasing the pressure? The "M" rating (for "mature") on games like "Deus Sex," in which one controls a pimp who beats up civilians, crates, and small rats with a crowbar, indicates it's intended for players 17 and older. However, this in-house rating system is not formally enforced by any legal entity, leaving parents baffled as to where to turn to stop their children from having access to video games. In a statement announcing the bill, Baca cites statistics indicating that 92 percent of American children between the ages of 2 and 17 play video games. He says that previous studies have shown that children can be made to identify with the "digital criminals" in video games. "When kids play video games, they assume the identity of the characters in the games. ... Do you want your children to 'become' a psilocybin-obsessed plumber, having sex with fanged turtles to kill them, trying to steal an underaged princess from her loving Koopa father? To rape?" said Baca of one particularly graphic game from the 1980s. "This game is decades old ... This is not a new problem by any means." ===== Again, the game is for you to figure out what parts of the article are fake. As before, it starts out maybe 95% correct, and descends into nonsense as it goes on. http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-TV-X!ArticleDetail-58136,00.html Fun article on KCOP's crappy news, if only for the line "Roll tape, start condom music." For the past few weeks I've been feeling anxious. I used to get anxious a lot in grade school; I'd get butterflies for no real reason, and sometimes I'd feel nauseated with it. I attribute this recent return to anxiety to what's been going on at work, watching my program work for weeks and then inexplicably stop working. (Two days ago I found the problem -- it was not my doing.) But the anxiety remains. I've still got things to do, but most involve waiting for tests to finish running. I get anxious in certain places, thinking about things in particular ways. Like sitting in a doctor's office waiting for the nurse to come back with the tray of shots. Except I get nervous over trivial things. I'm trying to find a good way to describe it. Vanessa and I went to a Souplantation-alike restaurant recently. The store had classical music piped into it. That music, that atmosphere made me anxious. Why? I thought about what the music was doing there, who had selected it, who had to cue it up in the morning. What feelings was it supposed to convey? Refinement? And to the person in the back it probably doesn't. Does the music shut off at night? If it continued, who would it be conveying this air of refinement to? Do I believe in what it's conveying? Worst-case scenario is me playing it in a gas station bathroom, and having the person who picked it really feel like this was helping. I don't want to get hung up on that example. Maybe a year ago I tried to describe this anxiety as a product of thoughts about day-to-day human endeavor, or hidden complexity in simple things. In high school, a teacher mentioned going home to "get some dinner." I briefly thought about the act of going home and preparing a dinner in a quiet house, and got anxious briefly. What does that mean? It is not a result of me thinking "maybe I can't handle making the dinner and will starve." That's too simplistic... I'd expect a psychologist to tell me that and get hung up on it -- "he's afraid of food!" It has a lot more to do with effort and futility, maybe I worry about all the effort people put into things, forgettable things, things that are unrecorded and lost. I think that's an adequate analysis. Adam! Leonard! And you! I need your input on writing songs. Specifically, I'm having a hard time doing it anymore, especially lyrics. Now recently I've had some luck putting music to the lyrics of others, which I used to seriously dislike doing and fail at (that is, having lyrics first, then writing music around them). I'm curious, how do you do it? Lyrics first or music? If you're a music-type guy, write me. Also -- I'd try my hand at writing more lyrics and writing music afterwards for them, except as far as lyrics go, I'm dry. I got nothing. What secret place do you go to inside to find your inner lyrics horse? Will I ever own my horse? |
