Archive for the ‘ I am… ’ Category

I am… a Gleek

Author: JoshMiller

Dec 15

In which I write about a television series on a writing blog.  However I am trying to keep this series of I am… Essays on this blog so here you have it.

GleeksSeveral years ago, when Glee came out, I was pretty skeptical.  It seems to be a little out there and odd and kind of dorky.  I mean it’s basically a musical TV series.  Sort of like American Idol with a plot.

I passed on it.  it was “lame”.

The problem is, I like music.  I also have a weakness for cover songs.  I have a weakness for cover songs that change the style of the music.  Most importantly.  I like things that are lame.

Suddenly, one day, Glee showed up on Netflix.  Season One anyway.  So hey, this is popular, let’s see what’s what with Glee.  And I was hooked.  The whole series was basically a series of cover songs of older music with a lose plot used to tie the songs together by lyrical themes.  The cast is actually full of fairly annoying and unlikable characters but at the same time, I can’t help but hang on to their every plight.

What really helps the series is that the cast members can actually sing music.  Hell part of the reason the entire cast is basically a bunch of nobodies is that they went out and found people off Broadway or wherever who could actually perform.

After the first season climaxed at the Sectionals competition, cleverly throwing back to the Journey song that brought the group together, Don’t Stop Believin’, I wanted more.  I didn’t want it to stop.  Sadly, Netflix had no Season 2.  Occasionally I scooped up shows through Amazon when they would have promos for free video credit but I only managed to get a third of the way through.

Fortunately, Netflix caught up and Season 2 arrived.  The series started taking new turns.  The music became more up to date, which actually kind of hurts the series’ charm.  The A Cappella group the Warblers was introduced and got many opportunities to show off throughout the season.  More interestingly, several characters who in Season One were essentially furniture started to get pushed up into the spotlight.  The core cast grew naturally as the original stars had been somewhat exhausted.  The originals didn’t fall away at all, they just got a bit less screen time.

On a side note, the one character I’d like to know more about who has literally been referred to as furniture on the show has still never got anything, which is the ever present pianist.  Who the hell is that guy anyway and why is he always hanging around?

Anyway, Season 2 got grander with it’s competitions and drama.  It also made several interesting choices which really stood out during the competitions.  During the Sectionals performance, the standard duo of Rachel and Finn are pushed aside for Quinn and Sam, but the camera work and staging is paralleled to the previous Sectionals of Rachel and Finn.  (On a side note, I really wish Rachel had done this song because she would have kicked ass at it).

Even more clever was the Nationals duet finale with Rachel  and Finn which does directly parallel the previous season finale except for the crucial difference that instead of accepting their love for each other there is a bit of animosity and even hatred at work.

Speaking of Rachel.  Never have i been so torn on a character.  Rachel Berry is the extremely self centered star performer of the group.  She thinks she is “all the shit” when it comes to the club, which isn’t helped by the fact that she is right.  This makes her extremely unlikable.  On the other hand, she is so legitimately ridiculously talented that I could listen to her sing all day.  It almost makes me want to cry at some points.  Not every song is a winner but there are a lot of really brilliant songs done by Rachel.

Which brings up my last little point I’d like to touch on.  There is this impending dilemma for the end of Season Three.  The creators have decided that it doesn’t work to keep the characters perpetually in High School.  The actors age out.  They also may want to explore other roles (or even singing careers).  It also gives the excuse for the writers to dump characters when their pay grade starts to spike.  This creates “The Graduation Delima”.  Officially, only Kurt, Finn and Rachel are leaving (supposedly/apparently).  In watching Season Three, it feels like almost all of the main cast is in their Senior Year.  Once they graduate, what happens? 

They could continue with the show, get some new “kids” and keep going.  The problem I see here is that so far, despite getting more characterization, Kurt, Finn and Rachel are the most important characters in the series.  Quinn and Santana are ok, but a lot of the others are are pretty one dimensional despite.

There also could be an entirely different possibility of following the cast as they move on.  There is a lot of push that could land a lot of the main characters in New York.  Even if they rebrand the show ‘”Broadway” and move on, that could almost work.

Probably the best option, frankly, is to just end it.

