Time Management Games

I really love Time Management Games. It is the strangest style of computer games but basically it is what it sounds like. They are similar to simulation games but there is a higher emphases on speed. Usually it is some type of shop scenario; a restaurant, spa, salon, bar, florist, bake shop, etc. I first found the genre with Diner Dash, which is still a classic. I have since rediscovered it with Sally's Spa and Sally's Salon. (See picture Right.) I actually got into them again because Lindz just got a new iPod Touch and I found Sally's Spa for that and it is amazing. Actually inspired a deep desire to get an iPod Touch or even, dare I say it, an iPhone. I digress. Anyway, I wonder if these games are enjoyed more by girls since they all have very girly themes. What does that say about what women find enjoyable? They are pretty hard to find online to play, you usually have to download a free demo which only lasts an hour or so. I keep being tempted to just pay for a full version of one. They are just so much fun, despite sounding so very lame.

I Can Always Justify It

*Phone conversation this evening about going to the mall*
Me: So I think we should take a cab there.
Ottawa Erin: Oh, ok, why?
Me: 'Cause you know, we are running late, it is raining...
Erin: Really? It is raining?
Me: I don't know, it could be!
*Turns out, it wasn't raining*
Erin: What do you mean you don't know if it is raining?
Me: I'm in a basement apartment!
Erin: It has windows.
Me: Yeah I know, I'm looking out one. It doesn't seem to be raining, but still, it could be! I think we should take a cab.
*Turns out, the whole evening it didn`t rain at all*
**Still took a cab though**

Only A Matter Of Time

I have only had Google AdSense on my blog for a couple of days and already I'm adding more. I am worried that it is going to be too much, that readers will find it distracting, and that it means I'm selling out. However, I really like that I can customize the colours of it so that it matches my blog. I love the matching!! I'm sure I will soon find out that the money comes in so slowly it is barely worth the aesthetic compromise but for now I am curious to see how it all works.

So Much Junk

I don't what has been going on with me these last few days but I have been going crazy with the junk food. This, coupled with no longer training to run, is going to have a pretty negative effect on my body very quickly. But I crave it all so bad....
-chips
-apple crisp
-smarties
-french fries
-cake
-nachos
-chocolate milk
-pop
-sour candies
-brown sugar, just plain
Note: In the last three days I have eaten all of the above, some multiple times. However, I have a plan. I'm going to try not to eat any more junk food until Halloween. Then all that candy, chips, and other goodies will taste so much better. I may end up eating some bad things over Thanksgiving but I figure that will be alright since it is also a holiday.

Envying My Future Self

"Every publicity image confirms and enhances every other. Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal. Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and this car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal. It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer - even though we will be poorer by having spent our money. Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour.

It is important here not to confuse publicity with the pleasure or benefits to be enjoyed from the things it advertises. Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it.

Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of other. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.

Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority. It is this which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. The look out over the looks of envy which sustain them.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product."

--John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Link - Always A Mess

New Link on Right

Blogging is great! Through my influence or otherwise a bunch of my friends have been slowly starting up their own sites over the years. Ottawa Erin is the lastest!! As a personal rule, I don't feature or link to a blog until it has at least 5 posts completed. This gives the writer time to get used to the format and gives readers enough material to get a sense about what the blog is about. Also, a lot of people start blogs and abandon them, I need to see commitment! (See section of an XKCD comic called Superlative on Right.) Erin's blog is called Always A Mess and is part of an effort to clean up her life, "sometimes habits are hard to change". She has been keeping a lot of clippings, pictures, cutouts, ripped bits of newspaper and other scraps for years now. They have been kept in pages of books, old shoe boxes, tucked into the back corners of drawers and every other imaginable place, I know this is true because I helped her move a few months ago. Now Ottawa Erin is attempting to clean up by cataloging all of it and new materials she finds on Always A Mess. One other thing, she has two really cool features at the very bottom of her blog, a Fish Pond and a collection of quotes. See Link to Erin's blog in My Links.

It Was Time

I finally got Google AdSense. I don't think I will add too much yet, I'll maybe add more later on. (Yes, there is a pun to be seen there, but I'm choosing to ignore it. I hate the puns.) Right now it is just one small banner at the very very bottom of the blog. I'm trying to ease myself and others into it. I figure if I can make money, I should try to make money. I don't think it will take me long to add a side bar one below my Blog Archive, maybe in a couple of weeks once I have gotten used to it.

Blow Your Mind Hole

I saw this little bit on an episode of West Wing sometime over the last week. It has been haunting me ever since. I have always know what it says to be true but to see it presented so clearly really blew my mind. I wanted to share it on Always Standing but didn't know how. I figured I would have to further research what they are talking about and write a post on it. I also could maybe find the episode online somewhere and direct everyone to the proper point in it. On a whim I thought I might be able to to find it on YouTube to see if the exact clip I wanted was available. I didn't think I would have much luck since West Wing is an older show and this was an obscure section in just one episode of its seven seasons. Turns out when I typed in just 'west wing' without even further qualifiers this was the third clip listed. I guess it was interesting to a few other people too. Enjoy!