...it's all been meh. I feel like I need a constant vacation, and weekends are only there to taunt me with it. I've been fighting the human subjects internal review board (IRB) of my college so I can do my fucken simple experiment involving people watching a movie and completing a survey for my thesis. I got "conditional approval" which means I have to stroke it a little harder to get all the way approved apparently

...my list of things to fix is a little asinine: "the researcher should provide approval from the copyright holder of EVERY MOVIE or provide evidence that such approval is not necessary". I already gave them the fair use act word for word...so this time I spent a couple hours on the cornell law website, reading through the provisions and cut/paste a bunch of shit that seems pretty airtight to me...hopefully. "the researcher should provide permission to use the current survey instrument or evidence that none is needed/the instrument was created by the researcher".....It's literally 6-7 questions, saying 'how would you rate the followinginsert 6 categories here to be rated on a scale)'...ugh. "people who have seen one of the films before should be excluded from the study" ...wat? That has nothing to do with human subjects safety/relevance...it's a design problem that, at worst, would effect my results. PLUS, these are mainstream movies for the most part (White Zombie-1032, Night of the Living Dead-1968, Re-Animator-1985, 28 Days Later-2002, and Shaun of the Dead-2004...my thesis is on horror films, why they scare us, what they represent about each generation, and a little on why people seek out their fears in film...experiment is narrowed to zombie films because it helps...well, narrow the topic)

...other than that, and lack of hours at my job, life's pretty peachy, I'd say.

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-Willum, the _________
(we've come a long way...)