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Quackalishus
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Name: Catherine
Birthday: 12/20/1987
Gender: Female
Interests: Um.....music piracy?
Art. I'm good at that.
My shiny new "digital piano."
Expertise: Does music piracy count as an area of expertise?
No? Okay. Well, then my expertise is peanut butter.
.....you heard me.
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  quackalishus
Member Since:
1/7/2004
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| Day 1663Batman's Story?
The most interesting and distinct thing about the story of Batman, both in the comics and the movies, is the focus on the villains. Batman himself has one story, and that was told in Batman Begins, as well as a few editions of the many comic books. Every other movie has been a story of his villians, the monsters and psychopaths that are just as much victims as Bruce Wayne is himself.
Scarecrow isn't a theatrical villian, but merely a pawn of a greater evil. He's a psychologist that begins to relish the horrible experiments he conducts on the patients of his asylum. He tampers with drugs and fear to satisfy his own interest in the deterioration of one's psyche.
Rhaz al Gul (I'm sorry I don't know how it's spelled) is a member of a dark organization that has survived for centuries. Like Batman, this organization takes justice into its own hands. Maybe because of the many generations of work, or maybe because of the individual perspective of the leader, Rhaz, the methods used are strict, uncompromising, and cold. Like most villians, he lacks the compassion that makes Batman acceptable to the people of Gotham.
The Joker suffers a horrible tragedy that changes him, both physically and mentally. I haven't seen the most recent movie, Dark Knight, yet, so I can't comment on his story in that movie specifically. Something happened to the Joker that changed him, that drove him crazy.
Two Face is a man who suffers a horrible scarring accident, and has to bear a second personality in his single body. He can't reconcile the two parts of himself, so he chooses to take the control out of his own hands, but leaves it to the chance flip of a coin.
The Riddler is yet another villian that suffers from a mental problem. He feels a need for attention that drives him to commit crimes, all the time leaving clues that point straight back to him. He intentionally leads his pursuers to him, perhaps for the attention, or perhaps to satisfy the need he has developed to infuriate others with unanswered riddles and unsolveable problems.
Penguin is mutated and discarded by society, and so lashes out against the society that so rejected him. Penguin is the villian that, in my humble opinion, most reflects Bruce Wayne. He suffers a tragedy, and must choose ho to respond. Bruce chooses to do everything he can to make sure that no one else will ever have to suffer the way he did. Penguin takes the hate and rage and fosters it inside until he is ready to resurface and release on the city of Gotham all of the evils that he himself had to endure. You might even say that Batman seeks justice, while Penguin seeks revenge, and the line that separates the two characters is very thin.
Cat Woman is attacked by an employer, and barely escapes with her life. The circumstances of her survival drove hatred into her heart, and spurred her villainous, and somewhat theatrical, response. She, like Batman, chooses an alias, a costume, and a myth to hide behind, but she uses hers for personal gain.
Poison Ivy is a scientist struggling to complete her research that protects plants, only to discover that her work is being used by a fellow scientist to create horrible monsters to be used to unethical ends. The scientist lashes out, throwing Ivy into the toxins used for her research. Leaving her for dead, the toxins transform her body. She emerges from her near-death experience determined to exact revenge on mankind, and more specifically men, and restore the earth to her natural form, supplemented by Ivy's killer plants.
Freeze is trying to save his wife from a disease that would ultimately kill her. In the course of his experiments, he has an accident which changes his body's composition. Suddenly he needs a certain temperature to survive. His suit that allows him to move freely about the world requires diamonds, a fuel source that he can't afford to continually supply. Desperate, he resorts to crime. He steals the diamonds he needs, all the while trying to find a means to cure his frozen wife and to force an environmental change on Gotham that will allow him to live like any other human.
These are only some of the many villians that enrich the dark story of Gotham city and its beloved protector. Many of these villians don't have malicious intent. They simply want to right the wrongs that they suffered, they want revenge. In most cases, the psychosis that accompanied their tragedies lead that desire to a much darker and twisted purpose that is merely a result of a twisted or exaggerated perspective.
In this way, I find Batman to be unique from the other super heroes from comic books, and in that respect, infinitely more fascinating.
Thoughts and comments are welcome. ^_^
Also, I haven't seen Dark Knight, so please no spoilers.
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| Day 1662If you could only keep five of your personal possessions, what would they be? Why?
