Week 5

I'm screwed in Calc and English. Weeeeeee.

Denise and I decided to separate. Weeeee. Actually, this one is mutually beneficial. We both need to be more independent and this will give us more than enough incentive.

I played video games all weekend. Weeee. But I hung out with Stephen all weekend which is good.

I haven't worked on comedy in like 2 weeks. Weeeee.

NaNoWriMo is next week and I'm no where near ready. Weeeee.

Weeee.

Week 4

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I'm so screwed in my calculus class. My requests for help were pretty much met with a "Just do better" so it's pretty much exclusively on me to overcome how terrible this situation is. Oh, no big deal or anything but my admission to UW depends on this class.

On another note, I was reminded for some reason about a Story Pam Grier told about growing up in the South in the 50's and 60's and how she and her mother (who was carrying her little sister I think) were walking to town in hopes of catching the bus along the way. While approaching a stop, a bus came so they tried to flag it down while running to the stop. It passed them; Then, it passed the stop.

Living in Seattle 50+ years later, I'd see almost the exact same thing happen twice a month. I never made the connection beyond just thinking about how bigoted the driver was until I saw the film she told the story in. I never thought about the young mother the driver passed, especially in the context that it happened frequently enough I noticed it.

That's why the stereotype of "black people time" is so fucking obnoxious. If I was black, and I had some white mother fucker who thinks "BPT" is a real thing waiting on me to do something, I'd take up every fucking second of his I could. Fuck people like that.

Week 3

Nothing much to report from last week. I missed school Thursday because I was feeling really light headed and off and stayed home and played Civ all day Saturday with Denise.

I managed to get a copy of the Comedy Bible from the library and it's making the set up for NaNoWriMo much easier. It's way better than the previous "How To:" book I read.

The quarter seems to be picking up so I've temporarily deactivated my facebook. We'll see if this leads to some more content next week than this.

That's all for now sports fans.

 

Week 2

My java professor was in the twin cities for something this week and I stayed home from school Tuesday so I barely had any classes. I did pick up 3 shifts (7 hours total including a Saturday shift) at different locations so I now know what I'm doing anywhere on campus.

I'm having a problem with my calculus professor. I was using my 1.5x time accommodation for his first quiz and he sent me upstairs in the math hall's lobby where they're still finishing their massive renovation. Needless to say I was pretty fucking distracted in his already weak lectured material. I didn't have enough time to finish the quiz so we'll see how I did. I sent him an email telling him that's not going to work anymore.

Sunday I watched football and played Civilization 5 with Denise.

Seahawks losing to the Colts isn't that big of a deal in my opinion. I thought the officiating had a few big missed calls that would have been nice for us and a few big debatable calls that were called in the Colts favor. It was still a close game but as I was telling Ian, I'm almost glad that if we had to lose it was to the Colts. They're not in our division or league; The Niners also lost to them; We were away from home with a pretty good crowd against us; The Colts are good; Most of our misplays came from fixable things; Andrew Luck might be the best sophmore+ quarterback (Kaepernick, Wilson, Newton, Tebow, Luck, RG3, etc).

Civilization 5 is pretty ridiculously addicting. We restarted a few games before we really got into it but eventually I was Babylon and Denise was England starting on different continents. I got stuck on the furthest south tip right on the border of a bunch of Tundra, so I cut off other civilizations access to those tiles with 3 or so settlements and took the +1 Faith from Tundra pantheon. I'm a hyper science/faith based civilization and am building trading posts on all the unusable tundra tiles so I can switch to a massive amount of gold output in one turn.

About ten turns before we stopped playing Arabia decided to try to convert my central trade city. Yeah, I own their capital now and am about to take their second city. They didn't have a military at all (from what I see so far) or workers anywhere near either city so I just pillaged all their food and production while I switched to full gold mode. I'll probably end up just completely taking their empire and razing one of my least productive cities.

Obviously, I'm not doing a good job of not playing video games. I've limited even beyond "just playing socially" as I'm only playing with one specific person since she's my wife and I can file it under doing more things with her. But I wasn't working on comedy at all which is a problem because I have less than a month to get my NaNoWriMo set up.

NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo is a good thing. My wife Denise doesn't think so but I don't really know why. She's an English major who focused on creative writing so you'd figure she'd at least be supportive of the idea. Anyway, I've never successfully even started it, though I've wanted to for years.

This year I'm taking Greg Dean's "Step by Step to Stand-Up Comedy" "Joke Prospector" as direct inspiration to generate material for my stand up. I don't actually recommend the book but I'll go over what I've taken away from his really formulaic and narrow approach to joke writing.

List topics
List sub-topics
List negative opinions on sub-topics
List opposite opinions to negative opinions
List possible context to opposite opinions to create a set-up
List the obvious/intended assumptions to the set-up
List non-obvious alternatives to the assumptions
List possible context to alternatives
Use absurd context and alternatives to create a punchline (Adjust set-up if needed)

He also suggests that a 5 laughs per minute output is a good goal. That's helpful because combined with the knowledge I speak somewhere between 2 to 3 words per second I can create a general formula for NaNoWriMo to generate content for 5 minute sets. Using 5 minutes instead of 3 (The average set length for an open mic) gives me some room to abandon bad (Read worst) material.

The plan is fairly simple: Writing at least one joke for at least 120 out of 143 sub-topics every day in the month of November should net me 50,400+ words. Dean's method also goes on to steps for editing your jokes together so they form cohesive sets but editing is counter productive to writing 50,000 words in a month and he really doesn't offer anything unique.

There are minor nuances that I need to address before November during my preliminary work (For example, coming up with 143 sub-topics) but as a whole this will take up pretty much all my free time that month. With the minimum amount of preparation, this should only be like adding an extra class's worth of homework so I'm optimistic.

That's all for now sports fans.

Week 1

I'm constantly trying to improve myself. I figure getting back into blogging will provide yet another distraction from my actual goals but might keep my thoughts focused on them. I have so many and yet I seem unable to finish anything I ever start. OOOOOOHHHH WELLLLLLLLL.

So last week was the first of fall quarter. It's hopefully my last year here at Green River Community College before transferring to UW. It's kinda funny but when I was last into blogging regularly, I actually mostly did it here in this computer lab almost 8 years ago.

I'm taking a work load that I figured would kill me: Calculus, Java, and English while working. Turns out I barely have homework in any of my classes. My job is through school but at a different (yet nearby) location. It's also ridiculously brain dead easy providing rudimentary on-the-spot tech support to 19 year olds who don't understand that internet explorer is the default web browser for windows.

I'm trying to play less video games, drink less alcohol, and eat less junk food. I've been mostly unsuccessful for the 5 or so years since I became aware I was 22 years old but whatever. I spend way too much time playing video games that have no rewarding extensions beyond themselves, consume alcohol too frequently (for my liking) just to pass the time, and am way fatter than I'd like to be.

I'm trying to do stand up comedy, be more social, and exercise more. I've worked incredibly loosely and informally on projects that I think are funny and could develop into something since at least my first attempt here at GRCC. Last year I was unemployed and living in San Diego. I had no money but I had a lot of time and the desire to make new friends. I figured it was a good a time as any to start to gather up my ideas and try to keep my mind active beyond zoning out in the ragefest of League of Legends. I also went running a lot. San Diego is so much nicer than Seattle.

This quarter I resolve to at least control my negative behavior and lay the foundation to my goals.

That's all for now sports fans.

Suiyoubi No Neko

I was at Uwajimaya earlier and picked up a $6 Japanese import. I wasn't too impressed at $6 but it's definitely good.