The Mind of Joshypoo

uh… suddenly my mind has gone blank. That’s not a great way to start a writing but you gotta start somewhere I guess. I just watched a little video on the legal ramifications of storming Area 51 and it’s not like Area 51 is a boring concept but honestly, it’s been done to death. I have this idea about potential settings for stories. There are Carry Settings that are difficult to mess up. A Carry is something that allows everything else to be good. It’s so strong that the rest of it just sort of falls into place. You can think of a Quarter Back as a Carry position on the field while the a Wide Receiver is a Skill position and a Coach is a Support position. Anyway, there are certain settings that are so well suited to stories that they kind of carry a story. They make a story interesting even when the writing and plot aren’t that great.

A good example of a Carry Setting would be Submarines or old timey sailing ships. All of your characters are trapped together on an island with a very clear chain of command and status. You can have high degrees of variance in your characters between passengers, officers, and crew. You can introduce any sort of conflict you want whether that’s the weather or opposing ships or conflict on the main ship. There’s an automatic feeling of fear and dread inherent in the setting provided by the ocean and the isolation. The veneer of society is fragile as well with that kind of isolation and that is always a great source of story. On top of the story freedom and all that there is also the fact that sailing ships are bad ass. Sailing combat is a fantastic mix of very slow paced waiting, which is a good thing for a story since you can get all the reactions to choices made by either ship, and also fast paced combat where cannon balls are destroying everything and people are jumping from ship to ship. Clearly, Sailing vessels are a powerful Carry Setting.

One Carry Setting that is way over used is the Post Apocalypse setting. Post apocalypse is a fantastically high potential setting. You, as the writer can create any sort of rules you want. Do you want to avoid having to be realistic? You can say aliens attacked and now their technology left behind after the big war is being incorporated into human technology and boom, you can do whatever you want. You can have groups be isolated or you can have them be close to each other. The veneer of society is even less likely to be present in post apocalypse so that gives you more freedom. If you want to make it scary that can be done easily. You can have mysterious forbidden zones that can’t be accessed because of radiation. You can kind of do whatever you want. Unfortunately the most common thing people do with post apocalypse is just to do the same thing every one is doing, at least in how the story and setting feel. There are post apocalypse tropes that people seem to be unable to get away from.

On the other hand there are setting that are the opposite of Carry Settings. I’m not sure what to call these yet. This would be something like a movie based on Medieval Realism. Creating a good movie set in Medieval times is not easy. Obviously it can be done and it has been done but it sure as shit ain’t as easy as post apocalypse. Basically in medieval times everything is shitty for all your characters at the start and more than likely everything is still gonna be shitty for your characters at the end since the Medieval period is kind of just shitty for everyone at all times no matter how much money you have or anything else. Even being a king is shitty because if you get sick there’s no medicine and there’s no education or quality parenting going on so even the royalty have shitty lives because they hate everyone. Obviously the peasants have shitty lives, that goes without saying.

John is talking to me right now. He won’t shut up. He is a poopy butt face poop face. John says Overwatch, the game I was about to play, is stupid and of course, he is correct. The game is terribly designed. There’s this thing where team based games have the most variance between good feeling and bad feeling. What I mean with that is that the feeling of power and fun and excitement you get when everyone is playing well and intelligently and everyone is working together on both teams is amazing. It can be the funnest thing to do. Obviously, team based competitions can feel incredibly rewarding. The problem is that any time you don’t have a great game you have a horrible game. It’s like 10% of your games are amazing and you pop off afterwards and your adrenaline is running high as you move perfectly with your teammates and everyone is on the same page and the match is a close game. Saying that 90% of the games are terrible might seem like an over statement but it really isn’t. Let’s first lay down the frw things needed to be able to operate as a team. The first thing is communication. Throughout history communication has been a vastly powerful tool in warfare and even economics so, of course, it is incredibly important when competing in a team based game. The other thing you need is intelligence. You need to be able to predict what your teammates will do and what your enemies will do. You need to be able to recognize an opportunity when it presents itself and also be able to analyze how likely it is for your teammates to also notice that opportunity and take advantage of it. If you see an enemy player out on his own and vulnerable you need to think about if your teammates are seeing the same thing. If you go off on your own than you are just making yourself as vulnerable as the guy you’re chasing. You need to pay attention to when your teammates and opponents use tools available to them so that you know when you should use your own tools. These are the two key factors in having quality team play. The only other factor that dictates your performance is your hand eye coordination and this, as well, compounds the problem.

Now let’s talk about where and how clear these factors exist in Overwatch. For the very perceptive of you all I have to tell you is that Overwatch is a game played by teenagers and you already know how this is gonna go but there are compounding issues here. Since it is a video game you either have to play the game with completely random people selected out of the pool of people who play the game or, you have to get a group of friends together to play as a team. Any one over the age of 20 probably understands that getting 5 of your friends to all be into the same thing and have free time at the same time as each other so that you can all get together is impossible. Ain’t nobody got time for that shit. People are busy when they grow up. How the heckers man? I lived with my best friend last year and we still only really hung out once a week at most because we both have jobs and relationships and different interests. How am I, a 28 year old introverted adult, gonna get 5 other people that I like all together to play a video game that I actually think is a pretty shitty video game? I wouldn’t even recommend the game to any of my friends. All this is to say that I play with random people and the vast majority of people do the same. Next, I bet you can imagine the type of people that fill out the population of the game.