1) Laptop - My laptop computer, besides being necessary for my classes, is something I couldn't do without. I talk to friends, I check my e-mail, I draw for school projects, I create digital art, I keep in touch with friends, and I spend hours of every school day on it. In addition, because of the many uses, this is the single most practical possession to keep.
2) Laptop Power Cord - Because the laptop is useless after about 3 hours if I have no means by which to charge it.
3) Cell Phone - I don't actually use my phone as much as most people use theirs. The reason I would keep my phone is because the function it performs is so important. It allows me to keep track of other people, (friends, family, classmates) and it allows other people to know where I am. To me, it's a safety measure. I don't go out at night without my phone with me and turned on.
4) Cell Phone Charger - This is just as important as the laptop power cord, and for the same reason.
5) Portfolio - My portfolio is a record of my best artwork. Since keeping the artwork is impossible, given that each piece is a separate item, I would choose to keep my best record of the best pieces I have ever done.
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| Day 1660How do you feel about the limited space in pulse messaging? How has this affected you personally?
Blagh! Talk about the devil! Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have a designated place on xanga for chatting, random blurbs, collecting info, running polls, and all the other misc things that pulse is/can be used for. But damn! I've posted comments on a few different pulse threads, but rarely have I needed only one comment to say everything I want to say. I feel like I have to use the vocabulary of a 6xth grader just to make my entries fit in their stupid character limit.
Which is another thing. Why did they pick that number? I think it's arbitrary....and that pisses me of any more.
Pulse sucks.
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| Day 1659
The Big Read reckons the average adult has read only six of the top 100
books."
1. Bold the books you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you LOVE.
4. Star next to the books you're reading/have read some of.
5. Copy, paste and repeat.
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1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings -
JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre
- Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronteu
8 Nineteen Eighty Four -
George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great
Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little
Women - Louisa M
Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare*
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit -
JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher
in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time
Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The
Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak
House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace
- Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and
Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of
Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland -
Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind
in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna
Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David
Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion
- Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
- CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs
of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA
Milne
41 Animal Farm -
George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of
Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies -
William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort
Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and
Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of
Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in
the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men -
John Steinbeck
62 Lolita
- Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret
History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of
Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The
Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell
Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession
- AS Byatt
81 A
Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The
Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB
White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven
- Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp
Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership
Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three
Musketeers -
Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet -
William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -
Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
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I've read 21 of the 100 books listed here. The one I recommend above all the others is Life of Pi (#51). It's amazing.
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| Day 1658"If you're a Christian, what do you think of telling
little white lies, particularly when they seem to make people feel better (No,
I really do like your new haircut)?" - From Musicisoxygen
I don’t know if I’m still Christian. I'd like to start by saying that I don't think being a Christian should have anything to do with this question. True, it implies a certain moral code (i.e. lying is a sin), but I would expect people that answer this question that hold to that moral code to explain that in their entries. Having said that, I don't know if telling white lies is right or wrong. I think that there are thousands of situations where a person might tell a white lie, and that each situation should be analyzed separately. I guess this question goes back to my discussion of ethical perspectives in an earlier post. But she didn't really ask if it's right or wrong, did she? The question asks what I think of telling white lies. So here's my answer. Telling white lies is cowardly. When you tell somebody that you like their new haircut better, when in fact you think it needs to be trimmed up again, you are choosing to avoid the negative consequences of being honest. You are hiding from what could happen if you told the truth. Maybe you're avoiding hurting your friend's feelings. Maybe you're avoiding starting a fight. Regardless of the situation, telling that lie is simply a way for you to manipulate the situation to your advantage. I'm not saying I'm above the occasional white lie, because I'm not. And what's more, I don't really think anybody is. And certainly, attempts to sugar coat things and say certain things tactfully could be construed as telling white lies. It's always a matter of perspective, dependent on the situation. So it's a difficult question to answer.
So to sum it up, I don't have an opinion about the morality of telling a white lie. I believe that it is cowardly, because it's avoiding negative consequences at the cost of your honor. I believe that it is manipulative, because it molds a situation to your own benefit. I believe that it CAN be justified, but every situation should be analyzed by itself within its context, which is impossible for any one person to do, certainly not me.
~~~~~~~~~~
Also, I don't know why my text has decided to go crazy and change sizes so much. I tried to correct it, but it won't let me...or something. Anyways, it's not my fault, and I'm sorry for any inconvenience or annoyance it might cause. =(
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