voxygen.net » Generations

I’m back

~LS~ — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 10:28:49 +0000

I’m waiting for Typekit to populate/propagate my font. I’m using Cooper. It’s been some time since I’ve blogged. There’s so much to say I don’t know where to begin. I’ll just chalk it up to a lost and found year. The font makes the webdesign. I have to finish rebooting things here.

As always, the design reflects things about my life too numerous to go into. For instance, I tried to de-clutter and get things squared away into a single-file simple column. I failed. However, things did get shoved to the bottom, all linky and soldier-like, messy in an orderly fashion, but overwhelming from a big-picture perspective.

The Sells-Jaros household is now just the Sells household. The Jaros household will be a household with someone else. Quite surreal. The Sells household is also without the beloved Pach Du. That was a devastation too great to be accounted for – [...]

The hidden cost of graduate school

~LS~ — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:02:40 +0000

I just paid my student loan a couple of days ago, which basically means I hit a button on the loan website and depleted my financial resources for another month. In the moment, I started to reflect on the debilitating costs of graduate school, costs which most people don’t consider even later in their lives after they’ve graduated. Most academics that I know have a deep sense of nostalgia for their days of poverty, where living on ramen, cheap beer, and the company of good friends in the same boat got them through until the next measly TA paycheck. They also have a healthy resentment for how paying student loans back takes money directly from their pockets in the present. This is all at the level of obviousness. But the unacknowledged costs add up to a substantial amount of cash, yet no one ever includes them in any accounting. When [...]

Allie Beckstrom is my hero

~LS~ — Wed, 26 May 2010 23:27:08 +0000

Paranormal fiction and urban fantasy books are plentiful these days and a large portion of them are vapid. There are exceptions, of course, as with any genre, but on the whole, the works of Laurell K. Hamilton and Stephanie Meyers are representative of “teh stupid” that is paranormal fiction.

Shows such as Buffy, Charmed, and So Weird made common the kick-ass female main character in paranormal or urban fantasy and opened the door for this genre’s expanding popularity. The burgeoning teen fiction/young adult market, born with the huge demographic hump of Gen Y, cemented gothy vampy werewolfy witchy faery stories as a permanent fixture at Barnes and Nobles. So despite the stupidity of paranormal fiction’s lowest common denominator, its frequent strength is an empowerment of females. Well, except for Twilight, which reduces girls to 19th century passive, pining virgins awaiting their one true love. But let’s [...]

Pornification

~LS~ — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:24:29 +0000

Recently on WMST-L, the Women’s Studies discussion list, someone posted a call for papers about porn culture. The call was clearly anti-porn and the posting provoked a brief but rapid pro-/anti-porn debate before the moderator shut it down for being inappropriate to the mission of the list. Those old issues from the feminist sex wars still prickle at us feminists and I’m predictably on the fence about porn. I content myself to remember the title of the book, Pleasure and Danger, because porn is both those things, a crucial point about sex that we should always remember.

But one thing that does bother me is the pornification of consumer culture. I mean this in a different way than the typical use of the term as a comment on the how advertising borrows heavily from porn’s tropes and porn itself has infiltrated every aspect of popular culture. I’m [...]

Women in rock: some things never change

~LS~ — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 02:09:30 +0000

Baton Rouge has a new radio station: 103.3. Well, not a new radio station but an old station with a new format. The new format is “Music for Generation X.” That’s me, of course. The old format was “Divas” — not for me.

I listened to the station for several hours today and it’s quite a Frankenstein’s monster in terms of genre. They played everything from Nirvana and Guns-n-Roses to C+C Music Factory, with pit stops at Salt – n- Peppa, and REM, not to mention mid to late 80s disco, hip hop, rock, and the weird, bad music that I forgot existed. Funny, though, I recognized every song I heard, which demonstrates the way that our (my!) listening in the 80s and 90s was rather homogeneous despite the generic differences that existed.

Still, after about four hours of listening, guess what…no women in rock. Ok, [...]

Suzuki Beane

~LS~ — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:05:53 +0000

When I was a child, my nickname was Binie. This is a huge confession on my part. Still, the net has become everyone’s confessional, so I have permission to do so. Binie was short for my middle name, which I will in no way repeat out loud to any living soul. In addition, according to family stories, I somewhat resembled the character “Suzuki Beane” (1961). Apparently, I wore jeans with the cuffs turned up and I had an attitude somewhat similar to hers. So the nickname stuck. Suzuki Beane, who lived on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village, was the child of hipster parents. She befriended a square named Henry and the two of them ditched school to adventure far and wide through New York City. It’s a charming book. In a fit of reminiscence, I searched for it and discovered it’s going for $100-200 these days. I [...]

My grandmother and her family

~LS~ — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:08:11 +0000

Generation Y documents everything about itself. Facebook, youtube, myspace, flickr, the repositories of that generation are endless. My generation has some documentation; we’ve got home movies, videos, pictures, but nothing close to what the children of Gen Y will have as they age. Most people of my generation are lucky if they know anything about more than their grandparents and maybe their great grandparents. My family did a poor job of documenting us. I have very few pictures of myself as a child growing up. I have very few pictures of my parents at any age. I have almost no pictures of my grandparents. There were no home movies or videos. Compared to most families, there is not much of Willow either.

I got in the mail today from my mother a handful of pictures of my grandmother. I don’t know anyone in the pictures other than her. I can [...]

Daniel Striped Tiger

~LS~ — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:36:23 +0000

Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood has always been special to me. As a kid I watched it all the time. When the show moved to PBS, which is when I was introduced to it, I was older than the target audience, but I loved it anyway. I started watching it again after I went through treatment for alcoholism and drug abuse. People in AA meetings encouraged it because the show promotes all kinds of affirming, feel-good life lessons that alcoholics need to hear and practice. I continued to watch it irregularly until it was taken off the air a few years ago. It always made me feel better regardless of what was going on in my life.

My all-time favorite character on Mr. Rogers is Daniel Striped Tiger. It still amazes me that Rogers voiced both the shy, shy Daniel and the pompous King Friday. One thing I really like [...]

Why I’m retro (and not in a good way)

~LS~ — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:37:00 +0000

1.I still play on text-based games (muds, mux, etc.). Most of the gaming world has moved onto MMORPGs.

2. My cellphone is the one they sell to senior citizens. Big digit buttons, no keyboard for texting. I don’t text. I don’t surf. I don’t even download ringtones. In fact, I don’t even keep my cellphone on. I just turn it on to call out.

3. Until my new computer this week, I didn’t have the capacity to play DVDs on my computer.

4. Until this week, I was using html frames instead of CSS for my website.

5. I would rather play D&D 3.5 than move to 4.0. Partly because I don’t like 4.0 and partly because I just don’t want to bother to learn a new system.

6. Teaching public speaking. I have long thought that public speaking organized around the standard informative, commemorative, and persuasive schtick was utterly [...]

Students’ sense of entitlement

~LS~ — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:04:00 +0000

An article about contemporary students’ sense of entitlement is all over the Canadian papers today. It cites a UC Irvine study published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. The article discusses how entitled today’s students feel. Here are some stats from the article:

The study asked approximately 400 undergraduates aged 18 to 25 whether they agreed with these statements:

If I have explained to my professor that I am trying hard, I think he/she should give me some consideration with respect to my course grade – 66.2 per cent agree
If I have completed most of the reading for a class, I deserve a B in that course – 40.7 per cent
If I have attended most of the classes for a course, I deserve at least a grade of B – 34.1 per cent
Teachers often give me lower grades than I deserve on [...]