My guilty pleasure: popular television shows.

I know, I know. I’m supposed to only like obscure scifi. (I do, really! Lexx is great fun!) Or say in a haughty voice that “I don’t really watch television–I prefer radio as a medium.” (”Of course, I get all my news from NPR. Did you catch yesterday’s This American Life?”) Maybe I should maintain that the best show on television is the Wire. (Well, I’ve seen a few episodes with my roommate. It’s not bad.)

Yet I can’t help falling into those all-too-popular traps. Mostly this happens on vacations, when I actually have the time to watch television, or indeed do anything but read Latin and write papers and go to rehearsal and the myriad of other necessities at school. Last year during winter break, I watched the entire first season of Lost at TV Links, back when it was working. This past winter, I did the same thing with Heroes. And now that I’m out of school for the summer and have free time again, I’ve fallen back into the second season of Heroes, and the rest of Lost is waiting in the wings.

Now, don’t let my tone fool you. I’m not about to say “But I only like them ironically” or anything of that ilk. Someone (I can’t remember who, unfortunately) once wrote an invective against claiming to like something because “it’s so bad it’s good.” If you like it, said this person, then just say it’s good! Don’t be embarrassed and try to over it up!

In that line, I really truly like these shows, no matter what people say. They’re engaging, and fantastical, and have all sorts of different fun plot lines (too many, if the critics are to be believed). Some of my like for these shows probably comes from A. my very clear love for scifi, and B. my secret attraction to conspiracy theories and secret societies and such things. Yes, I certainly did take that book out of the library and read about the Thugs and the Freemasons and the Illuminati before I got to the KKK and got bored of it. Oh yes, I suspect that there are all sorts of secret plots behind things. In fact, this item B is probably responsible for item A. All the “real world” scifi–Stargate, X-Files, etc.–tend to have some elements of the conspiracy theory in them.

And apparently I’m not alone in this interest, given the popularity of these shows. So when the plots of Lost get ever crazier and more all-encompassing and the people pulling the strings get more puppeteer-like, it’s great to watch. When we watch Heroes and get hints of the group of specials running things behind the scenes, we love it.

Are these shows great television? Do they have any larger value? Do they address any of the fundamental questions of humanity? I don’t know. Maybe. That’s something that will be collectively decided once they’ve finished their run and we can look back at them. But they’re certainly damn entertaining, and for that, producers of Lost and Heroes, I doff my hat to you. Even if writers’ meetings do actually look like this.

Whew. Greek is done, after a meh final this morning. It could have been worse, but it was by no means great. Now I just need to study Latin enough to do decently on Wednesday, and I’m done.

I downloaded Quicksilver recently, after reading about it somewhere or other and checking out reviews of it. I can see that it’s useful as a launcher, and probably saves me a little time over wading through the Finder, but it doesn’t seem like a true godsend, which is how people seem to characterize it. Then again, I haven’t gotten into most of the features, so I’m sure there’s a bunch that I’m missing. I could be convinced.

I’ve also continued using Akatoo. I’m mostly rating others’ answers, and answering questions myself only occasionally. One can get enough IKU points from rating answers (indeed, that seems to be the main source) to stay easily in the top 20 (and thereby presumably therefore be one of the contest winners at the end of the month), but it does require a certain amount of time spent reading and rating. Whether there’s worth in it beyond personal gain, I’m not sure, especially if I’m not contributing much of my own anyway. My questions of copyright and reproduction issues are still there, though somewhat muted–I’m certainly not saying anything particularly genius in my use of the site, and I don’t think most others are either. I inquired about the project mentioned in the ad that originally brought me to the site, and it looks like the project is to recruit more people and see what they think of Akatoo, and report that feedback to the company. I’ve never been a fan of the whole “get more people in and you too could win big!” marketing schemes (You know those people who post spam links in facebook groups and forums? I hate those people.), so I’m pretty hesitant to sign onto this.

In recent life news, I’ve agreed to assistant direct a (pending Drama Board approval) production of select plays from 365 Days/365 Plays, by Suzan-Lori Parks, next fall. More on that as it develops.

I signed up the other day for Akatoo after seeing an ad on facebook. The ad says “only students qualify for this online project which can pay over $25 per hour, serious inquiries only.” The ad directs here, requesting that you register for and try out Akatoo and see if you like it before signing up for the project.

