diversity win: this anime woman is over the age of 25

Dropped in here to say that it’s really funny how I happened to release this video essay about the problems of the Internet at the same time Twitter is rumored to shut down. Funny how the universe works that way.  I had this video in mind for ages. Like. 2011. I wrote up an essay about it on Facebook Notes back then and tagged my friends. Absolutely nobody replied, because everyone probably rolled their eyes like, “Eddie’s talking about Metal Gear Solid again...” Anyway. I think I’m glad I didn’t get to it until now because it became way more pertinent now than ever before. 

I'm not sure I really believe in redemption, but I'm giving it my best. In any case, I refuse to believe in fate, churning up the past, or remorse. What matter is not the harm I've done but the good I can do. I'll give it the time it needs, but I have faith in the power of my will. I will become for good the man I thought I was.

from Out of My Head by Didier Van Cauwelaert

Book Review: The Well at the World’s End

I wanted to take this time to gush about an old and obscure epic fantasy that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.  The Well at the World’s End by William Morris

Years ago, I wrote a list of fantasy fiction that predated (most of them) Tolkien. You can read that post here. At the time, I was really getting into epic fantasy that was written like Tolkien. I didn’t appreciate Tolkien when I was little but revisited it after college and I wished there was more out there like The Lord of the Rings. I wanted that “old timey” feel like Tolkien. It just hits differently from modern high fantasy. Background: William Morris (1834 - 1896) was mostly known for his textile designs, but he was actually the first person to write what became known as “high fantasy”. Scholars consider him the precursor to Tolkien, and both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had read his work during college and were inspired by him. Before The Well at the World’s End, Morris wrote The Story of the Glittering Plain and The Wood Beyond the World. I had read the latter before reading The Well at the World’s End. While The Wood Beyond the World was great, it left me wanting more, as it was light and basic. It had a few unanswered questions and the world-building was not strong. The Well at the World’s End is Morris’s magnus opus. Originally published in one volume, it was later published in two. The books are not exactly out of print but you can’t find them in your average Barnes and Noble, or even used bookstore. The most common version, which is the one I own, is part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (pictured above). Story: Everything starts in Upmeads, a small but lush kingdom where nothing much really happens. The four sons of King Peter, Ralph being the youngest, are bored of their lives and wish to go out and seek their fortunes. They ask their father for permission. King Peter agrees, but states that one son must remain to take care of them, the castle, and to ensure an heir. They do this by drawing straws, and unfortunately Ralph draws the shortest one. 

Seeing his brothers leave, Ralph quickly goes back on his word. He sneaks off and ventures into the world to find his fortune.  From there, the story is nothing short of entertaining. There is not so much magic (sorry, no fantasy creatures) as there is high adventure and derring-do. Ralph gets caught up with bandits, two rival towns, a mysterious woman rumored to be immortal, and a quest for the fabled Well at the World’s End (which is always written in all-caps to remind readers like in a Zelda game). And you will definitely see the influences it had on Tolkien with a horse named Silverfax and a character named Gandolf.   Out of context, it might sound like a stereotypical fantasy novel, but I still found myself surprised by all the ups and downs throughout the story. There is one moment in the book that hands-down shocked me. I thought it was going one way but it went another. The thing about this book that broke the mold for fantasy was Morris’s world-building. Until this book, hardly anything before had a fully developed fictional universe. There was no such thing as “world-building” back then. Fantasy tales were typically one-off stories with, at best, vague backstories. Keep in mind - this was published in 1896. Lord Dunsany would not enter the scene until the 1920′s. The fact that such an entertaining story has become so obscure is practically a sin.  One thing that struck me about this story was that it felt oddly...progressive for its time? The mysterious woman aforementioned is often caught in the middle of men and women who hate her and judge her, essentially “slutshaming” her. Ralph instead hears her out, passes no judgment, and kindly protects her. Throughout the story, she is constantly plagued by what I recognize as “nice guys” - knights who vow to protect her but then turn against her the moment she refuses their advances. There is also a later scene with natives described as “swarthy”. They are in no way depicted in an offensive manner and in fact live peacefully. The natives claim they have no desire to drink from the great well that grants youth, for they understand the natural order of things and do not covet eternal life. I found that incredibly interesting for a book released in 1896. Of course though, there are still some dated aspects, maybe more intentional callbacks to the chivalrous age, but nothing at all cringeworthy. A quick search on William Morris will show you that he was a diehard socialist and interested in a utopia, so some of those ideals definitely bleed into his fictional world. Prose: This is probably the one thing that might deter modern readers. Morris’s writing style hearkened back to medieval times. It is written as if you were reading something like Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. There are a lot of archaic words you are going to have to Google. Many of the character speak in a fanciful manner. Despite this, if you take it slow and just relax while reading it, you will be fine understanding everything. Tolkien’s inspiration is evident in Morris’s elaborate description of the journey that Ralph takes. Ralph visits cozy hamlets and men of the cloth, converses with many side characters, and Morris goes into great detail about the people who live in the cities and their buildings and the surrounding landscape.  There were really only two parts of the story I did not understand, so I had to reread slowly to get it. The characters and the narration have a roundabout way of describing what happened. But the funny thing is I found much of the dialogue to be very quotable. Something about that felt modern too. The writing was intentionally archaic but the witty banter made it feel modern.

