if everyone else jumped off a bridge

LJ Interests meme results

1. babylon 5:
   I don't even know where to begin. B5 is an epic scifi series that tells the story of the end of one age and the beginning of another (one of several direct nods to Tolkien) without ever losing sight of the little people who make history go. Plus Straczynski is just a beautiful writer. Some of the speeches he gives to G'Kar or Londo could just as easily have been delivered by presidents and real-world leaders.
2. coen brothers:
   It seems completely improbable to me that the same people are responsible for the Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, the Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou. But there are the Coen Brothers, making deeply strange films that transcend genre. I'd be a big fan if they'd only ever created one of the quirky characters populating their films, but fortunately for me, they made a whole menagerie.
3. existentialism:
   Like (I think) a lot of people, towards the end of high school and into my early college years I found myself suddenly exposed to writers like Nietzsche and Sartre and Camus and, in between horribly mispronouncing their names, discovered something profound. Something no one had ever bothered to articulate to me before. These days I don't glorify any of those authors nearly so much as I once did, and my own personal philosophy has become a complicated hodge-podge that borrows from writers across the board. But I still hold some (though not all) of the core principles of existentialism dear.
4. furries:
   At some point in my adolescence I realized that most of my friends didn't seem to develop crushes on cartoon characters the way I did. This was probably my first clue that I was wired differently from most folks. But it was a few more years before I discovered, via the magic of the internet, that my... idiosyncrasy was not unique. Not, apparently, by a long shot -- and as it turns out, there's a whole community of people way more screwed up than me. And they're proud of it. It makes me feel better to know that I'm just dipping my toe into a potential ocean of freaky weirdness.
5. john allison:
   I'm kind of a webcomic guy. Sort of. Its like how I am with music. I like those rare moments when I'm out on the edge, enjoying and appreciating an artist before the rest of the world has even heard of them. But I don't like it enough to devote a significant portion of my life energy to being there. So, as a result, when I am there, its mostly due to coincidence.
   I can't take full credit for knowing who John Allison is. I owe a debt to sleetfall for introducing me to his work. But he's a really funny, neurotic English guy who used to draw a strip called Bobbins and now draws one called Scary Go Round. And I love both works unreservedly.
6. josh malina:
   A good deal of my appreciation for actor Josh Malina comes from a little half hour comedy series on ABC called Sports Night that only ran for two seasons. It wasn't until I became enamored of the West Wing that I realized that Aaron Sorkin was responsible for the writing. Malina played a character named Jeremy. Jeremy was a nerd, but he still managed to be funny and self-possessed, and he had an inexplicably pretty girlfriend. And that made me smile, and it still makes me smile, and so I came to appreciate Malina as an actor and paid attention to other places I saw him cropping up. And now he's on the West Wing and I've come full circle. I also saw him speak at NU thanks to jrdameonhv and Morgan.
7. lucky boys confusion:
   I became aware of LBC during my freshman year at Northwestern through a girl I met at the Fling at the Field. I fell instantly in love (with the band, not the girl.) Their CD at the time, Throwing the Game, remains their best work and just a sublime piece of musical construction. The whole album flows from start to finish and back again. And then I discovered that, in addition to being quite a good little band, that had a truly excellent live show as well. They've just got a tremendous stage presence and ability to work a crowd, and in an era of manufactured stardom that really appealed to me. I was hooked, and I remain hooked.
8. perversion:
   Yeah, um, what can I say? I like people. I like the weird little ways that they are. I like reading Dan Savage (both in book and weekly column form) and I like puzzling over why a certain thing is taboo. I find the concept of Webcest fascinating.
   There's a scene in the Breakfast Club where Ally Sheedy's character refers to a nude picture that Anthony Michael Hall's character is carrying around in his wallet as perverted or perverse. And its just so funny to me, that back in the 80s guys were apparently considered perverted just for being interested in naked girls. Nowadays even bondage fetishism has cooled off, and become almost passe. Its not that people are getting weirder, its that the baseline is shifting. And that's interesting.
9. roleplaying:
   The hits just keep on coming with this meme. Tabletop roleplaying started as a casual little hobby for me, one that appealed to me both as a dork and as an actor. And then I stopped being much of an actor, but my geekiness remained, and I discovered somewhere along the line that it was less of a hobby and more of an addiction. I really don't know why its considered so far from the mainstream by some people, or how it manages to stay under the radar as much as it does, so that I end up explaining it to people more often than not when it comes up. I can't imagine life without gaming. I don't think I'd want to.
10. syncretism:
    I probably first heard the term in one of my freshman year classes, but it was thablueguy who really turned me on to how downright fascinating syncretism could be. We all do it, individually, culturally, societally. We do it constantly, a lot of the time without even realizing it. And yet to watch one group's symbols taken and reinterpreted and claimed by another group can be really intriguing. And that's not even to mention that the results are sometimes better, more interesting, than the starting point.

Enter your LJ user name, and 10 interests will be selected from your interest list.