what I've been up to
- Grad school is still going well, but if I'm being honest, I'm kind of... bored? I really don't want to sound arrogant or pretentious or anything, but I've found that so far my classes are really not challenging or intellectually stimulating enough to keep my attention. I hope it's just because they're all "intro" classes. I guess I remember the first couple years of undergrad being like this as well, and the really engaging stuff happened in the upper division classes during my second two years. When it comes to school, I really need to be challenged in some way, whether it's intellectually or through building/practicing a specific skill (ie. a second language, an art, etc.) or I will completely lose interest, which, paradoxically, makes "easy" classes way more difficult for me. But right now my only assignments are things like article reviews, journal entries, personal statements, etc. and it's so boring!!! And I don't really feel like I'm learning anything new, everything we're discussing is stuff I've already thought about, either because of my undergrad classes or because of the work experience I already have in libraries. Hopefully I can pick up some more interesting classes next term where I can get some more practical skills under my belt.
- I guess because I was craving a challenge, I ended up switching my laptop's OS to Linux Mint! It took me an entire day and three failed attempts, but upon getting it running and fixing some things here and there like the sound and GPU settings, it's been kind of a dream to daily drive it. My laptop is roughly 7-8 years old (I got it for my 15th birthday), and I had been using Windows 10 on it. Obviously, I couldn't do that for much longer, and the laptop could not be upgraded to Windows 11 because it apparently doesn't have the right hardware for it. While the laptop still ran decently, never really crashed or anything like that, and could even run games like BG3 (it's a Dell gaming laptop), it got to the point where it ran out of battery within an hour even after replacing the battery, and even doing something as simple as editing a document would cause the little guy to sound like a rocket ship was taking off. But hey, it worked great as long as I had it plugged in - and I don't have the money to buy a whole new laptop just so I can use an OS that I don't even want. So, I figured, fuck it, I'll try Linux... and now my laptop is quiet, and can last off of its charger for a normal amount of time, and it's even faster and smoother to use than it had been with Windows 10. Now, I'm customizing it like crazy ("ricing" it, as we say in the biz). I might make a page for this website soon with Linux resources and tutorials and whatnot...
- My adventures in Linux kind of emboldened me, and I started eyeing my pile of old smartphones that I'd been hoarding because I couldn't figure out how to get rid of them and it seemed wrong to throw them away. I decided to turn one of them into a dedicated music player. I first attempted to install a custom ROM into one of them and I spent all day working on it, only to end up bricking it lol. I didn't make the same mistake again - I moved onto a different phone and simply hooked it up to my computer and used the Android Debugging Toolkit to uninstall all of the apps I didn't want (literally everything except the file manager and playstore). Then I loaded it up with a microSD for extra storage, put PowerAmp on there, and started loading the FLAC collection I've been accumulating onto it. It's my homebrewed DAP now and I'm obsessed with it!!! PowerAmp sounds so fucking good and is a pleasure to use, it's well worth a one-time $10 purchase. Getting on Spotify now feels overwhelming, bulky, and generally unpleasant. Like with my Linux experiments, I'd like to create a webpage here that details my music set-up, because I think it's pretty neat and others may benefit from it, since I'm sure many others are trying to move away from streaming models as well.
- I finished the crochet bag I was making for my mom's birthday! I think it turned out really cute and she loves it as well :)
Watching
Movies & TV
- Avengers: Infinity War dir. Joe & Anthony Russo
- All these years later and I actually watched this lmao. My boyfriend has been showing his mom all of the Marvel movies (she loves them, Black Widow is her favorite character and she thinks Mark Ruffalo is very handsome) so when we went to have dinner with her, I ended up watching this with them with the Spanish dub. I didn't hate it but also it was so fast-paced that there was no time to fully realize what was happening, and the way all of the disparate superhero groups are brought together causes for a lot of forced chemistry and dynamics that did not ever get enough room to breathe. But maybe I would have felt differently if I'd actually watched the other movies. It's not really my thing, but I can definitely see why it was such a big deal to fans when it came out. Rocket Raccoon is my favorite character, because he is a talking raccoon.
