:)

[laceblade]

I bring you a post that was written last night, but was not posted until now because I fell asleep!

Productivity and Shakespeare Movies
I have been incredibly productive the last couple of days. I've been reading voraciously for school, and have also watched two Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare films - Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing. I love Much Ado About Nothing so much! Mostly I like watching Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh being Benedick and Beatrice. Both of them are so pretty, and so good at delivering their lines! I don't really care about anybody else in the play anyway, ;) The ending of the movie makes me want to call up all of my friends so that we could join hands and dance in a circle whilst being showered with white flower petals. BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS.

I think that Hero is a most excellent name for a female. Even though I like the character Beatrice better (like, wtf, who falls in love with someone because someone *else* woos you?! And after everything Claudio did, how could she still love him?), 'Hero' just sounds wonderful. If I ever have a daughter, then perhaps I will name her Hero.

Henry V was also pretty fun. Kenneth Branagh with eyeliner! Because how can you be a warrior king without eyeliner? I didn't know he could be badass, but he definitely can. He pwned the Earl of Cambridge and the other rebels. It was sad watching him betray his own old friends, though. :/ Oh Shakespeare and your multi-faceted characters.

I need advice
I am seriously considering getting a Netflix account. I went to Four-Star today to rent Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing and forked over $9.00. Blockbuster and Family Video and etc. always have really limited selections, too. It's ridiculous. Netflix is only $9.99 per month for unlimited rentals of 1-DVD-at-a-time, and they do have lots of anime, too, so I definitely know that I would use it. I would never have to worry about returning the DVDs by a certain time, and it seems like they have lots of old stuff, too, so I can continue to watch adaptations of Shakespeare plays while taking my Shakespeare classes for the rest of this semester, and then in the spring (yes, I read the plays first). Can anybody give recommendations/warnings about it?

Other Developments
Today, I declared my 2 certificates (aka: minors) at my university. They are (dundunDUNNNNN): Global Cultures and European Studies. Apparently, a lot of random classes I've been taking fulfill the Global Cultures certificate. Also, go figure: many of my English class count towards the European Studies certificate. The best news is that my Spanish credits count towards both certificates, so they counted towards something! Yays. I was really excited.

Also, this afternoon I was able to sign up for "Literature in Translation: Fantasy and Science Fiction." It counts towards my Global Cultures certificate, bwahaha! I need to keep scouring the timetable so that my whole schedule ends up badass. So far it seems like my classes will be nice, though. AND HERE'S WHY:
Fantasy and Science Fiction Tentative Reading List, According to the Website:
Lucian of Samosata: True History
Thomas More: Utopia
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Hope Mirrlees: Lud-in-the-Mist
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings
H.P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness
C.S. Lewis: The Space Trilogy
Ray Bradbury: Selected Short Stories
Harlan Ellison: Deathbird Stories
Jorge Luis Borges: Fictions
Alan Moore: Watchmen

HELLS, YES. Tolkien, H.P Lovecraft, C.S. Lewis, Ray Bradbury, and Alan Moore. If that's not a list of Badass, then I don't know what is.

Shakespeare class
Will be exactly like the Shakespeare class I'm taking now (same format, time, and professor) except that it's plays from 1600 on. So, we'll read things like Hamlet and King Lear and Macbeth and other wonderful angsty tragedies. Bwahahaha!

19th century English novel class
In which we read Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Alice in Wonderland, and other stuff. I keep getting warned about ridiculous amounts of busy-work, though, so I'm signed up for a back-up course, which is:

Select Major Modern Poets
In which we read poetry by badass people like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, and other people. I love T.S. Eliot, but I actually hate poetry, for the most part. Which is why this class is a back-up, :D

I Still Need...
Classes for my European Studies certificate. I'm signed up for 2 ILS classes right now, but they don't seem badass enough. I'll have to scour.

Random
There was a nice article about Clamp in the New York Times yesterday.

Comments

[snowystingray.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I can actually offer some advice about Netflix! I'm afraid this is going to be a rather long narrative, but I hope it is helpful... At the beginning of the year, one of my roommates and I were trying to figure out the best TV plan. It was $52 a month for full cable (AHHH!!!) and $15 if we wanted basic channels. We definitely did not want to spend that much on extra channels, but we had to at least have ABC to watch Lost, so we decided to go with the $15 a month. However, we are also both movie junkies, and I rely pretty heavily on TCM to feed my addiction. Instead of getting full cable just for movie channels, we decided to try out Netflix. We did the most basic plan, and just organized our queue so that it went back and forth between the movies that we wanted. It seemed pretty slow, though; this was probably a combination of our slow mailroom at school and then the fact that we split the account, so it really seemed to take twice as long for each of us to get our movies. That is, we got maybe one movie a week, but since we switched turns it was at least two weeks for each of us to get another movie that we wanted to watch. My roommate said that she had used Blockbuster Online at home and it was usually faster, so we decided to switch over and try it. Even though Netflix claims a much larger selection, I was able to find everything that I wanted at Blockbuster. We also upped our package to two movies at a time. It was $15, the same amount that we were paying for basic channels, so it made things more even -- I pay for the TV, and she pays for the movies. The first week it went super quick, maybe three days between movies. Then for a while it kind of slowed down, and we encountered a complication. Unlike Netflix which sticks rigidly to the queue, Blockbuster uses the queue as a basic guideline but will skip around if something is more readily available further down the list. As you can guess, this played merry hell with our carefully organized list of movies.

So, yeah, those have been my experiences so far... If this is just an account for you, you probably won't have a lot of the same problems that we did with trying to keep a fair order. In that case I would probably recommend Blockbuster, just because it is faster. There is also the problem of selection; like I mentioned, Netflix has a larger selection, but it seems like I can find more of the movies I want on Blockbuster. I would say just browse through each of them first to find out which one fits the movies you want better. I don't really know how often you watch movies, but I did get kind of antsy waiting for just one movie at a time, so I would say that it is worth the extra $5 to have two movies at a time.

*deep breath* Woo, and that's it! Well, let me know which one you end up choosing and how it works out for you.

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, thank you for the information! Based on that, I'd say that I'd want to stay away from Blockbuster - some of these Shakespeare movies are things I'd like to watch before exams, and I definitely don't want to watch anime/TV series out of order, so I think that getting my DVDs in a different order than they are on my queue would be extremely irritating for me to deal with.

At this point I'm leaning towards Netflix, although I will peruse Blockbuster's selection in addition to Netflix's.

The account will definitely be for just me - sorting out bills and getting people to pay me on time is already enough of a headache in this house, and I don't want to further complicate my life, lol. So now I just need to decide whether I should have 2 at a time or not!

Thanks so much!

[all-that-i-seek.livejournal.com]

~ I love the Emma Thompson-Kenneth Branagh tandem! It's too bad they aren't together anymore, they were a dynamic duo.

~ That SciFi class sounds cool! I wish I would have known about that class, but I am taking a Classical Mythology class on a whim. I love Greek myths and this ILS class that read ancient literature, so hopefully it'll be fun.

~ Yeah Clamp! Yeah CSS! Yeah... whatever else is Clamp. :P