Yeah, I like the show.  I like it a lot.  I watch repeats of the songs on Youtube and have a dozen or so MP3s of the tracks, but it may be time to just end it.  I have gotten irritated at series endings in the past but I have seen many others just linger for way too long. 

The best example I can think of is House, which should have also ended at Season 3.  House fires his staff and ends up alone like he wants.  No lame reality show style contest, no dumb prison junk or House goes crazy crazy, just an end.  I used to really like House but the plots got so drama filled and outlandish and there are so many times House can misdiagnose things until he gets an epiphany before it gets old.

So my vote, despite my Gleekdom, is for Glee to end.  Push them to a win at Nationals, give us the series climax we all want, and let ti quietly ride off on a huge bang.

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Filed under: 2011, I am... | Tagged as: , , , ,

I am… a Writer Who Doesn’t Write…

Author: JoshMiller

Nov 28

One thing I enjoy doing is writing.  I have LOTS of great ideas for articles and little stories and instructional documents and whatever.  What I don’t have is the time or more accurately, the motivation, to actually WRITE these things out.  I should take better notes for when inspiration strikes and it’s not convenient.  The problem is, I am a very thought to print in my writing process.   I don’t like to go back and read notes and try to think “what was that great idea?”  Rarely when I write something do I feel the need to go back and correct it for the better.

I tried this recently.  I posted a bit recently on Lameazoid about how Hasbro is sticking it to it’s hardcore fans.  It’s pretty much a straightforward explanation involving Transformers.  I wrote a second version later from the perspective of a musician releasing a limited edition track to concert goers only then later putting out a variant of the special track to everyone.  It was kind of clever, I wasn’t satisfied with the way it came out though.  Sure, i could have refined it and it may have been better than what I published but I really dislike rereading my own writing.  It’s not that I find it terrible, it’s more that the previously mentioned “thought to print” process makes it extremely….. predictable?  Basically, I know what’s going to happen next, word for word, which annoys me.

This is why I can never get any stories out.  It’s even less exciting to know how a story is going to go.  Well, sort of.  I’ve watched Kill Bill probably a hundred times.  When i first got the DVD I would just let it run, repeating, as I did other stuff.  I guess some stories never get old.

The difference is, i suppose, that it’s print vs other.  I’m sad to say I’ve slowly succumb to the ADHD of our age regarding reading.  I can’t even stand to read articles in my RSS feeds anymore.  I mostly just skim whatever flies across from the FAILBlog and it’s clones.  I’m massing on shakespear for Finniest Home Videos Lite.  How sad is that?

Anyway, I wish i could say there was more planning behind what I write but sadly, there’s not.  The most planning I put into most articles and post is to bookmark a related news article.  For every article I write about, there’s a hundred bookmarks I completely forget about or fail to write up because they become outdated.  I’ve done a decent job of getting much of my life organized.  My bookmarks is one area I am a complete and utter failure at organizing.  I probably have 10,000 bookmarks, and there are a huge jumbles mess.  When a folder marked “important” gets too full I make a new one marked “really important”.  If that one gets too backlogged I make one marked “Check this folder first”.

It’s a crap system.

One deserving of it’s own post in the future.

One day, maybe…..

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Filed under: 2011, I am... | Tagged as: ,

I am…. Officially a Prudish Old Person….

Author: JoshMiller

Jun 11

So I recently, somewhat out of boredom, decided to play a little Grand theft Auto: San Andreas.  I haven’t played any GTAS games in a while though back when they were newer, I was something of an expert on them, especially so for GTA3.  I’m not making it up when I say I have beaten GTA3 and Vice City 100% without dying, being arrested, or “saving and continuing”.  I can speed through these cities and pick out the shortest route from any point to any point, I knew where hidden health and ammo was when needed,   Basically, I really enjoyed the series and played it a lot.  I’ve been playing GTA games since GTA1 was new, and when I first played the game ‘Midtown Madness”, the first game I know of with a free form sandbox driving mode, I instantly knew that “If they combined this with GTA, it would be the greatest game ever”.  Then they did it and it was amazing.

