Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Yeah but why would anyone with a brain play on a JP server >.>

Welp finished updating servers and troubleshooting errors now to play some dead rising 2.

rt is usually dead on the weekend.

You're missing out

Suddenly, Galka-thing.

MNK AF pants

Macbeth is by far my favorite play. It's just so damn deep. Have you read it before?

Hey, I applaud you for going at it. I will say this, though. Don't just read it. If you just read it, you're not going to get the full gist of what is going on. I am a firm believer in the fact that Shakespeare's plays were meant to be performed not read.

I'm not saying don't read it. By all means, do so. And keep those notes and annotations nearby, because you're going to need them. ***, I need them. This girl I work with who insists that she's an authority on Shakespeare needs them.

But yeah, watch a version of it; ***, watch two. If anything, that'll help you grasp at the real point Shakespeare was making with that play.

I posted this on my facebook earlier, but then figured it was a bad idea. My clan has little sense of humor where religion is concerned, and I didn't want to start a war where words like "blasphemy," "sacrilege," and "disrespect" were likely to be thrown around. Oops! So here, you all can have it instead. I labored over this rousing rendition of "The Lord is my Shepherd" for ages and ages (five minutes at least!) about a restaurant of which I am fond.

Goodwood is my favorite, I shall crave no other.
It maketh my taste buds dance with joy,
It leadeth me to tangy and sweet BBQ sauce.
It guides me down paths of sweet pulled pork for mine mouth's sake.
Ye, though I walk through the valley of soggy cheeseburgers and half-hour drive-through waits, I shall fear no hunger, for it art with me.
Its pillowy buns and tender meat, they comfort me.
It preparest a table for me in the midst of rustic decor. It anoints my potato salad with perfection, my cup runneth over.
Surely savory deliciousness shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in Goodwood forever.
Amen.

i whould love to see Patrick Stewart do The Divine Comedy

I didn't like Macbeth so well. It was deep, but so dark! And the self-fulfilling prophecies are so sad. :-( If only the witches hadn't said anything, Macbeth would never have tried to force his hand (well maybe he would have, Lady Macbeth might have made him anyways because she's evil, but I don't think so.) and all those people would still be alive! ;; But it brings some questions up. Such as, should anyone who wants to be a king really be allowed to? If you want to take that power on, you probably have the wrongest possible personality for it. And will men do anything women ask of them? How harmful is it to a man to be married to a woman who mocks or questions his masculinity every time he doesn't do what she wants? And I thought she was so shameless, she even asked for her period not to come so that she would feel no sense of womanly tenderness, but then that famous "out, damned spot!" thing goes on and you have to wonder how her conscious actually is coping.

Anyway. Macbeth brings up a lot of serious questions. I liked Shakespeare's lighter works better. My favorite is A Midsummer Night's Dream, because there are so many different storylines all going on and wreaking havoc upon each other. Theseus and Hippolyta, Hermia vs Helena vs Demetrius vs Lysander (and all the troubles of love and the annoyances of meddlesome fathers who think they get to choose their daughter's husband for her), Oberon vs Titania (and more troubles with love), and then to top it all off, those outlandish players and their awful play. Shakespeare's comedy is fun.

I'd like to see a major production of it, regardless of who the actor is.

No, I take that back. I don't want Dante to be played by Justin Bieber. Patrick Stewart would make a badass Virgil, though. He could definitely pull it off.

Wow. You're like the anti-Magnuss. I cannot stand Midsummer Night's Dream. Seriously, Shakespeare had to have been on acid when he came up with that play. "Dude, what if I transformed that guy's head into a donkey head? How *** would that be?!"

Also, I like dark. That's why I like the British Romantics. I guess you could say I'm a glass half empty kinda guy, but there's just something about that Gothic feeling of the strange and unknown that I'm drawn to. That's also why my second favorite play is Titus Andronicus. Well, it's still tied with Hamlet, but it's starting to nose out in front. I like it when he embraces the less happy moments in life. At the very least, it's honest.

finally got a character on goblin~ :S

Yeah, the donkey head is a bit absurd! I wondered if that guy actually knew he had a donkey's head on. You wouldn't think so, because he hasn't seen a mirror and no one has told him, he even wonders why his friends run away from him. But then he starts cracking all those "I am a tender ***!" jokes and you have to wonder if he's really THAT oblivious. That was the same one who said that the lion had "deflowered" his girlfriend instead of "devoured" her. Deflowering would be that Shakespeare had the lion take away her virginity. What the heck! But I still like it better than most of his plays.

The dark ones, Macbeth and Hamlet and even Othello, I have to be in the mood for them. The lovey-dovey ones like Romeo and Juliet just annoy me. I know that times were different then, so 13 year olds getting married wasn't a big deal. And I know the point was to be tragic, so a selfish 2-day relationship between two teenagers that caused 7? 8? deaths was intentional. But I swear every time I read it, I want to slap a teenager who thinks she's in love. Then there's some that are just mean, like a Merchant of Venice. This is all pre-Holocaust, so people then weren't as careful with antisemitism, but come on. Those folks are just straight up cruel to each other. And at the trial, making Shylock switch his religion was really going a step too far.

I think I would feel differently about a lot of them if I had seen them instead of read them. Like you said, Shakespeare's plays were meant to be performed. I've never seen a single one as a play. I've seen several as movies, but it's just not the same. Maybe if I watched them I'd be more open to it, open to the emotion and human side of it instead of just black-and-white script on a page.

I'm embarrassed because I've never read Merchant, but I had a feeling there was some social implications going on, there. Also, R&J used to annoy the piss out of me until I took my Shakespeare class last year and my professor brought some things to light about that play and I realized that it was much more dark than we were led to believe. That play is about love like my shoe is about Zimbabwe. The two have nothing to do with each other.

Oops, sorry to spoiler Merchant for you. D:

So what's up with R&J? I've had to read it for a few different classes, and it was always pitched as a tragic love story. If it's about something else, anything else, tell me! Maybe it wouldn't drive me so mad if I could read it from a different angle!

Before they meet, Romeo is head over heels for this other girl. Mercutio makes note of that stating that she's basically Romeo's flavor of the week. Suddenly, at a party Romeo sees this girl across the room and he falls in love, right? Nope, he's just horny and that last girl wasn't giving him the time of day. He's moving on to the next chick. Unfortunately for him, he gets sucked into these relationships, and Juliet's actually giving him a chance. She on the other hand doesn't want to be owned by some guy like Romeo, but she's stuck between a rock and a hard place because her parents on the other end already have her life mapped out for her. So she chooses Romeo as the lesser of the two evils. The two begin playing romantic chicken as each one escalates the relationship entirely too quickly. First they're banging, then suddenly they get married. Romeo again is too caught up in the moment to realize he's being played, so he's mooning over her thinking she's the love of his life when really, she's just available. It gets weird after that where they make that "suicide pact" and things fall apart from there. The last moment when Juliet sees Romeo dead, she realizes that her life ended before she even had a chance to live it, so why bother with it any more?

Ooh, that does put a different spin on it. That would mean they were never in love-- she wanted an escape and he wanted to boink. They used each other and it ended badly. The message I would take away from it with that spin on it would be that you have to let your kids be free. At 13 years old, no girl should have her whole life mapped out for her without any of her own input. It would be so awesome if Shakespeare really was championing the rights of women to choose for themselves! And for guys, maybe if it seems to good to be true, it IS too good to be true?

Edit: Oooh! That also puts a really different spin on her "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet" speech. She's talking herself into it!

Mind. Blown.