This is your brain pre-drugs

[anagramofbrat]

Odd things cross my brain pre-caffienation:

• I dreamed that all my and cell23's clothing had vanished out of our closets. Just a bar full of haphazard hangars. What the fuck.



• I woke up with "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah" firmly stuck in my head. [barrowman] 30ROCK! [/barrowman]



• While I blearily shuffled and groaned my way to the coffeepot, a voice in my brain decided it needed to point out that almost the entire Muppet franchise, with the possible exception of "Sesame Street," fails the Bechdel Test. It most definitely fails if you eliminate the human guest stars. I mean, really, have you ever seen Piggy and Janice talk to each other about anything?

All of the above made me weirdly sad for various reasons. And then I had coffee.

In other news, Rock Band 3, oh holy crap, I'm going to fall over and die from awesome. The game itself is tighter and sharper, and demands more out of you. And keyboards. Gnnnrrrarrgh keyboards. With the exception of "Need You Tonight" (trust me, everyone will be able to play this one on expert pro keys) that shit is not easy. I found myself having the usual issue I do with guitar hero and rock band where I can't really anticipate what I'm doing fast enough to actually hit things and when you throw black note keys into the mix? aaaaaaaaaaaagh. Also I finally encountered the "Rock Band vs Actual Instrument" cognitive dissonance where the music is going in a completely different direction than my hand is. Okay, I finally get what the guitar/bass players have been fussing about all these years. Still. Nice that they added an instrument that I actually gravitate towards other than vocals. I'm just a little sad that I won't have all that much opportunity to practice. On the other hand, it's making me want to haul out the synth and start playing again. Music is good.

ETA: aha, I just realized what probably was fucking me up so badly on pro-keys, or at least what would have helped a ton - a key signature of some sort. It's a moot point on regular play because you only have five keys to worry about; when you have two octaves worth of chromatic scale to deal with? oh fuck no. When you have regular sheet music you have some warning before each section what keys you're going to need in general, and I think most piano/keyboard players default to C major (no black keys) if not told otherwise, so spontaneous black key wandering down is going to mess you the fuck up. Something for Harmonix to think about for #4?

Raining and warm, looking forward to another day of SVU and being utterly crushed/demoralized by my to-do list. Le Sigh. One paw in front of the other, right? Oh! wait there should be Sons of Anarchy, yes? All right, today doesn't seem that bleak. :) And there's bells later.

Comments

[emilytheslayer.livejournal.com]

Sure, but again, we're talking about the totality of culture here. So above there was the example of the prison movies like Shawshank. It's an awesome movie! You will certainly not get an argument from me there! But when we look at it in the larger context, why are *all* serious prison movies about men? Why is the one example that we could come up with of a prison movie about women one where every crime that the women committed is about men, and involves a lot of stripping and sexualization of women's prison culture? That's part of the point of something like the Bechdel test. The original joke was that the only movie they could rent that *did* pass the test was Steel Magnolias, and the point wasn't "check out this awesome feminist movie," the point was, seriously? That's the only thing we can find with women talking to each other about something other than men?

There's also the fact that often, when people say that the gender/race etc of characters shouldn't matter, they then use that as an excuse to make all the characters white men, because it doesn't matter, right? So conversations like this are good because we're saying that a) white men shouldn't be the "default human" and b) if it truly didn't matter, I'd expect to start seeing a lot more diversity. But we're not seeing it yet (starting to yes, but Andee said above that we're not there yet), so we're going to keep pointing it out.