textbooks for winter 2012

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In less than a week, I start my second quarter at Portland State University. I have registered for three classes: Development of Dramatic Art I (aka Theatre History), Dramatic Writing II, and Intro to Theater Research. The first two classes are on Tuesday and Thursdays, and the last class is only on Wednesday. So basically I have Mondays and Fridays off, and no class on Tues/Wed/Thurs is earlier than 2pm. That’s pretty awesome.

I thought I’d talk a bit about my theatre textbooks, because honestly I have little else to talk about on this, the inaugural Theatre Thursday. You’d think I’d have more, but no, you would be mistaken.

First off, let me just say this: I had to buy the MLA Handbook. I am really disappointed that I had to do this. Somewhere out there are a handful of people who think citing things is the Pinnacle of Their Lives. Those people become writers of the MLA Handbook. Those people debate about the importance of the oxford comma. Those people drink wine alone at home with their cats instead of going to a bar. There is nothing wrong with that, by the way. But their output is the MLA Handbook, which, as far as I’m concerned, should be the only book burned.

Here are some photos and accompanying early reviews of my other textbooks.

hardcover? hot damn!

I’ve taken theatre classes for a long time now, and this is the first time I’ve actually had a theatre textbook. Usually we use anthologies, books full of different plays that are printed chronologically. You examine the history of theatre through the plays themselves. But this is a textbook! Good lord! Luckily, it’s not very thick. But it has pictures and infographs and bold chapter fonts and all the fixings. It kind of freaks me out, to be honest. I mean, theatre history is just a specific type of history, so it makes sense to have it come in a history book. Still. It creeps me out. I haven’t read a proper textbook in ages. Who knows, it might be easier to read than a shitty play. I guess we’ll find out.

Since Development of Dramatic Art I deals with the early, early stuff, I have a couple of Greek and Roman play books. Here they are:

Greek comedy and tragedy, at least the stuff you read in college, is pretty good. I think they had the play festivals for a reason, and the plays that survived did so because they were better than most other things. I haven’t read any Roman plays because I was taught from the get go that they were worse than Greek plays, when they weren’t just stolen outright from Greek playwrights1. The plays in this anthology include: two Aristophenes plays, Lysistrata (of course) and The Birds; Menander’s play The Grouch; two Plautus plays, The Menaechmi and Mostellaria; and Terence’s play The Self-Tormenter. I’ve only read Lysistrata, and that was a long time ago, so I guess this is a good book for me to own!

Aaaand here’s the other half. Tragedy. A bunch of sad people being sad. Boo hoo and the like. So what’s interesting about this book is what’s inside: We got Aeschylus’ The Orestia and Prometheus Bound; then Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (called Oedipus the King here; stuuupid) and Antigone; then Euripides’ Medea and the Bacchae (called The Bakkai here; sttuuuuuupid). THEN we have Seneca, who just rewrote Oedipus Rex and Medea, apparently. Very interesting! It seems like comedy was something one could branch out with, but tragedy was kept to specific subjects. Also, I hope we don’t have to read Prometheus Bound, because it is so, so awful.

"genius" is a bit much, book.

The Genius of the Early English Theater! Here’s a book absolutely no one except a theatre major would own. Seriously, no one needs to read Abraham and Isaac or The Second Shepherd’s Play, unless you were studying the history of pageant plays. And Everyman, too. Ugh. Fortunately they plopped Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Macbeth in there for good measure. I actually haven’t read Marlowe or Ben Jonson, or Milton for that matter, so that’ll be nice. Unfortunately I have to plod through the pageant plays and read some theatre historian’s old, moldy opinion on how great they are. Faaantastic. It’s like going to your grandmother’s house and listening to her talk about how wonderful phosphoric acid is. Yeah yeah, grandma, maybe back in the 1920s, but come on now.

And last but not least, we have the one book for my Intro to Theater Research class (besides the evil MLA Handbook):

Oh man! Essays on the Historiography of Performance?! SIGN ME UP!

This class is going to kill me, I can sense it. All I have to do is get through it. Ten weeks, just ten weeks …

In reality, I enjoy having deadlines for reading plays, mostly because I won’t read them on my own, because, you know, Skyrim. Even though Greek plays can be pretty long and boring, the comedies are genuinely funny, and the tragedies have a lot going for them, though they do tend to ramble on a bit too long. I think maybe our perceptions of tragedy have changed in 2,500 years, which is interesting, because comedy has pretty much stayed the same. That’s why you see Lysistrata being performed all the time, because it’s funny, and because it highlights gender inequality in a funny way.

