Date:	2009-12-06 04:43
Subject:	Rolling Rocks
Security:	Public
Mood:	hopeful

"I say I'm a guy
But really I'm just a speck
Compared to a planet
And compared to a star
The planet's just another speck;
To think about all of this
To think about the vast, emptiness of space
With billions of billions of stars
Billions and billions of specks."
- Bill Nye, The Eyes Of Nye

I think I just play with the ferrets so I have an excuse to hit someone in the face with my old socks.

Why do I pursue the aims I do, in the names of game balance?

It's because of the people who support the underdog. It's because of those people who admire and respect the fighter. It's for people like her.

you just find something that reminds you unfailingly and unrelentingly of a friend you love.

From Glendon Mellow who seems to be a nice proper chap and all.

Jack: There's nothing wrong with being elite.
Or another example.
This one isn't about collectibles but it's the same kind of thing. I'm in a book store ... for new books. I've gone a little bit crazy and I'm about to spend a couple of hundred bucks. I murmur under my breath "money's too tight to mention".
Now the guy behind the register, he hears this. He looks at me, nodding his head knowingly like we're in some "club of cool" together. He says, "Yeah, Simply Red" like it's a password, and now we do the secret handshake.
And I'm thinking "Simply Red"? Lame English band. More soul at a polka convention. And the book store guy thinks he's on some kind of inside loop with that.
Sadie: Jack, that's the smuggest thing I ever heard. A guy tries to be nice and you stand there hating him just because he hasn't heard of the Valentine Brothers.
You're like my ex-boyfriend. He was that way about authors. He'd deliberately drop obscure quotes and references. He'd take over conversations at parties. But none of what he read was for the love of it. His knowledge was like a weapon.
Don't tell me you're like that. I don't want another jerk. I've had...
Hey, why are you smiling?
Jack: Because you've heard of the Valentine Brothers.

From wsfa:

"I'm not willing to give my true self up. It's a testament to my real personality that I would go so far as to make up another personality to give to the world," [Megan] Fox tells The New York Times Magazine. "The reality is, I'm hidden amongst all the insanity. Nobody can find me."

From this review of Roing Gogue, Sarah Palin's autobiomographicality:

Obviously a liberal. It seems they enjoy this type of ad hominem humor. What can you say? The French think Jerry Lewis is funny.

'Solve for gnome.'

Date:	2009-09-18 12:56
Subject:	Further Musings From A Wandering Son
Security:	Public
Mood:	depressed

This started as an attempt at a bio for the Atheist Nexus site I just joined. It grew out of control, so I'm posting it here instead.

I'm Australian, born in Victoria, and I spent the first four years of my life moving from location to location, sometimes as far north as Ipswich, before settling in Engadine for ten years. The reason for all the motion was following my father's ministry. We settled into a small Independent Baptist church-school in which my mother became a schoolteacher, my father a regular preacher for the church. I went through the Accelerated Christian Education system for ten years, was bullied constantly, was subjected to abuse from the principle both physical and emotional, and was routinely treated as subhuman - because my father was an outspoken Calvanist. My mother was similarly abused by her church regulars and my sister was subjected to massive amounts of self-esteem demolition by the same principal.

When I was... twelve, the pastor admitted to the congregation that he had been embezzling money from the church to prop up his lifestyle and to finance multiple business ventures that had failed. And not just from the church's coffers - no, he'd been using his position of influence to manipulate the (good, christian) wives of more successful churchgoers into mortgaging their houses to give him more money. He announced this as he announced that his creditors were getting too close and he was going to leave.

The principal of the school, who had been enjoying his position to torment my family on the basis of his disagreement with my father (who he could not attack directly), was heavily emotionally dependent on this pastor, and the revelation that he was leaving shook him - he said he would quit the school at the end of the year, and quit he did, taking with him his wife, the school's senior English teacher. I say that, but let me be as clear as I can: This is a school of thirty to forty students, ranging from kindergarten through to year twelve, being taught by a mostly self-teaching school system. The loss of the principal led to his replacement by one of the women in the church who had teaching experience, and, eventually, her replacement with an unqualified man whose primary qualification was as a choir leader. Why? Because he was a man.

Fortunately, I suppose, my father had a falling-out with the deacons of the church under this structure. The three remaining deacons disagreed with him, some major event - honestly, I don't remember the actual sermon - leading to a falling-out and them screwing my mother out of her long-service leave (ten years of service without a paid holiday). Rather than oust my sister from her education, mum and dad stuck it out for the last of a year, and, once my sister had graduated (she's four years my senior), fled south to Wollongong, where my sister would be going to university.

There was a huge cultural disconnect for me, leaving this church. Now, I had never liked the environment in which I was raised. It was literally torturous - I would go to school, get beaten up by kids half my age and half my size, run and hide, then be dragged before the principal and punished along with my assailants because of my involvement in 'fighting.' If not for students significantly younger than myself, it would be the school's collection of malcontents, behavioural cases that had been kicked out of public schools for various reasons. This includes stuff like starting fires or complete illiteracy. These kids would turn up at school, and before the school day had even started, be making their days by throwing rocks and bricks, chasing me down - and I was not a fast runner - and beating me. This was pretty much my daily pattern - my only rest from the problem was when these kids would be bored or entertained by something else, like the faddish fascinations with various games that the whole 30-strong school would embrace.

I'm not saying I was perfect - I really wasn't. I had a fast mouth and a short temper, so when things were what I felt was unfair, I would lash out, certainly in the early days of my life. I was especially incensed that, my slow speed being renowned, kids would routinely settle decisions about games with a short footrace.

Some of this stuff really persists with me - being beaten about the legs led to minor problems which even now give me twinges in my bones and remember unpleasant days. Fog rising off wood went from being a fascinating thing to an unpleasantly close experience, having my head smacked into the wood. They didn't leave a lot of bruises, either. I had a senior pick me up when I was eleven, and drop me a full foot onto his knee, crotch-first, for no reason that I can remember. I was bleeding from my groin for days. Rather than approach the principal to report to him what had happened, I crawled to my mother, the teacher of the primary school half of the school, and begged her for help - I was allowed to self-administer antiseptic creme to myself in the bathroom, and did so with much shame and embarassment... only to have the principal drag me out once I was done, and rail me up before the whole class for defying the power structure of the school (and defying god himself), but for lying about the nature of my injury. I stood before a class of my peers who were smirking and sniggering at me, claiming I was 'faking' my limp and lying about my time in the bathroom. It was humiliating and painful and oh-so-so typical. One of the more humiliating experiences was when an eight year old girl who happened to have a very big big brother led a trio of other girls her own age to pull me on the ground and rub my face in the dirt. I was twelve and literally twice the size of the girl. Why did I subject myself to this kind of abuse? Surely I could get away?

Well, the fences in your own mind are the highest. Early on, my father drilled into me that it was never okay to lose my temper; never okay to hit back; never okay to defend myself. No, that was God's right - and even though the Bible he vaunted featured so many stories of the good guy kicking ass, it was never my place to protect myself. That was God's place. Not my father's place - no, my father and mother were there to administer punishment and care, but to never address the problems.

It was clear I had no love for this environment. There really was nothing to like. It taught me clearly that all the television shows I could see about school days are the best days of your life as being written by selfish idiots who didn't realise there was more to the world than their own experiences, and their own nostalgia. Suffering from wretched self-loathing inspired by my family (don't get me started on masturbation), from physical and emotional abuse from school, I had no options. I couldn't physically leave the school - indeed, 'sending you to a public school' was a threat my mother used to try and encourage me to behave better in the school I was in.

The people you go to school with are not your friends. They do not have things in common with you. The people you make friends with are your friends. The people you want to see, want to deal with, the people with whom you forge connections, those are your friends. But to simply go to school with someone is no sign of a friendship. It has nothing to do with friendship, and the willingness of people to fool themselves into that leads to horrible abuses. Adults and parents considered those students who were physically assaulting me on a daily basis my friends, and were completely willing to ignore the violence.

And we moved. We moved away from this school system that had left me intellectually malnourished and physically scored and to a new place and a new school and a new church and what I found from top to bottom is that the only things I liked about the world in which my parents put me were when they didn't involve religion. I got along with my new peers as they swore and cussed and talked about punk music (and yes, this new school was christian, too - we had a teen pregnancy, mind you, brought on by ignorance of sex education). I tried in these years to grasp onto faith, to come to terms with the hipocrisy and the lying... it was really embarassing in hindsight, but at the age of 14, I was really much closer to a mental age of 5 or 6 with regards to critical thinking or understanding. I had a fundamental grasp of things like fairness, and a desire to make things work out evenly for everyone, but I hadn't the tools or the practice to truly appreciate what that meant. All my understanding of these processes were gained through apologetics - through sitting in in my fathers' various lessons to churchgoers, talking to them about how the mormons were a cult, the moonies were a cult, the catholics were a cult, and so on. I was not so cemented in the faith that I failed to consider the faith that I was myself espousing.

