Category Archives: People Climbing In And Out Of Boxes

Are you a communications professional? Do you think like a lawyer? Are you young, or just young at heart?

Why Do We Let Huge Life-Sucking Non-Human Lifeforms Like @Iconix Steal Our Fun?

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If this were yesterday, you could have gone to Peanutweeter.com and enjoyed the pairing of one frame from the classic Charles Schultz Peanuts strip with a somewhat random Tweet. These little connections, injecting an old piece of creative expression with a really current connection to our times, would have made your day better. Charles Schultz brought a lot of delight to people for many years. He died in 2000. I’m convinced he was up there, somewhere, enjoying Peanutweeter’s creative approach to bringing his work into the light again. Until yesterday, anyway.

Even though copyright law has expanded far beyond the original scope given by the Constitution, it was at least partly humanized by the Fair Use provision. This blogger has already made the case that Peanutweeter is fair use, so I’ll just link to his post. I’m more concerned with how non-human life-forms have been given even more control. Used to be you’d hear about how “lawyers” from McDonalds, Disney, or Paramount were out suing the best customers of their products. It was bad–but lawyers are technically human. Iconix is a “Brand Group.” If you go to the site and click on either Management or Board of Directors under their “About Us,” you get a list of “people” (though long since soul-sucked) towards the bottom. But the image that loads first is one of those generic “Gap Kid” collections. Those aren’t people, and they are certainly not the board of directors.

Iconix is a version of the corporate life-form that we’ve inexplicably given human rights to for a couple centuries now. Soul-less though it may be, at least it had to act through humans. Until some group of idiots passed the digital millennium copyright act. With it’s automatic take-down provisions, and anti-circumvention provisions, the DMCA allows non-human lifeforms to crush human creativity automatically. No lawyer-to-lawyer arguments, just a letter to the service provider. Down comes fun, and the cost of fighting it is too high for mere humans to undertake. Victory to Iconix, without ever having to face a real person in a fair fight. Iconix (or Skynet, as it probably calls itself when it’s sitting around with other soul-less life-forms) can go back to stalking across the landscape “touching every segment of retail distribution from the luxury market to the mass market” and sucking the brains out of the crushed bodies that get stuck between its toes.

Don’t Ever Let Them Call You a Guru

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Some words, like icebergs, only show 10% of their meaning above the water. “Guru” is one of those words that seem nice, positive, valuable. When used in the workplace, though, it’s that big hidden part under the surface that will sink your career-ship.

Just to disambiguate the word, here’s Wikipedia. [Side note, Wikipedia uses the word "disambiguate" incorrectly].

In the modern workplace, the career ladder is populated by people who are afraid that change and innovation will undo all those steps they’ve climbed over to get to their heirarchically-defined roll. If they see a new trend emerging, they have to either adapt or hire someone to manage that change. If the change can be managed by someone else, they can go back to their safe, slow, time-tested method of slow resume building. That “someone else,” though, has to be defined as “different.” The word “Guru” has come to fill that rule. Guru’s are protectors of non-changers. They manage the new stuff, make it less important. In the process, they make themselves less important.

If a Guru is allowed to jump onto the career ladder, though, the system has failed. The changes were obviously not managed to the point of irrelevance.

So being a Guru seems like a nice role. A lovely title. Career-ladder people will shower you with compliments. These are the same compliments you use when talking to someone you like, but would never date.

Not Everybody is Real

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How many times have you met someone, recognized them as part of a type, treated them according to that type, and gotten responses that are entirely consistent with that type?

Do you get to know someone, but still think of them as an amalgam of preconceptions based on education, profession, clothing style, ethnic background, geographic origin, etc.?

Some of this seems obvious.  There really are a lot of IT people who are a bit socially awkward and play video-games late into the night.  A lot don’t.  It’s not hard to see that the profession draws the personality to it.  But some of the most consistent types are less obvious.  The one I’m thinking about is the Navy Chief.  Somehow, no matter where they’re from, what ethnic background that started with, or even what rating they have, most Chiefs end up with the same look, same accent, same set of facial hair (within certain variations) and same waistline.  How does that happen?

