carolynjanai-blog

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A Year In Review

Was 2016 so Horrible? Was 2017 any better?

Neither, my dudes, I’m more of a “the wheel of fortune turns and crushes us beneath its impossible weight” kinda gal, so everything is horrible all the time, always, but here’s at least what I learned or accomplished in accordance with the prompt as well as the few last drops of my own wisdom.

I graduated college this year, so that was pretty dope. I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, because if I wanted to make deals only to go back on them later, I’d become the president. “New year new me” is old hat and everyone tries that every year. Something has to change in order to incite a lifestyle change, but but no one makes drastic lifestyle changes just because it’s January again. They have to have a heart attack or some similar scare in order to make a sincere change. Like Jean Valjean when faced with the aspect of dying in a Victorian era French prison.

Also, I think setting goals should be a year round thing, like Scrooge and keeping the spirit of Christmas alive throughout the year. For example, I had to give up red meat because I saw a cow in a tractor trailer sticking it’s tongue out in the breeze and for some reason it touched my otherwise, cold dead heart and now I can’t eat cows. Same thing happened to me and pork when I learned how smart pigs are. Thank god chickens are ugly and dumb or I wouldn’t get any goddamn protein. It’s an embarrassing change (thank god no one reads these, aye-ooo) but a change nonetheless. See, my philosophy is that change has to happen naturally, by your own volition in order to stick. You have to make the commitment to something and change will follow, whether it be weight loss or to be a better and more complete person, you have to take steps to achieve these things. You don’t just stop eating to lose weight, you have to eat wisely and exercise in order to better take care of yourself and by proxy, maintain a healthy weight.

Personally, I feel my most alive when I’m helping others. Not other people, god no, a bunch of bastards is what other people are, I like animals and I like helping animals. But maybe you’re interested in helping our least terrible kind of people, which are of course the children and the elderly. Some volunteering might help a person feel more complete in their lives, giving with no expectation of reward has its own rewards but no matter what I say, change must come from within.

So, as for what I learned this year, I learned the very extremes of my tolerance for other’s bullshit, as well as my own. It feels like a lot has happened to me, but, gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you why or give exact details as to what happened. I found that despite my best efforts, I’m a cinnamon roll of a person, that stray cats don’t like being held and nor do they like car rides to the humane society, that The Next Gen. is way better than Voyager, and that I loved this class and these prompts and I’m going to miss them and nothing else after I leave this garbage institution of a university.

[carolynjanai-blog]

Tony Montana Can Bite Me

The Bechtel test is the bar sitting on the ground. Behold Hollywood digging a hole under it. Watch as I pull apart America’s most beloved hero films and bitch about what I call Boner Films.

Some movies don’t completely suck and others aren’t all bad, and some very special ones bring grateful tears to my otherwise dead-fish eyes with their beauty. But a lot of movies are what I call Boners. Meaning they’re for men, by men, at the expense of women who are either not featured in the film or are used as sexy props or furniture. For example, Scarface. The Fast and Furious franchise. The Toby Maguire and the Andrew Garfield Spiderman series. Seriously, think about it, the only women are mothers and girlfriends and, while I have expunged every memory I ever had about the Toby Maguire series, I don’t think I’d be out of line to call Gwen and Mary-Jane sexy furniture that only exist to give angst and drive to our teenage mutant spider man. Since the Toby Maguire movies were just a shared hallucination and therefore never happened, let’s look closer at Gwen from the latest series that made me watch Uncle Ben die, Andrew Garfield’s. Her only point in the first movie was to put her own emotions on hold in order to comfort the hero. He dad freakin dies and she’s like “It’ll be okay spidey…”

Ugh, the second one was worse. She was only there to be killed, which we all saw coming because she broke up with him. Fuck you, Sony Spiderman Franchise, I was rooting for you, we all were…

This trope is called Girlfriend in the Fridge, from a different comic (DC) franchise. Green Lantern number four, Kyle Rayner, comes home to find his girlfriend dead and stuffed into the fridge. DC later made him the first openly gay superhero in its franchise in circa. 2013 and I can’t help but wonder if that was just an attempt to cover up their gigantic misstep which led to a trope being named after one of their many writing oopsie-daisies. Also, who the hell even knows who Kyle Rayner is? And who gives a shit about the Green Lantern Corp? They should’ve either created a new superhero who happened to be gay or revamped a character from a comic series that people actually read.

It’s a more common trope than you’d think, while not every girlfriend is stuffed into a fridge, more than a few are killed for either cheap shock value or to fuel the male protagonists journey.

That being said, let’s talk about Forrest Gump.

What do we even know about Jenny? The love of his life, best friend and troubled youth turned troubled adult Jenny? Off the top of my head I don’t even know her last name, I knew which Green Lantern had his girlfriend killed and made into a trope.

Anyway, we know her likes are folk music, not getting abused and drugs. Her dislikes include getting hit and her abusive father. End of list. That a messed up lack of character development for the lead actress, dontcha think? She shows up at the very end as a fuckin tombstone for Tom Hanks to cry over, which is just super. The fuckers at the bus stops had more character development and growth than Jenny. She’s a character you’re supposed to project onto and she’s only there to make Forrest feel things and to pump out babies for him to raise.

