chris the cynic's Guide to making Bad Movies for the Sci-Fi Channel

Now you may be thinking at this point that you'll never make a movie for the Sci-Fi Channel because you don't know anything about the genre, or movies, or writing, or acting, or plots, or story telling, or any of that stuff.  In fact, that's what makes it so likely that you will be approached to make movie for the Sci-Fi Channel.

If you knew how to write a script, they'd probably reject you out of hand.  Trust me on this, I've been watching their movies for years.

You also might be thinking that there is no such thing as the Sci-Fi Channel anymore.  That's true, they changed their name.  Now it's SyFy (SeeFee*) but I'm not about to go around writing, "SeeFee this," and, "SeeFee that."  I note that it's SeeFee when in writing only, whenever it is spoken you can hear the c in "Sci" not to mention the fact that it ends in an "i" rather than a "y".  So in spoken word it's still Sci-Fi, and as long as it remains such I'm going to write it the way that it is spoken which, as of today, continues to be Sci-Fi.

Now that we've gotten the basics out of the way, provided you are not a writer at some point in your life you will be approached to write a movie for the Sci-Fi Channel.

First off, my advice is to take the job because otherwise it will go to someone else and, while you might think that no one could be less qualified, you'd be wrong.  They will find someone less qualified than you if you turn them down.

Thus I present some general guidelines.  Not rules so much as pointers.

First off, know the genre.

For example, give or take half the time the movie you'll be called on to write will be a creature movie.  Bad creature movies come in two flavors.  They follow in the footsteps of either Jaws (town based) or Aliens (isolated group based.)  Knowing the genre can allow you play with the genre, as was done by the makers of such not-for-Sci-Fi movies as Bats and AVPII (movie, not the game; game was better), but you have to know the rules before you start breaking them.  You're writing (bad) hiaku here, not (bad) free-verse.**

Bats played with the rules by having the one that survived, digging itself out of the ground to ominous music, be immediately run over by the Jeep the human survivors were leaving in, the music abruptly switching to the much more upbeat music those in the Jeep were listening to.

AVPII played with the rules by following them exactly, but setting you up to think it was a town based creature movie when it actually turned out to be an isolated group of survivors movie.

Once you know the rules, you can deviate from them, provided that you do so in a way that doesn't leave the audience with the feeling that you don't know what you're doing.  That said, just as you should keep the genre in mind, so too should you keep the audience in mind.

People do not tune in for a movie they know will be bad so that you can intentionally depress them in an attempt to get across your philosophical or political message.  People do not go to a James Bond film so that at the end of the movie the villain can win and Bond can be left a broken man wandering through the shambles that once were London.  It doesn't work that way.  What you're making for the Sci-Fi Channel will never rise to the level of James Bond.  Even if your script is perfect the acting and effects will ensure that the overall movie sucks like chest wound.

If you end the movie with, "Rocks fall, everyone dies," the audience will feel that you betrayed them and they will not be wrong to feel that way.  By deciding to make a bad movie for the Sci-Fi Channel you entered into a covenant with the eventual audience.  Part of your end of the bargain was an ending in which the good guys don't lose.  The absurd ancient aliens theory is not disproved, the world does not end, the creatures don't swarm across the face of the earth bringing an end to civilization (yet, do recall that one always survives) and in general things don't work out crappily.

If you break that covenant then you become the six fingered man, "I just sucked two hours of your life away.  I might one day go as high as 24 but I really don't know what that would do to you.  So, let's just start with what we have.  What did this do to you? Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity so... be honest. How do you feel?"

So, those are the two big things: Know the genre; know the audience.  Betray neither.  Everything after that gets into the nitty gritty.

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Sometimes you feel like you need to include a character arc, in fact that is most often the case.  I'm not going to recommend against that, but I am going to make one recommendation: don't have your central character be a seemingly irredeemable asshole with with no good qualities.  Even if you brilliantly draw out the good in them over the course of the movie it won't matter because that sound you heard early on was the entire audience changing the channel to watch something else.

There is a reason that Iron Man, the story of an asshole, begins with Tony Stark getting his ass kicked and taken hostage and then flashes back to him being an asshole.  The audience is hooked by the hostage taking and that carries them through the asshole flashback until Tony is in the cave at which point we get to see him not being an asshole.  Told in strictly linear order the movie likely would have failed.  Your movie will not be as good as the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Again, even if your script is perfect the acting and the effects will make it a bad movie, so shooting for something that is difficult at best in a good movie that's well funded is probably shooting too far.

Have sympathetic characters.

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Have a sense of scale.

I mean this on multiple levels.  It's not just the standard thing about people having no sense of scale with respect to the size of the universe and whatnot, I also mean it figuratively.

If teenage hacker gets caught breaking into the high school system to change their grades then teenage hacker cannot break into the ultra top secret government systems.  Sorry, but no.  If they're not good enough to break into their high school without getting caught they're never getting into the NSA servers.  Not gonna happen.  Because there's a difference between small town high school computer security and top secret government computer security.  If the first is too big a challenge for teenage hacker then, barring an alien brain upgrade, the second is way out of their league.  You might as well have someone who can't climb a wheelchair ramp summit Everest.

Similarly someone who thinks "moment of inertia" is some esoteric bit of high level knowledge that ordinary people cannot grasp is probably way too low on the knowledge scale to be your scientist savior.

But also there is a literal sense of scale.  If your movie is Cyber-Dinocroc vs. Zombie Sharktopus you might not think that real world concerns matter all that much, but you'd be wrong.  Because if Cyber-Dinocroc goes tiptoeing unnoticed around small town USA mysteriously stealing microwaves and no one hears a thing, that's a serious problem if Cyber-Dinocroc is a 15 foot tall mass of muscle, bone, and metal.  It doesn't matter if he's got a cloaking device, someone is going to hear him and he's going to leave footprints.  At that point it doesn't matter if you've got the biggest effects budget known to humanity, top notch actors and Steven Spielberg as your producer, you fail.

Suspending disbelief on the big things is only possible when smaller things are kept in check.  Giant monsters with enough mass to shake the earth do not get to sneak.  It does not work that way.

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Some of your characters being stupid is probably ok, all of your characters being stupid is a problem.  The plot depending on all of your characters being stupid is a no-no.

There are too many examples to give an exhaustive list, so I'll just give one.  Say that a dam is about to collapse and some people are watching it from a helicopter.  Say the people decided to get a closer look coming in not just closer to the dam, but also lower than it.  Say that the damn dam starts to come apart and the people in the helicopter are ordered to get out of there.  Say that rather than using the helicopter's abilities to climb to safety or back away the people in the helicopter instead stay steadfastly in the only, very limited area, where the damn dam collapsing could hurt them and thus they die.  Congratulations, you, the writer, have just failed at life.

