YouTube Obsession

There’s a theory in ethics that people have a moral obligation to to help the most people they can. It’s virtual bullshit and the very structures of it’s arguments are based in capital and devoid of any soul¹ , and allows some of Earth’s most asinine people to justify their shitty behavior. All in the pursuit of more. “More for me leads to more for everyone.”

Anyway, humans have an obsession with “greatness.” No more obvious than our reverence for celebrity and none more ridiculous than our worship of sports athletes² . This worship then pushes people to the absolute edges of sanity in pursuit of the Sisyphean goal to be the best.

Greatness isn’t worth it.

BDE released their longest video yet and it is a pathologic breakdown of performance enhancing drugs in all sports. It becomes clear that the desire to “be the best” is so intwined with money that the financial benefits outweigh any potential harm you may be doing to your body. Or, like in the case of Tiger Woods, lead to addiction problems with other substances.

Watching

So that Super Mario Bros Movie eh? Pretty fucking terrible right? We love nostalgia without connection, without context right?!!? Who needs to draw on the extensive library of iconic music of the beloved video game series when you can have Mr. Blue Sky (A song made famous in other movie montages) play over the epilogue? Geeze, what a wreck.

I literally said aloud “There’s no way they’re doing a Mr. Blue Sky.”

I have been developing a simmering hatred for nostalgia-core movies and endless IP rebooting over the last few years but I really think this movie broke me. It’s for no one. The Mario games have some of the weirdest and cutest stories in the medium of games yet the movie just rehashes a rehash of rehashed kids movie cliches. I remember when I heard that Chris Pratt was voicing Mario and I said, “This is going to be a normal guy gets sucked into a Mario world isn’t it?” I was right, I could fucking do this! Where’s my million dollar studio executive job? What’s so funny is this is exactly the plot of the 90s live action Mario movie that made Nintendo wary of ever making another movie. Great job guys, you protected your IP just long enough to drown it in slop.

And I know this is a talking point that most people are ready to move on from but I’m not gonna let it die: HIRE VOICE ACTORS FOR YOUR ANIMATED MOVIE. Pratt is nothing. Taylor-Joy is nothing. Key is doing something, but it’s not good. Fred Armisen is in an entirely different movie.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the short story Jeffty is Five in the Harlan Ellison collection Shatterday. In the story, Jeffty is five, he is always five. Though his friends grow up around him, Jeffty is always five. The bulk of the story is the adult narrator character hanging out with Jeffty -his former peer- 20 years later and discovering that not only has Jeffty remained the same age but he experiences culture as though it had remained intact since he was originally five.

Jeefty still listens to old radio shows that are somehow still running as if they never went off the air. He reads old comic books that in the real world were canceled a decade ago. He sends in bottle caps and dimes for Little Orphan Annie decoder rings to addresses that no longer exist. The world moves on but Jeffty is still five.

The allegory of the stunted child is so visually sharp that it’s easy to translate it to the man-babies of today. Elison presents nostalgia as unnatural, the very act of being stuck in the past corroding relationships around Jeffty as he is unable to connect with anyone experiencing reality; the present.

And this is where modern pop-culture would have us. Man-babies arguing about Princess Peach wearing pants ignoring the totality of and urgency of reality.

MM

I might be a little sensitive to the subject at the moment. I just found out that an old boss of mine passed away. I worked on his farm almost year-round from 6th grade till I left that tiny town at 18 years old. This man was not a wise, magical figure in my life, he didn’t impart on me any wizened axiom that has guided me through hard times, no. But he was a safe man to work for for many of my most formative years and I’ve come to understand in my adulthood that that is no small thing. His death has stuck me harder than I expected it to, if not necessarily for the loss of a relationship but the loss of place that cannot exist anywhere again but in my memories. Nostalgia, actual nostalgia, for hot and humid Ohio River Valley days, smell of sweet wet hay and pig manure, afternoons that seem to stretch into arctic lengths in hilltop fields so isolated that we called them Kentucky, baloney sandwich and milk lunches with sweet corn eaten straight off the stalk.

This place existed, I was there. I am not there today. Jeffty is an aberration

Reading

When talking to a co-worker of mine a few weeks ago the conversation turned to books and he revealed that he had read all of John Saul’s books back in the day. Curious because I had never heard this co-worker mention books before, nor had I ever heard of John Saul, so I asked him which was his favorite:

With a title like The God Project and an absolutely bitchin 80’s cover how could I not give it a read? It is, as I guessed, very Stephen King adjacent: Small town people with small town stories encounter a horror beyond their understanding. Also from the cover I expected Saul was leaning heavily into another King tactic: Children in peril. Oh boy was I right. This book is squarely aimed at mothers who have/had small children. In fact, the book serves to inflame the very worst paranoias of white single mothers: Your child’s doctor is lying to you, your husband is against you, the police don’t care about your children, even your own child is a monster. While it also stokes the flames of delusion: “You were right all along mother!”, your deadbeat ex-husband will finally get his life together and pay alimony, your child is an angel.

It’s certainly not my genre but I did get a kick out of the early 80’s-ness of it all. Especially when characters talk about computers. Oh yes, early computer science plays a big role in the plot of this book. This leads to hilarious descriptions of computers doing things that they most definitely could not do at the time and wild misuse of terms like “access codes.” Comically outdated fear-mongering will never not be funny.

Curious, I looked for other John Saul books and found that “children in peril” is a genre he thrived in, just look at these covers.

I don’t really want to read any of his other work as I think children in peril is pretty lame scare tactic in horror, even when King does it, but this next book cover…

Written in 1992! There’s no way anything in this book about the dangers of children on computers is not outdated by decades and I must read it. After I read it I want to write a spec script for an Are You Afraid of the Dark adaptation.

Other Notables

** The bros are more liberal than you think

** Microsoft Outlook requires an update in space.

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1  The original argument compares saving a drowning infant to donating to relief funds. -BARF EMOJI-

2  I say this as a sports simp myself.