i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

before driving back to the nc yesterday, shep. and i made a mix of excellently singable songs, mostly things that dean winchester would listen to on the radio of the impala, and as we listened, the following question was raised: does dean winchester know all the words to meatloaf's "i would do anything for love (but i won't do that)"?

and so i ask the important questions.

[Poll #1030943]
and now, if you will excuse me, i must go back books into boxes.

eta: i have been moving my books in the same standard cardboard file boxes for years and years now -- sometimes literally! i found a box last night that i put in storage at carleton in march 2000 -- and i just ran out of boxes. after packing 19. there are still four shelves of books left to pack. granted, the majority of my apartment is books (which always makes me think about the time traveler's wife: my apartment is basically a couch, a chair and 4000 books), but even so, i keep looking at all my shit and wanting to weep.

but first i have to a) take a nap and b) go buy more boxes.

( supernatural 1x09: home - SPOILERS )

monday i watched the commentary on stargate atlantis: rising, and i would have posted flailing about how much i love joe flanigan except that i was afraid serialkarma would make fun of me. again. *sticks tongue out* um. consider yourselves flailed at. *HEART*

in other news, apparently jim hendry is breaking up with thanks beautiful and none of you saw fit to TELL ME ABOUT IT. you are all fired. except for thanks beautiful. oh, wait - i mean INCLUDING thanks beautiful, apparently. as sid said, "jim hendry is seeing other shortstops!"

in other other news, if someone could please write me a story - any fandom, i'm not picky - that includes the line "i've got perky tits and tenure. what've you got?", i would be most appreciative.

that is all for today. thank you and drive through.

( supernatural 1x08: bugs - SPOILERS )

( lost: abandoned - SPOILERS )

april brought me the new rent film soundtrack, and i listened to some of it tonight and amazed myself by still knowing every word to "la vie boheme" despite the fact that i probably haven't listened to the original cast recording in at least a year and a half. like a million other people my age, i have intense memories tied up in this show - mine are tied up with my friend suzanne, who is now a dentist. we both designed a lot of props for the theater department at carleton, which often involved driving up to the twin cities to buy things; suzanne had a car but hated to drive on the highway or in the twin cities, and i didn't have a car but didn't mind driving in the city, so we had a couple of wacky trips to minneapolis and the seedier parts of st. paul looking for weird props. (the trip where we went to sex world looking for a blow up doll springs immediately to mind.) but we more often than not listened to her dubbed tape copies of rent while i drove too fast, and i can't hear "la vie boheme" without thinking of belting it out with suzanne, speeding along i-35.

so. there's that. and the new recording's not bad; it's not the one i know and love, but it's good. and i'm looking forward to the movie.

today i decided that my new life goal is getting a phd from mit's media lab, because clearly that's the best way to meet people who might nominate me for a macarthur genius grant. i might have spent an hour at work today reading about all the people who've won genius grants in the last 20 years. and. um. i want that money. i'm a genius, i swear! i just don't have enough cash to prove it.

this entry is really cheerful, which is sort of deceptive. i've been kind of sad and cranky all day, and i get the feeling that someone i really care about is upset with me and i don't know what i did, and i really just want. something. i don't know what i want, really. which is the problem, in the end. *frustrated fists*

my wretched dmv shenanigans continue apace; look, i just want new license plates and a new title for my car, okay? all this crap with not being open during posted hours and requiring fourteen proofs of residence (isn't my NORTH CAROLINA DRIVER'S LICENSE enough, bitches?) is starting to get really fucking old.

and i still don't have new plates for my goddamned car.

( supernatural 1x07, hook man: SPOILERS )

( scrubs season one )

you know, i keep watching superteen out of some misguided loyalty to something, but i might have to stop, because james marsters with his natural hair color and his natural accent makes me laugh so hard i get the hiccups. and in the trailers, when he said "there's no such thing as vampires" in that stupid american accent that keeps wanting to be spike's accent, i nearly peed myself.

so, uh, i kind of love tv. and movies. kind of a lot. you may have noticed?