Unless that was meant to be a clue that the machines are suicidally rebelling against us, or that somehow people have been made suicidal, or that aliens have started taking over the bodies of key people (like say helicopter pilots) in order to kill off important humans, or that the assault on Hell begins now so everyone go kill themselves (because a death short of mortal sin won't ensure that these people all wind up in Hell)... unless one of these things, you, the writer, have just failed at life.  The best you can hope for is redemption, though you may have to work the rest of your days to reach that goal.  You will never pull better than neutral.  You had your shot, you blew it.

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If your movie can be summed up as a two hour ode to suicide bombing that required giant sand worms (stolen from Dune because the effects department was too lazy to make new giant sand worms) to make suicide bombing seem like an even semi-viable option... no.  Just no.

Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.  Just no.

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Research is in no way necessary, this is a bad movie after all, but it couldn't hurt and it could prevent you from making stupid mistakes.  Like, for example, basing a large portion of your plot on the false notion that NASA isn't a civilian agency or that supercolliders are power generators.

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Not mean, but be.  You might think that your movie is a wonderful metaphor for the difficulty of balancing work and family, but if you want your work to... work then you're going to have to take it on its own terms, not the metaphorical terms.  That means that if someone is saying, "If you really loved me you'd take this time off and thereby destroy the world," you don't get to fall back on, "Well it's a metaphor for ordinary work so the person saying that isn't really a nihilist," because in the work itself your character just said, "If you love me you will destroy the world," which is not an appropriate thing for anyone save an evil overlord in training from another planet to say.

Generally speaking taking your work on its own terms rather than the terms you try to impose on it will make it a better work, even if it's about a giant earthquake that's impossibly large, a comet tilting the earth's axis to cause the world's magnetic field to collapse, or a swarm of giant piranha beetles.

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Read some things about feminism.  Seriously.  Just do it.  I'll be here when you get back.

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It will probably be expected of you to have a romance plot or two in the movie along side the disaster/giant creature/giant creature disaster.  Given what else you're going to have to fit into your movie, and the time you have available (two hours, less commercials) you're not going to have time to do these in any sort of depth.

Thus they will be superficial and your primary objective is probably going to be making it so they seem less superficial than they actually are.

You don't want it to seem like, "I just threw in a romance because it was expected," even if it's true. Especially if it's true.

General advice is to make sure that you establish that the characters have similar interests and common ground and whatnot, make sure that they actually are written as liking each other because while "Slap-slap-kiss," may be done left and right it is not in itself a sufficient to stand in for actual romance.

One shortcut often taken is to have the people not fall in love but fall back in love, this can work or it can fall flat on its face.  Part of it will be what I said about the partners liking each other, but part of it will also be about why they broke up.  If they broke up for a good reason, and that reason remains, then them getting back together won't feel real.  If they broke up for a bad reason, then that can be worse still.***

What was the bad reason?  Was it the fault of one party, both, or some external force?  If Iago did it then Iago can be exposed and the two can get back together... maybe.  Iago, after all, was only able to do what he did because of some deep character flaws in Othello which means that maybe Desdemona would be better off with someone else.  On the other hand Desdemona loved Othello so who are we to argue with her choice if the relationship can be mended?

Especially because the idea of love as a reward is so ingrained in stories like this (the hero gets the girl/guy) the audience will be focused to a certain extent on deservingness, whatever that idea means to them.  If they feel like one party doesn't deserve the other that stands a huge chance of things falling flat.  As a general rule, if you're going to have a romance where one party doesn't deserve the other it's going to be more likely to work out if the work itself is focused on the undeserving party (Sabrina is told from the point of view of Harrison Ford's undeserving asshole millionaire who grows a heart, not the title character who is the chauffeur's daughter and deserves better than Harrison Ford's character.)

One last word of whatever.  "My lover just died, now there's nothing standing in the way of us getting back together," is probably not a good sentiment to have unless the lover was a vampire who had the person under hypnosis that died with them.  And in that case the sentiment should be more of, "Now that the hypnosis is gone I'm finally free to tell you how I feel: I love you."  The monster/disaster conveniently doing away with someone's romantic rivals resulting in them getting their lover of choice just makes it seem like the person whose lover(s) died is a shallow person who will latch onto the nearest individual of appropriate gender.

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When it comes to the part of the movie that places it on the Sci-Fi Channel: if you've got a disaster then all that you need to do is have the disaster follow consistent rules; if you've got a monster, more or less the same.

The problems will generally come up with people fleeing these things.  The general rule is, "How would you run away?"  That'll probably work out fine.  The trouble is that, instead of doing that, people tend to try for more cinematic means of fleeing which are, unfortunately, less good.

One example that comes to mind is the person who stays behind to nobly sacrifice themselves to buy other people time.  That's all well and good.  The problem is that it almost never happens that way.  See, that depends on the other people actually fleeing.  Generally speaking, they don't.

Person stays behind to nobly sacrifice themselves to buy other people time and the other people stay behind to watch thus making sure that the person's sacrifice buys zero time and is completely meaningless.  Or it gets worse.

Earlier today I saw a case where someone was trying to buy time but leaving open the possibility that he might yet live except... the people he was trying to buy time for refused to move and instead remained exactly where they were: on the only stairway out.  Which meant that when he reached the point of, "That's as much time as I can buy, I should run now," the people who should have been long since gone were blocking his exit.  If they'd left when he told them all three would have lived, but because they chose to stay and watch he was held up in his escape and thus died.†

Another example is, "I have this really good idea.  Oh, it didn't work instantaneously on the first try.  Let's abandon that and never mention it again."

Generally speaking any time that the characters are acting so stupidly that the audience wants to reach through the television and throttle them, that's not good.

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A lot of such movies depend on this or that element of science to be wrong and thus depend on someone to point out, "Science says X which would mean that Y is impossible," and then be wrong.  When making your bad movie you would do better to have this person be convinced by the introduction of new evidence and thenceforth prove useful than to have this person be an asshole.

Actually, you can have (this may surprise you if you're a standard See-Fee writer, but probably not if you're a standard reader of this blog) multiple scientists who initially object to [outlandish theory] on the grounds that it is outlandish, of whom most of which are willing to change given adequate evidence while one or two are unwilling to admit that they were wrong in standard asshole fashion.

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* As can be determined by the pronunciation of proper nouns ending in "y"†† and the parallel structure implied by the double capitals.

** So, for example, if you're writing a town based creature movie it's important to know that the audience comes in with a set of expectations:

Whoever is in authority, be the authority political or economic, be it official or unofficial, will overlook the problem, initially as a result of understandable disbelief but, as time goes on, increasingly as a result of willful ignorance that is forced to become more and more willful as the movie nears its climax and evidence finally mounts.  Instead he (or she, but usually he) will be more concerned with some social or economic event believing that that, more than the lives of the town's citizens, is key to the town's future.