Some of this may be just the templates we use on people.  We apply, they respond, it’s efficient.  Honestly, I have a set of types I use as well.  People see me in a certain way, I find it easier to stay in that role dealing with them. So for some large percentage of my human interactions, I’m not an individual.

My favorite people are real.  Sometimes I meet someone and instantly know he or she is real.  No type, no template.  Just that person.  Usually, when that happens, the person becomes one of my closest friends.  But there are others, people I dismissed upon first meeting.  Over time I saw behind the wall, or came to appreciate that the type itself was actually a real person this time.  Some of these people are also among my favorites.

A lot of people also cut against time in surprising ways.  Sometimes that seems real, other times it’s just a more subtle type.

Maybe the universe is full of real people, but nobody has time to interact with that many real people, so we use our template-matching system to get ninety percent of the interactions out of the way, leaving us more time for the people who are real, at least to us.

But what if Douglas Adams was right?  Really, there are only about 4,000 people in the universe.  The rest are some kind of mental glitch or something.  That’s why we seem to keep running into the same person.

Is It Really Socialist To Be Anti-Immigration?

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Not necessarily.   You could be anti-immigration for racist reasons, or out of “cultural-erosion” fears.  Or, if you believe most immigrants are non-working, non-consuming entities who will somehow place a cost on the system, you could believe that free enterprise needs the support of the powerful state to control market conditions.

But otherwise, yeah.  Most of the anti-immigration rhetoric follows some form of: “we only have _x_  jobs” or “our resources are limited.”  But this is not Kuwait.  We don’t all get a salary from the government based on some natural resource we’re selling to the world.  If you believe in the free enterprise system, a hard-working immigrant who has already gone through the dependent years is net gain to the economy.  This person brings in both skills and additional consumption.  Even if they send money to family at home, that still is a form of trade balance correction, you’re paying the whole family for service exported.  All is good.

But if you think of jobs and resources as a form of limited entitlement, then you’re in the socialist model.  Ergo, anti-immigration based on “scarce resources” = socialist thinking.

What About the Pope?

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There is a big discussion going on about whether the Pope should be held responsible for a certain pedophile priest.  Apparently the (not-pope-at-the-time) knew something, had some administrative responsibility, and took some kind of action.  I don’t think we really know what he knew, when he knew it, or whether what he did constitutes a “cover-up”.  However, the debates have jumped way ahead of the information.  There are actually two different debates:

Those within the church are arguing about  justice and how this might affect the church as a whole.

There are those outside the church who are arguing about justice, crime, and cover-up.  But some have also taken it as a platform to debate the legitimacy and goodness/badness of the church itself.  I think they’re barking up the wrong tree.  I’m not Catholic.  By definition, I guess that means I don’t believe in the legitimacy of the church.  I also think, like any large institution that has dominated the last 2000 years of human history, it’s done a lot of harm and a lot of good.  Currently, I think they are actively working against third-world development with their policies on birth control.

But the Pope argument is completely unrelated.  Contrary to the beliefs of the mis-informed, the Pope is not infallible.  The only exception is when he speaks “ex cathedra”, which does not happen often.  Even if the Pope where infallible, that infallability would not logically extend backwards in time to decisions prior to becoming the Pope.  Also, what would infallability even mean?  That any decision made would be just and moral?  That it would lead to no possible bad outcome?  That it would be in accord with current human laws?  Or should all decisions lean more towards Church values, such as forgiveness and redemption?

The Pope did whatever he did.  Made some kind of decision about some level of information.  We don’t know what he really knew, but it’s natural for critics to apply all that we know now to someone who was described as knowing something at the time.  Even critics who keep claiming the crown of reason as something they own personally make this mistake.  But administrators make decisions all the time based on information they barely understand or can’t really trust.  And he was an administrator, looking at old information, on a topic that he may not have really understood the scope of.  Human beings tend to dismiss things we aren’t ready to deal with.  And administrators do that more than anyone.

