Grove Street 4 Life

It's warm (finally) in Chicago, and I've been eating a lot of barbeque over the weekend. It's been pretty tasty.

ALSO: I've rediscovered the joys of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I've wasted a good three hours already this afternoon, and were it not for homework I probably wouldn't be finished yet. There's something about the actual gameplay and storyline and whatnot that's fun, of course, but for me there's also an added nostalgia from when my best friends and I used to gather around the television after school and take turns, each person wreaking as much havoc as possible until they died, then the next person's turn.

However, since my musical knowledge as well as my knowledge about LA has grown considerably in recent years (due to a friend in The Angels and......growing up) I've come to a little bit of a greater appreciation. Especially in light of literature/media theory, GTA stands as a vanguard for the appreciation of video games on par with other media. I mean, why not? It seems to make sense considering the recent admiration for the whole Web 2.0 (which name, of course, I hate), why can't a medium that's a mixture of user-creation and author-creation be a valid art piece?