I'm rooting for her!

It's Thursday night. There are many things I should be doing right now. I should be doing laundry. I should be scanning e-bay looking for games for my thesis. I should be prowling the web looking for gaming geeks to help me with my thesis. I should be writing some deep post or other. And probably most of all, as it is 10 o'clock and I've not slept much this week, I should be going to bed!

What am I doing, though? I've been cruising YouTube. I was going to cruise looking for Battlestar Galactica fan videos, but I caught sight of a "popular video of the day" on the front page of YouTube and am now hooked. I've just spent the last hour with LUCYinLA. She's a 24 year old woman from Texas (woohoo!) who's trying to make it in Hollywood and decided to start her own video blog. I hope she does make it.

I was too much of a coward to try Hollywood or New York when I left school with a BFA in acting in hand. The older I get, I find the more risk averse I become. When I was 18, I would've been all about it - that's probably when I should have done it; forgone college for the coast - but at 23, I was too scared. At 30, I'm too old in film terms to try to launch from the West Coast, but I still suspect I could get something going out here - local voice overs, extras work, bit parts, etc. The thing about acting is: you become a product and you have to market yourself. I know people talk about that, but - and I see it now more than ever, actually working on a show - it's true.

I'm 5'3" blonde and am about 10 lbs heavier than my happy weight. I'm "cute mom," "awkward date," or "rugged pioneer woman" (think Amy Poehler or Jodi Foster, only with boobs and hips) pretty, but not leading lady or classically beautiful. If I wanted to be serious about acting, I'd have to drop at least 20 lbs, visit the salon on at least a monthly basis for all the hairstyling and coloring, facials and waxings and nail jobs. (How much does that add up to? $200-$300/month, maybe?) I'd have to update my headshots - another $1000 right there, and I'd have to get a better wardrobe, say maybe $200/month on new trendy clothes. And, like Lucy in the video suggests, that's all the cosmetic stuff, that doesn't even address the talent portion. I'd probably need to spend a few hundred bucks a quarter on workshops and classes to stay fresh. I'm one of the lowest-maintenance women I've ever known. All that up-keep is annoying to me. On top of that, I'm one of the cheapest, stingiest people I know: spending that amount of money terrifies me to the core, even if and when I have it. But the real truth of the matter is, even though I'm talented, even though I'm pretty - though not nearly as much of either as I was at 18 or 23 - I'm afraid of being laughed off the stage. It's so much safer to be a working shlub in an office who's abandoned her dreams.

I think that's why I like this girl. She's got the chutzpah I lost several years ago. And she still seems like such a down-to-earth person. I've known other actors who are indeed very nice, but have that "business" air to them. Like the ambition to succeed in show business colors their interactions with everyone. For instance, I have no sway in anything and never have, but I've known some whose niceness seems disingenuous, as if they don't want to insult me, just on the off-chance that I may ascend to some power sometime. Like politeness is an insurance policy and not just the standard. This girl, Lucy, puts off the vibe that she'd be nice to you because she likes you - she seems genuinely joyful. I admire her. I'm rooting for her. Watch her blogs. Go to her movies when they come out!

Let's the procrastination over with, shall we?

I put the "pro" in "procrastination."

It's true and it's one of my favorite phrases. If I haven't said it before on this blog, I'd be surprised.

(<- btw, i'm trying to get in the habit of crediting images I use. I don't know where this originated; it was the second hit on google images under "video game," but I apparently I pulled this off a site called Elk Turd. Go figure. I know nothing about the sites I get images from, so I claim no affiliations.)

This morning Honey and I were going to go to church to hear a minister we really like who doesn't preach much here anymore, and who's actually moving soon. However, when I woke up this morning to feed the dog, I felt like really didn't want to go, even though I'd been looking forward to it all week. And I realize it's because I had a late show last night and had my dessert first, yesterday. (... and because Honey and I haven't attended church regularly for almost two years. You know how it is when you fall out of habits - you get flabby and lazy.) What do I mean by that? I used Saturday as my down day.

Tomorrow morning I have a meeting with my advising professor. Honey and I decided late last month that I should go ahead and continue with school this semester. After having bought our first (gulp) house and getting into the groove of the new "holyshitareyoukidding?" mortgage payments, we figured I should go ahead and continue - I'm close enough to graduation that pushing though makes sense at this point. So this week, I contacted my prof and the graduates coordinator at school to double check where I was in my degree. Turns out I'm one credit further a long than I thought I was. I'm through with my in-class courses, now it's the independent study before my thesis. So tomorrow, I have to give him my thesis proposal. Cool. ... and my proposed bibliography. Holy caca!

I'm less worried about my proposal than my bibliography. I figure he'll probably nudge me if my proposal needs narrowing or more girth. I probably shouldn't be so worried about my bibliography, but I am. There isn't much written on my subject: video game gibberish. And I'm really not a gamer, so off the top of my head, I don't know many games (aside from The Sims and the ones I'm focusing on) that employ gibberish.

So, once the university libraries open today, I need to spend a couple of hours there. I wrote my proposal yesterday; since it's just an expanding on a paper I did a year and a half ago, which he liked and which he thought I should expand into a thesis, I didn't have to do too much retooling. What I'll be looking for are books and articles on syllable structures of certain languages, dictionaries that have vowel inventories and preferably ones that have consonant inventories as well. ... and even though the libraries don't open until noon, I know I like my weekends to be lazy and restful (imagine that), so I'm choosing to forgo church today so that I get my procrastination done with before noon.

Allow me dear few readers - and my darling, phantom, Niamh - to ask your indulgence. I need help picking some games to focus on. (psst, I'm also talking to you ... presuming you're back from Guatemala.) Any suggestions?

My first paper was on the game Pirates! I compared the foreign language gibberish to the actual phonetic inventories and syllable structures of the languages they were supposed to be mocking. (Incidentally, their English gibberish was excellent; their Spanish gibberish was crap.) I chose that game because Honey was playing it like crazy at the time. Now, I need more games which utilize gibberish to stand for actual languages. I suppose I could use The Sims and compare Simlish to English if I had to, but when I was researching Pirates!, I came across a few articles which claimed the programmers of The Sims based the gibberish on Navajo. So it sounds like they wanted Simlish NOT to sound like English. ... of course I suppose I could lay Simlish against English and Navajo and see what I find. Hmm. ... moving on: for the purpose of the proposal, I figured I could also focus on Civilization and Colonization. We have the former at home, and while it is dialogue light, the characters who do speak (gibberish) are from specific cultures with specific languages. The latter however is old and frankly I don't know if it employs gibberish at all. I'm assuming it does, but ... quien sabe?

Anyway, that's my Sunday. Off to the library, later, to develop a bibliography and to cruise the web searching for gamer sites that can tell me what games employ gibberish to mimick existing languages. WISH ME LUCK!