 I’d like to talk about Wonder Woman, what it did wrong, what it did right, but it’s finals week and I’m already 100 over the 500 word count.

Maybe next time.

[carolynjanai-blog]

Jesus Was Born In April Anyway

 Remember what I said about Thanksgiving being a sham? Wait till you get a load of Christmas hoo boy, what a mess. I discussed the “Happy Holidays” vs “Merry Christmas” discourse in a separate prompt about political correctness, so I’d like to instead talk about the supposed War on Christmas and what a crock of shit it is.

The season was originally a pagan festival for the solstice, but everyone knows that, let’s add to it with a few myths from the Nordic countries and how modern Christmas traditions would have been sued for copyright if they didn’t forcibly convert or similarly quash any resistance.

Odin was the basis of Jolly Old Santa Clause, not St. Nick he was a real guy. Santa Clause with the long white beard, decked out in furs and carrying a bindle.

Throw an eye patch on him and you got Odin.

Odin got his kicks in Norse mythology by wandering earth as a smelly hobo, his possessions in a sack, picking up bits and pieces of wisdom and magic wherever he found it, which is how he lost an eye by the way. He gouged it out and traded it for a drink from the Well o’ Wisdom.

If your curious, The Hermit card in a tarot deck is also based off Odin and another poignant fun fact; Christmas, actually most Christian holidays, are mostly a hodge-podge of pagan traditions and Christian arrogance.

Another example of Christmas ripping off Nordic myths is in the piney décor. Christmas Trees started in old pre-Christianized Scandinavia, pine trees were often thought of as a divine gift from the most beloved and beautiful Baldur, god of light and love. The use of pine wreaths and boughs were used to ward off evil spirits and rein in the new year. Strong, earthy scented plants were often used to ward off evil. (Fun aside: Burning sage is the most often described plant of choice for banishing dark spirits, a ritual practiced for centuries by indigenous people of America and Europe but recently revived into mainstream by paranormal nonsense and new age bullshit.)

Another plant commandeered by the season is mistletoe. I think this one is really well known too, but I am often wrong. This myth tells the story of Frigga, great prophetess, goddess of love and marriage and wife of Odin Clause, having a vision of the death of her most beloved son, Baldur. She’s horrified and casts a spell on Baldur to make him impervious to all materials except mistletoe. Baldur and his pals do exactly what anyone else would do if they found out they couldn’t be hurt: they began hurling axes and spears and shit at their most beloved buddy. Loki, who suffers from John Smith Syndrome that he was miscast as a British gentleman instead of the piece of shit goblin he is in myth, hears about throwing shit Baldur and is always down for murder, so he tricks the god of darkness (who is blind) into shooting Baldur with the Norse equivalent of a kryptonite bullet. He dies, Frigga flips shit, Loki is cast out of Asgard and Frigga declares that mistletoe will not be a symbol of her son’s death but of what he stood for: love and light and shit. “Any pair found under the mistletoe shall share in a kiss… Um, just don’t eat it, this stuff is still, like super poisonous.”

And that tradition lasts even today, people still kiss under mistletoe and it’s still super poisonous is you eat it.

So, as a recap, Santa is in fact Odin, a Christmas tree is actually a ripoff of a tribute from Baldur the Nordic sun god and that the murderer was Loki in the ballroom with the mistletoe arrow. I could go on and on about different ripped off pagan symbols that were re-purposed for Christian use, but here’s a question for ya: why have pagan traditions permeated so deeply into today’s society especially since Christianity is so very anti-pagan?

Here’s a comparable story that I either heard in a class at some point or on a podcast or something.

The storyteller says that his friend from childhood’s Spanish grandmother used to have her over for weekends, and on every Friday night she would light a candles and put it under the table. The girl asked why she did that and her grandmother told her that it was a tradition her parents did, and her grandparents did and so one. It was just an old tradition, but the when the girl grew up she did some research into her family history. It turns out, that her grandmother’s family were all born in Spain until they immigrated in the 1940’s. You might remember a time when Spain lost its shit and tried to take over the world and either exterminate other religions or forcibly convert them or drive them out. Now, her grandmother’s family was originally Jewish and in light of their options, they chose to convert to Christianity and remain in Spain. The reason her family lit a candle and hid it under the table every Friday night was because of the Jewish tradition of lighting candles to welcome the Sabbath, Saturday. If you’re secretly practicing a religion in a hostile country, you do it secretly, so her family would put the candles under the table to keep their neighbors and secret police from discovering that they were still practicing Judaism. They did this for centuries in secret and eventually the action lost meaning, but was still practiced.

Kind of the same deal with the pagan traditions. They were so strongly imbedded in the culture of the people, that they just added their ideals to those of the newcomers and went from there. Eventually, the pagan/Christian traditions spread through Europe, likely starting with Germany, and eventually we just weren’t taught why we do these things and just rolled with it because everyone else seemed cool with it.

So this war on Christmas shit is all the more ridiculous to me. It’s like if I followed you home, kicked in the door of your house, sat at your dinner table and complained that I don’t like mushrooms and that you shouldn’t either and that you should make something else. So fuck the cups, Christmas already monopolized ¼ of the year, what more could possibly be given?

[carolynjanai-blog]

Black Friday is a Scourge and Thanksgiving, A Sham.

And here’s why.

