What I Write When I’m Feelin’ Low

WARNING, this post is not a happy one at all. In fact it’s long, sarcastic, and depressing. I honestly suggest that nobody who wants to keep having a “good” day read this. I’m telling you right now not to read it.

I just had to write it down. It very accurately portrays some of my emotions but not all emotions can be rainbows. I’m writing this prologue after writing everything else. Corona got me stressin’ enough to be willing to post stuff I typically keep to myself but, fuck it. There’s probably a block button somewhere on here and I won’t be offended at all if you use it. I understand the innately human desire to avoid caring and you have the right and the privilege to do just that. Maybe one day I’ll learn how.

When I become president in the year 2036 I will abolish and outlaw the American Education System. CLEARLY that shit needs to go for a multitude of obvious reasons. Gotta design ourselves a new one. Even if the new system has it’s own issues it can’t be worse than what we have now.

Everyone else can just continue to not change it or even acknowledge it in any way. I guess I’ll fix it myself. The rest of America can continue to sit back, relax, hate each other, kill each other, or just post tik toks about Black people or about anything really. Maybe we could fight another freakin’ WAR for PROFIT, or re-elect a guy who needs the Windex kept out of his reach since he’ll probably drink it thinking it’s a magical blue potion. Y’all just keep on doin’ what you’ve been doin’ America. I got this, I guess. I’ll be the one to Make America Great and if I do it will be the first instance in the history of our country that we will be anything but a country of genocidal dumb fucks who only got power, wealth, “safety” and “freedom” by being lucky that the Indians hadn’t invented artillery yet.

Or maybe I’ll just pray about it, pretend I did something to help, and hope god solves it, lol. If I spend an hour bored every week it means I’m a good person.

Oh, wait a minute! Maybe I could donate some Money to the Church! I don’t even have to go oreven pretend to care. Oh, thank the Lord above and the important, selfless, trustworthy people that follow him. I found a way to absolve myself from the guilt of inactivity by way of pure finances. It’s like dropping a quarter for the bell ringing Santa’s outside Walmart that most of us probably find kind of annoying and then feeling good about ourselves for the rest of the year. Bro, I’ll even get a tax break when I donate to charity so really I’m making more money for me! Nice! It’s like posting about it online (like I’m doing right now) and thinking it’ll make a difference.

Never mind about me and the 2036 presidency guys! I can go back to doing nothing and I guess I’ll just hope that my child’s school doesn’t torture some other kid bad enough that they bring a legally acquired fully automatic assault rifle with legal high-capacity magazines and some LEGAL armor piercing ammunition to school one day for show and tell. Maybe my kid will be able to dodge bullets better than the other kids. I’ll force him into track and field to make sure he’s faster than the other school children. I don’t know what sport could help my son avoid the home made bombs built with easily found guides online but hey, you can’t solve everything.

Now that the problem has solved itself I guess I’ll smoke another bowl and continue to wait to die in relative peace and comfort.

P.S. If you have no idea what issues there are with the education system than I actually have no idea how I could ever communicate with you. Maybe one day we will find a cure for being both blind and deaf. There’s nothing wrong with being blind or deaf from an ethical standpoint but it does make you miss out on some pretty easy to notice stuff.

P.P.S. None of the other countries are doing any better than America so I guess living here is still my best choice. Yay, we’re winning! I feel so happy and emotionally fulfilled.

What I Write When I’m High

Let me tell you my favorite story. I’ve told this story many many times. It always gets a laugh, a lot of laughs. Someone would always say something like “Thats not a story!” and they would laugh and start to tell their own stories. Most of those other peoples’ stories were all pretty great since they were all told by 4 years old kids and as such the tellers hadn’t been taught by society to hate themselves yet. Wow, that got pretty serious for a sec. Lets push past society’s negative and powerful effect on the psychology of kids and get to the story. Thats a pretty big thing to skip over but hey, society has taught us all to skip over the important things. Boom, suck it society. 

The story, right, of course. Uh… Once upon a time there was a broccoli. It was always this broccoli’s dream to be a cauliflower so one day he painted himself white and lived happily ever after. 

Classic. That one always worked. The mix up play here is to then pretend you’re gonna tell a real story afterwards. Pretend you’re about to tell a good one. Lean in. Then tell this story. Once upon a time there was a cauliflower… 

You can probably guess the rest and yeah it also gets the laughs. That’s my favorite story. I’ve never actually thought about it as a story and, when I thought it up I know for sure that there was no conscious purposeful decision making going on in the forefront of my head. I mean, there’s not really any deeper meaning behind any of it. It works really well as a joke and I would always tell it during lunch time so that’s why my brain thought of food. It’s odd that looking back on it now I start to think about what it means. Like, I need it to mean something because it’s my favorite story. How could I let my favorite story be not meaningful? If I was to think about it as a product of the subconscious brain what would I think. 

First off, let me say that I don’t really like the word “subconscious”, not because it sounds bad out loud or because the word is offensive. I don’t like the word because I think it doesn’t do a good job of explaining the actual thing. I also, probably foolishly, divide the mind into two. My two sides are called Lingual and Non-Lingual. Humanity, on a technological level, has evolved dramatically in the Lingual section of Technology. This would be books and text messages, facebook and twitter. This lingual technology has had some incredible and surprising outcomes. Humanity, has been making fantastic strides in facilitating the spread of language and words. Ooh, ooh! Let’s just talk about that for a couple pages.

Ok, so lets make a sort of map of how humanity has evolved, not just on a technological level, but on a… uh… “Entirety” Level. I just googled ‘how old is the human race’ and now I’m here to tell you, it is… I had to tab back over because I forgot… 200,000 years old. So according to the majority of scientists according to google according to the general public’s click rates, that’s when it all started for us. That’s the beginning of our… Wait. I gotta start from even before the beginning so that the actual beginning has more depth to it. Classic writing technique. Get a little prologue action going.

Let’s go all the way back to the birth of Humanity’s dad. Our dad’s name was Homo Erectus. Classic dad to be so embarrassing in front of our more immature friends. We are all partly products of our parents so any really deep story about us has to include our dad, even if only for one scene right at the beginning of the movie before we get a massive time jump. Anyway our Dad… Wait again! Am I offending anybody by calling it “dad”. I’m being too gender Okay, I’ll refer to Homo Erectus as ‘Our Parents’ from now on. Will you, as a reader, start to slowly personalize this story to yourself because you also have parents that were around for a while before you existed and you can therefore relate to this? Yes, of course you’ll personalize it and become invested in the story! Ha ha, you are so easily to emotionally manipulate. Sorry, sorry, sorry, I mean, WE are so easy to emotionally manipulate. It’s OUR parents that we are all here to talk about.

If you’re still here to talk about broccoli and cauliflower then just grow up already, jeez. Try to keep up with the times, being what they are. 

So, Our Parents was born 2,000,000 years ago. A cool 2 Milly. That’s a long ass time ago, right? Right? Can you even imagine 2,000,000 years? No, you can’t. The first thing that probably comes to mind when you hear that number is all the expensive stuff you could own with $2,000,000. Oh, baby we gettin’ the pool with the jacuzzi in the center of that pool and the Tiki Cabana Bar is gonna be in the center of that jacuzzi! That’s a lot of money right there. Two million YEARS though? I’m picturing Dinosaurs on Pangea or somethin’. 

Hey, Dinosaurs! Thanks for fueling my car. Dinosaur more like Dino-sore, right? More like Dino-thank-you-very-much. lol. Stupid dinosaurs.

Wait, Dinosaurs are how old? 230,000,000 years old? Ok, now I actually don’t know what numbers mean anymore. Two Milly made sense to me, at least a little bit. It’s just one super awesome pool. Two Hundred and Thirty Milly? Sorry pal, my brain can’t imagine that high. That’s a lot of years right there. 