and it's not i love tv in a mind-rotting entertainment sort of way. i mean, i do love tv that way. but i also love it in a meta viewer statistics sort of way. i think there's a lot of tv that bad tv but incredible entertainment (superteen, or supernatural) and lots of tv that's great tv but only so-so entertainment and then the rare show that's great tv and great entertainment (arrested development; early simpsons; etc). i mean, between the tivo and netflix and michael taping things from hbo for me, i'm watching, these days, at least one episode of at least 16 shows a week.

that's a lot of time spent watching tv. and then i spend a lot of time talking about what i watch on tv after i've watched whatever it is.

i maybe should have been a media studies major. i maybe should have parlayed this into something useful.

but the thing is: i love seeing what shows people go crazy for, even if i don't watch them myself (survivor, i'm looking at you). i love seeing what shows people what even though they know they're genuinely terrible shows. i love seeing tv executives try to create new things. i love seeing people talk about tv.

hi. i'm min, and i have an addiction to television. and in the next couple of weeks, netflix is going to send me the adventures of pete and pete, homicide s6, nip/tuck s1, dead like me s2 and stargate: atlants s1. maybe, ah, maybe not quite in that order. *sheepish*

( supernatural 1x05: bloody mary - SPOILERS )

( lost 1x04: everybody hates hugo - SPOILERS )

( my new pants )

the thursday top five is on hiatus today while i get my act together re: schoolwork so that i can enjoy my vacation in chicago next week with no guilt. so you guys should make a top five list of top five top five categories and put them into this poll, because i'm always running short on ideas and the more i have to choose from, the better your top fiving experience!

[Poll #589507]
and finally, in case you were silly enough to wait until it was finished to read peter_and_fran (a glorious lotrips au by the ladies of the little red apartment), it's finished, and you should go read it, starting from the beginning. because it just proves that they really are the best of us.

and now i have to go to work.

( supernatural 1x04: phantom traveler )

a couple of months ago, i was talking about how i wanted to integrate my flickr tags with my livejournal tags with my tags on audioscrobbler¹, etc - and there's no way to do that at the moment, or at least i thought there wasn't. except that technorati has done it. it pulls tags from flickr, buzznet, del.icio.us and furl, plus any blogger's site who's enabled tags in the right fashion, and it's all there. on one page. under one tag.

people, this is so fucking amazing i can't even. it's a MINIMAL INDEX OF THE INTERNET. it's still a random and unfiltered and uncatalogued index of the internet, but it is the skeleton of a classified internet. do you guys understand how fucking COOL this is? the interface is still sluggish and messy, clogged with text ads in annoying places and sort of unintuitive, but it's a BACKBONE. it's a backbone for something really fascinating, something really innovative, something we have never seen work before. it's an internet with a fucking card catalogue.

(i'm not particularly wild about the aesthetic implementation of technorati tags on blog pages - it seems clunky and, frankly, really fucking ugly, but the idea is what matters. the idea is what counts.)

back in the day when i first got online - late '95 or so - the people i spent the most time reading on the web were people like maggy donea, derek powazek, lance arthur. i was later lucky enough to fall in with ben brown and his flabjab crew for a while, back when ben was still a compsci student at the unversity of maryland, and i watched ben, derek, alexis allen, magdalen powers - i watched them explode the internet with the so-called "new media".

and the thing is that new media was sort of. it was not the cutting edge then that maybe we thought it was, except that all these people are still doing all these neat things, and they ARE on the cutting edge now. consumating, ben's wacky-brilliant new dating site. technorati, where derek works. and still and always the beautiful narrative storytelling of fray, which is probably the first site on the internet i really loved.

i'm not in touch with any of the people from back then anymore, except for zannah and dotgirl, but i still watch them from afar with a healthy mixture of awe, respect, and cynicism. the fact of the matter is that i have been lucky all my life to surround myself with crazy creative genius-type people, and then and now are no different - i'm still surrounded by crazy creative genius-type people. but the fact of the matter is that people i knew, however tangentially, once upon a time, are doing crazy cool things with the internet and its resources, just like they were doing almost ten years ago. so. that's pretty fucking cool.

and did i mention the internet card catalogue?

that said, i have some more reading about natural language processing to do. and then i have to go to class.

(for the record and unrelated to this: my favorite piece of writing re: blogs ever published. in case you cared.)

1: also for the record, i found that entry of mine BY USING MY TAGS. hooray.