A joyful end

I finished watching The Good Place this week.  (Substantial spoilers ahead, though I don't think it will ruin the show for you at all.)  The show is a bizarre hybrid of silly jokes and philosophical musing, a mishmash of pop culture riffs and deep examination of the meaning of life.

I love that combination.

I cried most of the way through the final episode.  It wasn't because the end of the show was sad, as it was most certainly a happy ending.  The characters completed their bizarre journeys across the boundaries of life and afterlife and concluded their adventures through The Good Place, The Bad Place, and The Medium Place.  The story ended, the plot resolved, and they went on to find their eventual end.  Wendy asked me what it was about the episode that made me weep throughout and after some consideration I have a couple of answers.

First off I love the idea of a properly finished story.  A character ending their arc and being done, finished, complete, has a huge emotional power over me.  I can be happy with a 'happily ever after' sort of ending, but if you really want to yank on my heartstrings you need to finish the character completely.

The characters in the show absolutely got their proper end.  Their adventures stopped, and they had the time needed to rest, grow, improve, and become their best selves.  Then, when they had done all the things, become beautiful butterflies, they ended.

Ended.  Not dead, not 'no more to say', actually ended.

I love that so much.  Something about an actual end, a proper one, one that comes when the character is truly ready for it, has immense power.

This leads into my second point, which is that I am so interested in how relationships end.  I love the idea of people accepting their partners for who they are, and not clinging on to a relationship that is no longer truly serving them, or being true to who they are.  I love watching people who love one another but who are capable of accepting that their partner may need to leave, and that this is the best thing.  Often a partner leaving is portrayed as a thing you must fight, or hate, but The Good Place absolutely took a stand that I love:  Sometimes someone leaving is simply the best thing that can happen.  That doesn't mean the relationship isn't important, that you now hate each other, or that the relationship failed.  It simply means it needs to be over.

You can love someone deeply and watch them leave you without anger or bitterness.  Set them free, and let them fly, and wish them only the best.  When we talk about children people mostly get this, and I wish we all saw our relationship partners the same way.

This is all most potent because of choice.  The characters *chose* their fate.  This wasn't the universe sweeping in and killing them randomly - they decided to be done.  I don't know why exactly, but watching someone come to that place of contentment, of satisfaction, of completeness, and looking into the void without fear or worry... so powerful.

Something about having done enough, having learned enough, *being* enough, that you can comfortably say that you need no more hits me square in the feelings.  I have often said that mortality is defined not by the fear of death, but the experience of fear, doubt, and worry.  Seeing people who have gotten beyond that, who no longer face those demons, because they have done all they need to do; it gets me.

I love that The Good Place managed to tackle the philosophical trolley problem with a trolley that runs over screaming people, covering the person riding the trolley in blood, with a cackling eternal being taking notes the entire time.  I love that it never stopped having Tahani drop names, or Jason be a doofus.  But while having all this silly humour they also taught us things and told a wonderful story.

You should watch The Good Place.  Whether you are there for the silly fun or the deep stuff, it delivers.

Failing to stick the landing

 Wendy, Pinkie Pie, and I have been watching Avatar:  The Last Airbender for months now.  We have a pizza and Avatar night every week, and tonight we finally finished the series.  Wendy and Pinkie Pie are way more into the show than I am, but I am definitely still enjoying it so far.  

Unfortunately, like many shows, this one failed to wrap up the series in a way that satisfies me.  It actually stumbled into what I consider one of the most common and unfortunate issues in entertainment - failing to resolve a difficult, tense choice properly.

One of the key things the show highlights about Aang is his conflicted feelings about killing.  He wants to defend the world, and it is made clear that his destiny is to fight and kill the Fire Lord.  He wants to fight, and to win, but not to kill.  In many places in the story this is a major source of issues and angst for our hero, and in fact there is a whole short arc devoted to him trying to resolve it.

Aang's decision to kill or not could be a powerful climax to the series.  He could kill the Fire Lord and regret it, saving the world but costing him personally.  He could refuse to kill and watch the world burn, which would be devastating in a different way.

Instead they decide at the pivotal moment that he doesn't have to make this choice.  He can just win without killing because magic.  Yay!  What a relief!

The problem is that all the tension in the scene falls completely flat.  What did training matter?  What did Aang's struggle over killing affect?  He just went straight to an answer he could have used in the first season, removing the need for much of the story so far, making many of the struggles of the protagonists entirely moot.

It seems as though the writers were desperate to have Aang not kill people, so desperate that they were willing to throw away half of their story.  It isn't as though a refusal to kill makes a story bad, far from it, but making that moral choice a cornerstone of your story and then just abandoning it is sad.  Thing is though, if Aang isn't willing to kill, why was there so much killing in the series?  Smashing ships, crushing tanks, exploding aircraft, there is no end of mass killing of bad guys by the heroes, Aang in particular.  Aang and his gang, without any sign of moral quandary, murder huge numbers of people throughout the series.

The people they murder without worry are the unnamed randoms, the soldiers without stories, the poor, the low.  But murder a lord?  We can't do that!  Killing the highborn *matters*, in a way that killing the lowborn does not.

Let me be clear - the murders of soldiers aren't shown on screen.  Avatar doesn't explicitly show the grisly deaths, but tossing people in the middle of the ocean, or crushing a vehicle they are in to nothing, is definitely lethal.  You can't ignore the fact though that the gang will kill without worry so long as the victim isn't someone important.  As soon as the victim is important, powerful, known, suddenly they will risk anything and everything to keep that person alive.

It manages to be both classist and cruddy storytelling at the same time.

Time travel is the worst

 I liked the Umbrella Academy Season 1.  It had characters I enjoyed watching, a great aesthetic, and a bunch of neat world building that I wanted to see more of.  It wasn't perfect, but I had a great time with it.

Unfortunately UA ended up being a lot like The Matrix.  It had all these cool ideas that didn't quite fit together, but it didn't have enough time for you to sort out exactly how they didn't fit.  There was still tons of room to imagine that the writers had all of it figured out, and that later on you would see the story come together beautifully.  Then the next chapter came out, and everyone realized that they had been just making shit up the whole time and when they actually tried to put it all together it looked like a junkheap instead of a carefully crafted narrative.

A substantial part of the problem was that UA was determined to have a bunch of time travel.  You *can* do time travel well (see Terminator 2), but the way to do it well is to simply have it happen off screen.  Time travel happened, sure, but now the characters just have to cope with the situation they are in.  Shows where the characters can time travel and change the past all end up being a disaster.  UA had the time travel pretty much off screen for the first season, which was fine, but in the second season they elected to have lots of time travel in the plot, and that blew everything to bits.

You can't just have a character who can go back in time and fix anything that goes wrong.  It makes all the decisions everyone makes totally silly.  Heck, the revelation that he can do this retroactively trashes the first season of the show, since now we know that he could have solved all the problems any time he wanted, and he just didn't because the writers told him not to.

Having everything go terribly and then fixing it by 'turns out the character can go back in time and change anything he wants!' feels like they were trying to go for a big emotional scene but lacked any sense of creativity or long term thinking and came up with the most silly, hackneyed, destructive idea they could and ran with it.  It isn't easy to write characters into dire situations and then have them get out of those situations in a believable but surprising way, but if you can't write that, then find someone who can.  Just throwing up your hands in despair, employing a Deus Ex Machina, and giving up on any world consistency or dramatic tension going forward is pathetic.

It is easy to see where this heads.  In future the character simply forgets to use his 'fix anything with time travel' ability, and they write stories as if this major plot point never happened.  I know that in superhero stories characters forgetting to use their powers is common.  That doesn't make it good.  It isn't just with nonsense time travel either - characters in UA consistently have abilities they forget about, or don't bother using, for no reason.  They have a hugely important conversation in the show where all the main characters desperately need a villain to tell them something.  One of those characters can mind control people, and does so regularly.  All she has to do is say "I heard a rumour that you answered all of our questions" and the villain would spill any secret they desired.  Since they were desperately trying to prevent Armageddon at that point, it would be entirely justified!  But she forgets, because that way the plot can happen.

It sucks, because I like the people in the show.  I like the weird retro/futuristic blend of the tech.  I like that they blend in stories about people of colour and queer people and make those struggles part of the narrative.  

But the plot is a travesty, and the worldbuilding is an inconsistent mess.  Whenever the characters need to be in a place for the plot, they go all robot 'beep boop I am going over here now' even if it makes no sense whatsoever.  What a waste of a bunch of good character building.

So many superhero shows fall into the trap of gifting characters amazing powers to solve problems and then completely forget that this changes the world and they will actually have to account for those marvellous new powers at other times.  Unfortunately Umbrella Academy does this, and to an extent that I just can't care about it anymore.

Making it up as we go along

I like my science fiction hard.  I want stories where a strange thing is proposed, and then the writer takes a long look at what that would do to society.  I don't like stories that are set in the future but in which everything is resolved with techno babble and space wizardry.

When I watched the first season of Altered Carbon I quite liked it.  It had some issues, notably the excessive sexual violence against women, the star actor having only a single expression, and the departures from the books in ways that weren't useful, but I still had a positive watching experience.  It did the thing I want science fiction to do where it built a consistent, believable universe and explored the consequences of a particular scientific discovery - the ability to move human consciousness from body to body and preserve it after the death of the meatsack.

I read all three books in the series and enjoyed them too.  The followup books weren't as good as the first, but there was still something there that I appreciated.  When I heard of season 2 I eagerly awaited the adaptation of book 2.  The reviews were positive and particularly highlighted how it was better than season 1, so I had high expectations.

Those expectations were dashed.  There were good things - I liked the queer and POC representation in the show better.  The lead actor was a considerable improvement.

But the story.... ack.  Instead of writing an installment that built on the first season, they decided to just randomly change physics and technology whenever they had a cool scene to write.  The AIs in particular were a neverending sack of nonsense technobabble in the service of unnecessary details.  Want to have a certain spot look a certain way?  Mumble about nano swarms and then have it just happen.  Want to threaten an AI?  Mumble about code and have it just happen.

It makes me sad when writers clearly give up.  Instead of building a compelling story in the world they have created, they just decide to change the world any time the facts get in the way of whatever thing they want to do.  I can't be excited about threats to characters when the threats are nonsensical, nor thrilled by solutions when they are pulled straight out of somebody's ass.  It is especially egregious when they use a solution for one thing and then refuse to use it for another because they want to make up some new stupid random thing to solve that.

Character abilities also shift without warning.  Sometimes people are unbeatable fighting machines, and then in the next scene they get bested by some random chumps because they needed to get arrested because plot.  Equipment randomly acquires or loses abilities for convenience, so it is hard to have any idea what anyone can do.  At one point the characters are standing at the scene of a battle, completely surrounded by well equipped dead fighters.  However, the next scene needs them to be at a particular gun store, so they announce that they need guns and head off to the gun store, leaving reams of excellent armament just sitting on the ground.

I can't get into a story that silly.  Nothing feels serious or real, and the emotional moments end up being contrived instead of poignant.  It is sad, because the source material gave them a ton to work with, and instead they created an entirely new story, one that is held together by the flimsiest of plots.

Everybody knows

Everyone knows Rambo movies are a collection of shirtless Stallone shots where Rambo uses a machine gun to mow down endless waves of soldiers.  Also he probably kills a lot of people with knives and explosives too, just to keep it from getting monotonous.  This is certainly what I thought, though I have never actually seen a Rambo movie.  You don't have to see it when all the images are so constantly embedded in popular culture.  I know Rambo without knowing it.

Except apparently I don't know Rambo.

I watched a review for the newest Rambo installation and found out that the original Rambo has only a single death in it, and it was from a fall.  Rambo was largely responsible because he threw a rock that caused the fall, but it isn't at all clear he intended to cause a death.  The movie had violence, but it was a lot more of a character piece and not an orgy of carnage like I had assumed.

It turns out that things that everyone knows are apparently just things I assumed from soaking up cultural references.  Of course I was completely correct in my evaluation of all the other Rambo movies - here are there death counts.

Rambo 1 - 1
Rambo 2 - 115
Rambo 3 - 175
Rambo 4 - 254

These movies sure take a turn for the death right around Rambo 2!

But it makes me wonder what other cultural icons I know nothing about.  Is Nightmare on Elm Street actually a poignant look at regret over missing out on raising a child?  Is Rocky about a man who just wants to start a career as an actuary but boxes in his spare time to keep in shape?

What else do I know for sure, that everyone knows, but which just ain't true?

Dodging meteors

I have spent a lot of time laughing at Archer.  Stirling Archer, that is, and his band of bitter, maladjusted misfits.  The show Archer did the super spy / mad scientist thing really well, so long as you can tolerate the characters being a bunch of bigoted assholes.

But the latest season is sad.  It still has Archer's classic banter, but it is set in space in the far future, and the writers seemed determined to use this as an excuse for shoddy, half baked writing.

The latest episode I have watched is a perfect example.  The entire story is based around the crew getting eaten by a giant space monster and their attempts to escape.  Ten kilometer tall spacebound tentacled horrors are absurd, but if you really need one in order to get your story working, I am fine with that.

But don't give me bullshit lines like "We were dodging a meteor storm when we cut through this galaxy and got caught by the space monster."  Galaxies are BIG.  Meteors are FAR APART.  You aren't suddenly dodging a meteor storm in deep space.  You might blast by a single rock while travelling 10,000 km/s, but this is never going to run you into a vacuum loving squid's mouth.

The space monster was necessary, so I am happy to forgive the ridiculousness of it.  However, the sorry set of excuses the show used for getting people *into* the monster was not.  "We came to investigate a distress signal, and when we tried to cut the monster apart in order to get the other ship out, the monster caught us." is at least a vaguely plausible story.  I don't mind making stupid crap up if it is necessary for the plot, but I hate it when writers make stupid crap up because they can't be bothered to spend the 30 seconds required to think up something that holds together.

It almost seems like the people writing this mess actually don't know what the word galaxy even means, the way they toss it around.  It strikes me as plausible that if the entire writing team was asked what a galaxy is they would have nothing more accurate than "It is, like, an area of space?"

I don't mind it when the rules get bent for reasons.  I get that!  What irks me is when the only reason is "I was feeling super lazy."

Writing this episode, or indeed any of the episodes so far, without butchering science and sensicality would have been easy and wouldn't have required any extra time or effort.  Archer went and got sloppy with the writing, as so many science fiction shows do, and it feels like the end of its appeal.

Jerk those tears, hard

Wendy has been watching a lot of Queer Eye and got Pinkie Pie and I into it.  Queer Eye is a show about 5 gay dudes who find someone who is doing laudable public service but who needs help to get their own life together.  Typically the hero of an episode runs charities, works in non profits, or volunteers a ton of time towards community organizations.  However, they have a terrible wardrobe, messy house, ugly hair, and unresolved issues.  Also they can't cook.

Then the Fab 5 show up to make everything better.  Yay!  They do a makeover, renovate the person's house, buy them new clothes, teach them to cook, and help them figure out their life.  Then, with all problems solved, the Fab 5 move on... and presumably the makeover lasts a week, the clothes a couple years, and the reno ten years.  You can't fix everything, certainly not in a week.

And yet I end up crying most of the time watching these shows.  Something about watching a person who is dedicated to helping others but who is hopeless personally makes me desperately root for them.  Seeing their reaction to their messes being cleaned up, to their homes being repaired, and to a new vision of themselves as respectable, together adults gets me leaking all over the place.

I know the show is terribly formulaic and staged.  Not fradulent or anything like that... but obviously they choose the parts they show to generate maximum impact.  They are trying to jerk my tears, and the best way to do that is to have a real story and then tell only the parts that reinforce the main thesis.  I know this, but that doesn't seem to stop me having all the feelings.

Clearly it isn't just about 5 dudes with great intentions.  I could help people pretty easily too, if I had a $100,000 budget for a wild week of shopping.  I don't know shit about grooming or fashion but I can pay people to know that for me as well as anyone.  Much of Queer Eye is just a lesson in how transformative a giant pile of cash can be for people.

I will give them credit for being critical of people though.  The heroes all have big flaws, and those flaws are out there for everyone to see.  Sometimes those flaws get addressed in some satisfactory way, and sometimes not, but that is how helping people goes.  The show really does do a good job of portraying the heroes as people with good intentions and lots of issues.

The world is not made better by 5 random dudes showing up with a wad of cash and a pile of cameras to fix one person's hairstyle struggles.  It is made better mostly by silent, unacknowledged grinding by billions of people, day after day. 

One tiny piece, one nearly invisible change, over and over.  That is how things improve, not in a splashy, easy to film moment.

But Queer Eye does give us the sight of people being overwhelmed with gratitude for good deeds done.  Maybe knowing that this is possible, that we can be heroes ourselves, pushes people towards doing good things.  Certainly it is a better example than all the superhero vigilante shows I watch!

A dragon or three

This post has all the spoilers for Game of Thrones season 8.

In the closing episodes of season 8, Daenerys murdered thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people.  Not because they were a threat, but just because she was pissed off.  There are all kinds of blog posts and articles and petitions that are angry about this because people wanted Dany to be good and pure!  She could be the saviour of Westeros!

Dany was never good or pure.  She was just white, as white as white can be.  The story of Dany as the great saviour is a pile of racism as far as I am concerned.  Dany is very much the embodiment of privilege, a person who wants the feeling of having helped people, the belief in herself as a benevolent person, but who has no interest whatsoever in considering what sort of help other people actually want.  She wants to *feel* good, not *do* good.

Throughout Game of Thrones Dany has been merciless, cruel, and hopelessly self centered.  She refuses to see anyone else's suffering as relevant, and regularly makes it clear that while she lays claim to titles like "The Breaker of Chains" she actually isn't interested in offering freedom.  She wants to be seen as a liberator, but she demands perfect subservience from everyone around her and total personal loyalty.  People should be free, she thinks, but what freedom means is simply "Have no other master other than Daenerys."

Dany 'saves' people occasionally, no doubt.  But she saves them without any idea of the consequences of her actions, and her expectation afterwards is perfect obedience and adulation.  Simply put, Dany sees herself as the natural and righteous ruler of the world.  When any power structure is destroyed she is happy because it means that more of the world is falling under her sway, and she is closer to the absolute power she thinks she deserves.  When she saves someone she thinks she is doing them a favour - the favour of being ruled by Dany instead of someone else.  Most people think of being saved as being given more freedom, more security, or a otherwise better life.  Dany doesn't think that, because they only thing that makes the world better, in her mind, is her controlling more of it.

Just look at how the whole thing with her rescuing Mirri Maz Duur from a rape goes down: Dany assumes that because she rescued Mirri Maz Duur that she is owed eternal loyalty and love.  Mirri Maz Duur, of course, remembers that the army that Dany showed up with raped and murdered her entire family, destroyed their homes, and enslaved them.  And then she was 'rescued' by being taken forcefully by her oppressors as a servant.  No wonder she strikes back when given the chance!

Daenerys is a delusional, murderous, megalomaniacal tyrant.  The fact that Varys and Tyrion, among others, could not see this is mostly a function of their own racism, and the fact that they really didn't see the suffering in foreign nations as important compared to the suffering of people in Westeros.  They saw her being a force for destruction and evil but hoped that she would suddenly stop when she arrived amongst white people... and she did not.  I wasn't surprised in the slightest, and they shouldn't have been either.

It was honestly funny to me that people complained about this turn of events as though it was impossible to predict.  Dany has been written and acted in such a way as to foreshadow this throughout the show.  Just watch how often Tyrion tries to convince her that she shouldn't use her dragons to burn King's Landing, and how she consistently ignores that line of reasoning.  She doesn't say "Of course burning a city with dragons is a heinous crime!  I would never do such a thing!"  She stares icily, and makes it clear that she would *love* to burn the city with her dragons, but just maybe if people beg and grovel enough she might forgo that pleasure.

Because she is the rightful ruler, and if she wants to burn a city, well, that is her perogative.  People only live because she allows it.

While Daenerys had a terrible time of it in many respects, she has always been a villain.  Many people were hoping that she was the one truly good person in a world of moral ambiguity, (again, way too strongly influenced by her whiteness) but that has never been borne out by her words or actions. 

Face it.  Daenerys is one of the great villains of Game of Thrones.  Just because she occasionally struck back at men for their sexist behaviour or ruthlessly murdered evil people doesn't change that.  Just because she is pretty and white doesn't make her pure.  Her suffering, appearance, and gender do not qualify her for Team Good status.

When Dany burned King's Landing I nodded to myself and thought "Yep, that sure was always going to happen."  You don't have to like it, but this was coming right from the beginning.

I wish it was good

The new Doctor Who got some people excited because the Doctor is now a woman. I liked the idea, and I think it was about damn time they tried that.  Of course many misogynists yelled on the internet that maleness is a key, necessary part of being the Doctor, but they are just spewing sexism everywhere and making a mess on the carpets.

I am glad that the actress playing the Doctor now really nailed the part.  She has just the right enthusiasm and quizzical positiveness that makes it work.  Unfortunately I am a little bit skeptical about the writing, particularly for the third episode.  The episode focused around the characters visiting Rosa Parks, of US civil rights movement fame.  They had to stop a very racist man from the future from preventing her story unfolding.

I like shows that push back against patriarchal norms.  I also like shows that showcase racism in a serious, wrenching light, and this show did that.  It had the main characters talking about their negative experiences with racism, and dug into the topic.  Great!

But the show was terrible. The writing failed all kinds of basic rules, and left everyone watching with a bad taste in their mouths.  It made little sense, felt shoddy, and was a real let down.  Politically it was good.  The story and scenes though... they were rubbish.

It reminds me of the Ghostbusters reboot a few years back with a female cast.  I wanted it to be good, the sexist trolls on the internet hated it before even seeing it, and it ended up being a bad movie.  There is something extra disappointing when a piece of media aligns with your politics and you want so much for it to be good, if nothing else because that might help more things like it to be made.  There is a guilt that manifests if you say you hate it because it sucks, because you don't want to be one of those people hating it just because it features a woman, or a black person, or a gay person, or whatever.  But you do dislike it, not because of those things, but because it just isn't any good.

So far I have only seen three episodes of the new Doctor Who.  I like the way the show is going, and if you liked the older versions of the Doctor you will probably like this one.  Doctor Who isn't exactly my thing, but this show, and the lead actress in particular, do the thing that Doctor Who does really well.

But the third episode... not so much.  Hopefully it rebounds from here.

Villainy

This past weekend I finished watching season 3 of Daredevil.  I loved the show up to that point, and the majority of season 3 itself was great.  The highlight of the show is definitely the villain, Kingpin.  The actor who portrays Kingpin does a fantastic job of being terrifying and evil while showing us a person who can be charismatic and smooth when it suits him.  Kingpin has no special powers aside from being extremely strong, so the fear he instills is about his ruthlessness, his audacity, his will, and his intelligence.  He is terrifying not because of magic or hand waved science, but rather because of his mind.

It is amusing almost to compare Kingpin to villains in other comic book shows.  In the Flash the villains are usually ridiculous and love to engage in standard terrible tropes - monologues, absurd threats, bragging, and other silliness are constant.  You can't be scared of them because they come across as so frivolous.

A real supergenious villain doesn't need to brag to the hero about how smart he is.  He just goes about his plans.  It is the oldest bit of advice in the book for writing - show, don't tell.  Having the villain tell the hero that the villain is super smart and dangerous is boring.  Write the villain doing something horrible and have his intelligence defeat the heroes easily - that is how you get me to believe.

Villains are honestly way more important than heroes.  I can get along with all kinds of heroes, but if the villains are weak, I lose interest.

Unfortunately the end of Daredevil season 3 was weak.  Kingpin goes back to prison, and the heroes celebrate.  But the entirety of season 3 taught us that in prison Kingpin rules all the prisoners, runs his criminal enterprise, and murders whoever he likes.  Prison only slightly slows down his crimes and body count.  So how is putting him back there a triumph?  It is obvious he will just do it again.

In a more cartoony version where nobody dies and a villain creates a doomsday device that the hero disarms just in time, prison feels like a reasonable solution.  In a gritty world with constant carnage, with a villain that still does whatever he wants from behind bars, how is prison a solution?  That conclusion was unsatisfying.

It seems other people agreed with me, and Daredevil was cancelled.  I guess that grittiness and darkness doesn't appeal as broadly as I had thought it would, or perhaps there was just something else that didn't resonate with people.

For those of us addicted to Netflix MCU superheroes, we can still count on The Punisher and Jessica Jones to deliver.  Admittedly The Punisher is more carried by the hero than the villains, but the first season of Jessica Jones is all about her foil, Killgrave.

I wonder if people would generally prefer my sorts of villains over the silly generic ones that so many shows produce.  I know what I like, but perhaps that isn't actually what most people want when they flop down on the couch at night.

Dream chasers

I have watched a couple documentaries this past week about MMA fighters and bodybuilders.  It is always interesting to me to examine the extremes that particular cultures will go to when you examine the most ardent members of those cultures and these did not disappoint.  The shows were full of examples of champions bragging about their victories, desperate to convince the world of their superiority, and down on their luck people struggling to stay in the game despite losses, injury, and despair.

It makes me think that chasing your dreams is a terrible way to live.

Probably more accurately, chasing the wrong dreams is a terrible way to live.  Looking at this reminds me of the Stoic philosophies I read about a lot years ago.  One of their core ideas was that you should strive to compete against yourself, not against other people.  There is no happiness that comes from measuring your self worth by how many people you defeat - there will always be people that beat you, no matter what you do, and then you are betting your happiness on random chance.  You might lose via your opponents cheating, you may lose by genetic lottery, or you might lose by any number of other instances of pure back luck.  Why stake everything on luck when you don't have to?  Measure yourself against yourself, and no one else.

All the people in these documentaries who were struggling to defeat others in competition got their quick highs of victory, but then they had to deal with crushing defeat.  They also inevitably end up broken, damaged, and out of the game.  The ones who actually seemed happy were always those on the fringes of competition, just doing a job.  The people that found joy in these communities seemed to be the trainers, judges, referees, and other behind the scenes types.

The trainers didn't end up getting an injury and then spend years desperately trying to get back into fighting shape, suffering constant sadness and frustration, to inevitably fail anyway.  They just did their job as well as possible and lived their lives.

I have made this choice in my life.  I could have chased Magic, poker, or professional game design, trying to make it in a field full of desperate people.  I don't think that is the way to be happy though. 

There are times when the shining lights and glitter of stardom pulls at me.  I absolutely get the appeal of being one of the names that everybody knows.  But the world isn't fair.  Even if I was excellent in terms of skill and work, even if I gave it my all, plenty of other people are too.  There would be any number of reasons why I could and would lose even if I do everything right.

I am not special.  I have talent, sure, but there is nothing in the world guaranteeing my victory.  The fact that I am the star of my own story means jack shit to the universe at large.

When I look at people like those MMA fighters and bodybuilders I see desperation and misery.  They struggle so hard to fill a hole in themselves and they refuse to see that no matter how many wins they rack up that emptiness will never be gone.

Pick something you love.  Do it a lot until you are great at it.  Become the best at it that you can be.  Forget about how good other people are at it, because that doesn't matter.  Stake your happiness on the striving, not on the victory, because striving is something you can succeed at forever.  Beating your opponents is not.

On blood, the giving of

In movies and TV shows you often see people cutting themselves to extract blood.  The power of blood for rituals, for spells, for magic, is a common thread in our stories.  Somtimes you test to see if people will go berserk, or if they are a vampire, or perhaps you just want to gather their blood because they are special and it has power. 

The really foolish part about all this bloodletting is that people always seem to want to slash their palms.  They grab knives, slide their hands down swords, and slice n dice their palms to bits.

This is a terrible idea.

Look, if you want to cut yourself in an obvious way you should *clearly* make a slash on the back of your arm just above the wrist.  Easy to bandage, easy to keep an eye on.  When you slash your palm though you have a bandage around your hand.  This is a disaster from a utility standpoint.  You are clumsy, you risk opening the wound if you use your hand for anything, the bandage will be hard to apply properly and will easily come off.  The back of the forearm doesn't have any of these penalties!

Plus the back of the forearm has little in the way of nerves so it won't hurt nearly as much.

So the next time a wizened old warlock tells you that your blood has the power to do some big exciting ritual blah blah blah do yourself a favour and don't cut your palm.  When the big powerful leader demands a show of loyalty and for some reason they want that to include blood, keep in mind that you need your hands for things and the big power leader wants you to be effective.  Back of the forearm, that is the ticket.

You are welcome.

14 year old writing

I like zombies.  Also apocalypse stories.  So it was no surprise that I liked The Walking Dead.  I love playing through scenarios in my mind, wondering how I would react if I were in such a situation.

One of the things I am sure of is that I would make better day to day decisions.  The people in The Walking Dead do all kinds of stupid things but I completely buy into their emotional, immediate choices even when those choices are bad.  Kill that person, let that person go, empathize with a zombie, these are all things that would totally go wrong.

But geez, can you stop making awful choices day after day when there is no pressure?  The zombies are pushing on the fence.  Go kill them all!  You can kill one every ten seconds, so if you work on stabbing for an hour you kill 600 of them.  There won't be any more zombies then, and you can stop worrying.  Clear the damn zombies out around your base, don't just let them accumulate to disastrous levels.  Get four people, build some spears, go get your stab on!

But no, they just let the zombies stand there until it all goes bad.  Fools!

I would be a much better zombie apocalypse survivor than most people, that much I am sure of.

The show was really great up until the end of season six.  People told me that it went bad in season seven, but what they didn't mention was that the finale to season six was a travesty.  I watched it and was all bitter and grumpy and then I finally realized why:  The writers had done all the same awful things that me and my friends did when we were telling stories in Dungeons and Dragons when we were teenagers.

You see, back in those days, we were terrible at storytelling.  We would have bad guys who always just knew what the heroes were up to.  The bad guys had infinite supplies of troops, traps, weapons, and plans, and could have easily defeated the heroes at any time.  They often captured the heroes and taunted them, only to dump them off somewhere for no reason at all.  The players often wondered why exactly such powerful villains had nothing better to do than spy on the heroes all day and try to be a pain in the ass.

And the finale to season six of The Walking Dead was exactly that.  The series has had plenty of good villains so far and they didn't resort to all these idiotic setups to establish the bad ass nature of the villains.  This time around the villains knew everything the heroes did, despite that making no sense.  They had unlimited soldiers, fuel, trucks, and weapons and spent lavishly of those things just to taunt and annoy the heroes.  In a post apocalyptic landscape where all these things are precious, scarce, and irreplaceable the villains tossed them away simply to be brats.

It wrecks the world.  It makes me feel like all the previous struggles for supplies that everyone went through were a joke.  Dealing with hunger and desperation in previous seasons was trivialized because obviously there is enough of everything just sitting around for these idiots to waste it to no purpose.  The immersion is gone.

I can't be too harsh in sum - the show was great up until now.  But geez, when you can't do any better at writing a season finale than the whimsical creations of a teenage DnD player you have lost your way.

No I just need to do what I did after watching The Matrix 2 and 3.  "Gee, The Walking Dead was so good.  It is too bad that they never finished season six.  I am sure it would have been great."

Almost famous

Last night my parent council group got an email asking us for someone to do an interview about the signs outside Pinkie Pie's school.  Apparently there were signs near the school telling drivers to slow down and then the signs were removed.  None of us felt interested in being interviewed about the subject.

Today when I was dropping Pinkie Pie off at school a man with a big television camera approached me.  He starting talking really fast and tried to get me to talk to him about those same signs.  I suppose their attempts to round up somebody to interview about them had failed so he resorted to randomly asking people on the street about it.  After just a few moments it became clear that he was looking for exactly one thing:  Outrage.

I don't know exactly what sort of outrage he was hunting for.  He might have been wanting someone to shout "Think of the children!" because they were angry about 'slow down' signs being taken away.  He might have wanted me to be angry about the signs going up in the first place, something like "Damn city hall, always making my commute longer!"  Heck, he might have wanted me to be outraged about the waste of "My taxpayer dollars!"

Or maybe he would have been happy with any sort of outrage at all.  Hard to say.

Unfortunately for him all I had was a shrug and a lack of interest.  I didn't much notice the signs, I don't know why they were put up or taken down, and I certainly lack any good data with which to decide what they should have done.

I know that sometimes the government does wasteful things, but you can't expect perfection.  Sometimes you try stuff to see if it works and then it doesn't so you try something else.  That isn't a sign of inefficiency, it is just how people try to fix problems.  I also know that if you want to supply useful news to the public about an event it is nearly worthless to get a random person on the street to be outraged on camera about a topic they are clueless about.

If I had thought I would get on TV I would have been really tempted to give him his interview and turn it to my own purposes.  I would have happily been outraged about how news programs trade on emotional people and ignorant outrage to get ratings instead of supplying information from people who actually know what the hell they are talking about.  I would happily have chastised the news program for trying to use me for shock value and being focused on upset people instead of facts.

But no way would they put that on TV, so there was no point.  I just acted like I didn't know anything and didn't care about the subject, which was easy because I don't know anything about it and I don't care about the subject.  He quickly realized that he was not getting what he wanted from me and went away to find someone who would be angry on camera for him.

I hope he didn't find anyone.  But he probably did - people like to be angry about stuff they don't know anything about, I have noticed.

Fight for her love

I just finished watching an episode of Bob's Burgers and it pissed me off.  The basic plot is that Tina is attracted to both Josh and Jimmy.  Jimmy and Josh both are attracted to her.  Tina asks Jimmy to the dance, Jimmy delays because he wants to play it coy.  Josh asks Tina, Tina accepts, and Jimmy realizes that he was an idiot for playing games and losing out.

All this is fine.  It is the standard stupid stuff people do in relationships, especially at the age of 13.

Then while Tina and Josh are at the dance Jimmy shows up and demands a dance off to determine who wins Tina.

/barf

I hate this trope so much.  Everyone just falls into line, accepting that Tina will be contracted to be in a relationship with the boy who wins the contest.

She doesn't get to just be with the boy who treated her well.  She doesn't even get to choose.  She is an object to be fought over, a trophy awarded for talent.

Now Tina actually likes the idea of the two boys dancing for her and is all hot and bothered about it, but that basic premise sidling in there, accepted so casually, pisses me off.

I never particularly liked a lot of the standard shitty sexist tropes in romantic comedies but the years I have spent being polyamorous have really ended any tolerance that I once possessed.  It isn't that I find the idea of only being attracted to one person bizarre - lots of people do that, and it is fine.  I am going to continue being attracted to and involved with way more people than is good for me, but you go ahead and only do one at a time. 

But what is becoming less sensible by the year is the idea that you would even want to forbid a partner from having other partners.  I am slowly drifting away from the mainstream here, to a point where I look at people desperately needing their partners to be exclusive and it puzzles me.  Why?  What, exactly, is the point?

I get that it is convenient, of course.  Having an open relationship does tend to cause other people to freak out.  But actually having a desperate need for it?  Weird.  Which is all kinds of bizarre because I spent most of my life so far doing just that, but it is getting so distant now that I can hardly remember what that Sky was thinking.

The episode ends with Tina trying to convince both of the boys that they ought to try some sort of threeway relationship.  This part actually goes just the way I wish it would - both of them politely decline as they aren't interested in that and wander away without anger or bitterness.  People asking for what they want, and getting useful, honest replies, and everybody respecting each other's wishes?  In a romantic comedy situation?  What?

So while the end of the show was okay, that trope of 'boys compete over who gets to win the girl' needs to die in a fire.  We can do better.  What should have happened is that when Jimmy shows up and demands a dance off, Tina should say "Um, no.  I went to the dance with Josh because he wasn't playing crappy games with me.  I date who I want, and if you want to date me try acting like the sort of person I would want to date.  Bye."

Raising burgers up right

This January has had some real rough spots so far.  I started off with a hideous illness, some kind of awful cold that put me down for a week.  It faded from there but had a long tail so after three weeks I thought the last of the persistent cough would finally end.

And then I caught another cold and am sick again. 

On the upside, being sick all the time has left me lots of time to watch animated sitcom Bob's Burgers.  I assume most people who talk about Bob's Burgers would want to talk about the silly events that occur or the ridiculous children in the Belcher family but the thing that really gets me about the show is the parenting.

I remember watching The Simpsons years ago and always being really uncomfortable with the parenting in the show.  Homer is constantly physically abusive to Bart and is generally a pretty awful person.  Marge is less brutal but still puts up with Homer choking Bart and does that parenting thing where parents desperately try to solve their children's problems by doing whatever they wished their parents had done instead of what their children need.

This is the thing that I like most about Bob's Burgers.  The parents are quirky and flawed people.  They make mistakes.  But they fundamentally believe in their children's right to self determination and do their best to support them.  They struggle to balance their own lives and dreams against the needs of their children and generally do all right at that.

The Simpsons is a classic model of abusive behaviour - Homer does horrible things, then at the end of the show suddenly gets all loving and kind and tries to make it up to everyone.  Not that every episode is like this, but enough of them follow that script that the dynamic was always very off for me.

When a show has parenting built into it I react pretty strongly to that parenting, even if the parenting is just a sideshow.  This even happened with The Walking Dead where I wanted to punch all of the parents in the face for their terrible decisions.  I get that they are living in a world of brain munching zombies and that puts a lot of strain on them, but the constant excessively controlling behaviour is just unpleasant.  Plus the parents constantly push the kids to try to make up for the parents latest screwup or meltdown and everything lurches back and forth all the time.  I hate that part of it.

I like zombies and apocalypse though so the show is generally fun but the parenting really puts me off.

Bob and Linda Belcher don't try to make their kids into their redemption.  They don't try to pin their lives and hopes on their kids following in their footsteps.  They let the kids be who they are, and hope for the best for them.  With many screwups and breakdowns along the way, sure, but their baseline relationship with their children is one I like.

So that is why you should watch Bob's Burgers.  Not just because Bob's voice is Archer and that blows my mind, but because the parenting makes me happy.

The end of 100

I just finished binge watching The 100 Season 4.  (Massive spoilers ahead).  While I was watching it was entirely clear to me that the show was ending.  The last few episodes saw main characters being killed off at a rate that would make George RR Martin proud.  All the plotlines were resolving themselves.  Romances were coming to fruition.  They even set up an ironic twist to how all the characters who were going to survive would manage to make it.

Then in a massive explosion filled final few minutes nearly the entire population of the earth was wiped out, the most important character in the series died saving her closest friends, and the story finished on a hopeful note despite all the tragedy.

And then somebody said "Oh shit!  We have enough of an audience to keep cranking this stuff out for more money.  Quick, find some way to have the main hero not die, and make up some ridiculous stuff to have a new season of the show!"

This show has had major changes in it every season, so massive shifts at the end of a season are the norm.  Season 1 was Teenagers vs. The Wild.  Season 2 was Teenagers vs. High Tech Underground Dwellers.  Season 3 was Teenagers vs. Evil A.I.  Season 4 was Teenagers vs. Wall of Fire.  Each time the scope of the show shifted drastically and the characters' struggles were quite different.  I liked that!  It kept things fresh and new and while the later seasons were not nearly as tightly written as the first one I still enjoyed them.

But this is a whole different level.  The story was done, finished.  The ending felt right to me.

And here's the thing:  I don't object to more seasons categorically.  I enjoy the show, I want more of it.  It is just that if you set up heroic deaths for characters and then have them shrug those off, and if you set up Total Apocalypse and then just fast forward past it, the big things you have set up fall completely flat.

A lot of the big emotional moments in this show, like any show, don't have world shattering stakes.  When Finn dies in season 1 it is a big deal and the audience feels it despite the fact that it is just one person.  You don't need an apocalypse to make us care, so if you use one you really ought to let it have the proper impact.  What I am saying is, you don't need a wall of fire a kilometer tall that stretches from horizon to horizon to get me involved, but if you conjure up said wall of fire then you had damn well better let it burninate the countryside.

If I had just forgotten to watch the last four minutes of the show everything would have been fine!  I would have been quite happy with the resolution and gone away thinking that finally somebody had the guts to end a show correctly.  Faugh.

Horsin' around

I started watching the Netflix cartoon Bojack Horseman.  I can't say why I jumped on the bandwagon exactly, but once I got on I really didn't want to get off again.

Bojack Horseman is the sort of show I have trouble pinning down.  Is it a ridiculous, idiotic comedy that relies on sex jokes and absurdity to get a couple of giggles, or is it an insightful critique of modern society?  I can't tell!

The show stars a horse.  Who is a man.  I mean, he has the body of a middle aged human male, with a horse's head.  The rest of the world is populated by a mixture of relatively normal humans and humans with animal heads.  That would be pretty weird just on its own, but the animals do impossible yet thematically appropriate things.  The ones with bird heads can flap their arms and fly around... but they are flapping entirely normal human arms.

Also three main characters are Bojack Horseman, a horse/man, Princess Carolyn (not actually a princess), a cat/woman, and Mr. Peanut Butter (not actually composed of peanut butter), a dog/man.  Did somebody get a four year old to name these characters?  Are their names supposed to be clever and ironic somehow?

I have a lot of respect for writing that makes me stare at the screen while stroking my beard and wondering if the writers are incredibly clever or incredibly dumb.

The thing is, the characters oscillate rapidly between preposterous comedy and interesting interaction that showcases real dilemmas and challenging situations.  Bojack sets up a giant autoerotic asphyxiation structure in his bedroom just to try to figure out if his girlfriend will tell him not to use it, because this will reveal if she loves him or not.  On the other hand once that comedy gold is mined thoroughly they actually have a real conversation that is kind of touching and it feels like how real people might deal with complicated conflict.

There is an episode largely about the ethical conflicts of eating meat, and it makes interesting points by having chicken/people farming other chicken/people to supply chicken as a food to other humans and human hybrids.  Of course it includes a car driving through a barn as part of a caper to rescue the food chickens from the chicken farmers (who are themselves chickens) so you can't take it too seriously.

But maybe the hijinks involved are just there so the writers can send a message about how humans wall off some creatures as being worth saving while others are okay to torture and consume, and make those divisions based on random and indefensible criteria.  If you add comedy, you don't sound quite so preachy, see?

I just don't know.  Is it mindless crap, just filling my days, or is it brilliant satire?  I don't know.

I do know that it makes me laugh out loud on a regular basis and I care about the characters even though they are silly and surreal.  Maybe that is all I need to know to decide that I should watch the next episode, so the writers have succeeded in that, at least.