Writing, The Gestation Of Ideas, And Shamelessly Plugging An Indie Author While Riding His Coattails

I write books in between dealing with other human beings, and I somehow find the time to write while being swamped under a university degree. This is because I find not writing for too long physically uncomfortable. I didn’t just buy an iPad because I wanted to read eBooks on it and play around online with it, but because I discovered this device could allow me to write down the thoughts of my every waking moment so I never miss an idea that might be worth something. I’m the kind of person who traditional pen and paper writers would be confused by, I even switched to mainly ebooks because a feature of my high functioning autism is, I don’t like getting my nice books creased and scuffed up so I back them up to my hard drive from Kindle where possible via clandestine methods the MPAA and RIAA would frown upon. I’m a product of my time, in the better way than the kinda way you use that word to mean outdated un-PC humour from old films like The Kentucky Fried Movie or The Flintstones’ racial stereotyping. The Kentucky Fried Movie has some good ideas in it, so does The Flintstones, but the jokes that didn't age well just aren't all that funny to me at least. It happens. I mean that i’m used to the idea of online distractions being online research tools whether you realise it or not. I’ve gone to some of my university classes with two hours sleep and i came out of there with more knowledge than one would expect an insomniac to soak in. I watch internet television - no not TV pirated on the internet, actual TV made for the internet. Screw reality television, I want to see what horrendous remnant of the Best Buy bargain bin nerds in their basement with cameras acting as critic comedians are gonna torture themselves with this week. Usually when i watch actual old media TV it’s  in a DVD box set and it’s usually anime, something made by HBO, or cartoons and old TV classics like Star Trek that actually worth watching versus a bunch of crap they put on DVD because everything has to be on DVD. And i buy a lot of movies on DVD too because i enjoy movies and my film school grad brother doesn’t read nearly as many books as I do so i have to communicate to him through the second language of cinema. And i read more books on my iPad because i carry it with me everywhere and i can write a book on the same device as i read one on. And while navigating the minefield of modern life’s distractions, books somehow get read and written, because i make time for them. Right now i have no real romantic or social life to speak of, and i became a writer because i wanted to do something productive with my tenure as a lonely shut in instead of whining into the abyss of internet forums which have no love for the mentally tortured whatsoever - a stupid thing i did because i had assumed internet forums worked like they did in Train Man by Hitori Nakano where the anime nerd is helped out by his forumite bros to ask out the girl of his dreams he just saved from a drunk guy on a train, hence the title. But my attempts at reaching out to the cold heart of two separate internet forums i now no longer post on were repaid, perhaps deservedly, with scorn and bile aimed at the whiny beeyotch-ness i once was and currently attempt to avoid returning to despite multiple failures in this department. This is the reason I only post on TV Tropes anymore. I spent about sevem years in the online wilderness trying to find both a place to belong, and myself. I haven’t found either one of those things but I’m still trying. Still trying even after constantly failing to find those is what’s important. The times i just gave up on everything were some of my most miserable. Of course this is coming from a man who staved off suicidal thoughts by shifting my haterade from loathing myself to something productive, like despising the Australian government for not giving us a bill of rights after more than a century. Also, writing was the cheapest medium of art I could find I could latch onto. That and I liked reading books enough to want to contribute to the craft of bookmanship instead of just reading Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales Of The Greek Heroes over and over until the spine began to fall apart (again, this is why as a high functioning autistics love ebooks, the tech is replaced and not the books). I wanted to be part of it all, i wanted to give people my age a reason to read again, since the perception of books compared to other mediums like film and television has much less razzle dazzle. I could probably write an entire post on razzle dazzle other mediums other than literature supposedly have, but this post is getting long as it is, so I’m trying to get to the point I originally started out with. Which was gestation of ideas. Often I try to write all of the ideas at once instead of focusing on three or four points to put in lots of blogs so I maintain some kind of productivity average that isn’t awful and makes me look lazy. So I decided to write this one blog post and shortening the other about eighteen blog posts gestating and needing to be cannibalised into other, better blog posts sooner or later. I know I keep promising that blog review of Mishima: A Life In Four Colours but right now since I'm at university my existence is a bit more Jacob Martin: A Life In Four Semesters. So instead I'm going to talk about Scott Morgan and his book How To Be A Whiny Beeyotch, since I both recently purchased and read it, and going into Mishima: A Life In Four Colours unprepared and unresearched could get me death threats from Japanese right wing groups, possibly even litigation from the author's widow if I dare suggest Mishima was gay, as I found out before sidelining that project in the Esky Of Unfinished Concepts. Meanwhile let's get to the point of the whole ideas gestation thing I hope I got across but probably didn't, as my arrest record by the Tangent Police is a long and storied one.

