Amateur Hour at the Internet Troll Open Mike Night

I have been working on a blog post for some time that took some serious gestation because it's about things that took me a long time to think out. Not all blog entries are like that. Sometimes I get distracted by temporary, but immediate concerns that are not only worth considering, but are frivolous enough that I can punch the keys and have this thing done in an hour. This is one of those times.

I followed a guy who was in the recommended section of Twitter after I followed another guy, and things seemed nice enough at first until this escalated.

This isn't everything I could grab, but apart from me as an autistic man calling this dude out on his ableist bullshit, the stupidest thing is this isn't even why he yelled at me at first. I'm a hardened veteran of the flame wars. I served in the trenches of many of these. My skin is thicker than most autistic people starting out in their first baptism of online fire. The sad thing is this dude started to diss me not just on the basis of me defending the disabled, but because my avatar was allegedly ugly. No, really. This guy's argument was that dumb. And he didn't even bring that amateur hour trash talk to the table until I attempted to discuss with him whether Kevin Smith and Joss Whedon counted as Gen X directors. An issue I'll add, has little or anything to do with how ugly my Twitter avatar may or may not be.

As you can see, his opinion of me just devolved from there. I was willing to let it go if he didn't escalate it, but he continued to call me a faggot without bringing anything else emotionally scarring and hurtful to the table. The stakes of this flame war were lower than Limbo Night at Van Helsing's place. I may need to give some personal history for context, but essentially, this dude is the epitome of amateur hour when it comes to trolls I've met online. I've seen people post image macros suggesting that "Aspies need curing with electroshock therapy!" that people spent hours in Photoshop creating this Fallout-style retro PSA graphic to hurt people's feelings with. I've been stalked online for four years once by a guy who threatened to letter bomb my house. In the words of Walter from The Big Lebowski, "This is not a worthy adversary." - in the ranks of Disney villains, this guy wouldn't even be in one of the Disney Animated Canon villains people know and love, fear and respect. The guy who threatened to letter bomb my house is like the Judge Frollo from Disney's The Hunchback Of Notre Dame of internet trolling, while this dude's the really vain guy who kisses himself in the mirror in Disney's The Hunchback Of Notre Dame II. I shouldn't really have to explain why Judge Frollo and the guy who threatened to letter bomb my house were way more intimidating. If you're gonna be a creepy asshole you're really gonna have to sell it, with charisma and a sense of conviction about why you decided to torment one's victims. This guy was just a guy spewing ableist and homophobic slurs at me in a sad, pathetic attempt to get a rise out of me. So I did what I do to most people like him who do this online. I bring up the fact that I might not be gay, but I have kissed a dude, and the experience was still more enjoyable than interacting with him. I did this not just to try and throw some Roger Ebert The Brown Bunny feud wit in there, but knowing this guy somehow assumes that asserting one's opponent in a debate is gay is the worst insult he has, throwing the fact that I've kissed a boy on the table is gonna leave him lying awake at night weirded out by this information. Even though I blocked him afterwards, I left him that nugget of doubt that his homophobic slurs had any effect, or that being gay was something insulting at all. And with this last response, I blocked him:

It makes me sad that modern internet trolls of the younger generation just don't put the effort in anymore. Internet creeps of yore used to pursue and humiliate a victim for months or even years. They were cyberbullies of myth and legend, a quality of dickhole so dedicated to their evil that they transcended mere douchebag and became a genital wart, just above the dick hole, on an uncircumcised penis so when the foreskin rubbed against it it got even more infected and gross. This quality of villainy still exists online, still bulling gay teens and not gay teens alike into what they hope will end in suicide, but a lot of these young ruffians of the internets just don't have that commitment to quality hatred. And I lament the decline in quality my own grandchildren will suffer through in future generations if trash talk fades from clever wordplay into lazy slurs.

The Mistaken Gendering of DVDs

So my brother does this thing where he occasionally, about once a month, comes into my room, rifles through my DVDs, and upon picking out some particularly "girly" ones like my Forever Marilyn 7-Disc Blu-Ray box set of Marilyn Monroe films, or the egregiously pink amaray case that Can't Stop The Music (The Village People Movie, for those not in the know) and the pink and glitter bedecked cover of my Clueless Blu-Ray copy, I've noticed he cherry picks these, ignoring the far darker subject matter of Cannibal Holocaust, Salo, and my entire grindhouse DVD section including Zombie Flesh Eaters and the like, just so that he can make cheap jokes about how "gaaaayyyy!" my DVD and Blu Ray collection is. I have long suffered under my film studies graduate brother's regressive agenda when it comes to the gendering of DVDs without them needing to be. Case in point, the fact that I have an anime DVD and Blu Ray collection from the get go is a big fat target for him to just shout "GAAAAAAY" at me without any real insight into how Ouran High School Host Club is somehow for a female or homosexual man audience only. I really hate how my brother outright dismisses entire subsections of media because they either look too girly or too "gay" for him. I should remind you, reader, that out of me and him I'm the only one who was willing to put his lips to the test to find out if he was gay for certain, whilst he seems to be very overtly of the "trolling makes homophobia funny!" camp. Oh how he justifies his regressive ideals through the guise of trolling. I've seen this argument many times and in the real world of the internet (bear with me here) such an argument usually gets laughed at or results in somebody cracking out the banhammer.

In any case, the mere suggestion that DVDs are gendered objects is something worth looking into since I've seen commentary from both my brother and his friends that there even exist "Manly DVD Shelves" as opposed to girly of "GAAAAY" ones. Allow me to elaborate on this. What comes to mind for most men when they engender a film with overtly masculine qualities? 300, the oeuvre of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, and Charles Bronson, that MMA movie Warrior, things like The Raid: Redemption and Dredd, Drive despite Ryan Gosling having a sex symbol status with women, these are fairly testosterone filled works of cinema, you start to think. Surely no hint of oestrogen could even touch these digital video disks and remain un-impregnated by their sheer virility? This is the kind of mentality my brother and some of his friends have when it comes to their DVDs. But the thing is... I own a lot of DVDs of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson, Jean Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone movies. I probably own more of these than my brother or his friends do. But due to the particularly pink packaging of certain films like Can't Stop The Music and Clueless, one can cherry pick these out of a shelf of otherwise gritty and muscle heavy audiovisual material and assert that the masculinity of the DVD shelf owner is somehow lacking in some weird imaginary way that guys who haven't really experienced the Tumblr Social Justice flame wars for themselves tend to do because they either don't know any better or are legitimately homophobic.

Now the supposed "Chick Flick" or "Romantic Comedy" has been stigmatised as a genre "men don't watch". This... kinda needs to die. Along with the idea that all of these kinds of films are terrible. When Harry Met Sally, gold standard romantic comedy right there. (500) Days Of Summer, one of the best romantic comedies of the last ten years by far. Yet somehow these films irritate men in some way (and often irritate women in completely unrelated ways which I'm not quite as qualified to comment on) and are regarded as the dross of cinema where nothing with testicles can enter without being emasculated. As I mentioned earlier, anime, particularly anime made in the last ten years, has a very, very stigmatised reputation as being "less than it was" in the 1990s where gore-fests like Ninja Scroll and Berserk were the order of the day. Worse still, I feel really uncomfortable about suggestions that something like Free! which is intended for a fujoshi audience of women who like to watch hot dudes splash around in water are somehow an affront to the standards of anime's halcyon days when manly men were men and women were... still as badly written a lot of the time as they used to be in the more fanservicey shows.

It's this really weird mentality of manly media that I don't understand when it comes to complaints about how anime's turned into an all out girly man mode. A lot of the anime that gets made now definitely draws in a female audience, which is a good thing, I assure you. You realise what happens when there's only dudes in a fandom, right? You get stagnation. Also you get a sausage festival. Just sayin'.

In Defence Of Annoying Comic Relief Characters

It's time that I stood my ground and admitted something that has bothered me since 1999.

I have never hated Jar-Jar Binks. The Midichlorians I get, Jake Lloyd's performance was infamous, but I saw him in Jingle All The Way and I enjoyed parts of his performance like that scene where he's imagined by Arnie-Dad as an adult drinking booze proved he had some brilliance if given good material where he could mix cute with creepy and disturbing. But I never hated Jar-Jar Binks. For many years, my brother asked me in no uncertain terms, "Why?". And that's a very good question to ask of a person who defends one of the most hated comic relief characters in modern cinematic history. I hope to illuminate what occurred to me at nine years old to defend this infamous CGI Gungan as it ties into other, more recent examples of people decrying other supposedly annoying comic relief characters which for the record I disagree with in ways we'll get to later. Oh boy will we get to it later.

