Theater Going Experience

            I re-watched "Django Unchained" last night at my college's movie theater, it was the last movie they would be showing for the semester, it is the last weekend before undergrad finals begin, the movie is a huge success, the showing is free to students, all of these factors contributed to the place being packed.  And I would like to say that I have a sort of complaint: people laugh at weird times.

            I read an article by a black movie critic about the "Django Moment" when a black audience member will hear a white audience member laugh at some point, and get mad about there being nothing funny on screen.  I have a similar complaint, but it isn't a black/white thing, it is a smart/dumb thing.  Stupid people laugh at things that they are made nervous by.  Stupid people laugh at things that make them uncomfortable.  Stupid people need to stop going to theaters cause this shit is annoying.

            At one point the protagonist shoots a man with what amounts to a 1850's sniper rifle.  The man getting shot is helping his son plow a field.  The kid watches his father fall to the ground and die.  It is a sad scene that is referenced later as an important moment in Django's growth as a gunfighter in a hard world.  People laughed.

            At one point three slave traders are transporting a cage filled with three men and have to move dynamite from a pack horse to the cage, they throw the dynamite in and the slaves are scared.  It is an illustration of cruelty.  People laughed.

            A character is about to be castrated.  It is a dreadfully scary scene.  People laughed.

            There are funny things in the movie.  It is hysterical at various points, there are little things that happen even in the most explosively violent parts that elicit a chuckle.  But none of these things are in that camp, these things are supposed to be watched and felt on a different wavelength.  If you are laughing at these parts, then you are watching the movie wrong.

            What is more this is the sort of crap that falls into the "theater experience" people claim is part of movie viewing.  Presumably the other parts are sticky floors, burnt popcorn  ambient body odor, people checking their cell phones (something will provoke me to murder one day) and the film reel randomly failing in the middle of a presentation.  Theaters are kind of shit when you get down to it and I am wondering more and more why we hold them up so much.  Why did I re-watch a movie specifically to take advantage of it still being in a theater?  Seriously, why?  I could have rented the thing for 50 cents and had a lot more control over my viewing.  Could have bought it and been able to see a lot more of the features.

Seriously, can't they just shut the fuck up?

            This will probably not answer the question but I keep thinking of it.  I recall a science fiction show called "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex".  "Ghost" primarily deals with cyber terrorism in the near future through the eyes of a group of talented counter terrorism and computer specialists.  In one episode a series of mysterious deaths prompts them to investigate, they discover that the deaths all had to do with people just plugging into a particular server, and then never leaving, eventually their bodies just starved.  So the lead investigator goes into the server to see what is the issue.  Turns out the server is the brain of a great movie director, the director was so sick of compromising his vision of his perfect film he decided to just turn his brain into a virtual reality theater to show the movie on a loop.  The people who died were so enraptured by the film they just watched it over and over until they died (kind of like those morons who killed themselves after watching "Avatar").  What is funny is that the inside of the server actually does take the form of a theater.  It's not that people are watching the movie in a private room, people are together in a massive room and can hear the murmur of each other's reactions, they can hear each other cry and laugh and experience art.

            So in a show entirely about the future  and technologies impact on the human experience, people still will get together to watch movies collectively in a dark room.  Not to discuss them afterward (because they never stop watching it) but because they feel that being a part of an audience is inherently part of watching a movie.

This show tends to be a good mix of the Cerebral and the Action.

FSU, Billing and Loans

            I am going to complain a bit about the way I see money being distributed and collected by my college, Florida State University, and also loans from the government.

            I am going to Law school, which is incredibly expensive, though if you look at the statistics of education costs to projected earnings after graduation Law School does seem less likely to leave you a cashier at Taco Bell than an advanced degree in Foreign literature.  Regardless I have to take out loans, and this is done in an odd way.

            Basically they tell me how much I am allowed to borrow, I then ask to borrow it, and then they send me most of what they said they would give me.  Let's say I need $10,000, and they say, "Okay, we'll give you $10,000."  They will then send me a check for $9,000 and a receipt for me having paid them $1,000 for the use of their service.  Why do that?  That doesn't make any sense.