The main character will not be an expert, instead the main character will call in experts.  Two of them.  One will be more hands on, the other more academic.  They will not both survive.  Which one dies is up in the air (in Jaws the hands on expert dies, in Arachnophobia the academic does.)

Whatever it is that the person in authority was concerned with, be it the beach season or the spring music festival, will be screwed over by the creature.

So on.

On the other hand, if your movie concerns an isolated group there are entirely different rules, in some ways fewer, in other ways more strict.  The most obvious is the end.  In the end there will be three or four survivors.  The three will be the main character (who has thus far always been straight, this could use some subverting) the main character's romantic interest, and another guy.  If there is a child the child will live.  If the child is male he can be the other guy, but it is also possible for the child to be a fourth survivor in addition to those already listed.  In the absence of a child there will not be a fourth survivor.

One of the things always survives.  Generally as the last scene.

Before that there's generally someone who has some experience or at the very least requisite knowledge to become a fast expert, and it's always the case that what is being encountered is unlike anything before.  Witness the queen of Aliens, or the fact that it's not just a shark it's a mega-, dino-, swamp-, sand-, super-, whatever-shark.  There's always something new because no one wants to tread the same territory twice, or something.  (This is true even if, as in Alligator II: The Mutation, they reuse footage from the original movie for the new creature.)

And so on.

*** I still remember, with a bad taste in my mouth, a movie where on learning she was pregnant a woman broke up with her boyfriend for no stated reason because he was a cop and thus might die on the job and, in her opinion, that's no way to raise a child so therefore she left him without explanation and he didn't even find out he had a child until said child was in her teens.  The breakup was for a bad reason because it was a decision to unilaterally change the lives of two other people without so much as consulting either of them.

So ex's current lover, who gets along just fine with the daughter, hears this story and what she takes away  from it is apparently that she should unilaterally change the lives of three people without consulting any of them.  She dumps the ex so mother and father can get back together and raise now teenage daughter as a family because what the fuck?

Making life altering decisions for other people without consulting them was the problem, it shouldn't also be presented as the solution.  Especially since other than her decision to dump the father so the original family can get back together whether they want to or not, it was otherwise shown that she'd make a fine stepmother and things would have been just fine that way.

† On the one hand, it was pretty clearly a writer subverting the three people live rule.  He was, by all indications, supposed to be the "other guy" who lived.  Thus it was mildly original and unexpected.  On the other hand it was one of the most pointless deaths in movie history:
Doomed Guy: I'll buy you time.
Other two: No.  We're good here.
Doomed Guy: You do realize that for me to escape I need to move through the exact spot you're in.
Other two: Yup.
Doomed Guy: So now would actually be a very good time for you to move.
Other two: Still fine here.
Doomed Guy: I've done all that I can, it's time for me to run.
Other two: Still fine here.
Doomed Guy: Seriously there's a giant prehistoric monitor lizard that's immune to cold who I just pissed off by poking his eyes out with spear on the advice of the now dead Saul Tigh from the new Battlestar Galactica so I'd like to run away now, could you get out of my way?  Please?
Other two: I suppose we could start moving
Doomed Guy: Thank yo- ahhhrrrggghhhh!
Other two: Crap he's dead.  Why is he dead?  Let's angst about him being dead while we finally use these stairs to escape.

†† A comprehensive listing would take longer than is allocated for this article but it is clear that any time a proper noun, especially but not limited to a four letter proper noun, ends in y it is expected, it is almost required ("almost" included for wiggle room just in case, not because so much as a single counterexample comes to mind) that it be pronounced "ee" not "eye".  In the absence of a comprehensive listing I give you one name for every letter of the alphabet:

Andy
Barry
Cherry
Danny
Elly
Fanny
Ginny
Harry
Izzy
Jenny
Kenny
Leny
Mary
Nancy
Ozzy
Pansy
Qunicy
Randy
Sandy
Tully
Unity
Valery
Wendy
Xandy (Yes, it is a real name.  It comes from Alexander the same way Sandy does, which is interesting because I would have guessed that Sandy came from Cassandra.)
Yancy
Zachery

Up to 70% off on Joss Whedon Stuff for the week

Perhaps I'm just jaded but "Up to 70% off" to me means, "Down to zero percent off."  That said, there's probably a bit of an overlap between those who read this blog and those who like at least one thing by Joss Whedon so I give you the stuff listed on the sale page:

Firefly on DVD and Blu-ray:

         

Angel on DVD:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (series) on DVD:

Dollhouse Seasons 1 and 2 on DVD and Blu-ray:

         

         

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (movie) on DVD and Blu-ray:

         

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Which gives a total of ten things, though when I think, "Joss Whedon," I don't tend to think, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie."  In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that those two were included to get up to double digits which otherwise would have been difficult because Angel and Buffy aren't on Blu-ray yet and they're probably not up for putting The Avengers into this sort of a sale yet.

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A Blu-ray is like a sting ray but significantly less cute.

The Van Scene, if Alice used her power

[Originally posted at Ana Mardoll's Ramblings.]

Alice: I think we should park in this spot.
Edward: Why?
Alice: Because otherwise Bella Swan will and then she'll almost be killed until you risk blowing our cover thrice over in your ill thought out, but none the less successful, attempt to save her.
Edward: How will she almost be killed?
Alice: Squished between a van and a truck.
Edward: So if we park here my Volvo will get hit by a van?
Alice: That's about the size of it.
Edward: Definitely not parking here.
Alice: You are such an asshole.

Later:

Bella has just parked.
Alice: Bella, can I talk to you for a minute?
Bella: What about?
Alice: My brother mostly, but can we have the conversation closer to warmth?
Bella: Ok.
*as they walk toward a building a terrible sound comes from behind them*
Bella: What the...
Alice: Well it sounded to me like a clockwise spinning van hit an antique truck, but I'm not really-
*Bella turns to see what happened*
Bella: My truck!
Alice: *to herself* Someday I'm going to have to figure out why I start sentences I know I'll never have the chance to finish.

Or something like that.

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[Twilight Index]

Snarky Twlight - Non-food analogies

[Originally posted at Ana Mardoll's Ramblings.]

Edward: You know how everyone enjoys different flavors? Some people love chocolate ice cream, others prefer strawberry?
Bella: No. I've lived for seventeen years on this planet... and a few elsewhere; don't ask. I won't tell you. Anyway, seventeen years on this planet and it has never come to my attention that there might be variations in preference when it comes to taste. Tell me, do similar variations exist in preference when it comes to sound? Could that explain the myriad musical styles? Anyway, you were talking taste. It certainly has never occurred to me that people could enjoy different things, I thought that the variety of different types of cuisine was merely an artifact of not having enough of the stuff that everyone universally wanted most to go around.
Edward: Sarcasm.
Bella: You noticed?
Edward: Moving on.
Bella: Yes?
Edward: Sorry about the food analogy — I couldn’t think of another way to explain.
Bella: Clearly a failure of imagination on your part.
Edward: Come on.
Bella: You know how some people like Star Trek, and some people like Star Wars, and others like things that aren't even in the genre of science fiction?
Edward: Ok, that's one example.
Bella: You know how some people like skiing and others like sailing and others like curling up with a good book?
Edward: Listen-
Bella: You know how some people like blondes, and others like brunettes, and still others like redheads?
Edward: The point is-
Bella: You know how some people prefer missionary while others prefer-
Edward: HEY! Not cool.
Bella: You know how some people prefer jazz while others like concert band sized wind ensemble?
Edward: You already did music.
Bella: That was before you said you couldn't think of anything but food.
Edward: Can we just-
Bella: You know how some people prefer plays, others movies, others books, others comics, others tales told 'round the campfire?
Edward: I think you've made your-
Bella: You know how some people prefer Macs and others prefer anything that isn't a Mac to the extent that Mac has been officially excised from the category of personal computer to the point that PC means, "Not a Mac"?
Edward: This is getting ridiculous.
Bella: You know how some people prefer hands on learning and others prefer more abstract stuff done out of books and on the chalkboard?
Edward: Please stop.
Bella: You know how some people love roses but others prefer geraniums?
Edward: Ok, scent, that's-
Bella: I was talking about the flower as a whole.
Edward: Damn.
Bella: You know how some people love orange while others prefer purple?
Edward: If I surrender now will you stop?
Bella: Unconditional surrender?
Edward: Hell no.
Bella: You know how some people love dogs while others prefer cats?

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[Snarky Twilight Index]

I was asked to share this (What the corporate jet tax loophole could pay for if closed)

I was asked to share this, and by share they apparently met on facebook because as everyone who knows me on facebook knows I am oh so active over there.  For those who don't and didn't catch the dripping sarcasm (text can make that happen) I am the opposite of active on facebook.  Facebook has taken to emailing me letters that say:

Look at all the stuff you've been missing by not visiting... um... it doesn't look like you've been missing that much actually, but... uh... there's this, and this and this that people you know have said. 

No, we're not going to tell you what they said.  You have to log in to find out. 

Pretty sneaky, huh? 

-The Evil Overlords at facebook

more or less.  Translating facebook into English isn't always the easiest thing.  I wonder if it suffers from similar problems in other languages.  Do people who have told facebook that German have similar difficulties translating German facebook into German?

Anyway, I did share it on facebook, by accident, but here's the thing that it asked me to share:

The source is this article, written before the sequester kicked in which means that right now those cuts have already started to kick in, though as with almost anything it takes some time between when the funding is cut and when people start to suffer.  (Think about it like food.  If your food budget suddenly went up in smoke it wouldn't be a problem until the next time you would have otherwise bought food and it wouldn't be a serious problem until you ran out of the food you already had.)

Likewise the corporate jet loophole is still in effect.

Because that's what happens when congress does nothing.  Everyone who isn't rich suffers, the rich prosper. They've spent a good solid 40 years now stacking the deck in their favor which means that the status quo itself is all that's needed to ensure that the rich get richer while everyone else gets poorer.  (In this particular case it's even worse than that because it's tipping the status quo even more in favor of the rich and against everyone else.)  Unfortunately one party, a party that controls one house of congress and can obstruct pretty much everything in the other, is in favor of everyone who is not rich getting poorer.

Hell, the Republican Governor of my state wanted to attract businesses by making us more like a third world country.  Because the proper response to looking at underdeveloped countries mired in poverty and either screwed over or ignored during the conflict between the first and second world (second world lost, which is why we use the first world's numbering which, naturally, places itself at number one) is to say, "I want my people to be in conditions like that."*  Yeah, that makes sense.

Thankfully turning America, or any state-sized subset of it, into a third world country equivalent is probably impossible at this point.  It might not be in the future, but I have high hopes that Republican Governor will be Former Governor in the future, so the person who actually came out in favor of turning a state into a third world country equivalent (usually it's something no one is in favor of but people accuse their opponents of being in favor of) won't have the power to do so should the capability ever arise (hopefully it will not.)

And that, by the way, is the problem with three way elections in which a majority is not required to win.  (It was more than three ways actually, but only three of them mattered.)  The majority voted for whoever seemed to have enough support to beat idiot in charge, but who seemed to have the most support depended on which part of the state you were in  Thus the result was 39% for, 61% against, but the 61% was divided between two candidates (actually more, but again, only two of them mattered) in such a way that 39% was the largest share of the vote.

But back to what I was asked to share.  It's called an infographic.  "info" being what happens to the word "information" via diminution to get a nice monosyllabic disyllabic colloquial form.  "Information" being a word that can be traced back through the French to the Latin, and in the Latin it actually has multiple steps but finally reaches back to in + formo (I form into, I form an idea, I educate).  "Formo" goes back another step in Latin and then to the ancient Greek "morphe" which means "form"  (thus metamorphosis = change form).  "graphic" comes directly from the Latin but the Latin came from the Greek and three steps of that gets you to "grapho" (I scratch, carve, draw, sketch.)

Thus infographic means, "A visual representation of what the fuck is wrong with this country."

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And in closing I see that it didn't even ask me to "share" it asked me to forward (for it was an email) and pass it along.  Regardless trying to get the image to include in this post sent me to facebook, specifically to "Share this link" on facebook which did not itself let me see what the link I was supposed to share was, and then only after I accidentally told it share was I able to get to the source via going to my own page on facebook and clicking on the link I had just inadvertently shared.

I might not have anything against the people who sent me the image or asked me to pass it on, but they could do better when it comes to making their sources easily accessible.

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* Jesus Fuck, man, why not look at it and say, "I want them to have access to better conditions like my people have"?

I get that you want to equalize things and whatnot, or at least that that's your excuse**, but why does making things the same always have to involve the shitty as the standard, why not try to raise those in the shitty up to the standard of those in the not shitty?  Or better still, give them the capability of raising themselves so you're not engaging in fucking over your own people or colonialism of those who have it worse.

Do it with loans, low interest but above the rate of inflation or, conversely, short term but high interest micro loans to individuals, and you can help people and make money.  So you can still be a greedy ass while not trying to make the living conditions of the entire world save the wealthy into the same as the lowest ones you can find.

And while it may seem strange to say, "The entire world," while he's just in charge on one state, my reasoning is thus: In theory he wants the state he's in charge of to be better off than anywhere else.  So if he's trying to lower the standards of the state, thus making it worse off, it follows that if he had the power he'd do the same to everywhere else.  Because what he wants for the state should, again in theory, be what he wants the best thing to be, and by definition for something to be the best thing everything else has to be equal or worse.

