Splenda Happiness

I’m not happy.

It’s weird writing that out and putting it in a permanent space because it makes it more real. The thought has crossed my mind before, but I’ve always been able to rationalize why I’m just being overdramatic. Much like when you think “I could really go for a double fudge sundae right now” and then spend time thinking of all the reasons why you actually shouldn’t go for a double fudge sundae, it’s been easy to convince myself I’m happy after the thought pops up. Logical arguments: you have a job, you make enough money to have disposable income, you eat every day, you have a social life, you have a girlfriend, you’re not dying. It flickers across your mind – you think it, maybe you even say it, but you spend so much time convincing yourself that you’re actually happy that eventually you shove that little thought into a small box in the corner and try to forget about it.

But the truth is surviving does not equate to happiness. And writing the words down literally sent a chill up my spine because I know what leaving those words in a public space will entail. People reading it and feeling pity and wondering what they can do, or people thinking I’m looking for attention and pushing me off as melodramatic. But I’m not looking for sympathy or pity or attention or anything, really. I’m just making a statement: I’m not happy.

Side note: Do not take this to mean I’m unhappy. Refer to this Oatmeal comic if you are confused.

The introspection and subsequent declarative statement was the result of something big happening this past weekend. Not big in the grand scheme of the universe, but big in the grand scheme of MY universe. Essentially, this weekend the nucleus of my internet life imploded. Everyone has an internet nucleus. It’s the website or thing you check the most frequently. For a lot of people it’s Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram. Reddit, YouTube, Something Awful. Maybe your nucleus is just your e-mail. But it’s the place you go to the most frequently when you’re on your computer or smartphone or tablet or whatever.

My internet nucleus was a forum called NeoGAF. It centered around video games, but it was where I went to catch up on news and events. It was a great place to go because there were hundreds of subcommunities where you could chat with people about anything. Games, TV shows, movies, music, sports, politics, dating, news articles, YouTube personalities, the latest Trump scandal…everything. Every video game had its own thread where people playing the game could discuss things and ask for help. Every TV show had its own thread where you could talk about the latest episode. It was basically my one-stop shop for whenever I wanted to find information or simply chat about something I enjoyed.

So this weekend this basic cornerstone of my life dissolved pretty quickly. You can read longer, full articles here and here if you want a more in-depth explanation, but I’ll offer a quick summary: A Facebook post accusing the CEO and owner of the website of sexual harassment went viral. The CEO himself took a long time to respond to it. This caused massive uproar on the website as it is a very left-leaning site on the political spectrum, so with the recent #MeToo developments there was a very low tolerance for these kind of accusations. The moderators all participated in a mass exodus as the owner kept delaying putting out a statement and it was making him, them, and the community as a whole look bad. As the moderators left, the site started being flooded with trolls and shitposting as the inmates were essentially running the asylum until the site went down for “maintenance” late Saturday.

It was kind of a harsh reality check about the impermanence of the internet and how everything we take for granted is really just data floating in the void that can be erased at any time. Suddenly a website that I checked basically every day (and usually spent a decent chunk of time browsing) was gone. I had a void in my life. Imagine if you went to the same bar every day for years after work. You exchanged pleasantries with the other barflys, you chatted with the bartender, you gave Smelly Joe some change as you left every day. Then one day after work you head to your favorite bar and it’s suddenly a Staples. Smelly Joe is still sitting outside but all the evidence of the bar you loved is gone. You ask Joe where everyone went and he tells you: some bartenders are trying to start a new bar, some regulars went to another bar down the street, a few guys took it as a sign to stop drinking altogether. Maybe some or most of your bar buddies will congregate at a new bar eventually down the line, but it won’t be the same. It won’t feel the same, because that bar is where you made the good memories.

That’s enough to kind of force an introspection. But I felt a larger void than I should have. I almost felt frantic, like I was scrabbling on the edge of the cliff and if I didn’t grab hold of something solid soon I was going to be taking a long fall to the ground below. And I couldn’t really figure out why.

Almost as if the universe kind of knew my brain needed to figure shit out, I was simultaneously introduced to something called “the spoon theory” this weekend. If you don’t know what it is, you can go here for the full original explanation, but I’ll try to summarize it myself quickly: The spoon theory revolves around explaining how chronically ill people have to plan out how they use their energy each day; basically equating a “spoon” as a unit of energy, and having a finite amount of “spoons” to use each day before they have to stop and recharge. And while healthy people have an infinite amount of spoons, those with physical or mental illness sometimes have a much smaller supply of them and when they’re out of them, they have to spend time recharging. Which means they have to make specific choices on how they want to use their spoons, while healthy people often don’t consider these “spoons” at all when making decisions in their life.

You’re probably wondering what the hell this has to do with a forum going down on the internet, but bear with me – I’m getting there.

So in the context of the spoon theory, I started thinking about how I was spending my energy – essentially what choices I was making with my life and whether I was happy with them. And what I realized was that for a long time I’ve been letting the world around me dictate how I use my “spoons” per se, as opposed to me choosing how I wanted to use them. I would hand out my spoons like they were candy or let people take my spoons because I cared about people’s opinions of me more than I cared about myself. I’d essentially started being what I thought people wanted me to be instead of being me. My energy was no longer my own.

I had lost all my spoons.

I didn’t have any energy to do anything, so whenever I had my own free time I would spend it trying to recharge by doing easy things like losing myself in a video game or book or TV show. For a while, I parlayed this recharging into trying to start up a YouTube channel, which ended up being an ouroboros of recharging energy to then use it again, which kept me static but not fully recharging myself. I was occupied, but I was still exhausted. I wanted this YouTube channel to be me accomplishing something, but I was just treading water as it never took off . I was using my free time to recharge just enough to make it through the tough stuff until the next time I had free time so I could recharge again. And then when I took a “break” from my YouTube channel, I never recharged enough energy to start back up again.

So then I put the final piece of the puzzle together. I had been using the NeoGAF website simultaneously as a way to both recharge and a place to put energy. I wanted to discuss video games and TV shows and movies and books, and sports and politics and dating and funny shit but I was going to GAF instead of my friends. It was safe. It was easy. And while I thought this was a good use of my time, it turned out I wasn’t getting anything out of it. Because while the community was great and I could talk about whatever I wanted on there – I wasn’t making any real relationships. If my account disappeared instead of the website, it would be a blip on the sea of users. Nobody on that site would care if I was suddenly gone. I was taking any spoons I had and just throwing them into the trash.

And I’d been doing this for years. YEARS.

And it started a chain of dominoes. Referencing the Oatmeal comic from above – I realized I had stopped doing things I felt were meaningful. Things that had previously brought me some form of joy or happiness I was doing simply to get my mind off everything else instead of enjoying them for what they were – things I wanted to do. I wasn’t actually interested in these things anymore, I was just collecting things to do to keep me occupied while I rested and recharged my energy.

