Played out, blah, blah, blah. Just read it.

"Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more will power, more drive, but because they know productivity is a game of cat and mouse versus a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty which can never be excised from the soul, " from Procrastination via You Are Not So Smart

Delayed Introduction

"夢の途中(In the Midst of a Dream) by Shuichi Nakano"

Dear Everybody,

I realize that my addition to the reboot of this blog has been rather lacking, and it can only be attributed to my own personal failings and the accompanying ennui. Alas, this is but a feeble excuse! So, without further ado, I present an update, a preview, and discussions of my current state of affairs.

ONWARD

© Jake Naughton 2010

Transfixed by the firm hand of taxidermy and the gaze of GOD, we look ever onward and upward. From the PACIFICNORTHWEST™.

All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

   -Walt Whitman, America

Lonesome Cold Weather: New Music!

from Gerda Suzanna Vegt

Dear Noah,

I hear it is unseasonably cold in Wisconsin right now. To help bear the cold, here are a few things to things to listen to that will warm your autumnal spirit. Cheers, to warmer hearts.

Manifest Destiny™

Gladiator versus the Wyoming wilds © Jake Naughton 2010

OH!FAIREST READERS MINE
In the coming days prepare thine eyes and stomachs for an onslaught of hitherto unseen images from the PACIFICNORTHWEST™ archives.

an intro...!quoi

hi i'm khoa.
this is me in summary:

Herald, the intern

"Puppies Dream" from Ray's Writing Blog: http://raymond-teodos-writings.blogspot.com/

Dear Everybody,

My name is Herald, the editorial intern. I'm supposed to write about myself, but I'm not sure why. I've known these cats for quite a while (four years by count, possibly three by theirs) and I'm quite fond of them. Most of them write frequently while I don't. But it can't be that hard, it's just like talking you know? I do that all the time.

These are the things I like. Actually, let me run down the list of things I look at every Sunday morning.

Halloween Books-What makes your list?

The lightening streaks across the sky over Lake Michigan, chased quickly by the growl of thunder. My favorite weather is thunder storms, and as Halloween approaches, it seems fitting that the weather tonight matches the creepy mood of the holiday. As a bibliophile with eyes too big for my wallet, I have always dreamed of owning a bookstore. And in said imaginary bookstore, I have already planned the Halloween "must reads table".

Allison

Sitting at my kitchen table with a bowl of pasta, large glass of milk, iphone, and stack of papers to grade on a Friday night, I thought to my self "self, find a way to procrastinate!" And thus, I decided it was time to write my introduction. While this encompasses most of my life, if you need more detail, read on!

My name is Allison, I am 22, and I am currently residing in the fantastic city of Chicago. Although I originate from Saint Paul, Minnesota, I spent four years at UW-Madison and have now made yet another move. According to that diploma that I spent years working towards, I am a secondary education English teacher. According to my job that I get paid way too little for, I am a 5th grade paraprofessional.

Working at a charter school in one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods on the west side has taken over my life, and thus most of my posts will probably center somewhere around there. The school day runs from 8 am to 5 pm and I spend it working primarily with a boy who suffered a stroke due to his sickle cell anemia 2 years ago. At age 11 he walks with a cane, suffered some brain damage, and is one of the sweetest children I have had the pleasure to work with.

Interests outside of teaching involves copious amounts of reading when given the time, drinking a lot of coffee, tweeting, and hanging out with my roommate that I have known since age 5 when she asked me to be bus friends on the way to kindergarten.

Happy reading!

Noah

 Howdy, reader- my name is Noah, and I am a husky voiced, handsome twenty-something that enjoys long walks on the beach, candle-lit dinners and altercations with tentacular horrors from beyond the stars.

Here is a picture of me. Please, don’t stare like that- I embarrass easily.

Let's get to know each other.

I live in the fine city of Madison, WI, living out my post-college days as a general-use underling at a factory. It is precisely as interesting as you have already assumed, and I won’t waste your time with the details.

I am, by aspiration, a writer of fictions; by perspiration, a manufacturer of comics; and by leisure, a complete media-vore: literature, comics, music, television, film, videogames and the trapping of the internet. As such, my contributions to this glorious land of Scrabblegories are those of review, preview and examination of whatever is currently catching my eye and devouring my time.

I can already tell we’re going to get along fine.

The Iraq War Logs

So this is literally breaking as I type this, and I know you all aren't as obsessed with media consumption as I am, but something extremely significant is happening right now.

As you may or may not know, Wikileaks has been ramping up to unleash something around 400,000 leaked and previously classified dox on the Iraq war (unsurprisingly, the largest document leak in US military history). Major news outlets around the world including the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Al Jazeera (links after the jump) and others have had complete access to all the documents for 10 weeks under condition of embargo until about 30 minutes ago. Here's the exciting part: simultaneously 5 of the most important news outlets in the world released their in-depth reporting on the information cache. Nothing like this has ever happened before. And everyone has some pretty damning discoveries.

Jake

illustration by MoxyCreative

lede:
Rather than do a lengthy intro, I thought I might just give you a digest of links I tweeted [follow me!] today. Lazy? Yes! But it's emblematic of what I'm interested in and the gist of topics that I'll probably be posting about here.

soundbite:

I currently work as an intern at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a journalism non-profit that funds in-depth reporting on under-cover issues around the globe and spend a lot of time on the computer at work.  