** With the caveat that I'm not telepathic, what he wants actually seems to be extremely low wages and the ability of companies to run roughshod over the rights, livelihoods, and lives of anyone who doesn't own a company (or owns a smaller company than the one running roughshod.)

This is, it should be noted, the person who took a mural of successes in labor history hostage because he thought that showing that once upon a time business did various horrible things to laborers until the laborers stood up for themselves (which is a historical fact; as just one example: it's hard to paint child labor in a good light, however Gingrich may try) was too one sided and to be fair it should show corrupt businessmen in a light just as positive as those who fought for and gained rights and protections for laborers in the country and the state.

Seriously, that was (one of) his (conflicting) stated reason(s).  It was too one sided in its presentation of those who committed abuses vs those who fought against abuse and thus unfair and needed to be held hostage in an undisclosed location as a result with various, "Hope nothing happens to it," type threats being made at vaguely regular intervals.

One wonders what he would have liked instead.  "And they fought to get rid of child labor, but on the other hand a case can be made that child labor builds character and is a good thing and thus those fighting to keep it weren't the bad guys.  There's two sides to every story after all and we don't want the fracking labor department to seem like it might think labor did some good things once upon a time.  Not if it paints the corrupt individuals of the past in a bad light."

I'm not well at the moment

Since vacation, which I may have mentioned didn't exactly go well for me, with about a day and a half of exception (thank you Lonespark for the day, thanks to my mother for the half.)  I've been off.

This week I'm going to have to go to see my psychiatrist and say, "I don't know if the medication has been working, I've been forgetting it more often than I remembered it."  Though maybe if I can stay on it between today and the day I see him I'll have some idea if it's working.  I haven't been having much of anything in the way of luck when it comes to getting enough sleep.  Hell, last night I had a dream with angels and demons and birds the size of cities and probably the most vivid part was when someone was, via magic, able to give me a good night's sleep.  It was such a wonderful thing waking up in the dream fully rested, and a disappointment waking up in real life to a feeling of, "One good night's sleep doesn't cancel out weeks of not getting enough."

I've not managed to stay hydrated well.

I'm not sure how well I've been keeping myself fed.  Last night I was sick.  (Sickness tends to make me more able to remember my dreams, for whatever that is worth.)  And I'm not sure whether I was sick because there was something wrong in an ordinary sickness sense, or if I was sick because yesterday I ate well for the the first time in however long and my body wasn't sure what to do with all the food.

First I thought I was going to vomit, then didn't.  Then laid on the bathroom floor as I heard-felt* bubbling in parts of my body that should never bubble.  I understand that the phrase, "It's just gas," is meant to be in comparison to "Something that could kill you," thus justifying the "just".  Even so, I seriously wonder if whoever coined the phrase had to deal with gas because it sure as hell hurts like you're dying.  At least I assume so, I've never been dying.  Difficult to imagine that dying could hurt more.  Hurt less, yes.  Hurt more, I have my doubts.

I've had broken bones, I've had grains of sand picked out of a deep gash in my foot with tweezers repeatedly.  (Couldn't get it all in one go, I think it took weeks to get it all out.)  How deep a gash? The only reason that I didn't have stitches was because that would have closed the sand inside of my foot.  They needed to leave it open to get the sand out.**  I've had a piece of  wood (too big to call a splinter  too small to call a stake) driven so deep into one of my toes that I was only able to remove it with pliers.  Fucking gas leaves all these things in the dust.

"Just gas," my ass.

No, no one said that to me.  But the phrase came to mind.

Later on I did indeed vomit.  This is something that happens to me extremely rarely.  "Feel like I might throw up," happens so much more often that I've reached the point where I don't even think of that as a reason to consider that I might actually throw up.  Instead I don't really consider the possibility until it's more like, "Feel like I'm in the first stage of throwing up."  At which point sprint to the nearest toilet.

And now here I am today.  Definitely feeling better than last night, but still tired, still somewhat nauseous.  First day back on my medications since I don't even know because I lost complete track of when I remembered and when I forgot.

Though, actually, it can be worked out that it can't have been more than two days without them, and I think it was two days.  The day I wrote my most recent post, I decided that I'd been missing my medication enough it was probably better to take it quite late than miss another day.  So I did.  Practical result: I didn't sleep at all.  Actually, I don't know if my meds are to blame for that because I never reached the point of trying.  I never even made it in the general direction of going to bed.  My hope that I could do something to counterbalance it by going to sleep extremely early the next day was dashed when it turned out a member of my family would be staying with me that night.

Anyway, been all out of sorts.  Missing my meds, missing sleep, missing hydration, possibly missing food, and possibly sick.

How long will this last, I know not.  Hopefully it ends today, but hopefully it ended before and yet it did not.

No idea what effect this will have upon the blog.  But it surely must have one.  The extreme drop in my output of late is what's been happening so far.  One might guess that that will continue unless I get out of this rut of everything going wrong.

Anyway, that's why this is tagged as meta.  What affects me affects the blog.  When I'm doing crappily so too does the blog.

And on a largely unrelated note, an ASL class just moved through here.

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* I'm not sure that everyone really understands the connection between feeling and hearing, I know I didn't always.  I think a break through moment for me was when someone talking about an old injury in their shoulder had me put my hand on it so I could "hear" the noise it made when the shoulder was moved.  The sensation was just like hearing, and processed as noise, but it wasn't coming through my ears.

That's part of why deaf people can enjoy music.  Hearing isn't limited to one's ears, it's just concentrated and specialized there.

My father once had a job adjusting music for something.  I think the biggest thing was monitoring the baseline because the sound of that is physical enough that without someone to adjust it the difference between a standing audience and a sitting audience will change the sound.  Or something like that.  (I tend not to get details from my father because if I start him talking there's no telling when he'll stop, so it's generally better not to ask for repetition, reminders, clarification, or elaboration.)

So when he was working at a birthday party for a deaf person, all of whose friends were deaf, he asked someone why the music had to be so damn loud.  It was explained to him that the music had to be loud so the deaf people could hear it.  The natural question of, "How can they hear it if they're deaf?" was responded to by pointing out that they don't hear it with their ears, the hear it here *gesture to chest*.

Those who are completely deaf, and were from birth, have a much more detailed sense of that kind of hearing than hearing people such as myself do because the part of their brain that would be used to interpret sensory input from their ears is taken over for the purposes of interpreting sounds picked up via the rest of the body.

It's all vibrations, and your eardrum isn't the only part of you that can feel vibrations.  Even amoung the hearing, if you pay attention (or there is a powerful enough baseline to make itself known in the absence of you paying attention) you can hear-feel music in parts of you other than your ears.

Hear-feel, heard-felt and variations on that are my own invention, I have no idea what the technical term for this non-ear-based sense of sound is.  If there even is one.