That’s when I realized that I was feeling a void in myself not simply because a website was gone, but because I had been feeding myself fake energy this whole time through the website. It’s why I suddenly started panicking and trying to find everyone I could on Twitter from GAF because what I had perceived as the support structure keeping me afloat was gone. Except it had never been a support structure. It was a false idol, a hamster wheel, a distraction. And now I was forced to face the fact that I wasn’t happy because I didn’t have my distraction to keep my mind occupied. The energy equivalent of empty calories had just been excised from my life – not by my choice, but the result had given me a choice: continue on feeding myself empty energy and recycling the same thing over and over, or try and change.

To try and find meaning again.

It’s ironic that as of writing this, NeoGAF has come back up with a message that says “NeoGAF will be back online shortly.” It’ll be a test of willpower on my part if I return to it – I imagine there’s going to be a lot of trolling and the site won’t be the same if it comes back online since there’s a lot of hatred for the CEO/owner now – but the fact is I’m 90% sure I don’t want to return either. Not just because I don’t want to be associated with him, but because I need to focus on my own happiness and I’m not getting any from there. At the same time, it’s going to be kicking a habit I’ve gotten used to over the better part of a decade.

So let’s circle back around to the beginning. I’m not happy. I’ve been close to happy. Splenda happy, if you will. It’s kinda almost happy and gets you through in a pinch, but you can tell it’s not the real thing. I want to be real happy. And moving forward it’s not anybody else’s problem but my own. I’m ready to face that fact – and the first step is writing all this shit down and putting it in a place that I can’t run away from it. Maybe none of this makes sense – but in my head it does, and I have a goal going forward, albeit a small one.

So now the question is: how do I go about fixing myself?

Movie Review: Baby Driver

When I was younger, before mp3s and iPods and all music was digital, my prized possession was a boombox I kept in my room. That was basically how I listened to all my music. And in 1999, at the ripe age of 14 I saw the James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough and fell in love with the soundtrack enough to ask for it for Christmas. Once I got it, I played the soundtrack non-stop on my boombox, listening to a majority of the tracks – but especially this one.

In fact, I listened to Going Down/The Bunker more than any other track on the album, over and over, until I had basically memorized all the beats and cues and when instrumentation kicked in and where the rises and falls were. Why? Because I was crafting a scene in my head. Not a scene related to The World Is Not Enough, but a scene from a story I was writing in my head. The track fit perfectly with the climax of my story, and so I would listen to the track over and over again until every action in the scene fit perfectly with the music. I knew where the punches where, when X character would do Y action, how the main antagonist would interact with the main hero – all based on the music. It’s how I created the scene in my head.

(As a side effect, I also basically have the action sequence from The World Is Not Enough memorized as well.)

It didn’t stop there – ever since, 80% of music that I listen to will inspire a scene of some sort in my head, which will work its way into a story of mine. And I’ll listen to that song over and over again until the fragment of an idea crystallizes into a fully-realized scene. From Painkiller to Six Shooter, from Vietnam to The Devil Within, songs that get stuck in my head turn out scenes in a story. I match the guitar solos, the bass drops, the breakdowns to car chases, dance numbers, and fistfight sequences. A drift around a corner is at the end of the first verse, a punch is thrown as the chorus hits.

(I’m basically making this section from the Atomic Blonde trailer whenever I listen to certain songs on repeat.)

So now when I say Baby Driver was a movie made for me, I hope you understand where I’m coming from. Baby Driver is not a movie with a soundtrack – Baby Driver is a soundtrack with a movie attached. Car chases are essentially musical numbers; bullets during shootouts are fired in time with the beat. Kevin Spacey’s Doc doles out cash on beats 1, 2, and 3. While Baby is strolling down the sidewalk, he walks past trumpets in the window of a music store as trumpets play in the song. Edgar Wright’s direction is so tight that the music BECOMES the movie. It’s essentially a love letter to every person that always has a song playing in their head that they match up to their life or a story or anything in between.

The songs become part of the story. In a great scene, Jon Hamm’s Buddy asks Baby if he has a “killer track” that he listens to – to get pumped up or when he’s really ready to roll. Of course Baby has one, and the two sit there listening to it – except it’s drowned out and faded, as if you were hearing it through another person’s headphones as they’re listening to it. Which is exactly how Buddy and Baby are listening to the song. Baby’s favorite track is, of course, later played fully for the audience in the climax of the movie – but this is the kind of thought that Edgar Wright puts into the soundtrack. The songs aren’t just there for the audience’s pleasure, but are a part of the movie.

And of course the typical Edgar Wright staples are there. A master of Chekhov’s Armory, there is no detail that doesn’t matter in set-up or execution. Even Baby idly flipping through TV channels has a later payoff, if you pay attention. The dialogue is on point, although not as quick-fire and rapid as the Cornetto trilogy or Scott Pilgrim. And while I’ve been gushing over Wright’s writing, cinematography and selection of songs, let’s not forget the principal actors. Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, and Kevin Spacey are scene-stealers (as always) and Kevin Spacey delivers my favorite line of the movie in a way that sticks with you after the movie is over.

And while some people may find the romance plot between Ansel Elgort’s Baby and Lily James’ Debora as too cookie-cutter and may not get fully invested in it, the chemistry between the two was one of my favorite parts of the movie. Their scene in the laundromat where they’re both listening to T.Rex’s Debora, each with one headphone in their ear, is probably my favorite scene of the movie and made the song itself one of my favorites simply because of how the two play off each other so effortlessly. Two people bonding over a shared love of music and making googly eyes at each other – it’s everything my teenage self fantasized about as a relationship.

This isn’t the best action movie of the year so far (that’s John Wick 2) and it may not be the strongest thematic movie of the year either (that’s Get Out). But Baby Driver is a movie that’s more than the sum of its parts. It’s a perfectly pulpy fun summer movie that’s a musical, comedy, action, romance, thriller, and drama all in one. It’s a nearly perfect movie to me because it’s a movie that I would want to make. Music and movie soundtracks have always been important to me and this is the perfect blend of everything that I love about music and movies. This movie will be a comfort blanket to anyone who can’t leave their house without their headphones.

After this movie, I will follow Edgar Wright into battle any day. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go see Baby Driver again and again and again. Oh…and you bet your ass I bought the soundtrack.

(Bananas.)

The Good, The Bad, and The Weird: March 22, 2017

THE GOOD

Lethal Weapon

Since nothing new has shown up on my radar as a “good” thing this past week, I’ll talk about a show that started this past fall TV season and had all the trappings of big-wig executive producer with no ideas cash-in. I’m talking about FOX’s Lethal Weapon TV series, based on the classic 80s/90s action films of the same name starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as Riggs and Murtaugh (who’s too old for this shit).

If you’re thinking to yourself “This doesn’t need a TV show remake” I don’t disagree with you. But surprisingly enough it actually turned out pretty good.

In the TV show version, Clayne Crawford (aka the guy that plays the scummy hick in that one TV show) plays Riggs and Damon Wayans (aka the successful Wayans brother who wasn’t a part of White Chicks or Scary Movie or…) plays Murtaugh. Most of the fun of the show comes from these two lead’s chemistry – they play off each other really well and it only takes a few episodes for them to completely slide into buddy cop territory. Crawford is great at being unhinged and manic as Riggs, and Wayans (who has obviously already established his comedy chops) does a good job at being his restrained, straight-laced foil.