The Crawling Hand (Review and Reflection)

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I saw this movie as a child.  It came in 1963, but as I saw it on television, it must have been later.  Whatever age I was, my brother was three younger.  I can remember, after watching the movie, creeping my hand towards him from around corners, down from the top of the bunk-bed, etc.  It always got a scare.  But I don’t remember much about the movie itself.  Since tonight is Halloween, and since I tried watching a modern low-budget slasher and got bored, I decided to pull this up on Hulu.

I’ll write this up as it goes.  The first section involves an overdue astronaut, coming back from the moon.  They make it clear that this is the second mission, the first one ended in disaster.  The second one is starting to go the same way.  The sets are minimal, but the film-makers didn’t try and show whole command centers, so it works well enough.  Then there’s a scene where the astronaut makes contact, twenty minutes after they know his oxygen must have run out.  He is pleading with control to kill him, use an auto-destruct button.  He cannot do it himself, because his hands won’t obey him.  The scene is nicely done, nothing low-budget of badly acted here.  You actually do feel the agony of the decision the scientists on the ground have to make.  So far so good.

Also, Alan Hale will be in this one.  I love Alan Hale.  He turned in a pretty great performance in The Giant Spider Invasion.  For those who don’t know, he is the skipper in Gilligan’s Island, the ultimate prototype sit-com.

We get introduced to the small town in a scene set in a cafe.  Some kids are dancing, the owner keeps telling them: “no dancing”.  Meanwhile, two girls, obviously main characters, are chatting.  They also have a cage with rats in it on the table.  One is wondering how the other managed to “snatch” the young med student as a boyfriend.  Apparently a dozen other girls have failed.  Actual dialog:

“I’m not saying you’re not stacked, he’s just not with it.”

That leads to a romantic interlude that, at whatever age I was then, probably went over my head.  Which is for the best.  The characters are weak 60s style teens, and the whole thing gets a little painful until it’s finally relieved by the arrival of the hand.  That section of the movie seems as if it were directed by someone else as well.  A second team director, maybe?  The angles are often wrong, people who are supposed to be conversing are staring off into space, and the presence of the back-screen is clear.

But when the action starts up again, it is kind of tense.  Moreso than with “Shredder,” a 2003 movie I tried watching earlier, but had to bail on as boredom swept in.

Now that Paul is going half-zombie, the quality of the movie starts plunging.  People keep acting strangely.  I think even as a child, I understood that things weren’t making sense.  The arm doesn’t seem very threatening, and the infected Paul seems to be more likely to go Emo than actually kill anyone.  But the movie is still fun.

It’s black and white, cheesy, and full of wooden acting, bad camera angles, and difficult to swallow plot points.  The central danger isn’t that credible, except when people are pretty near wasted.  But there are a few creepy scenes, and the overall cheese factor makes it fun.

We Need a New Word for Bad Movies

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Calling a movie “bad” doesn’t tell me very much, and is unlikely to keep me from going.  There are many ways in which a movie might be bad.

There’s “Snakes on a Plane” bad.  The badness is actually the genre, and the title tells us what to expect.  The genre has certain rules and expectations, and this kind of bad movie can be done well or poorly.  Snakes on a Plane hit all the right notes, so people called it bad.  By which they meant it was a very well done “bad” movie.

There’s “Crank: High Voltage” bad.  You throw plot out the window, along with a good dose of physics, probability, and narrative logic.  But what you replace it with is a bunch of crazy, unpredictable events that, somehow, fit.  The movie is considered bad because it doesn’t have the things a good movie is supposed to.  But it has so much other awesomeness stuck into every possible corner that it really doesn’t matter.