Now, a problem a lot of people have with Black Friday is that it starts too early. That Thanksgiving is about being with the family and being thankful and blah blah blah, but guess what, the original settlers of America were a bunch of clueless, rich assholes who wanted cheap land and to play around in a swamp. What they mostly did instead was almost starve to death and incite genocide.

What a bunch of dipshits.

 A quick interlude for a Carolyn brand historical rant and 20/20 hindsight.

The original Jamestown was burned to the ground, by the way, but it was a shitty location for a settlement anyway. The Chesapeake Bay has no redeeming qualities to the new shitheel settlers other than it was literally the first place they set foot on and they were too busy looking for gold and jerking themselves off to realize that there was no access to clean water, no place to grow food and no solid land to build.

So fast forward 3 months after the settlers first landed, everyone has dysentery (which is a poop disease. You get it from drinking poop water and then you poop till you croak), no one has found any gold, and winter is right on their dumb asses. There was one dude in the entire company who had the sense and discipline god gave to a plague rat and that was John Smith.

No, not the blond twunk from Disney’s “Pocahontas”, this guy was like 40 years old, brunette, mega ugly and by this time had spent the past 3 months in the ship’s brig for pissing off the nobles. They let him out and, by the skin of their giant Old English teeth, they survived long enough for the Native American population to save their asses.

So, yeah, Thanksgiving is a sham. The moral of this story is that generosity will get you nowhere, both as a person and as a population and that if a bunch of rich, white guys camp out in your area and drink the same water they shit in, then just let nature take its course.

 As you can tell Thanksgiving and Black Friday aren’t really high up on my fave list, mostly due to a strenuous relationship with my family and working retail as a teenager and young adult. Also, turkey is the least delicious animal on this earth and eating it for 4 days straight should be considered a federal offence or at least cruel and unusual. So the traditions of thanksgiving are rooted in exploitation and greed, so it’s just as well that the day after practices the same principles. People have fuckin’ died trying to get Black Friday deals.

You know how you can die on black Friday?

You get trampled to death by people trying to get a bargain, like the unfortunate calf in a stampede of wildebeests, you get crushed by a frenzy of weirdos.

That’s some seventh circle of hell level shit right there and not to sound like a witch cursing an entire village, but “This greed will be the ruin of you all.”

 Another part of this prompt was “what’s a traditions do your family have?”

My family’s tradition is to hurl abuse at each other for an evening, choke down god’s least delicious animal and then to do it again next month for Christmas, which is also a sham, but that’s tomorrow’s prompt.

[carolynjanai-blog]

Political Correctness for the Modern Asshole.

By A Modern Asshole

I want to open with that I’m not really into bending over backwards to accommodate random people I meet. That being said, I’m not out to be an asshole either, despite what the title may have fooled you into thinking. If someone prefers a certain pronoun over a different pronoun, it’s super easy to just call them by what they prefer but some people just get all tied up in knots over that. My mom for example goes through the world saying fringe stuff like she’s got something to prove.

By fringe stuff, I mean things that may have been acceptable at one point to say in public but can be considered extremely rude today, phrases such as “drunk as ten thousand Indians” and “chink place” in reference to Asian restaurants. She one time jokingly referred to my dead father as a “dago”, which he even called himself on occasion, but it rubbed me the wrong way for a reason I can defend. For me, the difference between calling yourself a dago and calling me a dago is a fist fight.

Like the old saying, you can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.

Even phrases, like “Merry Christmas”, offend some people and true, “Happy Holidays” is more of a topical umbrella term, but this phrase’s inclusiveness doesn’t in any way weaken the sentiment of the season. And yet, it’s been my experience that more people get upset by “Happy Holidays”, than “Merry Christmas”. Here’s an example of when I worked at Marshall’s over the holidays and accidentally said Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays to a lady who clearly wasn’t Christian:

 “Thanks for coming in, Merry Christmas.”

“Yeah, thanks, you too.”

 And that was it.

 Now here’s what happened when I said Happy Holidays to an older, aggressively Christian lady:

 “Thanks for coming in, Happy Holidays.”

“It’s Merry Christmas, this holiday is celebrating the birth of Christ our savior. That’s the problem with your P.C generation, you took the Christ out of Christmas and-“

“Ma’am please, I make $7.35 an hour…”

“And you and your anti-Christian views are ruining this country blah blah war on Christmas blah blah.”

 The only people who seem to get up in arms about being polite and accommodating are the people who are interested in keeping their views and beliefs in the forefront of everyone’s mind, like that second lady. And as an aside, her brand of Christianity is a completely different breed than what the rest of the world considers Christian, you can check out my opinions on that in a previous post entitled “Patriotism isn’t a religion and flag worship is creepy”

More on that point, Starbucks seems to be the center of controversy as of late, last year with its holiday cup not being Christian enough and this year’s cup apparently featuring a lesbian couple holding hands?

Which… okay?

That’s either provocation on Starbucks part, trying to get a rise out of the more conservative members of the PTA or a slapdash marketing scheme to appeal to the younger and more liberal crowd to seem forward thinking and hip all while posing no risk to themselves. It’s just a pair of hands? Like, there’s no indication that either hand is female or male, but maybe that’s the point? Who can say for sure.

Starbucks for one, actually, and their ad actually had a gay couple and everyone’s least favorite family member threw a fit about the traditions of the season.