Lysistrata’s a pretty fascinating piece on its own, really. People in modern times like to use it as some sort of proto-feminist play, where women “get back” at the men, but really, most Greek plays written by men were about the contemplation of women, whom they, for the most part, considered very powerful and were even a little frightened of. A lot of Greek plays involve strong, powerful women (Medea) and relatively stupid or naive men (Oedipus, Jason). I think women had a place in the home back then that we just don’t recognize today. We see it as male suppression. But a lot of it was just safety; places back then were a lot more dangerous than they are today.

Either way, I don’t want to suggest that the world wasn’t patriarchal back then, but more that it was a different form of patriarchy than we see today. Just like tragedy was different back then, or religion, or the concept of tyrannical rule. Doesn’t excuse everything, but it’s important to see things from all sides, rather than just putting our modern bias on the past.

Well, that was quite the digression. Fortunately, I have lots of time to read plays, write essays, and hopefully write more blog posts, perhaps on the subject of women in ancient times, which I know relatively little about because all of the history written back then was written by men. I guess that says more about the world back then than anything I say now.

  1. In hindsight, my Theatre History professor was Russian Orthodox, and probably didn’t enjoy Roman things very much in the first place. ↩

weigh in: week one

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Weight: 252
Goal Weight: 215

So here’s the thing: I lose weight pretty quickly when I start these kinds of things. Even before I started, during this entire Christmas vacation, I was eating candy and cookies and shit, but when I weighed myself on New Years Eve (before I went out and partied, of course), I weighted 255. My highest so far has been 260. So I seemingly lost five pounds, just because I wasn’t working, wasn’t using my time to snack constantly. Even though I was eating stuff that wasn’t so good for me, at least I wasn’t eating it constantly.

So now, day four of No Sugar January, and with the exception of New Years Day, where I ate Chinese buffet to stave off a hangover, I’ve kept my calorie intake well below the 2,200 suggested to me by myfitnesspal.com. And apparently I’ve lost three more pounds. I’m not cheering yet, because I know that some weight sloughs off fairly quickly when you start to take care of yourself like this, but that it will quickly plateau if you don’t keep taking care of yourself.

It’s kind of weird that we live in a country where attempting to lose weight is such a high priority. People make a living now keeping other people from getting too fat. Obesity, as we hear time and time again on the news, is an epidemic in America, because we’re the land of the free and the home of twenty Twinkies in my mouth. We don’t have to go out of our way to get food, and the food we do get is more than just satisfying — it’s delicious. And even the food that isn’t delicious is stuffed with chemicals and sugar to trick your brain into thinking that it’s necessary for your survival.

Couple this with jobs where we all sit at desks and stare at computers all day, and you’ve got a recipe for fat people.

This year I am going to be working extra hard to lose about fifty pounds. Not very much if you think about it, but the lifestyle changes needed to lose this weight are significant. No more sugar, first and foremost. This month is No Sugar January. The only sugars that will be consumed are those found naturally in fruits. In two weeks I plan on starting Couch to 5k and my exercise routine again (hopefully it won’t start raining). The only reason I picked two weeks instead of right now is because it takes time to let new routines become old routines, and jumping right in to doing everything at once will not work. It’s hard to develop that kind of mindset. To say, “I will focus on one thing now, and then add to it later.” People mistake it for being lazy. “Oh, he’s not working out because he’s lazy.” Well, yeah, I am lazy, but part of the reason I’m lazy is because I take on too much at once, and it becomes too much of a burden, so I drop it all. By focusing on my diet first and foremost, I can change my lifestyle, which will allow me to bring in exercise and eventually make me into something more in shape than “pudgy.”

That’s really all I got this week. Keeping the calories down, keeping my spirits up. Walking everywhere. That’s a decent start.

installing a new cpu cooler & power supply

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Yeah, see, when I said I was doing a Tech Tuesday post, I wasn’t kidding. Last week I installed a new CPU cooler (the Cooler Master Hyper 212+, because it is cheap and apparently very effective) and PSU (the Antec EarthWatts 750 Green, because my case is an Antec and because I like going Green as much as possible) into my enormous beast of a computer, and it was pretty simple, but time-consuming. I also took the opportunity to reseat my GPU and attempt (and fail) to attach my SSD onto the bottom mount. Let me talk about it, right here, right now!