That means the world Our Parents was born into was quite a crazy world. A world that, over the course a baJillion years, had been molded in to the All Time Greatest version of Capitalism. Anarchy isn’t possible since, you gotta eat stuff, who’s gonna make that stuff, boom anarchy is gone. This world of long ago is Capitalism at its height. Oh, you should have seen the old gal in her prime. It was truly beautiful and majestic. Everybody just doing whatever was Good for Them. 

I mean, if I’m a lowly normal gazelle in the olden days I love my kids as much as the next gazelle. But, if that cheetah over there makes eye contact with me I ain’t stickin around to help the Fawns. If my old man starts to get too slow I ain’t even stoppin to notice. I’m just gonna keep on eating this wonderful green stuff I’m always walkin on. That’s the way it has Always been and that’s the way it Always should be. Everything is just so simple that way. After all, we are just lowly animals and simplicity is very nice. I’m a Gazelle, I don’t even know what a “species” is! I just follow these other gazelle because… well… it’s obvious that’s what I’m supposed to be doing, duh. Why are you even asking me this? That’s just the way it is. I’ve never even asked Myself why we stick together! I’m a Gazelle! I mean, what is a gazelle? I don’t even know what that is. There is no reason behind any of my actions. Well, the reason is that I want to live obviously but there’s no motive. “Survive” is literally the only thing that goes through my mind.

You see how crazy this world is? Our Parents were born in a world where every other living thing did whatever it could do for itself. The weak are food. My life is more important than my child’s life. I only feed MOST of my children any food because I can’t afford to take care of any fucking Dependents who are more work than I think they should be. I can take care of some kids, sure, but only if they’re capable of learning to live just by watching me. Heck! Depending on what kind of animal I am I might just abandon my children on a beach before they’re even hatched. What children? Who cares? 

Not a single living thing on that planet had any idea if it was gonna get to eat tomorrow. For the prey, well… they could be dead tomorrow, killed by something that looks different than they do. For predators, maybe their prey gets away tomorrow. The predator knows it’s whole life that one day, many years from now, that prey will get away. The predator and prey both know that one day they’ll be dead but hey, that’s the way it has Always been and that’s the way it Always will be. 

Anyway, enough delving into the mind of Mr. Gazelle, and back to Our Parents. For Our Parents things were slow, real slow and real hard. Our Parents had to work almost every second of every day, starting from age zero, just to stay alive. Literally, they struggle all day every day while only being able to accomplish the great achievement that is, Remaining Alive!

You think, YOU reading this, that you are bored at home with nothing to do?* You could have handed Our Parents a dairy cow, milked it in front of them to show them how it works, and they would just let the cow walk off because… 

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You’re probably wondering what happened. Why did that paragraph go all Sopranos on us? You see I left that space there as a Representation. Remember how I got all weird and showed you what Mr. Gazelle was thinking? That was all a lie. I know that the realization that Mr. Gazelle simply a product of my imagination is hard to take. In reality, if we asked a gazelle a question, that blank space I left there would be a far more accurate recording. That Gazelle has no actual thoughts, sorry. It obviously doesn’t know a language, you fool. 

Only, that empty space up there wasn’t meant for another Gazelle was it? No!! It was meant for Our Parents. Ya see, Our Parents, (our parents of the timeline Two Milly years ago that is), are pretty much just Gazelles that have learned to hide things. Seriously, that’s all they are. They know how to read and write just as well as a gazelle. That one empty paragraph is the entire thought database of ALL of Our Parents’ nearly TWO MILLION year history. Like, they didn’t even have spoken language back then. Our Parents did not even know how to talk to other… uh… other Our Parents. That one empty space really is it. They don’t even have stories they pass to their young. They have never spoken a single word to their young. Their children don’t even have names. That’s the world of just a relatively short time ago. A world without humans is 200,000 years. A world without life on this planet? 4,540,000,000 years ago. If you take a really close look at those two numbers you just might notice that one is alot bigger than the other. We are basically about to hit puberty as a species and look at all the stuff we’ve figured out. Let’s get back to the olden days though shall we? Honestly the world sucks big time but the plot is about to pick up.

Finally, on one especially hot day in Africa, over the course of thousands and thousands of years, our parents had us. This is where things start to get real crazy. Homo Sapien starts to be a thing and well, we’ve got ourselves some ideas and we ain’t gonna wait around on our asses for 2 million years just waiting to see how “Natural Selection” outdoes itself next. That’s a pretty stupid idea if you ask us. Non non, mon frère!! I think not! In only 150,000 years we came up with a little something called LANGUAGE!!! Suck it dad! I mean, Suck it Our Parents! We know you guys don’t really “get” our new idea but believe us, it’s the bee’s knees. I know that to you, Our Parents, our ‘language’ only sounds like more confusing grunts and… in reality that’s all it is, but!,* it is also the start of something amazing, dad! 

I feel like this connection between my actual parents in real life and this name I gave to Homo Erectus is starting to feel weird. I love my parents. My parents are not Our Parents though. IF I write a story about MY parents and how that relates to YOU, or some shit, it will still just be my parents and my story. I’m trying to do something else. I’m trying to contextualize humanity’s Path as a coherent and somehow accurate re-imagining of that path, as a story. Wow. That last sentence was a doozy to read. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Homo Erectus is gone now anyway. Thanks a lot old man ..l..  I’m told thats a middle finger, see? ..l.. It’s just a joke Actual Dad, relax.

That’s as far as I wrote. I’m writing this part later after sobering up. I guess the point is that humanity is moving REALLY, REALLY fast. We keep getting more and more impatient but instead of trying to figure out how to be happy or how to be friendly to people we keep just trying to keep the Cheetah’s away. We have this idea in the back of our heads that material things will keep us safe from the existential cheetah that is Death. I’m not saying to never complain or to let things happen. All I’m saying is that if you want to to change the world you better remember that the whole thing is a process. Instead of trying to skip to the very end of the process we should try and focus on speeding the process up. People aren’t just born with this innate understanding of how the world really works. As they grow society lies to them about how life works and they get even further from the truth.

The “truth” is that goodness, compassion, and understanding through empathy. You can’t force the truth on people. Telling them what’s at the end of the rainbow doesn’t really help them get there. Even standing on the rainbow and calling them over doesn’t work. You gotta get over there and build a big ass bridge to the rainbow. You gotta print maps to that bridge. You have to teach people. They wanna know.

I’m starting to lose track of everything in this post. It might be a new record but I didn’t write it all at once so it has an asterisk next to the record.

Weird Puzzles Thing into Hero: A Film Review

There is a phenomenon that happens sometimes in a movie. A lot of movies have plot holes, right? We all agree that plot holes are bad but sometimes when you’re watching a movie and trying to fill those plot holes yourself, you realize that this movie your watching has solved all of it’s plot holes.

How do I describe this? Imagine you are a puzzle designer. You design puzzles for a living. You’re not an artist, you decide the way the image is cut up. You and all of your peers in the puzzle design community all have one thing you all hate. Every time you gather around the water cooler there’s about a 60% chance that someone is gonna complain about how mysterious and annoying this problem is. The problem is that puzzle pieces get lost so easily.

The puzzle research division has released a statement. Look how cute it is. They even have their own lingo.

“We, the experts on lines, blades, and the optics of fibers, have researched this subject thoroughly. Our findings are conclusive. We will compare our findings with the results of a poll we did online last week.
Question: “What percentage of the time does a puzzle lose a piece? In other words, at the end of a puzzles First Life, what chance is there that its already missing a piece?’
You guys answered the poll saying you think a puzzle loses a piece 76% of the time. We find this number to be amusingly dramatic. In actuality, if you remove the numbers taken from Level 9 houses or, houses with more than 3 pets or more than 6 children, you find that the number is much less concerning. On the First Life of a puzzle a piece is lost only 24% of the time. To you, it feels like 76% because those times where a piece is lost are always remembered.
We have even investigated the cause of these psychological patterns. The truth is that you silly Puzzle Design Community members actually WANT to lose pieces. Isn’t it so much more exciting to lose a piece? Doesn’t that make it more interesting to you? We ourselves see the temptation to feel that way. Somebody in the family has to have accidentally dropped it at some point. The mystery of who did it or how is so exciting.
Obviously, we are of a higher order than you since we are the experts. Therefore we make a concerted effort to keep all the pieces. There should be no joy taken from familial discord. Grow up.
Lovingly Yours, The Puzzle Illuminati”

You however, are not a part of this Puzzle Bougiouse. How the fuck do you spell that word? You’re far more open minded than those clout chasing Puzzle Bougeoisy. Maybe you spell that part “geoisie”? Anyway, you pride yourself on creativity and you use that creativity to think of an amazing solution to the problem. You simply ask, how do we use the problem as the solution.

You’re brilliant and wonderful.

Your solution is to make a puzzle that mixes in empty spaces. Obviously, the simple use of negative space by a puzzle should be innovation enough but you’re no one trick pony. You realize that with today’s modern material sciences you could probably make some puzzle pieces that are clear. You spend time with an artist, (gross, artists are lame), to create an “abstract” art piece, whatever that means. Your next idea is to design the cuts of the puzzle so that some of the empty spaces are identical in shape. Your shameful and disgusting “Artist” uses repetition as the key concept point for the art. Your idea BTW. When you cut the puzzle you will actually design it in a way that multiple pieces can fit into multiple places on the puzzle. If you have maybe 75 out of a 1,000 piece puzzle be either clear, non existent, or interchangeable and then you incorporate that into the art then you have infinite possibility puzzles. Every Life of the puzzle produces a different image. You really are a fucking genius. Like, wow actually. That’s a good idea right?

Anyway, you become incredibly successful, obviously. You make a bajillion dollars and everybody loves you. You’re so happy now. You’re at the top of the Puzzle game. You have more clout than all those Science Nerds combined. You put puzzles back into popular culture in a big way. ‘Infinity Puzzles’ start to replace every day items all over the place. As the concept is developed and perfected by your beautiful brain it becomes a primary way for many other people to express themselves. They make their own art with the puzzles. The puzzle has become a medium through which other creations are born.

But, you start to notice that things don’t exactly feel right. You went through all this trouble to develop this new technique but now the rest of the Puzzle Design Community is using it as a crutch. You realize that your puzzle doesn’t actually require any serious effort beyond the conceptual level. Creating an abstract piece of art is incredibly simple. Now, a bunch of people are talking about a hypothetical Super Puzzle where all the puzzles pieces are exactly the same shape so they can be as interchangeable as possible and there are no border pieces so everyone just adds pieces at random to see what it looks like as it grows.

FUCK THAT!!! You didn’t design the Infinity Puzzle for it to be used as a stepping stone for people with no original idea in the first place. Sure, maybe the puzzles get more digestible to casual puzzle fans but Overall Puzzle Quality, otherwise known as the OPQ rating, is dropping like a rock. Puzzle Minimalism actually makes money and that means everyone wants in. All your dreams of being an incredibly wealthy version of Philip Glass are dead. When your thing makes money everyone wants in. That minimalism is gonna be used as a crutch by simplistic people trying to make a quick dollar or grab some quick fame. As soon as that becomes their reason they’re dead inside! Those mother fuckers can’t take any of YOUR clout away from you. You won’t let em.

What did I originally start writing this post about? Oh yeah. Sometimes a movie will get “lucky” and all of it’s missteps and errors can all become useful by some simple mechanic in the movie’s design.

The movie Hero begins with the main character, Hero, sitting in front of the King of China.

You can see Hero on the left and the Emperor on the right.

Hero, sitting there on the left is telling the story to the King and Hero’s story has lot’s of melodrama in it because he believes that is what the King wants to hear. Everybody thinks the King is a tyrant and so Hero’s version of the story is emotional, hateful, bloody, and sexual. The twist after the first section of the movie is that the King then tells his own idea of how the story actually happened. The cinematography changes from blood red scenes and veiled faces to blue and poetic. The King’s version of the story is still melodramatic but it’s filled with honor, love, sacrifice, and virtue. Afterwards the true version of events is revealed and everything changes again.

The point is this. The movie is kind of boring for the first half with most of the characters seeming basic and childish. The action scenes are flashy with colors and grunts but they’re a little bit confusing. You understand what’s going on but somehow there’s a bit of apathy in you and that makes things confusing, of course. The action tries to be meta. Think, whirlwinds of brightly colored leaves or blankets of jet black Imperial arrows falling from the sky. Think entire fights that happen inside people’s heads.

Image result for hero 2002 leaves
You can’t even really see what’s happening all the time.

But, the movie can actually turn all of those problems with pacing or into a source of information. All of the boring angry-lovers scenes, idiotic revenge trips and seductions, all of it, fight scenes that are more interpretive dance than fight scene, anything at all that a person might dislike. These things work because the story is just Hero’s falsified version of the truth, with the purpose to fool the king. All of those parts of the movie I find boring are actually turned into fascinating character insight. We can see exactly what story Hero come’s up with. We can analyze why Hero might have those characters act like they’re in a Greek tragedy for the first half of the movie. Hero thinks the King wants those types of things in his story because he doesn’t know the King.

In turn, as the King tells the version of events he believes is true the boring or melodramatic scenes and lines in the movie become an expose on the character of the King. When two people tell you very different versions of the truth you can learn alot about them as a people.

The movie, because of this design, can basically do whatever it wants to do. The movie can get away with anything. It could have a scene be terrible and boring but that’s ok because they are choices being made by the characters. It’s exciting, well done, and expressive of the characters. The movie has somehow turned any possible screw up, mistake, plot hole or error into a commentary on the character telling the story. It’s brilliant.

Sometimes a movie accomplishes something like that. Another example is Hackers. What parts of Hackers are comedy and what parts aren’t. Personally I think it’s basically all comedy, and seen like that the movie is great. If you think it’s serious it’s still really funny I guess, but it changes the movie alot.

I’m getting kinda tired of writing and I’ve had “In The Heat Of The Night” on pause for the last hour. I’ll just change the title to Random Thoughts since I got off topic with the puzzle thing. That puzzle stuff was pretty funny though. Actually, I’ll call it “Two Problems Turned Into Solutions”. That’s a terrible title. Fuck it, no one reads these anyway.

My Feelings About Sex

     There was always more than one reason I felt like I was an outcast as a kid. Maybe outcast isn’t the right word. Confused is what I felt. One of the main reasons I was confused was because everyone one else around me, starting before even middle school, everyone else started to get completely obsessed with sex. It wasn’t even just the other kids. I didn’t really start to consciously notice it until I was in probably 6th grade but it had been there the whole time. The world has been obsessed with sex since the dawn of time. 

As I got older, I started to notice that almost every single movie involved sex in some way; beautiful women, tight outfits, romances, and even jokes. Disney Princesses didn’t fuck up my brain by giving me unrealistic body images. Well, it did a little. The real reason it fucked me up was because of how sexualized they were. Their faces didn’t look that unrealistic. It didn’t really matter all that much to me that their bodies were weird looking. I was confused by their fact that their asses were so incredible and how those incredible cheeks always seemed to sway in just the right way. Their cartoon tits? High and tight baby. A child’s toy woman? Just the right curves. A Michael Jordan movie for kids? Lola Bunny baby. Can Samus just be a female bounty hunter in a video game? Nope, gotta have a swimsuit skin.

