Monthly Archives: April 2009

The Ferris Bueller-Fight Club Connection

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Best. Metafilter Thread. Ever. A simple theory is mentioned, and then it keeps getting expanding, over and over, in the comments. They’re all worth reading, but I’ve reproduced the most amazing bits here.

My favorite thought-piece about Ferris Bueller is the “Fight Club” theory, in which Ferris Bueller, the person, is just a figment of Cameron’s imagination, like Tyler Durden, and Sloane is the girl Cameron secretly loves.

One day while he’s lying sick in bed, Cameron lets “Ferris” steal his father’s car and take the day off, and as Cameron wanders around the city, all of his interactions with Ferris and Sloane, and all the impossible hijinks, are all just played out in his head. This is part of the reason why the “three” characters can see so much of Chicago in less than one day — Cameron is alone, just imagining it all.

Then the base theory gets expanded:

Yeah, that makes the most sense. Ferris’s family is in reality Cameron’s family. He thinks he’s sick and alone, but the Ferris persona convinces him to go out and be Ferris. Everyone knows him as Ferris; he’s the only one who thinks of himself as the pitiful Cameron. He does actually sneak out, his sister does hate him for breaking free from the rules, Rooney does want to catch him and punish him. Nobody seems to care or even think about Cameron’s absence. Sloan is the only one that sees both of his personalities.

A reply to critics pointing out moments where Ferris interacts with other people:

I’m pretty sure we’ve entered the realm of Lynchian dream logic, and attempts to perfectly explain it are missing the point.

And further details on the Cameron/Sloane relationship:

I stumbled on the notion when I realized that Cameron and Sloane seem to inhabit a different universe than Cameron and Ferris, or Ferris and Sloane. It’s those two who are shyly and sweetly stumbling into a relationship, and “Ferris” is the thing between them. During the parade scene, for example, Ferris vanishes, leaving the two to have an understated and genuine conversation. Then Ferris erupts from a crowd of girls on a parade float, screaming out what Cameron cannot. He is the sausage king of Chicago, Cameron’s frustrated adolescent libido made manifest in the form of a short dude with a vest.

And the frosting on the cake is this brilliant summary of the Terminator movies, including a jab at the upcoming fourth movie.

The Terminator is Death. It can’t be defeated, only postponed.

In the first movie, the Terminator comes to kill Sarah Connor before she can reproduce- the only way for a part of her to avoid Death. The Terminator is defeated only after Sarah Connor is impregnated.

In Terminator 2, Death returns for Sarah Connor’s offspring, despite her best efforts to protect him. John must accept his own mortality by sacrificing his own protection from Death, bringing John into adulthood.

In Terminator 3, John Connor teams up with a potential mate, but realizes that he cannot defeat Death, and embraces it instead. It’s the least popular movie because it rejects the wish-fulfillment endings of the first two and embraces the reality that the future is set: everyone will die eventually.

In Terminator: Salvation, McG has Batman fight Transformers.

Propaganda Photos

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Some of you may remember Obey Fojar from back in the day, my rather blatant knock-off of the propaganda stylings of Obey Giant. That site isn’t even online anymore, and although I have it archived, I’m not going to restore it because, wow, that’s some bad stuff. Take photo, run posterize photoshop filter, convert colors to black and red, and post as original artwork! *shudder*

Still, the source photos are good for a laugh.

Looking to the Future

While I was going through my photo archives to upload old photos to Flickr, I stumbled across the directory with these photos.

Behold the Future

We took these in the tek room for the express purpose of converting into propaganda images. They were taken with the strong backlight provided by a halogen torch light behind the subject.

All Hail Glorious Leader

The pose was much more important than the actual subject or props used. Since we were in the tek room, we mostly had computer equipment around.

Power to the People

The idea was that we would photoshop the various computer equipment out with more standard communist props like scythes or bushels of wheat.

Sledgehammer

In this case, a t-square stood in for a sledgehammer. In fact, I later submitted that one to Print Magazine for the student cover design competition, and placed for my school.

Alas Poor Yorrick

The skull seems obvious, but I have no excuse for the beard, the pose, or the sound card.

Blessed and Stressed

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I don’t want to complain about money, because really, we’re doing pretty good. We’re in no danger of being evicted or having utilities shut off. There are no collections agencies kicking in our doors (well, actually, there’s one, but that’s somewhat unrelated and a long story for another post). I’m still employed full-time with a job I love doing. I’m under no illusions about how well we’re doing, especially as I watch some of our friends struggle with all of those issues.

Still, we haven’t slipped through unscathed. I’m not allowed to give details (it’s stupid, don’t ask), but suffice to say, we’ve had some budget shortfalls, and that was compounded by Sean recently having his hours drastically reduced. We’ve had to find a way to reduce our monthly budget by several hundred dollars.

Frankly, I feel incredibly lucky that I was able to find a way to do just that without any major impacts on our lifestyle. We’re still putting food on the table, and we’ve even still got a bit of spending money. We had to axe some things like cable TV and Annie’s (unused) gym membership, but those didn’t really hurt too badly.

The most frustrating thing, honestly, is that before the recession hit, we had finally gotten to a point where I was making enough money that we could start putting a dent into our debt. We’ve got thousands of dollars in student loans, and two credit cards that are just shy of maxed out from when I was unemployed before I got my current job. But then the economy tanked, and now we’re just getting by. The student loans are going unpaid (in forbearance) and we’re just putting the minimum onto the cards every month.

And I know it’s dumb to feel this way when so many of my friends are losing their jobs, and struggling just to get by, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t driving me crazy to throw $700 down a hole every month, watching it get eaten by interest rates, and knowing that debt wasn’t getting reduced at all.

So here I am, in the middle of “the worst recession since the Great Depression,” and even as I struggle with my own money problems, I’m looking around and realizing I’m one of the lucky ones.

And before you start, this wasn’t a request for financial advice. We’ve got a plan, and we’re making some progress, it’s just painfully slow. This post wasn’t a cry for help, I’m just trying to express how insane it is to be so stressed about money, but also feel like you can’t talk about it to anyone because everyone is in the same boat, and most are sinking faster.

First, Light a Fire

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The best advice my father ever gave me was to start a fire.

My family owns a cabin out in the middle of nowhere. For nine months a year, it sits empty, and during the summer, various branches of the family take turns vacationing there. It’s beautiful, but the first family in has the responsibility of “opening” the cabin for the season — cleaning, yardwork, de-winterizing, etc. It’s a lot of work, and when you first arrive after two full days of driving, it can be pretty overwhelming.

My father would often volunteer to open the cabin. When we arrived, he made a point to always start by lighting a fire. Not because you need one right away, but because it’s a quick, simple task, and when it’s done you immediately feel like you’ve accomplished something.

When I’m doing production work on a website, there’s usually a daunting list of tasks in front of me. I need to create the page templates, populate all the content, slice up all the images, and QA every page of the site in several browsers. Whenever I start to feel overwhelmed by it all, I remember my father lighting a fire, and pick a simple task to knock out of the way quickly and build momentum.

Once you get in the zone, you can plow through a giant list of tasks pretty easily. At the start of a project, your biggest challenge is motivation, so do yourself a favor and start your job by lighting a fire.

Note: This was originally posted on my work blog, and I’m re-posting it here for archival purposes.