Basically what I was trying to say is, How To Be A Whiny Beeyotch is a book that mentions different excuses authors use for not writing and I noticed that there was a particular disdain for Hogan's Heroes reruns, and maybe by extension spending time watching reruns of anything. Scott Morgan seems like a very Generation X dude since his mentions of disdain for flannel shirts and goatees does not match my Generation Y appreciation of them, not so much as a retro thing like he fears. So he's right that things like TV reruns and internet dicking around is distracting to modern writers but at the same time my high functioning autism comes into play where I hyperfocus on things I'm really interested in, so my writing generally takes priority over things I actually should be doing as well like university assignments since I'm still bad at time management and do not know how the real world outside of my parent's house actually works despite my paying the rent to live there. Also the gestation of ideas I get when I go outside and then watch something like some internet TV where nerds in their basements are torturing themselves with the latest Hollywood dreck they found in the bargain bin of a Best Buy (most internet comedians are American, as an Australian I should say I shop at JB Hi-Fi which is pretty much the same thing as far as I'm aware), only to realise somewhere buried in the crazed rantings of that internet comedian that something inside that movie made that person react in a certain way that gives me a new approach to write a story or book with. And then I read an actual book, just to keep myself in tune with what the written word actually looks like. I mentioned The Kentucky Fried Movie earlier not just to cite it as an example of something that hasn't aged well on either a PC or comedic level but it's also the source of an idea I had for a short story collection where despite each short story having vastly different universes, some of them are similar enough that characters could appear in two rather than one story in cameos, like Big Jim Slade from The Kentucky Fried Movie emerging from one sketch only to resurface in another sketch unrelated to him called A Fistful Of Yen where he breaks other characters out of prison. Considering The Kentucky Fried Movie is a collection of short sketches, and short story collections are anthologies unto themselves, the idea of one character from one story reappearing in another is one worth recycling in my writing, hence watching a random film like The Kentucky Fried Movie was not a waste of unproductive time for me as a writer, it's not like I'm watching reruns of Hogan's Heroes and doing nothing with the experience. If anything watching new audiovisual material that's odd enough to be worth remembering rejigs my memory of unfinished stories or novels worth rescuing and bringing back out of the Esky Of Unfinished Concepts to be completed, since a lot of these ideas aren't bad, they're incomplete and need to gestate for a while before continuing. Which is a lot like that Mishima: A Life In Four Colours review. I'm not not writing it because I'm lazy, it's because I'm still writing other things while juggling university stuff and my research for university to obtain grades outweighs research that will help me avoid death threats from apologists for Imperial Japan. I've got enough on my plate as it is.

Oh, and as for why I trackback linked Scott Morgan? Trackback linking won me an interview with Australian radio personality John Safran before. So if I link to his website through my blog he'll probably notice, and might offer a rebuttal. Which is good because I've noticed he's been lamenting that new people don't reach out to him as much any more for Twitter discussions. Consider this the beginning of a discussion, Scott Morgan. I just rode your coattails before you knew it.

