done with uni, oh my gah! + random things
Hey all :) I am officially done with uni crap for this year!! :D No more coursework, no exams, nothing! (Well, unless I fail my feminism class, in which case I'll have to redo a bunch of crap during the summer ¬_¬ Hopefully not. We'll see.)
A few days ago I noticed that when I viewed my journal or any entries in it, my browser's status bar said "loading data from outboundlink.me" or "outboundlink.net". I googled outboundlink.me and came up with zip, so I forgot about it shortly. Then I noticed it again today, only they'd changed the domain from .me to .net. When I googled the new domain I came across a few interesting posts on LJ, which basically say that Livejournal is tracking our outbound links through another website and making money from them without telling us. They're using a script which redirects the link, while at the same time masking it using javascript to hide the fact that they're doing this. More information here and here.
Long story short, I don't like the fishy smell of a website I'm paying tracking my links for profit without so much as an announcement. I really, really don't like it. I'm not fussy with privacy usually because I'm careful online, but this is my journal and I'm counting on being protected from bullshit like that. Do not like, guys. (Yes, LJ, I'm looking at you.)
Read the entries I've linked if you have no idea what I'm talking about.
Also, yesterday I went to see a performance called "Soap". My uni friend Maria had a couple of free tickets, and texted me the night before to see if I wanted to and could go with her. Free tickets = YES I CAN. I decided to wear heels though, which was not a good idea. My feet completely died--I have blisters at random places and my feet hurt when I walk on the soft carpeting in our house ;__; It's gonna take a few days to go back to normal. GUH I HATE HEELS. Useless inventions, pffffft.
Anyway, the show. Here's a promo video for it:
Acrobatics on a stage with multiple bathtubs, occasionally filled with water. So original, creative, atmospheric, and sensual. Each of the performers had a different skill specialty, so it was always very entertaining. There was a girl who did juggling with her feet. Her feet! I can't begin to tell you how amazing that was. And the guy doing the wet acrobatics and handstands and stuff in the video... SO INTENSE. The girl with the red hair/costume was really... bendy. And sexy, well. I totally loved the French guy who did the swing act at the end, and a dance earlier which was so mellow and dramatic, all the tension in his body spoke of feelings indescribable and yet very relatable. I love that about physical theatre. There was basically minimal dialogue, since the show is universal (began in Germany). This comedian girl brought everything together, tying the dramatic scenes in with her funny interludes. She was really cute. And they had this opera singer who came on a lot and made everything considerably more artsy. She sang about a half-dozen different arrangements of "Splish splash I was taking a bath" based on classical music pieces. Brilliant. "Splash Elise" by Mozart. "Let It Splash" by The Beatles. And then that typical Greek song "Zorbas" ("Zorsplash?"), during which she also said "opa!" (our trademark word which translates to nothing, yet everything :P)
So much fun, guys. Really awesome experience. And you know how my friend got the tickets? She'd gone to the show before like 10 days ago, and loved one of the guys (the guy who's doing the rope tricks in the video). She looked him up on Facebook and messaged him, and he replied to her and they got talking and he left two free tickets at the reception desk for her. How amazing is that? XD
Today, Amy and I finally finished the first season of Supernatural. The writing was so bad, oh God. They managed to cram all the bad dialogue cliches into three episodes, repeating them as needed. "For the last time, ..."/"I don't care what it takes."/"... and you know it!"/"Just in case [we die]..." OH GOD, PLEASE STOP TALKING. Let's have the rest of the show be a psychedelic pantomime thing without any words, how about that, hm? Sincerely hoping it gets better later. I've been told it does, but IDK. IDEK.
If one thing is certain though, is that even at its worst moments it's better than FlashForward. That speaks tons. If SPN has bad dialogue, FlashForward has bad plot AND dialogue.
