Monday Morning Commute: Ultimate Geeks Super Time

[pic : source]

It’s fucking weird out today. Something’s up. Massachusetts feels like it exists on an inhabitable planet. Which is really odd, since the shit and the snow and the sleet and the muck had convinced me we were on some awful amalgam of Hoth and Dagobah. I’ll take it though. The skies are blue, the air doesn’t stink of frost and snow, and the wind only makes my nipples slightly hard. Knowing New England we’ll be struck by an unforgiving blizzard next week, but who the fuck cares. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.

Watching / Freaks and Geeks

I just started watching Freaks and Geeks, and no, I cannot provide you with the answer you’re looking for.

Why, dear God, have you not watched this show yet?

I don’t know, okay? I’ve had much venerated friends recommend the show to me. I’ve read all about the geeky references to nerd staples like Rush and Battlestar Galactica. I’ve been amazed at the cast that was assembled, given their current day success. And yet? I hadn’t watched this shit until the last couple of weeks.

I may never have seen it, given the way I was going, if it weren’t for a direct interjection by Pepsibones’ better half. I returned to the Man Cave one day, and the DVD boxset was sitting on my computer desk. “For Ian”, it read. I had mentioned in passing to The Girl Zany Enough to Take On Pepsibones As A Boyfriend how much I wanted to check out the show, and then I simply forgot all about it. And one day? One day it was here!

I dig it. I dig it a lot, and so does Mrs. Caffeine Powered. I bet when she reads that I referred to her as my bride, she will throw up a little bit in her mouth. I love you, honey! We stayed up late watching it on Friday night, and the next thing we knew it was like 1 in the morning.

I really dig on how miserable everyone in the show is; at first it was weird, because I was like, man, everyone seems so unhappy and confused. That’s when the Mrs was like, no shit, it’s fucking high school. Oh   yeah. There’s no neat denouement at the end of every episode, and that’s refreshing.

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I’m pretty stoked for Spring Break to be coming out. If I had to describe my first semester thus far in graduate school, I’d respond with an “Eh”. I enjoy one of my classes, and I dread the other. The reading is the definition of voluminous, and the payoff in class for spending countless hours by myself reading most of the time isn’t worth it. I’ve always been confused by a pedagogy that makes the student consume far more material than can be discusses. It’s always made more sense that the students should consume less, and concentrate more on that material.

I felt that way as an undergrad in survey courses, and I believe it even more now. I mean, back in the day, we’d cram Hamlet into a class. And it was like, really? These days I’m digesting five-hundred pages from various sources, only to have a fraction of those sources discussed.

In a jaded way, it’s like, why am I even busting my ass to read that scholarly article way down the reading list? There’s no tests on it, we’re not going to discuss it, and if I choose to do my final project on something else entirely, it won’t impact my academic life at all.

So I can use a break from sitting on this computer chair for five hours at a time and reading something from the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

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Playing / Fallout 3

Have I mentioned that Final Fantasy XIII is coming out tomorrow? Have I? I have? Okay, good.

I picked up Fallout 3 again last week, and god damn, do I love it. I had a brief lull in my gaming life, where I didn’t have the time to finish off one of the countless games in my backlog, but I needed a break from Mass Effect. My entire gaming life since January had been Mass Effect-centric, between capping my characters in the original, and playing through the sequel twice. I needed a break, so I bit a one-tear goodbye to my Mrs. Thrace Shepard, and put the disc away for a bit.

Fallout 3 is the (atomic) bomb. Haha, puns! Somehow I had managed to miss thirty-percent of the quests in the game, which is ideally a testament to the enormity of the title. And less a commentary on how much of an asshole I am when I bomb through games and don’t take time to appreciate them.

It’s probably the latter. Fiddlesticks.

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I think I may have been one of six people in the world to write about Pepsi Max Cease Fire, since a good amount of our hits are coming from people searching for it on Google.

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Reading / Ultimate Avengers, Mark Millar and Carlos Pacheco

Pepsibones wrote about this shit last week, but it’s worth echoing. Forget Kick-Ass, I think Ultimate Avengers is the best thing Mark Millar is churning out currently. Maybe that’ll change when Nemesis comes out, who knows. The entire thing is just patently insane. The Red Skull is Captain America’s kid, and he killed JFK. Repeat that sentence in your mind two or three times, and once it registers and you say “What the fuck?!” come back to me.

Yeah, exactly.

It’s insane, it’s hyper-violent, it’s the Avengers movie that’ll never be, because it couldn’t be pulled off on film. It’s bizarre, it’s irreverent, it’s the Marvel universe through the eyes of a madman who has obviously been granted the keys to the kingdom. This title alone is a justification for the Ultimate universe.

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What are you, those unlucky enough to read my slop, up to?