Another Lapse Into Academia (And Return To Metal)

So I know I haven't done one of these blog posts in a while, academic commitments came up again. Got three deadlines due over three weeks. But for now I'm gonna write about metal. I usually listened to pop music and hip hop for a while, since I had lost my path from the way of metal. Metal was something I adored back in the day like Dragonforce, Rhapsody, Metallica, and Yngwie Malmsteen. But as the years passed by I lost touch with my metal roots as my friends started listening to more rap and hip hop, and they lost touch with metal too. I didn't think much about this until I started trawling through Youtube and listening to classic metal albums I heard about in this book called 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. I didn't get very far but I did listen to Slayer's Reign In Blood album for the first time and discovered that I really like Slayer but it's the sort of thrash metal that gets me really agitated and anxious. I can see why most of the metal I listened to was the likes of Dragonforce and Rhapsody, I'm an anxiety ridden dude who finds it hard to calm down. But I liked Slayer for what they were, and eventually came across stuff like Ghost and Sabaton through this guy called Happy Metal Viking.

Ghost are literally Satanic Metal like your parents keep warning you metal is, but it doesn't sound too brutal like black metal, sounds more 70s than black metal and thus I quite enjoyed listening to the literal devil's music. Sabaton on the other hand are great because they take the epic tales of glory I love about what metal can do as a genre and makes good use of them with lyrics you can hear that aren't growled into the microphone as much as sung. Sabaton sing about various battles of history. They're awesome.

That's all I've got for now until I get these assignments off my back.

I Fell Down A Hole IV: The Final Chapter

So here it is, part four of my quartet of ramblings associated with what I've been going through this past little while. I've recently bought a new pair of shoes and a jacket, both of which don't smell like old motor oil, which is a plus, but what does going out there and buying ones own clothes rather than rotting in your shut in abode with old flannel shirts to keep you warm really mean?

Part of why I started writing the four part I Fell Down A Hole blog series was to establish what exactly went wrong in my life wherein the past seven years of my existence were a bit more miserable than they should have been. The titular falling down a hole refers to an in-joke I had about a time I fell down into a literal hole once I was exploring an old house I lived in, and found a mysterious world underneath this place, and once I exclaimed to my brother what I'd found down there, I said: "I fell down a hole". At twelve years old this was a place of magic and wonder, because I was a developmentally delayed chap who didn't lose his imagination quite as quickly. Or lost it ever, for that matter. Rather than abandoning my imagination into adulthood, I kept it secret from everyone else because they'd mock me if I ever tried to explain the value of it. So I kept on imagining for years and didn't tell anyone about it.

And yet... though I kept my imagination fertile, there remain certain things I at twenty three years old have not grasped. Dating and relationships is one. How to tie one's own shoelaces in a way that keeps the shoe on your feet for longer than an hour is another. I also can't cook for myself yet for whatever reason. I don't like dealing with things that involve fire and possible burning the house down if I get it wrong. I never learned to drive either, and have a phobia of trying to because of my well meaning father's misguided attempts at trying to force me to learn regardless of how uncomfortable I was about driving a manual, rickety old Volkswagen Beetle that sputtered and stalled if I didn't do everything exactly right, endangering both the ancient car and my whole family, let alone my life.

I don't really know how to do a lot of grown up things, though I somehow managed to figure out how to claim Medicare benefits and sign up to be a post-mortem organ donor on the same bureaucratic form I had to sign. One of these days I'll have to learn how to spell bureaucratic without using Google to help me spell it properly. So I've been helping out around the house trying to make something of myself, which I'd already been doing in my creative work only to discover I'd been neglecting other core skills that help you survive living in this world once you move out.

I'm still working on that stuff. New, better and more analytical post on Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters is coming, I had to grind that to a halt before I said something stupid since I uncovered something that changed my outlook on that whole movie a second time over.

I Fell Down A Hole Part III: The Quickening

Last time in the I Fell Down A Hole dramatic miniseries I was beginning to talk about what makes me happy but got bogged down in what I'm still struggling with and what makes me sad about life.

This time let's not do that.

I want to discuss, finally, the things I actually like for once.

A lot of you probably don't know what I'm into at all, from reading this, but not only do I have hobbies, but contrary to what you've probably heard, I actually enjoy them.

I write books as a hobby that might transfer into a living, it's not fanfiction and publishers have taken a peek over this thing over the years. I also like to read a lot of books but you're probably wondering what kind of books I like, so here goes:

Anything where a guy who's either a shut in or a creative person or some kind of wizard/warrior trying to do his bit to save the world is always good. My favourite book of all time is Welcome To The NHK by Tatsuhiko Takimoto, I think it's one of the greatest works of contemporary literature written in my lifetime. It's getting to the heart of a big problem in Japan where a lot of people feel isolated or become shut ins because they have social anxiety disorders, since I have an anxiety disorder it's really interesting to see a book written by a man who clearly gets the short end of the stick because Japan has an even worse track record of helping out the mentally ill than Australia does, at least Australia has some kind of Medicare to pay for meds at some level, Japan is a place where most drugs like Prozac aren't available so a lot of people there go it alone and Welcome To The NHK is about somebody who's a hikikomori or a shut in because of social anxiety who's right in the middle of this minefield. Part of the reason why I love this book so much isn't just because it deals with things I can relate to with social anxiety, but because I don't think many novels like this capture the essence of anime in the printed word quite like this one, it's like when you read it an anime explodes in word pictures inside your mind. You literally can't imagine it not being an anime because as the light novel format it is, it's heavily inspired by anime but it's a novel, yet it gets to the heart of what anime is capable of without a single illustration, it was adapted into an anime later but it's kinda weird to me that even now, light novels instead of manga are being adapted into anime rather than people having to draw to be a part of that cultural scene at all, it's really fascinating and exciting that something like Welcome To The NHK can be not just a novel that talks about heavy themes and problems of contemporary Japanese society, but it's also this cult classic to anime fans both in Japan and the West because it speaks to both fanbases in a way that some people, like this actually Japanese guy I met on an internet forum once who said something along the lines of "Welcome To The NHK is everything wrong with my country" - I earnestly think this guy completely missed the point of what Welcome To The NHK represents not just as a novelist's story about a shut in who ends up in this zany scheme with his pervert neighbour to make a hentai game which he agrees to because he wants to impress a girl he knows, but the hentai game they end up making is horrible, they fail at making something but their attempt at making something, even if it was terrible and kind of perverted, it was a valiant and noble triumph over the apathy and self loathing they had for themselves before. I think that's the part this Japanese guy I met on a forum didn't get about why Welcome To The NHK doesn't just speak to a Japanese audience, but to a Western one, cause Japan is very hardline on slackers and shut ins, doesn't allow them to thrive, but the Western world has a lot better safety nets for the slackers and shut ins, and as a result I think though we make a lot of jokes about them in our culture we're way more sympathetic to them than Japan as a culture would be, and Welcome To The NHK, like many great novels new or old, gives us empathy to a man's story whom we wouldn't normally listen to, but a lot of people did even outside of Japan because as it turns out, like JD Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye which is partly responsible for Welcome To The NHK existing, white people like to contemplate their problems and talk about them because they feel alienated in society, they always have whether it's justified or not, and that's just fascinating that something written by what was essentially a Japanese shut in who became an author, then a manga and anime franchise, blossomed into something so huge that meant so much to this die hard audience, it's the magic of literature that allows itself to coexist in a multimedia environment, it is a story that is not threatened by being constrained to a book or a comic or an anime, it is a story that escaped and could not be contained even in isolationist Japan, but I think the greatest accomplishment of Welcome To The NHK was that it was created by an unemployed bum loser who was tired of being a massive failure, so he turned his failure into a novel about being a failure, which then turned into a huge multimedia franchise. Truly, an inspiration to us all.

Another of my favourite books ever which is like the flipside of the otaku culture Welcome To The NHK comes from, it's much more upbeat and portrays the positive aspects of otaku in Japan rather than the creeper side of it like NHK does.