Personally, I couldn’t give a shit.

It’s a cup, D-list relative, put down the pitchfork.

It’s not de-valuing Christian values just by including other values, the spotlight can be shared.

I mean goddamn.

[carolynjanai-blog]

Discourse Review: Drunk Writing

Yeahhhh! Drunk bonus paper, lets fucken do this!

Sweet jesus autocorrect be my savior tonight.

 I figured, this is a kinda topica assignment, why not liven things up a bit with some light substance abuse?

So I just did a shot or 2 and im ready to fucki g wright this thing.

 I like the zine, I’ll be totes honest. I really like the freedom it affords. I never, ever get to write about whatever I fuckin feel like. It’s so much fun! I think some of my best writing has been done through the zine.  the word count is hard to reach but it’s a high level class, so that’s like normal right?

As far as books go, I really, super like the Art of Fact or whatever its called. It’s the best book I’ve been told to read, so good call there. This class is so laid back, I really like that too. It’s fun just to show up and talk. I’m wondering how you ended up with the math/engineer discourse, cause I definitely didn’t end up here on purpose.

Holy shit, and to think I was dreading this class, I’m so relieved it ended up being so fun! But, Im also a pretentious asshole, so I gotta make some book recs, aight?

The book is really good, but I fucken hated the On Writing thing. God, I didn’t get jack from thart book. I barely learned a god dame thing from it. I wish I had some better recs, but I don’t usually read “writing well” books in my spare time so I don’t really know any.

Oh oh! But I got a killer just regulare book recommendation! The best goddamn book I ever read was City of Thieves by David Benioff (beniov?). Oh man, I stayed up all night to finish It and I cried like a child, it was so beautiful. I was never taught City of Thieves in a classroom, I read it for kicks last semeseter, but I can see how it could easily translate into an academic setting. Even if it doesn’t, everyone should read it, oh my god I bawled like a child. Its set during world war II, which I usually hate because its so fucking cliché, but Benioff (benico?) is a masterful storyteller. God it was so good.

 My favorite assignemt I think was a speech I had to give in Disouce 2. I did it on cannibals in modern media, which then set me up for a bonus presentation in my psych class, which then set me up for guest lectures on “Serial Killers, Cannibals and Necrophiles of the 20th Century”. Super rad, that. So A speech on whatever the hell I felt like led me to some seriously impressive resume bait, the same could be said for this zine.

Thank god people are obsessed with serial killers, or I’d be out of a job.

Dracula was a fun read, but I think a lot of people already read it right? My boy Jon Harks and his lady Mina are a tale as old as time. Focusing it around movies is an interesting idea, Discourse 2 teacher Erin Hamer-Beck did that and it was really fuckin awesome. As a class, we had some really good discussions, especially since the topic was “Nazi Occupied Europe”, so we watched things like Cabaret, The Boy In Striped Pajamas and things like that. It didn’t diminish our learning and absorbing the content took less time than reading did, which I enjoyed.

 I mentionee being a pretentious asshole, yes? I saw King Lear a few weeks ago and shit! I loved it! We should do King Lear! And Hamlet! I loved Hamlet! But King Lear is on the brain fir me. I wonder how other people feel about it, how ol Will Shakes intended people to feel when they viewed it. I was sad, of course, this pitiful olf man could only see the error of his ways after it was too late to fix his mistakes. But my theater pal, Sarah, was like “Serves him right.”

!!!

Am I supposed to feel that way??

I vehemently deny being a softie, but am I a softie?> Should I treat his behavior with derision?

Qui peux sais.

Anyway, I’ll rewrite this in the morning and add it to the bottom, but drunk art is just as valid and important as sober art, just ask Hemmingway. Or Stephen King.

But fuck Stephen King.

 ....

So I didn’t get around to rewriting this sober, but it’s good for a laugh and that sweet, sweet extra credit.

[carolynjanai-blog]

Thoughts On Appropriation

Halloween is by far the best holiday, hands down. No familial obligations, I don’t have to buy presents for anyone, no annoying Halloween carols the candy flows free and you can dress up as anything you want, barring a few exceptions.

Brown face and black face are offensive, let’s get that clear right off the bat. Painting yourself brown and calling yourself an “Indian Princess” is racist, and dressing up as a stereotype of any race that isn’t your own as a costume is racist.

Glad we cleared that up.

I’m not so sure about dressing up as character of a different race is the same thing. Like the Maui controversy. Disney made a children’s costume that was a Polynesian skin tone suit with Maui’s tattoo design printed on it and the company got in huge trouble for that. I think if his tattoos weren’t such a big part of his character, you could just buy a big hook and a wig, yell “Whee-Hoo!” and turn the fuck up. The problem was that the costume was a jumpsuit made out of a heavy polyester and closed with velcro in the back. If it was made out of sheer nylon that went on like other fake tattoo sleeves, I think there would be less of an outrage.

The idea is to mimic the tattoos of a character, not his race. The same principle would apply if I wanted to be Esmeralda for Halloween. For the sake of argument, let’s ignore that Hugo’s book was pretty racist to begin with, okay, and to Hugo’s credit, he was pretty forward thinking for a man in the 1820’s. Anyway, so if I wore the same dress as she did in the movie, green contacts and carried around a goat, then there’s no harm done. Besides the possibility of getting beaten up in a dark alley by the ghosts of Uncle Walt and Victor Hugo. Alternatively, if I painted myself brown, tied a bright scarf around my head, carried a tambourine and told people I was Queen of the Gypsies: Esmeralda… then yeah, that would be pretty goddamn racist.