Verdict: Oh my God. There is virtually nothing wrong I can say about this book. This surprised me. I love reading old and obscure things but have definitely felt their age. Sometimes they’re clunky and other times they simply did not age well. Usually these old novels that broke the mold and started a new genre were more concerned with the genre itself than the story. Not with this. I ate it all up from beginning to end and it was beautiful and breathtaking. It really feels like a precursor to Tolkien. If you are a fantasy fan in the same vein of Tolkien, PLEASE give this a read. You will not be disappointed. And go look for more of Morris’s work! I’m pretty much sold after this and The Wood Beyond the World, so I’m set on reading everything he wrote. The best part? William Morris’s work is all in the public domain. You can go ahead and read The Well at the World’s End here! On a personal note, some things in this story (and in The Wood Beyond the World) really felt eerily similar to the fantasy stories I attempted (still attempting) to write when I was a teenager. Ralph’s quest, the heroes he meets, and his romance eerily mirrored my own OC Adder and his quest. Do you ever get that weird feeling that a historical figure was you in a previous life? I got that vibe from William Morris. Then again, the irony about being a writer is that not reading anything ensures you will write something that has already been done. The more you read, the more you are aware of tropes that have already been done again and again. Maybe I was a bit of a Ralph myself in my younger days. The trope of a young lad bored with his provincial life seeking to make a name for himself and help others is an age-old tale.

DON’T STOP MAKING YOUR ART. NOT NOW. NOT EVER. KEEP GOING. WRITING. FILMING. DRAWING. DANCING. SINGING. KEEP DOING IT. ARTISTS PULL US THROUGH AND DEFINE THE TIMES WE LIVE IN.

I have a lot to say about Super Princess Peach and Sexism

I have a confession.  Princess Peach was one of my first “sexual awakenings”. No, wait, okay. I have to be REALLY honest. She was my first sexual awakening. There. I said it. I had a crush on a fictional character before a real person. She always had and always will have a soft spot in my heart ever since I first played Super Mario 64.

Nowadays, Princess Peach has been shat on in favor for Princess Daisy.

In our more enlightened age, people have forsaken the “classical view” of a princess that was seen in Princess Peach in favor of Daisy. Over the years, Daisy has been subtly marketed as the more tomboyish of the two. She’s peppy, she’s loud, she’s brown-haired because we need to take back the throne from the blonds, and she’s “the more fun one”. 

Fuck that Princess Peach, amright? That hoity-toity dumb bimbo who keeps needing to be saved. This is the 21st century - down with stuck-up blonds!  And meanwhile, I was there in the corner laughing nervously at this uproar and whispering, “I’ll never betray you, Princess Peach. They don’t understand you like I do.”

I get it though. We need to showcase a wider variety of what a princess acts like. All for it. Princess Peach stood for the stereotypical blond bombshell princess that Nintendo cashed in on. 

Well, originally, she was red-haired, but that changed with the times in favor of blond. That’s the thing though! Peach became what the popular male psyche demanded and desired at the time! 

Therefore, she became the target of contention for every woman who grew up failing to meet her standard. But now it tipped too far in one direction, and I can’t help but feel that we never learned our lesson.

It concerned me when female gamers seemed to learn to hate Princess Peach by practically drawing an X on her face a la Mean Girls and muttering, “She’s a bitch.” When I’ve played Super Smash Bros. with girls, one of them typically makes some scathing remark about Princess Peach. “What a whore.” “That bitch.”

“That blond bimbo.”

Yay.  In reality, we fell into the patriarchy’s trap all along - women hating on women. When Super Princess Peach first came out in 2005, I happened upon it by chance in Best Buy when I was looking for something for my birthday. It was always a deep dark secret that I now openly admit. I fervently wanted a video game that starred Princess Peach ever since I was little. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars for the SNES was the closest thing at the time, but we all know how obscure that game became. And there I was, 15 years old, all red-faced at buying a stupid video game. When I approached my mom in the store to show her what I wanted, I felt like I was making a drug deal. I shifted my eyes around me to make sure I wasn’t being followed or watched. I murmured, “This one.” I was confident that she would go along. She doesn’t read much into these things. She mixes Nintendo games with PlayStation. She would just buy it and go. 

But that time, she stared at the cover for a while and said aloud, “Is this right? Super Princess Peach? Are you sure this is for you?”

AUUGGGGH. MOM DON’T MAKE A SCENE HERE IN BEST BUY THIS IS WHAT I WANT OKAY? BYE. I said yes, and she further asked some questions like “Are you sure?” and “Is that a little kid’s game?” And I just gritted my teeth and mumbled something incoherent about it being just another Mario game.  I finally got the game, and I was excited to play, and breezed through it in almost one sitting.  At the same time, it was an awful game.  Let me lay it out this way.  This is the first time in Nintendo history that Princess Peach gets her own video game. 

Right?  It’s her BIG debut.  And so. . . The game has her trying to retrieve the Vibe Scepter from Bowser, and place it back in its rightful place on Vibe Island. Without the Vibe Scepter, people’s emotions are out of control. 

Are you sensing a theme yet? 

No? 

Let me go into more detail. 

The gameplay requires you to tap into Princess Peach’s four emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, and Calm) to get through obstacles. So, say you need to grow a flower, you make her sad and she cries so much that it---I fucking can’t even continue writing this. You get the picture.

So there I was playing this game in my bedroom and realizing how horribly sexist it was. I had so many conflicting feelings about it (maybe THAT’S what they were trying to do?) because on one hand I wanted to support my first waifu but on the other hand this was laughably dumb and sexist. I played through to the very end anyway. The other non-emotion-based abilities were enough to keep me going. That was really what I wanted. I just wanted a Mario-like game starring Peach where she used her umbrella and shit, maybe did a dance, and then saved the day and winded down with some tea in the final cutscene. Like you know Super Smash Bros. Brawl in the Subspace Emissary cutscene where she meets Fox?  She’s sauntering down the Halberd while a literal dogfight is happening in the sky above her, completely unperturbed.