It's called Train Man or Densha Otoko by Hitori Nakano, it's this romance novel for guys oddly enough that's about this guy who saves a girl on a train from a drunk guy but later he turns to his 2channel forum buddies to help him get the courage to ask out this girl on a date and the plot just blossoms from there. What makes Train Man even better is that it may or may not be a true story. I once watched a video online where some girl was saying that we don't need myths and legends anymore, with this assumption that myths and legends don't happen in modern culture, but Train Man is a prime example of 21st Century folklore from the internet age that I don't think gets enough credit for proving that myth and legend is alive and kicking, I think it's awesome that we live in an era where while it doesn't matter if Train Man was real or a hoax, we have this 21st Century equivalent to Robin Hood of Nottingham or some shit which is another folk hero based on very dubious historical record. Train Man is also the first example of a romance novel for guys that I've ever seen, and it came from a time in Japanese culture where men in Japan were somehow allowed by society to be all romantic to the women they loved rather than like it is in Western culture where hypermasculine whitey culture is all "Being loving and affectionate to your lady is totally gay". Train Man isn't just a romance novel for guys, it broke ground, it challenges what men are willing to read, not to mention how the internet can be incorporated into the 21st Century novel so that it can continue to be a valid art form that young people continue to work in as a medium. Lots of people in say, The Guardian newspaper and other places get all worried about whether literature is dead, or nothing original will ever be committed to the printed page, but I don't think books are dead as an artform at all. Considering the above examples I've listed of my two favourite books, which tell a very similar cultural story from different angles and different ideologies, literature is alive and well but nobody bothered to check the pulse. Literature has barely begun to deal with the kinds of issues young people my age are dealing with. And people say that nothing original will ever be written again - bullshit, you know why there's a sense that nothing original is getting published right, it's not because Fifty Shades Of Grey was a fanfic that became successful, it's because young people haven't been passed the torch to yet and we're still being bombarded with the leftover ideas and cultural memes of the last generation. Ten years from now I guarantee you we'll be seeing a lot less tired Star Trek and Star Wars references in pop culture and we'll be seeing a lot more Jurassic Park, Neon Genesis Evangelion, maybe even a few Dragon Ball Z and Scott Pilgrim Versus The World references here and there, these are things my generation grew up with that were made in our own lifetimes, and they're fresh, new cultural memes that yearn to be run into the ground by young voices yet to be heard.

As for films I like, I'm really struggling to come up with a top ten list of my favourite films ever, since I grew up in a house with a film school grad brother and I watched a lot of films with him. I don't play video games much because I'm terrible at them so in order to reach out to my brother I'd find myself subjecting him to weird movies I'd heard about online and managed to hunt down in some backwater JB Hi-Fi where these kind of oddball films are still in print within my region code. I've made it obvious that TGWTG and other internet reviewers were responsible for encouraging me to try new cinematic delights but I don't think people who know me in real life realise this, there was this one time I was on the bus from a street party in Newtown and my sassy gay friend Terry was astounded as to why I knew about all these awesome films he'd never heard of, I ended up telling him that the reality was I wasn't a cool tastemaker at all, and that I just found out about them from TGWTG and such places, he was kind of shocked because he previously thought I was a cool dude as far as high functioning autistics went, the man clearly doesn't understand that nerds talking about obscure things on the internet is to autistics what reality television is to gay people of his kinda circle. My point being is I ended up revealing the secret to my underground arts success and he was floored that I was a nerd all along. I get mistaken for being a hipster a lot because I go to an art school, but don't be fooled by my awareness of surrealist filmmakers and artists, the nerd roots run deep to the extent that after a long period of horrifying depression I tried going back to my nerd roots and started watching anime and weird movies that appeal to nerds again.