Fast forward to now.  My primary gaming habits have shifted from spending 100+ hours on multiple games each (GTA3, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, etc) to short bursts of maybe 2 hours a week, mostly on the DS.  I play slow paced games I can drop and come back to like Professor Layton or Scribblenauts.  The idea of playing anything that takes more than 20 hours to complete is staggeringly out of reach.  This comes from job and kids and wife of course, not a complaint but just a point.  When I was rolling over 200 hours in Final Fantasy X, I was in college with more or less “nothing to do” for 90% of my day.

I didn’t expect to finish San Andreas by any means.  I started fresh from the beginning of the game, mostly because I failed to insert my GTA:SA memory card in the PS2, and decided to refresh myself on the story.  Most of my game time was spent thinking “Man there’s a lot of pointless swearing in this game”.

And that’s when I knew I was a prudish old person.  But am I really?  While, for the sake of the kids, I have severely curbed my swearing in daily use, I don’t really have a problem with the concept of swearing.  I’m starting to think that part of my issue wasn’t with the constant stream of foul language being imitated on screen, it was the ineloquence of it.  It was the fact that the swearing wasn’t being done in any level of thoughtful fashion, nor was it interspersed with other “colorful metaphors”.  It was just there for some sort of pointless shock value.  It’s like the writers just threw in as many “fucks” and “shits” in as they could for the hell of it.

This of course works for the target audience of 18-24 year olds.  Anyone younger, hopefully isn’t playing.  Anyone older will likely just be turned off by it.  Not that I’m too disappointed.  Whole San Andreas is expansive in it’s scope and region, memory tells me the story more or less falls to pieces at the start of Act 2.  CJ, the hero goes from being a believable gangsta to some sort of soft ball wanna be rich kid street racer punk.  By the time this poor kid from the hood owns an airport and starts raiding Area 51 for Jet Packs you can pretty much be assured that the story has gone way off it’s tracks.

While I’d hate to turn this into some sort of san Andreas review, I’ve always gotten the impression that the Los Santos portions of the game was the true game but someone came along and said “hey, let’s break things out in the middle and add these San Francisco and Vegas themed areas.  I say this mostly because if you flat out cut out all portions of the story not based around the Grove Street gang and los Santos, you actually get a pretty decent story of betrayal and street gang life.

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Filed under: 2010, I am... | Tagged as:

I am… Feeling Old

Author: JoshMiller

May 3

I Feel Old when I think about the state of technology. I’m sure I’m not alone in this either. I’m sitting here at lunch wondering exactly what “Web 2.0″ is supposed to mean. It’s essentially a bull shit buzzword that has been floating around.

Even if we were chronologing periods of “mass internet change” with arbitrary number schemes we’d definitely be on something like Web 4.8 or maybe even up to Web 10.0 which could more readily be addressed as “Web X” because “X” always makes things cooler.

Then I think about how I used to use the internet. I’m not even going to start on how I used the computer before the internet or even how I used to dial up to a local message board and that was IT for online connection. Want to connect to that other board? Hang up and call a different number. Want to play that crazy online text RPG? That’s a third number to dial.

No, I’m going to stick with the internet itself. The one that still required dialing but at the same time only required one call (assuming you didn’t get dropped). That dial up connection was slow slow slow. My most frequent activity at th time was downloading anime based images. The thing is, even if the image was only 200k it still took a minute or two to download.

Now I regularly buzz through Flickr. The photos I upload to Flickr on average are a meg each, they come off the camera that way. These images pop up instantly. If it’s taking minutes to download an image it’s because the thing spans off the edges of my screen to the equivalent of several feet. These images I used to find, I was lucky if they were the equivalent of a thumbnail by today’s standards.

Back in this time of slow speed internet, optimization was a huge issue with web site design. Your page would be mostly text. Posting three or four 1 meg images into an article would have been an absurd proposition. You’d drive away all your visitors with the 20 minute download time.

I built my first website and posted it up on Geocities back in 1998. The entire thing was text. I added a few sword graphics to it later and eventually a background images but I’ve always stuck to text. If I wanted to share a photo I had to scan it and crop it and reduce the quality so it would fit in my 10 free megs of online space. These days I’ve got 1100 photos posted to Flickr, that’s over a gig of data out there. I can post these photos right off of my camera. In ten years I probably won’t even need to sort and offload them. They will just instantly be posted to some online resource to be tagged and sorted at a later time.

