all i gotta say is, if you liked that, and you wanna write it up as “so crazy” or “so cool” or (god forbid) “so feminist”or whatever? zack snyder’s sucker punch is sitting right there, waiting for your apologies, then.
if you don’t want to do that? then don’t do that. because do that and y’all better. you know that’s what you just watched a sequel to.
So one bit of social technology we’ve regressed on lately is repressing memories. Which is a shame, because it’s a great way to elide social tensions or contradictions, often a lot more efficient than the currently popular approach of attempting to rejigger everything to eliminate them, breaking important shit in the process.
(I guess the metaphor would be industrial lubrication, where the problem of metal parts rubbing against each other and causing heat and damage isn’t resolved by separating the parts - whose contact is often the functional part of the mechanism - but by enabling the opposing forces to slide right off instead of accumulating, improving durability.)
And the best part is it requires no external energy source and creates no waste - when you die, as you inevitably will, it all decays to nothing.
(Okay, if you believe the Freudians, it gives rise to weird quirks, fetishes, paraphilias, and psychosomatic afflictions. But come ON, it’s 2015, this is tumblr, “weird quirks, fetishes, paraphilias, and psychosomatic afflictions” are in.)
But why curse the darkness when you can light a candle? So, here, let me share with you an excellent trick for repression I stumbled into when I was a kid.
The way it works is like this: humans can only maintain a limited number of mental “threads” at one time, usually around 7-8. So, when your painful memory intrudes from nowhere, immediately start shoving things into that stack until it’s full and new entries pop the old one out.
And these don’t have to be complex things, I remember some of my go-tos were the silhouette of the state of Kentucky, rainbows, and the number 7. Not anything about rainbows or the number 7, just the fact of them.
By doing that right quick you could clear your short-term memory before it had a chance to “set” in long-term memory, and keep from making associations to other concepts that could trigger further uninvited recollections.
Now, if that were all, it would still be a decent trick, but there’s more. I noticed that as I neared the limit of entries in the stack, they became… abstracted. If we’re carrying through with the computing metaphor, maybe my mind was doing some sort of compression or memory swapping to try to stretch capacity. In effect, it got to a point where as long as I maintained this balance I could examine the painful memory as if it were sealed in a cube of lucite. Reflect on it, rotate it to view from various angles, intellectualize about it, without actually feeling anything about it.
From what I understand, this is close to the concept of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, where you can rationalize through your trauma under the protection of an impenetrable shield of chemical love. Anyway, totally worked 100%. Every time one of those memories came up I’d lock it down, sand a bit of it off, and toss it back into the void. After enough cycles it’d be either polished to nothingness, or by then so distant from where I was “at” to permanently dismiss as irrelevant. At this point I can look back on the stuff I used to shudder at and just laugh, or at least shake my head.
I mean I suppose it’s possible that some memories are too strong, I didn’t actually resolve all my issues and still have some dark secrets buried so deep I’m consciously unaware of them. But that’s still not an argument against efficacy, is it?
Mary is a crane operator at the container port. Her hobbies include playing darts and following the LPGA tour.
Anna is a kindergarten teacher. Her hobbies include horseback riding and following celebrity fashion.
Of the two, one is a lesbian. Which one?
The tediously correct answer is that you don’t know, nothing I’ve told you conclusively establishes the sexuality of either.
But that is what I have told you, that is what I asked, and come on. If your reasoning process can only yield answers you’ve already been told, it’s not much of a reasoning process, now is it?
But okay, thumbs on the scale there. What if I’d only told you that Anna liked female singer-songwriter folk music and Mary was a fan of Taylor Swift?
(All the best Tayswift thirstblogs are run by women.)
Okay, okay. Make it harder. Keep Mary, throw out Anna.
Heather is a professional activist for gay rights. Her hobbies include blogging against the expectation that women will marry a man and bear his children, and following the portrayal of sexual minorities in popular culture.
Of the two, one will marry a man and bear his children. Which one?
Had a dream where someone said Trent Reznor must be the buffest goth ever and I was like “Nah man, The Undertaker. Every year he tops the list in Bulking & Cutting.”
And then I woke up like holy shit.
One of the cool things about being a good storyteller is my dreams (which are part of my mind telling a story to the other part) get absolutely ridiculous.
Children of Men (2006)
The Fifth Element (1997)
24 Hour Party People (2002)
Sucker Punch (2011)
Human Traffic (1999)
So on one hand visually intense one-off SF-ish action with a lot of worldbuilding-by-implication, on the other British humor about clubbing. Okay, I’ll take it.
at some point in our lifetimes the republican party elephant and the democrat party donkey are going to be officially redesigned into elephant and donkey themed cute and sexy gijinka anime girl characters
Do memes count as the successors to political cartoons? It’s a little fucked that we’ve gone from following the adventures of, like, “The Democratic Party” or (multiplevariants of!) “America” to “sadness” and “loneliness”.
I take holidays very seriously. Culture and cultus and all. The thing that most bugged me about the reign of Bush the Younger was declaring September 11th as “Patriot Day”. HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO CELEBRATE PATRIOT DAY? Parades? Barbecues? Mattress sales?
(I threw a Jenga tournament.)
Anyway. Christmas made the transition to post-Christianity pretty well. It’s the feast of one half of the new Santa Claus/Batman dual god, one of the biggest holidays of the year, strong enough that people make up knockoffs.
(and don’t think you’re daring for pointing out that Kwanzaa is bullshit, actual black nationalists realized that by, like, Nia of 1966)
But Easter, man.
I think part of that is the secular aspects haven’t kept up with the times. Christmas gifting went from rare exotic fruits and nuts to rare consumer electronics, Easter from rare chocolate and candies to trivially ubiquitous chocolate and candies.
I mean that’s the only time you get bunny chocolate (pf, no one cares about the Easter bunny) and creme eggs (fair) but psh.
So, ideas:
• expand the egg hunt thing, make it a day for huge scavenger hunts, like the Herald Hunt. (Dave Barry is a national treasure.)
• deprecate it in favor of Good Friday. This sets up a 3-day weekend in its role as “spring festival” and reorients it around death. That’s weird for a spring festival, but it could work. In one direction, as a celebration of the time humanity managed to kill a god, in another set it up as the “Batman” feast, maybe by transposing the Crucifixion elements of Marian cultism.
Fuckin’ A, the Walking Dead code update is solid (aside from the whole thing where it bricks some machines, I guess). It’s like that Metallica update, taking high scores from 100 to 350.
Children of Men (2006)
The Fifth Element (1997)
24 Hour Party People (2002)
Sucker Punch (2011)
Human Traffic (1999)
So on one hand visually intense one-off SF-ish action with a lot of worldbuilding-by-implication, on the other British humor about clubbing. Okay, I’ll take it.
(And yes, I was fond of Fury Road.)
HOW did I forget Interstella 5555 (2003)?
I don’t cry at sad things. (Usually. Fried Green Tomatoes is, say, #12, though the frame story blows. Yay Lilith Fair ‘90s.) What reliably makes me cry is
• spacecraft launches
• bravery set to music
• heroic sacrifice
so this movie gets me fucking bawling, every time. And I love it.
