Because of a movie (Avatar) about a fictional race on a distant moon who encounters human beings attempting to mine a substance called “Unobtainium” for profit to be made back on Earth.

How is this movie being perceived as racist?

The “hero” is white. And he’s not even much of a hero, in my eyes at least. He was a crippled ex-marine of average intelligence with simple, borderline crass, communication skills who relied heavily upon the deeds of the supporting members of the cast to be propelled into the “white messiah” status he’s being given. Pardon me for being different, but if that’s what we’re calling a hero, then I’d much rather be in the supporting cast. The kick-ass, helicopter pilot; the dedicated scientists/researchers (who, by the way, make every effort to do no harm to any living being or thing), the Na’vi high priestess/shaman to name a few examples. Heck, I’d rather be one of the flying creatures, or a tree than the actual “hero”.

To circle back around to the topic of this entry, I just didn’t get racism from this movie. It may have been there, but far more apparent to me was the humans’ destruction of the fantastical natural environment and their complete lack of concern for it. Instead of taking time to research and study the native environment and cultures, they stopped once they found one thing of value and completely fixated on it with no regard to what was destroyed in the process. Hasn’t THIS theme been repeated over and over again on various regions of our own planet? Does this not still continue to this day? I’m sorry to those this may offend, but racism takes a backseat to the loss of that which sustains life of all races; our natural resources.

So what did I take away from this film? What was most sad to me (and I hope others)? That even with the amazing advancements to technology that are going to surface in the future that will enable the human race to explore other planets, will also come the rape and destruction of those planets and their life-systems.

Welcome to Friday in all its magnificent, caffeine infused glory! Hope you all had your delicious morning Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Eggs, Spam and Spam. Ryan is currently in class for the next couple hours, so I am commencing takeover. I’m Noelle, bytheway, Ryan’s girlfriend and torturer. He has reached a level of crazy sufficient to allow me blog priveleges on his web site, and now I’ve come to abuse them. Now the question is, can the Internet be abused? Bring us your tails of Internet abuse! Not to be confused with self-abuse, mind you. Some things should be kept to one’s self… Anyhow, off to chug more caffeinated beverages.

I also have been terribly busy with school. I am currently trying to write a policy review on something from the Social Security Administration. It is really hard to track down stuff beside the laymen level explanations. I am slowly getting there.

My birthday is coming up, it is actually this Saturday. Yes, the 14^th. My mom, her boyfriend, and my sister are coming up most likely for lunch or dinner. Mom wants to do something at Pike Place Market, but considering it was snowing a little bit ago, we’ll see what happen.:)

Anyhow, I saw that at Sat Feb 14 01:31:30 EET 2009, the Unix time for the given date is: 1234567890, unfortunately that’s only 3 in the afternoon on Friday (Fri Feb 13 15:31:30 PST 2009) here in Seattle. I was so close!

I am not sure why I am being vague. Basically I met somebody who I thought I connected with really well. Or so I thought. I went from getting a reply to a text or instant message almost instantly, to going an hour without a reply or acknowledgment. While this happened she claimed it did not, however I could see quite clearly something was going on. After about a week of this I had enough, and called her out. I was hoping for a civil conversation, but it ended up being her yelling at me.

In other news, school is going not to well. My financial aide has not kicked in and paid. That means that the lovely housing department has cut off my meal card, and I cannot eat. Fortunately, I knew that they were going to do that and I bought a good amount of food prior to that. However, that doesn’t get around the real issue of why my aide has not paid yet. They have not called nor e-mailed me back yet telling me what’s up, yet the last time we spoke it was going to be done in the next couple days.

Having no money myself, I cannot really pay all of it, and I am considering a loan, which I am dreading. People have been like well that is just a part of college deal with it. So, like I said the past few weeks have been hell…

Technorati Tags: life, college

One of the reasons I also haven’t updated is because I lost one of my grandmothers not too long after Thanksgiving. I have been trying to deal with that. It was more like being there for my mother and sister, more than anything personally.

Then of course there is school and work, and trying to have somewhat of a social life. Just wanted to tell the people who visit regularly that I am all m right for the most part, but just haven’t had the time to update.

This was just under two years ago, and I still get hits daily for that post. I am shocked, a few days ago, I have gotten just under 950 hits for that post. I wish that all of my posts or just my blog in general got that many on a regular basis. But, I think I write half-decent things, although I don’t get much attention from it.

I have been working on putting together a site for a department at school. My initial design went over pretty well, I am waiting to hear back about it. This caused me to dive back into PHP. One of the features the department wants is to display a few blurbs about the department — like updates and such. This caused me to throw together a small database and figure how to show only the latest few entries.

My next step is to figure out how to make a form, so that the proper people could “update the site” without touching my database. My main issue is I don’t know how to make the form say: put these values into these fields of this database. I haven’t really looked too much to figure it out. The examples I have seen, have a random URL in the beginning of the form. From what I recall, you need to do that only when you are giving a detail summary. If anybody could give me a pointer, it would be great.

I have gotten several IMs wishing me a good fourth, but I sometimes wonder why. We say “Happy Fourth” and such, but rarely we say “Happy Independence Day” to each other.

It is funny that one minute things are great, and the next it is falling apart. The short story is that a friend got sick, and went to the doctor. The doctor gave her some medicine, after a few days on the meds, she wound up in the hospital. Well from what I have read, you only see a doctor if it is really bad. And it is really bad if you do not take care of yourself or if you have a bad/weak kidney. The reaction, I was told by a friend, is caused only if you have cancer. To me and others, that quite doesn’t follow through. So, I am trying to see if my chain is just being pulled or what.

Aside from that, I am also going back and forth with my summer employer. This is, or will be my fourth summer with them, so I am not sure what is going on there.