Stickup #44

You're not gonna hit me with an Ipad, are ya?

Stickup #43

Succeed cause this paper says so

Stickup #42

Building a house with the bricks they throw at you

Why Breaking Bad Succeeded And (Insert TV Show) Failed

You know, there's a lot of potential in television. Like the creators of The Wire said, you can make a TV show like a "visual novel" if you know what you're doing.

And yet, potential is a promise you don't have to make a commitment to. People have this notion of what you will be in a couple years based on what they see now.

And we've seen a lot of shows that made a promise of something crazy happening in the future, only to come up short.

Some shows delivered. Supernatural had there own "Kmart Apocalypse" in the fifth season that made out on all the things it promised. Granted, it wasn't a John Martin painting, but with all the creative, artistic, and managerial difficulties of television, I can't really blame them for this.

And we have had many disappointments. Jericho. Heroes. The later episodes of Twin Peaks.

The Epitaph episodes of Dollhouse that came a little too late.

And Lost rebounded after every other option was experimented and played with.

But there's reasons why Breaking Bad succeeded where those shows failed:

They held nothing back. 

Usually, a four episode rule applies when it comes to television. A creator and their writers don't really know what a show is yet, and so they have to play around for the first four episodes to figure out what they are. As many television shows are now available on DVD, you can watch the first disc of a show and wonder if it's something worth continuing. 

The pilot episode of Breaking Bad did not have any of these problems. We know who Walter White is going into this. We saw his life.

A lot of television doesn't undergo the rewriting that movies do since they evolve with each episode, but the opening of Breaking Bad was cinematic. 

Breaking Bad was also amazing in how they slowly revealed Walter's wrongdoings to Skyler.

There wasn't any Clark Kent/Lois Lane thing going on. Skyler was catching onto things. And the show's writers didn't jump any sharks with each revelation.

There was no amnesia. This wasn't any Pinky and the Brain/Coyote and Roadrunner chaos without growth. Things carried on. Things you as an audience member might even forget about. You didn't scratch your head wondering about Peter Petrelli's lost Irish girlfriend.

Watching Breaking Bad felt like I was reading one of the best graphic novels of all time. You know that feeling you got when you read Watchmen for the first time? Yeah, like that.

You can tell that Vince Gilligan cared. 

It was really refreshing. People have been telling you since the age of nine that you have to leave your brain at the door when you engage in pop culture or else you will alienate a part of the audience.

They Knew What They Were Doing

Breaking Bad didn't treat the audience like a dummy, and they weren't dummies either.

They did their research. And they knew where the show was going. They were prepared. They took calculated risks (like Walter White) and everything resonated because of it.

Even when they didn't know where the fifth season was going (showing Mr. Lambert and going backward) they excelled since it challenged them. They weren't going through the motions.

There's this video online of Louis C.K. talking about how much George Carlin meant to him. C.K. said that his career changed when he listened to an interview of Carlin's where he explained that the secret to coming up with new material was throwing it away after his special was done.

Carlin explained that a person has to dig deep to find new material once they throw away what they had before. And in this digging, one finds himself.

Breaking Bad feels that way. You know how characters in horror movies do dumb things for the purpose of plot? I can't recall a time when that ever happened in Breaking Bad.

There was never an easy way out of things. The villains were as smart as Pinkman and Heisenberg. You honestly didn't know how things were going to be. It was awesome.

They Knew When To End Things 

When things look great, you have this tendency to keep going until it's bad. When things look bad, people tell you to give up.

The creative staff of Breaking Bad quit while they were ahead. I know a lot of people who thought that they should have kept going. These are the same people who also thought Dexter should have ended sooner.

Breaking Bad is also the one show that knew both when to kill characters, and how to give deep meaning to each character's death.

There was no Kirk falling on a bridge that you got with Star Trek Generations. You felt pain when people died. And they died with dignity. There wasn't any crying. They anticipated it.

It was all very badass. 

You didn't have people who should have died two seasons ago hanging around for ratings.

The show made tough decisions. Creativity comes from knowing what to cut. The same goes for the length of a production.