There’s Sci-Fi Channel original bad.  These movies are formulaic, yet fail to rise to the basic requirments of the formula.  Bad special effects, terrible acting, ridiculous scripting, and broken physics make you flat out angry.  Or you laugh.  But the movies are low-low budget, usually there’s at least a few actors who are trying hard.  If the bad guy/creature is evil enough, you cheer for them to get it, even though you know the whole thing sucks.

Then there’s Michael Bay.  Big-budget, crap gets blown up, plot-holes swallow whole planets.  Random stupid elements are stuck in, and CGI runs rampant.  You can sort of like Michael Bay because of that “awesome” commercial.  He’s a big kid who likes to blow things up, and he likes the piles of money we give him.  The first transformers movie, Armeggedon were pretty bad, but in a fun way.

But there are degrees of badness within the Michael Bay category.  Pearl Harbor was so bad they wrote a song about it.  And Transformers 2: ROTFL, hurt.  People say: “what did you expect?”  Well, the first movie was okay for a summer outing.  How did the second find it’s own special level?  The movie is not only rife with stolen scenes, questionable special effects, stereotyped racial robots, and random things-humping-other-things, it also laughs at us.  The viewers.  Michael Bay thinks we’re idiots.  He also thinks he can tell us he thinks we’re idiots, and we’ll still give him money.  We do.  This is a unique level of badness.  Nearly unique, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull Disaster comes close.

Transformers 2: ROTFL (Review)

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Last night I had a dream.  It was so scary, so soaked in anxiety, that it woke me up at around 4:30 a.m.  So maybe I should say I had a dream this morning.  It started off innocently enough.  I was standing in some kind of steep hall, with friends, watering the carpet with a garden hose.  Some kind of thing, it was either a polar bear or a malevolent ice cream truck, was playing around at the bottom.  Naturally, we hosed it.

The thing started coming up the carpeted hall, but fortunately I realized that if I kept spraying water it would lose its footing.  But I needed to have enough water.  (By this time the carpet had disappeared).  There was another, side hall, and the polar bear/ice cream truck would switch over and try coming up that side, but I quickly doused that as well.  It seemed clear that I couldn’t keep this up for long, though.  The only thing for it was to run.  But I’d left some of my clothes in an obscure locker somewhere and couldn’t quite get there in…

Everything changed.  The polar bear/ice cream truck that I had been keeping at bay was now a mobster.  He had invited me, and I was waiting around for the party to get going.  I didn’t much like this mobster, and he knew it.  He had some nefarious end planned for me, yet I couldn’t seem to leave.  Partly because my keys and suit jacket were now wherever those other missing clothes were before.  The party kept filling up with other sort-of-bad people.  I decided I would not go along with whatever they wanted, and failed to applaud when the bad hair guy won some kind of contest that involved matching air canisters with bottles of some kind of liquor.  He cheated by substituting a broken drill, but because he was a known mobster friend/important person, everyone clapped anyway.  Except me.  I knew, then, that I would have kill him, or he would kill me.

My friends didn’t understand the direness of the situation.  Mostly because, apparently, they hadn’t lost their car keys and suit jacket and could just leave.  I was not only trapped, but I had trapped myself.  I did not have the spirit it took to simply walk away from something that was going really badly, and could only get worse.  It was this overwhelming feeling of being trapped and yet being a contributor to my own state that woke me up.

Sometimes dreams don’t mean anything.  But a lot of stressful dreams go back to real-life situations.  There were clues here:

Whatever badness was happening, I had accepted it

I was surrounded by certain friends

Much of the dream was spent keeping something at Bay

The only thing that matched this was an unfortunate decision to see Transformer 2: Return Of The Friggin’ Losers (ROTFL).  Sitting through this movie violated even my normal willingness to watch trash.  After all, Michael Bay KNOWS IT SUCKS.  But he’s counting his money and laughing at us as we sit through it anyway.