+ 

I am a photographer. Find my work at my website, Jake Naughton Photography.

more after the jump

An Introduction: James

Greetings fellow citizens of the internet, my name is James T. Tynion IV, and I am generally pretty awesome. Here is an awesome drawing of me, so you can see for yourself:

(Art by Joe Kuenzle)

REWELCOME TO SCRABBLEGORIES

Picture Unrelated (via chan4chan.com)

Howdy Folks.

If you're reading this, congratulations! You are literate. You're also on the World Famous SETTLERS OF SCRABBLEGORIES, a delightful addition to the already overstuffed blogodrome that we call home.

So here's the story-

Five Great Halloween Movies for People Who Don’t Like Horror

As many of you know, over the course of the last couple of years I have spent a great deal of time working to further my knowledge of the horror genre, particularly in regards to its film presence here in America and across the globe. There are an incredible number of these films, particularly when you broaden the spectrum to include the majority of tense, monster-based Science Fiction films of the 1950 and 60s... And yet a large number of filmgoers can't stand this genre, and do their best to avoid scary movies, but then Halloween comes by and I get the familiar question, "What kinda horror movie won't scare the crap out of me?" And here I am today to oblige an answer.

If you are one of the multitude of people who don’t care at all for blood, gore, screaming, and monsters from another world, and yet you'd like to keep your movie-watching experiences to be season-appropriate, I suggest you take a look at the five films I've listed below. They each certainly count as members of the Horror genre, and yet they lack that visceral terror that renders some trembling with fear long after the final credits have rolled. That doesn't mean these are bad horror films, some of them are simply old, and others hold more of a comedic or adventurous tone. But to this day, these remain among the best the genre has to offer, and I couldn't recommend them enough.

1. The Curse of Frankenstein

With any film adaptation of the original Frankenstein story, the subtleties of the original novel tend to get nixed in favor of clear-cut good and evil. However, the lovely people at Hammer Films decided to take a much different path than their predecessors at Universal by making Baron Frankenstein himself the true villain of the film. Creepy with a touch of camp, with a great performance by Peter Cushing (Grand Moff Tarkin) as Baron Frankenstein and a young Christopher Lee decked out as Frankenstein’s monster himself!

This was quite the scandalous film at the time, but it’s doubtful this film out of the 1950s will send you shaking with fright. And yet the image of perfect villainy in Baron Frankenstein, and the creepy overtones in the film still leave a spooky Halloween movie you can enjoy this October.

Simple Joys

Some times its the simplest things that can brighten up one's day.

Re:re: So Uncomfortable

Sadly, as many things go in education, it is never as simple as "so don't".

The students in question are being stigmatized by their clothing being soiled everyday visibly, as well as the odor coming from them. It is affecting them socially, as other kids don't want to sit by them, work with them, or talk to them at lunch.

And no, I do not have the resources to get them new shirts. I can't afford it, the school can't afford it, and from what I got from the special education teacher, the parents definitely can't afford it. They don't have running water in their home, mom and dad don't work, dad can't read, mom is in and out of the hospital on a weekly basis, and all four of the boys receive almost every service offered by the school.

So maybe in suburban Milwaukee, the worst thing that can happen to you is a teacher labels you a "dirty kid" by discreetly talking to your parents, but in one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago it is far worse to have to wait days for your food stamps to arrive because you have nothing in your home to eat.

-Previously-
Re: So Uncomfortable
So Uncomfortable

Dreamcats

My love for tmblr has its limits. This is not one of them. 

DREAMCATS....

Listening to Sung Tongs...

New Mexico dreaming...

Amores Perros

Sartorialist or Catorialist?

via Catorialist, male on street, sporting a bronze ball choker

via Sartorialist, male on street, sporting a butterfly

Re: So Uncomfortable

Simple Answer: You don't. 

It seems that if the boys' hygiene aren't bothering the other students and aren't impairing them educationally or socially (as far as you can see), then why does matter if they have stained shirts? I know you probably have the resources to get them new shirts, but I'm not sure you want to be in charge of these kids weekly dirty laundry.  Any action short of that will result in the implication that the parents aren't keeping up their end in the battle of boyhood hygiene. And I think that prospect is what is seriously putting the chill in your bones. 

But if the boys are getting along fine (whether or not they're secretly embarrassed), then let them go along -- no need to add further insult to injury. 

The worst thing in the world for a kid is for your teacher to name you the dirty kid.

-Previously-
So Uncomfortable...

So Uncomfortable...

I need to have the most uncomfortable conversation that you can have with a parent today. How do you talk to a parent about the fact that they are sending their children to school dirty? I am not just talking about a body odor problem, that’s be easier to handle. These 4 brothers are coming to school in the same grossly stained clothing many days in a row. One of these boys is the student that I spend my entire day modifying work for, and it breaks my heart to see him coming to school in filthy clothing every day.

How do you talk to a parent about this??

Internal Matters for Posterity's Sake

So the wheels are turning again and something might just become of this strange little blog. BUT WHAT COULD IT POSSIBLY BE?!

For all of our faithful readers (which are basically just all of us who were already "on staff" so far), I think it is important to peel back the curtains and reveal what's been going on. If only for posterity's sake, so that we might come back to this post months from now and remember when we started to define ourselves. Or so we can trace the origins of the internal disagreements that ripped the blog asunder.

It seems that we've moved back to that special time of year when all of us have been thinking about how we really ought to run a blog together, only it seems that with our group of friends now spread evenly across the country (if evenly is the proper description for a handful of cities on the East Coast and in the Midwest), both Misters Noah J. and Quoctrung Bui have decided to get the ball rolling! How Scandalous!