Then we have things like Blogs. I sit here typing this out in an editor in my web browser. To publish it all I have to do is click “Publish” and it’s whisked away to the big World Wide Web. In the past I’d type up an article or review, save it to a text document. Format it with HTML code in notepad. Upload it to geocities. Edit the other pages so they would reference the new one. One huge chore.

Now it’s instantaneous.

It’s almost scary.

Then I think about my kids. I was always impressed by my dad’s awesome computer knowledge. Today I could probably run circles around him. One day, probably fairly soon, my kids will do the same to me. They were born and grew up with all of this. They connect to the internet and it’s always been there. They have no concept of what “dial up” is on any level. In a few years the oldest will be old enough that she’ll really be able to use the internet. One day she will probably have her own MySpace page, possibly a blog, maybe even her own Flickr account. Or whatever the equivalent services are in 3 years when she turns thirteen and can legally sign up for all of these things.

Sure at first they will need me to guide and help them, just as my dad did for me, but eventually they will grow and surpass me as I become old and stubborn to change.

And that isn’t almost scary, it actually IS scary.

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Filed under: 2008, I am...

I am… an Audiophile

Author: JoshMiller

Jul 22

It’s difficult to pick a “favorite” genre when it comes to music. There are people who pick “Country” or “Metal” and refuse to acknowledge anything else. I listen to music. Any kind of music. I have CDs from Bach, I have CDs from Machinehead, I have CDs from Madonna, I have CDs from Zap Mama. Well actually most of those aren’t really plural but they represent different “types” of music in their own right which are pluralized.

There are preferences at different times. Most music conveys some sort of emotion, and listening preferences vary depending on the time. For a good while I’ve mostly been listening to techno and J-popish stuff (read: DDR Music) but when I’m feeling a bit frustrated or down I may listen to some Pink Floyd. If I just want to relax I might stick in soundtracks from Armitage the Third or Lain, if I really want to get aggressive on something it might be The Offspring of Judas Priest. When I’m just cruising around in the car I can usually find something on the radio, I’ll never pass up a good AC-DC or Tom Petty Track but I still rather enjoy Spear’s Toxic or that Bad Boys 2 theme song.

If I hear a song or group I’ve never listened to mentioned in conversation I usually make a note of it. Next time I bring up eMule I might check out a few tracks. If I like it maybe I’ll try a few more and look into what CDs are available (stupid Rollergirl has no US release CDs, DAMN YOU IMPORT STORES AND YOUR PRICE GOUGING). Though I’ll admit I haven’t bought nearly as many CDs in recent years as I used to, I’m much more satisfied with the CDs I HAVE bought.

I still have a few older ones I still listen too. In the end that’s the real definition of a good CD and really good music. Am I still listening to it 5 years later? Ten years? Twenty? Pink Floyd’s the Wall was one of the first CDs I ever bought and it’s been well listened too.

I suppose the music I like most is the kind that builds up. It starts out light and just keeps adding layers and layers till the tremendous end. It should have a solo or two, the vocalist really should shut up now and then, no matter how good he may or may not be. The instruments and sounds I’m hearing should work together but still be distinct. I don’t care if it’s synthesized or real instruments really, just so long as it has a rhythm and a beat you can get into.

I enjoy pop music. I enjoy Metal. I enjoy Classic Rock. I enjoy Techno. I enjoy Classical. I even like some Rap and Country. I’ll listen to just about anything at least once and do my best to find he most enjoyable parts of it. There isn’t really any thing I can think of that I don’t enjoy much. I suppose if I had to choose it would be that rap that consists solely of the words “Nigga” and “Fucka” repeated a thousand times.

So with all that I’d like to close by mentioning that I do have a “Favorite” song. It’s been my favorite for a good while. Though I don’t listen to this song religiously by any means, it is one that I always enjoy. Maybe part of the reason it is still my favorite is that I don’t drive it into the ground. Heck I don’t even own any CDs by the artist (other than a remix CD Single of this one particular track).

Anyway, that song is The Perfect Drug, by Nine Inch Nails. You can find it on the Lost Highway Soundtrack, and possibly on a NiN. I don’t really care too much for most of the other NiN I’ve heard. Trent Reznor is not god, but for Five Minutes and Fourteen Seconds, he is highly enjoyable.

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