I Hate Computers (Or, Allegra's Favorite Time "Wasters" That are Actually Great Uses of Your Time Assuming You Have Nothing Important to Do)

Because MY computer crashed I now have a vendetta against all computers. This is how a rational person...rationalizes?

Mehhhh.

If my computer was working I'd be finishing my college applications. Actually, I'd be procrastinating on finishing them. Now I can't even do that! Well, technically I AM procrastinating, sort of, just now I have a valid excuse.

Here are my invalid excuses:

Style Rookie: At the risk of sounding creepy I've been reading this girl's (Tavi, age FOURTEEN) blog for almost 2 years now. It's about fashion, which, if you know me in person (I bet you do, too) is like the antithesis of my being. That's actually extremely hyperbolic (as is the use of "extremely"!), I think fashion is great, especially Tavi's fashion sense considering she's barely a teenager. I'm just really lazy (not a stretch of the truth in any sense) and self-conscious and cheap and lazy and repetitive.

The thing about fashion bloggers is that their blogs are always very accessible and fun to read, even for people like me whose pictures show up in the thesaurus as the antonym of fashionable. Tavi likes Freaks and Geeks and that's good enough for me. (Seeing her in all of these magazines is a strange experience for me, just like how every time I walk past Forever 21 and see the girl from The Stylish Wanderer, another blog I read, I freak out. I remember reading these blogs when they would get at most 60 comments! Which is still a lot but now they get so many more and are on advertisements and it's insane! And recently I was reading some magazine and they had Keiko Lynn and Jane from Sea of Shoes and Arabelle of Fashion Pirates and I was just like, WOW, this is nuts. Yes, I read way too many fashion blogs. I know. You can stop laughing at me. Really. Please. Thanks.)

Oh No They Didn't!: I always get randomly obsessed with this site. Once a month or so I'll go on here because I'm bored and have an essay due the next day and then I'll just go on it every day for the rest of the week. The thing is, I consider myself somewhat culturally aware and yet I don't understand half of the posts on here. But the posts I do understand are great. And I like the comments section, if mostly for people's icons. The terminology they force themselves to use can be grating ("I agree" = "ia," "My thoughts exactly" = "mte," etc. which seems obvious but totally isn't so urgh go away) but so can I! Also their layout is purple, and purple is a nice color, so I am obligated to enjoy this site. See: red, yellow, light brown.

NeoGAF: I've mentioned this site before. The number one video gaming forum/news aggregate on the Internet, NeoGAF also has an entertaining Off-Topic section. Okay, so half of the jokes are just stolen from the site that rhymes with More-Can, but at least GAFfers don't sic their hounds on people and there's no porn or anything. Although my NeoGAF primer consists of: 1. Do NOT join the website 2. Do NOT read Girl-Age threads for fear of being sucked in 3. Do NOT read OTs for a popular game you like but know is divisive because you WILL get mad. (P.S. I break rule number 2 all the time. Girl-Age threads can be hilarious.)

Sporcle: So fun. Usually I resist phenomena like I resist laughing in classrooms (I said I was self-conscious bruh) but this is the one thing the people I have had the "fortune" to attend school with for the last 13 years got right. Sporcle is full of "fun stimulating mental diversions," AKA "Games that Allegra Must Play, Preferably Late at Night, Preferably with Her Sister." And she does! I recommend games that involve video clips or naming as many episodes of a show as you can. I also like the ones where you have to write out all of the lyrics to a theme song in a minute or so. SO fun.

IMDb forums (fora?): Only if you feel like dropping your IQ a couple hundred points. Yes, IMDb forums will knock your IQ into the negatives. I recommend going on the Jon and Kate Plus 8 forum because it is the most hilarious forum in the WORLD. An alternative to this for the people who are fond of their brain cells would be TWOP (aka, Television Without Pity for those averse to cutesy acronyms). TWOP has some really bad threads, too, but overall it's a better moderated and thus better reading. Check out the America's Next Top Model and Teen Mom threads/boards for all of the LULZ and insight you can handle. TWOP-ites are nasty, and I love 'em for it.

I think you've got enough fodder for preventing you from getting anything done for weeks now. Yeah, you're welcome.

"Oh REAL-O?" And Other Things You May Not Understand Yet

Last night's 30 Rock was stinking amazing (contrary to what that idiot who writes the recaps on TWOP says. C+? Are you on drugs? Are you mentally ill? Or are you just really that dumb?). SO GOOD. I have high hopes for this season and I wish they would just release it on DVD right now for me to watch and re-watch forever.

