I'm back!

And...

God, it's been a while hasn't it? What's it been, three months? It's been so long I've forgotten how to do this properly. So allow me to be awkward for a while until I figure things out again.

I'm in (hopefully - to be explained momentarily) the final stretch of my college experience. The classes are pretty much going how I had expected them to go; with one minor exception. I've been accused of academic dishonesty - so as of this moment I am typing this I do not know if I am passing or failing that class. For those unaware of what exactly that means, he (the accusing professor) believes I have plagiarized one of my essays. The kicker is that he thinks I plagiarized Sparknotes of all places. As if I'd be stupid enough to do that. But once again, I have to digress before I stress myself out about the situation, more than I already have. I was supposed to find out more about the situation sometime yesterday (April 4), as apparently there was a hearing on the matter - students not welcome for whatever bullshit reason - but I have heard literally nothing about it as of 2:16PM this afternoon (April 5).

I do not like the way the college has handled (or seems to handle all of them from conversation with others) the situation at all. I'm not sure how it works at other schools. But let me tell you how it works here.

STORY TIME!

the teacher see's that the student may have committed academic dishonesty and may contact the student informally to investigate (this did not happen). Within five business days the instructor gives the student the notice of the claim or it is mailed to them, and then must decide to dispute the claim within ten business days. At the same time the instructor notices the possibility of academic dishonesty (before notifying the student via form) the professor notifies the department chair, who then within three business days (still before the student must have the form), reviews the form and forwards it to the school dean. So, in many cases, before the student even knows things are happening, the school dean may already be looking at the claim and making a decision on the matter. In other words you could be kicked out of the school before knowing any of this was going on. If the student chooses to dispute the claim to the school dean (before a decision has been reached) the school dean then determines the appeal's worth, and without meeting with the student, may dismiss the claim immediately without question within the next three business days, penalties standing. Either that, or they accept the appeal and hold a formal hearing (which is what I believe just happened), and then within three more business days the student is informed of the hearings decision. In the mean time, the student still has to go to this Pavlov's class, that they are failing or not failing, and deal with this professor that is not allowed to discuss the issue with them whatsoever. 

So, I could have been kicked out three business days after the claim was issued, but that didn't happen, I got my appeal to the school dean out in time. But if the hearing happened on Friday, I have to wait until at most, fucking Wednesday (April 9), which means one more class with the accusing professor, to hear anything about the situation. I think the biggest issue with the whole thing is that the student has no place in the process other than the initial appeal. I cannot do jack shit other than say, "yeah, uh, I didn't do that." The other big issue with it, is that it takes way too fucking long, and it stresses the students out to the point where they don't care about their other classes at all, and all they care about is fixing this problem. But they can't fix the problem, because they are not allowed to do anything other than submit an appeal against the claim. Basically, all of this has made me just, not want to be in this school. But thankfully I have three other professors this semester and an amazing girlfriend who all keep me sane. Further, if I am failing this class, meaning the appeal failed, I have to come back for another semester to graduate, which I do not want to do in the slightest. I mean, it would allow me to take at least one class in the new Liberal Arts building, but if I have to do that because of this bull shit, I'd rather just drop out - and I mean that, I'll finish this semester, and not come back. I will willingly not graduate, I will not give this school another fucking dime, just for a slip of paper that says I'm "smart" and I achieved something that half the fucking population receives. 

End of Story!

I feel like the use of "brah" is what makes this superior to other .GIFs

It takes time to write like this, more than it used to, and I'm not entirely sure why. I feel like writing personal stuff is harder  - yet I don't know exactly why it's more difficult. All of that being said, I'd like to take a minute (just sit right there) to talk about my life, now and after college.

As you could probably guess from the situation I spelled out not too long ago life isn't exactly going according to plan. But I honestly couldn't care less, because I still have, what I assume (more of a hope, really) to be, a rather bright future ahead of me. Most of those thoughts come from my lovely girlfriend, and my plans to move in with her and stuff. And the puppy I'm totally going to get. Puppies, even future puppies, make everything better. Everything.

It'll be a Labrador, likely of the chocolate variety.

 

So yeah, aside from the school issues, life is going pretty good though - and to my fellow friends, who may be reading this, we might need a roommate - so if you're interested... call me! As my last bit of business I will now do a review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Enjoy.