I could still upset a handful of people by dressing as a fictional woman who is a different race from me, but that handful of people should probably get out more. There is a time and place for outrage and revolution and it should be reserved for important issues.

Not that appropriation isn’t a problem, but it’s a problem that causes no harm and can easily be circumvented with a little bit of public education and an ounce of consideration. What happens when you tell a person what to do? No one likes puppeteers and getting their strings pulled, we automatically resent it when people try to control us I’ll tell you what happens when someone tells me what to do, I endeavor to do the opposite of what they tell me. You tell a racist person to dial it back a bit and they’ll become a million times more racist.

One of my professors had a health intervention to get people to take the stairs instead of the elevator or escalators, “Stair Takers are Change Makers!” was the slogan. Every time class met she would slip her stupid slogan into the lecture somehow. Every time I see a fucking staircase I think of that slogan and then I hunt down the nearest elevator because fuck her she doesn’t control me. Stairs are better for me, but my heart is especially petty and I’d rather defy someone who would control me than take the stairs. I might just be extraordinarily petty, but I’m sure there are lots of people out there who are the same.

You practically have to be a grand fucking chess master to talk people into anything.

[carolynjanai-blog]

Walt Disney Can Bite Me

Should copyright be extended?

Hell no.

It’s high time for Mickey Mouse to fuck off into public domain where he belongs and never return. Also, Walt Disney can eat shit in hell, that awful, awful man.

Let me be frank. The line needs to be drawn somewhere. But noooo, the Disney Landlord of fairy tale’s demands that his shrill mouse of yesteryear be protected from the nefarious people who would use him in their creative works.

The Horror.

In a short 200 years since his creation, people might forget that Mickey Mouse was created by Walt Disney.

But so it goes. His name can be on the biggest blockbusting dream-machine ever created as a consolation prize. At least he won’t be remembered as an antiemetic alcoholic.

But either way, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t care how he’s remembered.

He’s super dead and has been for fifty years.

His company however, has had too much impact on the development of copyright law through the years. I hate to sound like the idealistic, but ruggedly handsome protagonist in a sci-fi flick, but that is way too much power for any one person to have. I think it’s pretty sketchy for a single company to have almost sole control over any law.

That’d be like if me, in all my narcissistic and malicious glory, had sole control over what gets put on TV. You can bet that TLC would be eradicated and Animal Planet would be a loop of videos of animals approaching humans for hugs and dogs greeting their owners after not seeing them for months.

This might be totally awesome for me, but not everyone will agree. Someone out there is going to miss the garbage reality shows on TLC, and maybe someone wants to watch Animal Precinct once and a while. Same principle with Uncle Walt. His control over the market is some serious bull shit. He and his company just kept throwing money at copyright lawyers and congress until the laws were changed and I disagree with a anyone’s ability to bend the law to their will as long as they keep throwing money at it.

 But Carolyn! What about a creator’s decedents and family! They should earn the money from his creations after he dies.

Okay.

Well, reader, here’re my thoughts.

If the creator wants their family to financially benefit from his works, then he should use the money he earned from his creations to send them to college so they can earn a nice living themselves. Artwork or no, you can sell your painting and make your comics and earn royalties while you’re up and kicking. I get that that might be a controversial opinion, so maybe changing the law that states copyright lasts the life time of the creator and 50 years after their death and reeling it back to about the lifetime of the creator and 20 years after their death. That seems fair, their kids and grandkids should be set if their grandparent/parent made the next Mickey Mouse and can afford an education to further support themselves. Riding on the coattails of your long dead ancestors is an ideal that I have long disagreed with on principle. (I disagree with most things, so know that.)

Just as an example, Bill Gates is leaving his kids a small inheritance and donating the rest to charity. His kids are getting a few thousand each and that’s it. They have been given every opportunity their father’s wealth could offer them and Bill Gates thinks that that should be enough to give them a future. I’m inclined to agree, but Bill Gates’ children have Bill Gates smarts. They’ll be fine.

Even if Disney kids don’t have Gates smarts, but they have those Disney stacks.

They will also be fine. The Disney grandkids will be fine.

 Now aside from my beef with Uncle Walt, I have several other issues with copyright law.

 I feel that the length of copyright is stifling the creativity of new creators and tying up the creative process in a byzantine-like maze of litigation and paperwork. Newton said that he only got to where he was by standing on the shoulders of giants. The same should apply to scientists and artists alike. They should be compensated during their lifetime and their work honored after their death, and that should be it. I can reference only works created centuries ago, and while I love Lizzie Bennet as much as the next gal, maybe I want to reference something a bit more of the times. Hamlet can make a damn fine Disney film about a pride of lions, but Romeo and Juliet as lions is pretty fuckin stupid. If, god forbid, I wanted to make an animated King Lear but with lions, I would probably get the living crap sued out of me by Mr. Mouse himself. Because Shakespeare is public domain but lions as Shakespeare is strictly Disney. Same goes for the Sherlock Holmes novels, those are public domain but not Sherlock Holmes as mice.