It doesn’t hesitate to be over-the-top with the action either. In the climax of one episode, Riggs chases down the bad guy who is attempting to run over the Attractive Female of the Week. While driving, Riggs leans out the window and with both hands on his gun, shoots out the tires of the bad guy’s SUV, causing it to crash and flip over the AFW (who has tripped and fallen helplessly, of course) and land on its roof behind her, allowing Riggs to stop, pick up her, and walk away from the subsequent explosion in slow-mo.

Yeah, okay, the show isn’t going to win any progressive awards. It’s pure popcorn entertainment, sprinkled with some family values (I thoroughly enjoy that they kept the wholesome Murtaugh family aspect from the movies, as it’s fun to watch Wayans-as-Murtaugh juggle a suicidal partner along with a son who is expecting a car for his birthday) and some honest emotional moments (Crawford does amazing work showing Riggs’ emotion grieving over his dead wife).

And while I’ve focused on the main duo, the supporting cast is pretty great as well. Jordana Brewster plays the department psychologist in a much more pivotal role than the movies where the psychologist was just a punchline for Riggs’ antics. Kevin Rahm does great as the Captain who has to drag Riggs and Murtaugh into his office every week thanks to what mayhem they’ve caused on any particular case. And Keesha Sharp gives a great performance as Trish, Murtaugh’s wife. (There’s also an episode where Thomas Lennon guest stars as Leo Getz, and while he can’t replicate Joe Pesci’s sleazeball exactly he still does a wonderful job as Riggs and Murtaugh’s third wheel.)

All in all, if you’re looking to turn off your brain and watch some fun entertainment, you could do a lot worse than Lethal Weapon. The first season just wrapped up and it’s been renewed for a second, so I expect it to pop up on Netflix or Hulu or one of those places in the near future. Give it a watch if you like action comedy. I think you’ll enjoy it.

THE BAD

YouTube Celebrities Are Celebrities

Do you know who PewDiePie and Jontron are? If you don’t, I’ll give you a crash course: PewDiePie is a YouTube star who makes gaming videos and has over 50 million subscribers to his channel – he’s the richest and most subscribed to YouTube personality. Jontron is another YouTube personality, formerly of Game Grumps and now kind of his own thing (and has around 3 million subscribers on his channel).

Both recently have kicked up a shitstorm in different ways. PewDiePie made headlines last month because he pulled a “practical joke” when he made two Indian men hold up a sign that said “Death to All Jews.” His explanation was that it was a joke and he did it to highlight absurd services you could pay for online. Disney immediately ended their partnership with him, unsurprisingly, after this “joke.”

Jontron more recently – as in last week – also decided to be racist and defended Steve King’s abominable tweets (you know the one: “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”). He then went further and double-downed on his racism during a streamed interview with another streamer. One of the finer talking point he brought up was that the richest black man is still more likely to be a criminal than the poorest white man. You know, standard racist shitbag stuff.

Both of these guys have millions of followers on YouTube. More importantly, a lot of their followers are impressionable kids. And their attitude after making these “jokes” and remarks has kind of been “Why do people care? Aren’t there more important things to do than harp on me for some little thing I did?” Remember when Michael Richards went on a racist rant doing comedy and his career basically died? Remember when Mel Gibson espoused Anti-Semitism and he’s still struggling to claw his way back into the accepted ranks of Hollywood?

Back when reality TV was booming, people would distinguish between “real celebrities” and “reality TV celebrities.” This distinction has continued to the YouTube generation where there are “real celebrities” and “YouTube celebrities.” The thing is…these YouTube stars are still reaching millions of people with what they say and do and the videos they post. They’re still celebrities. And the problem is because they exist and make their celebrity from the internet, it’s very hard to hold them accountable because for every article that pops up denouncing him, there are far more who subscribe because they think that joke is fine.

As YouTube (and other internet-based) celebrities grow, as a whole we need to stop treating them with kid gloves. Jim Sterling (one of my personal favorite YouTube personalities) wrote a good article on it today – better than I could ever write – so I highly recommend reading that. Here’s a quote from it: “YouTube has seen more individuals than I can count skyrocket to fame without managers, without marketing departments, without agents, without people telling them when to stop or how what they say and do could impact the world as well as themselves. I do truly believe that some of them don’t understand how important they actually are, and that their surprise right now is genuine. But this is the reality of the situation. You are celebrities now, and that doesn’t mean you get to say and do whatever you please.”

More importantly, we’re in this middle-ground where parents don’t really pay attention to what their kids watch on the internet (as long as it isn’t porn). Sure, you can keep them from watching an R-rated movie or listening to Eminem’s latest album where he talks about killing his wife again, but do most parents nowadays have time to go through YouTube videos themselves and filter out who they’re allowed to watch?

Hold people accountable for what they say. Don’t let racist shitwads get away with being racist shitwads, and don’t encourage them either.

THE WEIRD

What WHAT In The Butt?

I’m not gonna link to this because I’m sure you can find it yourself if you really want to know more about it, but apparently a matador got a bull’s horn up his butt in Spain recently.

That’s right, the horn went up his butt.

Ow.

Also ew.

Ew and ow and ow and ow and ow.

The Good, The Bad, and The Weird – March 15,2017

THE GOOD

Horizon: Zero Dawn

I wanted to wait until I’d played enough of the game to do a proper “review” before I put this in my good list. And after about twenty or so hours of gameplay over two weeks…yeah, this is definitely a good. One of the best games on the PS4 for sure and a must-pick-up if you’re into open-world games that involve giant robot beasts, and I mean, who isn’t into that?

The basic plot of Horizon: Zero Dawn is you’re a young woman who has grown up as an outcast in her culture. It takes place after an apocalypse (like most fiction does nowadays) and the human race lives in different tribes while wild machines roam the earth killing and sucking up resources. Most machines move like herd animals, although some are more aggressive than others. It’s an interesting concept – normal wild animals like rabbits and foxes and pigs roam the wilderness as well, but the main threat to humanity’s existence are these large robotic animals that are very intimidating.

Gameplay is addicting – each beast has weaknesses you have to exploit to be able to take it down. You never feel overpowered – the only things you get from leveling up are a few more hit points and a skill point. Therefore all of the robot beasts still pose a threat even twenty hours into the game. “Easy” encounters can go sideways very quickly when an unexpected variable is introduced. For example, I thought I had a beast well away from the rest of its herd and started trying to take it down – unfortunately I didn’t sequester it far enough away and I ended up having to fight the entire aggressive herd at once instead of one by one. Whoops.

The game suffers from typical open-world tropes – there’s collectibles you have to search for, sidequests that involve you going from point A to point B, only to discover you actually need to go to point C before returning to point A. But Aloy herself makes it worth it – she’s a well-developed character who faces the world with lots of sarcasm, and it’s nice hearing her talk to herself about some of the situations she gets into. And the minute-to-minute gameplay makes you forget about the “typical” quests – I get so much joy out of chipping away a robot’s armor and exploiting the weaknesses. And the game fits different playstyles – going in with no plan and shooting from the hip can be just as efficient as taking a few minutes to set up traps and plan out your attack.

On top of all that, this is a very pretty game. Videos don’t really do it justice due to compression and the like – everything about the environment is gorgeous. The robots are very detailed and life-like in their movements – one of the little joys I get is overriding one robot and watching how they interact with other robots before they attack each other.

All in all, I highly recommend this game if you have a PS4 and like open-world games that aren’t just your typical marine shooters. The world is big enough to be impressive but not so big that it’s overwhelming, and people seem to be finishing it in 40-50 hours which is a pretty good number for these types of games. I could go on and on about it, but if you’re interested – you can watch one of my videos to see whether you’d like it or not.

THE BAD

Amai Clooney’s “Baby Bump”

This is gonna be short. Last Thursday, Amal Clooney gave a speech at the United Nations. The next day everyone was not reporting on her speech, but instead her fashion choice and her “baby bump.” The Washington Post has a good summary of everything here.

I’m going to hark back to what Tina Fey said at the Golden Globes in 2015: “Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria and was selected for a three-person U.N. commission investigating rules of war violations in the Gaza Strip. So tonight her husband is getting a lifetime-achievement award.”

It’s Hollywood’s shittacular treatment of women on steroids. Amal Clooney happened to marry George Clooney – and the media treats her like she’s the trophy wife. This is a woman who has accomplished pretty much everything that George Clooney has pretended to accomplish as the characters he’s portrayed in movies.

Why the fuck is a “baby bump” something important to report about in the first place? Sure, fine, if there’s an actress on the red carpet who is pregnant, fuck it. Report on that if you fucking have to. But this woman was literally giving a speech on crimes perpetrated by ISIS to the United Nations and the media has the gall to report on her fucking “baby bump”? Jesus Christ. What’s next? “Ruth Bader Ginsburg rocks amazing hairstyle and puts the supreme back in Supreme Court”?

Fuck off gossip trash media.

THE WEIRD

Metacritical Mass

I don’t really have a “weird” thing to report on this week. This gravitates more towards bad than weird, but in lieu of anything else I’ll just throw this out there.

On February 28, the aforementioned Horizon: Zero Dawn released. On March 3 (the Friday of the same week) the new Legend of Zelda game released as well. Both are open-world video games…both are console exclusives…both are being raved about as excellent games…and under normal circumstances, that’s all you need to know.

However, as much as I hate to say it as an avid video gaming fan, video games are insanely petty and childish. Going all the way back to the days of Nintendo vs. Sega, people who play video games have stupidly ludicrous brand loyalty. And with the advent of the internet, there’s this subset of video game players who have to prove that MY game is the BEST game and no OTHER game can be as good as MY game.

Metacritic is the bane of video game existence right now. I’ll probably go into more depth about this in a later blog post, but essentially the review aggregator holds a lot of weight in the gaming community. Horizon: Zero Dawn currently has an 89 (out of 100) average review score. That’s awesome. The new Zelda game currently has a 97, which is amazing.

But it’s not a 98, which is absolutely horrendous to some idiots.

You think I’m joking? I’m not. The reviewer that gave the new Zelda a 7.5/10 which lowered the Metacritic from 98 to 97 ended up having his website DDOS attacked and people also tried to hack his e-mail and Twitter handle. All because his review wasn’t a 10/10 (or, in a pinch, a 9/10).

This stupid shit is why people won’t take video games seriously as a medium. For fuck’s sake people, grow up.

The Good, The Bad, and The Weird – March 8, 2017

So I know I promised two blog updates a week, however I had a few issues with coming up with a theme for Monday’s blog post. Fortunately I finally settled on one – unfortunately it was Sunday night when I was hit with inspiration and didn’t have a topic that fit my theme that I felt comfortable writing by Monday. So there will definitely be two blog posts next week – I apologize for that!

Moving on to this week’s Good, Bad, and Weird:

THE GOOD

Logan

I saw Logan this weekend and it was fantastic. As I described it to my friends, I came out of it thinking it was a good movie that happened to include superheroes, as opposed to a good “superhero” movie – if that makes any sense. It wasn’t perfect by any means but it was damn good and a wonderful send-off for both Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart – who have both said this would be their last movie in the X-Men universe. And what a movie to go out on.

I won’t spoil anything about the plot itself, but if you didn’t know this is an R-rated take on the character of Wolverine. And within the first ten minutes the movie lets you know that this isn’t a family-friendly take-your-kids-to-see-superheroes-fight movie: there’s boobs, there’s cursing, and Wolverine slashes a guy’s arm off in a much bloodier fashion than we’re used to from the sanitized previous X-Men.

Once the director establishes that this is not your father’s X-Men, it slows down a bit and becomes plot-focused. Not that it’s a bad thing. Both Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman are at the top of their acting game, giving increasing depth to both characters we’ve come to know and love. And Dafne Keen does an amazing job as Laura, the young girl Logan ends up having to care for, and manages to keep up with both actors in her film debut.

This isn’t a popcorn flick by any means – it actually evokes a very T2: Judgement Day-like atmosphere both in cinematic experience and also the world created. I highly recommend seeing it even if the regular Marvel superhero movies aren’t your thing – I have a feeling in years to come Logan is going to stand up with the greatly respected movies of the genre like The Dark Knight.

THE BAD

Obama is not the Oboogeyman

On Saturday morning, Donald Trump tweeted a message accusing the former president of wiretapping Trump Tower. Trump claimed in that tweet that it was a Nixonesque, Watergate level scandal. Now, as far as reporting has investigated, it seems Trump got this idea from a Breitbart article that mentions wiretaps in regards to an FBI investigation regarding the Trump campaign and Russian banks. Having to condense the article into a 160-character tweet, it became “Obama’s wiretapping me!”

Now let’s put aside any sort of discussion that maybe it was to distract from the Sessions/Russia brouhaha that was stirring. Let’s focus on one simple fact:

For 8 years, Barack Obama has been the person the GOP blames for everything. Now they’re having trouble letting go, and on top of that Donald Trump is trying to invoke the former president’s name as some sort of Bloody Mary type scenario.

The White House leaks are Obama loyalists. Obama wiretapping. Obama is secretly still pulling strings in the WH to make Trump look bad. Trump inherited Obama’s mess. Obama Obama Obama Obama Obama. (Careful, Congress GOP, don’t say Obama’s name three times in front of your bathroom mirror or Obama might appear and allow transgender people to use your bathroom.)

But in all seriousness – Obama is no longer the President. There’s a little bit of wiggle room at the beginning here during the transition of power. But invoking Obama’s name to take the blame can only work for so long. The GOP is in control from top to bottom. They basically have all three branches of government in their control (whenever Trump’s Supreme Court nominee goes through) so eventually it’s going to become their mess. I think the actual career politicians are starting to notice this – especially with the Trumpcare bill that is now being debated. They’re starting to realize the blame game they’ve been passing forward for the last eight years is no longer a credible action. Especially because they tied everything to the former president. But that’s what they have to live with – they spent those two terms villifying Obama and everything he tried to accomplish, and set themselves up to be the conquering heroes if they only got that dastardly Obama out of office.

Well he’s gone now…you’re going to have to stop trotting his name out to distract from your own problems. Sorry!

THE WEIRD

The Switch Taste Test

If you’re not up-to-date on video game news, the latest hot new console has been released: The Nintendo Switch. Now I’m not going to review it (I don’t have one) or talk about it much yet. Instead, I’d like to inform you of the weird internet-goings-on related to the Switch cartridges.

You see, Nintendo (in a smartish move) applied a bittering agent to the Nintendo Switch cartridges to keep small children from licking/biting/eating them. The same agent used in anti-nail-biting treatments and the like. That’s a good idea…except, well…

See, the funny thing about human nature is that we have an indomitable spirit. And when we’re told “NO” sometimes we just have to do it anyway. So when the Switch released this Friday, it wasn’t long before YouTube was flooded with videos of people “taste testing” the cartridges. Because they couldn’t be THAT bitter, right?

You think I’m joking? I’m not. Just take a look at all the hits when I search for Switch Taste Test.

Yep. That’s this week’s weirdness. Don’t have anything else to say about that…other than…for the love of God, why?

The Good, The Bad, and The Weird – March 1, 2017

After getting on a schedule with my YouTube videos, I’ve realized if I hold my own butt to the fire and establish a specific time for which to do things I start actually doing the things on a regular basis. Surprise! So in an effort to start getting back into posting blogs on regularly, I’m going to start holding my butt to the fire on these as well.

To help with that, I’ve decided to schedule blog updates on Mondays and Wednesdays (this coincides with my YouTube videos going up Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursday). With the possibility of also having a special type of blog post on Sundays – I’ll get to that in a bit. On top of the schedule, I’ve decided to theme my blog posts as a way to make sure I write. The fact is so much stuff happens that it gets overwhelming trying to decide what to write about. So if I stick to my weekly themes, hopefully I’ll be cranking out blog updates on the regular pretty quickly.

So the Wednesday updates are going to be called The Good, The Bad, and The Weird. Every Wednesday I’m going to pick something from the past week or so that makes me happy, something that makes me upset, and something that was either strange or caught my eye for a random reason. It’ll be three quick, short-form topics that I can either heap praise on or rant about to get out of my system. Should be fun for everyone, right?

Cool! So that’s enough preamble – let’s get to it!

THE GOOD

Netflix’s Santa Clarita Diet

So I just finished watching the first season of Santa Clarita Diet on Netflix (it was added early February) and I’m gonna go ahead and say this is a big ol’ recommend from me. Now I knew what I was getting into when I started it – it’s by the same guy who created Better Off Ted, a lesser known comedy that got two seasons on ABC before being cancelled. Better Off Ted was a workplace comedy that took the ridiculousness up to 11 and was right up my alley in terms of its humor. (Better Off Ted is ALSO on Netflix, if you’re curious!) It also stars Timothy Olyphant (who is one of my favorite actors) so it was basically a must-watch for me and I was pretty certain I’d enjoy it. And I did.

Santa Clarita Diet is a send-up of the suburban family comedy the same way Better Off Ted messed with the office comedy genre. In it, Drew Barrymore and the afore-mentioned Timothy Olyphant are married realtors whose life has gotten a little…routine. Then suddenly the wife becomes a zombie and everything goes ass-up.

Every time I thought the show was going to go in one typical comedy direction, it almost always threw me a curveball and took the plot in a completely different direction. Drew Barrymore is great as the bored wife-turned-exciting zombie, and Timothy Olyphant plays slightly against type as the somewhat exasperated husband who can’t keep up with his wife’s new zombie ways. Some of the best moments of the show are them arguing about typical husband-wife things – for example, while standing over a large pile of weapons they bought for the purposes of a murder, one argues with the other over a hairbrush: “Just once I’d like to go to the store and buy only what we put on the list!”

Liv Hewson plays the hapless couple’s daughter, who for good reason has a bit of a teenage rebellious streak once she finds out her mom is undead – and she often times steals the scenes she’s in. Similarly, Skyler Gisondo plays their nerdy neighbor who knows everything about zombies and is totally cool with all the people-eating happening next door, and he has some great one-liners over the course of the ten episodes.

If you’re in the mood for a laugh, I highly recommend putting this show on – it’s ten half-hour episodes so easy enough to binge watch if you like it, and also easy to get a decent sample size to see whether or not you’ll enjoy it, but not too much that you’ll feel like you’ve wasted your time. But I don’t recommend eating while watching it – as it has to do with zombies, there are quite a few gross-out scenes included that may make you question that burger you’re about to chow down on.

THE BAD

Kellyanne’s Couch “Controversy”

A while back I made my feelings on “controversy” very clear. As such, the “controversy” that has come up in the past two days has drawn my ire because of how goddamn stupid it is.

If you haven’t heard, a picture of Kellyanne Conway with her feet on the Oval Office couch made its rounds on the internet recently. Some people made it a meme, some people were outraged by the disrespect she was showing the Oval Office. Some people even went so far as to say she was being racist, because it was during a meeting with a bunch of leaders from HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities) and surmised that if the room had been filled with a bunch of white people, she would have been standing at attention and not in such a casual position.

And this pisses me off.

Kellyanne Conway has done some stupid shit. “Alternative facts” and the “Bowling Green massacre” come to mind immediately. There’s probably lots of other things she’s said and done as Trump’s mouthpiece that are disrespectful and dumb. I’m not arguing that people can’t dislike her as a person or think she’s doing a bad job. But please. For the love of all that is holy – don’t make fucking controversies out of petty shit like this.

Make controversies over Congressional Republicans trying to sweep the Trump administration’s ties to Russia under the rug. Make controversies over Trump rolling back clean water regulations and heading towards dismantling the EPA. Make controversies over Sean Spicer taking people’s phones to see who they’ve been talking to. Make controversies over people like Trump, Spicer, and Conway making up terrorist attacks to make people scared and become more pro-nationalism.

But don’t do this. Just don’t. This is one of those things where people have decided to hate Kellyanne Conway and now every little thing she does is put under a microscope and judged. She happened to be sitting on the couch, looking at her phone (as she was taking a picture of everyone with said phone) when somebody else took a picture. Fuck off if that’s enough to get riled up about when there’s plenty of ACTUAL problems we should be discussing instead.

THE WEIRD

Tacos in Traffic

This one’s gonna be short as it’s just a link to an article:

In Seattle, a taco truck apparently opened its doors and served food to people stuck in traffic while waiting for an accident to be cleared up.

Just an amusing little anecdote that caught my eye. The world isn’t all that bad, right? Find happiness in the little things.

Even if you’re stuck in traffic.

The Best of 2016

2016 wasn’t particularly regarded as a great year. People died, things generally sucked, and so a lot of people were happy to see it end. However, I started 2016 with a list of the best things of 2015. So it only feels right that as we start 2017, I should take a look back at 2016 and talk about some of my favorite things from the year. Because 2016 wasn’t ALL bad.

Best Movie of 2016

The Nice Guys

It was a difficult decision this year to determine what my favorite movie was. There were a lot of “top 5” movies, but nothing really jumped out at me as the “best.” Definitely nothing that blew me away like Mad Max: Fury Road did in 2015.

That being said, The Nice Guys is a damn great movie. Shane Black is a writer/director that I have a soft spot for and his take on a buddy cop-esque romp through the 70s was hilarious. Russell Crowe plays slightly off-type as a disgruntled fixer who basically gets paid money to visit bad people and hurt them to make them stop doing the bad things. Ryan Gosling plays a ‘detective’ who does some detecting, but does more drinking and conning people out of money.

The two get together and end up investigating a case linked to the porn industry (which was a happening place in the 70s) and, of course, hilarity ensues. The two leads play off each other extremely well, and the young actress who plays Ryan Gosling’s daughter is great and doesn’t ever feel like one of the dreaded annoying children who ruin movies. Matt Bomer also shows up as a villain and is pretty menacing in his role.

This movie feels like an old-school 90s action comedy at times, which is why I was drawn to it so much. The more I thought about it, the more I enjoyed The Nice Guys, and as such it tops my list as my favorite movie of 2016.

Top 5 Movie Round-Up:
Captain America: Civil War
Arrival
Star Wars: Rogue One
10 Cloverfield Lane

Best Video Game of 2016

Overwatch

This is pretty much the biggest no-brainer out of all the lists for me. Overwatch basically consumed my soul from minute one, and it hasn’t let up yet. I’ve put close to 250 hours into this game since getting it at the end of May 2016. Which means out of seven months of the year, I dedicated around ten days of my life to playing this game. Addicted? Perhaps. But it’s a damn good game.

To start off, I’m not big on multiplayer-only games. I like playing games with my friends, of course, and growing up it was very fun to play games like Goldeneye, Smash Bros, Perfect Dark, and the like with all of us crowding around a small-ass CRT television to watch the splitscreen. But video games overall have been my escape to new worlds, which means I’ve gravitated towards single-player experiences as games went from local multiplayer focus to online multiplayer focus. I’ve never felt the need to get competitive with people across the world in multiplayer, it was more about hanging out with friends if I was playing games with other people.

Until Overwatch.

Now I play with random people all the time and I’ve made a bunch of new gaming friends who I team up with to play matches. I get frustrated and yell at my screen, turn the game off, go watch a few Overwatch videos, then turn the game back on and play some more. It’s addicting at every level. The game encourages you to play as many characters as possible because they’re all useful and they all have different abilities and different situations where they excel. And I’m a guy who has ADD when playing any sort of multiplayer, so being able to play new characters every match and still be good at the game was right up my alley.

The mechanics are all polished, the characters are bright and fun and varied, and Blizzard keeps putting out new content each month for all the players and most of it is free. From tanking as Reinhardt to building turrets with Symmetra to blowing shit up as Junkrat, I love playing each and every character (except McCree – fuck McCree) and I will probably continue to play this game all through 2017. Which is good. It will help me save money.

Top 5 Video Game Round-Up:
XCOM 2
Enter the Gungeon
Uncharted 4
Doom

Best Television Show of 2016

iZombie

I didn’t start watching this show until last year, even though it was already into season 2 by the time I picked it up on Netflix. But it was by and far the standout show of the year for me, and when season 3 starts airing in 2017 I will be there with bells on.

iZombie is basically Veronica Mars, but with zombies. Liv Moore (ha ha!), the main character, is a zombie who works as a medical examiner in the morgue. When she eats brains, she takes on the personality of the person’s brain she ate but also gets access to some of their memories. So under the guise of being a psychic, she helps her cop buddy solve murder mysteries while acting kinda strange.

All the characters are charming in that Rob Thomas-inspired witty banter kinda way. There are multiple season long story arcs and maniac villains that keep you on the edge of your seat, wanting to find out just what happens next. Rose McIver does a wonderful job as Liv, especially since she basically has a different personality every episode. David Anders is pitch-perfect as Blaine, Liv’s rival who just fucks up her life over and over again.

It’s not action-packed by any means, but the mysteries and plot twists are many and you won’t see all of them coming. Plus, Rob Thomas (the singer) actually shows up in the season 2 finale. Rob Thomas on a Rob Thomas show! How cool is that? (It’s very cool.) If you like mysteries and don’t mind brains for dinner, this is the show for you.

Top 5 TV Show Round-Up:
Person of Interest
The Flash
Mr. Robot
Lethal Weapon

Best Book of 2016

The Four Legendary Kingdoms, by Matthew Reilly

So I’m pretty sure this is the only book that came out in 2016 that I read, so by default it’s the best book of 2016. However it wasn’t the only book I read this year, and yet I would still say it was the best book I read. So I’m not just giving it top honors for releases in 2016, but it’s the best out of anything I read last year.

Matthew Reilly isn’t an author for everyone. His novels are action movies condensed into book form. Ridiculous shit that would never be possible in real life is done by the heroes and heroines. It’s pulpy, campy fun that is easy to digest and a thrill ride from start to finish. When I was 18, I visited England and found his book Ice Station in a used book store. I read it in one sitting that very night in the hotel room, and the next day I went back to the store and bought his other three books that they had and read them all, too. The main character of several of his books is Shane “Scarecrow” Schofield, an American marine who kicks ass and doesn’t chew bubble gum. And one of his crew is one of my favorite female characters ever: Mother Newman. Her introduction, word for word, from Ice Station:

“Mother was thirty-four, six-foot-two and had a fully shaven head. She weighed in at nearly two hundred pounds. Her call sign’Mother’ wasn’t supposed to mean ‘maternal figure.’ It was short for motherfucker.”

The Four Legendary Kingdoms, however, isn’t a Scarecrow novel. It stars Matthew Reilly’s other main protagonist – Jack West Jr., a former Australian army ranger who is tasked with a project to save the world in his first novel Seven Ancient Wonders. Unlike Scarecrow’s books, which are more Die Hard – military & technology based and usually involve Scarecrow infiltrating bases and fighting off scores of enemies with his badassitude – Jack West Jr.’s books are more Indiana Jones in style: action-packed, but involving historical artifacts like the seven ancient wonders and have puzzles and historical mysteries thrown into the action as well.

The Jack West Jr. novels are basically what I would write if I were to write action novels – ancient mythology infused balls-to-the-wall action. And The Four Legendary Kingdoms didn’t disappoint in that aspect. Not to spoil the story, but it ends up putting a twist on one of my favorite mythologies and does it in a way that I didn’t even figure out myself until Jack West himself figured it out. And on top of that, there was a moment very early on in the book that made me actually shout “No Way!” and put a stupid smile on my face for the entire rest of the book (which I read in one sitting, of course).

Okay, I’m done espousing about how much I love Matthew Reilly and his books. I wouldn’t recommend starting with The Four Legendary Kingdoms if you haven’t read any of his other books: pick up Ice Station, Seven Ancient Wonders, or Temple (a standalone story) if you want to see if you enjoy his work. If you like thrill rides with twists and turns and non-stop shit-your-pants adrenaline, read his books. I promise you’ll enjoy them.

Other Books I Read in 2016 That Were Awesome:
The Mistborn trilogy, by Brandon Sanderson
The Rook, by Daniel O’Malley
Vacant, by Alex Hughes

Best Album of 2016

Blink-182 – California

I’ve always liked Blink-182 – ever since I was a little freshman turd listening to Enema of the State in high school. They, along with The Offspring, were the band that defined my teenage years music-wise. They weren’t mature then, but I wasn’t mature either. It was a nice fit and I still enjoy a lot of their songs – perhaps driven by nostalgia, perhaps not.

17 years later, replacing Tom with Matt Skiba, Blink released a new album that immediately jumped into my favorites after a first listen. Their sound is different and they still haven’t quite matured all the way (go listen to Built This Pool for proof) but it’s definitely a Blink-182 album for better or worse. In my opinion, it’s almost all better.

I’m not going to spend too much time on this because as I’ve said previously, I always find it hard to talk about music because people’s taste varies and at this point, you probably know whether you like Blink-182 or not. My two favorite songs off the album are No Future and Teenage Satellites. Listen to those and if you like them, you might want to give the album a full listen.

As much as 2016 sucked, I’m gonna be honest – I’m glad I got a new Blink-182 album out of it. That’s a win in my book.

Top 5 Album Round-Up:
Bad Vibrations, by A Day to Remember
Revolution Radio, by Green Day
Ace, by Scooter
Death of a Bachelor, by Panic! at the Disco

The Shittiest Turd of 2016

Death

From the death of David Bowie a week into the year to Carrie Fisher’s death ending it, 2016 was one long reminder of our mortality and our finite existence. I would be lying if I said I didn’t have a few mortality-induced panic attacks over the course of the year. It sucked to be reminded of death every other week as yet another hero or idol of yours ended up in a casket.

So for everyone who managed to survive 2016, here’s a big middle finger Death. Fuck off.

Top 5 Shittiest Turd Round-Up:
Donald Trump
Harambe memes
Mechanic: Resurrection
All the alt-right, white supremacist motherfuckers out there

That’s it for 2016. Onwards to 2017! Let’s see what this new year brings us, both in good and bad!

100 Albums To Listen To

It’s been a while since I wrote anything of significance in my blog, and in an attempt to ramp back up to regular updating I’ve decided I’m going to return to doing one of my favorite things – making lists! Easy enough for me to put together and will ease me back into writing posts on a regular basis.

So the first list was inspired by a friend of mine – I was asked for recommendations on electronic music which led me to starting to listen to a lot of old music I had on my computer as well as old albums I hadn’t listened to in a long time. I started thinking to myself “what albums would I consider the best out of my collection?” And after about two weeks of poring over different choices, I finally settled on what I consider a good list of 100 albums.

I aimed for 100, initially excluding compilation and live albums, however when I hit 80 and realized I didn’t have many more that immediately jumped out at me as belonging on the list, I included a few compilations and live albums that I enjoy. I didn’t include things like movie soundtracks, movie scores, or other compilations that involved multiple artists.

The main qualification for this list was that I had to enjoy the album from start to finish – i.e. if I stick the CD into my car I could enjoy it from start to finish without skipping any tracks. I’d say about 75 of the albums have either 0 or 1 song that I truly dislike enough to skip.

This isn’t the full extent of my music taste, as there are a lot of artists I enjoy that I’ll like four or five songs off an album but don’t like the rest of it – therefore they weren’t included. I’m also notorious for cherry picking my favorite one or two songs off an album and only listening to those over and over.

Anyway, enough talk – here’s my list of 100 albums to listen to. They’re sorted alphabetically by artist because I think it would be too hard for me to physically rank them from 1 to 100.

100 Albums To Listen To

3OH!3 – Want
3OH!3 – Streets of Gold
30 Seconds To Mars – Love Lust Faith + Dreams
A Day to Remember – Bad Vibrations
Amaranthe – Massive Addictive
And Then There Were None – Who Speaks For Planet Earth?
Arctic Monkeys – Favourite Worst Nightmare
Arctic Monkeys – AM
Assemblage 23 – Storm
Assemblage 23 – Bruise
Bleachers – Strange Desire
Blink-182 – Enema of the State
Blink-182 – The Mark, Tom, & Travis Show
Blink-182 – Neighborhoods
Blink-182 – California
Bloc Party – Intimacy
Bowling For Soup – Drunk Enough to Dance
Breathe Carolina – Hello Fascination
Buckcherry – Confessions
Bullet for My Valentine – Fever
Bullet for My Valentine – Venom
Cobra Starship – Hot Mess
David Guetta – Nothing But The Beat
Disturbed – Ten Thousand Fists
Electric Six – Fire
Electric Six – Senor Smoke
Electric Six – Kill
Electric Six – Zodiac
Eve 6 – Horrorscope
Fall Out Boy – Infinity On High
Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand
Franz Ferdinand – You Could Have It So Much Better
Green Day – American Idiot
Green Day – 21st Century Breakdown
Heaven’s Basement – Filthy Empire
Jimmy Eat World – Bleed American
Judas Priest – Screaming for Vengeance
Judas Priest – Painkiller
Lady Gaga – Born This Way
Less Than Jake – Anthem
Linkin Park – Hybrid Theory
Ludo – You’re Awful, I Love You
Metallica – The Black Album
Metallica – Load
Metallica – S&M
Mindless Self Indulgence – You’ll Rebel to Anything
Mindless Self Indulgence – If
Mindless Self Indulgence – How I Learned To Stop Giving A Shit And Love Mindless Self Indulgence
Muse – Black Holes and Revelations
Muse – Resistance
My Chemical Romance – The Black Parade
My Chemical Romance – Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys
Neuroticfish – A Greater Good
Nothing More – Nothing More
Orgy – Vapor Transmission
Papa Roach – Infest
Papa Roach – The Paramour Sessions
Panic! at the Disco – A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out
Rammstein – Mutter
Reggie and the Full Effect – Songs Not to Get Married To
Rise Against – Appeal To Reason
Rise Against – Endgame
Rob Zombie – Hellbilly Deluxe
Rob Zombie – Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor
Scooter – Push the Beat for this Jam
Scooter – Jumping All Over the World
Shinedown – Amaryllis
She Wants Revenge – She Wants Revenge
She Wants Revenge – This Is Forever
Spineshank – The Height of Callousness
Spineshank – Self-Destructive Pattern
Stabbing Westward – Darkest Days
System of a Down – Toxicity
System of a Down – Mezmerize
The Bloodhound Gang – Hooray for Boobies!
The Bloodhound Gang – Hard-Off
The Crystal Method – Vegas
The Faint – Danse Macabre
The Faint – Wet From Birth
The Faint – Doom Abuse
The Glitch Mob – Drink The Sea
The Killers – Hot Fuss
The Killers – Sam’s Town
The Offspring – Ixnay on the Hombre
The Offspring – Americana
The Offspring – Conspiracy of One
The Offspring – Splinter
The Offspring – Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace
The Presidents of the United States of America – Love Everybody
The Prodigy – Invaders Must Die
The Prodigy – The Day Is My Enemy
Tiesto – Just Be
Tool – Ænima
Tool – Lateralus
Trivium – Vengeance Falls
Twenty One Pilots – Vessel
Velvet Revolver – Contraband
Volbeat – Beyond Hell/Above Heaven
Volbeat – Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies
Walk The Moon – Talking Is Hard

                               

And there you go. If you enjoy music recommendations, there’s a whole bunch of them. I’ll also be doing a few more music related blog posts in the next few days. Aaaaaand that’s it. Kbye.