First off, a shot of my computer’s guts before I started all this nonsense:

gargaroth, version 1.0

As you can see, my cable management was a bit off (read: sloppy as hell), and for some reason, I decided to install my GPU on the bottom PCIe slot, rather than the top one. Since my new PSU has a fan on the top of the box (rather than facing out of the case, like my old PSU), I would have a problem of my PSU sucking air downward and my GPU sucking air upward, while being only an inch or so away from each other, which would probably not be very good in terms of airflow.

Also, if you can see the white QA sticker at the bottom of the case, that’s where a 2.5″ SSD is supposed to mount. I have an external hot swap module on the top of my case (here’s a picture of it from another site — the module is at the bottom), which is where I put my SSD, because, at the time, I thought it was Super Cool. But now I realize that the SSD with my operating system on it probably shouldn’t be in an easy-to-remove spot. So I attempted to move it to the mount at the bottom of the case. In the end, though, it didn’t work, because, if you notice my SATA cables, the end that plugs into the device is set at a 90 degree angle, and the way my SSD must be screwed in to the mount, the cable just won’t fit. So I had to scrap it until I can buy some different SATA cables. Oh well!

Here’s the things I installed and the tools I needed to install them. From left to right: canned air! You can never go wrong with canned air. I knew pretty much from the get go that I was going to be taking everything apart, which gives you a great opportunity to can air the shit out of your case and components. I’m telling you, if you’re not canning air at things then you haven’t lived.

Next is the cooler. Maybe right now you’re thinking, “Josh, that fan above the cooler box is your CPU fan, right? It looks like the box is so much bigger than you stock CPU fan. Is that true?” You’ll find out, dear reader. You’ll find out …

Then! Isopropyl alcohol! Why, do you ask? Because it, in conjunction with the q-tips, will be used to clean the thermal paste off of the CPU and the old heatsink. It’s sterile and dries quickly, and won’t gunk up everything. It’s the best!

LESSON TIME!

At this point you’re probably saying, “Josh. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Well, here’s two things to help: first, I have a glossary of terms and acronyms on the “Tech Tuesday Glossary” link at the top of the page, but also, I’d like to talk about thermal paste for a second.

See, in your computer, right now, even in your laptop, you have a CPU. The CPU, or central processing unit, is the brains of the operation — it calculates billions upon billions of processes that end up looking like this blog post, or a Microsoft Word document, or even stuff in the background that you pay no attention to. Everything that you see on the screen passes through the CPU. One of the side effects of billions upon billions of microscopic processes passing through tiny gold wires is — HEAT! Lots of heat. And the smaller and more impressive these CPUs get, the more heat they generate. Thus, you need some kind of cooling option. Most cooling options for CPUs come in two parts: a heatsink, and a fan. The heatsink is made of thin, rigid strips of metal and conducts heat away from the CPU, and the fan blows that heat off the heatsink, and out of the computer. It’s a pretty simple, yet effective, process.

But there’s one problem: the heatsink has to directly touch the CPU, or else some of the heat from the CPU won’t get pulled away by the heatsink, and the CPU will get too hot. Now, you could just press the heatsink against the CPU and hope for the best, but there are imperfections in both the base of the heatsink and the CPU itself — tiny imperfections, but still — and those imperfections cause more heat to be released than is wanted. (Air, by the way, is a terrible conductor of heat.) So, some friggen genius developed thermal paste. The paste is applied to the heatsink and, when pressed against the CPU, fills in the gaps created by the imperfections, resulting in a much better connection between CPU and heatsink, which means more heat is conducted away from the CPU, resulting in lower temperatures. All because of some goo.

/LESSON TIME!

david and goliath (except goliath wins this time)

Here’s a comparison picture between the stock CPU cooler that comes with Intel CPUs, and the Cooler Master Hyper 212+. Pretty damn huge, right?! When searching for coolers on Newegg, I had no idea they would be this giant. But I guess more heatsinks, more heat distributed. Also, while the Intel stock fan points straight outward, the Hyper 212 is angled so that the fan points toward the heatsink, which points out to the back of the computer. This means the heat can head straight out of the case, rather than being basically blown back onto the motherboard, as the stock fan does.

I should also mention that the Hyper 212 has copper heat pipes which aid in the movement of heat away from the CPU. You can read more about heat pipes here, because there’s no way in hell I’d explain it correctly.