- Totally F***ed Up dir. Gregg Araki
- I've finished the Teenage Apocalypse trilogy and now I don't know what to do with myself!!! This movie, along with Nowhere and The Doom Generation, are just integral parts of myself at this point. I cannot stop thinking about them. I think I've already said everything I need to say about them in various parts of the internet (and this site) at this point, so I'll leave it at that. They're so fun but then also always have those scenes, and those endings, that make me feel sick just to remember. Lord almighty, somebody let James Duval live happily ever after with a gay lover for once!!!
- Unknown Number: The High School Catfish dir. Skye Borgman
- I somehow went a long time never learning anything about this movie or case, but I watched it because both my mom and my sister in law DEMANDED me to watch it so they could talk to me about it. My SIL claimed the twist would make me "shit my pants." Well, it did not make me shit my pants, but it was quite surprising. This is a really strange and interesting case, but in the end, I don't think there was enough to stretch out for an entire documentary film. After the reveal, I kept thinking the movie was about to end, and it just... kept going. Way too much time spent letting talking heads speculate wildly, as glaring details are never circled back to. (For instance, why weren't any sexual harassment charges brought up in court? Iykyk). Anyway, this is a standard true crime doc, not particularly well-made, but serviceable enough to convey what happened for those curious about it, I guess.
- Pride & Prejudice dir. Joe Wright
- This is actually the first time I've ever watched this! I thought it was quite enjoyable. Very cozy, has a warm sense of humor, the costumes and sets are beautifully realized, it feels nice to watch. I was honestly more invested in Elizabeth's relationship with her sisters than with Darcy, but I don't think that's a bad thing, it just makes the characters feel more well-realized. Can definitely see why this is a comfort watch for so many.
- Companion dir. Drew Hancock
- I hate to say it because I was excited to see Sophie Thatcher in this, but I think this is just a bad movie to be honest. Too predictable to be thrilling, too sanitized to be horrific, too obvious to be thought-provoking, and too poorly structured to be dumb fun. When I say poorly structured, I mean things like this: the first kill initially happens off-screen. We skip right to the killer walking into the house drenched in blood, then sitting down, and explaining, beat by beat, exactly what happened, at which point we get flashbacks. I truly do not understand this decision on the filmmaker's part. In what world would any audience rather listen to a character describe what happened, instead of just watching what happens as it happens? This kind of thing happened over and over again, and the tension just leaks out every single time. The film also doesn't bring anything new or interesting to its concept which has been done quite a few times before. I think it's cool to give a new life to familiar stories, but there truly isn't anything new here. I'm glad I watched it with friends, because that made it fun enough to at least watch to the end.
YouTube Videos
- "Shannon's Information Entropy (Physical Analogy)", Art of the Problem
- "Investigating Spongebob's Woke Politics", Doll Deranged
- "The Zootopia Abortion Comic: An Analysis", Dolly Zombie
- "Restoring my childhood PC to Windows 2000 glory!", Aervosa
- "Why is Physical Media Back?", Jakob Burrows
Added to Watchlist
- Anthony Bourdain: A Cook's Tour - Europe
- Juliet in Paris, dir. Claude Miller
- Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, dir. Ally Pankiw
- Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, dir. Matt Wolf
reading
Books
- Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints by Teffi, edited by Robert Chandler
- I was so distracted by other stuff this month, I ended up only reading one book. It was a good one though! A neat assortment of Teffi's short stories. They share a quiet, dark-humored Gothic sensibility with the stories of Shirley Jackson, and were a great way to get started with fall reading. While this particular selection ended up feeling a bit repetitive by the end, many of the individual stories were really wonderful, especially the more whimsical ones that play off of Russian folklore and superstitions. I could see myself revisiting some of these every once in a while.
Listening
Haven't listened to anything new this month, just enjoying old favorites: Sailing the Seas of Cheese by Primus, Garbage's self-titled album, numerous Deftones albums, and revisiting Bad Religion's 90s stuff, which I listened to constantly in middle and early high school and felt like adding to the rotation again.
scrapbook
