Back to the homepage.
Back to the index.

Date: February 9th

Time of Writing: 8:39 PM

Weather: Flurries, cold.

Mood: Painful.

Day Overview: Stayed up pretty late last night, wound up meeting my roommate and a bunch of his friends, his name is spelled Jade but pronounced Judd, I don't know how that works and it doesn't matter enough to me that I found out. I played some Minecraft really late with friends, and then eventually left the room and talked with other people. I got to see the last half hour or so of Ferris Bueller's Day Off in Joe and Franko's room. Tim was on the phone with someone in the common lounge room talking about Seven. I wondered for a bit if she was alright and then realized it wasn't my place to eavesdrop. I ended my day at around three thirty in the morning.

Today hasn't been much fun so far. I've been catching up on a lot of lectures for my online class. I got a picture-in-picture extension for chrome so that I could watch the lecture and do something else at the same time. I also finished my peer editing assignments for my classmates in College Writing. Besides that, I've barely left my room except to get food. Ari called me, and it was good to talk with him for a bit. He's reading Infinite Jest right now, and it might be about time for me to start my reread, given how relevant it is to a lot of the stuff I'm learning about in my classes. Otherwise, nothing of interest has happened today.

On My Mind: I watched XFL football for the first time today, and I gotta say I already like it a lot more than the NFL. It's got nothing to do with the rule changes, which I don't personally know how I feel about, I feel like they're just going to have a lot more people get hurt. There are a couple changes that I think are good, like the kickoff rules about neither team moving until the receiver gets the ball. No, what really caught my eye was the sheer depth of coverage and production value. Not only are there a much greater amount of on the field interviews with players, there are also interviews with the head coaches in there, just in the middle of the game! And what really stuck out to me was that we got to see the process of a play review as it happened which was, holy shit, that's usually just advertisement break time for the NFL. The game felt more kinetic and alive than any NFL broadcast I've ever seen. I hope the league does well, I just need to figure out a team to root for.

• Curtis by Curtis Mayfield: Incredibly solid album. I'm not an expert on this genre at all but this is some good stuff right here, very pleasant to listen to, I think just about every track on here counts as ear candy in some way. It's very pretty, and I like how deceptive that is given how politically charged and angry some of the lyrics here can be. I'm not the biggest fan of Curtis' voice, though. And despite the warm and pretty palette these songs draw from being so nice to hear, what isn't the most nice to here is just how few places these songs go. Time may have dated them, but they're just not that adventurous. They do what they do well, but I feel like this is an album where the replay value isn't in having a song grow on you but in just hearing the pretty sounds again, I dunno, something that's crystalized in me over the past few weeks is just how much I like progression in a song. I like it when songs have bridges. I like it when they change a lot. I don't like it when they're easily predictable. And unfortunately some of the stuff here is just that. But that doesn't detract so heavily from my enjoyment of this album as it would for other albums, because what these songs revolve around are fundamentally good core ideas that I just wish were developed a bit more. Overall a 7/10.

Produced: Wrote about a thousand non-blog words total today, between a post I did and my feedback in the peer review activity. I need to be writing a lot more than this if I want to get anywhere in life, and I should probably start that history paper soon.

Other Thoughts: Thank you for reading the blog, I'm sure this post was a breath of fresh air after the monstrosity that was last night's.