I was raised with a fear of death, a fear of hell, a fear of sex, a fear of fellow men, a fear of breaking the rules, a fear of real demons that walked the earth, a fear of satan himself offering me pleasure, a fear of culture that made me happy, a fear of masturbation and a fear of even other people within the Christian faith. I was scared and lonely and wretched and my entire upbringing was designed to create this attitude, and created by a mother and a father who to this day I have no doubt whatsoever, love me. They did this horrible thing to me and defined my childhood with nightmares because they honestly and sincerely believed it to be the best thing to do.

I started heading home from church early. I started walking home on my own rather than spend my time associating with people with whom I didn't want to talk. I stopped taking notes and started drawing pictures. I gave up. Some part of me on some fundamental level surrendered. The contradictions, the conflations, the differences between the types of faith... they were getting to be too much for me. So one night, I had the closest thing I ever did to a serious talk about religion with my father - I told him that church was about a real, personal relationship with Jesus, that the nourishment of the Holy Spirit was part of the experience, and that I had never felt it. I had never felt part of God's chosen and never felt that I belonged. So I wanted to take some time away from the church, to step away, so as to not provide a stumbling block for others within the faith.

And he accepted that. It was... sad and intense for me to realise that my dad felt this represented a fundamental failing on his part. And there was further tension with him, over employment, over my direction. See, the culture in which I'd been raised had been so tightly controlled that in all my years of schooling, a fundamental question had never been posed to me, it had never been asked of me: What do you want to do after school?

I'm serious. It had never been asked. I had never had the 'when I grow up I wanna be' discussion with anyone, and I honestly have no idea why. I had no ambitions, no drive. I went into every year of school figuring that school was the unending path that spiralled ahead of me, and if it was going to change that someone would tell me. Even now, I find it hard to take first steps towards things because that grounding is so strong. I have a hard time putting myself forward, starting sentences with I want. It's something down to my bones now, and I really think it's made me a failure as a person.

A terrible education, a stunted social circle, physical and emotional abuse, interpersonal helplessness and a lack of direction. The fruits of a religious environment, the result of being told that someone else is in charge and to never think for myself.

People have often accused me of being an angry young man. You know what? I think with a life like I've had, I have that right.

Date:	2009-09-16 17:32
Subject:	The Straight Poop On The Exodus
Security:	Public
Mood:	depressed

My father wanted me to stop reading the Fighting Fantasy books when I was nine. He wanted me to stop reading them because he was convinced there was a demonic element to them - that the books which were, basically, about a lone guy in a world full of things that could randomly and arbitarily kill you but was somehow going to survive and save the world one way or another, was somehow actually a gateway into believing genuine, honest-to-god, real-world magic. They believed I could cast spells by inventing number systems and were cautious about my use of oragami because they saw a textbook that referred to the sacred geometry. They were worried about all the fiction I saw when I was growing up. Fighting Fantasy, Disney films, and even more advanced stuff like The Belgariad. There was only one proxy that made a story automatically acceptable - if the story could be easily seen as a Bible parallel.

So I thought, sitting down, with an afternoon to work with... why not have a go at that? Why not actually look at one of the Bible stories that my dad regards as a fact, and see how well that works? Because there's a creeping sense I've been getting lately, something I'm trying to put into words about the environment in which I was raised, which disturbs me the more I consider it. Now, rather than dismantle a full story, I thought I'd leap to something I could manage with science because I had an idea as to applying numerical tools to the information in question. The story in question is the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.

So I asked my dad - how many people left Egypt in that one night? His answer was a very simple one: Two million people, plus livestock.

Two million people. Two million people. Two million people plus animals. Two million people. This number is fine to say from a pulpit. Extolling it emphasises the miraculousness of the event, but the thing is, miracle working is just like a magic trick. Narratively speaking, you have to use the miracle to make a bridge in the minds of the listeners, and that emphasises the specialness in the narrative. People don't like the unlikely, or the impossible. And the miracle misdirects their attention. When you have people swallowing ten plagues across Egypt - and I can go onto them later - you can simply have the population of Israel walk out of Egypt without any problems.

So what does two million people mean? Really? Really really? Because repeating it over and over only gives a vague impression. People don't really handle expanded numbers well, and it's kinda funny the way we think we do grok them. Especially when you translate those numbers to long-term effects. People don't realise the gulfs in space, for example - you can watch any sci-fi series and see as every planet and star is basically a long trip to the shops rather than anything else. You can see people talk about 'a million dollars' and they talk about things like cars (the majority of even the plushest cars tend to run barely a half a million, and the cars that cost closer to a million tend to cost even more in upkeep), or property (property being worth a million dollars is pretty reasonable when you consider what people pay for it and the way it doesn't go anywhere). When you start talking about scientific values or populations, that's when people's grasp on numbers like a million become meaningless. They just think in terms of chunks, and they don't tend to chunk it up very well.

The classic image of the Exodus is these two million people in a line or column about, well, a dozen or more people across, then trailing off behind those dozen. Okay, makes sense to anyone who's been on a hike, right? You don't have to be able to track the people behind yourself, you just need to be able to keep an eye on the guys in front. Plus, we're talking about the desert. It's not like we're guna get lost, it's nice and flat. That's not the problem. The problem is length.

When you go walking with your friends, you probably don't all hug close. You have about a meter of personal space around yourself at any given point in time. Again, this is presuming we're just talking about the people, just the people, ignoring their camping supplies or their animals. Assuming they're all moseying along, carefree, like we're talking about the street-walking bummery, with about half a meter of personal space to each side, and about a meter behind them - because, you do by default keep some distance between yourself and the guy in front of you? - how big is this column? Well, if we assume the leading face of this group is merely twelve guy, you're looking at a column that's about 6 meters wide and 166,666 meters long. A HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX KILOMETERS.

Well, fuck!

So what if we adjust that number of the face. Clearly, that twelve is pretty silly - it's just me using sunday school stories (remember, those things we tell kids) to handle a real logistical concern. Two million people don't just file along like that - but then, they also don't travel without horse, pack, and cow, which the Bible makes clear they did have. I'm throwing out things that make my case stronger in this. Yet even then, I concede that the dozen-guys-at-the front image is wrong, and instead we'll let this mass bulge out a bit.

What say that this grid of two million folk is just a quarter as wide as it is long? Then you're looking at a face, the face that's following just Moses, that's about three hundred meters wide.

Okay, let that one filter into your head. You have just Moses, maybe Aaron and Miriam at the head of a column of guys three hundred meters wide. What are some things that are three hundred meters wide?

Well, there's this. Or this. Or what the heck, four of these! Think about that! And this means that if you're off on the sides of this column of travellers, Moses is a hundred and fifty meters away Buhwhah? Have you ever tried to maintain control and direction over a group like that?

Now, when I criticised Death Note, I did so with the argument that the whole thing required a very small, petty, scared world, a world roughly the same size as the writers' highschool classes. The way gossip blossomed around the world, the way everyone seemed to react to shit in roughly the same way, and the way everything was grotesquely simplified all spoke to me of not a world afraid, but rather, a few dozen people, people just like the authors. This is the same writing that plagues the Bible. Why?

The guys who wrote the Bible didn't know what two million people meant. Fuck, I doubt the number two million is mentioned there. Even if they had, there's no way they'd have seen two million people concentrated. Heck, even now, these people - yes, I use 'these people' to refer to ill-educated idiots who exalt in espousing bronze age idiocy, so, yes, Americans in this context, - can't tell the difference between 30,000 people and 1,500,000 people. What's the difference, in easy form? Well, ignoring the simple math (FIFTY TIMES AS MANY PEOPLE), thirty thousand people using the same area mass I'm using for the children of Israel, all in a square, represents about a hundred and seventy meters of square space. Or for further comparison: 1.5 million people is less than half the population of Sydney. 30,000 people is one-and-a-half times the capacity of the Win Stadium.

I'm getting off-track - as I so often do. The wonder of this kind of exercise is it causes me to stretch my brain and remember formulae I let lie fallow since I was in high school, and that kind of thing excites me. I want to apply these formulae to all areas of life (you should see some of the numbers I've got written down that aren't going into the article).

Alright, so a hundred and fifty meters to see Moses. Do you know why we call normal vision '20/20'? It's because 20 feet is the distance at which most people (hence 'normal') can differentiate two objects from one another. At either side of the column, you're going to have a hard time telling Moses from another member of the column who's technically on your left, unless Moses is way out in front - and with the dust kickup and the level of detritus you have moving when you have people on the move, chances are that that's too far away.

So if we limit the column to twenty feet on either side, what number do we wind up with...?

Twelve meters.

Duhshitwhat?

Didn't I throw that number out as a silly, Sunday School story angle?

Seems it's the most reasonable one I can find, too. I mean, I tried - the Bible makes no note of even reasonable technological devices they could have used to guide a population that large (even as the apologists leap to claim they were used, hahahah, nice literalism, fuckheads), it makes no note that god miraculously guided them - in fact, the Bible made a big point of the fact that the Israelites were kinda pissy that the only person receiving any divine guidance was Moses. If God had set up a landing strip or sets of lights, it would have worked out far more easily and he wouldn't have had the problems he did with getting these people to move around. Then again, the story of the Israelites is basically a chain of sequential incidents highlighting that the only thing that could match God's unreasonable dickishness was the Israelites' nanosecond-measurable forgetfulness as to that same God's dickishness. Either way.

If we presume this is true, we're talking about a column of people about twelve people wide - again, ignoring cattle, camp, and assorted crap - that's over a hundred and fifty kilometers long. A hundred miles long. Using this number of a hundred and sixty-six kilometers as our gauge, we get to the next part of my objection to this story.

Oh yes, you probably knew this was coming.

We're going to talk about poop

Now, your average stool is 100 grams. These numbers, I won't lie, aren't great - but I can say with no small amount of confidence that nobody I know has pulled one out of the loo to weigh it in a plastic baggy, or if they had, they're not about to argue with me about it. You poop, on average, three times a day, so we're talking about 3*100*2,000,000 grams of feces every day. How much is that? Six hundred tons

SIX HUNDRED FUCKING TONS. EVERY FUCKING SAY. And it's not like this stuff is neatly being disposed of, and this is still ignoring the cattle and livestock and such. If this stuff is being disposed of neatly, then it's being shifted out into piles. Now, either some people are shifting this poop a few hundred meters away (and you gotta remember, the Israelites had strict rules as to what was and what wasn't clean, to the point where you had to get all your masturbating done on the sabbath afternoon if you wanted a chance to go to temple next sabbath, but this is before that law had been bestowed. For all we know, these guys were noshing away on pork, and we do know they were uncircumcised, since it wasn't until after the Law was dispensed that Moses went on his disgusting little foreskin-collecting blood orgy. So what's going to happen to six hundred tons of shit?

Well, one can hope that these Israelites were smart enough to keep it separate from their foodtstuffs and whatnot, since if they didn't, there wouldn't be two million of them long. On the other hand, it wasn't until the rise of the British empire that it became common knowledge that people shouldn't get shit near their food. It's easy to look back with the eye of a storybook-reading modernist and assume, assume that these things went in place because we're projecting our values back on them. But this is in Exodus. They don't even know - get this, they don't even know that murder is wrong!

Isn't that a hoot? Some fucking chosen people!

(Remember, God loves everyone equally, he just loves the Jews more. Let that one spin the literalist propellor.)

What makes this worse is the length of it all. A hundred and sixty kilometers of people do not move quickly. According to most sites I could find, human walking speed is about five kilometers an hour, presuming a young, healthy male. Now, the children of Israel were not as fit or as healthy as we are. Racist, I know, but we're talking about an era of human history where humans lived to be about forty (unless you're one of the chosen of God, in which case you live to a hundred and your eighty-year olds can murder giants). So again, presuming no cattle, presuming no horses, presuming none of the murdering and adultery slowed these people down, and presuming no children, or no elderly men (you know, thirty year olds), you're looking at 5 kilometers an hour, and let's give 'em the ability to set up and pull up their tents in an hour total. This means seventeen hours of the day are spent walking. No food breaks, no poop breaks (hah), none of that - and you're looking, once more, at a transit time of 75 kilometers a day.

This means that the back of the line wouldn't have caught up with the place the front of the line had gotten up to. The people in the arse of the line would be walking through yesterday's camps from the front line. Through the miraculously-dug privy holes, past the literal tons of shit that the front half of the line created, and so on, all the while crawling along at seventy-five miles a day.

This is just one logistical problem with the departure of Israel. We could go on - we could talk about the impact it would have had on the Nation of Egypt. We could talk about the Plagues. We could talk about the calf of Baal, we could talk about God talking about other gods, we could talk about the supposed reproduction rate required for a population to maintain itself when it's two million people dying off at the age of forty. The thing is, we're not told to look at that. This is before Manna, before the law, before any of this stuff, on the way to Mt Sinai - but I digress.

This entire idea, of two million people migrating, en masse, by foot, from Egypt, is a logistical nightmare, unfeasible in the extreme, and made worse by the first encounter that the Red Sea. The red sea is, on average, about two hundred kilometers across. To cross from Egypt to the Sinai peninsula, across the narrower parts of the Red Sea is a trip of a mere sixty-four kilometers.

Assuming our population of two million completely healthy, long-legged, modern men are keeping up their good clip, that should take them merely ten hours to cross. Ten hours for the guys who came across at the front to cross. The guys at the back? They're not getting across until they catch up. They guys at the back of the queue are over a hundred kilometers away. Remember, they're being pursued by people on chariot at this point, and yet, somehow, these chariot-bound guys are able to arrive at just the nick of time to fail to stop them finishing the crossing.

This all sounds ridiculous, right? Of course it does. It'd be better organised than that. It'd have to be better organised. There would have to be a wider column, there would have to be more people leading than just Moses. There would have to be better ways to handle this, and while we're at it, people would need to already have a good reason not to murder one another, and there would have to be ways to dispense with the shit out of the whole column and so on and handling the animals and speeding up the children and ... well by this point, you have to wonder if the Biblical account is leaving out more than it's providing.

The story is written from the fanciful position of the ignorant. It only works if you don't think about things. Compared to nonsense like Die Hard 4.0 and Death Note, the Bible is a far more offensive example of idiocy, because there are intelligent, adult people who believe it's true and believe it's not only true, but that its completely unjustifiable self-confirmed status as factual justifies embracing the further idiocy of this bronze-age pack of fantasy myth-weavers in a modern era with people who are raising kids, determining policy, and making medical decisions that impact the lives of people who have no such pre-existing bias.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that I finally understand why my father was so worried about the culture I was absorbing, why he was so afraid of me losing my ability to determine reality from fantasy. It's because he unknowingly or otherwise, had not this same grasp. My father lives in a world where there is a literal devil, where conspiracy genuinely suppresses information like the very real video footage of demonic entities, where science is an orthodoxy. He lives in a very, very scary world, haunted by ghosts, where he, as a man with military training, is helpless. My father is a man full of fear living in a world of demons.

So, of late, I'm somewhat jarred about what I can and can't manage to write. I have the stewing start of something but I never seem to finish what I

Date:	2009-08-29 15:26
Subject:	Good Stuff!
Security:	Public
Mood:	thoughtful

I've come to the conclusion that the main barrier for me writing epic positive reviews compared to the leviathanic pieces I compose to highlight how little I like something is the utter disdain I wind up having for those series I view negatively. Once I deem a series shite, I stop giving a fuck about 'ruining' people's experience of the series or contexts themselves, since if they're listening to me, they're not going to watch or read the thing in question, no?

I don't mind telling you about how rotten Death Note is, talking about Misa, or L, or Near, or Mello, or whatever, because I quite frankly do not give even half of a shit about the way the unfolding and development of these characters plays into your enjoyment of the series. Like watching an elaborate oragami presentation where the gossamer passes by the rose by the turqoise and they fold out past one another with the eventual revelation of the gold ring within, these events in-series do not actually hide some brilliant centrepiece, but rather are just the bothersome dance of feathers and lights attempting to subvert attention away from the eventual revelation that the story is nothing but an empty husk within.

At the same time, when I encounter a series I really enjoy, I find these developmental layers to be vital to my enjoyment of the series. Not necessarily twists, but moments that resonate in the path of a character tend to be cornerstones of things that matter to me. They're the things that really echo through my mind, things that are important. To start to dismantle them is too much, and I have realised that my enthusiasm boils over too aggressively, that I often mention things that merely by their mentioning are spoilers. Rather than destroy something in a series I like, I instead find my reviews that are positive to be quiet and sedate, with an almost 'please like thise series,' note at the end.

There has to be a threshold, though. After all, reviews that don't touch on the actual events within a series can be very dry and yes, short. If you read the Equilibrium review and jump the extensive bitching I do about the movie, you wind up with something like three paragraphs. On the other hand, events that occur within the first ten minutes of the story seem to me to be pretty much fair game, right? The first fifteen? The first thirty? What about events that are well-established? If I were to talk about Avatar, there are characters who are central to whole seasons of the series, of whom yet mention can constitute pretty wild spoilers.

Now, what makes this more funny, really, is that I'm writing this blog to an audience of about nine people, most of whom I know in real life, and of them, each of them are the kind of people who will respond to a spoiler with Oh, that was so obvious. It's kinda jarring, since I know on a conceptual level that spoilers for major events are a bad idea and will diminish the reader's eventual experience of the subject matter... and they don't seem to make a damn difference to the people around me, who are the kind of people who upon seeing the conclusion of The Usual Suspects will turn to me and claim they saw the twist coming miles off. What makes it worse is they probably do, but it doesn't seem to me to be ever born of an in-universe savvy, but rather from knowing how stories work.

Leaving aside these social concerns, I have found - thanks to the miracle of Fox - that I can generate spoiler tags. I'm not sure how useful they are, or will be - but I do find the idea intriguing, of being able to force you, the reader, some complicity in stepping past your enjoyment of something you might not yet know. If you want to read the text in the tags - yes, tags like these - you have to highlight them with your mouse, revealing to you the dread secret that lays beneath. This may see some workout in the near future. If you want an entirely spoiler-free opinion from me at the moment, though?

Paranoia Agent is fucking awesome.

Women never measure penises. They might read about fiction with penis measurements in them, but the numbers provided are wholly for the men keeping score at home and the male writer. A woman might think of a dick as 'big' or 'small' or whatever, and indeed, she might give a size in the narrative (because such things are expected or whatnot), but they don't go whipping out tape measures the way guys do when they're in private and feeling curious.

Therefore, any character uttering a line which gives an nearest-half-inch estimate of a penis size is either a logistic savant or male.

One of the problems with being a writer who enjoys one specific element of your writing is that you will routinely wind up returning to that same point. This has been highlighted to me by Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content. Given how I was willing to bitch out the authors of Death Note for terrible character voice and how their multi-million dollar, multi-platform success that has inspired books, games, video serials and at least one honest-to-god murder, surely I'll have a round to fire into the hipster T-shirt sales platform that is QC, right?

Well, yeah, kinda, but it's so trivial as to make me wonder why the fuck it bothers me. I don't read the comic regularly, and I won't read the comic regularly and I overall, he does some good things by having continuity, outfits change over time, and by not constantly returning to the same plot point (though I do think the progression of the story is very slow and the character development is glacial; one day in the comic takes weeks of time in reality, which means that if you're following the updates, any long conversation takes weeks of stuff you may not give a shit about, because this series compensates for weakness in characters with strengths in other characters). So what is it that's pissing me off?

It's Sven's hair.

Sven, when he showed up, was really visually distinct. Glasses in a particular shape, and unlike every other male in the series, he had long hair. This was not a huge deal; I just liked how it looked and it made him seem different from the other, more hipster-indie style characters in the series. The main male you see is basically Marten, whose hair goes through very little variation and is almost the definition of an anime-style 'generic spiky.' Sven stood out from Marten through a visual device that's simple, but then, QC's art isn't very complex (not that it doesn't have its moments). Steve, Marten's friend, has a similar device, expressed through massive sideburns.

Anyway, as Sven became more prominent in the story throughout 2007, one day, bam, short hair. Short, generic hair that fell in a short, generic pattern. What makes this more annoying is that this meant he was visually almost identical to one of the other bit-part characters that preceeded him, Angus the abuse addict. To make things worse, Sven and Angus are both in competition for the same girl, and a story arc in early 2008 legitimized Angus. So two visually indistinct characters, one of whom has an established personality and character voice (which honestly, kinda derails as the story advances), the other of whom is a bit character who resurfaces in time to be competition for the other. This is not in my opinion, very good.

I suppose Sven's hair is a metaphor for Sven himself. When he had the hair long, there was a certain charming honesty about him; he was a man-slut who was completely okay with his identity in that regard. As the comic advanced, he became a much more generic message of 'see the evils of low-commitment wild sex,' which in turn feels rather hypocritical when those same instances of low-commitment wild sex are demonstrated to the audience in a fairly titillating way. It's especially obnoxious when he turns into a mopey sort with what basically amounts to a Female Conscience hovering over his shoulder, or when a group of grown adults think it's okay to physically assault or threaten physical assault on a guy because he has different sexual mores.

It makes me worry about my own writing. Is sex just that loaded a topic that a generic story about very sexy people gettin' it awn and gettin' it awf just happens to automatically bring with it behaviour that people see as acceptable, or necessary? Bah. I am annoyed and my only avenue for expressing it is this.

Also, I have an appointment in seven and a half hours, but I'm not tired. I am uncertain as to if the solution is to stay up and go wired and tired, or to score a few hours of sleep and go in feeling half-dead. Hrmmm.

I wonder if anyone else has noticed this terrible habit I have of going on ranting tangents about how terrible something I dislike is, typically using - early on - a contrast point of something which I really like, against which the terrible thing looks even more terrible. It means that one can very easily get the impression I only like some things so I can dislike some other things more, and that kind of behaviour can give me a well-earned reputation for being a cynical jerk who doesn't like any art at all, which funnily enough, was something a friend of mine said to me when we met for the first time in four years.

Now, it's kinda true in that when something becomes extremely popular I am predisposed to become jaded and cautious about it, but that's not actually because it's extremely popular. If I was to knee-jerk in the opposite direction as some kind of semi-rebellion against popularity, I would be just as bad as the chimps who will buy into anything mainstream, especially since I'd no doubt be pretentious about it. If one looks at the recent properties for which I've vocalised my disdain, it'd be very easy to get that pattern. After all, I've rubbished on Death Note, Hellsing, and Pirates of the Caribbean, purely off the top of my head, and all three were or are outrageously popular (to the point where all are under discussions for More Of The Same).

On the other hand, these reviews all contain seeds of things I do like. I held Die Hard 4.0 up for scrutiny in light of Die Hard With A Vengeance, and part of what made so annoyed about Death Note was just how terrible it was in comparison to 20th Century Boys. So why don't I ever talk about those series I do like?

...

Well, okay then.

Let's go over the basics. 20th Century Boys is a 249 chapter sci-fi manga by Naoki Urasawa. The story is long, even compared to Naoki's previous work, Monster. Monster is a very contained story, time-wise; if you consider the opening section a prequel, with flashbacks to the past scattered throughout, the series covers about a year of time. In contrast, 20th Century Boys starts in 1967, and the story continues forward for almost forty more years. We see characters as they progress through varying stages of their lives, from childhood to adulthood and in many cases, to their deaths.

Normally, this kind of time passage is mishandled in manga and other visual story media, where characters come in three simple age categories - child, adolescent adult, or old person. 20th Century Boys averts this by making the story protaganists age very distinctly from time to time. This is a simple-sounding thing, to make characters age, but one of the things that visual media does as a very deliberate maneuver is to make the focus of the story visually distinct. Therefore, character designs in manga need to be clear and sharply defined, which can make things like design evolution tricky. Budget isn't the only reason character designs remain consistant throughout many series - it's often a very deliberate move to help the viewers track things when they get more hectic.

To both evolve a character design and keep it in a state where the readers can recognise or grasp a character is an impressive feat, and Urusawa does it through a numbenr of clever tricks. The easiest one I can point to without getting into spoilers is to point out the protaganist, Kenji, has a very pronounced upper lip. This is represented by a simple line over the line of his mouth - which typically diminishes his visual appeal, and tends to make him look pouty, and bored, but is just a feature of his appearance. This is just one thing, and you might never notice it if you read the manga naturally.

There are others (and other, more obvious ones, such as a fat child becoming a fat adult becoming a fat older man), of course, yet these are all examples of how Naoki's art style is subtle, but effective. Unlike a lot of other anime and manga artists, who have started to take their cues in art direction from more evolved anime sources such as the more Americanised styles of the early 1990s, Naoki's style instead draws upon the font of almost all Manga itself. Any fan of Osamu Tezuka's work would have an easy time seeing where I'm going with this, and I at one point laughingly declared Monster to be 'the darkest Astro Boy fanfiction ever.' One of the really interesting things, to me, is that in Naoki's Japan, the Japanese people look like Japanese people. It doesn't stop there, though - the Thai people look like Thai people, the Chinese people look like Chinese people. Even the American people look like American people.

Now, I understand that I barely touched on the visual style of Death Note as I reviewed it, instead focusing on things like the storytelling and the setting and the characterisation. That's because Death Note was a competently-done work, visually, with pretty and distinct character designs that could easily draw the viewer's eye. They weren't difficult or challenging to make, and they are, I am certain, very much to blame for a lot of the show's popularity. On the other hand, 20th Century Boys is ugly. There are only a handful of character designs in the series that fit into any spectrum you could consider 'sexy,' and it seems almost as a direct (and perhaps unfortunate) backlash against the excessive prettiness of more modern series. Naoki's art style eschews many of the exaggerations and distinctions that makes manga such a visual feast - there's no bishounen ghetto, no buffet of sexy girls to dazzle your senses and keep you reading. There's no fanservice, really, either, with the exception of a few bits of fetish fuel I can remember.

This 'realism' in visuals makes the unrealistic things that transpire in the story all the more swallowable. It's not watching a pack of long-haired prettyboys swan around and have improbable adventures. The impact of each scene becomes much more like watching a live action movie with a small special effects budget, a more human style of drama. Plans and ploys are much more down-to-earth, characters' accomplishments less superhuman. The funny thing is, there are more than a few instances of characters in the series being shot and surviving... which is itself, a subversion of what people think of as realistic combat. By using a style that is almost unheard-of in modern anime and manga, Naoki has created a work that doesn't just start off and touch upon the spirit of the 1960s and the 20th century, but has embraced it, could be part of it.

The unfortunate side-effect of this striking visual style is that it's not striking. The series doesn't look creative, or bold... it looks, by modern anime standards, plain and unexciting. This is very much a series that needs to tap into a reader's sense of nostalgia to really take flight. This is a series written for Naoki's generation - to people who can remember the Worlds Expo, people who can remember the moon landing, people to whom pornography was hard to get, where punishment was corporal, and where portable communications devices were unheard of.

The story is told at first in a kind of retrospective style; flashbacks to the 60s preface each chapter, with the characters being introduced by who they once were, compared and contrasted with who they are now. Ambiguity abounds and multiplies, and along the way, a lot of very wistful nostalgia is spread around. The storytelling wavers at times between wistful and frustrated, with a constant contrast between the future the kids thought they'd have compared to the future they wound up having. The group had a childhood defined by pursuing adventure, even in their own heads, and this makes the mundanity of their adulthood more wretched... even while they realise that the adventure that they thought they wanted is coming for them and they don't want it any more.

20th Century Boys dabbles in alternate media, too. A song, which is a major focus of the story, is distributed on a CD with one volume of the manga; another volume has a number of cryptic notes, hand written bits of story detritus.

To summarise the plot of 20th Century Boys would require a lot of explanation, and would provide about as much insight into the joy of following said plot as would throwing a frog skeleton at someone could explain the miracle of life. Said summary would also be somewhat spoiler-heavy, given the way transitions are marked in the series. As it stands, this review is a bit long already - the Death Note review was something like nine pages long, which I think turns people off commenting, as if people are reading, so I'm going to pause here and come back to the writing later.

Hopefully, I'll generate some fiction tonight.

Date:	2009-08-19 06:30
Subject:	Exactly as planned!
Security:	Public
Mood:	quixotic

I'm annoyed to consider that which motivates me most to write is not good writing, but bad.

I have recently finished reading two very different manga series. One of them was an intense, epic story that spanned a variety of diverse artistic styles, utilised an asynchronous timeline, and an impressively large cast that touched on a lot of interesting different character types, showing character evolution over a wide scale, and it was called 20th Century Boys. The other series, I say, somewhat flippantly, was Death Note. The former was recommended to me by no people, but rather by the knowledge that it was authored by Naoki Urasawa, the author of the seriously brilliant manga Monster. Before we go on, I have to profess to a proactive bias, uncoloured by fanciful metaphor or extreme comparison; Monster is one of the greatest manga I have ever read. I have deleted this paragraph three times because it starts being all about how great Monster is, so to give it a three-word review: Read it. Now.

I had intended to give a spoiler-free overview of the two series here, however, I found that 20th Century Boys, being in my mind the far better series, did not deserve to suffer shelf space with Death Note, and its analysis spiralled out into a tale of lightly-spoilery criticism, with an attempt to summarise my thought process; so instead, let me talk to you about Death Note. Eschewing spoilers from a discussiion Death Note is to basically eschew examples. All the highlights of the series, all the elements that make up the story's better moments are spoilers to some extent or another - even the simplest notes of dialogue that I like come in an advanced stage in the series, making it very difficult - or even impossible - to really convey how well the meaning translates without the context. Context requires spoilers, and spoilers beget spoilers in this series. It's not quite as bad as Trigun (a series where even the name of the series is a spoiler), but it's still a very ornate series. And ornate is a fine word for it.

I'm going to say some rude things about Death Note in this review, though. I'll avoid spoilers for sensibility - and yes, to preserve the mystery for those of you who wish to read the series later - but I won't avoid insulting the story, or a mindset I see that might drive the series fanbase.

Note that when I draw a conclusion about a series' popular fanbase, I am not making a blanket rule. I can't lie, it's all armchair psychology, it's all worthless to some extent. I find it very easy to slip into the minds of people, to see what they like and why they like things, and to then work backwards. I may wind up with a caricature of a personality, but these broad strokes can be seen to have some truth to them as trends - or, better yet, they can demonstrate how these elements seem from the outside. I've been mulling over this habit, but since I have had three people note that my Watchman review perfectly summarised why they liked Ozymandias at first, I have been considering it might well be a mental practice that has some value, some merit. So, onwards, into the realm of penury and scorn.

It is very hard for me to not think of Death Note's fanbase as anything but unreasonable. There are a number of scathing summaries I could use for the story, but the phrase that continually comes up when I try to explain it to friends is a phrase I first acquired from Yahtzee's review of Assassin's Creed: The World's Biggest Dickhead Competition. There are stretches of the manga where you will go page after page after page and see nobody with a redeeming trait. Dickhead A talks to Dickhead B and manipulates Dickhead C into being a dickhead to Dickhead B, while Dickhead D waits in the wing for his chance to be an unwitting dickhead to Dickhead C, fucking up Dickhead A's plan of making Dickhead B be the one to be a dickhead to Dickhead C, and therefore being a dickhead to Dickhead A who again, is manipulating other Dickheads into being dickheads to another Dickhead, making him a dickhead. There is nobody to like. Oh, there are people who are liked. The fanbase adores L's 'quirkiness,' his odd behaviour and his fascination with sweet food (which in Japan, is a covert message tantamount to a scrabble board where your first four turns are spent spelling out 'L LOVES COCKS'). Light in turn represents a classic Japanese stereotype of a willful young man with a massive, massive brain, who studies brilliantly, pushes himself rather than let his parents push him, and bleeds and oozes success. Misa is well-loved by the male fans for being 'so devoted' and 'lovable,' which I find not just wretched, but disturbing. Misa is roughly tantamount to a child in her emotional development, a victim falling in love with a cycle of violence, mentally arrested and obssessing about a trauma.

What really revolts me about these characters, however, is that they aren't characters. They're each a hundred-page long establishment shot. There is nothing that any of the characters choose to do, or how they choose to behave that is influenced by the story itself. The way they behave and act on page 1 is how they behave and act in page 108, when the whole story's concluded. I might be a fuddy-duddy, clinging to the old ways of how stories 'should' go, but I think of character development as core to a story. I couldn't provide an extensive, theoretical application for this idea - it just seems to me as something essential to enjoy a story. If someone goes through the story and is unchanged at the end of it - and I mean literally unchanged, not reaffirmed - was the story really that big a deal?

The characterisation within the story isn't just flawed when we deal with the characters. It requires everyone to leap between bouts of extreme, hyper-competence, with detectives making literally epic guesses that are nonetheless always completely on track (and we, the audience know it), followed by everyone around them demonstrating a complete lack of competence. If you're over the age of twenty in Death Note, you are pretty much guaranteed to be crap at your job.

There's also this messy business of how the story influences the world. The world in which Death Note operates seems to work on a kind of emotional level comparable to that of a child; a belief that the rest of the world is more or less exactly like upper-middle class Japan, where people behave out of a fear of punishment, rather than the principle of being good. You know what'd happen to the criminal world if five criminals in Japan dropped dead, with the only commonality being heart attacks?

Fuck-all.

Fifty?

A hundred?

A thousand?

A thousand a day?

Fuck-all.

The world of Death Note is a small, tight place, where people are divided into an easily predictable, sheeplike mass who see a monstrous bully as acceptable, where principle is completely meaningless, and the small, the elite, the we few of intelligent people who know better than that.

The story of Death Note, from its premise could be compared to a Thomas Paine story about a ring of invisibility. In Paine's story, the protaganist gained a ring that made him invisible, and with it, he went about performing wicked deeds of steadily increasing levels of wickedness. Without any consequence to his actions, he truly flew off the rails, but he started stealing silverware and moved up to murder, and probably, since this was the 18th Century, rape. Paine's idea - one that was very reflected in his day to day, a world dominated by world religions and without much in the way of an understanding of the greater universe - was that mankind was fundamentally, a horrible little troll of a creature, kept only in the basic patterns of proper behaviour because of social pressure from the people around him, and that this behaviour was simply the natural effect of mankind freed of consequence. See also Lord Of The Flies.

Now, ignoring for a moment that I personally reject this philosophy, it is a worldview that is nonetheless popular to take to in fiction. It rings in Death Note's outset - a young man finds a book that he can use to kill people without any ramifications and consequence. One would imagine that there could be a chance for a character evolution through this, no? With an outset like this, surely there will be a progression, stepping further down a spiral of dehumanisation?

Nope! Light merrily jumps - and this isn't a spoiler because it's all in the first fucking chapter of the manga - straight into messianic self-delusion, merrily killing people as experiments, and becoming a mass murderer in something like a week. Where, exactly, is the pathos? The sense of scale here? It's out the fucking window, because our protaganist, our window into the story, is not actually a normal human or a human avatar, but is instead a man in training for the World's Biggest Dickhead Olympics.

And again, these are isolated murders in Japan, where the murderers' names and faces are posted. Know what poppy-sellers in Afghanistahn are going to say about that? What the Finnish mob will think? What Canadian grass-runners will think?

Who gives a shit?

This is a point I already consider a given based on Freakonomics' treatment of most criminal enterprise. It's like a competition - you have risks if you lose, and a payoff if you win, and most people who enter into this situation are not doing it out of some malicious lack of disincentive - there are plenty harsh disincentives for this kind of thing, and as the story indicates the police have the rights and means to kidnap and torture celebrities without it causing any problems later on, I find it hard to imagine that the real hard-boiled crooks in Japan went into their job position without the understanding that they might die. They also outnumber the police and the media significantly - the reason the news talk about murder and theft and violence and rape so heavily is not because these things are happening and they've caught them all - they're talking about them because these issues are very good at grabbing public attention, and with that done, they can be assured you're going to keep watching.

So, in essence, Light was peeking through a keyhole into a tiny, tiny cross-section of criminals bad enough to get caught, killing criminals to whom he attributed genuine malice, and this somehow is enough to make the American criminal population piss its pants. Again, the deaths are centered in Japan!

So the whole underlying principle of the world is that it is a world composed of late to teenage Japanese upper-middle class boys who would do whatever they want if not for the fact they can't get away with it. The series attempts to legitimize its premise, but the more it goes on, the more if fails to - repeating a silly line in a serious voice, multiple times, does not actually make the line less silly. If anything, it multiplies its silliness. This is a world, not of six billion people with a diverse world, amazing cultures, rich history, deep social and political emnity, important religious and dogmatic beliefs, most of whom are not in constant contact with one another, but a tiny world slightly larger than a school, with everyone in more or less the same social and economic strata, playing chinese whispers with their mobile phones between lunch breaks.

The premise and setting aren't the only things that are bad. Just as writing out the word 'dickhead' enough will make it lose all meaning and humour value, Death Note uses every basic way to communicate over and over again. Concepts are exposed time and again, with gordian knots of dialogue and massive slabs of info-dumped text being used to serve as proxy for development and exposition, with four characters with near-identical character voices spending their time trying to second guess, third guess, fourth guess one another. There is a reason why this kind of dialogue is eschewed from most storytelling, because it's bad.

In the anime rendition of the series, the characters who do this internal monologuing colour-tint the screen as they do it. While this could be used as an interesting narrative tool to determine to the audience elements of their nature, with blue being a cool personality and red a fiery one, it's not. This device is utilised so the audience knows who's talking. Even if the character dialogue was distinct, this would be like a squeaky mallet guide to keeping track of things.

Ostensibly this similarity is to highlight that Light and L are supposed to be two sides of the same coin. Again, if this is true, this is a terrible way to demonstrate it - they're not different sides of the same coin, they're the same fucking character. They speak the same, they anticipate one another and even basic conversations are chained sequences of manipulation. This is not intense, psychological conflict, because conflict requires an investment. Conflict where you don't care about the outcome isn't a conflict - it's just a noise. Again, I understand that some people are invested in these characters. That is its own problem.

Much as any review of Resident Evil 4 can't help but point out the racism (that may or may not be there, depending on the reviewer who even if he doesn't think it's there is going to talk about it), I feel one criticism I can boldly and clearly lay against Death Note is a claim of sexism that borders on outright misogyny. While I did jump in the later third of the manga - I hopped from chapter 78 to 100, operating on the prediction that the story was going to spiral out the way it did, with the World's Biggest Dickhead competition accelerating with more challengers to the throne of Dickhead - in the preceeding chapters, there were four and a half female characters. Two were killed off as footnotes, to highlight the cleverness and manipulative skill of Light. One was a maguffin traded for with about four lines of dialogue, none of which had any substance. One was Misa.

Do I need to discuss Misa?

Do I?

Oh, and that half? Revealed to be female once, everyone thereafter refers to her as a male. Not because they think she is one, or because of interesting, sensitive gender issues. But because they don't know she's female. And why would they? She, after all, does something.

Everyone in this series who is important is male. Everyone. Female characters are easily-manipulated or obedient dolts who exist to be bartered over. The tiny population of female characters are objectified in a disgustingly passive way. A very competent woman is told by her husband doing the same job that her role should be that of a housewife and she complies. She then dies, after he does. He comes back into the story. She doesn't, at least, not in the manga chunks I read. If she does come back and kicks some arse, she's not there at the end of the story, which indicates she probably got outwitted and killed. Exactly as planned.

What makes it all so sickening to me is the way the story treats it like it's irrelevant. That there is nothing odd, nothing odd at all, about a woman jumping from the role of FBI agent to housewife at the behest of a husband doing THE SAME FUCKING JOB.

Oh, and Misa. I can understand if lots of fangirls hate Misa. I hate Misa. I don't hate Misa because she gets in the way of the shipping, but I hate her because she's a popular female character in what seems to be an insanely popular story and her entier existence is predicated on a childish infatuation. I hate Misa for the same reason I hate Bella Swan. I hate her because she is nothing but a shallow, cardboard cut out, maneuvered around and manhandled by the storyline as a convenient and stupid engine to further other, more important characters' aims. I hate her because there are girls in Japan who honestly like her and aspire to be her. I hate her because there are people who view her conclusion to the story as dreadfully romantic. I hate her because of what she represents, a childish, fawning ignorance, an enshrined simplicity, a bobbleheaded sex doll with no wants but to pleasure our chaste supposed-hero.

I keep veering into the realm of wanting to cite examples, so perhaps it's best to move away from the work and talk about its appreciators. You know one of the things that I think will be forever etched on my mind throughout this experience? Death Note afficionados that I spoke to when voicing my concerns about the series as I experienced it either chose not to comment (probably based on me, personally, rather than on their views on my views), or would always cite attractiveness. Near was cute, Mello had an exotic allure, L's mannerisms were adorable, Light's intensity was sexy, etcetera. I am quietly gobsmacked at the way this was constantly brought up. And it started to get under my skin, and I think I know why. The fanbase for Death Note worries me. Not worries me the way that the fans of Gor or the fans of FATAL worry me. Those people are degenerate, subhumans with deeper issues that need to be dealt with before they wind up putting bits of women in the trunks of their cars. No, the fanbase for Death Note worries me because the series seems to be geared towards enshrining all the wrong elements and providing bad rhetoric to people who will use it as an excuse.

A good example of this is Fight Club. There are men who nonironically spout Tyler Durden's philosophy of controlled self-demolition and nihilistic dehumanisation without realising that the man in question was very literally someone's psychosis (OH NO SPOILERS). The irony that these men are probably also homophobic just compounds the black comedy of the scenario. Watchmen suffers this, too, where Rorschach has fans who genuinely think he had the right idea, who write Alan Moore talking about how much the world needs men like Rorschach. These are the kind of people, who when you confront them on being horrible people to other people, will spout some nonsense, no doubt gained from someone other than themselves about how the world they live in is rotten, and how people are sick to the core, or how they are not their fucking kakhis. It puts tools of non-argument into the hands of people who shouldn't have them.

While Fight Club and Watchmen arm the cannons of the self-styled would-be macho minute-men of our socities, however, Death Note provides ammunition for another segment of society, one who I wholly have come to disdain. The series makes a strong note throughout it that Kira is somehow at his core considered an acceptable option for the world. That this world of terrified little boys is somehow better of being ruled and controlled by an insane, capricious dictator with infinite power but not infinite wisdom or infinite information. That there is no principle, and instead people will make unreasoned, knee-jerk behaviours based on their immediate lives. It also highlights that Light is a childish, bratty super-genius capable of managing his time perfectly, passing judgment on the world, and disdaining boring things like sexual contact with womenfolk, and in fact, disdaining everyone who doesn't have the ability to share his intense, totalitarian focus on this one thing here. He's a jerk to every person he deals with, interacting with people in the most superficial and manipulative of fashions, he doesn't make jokes, he doesn't laugh throughout the series (except for, well, you know, the crazy kind), and he flies into a rage over tiny emotional slights that he perceives as attacks on his self-esteem, throwing tantrums despite being a grown man. He overplans everything, and because everyone he deals with is functionally retarded, the events all conspiring to make his plans work, that's seen as genius rather than being socially stunted. He is, simply put, an incomplete person. That's okay, kind of, because so are all his oppositional forces. L and others oppose him purely because it entertains them, because he is their obssession.

If this sounds familiar to you, it's probably because you're male, on the internet, and found that if you claim you have asperger's syndrome, you get a free ride on behaving like a jerk.

This series is basically a love letter from the self-diagnosed autistics to themselves, because nobody else gets them. This goes beyond being an inspiringly disabled kid who competes in the normal basketball games despite being stuck in a wheelchair, and into a creating a world where only the 'sufferers' of this syndrome are capable of interacting on a 'real' level, and being given prey to amazing, superior powers and stories fall into their laps, while silly people who actually interact and can focus on more than one thing at a time and don't get strange looks from women are just cattle for the slaughter.

Worse, the series' dark, death-focused tone leads to people saying things like 'I identify with the evil,' or something like that. Calling what Light does in this series 'evil' is like calling what Misa experiences 'love.' The world of Death Note is not one given to such depth. The 'evil' in this series is eensy-weensy evil, the equivalent of not inviting people to your birthday party - not because people don't die (and far as I can tell, nobody comes back from the dead), but because one of the core ways to demonstrate evil is to treat people as things. There aren't people in this series. There are just things. The narrative treats them as things. The thousands killed, supposedly, are not a good reason to oppose Kira, but finding patterns in the static, that's important.

Should the autistic have a series of their own, something they can love? It'd be callous of me to say no, but even the autistic deserve far better than this.

This ties back to the story concern I have with people identifying the attractiveness of the characters. It's a very shallow appreciation. The characters - and I won't lie, there are many times where I myself look at various Death Note characters and consider them, in their own ways, very attractively drawn - are vague suits into which people can imagine themselves. Near is an example of this - to demonstrate his aspergersian focus, he's constnatly shown making awesome matchstick models, or building New York out of dice, or playing with Gundams, or Transformers, or Lego. He's an underaged supergenius who outwits everyone, even other, slightly older supergeniuses, and he plays with toys all day, and he turns up at work in his pajamas. Oh, and he's adorable, but he likes to be outside the group, out on the edge, and as the series denoument demonstrates, he has no moral imperative to do anything - he is just as selfish as Light, despite his rejection of Light's perspective one chapter earlier.

A series with no heroes, a story with nothing but shallow caricatures, the story of Death Note bills itself as an intellectual, subtle, and clever psychological thriller. Having read The Silence Of The Lambs, I must disagree and instead file Death Note on the same shelf I would tuck pornography. If there was a series that so blatantly fanserviced its female characters in such grotesquely overly done way, it would be reviled and I would be considered a cro-magnon for liking it.

That said, if you like Dresden Kodak, chances are, you'd love a gender-flipped Death Note.

I'm posting this 'before' the next post, which is going to be big and ornate and eat up all the top space. I wanted to write it out, to put it somewhere public, but I really don't want it eating discussion - HAH! - from the Death Note considerations. This was my original conclusion to the Death Note post. It'll appear after, but be posted beforehand. There's something pleasantly incorrect there. When I excised the discussion of 20th Century Boys from the post, I felt that the conclusion needed rework, and then I realied it was written more to myself - almost as if I was giving myself permission for what I was doing - than it was to you.

Once I have all these thoughts out, however, looking back at the way these two series made me feel, it has filled me with a certain sense of quiet misery. The two series kick around in my head and I realise how grey and how dusty my mind has become in these past few months. With the departure from my life of one friend who very much encouraged me to write was I was good at, and enjoyed, I've realised I'm bearing up under a burden of people who want me to write Because I should write. It's hard to put my finger on the problem - nobody is making me feel bad about my work, nobody is pointing out that for all I keep saying I'm a writer, that I'm working on writing, I haven't written anything in months. I'm afraid that I've lost something, or that some part of me that wants to write is just too used to destroying itself.

I'm not sure if I'm making excuses. I suspect part of it is very much that - that I let myself be made to feel bad about it as an excuse. Right now, I'm staying up late. I know Fox doesn't like that - she sleeps better when I'm there, and ever since Rowdy died, I know I've been more aware of how my thoughts wander when sleep is hovering nearby. But tonight, I wanted to get some writing done, anything, and I'm not going to bed until I'm done. It's 5 AM. Do I use Fox's sleep - Fox's desire for me to be there when she sleeps because it makes her comfortable to be an excuse that drives me away from the practices I know really do push me towards writing?

I listen to my headphones, I stay up late, I drink lots of soda and I read lots of porn. These are the things, that, inexplicably, prompt me to produce writing I'm proud of, ideas I like. And I don't just mean for pornography - I mean for work like Serious Young Woman, which I look at every time I need to remind me of the kind of beautiful things I think and feel about my friends that I can't ever say, even with all my conscious attempts to do so (attempts which wind up fumbling time, and time, and time again). These are all three things I know I shouldn't do. And tonight, I am doing them. And tonight, I am writing.

Die Hard 4.0 is Die Hard With A Vengenace for really fucking stupid people.

I got your attention? I initially didn't have the 'really fucking' there, or the boldfacing but I think it adds something to the piece. It basically says If you enjoyed Die Hard 4.0, you're really fucking stupid.' This is part of my recent self-improvement push, to both understand why I make these desperate cries for attention and my overwhelming desire to analyse my own objectionable behaviour vocally in an attempt to try and convey it like it's humour rather than rudeness. Then I can get overly self-analytical in the second paragraph and cry myself to sleep over a totally justified statement on someone else's facebook status that makes me feel like a waste of a person.

In my last movie review I wrote about the free-ride expectation-light existence of Action Films. That is to say, if your Action Film makes no sense but has a good scene of you kicking a guy in the face, it doesn't matter, because the people who watch these movies don't want to think about it. Therefore, a selection process comes up, where people who don't want to think embrace these movies, and the people who make these movies realise the people watching them don't want to think about them. The unfortunate side effect of this is that a genre that's produced good films like Pitch Black and Die Hard With A Vengeance, has produced a piece of crap like Die Hard 4.0.

It's no doubt obvious by now that I'm going to have to explain what I think about Die Hard With A Vengeance so as to give appropriate contrast to my opinion of Die Hard 4.0. It's especially necessary given that, just as a field of comparison, a review of a movie in this genre would be given to comparing any movie in this genre to one of the best examples in the same genre. Being the sequel to the best Action Film I'd seen could be seen as a warning sign right off the bat, but the Die Hard franchise was, prior to this movie, two-thirds good, and I was totally willing to give 4.0 the benefit of the doubt. I don't think I judge sequels unduly harshly. I don't think so. Either way, I'm going to avoid poo metaphors this time as we consider and contrast movie A, a good movie, with mobie B, Die Hard 4.0.

So let's do a quick run down of what I liked in Die Hard With A Vengeance. For a start, the casting was handled well, with John McClane's characterisation as a down-to-earth, wrong-place, wrong-time hero who combines street smarts, an extreme but not too extreme action-man physicality and an iron will, carried off brilliantly by Bruce Willis. Samuel L Jackson did a great job of playing Zeus Carver, a wonderfully unstereotypical black man whose presence required a certain measure of authorial testicles, and did he pull it off well or what? Then you throw in a villain being played by Jeremy Irons and even Uwe Boll directing a George Lucas script would have a hard time fucking it all up. And they didn't stop there. The music was great. The direction was great, the sets were effing brilliant. Special effects were also handled really well because the movie didn't try to do anything ridiculous with computer graphics. For the most part when you saw an explosion, you were seeing something that a couple of guys with a chemistry set had set up quite well to go 'foom' and the overall effect is great. Objects fall with weight, explosions cast rubble around, all that good stuff. The thing that you don't have to pay attention to when you do the special effects in a more manual fashion. Then, the glory of glories to Die Hard With A Vengeance is that the movie keeps making sense if you think about it. It all combined to create a gigantic, steel-toed boot to the forehead of the moviegoing public which kicked the majority of their target audience into unsensibly stunned joy, and then turned around and applied a boot to the arse of every long-haired gaggling smartarse like myself who was all prepared to disdain it as running a franchise out on its last legs and using star power in the vaunted phoning it in phase of their respective careers.

Twelve Years Later, we get Die Hard 4.0, which is a very different beast. Where Vengeance was a smart film that parodied prior action films and held them together with a taut, sensible plot, 4.0 is a fearmongering pile of dogshit that takes the smart bits from its predecessors and stitches them together with a healthy dose of nonsense to get cheap emotional reactions. Rather than sustain its plot on the basis of narrative and storytelling and get its representation of science and technology generally right, the movie relies on the fact that its viewership are going to go into the movie with a willingness, nay a desire to not think. And lords, does it show.

I suppose I could get authoritive, as a reviewer, and point squarely at the audience, with a certain additional sense of smarm, saying You, yes you, fetid chimpanzees like yourself are to blame for this god-awful stain of a movie but that's just distributing responsibility and makes it look like it's everyone's fault at large. If it's everyone's fault, nobody is to blame, and that makes the whole thing a bit less embarassing for the population. I have no intention of doing any such thing

Now, the technology that was introduced in Die Hard With a Vengeance was real technology. It's entirely reasonable for there to be a highly explosive liquid that's composed of two chemicals that are safe and inert to transport otherwise (for example, thermite and tannerite both behave in this fashion). It's reasonable to make a highly magnetic panel that can support a light bomb. Radios - at least in the mid 90s - were still in common use by the police force, and explosions.

Now, of course, there are some acceptances. The 'light shockwave' explosions you see in the Die Hard Univers aren't uncommon, with McClane being somehow close to an explosion that can throw a train through the air but doesn't tear him into his component bits or even demonstrating any of the problems you get with actual explosive trauma. I can understand that, and there were some actual concessions made towards things like cover, and how John can't just breeze past opponents. He and Zeus demonstrate reactions to some of the ridiculous things they do, and there are always those obvious, face-and-upper-arm cuts that remind the audience that yes, of course, John is actually at risk of suffering or dying in this situation even though we all know full well that he's not. In essence, the threat presented in Die Hard With A Vengeance is a real potential terrorist threat as would be fielded by a clever, devious, ingenious opponent who composes a clever plan, and capitalises on windows of opportunity. Basically, it was a plan that worked, even when you thought about it.

Die Hard 4.0, on the other hand, isn't so well-crafted. Instead of using demonstrable things that they can show as a threat, every threat in Die Hard 4.0 is a nebulous com-pu-tor problem. Hackers in the internets! Tubes full of terrorism! Connecting up to the old sat-net!

The entire premise of Die Hard 4.0 is predicated upon an audience that not only doesn't understand computers, but fears them. It's the same family of people that happily smoke and drink but are cautious of the idea of ordering a pizza online because what if the internets get me? I would assume with even a basic level of high school education any person watching this film would have reason to ask themselves: Is it possible that every single thing in the United States is hooked up to the internet? When you take a step forward and deal with people who have dealt with the actual internet, the question comes up: Given what you can achieve with the internet, do you really think that every major service and the like in the United States is easily and centrally controlled? Because the answer in both cases is no. No, they're not.

The movie pours every possible fear, every tiny niche problem (the traffic network failing) and rather than concoct a way or a reason in which or for which way that one could go badly, it instead seals all that reasoning in the wonderful black box of com-pu-tors. Without needing to explain or justify exactly how this works, the movie just assumes that yes, of course, it's entirely feasible for a gang of spotty hackers being bossed around by a breathtakingly incapable actor portraying supposed-villain Thomas Gabriel. I know it's a tall order to follow up a role that's been held by both Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons. Moreso if one is in fact, not an actual actor per se.

This means that any time you encounter a computer in this movie, you are not going to see it do anything that resembles an actual computer's operational behaviour. If it has a chip in it, it can be hacked, and in turn can be used to hack things. If all telephone providers in the United States went down, people could still access the internet, demonstrating a colossal failure of understanding of how the internet functions and hey, while we're at it, you can turn any PDA into a satellite phone that operates completely free of any such provider malarkey because the internet is carried through the airs on the radiation-laced wings of vaccine fairies when they're flying back on the way from dispensing big buckets of autism. Whoever handled this movie clearly was not so stupid as to actually think it worked, but seemed to cynically think that the audience would be just retarded enough that it wouldn't be a problem.

There are other elements to the movie that make it bad. On the one hand, I thought Die Hard With A Vengeance handled a racist black man quite well, I feel that Die Hard 4.0 was quite sexist. Not because it showed John punching a woman in the face - indeed, that he was willing to fight her like he would fight a man is one of the points in the movie's favour. But then, the woman - who had no actual personality but being John Gabriel's generic asian hottie (another shortcut towards characterisation by making her something lathered up nerds fap over, a computer super-savvy asian kung fu artist who happens to be very sexy) - is then referenced entirely in insulting, perjorative words that have no actual connection to the woman. She's called a slut, a hooker, a whore - none of which she showed any indication of being. A bitch? Sure. That I can get behind. Manipulative? Same thing. Worse, because McClane is 'getting under Gabriel's skin' it's considered okay. In theory, it's a sign of John being smart. In practice, it's an excuse to have the macho uberhero spout sexist drivel to another man in a way that gives wife-bashers a boner.

Then we get onto the notes of non-computer science stuff, like how natural gas is shipped from point to point in big burning caravans and the rest of the time, it seems, the tubes are empty. That natural gas detonates on contact with oxygen. Helicopters can't make a journey in half an hour that a car made in five minutes, that the pilots of F-22 hornets are in fact both incredibly shortsighted and retarded, that a car running into a flat concrete post will ride up it like it's a ramp. That - okay, look, I'll stop.

It's a despairing thought, but we are routinely offered entertainment that has no connection to the reality that it's supposed to depict: Art and entertainment are ways for our mind to unpack and handle the information that they've accrued over the course of the days. They're ways for us to consider and re-examine and think, and this is a genre that blunts our ability to do it when it's wielded like this. It's depressing.

Just to be clear, however, both films piss on 12 Rounds.

Date:	2009-07-02 13:05
Subject:	Equilibrium Review (Talen Head)
Security:	Public
Mood:	aggravated
Music:	Doug Ashdown - And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

One of the important things I see a reviewer being able to do is combat factual misconceptions. Thanks to a review - of sorts - I learned how one would most appropriately cut through jail bars, how the weather actually works, and whether or not Ben Stiller is in fact a strategically shaved monkey. It is therefore with something of a heavy heart that I must take up my pen and scribe my thoughts about the movie Equilibrium, because I've made no secret that I think the movie is bad.

When I criticize such a beast, however, the immediate thing I find said about it by people who agree with me is that the movie ripped off The Matrix, so I feel I need to address this error before I approach my actual griefs with the movie, in the interest of padding my word count and legitimizing my opinion. After all, if I disliked it because it was a Matrix knock-off, my opinion looks like it's part of a herd.

The three year gap between the release of Matrix and Equilibrium might be, in some people's minds, short enough to allow a full knock-off to be written, developed, shot, and created. On the other hand, it's much more likely that Equilibrium was in production well beforehand, and the success of Matrix let it be pushed forward - as would be germaine, with the two having similar styles. They don't have much overlap once you push past the most superficial elements:

• An unlikeable protaganist.
• Trench coats.
• An awesome underutilised actor.
• Retarded use of firearms.

In a conversation with a good friend recently I mentioned two things. The first of these things evoked his surprise, the second of these things evoked his sympathy.

The second thing I said is that I often offer up my opinion feeling like it doesn't really matter to my friends around me. This is something that I realised cuts both ways. I keep from stating my opinion a lot of the time because I feel like the visceral reactions I give aren't helpful, and that more and more, people don't want to hear what I really think, so instead I peck around the edges of expression. This has led to some awfully timid writing and thought of late, where I would delete something as I started it, thinking Someone I know likes this movie. They will probably disregard my opinion because it disagrees with them. They probably will be upset at me for my opinion. More and more I find that I put a lot of effort into creating a review, then for the fear of negative reactions, or worse, no reactions, delete it.

The first thing I said is that I didn't like Wall-E. He was surprised to find this out because I recommended he and his now-girlfriend see it, because I was certain they would like it. It led to the startling revelation that just because I don't like something, doesn't mean I don't see what merits it has. The idea that I can criticize something not just based on my emotional response and make a meaningful suggestion based on what I saw. I could tell the way the themes of Wall-E would play into what he would enjoy. I could tell its sweetness and its lightness made it a good date movie for nerds, one of whom is an astrophysicist, the other of whom imports games from Japan.

I had no need to enjoy the movie myself to recognise what was good in it. I just didn't like it. Once I sat back and considered what I had done in this statement, I wound up realising that if I make someone sad because they don't like my opinion of something they liked, then they need to consider dealing with it themselves. I'm not a jerk. I just didn't like a movie. I don't make fun of movies because I want to make those who like the movies feel bad. My negative reaction to movies tend to run in three broad strokes:

• I didn't like this movie. If I don't like a movie, often there's not a lot to talk about. There are heaps of perfectly good movies that don't merit any kind of word about it. These movies won't usually rile me up, they won't usually have any real reason to be considered. They're just there. A good example of this category of movie would be 15 minutes. It wasn't a bad movie, it did some things interestingly, I just found myself not really interested in what was going on.
• This was a bad movie. Welcome to the vast majority of the actual critique I have of movies that spur me to write. Typically speaking, a movie that gets praised while having significant flaws is a movie I think of as bad movie. When you extract a movie from its hype and look at it without the weight of its marketing behind it, you'll find a lot of bad things - thin characterisation, poor storytelling, loose plot threads, misuse of themes, or badly handled subtexts. Sometimes a movie is defined by a badly done story, sometimes by badly done characters. Funnily enough, I tend to not think of special effects or set or music in the same category. Either way, I think of a movie as a bad movie if it has some big failing in its whole script. A bad actor can't make a bad movie. He can just make a movie more painful to watch.
• This movie is actively harmful. This is a very rare category to find a movie in. I haven't seen very many actively harmful movies in a while. For the most part, movies have some really negative or harmful elements - consider the sexist writing in Van Helsing. The film was overall decent enough (if I was pushed to it, I'd consider a 'bad movie', but one I enjoyed), but the way it treated women was something I genuinely think of as harmful.

• 12 Rounds
• Stardust
• Equilibrium
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine