My Take On Movie Remakes and Sequels
You are not allowed to complain about Hollywood’s constantly making sequels and/or remakes unless, within the last twelve months, you have paid to see more original movies than sequels and/or remakes.
Until that case is true, you’re the fucking problem.
My Inside Is Not My Outside
When I posted about my anxiety over the upcoming block party, I got many helpful suggestions, most of which were redundant.
Now, I don’t mean to discourage you from posting comments, as I’ve gotten a lot of great advice from y’all over the years. And the people who told me how block parties usually go (I can attend for just fifteen minutes and leave?) were particularly awesome. Thank you.
Yet in general, despite my flailing, I do know how to make small talk: I read How To Win Friends and Influence People years ago, and that advice is timeless. Listen. Ask questions. Be interested in people. I even have a small stockpile of sports knowledge, utterly of disinterest to me otherwise, that I haul out for such occasions. And so when I go to a party, I’m usually quite normal, sometimes verging on “charming” if the crowd is right.
Yet inside, I still boil with terror.
That’s the thing one must remember when dispensing advice: it is one thing to know what you are supposed to do, and quite another thing to do it. I’m aware, sometimes excruciatingly so, of what I need to do – which sometimes makes its worse, as I have all the instructions and am still bollixing it. But in any new social situation, I’m battered by such terror that you’re doing it wrong and you look so stupid that even if I manage to function, the event is totally unenjoyable. On many – nay, most! – occasions I push past the discomfort and emerge into a nice, social experience; on others, I pretend for a sufficient period of time and then withdraw to have my panic attack in private.
(And to those who said, “What the fuck do you care what strangers think?” should recognize that you have come to know me upon the Internet because I do very much care what strangers think, and have written my blog in an accessible way so as to make it comfortable for strangers like you were, once, and should perhaps reflect upon the possibly poor idea that strangers are people to be ignored and rebuffed instead of people to be welcomed whenever possible.)
The anxiety I was trying to describe in my post was not “A guy who doesn’t know how to do this,” but rather “A guy who knows, and yet is still besieged by really stupid concerns.” Yes, I’m aware most folks don’t pay much attention to me, as I am background noise to their much more important “All-Me” channel. That awareness doesn’t negate the emotional reaction I have, nor the growing panic I’ve felt over the past week of “How do I do this properly?”
That’s why I always tell people with my advice: “I didn’t say it was easy. I said it needed to be done.” There’s a lot of people who tell me, “Well, you write every day, you get out and socialize, it’s easy for you to say” and my point is that it utterly isn’t. I’m still barraged by insecurities, hampered by swells of idiotic reactions I can’t fully control, pushed down by laziness.
I just recognize that those inside emotions aren’t as important as what I actually accomplish, and then do it anyway.
…Most days. Some days I break down. I used to break down a lot more. But once you get some practice recognizing that your emotions are not objective reality, and are confronted with evidence that you may have felt like an isolated clod but people enjoyed talking to you, it becomes easier to fight it. But you have to hunt for the good evidence, because otherwise you’ll do the social anxiety thing of overanalyzing every awkward pause as a condemnation of your entire being, and then you’ll never leave the house.
Will I go to the block party? Probably. Will I do okay if I go? Probably. Will any of that prevent me from shaking, quivering, and quailing?
Not a chance. That’s my reality. Yet all I can do is fight against that terror and keep shoving forward.
Keep fighting, my friends.
Bigger Is Not Better: On Videogame Maps.
I get lost going to the bathroom. So in general, I dislike huge games with terrible waypoints, as I just wind up unsure which way to go (I’m looking at you, Arkham City).
But gamers seem to love huge maps. If it’s huge, it must be awesome! Look at this Grand Theft Auto 5 map, it’s bigger than anything they’ve ever done! GTA is gonna be soooooo good!
Hold your horsepower there, chief.
Big maps are not automatically awesome. What’s important is what you can do with them. I found Grand Theft Auto IV to be a snooze because so much of the big, big map was actually just vaguely different scenery for a new swathe of no gameplay. Yes, I could drive past slightly browner buildings, but there still wasn’t anything to do. (Aside from the available-anywhere “murder civilians, get into a fight with the cops.”)
Whereas one of the reasons I liked Saints Row so much is that it had a big map, but I kept tripping over mini-missions. Wander for a while? Here’s a power-up hidden beneath a house! Here’s a race! Here’s an audio clip! The exploring meant something, providing plentiful rewards.
I think of Half-Life, which had teeny, constricted maps where exploring was nonexistent, but it was still a hell of a game because each cramped corner funnelled you into another semi-interactive experience. People remembered Half-Life because there was always something happening, and “something happening” is the core of a game experience. Give me a big map filled with emptiness, like a lot of sandbox games have these days, and all you’ve managed to do is shamelessly pad the game. Oh, now it’s three minutes to drive to the next mission instead of one! How. Awesome.
“A big map” is like “a big dick” – potentially exciting, sure, a technological breakthrough, but you still have to know how to use it.
