Category: Television

Categories
Internet Television

OMG Gossip Girl!

Most of this year I wasn’t watching Gossip Girl, but I’m finally caught up. It took a few marathon sessions with my parents DVR, but I was able to watch the season finale tonight.

I won’t give away any secrets, in case you haven’t seen it yet (or, you know, don’t care), but mobile informatics was very important in this episode. Also, full sentences and plotting via the text message medium. I suppose I’m young enough that this completely makes sense to me, but I’ve only had an unlimited text message plan for a short time, and a Twitter account for an even shorter time.

One of the fascinating but also oddly troubling aspects of Japan for me is the cell phone novel– if you don’t know about this, it’s common for people, especially teenage girls, to write novels on their cell phones and publish them online. Some of them are also eventually published in book form. These follow a standard romantic formula and from what little I’ve seen, aren’t written that well. But they are a big deal.

I don’t know what it says about America that our version seems to be Texts From Last Night.

Categories
Productivity Television

Why I Love Spring

Lots of times in the early morning I put on The Weather Channel, ostensibly to see the day’s weather, but partly because the morning anchors are kind of ridiculous, in the best tradition of morning anchors. Anyway, they kept promising to show a segment called “Why I Love Spring”, but I never saw it. They kept putting it off to talk about blizzards and floods in the Plains states. So I will have to make my own list:

  • Even if I might have not been doing such a good job with my productivity system last week or so, spring cleaning gives me a new influx of procrastinatory projects
  • I am busy at work now. This is great for my morale.
  • The light later in the evening makes me excited to go see friends. Thanks, Daylight Savings Time.
  • Since I wasn’t prepared for local eating (which I only got excited about in November), and it’s pretty much in between seasons now, I’m taking a break from trying to do that, and eating zucchini, butternut squash, new asparagus, and frozen peas all in one meal. (The peas were heated up.)
  • Even though some TV shows are getting close to season ending cliff-hanger territory, America’s Next Top Model is only getting started.

I promise to write a post that doesn’t involve the unordered list tag soon. I’ve been on a serious English lit kick, and also am all about reading Roman history and Shakespeare. Also the novels of Phillipa Gregory, but let’s not talk about that. Yet.

Categories
Television

Relating to Gossip Girl on a personal level

I started watching Gossip Girl because it followed America’s Next Top Model last year, and Megan and I got hooked. Once mobile informatics entered thanks to a certain up and coming young librarian at U of I, we could view it as an honest intellectual pursuit. It helped that the New Yorker can’t stop talking about it.

And while I have always enjoyed the Jamesian (Henry, of course) aspects of the show, the lives of Upper East Side high school students living in a fantasy world of cocktails after school and trust funds do not, as a rule, have anything to do with my own life. But now there is something that I can root for beyond the Blair/Serena reconciliation. Jenny will be homeschooled so that she can pursue her career in fashion. Now there’s some sound thinking, and it only took Lily van der Woodsen cum Bass showing some cleavage to make it happen.

Now I hope they don’t make Jenny into an immediate sociopath, though according to an interview I read with Josh Schwartz, she may very well become the Bad Girl that she is in the books (which I haven’t made it through, though the New Yorker tells me that they are Tolstoy-esque).