I won’t take time explaining how to install the Hyper 212 onto your motherboard. There are videos on YouTube which do a much better job than me. But I would like to say that I read a lot of reviews of the Hyper 212 saying that it was difficult to install and that the instructions were lacking. I disagree. I found it very easy to install and very simply laid out. Maybe it’s because I did a lot of research beforehand, maybe it’s because I am lucky, who knows. The hardest part for me was applying the thermal paste, not because it’s difficult, but because I had read horror stories of people applying too much paste, or not enough paste, and it freaked me out. But I think I did a good job anyway.

Here’s a photo of my pre-PSU replacement cable management:

ugh

Actually, this isn’t totally correct. I had removed all the zip ties, and a lot of my PSU cables are off the frame. But still, it looked like crap.

behemoth!

A photo of the Hyper 212 installed. It’s seriously a giant thing. And the fan wouldn’t fit flush with the heatsink because it ran into my Sweet Ass RAM (Seriously look at it they’re RED so awesome), so I had to move it up a teeny bit. Not going to seriously affect anything.

After installing that, I put the motherboard back into its place, then went about swapping out my old PSU for my new one. I didn’t take any pictures of that, because it’s really an annoying job. Non-modular PSUs kind of suck, because you have all these cables and you have to do something with them. With modular PSUs, you can just take out the cables you don’t need.

Anyway, here’s what my cable management looked like after the first round of PSU installation:

ughx2!

Not so good! Those big black zip ties are cool because you can undo them, but they are also big and bulky. Also tying the power cable (the thick red and black one) up to the other cables made everything too round, making it impossible to close my case up. Sooo I used some better zip ties and eventually got to this:

eh?

Still not great, but much better than before. Part of the problem are the fans on this case. They don’t plug into the system fan slots on the motherboard, so I have to plug them into the PSU cables, which takes up space. Also there’s just a lot of cables! It’s a pain in the ass. But at least no one has to see that side. You all get to see THIS side:

oooooh. aaaaah.

With my last PSU I didn’t think I could get the power cable to run along the back and still be able to plug in. But this time I just kinda forced it. And it worked! It’s still looks a little cluttered to me, but some of it just can’t be helped, like the extra USB 3.0 controller thing I have sitting above the GPU. That cable just can’t go anywhere else.

Aaaaand there you have it: the installation of a new CPU cooler and 750w PSU. Relatively simple. If you were wondering what my CPU temperatures are like now, take a look:

Temperatures in the middle column are the lowest they’ve been (generally while idle), and the ones on the right are the highest they’ve been (after playing Skyrim for about an hour). The GPU temp is higher because I had a side fan installed but I took it out. I’m sure if I reinstalled it, I would get lower temps there.

The end!

death cab for cutie – the new year

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Happy New Year, everyone. Here’s some middle school Death Cab for Cutie to launch you into 2012 with the kind of emo angst you need to take on this weird, duckfaced world. Transatlanticism is one of my favorite albums of theirs, which is saying a lot, because I’m not a huge fan of DCFC. I do have an unhealthy obsession with Ben Gibbard’s weight, however. Everyone complained that he was too fat, then he got skinny and we were all like, “What! You’re too skinny!”

Guy can’t get a break these days.

2011, an introspective retrospective

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Well, 2011 is almost over, and in the last month my world had been upended faster than anything that happened over the course of the rest of the year. I lost my job, the wonderful owners of the Greek deli by my (now old) work are retiring after over thirty years in their incredibly delicious business, and the yoga center by my house is closing after what I can only assume were financial hardships brought upon by Groupon. All of this happened in December. Much of my old routine no longer exists, and, in a strange twist, my new routine is very similar to my old old routine — I’m going to school and not working. The only difference is that I will be getting unemployment while not working this time around (and my financial aid is a lot more than it was when I was an undergrad).

It’s a funny thing, to take a relatively arbitrary means of establishing time and use it to figure out if you had a good or bad time during that time. I’ve been alive almost 29 years now and every year I try to think back and wonder if I had a good time or not. I think I’m kind of an accidental Buddhist. A lot of people are stuck in the past, or fantasize about the future, but I’m pretty okay being in the present. So when I try to think back on 2011, I can’t ultimately say if it was a good year or a shitty year. Am I happy? Not really. My current circumstances are lacking in something that I don’t quite understand yet. But happiness isn’t something you should try to maintain for such a long period of time. People who pursue happiness like that are doomed to never see happiness when it arrives. (On the other hand, people who pursue despair find it in abundance. Funny how that works.)