                                          (Peach just not giving a fuck.)

And like her only reaction is a little “Oh!” as she protects herself from the wind as if it were nothing more than a little squall.  There’s some sweet action of Sheik breaking into Fox’s cockpit, and the two jump down to the Halberd and run at each other until Peach raises a hand and offers tea to stop the conflict. 

That is the Princess Peach I want to see, the one I think is rare in media - a conventionally feminine action/adventure protagonist.

Lord knows we have enough femme fatale assassins with a dark past.

The femme fatale assassin is seemingly the only acceptable female protagonist in movies. Why? Because it’s a male fantasy. The only way men are going to see a movie about a female action hero is if she acts more masculine. And it’s a trap. It’s a fucking trap. We dug ourselves in a hole again and can’t see the point three inches from our fucking eyes.  You rarely see a female action protagonist who shouts “Ew!” when she sees a bug, or who loves to collect pins, or who has a thing for baking, or who doesn’t have some terrible trauma as a backstory. You never see a female action hero who is awkward around men or has no idea how to seduce someone. The moment a female character like Princess Peach can star in her own game, the developers play into female stereotypes of emotions. They market the game for girls by tying it to emotions, in a world where we are still afraid to treat the female lead equal to the male lead. THAT is the problem I have with Super Princess Peach. I brought this up once in a certain video game forum a long time ago. The reception wasn’t very well met. I knew I shouldn’t have opened that can of worms but I fucking did it anyway. Just couldn’t shut up about it. Goddammit, Eddie, you should have shut up. You should have shut up. But no, I couldn’t. We’re doing this. We’re having this conversation. It was just burning on the tips of my lips. “Hey, isn’t Super Princess Peach a bit sexist?”

The surge of counter-arguments included things like “Well it’s not about Peach being emotional, it’s the island and the island is out of control so everyone’s emotions are out of control.” To me, that sounds awfully like the developers tried really hard to find an excuse to incorporate female stereotypes about emotions. It’s just so obviously contrived. I fervently wanted someone to see my point. I didn’t go out and about just starting arguments this way. I kept waiting for the right opportunity to spring into action. 

The second and final chance popped up on Facebook. This was still a long time ago. Maybe some six-ish years ago? I don’t even remember how the debacle started but I think someone brought up female protagonists in video games, and I brought up the unfortunate failure of Super Princess Peach and how it was sexist.  I was immediately torn apart.  Immediately.  This time was different though, because the person who tore me apart was a woman.  I thought, “Dammit, Eddie, maybe you were wrong the whole time. Maybe I AM the bad guy.” Not only did the dude bro Pr0 GaMeRs disagree with me, but now a female gamer too. 

“You are dangerously belittling women's’ emotions”, she told me. I cringed so hard at myself and wanted to just crawl up and die. It was such a stupid argument and I honestly was ready to die. I feel SO dumb admitting it but I was just SO into that argument. I had officially died on the hill that I so desperately wanted to defend and nobody - fucking NOBODY - was on my side.  I went through a dark time (of like maybe a week) and dove into in a dark place (my bedroom). I questioned my morals and my goodness. Was it sexist to dislike the game? Was it not sexist? Was it sexist to equate the game with the stereotype that men think of women as PMSing all the time? Was it not sexist to identify the stereotype? Because aren’t the makers of the game trying to weasel their way into applying their beliefs about women and what they think would attract female gamers? Maybe it’s only sexist in the metaphysical context? Maybe this is what the patriarchy is all about - trapping you in an endless pandemonium where you can never be sure if you are advocating for freedom or oppression. It was a never-ending soul-crushing conundrum that I couldn’t break free from, constantly philosophizing and moralizing.

But look - Nintendo marketed Super Princes Peach towards girls in hopes of drawing them in to what they think they could relate to. It sold well, yeah, but it wasn’t like large swaths of girls in the gaming community suddenly exclaimed and said “FINALLY! THE GAME FOR US!”. Why? Because it’s fucking patronizing, that’s why! Girl gamers just want to play the same shit that guy gamers play. Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Call of fucking Duty. I had this piece in my drafts for well over two years, afraid to post it. 

Fuck it. 

Here it is.  Anyway.  It’s 2022 now and apparently most of us can agree that yeah - Super Princess Peach was pretty fucking sexist. I hate you all. 

the zodiac signs flirting

Aries: uhhhhhhhhhh hi.

Taurus: clearly into you but will never openly admit it.

Gemini: talks about something other than sex wanting to have a nice conversation

Cancer: clearly into you and everyone knows it, even you

Leo: always flirting, even when they’re not trying to

Virgo: takes a selfie with you without asking and says shit like “haha we look so good together don’t we???”

Libra: conventional compliments

Scorpio: teases you and says borderline mean things and then when nobody is looking asks you what you’re doing later Sagittarius: very strong “my body is ready” vibes but cannot effectively communicate it with words. just kind of whips their hair a thousand times hoping you notice.

Capricorn: they are freaking the fuck out because they know exactly what they want and what they want to say but instead just panic

Aquarius: perpetually teeters on the border between flirting and just being nice so you are never sure until one day they just show up with a significant other

Pisces: secretly always down to fuck but until that day comes they’re “just joking haha”

we interrupt your regularly scheduled scrolling on Tumblr to say: fuck the Supreme Court

abortion is a human right. my partner and I have compiled an exhaustive document with links to abortion funds and pro-choice organizations to support during this time, including state-specific resources. please consider donating + sharing!!! 

linked: here

I love your blogs

Music Without Lyrics

I’m going to make a sweeping generalization here and I don’t care.  All of ya’ll were fucking brutal and unforgiving when it came to music tastes. 