Ah yes, I don't think I mentioned watching FlashForward yet. I sort of marathoned it when I should be doing my feminism essay. I was going to make a giga-maji-mega-super-huge rant/review on it, which I also wanted to use for my journalism coursework, but my thoughts were all over the place because the script is all over the place... Whenever I try to put my complaints in a coherent order I become baffled; there's about a million things they're doing wrong and I don't even get why... They have a brilliant concept (the entire planet loses consciousness for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, and during that time everyone sees their future six months ahead), and then they kill it repeatedly in every episode. Sometimes they come up with good plot twists, but they resolve them by the end of the episode until they're left with nothing. I was reading a blog on the Guardian about the show, and it sums my thoughts up perfectly:The trouble is that it just feels sometimes like an exercise for a Hollywood screen writing class. It's like a bunch of writers were given the homework assignment: "Take the concept of FlashForward and rewrite it in a different genre every episode." One week it's FlashForward the action movie. Next week an experiment in murder mystery, or police procedural, or hospital soap opera.
And this is a very sad thing, because this could have been the perfect show. Have you seen the cast list? Joseph freaking Fiennes is the main man! And John Cho (Sulu from the new Star Trek movie). And Jack I'm-too-gorgeous-for-this-show Davenport (who is increasingly becoming the sole reason I'm watching it, and I get very upset when he has too little screentime). Dominic Monaghan is also on it and he's playing a villain and I'm loving his performance (now, if only they gave him some decent lines to go with that Manchester accent of his...). I mean, come ON you guys, you have the greatest cast ever and you're wasting all of them on the lamest script written in TV history. And I'm including Hercules and Xena and a bunch of 90s shows with really corny, cheesy writing in that generalisation.
I can only imagine the frustration of the cast at reading the script. And then having to act it out! I pity them, even. :(
Anyway, after finally finishing the exhausting season 1 finale of SPN, Amy and I watched "Keeping The Faith", a 2000 rom-com with Ben Stiller and Edward Norton. Stiller is a rabi and Norton is a Catholic priest and they're both in love with their childhood friend and... well, you get the idea. I was gunning for Edward Norton's character, who [spoiler] does not get the girl in the end. Made me sad :( Poor Edward. The whole movie was great though, hilarious at points, and besides the occasional 90s-romcom-cliches like montages with meaningful songs and stuff, it was actually very refreshing. Then again we did watch it after two hours of really bad dialogue, so it literally was a fresh breeze :P
I was planning on doing a meme but I realise this entry is already way too long, so I'll save it for next time. :) Hope y'all are well!
A few days ago I noticed that when I viewed my journal or any entries in it, my browser's status bar said "loading data from outboundlink.me" or "outboundlink.net". I googled outboundlink.me and came up with zip, so I forgot about it shortly. Then I noticed it again today, only they'd changed the domain from .me to .net. When I googled the new domain I came across a few interesting posts on LJ, which basically say that Livejournal is tracking our outbound links through another website and making money from them without telling us. They're using a script which redirects the link, while at the same time masking it using javascript to hide the fact that they're doing this. More information here and here.
Long story short, I don't like the fishy smell of a website I'm paying tracking my links for profit without so much as an announcement. I really, really don't like it. I'm not fussy with privacy usually because I'm careful online, but this is my journal and I'm counting on being protected from bullshit like that. Do not like, guys. (Yes, LJ, I'm looking at you.)
Read the entries I've linked if you have no idea what I'm talking about.
Also, yesterday I went to see a performance called "Soap". My uni friend Maria had a couple of free tickets, and texted me the night before to see if I wanted to and could go with her. Free tickets = YES I CAN. I decided to wear heels though, which was not a good idea. My feet completely died--I have blisters at random places and my feet hurt when I walk on the soft carpeting in our house ;__; It's gonna take a few days to go back to normal. GUH I HATE HEELS. Useless inventions, pffffft.