When I was a little kid I loved Lola Bunny cause she was better at basketball than everyone else and she was smarter than everyone else. I didn’t even think about the idea of being attracted to her. Why would I? An ass as amazing as that is still no good reason to like someone, obviously. Even as a little kid it seemed obvious, to me, that those features had no correlation with friendship. In fact, attractive features, at the time, were kinda scary for a kid like me. Hot kids were rarely nice kids. I didn’t bring Lola up because she means anything to me in particular. If she did I would tell you, cause why not? Now, I find her a little bit disturbing. Lola Bunny was just one example out of millions of an extremely sexualized female character.

The problem is that even when you’re as young as elementary school, obsession with sex is expressed in a lot of different ways. The kids that get made fun of in first grade? You think any of em are hot, from the perspective of another first grader? It’s the ugly ones, from the perspective of another first grader, that get shit on every day. It helps to be a quiet kid but if you’re ugly and loud? 

When kids started to grow up though, they turned that looks based system into a competitive sport. They didn’t even realize it was happening but suddenly there’s this name based scoring system. It’s universally installed to keep track of who’s currently winning the game. Each name was worth a certain number of points, metaphorically, based on the name’s tits. You start to see sex more and more often in the movies. The movies you’re newly allowed to see are filled with it and on top of that, you realize that 65% of the all the movies you had already seen were also subtly about it. Every sitcom has an “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine” episode. Rachel has to have sex with Joey because fuck it I guess. Bond has to fuck the girl and the girl has to look just a little bit younger each movie. Every marvel movie needs at least 3 Ass Shots with a great ass in the foreground and someone else in the background. Shit even Lion King has the word “sex” written in the stars of one shot. Obviously, I didn’t notice that until way later but it’s there.

Like, God Damn guys. Relax. Christ above. Like, every time a attractive woman walked by the other guys would be curious about what she would look like naked. 

Me? I’m being 100% honest when I say that I would get curious how much more amazing she would look if she were smiling, or laughing. God, that would be a sight to see. 

Back to Everyone Else? Rating tits and ass. Fuckability. One to ten. 

I’ve been conscious of that difference the whole time but obviously never told other people cause its real cheesey. I laughed at how corny it was myself. I still kinda do. Like, holy cow that’s corny.

In your own life try and take a step back and look around once in a while, seriously. The whole world is obsessed with it, either for its own sake or for how well it sells. When I was a teenager I once looked up how to tell when puberty started. The top google match said it started when you had your first “Night Emission”. I was a kid so I didn’t bother to do more research on the subject. I just thought that was it. I had remembered some kids saying that was true before and, at the time, they seemed to know what they were talking about. That’s 2 separate sources. You could run a news article on two sources so that must be enough. I am 28 years old and I have never had a wet dream in my life. Shit, I’ve never even had a sex dream at all. 

The closest thing I’ve had to a sex dream in the last 8 years was me trying to fight off a naked and begging Selma freaking Hyak. Damn that woman looks good but I couldn’t take advantage of how sad she was at the time. I don’t know what she was sad about but it did not seem like an appropriate . Then another guy comes in and is into the idea and I start fighting him off. The dream transitions from there into a video game dream where I fight the guy. That’s the kind of “sex” dreams I’m having.

I’m pretty much 100% certain I’m not asexual though. I am definitely physically attracted to women. It’s just that my fetish is emotional connection and consent. It’s one of the few fetishes still not really accepted by society. You can suck someone’s toes all you want but want your sexual partner to be having a good time? Thinking about in a way that isn’t a contest or a proving grounds? Want to be happy? Sorry, that’s not really a thing that can be translated to into porno format. Actually, emotional connection is really hard to get but people still want sex for those other reason so you just have to watch that. Consent is so amazingly sexy guys. It’s like don’t you like toes or other fetishes partly because if the other person is into it then it’s like the truest act of consent? Oh my god she’s into this too? She’s knows me and is still into me.

It’s not just porn that refuses to focus on emotional connections or even consent. Sexual for the sake of sexual is the way woman are in 95% of even big budget films. Even those movies that aren’t explicitly about sex have to bring it up, like The Sandlot. Submissiveness seems to be the most common fetish by a mile and I hate the shit out of it.

People bring up “facts” all the time like ‘Men think about sex once every 7 seconds’ or ‘A movie about a 40 year old virgin is wacky and hilarious.’ I know that movie isn’t a bad movie but when your a kid trying to escape you never really give it a chance. To a kid like me it was just a joke making fun of someone for the same things I’m afraid to be made fun of. 

I really don’t want people to think that 40 Year Old Virgin scared me or anything. I haven’t seen it all the way through but the characters were not basic and the movie didn’t really make fun of him. It’s just one example of thousands of moments in my life where I was told that having sex was a crucial goal. I never thought about it till now but the goal of the main character is even to have sex with the woman in that movie. Yeah, writing wise his goal is to find the right person that he can truly open up with, but the movie part of the movie is about the sex.

It felt like society’s addiction turned all woman, all of them, into sexual objects, good or bad, and it turned all men, all of them except the “pussies”, into competitors. I sucked at this competitive sport and was therefore disrespected among my peers. Secondly, I didn’t care about the sport. That was one of the reasons I sucked at it, to be sure. Thirdly, I didn’t understand one bit why everyone else cared so much. It was confusing. It still is confusing.

I know my brain manufactured some of that pressure as a response to other things as well but I can’t tell you every exact detail because I don’t know. I can only tell you how it felt and that is how it felt. Confusing. The cool kids were respected and admired and, while I was fine with being an invisible observer, I never figured out why they were respected or admired. Why was anyone listening to them? It had to be because they knew something I didn’t. I must have been defective. Why was I different? My confusion only kept producing more confusion.

I think eventually sex will be seen as less important in society since population issues are a thing now and because raising kids is really fucking hard. This post isn’t to say that I’ve been repressed or damaged or scared. I just felt confused. I just felt like the people around me were nothing like me and that’s scary for a kid.

My Alternate Twitter Account Experience

I have two twitter accounts and the experience has been really interesting. The two accounts were created for entirely different purposes and are incredibly different from one another. I’ll first explain what both of them are and then maybe dive deeper into how it makes me feel. If I’m tired I’ll probably just skip that part but here we go.

The first twitter account if just like almost all other twitter accounts. I don’t do much tweeting myself but I follow everyone in the Competitive Super Smash community so I can keep up with the news, the rivalries, and announcements. I follow 42 other people and Twitter helps me to never miss the moments of expression those 42 people put out. I check it about twice a day and my profile picture is a joke. The picture doesn’t even represent something, it’s a joke I thought was funny. The account name is an old gamer tag. I have 4 followers but I don’t know who they are or why they follow me when I almost never post. It’s mostly a news source for my chosen community.

My second account is much different. I have zero followers and I follow zero people which means that nobody at all sees these tweets and twitter tells me this for a fact. On this blog, my mom and dad read it, they’re the only readers really, and I have no problems with that. I enjoy writing here and wish I did it more. Maybe I will do it more. But, there is an obvious difference when one avenue of self expression is 100% invisible while the other avenue is seen by two of the most important people in your life. Two is not a big number unless it’s your parents. When it is your parents… well… how “important” are your parents?

So, this second account is way more personal. I tweet many times a day and they’re all just these personal thoughts I have about life as I experience. The majority of these tweets end with question marks. I have to figure out a way to express my thought into one very short paragraph and then when I’m done that part of my soul just floats off into the incomprehensibly huge void that is The Internet. It’s out there in the world with no real goal and, at least for right now, it enjoys being separated. Honestly, I think these thoughts are interesting and I think my tweets are fire but at the same time I’m afraid it will get hurt. I don’t know if I want my account to get popular or not because I don’t even know if either will make me happier.

