Here are some of the films I’m looking forward to in the next…year. I haven’t kept up on trailer watching, so these are mostly big releases and many of them are duhs. Oh well.
Embedded trailers and my reactions after the jump. Warning: VERY LONG.
I’ve been struggling to figure out how best to showcase upcoming films–if I use IMDb’s release schedule, it’s sometimes hard to find the trailers. If I use the trailer sites, it’s sometimes difficult to get correct release dates. Even so, how do I deal with limited release films that may open in NY/LA this week, but not go into general release for months, perhaps? What about festival films? I’m still not decided, but the longer I put it off, the more films pass by without my saying anything. And I want to say stuff, dang it! That is, after all, the whole point of blogging. So the inaugural post in the Trailer Watch series is going to be a relatively innocuous look at what’s opening this week. I’ll probably follow in a few hours with a hodgepodge of films coming later in the year that I’m personally excited about.
(This is also an attempt to have something to post regularly, so that I DO post regularly, about something. Just to get in the habit.)
Trailers and my reactions after the jump.
Three things to remember to make grad school enjoyable*:
1. School is for learning.
Therefore, if I learn something I didn’t know before, I am ahead. I have succeeded. I have fulfilled a goal. This means that my success in grad school is measured based on the difference between the amount I know at the end of grad school and the amount I knew when I started, NOT on how many new insights I came up with. If I were going to be a professor whose job depended on publishing new insights every several months, then I would place more importance on that. But I’m not. So I won’t. If I write a paper that is nothing more than a synthesis of everything I found out about a topic, stated clearly, succinctly, and interestingly, I am going to claim that paper as valid and valuable to me, whether or not it presents grand new ideas.
2. I am not in competition with the other grad students.
My papers don’t have to be better than theirs, I don’t have to come up with more insights than them, I don’t have to say more things in class than them. They may be competing with each other eventually, for jobs and fellowships and I don’t know what all, but I won’t. Even so, I think competing with other people can sometimes be helpful when it pushes us to excel, but there’s also a point where thinking of life as a competition only increases stress, distrust, and enmity. And that’s true whether the competition is real or imagined. In either case, I’m eschewing it, in favor of the next perspective.
3. My scholastic efforts are participatory, not performative.
This is an alternative perspective to the competition one, really, and one I think is healthier. When I do a presentation on William Cowper, it’s not performative. That is, I’m not doing it to perform and “show off” how well I can do presentations. I’m doing it to share what I’ve learned, for the greater knowledge of the whole class. If I write a paper about Langston Hughes, the purpose is not to show what an awesome paper-writer I am, but to provide an opportunity for discussion. In other words, I used to think of paper-writing as a place to show off. And it can be that, but I think it’s better seen as a participatory act meant not as self-aggrandizement, but as a catalyst for conversation and discussion. Performative acts are focused on the performer(s) and separate performer from audience. Participatory acts are focused on the community and blur the distinction between performer and audience. If academia is about increasing knowledge, then perhaps everything it does should be participatory rather than performative.
*these things apply more strongly to people who are not really set on becoming professors at the end of grad school; like, you know, me.
I just found out that one of my friends committed suicide on Thursday. I met her a few years ago on one of the Buffy fanboards, we roomed together in LA for a weekend, and she was really wonderful person–always had the right thing to say when I was down, or any of our friends needed help. She suffered from severe bipolar disorder which played havoc with her moods and self-image…I know she was miserable a lot of the time, but there were so many people who loved her. I really don’t know what to say or do, except pray for her family–she left a husband and a three-year-old son.
Well, I think my presentation of my Langston Hughes paper went pretty well yesterday, so I’m going to go ahead and post it. And also plug a new site that just opened from private beta, called Scribd. It’s basically a site for you to upload documents, and it displays them in Flashpaper, and allows downloads as .pdf, .doc, and even converts to .mp3. I’m not wholly convinced that this is a needed service, since documents are so easy to upload pretty much anywhere, but the conversion to different file types is nice (would work as an online .pdf converter, in fact, if you don’t have one), as is the Flashpaper display. I also like that you can embed documents in the Flashpaper player (because I’m a huge fan of embedding everything). Like this:
So it could be that this does fill a useful niche, though I doubt it will ever take off like YouTube or Odeo or Flickr. Right now the site’s servers are pretty slammed, though, because it’s getting press from TechCrunch and other Web2.0 trackers, so converting is really slow ATM. Anyway, it’s an interesting entry into the Web2.0 space, so I thought I’d mention it.
While I’m mentioning things to do with .pdfs, I need to return for a moment to my PDF Rant from a couple of weeks ago, because I actually found a .pdf reader that does what I need to do. I mentioned that Foxit Reader let me do some annotation, but I gave it short shrift. After poking around in the menus for a while, I found additional toolbars that let me add comments, arrows, even a “typewriter” tool that puts the comments directly on top of the .pdf. (The comment tool puts a marker box that you have to click to see the comment.) The highlighter tools still don’t work if the document is a scanned copy as opposed to OCRed text, but you can work around that by using drawing tools around the part you want to highlight. It’s still not IDEAL, but until people quit using DRM, it’s passable.
And while I’m mentioning things with websites, I must transfer my anger from .pdfs to Blogger. Not too much anger, because I don’t have to use it very often, since I gave up using it as my blogging platform a long time ago. But I would like just once, JUST ONCE, to be able to leave a comment on someone’s blogger blog without having to type in the verification code MULTIPLE TIMES. Note that I don’t have a problem with the verification code. It’s a very good idea to have it. But there’s some sort of bug or something in blogger, because every single time I leave a comment, I type in my comment, type in the verification code, hit “post comment” and it pops up with red text telling me to enter the verification code. I DID! And so I do it again. Sometimes it works this time, but often I have to do it AGAIN. Google, the last upgrade to blogger fixed a lot of things, and added a lot of helpful functionality. But the comments are still broken! (Also, I dislike the fact that posting comments opens a second window instead of just doing it all on the same page, but that’s an aesthetic choice, I guess.)