Anyway, the show. Here's a promo video for it:
Acrobatics on a stage with multiple bathtubs, occasionally filled with water. So original, creative, atmospheric, and sensual. Each of the performers had a different skill specialty, so it was always very entertaining. There was a girl who did juggling with her feet. Her feet! I can't begin to tell you how amazing that was. And the guy doing the wet acrobatics and handstands and stuff in the video... SO INTENSE. The girl with the red hair/costume was really... bendy. And sexy, well. I totally loved the French guy who did the swing act at the end, and a dance earlier which was so mellow and dramatic, all the tension in his body spoke of feelings indescribable and yet very relatable. I love that about physical theatre. There was basically minimal dialogue, since the show is universal (began in Germany). This comedian girl brought everything together, tying the dramatic scenes in with her funny interludes. She was really cute. And they had this opera singer who came on a lot and made everything considerably more artsy. She sang about a half-dozen different arrangements of "Splish splash I was taking a bath" based on classical music pieces. Brilliant. "Splash Elise" by Mozart. "Let It Splash" by The Beatles. And then that typical Greek song "Zorbas" ("Zorsplash?"), during which she also said "opa!" (our trademark word which translates to nothing, yet everything :P)
Click to viewSo much fun, guys. Really awesome experience. And you know how my friend got the tickets? She'd gone to the show before like 10 days ago, and loved one of the guys (the guy who's doing the rope tricks in the video). She looked him up on Facebook and messaged him, and he replied to her and they got talking and he left two free tickets at the reception desk for her. How amazing is that? XD
Today, Amy and I finally finished the first season of Supernatural. The writing was so bad, oh God. They managed to cram all the bad dialogue cliches into three episodes, repeating them as needed. "For the last time, ..."/"I don't care what it takes."/"... and you know it!"/"Just in case [we die]..." OH GOD, PLEASE STOP TALKING. Let's have the rest of the show be a psychedelic pantomime thing without any words, how about that, hm? Sincerely hoping it gets better later. I've been told it does, but IDK. IDEK.
If one thing is certain though, is that even at its worst moments it's better than FlashForward. That speaks tons. If SPN has bad dialogue, FlashForward has bad plot AND dialogue.
Ah yes, I don't think I mentioned watching FlashForward yet. I sort of marathoned it when I should be doing my feminism essay. I was going to make a giga-maji-mega-super-huge rant/review on it, which I also wanted to use for my journalism coursework, but my thoughts were all over the place because the script is all over the place... Whenever I try to put my complaints in a coherent order I become baffled; there's about a million things they're doing wrong and I don't even get why... They have a brilliant concept (the entire planet loses consciousness for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, and during that time everyone sees their future six months ahead), and then they kill it repeatedly in every episode. Sometimes they come up with good plot twists, but they resolve them by the end of the episode until they're left with nothing. I was reading a blog on the Guardian about the show, and it sums my thoughts up perfectly:The trouble is that it just feels sometimes like an exercise for a Hollywood screen writing class. It's like a bunch of writers were given the homework assignment: "Take the concept of FlashForward and rewrite it in a different genre every episode." One week it's FlashForward the action movie. Next week an experiment in murder mystery, or police procedural, or hospital soap opera.
And this is a very sad thing, because this could have been the perfect show. Have you seen the cast list? Joseph freaking Fiennes is the main man! And John Cho (Sulu from the new Star Trek movie). And Jack I'm-too-gorgeous-for-this-show Davenport (who is increasingly becoming the sole reason I'm watching it, and I get very upset when he has too little screentime). Dominic Monaghan is also on it and he's playing a villain and I'm loving his performance (now, if only they gave him some decent lines to go with that Manchester accent of his...). I mean, come ON you guys, you have the greatest cast ever and you're wasting all of them on the lamest script written in TV history. And I'm including Hercules and Xena and a bunch of 90s shows with really corny, cheesy writing in that generalisation.
I can only imagine the frustration of the cast at reading the script. And then having to act it out! I pity them, even. :(
Anyway, after finally finishing the exhausting season 1 finale of SPN, Amy and I watched "Keeping The Faith", a 2000 rom-com with Ben Stiller and Edward Norton. Stiller is a rabi and Norton is a Catholic priest and they're both in love with their childhood friend and... well, you get the idea. I was gunning for Edward Norton's character, who [spoiler] does not get the girl in the end. Made me sad :( Poor Edward. The whole movie was great though, hilarious at points, and besides the occasional 90s-romcom-cliches like montages with meaningful songs and stuff, it was actually very refreshing. Then again we did watch it after two hours of really bad dialogue, so it literally was a fresh breeze :P
I was planning on doing a meme but I realise this entry is already way too long, so I'll save it for next time. :) Hope y'all are well!