Like I remember I found out about Ralph Bakshi through hearing about this movie called Heavy Traffic, which was about this shut in cartoonist who made art in his basement essentially while living with his mixed race parents in New York City, and he ends up dating this sassy black woman bartender and it's the best film about how racism actually happens in real life rather than stuff like The Help which try to hammer in the racism is bad angle so hard it misses the mark, Heavy Traffic is one of my favourite movies ever though, if you had to pin me down and force me to put at least one movie on my top ten list it would be on there, in the higher rankings too. I discovered round about the same time I was looking for similar subject matter to Welcome To The NHK, I really dig stories about creative shut ins who try to make something of themselves, most movies you see about young people now have slacker characters like a Scott Pilgrim or a Judd Apatow archetype, who people my age are supposed to relate to but I don't think any of the modern slacker characters outside of Satou Tatsuhiro from Welcome To The NHK have come close to remotely being as relatable as Michael from Heavy Traffic, both of them share similar qualities in that they're considered failures by society's weird standards but there's more going on in their heads than people actually see and give them credit for.

I guess you could call Satou and Michael something along the lines of "creeper with a heart of gold", since they're kinda creepers sometimes and they have serious flaws but they have such fascinating inner lives and struggles that you stop caring that they're kinda sexist or racist since right from the get go you understand that the reason they're like that is their environment versus their actual morality most of the time. I really love Michael as a character because he represents a reality of the 70s you don't often see, Hollywood depicts the 70s in most mainstream movies as this safe, watered down counter culture where civil rights and everything happened, but he was a twenty two year old virgin in an era before the internet and back then we didn't have webcomics that Michael probably would have been in the business of if he existed now, or in some kinda remake. I look at Michael and I feel kinda sad for him because it makes me realise how I was born at kind of a perfect time in history where you could reach out to complete strangers on the internet, and you can just outright post your creative work online. I also admire the shit out of him because when I was about twenty two like he is in this movie, I was a virgin (still am) whose only real outlet was his creative work since I didn't get invited to many parties, sure Michael's a cartoonist and I realise to young people that's a way cooler profession than just being a writer who writes novels, short stories and blogs, but I think despite my being jealous of Michael's ability to draw I relate to his ability to resist the dreary awfulness of his lonely urban lifestyle where he has to go to the movies by himself, his only outlet is drawing stuff late at night, he's probably not sleeping too well either, but his passion for his creative work keeps him feeling imaginative and alive and that meant the world to me when I was just starting out in University. So many slacker characters in fiction get depicted as being too lazy or afraid to take a chance and make something of themselves, but not only does Michael know what he wants to do with he's life, he's already doing it, right now, presumably because he knows if he doesn't he won't have anything else to help him bear the burden of his lonely life. He might not be published in the newspaper comic strip yet but right here, right now, he's exactly where he wants, nay, needs to be in his life. He's well on his way to being somebody. And we need more young people characters like that. Because not all of us are listless bums wandering the Earth being shouted at by our parents. Some of us actually like our parents. Because they support us.

I used to listen to nothing but Andrew Lloyd Webber until the internet rescued me from the Phantom's clutches. I still like the Phantom Of The Opera musical, it's just that I'm now aware of music that doesn't come from film soundtracks or musicals now. I listen to a lot of hip hop, pop and some rock and metal in equal measure, I'm very eclectic because as a guy who writes books I'm always looking for the appropriate background music for the right moment and tone. It's funny because since a lot of the pieces of music I allude to in my novels are instrumentals from film scores I may not have to pay royalties to the publishers of the lyrics due to there not being any to reproduce in my prose.

I really like Kanye West and The Beastie Boys in terms of rap, but I'm also the proud owner of Vanilla Ice's To The Extreme album and two NWA CDs of their most influential work, I have Eazy-Duz-It by Eazy-E as well, but before I get rambly about that I want to point out why I find the work of The Beastie Boys so interesting, it's because The Beastie Boys appear to be the definitive example of cross cultural influences that get co-opted by white people right. I've noticed Ralph Bakshi in his animation work has a shitload of African American characters in them, regardless of how integral to the plot they are, well The Beastie Boys succeed because they're also Jewish artists who were influenced by black culture and the music that comes with it, but they did it in a way which wasn't annoying or irritating to actual black people, kind of how many black people adore Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin despite it being made by a white, Jewish guy. The Beastie Boys aren't just important because of their vast body of work, they're also important because they prove that white people actually can be cool, and be inspired by the artforms of other cultures than their own without degrading or debasing those cultures by respecting the material they draw from that. Another band I like is Oingo Boingo, I only have one of their albums, Only A Lad, but I listen to that thing again and again, it's shorter than a lot of albums can get in rap sometimes, very digestible in ways but eerily sinister in others, like there's this song by them you've probably heard in AMVs on Youtube called Little Girls which is about pedophilia. And they close out the album with a song about masturbation. And the sinister subject matter is contrasted with cartoonish pop Caribbean influences and 80s beats. Yeah... I adore this album for being both brazen and quite a work of art in its own right as far as pop music goes.