Who do you think plays this stuff? Young people play this stuff. I play it because I like letting my brain go crazy and try and analyze lots of incoming data at the same time. I play the game very rarely since it sucks but I do play it some times. The vast majority of the player base is children. That isn’t to that the majority people in middle school. Like I said in a previous post, “Child” is a distinction that can be applied to anyone of any age and believe me the people who play video games are highly likely to be children. I’m not saying that video games as a medium is for children or that being an adult means never playing video games. What I am saying is that the statistical majority of players are children from a maturity and intellectual level. If you think I’m being harsh than you clearly have never played this game or other games like it like League of Legends where everyone is just pissed off 24/7 and also everyone is anonymous. Anonymity is an incredibly powerful thing that vastly changes how most people think and act. Anonymity can turn decent people into monsters as easily as any hardcore drug. I also think of anonymity as an addictive substance but that’s a conversation for a different time. The addictive nature of anonymity could be an entire book. It could be an entire series of college courses. Let’s avoid discussing it at length and just define it quickly in how it pertains to video games. The quick and simple way to define how anonymity affects video game players is this; it makes them all assholes. This is a fucking fact. Anyone who plays these games either agrees with this statement or shows themselves as innocently delusional.

So combine a bunch of angry children into a team based game where nobody plays with a group and also nobody ever communicates and I think you can imagine how fucking awful it can be. If you wanted to design a system and competitive sport for the sole purpose of providing the most frustrating experience possible you could not do a better job than Riot games did when they designed League of Legends or the job Blizzard did when they designed Overwatch.

I’m tired of writing about this. If you are wondering why I still play a game that I so well understand I don’t have a very good answer. I go into it every time with a mental attitude that only a tiny percentage of the player base is mature enough to have. I go in knowing that I’m gonna lose alot and I’m totally capable of having fun despite whatever experience the people around me are having. I guess the real nail in the coffin for the game is that mechanical skill, so aiming and shooting, are all very difficult and still important. What this means is that your intelligence, maturity level, and desire for fun, do not, in nearly any significant way, dictate you competitive ranking. What this means is that I, since I suck at aiming and hitting things due to poor hand speed, play with people who are in the middle level of skill rankings and you can imagine the variety of angry people that make up this section.

John started me on this dumb topic so he’s to blame for this diatribe. Also diatribe is a awesome word that is going on my list of great words. That’s right I have a list of great words and maybe one day you’ll see it.

I’m tired now.

Right now I’m drinking kombucha and I’m a little confused. Basically I’m drinking a whole ecosystem of “cultures” and while I may not know what “cultures” means exactly it is obviously an odd idea. People don’t usually eat stuff that’s alive. I’m not saying I have some sort of ethical issue with turning myself into a real life Sarlacc Pit that eats and slowly digests living things. I have enough to feel sad about in this world already I don’t think developing emotional connections to “cultures” would be a very healthy choice. The reason I bring it up I guess is because it makes me think about a movie that came out a while back. Osmosis Jones is not a very good movie but it’s concept is one that I think is really interesting. If you look at the “culture” in the way that movie looks at the cells of the body than what anyone who drinks kombucha is doing is a pretty dark action.

I spent alot of time as a youth feeling bad for inanimate objects that I felt weren’t fulfilling their purpose. I’m sure things like Toy Story is partially to blame for this. It wasn’t like I was compulsive about making sure these things were happy. I knew they weren’t real but for some reason my brain wanted them to at least do what they were meant to do. If my closet door stood ajar for a couple weeks I might close it one day just to let it have some variety. Maybe I was trying to give myself variety but that wasn’t the conscious thought process. I think it should be obvious to anyone reading these posts that I am not a normal person. That isn’t a brag and it might not even be something anyone should brag about if they wanted to but I’m pretty sure I have some abnormal stuff going on.

I still am hitting the space bar about 10 times to get these indents on every “block”. I know that there might be some sort of advanced setting in the website that lets me set a preference but I don’t care enough to find it. Sometimes I wonder if I really just don’t care or if it is another reason all together. Lets set up the problem and then my reaction and then theorize about why that reaction might come to be. First the problem; this website does not obviously allow me to set paragraphs to automatically set indents. My solution to that problem is a short one time look at the advanced control section. I found that rather than having an option to indent the website actually doesn’t even have paragraphs. They have “blocks”. Don’t ask me why because I don’t really know. Anyway, after this first look my brain quickly comes up with the obvious solution to the problem of just hitting the space bar before every “block” thereby giving the appearance of paragraphs and I have been using that method for this first month of the blog. I also had to measure out how many spaces I needed for it to look like a legit indent. I know on Word programs 5 spaces seemed to work, or at least it did the last time I used Word regularly when I was in high school more than 10 years ago. That’s not really an important point in this analysis but I figured I’d say it anyway since I can.

Now lets try and think of some reasons why I haven’t done any more extensive research on the problem to actually definitively find out if there is or is not a solution built into the software of WordPress.

