Michael Lesiuk

On reading speed and retention

You know how in sci fi, a character gets some alien implant that dramatically increases their reading speed, and then they can blitz through a book about some subject they've never encountered before, and can instantly sum up the book's argument and remember every...

Total Recall (dir. Paul Verhoeven)

Boy, Total Recall (1990) is actually a lot weirder than I remember it. This is probably because, as a kid, I often caught bits and pieces of it on TV, so I rarely (if ever) watched it straight through, and whatever I did watch was an edited-for-TV version. The mixture...

The Grey (dir. Joe Carnahan)

The Grey (2012) is far better than I would have thought. The quote on the DVD box -- "Terrifically exciting! Hold on tight! It's a true call of the wild!" -- really doesn't do justice to the film. You know how when you finally get around to seeing the original Rocky...

Five Scary Things

Here are the five scariest things any human being has eve imagined: Sam Neill with no eyeballs. Sam Neill with eyeballs made of hellfire. Sam Neill with his face all scratched up, and also he is saying ominous things; A hole in space-time with Sam Neill in it;...

Your first conference presentation

It's sort of like when you go up to the big kids' diving board for the first time because, hey, every kid has to do it eventually, and you know it's not really that bad, but then you look down at the water way, way down below and oh! this was a terrible...

The Pomodoro Technique

I've recently found the Pomodoro technique pretty useful for increasing my studying/reading productivity, with regards to my studying for my comps. Basically, you work for 25 minutes, take a 5 minute break, then repeat the cycle. After four of these, you take a longer...

Herp Derp Youtube Comments

"Herp Derp" is a good extension. Here's a visual which I shamelessly stole from the Herp Derp website: The extension is useful, obviously, because YouTube comments are just all-around terrible, but more importantly, it prevents spoilers, like if you want...

Stargate SG-1: It’s a sitcom

I've been binging through Stargate SG-1 recently, and my theory is that the show is secretly a sitcom. The sci-fi ideas in the show are not that innovative; some of the plot lines are quite bad; the effects are definitely not anything to write home about; the villains...

Some audiobooks and other audio stuff

Simon Prebble's reading of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is quite good. I've been listening to it on my runs and while I'm doing mindless tasks like making dinner or cleaning. The Literary Theory course by Paul Fry from Yale (on iTunesU) is also...

Traffic Sources

I just looked at my analytics and it looks like about 60% of people who come to this blog do so after searching for things like "blondie recipe" or "Reese's cheesecake recipe." For all those people, I hope you like the recipes, and I apologize for all the weird other...

Writing and Studying, Writing to Study

Jay Dolmage’s (relatively) recent blog post about Learning by Writing seemed to me quite on the mark, especially with regards to some of ways in which I’ve been toying around with my own study habits. I’m studying for my reading exams right now, and I’ve been finding...

Drive (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)

I liked this movie. (Maybe from now on I'll just post "hey, here's a thing I liked." Huzzah for low-content posts.) This was my favourite exchange: The Driver (Ryan Gosling) and Benicio (Kaden Leos) are watching cartoons while Irene (Carey Mulligan) gets ready. The...

Cats and the phatic function of language

In Linguistics and Poetics, Roman Jakobson describes six functions of language. The phatic function of language is language whose function is essentially contact, language for the sake of language, regardless of signification. Anyone who owns a cat understands the...

Fake Movie Posters

A lot of fake movie posters are really lame. These ones are not. I like the time gap theme that's going on. Example: ...from Peter Stults at Behance Network.  

The Passage by Justin Cronin

I am not a fan of the vampire craze in today's media, because I think that vampires are being horribly misused. Being bitten by a vampire should be a very bad thing, not simply the means by which one gets a fun superpower. If you want to write about vampires, you can...

Confessions of a Sleazy English Professor

My graphic novels course is just based on a couple old issues of Amazing Spider-Man I found in my basement. I don't know anything about comics. One time I told a student that I would give him a letter of reference, but all I sent was a drawing of a stick man with his...