There are authors who hate the idea of people using their works as springboards for their own creative works. Anne Rice, who wrote a popular vampire series, is one such author who goes out of her way to hunt down people who write fanfiction about her works and sues the pants off them if they don’t cease and desist. That’s just mean, in my opinion. If I found out there were people out there who loved my writing so much that they based their own stories around the characters I had written, I would immediately burst into grateful tears.

There’s no such thing as an original idea, that’s why there are so many remakes of the same films, and if there were original ideas, I’m sure they would be bad. Take a look at the emoji movie, sure it’s original, but it’s also a bland, poorly executed cash grab.  Most movies and books are based in some way or another to a previous book or work. The obvious being Shakespeare but Lions, Vanilla Ice Ice, Baby, and of course The Nosferatu/Dracula Debate: Battle of the Vamps. The only thing left to write about are variations of things that happen here in the horrifying confines for reality, which isn’t even a new idea. The Nosferatu/Dracular Debate: Battle of the Vamps was based off a real man, Vlad the Impaler, son of the dragon as he was also known. The same goes for Hamlet, except the lion part, that was creative license, but not Vanilla Ice.

Because Vanilla Ice is a hack who ripped of Queen.

Queen!

Of all bands, how on Earth did he get away with it?

Anyway, that’s all I have for this week’s bonus.

In other news, Anne Rice is a gigantic bitch so I’m going to read, then subsequently write terrible fanfiction about her intellectual property because I’m petty and just have vast acres of spare time to devote to that pettiness.

 Fuck the system.

[carolynjanai-blog]

*x-files theme*

Is the world better for having mysteries or are we better by not knowing things?

Its 100% better to know than to wonder. Hands down.

If you put a locked box in front of a person and tell them it’s very old but not what’s in it, there are two ways a person can react to it. They’ll either want to know what’s inside or not.

Some people like to dream, they might rest their head softly in their palm and wonder what could possibly be inside.

I’m not one of those people.

I’ll be tearing at my hair and pounding on the table, glaring at the box before impatience overtakes me and I begin frantically googling safe cracking methods but then probably end up trying to break it open with my fists and teeth.

I think closure is more important than any mystery. I see the world as merciless, thorny and difficult to see into, let alone understand, which is what I think drives us to discovery and exploration. This thought could be in part due to my being a nosy busybody unable to suppress my natural curiosity or it could be me trying to make the world fit tidily into a box. It won’t of course, but it makes life seem manageable if you can fit even a portion of your understanding into the metaphor box.  So I count learning the contents of a mystery box is a victory over the gaping maw of the abyss.

Knowing anything in such an unfathomable, awful world is a gift and a victory.

Who knows, maybe there are people who’re more satisfied with life and like to think of possibilities but I find that playing the guessing game sends me trotting down Anxiety Road. Give me 20 minutes and I’ll come up with hundreds of ways this box scenario can go down, ranging from a mild surprise to my gruesome death. It’s better to know for sure. I’d rather have conclusive proof rather than wondering if it contains something cool, like a sample of a long dead spore or of an extinct animal. It’s more likely full of dirt or some other useless nonsense but if I don’t break it open, I’ll never know. I can’t NOT know something when it could so easily be learned. Knowledge is the enemy of fear and offers a sense of control.

That being said, the DB Cooper hijacking puts me in a near frenzied state.

The man hijacked a plane, demanded a ransom, was paid by the government and kept the pilot flying the plane but skydived out before the plane landed again. They found some of the money he stole in a creek-bed, but none was ever put back into circulation so he never even spent it. Did he have a hostage situation on his hands? If he did, why wouldn’t the kidnappers spend the money? Did he do what the Joker did in that movie and just set it on fire? What the hell was going on? It’s a mystery for the ages and that just enrages me for no good reason. It’s been over 30 years, how have we not figured this out? Was this a team effort? How many accomplices? It makes me crazy and I can’t say I’m better off knowing about it, but it might come back to me in, like, a cosmic sense.

Either way, some evil genius from 30 years ago is ruining my life with his unsolvable mystery.

…

Maybe it was aliens.

[carolynjanai-blog]

Patriotism Isn’t a Religion and Flag Worship is Creepy

This week’s bonus is a discussion about strawmen, truth, justice, radical nationalism and all that good stuff.

Also, I’d like to discuss the absurdity of idealizing flags and other modes of nonsense nationalist propaganda.

Mostly I’d like to vent my own personal feelings and anger.

Because I’m angry and have no healthy outlets.

Let’s begin.

I hate that every time someone says “hey, racism might exist”, some spray tanned creamsicle-looking asshole goes “hey, you must hate the flag and therefore America.”

God. Fuck. Damnit.

There’s a lot of things wrong with this statement, but let’s start with the obvious.

Taking a stand against inequality and brutality is exactly what a person should do. Saying that protesting police brutality is equal to hating the flag is like saying that the people who protest the pipeline in one of the Dakotas must hate electricity.

It’s like comparing apples to fascist oranges.

So, let’s look at the constituent parts of this clusterfuck.

A handful of people in the public eye take a very public stand against police brutality, something they view as an issue in their country today. They take a 2-minute knee and then resume their activities.

These people happen to be black.

