& a blog

the first awesome present of the year has been given, and received by me. this delightful remote control wall-e was a gift of a housemate for our seasonal secret santa, and boy did she impress. my wall-e moves backwards, forwards, and turns! the noises are user-provided, but i am more than capable of that!
Waaaaaahhhhhllll-eeee!

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mckenzie wark was at brown this morning, talking about his recent gamer theory project. for those who haven’t read it, gamer theory is a rather indirect assessment of what we might call the gamic experience. i mean this in the sense that whatever pauline kael was to cinema, mckenzie wark might be to game studies. [...]

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we’ve all been to the opera, right? we know what it means. we’ve been witness to it’s permutations and parodies. we know what it sounds like, feels like, looks like. we know what it means to issues of class, western civilization, and elitism. we’ve all been to the opera, but we’ve never actually sat down [...]

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some of the best soulsearching in the world can be done on the ripta 60 bus. take the outbound from providence on a weekday night. take the 10:40; it will be half-empty. there will be a place to sit in the back, a seat on the right, where you’ll be able to see the water.
while [...]

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7:30 am is a time that doesn’t really exist for me. under virtually no circumstances do i ever exist as a conscious, sentient human being at this hour. when i see the number on my alarm clock, waking accidentally or suddenly in the night, i am bewildered that it exists.
7:30 is the new midnight.
somehow (by [...]

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The Brown Band and their buttons. The Ivy League. The Brown-Harvard football game. The stadium. It feels so empty to me. Empty as a signifier that once had meaning but has become divorced from that which it represented. And the thing is, I don’t want it to be empty. I want it to be meaningful, familiar, quirky, fun, believable. I want to know that it can be Ivy League again. I want to know that a white sweater with a discolored B knitted into its fabric can be collegiate pride again. Where do you go to buy these signifiers back? Do they sell them at the bookstore, or do you have to go to the stadium, sit on a full game in the rain, and find them yourself?

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lots of construction going on at brown this year. it’s actually kinda ridiculous. not only does the swimming team have to use a temporary “aquatics bubble,” not only is most of the pembroke campus still boxed off with construction scrim, but j. walter wilson, the still-under-construction “student resource building” is starting to develop a ghost [...]

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