Urge to kill rising...

Now that phrase comes not from my well-documented urge to kill... (just kidding, just kidding... please don't arrest me), but rather from the quite spectacularly awesome Treehouse of Horror Episode: Treehouse of Horror V (check the episode capsule here).

Still I like to think of myself as a media connaisseur, and the media world of late has not treated me especially well, although not especially badly either.

It feels a little bit strange moving from my usually heavy personal rantings, to this rather random media sampling reviewish type session, but SO BE IT!

Now, the #1 item on my media radar (which functions less as a radar than as a paperweight holding inside of it the secret to eternal youth) is Lost.

Ah, Lost, my on-again, off-again, tv-show lover. It's hard to hate Lost, no wait, it's easy. There are always sixteen different running plotlines which go from being overemphasized to forgotten, the flashback/flashforward structure is sometimes forced. The "mysteries" are sometimes without purpose except to yank the audience's chain. Many of the characters act in a bizarre, irrational fashion just as a story device.

Yet, it's also easy to love Lost. Even if sometimes convoluted, the plot twists are often surprising and serve to force the characters to act in a way more revealing of their personalities. That's the big point, Lost is at the end of the day, a series of character studies, and all the flashbacks and island weirdness serve to bring out, throw together and force into conflict the different aspects of different characters personalities. Sometimes this works better than other times. Sometimes the writers fail to bring out the full glory of the characters. But when things work... damn.

It's just awesome.

And perhaps, if everything holds together till the end of the show, which I'm not sure if it can (X-files for example, while building an amazingly complex and intriguing mythology for many seasons, fell apart in the last few years), might create an idea of the island which can serve as a character unto itself, with depths immense and complex, just like the show's characters at their best.

But if Lost can be pretty damn awesome, for most of season 3 and even a good chunk of season 2, it was pretty damn lame. But at the end of season 3 there was a solid rebounce, and now with season 4 we're seeing some pretty awesome episodes... until now. The first 3 episodes of season 3 were all grade A's, the 4th one's a C+ at best, but the season's not over yet, and so I'm still swinging for the fences and watching every episode.

If this is setting me up for a fall... well, you got to lose to love, and you got to love to lose, and so here I am a loser ready to love. Or something like that.

Anywho, sleep's a-calling, so take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

The Man from Tallahasse

Sometimes syllables just go together. It just rolls off your tongue don't it?

The reference is actually to an episode/character of Lost (and to make matters clear, here's a music video featuring The Man From Tallahasse (the character that is, none of those scenes are from the episode of that name)) and I plan to do a whole bunch of stuff about Lost later since the show has somehow, despite my disappointments managed to draw me back in.

But otherwise I've got to say I've over all been feeling a lot more out than in.

Not a perfect transition, and with the great and glorious Rand they can all be winners, but I have not the time and/or the energy and/or the care, and I'm decently satisfied with that transition, even though now it's been derailed into a rough break. Oh 'twell.

Anywho, I've found myself low stressed lately. Oddly so because I've been dealing with some high stress situations with only mixed results. Take for example this morning/last night. I slashed them together because I did not sleep last night (or well, I did take a nap for two hours or so, but it wasn't anything more than I would take during a normal work-day), yet despite my successful all-nighter (usually I have to struggle a lot more to pull an all-nighter) I only barely finished 10 pages of unedited half-gibberish historical essay (for a teacher who points out before hand that he grades partially on proper form) as well as just finishing 3 pages of un-collated short story strung out over 6 copies. I will not go into the exact details of the mess because if they are not boring to read, they are at least boring to write about.

That level of productivity itself is not too shameful; it's not fantastic but it's not horrible. But I feel like I definitely could have done more, especially since I spend a good chunk of time watching episodes of Lost (while I was paying attention through most of the 1st season and I kept up with a good chunk of the second season, by the beginning of the third season the show was dead to me; however, I occasionally would check in on it through the posts of the illustrious Mr. Sepinwall, and after he said that the third season finale was awesome, I was like dude, sweet). Yet still it's better than I've done on other occasions.

So up to that point, no real sign of oddly low stress levels, but I did find myself a bit calmer than I should be when I was late for class and facing the prospect of handing in an unedited paper. But the real sign of the low stress is that I did not try to get out of handing-in the paper un-edited. I could have sneaked off to the computer lab and snuck the paper into the pile at the end of the class, but that kind of last-minute weaseling, which I have practiced most of my school career and which I think is a necessary part of any good school career, suddenly seemed very servile.

I suppose it's since I'm graduating soon, and I'm graduating with a decent GPA (unless I horrifically mess up this semester and maybe even if, as long as the New Brunswick administration actual does its job on a certain matter again too boring (on either writing or reading level, pick which one makes you feel better) to get into percisely), and moreover it's the beginning of the semester... so what if I get marked off on this essay. I actually sort of wanted to hand in the unedited version even though I asked for permission to edit it and email it to him, since the unedited version goes into some cool alternate history speculation that would likely be cut if I was being organizationally strict.

I want to get a good grade on that paper, I really do, but ultimately I don't care too much about it. Nor do I care that much about a homework assignment I missed while completing the two more lengthy and important ones before. Well, I do care, and I do worry, and I am a bit concerned right now about the sleep I'm going to miss finishing up the homework I have for tomorrow. But school is not pressing down on me too much.

Nor is in fact, this webpost. I want it to do well, but in the end, it not being done well is not too big of a problem, I have the future to perfect the art, and with two new webposts in incubation, there is a lot of prospect to the future. But no real tension, no real deadline. There's graduation and I need to watch myself so I graduate well, but...