This twitter account is basically an exact digital version of myself and it’s really odd. I feel like J. Alfred Prufrock looking back on his life and there is this overwhelming fear that me and J. Alfred are the same. That poem is a tragedy right? Isn’t the lesson that coffee spoons are tiny and that if that tiny spoon is your unit of measurement then you should be at least conflicted about it? I haven’t even considered the possibility that the poem is trying to display that kind of life in a positive light. Honestly though, it coincides with what might be my biggest fear. I think that fear is at the core of most people in the world, especially people from my generation. As kids, we kept being asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and for the first time in human history we, as children, actually had a say it what we could become. Maybe that question should be reexamined. Maybe more trivial and commonplace things should be reexamined. Actually, I don’t know why I said ‘Maybe’ at the start of that last sentence.

So I have this fear of not being something right? At the same time though, I know for a fact that it is a manufactured fear. It’s a fear manufactured out of the intense heat and pressure of society. There’s no reason to be afraid of being a side character or to be afraid of not having things to be proud of. It can really hurt sometimes but I think that pain is mostly a product of the derision the world gives you for not being able to brag very well. I don’t think kids are born afraid that they won’t be popular or successful. They’re born confused and the popular kids seem to be happy so I guess they aren’t as confused as I am. They must know more than me about how things actually work because I feel like I have no fucking clue how things work.

If I had to boil society down to one single thing that matters to it I would say that every single person in this world seems to be obsessed with competitive Bragging. Obviously, if you accomplish something then your bragging levels are gonna go why up and everyone else will be beneath you. That is, until you look back up and see all the people above you still, and gollie those people sure look happy don’t they? I mean what problems could they possibly have?

Anyway, that’s basically the difference between my two twitter accounts. One is a news source, like any other news source, and the other is a recreation of my soul into an entirely new form.

We live in interesting times, to be sure.

I think there’s a saying about that. Maybe “saying” isn’t the right word. Apparently it’s a curse and honestly, no time in history has been this interesting. I’m pretty sure the ancient Chinese were wrong about the negativity of it but I’m very afraid of them being right. That’s a topic for another day I think.

What Art and Positivity Can Make You Feel

Just finished The Crown season 3, episode 6, and I can now say that this is the best show ever made. I’m not adding any caveats, like I did last time, about how much I like it or don’t. I love the shit out of it. The writing and directing both are perfect and not just perfect in the way you expect an Oscar winning drama to be but perfect in the way you should expect any movie to be. I’ve seen many Oscar winning movies that I didn’t care about at all. The show is a marvelous delve into what it means to communicate and to exist as a human being but through the lens of the one family that isn’t allowed to do that at all.

Oscar winner is a typically meaningless descriptive to me. It doesn’t mean anything negative, worse, it means nothing at all. The Crown is perfect in a way that renews my hope in the potential of the medium. Any doubts I might have had are gone. Could you display the true depth of what a real human could be thinking? Could some one actually direct well enough to make up for any possible flaws in acting? I mean can the directors, writers, and actors really work together so well as to make every single character feel that real? How much of the acting is the actors? Can any group of people be that good? Can any one person be that good?

There are shows coming out that make me believe in this medium. Movies, for a while now, but shows, right now; The Crown, The Good Place, Bojack Horeseman. These shows set the new bar, at least to me, for what Television as a medium is capable of. I feel like it doesn’t change my opinion of film since this in no way should be in the same category. Television has time, and it has chapters.

Hyperion served to redouble my confidence in books and I’ve always known the great films from even a long ways back; The Bishop’s Wife, Lawrence of Arabia, The Good the Bad and the Ugly.

We truly, truly, truly live in the golden age of civilization and some how I only see things getting better in the long run. Maybe some wars still happen, and maybe some big ones but the fact that humans are slow learners can’t be ignored. We need a total global realization that compassion, knowledge, creativity, empathy, communication, and being open minded is the only combination that leads to real happiness. I think it’ll happen. The information age. The more that is unknown about our paradise and the incredible people in it then the less there is to be afraid of. The less there is to hate since hate is just fear. Lastly, if we, as a species, are to die due to the unfortunate ignorance of some terrified human with power than that’s just the way it was meant to be.

That’s how the universe works. It’s evolving and if we die than at least we got close to perfection. At least human species was wonderful enough to let us get a taste of heaven before it ended. We got love, art, history, story, philosophy, the internet, language, books, telephones, education, games, organization, and safety. The Dodo Bird didn’t get that. No matter how much we try to glorify animals as if they were saints compared to us that doesn’t make it true. Nature may be in balance but it’s about as fucked up as any existence can get. Don’t let yourself be fooled. A lion is not as nice as your dog. The Cheetah will target and eat the weak, the old, and the children. Gazelle mother’s will let their babies die so that the now feeding Cheetah will let them live. Don’t look at humans and think that just because we are irresponsible and idiotic we are also evil and doomed. All we have to do is keep learning.

Random Thoughts: Boring?

So, I’m a little worried about my theory of a good way to start writing. My idea that you can just start by typing about literally anything at all and then let it flow into more focused and interesting ideas is great if all you are doing is writing random thoughts. I kind of realize now though that some people might read this and not have the same idea I have about what a blog should be. Maybe they think it should be a series of articles or maybe it’s supposed to be a diary. Maybe they think blogs can be anything we want. I don’t know, I don’t read blogs. I wish I could say that I refrain from reading other people’s stuff because it would change my own vision and I want my vision to be entirely my own and not influenced. I should say that influence might not be the right word.

Influence is impossible to avoid and shouldn’t be avoided. Now that I think about it ‘influenced’ is for sure not the right word. I guess I would call it, Self Doubt. I try and avoid self doubt. That sounds right. When I see what other people are doing or especially when I see what is considered successful and “good” I start to let that create doubt in my head. I start to think of a interesting thing to write about and I think to myself, well I think alot of things to myself but one of those things is this. I think that I should dial it back a bit since it might be a little too much. Let’s take the last post I made on this blog for example. I talked about how I was comparing sports to hypothetical mountain ranges and it sits on that line of weird and interesting that my brain loves. What’s it like to live in the mountain range of Baseball? What kind of trees are there and what kind of music develops among the society? Let’s not get to deep into it but you see how my brain is making these strange connections. I don’t want to be the version of myself that tells myself to stop doing what I want to do. I don’t want to tell myself to not write the things I want to write.

When I start a post with a description of what I’m doing right at that moment, like I’m waiting for my chicken to finish baking in the oven, a casual reader who just clicked on this post to give it a few sentences maybe before judging it will click away. I mean, if you starting reading a post and it began with a boring description of my favorite cup that I use, are you really gonna feel hooked in? It’s a common rule among in writing that you wanna try and hook your audience in at the start because when they pick the book up off the shelf they’re only gonna read like half a page before making a decision. Most of the time the only thing they read is the back and writing blurbs is an entire art form in and of itself that is not really gonna do a great job of capturing the quality and feel of the book.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I will probably just make the choice to not care about drawing in an audience. I’m not saying that to be hipster or anything like I don’t care. I’m saying that because this sin’t supposed to be some great endeavor to start a career blogging. I’m not gonna sit here and try to start writing well edited and paced articles going over things. I’m not an essay writer. My college GPA ended at like 2.4 so yeah, I should definitely not focus on being well written. The only thing I have going for me is that my brain takes me to weird places of thought.

My favorite cup was given to me by some parent of one of the kids at my last job. It looks like a giant blue Solo Cup. If you try and picture a solo cup there are these little concentric lines on the cup and the cup gets a tiny bit wider at every line. They’re like little cliffs going up the cup. You might not know this but on a solo cup those lines are there as measurements. The first line from the bottom is a rough estimate of how much you should pour to get one shot’s worth of liquor. All the lines are there to help measure out drinks and that’s pretty cool. I’m about 80% sure what I just told you is true. I hope it is true that solo cups are designed that way an I know someone told me they were at some point.