If you were someone like me who did not have conventional music tastes while being in middle school, high school, or even college, people shat on you. They made sure you knew you were fucking weird.  My high school biology teacher told us that we are very sensitive about our sense of taste, smell, and hearing because they are closely tied to our emotions. People tend to feel very strongly about them because we associate them with fond memories. The smell of your grandmother’s cooking, the oldies music your uncle listened to, the taste of a Coke with sugar cane on a hot summer day.  While people will ceaselessly argue about pineapple on pizza, I personally experienced fiercer arguments over what is considered “good music”. I always had a need to hide my taste in music from the world for the longest time. I grew up loving movie scores, aka - soundtracks. I came from a time when if I wanted to listen to a piece of music from a movie or video game again, like the end credits, I got my TalkBoy out and recorded the music on a cassette tape through the TV speaker. You couldn’t just find your favorite song on YouTube or Spotify and listen to it endlessly on repeat with the click of a button. I had to fucking rewind that shit. And if someone, like my mom, interrupted the recording then I cursed out loud and recorded from the top again. The artists I grew up with were John Williams, Danny Elfman, Elmer Bernstein, Lalo Schifrin, John Barry, David Arnold, John Powell, Koji Kondo - most of whom sound alien to you. I never once had an interest in Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance, Backstreet Boys, Fall Out Boy, or literally anything that everyone else I knew listened to at the time.  To this day, I still don’t quite understand why I became that way. I was always a movie fan, even before I could form a proper sentence. It’s possible that I associated many fond memories with movie soundtracks. You know how people can recite the entire dialogue to their favorite movie? I could also recite the music that played throughout the entire movie in my head. I have strong memories of when I became fascinated with film scores. They were particularly strong during long car rides. My parents had a van with a TV in the middle that could play VHS tapes. I would constantly rewind the end credits to Batman, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, James Bond, etc. so that I could listen to the music again. Listening to soundtracks was what fueled my imagination to write stories. As the music went along, so did an impromptu story in my head. I’d imagine a fight scene or romantic moment or mysterious murder. Oftentimes, the stories I wrote ended up being similar to the movie whose score I was listening to, but overall that was how I got serious about writing. A single track from a movie score could take me through a million emotions, as it depicted a scene that was happy one moment and then sad the next as someone gets shot on screen after a kiss and you think everything is going to be all right for the characters. I think because I grew up with a strong attachment to instrumental music, I thought it sounded cheesy, maybe even wrong on some level, to sing about your emotions with words. There were many other nuanced emotions I found with instrumental music that made me feel more alive than with the pop songs at the time. To me, anything else with vocals and lyrics was a “pop song”. Everyone argued about whether rock was dead and this and that and the other thing. It was all Greek to me. Whenever I heard popular music my friends listened to, I cringed and tuned out. It really turned me off. Maybe on some level I thought it was not artistic to be so obvious about your feelings? I have no idea. I was just not into it for the longest damn time. Sometimes when a song had a banger instrumental opening I would be like “Oh man this is great”, but then the person started singing and I’d be immediately turned off like “Okay, you killed it. Shut up.” My own mother found that strange and annoying. This one time when I was a kid, after buying me yet another movie soundtrack on CD, she said, “Why don’t you listen to normal music? Maybe music with words?” It’s important to note that it wasn’t like I was shouting “Turn off that racket!” whenever someone turned on a rap song or rock song or pop song. There was music with lyrics that I did listen to once and a while, though rarely. The first band that I could bear listening to was Franz Ferdinand, back when I was in high school. They still remain my favorite band. For some reason, I have no inclination to skip any of their songs and can bear listening to an entire album. I hated it when I would like one song in an album but then hated literally every other song the band ever made. That wasn’t the case with Franz Ferdinand. 

Whenever someone asked me what music I liked, I said, “Oh I like a little bit of everything”. In reality, I was sweating my balls off hoping they wouldn’t grill me about band names or band members. I dared not say “classical” for fear of being labeled as boring. I knew a couple kids who listened to classical music and they were endlessly made fun of. I didn’t want to be seen as “prep”. I just wanted to be me. People didn’t get film scores like I did, and they immediately assumed it was akin to “classical music”. It’s much more difficult to describe than just that. It was extremely alienating growing up with even the nerds thinking you are weird because of your music tastes (all the nerds in my time were listening to stuff like Coheed and Cambria). Soundtracks are difficult to classify, even film scores in general. You can’t really call film score or movie soundtracks a genre because they can encompass an infinite range of genres. John Williams is often cited as the most popular and legendary film composer, but he strictly does orchestra work. As much as I love John Williams, I’m not always in the mood to listen to Star Wars or Indiana Jones. There is so much more to listen to! There are the progressive rock undertones of Nobuo Uematsu’s scores to Final Fantasy video games. John Powell’s drum and bass tracks that were popular in early 2000′s action movies. The early 60′s jazz tunes to popular spy shows and films like James Bond, Peter Gunn, and Mission: Impossible. Danny Elfman’s creepy music for a darkened theater. A score could have a hip-hop/pop-ish beat for the movie’s opening titles but then have a track further down that sounds full-on metal (see Powell’s The Italian Job), and I equally loved both. So it was virtually impossible to try and explain what music I liked.  Simply put, once someone started singing, then I cringed and died a little on the inside. For the most part, at least. I shied away from talking about music with people because everyone reacted so violently and pompously about it. I will never forget reactions people had to me finding out about a piece of popular music I did like. I once listened to the Tomb Raider score and then the album. Usually a movie releases two CDs - the score (which features the instrumentals) and the album (which features popular music that was either featured in the movie or that the movie was inspired by). I asked someone if they heard of “Where’s Your Head At?” by Basement Jaxx. They looked at me with utter disgust, like I had just vomited everywhere on the floor, and said, “That song is sooooo old! That was like three years ago!” We were in middle school, mind you. I hated that people treated life as if they were 80 years old. Calm down. You were probably still hugging a binkie when this song came out. Or the time someone said I was living under a rock for not knowing who Mumford & Sons were.  Or being told “What the fuck is wrong with you?” when I didn’t know who Kings of Leon were. Or the looks I got when I didn’t know who Chester Bennington was and why everyone mourned him.

