The legacy of Fidel Castro — Phil Ebersole’s Blog

Fidel Castro died yesterday at the age of 90. He ruled Cuba from 1959 to 2006 and was widely admired as a brave patriot and revolutionary who defied the power of the United States. He was indeed a patriot and a brave man, but I never believed in him or what he stood for. Human […]

via The legacy of Fidel Castro — Phil Ebersole’s Blog

Selfsgiving

This year I’m spending my Thanksgiving all alone. I was going to go back home and had a round trip Amtrak booked to go to Washington and back, but my mom told me she thought it would be wise if I cancelled the ticket and stated in Oregon. She’s right. I’ve been busy and stressed out, with barely enough hours in a day and days in a week to stay on top of my homework. That train departed on Tuesday and I had a revision draft of an article due yesterday. Tuesday was also the day I gave a student presentation that forms 35% of my grade in that class, I hadn’t been scheduled when the ticket was bought.

I always found Thanksgiving break to be ill timed, since the semester/quarter is usually only for like two more weeks or so not counting finals week. During undergrad the break generally helped me charge my batteries to soldier through the last leg of the semester. Now that I’m in grad school I simply can’t afford to take almost a weekend off, let alone an extended one. Especially when home is a six hour train trip away, compared to a half hour car ride.

As for my Selfsgiving dinner I’m having turkey breast, cranberry sauce, Brussels sprouts, marshmallow yams, and stuffing.

They’re coming for you!

As I mentioned on an earlier post, I took a film making class during my last undergrad semester. One of the assignments was doing a shot for shot reproduction of a scene from a theatrical film. For mine I did the opening graveyard scene from Night of the Living Dead. It was fun to shoot but there were a couple of important cuts that acted were out with the camera off unbeknownst to me, an unpleasant discovery made when I was editing the footage in Adobe Premiere. This was frustrating because we didn’t have time to reshoot those missing scenes, so we had to make do with what was shot.

And here is the original scene for for reference:

Colors of the Campus – Photo Journalism project

Here’s post from a friend of mine who did the grad program I’m in now.

/Erica Rodriguez - Media Portfolio/

The various photos were taken in my 2015-2016 Grad school year. The photo series explores the vibrant school not only through its main color, green, but also through the rest of the sequence of hues.

Colors on campus — JSMA

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I’ve seen a leprechaun

One thing I love about living in Eugene are all of the characters that I see on a regular basis. Almost all UO students dress totally normally, but lots of the other denizens in Eugene are rather unusual. Hippies are the most obvious subculture visible, but there are also a lot of others like punks and the occasional lite Goth. Some notable individuals include a barefoot, dreadlocked, mandolin growing pot farmer, a guy in a fox skin hat who plays the didgeridoo, and a leprechaun.

Yes, you read that correctly. A leprechaun. He wears a green bowler, a vest, shorts with striped knee socks, has a pointy goatee and smokes a pipe. His backpack has a bong sticking out of it and a cauldron attached. I’m honestly uncertain whether he intentionally dresses like a leprechaun or if it’s all a crazy coincidence.

I’ve been tempted to ask him about his pot of gold.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/mythical/

 

Down the Rabbit (or frog) Hole

In my Media in Society class all of the students have to give presentations on a topic of their choice. My topic is the Alt-Right, the loose confederacy of meme savvy neo-Fascists who have propped up Donald Trump as the next Fuhrer/Duce. Unfortunately my group partner dropped out of the class, leaving me to fly solo for this one.

I’m giving my presentation on Tuesday, so right now I am taking a break from putting the PowerPoint together. It’s difficult slogging through countless losers who blame all of their problems on Jews, Muslims, Feminists, immigrants, and everyone who is different from them. What distinguishes the Alt-Right from more “traditional” Klaverns and Nazi parties is their savviness with social media. White Supremacists have used the Internet as long as there has been an Internet, generally occupying the echo chamber forum Stormfront or designing their own shitty Angel Fire pages. The Alt-Right recruits impressionable young people on 4chan and Reddit, they ride the coattails of Internet Troll culture the same way White Power skinheads do with the punk subculture. Now they are all over Twitter, spreading their filth to audiences that would have never been exposed to it otherwise.

Right now I am trying to organize a coherent presentation explaining the Alt-Right’s relationship with Trump and the media in general. My plan is to recycle the content of my PowerPoint and turn it into a YouTube video. I’m not sure when I will be able to do that, but I will be sure to post it on here.

New chef

During undergrad I lived in the dorms residence halls (I don’t want to offend the Res Life community, they love to bitch about the word “dorm”) and almost all of my meals at the cafeteria, the only exceptions being the local Thai or Vietnamese places about once a week or the closest Subway whenever I was hungry on a long weekend night.

Now that I’m in grad school I live in an off campus apartment, I eat out more often than I really should in addition to making my own meals. I subscribe to Blue Apron, a delivery service which ships the ingredients for three meals for two once a week. That is what I eat from Friday to Saturday.

I love Blue Apron because it gives a huge variety of meals, including many things that I had never heard of before like shakshouka (a Jewish egg and chile dish similar to huevos rancheros). Recently one of the meals was tarts, well personal quiches. They had mushrooms, cheese broccoli and vinegar. I’ve had quiche too many times to count but I had ever made it before, it was pretty good.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/tart/

 

Anti-Trump protest in Eugene

On Thursday I had the opportunity to witness a protest against Trump, so I decided to film what I saw. I’m sorry for the shoddy quality, I filmed it on my phone and it was getting dark.

A Muslim veteran against Islamophobia — Phil Ebersole’s Blog

Nate Terani is a Muslim, the grandson of Iranian immigrants and a U.S. Navy veteran. He also is a member of a new organization called Veterans Challenge Islamophobia. He grew up in central New Jersey, but, in 1985, the eight-year-old Terani was taken on a visit with his family to his ancestral homeland. While there, […]

via A Muslim veteran against Islamophobia — Phil Ebersole’s Blog

Even Hitler hates Trump

One hobby I’ve picked up during my last hiatus was YouTubing. I took a film making class during my last undergrad semester, so I launched a channel to show people outside of class the videos. Since then I got into making untergangers which are videos with fake subtitles for the film Downfall (Untergang in German), which chronicles the last week of Hitler’s life. One famous scene has Hitler receiving bad news about Berlin’s defense, which results in him having a meltdown in front of his inner circle. This scene is the basis of most untergangers, and they have him have rant about practically anything you can think of. My first two had him flipping out over Trump naming Mike Pence as VP and Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

My new one, however, features him very upset over Trump being elected. Enjoy: