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idk what i am doing!

Guess it'll be a blog or something...

Fuck it I'll just start writing something.

January 2025

here's a rudimentary table of contents because I am sooooooo wordy

2025 is off to a shitty start in a lot of ways. I can't decide if Trump or Musk is a more historically accurate analogue to Hitler at the tail end of the Weimar Republic, but point is, bad things are coming. And on a more personal note, the company I work for got bought and is getting merged into another, and -- if you are so blissfully ignorant of corporate shenanigans that you don't know what that means for me -- that means that I have a veerrryyyy good chance of losing my job in the next few months. So, the tech layoffs continue and finally impact me. Great.

Moving on from that. I want my blog to be a place of.... (hold on let me see if I can pull a real 2005 and do a marquee......)

hahahahaha holy shit it worked. Really busting out my Neopets / Myspace skills here.

Well, I don't promise only positivity, but I do promise... uh, what's the word.... Irreverence. Yes, that's it. I would like to do a blog post maybe once a month or so where I just talk about interesting things I've done lately, media I've been enjoying, etc. This is going to be very stream-of-consciousness. So without further ado:

Book(s) I read

I'm kidding myself thinking I'll read more than one book in a month. Hell, if I can do one book a month, that would be a huge win for me. Anyway, this month I read Brave New World. A classic dystopian novel that I've never read before. Hot take, it wasn't a very good book, but it had some really interesting ideas and was written in the 30s by a white dude, hence, it became a classic. You can come at me if you want; I know I'm offending at least one friend by saying this ;) I mostly thought the writing style was bad. Everything was either painstakingly over-explained or glossed over and not explained at all. Lots of important plot stuff seemed to just get skipped because I guess the author didn't feel like writing it. Like, fair, I can't blame him?? I'd be the same way; I don't want to write what I don't want to write. But for a published "classic" novel, I expected better.

The setting was also logically inconsistent sometimes... with the concept of money specifically -- it portrays this society where everyone has all their needs provided for, everyone's life is pre-determined, etc. Money is never presented as being a concern for anyone. The book goes out of its way to tell us that everyone is happy and never stressed, even the low-caste people. But then there are just randomly a couple of times in the book where money is mentioned (like Bernard stresses about a bill out of nowhere), almost as if the author forgot that he was creating a post-scarcity utopia with dystopian eugenics, and he just accidentally let his own concerns about money slip through into his writing. Another thing that rubbed me the wrong way isn't necessarily a fault of the book or the author, but just the book being sooooooo dated. Like the idea of a futuristic society where... All of the upper class has helicopters? and private airplanes? With seemingly no air traffic control??? How are people not dying every day in airplane accidents? it's so implausible lol. But the people of the past were weirdly enamoured with the idea of private flying vehicles....

With all that uncalled-for bitching out of the way, I still enjoyed the book, and there is a lot to discuss about it. The meticulously-described human breeding/cloning facilities were certainly interesting. It's also really interesting to consider the concept of a society conditioned towards polyamourous hypersexuality, and against "pair-bonding" so you get basically the exact opposite of our monogamy and romance-focused society. Perhaps without meaning to, the book critizes real life slut-shaming and toxic monogamy. Of course, the way human relationships work in the book aren't good either, but it is in presenting this polar opposite to our own that we are made to gaze at our own society in a critical light. I will say the interactions between "John the Savage" (god help me with the outdated language referring to people of color in this book) and Lenina were hella entertaining. (until he beats her for being a 'whore,' yikes) And his mother, Linda -- it was kind of tragic that she just wanted to bone all the hot dudes in the native american tribe (because "civilization" had taught her that having casual sex was a virtue) and the tribespeople hated her for it.