The reason why I defended Jar-Jar Binks to a crowd of Darth Maul fanboys who mocked me as a child was very simple now I think of it. It wasn't merely Jar-Jar Binks as a character, I mean I thought the floppy ears were cool in the promos but there was more to it when the backlash reached unholy levels of hatred to what was really a CGI creature put there to please children. Children, I remind you, who were my age at the time of The Phantom Menace's cinema release. I was Jar-Jar's target market, as were a lot of other kids who rejected him and preferred Darth Maul instead. No, it wasn't just Jar-Jar's character design or comic relief appeal that got to me. It was the way nerd society just spat on this poor critter and wanted to see him dragged through the streets and maimed, for the crime of... existing. As a child, I'd often been mocked and teased for being annoying, naive or getting in people's way a lot. I was diagnosed with high functioning autism from a very early age and I saw things in Jar-Jar Binks none of the other kids really saw because they didn't have empathy for somebody they saw as annoying. I related to Jar-Jar Binks because here was this alien creature, made an outsider by society even in universe (That's part of the plot if you recall) and despised by the divine wrath of Star Wars fandom, and he was reviled for being annoying rather than a real villain who did truly reprehensible things. Kids then fanboyed over Darth Maul because he looked cool, he had a double bladed lightsaber and had cool makeup, yet the fact my generation rooted for him over the outright harmless Jar-Jar Binks just sat wrong with me, and for years I couldn't put my finger on it until I saw this same thing play out again and again with other movies that came out which were unrelated but the hatred of these harmless comic relief characters was all too familiar. Where other people saw hilarity in jokes about Jar-Jar being frozen in carbonite and harmed in various ways, I saw the same bullying I was put through by my peers for nothing less than the crime of my high functioning autism that made me different and harder to deal with than the other kids who took their social skills for granted. It was also something I've noticed the internet latched onto, this unwarranted hatred of these outright harmless characters who hadn't hurt anyone really.

I didn't notice this cynicism creep in modern fandom reach intolerable levels for me until I saw criticism of Wreck-It Ralph because Sarah Silverman played Vanellope. Oh my word. The overreaction to this character purely on the basis on Silverman Stigma brings my piss to a boil. Don't you fucking dare bring Silverman's baggage into this. Don't. You. Fucking. Dare. I was in the cinema when Wreck-It Ralph was released. The moment I saw this character I knew I was going to like her. For reasons that will take some explaining. For starters, she's wide eyed and fun, annoying to some critics yes, but she's a breath of fresh air to what would be considered the mainstream acceptability of "annoying". Vanellope has fans. She has more fans than Jar-Jar making her a lot safer to defend. She's also got aspects to her character which I find far more eerily relatable to my personal childhood growing up than Jar-Jar had in universe, notably the fact that she has a glitch disability that makes her unable to be accepted by the other game characters and race in the Grand Prix. This character put me back in a place that was very familiar. A familiar place I associate with being hurt and shamed for who I was, by people who either didn't know any better or were just cruel for the hell of it. As soon as those bullies showed up on screen I had an inkling I wasn't gonna leave that theater before going through some flashbacks I'd rather forget. The part where Ralph smashes her car in order to spare her feelings only to make it worse... broke my fucking heart. Let's be real. I've seen Cannibal Holocaust a worrying amount of times. That movie is brutal. Yet due to a horrendous borderline clinical depression I'm still recovering from, among other things like these characters murdering animals on camera earlier, I felt nothing for these bad guys getting torn apart by cannibals. When Ralph tore that car to shreds though, the car that Vanellope worked so hard to create from spare parts, I was in actual tears. My eyes are watering right now just remembering it. There's a big difference between the catharsis of seeing a villain suffering from violence and seeing some poor comic relief character that's done nothing to hurt anyone get their dreams crushed. There's a very important difference. About three jugs of tears worth of difference. I cried the same tears children a quarter of my age cried that day. I thought my years of political activism was enough to kill my soul and I'd never feel emotional about anything ever again. I have never been so wrong. I learned that day that I did have a soul still. That I was capable of emotions I forgot I had. And that I felt the same way about this carnage that these kids who didn't know how rough the world was yet, despite being three times as jaded.