Option 1: This is the simplest option. It’s not like hitting the space bar is hard at all. To be honest it’s actually kind of an enjoyable little ritual I do every time I start a new paragraph. It’s a small reset like a typewriter dinging and sliding it back over to the right. I’ve let the failure of WordPress translate into a positive little moment that I like for no reason other than it is my own. Why try and find some other solution when the one I have is perfectly fine? Maybe that’s a bad mentality for life and it has led to me being very pathetic about things being mildly inconvenient. On the other hand, learning to put up and embrace minor inconveniences is a powerful skill for someone to have and more people should do it. Either way, lets move to Option 2.
Option 2: Looking around in the advanced controls section constitutes work and labor. Additional to it just being a chore it also means I have to interact with the advanced features of electronics and I gotta say I hate electronics and how complicated they are. Let’s just say I have an incredibly high appreciation for simple, natural, and ergonomic, systems and interfaces. I understand the difficulty of designing quality interface systems but oh my god does it make a big difference. I’ve never more angry than I have been at electronics not doing the things they are supposed to do. I just want the god damn phone to send the god damn text message and when it starts freaking out and doing shit I don’t want I get pissed off at it. Maybe I get extra pissed off at it simply because it is inanimate and I’m not hurting anybody’s feelings when I yell at it. To get back on topic Option 2 is that I’m too lazy to deal with looking around and doing research.
Option 3: My stubbornness makes me apathetic to anything that is in the wrong place. I’ll try and explain better. If the people who make the WordPress are willing to make the choice to forgo indentation and paragraphs then fuck them. This is not a part of me that I typically think of fondly but it is there regardless of how it makes me feel. I’m not gonna do some extra work if you are gonna be crazy enough to not have paragraphs in your flipping typing software. Even if you have the option for automatic indentation, which I don’t think you do since I went through the setting at the beginning, I don’t care about it if you don’t. Indentation should be right there with all the other format control systems. This software doesn’t even really have alot of format control options on the page where you do any typing. Maybe there are alot of them on the main page website control systems but why would anyone put indentation in the website controls and not in the flippin’ typing controls? I’ll solve it my own way thank you very much.
Option 4: This is the option that might be least likely but at the same time it is also the option that scares me the most and the option I think about the most whenever these problems come up in life. I didn’t really mean to tease you with what option 4 is by making you afraid of it before telling you what it is but if the only way I can add suspense is on accident then I’m all for it. Option 4 is that I’m afraid. Either I’m afraid that there is an easy indentation control option and I missed it like an idiot for a whole month or I’m afraid that to confirm that this software really doesn’t recognize the existence and importance of paragraphs. Option 4 is sadly a universal possibility in everything I do. I think alot about why I do anything and there are as many negative reasons to things as there are positive and my intrinsic cowardice leads me to always be afraid that I’m holding myself back out of some sort of misguided fear.

Every time I write out the word “alot” the software puts a little red squiggly line underneath it to let me know that I misspelled it. I don’t care! I like to write out “alot” as “alot” instead of “a lot” and I don’t see any reason to change. Hold on. Ok, I added “alot” to my personal dictionary so that WordPress, on my account, will think that “alot” is a correct spelling of something. Suck it world. Suck it Webster. Your dictionary is irrelevant before the might of my ignorance and stupidity. How do ya like that?

I only did 7 spaces on the indentation of that last paragraph. I think I just started hitting the space button a whole bunch while counting to 10. It’s like how little kids will point at things while they count but their counting out loud will be at a completely different speed than the way their finger is moving so they count out loud to 10 when they only pointed at 7 objects. The idea that matching physical movements with the rhythm of counting out loud is not a natural thing for the human brain to do is really weird. It makes all the sense in the world that when you count you should keep track of the things you are counting rather than just spewing out ascending numbers at any random speed while you point at things. Like, they don’t even realize when they point at something more than once. What else is going on that seems obvious to me but really isn’t? Probably a whole shit load of things. Maybe even 99% of things. Is it natural to pee in one place every time? Is it natural to care about using the right restroom?

Every year teaching pre-school I’d have one or two kids that would try and use a toilet at the same time as another kid. The two kids would stand off-center on either side of the toilet and they’d both use it at the same time like it was a totally normal and intelligent thing to do. While I always thought it was funny I would always have to tell them to not do it. I’d have to tell them that walking up to another kid using a urinal and looking at them going to the bathroom was something to not do. To them, they were just checking to see if the other kid was going to the restroom. Doesn’t it make sense that if you are waiting for someone else to finish doing something you should watch them do it? When you stop at a red light you look at the traffic light to see when to go. You don’t just stare at the car next to you to wait for him to go. Why add another layer of waiting when you can just just look right at the traffic light and know immediately when the wait is over? It even makes way more sense for people to use the toilets at the same time. The toilets were originally installed for adults so they aren’t small. It’s like trough urinals versus everyone using single toilets to pee. If we can get two kids to be finished peeing in half the time and using half the water than why would they wait? We tell them to. I always thought it made more sense from a practical standpoint but at the same time I would always tell them to stop. You have to wait until the other kid completely leaves the stall before you walk in. You can’t just stand right behind someone when they are using the restroom. It would always get me thinking about what other stuff is learned versus natural. I would apply that question to all sorts of other things. Is there a real reason to wear clothes? Yes, obviously there is. It keeps us warm and keeps the things around us from being made dirty with the oils our bodies naturally excrete. Is there a reason to hate my fellow man? I don’t know.