Anyway, I’m not sure if the little cliffs on my blue cup signify anything. I would measure it right now by emptying it and pouring like one cup of water in and seeing if it matches up to a line but the cup is holding my drink. Should I just pour the drink out and do these tests? I’ll wait till I’m finished eating. Ok, as soon as I started doing measurements I realized that there is now way for me to figure it our exactly. You see, a solo cup is thin plastic and the little cliffs can be seen on the inside and the outside. My big blue cup is one of those cups that has a layer of air between the outside of the cup and the inside of the cup so that the cup can keep cold water cold for a longer time. The inside of the cup has no lines or markings or cliffs at all. If the inside of the cup has no lines than the it doesn’t really matter how the outside is designed. It’s gonna be no help to me. I don’t really have anything else to say about this blue cup.

I love lemons. Love to put em in water and to squeeze em on chicken. I baked two chicken breasts. One had curry seasoning and one had jerk seasoning. They were both just ok, but the worst part was that those don’t really go well with lemon, and yes I did try these with lemon on them and without. Do I just get lemon pepper seasoning and that works well with squeezed lemon. For some reason that seems to simple. Should I try and relearn how to make hollandaise sauce? I seem to remember that it was tedious to make, something about slowly adding one part to another part while you maintain a constant stir speed.

If you’re reading this than you probably are starting to wonder when my mind will veer off this topic and say something interesting. I’ve written a paragraph about a cup, that came to zero conclusions, and a paragraph about chicken and lemon that also came to no real conclusion. Maybe not having a conclusion is another problem with just writing down stuff randomly and never editing or going over it again. That’s how life is sure but that doesn’t inherently make it good. People like conclusions and closure. I used to hate open ended stories like “The Giver” and what not since I wanted to know exactly what was gonna happen.

I’m scared I might go into a whole thing about how Stephen King’s Dark Tower series’ ending helped sort of shock that old hatred of mine into the light for me to analyze and change. That would be a whole article. I gotta start making a list of all the topics I start but decide to safe to write about it later. So far I haven’t gone back and written any or them. Maybe if I kept a list I could look through the list on days where I don’t immediately have an idea and then I’ll just pick one that looks interesting to me that day. That’s how I choose what movies to watch alot of the time.

It would be great if I wrote for as much time and with as much interest and stamina as I can watch movies. I could watch good movies or TV shows for weeks at a time and I have. There was one semester where I didn’t sign up for any classes at all and in one of the months I had total free time I watched all 11 or so seasons of Friends. For another of those months I marathon’d almost all 7 seasons of Star Trek: Next Generation. I still haven’t finished watching it all and honestly I don’t really care to.

These posts are getting really long I think. I just write like two paragraphs and then switch topics again. When do I end the post?

More Random Thoughts: Third Times the Charm

This is the third time I’ve tried to start writing today but I guess today is just one of those days where the ADD decides to drink coffee that morning. I tried to write one about me trying to come up with a good name for the type of craft or activity where it feels completely alien to you and it almost facilitates a rewiring of your brain. I’m talking about something like Golf, or Texas Hold ’em, or Super Smash Brothers Melee. I just now realized how ridiculous of a list that is. Who else would put all three of those things into one specific category? Who else would actually believe that those three sports, we can call them “Crafts”, share alot of similarities with each other?

Damn, now that I’m writing about it again maybe I’ll just keep going. No. I’ll see what happens if I leave off on a topic and try to write about it a few days later. I think I’ll be really lazy about it and not do it but we gotta test it.

I also tried to write a strange post where I compared different sports to mountain ranges. The peaks of the mountains are the high points of the sport so Derek Jeter might have his own mountain in the Baseball Mountains along with other greats. The highest peaks of the Baseball Mountains would be the legendary world series games and it’s deepest valleys would be the various scandals that keep happening in baseball. Continued steroids, Pete Rose, the Black Sox, and the Astros. If I was to try and describe the Baseball Mountains in detail how would I? Are there many sudden cliffs? What’s the climate like? Are there any avalanches? Would the Football Mountains be dangerous to ski on? What mountain range would have the tallest mountains? These are the questions that will define America as a country. The real, hard hitting, meaningful questions that will dictate the next 1,000 years of human society.

That last bit was obviously a joke. That’s such a strange concept for a mind to try and flesh out. I don’t make alot of sense but even still, I’m into the idea of comparing sports to mountain ranges. I’m gonna keep doing that in my head.

Then I tried to write episode one of my TV show idea since my parents told me that’s what they wanted for Christmas. It can be annoying sometimes how great my parents are. Those assholes are probably reading this right now and laughing that I called them assholes and they’re probably planning on commenting about how I’m doing a good job. I’m a pretty open guy about being sentimental. I like musicals and rom-coms and all sorts of cheesy stuff but my parents need to grow some of their old flaws back before I write some uplifting sonnet poem or some shit.

Now I guess I just write about whatever. The problem is still that I kind of want to expand more on all three of those topics, sports topography, entirely unique sports, and episode one. I forgot to say why I stopped writing episode one. I have multiple ideas about the way the plot of the first episode can go. I gotta ask John since I think both are interesting but one might be a little too silly for episode one. Episode one has to give off whatever atmosphere and style that the show as whole most identify with. I plan on doing all sorts of different types of episodes but episode one, and most episodes of season 1, need to be my version of the standard action adventure rather than my version of The Count of Monte Cristo or my version of Murder Mystery. Even if all I ever do is post any episodes I write online I still would want it to follow that progression of growing comfort with variations in genre. Gotta get the audience used to things before hitting them with the more unusual things.

I plan to have episodes that are not canon at all. Episodes of my own TV show will sometimes be not canon and this will allow me to take an episode and do whatever I want with it. I could have a zombie apocalypse where the main characters all die, not that I would do zombie stuff without some twist, or I could do an episode that’s kind of an alternate reality. Alot of shows have done alternate realities but the plot is always that people form one reality get sucked into the new one and freak out about stuff but I would just set the episode in the new reality and just let the camera be the one that has jumped dimensions. The audience can react to things itself, hopefully, and they don’t need some character from the normal show to be there gawking at every random thing.

When coming up with my world building and what not I tried to give real priority to leaving myself with as much freedom as possible. I want to be able to write any type of story and have it be able to fit into this sci-fi universe I’ve come up with. Other shows could all exist in the same universe. Part of how I would do this is to have some of the populated planets in the galaxy be designated by themselves as Isolated Planets and they don’t have any contact with the rest of the galaxy so maybe 2,000 years ago a planet was settled by a bunch of Amish. Nobody on the planet knows about the rest of the galaxy since the settlers specifically decided to keep it a secret for whatever reason but it’s been 2,000 years so they’ve developed there own really weird identity and maybe even have different types of solutions to thing. Maybe they decided to allow science and technology but only if it was based around agriculture so they can genetically engineer plants and animals but they don’t have cars so they’ve like invented the Pegasus or something to be the primary mode of transportation for the culture. I don’t know what the Amish would look like after 2,000 years of isolation but these would be space Amish. The original settlers obviously had to incorporate technology into their lives since they probably have never even seen Earth before so they’re like the Amish we have now except like 2,000 years from our time, after humanity has spread across the galaxy and the Amish society has gone through the changes that space travel kind of forces on you, they decide to use that technology to go to their own little planet and they don’t tell any of their kids about space travel or anything so that the Amish can live in Amish paradise.

After another 2,000 years, or whatever, our main characters can have to go there or they crash land there. John had a really good idea where you make it a conspiracy episode. Like a modern day Area 51 type episode, Close Encounters of the Third Kind type of thing and it’s told entirely from a regular future Amish guy’s perspective and he’s freaking out about stuff and maybe there is an Illuminati of the Amish people. Like one wealthy and douchey family on the original colony ship just decided they were gonna tell their kids about space and keep using technology in a world where everyone else is clueless so that they can live like gods. This Amish regular guy has a whole conspiracy theory thriller plot and episodes style and at the end it’s revealed that the big conspiracy is that the story is set in the same universe as the sci-fi show. Maybe the main characters from the sci-fi show are spotted doing work for this Illuminati and it triggers the start of this Amish guy’s story. That’s a good episode. John thought of the idea of making it a conspiracy thriller episode but I came up with that Amish idea just now. I probably won’t do that but maybe I’ll incorporate the general idea of it into some other story.

