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Geek References In Your Writings

post #1 of 12
11/4/04 at 6:38am
Thread Starter 
I guess in order to help me stave off the boredom of the average assignment, I have found myself increasingly including trivial movie references that only a geek would get in my papers and college assignments. For example, in my rhetoric class in which I had to write a paper on a speaker, I did James Camerons' speech to the Mars Society and called him alongside Isaac Asimov and Jeremy Bulloch one of the greatest sci-fi luminaries of all time.

In another class I had to do a short script for a lover's quarrel, and called it "Indiana Jones: The Twilight Years" which featured the maritial problems of a nagging Marion and Indy sitting on the couch watching TV and about to leave to play cards with Sallah and Short Round. Sample dialogue: "So her name's Elsa, now?!"

Then I had to do an argument between two friends, and had it be about two movie geeks arguing over whether or not the Matrix sequels sucked, and used some of the defensive excuses used by Matrix fans here on CHUD.

Just now I finished writing a script for a radio advertisement publicizing a horror movie, and naturally it was for Freddy Vs. Jason Vs. Ash.


Any of you guys out there find yourself doing stuff like this for your college assignments or any other things of this nature?
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post #2 of 12
11/4/04 at 11:31am
I find myself doing stuff like that all the time for school assignments. Here's a business letter I wrote last semester for an accounting class:


February 11, 2004

William Lumbergh
Initech
4120 Friedrich Lane
Austin, Texas 78767

Dear Mr. Lumbergh:

The letter is to inform you that the TPS reports you requested have not been completed. As you are aware, my job entails going through thousands of lines of code and changing it to recognize four digit years, like “1998” instead of “98.” As you know this should have been completed five years ago, as I originally projected, but in a given day I can only accomplish so much work. I assure you that the problem is not that I‘m lazy, its that I just don’t care. I recommend that Milton Waddams take over this time consuming task, leaving me free to concentrate on more important tasks.

In addition, I would like to address the hierarchy of command in the office. When I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

Also, I’ve been asked to inform you that there is a problem with the copy machine that requires immediate care. The fax machine says paper jam when there is no paper jam. This is causing undue stress to several employees who have threatened to “kick this piece of shit out the window” or smash it with a baseball bat.

Sincerely,


Not too original, but hey, I was trying to fill space as quickly as possible since we just had to show we knew the format. I also once wrote a paper for a stats class and totally turned it into a rant about how much better Quincy ME was compared to Oprah; the project was really just busy work to show that we had watched a video on a day the teacher was out. Maybe not geeky, but the teacher read it to the class, cause I was riffing on the lameness of the video(standard mid eighties video made to show how statistics affects out daily lives). Just finished a database project for a MIS class and we had to fill in a bunch of made up names. Among those present: Ashley Williams, Jack Burton, Peyton Westlake, Jon Stewart, Henry Jones Jr., Bruce Wayne, Keyser Soze, Egon Spengler, Max Fischer, Jack Bauer, and John McClane. Nothing too out there, but it's hard coming up with random names.
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post #3 of 12
11/4/04 at 11:47am
Unless you are a god of dialogue like QT, adding pop culture references to a script usually limits the reality of that script. it screams out 'this is just a movie! i got all my ideas from other movies! this has nothing to do with real life!'.

As for college assignments: whatever keeps you from falling asleep or slitting your wrists while writing those bastards is a good thing. As long as the assignment actually answers the question at hand of course...otherwise you'll end up on one of those regular e-mail things that go round with attachments of all the completely mental essays teacher's get from their 'special' students.
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post #4 of 12
11/4/04 at 1:55pm
I don't think you have to be particularly film geeky to spot the pop culture reference in Indiana Jones: The Twilight Years do you ?
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post #5 of 12
11/4/04 at 5:51pm
Thread Starter 
No, not really, but I figured it fit in with the theme of the thread I was creating. And I'm sure the average moviegoer doesnt' remember the names of all of the supporting characters from the Indy Trilogy.
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post #6 of 12
11/7/04 at 4:18am
My freshman year of college I wrote a paper on Rashomon where I compared the use of the camera to Raimi's use of the camera in the Evil Dead films.
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post #7 of 12
11/8/06 at 8:31am
Thread Starter 
I just rediscovered this paper I wrote in an ethics class two years ago. Goddamn am I proud of it.

Quote:
At first it seems like an easy, if odd, question to ask a utilitarian: if aliens offered to give humanity the cures to all viral diseases, including AIDS, in exchange for the right to kidnap unwilling humans and experiment on them, would you say yea or nay? I mean, this is obviously a case where the benefits to the many would outweigh the difficulties of the few, right? However, there are so many problematic variables that determining whether or not this is truly beneficial to us Earthlings is in question, and whether or not you are an act or rule utilitarian also makes a major difference in this strange moral supposition.

Firstly, let us look at what we know: that some alien life form (let’s call them “Grays”) has contacted us with a proposal: if we let them abduct fellow members of our species, they will give us the cures to every viral disease from Japanese encephalitis to AIDS. This seems simple enough, doesn’t it? However, therein lies the problem. We simply do not know enough about what we are getting ourselves into, and whether or not this will really benefit us in the long run. For instance, what is the reason the Grays have decided to perform this noble service to the universe and help another species out? If they are to go out of their way to help us then they must be expecting something profitable from it. I mean, if they only really want to help us, then why hadn’t they done anything before? No, there must be some ulterior motive here.