            One problem: it is incredibly hard to plan around.  If I need X dollars, and ask for that much, and they then tell me that I will get X dollars, students are not going to know that X dollars is not X dollars.  It is a rug getting pulled out from under them.  Why not just charge a higher interest rate?  Why not send them X dollars and just tell them that an additional charge of some smaller amount will be tacked on to account for processing, but won't be charged interest like the loan money?

            This is the sort of bureaucratic crap that people claim is what is wrong with government in general but is never fixed.  There has to be thousands of parents who discover this every year putting kids through college.  And these parents are the type who have money and vote, you can tell because they are sending their kid to college instead of having him work.  So why is this not an issue to get ironed out?

            Then there is the issue of bill collecting.  I had a pinched or irritated nerve in the left part of my rib cage so they took X-rays to be sure nothing serious was there, since they have not bothered to contact me except for a bill I guess I can rest easy.  And while medical care is another bag of worms (charging as much as they do to use a machine is kind of fine, but not telling me how much it costs before doing it is not, and even if they did tell me I am in no position to refuse preventative care because I have a pain in my rib that I can't identify and that puts you in a mindset to spend more money than you otherwise would... Because this country has flooded our heads with medical information that is alarmist in order to get us to both go to the doctor more, and to justify charging more and more for services)... I guess I let a few worms out of the can, but moving on.

            The service was rendered in March, they billed me personally one month later, and then told me of the charge one week later when they decided that enough time had gone by to justify withholding some university services... During finals week.  Aside from the fact that this should have been handled by the insurance, and they bill me if they decide this doctor prescribed treatment wasn't covered, the school shouldn't be billing me directly.  Two, it is all computerized, why did the mistaken billing take a month?  Why was I not notified when it finally happened?  Why was my only notice in the form of a sort of penalty?  Why do they think finals, a time in which people have priorities other than paying the academia pimp, to chose to demand money?  I don't know.

            Then there is the system.  The school charges a $7.75 convenience fee for paying online.  Couple of things, paying online should be the only way to pay, that service is instantaneous, mechanized, and can be done at any time, from nearly anywhere.  The idea of having a room with people sorting written checks is stupid in a modern civilization. 

            Then why charge this fee for every use of the online service?  It is always $7.75 whether you are paying $10,000 in tuition, $250 in med bills, or a $5 library late fee, that is insane and unfair.  They should just have the charge be hidden, slightly increasing the cost of everything to account for that cost.  Wal-Mart does not charge you $5 for paying with a credit card, no one does, that would be insane, and having an all cash business or sorting through all the checks they get would be monstrously time consuming and have huge overhead costs.

            Another solution: charge some flat rate at the beginning of the school year, "Electronic Services: $20" just like they do with "Transportation: $40" that lets FSU student use the Tallahassee bus lines at will.  You get money up front that people see the one time, and can account for.  Either way, you have a billing system that a person can use to pay off the apparently overdue medical bill that is wrongly on his account when he receives the useless email at midnight without feeling like he is getting his/her lunch money taken away as an insult to the injury.

999,500 to Go

            To get good at something requires 10,000 hours of practice.  But it works a little different with creative enterprises, it is counted with words, and they put the target at 1,000,000.  A million words of practice can be done.  I write with a good bit of frequency, and could stand to put out more and more to further this mental cause.  Now rather than count the 5,000 words I wrote on finals tests this week, or my blogs, or really anything else.  I think I need to start now.  Each day I will write 500 words.  Sometimes I will miss a day and make it up later, but I will never have it take more than a week to catch up.

            So only counting the 500 words entries, I discovered how many days that counts out to: 5 years, and then 174 days past that.  So here is how I will regulate my goal.  500 words a day, not always on the same things, but I will push forward when I like it, and edit it when I want to make more of it.  Those edits will count for and against me.  Keep a tab.  And on October 17th 2018, I will consider myself done with practice.  And maybe I will make some art at some point in there.

            Having some ideas.  Though not clear or what to do with them  I feel a creative mist hanging around my skin.

            I was at Barnes and Noble's bookstore the other night for 4-5 hours.  It started out as killing time but it had been a long time since I had been in a book store and I always get an odd vibe.  Like I am literally breathing in the room.  Looking over cover after cover and wondering what that strange ethereal hunger in me is for.  I kept thinking swashbuckling, but I also wanting something dripping with very wet and sticky magic, and then I also wanted something simple and thin and easy to get through to a satisfying end which made me smile for a bit and left me geared up to read something else.

            I remembered that years before I had thought to read some classic science fiction authors to get some perspective on the medium.  And I read "Dune", "Ringworld", and "Ender's Game".  Breaking this up with "The Hunger Games", "MogWorld", and a reread of the 10th anniversary edition of "American Gods" (my favorite book).  I wonder if I should try something similar.  That I find a list of 3-4 classic mystery or horror.  Or I could find straight up pop-literature and read David Baldacci, Clive Custler, James Patterson, and Brad Thor.  It seems unfair for my reading to consist of Sci-fi, Fantasy, comics. and some classic literature.... Maybe I will ask for suggestions from those in my life who want to watch me be unpleased because that is where my best jokes come from.

            This is one more sentence, its intention is to bring this to five hundred.

Measure of a Spiderman

            Spiderman has to be in the top 10 of most recognizable figures in Western Civilization.  He is at the center of an incredibly profitable movie franchise at the beginning of the 21st century that was along with "X-Men" the dueling efforts to have the best Superhero merchandising opportunities.

            Strangely "X-Men" and "Spiderman" chose to stick with an abandon the comic stories they were based on in different ways.  Spiderman was unquestionably faithful in a lot of ways, with a spot on J. Jonah Jameson, the best rendition of a super-costume prior to "Iron Man", and a large number of the supporting cast being thrown in and developed to different degrees.  However, much like "X-Men" (and the 90's "Batman" franchise) the drive to sell action figures pushed the creative team to over stuff the 3rd film with too many characters, causing the story structure to get completely butt fucked.  "Spiderman 3" was a bad movie that betrayed or undercut a lot of "Spiderman" and "Spiderman 2" retroactively.  The franchise was then taken out back and shot.

            However both "X-Men" and "Spiderman" are really potent properties, properties that were not owned by Marvel Studios.  The reason Spiderman was not in "The Avengers" is because he is currently owned by Sony, who also own "Ghostrider" (which Sony has no clue what to do with).  In order to hold on to those movie rights Sony has to produce a movie every so many years, so last year we got "The Amazing Spiderman" and this year we will get "The Amazing Spiderman 2".  I'm so far fine with this.  Mostly.

            When you are trying to make something that is not original, but is instead a new installment of something else the wisest thing a person can do is take the elements that are core (in this case Spiderman, Mad Science, and New York) and then take them in a new direction.  Spiderman has a big cast of characters to draw from, love interests, allies, villains, and supporting characters.  What is more the story line is pretty much pre-written and doesn't require much effort.  Almost without fail a Spiderman story revolves around someone who was trying to use mad science for profit and nefarious purposes getting turned into a monster and Spiderman having to stop them.

Not going to lie, if you study lizards for a living I kind of assume you are one lab accident away from super villainy at any minute, regardless of monstrous super power acquisition.

            "The Amazing Spiderman" does this new direction thing not nearly enough.  It keeps inviting comparisons to the old franchise.  While new casting was necessary and the actors were always going to have to deal with being compared, there really was no reason to exacerbate the problem by having that layered over the old story.  They re-tell the origin of Spiderman, a story everyone already knows and has seen on film in the last 10 years.  Then they invite it again with having Oscorp exist, the company headed by the Green Goblin, who will be appearing in "The Amazing Spiderman 2".  WHY?

            As I said, Spiderman has a big universe.  "Amazing" does use a new love interest, Gwen Stacy (played by Emma Stone) and I think she's great, she isn't just a damsel in distress but also uses her abilities to contribute to the ultimate success of saving the city from a mass poisoning.  Unlike Mary Jane (played by Kirsten Dunst) who just seemed like a constant put upon victim objectified by Peter in the original movies.  And it has nothing to do with the actresses, I like Kirsten Dunst, I like Emma Stone, it was the material that they were given to work with that set them apart.

And when they reboot it again in 2018 they'll probably have the Black Cat to work with.

            Now why couldn't they Gwen Stacy the rest of the world?  Instead of Oscorp, why not use Roxxon?  Roxxon is a lesser known entity in Marvel comics, they are less defined but still concretely evil, selling tainted medicine to the third world, irresponsible building practices, and employing mercenaries like Silver Sable to do dirty work for them.  They would actually free up the creative teams a bit to have more mad scientists and programs without being compared to the previous Goblin Industry.