I could not deny that this character reawakened something human in me, when I'd lost all hope I'd ever feel something like that again. I once more believed in cinema. It's entirely likely that Vanellope's glitch disability would make me biased to defend her from the get go. As a high functioning autistic, disabled people in movies get me very protective. I do not fuck around with that stuff. But Vanellope's charms worked all on her own. She was more than just one gimmick to tug on your heart strings. She was a complete character with actual dreams and hopes beyond just being there for sentimentality. She refused to be a victim of her own condition. For these reasons, and a few others I've forgotten to mention by now, I just don't see that Silverman Stigma has any right to remove the dignity of this character. No. Just... no. Jar-Jar has his detractors, but I refuse to acknowledge that he in any way ruined the Star Wars franchise. And I refuse to my dying day to concede to the haters that Vanellope somehow makes Wreck-It Ralph a bad movie. Don't you fuckin' dare.

I should probably mention that Donny is my favourite character from The Big Lebowski, even moreso than The Dude because I know I'm a Little Lebowski Achiever who can't give himself permission to BE The Dude. Donny is the guy who gets on Walter's nerves a lot. I was irritating and hard to love by my friends and family also. He walks into conversations not knowing where the context started. He's out of his element. And I've been out of my element a lot of times. This doesn't make Donny a bad person. He's just a bit out of the loop but he brings a lot to the table. He's still the best bowler. And a guy like that deserves a better funeral than he got.

Muffy: Or A Transmigration Of Selves (Book Review)

Transgressive literature often tries to say something but the execution makes them say something else by accident. In the case of Muffy: or A Transmigration of Selves this is especially true since unlike other transgressive novels I’ve read like American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis or Michel Houellebecq’s The Map And The Territory where Patrick Bateman is a character intended for us to detest and The Map And The Territory feeling more like a fictionalised essay about the contemporary art market and capitalism’s confusing relationship with human labour, Muffy is a bit like American Psycho in that it also contains sexualised torture scenes but this time Patrick Bateman’s been swapped out for this left-leaning extremist woman whose commentary would be grating towards American readers who would find the beating of the Ronald Reagan dead horse juvenile via the author’s implying the man tripled the national debt buying a sculpture made from the corpses of an African American family… to an Australian man like me whose irreverence towards authority is considered a national trait shared by many other of my countrymen and women, this satire is a bit lost in translation much like I imagine my own work’s references to the OFLC would be lost on readers if I didn’t put footnotes in my novels out of mercy. Muffy is a novel that in all honesty, I can only explain via reference to obscure lesbian internet comedian reviewer Diamanda Hagan and her internet show on Blip.tv where she dresses up as a supervillain with minions and reviews Z-grade transgressive cinema as well as the occasional special episode about more mainstream stuff. If Diamanda Hagan reviewed books instead of messed up cinematic delights, this is the kind of book she would review on her show. It’s so eerily up her alley that the book explicitly mentions that the character Sarah who makes sculptures out of human corpses has a collection of depraved cinema at her disposal. Diamanda Hagan is the sort of person who’d find a book where a woman is masturbated with the severed arm of a still alive human baby compelling if not worthy of consideration for examining its core themes, so if you’re part of Hagan’s fandom and you’ve ever wanted a book that combines The Raspberry Reich’s political diatribes with Schizophreniac The Whore Mangler’s Z-grade cinema exploitation and sleaze, there is no other book I would sooner recommend to this very niche demographic. I’m only expending five hundred words on this thing because it’s less plot driven as much as a number of transgressive vignettes, but as far as independent self published projects it’s proof that books are getting just as weird as independent cinema has gotten in the opening parts of this decade, and that books are still rather relevant as a counter cultural artform that can be distributed cheaply now that eBooks are a thing. I bought this for about three bucks on my Kindle so it’s worth a look.

Pat Grant's Blue and Australian Identity

Pat Grant's Blue is possibly one of the most intelligent deconstruction of Australian identity and latent bogan racism ever written. It's also a very good comic book that's well produced and drawn instead of being a narrative with a graphic novel tacked onto it. The story of young kids adjusting to adulthood as times change around their fictional isolated country beach town while immigration of blue people from an unnamed nation sets tensions between cultures to a boil explores the uncomfortable and weird subtext of racism in Australia that seems odd because these people are fighting for a way of life that wasn't very culturally enriched to begin with. They fear losing their precious meat pies and sausage rolls while disparaging newly introduced cuisine to their local area that's made by immigrants that don't speak their language, but it's left unsaid whether the noodles in a bowl they make is better than what the yobs had before. In the final panel of Blue the central bogan character is seen eating one of these bowls even as he literally whitewashes the blue alien graffiti off a wall, which is re-claimed by a passing by blue person as he abandons his post. The graphic novel before us could be misinterpreted as a right wing screed against immigration but the author states in the end notes he's not a right wing crank at all, and given Shaun Tan took a look at this thing before he was willing to publish it says a lot about where this Pat Grant guy's intentions lie. He's so successfully captured the mindset of a bogan racist within a fictional universe with blue alien people that he could be mistaken for a racist himself.