Music was (and might still be, I don’t know what the kids say these days) closely tied to your lot in life in school. People made sweeping judgments across the board about what kind of person you were based on what music you liked, and they said it to your face. One time at my old job someone asked me what music I liked. I was still in that phase of being deathly afraid to share the truth, so I said, “Classic rock.” He nodded his head and then said things like he knew the kind of person I was and that he liked classic rock too and that we should hang out sometime and I instantly regretted my little white lie like, “Oh God, why did I say that?” Everyone treats everything with an absolute certainty. I don’t fucking know, man! I think some classic rocks are great, and others I don’t care about. 

A long time ago, this one girl I met told new friends to make her a CD with songs that meant something to them or described their life. Something like that. I wanted to impress her. I was on the verge of admitting my total love for film scores, but then I panicked. “I don’t want her to think I’m a loser, or that I’m boring,” I thought. “But I should also show her the truth. But how much of the truth? Maybe just 50 percent. No, wait, 70 percent?” I overthought my choices and created what was probably the worst fucking playlist I ever made that ended up not being anywhere close to how I wanted to express myself. She never mentioned it after I handed it to her, and I dared never to bring it up.

The anxiety over sharing music tastes was that real for me.

Then somewhere down the line, I don’t really know when exactly, I stopped caring. In fact, the last time someone ever asked me what music I listened to, I told the truth. He said, “Oh nice! I listen to music soundtracks too.” 

I beamed. Really??? A fellow music soundtrack lover??? I said, “Oh cool! Which ones?”

“Hans Zimmer!”

Ugh.  UGH.

Okay. 

So. 

I have a thing about Hans Zimmer. When you tell me that your favorite film music composer is Hans Zimmer I instantly know you haven’t really listened to film music. 

I don’t hate the guy. He’s perfectly humble and nice. But I hate how he dominated the industry and everything nowadays has to sound like Inception with motifs that are like three or four notes long repeating over and over. And people call it profound. Hans Zimmer is basically the modern art of music. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say, but...you know...Eh.

Later that day, I was pissing in the urinal and thought about that interaction and laughed my ass off.

I did the thing too! I judged someone based on their taste in music! I can never really be happy, can I? Anyway.  I’d like to rescind the previous CD I made for that girl years ago. It doesn’t really matter now, but after years of being afraid to share my tastes in music I feel like I should be free once and for all. Like any good movie soundtrack, there really should be two CDs - the album and the score. So I will follow that format. As I alluded to before, these music with vocals are the only popular songs I ever really liked in my whole life. I was still afraid to share them with people because I’d be afraid of judgmental responses like “Oh that’s SO overrated!” or “Oh so your an X kinda guy. I see.” But these songs with lyrics did speak to me, deep in what I believed in and what I felt. And the following pieces of music scores really tugged at me.

Eddie Francisco - The Album

The Fallen - Franz Ferdinand Then The Morning Comes - Smash Mouth Walkin’ on the Sun - Smash Mouth You Get What You Give - New Radicals 99 Red Balloons - Goldfinger Get It Right the First Time - Billy Joel Summer Wind - Frank Sinatra Beyond the Sea - Bobby Darin Wake Up - Rage Against the Machine Madder - Groove Armada You Could Have it So Much Better - Franz Ferdinand You Know My Name - Chris Cornell Live and Let Die - Paul McCartney and Wings Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There - Lyn Inaizumi Uptown Funk - Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars Sinnerman - Nina Simone Scenes from an Italian Restaurant - Billy Joel The Boys of Summer - Don Henley With The Stars and Us (Hoshi to Bokura to) - Lyn Inaizumi

Eddie Francisco - The Score The Entertainer - Scott Joplin Lupin the Third - Yuji Ohno Main Title - Lalo Schifrin (Dirty Harry) Playing House - John Powell (Mr. and Mrs. Smith) Looking for “Job” - Danny Elfman (Mission: Impossible) Pudding Brains - Murray Gold (Doctor Who Series 8) William Tell Overture (Finale) - Gioachino Rossini  Hog Chase Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 - John Powell (Paycheck) Bull Run - John Powell (Knight and Day) On Her Majesty’s Secret Service - John Barry (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) Back to Mi6 - Hans Zimmer (No Time to Die) Backseat Driver - David Arnold (Tomorrow Never Dies) Iced Inc. - David Arnold (Die Another Day) The New Plan - John Powell (The Italian Job) Tunnel Run - John Powell (The Italian Job) Bim Bam Smash - John Powell (The Bourne Supremacy) The James Bond Theme (End Titles) - David Arnold (The World is Not Enough) Epilogue - Justin Hurwitz (La La Land)  The End - Justin Hurwitz (La La Land) Mia and Sebastian’s Theme (Celesta) - Justin Hurwitz (La La Land)

Being a Writer is Lonesome

When I was a kid, I wasn’t the type of writer who was shy about sharing their stories. In fact, I frequently annoyed people with my stories. I wrote with a pen on a pad of paper. I wrote on anything I could find really. If I left my pad at home and was out with my parents at a restaurant, I would start writing the next scene on my napkin.