Something else that was really neat about the book was that the "protagonist" Bernard (structurally, I'm not sure that he technically is a protagonist, but I digress) is like, a deconstruction of the tropes associated with the typical dystopian story protagonist, but BEFORE those tropes were established. So he's not really a deconstruction because there was nothing yet to uh... deconstruct.... But LISTEN, what I'm saying is that he has the trappings of the dystopian protagonist we expect as modern readers: He feels apart from society, he's different, he's an outcast, he's an intellectual, he wants to make people think, you know, really think. He questions society. He doesn't take soma; he like feeling unhappy. But then:

• He takes "the love interest" on a date and tries to woo her in true sigma male fashion, by stopping his helicopter in the middle of nowhere to just enjoy each other's quiet company... And she fucking hates it. She begs to leave, she begs for music and distraction and noise and other people and drugs and sex. She does not become awakened to the oppression of her society; she does not fall in love with him.
• His friend Helmholtz who is probably the real archetypical dystopian protagonist, seems to think Bernard is pretty pathetic with Bernard's desperation for the approval of others.
• When Bernard gets his 10 minutes of fame, he TOTALLY conforms to society and abandons his 'anti-social' tendencies. He's pretty aggressively awful in the end. He even specifically describes his friends as being people who he can shit on to make himself feel better when he can't get revenge on the actual people who have slighted him.

TV and Film I watched

ummmmmmm i'll just refer to my letterboxd. I log my movies there.

However, something that isn't on letterboxd is Severance. This is my favorite TV show of the past 5 years. The last TV show I loved this much was Mr. Robot.

I'm not going to say as much about Severance because I want people to watch it and I don't want to spoil it. I love it so much I kind of don't want to say anything about it. But I'm gonna anyway. It is so unique. It raises philosophical and psychological questions about identity and memory. Who are you? Are you your memories? If you get amnesia and forget who you are, are you still you? What makes a person an individual? The show posits that there must be more to it than just your lived experiences, because if it was only your experiences that made you an individual, then each "innie" would have an identical personality. But they do not. They are each unique, they have a clear identify and personality and preferences and reactions and desires -- where does that all COME from?? We meet their "outies" and we, as viewers, get to make connectinos between the personalities of the two versions of the person... What's different, what's the same.... It's just crazy interesting. The show also portrays cult brainwashing possibly better than anything I've ever seen... The cult is really good at controlling different individuals (again, emphasizing their unique-ness) using different methods for different kinds of people. It's scary, it's existentially dreadful. At the same time, the show is kind of funny and silly a lot of the time. Thanks, comedic director Ben Stiller! That's perfect, too, for a cult, because cult idealogy is usually laughably stupid. If you can get past all the human rights violations, Lumon is just a bunch of silly guys. The show ocillates seamlessly between dark comedy and holy-shit-this-will-haunt-me darkness and I cannot get enough of it.

Video games I played

I started and have almost finished Pikmin 4 this month. Pikmin 4 came out in 2023, and I planned on playing it eventually, since I played Pikmin 2 as a child (~11 or 12 years old), and then I played Pikmin 3 when it came out (I was 21 or 22... So, 10 years later) And now another 10 years later, I'm 31, I played Pikmin 4. Is Pikmin 5 going to come out when I'm 40 and I'll play it when I'm 41? Haha, I can hope.

Anyway, I dunno why I wasn't interested in playing Pikmin 4 in 2023 when it came out. But, about 4 weeks ago, I was struck with a POWERFUL urge to purchase and play Pikmin 4. You know, it's weird, but this is how I often experience the desire to play video games works. I won't have any strong desire to play any specific game, and then one day I'll just wake up in a cold sweat like Holy mother of God I really need to play (insert game here) right now. And when that craving hits, it is insatiable. Fortunately, the ebay seller I bought Pikmin 4 from got it to me very quickly.

Anyway, Pikmin 4 was GREAT! Since these games only come out once a decade on average, I can't reasonably compare it to the other two I have played. I don't remember anything about Pikmin 2 or 3 besides the fact that I enjoyed them. But I have had a blast with 4. I've pretty much played it every day since I got it two or three weeks ago. All of the Pikmin games present a very unique and very "Japanese" form of fun: The fun of project management! No, I am serious. The idea of the games is you have an army of cute little creatues who do your bidding. Each type of creature has a different aptitude. You are trying to execute the greatest number of tasks in the shortest amount of time. It activates the brain in ways that most games do not: It's the game of being as efficient as possible. Reading this, you probably do not understand why this would be fun, but just trust me. It is. And it's addictive. I've almost 100% compelted Pikmin 4 and now I'm thinking about buying the re-release of Pikmin 2 so I can play more ;_;