2012. A year in review.

This will be a touch more personal than my posts usually are.

Fuck 2012.

I can name a handful of great things that happened:
My sister got engaged.
I got to spend another year with my wonderful girlfriend.
Got to visit with people that I have been missing.

But then there is the bad:
I've been sick for the entire year. I won't be diagnosed and treated until 2013.
I'm on the verge of losing my job. "Happy New Year!.... You're now unemployed.."
I've been so busy with work and illness that I've been unable to do all the things I wanted to do. Parties, gaming, video games, music, writing.
I've been so sick all year that I missed alot of important things that I wish I had been able to attend.
      Example: My Great-Aunt died this year. She was a wonderful woman and I remember her fondly. But I was unable to attend her funeral because I was bed-ridden.

So yeah, Fuck 2012.
But as the good song says: "Always look on the bright side of life."
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJUhlRoBL8M

This year has given me the intense feeling that it is no longer ok to just go along with what life gives me.
I need to stop getting stuck in shit jobs. I need real work, that pays me real money.

And lastly, I need to stop sitting on my problems and waiting for them to go away. They don't go away, they just bunch up and bite you in the ass.

So fuck that, and fuck 2012.

Look out 2013, once I'm well, I'm going to grab you by the balls.

The Hobbit & Wreck-it Ralph

I'm currently on sick leave from my job, so I figure it's time to review some of the movies I've seen in the past month.

The Hobbit

Peter Jackson once again gives us a stunning Tolkien trilogy.... except it's based on one book instead of three. Two books if you count the Silmarillion (yes I did have to look up how to spell that title).

The Hobbit is a short book. As an adult you can read it in a day. Jackson is showing it to us over the course of 8 & 1/2 hours.
So this is a very long movie, and it feels long.
That being said, I still highly recommend this flick.
It has something that LOTR didn't have, and that's adventure for the sake of adventure.
In LOTR the ensemble makes their epic journey because if they don't then the bad guy get's his OBJECT OF ULTIMATE POWER and takes over the world.
In The Hobbit they go on the adventure for wealth, prestige, and to reclaim what was stolen from them. If they suddenly decided to go home and say "to hell" with the stupid quest, they'd be back where they started, but no worse off. Bilbo chose adventure, Frodo had adventure forced upon him.
And the results are telling too. At the beginning of LOTR Bilbo is wealthy and surprisingly old for a Hobbit. His adventures rewarded him. At the end of LOTR Frodo is forced to retire to Elf Heaven only a couple years after his quest. Meaning he never got to marry, probably never even had sex (unless him and Sam got freaky off-screen). Effectively he was punished for the quest that he was forced into. Plus the whole losing a finger and being tortured by the being off all evil.

So end result, The Hobbit is basically the same concept as LOTR but with fewer elves, more dwarves, a happier story, and a goddamn dragon.



Now onto Wreck-it Ralph.

Honestly, this is my movie of the year. I've seen alot of movies this year, but this was my favorite, I went back to see it again in theaters and I added it to my Amazon.com wishlist immediately after leaving the theater for the first time.

Settling in close to the most nostalgic portion of my heart, it tells the story of a old school arcade videogame villain who grows tired of being the villain and wants to be the hero. The rules of his world are such that he literally cannot ever be a hero or else humans will realize that video game characters were alive (kinda like Tron). So he sets off to prove himself a hero in other video games. And of course he fucks it up, because, hey, he's "Wreck-it Ralph" not "Automatically-succeed-at-everything Ralph".
But what really makes me happy in this film is the sense of personal growth for every single character. Everyone in the cast grows, even minor characters get to grow.
The story drops hints about the eventual outcome of the plot, but they aren't so heavy-handed that you're likely to guess the twist until it actually happens.

So yeah, if you can find it still in theaters, go see this movie, if not, just buy it on DVD. Hell, I'm gonna get whatever DVD/Blue ray super combo pack I can for this movie, and watch it until I burn a hole in the disc.

Every time I left the theater after watching that movie I just felt happier, and I want to own it just so I can continue feeling that.

What your government has stolen from you.

As a man of thirty years, I've seen much change in this country. Talking to those older than me I see even more that has changed.
We've lost many things in the past fifty years, and what we gained in return is nowhere near fair value.

When I first started going to college ten years ago community college tuition was $9 a unit. When my mother started college it was $3 a unit. When she was a kid it was free. Now it is $36 per unit. That's insane.

To make it worse, back when my mother attended school, community college wasn't a mandatory thing. Hell, university wasn't required. People went to university to become leaders in an industry. Doctors, lawyers, powerful businessmen, teachers, etc. It wasn't required. Your average adult never went to college of any type. They started working straight out of highschool and that was their career. And it was enough to live on. People went to college to join the middle class.

Now we need a college education just to be at the top of the lower class.
To make matters worse, the pay of teachers has become abysmal. These are the people who educate our children and take care of them for us during the day. The least we can do is to pay them better than a nanny.
And whenever the government cuts money from schools, the first thing they do is cut the "non-essential" fields like art, music, and theater.

Now moving on to our tax dollars at work.

Thirty years ago the country was filled with low-cost/free Mental health clinics. These weren't mad houses for the criminally insane, they were places for people who just have some crossed wires and couldn't deal with the real world. Then the country started closing them. All of the mental health care professionals cried out that this would leave our streets filled with crazy people, and they were right.
Before all of these people with mental problems could be treated and medicated so that they weren't a danger to their neighbors. Now they are homeless, or living with relatives or friends because they can't hold down a job un-medicated and they can't afford their medicine.
If you look into alot of the mass-shootings that have happened in the last thirty years, the gunman often suffers from some sort of mental condition that is untreated. Yes, having access to high-powered assault weapons gave them a means to act out their madness, but their madness effected the rest of us because the government decided to get rid of the mental health clinics so that the rich could have another tax cut.

Before it was rare to see a crazy person walking down the street talking to themselves. It's not that we've suddenly developed more crazy people, we just stopped treating them. Before if the police came across a man talking to a tree (in a non-religious way) they would pick them up and take them to the clinic to be examined and treated. Now they just pick them up and dump them at the border to another city. Make them someone else's problem.


Next factor to consider is public transportation.
Prior to 1963 California had a great public transit system. Everyone could take a train or a trolley everywhere they needed to go. Then GM bought out the public transit and mothballed it so that people would be forced to buy cars.
Now this was the act of a corporation to make your life more difficult, but the government let them do it.


Next we have health care.
Free or Discount health centers still exist, but they are much more rare now, and their quality and funding are all but gone. Now they are effectively a place to pay $50 for a antibiotic prescription.
They don't give the care that they used to, how can they when their budgets have been gutted.


Now what have we gained for all that we gave up?
Facebook.
Seriously.
Also, free porn.
I will grant you that the internet is an impressive tool for the people. Mass communication allows us to share information with loved ones across the country, our friendships are no longer limited by zip codes. There are great things that the internet has done for us. We have access to literally any piece of information in the world with just a few keystrokes.
But it also comes with a cost.
Yes twitter, instagram, facebook, myspace, etc allow us to cyber-stalk eachother. We can e-poke eachother, with our cell phones we can reach eachother at any time.
But really, is that an improvement?
When I was a kid, if I wanted to talk to a friend of mine I got on my bike and went to visit them. I would knock on their door and say "Hey, can _________ come out to play?". The same was true for my parents and the generations before them. To communicate with people, we had to be physically with them.
The current generation of young people has got to be the most anti-social humans ever born. They don't see eachother in person, they see eachother online. And what's worse is that this behavior has affected the rest of us. It's the rare people who actually see their friends on a regular (more than once a week) basis. We all remain creepily aware of eachother's lives via Facebook, but really, who the fuck cares what that bitch of a co-worker said to you when you got to work?
Before nobody talked about that shit, because it wasn't important.
Here's a shocker: It's still isn't important.
Nobody cares, but we all know about it because we have the captive audience of the internet. Any stupid little thing we say gets posted online and everyone "likes" us complaining just to make it clear that they were paying attention and not ignoring us.

And then there's porn.
Nothing has done more good and damage to modern sexual relationships than internet porn. Back in my youth porn was a rare thing, and it usually consisted of a half-torn playboy somebody found in a dumpster or half-blocked cable porn.
Now we have access to any, and I mean literally ANY crazy type of porn we can possibly think of.
If you get off to people beating their own genitals with live squid, I'm sure you can find porn of it.
But is that really a good thing?
Before people started having sex, all they brought to the table was their partner and whatever previous first-hand experience that they already had.
Now by the time people actually have sex, they've already seen hundreds of strangers having sex. Internet porn has turned all of us into Voyeurs, Voyeurs with completely unrealistic expectations. Yes, we can find porn of people doing whatever crazy as thing gets our rocks off, but wouldn't it be better just to find a partner who is willing to do that with us?
Honestly, before it was trial and error. People would find a partner and experiment. Now people are going into experimentation pre-disposed for or against whatever the kink is. Before it was new, and most often both partners were trying it together for the first time. So good or bad, neither one had any pre-existing opinions.
So now instead of learning about sex from eachother, we're learning about sex by watching other people have sex incorrectly. Cause let's be real, nobody really has sex the way they do in porn. It's not intimate, it's not comfortable, and most of the positions are too physically stressful for most of us.

It's all stupid. And for the loss of cheap health care, safety from psychos, loss of affordable education, and loss of cheap transportation. All they give us is Facebook and porn.