The Trailers:

Expendables 3

 

Lucy

 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Maleficent

 

Blended

Guardians of the Galaxy

The Review:

This is, in my opinion, the best of the Phase 2 Marvel movies so far. Phase 2 includes Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World, and will continue for Guardians of The Galaxy on August 1, 2014 and The Avengers: Age of Ultron on May 1, 2015. The movie is a lot darker than it's predecessor, Captain America: The First Avenger, though still light at heart as most of Marvel's movies tend to be. Cap is faced with many issues that are both personal and impersonal. As is the case with most movies, it's the personal that is of intrigue. Something's going down at SHIELD, and The Winter Soldier is out on the loose, and it's up to Cap to save the day with the help of Black Widow, and the newly introduced Falcon.

The Winter Soldier's identity reveal was handled quite well, anyone who wasn't expecting it, like my girlfriend, was in for quite the surprise.

Though, as it seemed apparent for one kid, children may not be able to follow or make the connection as to who he is, regardless of him being named in the film and the kid being told who he is. Hearing "who is that guy" every time he appeared on screen was initially annoying, but became quite humorous by the time it happened in the film's climax.

There's a lot of twists and turns in the film, and a hell of a lot of ups and downs. The pace slows and picks up, then slows back down again. If the first film was made to be a World War II movie first and a super hero movie second, this one is a political thriller first. Dr. Strange is apparently referenced, I missed it so I wasn't able to mark out and confuse the hell out of my girlfriend and suite mate, but here's my (don't read if you don't want spoilers) source. So it looks like Dr. Strange at least exists in this universe, so a future movie, likely in Phase 3 (Ant-man and Captain America 3 being the only two in that phase as of now) is entirely possible.

 
The film was fairly par for the course as far as superhero cinematography goes. The action, though quick cut, was fairly simple to follow. And the explosions, as many other than myself would greatly appreciate, are all done in wide shot so you can enjoy them in all of their glory - no obscured explosions here.Though this doesn't serve to jumble or confuse the audience, as is the goal - or at least, the result - of many-o-mediocre directors of photography.

With this being the set up to the next Avengers film, and Guardians likely having nothing to do with the aforementioned sequel, I'm certainly looking forward to seeing what Joss Whedon does with it. I know he can pull it off, because it's Joss Whedon, but here's to hoping for Thanos in Avengers 3 when the Guardians finally team up with them, along with Dr. Strange and Ant-Man, hopefully.

Post Credits Tease:

Like with Thor: The Dark World, there were two scenes in the credits sequence. One teasing The Avengers: Age of Ultron. The other teasing, I'm assuming, the recently announced Captain America 3 slated for a May 2016 release.

The Score:

9 Captain America shields out of 10

So, yeah, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, turned out to be a pretty fun ride. Well worth the watch, though I'm assuming most people will be doing so without my approval.

I plan on keeping this going on a weekly basis, with a new post every Friday or Saturday night, potentially missing a week or so. Later bitches, it's good to be back. Watch the video to tie you over until next time!

College Sucks

Or Wednesday, whatever. As for the title, I couldn't really think of anything else, so, college sucks. Mainly because I have so much work to do this week, as it is midterm week. That things had to be pushed back a bit.

Let's see here, I had to write a poem for advanced poetry today - that took a whole thirty minutes so it doesn't count, a reading review, which took thirty to forty minutes, I had two 5-6 pages essays that were due Friday at midnight (Both got moved, one to Saturday at midnight, and the other to next Friday, the 18th by midnight), I had to write a journal entry on Girls, which is basically just me discussing the episodes we watched and discussing the readings for that week. And to top it all off, I had a shit ton of Modern Logic work to do. I love this class, it's challenging, and I love a good challenge, but by God is the workload ridiculous. The assignment was one through five, six through ten for over achievers. I know what you're thinking, ten questions, that ain't so bad. WRONG. Each question has multiple parts, each part is a letter, question one goes to "r," two to "m," three to "n," four to "f" (and each part is two problems), and five goes to "i." The over-achievers have six to "h," seven to "m," eight to "g," nine to "n" and ten to "h." Essentially that's 60 questions for non-over-achievers and an extra 50 for the over-achievers.

Why is this, in any way, acceptable. Do professors not realize that we have other classes, that require us to read, and write as well. I didn't even include the reading assignments I had, or the movie assignments for my film classes (I had to watch The Searchers for Tuesday and I have to watch High Noon for Thursday). I get that professors don't keep in touch with each other and all discuss what assignments their handing out. But for Pete's sake (again, who is this Pete I keep talking about), were they not students themselves. Do they not remember this? Or do they, and this is just their sick way of getting some sort of satisfaction out of it? As if it were some diabolical plot. "I had to do fifty problems write four essays and read 120 pages all in the span of three days and it sucked, so now you do as well."

