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The Irrelevant Musings of a Factotum

A Fan's Dream Premiere for 'Community' Season 4

1/31/2013

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So guys, have you heard?  Community is BACK!!!!

That's right! My favorite group of community college misfits will be back on our television screens on February 7th! I'm so excited I may poop. Or puke. Or something. 

It is with great trepidation, however, that I approach February 7th, because something is amiss. I fear that the great and powerful 'Community' may be starting an uphill battle which is can't overcome.  

This is not the first time the show has had to do this.  Rumors surrounding the cancellation of Community have been circulating since the end of Season 2, and yet it came back and got itself a third season.  And then just when everyone thought that was it, it's kaput for Community, they came out with an announcement of Season 4, premiering on October 19th, and the fan base breathed a collective sigh of relief.  We then sucked all that air right back in when October 19th rolled around and there was no Community.  Little did we know that it had been pushed back to the spring, we thought it was over, they had destroyed us, and we were left to wallow in our own tears.  The light is back, and it is shining.  But until that season premiere happens, we won't know just how bright that light shines.  

Community is the brainchild of a brilliant television writer named Dan Harmon.  Harmon has created an amazing piece of comedy which comments on just about everything possible, is self-effacing, self-aware (without being pretentious), and really too damn smart for its own good.  This is all because Harmon is notoriously strict in his control of the show.  The show has been sculpted, crafted, and given to us by Harmon, and he has held tight onto the reins the whole way.  I am not sorry for that in the slightest.  The show has so much heart because it doesn't apologize for what it is.  It doesn't go out of its way to try and get a broader audience.  It doesn't exist to appeal to anyone, it hopes that someone is willing to watch it, and it does what it wants.  This is not the kind of show that Television Producers like to get behind, in other words.  Where they wanted ratings and cash, Harmon wanted quality.  He has been at odds with the producers since the first season, and so it is no surprise, that after three seasons, begging him to open it up to a wider audience base, they fired him.


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A Commentary on Popular Music Lyric Writing

10/29/2012

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Why can't anyone write a full complete thought in song form anymore?  I have a playlist on my iTunes that syncs to my iPhone which is all music that I haven't ever listened to in my iTunes library.  Recently I've had a string of newer Hip-Hop, Alternative, Rock, and Pop and I'm a little annoyed with what I've been hearing.

It's not the quality of the songs, or the accompaniments, or the simplicity or intricacy of the musical writing, what has been annoying me specifically is what I call "Twitter" lyric writing.  In other words, lyrics which serve only to be smart or clever to themselves.  Lyrics which rhyme, and complete a thought short enough to be encapsulated in a twitter update.  The more clever of these lyrics start with a very convoluted, dense, and undecipherable sentence, they then add a "because" or a "so" or a "when" or some other word meaning "check out what comes next to wrap up the phrase".  They then end with a equally convoluted, but more decipherable sentence which helps to explain the last one.  Afterward we move on to a completely new thought, and a completely new set of lyrics which also could be their own twitter status'.

Let me give you an example:

"Yeah I'll ride the range, and hide my loose change in my bedroom,
'Cause riding a dirtbike down a turnpike always takes it's toll on me"
- Own City "Cave In"

This means, literally nothing in relation to compared to the moral/meaning of the song, it is simply a clever lyric designed to make people impressed with Owl City's lyrical prowess. 

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The Effect of Mass Effect

3/31/2012

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The summer after my sophomore year, I picked up a used copy of "Mass Effect".  I'd heard a ton about it, but had never spent any time playing through the system.  In a nutshell, the game is an action sci-fi about a character, Commander Shepard, who can be male or female based on early character creation.  In the future of the human race, we find a whole plethora of other species and live alongside them in the galactic communities.  In the first game, Shepard is sent after a rogue agent named "Saren" of a different species who is trying to take over the galaxy with a race of self-thinking robots called the Geth.  We find later that Saren has been brainwashed by a race of superior synthetic beings called the Reapers, and the fight turns to them as the bad guy.  Through games two and three, Shepard and the other races struggle to survive in the face of these superior beings. 

What was interesting about this series, was it was open-galaxy sandbox style game.  As you met characters, made choices about which missions to undertake, spoke with characters throughout the games, and ended missions in certain ways with huge decisions affecting the future of certain characters or species, the game adapted with you.  At the end of game one, there had been several hundred decisions, all of which affected which characters lived, died, or what their life trajectory was. Enter game 2, and all of those choices were imported and the timeline continued.  Time and time again you saw choices you made in the previous game affecting your current one.  Characters who died in game 1, were suddenly not present in game 2.  At the end of game 2, all the choices of game 1 AND 2 were imported into game 3.

Woof.


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The Systematic Destruction of a Patriots Fan

2/7/2012

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I'm so sorry boys, but a bet's a bet
Well hello there everyone,

This is officially the most awkward post I have ever had to do.  As some of you know, I am a diehard New England sports fan, especially for the Patriots and Tom Brady.  My housemate, John Gardner, is a huge New York sports fan, specifically for Eli Manning and the Giants.  Obviously this caused a serious problem for our household.  A wager was placed on the outcome of this past sunday's Super Bowl.

As you may know if you've looked at a newspaper or seen the news in the last couple of days, my team lost.  Not badly, it was actually an amazing game of football.  However, I still had to uphold my end of the wager.  I would tell you all about it, but I think that ruins how epic this bet truly was.  So without further ado, I give you the video of the destruction of my personal honor, and one of the most sickening experiences I've ever had to sit through.


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Talented People

1/11/2012

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For anyone who's had the misfortune of talking to me in any context in the last 3 months, you know that I am absolutely obsessed with the a'cappella group, Pentatonix.  They are the group that just won season 3 of the NBC a'cappella competition The Sing-Off over my high school brother-in-arms Michael Odokara-Okigbo.  

Pentatonix is an amazing group for a few reasons.  One, they were one of the smallest groups on the show, and yet they had one of the biggest sounds.  What's remarkable about the small group, is that in almost every other group, there were at least two people singing each part.  If one ran out of breath?  He could stop for a second then come back in.  If one got off pitch, he had the other to pick him back up.  Not Pentatonix, Pentatonix has only themselves to trust, and their arrangements were complicated, amazingly specific, and each time added a little trick pony (usually from Avi or Kevin, the Bass and Beatboxer respectively) to make their songs fresh, original, and fun.  I love Michael, I mean he might have been the most engaging person in any of the groups, and easily the crowd favorite of the show, but the Aires were not going to win.  It would be too hard to give an a'cappella recording contract to a bunch of ivy league guys majoring in philosophy.  It's not their world, you know?  Pentatonix?  A bunch of young, entertainment-minded individuals who formed the group specifically for The Sing-Off?  Now I'm interested.  In the first week, when the group stepped forward and sang "ET" by Katy Perry, I was pretty certain they were going to win.  There was something they had no other group had, call it "Backstreet Boys" syndrome, but they were a group that needed a label.  The others were just amazing a'cappella groups.


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    Photo by Danny Bristoll
    Factotum
    (
    fac·​to·​tum | \ fak-ˈtō-təm) noun - a person having many diverse activities or responsibilities

    I find myself hilarious, and I use this blog to stroke my own ego. Thanks for indulging me.

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