But in the endnotes, Genealogy Of The Boofhead: Images, Memory And Australian Surf Comics, included in the back of the graphic novel, Pat Grant's true genius as historian as well as cartoonist emerges.

I knew I wanted to write about localism, racism and the creepy politics that play out in small town supermarkets and surf club car parks, but the ideas I came up with didn't work until I combined them with the story of some spotty kids who walk up the line to see some human wreckage. - Pat Grant

 Yet the disturbing undertones of Australia as a culture of bogans isn't fully appreciated with the text of the Blue graphic novel alone until the themes of this work are further elaborated on in the endnotes:

Today's 12-year-old will never understand what it was like growing up in an isolated Australian coastal town in the 90s. The nearest comic book store was six hours' drive from my home. The internet was five years late and another five had to pass before it was fast enough to be useful. The media we had access to on the north coast of New South Wales was as bland and lacking in sustenance as the white bread in our lunchboxes. To add to this, Australia does not have a wealth of comic art history. In fact, this country has a bad record when it comes to any kind of history. Our way of writing history is to destroy old things pertinent to our landscape and experience, and to import readymade mythologies from overseas. There's not a lot of comic art floating around Australia, in the way that there is in the US, nor is there a culture of collecting it. If we had a silver or golden age of comics, it's unknown to me. And while there are attempts at a publishing industry like that in the States, a truly Australian comics culture has been something of a chimera. That's not to say there weren't or aren't amazing artists or devoted fans, but when it seems you're on the rock farthest from the bright center of the comic-book universe, Tatooine syndrome tends to prevail. Success on the sandy planet isn't much success at all, and there's always another womp rat in a Southern Cross singlet looking to tear you down. - Pat Grant

There is so much in that singular statement that expresses so much of the older, Generation X mentality towards Australian culture that says more than I ever could about how the Australian creative character feels stunted, and no matter how much you wish to create something beautiful and thoughtful  some yob in a Southern Cross singlet will kick down the elaborate and wondrous castle you have built on the sand. The beginning sequence of panels where a newcomer to the beach inquires what his peers are up to, explaining he's from Sydney and he's come to visit the beach. But when the locals who have built what they declare is not a sand castle, but a keep, grow bored with their own creation, they kick down the object of their creativity, leaving the newcomer to gaze upon the ruin of something that he showed interest in. The symbolism of these sequential images is palpable given the above statement, which I haven't entirely finished unpacking. Perhaps Pat Grant is implying that the Australian culture has been neglected and destroyed once the yobs who made it popular are bored with it, and furthermore his statement seems to imply that any Australian attempt at creating any kind of art that wants to compete on a world scale with imported works has to cope with the looming boofheads who will tear down any attempt to create a civilised world in the Land Down Under.

Pat Grant is entirely correct in one assumption. The isolation of a pre-internet Australia will never again exist for my generation and the ones coming after it. Where Pat Grant's generation must have seen apathy, cynicism and painful resignation to the lack of change and caring about our own history, I've seen slowly disappearing, if a bit gradually from the ranks of my own peers. The best and brightest of my peers I hang around with aren't going to risk trusting their future with the yobs who would tear down everything beautiful. There is a deep distrust of politicians currently with people my age, however it is not a cynicism rooted in the idea that nothing will ever change. It's the idea that we know how to run the country better than the boofheads in Parliament, and because we have no Bill Of Rights to call our own because of our archaic Constitution written in a time when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were considered subhuman and terra nullis was the order of the day, we feel completely powerless to change anything until we can finally take the reigns for ourselves.

The awkward embarrassment young people with intelligent minds feel about Australia isn't just the racism or the misogyny and the lack of a true established culture we haven't imported from elsewhere, it's the result of several generations of Australians living under the dinosaur era isolation mentality that refuses to die in spite of the internet. We feel like our politicians have to die off before the threats to our sanity and our reason expressed to the decaying wreck of bogan rule before anything good or beautiful can exist here. We care little for our history because we're screaming for a future where intelligence is valued and art can prosper to arrive.

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.