And the President calls them sons of bitches on the news.

Here’s a comparable situation.

of white nationalists and Nazis gather in Virginia carrying torches and chanting anti-sematic slogans while wearing swastikas and carrying torches, generally menacing the public at large for several hours. A person was even killed by a Nazi sympathizer.

And the President says that there were good men in that crowd.

If you don’t see the disparity between these two scenarios, then I don’t know what to tell you. Actually, I have a lot to tell you but I risk editorializing as is.

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend, especially in older, particularly white, generations with idealization of certain “American” values and a bizarre obsession with the American flag.Younger people don’t seem as obsessed for some reason (probably the constant war and insurmountable deficit), regardless It’s especially strange to people from other countries that the flag is literally everywhere.

Look outside any building. Flag.

Look at any shopping plaza. Flags.

Look at the ceiling at a Wal-Mart. A sea of flags.

Look inside. I’m can’t be certain that I don’t have the flag etched into my goddamn bones.

In Europe and literally everywhere else (that isn’t under totalitarian regime), the flag is only outside government buildings.

I could throw a rock out a window here in America and it would bounce of 3 flag poles and knock some yahoo’s flag hat off.

Our loyalty in it is creepily instilled in us from a young age. We pledged allegiance to it every day as children.

Children chanting and swearing undying allegiance to literally anything should make a reasonable person skeptical.

That’s some Children of the Corn level shit.

It’s just that its indoctrinated into our everyday lives, making it seem normal. Which is so clearly isn’t by global standards. Which brings us to nationalism.

You remember nationalism, right? It’s that thing that blinded an already divided Germany with pride and got like a third of the European population killed.

America’s pretty divided right now, wouldn’t you say?

Like, we’ve been pretty divided for a while now (Thanks for advocating a 2 party system, T. Jeffs, you shitty, slave raping fuckwit.) but especially now with racial tensions running high, the gun toting lunatics running wild and people throwing down straw man fallacies left and right in order to excuse these events. (for example, saying that police brutality is not an issue because of black on black crime. One has nothing to do with the other and therefore is a strawman. Somehow this is a common argument against police brutality but I’ll get back to it in a moment.)

The division of America will reach its apex in our lifetime, I think, now more than ever. This movement is transcending generations and races more so now because there is an abundance of concrete evidence of these awful things transpiring. Before nearly everyone in the nation is carrying a camera and a means to distribute footage on a device smaller than a deck of cards, we had to take someone’s word for any accusation. A person’s word has never meant much, especially in a new age of 

Footage that can only be irrefutable proof of two things, that police brutality is escalating OR what we can now all see happening has been happening for years and years.

Remember our old pal the strawman? Well, he’s here in the original argument, too. Trying to refute an opponent’s argument by offering a completely unrelated argument is a yellow card, 2 more and you’re off the field.

Even if taking a knee meant hating the flag and therefore hating America, this has nothing to do with protesting police brutality.

Being a petty criminal doesn’t warrant a person’s public execution by the local police.

That’s a matter worth taking a stand for.

Harmlessly taking a knee during a ballgame as a means of silent protest is a drop in the ocean compared to the outrage a country should feel when private, unarmed citizens are gunned down in the street by overgrown bullies wearing badges.

(I’m late to post this and it went all over the place, but I reached the word count and got my ideas mostly down)

[carolynjanai-blog]

Stephen King Has Taken Enough Of My Money

There’s an interesting psychological phenomenon that goes along with being scared as well as a physiological response that comes along with fright that effect different people differently.

Our physiological journey starts in the kidneys, if you can believe it.

The owner of these kidneys has just seen a spider the size of Delaware.

This sighting has scared the soup out of this person.

When a person sees a spider the size of Delaware and are subsequently scared soupless, their adrenal gland, located at the tip of the kidneys, sends the signal to their brain, which then orders a flood of adrenaline and cortisol. Cortisol triggers our fight or flight response and adrenaline makes us more alert and quick to react.

Now, we all react differently to different stimuli and different amounts of adrenaline and cortisol. People with high stress jobs, anxiety disorders, or just chronic, abnormally high levels of cortisol tend to react less because they’re used to being under pressure or their body constantly has cortisol pumping. Or, on the flip side, they react in a more extreme way because of how much is already in their system to the point of irrationality and hysteria in relatively mild situations. People without these problems can be our control group. They get startled by surprises but they aren’t emotionally damaged by it, but that’s more psychological and an entirely different lecture.

Some people, like the adrenaline junkies outside of our control group, feel the adrenaline and cortisol mechanism as a kind of high, and enjoy trying to replicate the rush via extreme sports and dangerous idiocy (the games “Fire Bop-It” and a St. Louis Snowball Fight come to mind. The usual ways to lose body parts or nerve sensitivity). Others like the rush of being scared, but don’t like the personal risk, so they binge watch TV shows like the Hannibal NBC series or they go to bed early to be alone with their thoughts.

There’s a limit to this high for most people, where it stops being fun and starts to legitimately frighten. Let’s say, I wasn’t scared of IT because I’m not afraid of clowns, but in the film there was a part where the monster was hiding just behind the oblivious protagonist and that really freaked me out.