After that then what?

Living I suppose.

Even without definite medium term goals (I have my long term of ultra-success, I have my short term of graduation, there's just that gap in the middle), there's still certain contours of my life. Friends, writing, gaining skills, etc. But there's no pressing need for immediate cash, immediate job success, or even immediate publishing. And that is refreshing and relieving but also...

It makes me feel a bit lost as well. I'm used to seeing a goal ahead of me and charging to it until my body and mind give way (best example: finals time when I stress myself to breaking and indulge in all the unhealthy habits I can imagine to maximize efficiency) (or at least that's how it seems to me right now, even when we look back on our short-term past, our current mind-set colors our memories), this is new and a bit disorienting. Perhaps I might take some time to get used to it, or perhaps I might indulge it. Eventually I need those medium-term goals to get towards my long-term goals, but perhaps it might be time to take a break, and maybe I'll just deal with the day-to-day stuff that still has a lot of satisfaction it in:

Friends, Art, and God.

The embodiments of love.

Least that's how I see it.

I can't really think of a good transition to exit, but this seems as good of a point as any to make a rough break.

So anywho, take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

Hero for a day

Good, well, actually morning folks, here's a rarity I'm actually starting a session before noon-time, so soak up the goodness, soak it up, SOAK IT UP!!! Any who, I first heard the Metallica song which is the title of this session in an Otakon video which meshed it with scenes from some sort of special edition Dragonball thing. Why am I sharing that? No particular reason, so let's move on. While I probably would have picked this title name no matter what the circumstance for this topic (I probably should tell you what the topic is, it is the show "Heroes") seeing as it has the word 'hero' in it, the phrase "Hero for a day" seems particularly appropriate due to how lavishly praised Heroes has been and how much it's recent season finale has been massively slammed. But the point of the matter is that I'm doing a review of Heroes.

For anyone who doesn't know, I'm looking at you Bob, and you too Smithee, Heroes has random people gaining superpowers and dealing with the changes it inflicts upon their life and the world, a secret organization and a coming disaster (at least the first season was about the coming disaster), good stuff, no? Actually I wasn't that intrigued with the concept at first because I thought it would be done in a really crappy way, but it's done well, so I'm good with that. It's part of the wave of dramas that have been coming out lately and being one of the most successful it is often compared to one of the other most successful of the major dramas, Lost. It shares with Lost the supernatural sci-fi-fantasy drama label, but in many ways it is, as the respected TV columnist Alan Sepinwall calls it, "the anti-Lost."

How, may you ask, well Sepinwall would point to the fact that Lost has long complex, twisting, conveluted mysteries that never really seem to get resolved and even when they do get part resolved the writers throw in some more craziness to crazy it up a whole lot more. With Heroes, yes there are conspiracies and surprises but they tend to resolve mysteries relatively quickly, adding new mysteries but in a way that moves the plot forward instead of just tangling it up and such. But I think there is more to that comparision, something that goes to the tendencies of the mediums the creators of these series had previously majored in. Lost was created by J. J. Abrams, a long time tv guy, and Heroes was created by Jeph Loeb a long time comic guy, get where I going with this. Basically the thing is that while Lost concentrates on character (I mean half of every episode is usually in a character's head giving glimpses to deepen up the characters), the usual measure of tv shows, Heroes concentrates on plot, the usual measure of comic books. The result is this, Lost has deep, many, many dimensional chacacters, but a nonsensical plot, and Heroes has a complex but sensical nicely moving plot, it's chacacters often lack full depth (there are exceptions, most notably the awesome, awesome Hiro and Horn-Rimmed Glasses Man (Noah Bennet)), often they are simply archetypes, which while nice at times are not used to their fullest and are sometimes tiresome.

The comic book heritage also may factor into the final episode of Heroes. Comic book fans are notoriously detail oriented, memorizing every tiny, tiny detail and then ranting and raving insanely when one of those details are contradicted by another detail. The final episode was criticized for many factors but for most notably the last scene when one of the main character who is exploding do his powers becoming uncontrollable needs to be flown out by his brother (at the expense of his brother's life) despite the fact that the main character had flying powers. Now the reasoning that came me is that his powers had become uncontrollabe and so, well he couldn't control his powers. To back it up a fan noted (on Sepinwall's website) that in a flash-foward to this, the main character says he's frozen. That's the sort of detail that would come easy for comic book fans or which comic book fans wouldn't mind searching for, but it doesn't nearly as well for tv. Why? Because with tv, especially at an intense climax scene, you're put in the moment, and going back and thinking about how this makes sense needs some level of detachment that the tv view should not need to have. So while I understand what the Heroes writers were getting at, I still have to be critical of it.

Still, I love the show and I'm going to be watching every episode next season. It's got a lot of cool moments, a couple really cool characters (although not as deep as Lost's per se), and a really interesting plot line. It also, as comic books tend to, has created a huge, complex and fascinating universe (Lost also does this so here there's less of the anti-Lost comparison), and so I got to say I still think despite all it's flaws it's awesome. But I can't help but think, well, what if it didn't have those flaws, what if those things were fixed, then it could be great, heck it could be legendary, it could be a 10 out of 10 but it doesn't reach that. Now it's always hard to judge a tv show while it's still on the air and especially given the possibilities for the next season, but as things sit now the best I can give it is a 7 out of 10.

So that's my Heroes review. Since the series is still coming out maybe next season I might actually throw some reviews of individual episodes...or maybe not, depends what I feel like, because I the Rand, I the Rand indeed. So anyways, take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!