Vaguely related, I once saw and heard B.B. King live in concert.  (I recommend it if you have the chance and the money.)  I realized as I listened that different parts of the auditorium responded to different parts of the music.  My chair would vibrate with one sound, the floor with another, so on, so forth.  Resonant frequencies at work.

** What happened is this: a warped piece of wood on a dock had loosened a nail with the result that the head (that is the flat part, remember.  It doesn't cut; it rips) was exposed.  I ripped open my foot on it.  In my extreme pain I was less than rational.  I knew there was a med-kit in a building on shore and I ran across the beach to get to it, thus driving the sand into the gash.  If I'd been rational I would have called out for help, the help would have gotten the medkit, and I would have not gotten any sand in the wound.  Help wasn't far away, probably would have taken only a few seconds longer than me running for the medkit myself and it would have saved me lots of pain in the long run.

Random things

There are actual Satanists.  I did not know that.  Now I do.  I'm interested in learning more about their beliefs but I don't have time at the moment.  In fact for almost everything it seems to be a running theme that I don't have time at the moment.

I completely forgot to talk to my psychologist about getting registered in the school as being disabled.  University was the first place where you had to get that... distinction?  Label?  Not sure.  That thing for yourself.  Every school before that just knew.  Presumably at some point before my memory kicked in in full force someone somewhere had to make a determination, but after that they just passed it on up the line.  So for as far back as I can remember in elementary school they knew, the elementary school passed on the information to the middle school, the middle school passed it on to the high school when the time came.

This hasn't been a problem because I, being one of the most boring people in existence, have had a truly small number of teachers given how long I've been in university.  Thus I have tended to work with people who know me and thus knew the problems I face.  It was pointed out that teachers new to me have no idea what the fuck is going on in my head, and if I made it official they would and that could possibly lead to good things.  Sort of.  More that it could lead to the possibility that good things deferred might be able to count as good things not-late, or whatever.  Learning disabilities, mental disabilities, whatever disabilities, or no: you still have to get the work done at some point.

So another two weeks before we try with that thing.  I could look into it on my own, but I could do a lot of things.  Provided that "could" here refers to physical capability rather than mental, which seldom line up.

I have at long last sent Social Security the thing to send Albany to get a copy of my birth certificate because the original wasn't good enough for reasons that no one other than the one person, who happens to be an asshole, handling my case knows.  Everyone else just responds with shock, "You brought the original into the building and showed it to the person and that wasn't enough?"  National, local, doesn't matter, everyone else in the Social Security Administration is as bewildered by this as I am.

All that was required was that I walk across the street to my credit union when it was open and get one thing photocopied and another notarized.  That, to me, is something that takes near herculean amounts of effort. And I am far from Hercules.  Or Herakles, depending on whether you take it from the Latin or straight from the Greek.

My two major problems are these:
1) Initiating an activity on my own.
2) Doing work while unsupervised.

I have lots of other problems, but those are the two big ones.  I could only flip burgers, as just one example, if the company hired someone to watch me do it (even then it would take me a while to get started).  Which they wouldn't do because they could just have that person flip burgers and cut the burger flipping staff in half.

Once the Social Security office discovered this they set me on various tasks all of which required initiating activity on my own and doing it to the end while unsupervised.  And they wonder why it took me months to get done.  If I could do these things I wouldn't be applying for fucking disability, thank you very much.

Elsewhere, but on this blog, I compared it to saying to someone in a wheelchair, "Getting aid is easy, all you have to do is go up those stairs and ask for it.  No.  There isn't an elevator.  Why do you ask?"  I leave it to people in wheelchairs to determine if the comparison is fair.  I think it is if you're considering a standard "Legs don't work but arms do so an unpowered wheelchair can be used for locomotion," wheelchair and wheelchair occupant.  Arm power alone can get you up stairs, but it'll take a lot longer than someone walking and it'll be a serious accomplishment when you reach the top.

Given my mental problems the tasks given me seem like that kind of thing.  Hopefully, hopefully hopefully hopefully, this was the last one.  Hopefully it's in their hands now.  Hopefully I don't need to do any more of these, "It would be easy if you weren't disabled but this seems like it was specifically designed to be really damn hard for people with your disability."  Hopefully.

And no, I'm actually not filled with hope.  But there is a sense of relief that at least I got that part done.

Before that, seemingly out of nowhere came things for the Social Security of Maine.  So not the local Portland office, but the main office of the state in Augusta.  I couldn't figure out why they mysteriously appeared, but I did my best to fill out the forms and send them in and follow the instructions and whatnot.  These things asked me about my disability (though, strangely, never asked what the disability was.)  I knew it couldn't have anything to do with the SSI I was applying for because the application with them was being held up until they could determine my birth date for absolutely positively sure.  Every other government agency in the country (local, state, and federal) knows my birth date.  Social Security fucked it up.  Hell, I think the nation of Italy knows my birth date.

Having had time to reflect and reread and think and whatnot I think I know what happened.  When I applied for food aid I also applied for medical aid.  Now this is through HHS so I don't know why Social Security is involved and honestly I don't give a damn, but it would appear that this time (no idea why not last time) when they sent me a thing to renew my food aid they also assumed that I'd be reapplying to get the medical aid I was denied (very short version: I was denied on the basis of not having enough information, they didn't have enough information because they didn't contact any of the people I told them to contact.  When the opportunity came to appeal I simply didn't have the spoons.)

So that's all sent out and maybe I can get my medications paid for instead of a combination of having family members go broke buying them out of the kindness of their hearts and using student loan money.  (It's a living expense; it counts.  I checked before I got the loan.)

But, food aid and medical aid both apparently require me to talk to someone on the phone.  I got a very nice letter saying call this person on Monday through Friday between these hours.  After realizing today was a Friday (for some reason I thought it was Saturday) I did call.  Only to find out that the person I was to call would be busy for all but one of those hours.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The very nice letter said "Please call me with the following information" by deadline.  Otherwise benefits may be denied or cancelled or apocalypse or very bad things.

Now, if you're like me you're probably very interested in what the "following information" was.  There was none.  Nothing.  Blank page.  White space.  No ink.  Nothing.  Nicolas Cage in National Treasure couldn't figure out what the following information was because there was nothing there.

So I called the person, with the following lack of information, during the one hour he'd be available today.  Wasn't there.  Left a voicemail.

Now the deadline gives me all of next week so hopefully I'll get in contact to this person, give them the lack of information that they want, and thereby prevent the apocalypse, but that still leaves a lingering question.

Who the fuck says, "Please call me with the following information," and then doesn't have any information follow?  I mean, seriously?  Who?

Other than The Department of Heath and Human Services, I mean.  (That one was HHS not SSA.  So says the letterhead.)

My thing on aid, seems to be rather controversial, but not in the post I just linked to, instead in the thread that eventually inspired me to write the post.