Make America Stand Again

So I’m sure you’ve heard about the hot new controversy that is sweeping the nation. The one where a 49ers quarterback decides to protest by sitting down during the national anthem. And before I talk about what I want to talk about regarding this “controversy” I’d like to make it clear what my opinion on it is.

I don’t care.

I really, really, really don’t care. Like, on a scale of 1 to 10, it’s a 0. I don’t care. This is exactly the bullshit kind of “controversy” I talked about in a previous post and I was over it before it was even real news. He’s a football player, he’s protesting about something he cares about, let him do it, who fucking cares. Honestly. You don’t need to interview experts or other athletes or bring it up to politicians. It’s not news. It’s not a story.

The best thing I saw on it was “Colin Kaepernick is a rich quarterback, why should he be protesting anything? Because if he was Colin Kaepernick, employee at Verizon Wireless nobody would give a shit.” Which is exactly true. The only reason anybody cares is because it’s a sports guy doing a thing. If the guy next to you at the football game doesn’t get up during the national anthem, do you get in his face about not being a patriot? Do you go bare-knuckle brawling in the aisle? Is your experience ruined if the guy in seat 42B across the way didn’t get up? Are you going to walk over there and give that person a piece of your mind?

It’s manufactured controversy. It’s dumb. I don’t care.

BUT.

I do care about psychology, because I majored in it. And what I really find interesting about it is the cognitive dissonance that is on display during people’s reactions to it. I’ve seen things like pictures of people holding an American flag standing on Colin Kaepernick’s jersey to prove a point. What point? That apparently this quarterback jerk is disrespectful to the flag, to the country, to all the soldiers who have died to make America free, etc. etc. A big argument I’ve also seen is the “well, I understand he’s expressing his First Amendment right, but I’m going to express my First Amendment right and call him an asshole.” And that’s understandable and perfectly fine because, you know, First Amendment rights and all that.

But let me tell you something. There’s this guy who’s been on TV for over a year now who has been saying America sucks every chance he gets. He’s been belligerent, insulting, misogynistic, and racist. He’s been exercising his First Amendment right to be an asshole (and call people assholes) all over the place. If you missed my thinly veiled reference, I’ll immediately clarify: I’m talking about Donald Trump.

If you disagree with me, don’t forget his campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again.” He is directly implying that America as it stands is not great. That it needs fixing. Which I’m pretty sure is the reasoning behind Colin Kaapernick’s sit-down protest. He thinks there are things in America that need fixing.

And yet there are people who in one breath say they want to make Donald Trump president, but in the very next breath say that Colin Kaepernick is a spoiled brat and an idiot. One is “speaking his mind” and “telling it like he sees it” but the other is “trying to gain attention” and “a daft prima donna.”

So what’s the difference between the two situations?

(Some of you are going to say Trump is white and Kaepernick is black, and while yes, that is a big difference and in all likelihood a huge factor, that’s not what I’ll be delving into here.)

The difference is simple.

Colin Kaepernick “disrespected” the flag. He “disrespected” the national anthem.

And for the love of God, people love their symbols.

I’m not knocking it. It’s so much easier to get outraged when an object is attacked over an idea. Plus, you get emotionally invested in those symbols. Somebody loses their wedding ring down the shower drain and they go nuts, but it doesn’t mean the marriage is over. But there’s an attachment there. It’s why people give a shit if you burn the American flag. Or a book. Or a bra. It’s a symbol of something.

Donald Trump talks in vague ideas. He wants to “build a wall” but skips around how he’s going to actually get it done. Similarly, his disrespect is vague. He wants to make America great again, but he never crosses the line to actual disrespect of the country itself by attacking a specific symbol (other than the President, I mean HA! It’s not like the President is the leader of the country and a huge symbolic presence in the world at large, right? Right guys?).

Patriotism is directly tied to symbolism. Americans stand behind our flag as a symbol. We stand behind our soldiers as a symbol. Just being in the military demands respect because we put high value on serving the country. But we don’t respect other flags as much. Would you hold the same outrage if Kaepernick didn’t stand during the Canadian national anthem? Do you think Canadians would have the same outrage if a Canadian athlete didn’t stand? And religion is tied to symbols, too. A Christian is probably going to directly oppose burning a Bible more than they will burning a Quran. Catholics might not care if a Book of Mormon gets torn to shreds, but a member of the LDS church would. Some of the most powerful beliefs are tied to the symbolism. A right-side up cross is holy, an upside-down cross is Satanic.

And Colin Kaepernick’s act of sitting down is two symbols clashing. It’s America’s patriotism clashing with America’s love of sports. We idolize our athletes. We wear jerseys of our favorite teams. We have pennants and jackets and helmets. We’ve turned them into symbols. It’s why we’re heartbroken when a respected athlete turns out to have been doping, or gets into a domestic violence dispute, or is Tim Tebow.

And that’s where this cognitive dissonance comes into play. Politicians we don’t respect. So Trump can say whatever he wants because he’s SUPPOSED to say America sucks. He’s SUPPOSED to insult the President and his rival, because we’re a two-party system and Republicans are better than Democrats, obviously. He’s going to fix everything!

But sports stars are our symbols. And we can’t have our symbols disappoint us. So we get outraged that one symbol isn’t respecting another symbol.

I’m using the royal we here. As I’ve said before, I don’t care. I don’t put my faith in symbols. But it sure is fascinating to watch others react.

I don’t really have an ending to this. This was a spur of the moment post. All I had was a slight rant prepared, and I don’t really have a rug to tie the room together. So I guess I’ll just end with a link to a psychology piece on the social function of symbols in case people feel like reading about it a little more.

And for the love of all that is holy, be happy! Don’t let media (social or otherwise) dictate what you should feel outraged about, or that you should feel outraged at all! Focus on happiness! CBS cares!

9 Reasons I Hate Clickbait Articles – You Won’t Believe Number 7!!!!

1. Whenever I see a clickbait article.

2. When people tell me “it’s just how news is right now.”

3. LOL.

4. When Psych perfectly encapsulated how I feel about Buzzfeed.

5. When cats are adorably funny!

6. When Tom Hanks’s initials spell Thanks.

7. In 1997, Bill Clinton enacted a secret government program to quietly introduce a drug that was unapproved by the FDA into the national water supply. This drug is supposed to boost dopamine levels to make the entire American society as a whole more compliant in the wishes of the Big Pharma 6. However, in .000001% of the human population, this drug had an unimaginable side effect – it turns humans into wendigos, cannibalistic creatures that feast on living flesh. The men in black have managed to keep this from the masses at the behest of former President Clinton, because his wife is one of these awful, wendigo creatures. I have hidden a non-binary code in the metadata of all these gifs and jpegs so the men in black do not find me, and the believers out there who are smart enough will be able to piece together this data and prove once and for all that the wendigo conspiracy is real and they ARE among us. Don’t be complacent. Don’t elect a wendigo president this fall.

8. But seriously, cats are adorable!

9. My feelings when clickbait articles have no proper ending!