That would have to be in like season 2 though since it’s pretty wild and out there. You can’t just start with total crazy, I mean, you can but there actually is a time where changing your vision to be consumable by a wider audience is a good idea. The only time that’s they right choice is at the start of a series or season when you are hoping to get alot of new viewers to watch the show. When you have some sort of event it’s okay to sell out, I guess. That’s not exactly how I wanted it to sound but you know what I mean.

My hand is getting tired. Me and John played about 5 hours of Melee yesterday. My right thumb is sore from having to fly around the controller so fast. Also my hands get sweaty so I’m gonna order some hand antiperspirant. I was surprised to find out that was actually a thing. We live in a crazy world where I can just choose from any number of lotions that are designed to solve my super niche issue of having sweaty hands when I play Melee. You see how that’s kind of a proof that we live in a crazy time. I certainly wouldn’t choose to live in any other time and that’s not entirely because the other era’s of history were less convenient.

I’m thinking of splitting these types of posts into multiple really small posts but I don’t know. What do you think Mom and Dad?

The One Problem with The Watchmen TV Show.

I’ve been watching a show called The Watchmen on HBO. The show is very interesting to watch as it isn’t like any other show. Obviously, that is a huge compliment but the bigger compliment I give it is when I say that it is a worthy successor to the original graphic novel. I actually mean that and I think that the graphic novel is one of the greatest works of fiction of all time. This show is very very good, though my two readers, mom and dad, would hate it. Everything I’m about to say is me focusing on one very small issue that most people would never even think about. I’m harping on one aspect of a great show but I really seem to care about this little aspect alot.

I think that so far, the only thing I don’t like about it is the soundtrack and to explain why might make me seem douchey. Let’s start at the beginning of what is going on in my mind with this soundtrack. For a long time I have loved classical music and also loved the idea of using it for soundtrack in a movie or show. I have always had ideas about grand space war scenes with no diegetic sound and instead with epic classical pieces over it. A good example of classical music use that I like is 2001: A Space Odyssey. When Stanley Kubrick uses classical music he is letting the music be the primary input to the audience. When the ships are slowly landing on the moon there isn’t exactly a whole lot going on the way of visual motion. There certainly isn’t any dialogue or anything new and very interesting being presented to the audience. Kubrick isn’t combining the complex and powerful music with any other information aside from what we already know. We already know the ship is landing so the only new exposition we get is simply a visual description of the moon station and how it’s landing procedure. This information is not complicated or anything so the audience can sort of sit back and let the feeling of the music and the simple yet well thought out visuals wash over them. Johann Strauss’s op.314 can fill almost all the senses and it does so splendidly. It should be allowed to occupy the majority of the audiences mental abilities.

You can think of your audience of having a limited amount of things they can pay attention to at once. This is why there are close ups of things like eyes and important objects. In the wide shot you have all sorts of stuff to see. The wide shot communicates something other than detail. It establishes positioning and relationships essentially. Close ups allow for detail like the squint of Clint Eastwood’s eyes or the shot gun leaning on the wall in the corner that will probably be used in the next act of the story. It’s a little moment letting the audience focus on the one thing and then you let that knowledge impact the way the next shot feels. If you show a shotgun than transition into a shot that holds the tension in the mind of the audience or a shot that is the opposite and is very happy so that the audience gets a feeling of fear that this happiness might be gone at some point. If you understand that a movie is an education and communication and you know that the mind acts a certain way than you can plan around it and deliver a better experience. If I’m about to show my audience alot of confusing information that has far reaching ramifications and meaning that they will probably have to guess at than you should probably want your sound design to let the audience do those things. If you overload them than how can they focus on having the thoughts you want them to have?

If you want them to be surprised and questioning and wondering about the details of what is happening don’t flood the screen with fast cuts and insane colors and motion and don’t use a classical piece written with the purpose of standing on it’s own. These classical songs are written to be given to an audience that is sitting in a theater or auditorium or whatever. Felix Mendelssohn is trying to write a musical piece that communicates a whole host of emotions by itself. It is telling it’s own story and has it’s own plot and feeling and message. The last thing you want to do is have a song like this going in the background of a complex scene with shit loads of new information and concepts and confusion. That wold be like trying to listen to a college lecture on physics while also trying to play a video game. The two things are both designed to hold your entire attention with your entire brain available to process what is going on. It’s almost a disrespect to the strength of music to use it that way. Kubrick in a movie like 2001 understands that when complex plot ideas and world building is the focus of a scene then the best thing to have is a minimal sound for the scene.

The more I think about the sound design of Watchmen the more I think it’s a problem for the show. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what classical music is. Let’s try to think of a few more good scenes with classical music. I think a pattern we might find is that they are all essentially montages. How about the helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now? The hugely powerful and complicated song by Wagner is used in a scene where nothing really important is being revealed to the audience. The fighting hasn’t started yet and we all know what is happening. The entire scene is just them transporting themselves to combat. Nothing is happening but the song is used and focused on by the film and the result is a powerful sense of feeling in the audience. We feel all sorts of scared and amazed and excited and we know that the people on screen feel the same. Classical music should be used to evoke a certain feeling and when it is used it should be used only with simple visuals in a montage setting.

Before now I never really connected montages with the use of classical music but I see now that having a rule about that is important. Every great montage, and I don’t just mean Rocky type montages but montages in the sense of almost half of 2001 as a film. Even the Rocky montages though have great and really interesting music that is combined with incredibly simple plot points and new information. The audience isn’t being asked to take in all sorts of new and complicated concepts while also having to deal with a classical song that is designed to introduce new and complicated concepts with only sound. It’s like having a magazine that covers both high concept physics and also cover shopping trends. That goes past multi tasking and enters a state of just pointlessness. Maybe if your audience isn’t paying attention to the classical music at all than they can get the feeling of it but the music is designed to get your attention because it wasn’t written as sound design for a complex scene.

I’ll end this little post with a clip from the movie that shows what I mean. First though I have to figure out how put youtube videos into this blog. um… Let me set the scene before the video starts.

At this point in the show we know very little about any of these characters. We don’t know who the “Game Warden” is or even exactly who the two characters in the scene are. We may have educated guesses about their names but those are just guesses. One of them is possibly very insane and the other one might be a clone or something. If that sounds confusing just know that it is confusing. At this point in the story we, the audience watching the show are also looking for clues to see where any of this is happening. Me and my brother were trying to figure out if the took place on the moon or on earth. We have no idea of so many things and our brains are trying desperately to grasp at any straw of information possible. The contents of the letter refers to things in a very modern way where we slowly get more and more information about what is actually happening. This pacing is fine but leaves the brain in a state of desperation for more. It’s fun but forces a certain amount of focus. Every phrase of dialogue is designed to be vague and to evoke a certain amount of questioning and prediction from the audience as we try and put the pieces together. Phrases like “Consequences” “Criminal Activities” “Terms Upon Which We Agreed” are all supposed to give us tiny bits of information and tease us. While the audience is trying to do all of this Bizet’s Carmen starts to play. Bizet’s Carmen is not a background song to begin with and now it’s in the background of a scene that is already asking so much of us. I don’t know what song I would use here and maybe you think the song works but believe me when I say that there are multiple scenes every episodes that use even more complicated classical music while still expecting a certain amount of focus.

