Acid mod enabled.

[prog]

I have been playing too much Ratchet & Clank. I must have just sunk half an hour into this game's version of grinding-for-gold. OK, I have the stupid qwack-o-ray now. Time to hang up the controller for a while.

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The job thing has been resolved! The long delay was, I have been informed, due to egregious internal miscommunication at the company. I am holding a contract in my hot little hands. I have not read it yet. It has been summarized verbally, and I certainly don't expect anything untoward from these folks, but I intend to examine it closely and settle the matter today.

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I got new shoes. They are just like my old shoes, except that they have yellow details instead of blue. Crazy-looking brooks running shoes again. I wish they were more low-key but they feel so good and they wear down evenly despite my horrible pronation.

I still need to get a pair of dressier shoes for business stuff, though. Ugh.

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I watched three more Losts and thought they were great. Shrug. The audience was great, though one of our number has dropped out. Most of the rest of us are going to gorge on the remainder of season two Saturday.

Another TV trope that I'm again willing to bet is as old as the medium itself: every childless couple wants children. Corollary: If a couple doesn't have children, it's because one or both are infertile, and this makes them sad. This is true in both the shows and the ads. (I add that this is effectively limited to heterosexual couples, but the proportional number of gay couples that have ever been on TV is probably smaller than any margin of error you'd care to apply.)

Every time I see a Pregnancy Test Scene acted out in either context I always think of the Evan Dorkin (evandorkin) comic strip titled "Bullshit-free pregnancy test ad" that showed a couple hunched over a stick, and she finally says, "...it's negative." At which they both collapse back in relief: "Thank god." "Tell me about it."

(Yes, I know Evan and Sarah have children themselves now. Unless I'm quite mistaken. Maybe he was writing about one of his cats when I thought he was writing about a kid. I should just friend him already.)


I have a mixed bag of observations about the show's treatment of things like race n sex n body types. It does some things that I like and has disappointed me in other ways. This is a post for another time.

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

we just watched three LOSTs in a row, and I think I'm finally caught up with you. The whole "woman feels woozy and/or faints or throws up = she's pregnant" is a trope that always annoys the crap out of me. Also, are we ever goling to find out who had a pregnancy test on an airplane and why?

[prog.livejournal.com]

I didn't even think about the morning sickness thingy, but yeah, that's an odd bit of TV-storytelling shorthand. It's not of the same class of things I'm complaining about, though, which are more like common misstatements about human nature or modern culture that irritate me.

Everyone is obsessed with why there was a test on the airplane!! My friends questioned this immediately, and then someone within the show did, and now you! It didn't seem that big a leap to me, though I guess... meh.

[kahuna-burger.livejournal.com]

huh, I had a pregnancy test in my luggage on my last trip so if I had a migraine too close to when I was due I could test to see if I could take my non-pregnancy aproved meds.... To me merely having a pregancy test with you indicates that you don't yet think you are pregnant, since if you really thought you were pregnant that moment, you would have used the thing already.

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

Well, you already know how I feel about the more widespread trope, after all :)

The storytelling shorthand is annoying for me, because it is so obvious it's distracting. "Oh look" i says to myself (and anyone else in the room at the time) "she's supposed to be pregnant," way before we're supposed to realize that. LOST does a halfway decent job of shaking up other expectations I was disappointed to see it there.

[karlvonl.livejournal.com]

Some number of years ago, one of the well known brands of pregnancy tests such as EPT actually *did* do a TV commercial just like the comic you describe. I remember seeing that ad, and then later reading an editorial about how tasteless it was. The editorial pointed out that the company had done commercials illustrating 3 of the 4 possible scenarios: wanting a child and coming up positive, wanting a child and coming up negative, and not wanting a child and coming up negative. The not wanting a child and coming up positive scenario was conspicuously missing from their lineup.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I think I remember the "It's negative... we'll try again" one! It surprised me. I didn't know about the "negative - whew" version, though.