The Agony of the Introvert
A month ago, they announced that Dale Avenue would be holding a block party. Everyone would get together to meet, eat, and greet.
I have been in anguish ever since.
Dale, it must be said, is a cordial but not particularly cohesive neighborhood. I know the names of the neighbors on one side of me. When there are parties at other houses, they too seem to consist entirely of non-neighbor people. We nod as folks go by, but that’s about the end of it.
So with this block party, all I can think is: Shit. Strangers.
Gini will be out of town that weekend, so I’ll be on my own. I’m patently, blatantly, awful at introducing myself. The concept of being among people I don’t know fills me with guttural terror, a sort of mumbling awfulness where I know I’ll just stand there, smiling numbly at people, hoping someone says something to me, terrified to introduce myself. Attending places alone brings me the heightened paranoia of pot, where every action I might take seems utterly foolish, crazy, the kind of thing they’ll laugh at you for weeks afterwards.
Do I have to go? I could stay inside. Oh, but then they’ll think of me as rude, I don’t want to be rude. Plus, the dog, I walk the dog, they all see me, they’ll note my absence, they’ll mark me as one of Those People and hate me. What if I just stay inside and pretend it’s not happening? No, the damn dog! She’ll bark. She might as well broadcast that I’m home. She’ll want to go for a walk during this damn thing. I can’t just walk past them and not say anything, right?
What if I take the dog with me? Dogs are icebreakers. Except Shasta growls a lot and jumps on people. She’s good, but she scares people sometimes. If I bring the dog, then maybe she’ll nip someone in all the fury and they’ll think I’m a monster. What if she poops outside? They’ll think I’m some crazy dog person, the nails, oh God, they’re going to hate me.
Okay, I’ll go without the dog. Then I’ll just stand there. What would I say to them? What do normal people say to each other? They have kids, I don’t, I’ll probably be awkward. What’s safe to say? Do they know I have bees? How much do these people talk with each other? Would they have told each other about my bees? Oh, God, what if I’m wrong and this whole neighborhood is cohesive and chats with each other daily and Gini and I are the only ones who are left out, just this pocket of sad isolation in the middle of some cheerful neighborhood, and this block party is actually a secret test to see what it takes to get us out and socializing?
What’s safe? I’ve got these crazy nails, maybe this neighborhood’s more conservative, they might hate me, what politics could I utter, how does this work, I can’t eat the hamburgers maybe they’ll think I’m rude for that I should just stay inside.
But the dog.
The damn dog.
How We Declared War On Syria (Or Didn't)
I think no current issue showcases the absolute dysfunction of American politics than Syria.
Before we continue, let us just admit that Syria’s a shit sandwich. Each side appears to be happy to slaughter thousands of Syrians, and neither side appears to love America. If we invade unilaterally, our best hope of war seems to be some kind of Iraq-style situation where we commit enough troops to basically sit on a powderkeg and hope we starve the fire of oxygen: expensive, bloodier than we’d like, and probably causing a lot of festering resentment at the US of A. If we don’t go in, then we send the message that hey, maybe chemical weapons are back on the table, and every war from now on becomes even more horrific. Plus, we basically say, “Hey, if you guys wanna commit atrocities on each other, that’s none of our business!”
No matter what we do, it sucks. Can we just acknowledge this as adults? That literally no matter what Obama or the Republicans chose to do, it would have ugly costs that nobody wanted?
Thank you.
But the thing that strikes me about Syria is that we don’t even know what our own politicians want. I’ve heard Obama being called another bloodthirsty warmonger and a man with secret hopes of peace. He went to Congress to get authorization to go to war, but we all know Congress couldn’t zip its fly after dribbling pee down its pants.
Was that the act of a man hoping to hand his war plans to a Congress he fully expected to bobble it, so he could tell the world, “Well, I wanted to go to war but they said no?” Was it a man who was hoping to call Republicans out, forcing them to see the gravity of the situation so they’d have to stop dicking around for FOX news and vote rationally? Was it a man who, unable to carry out his war-crazed agenda on a war-weary public, reluctantly shuffled off to Congress in a last-ditch effort to get the missiles flying?
We have hit the point in American politics where we can tell you precisely what our politicians are doing, but can’t even formulate a consistent theory as to why. Motivations have ceased to exist in the ridiculous Crossfire wind where existing biases and relentless 24/7 coverage has obscured any hope of understanding why anyone did anything.
And then Syria caved? Or did they? Is it a delaying tactic inspired by Russia? What the hell.
I’m not saying politics is simple: it’s always been hard discerning someone’s true motivations. But this is the first time I can recall a President has asked for authorization to go to war and there’s a very reasonable case to be made that he does not in fact want to go to war, that he’s counting on a dysfunctional Congress to fuck it up so he doesn’t have to. This could well be the moral equivalent of the husband who hates doing laundry, so he does a load where the whites all emerge pink and the wife sighs, “Oh, for God’s sake, forget it.”
How much does Obama want war? Fuck if I know. And I don’t think anyone has a clear opinion on that except for Obama, and maybe not even him.