Bloging by Logging In

Hello, this is a post from the other blog writer here.

Since Patrick seems bent on tipping the golden cow the moment we descended from the mount, I figured I might as well chime in a similar fashion. Excuse the brevity of my reasoning compared to Cuff's, I'm studying journalism at the moment. A journalist attention span is limited to 250 words or less, exceptions being granted on Sundays.

1: Ender's Game

This is a terrible book with a terrible premise and terrible writing. It's so terrible that its poor writing rubbed off on me and produced that atrocity of a previous sentence. Look, in the 1970s when this was written it may have been golly-gee whiz-bang exciting. Today, however, the idea of two 12 year olds taking over ARPAnet is just silly. Joke's on Card though. Children never used
the internet to further themselves. Of course, with the advent of Wikipedia, maybe Card was ahead of his time and foresaw these children toppling all of academia via poorly written articles which cite Fox News and Newsweek as sources. See, he rubbed off on me again. That's a classic run-on back there.

2: The Harry Potter Series

It seems kind of pitiful of me to claim that I hate a series of children's books, but I do. I don't hate them really for what they are, the nature of fantasy being long in the tooth aside, but I hate them on the basis of spreading fantasy novels like wildfire.

You see children, let's have a sit down here with Uncle Tim. Fantasy and Sci-Fi only work if there is something greater than the core narrative at play. What's also important is that no one cares about the hero's quest anymore. It's done, it's over, it suffered, died, and was buried just so we could remove it from our memories.

Instead, people want a fall nowadays. This is what makes Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Beowulf, and The Green Knight so great. The characters go on a journey, sure, but they all let themselves down in a certain capacity.

Above all, however, these works leave your imagination at work. Potter, Lord of the Rings (yeah, I'm going there), and modern pulp novels attempt to explain things which are better left to the readers imagination to fill in the blanks. It's the classic question when reading a novel not set in our world: "Why does this exist?" The best response is, as always, "plot dicates it, you figure it out." I, as a reader at least, don't care about your explanations for the shlock you invent. Give me a decent character instead.

Wow, so far I've fulfilled the stereotypical 21 something male demograpic for reading. Such is life I guess.

That's really about it for books I hate in all honesty, so lets get to some other meat on this post bone.

Today I want to tell you about my internship. Considering the institution I'm currently interning at has mandated that all employees take an unpaid week furlough at somepoint in the coming year just to save money, you know the industry is in dire straights. That's a story for another time though.

What I find fascinating about working at the paper, however, is a pocket Conservative resistance I never realized existed in MA of all places.

Considering where our little college is located, this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to readers of this blog. Lord knows what happens in the boonies of the Ayer/Shirley area. Still, my internship is located at a collection of suburbs north of Boston, a place I'd have expect to be blue to the core.

From our editorial staff, to our opinion section, to every single call I've handled with our "call in" feature, folks believe that paying a tax for anything is akin to severing the digits of their first born.

Of course, the spectrum of political beliefs which comprise this nation (you may pick only one of two however) are what make our country great. I cannot for the life of me though understand how anyone in this day and age can unironically type the phrase "welfare queens in caddies" without simply self combusting. It also disappoints me that I didn't hear the noise coming from our editorial department as any professional op-ed writer who can be paid for typing that is simply a paradox within our reality.

My red flag waving liberalism aside, I cannot help but feel depressed because, outside of a little monthly that carries all the credibility of The Onion, we're the only paper within the area. Where is my liberal bias going to come from? The Globe?! I'd be lucky if that thing will still be left standing overnight.

Of course, I could just be bitter at our readership as they called Fitchburg State College's teaching program "nothing but a vocational school for Masters degrees". I shouldn't be too mad though, as this same individual also believed that having schools be completely privatized was the best way of handling education.

Sometimes I wish I could lie to myself that well.

Well that about does it for now. If you folks want more endless musings on things not relating to FSC and it's English department, feel free to check out Mass Time Waster- my blog on video games. Truly a subject which matters. It's currently being written for credit in another class, so I can somewhat justify writing over 1k words on manchild toys.

Well this was a long first post. See you all soon.