I would openly wave my papers in front of friends and classmates saying, “Hey do you want to read this fanfic I wrote about Yoshi saving Princess Peach? It’s really funny. At least, I think it’s funny. Tell me what you think!” 

Some classmates would try to get me to shut up by tearing apart my papers. I would then painstakingly rewrite the story word-by-word on new pages. If they tore that up too, I just kept rewriting. . . and I kept asking them to read my stories. I had to piece together lots of pages with Scotch tape, and I still have them stored away in my drawers. They are ancient artifacts by now. You have to be very gentle when you hold them.

I think I was too innocent back then to recognize that I was being bullied. Even today I think about it like, “Was I bullied? I don’t actually know.” Can you say you were bullied if you were never aware that you were being bullied? For the sake of avoiding a long philosophical argument, probably. Yes. But that behavior flew over my head at the time because I had a one-track mind. It was to create. If someone destroyed my creation then I had to recreate it. No ifs ands or butts about it. It HAD to come alive again. I just retorted with, “You’re fucking dumb” and rewrote the story. I’d then have the audacity (or stupidity, either way) to ask them again to read it.

Learning how to write was no easy task. I had the very bad luck of being assigned very bad English teachers throughout my schooling. Very bad. Extremely bad. My middle school English teacher ruled with an iron fist, and we did what we could just to evade her wrath, not so much to genuinely learn. My closest friends from that time will never forget the traumatic experience we had reading the book Johnny Tremain as a class. Just thinking about that book makes me shudder. We were survivors of a long, bitter war. Then in high school, each year was like another Defense Against the Dark Arts situation. The English teacher would be relatively new, not very good, and didn’t last very long. 

My English teacher in sophomore year was more like a surfer dude than an English teacher. You would take one look at this guy and “English teacher” was the last guess on your list. Oh, I’m sure he knew his stuff. He had the enthusiasm. He had the knowledge. He just had absolutely no control over the classroom. That happens with really young teachers. Most of my memories of that class are of my classmates just yelling and laughing and doing whatever they wanted. I have this image ingrained in my memory of him zoning out with the most dejected look on his face after failing to get us to care about The Catcher in the Rye. The only other memory I have about what we read in that class was Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil. That was a pain for us to go through - a short story but a long haul. Not long after we graduated, he got kicked out of the school after the administration discovered a picture of him smoking pot on Facebook. I joined the sci-fi/fantasy club right away as a freshman in high school. I joined at the right time because they were considering making their very first literary magazine. I think around my junior year was when they got serious about it and I submitted a story to be published. It was then that I realized how bad my writing was. The moderator loved my story but, with a straight face, he looked at me and asked, “Is English your second-language? The writing is very bad.” Up until then, I had never felt so embarrassed in an academic setting in my entire life. He legit thought I must have been from another country because my grammar was all over the place. But the honest truth was that I just had really bad English teachers.

There was really only one genuinely good English class I had, and that was AP English Language and Composition in my senior year of high school. I finally learned how to “really” write, with flavor and wit. The road to get there though was really rocky, and the teacher gave us some very difficult assignments. The worst assignment I ever wrote was also my second most embarrassing moment as a writer. The paper required us to nitpick George Orwell’s choice of words in an essay he wrote. We had to somehow dish out a 10-paged paper on why Orwell chose the words he did in his essay. It was the weirdest and most obscure paper I ever wrote. I fucking bombed that essay, and everyone else did too, so the teacher gave us all the chance to rewrite it. I still have that paper in my drawer with my teacher’s glaring comment in red ink that reads, “Your thesis borders on sarcasm.” It stung when I read that for the first time. But I think it took that one terrible awful paper to get me to finally learn how to write a paper. I learned so much in that class. That teacher was direct, no-nonsense, and told you exactly what you needed to do. People were afraid of him, but I thought, “Damn, I wish you were always my English teacher.” Before graduating, I gave my favorite teachers a copy of my story at the time on CD (that’s how long ago this was). I never heard back from any of them. I didn’t really expect them to. They were teachers after all, and teachers are very busy. Looking back now I cringe at the story I gave them, because what I thought was a masterpiece back then was really very rough and unpolished. 

My parents learned English as a second-language and were on a different wavelength about things. I was excited to show them my story called “The Drifters”, a sci-fi adventure that I was maturing since 8th grade that involved political satire about the current state of affairs. They immediately rejected it, fearing that I would draw ire from people and the government. I saw where they were coming from though. They hailed from countries that suffered years of political turmoil. Being that I was becoming a writer in the time of the Patriot Act, they firmly told me not to write about “those things”. 

I felt very uncomfortable showing them anything else after that. With little direction or motivation at school and an elephant in the room at home, I did what any artist does in the modern age - I retreated to the Internet. There, I learned more about writing than I ever did in school, and learned how to critique a work of fiction and discuss with writers.

Of course, as the Internet grew, so did all the bad things that came with it. You can get lost in many arguments that spiral out of control. Someone’s critique can border more on shaming you than genuine constructive criticism. You try to retaliate. They pick at something dumb you said, so now you look like the bigger idiot. It all goes to shit.  The third and last most embarrassing moment I ever had as a writer happened online. I used to be part of Young Writers Online (YWO). The site is now defunct and scrubbed, but man there were some embarrassing posts from me.