I also really like animation, both Western and anime if you haven't guessed, but that's for another day.

This is getting a bit long so I'll end it here, part four will wrap this up.

I Fell Down A Hole Part II: Fall Harder

Read this first, as it was the beginning of my trying to grapple with this. It explains some of what I've been going through, not all of it.

As you may be aware, for the past five years I've been trying to complete my University degree whilst struggling through a fog of depression. This isn't easy because my mood swings so often that you could be forgiven for thinking, if you only saw me for about three hours that day on a Friday when I only have one class, that I was happy as a clam this whole time. Not the case, since as soon as I got home usually when it got dark and cold as it does in April in the Australian climate my mood goes haywire and my brain gets sad and I start hating myself.

This was usually what happened, every April, like clockwork until this year when after I got into somewhat of a decent sleeping pattern my moods swung less erratically and for once this time of year I was a lot happier. And scared, because I didn't know when my mood was gonna swing back into Sad Land at any moment. I didn't trust it, I thought I'd wake up in The Matrix and find out I was in Sad Land the whole time.

But after three days being happy as a clam... my mood didn't swing back to unhappy and crazy.

I have a few theories as to why this must have happened.

For one thing I stopped troll rolling on message boards trying to reach out to people who didn't want to deal with me, and I didn't want to burden with my crazy mood swings. This resulted with me going to bed at semi-appropriate times instead of falling asleep at 3am in the morning at best. And because I got better sleep I got more sunlight and my brain got happier I guess.

I've also wanted to get back into my usual hobbies I had before I fell into this hole of academia and depression, but it also seemed like it felt that getting a University degree was the thing preventing me from achieving my true potential trying to get published instead of rotting away undiscussed while trapped in an academic situation where I was forced to analyse stuff rather than create it, since I'm at that part of my Uni degree where you're doing theory subjects instead of practical work, and too much theory lumped in there makes you feel very uncreative sometimes unless you put your mind to it and start making it fun. I had to use gamification to improve my outlook on academia, despite my lifetime of negative, stressful experiences trying to play actual video games which put me off the medium of video games for life.

So what was I if I wasn't a gamer? Did I suck because I sucked at video games, alienating me from a lot of men I grew up around who loved video games? I hated video games growing up because my autism comes with this thing called a motor skills deficiency which means everything the movie The Wizard told you about autistic people pwning at video games is a hollow lie. The game controllers intended to immerse me into these digital worlds were ironically the thing that cripples me from being able to enjoy those imaginative digital worlds at all. And yet young people were playing video games in droves. Hardly anyone apart from me who I knew were reading books. I loved reading books. I loved writing them too. It's all I really had, considering I enrolled in an art school degree out of a fear that an Arts Literature or Creative Writing degree would be the same recycled shit I learned in high school about postmodernism. I hated that, I'm not surprised a lot of kids my age hate reading because I had to fight tooth and nail to retain my love of it through an education system that failed to imagine things, or for that matter imagine a future of kids who loved to read because they were allowed to think their own thoughts about what they read, and read for fun even.