Am I content? Yeah. Of course! I have a roof over my head, clean water, food when I want it, a delightful woman who enjoys sharing her time with me, and, of course, the internet and enough money to furnish my new computer building hobby. I have no reason to be unhappy in a general sense. Specifically, yes, there are aspects of my life that I wish I could make better. I wish I had as much control over my impulses. Being caught in the present makes for awful choices sometimes. I wish I could save money. I want to lose weight. There are a lot of t-shirts in my closet that I just can’t wear anymore, and it’s getting to a point where I can either buy new shirts, or lose weight, and I’d like to do the latter.

I also feel creatively stagnant, so I’d like to work on that. I have to just create things, even if they suck. Part of the process is honing your skills so that you get better. You can’t get better if you don’t try. Be prepared to fail. I have to be prepared to fail and possibly be humiliated. It happens. Welcome to the world. You can’t spend your entire life not trying to be the best you can be. The best for you, I should add. You don’t have to be the best for anybody but you. Don’t spend your life trying to please others, just please yourself and that will please others.

Anyway, I’ve thought a lot about this blog recently, because I started it three years ago in response to having graduated college and not having a job. It became an outlet for ideas and thoughts that were stuck in my brain. Over the course of time I moved to Portland, found a job, and became entrenched in the “new old routine” of going to work full time every day for three years. My creativity waned to the point of near non-existence; every February my FAWM1 output has declined, and now I don’t even write or record music anymore. Obviously these blog posts have been more infrequent, not because I couldn’t write them — I had the time — but because I didn’t want to. I had no energy, no desire. No passion. I spent three years making money, and I came out of it with nothing but money. I’m not really depressed about the whole thing, just more in shock: what did I do with my life? Why did I allow myself to stagnate? Why did I not grasp the multiple opportunities around me, in this bigger city where no one knows who I am? I could’ve done just about anything, but instead I took the first job I got and ran with it for too long. Again, not depressed about it. I mean, it helped pay for rent and food and water and warmth, and even more on top of that. It allowed me to travel back to Boise and see my friends, to attend concerts and movies, and to buy parts for my new computer. My job didn’t buy me happiness, but it did allow me to purchase things that would bring happiness. And that was good enough. For a while.

But! Now I’m in graduate school, and I have no job, and I hope that the money that I have and the money I will get through unemployment insurance will be enough to sustain me until I graduate. But since I have a little more time on my hands I figured I would make one of those New Years Resolutions and state right here, right now, that I intend to write more in this blog. Every weekday, in fact. Monday through Friday. Maybe even Saturday or Sunday! Who knows! Every day will have a different topic, cleverly alliterated for your enjoyment: Music Monday, Tech Tuesday, Weigh in Wednesday, Theatre Thursday, and Fiction Friday. Monday I will post a song or two that I’ve been enjoying lately; Tuesday I will update the world on my computer builds, or some new thing I learned or was interested in, etc; Wednesday I will update my goal of losing weight and getting in shape over 2012 (obviously I will weigh myself every Wednesday, hence the title); Thursday I will review a play I saw or read; and Friday I will post a bit of fiction that I wrote, whether it be a play, short story, or ongoing serial. I might include a Special Topics Saturday or Sunday just because I like to talk about video games, but there is no day of the week that starts with V (not in English, at least).

Yes, I am doing this. Yes, I am starting this Monday. I may even do podcasts for Saturday. Yes, I will be doing this while attending graduate school, so if I slip every now and then, it’s because I’m writing essays about Plautus2. But hopefully I can buffer by writing posts on the weekend and queuing them up. Whatever! I’m going to do it.

My three main goals for 2012 are the following:

1. Return to my undergrad weight and toning: 215 lbs (at least. I’d like to go further than this).

2. Write the aforementioned blog posts. Be on time with them as much as I can.

3. Be more creative. Write music, write stories and plays and poems.

And all I ask of you is to read, enjoy, comment, and maybe give me a hundred dollars. Is that so much to ask?!

Hope you all have a fantastic New Year. Let’s have some fun before the Mayan calendar ends and we all die in the horribly fiery death maw of the World Eater, Xtloclixtli.

  1. February Album Writing Month ↩
  2. Got help me if I have to write essays about Plautus. ↩