Maybe being watched from the dark by some unseen being with malicious intent is one of my top three biggest fears and this has the same effect on me as a spider the size of Delaware can have on another person. My empathy makes me feel as though I’m in the place of the protagonist, the sensation of my biggest fear is too much for me to stomach and I have to shut the movie off. I see something scary, cortisol is released, fight or flight is activated and now I’m too scared to even go to the bathroom by myself.

That’s the gist of the physiological effects, now, let’s talk about my favorite hobby, psychology!

There’s about a peculiar psychological phenomenon going on in the millennial generation. The constant war and threat of war, economic uncertainty and even the rapid development of technology has put a tremendous amount of pressure on people during some very formative years and the strain has led to a notable spike of people in their teens and early twenties being diagnosed with anxiety/depression. The rapid change and development of new tech has given a lot of young people a misplaced sense of age and nostalgia. In their lifetimes, they played Oregon Trail on a floppy disk and learned to write in cursive but by the time they were in high school, floppy disks were considered a relic and cursive, a lost art. This generation had such rapid development of these kinds of things, that a new console came out and cycled through households every year. The growth from 8-bit to 144p 3D to HD 3D is a lot to process during early-mid childhood especially when previous, slightly older people went from one blocky game to the next, slightly blockier game.

What does this have to do with horror movies and anxiety? I’m glad you asked!

There are a lot of dirty millennials running around with high speed internet and no money. They are the largest population in the United States right now, even outnumbering the remaining baby boomers, who are still clinging to life with their rat-like claws. Now with the turmoil and misplaced sense of agéd-ness, there is a high number of people desperate for a sense of control in their lives. Horror might seem more popular now because of there are more of this age group than anyone else and almost all of them have access to the internet, which can access any horror movie ever created. That’s about it.

Remember what I said about people binge watching NBC’s Hannibal because they don’t enjoy the personal risk of playing Bop-It over a campfire?

There’s a reason for that! Outside the obvious reason for not wanting to play Fire Bop-It.

Observing terrifying but blatantly fictional things from a soft nest Netflix and blankets is very different from a St. Louis Snow Ball Fight. During an STL-SBF, you can never know if or when you’re going to be beaned in the ribcage by a cue ball going 45mph or if the opposing team has further weaponized their snowballs by putting them in tube socks.

So in other words, you have no control over a dangerous situation and your brain’s old pals, adrenaline and cortisol, are trying to kick you in the pants trying to make you make a decision to fight or fly. But while watching movies, there’s nothing to fight or run from and you’re in no danger.

Sure, the stakes might be high for the battered protagonist, who we of course empathize with, but we’re pretty well acquainted with the formulaic layout of horror movies. Bad shit will happen, but the main character will almost always vanquish the demon or monster or demon-eldritch-clown monster and the suspense we feel as the viewer is more or less a controlled sensation. I know that Agent Will Graham’s going to catch the killer, the lady in Hush will escape and the fine people of Castle Rock and Derry will be alright. Or most of the fine people of Castle Rock and Derry. But even is 5/7 of the towns are destroyed, it doesn’t matter because, most importantly, we know it’s not real.

That gives a sense of control, and that sense of control is what appeals to people because we live in a chaotic and awful world that is beautiful, merciless and on fire.

[carolynjanai-blog]

*Liza Minnelli voice* money...

I think college is absolutely necessary in order to be successful, at least for me it is.

With an increasingly uncertain future looming over the horizon like the grim spectre of death and in a tough job market I think the safest bet would be to go into some kind of medical field, hence the health sciences degree I’m striving for. At the very least a college degree will get me further from what I don’t want in life. I can’t watch a handful of YouTube videos and put it on my resume at a hospital. They require certification of my training and education, so I need college to get what I want in life. I don’t believe I would be satisfied with a life where I didn’t at least have a master’s degree I need to make a decent living, but I don’t have the charm or the intrigue to be as successful because I don’t have the makings of a YouTube star or a big Texan oil tycoon, I have to throw money at garbage institution after garbage institution until they give me a diploma and let me move on to the next garbage institution. I could always try to marry well, but that would include several steps such as finding a rich person, tricking them into marrying me and then subsequently spending the rest of my life avoiding physical contact which is frankly more effort than I’m willing to exude.

All I really want is to have a consistent job with health insurance that won’t compromise my quality of life. For example, big semi-truck drivers make very good money but I would rather swim through a sea of rusty nails than drive a semi. Those trucks are huge and driving one would scare the soup out of me, and the same can be said for any job I can name that didn’t require a degree. They either lack consistency or they’re not safe enough to meet my criteria. Therefore; college is my only option if I wanted to live till the current life expectancy in relative comfort and style. It’s a terrible and expensive option, but it’s all I’ve got and not to editorialize, but I’ve made a terrible and lifelong mistake oh god please help me.

The comfort part is not a guarantee. And the style part is subject to change, but to be fair, nothing is guaranteed. Pretty much nothing can be expected from anything and everything is awful, but it’s a manageable kind of awful because I’m in the same boat as a lot of other people.

Here is some quick prose to summarize my thoughts and feelings on the necessity of college and what an unfair racket it is.

 You can really only hope that the knowledge-trees you tend can bear job-fruit

But your options are raised in a climate in change, and your outlook is terribly poor.

You can beg and you can plead and hope for the best but your dreams are moot

But one thing is sure, I would rather die than be a concubine to an old rich stegosaur