One possibility is that the human captives would be used for guinea pigs for testing of the Grays’ cures for their own diseases, or even worse, for testing of their cleaning products, and if one looks at our own habits of using animals for testing, they’ll need quite a few. Test subjects are gone through rather quickly and thoughtlessly, and if we are truly unfortunate enough to be the subjects of testing to the Grays’ version of Windex on some ungodly planet then there will be many, many competing corporations all in need of test subjects. How long would it be until a few sporadic hicks getting up and snatched turns into human strip-mining of entire nations? Much like the way we have been capturing massive numbers of monkeys that are now endangered species, we could become a sort of livestock, allowed to live in the wild in dwindling numbers as more and more of us are snatched each year.

Another possibility is that we would be naively giving the Grays tools to use against us by allowing them to experiment on our people. Perhaps they are testing the abductees to determine what neural devices work best for when they are ready to enslave the human race. Sure, they are helping us cure our diseases; who wants unhealthy peons? But what could be worse than being enslaved? What if the Grays are involved in a war with some other alien race, like the Galactic Empire or Kree, or perhaps even the almighty Galactus? They may wish to experiment on their human specimens until they have found a way to transmogrify our population into a mindless race of soldier creatures, cannon fodder to be sent to our doom at the talons of the Shivans in order to keep the conniving Grays from harm. Either way, we don’t truly know what the Grays’ full intentions are, so to give them what they want so easily without knowledge of their ultimate purpose would be potentially disastrous for the entire population.

However, an act utilitarian may overlook all of these possibilities, going directly for what would be perceived as the immediate good of the human race. Screw minutiae and what-ifs! cries the act utilitarian. In their minds they see a powerful and immediate good for the vast bulk of humankind, and if that means sacrificing a few individuals to see the end of the AIDS epidemic in Africa and the devastation that chicken pox causes to the first grade attendance sheet then so be it. These act utilitarians could be right and they could be wrong to act so quickly; if the Grays’ motives here were pure of heart and they were offering us these cures simply for our own good then there wouldn’t be a moment to lose. Every second spent deciding what to do could cost diseased people somewhere in the world their lives. But at the same time if they act to rashly, their willingness to go along with the Grays’ plans could result in a double-cross that could be the end of us all.

The rule utilitarian, on the other hand, is more cautious and willing to look ahead at what the possible consequences would be. If the decision-makers were rule utilitarians, then they would probably come up with many of the potential outcomes that I have put forward here, and would most likely either give a polite “no” to the Grays or request more information until they had a more detailed idea of what the Grays had in mind with this deal. Rule utilitarians may find the possibility of curing all viral diseases to be mighty tempting, but they have the well-being of the entire world population on their minds, and if they have to choose between curing all those with disease or protecting the entire human species from enslavement, then unfortunately for the diseased it’s simply not a fair choice for the majority of us.

So in conclusion, while both act and rule utilitarians do what is best for the majority as their main principle, if faced with extraterrestrials offering dubious deals involving disease cures and kidnapping rights the two types of utilitarians would act oppositely. With the exception of the observation that act and rule utilitarians will respond to challenges differently, however, this entire essay was about a concept that is rather unlikely and thus rather worthless. But if, when we do make formal contact with an alien life-form, it is heartening to think that there may be some slim chance that they come bearing gifts of medical science, and not spaceships that torch cities with huge walls of orange CGI fire.
I don't think I still have the physical copy but I'm pretty sure I got an A on this, not bad considering the amount of geeky digressions I made simply to amuse myself during the writing. But if a professor asks a film student to write an essay involing aliens they're just asking for it anyway.
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post #8 of 12
11/8/06 at 9:02am
While this isn't specifically about a writing assignment, this is a definite geek reference.

For a history assignment in high school, I once turned in a piece of laminate flooring that had about a half dozen quarters super glued to it. The assignment was to represent visually the "economy" as we saw it. The whole thing was so ridiculously open ended that I decided, and justifiably so as far as I was concerned, that I would simply throw in a convenient Empire Records plug to illustrate exactly how I felt about it.

After turning it in, I was asked by my teacher "just what in the world is this supposed to mean anyway?"

Seizing the opportunity, I quickly countered, "I don't feel that I need to explain my art to you, sir."
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post #9 of 12
11/10/06 at 3:42pm
I managed to slip a Commando quote into the last short story I finished for my master's thesis.
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post #10 of 12
11/13/06 at 1:37am
"Remember at the beginning when I said that this would be the last paper you ever read? I lied. It will be the first."


Yeah, I sucked that one. It's late and I'm tired.
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post #11 of 12
11/13/06 at 4:03pm
I remember we had to write a dialogue for a psychology class, and I had Derrida and a few others whom I don't remember discussing the form and function of science fiction at a dinner party. The Wachowskis show up and the philosophers mock them cruely.
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post #12 of 12
11/13/06 at 4:18pm
I passed my computer lit class my sophmore year without doing a single actual assignment. We were supposed to do a series of Word and Excel documents, culminating in a full media presentation of a summer camp of our design.

Instead, I made an epic powerpoint presentation, telling the story of Pre-Revolution Havana Guitar Man and His Magic Talking Denehey Fish [a creature that was half-fish, half Brian Denehey, that granted wishes and had it's own theme song] and Their Quite Grand Battle Against Les Claypool and the Craig T. Nelson Fightin' Five [5 Craig T. Nelson clones, all representing the 5 elements: Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, and Barium].

It ended with a Heavy Metal Duel inside of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, in which both Pre-Revolution Havana Guitar Man and Les Claypool are exploded by Soupy Sales, who then eats the Earth.

It was very lame, unfunny and forced (think Family Guy at it's worst) but the very fact that I got a 100 in a class for just dicking around with google image search still makes me pretty proud.
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