A little late for St. Patrick’s Day, but fun none the less: check out this render of a beer, complete with particles to act as the carbonation and foam.

I’m taking American Sign Language this quarter, and it is so intimidating in the best possible way. My professor is actually deaf, and there’s been no interpreter since the first day. It is so immersive it’s obvious that I am learning a lot, but it also very nerve wracking. I love that thrill of learning something completely new, but I don’t love how much I sweat in that class.

I actually entered a Rock Band tournament with my friends Sam and Katie yesterday. If only our drummer Cody wasn’t in jail (that sounds more bad ass than “he had to work during it”). It was a blast, going to this room with multiple large projections of Rock Band on the wall, and a practice set in the corner. And of course it’s fun trying our best against these great competitors. Each band got two sets of 3 songs, and the songs were chosen with a point system, which was tricky, but seemed to work well. There were people there a lot better than us of course, but let me tell you: we performed our hearts out.

There were some high highs (we won best dressed! That’s right, we went in costume!) and some low lows (due to speaker malfunction Katie couldn’t hear herself singing, which led to us failing Won’t Get Fooled Again even though I was a millisecond away from saving us, it was so heartbreaking I had to fall to me knees). And to my surprise, I won the raffle to get a brand new Rock Band bundle! How amazing. Sam is going to take it off my hands once we finish college, but until then it’s tons of drum battles!

Similar to my Y rant, once something I love reaches its end, I am compelled to tell you all about it. Maybe it is part of the letting go process, attempting to give it to others, in hopes that it will live on with them. But then again, I would have been willing to tell you about it at any point in its 60 episode run, because it is the best thing I have watched in a long time. It is an amazing hyper-realistic examination of modern American city, represented here by Baltimore, Maryland.

It starts out as a twist on the old cop show formula, in that the crime is not solved by the end of the hour long episode. The case is allowed to breathe through 13 episode seasons. It gives time to the showcase minutia of detective work, really develops characters, and becomes a very satisfying experience. This means it requires you to watch TV a bit differently, however. You will need to pay attention to things. Threads are dropped and picked up multiple episodes later, and it will be all the better if you remember who that guy was and what he was doing.

As the series progresses, it does not bother telling the same stories of drug dealers and the po-lice after them. It shifts gears each season, introducing a new facet of the city, while never neglecting the people you already know and love. You get to see the plight of the blue collar dock workers, the back door dealings of the politicians, the heartbreak of the school system, and the crushing responsibility of the media to report it all.

And in the end (as it has been with each season finale, but especially now), it somehow manages to be satisfyingly closed and open. They managed to combine a circular “life will go on” with a “this story is complete”. We know exactly how the lives will work out for most characters, except for two, and I will happily continue to imagine their possible lives far into the future. Creators David Simon and Ed Burns have made something really special here, it is the most riveting and rewarding show I have ever seen. Congratulations to them and everybody involved! I will never be able to get you out of my head.

Here is a project I did in Experimental Media, it’s six manipulated photographs about mankind’s dependence upon technology, and technology’s dependence upon mankind. Make sure you look pretty carefully at each image, as the manipulations are not supposed to be obvious at first glance.