An early finish that leaves them wanting more.

Stickup #41

Purgatory is having writer's block on your suicide note

What I Want...

This is a little diddy called what I want.

What I want:


I want what all those old school movie posters promised me but never gave (well, maybe sometimes).

I want miniatures exploding.

I want the movie I thought Army of Darkness was going to be. Which isn't to say that Army of Darkness is bad, but to say that what I thought it was was actually quite different.

I want all those movies that I thought all those computer games I played in the 90s were based on.

I want to make the movies that everyone thought would have existed by now since CGI meant that "you could do anything" even though we feel it has yet to do those things.

I want to give answers to horror cliches in a way that makes sense, but not in a way that thinks it's too clever or more clever than the genre.

I want to suffer artistically for a bit, because I know mental/physical/and financial suffering is part of the equation of making a great film.

I want to be able to watch an enjoyable afternoon's worth of YouTube clips based on my material, promotional material, or a fan mashup of the previous two things.

I want three dimensional female characters. Which isn't to say that they will all be feminist propaganda pieces, but rather human beings reacting rationally in a situation.

I want to set out to venture onto my accomplishments and not worry about the idiots from my past who told me to choose another career path due to the fact that my fanbase will outnumber them.

I don't want fame. But, I want the people who like projects like mine to know that my project exists, and if I have to do endure a little bit of overexposure to get there, I will accept that.

I want to know that my goals have changed since I have ventured onward, and they will continue to change as I progress, and that I am totally okay with that.

How The Evil Dead Remake Explains Pop Culture At Large

So, I just finished watching the Evil Dead remake. The movie was well done, and exactly what it was supposed to be.

I also felt that it was a microcosm of the filmmaking world at large.

The only real issues that the movie had was its familiarity.
But it was a remake. That's what a remake is supposed to be.
I mean Evil Dead II was it's own remake. So it wasn't like there was some tradition that had to held up here. 

And yet, there was something missing. Something that could have made it a lot better.

And I realized what those things were.

It was aftermodern

The Evil Dead remake had pretty much everything a modern Evil Dead remake should have, short of a Bruce Campbell saying awesome one liners as he fights demons.

There was a couple of things that gave the characters a lot of depth, and I'll give them credit here.

I'm a big fan of Ataque de Panico,  Fede Alvarez's short film depicting an alien invasion in his native Uruguay. I think Alvarez is a talented guy with a long amazing career ahead of him.

I don't know, I like a lot of movies made in other countries. I think a part of it has to deal with the military industrial complex. America spends more money on defense than any country in the world. There really isn't a plausible fear when it comes to aliens, zombies, or monsters in Manhattan, unless you act stupid during the entire situation.

But any of those scenarios in another country, like Egypt, or Syria right now, would be interesting. Especially when seeing how its citizens deal with it. We can't all be Brad Pitt and have a special airplane fly us out of any situation.

That, and we are a culture that fantasizes about this nightmare scenario. America lives in codependency with the threat of a giant monster it can be the hero against.

It's why we love movies so much. We're a bunch of drama junkies. We can't be content. Contentedness is boring.

And yet, we feed off of remakes from old movies we have seen many a time before.

I guess it's understandable. It takes five times as much energy to create an original property as it does to make a remake.

Anything in its past is a tangible advertisement, it's money you don't have to spend in marketing. You get that a lot with new stuff "I've never heard of this movie, it it any good?" as opposed to "Oh, I saw the original as a kid. I will check this out".

There's a confidence to working on an established property. It's like building your own boat versus buying an already made boat. If you build a boat, you always have this fear that it might sink. Like, you're not doing something correctly. But, a boat that's already built usually doesn't have those problems. It's an old boat.

Since people did not have a hand in creating the intellectual property they're working with, they tend to develop an entitlement about them. Like people are obtaining what they haven't earned. They mistook a remake's recognition for their own fame. Of course, you have the drones treating the remake like some pet or family member.

It's like when Crystal Skull came out, and you had all those idiots on the Internet saying "Welcome Dr. Jones". That's cringeworthy.

You're supposed to feel like an asshole for making a fan film. Unless that fan film is mindmeltingly amazing.

Remakes do sort of the same thing. You see younger talent in these things, and they have an arrogance about them they didn't earn.

I feel the same way about most DJs/people of the sampling ilk.

There's this Twitter account called "DJ's Complaining", and it's dedicated to well, DJs complaining. Henry Rollins broke this down in his now famous rant about modern music and the egos these people have.

In my work, I have found that the people who create original work tend to be humble (unless someone is actively trying to destroy their creation), but a lot of people who were not involved in the original creation process have an ego about them.

It's the same way with joke thieves. Look at how Carlos Mencia acted during his time on Mind of Mencia. Compare that with Louis C.K.

There could be a couple different reasons for this. One, fame has gone to their head because it was easy for them. Or, they act in this brash manner due to an inferiority complex. That is, they must exude what they believe to be confidence, so no one steps back and realizes that the emperor has no clothes.

Star Trek Into Darkness echoes postmodernism. The movie retraces and reiterates all of the things that Star Trek has done in the past.

I mean, the movie didn't really break any ground, outside of interesting concept art and design. And I know why that is. But, it sort of goes against "boldly go where no man has gone before".

To go where no one else has gone takes risks. And risking is hard. Especially nowadays. We are living in a world that is paying for the risks of the past. All the films and albums that the industry gambled on that didn't pan out is why things are the way they are. But, that can be a huge drain to one's motivation.

Now, I'm not a fan of Kantianism, mainly because Kantianism is not practical. That, and I'm a filmmaker. There's that old interview with George Lucas in the 70s where he says that a special effect is not good in and of itself, but only good if it helps tell the story better. Later in life, it might be argued that Lucas became more Kantian when it came to special effects.

So doing things in and of itself themselves is a weird thing to live by. But on the subject of remakes, schlocky movies, and the difficulty of making movies, it's sort of re-emerged as a counterpoint to working on movies you don't enjoy.

Like, you see all these people working on all these various projects. And you wonder, do they even like movies? All these nerds complaining about stuff. Do they even like movies?

They always work on something in the hopes of getting somewhere else. Somewhere else in the somewhere future. But, have they enjoyed anything they've worked on recently? Is there any sign that their goals are tangible?

Like, they would make a crappy horror film, because they want to build clout and make their serious drama later. But sometimes, that doesn't happen. What ends up happening is that movie ends up bombing, and the drama never gets off the ground. They would have been better off just making their serious drama now when they had an opportunity to make a film.

It's like these people who go on Kickstarter and try to get their short film made for $40,000. Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7000. Why not just make the movie? Cut out the spectacle, and focus on story. You might not get another chance. Not with that kind of money.

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How To Focus On Your Midterms

So, this little blog of mine has been getting a huge amount of traffic in the last couple of days.

At first, I thought it was because I was just that talented. But, I realized it was something more than that.

You're procrastinating, aren't ya?

That's okay, I do it all the time. I just do it structurally. Like, I learn Arabic while not wanting to mow the lawn, that kind of thing...

Anywho, midterms are upon us. While you find yourself browsing this site at an attempt at wasting time, here are some things you should know:

Obey the 80/20 rule

A lot of math equations are hard to remember because they're so useless, but this is one will remain with you for life. This ratio comes from a little thing called the Pareto Principle, which states that 80 percent of a desired outcome comes from 20 percent of the variables.

You will find that 20 percent of the population makes 80 percent of the money. Another 20 percent of the population is responsible for 80 percent of the crimes, and so on...

The main component of this that occurs in production (or studying) is that you will find that you spend 80 percent of the time on 20 percent of the tasks.

The secret to successfully accomplishing anything is to figure out what that 20 percent is, and focus on it. There's always that one class causing you the most stress. And that's the one you need to focus on.

Make a concrete list of problems

Emotions are running high right now. Everything is everywhere. It can be easy to panic. It can easy to do the exact opposite of what you want to do and just watch cat videos (and only cat videos), but a lot of times procrastination occurs when you don't even know where to begin.

Luckily, procrastination ends when you know what concepts need to be understood in further detail.

Put it down on paper. You'll be amazed at how much easier it becomes to improve afterward. Make a list of what you don't know if it makes it more doable.

Don't be afraid of asking questions
Honestly, no one cares that you don't know. The class is only for a semester. And if they care, I don't care. The only caring that needs to be going on is you caring about your grade.

See, short and simple.


Now, get back to work. 

Stickup #40

The Good Ideas/Self-Loathing Graph

As much as I think this picture is stupid/as much I think it's a good idea

My Issue With the Literary World

You know, I made a promise to my seventeen year old self not to be a little tapioca sellout.

I understand that might be hard for some people to understand, so I'll tell you a story from my childhood.

When I was a kid, they had these things called book fairs. They weren't really book fairs, they were an additional array of cardboard promotional book materials that the school library had every once in a while. The book fair would come with these multi-colored promotional fliers that showed what books they were selling.

And I'll be honest, the books they sold weren't very good.

And maybe it has to do with a bunch of factors, but I didn't like them. Not the same way I liked Jurassic Park.

You didn't have to convince me that Jurassic Park was good. I know Jurassic Park is good. People tried to convince me that all this post-Harry Potter lit is something to embrace.

If you like Harry Potter, yeah, more Potter for you.

I don't know, I never liked my teachers pushing Potter on me as they did. Never was a Potterhead.

I think the films might have had something to do with it. I was wanting a little more from people being "paralyzed" by the Basilisk than what I was given.  

They water these things down. Cause they think that's what we want as kids.

Cause every publisher wants to figure out how to steal a child's money, but no one ever asked the child what he thinks. Children aren't innocent, and they shouldn't be. I remember being a kid and having long conversations with my friends about nerve gas and the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual in the fourth grade.

I don't know, maybe I just don't like it when people try to make you like things. This is something that happens every awards season. A lot of parroting about what's good or not. And then you look back and wonder how a certain movie won Best Picture when it is clearly garbage.

I was four years old when I watched RoboCop. I thought about that when the lackluster trailer to the remake came out. Jose Padilha is to said to be having the "worst experience of his life" on the shoot. I think he needs to pull a John Woo, and make more films in the home country. The industry does this to people.

I hate it when you're a kid and people pushed their bullshit on you. You always know when you're someone's target demographic. And a lot of those books at the book fair felt that way. A young boy must go on a quest to do some boring stuff you've heard before cause screw hurting people's feelings with something interesting...

Good art is painful. You ever watch Breaking Bad? That's painful.

Game of Thrones? That's painful too.

There was a lot of media launched on me as a child that wanted to be the next Star Wars. They indulged in each step of the monomyth. And they always wanted to do this thing where "this kid is just like you".

It didn't work. Cause "a kid like me" isn't a distinct character. It's a bland Mary Sue.

And it's funny, because a lot of people talk about the need for story.

But, I don't think it's the need for story/character development that's the problem.

There's a lot of movies with zero plot that I've enjoyed. The early films by Richard Linklater, for instance.

And I have sat through a lot of crappy children movies. They had character development. They had some stupid "save the environment" message. Save the environment. Put it in a flash drive.

It isn't to say that saving the environment is bad. But, it's to say that they had to put a theme in this stupid thing, and that was the default theme they picked.

Which isn't to say it couldn't work. But the angle they've done on it has been explored. Sometimes you have to say the exact opposite to say what you wanna say.

Remember the beginning of Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes? That wasn't nuclear radiation. That was deformed Vietnamese babies exposed to Agent Orange. The same people responsible for that atrocity are now genetically modifying the food you eat. Isn't that more interesting instead of the same old Captain Planet shenanigans?

I mean, even nihilism is fun when you talk about it. Nothingness. Scary nothingness. Horror movies where innocent people who do the right thing die. It happens. You're not going to live forever. And sometimes you find something out of that. Maybe you wouldn't be killed if you weren't so naive.

We've all seen these movies. People do stupid things, and we root for them to die. Cause we have real problems. That's why we love Walter White so much. He's actively dealing with the things life is giving him. He did the right thing, and life gave him a bad hand. So, he gamed the system a bit. And you can't really hate him (in the first four seasons anyway) because he picked the more adventurous option of a no-win scenario.

He took the rollercoaster for what it's worth, and enjoyed the ride. Again, first four seasons is what I'm talking about. 

There was an incident a while back where a woman came home to find two men holding her family hostage. These two men told this women that they were going to kill her family unless she emptied out her entire life savings and gave it to them.

This women went to the bank, where she withdrew her money, and tried to figure out a way to tell the teller about the situation, without actually saying it, since these hoodlums were watching her the entire time.

She returned home with these men, where she was killed along with the rest of her family. Did what they told her to do, and they killed her. Did what they told her to do, and they killed her.

Can't leave any witnesses.

This is a true story. This is a modern fairy tale (fairy tale as in, Cinderella's stepsisters getting their feet cut off) to tell your children a lesson. And that lesson is this:

When faced with the option of imminent death, one must ask themselves "How do you wanna die?".

See, it started as nihilism, but then you look into it, and you discover some things.

Even in a vacuum, meaning will find itself. 

If you're gonna deal with something, you might as well deal with it in your own way.

Isn't this an interesting thing to talk about?

You discover things when you get rid of the old stuff, and dig for new things. 

Hoarders. This is a show where people suffer from their inability to let go of the past. Now, I can't blame some of the people on the show. When you go on SSI, and have to deal with a limited income and the lacking illusion of control, you do those things. When all you can do is save to better your situation, instead of making more money, you get locked in like that. Urban cabin fever.

That goes twice for those raised in the Great Depression.

Change is scary. That's why knowing one dies is important. The bigger picture helps you deal with those smaller anxieties. You're gonna worry about losing a shirt on your deathbed?

Now, what I have presented is dark, morbid, and depressing. But, it is also what I wanted to talk about, with regards to themes, messages, and the like.

And by talking about this, you learn to appreciate life more. Contrasts help accentuate things. If you wish to win against opposing viewpoints, you must understand them.

Or you could talk about the importance of recycling. Whatever.

You're supposed to go against the grain.

Is there a chance that anything I'm talking about is going to be depicted in the cinema anytime soon, unless I go out and produce it myself? No. That's extremely doubtful.

Now I know why things are this way. Sanitized, processed, and sugar coated.

Honestly, it's counter-intuitive. Honesty in the creation of fiction.

And yet, being honest is what makes a film's theme resonate with the audience. 

It's more about being sincere than throwing money on the screen.

To quote Christopher Nolan: "I want to feel that the people who made the film think it's the best movie in the world". That's an interesting way to word things. It explains why Ed Wood is loved and bland romantic comedies fall by the waist-side. 

Real shit always beats a polished turd. Cause that's what it is. You can't get angry at someone for being who they are. You can always be angry at someone for being something they're not.

Maybe I need to read the books again for leisure, but Harry Potter is a stupid concept. It really is. It really is the epitome of entitlement. Be famous for sitting on your ass while Snape suffers in the background. Even if you think Snape is the secret main character of Harry Potter, you'll have to admit that Harry Potter is not someone worth rooting for.

I mean, the Frog Brothers did more with less against a bigger threat. 

I think I'm projecting childhood strife onto this cultural icon/media franchise, so to J.K. Rowling, I apologize. However, this agitation has helped fuel many a writing of mine. Blogging is not fun. No, that's a lie. Blogging is not fun sometimes.

But let's be real, if anybody can be your protagonist, it's hard to root for them when they suffer in conflict and do dumb things.

If your protagonist's role in the story can be replaced seemlessly by a toddler, the story needs to be reworked. That's why everyone hates the Phantom Menace, in addition to a bunch of other things.

I'm not Indiana Jones. I can't decipher Egyptian cultural artifacts and shove bald guys into propellers. I'm not Dr. Grant. I cannot look into the genes of African frogs and realize that it's going to make the velociraptors have babies. Even if you told me, I'd have a hard time believing you.

Can I fantasize about it? Sure.

But that's because I can't do it. I don't fantasize about things I can do, unless I'm having that dumb dream where I'm brushing my teeth again. .

I mean, call it my contrarian nature, but I want to move away from kid's movies for the time being.

I think doing so will help people grow up. All these kids from the millenial and onward were raised by people who didn't want them to grow up.

That's stupid. You're supposed to grow up. You're supposed to invent things, build empires, drink alcoholic beverages, find the cure to liver cancer, and have a lot of sex to celebrate your accomplishments.

But some asshat will be offended by my previous statement. Probably someone who didn't accomplish anything in their life. Someone who doesn't deal with things.

And it's the people who don't deal with things that make life difficult.

It's those people who make you feel awkward when you pitch something of meaning to them. Who make you question your accomplishments. And now they wonder why people lack motivation.

Wow, people have a hard time transitioning to adulthood in the golden age of bureaucracy. Who would have figured? Can't even work a simple job without a mounding pile of paperwork. It's easy to have it suck the enthusiasm out of you.

And don't tell me about watering things down cause it makes more money. You can make a lot of money smuggling an invasive species of poisonous frogs that spit in your face. Does not mean you do it.


Don't worry about the children. Worry about yourself, and the children will be fine. In elementary school, we talked about hypothetical scenarios where we blew up gophers with M80s.

I wanna remember those conversations. Cause that's who we were. No rose tinted glasses. No J.D Salinger Catcher in the Rye hymn on innocence. No, we talked about nerve gas. And we talked about it with enthusiasm, as juvenile as we were.

The Literary Collective wants to take this feeling away from me. They say it's offensive/some other thing. And that's why all their manuscripts suck. Cause it's about not making you feel a certain way, and you end up feeling nothing at all.

Why Fandom Is Hateable

I don't know, the general masses have something about them that makes them hateable.

But, there is a certain amount of nerds/dweebs/etc. in the current that are bothersome. It has been something that has irked me for some time. I know this sounds like a crappy thing to do. I mean, they are fans and the like. And understand, this is not a blanket statement for the general fandom at large.

Rather, it is something that is occurring as nerds become more and more accepted into the mainstream.

Most of it has to deal with the fact that we are quickly approaching a nerd bubble if things continue to be the way they are. Repetition is needed for an artisan to be skillful, but the public sees repetition as tiresome. The brain loses meaning of a message as it continues to be repeated on and on.

And when that occurs, we get backlash. Backlash occurs when people forget why you're famous. Anyone can accept someone doing the crazy celebrity shenanigans when they are on top. But, if your partying outshadows your current slab of output (music, movies, etc.) it can be damaging.

Backlash, like fame, can take a while to grow. It also can be hard to detect now more than ever. Trust me, if the Bee Gees had Twitter, they would have never known disco was dead. They would receive all those tweets from fans telling them how much they loved them, and they would have never known the difference.

If culture acted the way we do now in the 80s, Van Halen would never have a chance, and some hack would have belted a half remixed version of Stayin' Alive that would have been number one in week and then drop off the charts in the following week.

I can't be one to blame the industry at large. We have done this to ourselves. A lot of times, I see a bunch of original films in theaters. Kind of things we compliment without watching/paying to see. And yet those projects come short. Not necessarily because we didn't watch them, but because there are as many bad original films as there are remakes/sequels/mixed chronological media franchise pieces.

A lot of movies that we view with nostalgia as childhood classics bombed at the box office. I mean, they destroyed people's finances. Secret of NIMH comes to mind. Again, ambitious, but it didn't sustain itself in its lifespan.

You can't make a living off the imaginary wages and praises of the Bohemians. Woody Allen lives in a little apartment for such a reason.

In 1997, it was said that out of all the albums that are put out by a record company, ninety percent will lose money, only to be compensated by the ten percent that make a profit.

You ever watch a music video by a crappy band and wonder where all the fans came from? The record companies paid for all those extras. They paid a whole bunch of money for flash and flair. It started in the eighties, it sort of continues now, but the record companies had to back off because they had taken too much debt promoting original acts that didn't make any money back.

Can we make speeches and examples of record companies ripping people off? Sure, it happens all the time. But the risk has gotten too high for these companies, and if they will see a sampled 2003 hit with some rapper's name dropping designer brands in exchange for everybody keeping their jobs, so be it, they will do that.

It is only when we see both sides of the spectrum that we can truly bring about change. Understand that for every action, there is a reaction. For every file shared, there is another Justin Bieber.

It is easy to be a "foodie" and complain about boring food on Yelp. It is a whole other thing to run your own restaurant. And yet, the consumers think it is so easy to profit from concoction.

Negativity Is Reciprocated When It Is Not A Vehicle Of Change 

I can understand hating something. It's an evil world. They build you up and tear you down. It happens.

But, a lot of film critics don't make this a pleasant experience. You go to Twitter and they talk about all the negativity and complain about every damn thing like anyone cares. If you find yourself an artist under scrutiny remember to look at the person, not the words regarding harsh criticism of your work.

I mean, I'll deal with criticism. If you don't like it, and there's a way to fix it, we'll do that. But I won't deal with people who don't know what they're talking about. I won't deal with people complaining about mumblecore when they haven't watched mumblecore. I won't deal with people complaining about a film that is obviously not in their target audience.

Might there be an exception? Maybe. But some big picture common sense goes a long way.

Sometimes I see somethings that remind me of how large the world is. How it's larger than my concerns. It's usually the silly things that make me realize this. Mostly involves angry Australians complaining about how their favorite soccer player has been traded, people in India complaining about new laws that have been passed, or Filipinos blocking up Twitter with love of their own Bieber-like teen idol.

Again, silly things. Americans have been taught to think that rest of the world is so much more refined. But, the Internet has proven this is not the case. This is so not the case.

Cause look at what people complain about on Twitter. It's always some vague relationship thing. Do you ever stop to wonder how much time is wasted on relationships which will inevitably go nowhere? How much time is wasted on an argument that started over where to place a towel or some other silly nonsense?

I could have been doing something productive that entire time.

It's like when you watch Maury and see the arguments those people get into. It's gotta be so consuming to deal with that on a constant basis. Who the hell cares?

Everything Has Become Disposable 

I guarantee you that people will leave the nerd scene. I know enough about trends to know it is coming. It happened in the 90s when the comic book companies launched seven different collectible copies of the same comic book. It gave us titles like Youngblood. The industry reached its peak, and it never truly recovered.

That's where the root of the disdain comes from. Popularity is temporary. We are up. Let us fall, before we aren't paying attention and end up hurting ourselves.

As bad as this may seem, it isn't as bad as the worst thing about fandom:


It Destroys Creativity 

Anyone will tell you that they want Hollywood to have an original idea. But, go to any convention, and you'll see a lot of stormtroopers, and a lot of Marvel characters.

You see a lot of artistic echoes is what I'm saying.

I don't hate cosplay. I just think the people who spend thousands of dollars replicating other people's work could use that same energy to make an original idea.

I'll echo a previous statement of mine: If George Lucas had the same mindset that we do now, we would have never had Star Wars and instead be given a cheaply made version of Flash Gordon.

And it would be cheaply made, because money spent on licensing fees is money spent not making the film. This is why so many video games based on movies suck.

And I'm getting really tired of fandom mentioned in media. Can it be executed properly in certain situations? Absolutely.

Were there any nerd characters in Star Wars? Indiana Jones? Not really. I mean, Indy knew his stuff, but he was also a womanizer.

Did Han Solo have a tattoo of Darth Vader on his arm and give a detailed lecture of the lightsaber schematics? No, he did not. Luke did a little "golly gee" thing when Obi-Wan mentioned the Clone Wars, but he grew to leave that in his past.

One cannot grow if he does not grow up.And if we do not grow, we're probably dying.