There is one argument that this is actually a great movie.  It’s a great read, but it doesn’t require anyone to see the actual movie.  There’s another argument that this movie will doom future civilizations.  (Also a great read, but it does contain an inaccuracy about why someone went to the wrong theater).  But I think there’s a worse fate in store for us now.  We have willingly given up our money for something we knew would be bad, for something that turned out to be far worse than we imagined.  Now we will wait in our little cubbyholes while vast sums are dedicated to the making of Transformers 3.

Religion as genre

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Just because I don’t attend church doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate religions.  I like religions.  I like spirituality, and for most people the best place to find that is in church.  (or equivalent).  What I don’t like is the “one true” mentality.  The Bible clearly says that God wants everyone to make it.  (see parable of the shepherd, among others).  If this is true, why would God act like a bad D & D dungeon master, creating one safe door and a bunch of doors that lead to certain doom?  With no way for an average person to decide which one is correct?

Face it, most people choose the religion they get from their parents.  And some people, naturally, try to find the exact opposite.  A few go adrift, then wander into some church led by friends or potential romance.  Nobody actually sits down and does comparison shopping, using analytic tools to ascertain the one true religion.  People who claim to have done so inevitably either decided on the church they were raised in, or the one with the prettiest girls.   Presumably God knows this is what would happen, so judging people on their failure to do this makes no sense.  Therefore, every religion that makes this claim is wrong, at least to that extent.

I also used to believe that religions had really fundamental differences.  Christianity was the “only” religion that allowed for salvation through mercy.  Islam had five pillars, including total service to God.  Buddhaism is the only religion that really understands the denial of the self.  Etc.  But now I think that any story about the relationship between God and man can be told within any religion.  The differences have more to do with temperment and culture.

Movie genres behave the same way.  You can tell a story about guilt and redemption as a romantic comedy (Wedding Crashers), an action movie (The Untouchables), a horror movie (The Exorcist), or as a Western (The Searchers).  Each genre has its own symbols, conventions, and appeals to a far different crowd, but central human themes are available in each.  And, naturally, there are some people who feel that one genre is the one, true means of expression.  Having said this, I reserve the right to bash the idea of Romantic Comedy at any point in the future.

I Didn’t Know it Was Supposed to Be Embarrassing!

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I’ve been looking for a new roommate, which can be a painful process.  Like dating, but without any possibility of sex.  I was corresponding with one woman, who seemed really interested, and she asked me my age.  I told her.  She said, and I quote:

“Thank you for your honesty, but…”

WTF?  Okay, there are several things wrong with this.  First, was she looking for a roommate or romance?  Maybe a new BFF?  Whatever, apparently it had an age cap.  The funny thing is, a lot of people would accept that as perfectly normal.  Why allow anyone who is outside my generation into my world?  Why not live in the eternal world of Gap commercials, interacting only with people who are within a few years of my age?  Because it makes you parochial.   Or provincial.  Whichever.

I’ve always had a lot of friends who were older, younger, more conservative, more liberal, and from many different cultures and backgrounds.  People who believe they grow best in a world populated only with near-them clones are usually due for a shock.  At some point, they will encounter a world of people who don’t share their beliefs, their predilections.  I was at dinner once with a bunch of people.  A woman, visiting from out of town, came from a sequestered liberal environment.  She was not the most liberal person at the table, and she wasn’t in the minority.  But she went into shock because her beliefs were not held by everyone in the group.

Of course you might say that, even if you want friends who are different, you’d like a roommate who is pretty much the same.  But that brings us to the second f’d up thing.  She thanked me for my honesty.  Implying I was admitting to something less then pure about myself.  My age is higher than hers, so I should just be more embarrassed about myself.  Really?  She’s in her 20s.  Should people outside of that bracket be hidden away?  Trotted out only for family gatherings where they can be socially placed and excused?  It’s not just her, I really see this in a lot of twenty-something culture.  They see the world as a playground that is only ruined by older people.  I was like that, myself, as a teenager.  But then I grew up a little, joined the world of adults.