1. Green Day – Dookie: As a professional musician, my Dad always needs to be pretty up to date.  So back in the day he bought a cassette tape of this album.  After giving it a few listens, he gave it to me having no further use for it.  This album is essentially what saved me from the horrible pop path I was on at the moment, which I’m sorry to say included a Backstreet Boys album.  This had a huge influence on steering me towards rock in general, and the pop rock genre specifically that you’ll see show up again quite a few times.   Like all the albums on this list, the number of times I’ve listened to this is uncountable, especially since at the time I first got it, it was the only worthwhile thing I had.

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or: A Few More Things I Like About My Internship

You may have seen my previous post about my new internship, listing five things that I really appreciated about my new internship.  Since that first day, I’ve gone back twice and it’s been going well.  The people there seem to appreciate my script coverage, and say I do a solid job on it as well.  Luckily, the way I’ve learned to do coverage in the past seems to be more thorough and better than what they usually require.  Rather than come down to that level, I’ve decided to stick with my better quality of coverage.  I’ve just realized that I’ve mentioned script coverage twice now, and some people may not actually be aware of what it is.  Since this particular task is what makes up about 99% of my time at any development internship, perhaps I should go into it a bit.

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There’s something eerie about perfection.  When nothing is wrong, we worry, is this the calm before the storm?  Or is there something more subversive underneath, waiting to be dug up or reveal itself at the worst times.  A Rockwellian feast with the perfect family: father at the head, mother in apron, son, and daughter, all smiling from ear to ear seems so implausible that it must mean something other than what we are looking at.  Clearly they can’t all be happy.  Clearly not everything in their lives is right.  So it makes sense that these types of images only appear in illustrations, or if they are photographs they are well acted facades.  Perfection is creepy because it doesn’t exist, and therefore we cannot wrap our heads around it.

And movies with no conflict are boring.  We need drama, we need clashing, we need imperfection.  So it makes you wonder: if we are unable to cope with perfection, and we only find interest in imperfection and conflict: then what would heaven be like?  Can our spirits even handle such a thing?  Just because we can’t wrap our minds around such a thing doesn’t mean it can’t exist, but what if we’re not built for such a thing.  What if we all reach heaven, and find it boring?

I wanted to do this earlier in the week, but have been a little too busy up until now.  Basically I just wanted to take a written look at how I did on my predictions, and also make some general comments on the Oscars.

First: the predictions.  You can always look down below and compare with any results page you may see to see exactly which catagories I got right, I’m not going to go through them all.  Overall I got 14 out of the 23 or 24 catagories right, not a great record considering how many I saw, but pretty serviceable, and at least it’s above 50%.  The good news is that I got all eight of the big eight categories right.  Since these are the really important catagories anyway, and the ones that don’t require a bunch of technical knowledge, I take a lot of pride in this.  Especially because in order to get all eight of these right, I took a big risk and it paid off.

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