There was a period of time where I was paranoid about my ideas being stolen, or that I had wasted so much time that other people out there would publish a similar idea before I could. I imagined that when my story would finally be published, readers would compare me to someone else, when in reality I developed my ideas years earlier. It was my worst fear as a writer. Any time a major Hollywood movie or TV show had a similar idea to something I wrote, I panicked. I always posted about these feelings on the writing forum. A certain someone on the writing forum clashed heads with me whenever I expressed my anxiety. He was my most fervent critic. I once read an issue of Science Fiction & Fantasy. I bought their issues at the time to really get a feel for what kind of stories get accepted into magazines. I had already submitted stories that got rejected. One of them was called “Janus in Space”, which was set in my fictional world of “Space Hotel”. I then came across a sci-fi story in the magazine called “Mars Hotel” that was eerily similar to my story “Janus in Space”, which I had also posted online in YWO.   The parallels were staggering. Topps was the name of my hotel’s maid, and she was written off at the time as a young android who was a bit of an airhead, and she hummed a lot because of a mechanical error. The maid in Mars Hotel was also a young android and also had a mechanical error that caused her to say things incorrectly. Both hotels had a creaky pulley elevator that everyone complained about and wondered why they had it if turbolifts existed. Both had clerks who hated their job and an absent-minded boss. The tone was also humorous and witty and used modern curse words, much like my world of “Space Hotel”. This freaked the fuck out of me. So, I went out of my way to contact the magazine and show my evidence.  I posted about this in YWO too. That same critic once again lambasted me saying it was my imagination and I was making a fool of myself. Then one day, the writer of “Mars Hotel” created an account to respond to my comment. They explained the situation and assured me that they never came across my story on YWO, that it was an original idea, and wished me well.  I had reached peak embarrassment as a writer.  “It doesn’t matter who is original. What matters is who does it best.” That was what my most fervent critic told me, and kept driving it into me.

Alright. I learned to live with it. 

A couple years later, that same critic posted on YWO complaining about how Interstellar had a similar idea he was working on, and he didn’t feel like he could write his story anymore. Well...                                                                #

I think as I got older I learned more and more not to share much with anyone. There’s no real use to it. You’ll only complicate things. They say that the biggest regret people have on their deathbed is not having had the courage to say what they wanted to say. I did that for most of my youth and it only got myself into trouble and awkward situations. I don’t recommend it. When I die, I will say that I wish I had kept the peace. Also, people don’t have the time to read your work anyway. Every writer knows this.  “Hey, I can read your story!”   “Oh cool! Let me know what you think in like a month if that’s okay?”  “Yeah sure!”  And that’s the end of that there.  You never hear from them ever again.  Not your friends, not even your significant others or your spouse. Everybody’s got something they need to do nowadays, even you.

You get stuck in a dead-end job doing your writing. You tell yourself you’re going to make it big one day, but every other day you have to do something else. Obligations, emergencies, the struggle to keep it together in the Middle Class. You try really hard to find time to write but someone out there gets mad that you’re not focusing on them, like your friend or your significant other. The second you have time to sit and write, something happens. Something always happens. There’s always a thing you have to do or a thing you have to attend. Then there’s money that you need to make in order to fucking live. Every week you find yourself thinking, “This week was crazy but the next week should be clear. I should get back on track next week. Yeah.”  And then the moment you express an ounce of needing alone time suddenly you’re the bad guy. Suddenly it’s, “Well, Eddie, think of all the other people who have had it worse” or my favorite is “You just need to budget your time better” - coming from some guy on YouTube who went to Harvard and whose parents paid everything off and who is now telling you how you can do anything by simply blocking your time differently. 

As if you have nothing else in life to do that is currently on fire. 

I have come full circle as a writer. 

The happy giddy kid has long disappeared, and I have embraced the stoic and reclusive hermit.  Being a writer is lonesome because it’s something so introspective that I don’t think your friends or family will really understand it. You can have your deepest, darkest secrets laid out in a mosaic across your entire story and those closest to you won’t even blink an eye. Other times you don’t want to write a metaphor about anything, and you just have a cool idea you need to dish out. Then that’s when those same people are convinced that THIS is the story that means something to you when it doesn’t. They’d be like, “Oh my God, are you okay? Wait is this character me? Does that mean you hate me?” NO. It’s literally just a story about a talking donkey wearing a hat. If you ask me that again I swear I will call the police. Being a writer is lonesome because it’s all in your head, even when you show people your words. Why do we do it anyway when it gets adapted into a Netflix show before you can even finish the series? Why do we do it when there are so many artists and animators now?  The thing I find unique about being a writer is that nobody will really know or “see” how you imagine the story the way you do. You may have your tale adapted on screen or illustrated, but when you die that world truly dies with you. You can never translate something 100%. Nobody else will ever fully experience how your characters walk, talk, and exist. Nobody else will know its secrets that you consider canon but dare not tell anyone. Nobody else will fully understand how the buildings in your towns and cities look, their exact angles and shapes. Nobody else will fully imagine the sounds everyone and everything makes. And the vibe. Nobody will get the vibe like you do. Even when I finish a draft and one day publish it and consider it “finished”, it will never fully convey how I saw the story in my head. Every person who will read it will have their own vision. I think that is why we write. One story becomes a thousand different tales, a thousand different interpretations. We discuss the intended and the unintended. And that’s really just art in general. When I die, so will all my worlds and all my characters. Thousands of worlds and millions of characters, lost in time. Entire cultures and histories. They will never be realized like how I realized them. It sounds lonely and sad but there’s also solace in it. It’s sacred. Everything will die with me in private. 

Every other month I make the same stupid mistake.

I go somewhere and say to myself, “Yeah! I’ll join their email list!”  And then I never actually look at their emails and now have to delete all their emails and unsubscribe from their emailing list.

life as a writer

0 - 13 years old: You are exploding with ideas. You have so many ideas that all or most of them will disappear into the aether by the time you grow up. You won’t remember even a quarter of them but you do remember being high on imagination. You acted out entire stories with your action figures. You went on “adventures” with your friends. The entire world was a playground. 13-18 years old: You start developing original ideas. You may go on fan fiction sites and write your own twist on your favorite character. You have goals so big that you don’t realize they are too unrealistic, because in your mind anything is still possible.

