Week of February 9th, 2020

Forgive me, this one’s a day (update: or two) late. I spent yesterday (update: Saturday) wrapping filming on my movie. Production did not go perfectly, but after all these years, I’ve got a big self-driven project under my belt. It’s a good, strange feeling. I’ll probably edit a rough cut over spring break. Until then, you know how school is. Then we’ve got to do effects and music and sound… it’s a process. I’ve learned to enjoy acting more and more, and I now occasionally fall under the delusion that I might be halfway good at it.

As I think I said before, I’ll tell you more about this whole process another time. And as the weeks go on, I constantly collect tales I can hardly wait to report back on. I hope that school’s going well for you. I’m guessing that it’s finally heated up. At least for me, it looks like the water’s about ready to boil. I’m not sure I have the energy for this shit anymore, which might be a bad sign. We’ll see how I fare this week... In theory, you have some trickier classes this semester, so I hope you hang in there.

As we lamented by text, Yang is out. I feel genuinely sad about losing a candidate which I purportedly supported only in irony—what the hell is wrong with me? First Sky Mother Marianne Williamson, then the Cool Guy who promised me a G a month? And now Boring-but-Safe Moderate Joe Biden is fading fast—though perhaps not as decisively as some outlets suggest in my opinion—let’s hold out for South Carolina. People other than the nice ladies at Indian Gardens are endorsing Buttigieg as if he were a moderate. Senator Sanders is the frontrunner, positioning himself to be several firsts, some mild—first Jewish president, first secular* President in a longass time—some less so—first openly socialist president, though this doesn’t mean a ton—we’ve had plenty of socialist presidents—and the first octogenarian president in office, something which, despite the silly protest of folks of various political perspectives, actually does matter. Humans have an expected shelf life and Bernie was probably “best before” 2002. If we do really go that way, I think Trump wins, but I certainly don’t think it’s a sure thing.

A new disruptive electoral element is former fake Republican mayoral multi-deka-billionaire spending three times as much as all other candidates combined. This motherfucker just drops a cool 400 million dollars on commercials without showing up to a single debate or town hall, making fellow billionaire candidate Tom Steyer look like a little fucking baby, and to my utter shock and horror, it’s working, particularly among black voters—a critical part of Joe Biden’s base—despite stop and fucking frisk. In the states in which he’s running, he’s beating Biden and threatening Sanders as the “moderate” opposition. He could win. This 2016 sequel is going off the rails.

There are, in my opinion, scant few tolerable candidates left in the race. I think now is a good time to remember how comically abusive Senator Klobuchar is to her staff because, well, I just might vote for her.

In more important political news, here’s Joe Biden having a serious conversation with a polar bear. And here’s the President of the United States mocking Michael Bloomberg’s height in a barely comprehensible word salad tweet!

I’m really not sure whether or not you would be familiar with The Moviebob. He’s an old face from the gamergate days—the feminist side. He’s a neoliberal and not a very well-liked guy. I try to track what he does because he’s one of those unique, always wrong voices I think are so valuable. I could go on about his antics all day, but I’ll just share a recent clip in which he gives off extreme supervillain vibes discussing how space travel is more important to him than world peace. I find this mindset positively fascinating as well as pathetic. It’s got this intangible self-important white guy energy that I’m certain Bob would detest if he saw it in a different form, and more deeply, it’s an unmissable expression of the misanthropic pessimism that I think is going to kills us.

The Oscars happened. I’m so glad I don’t care about the Oscars. And not in the way that my film friends don’t care about the Oscars, where they’re a waste of time when they make the wrong choice and an essential part of the art of filmmaking when they make the right one. No, I really do not give a shit either way. I was rooting for Joker to sweep because I thought it would be funny. Parasite, a really great Korean film, won best picture, prompting this instant classic video of an idiot who hasn’t seen the movie declaring that Oscar’s gone woke. There’s something about this uninformed, self-indulgent rage, something about being a living caricature.  Maybe laughing at these clowns is old hat, but being one of them is more so, and it took me a little maturing to see just how funny it is for someone to be just this lame. We live in a society.

Shoe0nhead, who hails from the other side of gamergate long ago, who now spends her days as a brother of Bernard (assuredly a gender-neutral term) slamming the DNC on Twitter, and a YouTuber whom, despite her flaws, I’m a fan of, posted a very good 20-minute video about the abuse of male students by female teachers, and it made my blood boil. I was straight-up triggered by a YouTube comedy video by a self-branded anti-feminist. What have I become?

Loss is an intense emotion. Duh. Well here’s something unsettling! With the help of a lot of ostensibly good-hearted people of remarkably poor judgement, this woman resurrected her deceased daughter in CGI form in virtual reality to give her some parting words and perform a representation of grief to masses wanted to experience a moment of vicarious pain. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming reaction to this experiment was “What the fuck?” But I think it’s worth thinking about more, specifically in the context of Virtual Reality and ignoring the whole performance element to this situation. A creepy VR doll is not the first or only way we preserve an image of the deceased. We’ve been painting, sculpting, and staring at photos of the dead forever, and this comforts us. So one of the following must be true:

• This is just new and feels weird, but isn’t actually fucked up. This is difficult to imagine, but lots of new tech seemed offensive before we adjusted to it.
• This is fucked up and so is keeping photos and videos of deceased loved ones. We should be focused on the present and the future and ought not to keep emotional ties to the past. Iconoclasts rise up!
• The previous but even more extreme. All sentimental media is bad! There’s nothing necessarily wrong with art that conveys ideas or stories, but using media to feel the past again is a form of lying to ourselves, pretending that the past is the present, and we ought to be singularly focused on what we do now and what we do tomorrow.
• This is really fucked up whereas sentimental pictures and so forth are considerably less bad. It’s a matter of degree.
• This is fucked up whereas photos and videos are not because VR is a fundamentally different form of “media” to the image or video which requires a new ethical perspective. This suggests that VR is inherently disruptive to our society in a deep way that we almost certainly do not yet understand.

I really don’t know which one of these is true, and I’d love your perspective. But my gut tells me that reviving simple imitations the dead in a virtual world for personal emotional fulfillment is a form of blasphemy impossible to overstate and this is deeply, deeply sad. I think we need a modern conversation about the benefits of embracing a new stoicism in an age of technology capable of doing this to us.

For something a little closer to home, did you know that the academy has a podcast hosted by the new principal? I didn’t until recently. They’ve had a few familiar faces on, and now my brothers, which I thought was pretty cute. Part of me desperately wants to go on (which I think could be easily arranged) and, calmly and friendlily, hold nothing back. What I won’t do is go on and be an advertisement for the school or crawl back into my juvenile performance of religiosity. I think this will probably have to remain a silly fantasy for the time being.

Denis Prager news! Well, Denis Prager olds, this happened in 2008. Nevertheless, I think this is an important segment I mustn’t overlook. Here’s a two-part article posted by Prager about how his wife should fuck him even when she doesn’t want to because, and I quote,

A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him.

The Prager lore is always deepening.

Well, I think that’s all, I say after writing way to many words. I’m going to have to start cutting these things down probably. Let me know if you’re not reading/enjoying these because I can stop attacking you with them every Saturday if you want. Oh well.

Thanks,
Jacob Morris