Reading and writing were my true passion. I'd been doing it since I was twelve years old, I think anyway. They gave me an award for Interest In Library back in Primary School, I wish I could find it in the pile of boxes we had after my family moved. It's all I knew how to do. My brother, he was way more into film growing up than me. He didn't just want to watch films and be entertained like I did, he wanted to make them. Me, I read books not just because I wanted to read them, I wanted to write some of my own too. When I read a book, I thought to myself that this was a form of expression I could totally do myself, it's a low budget medium with minimal stress compared to film which would have overwhelmed me with a career of one panic attack after another once the smallest thing went wrong.

Literature on the other hand allows itself to be taken in slowly. It's what I like about it. You go at your own pace and you can deal with the emotions it throws at you in your own time.

And a few days ago that got me thinking about other things, not just books, that I used to love before I got all depressed, lonely and miserable. Things that got me through the day since I didn't have a girlfriend like the other boys sometimes had to motivate me to get out of bed in the morning. I had my book writing and book reading to do, but I had to compensate for the whole being terrible at video games thing. So I looked out for things that gave me the same beautifully imagined creative worlds of video games but presented in a format I could actually enjoy.

I started looking up videos on the internet, somewhere on TVTropes I came across ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com and I found something there. To this day that website is the reason why I'd rather watch nerds in their basement talk about a movie or cartoons on the internet instead of reality television. Fuck Keeping Up With The Kardashians, I wanted to figure out what The Cinema Snob was gonna drag out of the dustbin of history this week. Fuck Honey Boo Boo, I was watching Nostalgia Chick and Todd In The Shadows introduce me to the joys of pop music and incredibly girly media I wouldn't have touched back in high school for fear of being persecuted more than I was. Before I watched Brows Held High for the first time the only arthouse films I was familiar with were the ones I walked in on my mother watching on SBS, and she'd tell me to scram because these movies often had nudity, or violence. There was one Friday night my mother was proven right in her assertion that SBS wasn't a kid's channel because that fateful late evening they were showing Perfect Blue, and if you know what Perfect Blue is you'd realise why a twelve year old boy would be scared shitless by it.

I was twelve years old, man. I didn't even know what rape was. I was so innocent that if I were a character in the Dragon Ball Z universe I'd still be eligible to ride the Nimbus Cloud. That's how green I was then. Depressing to think that the kid who once was horrified by Perfect Blue at age twelve barely raised an eyebrow at Cannibal Holocaust because Brad Jones, The Cinema Snob warned him in advance what he was getting himself into. And I think that's why I was willing to expand my horizons a bit more. Spoilers are generally avoided by some, but if I know something horrifying is about to happen in a movie, and your spoiler saves me from being traumatised, you've done a service to my poor anxiety disorder that thanks you for the heads up.

And I think that's where the pieces started to fit together. I was raised in a family where somehow, by some twist of fate, the act of tricking one's elders into letting you see The Godfather is a rite of passage that for unknown reasons was passed down to my generation, after my own mother tricked her mother into letting her see it in cinemas on its release. Truly the watching of highly age inappropriate material that changes your life is a time honoured tradition in my household, as smut and ultraviolence is passed down through the ages to the younger generations. This is the tradition I hope to pass down to the children I hope to have the privilege of conceiving, considering that my lack of luck in love or romance compared to my peers of the same age made me shun the entire rom-com genre for its making me feel miserable and lonely when I compare my life to everyone else's.

It's a flawed, borderline crazy reason to hate rom-coms, but you can see how a twenty three year old lifetime with no reciprocation in romance can make a man hate such a genre and its tropes rather than using that genre to live out fantasies that will become reality maybe one day when the stars are right. Instead my depression ridden sadness brain was offended by the rom-com genre due to its believing I, and my brain, were being lied to by Hollywood.

Things started to change for the better more recently, not from the charms and embraces of a woman's love, but instead an intellectual love of new ideas and concepts found in cinema, books and various other places I'd run into at Books Kinokuniya and JB Hi-Fi where entire worlds could be found inside a graphic novel or a DVD that was sold in either of these places.

I'll tell you about that stuff in Part 3, where I come to grips with what it is I actually enjoy in life rather than hate about it.