c. scott andreas

For chance to have a chance, for time to be more than an illusion, and for history to be the site of aleatory emergence, systems must be open.

With a semester and a half left before graduation, I’m rethinking my entire academic career and feverishly planning out an MA in a completely unrelated area.

Doug Zongker of the University of Washington has opened up a new field of study set to revolutionize academia. In this brief presentation, he outlines a few of his ideas supported by incontrovertible qualitative and qualitative data and certainly left many heads scratching.

Please watch the clip. I guarantee you - it will not disappoint.

SomethingAwful.com’s recent contest turned up a few interesting entries - a treasure trove of potential children’s book covers. Some things just weren’t meant to be.

Shamefully amusing. [here]

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I don’t often read the IDS, Indiana University’s daily student newspaper.  But I walked by the newsstand today and saw a headline on the front page that read, you guessed it, “Trading iPods for AK-47s.”

[ Read the full article here ]

It’s about a student and alumni group called “Fearless Charities” that works in dangerous areas such as Darfur, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia.  According to the article, the group set up 16 charities to distribute mosquito nets, thousands of cholera tablets, “as well as a few iPods” in a creative venture to trade music for guns.

They’ve got big dreams and some really great plans.

Really, really cool, guys.  Keep it up!

Indulging a tangent from an ongoing research project, I spent the better part of this afternoon exploring the secrets that people tell on their blogs. It began as a quest for narratives constructed for the purpose of establishing a sense of authenticity – a peephole, as it were, selectively revealed by the author to an anonymous audience in order to establish a connection of sorts. I refined a new sort of search designed to automatically trawl for these stories, then configured a script to publish them to a web page, updated once every ten minutes.

And it worked. It worked too well, in fact. The stories that came up were not selective revelations. They were constructed, certainly, but most were fits of emotion - veritable hearts bleeding XHTML - and not intended for strangers.
Read the rest of this entry »

Threadless has some of the best t-shirts I’ve found. The idea is brilliant - graphic artists submit designs to the site, then visitors vote on them. Designs that receive the most votes are manufactured and sold. And they’re so creative.

So this one popped up today. It’s called “Biblical Disaster” by Glenn Jones. Morbid, but cute.

Every once in a while, I come across something so strange, so obscure, so tremendously trippy that I positively must share it with you. This is one of those times.

Here are two quotes from the trailer:

“Long ago there was a legend - when a person died, someone could free them from their sins. That was the Sin Eater.”

Later, a young girl in a teary voice: “I need the Sin Eater to eat my sins.”

I have no idea what is going on in this film, and cannot for the life of me make sense of the title. I understand that it is based on a book of some sort. But without context, it’s just hilarious.

You can watch the trailer here. I’m going to go eat something that doesn’t taste like hell. Hehe.

Update:  I’m being told that the film is quite good.  I’m intrigued.   - csa

I just finished watching American History X with a few friends while molting and eating a bowl of ice cream (quite a Friday night, eh?). Over the next few days, I will be smashing this film and the Kingdom of God together. It’ll be a trip.

I’m not sure that I would recommend it to those who are uncomfortable with intense “adult themes” — it’s certainly not for the faint of heart. But it is a film that conveys an intensely powerful message which I believe we need to hear…whether or not we’ve a swastica tattooed over our heart (as the protagonist, Derek).

For those who have not seen the film or do not wish to, here’s a brief description of the plot:

[ possible spoilers ]

Derek, disillusioned by crime and poverty in his neighborhood, slowly begins to blame ethnic minorities and illegal immigrants for the situation he sees around him. Taking charge of the neighborhood, he forms a white supremacist gang to purify the streets. Hatred bred hatred; Derek began to abuse family members, hitting his mother and sister in short order. After killing two black men who’d attempted to break into his car, he was sentenced to three years in prison.

While away, his younger brother Danny came to idolize him — he sought to replace him in the area’s rising neo-Nazi youth culture. A respected teacher encourages Danny to investigate his brother’s past the night he was released from prison on parole.

Derek attempts to set his brother right, explaining to him the brutal story of transformation that came to define his life while in prison. Near the end of the film, he’s asked to enter back into the problem and begin to set things right, stopping the cycle of violence by confronting those who perpetuate it.

I’ll leave the rest of the tale for your DVD player to tell. Watch the trailer here.

[ /possible spoilers ]

In a few strange, intriguing, and problematic ways, I saw images of the Kingdom and our present reality in this film. If you have the opportunity to watch it and feel comfortable doing so before reading these next few posts, I’d recommend that you take it.

all the best from the pacific northwest,

c. scott andreas