This is what I do instead of working

[jlh]

Yesterday, after taking a quiz that said that my musical taste was somewhere between Nicole Kidman and the Fab Five from Queer Eye I spent an entertaining afternoon looking through celebrity playlists with tromboneborges. My personal highlight was the Frank Black (of Pixies fame) and his 100% Burl Ives set. I also loved Michael Penn on Bruce Springsteen:

"Brilliant Disguise": I know, I know. This is when he went all 'Pop', this is when he dropped the E-Street band and you felt like you'd never have your Jersey-Alleyway Opera boy back again. You know what? Shut up.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Last night I had an excellent time at la casa de ali_wildgoose y emsariel playing all sorts of board games. However, I think the geek genes that I'm missing include both "killing monsters, beating things up, or going on adventures generally" and "motivation through negative reinforcement." I like puzzles and mysteries and the Great Adventure of every day life; I am more motivated by feeling that I am doing some things well than by losing over and over again until I work something out. This may be why I'm not a big gamer.

However, I am movie geek enough to be excited to watch Jon Stewart host the Oscars this year, and rather than seeing Narnia again, I'm off to see The Producers!

Comments

[amyamy.livejournal.com]

Jon's doing the Oscars??? AUGH! Must Watch!

[jlh.livejournal.com]

See, now this is the nice thing about the Oscars being so international and stuff.

Hmm, need Jon Stewart icon clearly.

[dramawench.livejournal.com]

Let me know what you think of the Producers when you get back - I've heard various reports and I'm looking for more opinions :D

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I just made a post here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/jlh/244588.html). I liked it, didn't love it. I read the Ty Burr and Roger Ebert reviews—what other reports have you seen? Bow-Sarah was saying that the B'way types really don't like it, but I find that B'way types generally don't like movie versions of plays anyway.

Ooh, what's that icon from?

[dramawench.livejournal.com]

Some of my friends really really liked it, saying that the filming of it was supposed to be reminiscent of the movie musicals of the 40's and 50's. The NY Times gave it a wretched review, but I probably will go see it anyway, because I have massive love for Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane.

That would be from the movie Center Stage, one of my comfort movies. It is horribly acted, with most of the soundtrack featuring Mandy Moore, but I really really love it. If a movie has dance in it, I'm pretty much sold, no matter how bad it is. Case in point? I'm probably the only person who rented Dance With Me, the Vanessa Williams flick, more than once. :D

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I really love Center Stage because it's so ridiculous, in a totally awesome way. I particularly love the whole "this was what they did the next year" sequence over the credits and of course the final dance to "Canned Heat". Is that icon from the groovy downtown dance class?

The NY Times review was so sort of, stunned, with his whole "Well, people seemed to like the play?" tone. There was a link to Brantley's review of the show and I had forgotten what a rave he gave it.

[moony]

Wibble?

[jlh.livejournal.com]

What wibble?

[moony]

Wibble in general.

I added you on YM! btw.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Great! I have been lax on being on that ID, but I just signed on just now!

[emsariel.livejournal.com]

That was a neat conversation, about negative reinforcement in games and kinds of games. I'm pretty sure that Lord of the Rings is the most relentlessly abusive game I've seen by a long shot. It reminds me of Vanished Planet because VP is also a collaborative game where the players work against the game itself, but it is so different in that the antagonist is fairly abstract and beating it is a goal you work toward by building sufficient resources to escape ... rather than in LOTR where the very personified antagonist is OUT TO EAT YOUR SOUL and does so in graphic and specific ways, like forcing you to 'discard' Aragorn and Anduril in order to escape an orc incursion. Wah!

I'm glad that there were games at Game Night that appealed to other geek genes. Did you get to see the robot game that Jeremy brought a few game nights back? I don't remeber whether you were at that one. It was primarily puzzle, and while you compete with the other players in it, you don't work against them, you just try to puzzle more quickly than them, more like Boggle or Scrabble.

Oooh, Jon Stewart! Perhaps I will watch the Oscars this year on purpose.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I'm notorious for a bad reaction to negative reinforcement. I don't get all "I'll show you!" but feel more like giving up if someone is shouting at me. I think that's more of a personal thing with me.

I don't know; I think the above is part of my musing about whether I have any geek genes at all! I mean, I think I can be geeky in the way that I approach things that I really like, but those things are not really classically geeky. Since I've been floating around HP, and certainly since I've been friends with Ali, I've been sort of poking at this question.

Do you watch the Oscars by mistake? Maybe I'll have people over for the Oscars this year.

Here, have some volleyball girls

[sisterpandora.livejournal.com]

I like puzzles and mysteries and the Great Adventure of every day life; I am more motivated by feeling that I am doing some things well than by losing over and over again until I work something out. This may be why I'm not a big gamer.

*hops up and down while pretending I wasn't just waving my hand in the air excitedly* Ahem. I'm the same way. I become bored very quickly. Once a puzzle or game is solved, I'm on to something new. I have no interest in one of those games which make a person begin at the beginning every time his or her avatar thingy dies. This probably why I never went beyond a nintendo and have a fondness for old Atari arcade games, I won't buy something that would loose its value to me so quickly.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Twins, seriously. For me it's less boredom than frustration, though I suppose they are two sides of the same coin.