I think part of it is that I'm not entirely against a nanny state and I believe that compartmentalization has benefits* and I have a fairly positive view of human nature.  If people get more aid than they need in one area, I trust that most of them will not sell it on the black market (there is currently a black market for government aid, no reason to assume that there wouldn't be under my proposed system) or spend it on things they neither want nor need just to be able to spend it all.

Likewise I assume that if the government did take care of the necessities (food, housing, clothing, medical care, education, fire, police, so forth) people would still get jobs.  Part of this is that I believe that people want more than just what is necessary.  Long ago there was a meeting of manufacturers and marketers where they realized that improvements had made it so they could no longer survive just selling what people needed, they instead needed to start selling things that people didn't need but did want, and in the absence of want they needed to create that want.  They're all still around.  And as John Oliver says, we cannot be beaten when it comes to consumption**.

If the idea is for everybody to be able to live with necessities, and have enough of a margin of error that they're not on the razor's edge of not living, then that still doesn't mean that the government is giving people everything they want, which means people still have an incentive to get a job, and capitalism can deal with wants rather than needs which is an area it seems much better suited for.

And I also believe that for a lot of people there is a desire to contribute, which means that even if they didn't need to they'd still want some kind of job.

But my idea of compartmentalized, "Here's your card, every month you get this much that can be used for food, this much for housing, this much for clothing, this much for..." which everyone gets got some serious pushback.  Not because it would cost so damn much (which it would, that's the reason that I always mention the fact that I'm in favor of serious tax reform alongside it, new revenue would definitely be needed) but because people, or at least one person, it's kind of fuzzy at the moment, don't like the idea of funds that can only be used for designated thing.

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Ok, that was long.  There are various other things.  I tried to go to the credit union to get thing notarized earlier, but they had closed for two days on account of the blizzard.  Before the blizzard I opened the gate that I use to keep the dog in the backyard and the (back half of the) driveway when he goes out.  My hope was that friendly neighbor with plow would plow the snow into the back half of the driveway if he plowed the snow.  First off, he didn't plow the snow (though since then he has helped in plowing out the snowbanks that city plows leave in the front of the driveway) but second and more importantly, the result was that the gate couldn't be closed again.

Since the blizzard every time I think that the snow has gotten low enough that with shoveling (and ice breaking, what stopped me last time was reaching the ice core of the snowbank) I might be able to close the gate... it snows again.  Which means I can't close the gate, which means that there's nothing to keep the dog in the yard and back half of the driveway.  The solution has been to watch him when he goes out and verbally stop him if he starts heading toward the road.

That has worked, though inefficiently and annoyingly, with two exceptions.  Last night and today during the day.  Last night he saw a car and ran out to chase it.  Thankfully the car was parking on the street otherwise god knows if I'd have caught up with him.  I got him back into the house while shouting apologies.

Today was worse.  I think I've noted that my dog's breed is unknown for sure because he's a rescue and they don't come with pedigrees.  If you look up Mountain Cur on Wikipedia you'll see a photo of a dog that looks just like mine and that's what we think he is.

You'll also see that they're bred to bark.  Like almost any dog (or is it "any dog" without the "almost"?) they will fight to protect those they care about, but that's not what they're bred to do.  They're bred to do two things.  One is scare off dangers, which is done by barking at them, the other is participate in bear hunts.

Dogs do not participate in bear hunts by fighting the bear.  That would be a good way to lose a dog in a hurry.  Dogs participate in bear hunts by scaring the bear, and in so doing herding the bear.  (There was an episode with Dragon being called on to do a similar thing to a boar in Jane and the Dragon.†  I mostly bring this up because I happen to like Jane and the Dragon.  The TV show, never read the books.)  And how do you scare and thus herd a bear?  By barking at it.  Very loudly.

Attempts to use nurture to overcome nature and get him to bark less have thus far failed.  He barks at strange noises, and considers opening and closing car doors strange, he barks at anyone too far away to smell (For fear they might be Cylons I said to Lonespark, to which she replied, "But aren't we all Cylons now?"  Yes.  Yes, we are.)

The good news is that that's all he does, bark.  The bad news is that that's not much of a comfort when a strange dog runs after you barking his ass off.  I imagine it's rather terrifying.  And as I rushed out of the house after him today, thankfully not barefoot but in flip-flops totally ill suited to the cold and one of them broken enough that a certain amount of concentration should be devoted to making sure it doesn't fall apart (the right one, if it matters) I shouted to the young woman between attempts to call the dog back, "The good news is he doesn't bite.  The bad news is I don't know if he'll ever stop following you."  And I told her that if she stopped moving for a bit I could grab the dog and get him away from her.

She thanked me, which she honestly shouldn't have because it was my fuck up that let a loudly barking dog chase her down and harass her, and said that she's totally not a dog person.  I don't remember the exact words she used, probably not "totally", but something that indicated that this was worse than if it had happened to an average person.  This happened to someone who doesn't necessarily have a dog phobia (though she could for all I know) but at the very least a dog discomfort.

I have no idea how old she was.  She was a student, not a college student.  High school would be my guess based on when she was walking home.  But that's all I have to base my guess on because I really, really suck at telling age.  Someone asked me the other day how old Lonespark's children were (either my mother, my psychologist, or both) and I honestly have no idea.  After spending a day with them.  And previously I've shared a house with them for the night.  I suck at telling age.

I'm like Mike from Stranger in a Strange Land when it comes to telling age.

"Patty," Jill put in, "he really does mean that he can't guess. He hasn't had much chance to
learn to judge ages-you know how short a time he's been on Earth. And besides that, Mike
thinks of things in Martian years and Martian arithmetic. If it's time or figures, I keep track
of it for him."

Except, you know, without the excuse of having spent most of my life on Mars.

So, young woman hopefully not traumatized.  And the same goes for Lonespark's children.  He was able to sniff one, but never the other, and so he never stopped barking and had to be put in his room, which is unfortunately also the bathroom which made things somewhat difficult when the children had to go before leaving.  Also he tends to be afraid of people who are afraid of him, which really doesn't help at all.

(Because he barks as things he's afraid of.)

It would be much better if he were afraid of people who were not afraid of him because, mentally, they'd be much better equipped to weather the nonstop barking.  (On the other hand, it does make sense.  Someone who is afraid is much more likely to do something rash like attack the dog than someone who isn't afraid.)

-

The die is cast.

I've applied for Greece.  First hurdle: Do they accept me?  Second hurdle: if they accept me I have to make a down payment of $500.  Third hurdle: Then I have to pay the remaining $3,500.  Fourth hurdle: Then I have to pay airfare there and back.

If I can't make the money in time I'm pretty sure I lose that down payment.  Can I make the money in time?  I think so.

