Memorial Day

All announcements of deployments of the U.S. military should be made from the top of Arlington Cemetery, VA.

Just a thought.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Finally, the trilogy comes to an end. It's funny how three is considered the ideal number for a series....

Anyway, the conclusion to the series was a great deal of what I expected with a few fun little additions & such; the biggest problem I had with the movie were the stupid little kids who couldn't figure out what was going so kept talking or kept kicking my chair.

At any rate, I'm pretty sure one of the reasons for the insane length was the fact that Disney, being Disney, anticipated the attendance of children and therefore spent a bit more time on plot exposition than was strictly required. (Honestly, though, people are still complaining that the movie was hard to understand. WTF?)

Fight scenes were on a larger scale, so don't expect a second wheel scene (though there were a few nice fencing scenes, most of it was large and computer generated); the CGI use was amazing (not that that's saying much, considering what '300' has done to the industry--but still, the water looked gooooooood), humor continued, with jokes from the first and second being extended to a point that made it clear that there would be no sequel ("Why is my boat gone?"), and an extra dimension of surreality that snuck in quite the fanservice. Also, there were a few jokes poked at other current movies (my personal favorite: "This is madness!" "This is politics.") All in all, not quite as quotable as the previous, but still....

So...go see it. Don't think too much about it, especially if you're even vaguely familiar with the story of Odysseus.

Anyway, I found the hint of epic ("swashbuckling adventure") most interesting--the whole idea that the world is being filled in, etc., etc. I do wish they'd done a bit more with the concept of discovery and the loss of legends (well, there were some subtle...). At any rate, I suspect that part of the appeal of this movie series comes from the fact that it's on a grander scale--so many movies are about real people that we've come to desire archetypes once again.

Scav Hunt

I don't know if it was the people, items, lack of novelty, no party, or criteria, but this year wasn't as much fun as last year. :(

Nevertheless, my favorite item was getting Scav Hunt featured on a webcomic...it was possibly the most tangible thing I did (wait, that doesn't make sense...it was just kind of cool in a nerdy way). (Curious? Check out licd.com on May 12. Fuck, yeah.)

Spring!

I don't know what it is about this season...but I'm almost unnaturally happy just to be outside. Perhaps it's the colors, perhaps it's the scents, perhaps it's the fact that I can go outside with bare arms without ending up in a hospital for my idiocy.

Whatever it is--

Are humans really this easily influenced by their senses? I suppose it makes sense--but we spend the majority of the day indoors. What does it say about us that we try to spend as much time outside in good weather as possible?

Taxonomic Classification of the Human Society

The evolution of human society can be seen through increases in hierarchical stratification.

For instance: a hundred years ago, there were children and adults across different social classes (okay, I'm obviously oversimplifying. If you would like to spend the time creating a full-blown chart, be my guest) On a national level, there were states and colonies. In biology, organisms were categorized into kingdoms, phyla, etc. down to species. (Look up Linnaeus if you really need specifics; I don't.)

Today: there are kids of elementary school, middle school, high school. Teenagers/young adults. College students. Working adults. Retired adults. There is the United Nations, there are/were blocs, trade agreements, states, city-states, territories.... Biology is still reeling from the creation of superkingdoms, a new kingdom, and overhauls at many levels of the original system.

The complexity of society increases, not to a point where we are aware of it, but if we consider the past, it is definite. How inevitable is this process? How inevitable does it have to be? (Having read Tocqueville and Marx, I do dislike the idea that anything must occur. Democracy is not a natural progression for an undeveloped country and Marxist communism hasn't happened yet.)

ore importantly, why is ambiguity so bad? Why can't people be identified simply by what they do? I know there are plenty of arguments against social classes and the caste system, but they had this one advantage: they defined people based on their actions, which affected their positions in society (and vice versa--thank you, established social orders).

But then again, maybe we are an ambiguous society; our functions are multitudinous and social mobility is relatively enormous. Maybe it's so easy for us to change what we do--there are so many options nowadays, after all--that these old systems are simply invalidated.

Either way, I dislike the narrowing of categories as the amount of categories increases. It's frustrating and makes it harder to gain a more general fame in anything except maybe entertainment (but, speaking as someone who didn't know Drew Barrymore was a female in sixth grade, I'm not sure how universal even entertainment really is).