I’ll link Kubrick’s use of Strauss as well just so you can see both sides of what I’m talking about. Strauss’s “Blue Danube” piece, by the way, is much less complicated and has much less going on in the way of plot than the song Watchmen used. Carmen’s song is from it’s own story with it’s own plot and characters and meanings that have nothing whatsoever to do with the scene it’s being used in. Youtube does not have the entire 2001 scene so the only clip I could find was the first half of the scene. Really stupid but youtube gotta make that money I guess. Kubrick let’s the music be front and center in the mind of the audience as it works with the simple information of the visuals to provide the right feeling.

-The classical music comes in at around the 1:24 mark.

I’m tired of writing now. Wow this text is tiny. I think I’m gonna turn this whole section of this writing into it’s own post since it’s so long and focuses on such a complicated topic. As a disclaimer it should be known that I think the Watchmen show is really really good. You change this one repeated mistake about it and you have a perfect show.
I love this tiny text. You see how the music is front and center and is allowed to be itself? Most people don’t care about any of this but I ain’t most people and that can be a problem when it comes to allowing myself to like things.

Plato’s Republic: Book Two into Random Thoughts

It’s been a couple weeks since I read the first section of Plato’s Republic and I’m bored right now so I figured I’d read book 2. Just as a reminder I’m gonna put the designation of whatever section I’m on every time I feel like I want to write something down. I don’t expect anyone to follow along or anything but it’s always a good idea to keep track of stuff like that.

358b: Glaucon, my favorite character so far, knows that Thrasymachus isn’t actually convinced of anything other than the fact that Socrates is a better speaker and arguer. He wants to slow it down so that Thrasymachus actually gets it. If Socrates is the benevolent smooth talker I think Glaucon is the quiet educator. While Socrates feels like his job is done and that he has finished explaining everything Glaucon is the one that best understands Thrasy. Being an educator is all about understanding that other people aren’t thinking the same things as you are. You need to be direct and thorough in education as much as you need to be knowledgeable. More than any of that you need to be empathetic. Empathy is the primary component of education, in my opinion.

359a: Glaucon says that the common interpretation of “justice” in society is that the best thing is to do injustice and get away with it while the worst thing is to suffer injustice without being able to get revenge. So, laws and nations are created with the goal of making sure that no one suffers injustice.

360a: This is a crazy hypothetical. He wants to give one just man and one unjust man each a ring that can make them invisible. I wonder if Tolkein was inspired by this. This book was written over 2,300 years ago. The dialogue is more advanced than any stories being made now. It’s like the idea of telling stories being profitable has made stories mindless. That’s a kind of jaded opinion of a lowly nerd like me but it is a fact that the book was written before even the birth of Christ. In 2,000 years story telling has developed much slower than technology. It would be interesting to think about story telling as an evolving art form. I think story telling is harder to make advancements in than science. That’s not a brag.
If society is right about justice being bad than Glaucon says that the just man will do the same thing as the unjust man. People only praise justice because they are afraid of having injustice happen to them.

361a: “the extreme of injustice is to seem to be just when one is not.” “the just man does not wish to seem, but rather to be, good.”

This is not an easy read. I feel like a pure understanding of grammar makes a big difference. Did I say the same thing during book 1? Did Plato mean for the book to be difficult? A professor I had in college once said that writings like these were intentionally hard to understand and interpret so that the writers wouldn’t get in trouble with the rulers of the nations. He seemed to believe that esoteric writing was meant to exclude the lower class and the was made for the educated man who was the only type of man that could understand it. Writers would do this to avoid persecution. I think that some one other than Socrates might make that choice but clearly Socrates doesn’t give a shit and isn’t afraid of anything or anyone else’s judgments.

368a: Adeimantus just had about 5 pages all to himself. It was real hard to follow but I think I got it. I mean, I think I got it. Let’s just say that I got enough of it to continue reading and that if I wanted to get all of it I would have to reread the thing about 4 times and take notes and try to map out everything he said and what references to what. Damnit Plato. Socrates would have given the truth to me straight and clear, I bet.
Also, some one really needs to find a way to read books that isn’t so physically inconvenient. Movies can be consumed just as easily and just as veraciously no matter what sort of physical position you’re in. Movies and television are so much easier than books. This needs to be solved mostly because while books are harder they are substantially better. Books are like a metaphor that runs parallel to what Socrates seems to be saying sometimes. Justice is harder than injustice but justice is far better and more rewarding. How can the thing that is harder be better? IS the truth of the thing the idea that what we think of as “hard” is wrong. Maybe the truth is that justice isn’t harder at all, it’s just not what we think of as easy. Maybe we just need to redefine “hard” and “easy” because our current definitions are completely ridiculous. I might copy and paste this paragraph into my next daily journal and see if I go any further on the idea. Honestly, I probably won’t. Thank god I actually started writing this stuff down cause as fast as I think I also forget it. It’s like the thoughts are eaten by my brain and I get the nutrients of them but the food itself is gone. I’m sustained and fulfilled as I break down these thoughts into their emotional core just the way food is broken down. I have been perfectly content my whole life to just let that sustenance do it’s thing and let the memory of the food itself fade away. I feel like I’m a teenager with instagram or twitter that takes pictures of every meal and talks about how great they are. My version of that is to capture a snapshot of some of my own meals and to try and share them with you.
Dang, this paragraph has been solid gold, man. Should I leave it down here below a bunch of stuff I wrote before that isn’t gold or should I move it to the top? Should I leave a little note for potential readers to tell them to wade through the boring stuff at the beginning to get to this good stuff? Would that be a lie about the truth of the world? The truth of the world is that variety is a fact and you never know when or where you might find something to think about. You never know where your next mental meal will come from and on top of all that you also can’t pretend that the time between meals doesn’t exist. There is a big difference between watching a sports game and watching a highlights of the same game. Highlights are a misrepresentation of the truth. Not saying they’re unethical or anything but don’t let the existence of highlights cloud your judgment of the truth.
Am I on a roll right now or what? This is either a perfect time to quit or the exact wrong time to quit. If I stop writing now than this feeling will carry over into whatever I do next but if I just keep writing maybe I’ll lose steam. Honestly, if I had anything else that I wanted to do right now I would probably stop writing and let this feeling of accomplishment ride into the rest of my night and into my sleep and the next morning. I’m doing a good job with this blog, or at least I think so and that’s the opinion that matters most since I’m the one doing it. It’s a good feeling to know that you are doing a good job at something and that feeling is even better when the thing you’re good at is something you were used to be worried about. I am good at this shit. I knew I would be but, of course, the fear that I might not be was always there. That fear is ALWAYS THERE and every time I successfully prove that fear wrong I feel amazing.
Damn! What happens if I just keep writing for like an hour and a half? I mean, this post isn’t even about Plato anymore really. I changed the title from “Book Two Thoughts” to “Book Two into Random Thoughts”. I wont change the content of what I’ve written but a title serves a different purpose and therefore has completely different rules about what it represents. If the writing itself is meant to reflect the way my brain works the title is there to be a teeny tiny vague preview for you. I don’t want you to come into this and get to this point and think something like, “this isn’t what I signed up. I mean, it’s not bad but the title is misleading.” I hate when that happens. Like, I click a youtube video thinking it’s gonna be educational and just information but than there are animations and shit and they try to turn info about a volcano into a whole story about how the world might end to Yellow Stone national park and doesn’t that scare you? Aren’t you getting to feel some emotion right now? I say to that, “If I wanted to feel shit I would have watched a movie. I’m trying to learn pal. I just want the knowledge! I don’t need you to interpret that knowledge into a story so that I can process it. I’m clearly already interested in the topic since I clicked the video. Who are you trying to please with this? If people don’t care about it then just let them not like it. Don’t try to make things that please as many people as possible.
Ok, I’m starting to cool off I think, I hate complaining about shit in writing. Complaining is the worst thing to try and read. It looks like shit and feels childish to write.
I gotta relax, this has nothing to do with Plato anymore. I’m done with that for now.