18 - 23 years old: Crisis time. You’re not sure if you’re good at this. You still have many ideas but also there’s this little thing called college, or at the very least you need to find a job and figure out what you’re seriously going to do with your life. You may be neurotic about your work in some form or another, or may get frustrated never finding the time to write. You may think you suck and might quit. You may be paranoid that people will take your ideas because you want to be recognized as original. Whatever happens, you start becoming neurotic and anxious and frustrated. You will start dropping old ideas and old goals that you had. 23 - 28 years old: You either mature old ideas or drop all your childhood dreams and focus on something new. You have a day job but any free time you have to yourself is spent fleshing out your writing. Your day job could be something you’re into, if you’re lucky, but either way it’s not your main goal in life. The writing you do in those intervals of free time are what you really want to be known for. 28 years old to pretty much the end: If you have continued writing this far, then you know exactly what you want to do in life. You’re becoming set in your ways and the ball is finally rolling. You have the amazing ability to not pay attention while people are talking because you are writing about something in your head. Someone’s mad at you and you don’t know why. It’s probably because they were spouting about their emotional breakup over the phone and you were saying “Uh-huh” and “Yeah” while you were plotting out an entire three-act play in your head, or had the phone on speaker while you got warped into editing your podcast episode. Any neurotic insecurity you had when you were younger is a thing of the past, because all you do is think and make it happen.

The First Time I Heard About Putin

You may be shocked to hear this but the Internet used to be a cooler place. I’m talking about pre-2010 when the Internet was an exciting warehouse full of secrets and fun. Shit was wild back then. You could find a dozen forums or even Myspace posts out in the open dedicated to teaching you things like how to phish someone or make an explosive. There were no rules or boundaries. Then people like Mark Zuckerberg and the government ruined a lot of it. That’s how it is for most major innovations. They are lauded as the saviors of humanity when they first come out, but then some ten or twenty years or so down the line they become our next big problem. I used to be a member of a writing forum in that “Golden Age” of the Internet called Young Writers Online. The site is now defunct and was erased from existence, and the rest of the group thrives elsewhere. In times like these, I remember posts from this user named, “Georgy”. He was the reason I became cognizant of Putin. He was either “Georgy” or “GeorgeMichael”. I’m 90% sure it was “Georgy” though, and “GeorgeMichael” was a separate user. I wish I could find his posts, but alas the wayback machine only took snapshots of the front page of the website. Either way, “Georgy” lived in Russia, so he claimed. At least once a week he would start a thread about Putin in the Common Room. This was back in 2007, right before the Russo-Georgian War (”Georgy” = Georgia? Possibly?). “Georgy” would write long posts about something Putin did and warn us about him, sometimes with articles and pictures. “Georgy” kept saying that Putin was rising to power and that any journalist who tried to uncover his secrets was met with a very bad “accident”.  For the most part, nobody replied to “Georgy”. People kind of treated him like “Oh it’s him again”. I always had an inquisitive mind, so I asked him questions and replied from time to time. I also knew what it feels like to not be heard, like you are shouting into a void, so I wanted to give him some kind of response to let him know that he wasn’t shouting into a void. He told me through PMs once that Russians always have dashcams in their cars because the police there are always corrupt and can always fuck you over, so people try to record everything. That explained why “crazy Russian driver dashcam footage” memes were so popular. 

One thing that struck out at me about “Georgy” was how paranoid and fearful he was of propaganda.  Someone started a discussion thread asking if it’s possible for someone to create a story without thinking of the characters first. I said something along the lines of, “Yes! An idea. Sometimes I think of a concept or an idea first and then build a story around that.” “Georgy” immediately chimed in with, “That’s called propaganda.” “Hm, I didn’t really think of it that way,” I said. I thought it was an interesting take but I didn’t discuss further. Another user responded that it might be considered propaganda but propaganda is a specific term about trying to push a political agenda. “Georgy” went on to say that any story where one wrote the idea first is considered propaganda - and that any idea you write is ultimately political. I think it was then that it fully hit me that this person must have been very traumatized to react so strongly to this. “Georgy” seemed to imply that ideas are very dangerous and should be wielded cautiously.  I thought about “Georgy” any time Putin came on the news. Around 2011 was the last time I remember him posting online. He started mentioning that the Russian government was doing more to monitor the Internet, and it was becoming more dangerous for him to talk about Putin. Many people tried to use the Internet to share forbidden knowledge that was otherwise censored or long-thought to have been destroyed. THAT was the Internet I knew and loved, before it became inundated with sedative memes and “culture wars”.  I have been thinking about “Georgy” ever since Putin invaded Ukraine. I hope nothing bad ever happened to him ever since he last logged off. I hope he continued fighting the good fight. If anything, he might be out there right now in Moscow protesting the war.

I don’t WANT my laptop to be the Thinnest Model Yet

I want a battery that will outlast the sun, a screen big enough to blind the person behind me, more USB slots than there are apple fanboys in the bay area, a fucking disc reader/writer

Now more than ever we need to get together

I made a Discord server a long time ago in hopes of creating a network of people across the globe to help each other out in real-time and share information and knowledge. My friends and I post free content from school textbooks to banned books to art tutorials to movies to computer programming to learning languages to Adobe and Microsoft programs to martial arts to video games to life hacks and everything else in between. It was a dream I had so long ago in high school. I once tried making a secret website with friends but that failed, and Facebook failed. Discord was the closest thing to making that happen.  So join now.  Right now - knowledge is power. You need to arm yourself with as much information as possible. https://discord.gg/SnXfrhA