Friday times

Friday is my busiest day, which is a bit sad considering that that means 3 hours of class (one hour of biology and two of history, this being the one day a week that class meets). Of course, it also means various hours of rehearsal, for four things today, all overlapping. Hooray! I will be going to shooting for a student film I'm in (stokked--playing the part of 'psycho guy', a non-speaking character who is in the background of every shot, being creepy. They've told me to bring clothes I don't mind getting blood on... :) ). The film is only shooting this weekend, so that'll be a good short commitment. The weekend is relatively light for me, with that shooting, an essay to write (for this history module. I think I'm going to do it on Thoreau, since I want to read him anyway and this will give me a good excuse), and a couchsurfer coming in at short notice tomorrow!

I've also, for some mysterious reason, decided that video games are a good use of time again. Cue 4 hours yesterday spent exploring planets in the original Mass Effect. The manufacturer, Bioware, is famous for its stories, though I can't help but cringe at some of the writing (especially in unskippable talk-y bits). Mass Effect is all about politics, with a heavy dose of aliens and guns thrown in. I'm also writing my devised play, and the writing for that is going really well. It's ended up more political than I expected--it was always meant to be a story of a journey, and the reason for that journey has ended up being a political refugee situation, which is incredibly powerful just to think about and is, I know, very much influenced by our trip around the Balkans. The *proximity* of war and subsequent *urgency* of it is something that Western Europe, and even more so the US, just don't have.

Also reading about tobacco, which is quite interesting to look at historically. It's a new world crop and so wasn't even heard of in Europe until the 1500s, and the idea of "smoking" was non-existent. It was associated, through natives and the Spanish being paranoid assholes, with satanic pagan cults, but also has early associations with sex as some of the first European use was as a medicine to combat the syphilis they got from raping and pillaging the natives (ah, sweet, ironic justice). And, naturally, the English were the first to use it for pleasure.