That paragraph escalated pretty quick there at the end. That’s right WordPress, I called it a paragraph. You don’t control me! I’m my own person!

I’ve been thinking alot about the difference between adults and children or between mature people and immature people or between professionals and um… whatever I decide to call the opposite of professionals. They aren’t casuals. They take what they do seriously but there’s a level of mentality about professionals that their opposite cannot boast of. I’ve been watching alot of competitive events as well as military tactical videos about really old battles.

Alexander the Great and his army is a great definition of what it means to be a professional. His troops are Pros and his enemies never understand that and they could never match it. His opponents aren’t professionals so they make all sorts of mistakes and their soldiers are far worse fighters. Alexander’s dedication to leading a professional army is why he could do ballsy stuff with fewer men and constantly come out on top. It’s a mentality about your goals and abilities that classifies a person as a professional. It’s hard to describe that mentality very well.

On an entirely less violent metaphor I can talk about competitive video game players. I know none of my zero readers know about esports but I’ll explain it clearly and it’s not very complicated. At the top of the Super Smash Brothers Ultimate competitive esports scene there is one player at the top, MKleo. Maybe I shouldn’t use this as an explanation since you have to know whats going on to really see the differences. Anyway, this guy is so clearly a professional among a throng of children. In every clutch and tense moment of the championship games you can see his opponents break down. Their mentality is for shit. They get too aggressive or too upset or too emotional or too depressed and you can see it in their play. This is one reason I love to watch a different smash game called Melee. The game is fast enough that a person’s mentality is obvious to a competent spectator and observing that mentality is what is great about it. People’s character comes through in their play and you can see their creativity and all sorts of stuff.

Unfortunately for Smash Ultimate as a spectator sport, MKleo is the only one that has the mentality of a professional. Obviously, any esport is going to be hugely populated by children.

I feel like I need to establish what I mean by “children”. When I say children I make no claim about age. Any person of any age can be children. As should be expected, esports players are highly likely to be children in their 20’s. Where do they have a chance to grow up? They go from being in high school and being good at video games to getting signed with an esports team’s brand and being good at video games. They get fame and clout and have no fucking clue what they are doing. Where do they get a chance to grow? Even in actual physical sports a player can go from some touted high school kid to a super star on campus to a super star on national television. I’m not belittling anyone for being a child here because when were they gonna grow up? You can’t be an adult if everything just falls into your lap all the time and nobody, not your parents, your employers, or your fans ever show you what it means to be an adult.

Being an adult is something most people don’t accomplish until their well on their way to being old. Whenever I see anyone or watch anyone on any level whether I’m watching them in a sporting event or in a casual conversation I try to get an idea of how immature they are. I know that sounds judgmental and it is but observation and objective analysis are very different from judgment. I desperately want every person to be an adult and one of the problems I had growing up was that I just assumed everyone was smarter than me and more mature than me and that I had no idea what I was talking about. I gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. I still do but I’m not gonna lie to myself when someone shows their immaturity. When I was a kid I would try to come up with ways to explain their decisions from a reasonable and rational view point and as soon as I found a reason that was intelligent I just sort of assumed that was the real reason because other people can’t be stupid and they certainly can’t be stupider than I am. I’m just a normal kid! Why would I know better than anyone else?

I firmly believe that it is entirely possible and entirely beneficial to rationally understand and objectively conclude people’s maturity levels as long as you can keep yourself from being happy that you are smarter than them. Most children love being smarter than other people. I believe that I am smarter than alot of people and I know for a fact that I’m more rational and observant and mature than most people but believe me I do not let it go to my head and my opinion of children has never been a negative one. I worked with children for 5 years and in that time, along with other experiences, I learned that every single human is capable of being a rational and amazing adult that can be happy and supportive and intelligent. The problem is that nobody shows them how to be those things. Education in this country has nothing to do with teaching kids how to be adults or how to do actually important things like take leadership roles or how to empathize with their fellow man. Kids aren’t taught how to do taxes or why people do things. They aren’t taught how to introspect and develop themselves. They aren’t taught how to pay attention to things or what the benefits might be to using their brains. They’re taught a bunch of essentially useless bullshit that allows them to fill out scantrons in the way where their school makes the most money. Believe me when I say that I know many 4 year olds as mature and rational and capable as many 25 year olds I know. Also believe me when I tell you that even 4 year olds can easily understand, internalize, and apply complicated ideas about psychology and friendship to the rest of their lives. The only thing they need is for some one to tell them and show them what kind of mentality is possible. Show them what respect looks like and what intelligence looks like. Show them what empathy looks like and sit them down and explain to them why empathy is good and even a 4 year old kid can have a rational conversation.

I’m not really sure how on topic I am anymore but I’ve written this over the course of like 4 hours so things are kind of jumbled. should I try and sum it up?

I don’t know how to sum any of it up and if I did this unread blog wouldn’t be the final product of that summation and it wouldn’t be the place for it either.

This might be a short one but what I want to do is try and describe how it feels listening to other people talk about what movies they like and, more specifically, when they talk about what is good and what is bad. I thought I would do that with an analogy about being a connoisseur of something like beer and how it relates to being a connoisseur and how they are far more alike than they think. Honestly though, being any type of connoisseur can be pretty weird.

Lets first get over this negative connotation some people have toward the word connoisseur. In today’s society people hear that word and think about rich, douchey, white, possibly British, snobs drinking wine and making fun of poor people. While this is a very funny image and one that is enjoyable to laugh at it isn’t really what the word means. The reason the word seems negative to people is because assholes want to feel like they are better than other people and assholes falsely believe that knowing more than someone else makes them better. They don’t care that their knowledge isn’t useful or that it’s entirely focused on one obscure topic like wine or poetry.

So, when I use the word connoisseur please remember that this is another word for expert. The two words are interchangeable. Synonyms. I think synonym means same. You know what I mean. Expert is a very broad term while connoisseur typically means being an expert in some sort of art. I am a connoisseur of movies and television.

I feel like I might need to explain a little more even. You do not just become a connoisseur of movies and television by watching alot of movies and television. This may seem contrary to you but let me make sure I’m pointing out the truth of how to become a connoisseur. You become a connoisseur by paying attention to the movies you watch. You pay attention to the thing your doing and eventually you will be a connoisseur. The more you pay attention the faster you learn about the thing and it is an absolute fact that there are a multitude of products out there that are designed for you to be able to not pay attention to them. You see, people don’t really like paying attention to that many things at once. It’s very difficult and obviously people who are especially busy, or people who feel especially busy, are going to want to be able to relax and calm down and have some simple fun with their brain turned off. It’s a difference in mentality akin to walking into a restaurant you’ve been to before. Some people order the same stuff they always get because you already know it’s good and you don’t have to think about it. You order it and you get good food. Your brain isn’t needed. I’m not saying that someone who orders the same food every time at a restaurant uses their brain less. I’m saying that they are making the choice to reduce the amount of new inputs into their brain. That’s is a great and powerful ability to have and while you shouldn’t do it all the time the same can be said of the opposite. Maybe a restaurant isn’t a good metaphor because people will think I’m talking about adventurous people vs safe people when that has nothing to do with it. Let’s change to beer.

There are two kinds of fun in the world. There is fun with your brain turned on and there’s fun with your brain turned off. There are products designed for both types of fun. To use a beer analogy there is Bud Light on one side and some ridiculous craft beer that was aged in bourbon barrels and has hints of grapefruit, coriander, and select artisan spices or some shit. One of those products is supposed to be enjoyed without thinking about it and one is supposed to be focused on while it is enjoyed.

Bud Light is essentially a comfort pick. You know exactly what it is and if that’s what you want your drink to do than good for you. Liking Bud Light and liking some craft beer are essentially equal in their ethical goodness so don’t feel like a lesser man because you like Bud Light.

Craft Beer is essentially a new experience / topic pick. You know you are gonna get some interesting flavor that you can then talk about with your friends and or with the rest of the craft beer community. Liking Craft Beer and liking some basic name brand beer are essentially equal in their Ethical goodness so don’t get the idea that you are a better man because you don’t like name brand beer.

There is one key thing each of these two types needs to realize. The connoisseur needs to realize that knowing shit doesn’t make him better and the basic comfort man needs to realize that what he likes is not the greatest beer of all time while any other beer is pointless.

The thing you want to be is a connoisseur who isn’t an asshole. Well, basically no matter what the thing you want to be is… not an asshole. This topic kind of got away from me didn’t it. What I wanted to do was complain to you that I’m a connoisseur of movies and when regular people tell me they like something like Star Wars I respect their choice but when people tell me Star Wars movies are “great movies” I want to slap them in the face. That sounds harsh so I said all this other stuff to get you to believe I’m not an asshole. I guess the real point of all this is that liking things is fine no matter if it’s shitty or amazing. The point of amazing things shouldn’t be to get you to devalue regular things. Regular things are amazing for their own reasons and being the positive guy I am I think most everything is kind of amazing in a whole host of different ways. The other trap you can fall into is letting your desire for your favorite thing to be amazing, from a artistic level, trick you into thinking it is that kind of amazing. As soon as you start letting the things you like be what they are you’ll be happier. It’s hard to admit that a movie you like isn’t a great movie and it’s hard for a connoisseur to keep his mouth shut when you let your feelings about a movie make you think it is a great movie. Just know that if it is ever me saying the thing you like is a bad movie then I’m my only goal is to possibly educate you that if what you want is “great” there are a whole boat load of movies out there for you to watch.

I want to make a full fledged edited post about all these ideas but fuck it. I’m lazy and I want to watch The Count of Monte Cristo (1975).

Right now there are alot of big sports news stories going on. In the NFL we just had the Browns play the Steelers on Thursday Night Football and that ended with one of the dirtiest brawls in NFL history and on the MLB side we have the Astros cheating scandals breaking like 2 days ago. There is one fact about sports as a whole that should be blatantly obvious to anyone at all but some how none of us ever notice it at first. That one fact is this; Sports, as a concept and as a story, is incredibly dark. It’s dark in the sense that it is fucked up from start to finish. Injuries, concussions, fights, money, ignorance, immaturity, ineptitude, greed, and a loyalty only to Physical Prowess all combine to make regular day sports a pretty dark story.

I would actually compare the feeling I get when thinking about the NFL to the feeling I get watching a movie like Scarface. When you watch a movie like Scarface you know the whole time that nobody is gonna get out of this story with any happiness whatsoever. Even the people who survive are in various states of being miserable. The feds are half dead and they got the guy sure but is that really gonna make em feel good? Scarface himself is obviously dead along with everyone he has ever loved. The entire time you watch the story you know that there is next to no chance that people end up happy. Even if they are capable of accomplishing their goals it typically doesn’t matter because any serious injury from childhood to any time before you win a world series means that you’re out of the league and out of sport and you have to go get a normal person job. You can lose the ability to even compete in the thing you love at any moment. Roger Federer is giving his kid a bath and he slips on something and he is out of tennis for 6 months. It’s not just that he’s out of the game that he loves to play or that his opponents get to chances to win while he has to sit on the couch. The real kicker is that the fan base and the sport as a whole doesn’t give a shit. Ok, Fed isn’t the best example since everyone loves him beyond words so the sport cares but imagine you are anyone else in any other sport.

Imagine your a guy who has been in the MLB farm systems for years and you get your chance but you happen to get a little bit sick the night before the game since the pressure is insane and you are having to deal with a new workplace, new team mates, and a new pre-game routine with your team. You obviously keep your mouth shut about being sick. Lying about injuries and sickness is one the most storied and long lived traditions of darkness in sports. You lying about your health is something that is going to distract you on top of everything else. You get into the game and maybe you feel ok as far as sickness goes but you couldn’t really stay calm in warmups and your team treats you like shit cause you’re a rookie and now the crowd is yelling shit at you while you warm up in the bullpen. The opposing fans have done research and they love to try and influence the game and when verbal is the only form of communication available those fans will rip you a new one on your first day of your dream job. You get to the mound and of course your pitches aren’t as good as they usually are. You allow one hit to the first guy you go up against, an MLB pro, and your manager decides to change pitchers for the left handed hitter up next. You get to the dugout after 10 minutes of terror and experience and you get sent back down and you know you’ll probably never get picked up again.

Maybe that sounds like a rare story to you but that’s how sports work at every single level of the game. You go from high school to college and there’s all this pressure and you have to not only perform or be capable of performing, you have to get lucky that everything goes right. Sure, with a good mentality you can keep your pitches around how good they should be but that might not even matter. Maybe you come across a team that’s “hot” or, maybe the opposing team notices that you tip your pitches. So, you get destroyed and nobody knows why so you go back to the minors.

This is one story but it has happened millions of times throughout even this one sport and now there’s hundreds of millions of dollars on the line and kids in the Dominican Republic and Cuba are risking their lives and their families lives to come over and they better fucking hope they don’t get even the slightest bit unlucky. Other teams want to win and make money so they try to cheat or “game” the system. All the players go from being young and physically talented to millionaires overnight and how can they be expected to be adults if they never get to be adults? Suddenly they have to control such absurdly powerful emotions? That isn’t an excuse it’s simply an understanding and all of sports is this way.

Even my favorite competitive game, Super Smash Brothers Melee, a game that came out in 2001, has a dark side of hand pain and controller issues. Now, since there is no money involved and there are no preconceived ideas about how things should work you end up with players developing entire new technologies to help themselves and their fellow players. In Melee, one player, who had chronic hand pains, started his own company and developed an entirely new type of controller specifically designed for players with hand pain. He relearned how to play the game, developed the software and hardware, and now sells his new Controller to any other players who gets hand pains when imputing 7 different precise inputs per second.

A community that is small and passionate has the chance to solve these types issues but a community like the NFL or MLB is huge and has it’s own ideas that it is very reluctant to admit are wrong. The only times you ever see changes here is when something huge happens like a team loses the superbowl in overtime because the rules are stupid. Everyone knows the rules are stupid but everyone is so terrified of making changes, changes everyone agrees need to be made, but that they still don’t make. This is as much the fault of fans as it is the organization itself. We, as “true baseball fans” waited until the freaking 21st century to add rules to baseball that stop baserunners, going from Third to Home, from being able to literally Shoulder-Charge into defending Catchers as hard as they possibly can with the goal of getting them to drop the baseball. How the fuck was that not a rule in Year Fucking One back in the 1800’s? Did they really not notice that the “Breaking the Other Guy’s Leg” was not cool?

The answer is that sports are dark as hell and they have been for all time. Even just being a fan can be an exercise in keeping yourself afloat in a mire of pain and suffering. Eventually it either breaks you or you get over it and both of these possible outcomes are, in reality, incredibly fucked up.

By the way, I’m still having to hit the space bar 10 times whenever I start a new paragraph. How is it that I haven’t figured out yet how to freaking indent? I’m getting more and more used to all of this as I go and I guess that’s the point. I’m also noticing the things I say alot. I mean, to be honest with you, don’t think I don’t notice when I use a phrase a whole bunch. I’m probably more aware of the patterns present in my speech and in my writing than you are. How crazy would I have to be to not? I mean, I mean, I mean I’m the one writing them. I’m the one saying the stuff I say, and we have already established that I pay attention to everything.

I mean, anyway, I guess I should sort of hedge a little bit on the whole Socrates thing from last night. I mean, to be fair, I am on alot of similar wavelengths as the guy but I am nowhere near Socrates when it comes to saying the things that are perfect to say. I’m not nearly as good at following my own doctrine as he is, or at least how well his character does in the book. I’m interested to see more about Socrates in real life. I know that he was put on trial for something and that is obviously gonna dictate how he represented on the internet. I don’t know. What I do know is that the version of Socrates, fictional or factual, from Plato’s the Republic is a guy I want to be more like and a guy I think I am quite like. Maybe I’m nothing like the real Socrates or the real Plato because those are real people who aren’t actually like anyone else simply due to the fact that they are human.

I should also be a teensy bit worried that reading something like this is gonna really change the way I write, at least for a while. John came home from yesterday and I was just sort of unconsciously sounding like Socrates in my argument, trying to bring up stuff and change everything around and obviously it sucked ass as a conversation. I do this with alot of things and I think that basically everyone in the history of the world does this. For example, when I was younger I would watch the same movies a bunch of times and one of those movies was Bourne Supremacy and every time I watched it I would feel really amped up after wards. I’d get stuff done after, like I’d clean my room and I’d be super efficient about everything like how Jason Bourne would clean his room. It was pretty fun but it was never something I choose to do. I’d watch the movie because I like the movie, not because it made me feel a certain way afterwards. I didn’t really think of the movie as like a cup of mental coffee to watch before going to work, it’s just what happened sometimes after watching it. I think everyone does this to some extent as the consume story and creative creations.

I’ve never felt more validated than I do when I watch a movie I used to love as a kid and as an adult I watch it with new eyes and new ideas about whats good and what isn’t. I have more knowledge than I had as a kid obviously. I didn’t pay attention to shot composition or pacing as a child watching a movie like You’ve Got Mail or His Girl Friday. What feels amazing though is rewatching it now and finding out that the movies are actually really good movies still. Like my opinion as a child was perfectly correct even though I couldn’t have really told you or expressed at all in words why I liked them so much as kids. Even from technical standpoints of film making these movies are very good and in subtle ways. You’ve Got Mail is especially easy to understand it’s subtle strengths as you watch the blend of narration, email, inner thoughts, text, and spokenm dialogue all intermingle perfectly to make the emails feel like true conversations and to see the mental process each character has as they write. It’s actually a pretty amazing accomplishment from a film design standpoint and I believe that no other movie has ever reached that quality of variable control. I loved that stuff as a kid but as a kid I felt it more than I saw it. I could feel the maturity of the characters as they talk to each other like mature intelligent adults. How could I notice how amazing it was when I wasn’t conscious of what terrible dialogue was like from a intellectual standpoint? I felt how good the movie was as a kid and I was 100% right.

I have always been a big fan of my own taste in things I care about and to have my childhood favorites put to the same test I put every movie now, and to see them pass with flying colors, feels so good. I know there’s a good amount of pride in that and maybe a little bit of smugness but it undeniably does feel good and then I watch them with people who have never seen them and they also completely agree that they are amazing. I love when other people love what I love so when my brother, who is into film, watches You’ve Got Mail with me and without even really putting much thought into the words he chooses he says something like “This is the kind of thing I want to make.” I watched His Girl Friday with my best friend Eric and I was freaking out since I hadn’t watched it years and I was in the middle of the euphoria. The euphoria was turned from a self-focused feeling to a total feeling when he kept agreeing with me and saying how good the movie was. He was noticing and praising the things I had praised for years and he was doing it without my guidance or anything.

It was like a proof that I was right and maybe more importantly it was proof that I’m more like other people than I thought. You might not think it feels good to be like everyone else but for a kid like me that never really felt like he had anything in common with your average kid, you learn to appreciate unanimity and to understand that conformity is something completely different than unanimity.

Yesterday, I just didn’t want to write but today I actually just can’t think of a good way to start. I don’t really know what to talk about. Well, I do have one thing on my mind but I’m not ready to talk about it here. Please, dear reader, do not get mad at me for teasing you. It is not my intention to do so. Plus, you don’t exist so boom, I can say whatever I want. I could whine and complain about stuff for 1,000 words and I might feel like it’s absolute trash writing, as most writing motivated by being upset typically is, especially when it’s written by some one young with not alot of writing experience.

I’ve been making myself an omelette every morning for a little over a month now and while I really enjoy having a regular breakfast everyday for the first time in my life I also am starting to get worried that omelettes may not be the way to go. I really like the idea of omelettes but, to be honest, eggs are not a very interesting foundation for someone like me who is not a chef at all. Eggs need other things with them to be any good, I have noticed, and other things are, inevitably, more expensive than eggs. I think I’m gonna buy one of those pre-cooked chickens at the grocery store and try chicken for a while. I bought a huge thing of cheese about a week ago and I have no idea why I bought the biggest bag of cheese I could find. I don’t even really think the type of cheese I bought works. What am I supposed to do with a giant ass bag of shredded cheese that I don’t particularly want. I guess I could make quesadillas with the tortillas I also bought for no reason but simple cheese quesadillas are also pretty boring. I also think cheese is not my body’s favorite food. I heard some where a long time ago that all adults are slightly lactose intolerant and all animals stop drinking the stuff but humans just keep drinking milk.

I’ve never even liked milk. there is only one situation in history where milk has been really truly good tasting in my eyes and that time is right after eating some french toast. Something about the combination of maple and milk just works. Maybe I’ll make french toast tomorrow instead of an omelette. I’ll keep you readers informed on further developments.

I think the word ‘people’ is one of my favorite words. Maybe it isn’t one of my favorite words to say but I love the way it’s spelled. That ‘o’ is so funny to me and every time I write down the word, for any reason, I pronounce it in my head as Pee-oh-ple. Me and the english language have kind of a strange relationship. It’s strange in the sense that I am in love with it and it is a series of letters that can never love me back. Loving something is odd.

Let’s move off the topic of love. Don’t get it twisted, I love the topic of love and I have always thought myself as a bit of a romantic, though clearly a foolish one. The problem is that I’m lazy and don’t want to get sucked into writing about love in really serious ways for the next hour. “But Josh, isn’t you getting sucked into the practice of writing the entire point of doing any of this?” Shut up you.

The question I’m asking myself is if I should just keep writing for a bit and then publish whatever it is that I’ve written after an hour or less OR if I should stop writing but leave it unpublished so I can add on to it later. I mean, I did say this was a collection of morning thoughts but my ‘morning’ has become 4 o’clock in the afternoon. I really don’t like this sleep schedule but my roommate, who is also my brother, wakes up at 1:30 P.M. and goes to work an hour later. He gets back around 11 at night and wants to hang out and stuff and I like my brother so I want to hang out to but we end up going to sleep at 3 in the morning and at that point I just kind of don’t care anymore about going to bed on time so I just stay up to whenever. I told him to try and get the morning shift at his work but he said that anyone who even asks ends up getting punished in some way. After I said that seemed untrue he said he already asked a couple times and he was essentially ignored so the morning shift could be given to less qualified people. I don’t doubt any of that story but… well… I guess I have no real ability to guess what’s going on at his job. His job is unlike any job I have ever had simply by virtue of it being a regular type of job. I, on the other hand just ended a 5 year stint as a preschool teacher, which is quite an unusual type of job, and now I’m unemployed. I got along great with my bosses and they encouraged me to come to them with anything I needed. I didn’t need much since I’m real easy to appease but I guess the idea of having a boss that wants you to be happy must be an unusual one in today’s society. That’s pretty fucking sad actually. I think maybe we should also avoid the topic of workplace balances and attitudes. Again, I’m not afraid of talking about for fear of getting upset or for fear of lookin a fool. I’m just not looking to try and convey all of my policies on how people should interact with each other. As soon as I start talking about interactions between people I get carried away with my own insane yet obvious and well thought out philosophies of human interaction. I say ‘well thought out’ because all of my ideas and policies work and are clearly mature and commendable. I say ‘insane’ because nobody else seems to agree with me.

This isn’t a brag by any means or a knock on people who don’t know how to communicate like adults. I actually pride myself on my ability to easily and quickly communicate the important things to people and in ways that they both can understand and can feel good about. You see, saying what you want is not actually the entire goal. You need to take what you want to say and translate it into something the other person can not only understand but that they can digest easily. That’s what it means to be a teacher in a way and God has seen to it that I am a teacher at heart. I’m not too happy with God about it since that basically means my soul job makes zero money.

I haven’t talked about my idea of Soul Jobs yet. A Soul Job is what a person is truly meant to be. It’s like the soulmate version of jobs. My soul job is probably teaching but what any teacher should try to do is to find a way to teach in a line of work that isn’t teaching. Obviously teachers should be able to be teachers but fuck that. If the world is gonna think we are useless and if the world is gonna take it in turns to push us down over and over than I’m gonna try and not be a teacher. IT fucking sucks when you know your soul job, and you love your soul job, but that job sucks real bad. The amount of shit that is both hardcore systemic and also makes your job way worse is just ridiculous. Being a preschool teacher is no bueno my friend. Especially a male preschool teacher. Being a young, male, preschool teacher is IN NO WAY WHATSOEVER a sustainable existence.

I know I shouldn’t write in all caps but whatever man. I care about this stuff. Me trying to avoid talking about just ranted for a bit. I guess me ranting is what this is supposed to be but I’m done making myself sad. Thinking about the truths I hate most in the world is a healthy and productive thing to do but thinking about it too much is just depressing. My brain can kind of get obsessive once it finds something it can actually focus on for more than 5 seconds.

I’ve thought alot about how I could describe my brain to a normal person and I’m not sure I have found the right answer. I’m not saying my brain is any better than the average person or that I’m significantly more intelligent in any way, its just that my brain is clearly doing things it is either not supposed to be doing or its doing things that other brains should be doing more of. I guess the last possibility is that my brain is doing it’s own thing and that’s not inherently better or worse or more valuable than what your brain is doing. Comparing myself to other people is something I do alot but it’s always motivated more by simply understanding the perspectives that other people might have.

Almost forgot to write today. Honestly, I’m pretty bored right now. I’ve lived my life with alot of boredom.

It’s been about 8 hours since I wrote that last paragraph. I wish I could say that I just forgot but to be honest I didn’t. I gotta turn this shit around. Not only is it kind of a goal to write every day, it is also a benefit to the quality of the operation. Does it deserve to be called an ‘operation’?

Well, at least I’m writing something at all. It’s better than missing the day as a whole. It is odd to write something over the course of the whole day. I’ve spent basically the entire day watching some World War 2 documentary on Netflix that is, I guess, ok. It’s hard to fuck up a retelling of WW2 as a story. It kind of carries itself. Literally, just the truth is more amazing of a story than any writer could capture or match.

I’ll do better tomorrow. Hopefully. Maybe.