So I registered, and I’ve taken a look around. The idea of the site is that members ask questions (any sort), and other members answer them. Then those answers are rated by the community so people can see at a glance what answers are most useful. By taking any of the above actions, users accrue points that add to their IKU (thus far I’ve been unable to find out if that actually stands for anything). There are constant promotions going on in which the leaders at the end of a certain time period can win iPod nanos or shuffles.

On the informational level, Akatoo is not bad. Browsing through, I answered a few questions whose answers I knew, and learned some things I didn’t know previously. Questions vary a lot in quality. Many are specific (”How does a silkworm make silk?”) while others address opinion and are intended to spark debate (”What are your morals, values, and ethics?”). Most questions do seem like they could be useful, though I wouldn’t be interested in the majority, but some are clearly inane.

The thing I’m wondering is what those running the service are getting from it. I’d like to think they really are trying to develop a compendium of knowledge for the good of humanity, but I’m guessing there’s something in it for them too. At the very least, unless they’re funding the contest prizes out of pocket, they need some source of income from the site. I haven’t advertising on the site, except for google ads by the sides of individual user answers. When you answer a question, you can allow such an ad to be placed and the profits donated to a charity of your choice. So unless they’re skimming off of those, it doesn’t look they’re taking in ad revenue.

However, a look into the Terms of Use reveals a possibility. Under the subhead “License Grant,” the terms state that:

• By posting a question or answer to the Service, you automatically grant Akatoo a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, edit, translate, distribute, perform, and display the post, or any part of it, alone or as part of other works in any form, media, or technology whether now known or hereafter developed, and to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees. Any deletion of a post by you will not limit the foregoing license grant.
• You further agree that Akatoo has the right to use, without any payment or accounting to you or others, any concepts, know-how or ideas that you post to the Service.

Maybe these is just the standard legalese cover-your-ass jargon that appears in such terms of use; not being a lawyer, I don’t know. And I think it’s not unreasonable to expect that you don’t own exclusive copyright on answers that you freely post in a public forum. But this section allows Akatoo to use your work for their own profit into eternity, in whatever form they like, without any attribution to you. And even if you post it and then decide you want to remove it from the site, Akatoo still has that same license. This seems a little worrisome to me.

Admittedly, most answers given on the site can be readily found already online with a quick google. Most of it is common knowledge (though I’ve found at least one instance of cut and paste plagiarism), in which case this license grant isn’t much of a problem. But I’d caution Akatoo users against posting anything original or anything that they don’t want to see republished in, say, the Complete Akatoo Encyclopedia twenty years from now

I did, by the way, get to SCCS. Kit took care of upgrading my WordPress software. The problem was with Fugu in fact, and not actually a problem so much as a quirk in the way it handles deletion of directories. He also kindly modified this theme to include tags, which you can now see at the tops of posts. Plus, he changed something with permissions that briefly allowed me to upload photos in the old WordPress, but with the new upload system of 2.5, I’m getting a different error message when I try. One of these, days, I’ll be successful.

Had my last seminar on Monday, and my last Movement Theater class (which was actually a joint performance with the Movement Theater II class of pieces we’d been creating throughout the semester) last night. Now it’s just two Greek classes to go, and then just studying for finals. Today was the end-of-year Classics picnic, which featured excellent food and a skit parodying the Agamemnon and much discussion of what this year’s Classics T-shirt should be.

Housing didn’t end up being terrible. By the time they got down to the last hundred or so Juniors, all singles were gone, so they opened up the singles waitlist. Most of the remainder elected to go on it, which meant that the part of my block that will be here next semester managed to get the last two (pretty sizable, actually) available doubles in Mertz.

Anyway, if all goes to plan, I’ll only be here a semester anyway. In the spring I want to study at ICCS in Rome. From what I’ve seen in my research of it and what I’ve heard from several people, it’s a great program, and while it’s pretty highly rated in academics, the workload is not bad compared to Swarthmore. I think I could do with a break, especially in Rome. Half of the program is a course that involves multiple field trips per week to go look at old Roman things, so I’m excited.

I’m also trying to figure out what to do in the summer after the program ends. I had originally planned to make a bunch of money sometime between now and then in order to stay in Europe and travel for a while. After speaking with Professor Turpin, however, my new plan is to find some sort of summer program and get the college to pay for it through Classics Department or general Humanities funding. This is a while off, so I have plenty of time to consider, but I’ve been looking at archaeological digs, mainly in the U.K. I’d kind of like to go back to Germany or the Czech Republic, though. If I could come up with my own interest and write a convincing enough plan, I could probably get funding for whatever I wanted, actually. I just need to figure out what that is.