After class on Monday, the assignment was at first, not even possible. I mean it, I spent more than an hour doing everything short of banging my head against a wall to try and figure out just one problem in the first set of 18 (1, a-r). On top of all of that, the cherry on top of the icing. The thing that pisses me off about this the most. I have no time to play Grand Theft Auto 5, Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 ReMix, or Beyond: Two Souls, AND I am four shows behind. I have Sleepy Hollow, The Blacklist, Supernatural, and Sons of Anarchy. After tonight, who knows how far behind I'll be, it makes me sad, very sad.

I don't know how my suite mate can manage being behind. He still has like shows from last week to watch.

Thankfully, there's a break coming up, Friday from 3:20 until Wednesday at 11:15. That entire break will be spent catching up on shows, and destroying GTA and B:TS. Hopefully, my professors don't come up with any surprise assignments for us to do over break that completely ruins the point of a break. In high school, it was terrible, in college, it's even worse. Because in college, the assignments are longer, and the breaks, shorter. When you finally finish, you do this, and when you wake up, the break is over and you had literally no free time to yourself.

It's straight up torture. I've had tough semester's before. Tougher work load semesters. Hell for some reason I decided that my second semester as a Freshman would be fun if I had six. SIX. Literature classes. That's just reading, and writing essays. Reading a lot, and writing a lot of essays. That's all it is. Nothing more, no fun assignments, no sixty logic problems. Just pick up a book, read it, and write an essay on it. Every week. But I will admit that my favorite class I've ever taken was in that semester, so I don't regret it at all. Confronting Death was the class, and it was phenomenal. God, that Michael Cera .gif is mesmerizing.

So, about that poem assignment, it came out of left field, right after he had just given another assignment, which admittedly is going to be one of the best assignments ever. The first assignment is longstanding, for the rest of the semester - and son of a bitch my suite mate just turned on his X-Box, time to listen to Call of Duty for the next twelve hours. I don't understand the appeal of Call of Duty, well, the appeal of taking Call of Duty seriously and playing for anything other than fun. He was literally yelling at the TV yesterday, well, yelling at someone over his mic, about how they were "dicking around" and having fun. I know right, I guess no one is allowed to play video games for fun any more. I think that's what I hate about it the most. It changes people, it turns non scumbags into scumbags, and scumbags into meaningless sacks of shit.

The best part was that someone called him a "bitch ass nigga," nigga is used in a vain attempt to be politically correct, rest assured there was an "er" in the place of that "a." Then he accused that person of not knowing how to speak English. As the English major in the room, I had to inform him that "bitch ass nigga," is proper grammar, and that the person was giving him the label "bitch ass nigga." I don't normally get joy out of doing this, but it felt so good here, because he is so annoying when he gets into these stupid insult arguments where it's just one insult thrown back and forth one right after the other, that I just want to punch the mother fucker. Anyways, I have to write "bitch ass nigga" one more time.

So back to that first assignment. My professor bought a typewriter, off craigslist, for what I believe he said was ten bucks. and he is giving it to us, to take ho our homes, and use in order to write a poem that is confined to the space of adding machine tape. All of this is in the spirit of the book we just read, A. R. Ammons Tape for the Turn of the Year in which he does the same thing. We all contribute to the piece, one at a time, and we keep going until the semester is over. I'm not sure what will come of it after the fact, i.e. once the class is over, but it will be a fun little experiment. He is even allowing us to get together and work on some of it in a group, passing it around as we write.

The second assignment was just to submit any poem we had for workshop and bring in four copies. So I reworked an old poem that means quite a lot to me that I have used in every poetry class I've had, all three of them now. But the form is entirely different, a lot of the words that were in the old poem are still there, but reworked and moved around to create an entirely different poem. I actually prefer this newer version to the older version. the poem was written as a letter, to my older brother who died shortly after birth, and it didn't have the shape of a letter, now it does. It just looks better, though I'm not quite convinced it sounds better, it's still a slow reading poem, with a lot of pauses and breaks. I just haven't read it aloud to myself enough to know whether or not it sounds better compared to the old version.

Anywho, I have class soon, thirty minutes to be exact so I gotta bounce (who says bounce anymore? God I'm lame). So here's a video, and I'll see you Friday.