Days Of Future Past

They say that the two most powerful words in advertising are “new” and “free”. Well, thanks largely to my habit of collecting rewards points and buying all of my tickets to films, I was able to redeem the offer of a free ticket last Thursday. Which made X-Men: Days Of Future Past the obvious choice to see.

Rather than give a detailed review, I am going to reflect on my reactions to the content.

I think I have the shits.

So, on the advice of a good friend who is now a neighbour, I went to a local rental video outlet and rented a foursome of films on BD. I will talk about what happened with the outlet in question later. For now, I want to talk about something that I think a lot of so-called creative artists need to learn.

Why videogames are not art, and are unlikely to become it anytime soon.

Some time ago now, the great but ailing media pundit Roger Ebert wrote a statement to the effect that videogames are not art. He gave some reasons why. And the whinging from fanboy idiots who were clearly too young to even know what the word Atari means in this particular context was precious to behold. Not because Ebert‘s critique of videogames as an industry was especially well-informed, but rather because the near-illiterate responses betrayed a simple fact about the people making them. Specifically, they had no idea what the word art really means.

Ed Wood. The man, his films, and their meanings.

I will say this much to start with: I am a fan of the films of Ed Wood. In fact, Ed Wood‘s work can be considered a reason to be grateful for the joys of home video and film preservation. Without either of those things, we, the plebs of the later twentieth and early twenty-first century would not be able to enjoy his work. But this also provokes a myriad of questions. Like every celebrity that walks or walked an unusual path, Ed Wood‘s work and life prompts a number of questions that one can learn from by answering.

Much ado about nothing: Christopher Nolan’s Batman films…

I will come out and say this off the bat. I do not “get” the hero worship of the director named Christopher Nolan. No, wait, let me rephrase that. I get it just fine. It is just that once I get it, I do not want it anymore. As I have mentioned, I have insulin-dependent diabetes. I have had it since I was a little shy of ten years old, and have been promised an imminent cure ever since. So when I tell you that “…it’s time for my shot…” offended me more in that moment than two Rain Mans put together, I want you to understand my full meaning here. People who crap on that Christopher Nolan is some awesome director who can not do wrong can blow me. Their opinion has less meaning to me than the life of Jenny McCarthy.

Illusions of life, celebrity, and society, part whatever of millions

As I believe much of the trimmings make clear, I started this journal with one very specific purpose in mind. To add my voice and perspective to the so-called debate about autism civil rights. I say so-called debate because as any person who pays attention to the proper meanings of words can tell you, debate implies something. It implies that there are two (or more) sides to the argument, and both have a certain amount of demonstrable merit.

I am doing this all by myself, please remember…

As I was looking through some old posts and cleaning up some of what I consider to be the worst previously unnoticed mistakes in them, I noticed that the raw URLs of my posts (as opposed to the Shortlinks) were in some cases insanely long. Anyone who was there to witness when I posted a pair of posts about how awesome RoboCop and by extension its director, Paul Verhoeven, were, knows what I mean here.