Why don't you take the next 20 minutes to watch it? It's truly worth it. Highlights: Ritchie's Civil War re-enactment skills, Tracy playing Cash Cab, JACK BEING JACK-ISH, LIZ BEING LIZ-ISH (Seriously, the "Oh real-o? I meant to say really, I misspoke, continue" line is my absolute favorite), Dr. Leo Spaceman!, the fact that Pete is there being awesome (they should keep giving him more screen time!), and just basically everything.



Just in case you were wondering about the other Thursday Night NBC shows, well, I don't watch Community anymore so don't ask about that, and I watched The Office this afternoon (having passed on it live for Project Runway, which was pretty crazy dramatic and man did those outfits suck). It was not funny. I can't remember laughing more than twice. Pretty pathetic way to go out, The Office. Although I like the idea that Michael may be fired for his "homicidal potential" (severe, says the ever-pudgier Toby).

I'll leave you alone so you can watch 30 Rock in peace, the only sound being your own uproarious laughter.

In Which I Get An Obligatory Post Out of the Way So I Can Post .Gifs of Conan O'Brien Dancing

This is Malcolm Gladwell.

As you can see, he's one classy bro. Unfortunately, when I read Outliers for school this summer, I came back in the fall to find myself as one of the only people who felt that way. The name "Malcolm Gladwell" is largely met with a sneer now, even by people who aren't between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, I find, and it saddens me, because how could anyone hate this guy, even dislike him? (He's like Paul Rudd or something! Everyone loves Paul Rudd!)

Despite its age (because 2005 is so old), this review makes me like him even more. I guess I'll summarize it for you, if you're really that lazy. Basically, Gladwell reviews the book Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Pop Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, which is about how today's pop culture is actually making us smarter. Sorry, was that obvious?

Anyway, sarcasm aside, the book discusses how today's popular culture is much more complex than it used to be, which causes us to think more and become much more active participants in what we're watching (or playing; he cites video games as examples, too) than we used to be. This is something I've been saying for years. Critics of the television and video games are only seeing one side of the picture, only taking things at face value. I find that many of them have only sat through a show or a game long enough to be able to develop a thesis statement and be able to denounce it without sounding uninformed.  But they are uninformed, because the things that make these shows, movies, games, whatever, so great are the things that you actually have to think about: the allusions, the references, the metaphors. Why do they think there are so many sites like Television Without Pity or The AV Club, both of which have hundreds of thousands of views? Yes, for every TWOP you have an IMDB, which has way too many whiny preteens complaining about the dearth of shirtless pictures of Devon Werkheiser there are out there, but the TWOPs and the AV Clubs prove that there is a thoughtful, intelligent audience out there willing to be sucked into the television. These people prove that it can't be all bad.

This is one of my favorite parts:

Most of the people who denounce video games, he says, haven’t actually played them—at least, not recently. Twenty years ago, games like Tetris or Pac-Man were simple exercises in motor coördination and pattern recognition. Today’s games belong to another realm. Johnson points out that one of the “walk-throughs” for “Grand Theft Auto III”...is fifty-three thousand words long, about the length of his book. The contemporary video game involves a fully realized imaginary world, dense with detail and levels of complexity...This is why many of us find modern video games baffling: we’re not used to being in a situation where we have to figure out what to do. We think we only have to learn how to press the buttons faster. But these games withhold critical information from the player. Players have to explore and sort through hypotheses in order to make sense of the game’s environment, which is why a modern video game can take forty hours to complete. Far from being engines of instant gratification, as they are often described, video games are actually, Johnson writes, “all about delayed gratification—sometimes so long delayed that you wonder if the gratification is ever going to show.”

Exactly. As I said before, for every Ico and Final Fantasy IV you have at least two dozen mindless first-person shooters, but even those are more complex than your parents' Pong. Ico is one of the most frustrating games that I've ever played, but it's all worth it because I take away so much - it's like a well-made film, complete with a great story, beautiful art, and an immerse world. Gladwell and the author (Steven Johnson) are exactly right - video games today involve a large amount of critical thinking and are often incredibly complicated. But that's what makes them great.

I said before that I am not so keen on the idea of calling this a "pop culture" blog, but after reading this review, I feel less ashamed of the term. If we can learn to ignore Kim Kardashian and Two and a Half-Men then maybe we can start to realize popular culture's true merits.

Now here is a picture of Conan O'Brien (and Andrew W.K.) dancing:

You're welcome.