I've compared it to a bottle drive.  You can make a lot in one push with a bottle drive, but you can't go out and do the same thing the next day.  I think I can make a $4,000 push even though I don't think I could make enough to support myself.  Because I think that after the push I will have dried up the market so much that there's not another $4,000 left in it.

-

Speaking of stuff, there was a last little bit of each part of the resin in my old containers.  I decided to use it.  Huge mistake.  The stuff in the unopened new containers appears to be fine.  (Though testing will tell.)  But the stuff in the old containers was visibly off to begin with.  Think of curds separating from whey and you'll have some idea, but worse.  I tried to mix it back together,  I thought I had success.  It took a long damn time but I thought I had success.

Either I was wrong or it was so far gone that even remixed it wouldn't work.  Some of it never solidified, some of it partially solidified.  I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to clean out my molds, which I definitely need to do.

-

The person who was picking on me, appears to have stopped.  I don't know if the intervention of a teacher played a role.  Teacher made it clear that she'd rather not intervene as we're all adults and should be able to sort things out ourselves but also that things had gotten to toxic to the point that she was considering changing the rules for how we do things, which would definitely be an intervention.

She never did change the rules.

I don't know what happened (or didn't happen) behind the scenes, but from my angle it looks like person has largely stopped being an ass, and the things that remain are so low key that I'm not sure if they're really her being an ass or they're just things that I'm inclined to interpret that way based on past experience of her being an ass.

My hope is that she hasn't just picked a new target to direct her assholicness at but has really stopped being an ass.

It was brought up to me after the whole thing calmed down that the teacher was the wrong person to speak to about it.  (I only spoke to her because someone else brought up the possibility that maybe the student in question was doing it to someone else and since I wouldn't be there for that but maybe the teacher would, I should let the teacher know that this was something to watch out for.)  There are other people and other means and a zero tolerance policy for bullying and whatnot that I apparently could have invoked like fire from the sky.

My ultimate decision on learning this was one of wait and see.  If she keeps behaving herself then I see no benefit to make an official mess of things.  If she reverts to past behavior then I'll go to the proper authorities and see what can be seen.

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I'm probably going to make a whole post on it at some point, but the idea I bring up here is one that I think would be awesome and I think would never happen.  The audience would be the overlap between people who like actual classics enough to catch reference to the style of good and bad translations alike and people who like Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess.  Not exactly the biggest audience ever.

Also, not yet developed idea, MST3K like silhouettes for each episode of both but instead of a hapless human and two robots, of a panel of classicists who actually know by heart the history/myth/both being butchered in the episode in question.  Or maybe not.

-

I've noticed that often when I try to type "think" I type "thing" and that the reverse is true as well.  I have no objections to typos (of which there are usually many) being pointed out in the comments, but until/unless that happens and I make a correction, if a sentence with think or thing in it is making no sense, try swapping it out for the other word.

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I'm behind in all my classes and I think I just got the lowest grade on a test in years.  Though it was a respectable passing grade I feel like someone I once knew who said, "I got a B," and then had to explain, after receiving congratulations, that that was a bad thing.  Of course the grade I got was probably pretty good considering that I was trying so hard not to forget the signs (I mostly succeeded) that I completely overlooked the fact that deaf culture and history were going to be a not-negligible portion of the test too.

-

Did I mention that the Greece thing is with Harvard and they asked for a copy of my transcript which shows that last semester ended with three incompletes and a failure?  Yeah, suddenly wondering if getting accepted in the first place might be a bigger question than whether or not I can raise the money.

-

I like Roman Holiday even though it's the kind of film I normally wouldn't.  Even though I haven't seen all of it.  (Missed the beginning and haven't been able to catch it since.)  No one gets a happy ending, that's generally not the film for me.  But it's also referenced in .hack//Sign so now I get the reference (not that not getting it was a big deal because it's pointed out to be a reference to Roman Holiday and you really have everything you need in the scene) and more than that it's the perfect illustration of why I want to go to Greece.  It's the idea that having that one good day is worth it even if you have to return to your crappy life afterward.  Because you have the one good day, and you have the memories, and you've got stuff and stuff and stuff.

Were I not completely aware of my duty to my family and my country, I would not have come tonight. *pause* Or indeed ever again. 

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There were probably other things to throw in here.

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* For example it is known that if there is a rent subsidy in an area the minimum rent usually rises to meet that subsidy, so it would seem like a very good idea to have any subsidy for rent cordoned off from other forms of aid otherwise the minimum rent might rise to a level that prevents people from getting enough of everything not-housing.  Thus I see it as valuable to have housing aid be only able to be spent on housing, and non-housing aid only able to be spent on non-housing.

** John Oliver, from Terrifying Times, which I recommend you buy***:

Now, I don't understand economics.  I don't fundamentally get how it works.  I've lived for 30 years on this planet... two elsewhere, and I still don't understand how the system works.  To me, economics is like the Dutch language-- I'm told it makes sense, but I seriously have my doubts.

But I want to understand economics. I feel like I have to.

So I bought this book recently which is designed to explain economics to someone who does not have the capacity to understand it.  And I learnt a key lesson in it, and that is that any nation's economic strength is solely in the hands of its citizens.  In your ability to consume.

Or if you want to be really great, in your ability to buy shit.

That is why America is the greatest economy on earth-- because you people cannot be beaten. 

As a citizen of the world, let me tell you, it is intimidating.  I have been to your malls.  They are cathedrals to bullshit.

I was at a mall in Connecticut and I saw an item in a shop window which stopped me dead in my tracks.

And I mean that.  I was moving, I saw this item and all of a sudden I wasn't moving anymore. 

It was, and I promise you this is true, an inflatable barbecue. 

*Audience laughs a lot* 

You're right.  *beat*  We should take a moment together to let the gravity of that sink in-- an inflatable barbecue. 

It was a full functioning barbecue with inflatable material around the outside of it so that you, like the man on the front of the box, could cook while swimming. 

Is there any greater example of what it is to live in the freest nation on earth than that?

*** As if ever anyone has bought something on my recommendation.  I can see whether anyone bought something by clicking through my links.  A few people have, or one person has a few times, and there's one universal truth.  What is bought is never, ever, what I actually recommended.  It would seem that someone, or someones, click my links, look at the thing I linked to, say, "I'm not going to buy that," and then found something they were going to buy while still in the same session thus earning me the 68 cents [correction] $1.64 (I should check more frequently because I'm rolling in the money now) [/correction] I have to my Amazon affiliate account.

On the other hand, the fact that my most dedicated readers are not Americans might play a role too.  I have a deal with Amazon, not Amazon Canada or Amazon UK.

† And I am somewhat pissed off that I can't post a link to it.  How the hell is the series not out on DVD?  With a total run-time of a little under ten hours it's a series that someone might actually be able to afford to buy unlike Hercules and Xena.