            And why use the Lizard as a bad guy?  Doctor Kurt Connors appeared in "Spiderman 2" and "Spiderman 3" played by a different actor as one of Peter's Professors at NYU, a role he fills in the comics and cartoons.  The bad guy in this movie, a mutant genius with aims to turn everyone in the city into him with vague connections to Peter's past should have been one of two villains that no one has ever heard of, either Smyth the inventor of the Spider-Slayer giant robots, or the Jackal, who created a legion of Spiderman clones to take over the world.  Hell, the Jackal even has a cinematic theme to run with, wanting to create a flawed copy of the original, much as this series will inevitably be called by critics.

A small army of goofy killer robots called Spider Slayers would do a lot to lighten the tone of the movies.

This is Jackel.  One of his primary character drives in the comic was his stalker obsession with Gwen Stacey, to the point where he cloned himself a copy of her to have.

            The sequel actually seems to have this problem in spades, bringing back Mary Jane and both Harry and Norman Osborn.  And the bad guy they chose has some odd casting too.  They cast Jamie Foxx (great actor) as Electro, and he looks nothing like the character.  Electro is a silly looking character so change is appreciated, but if you are going to use a prominent black actor why not use a black character?  Like Cardiac?  Cardiac is a black character, he has electricity based powers and he is an industrial terrorist, fighting against Roxxon, the villainous corporation they should have used from the start.  Cardiac even has a fully body blue costume that actually resembles what Jamie Foxx has been shown to look like in the new movie.

Albeit, more hoody and less shoulder armor.

            "The Amazing Spiderman" does have a lot going for it, the costume looks cool (though they could have made it look really different to further differentiate the movies), the action is just better because special effects and the competitive one upping of superhero movies has compelled action to be more dynamic, and overall the casting is stronger, Andrew Garfield is a better actor than Tobey MaGuire, Martin Sheen is a better Uncle Ben than... That old guy who played him before, Denis Leary plays cops and first responders as well as anyone, and Sally Field is a great actress (though she gets to do next to nothing).  My complaints are not about the execution really, just that it doesn't do enough to stand apart.

            Look at "X-Men: First Class".  Fox Studios owns the rights to "X-Men" the same way Sony owns "Spiderman" and they made "First Class" to meet a deadline.  However they go so far away from the third X-Men movie so as to actually contradict it in places.  They are in a different era, they use characters that almost no one knows off hand, the costumes are totally different, and it really, REALLY worked.  It is hard to compare "First Class" to any of the other movies and it shines because of that.  It is its own thing.

Though I guess the sequel's job is to erase that distinctiveness and drag in all the old actors for a comparison.

            The reason I decided to write this is because I saw the new "Man of Steel" trailer and they are having some problems with differentiating themselves too.  But they are trying to work against that.  Krypton looks different, they are using new music, they have altered the costume a lot (and I think it looks really cool) and they have really good actors in every part because if they can't avoid comparison, they might as well try to vault it.

            This issue is going to come up more and more because actors get expensive and do not want to play a part forever, as of yet only "Doctor Who" has gotten around that problem entirely, and only James Bond has gotten away with ignoring it entirely (something they won't be able to do in the new era).

Food Journal Presentation, P-90x Approaching

I am compiling the first 4 weeks of my food journal.  I would hope to enter some of this into a simple chart to show how I have held steady.  But at the same time I feel the need to trim off the outliers, but a trim would only be 3 entries off the top and bottom of the curve, and since I have no "pie eating contest" event, or "got lost in the woods and was found the next morning" the high and low will mostly just consist of whether I ate more oatmeal or Hershey's kisses.

Maybe I should hold out on this charting until I can look at bigger charts just before I start P-90x mid-May.
Currently I have this monthly average of:
Calories per day: 2,741
Grams of Saturated fat: 40g
Grams of Protein: 91.3g
Grams of Fiber: 23g

Regardless of my current ability to present the information I will be thinking about it soon  I will be doing the P-90x workout program, which is actually a wild departure from my usual work out of lifting heavy things at a modest speed for a reasonable period of time.  To that end I plan to make this a daily update, with food, workout, and occasionally picture (Day 0, Day 10, Day 20, all the way up to Day-90).  I want to get healthier during the summer while I am moving into a new matter of study, and this seems like the thing that will keep me on target.  I will have daily self assessment on this thing talking about salad toppings and brown rice.  And then a bit of discussion about my research.  Then talk about lifting things.

I had two goals in regards to my own personal bettering this year.  I do this every year in regards to writing and not being fat.  I do not ever want to be fat anymore.  That is an easy goal.  But I want to do more.  I have never had a six pack... so my goal this year is to try to do that.  My other goal was to write more, both personally and into this blog.  I am hoping that I have more than 200 entries on this thing.  P90-x would crush that if I ended up doing daily writing.  I hope this gets me into gear to write a thesis in this year's third act.  I need practice, and this gathering of information and following this routine should make this a lot more doable in the long run.

I have some goals.  Here's to hoping they don't end in a tremendous waste of time and money so I end up managing nothing but my own intake of medication following my hysterical mental breakdown.

4-20, My Opinion on Marijuana Politics

            I thought I might throw out an opinion on the topic of weed in America on account of it being 4-20.  Side note, the reason 4-20 is "Weed Day" has nothing to do with weed really, it is Hitler's birthday.  The whole getting high to "honor" Hitler was a giant joke.

            Weed, and I cannot say this flatly enough, should not be criminalized to the extent it is currently.  It should not be as ubiquitous as caffeine or saturated fat, but it sure as hell is not something people should be going to jail over.

            The sanest way to look at drugs is through criteria and then weigh it against societal norms.  Basically find ways to measure Weed against the drugs humans use every day: Caffeine, Nicotine, and Alcohol.  I have 4 criteria.

            1) How likely is an overdose in the course of regular consumption?  You can overdose on Cocaine or heroin the first time you use it and die instantly.  Proper use prohibits this, but that doesn't stop people from doing it.  Currently you would die of smoke inhalation before you ever died nicotine poisoning, and drowning in coffee is more likely than caffeine overdose, alcohol is another story though.  People drink themselves to literal death everyday because this shit is dangerous, and available in cheap high concentrations.

            How does Weed compare?  Well, the difference between Drunk and Dead with alcohol is about x5 or x10, so if you are drunk at 5 drinks, 25 will kill you.  Marijuana requires about 40,000 times the exposure.  So, much like cigarettes, you would die from the smoke (or the towering inferno) before the drug actually got to you.

            2) How likely are you to become addicted?  Again with things like Crack, close to 99% of people who use it more than once, will become addicted; opium (even prescriptions, Oxycodone being one of the most abused prescription drug in the country right now) are dependency machines, rewiring brains to have a constant need for them after a steady period of use.  Nicotine is highly addictive, one of them most addictive of all drugs, with most anyone hooked after only two cigarettes, I imagine half of the lobbying money that goes into keeping cigs legal comes from the industry to treat addictions to them, the gum, patches, and various things to chew on (like the pen cap industry).  Alcohol is less addictive, ringing in at about 1 in 13, or 7.6%.

            How does Mary Jane measure?  10% roughly.  It is hard to get real test data because doing a substantive study on Weed is looked at by the United State's Congress like disposing of Toxic Waste near pre-schools.  But what data there is gives Weed a comparable measure to the drugs that are already in the system.  If the differentiation is arbitrary, and can't be justified compared to other parts of the policy, then it is unjust and the law shouldn't exist.

            3) What is the long term harm to a user?  Alcohol kills people by inches, contributing to every negative condition a human can get (if you want to bring up the glass of red wine argument, that benefit has nothing to do with the alcohol, it has to do with grapes, if you ate a shit ton of grape skins, and didn't take the alcohol you would be better off still).  Smoking causes cancer not just to the user, but to those around them, contributing to the overall indoor and outdoor air pollution that is becoming a major health problem for the whole country.  Caffeine mostly just causes ulcers and the shits.

            What about the Ganja?  Basically, all of the effect of smoking cigarettes.  The real issue is regularity of use, and how it is consumed.  Eating weed brownies dodges the smoke issue, as does using a vaporizer because you aren't breathing in heavy wet smoke, just the drug in a gas form.  The real problem is sexual, it lowers sperm production, motility, and the ability to get it up at all.  Weed makes every part of a person lazy.  That is what it does.  I would like to posit however, that this is not as bad as sclerosis of the liver.

            4) What is the ambient damage to a user?  This goes to how bad the use affects family structure, and a person's ability to go about their day to day life if they used the drug.  Alcohol is the king of this problem, ask any police officer, alcohol is fuel on the fire.  Alcohol might not actually cause crime, because there is still a moron who drank and drove, or drank and punched, or drank and shot, but there was a reason the temperance movement existed in America.

            How about the green?  People are arrested for having it.  People are arrested for selling it.  People are arrested for growing it.  Not a lot of people beating their wives after hitting a bong.  Driving: Hell Yes.  People drive stoned because they are stupid, just like the morons who drink and drive.  But people who smoke weed are not taking a depressant in the same sense as the drinker, it is a relaxer, a duller, a mechanism of sloth and non-productivity.

_______________________

            I am currently considering my Masters thesis related to the drug trade and drug policy, because the organized crime wars in Mexico and Central America are big news and likely to get me a decent job, and these are the sort of criteria I would like to study to determine whether drugs are really the economic and social burden that they are made out to be.  Prohibition and the Opium Wars have a very different context in modern hindsight then they did at the time, and modern healthcare has the potential to gather more information on the use of drugs than any point in history.  So while I have very little to go on, I am going to make this very broad statement with the information I have, Weed is no Opium, in fact, Weed isn't even as bad as Alcohol, and America drinks that up.  A new perspective is needed.

            Lastly, a disclaimer: marijuana is a substance I have never tried, along with other drugs in general.  I am a straight laced killjoy and have never had any desire to take anything.  What is more I am fairly certain that other people take drugs in order to think like I think, so if I were to take drugs I would either cancel out and lose my mental super powers, or I would become to me what I am to normal people, Josh^2 and would probably get some form of telepathy.  Either situation is probably not good.

"Bioshock Infinite" Go Ahead and Spoil It

            I bought "Bioshock" the week it came out.  I was not into internet culture like I am now.  No blog, Facebook was more of a stylized email account rather than my primary news source, so I really did not feel the huge wave of good reviews like I do now bearing down on me like a bunch of very encouraging wolves, "You-oooooh, sorry, saw the full moon there.  Meant to say, you should totally pick up "Bioshock: Infinite" it is really good."

            Then they bite me and I have to eat wolfsbane before the next full moon or be transformed into a beast.  All of that aside I really wish I had the sort of income that made buying and playing games at the 60$ price mark more feasible, rather than waiting for Target to slash prices to snap things up, or the Steam summer sale fast approaching.

            I love the original "Bioshock", it having taken me several months to finish, though the first 6 hours went pretty well.  And I did not get spoilers the way I have managed to get them for other game series I like (Mass Effect 3 has been 90% spoiled for me)... But I wonder if I should care.  I often find that watching a review of something beforehand allows me to better appreciate what is coming, and look for the clues, (to use a movie example, "The 6th Sense" was spoiled for me, for no good reason, just some guy talking loudly about it in a room... To me with the intent of spoiling it.  Point is, that allowed me to see the movie from another angle, and did add to the experience, it was just one that was less emotional, and instead more technical).

            I wonder if that sort of thing will happen for me in the case of "Infinite".  Can I read the material, take part in the discussion but not play the game till it hits the $30 mark?

            I think I am going to just have to try.

I still do blame my liking of this game more on the images and art style than the mechanics.  This Big Daddy remains one of the coolest boss designs in gaming, fit to stand next to Pyramid Head, the Colossi, or the Tripods.

"1963"

It is strange that sometimes I will have a word or phrase, or even a whole memory play over and over in my mind, for whatever reason certain things will stick in and play on loop, which can lead to me feeling like crap, or smile like an idiot.  When it is something simple like a series of words or a name, "cool, calm, in control", or, "Captain America" I must appear like even more of a crazy person than I do normally, as I walk along, silently mouthing (or whispering) it over and over again.

Lately I have had, "1963" and I couldn't figure out why, finally realizing that was 50 years ago, and I must have just been making the connection.  I then started running through a few things that happened in 1963 (like the Kennedy Assassination, and the invention of X-Men) and I think the repetition helped me recall more easily these random things.