Okay, for those unwilling to click the link, the story is about a man who died of deep vein thrombosis because he sat and played Xbox for twenty, count ‘em twenty, frikkin hours. Dude, get up and get a soda. The real funny kicker was that the guy was about to go off and “study” video game design at a university, which means that if he hadn’t died here he would have just died later, from the same thing. Hello natural selection. The family is trying to raise awareness for “the health risks of playing online computer games”, which is kind of like raising awareness for the health risk of headbutting bulls: it’s not necessarily the bull’s fault. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hating on the family, this just seems like one of those “the universe despises you, Timmy” moments.

If you’re so deep in your fantasy world that you forget to get up and eat or use the bathroom, it’s probably best that you go softly now, as opposed to in 15 years when you’re paunchy, balding, alone and ugly. Die beautiful, baby.

Fuck, just kill the Roadrunner why don’t you? On the other hand, suck it Illuminati theorists, hahahahaha!

As we currently find ourselves involved in another war, I found it necessary to ruminate over the supposed reasons that have been given. I’ve been told that it’s over oil, to find Bin Laden, or for apple-pie or some shit, but none of those reasons have ever felt right to me. They always rang hollow, not quite getting to the nub of the matter, or outright ignoring certain variables necessary for a convincing model. The theory is flawed. While thinking on this I had a flash of insight that sometimes overtakes the human mind. Thanks to the sort of anarchist nonsense that I tend to feed on, it came to my attention that I was too close to the matter to get a good view of it. Taking a step back and looking at what we are doing without any sort of national pride, and from a more historical perspective, I have realized that we are waging a holy war. Us, the U.S. Not the Arabs. Us. Well, both of us.

Most of the things we have been told are not the reasons we have engaged in war for the past few decades: we are not there for oil. Oil is a reason but it is not the reason; don’t let a former oil-man for president fool you. The “tension” in Libya had gas prices soaring before we let a HEAT fly, and there are plenty of easy ways to make money off oil if you are unscrupulous enough that don’t involve razing the ground over it. I won’t say that oil has nothing to do with these wars, but it’s not why we’re staying over there.

It is not for National Defense. If we wanted Bin Laden, we would find him. Look up “Green Beret” on Wikipedia some time, impressive doesn’t quite cut it. And these guys aren’t even our special forces! We all remember how wrong “Weapons of Mass Destruction” was, and when it comes to protecting the homeland, there are a lot more substantial threats. A nasty place comes to mind, very close to home, run by an evil dictator, riddled with communism (gasp!), mistreating its citizens, and fully willing to commit crazy-suicide war against us: it’s called Cuba.

Heck, the main reason 9/11 was “allowed” to happen was that America was far more concerned with the slew of domestic terrorism that had been happening, and so was not prepared for an extra-national attack. The Unabomber ring a bell? Suffice to say, there were other things on our minds, and for good reason.

Revenge is a silly thing to go to war over, and a silly thing to think we went to war over. Neither was it racism, America is actually smarter than that. It may not seem like it, but we really are. Why worry that someone doesn’t look like you when you can make them think like you? Which neatly segways into the real reason for these wars, religion.

Richard Dawkins called animals “survival machines” in The Selfish Gene, and what he meant was that any creature built from genetics was a tool to ensure the survival of the many genes and genetic material that the machine was built from. Is it simplistic? Of course, it’s an analogy. Dr. Dawkins also coined the term “meme,” the concept of self-replicating ideas that use our minds as an environment. Just as “run” might be an instinctual command from one’s genes, “throw salt over your shoulder” is a habitual command from a meme. In this case, the meme is a superstition, the information form of a virus. It co-opts space in your brain and runtime from your daily activities and replicates itself quite successfully through generations, even though it doesn’t do anything beneficial to the organism it inhabits. And just as the human body can be considered a survival machine for one’s genes, so can a nation be considered a survival machine for a society’s memes. Analogy.

The gene only allows for a society the size of one’s family, it is the meme that swells it to the size of a nation. Numbers for debts and allowances, agriculture for increased food supplies, metallurgy for defense and production, arts, music, language, craft; all these things are ideas that must be learned and are separate from genetics. Humans are special in that we are equally memetic creatures as well as genetic. The nation, however, is almost wholly memetic.

Our nation is built out of certain memetic qualities, some beneficial, some downright cancerous (coughJerseyShorecough), but that’s beside the point. The countries of the Middle East are also built out of certain memetic codes, with a great deal of overlap between them. America has “the Republic,” humanitarianism, Gaiaism, Christianity, and the family heart-history known as Feminism (viral); the East has, well, anything but that. What we have is one organism trying to co-opt the resources – people -  from another organism that shares no family history with it. The common cold is trying to muscle in on the chicken-pox’s turf.

The reason we haven’t pulled out of Iraq is because we are winning. We are converting the country to a western ideology. We are giving birth to our memetic legacy in the minds of Iraqis. Saying it was about spreading Democracy is about the only honest thing Bush said.

People (myself included) are wondering how on earth Obama could possibly think that attacking Libya is a good idea. The answer is simple, he didn’t think at all. No joke here, the memetic code of our society compelled him, and us, to take whatever action necessary to spread western ideology further in the world. The man had about as much to do with it as knocking on the doorframe has with keeping away influenza.

You don’t have to believe me in saying the President had nothing to do with it, evolution works whether you think God started it or not, but it is unassailable that what we are engaged in a war of beliefs; I suppose a better word would be doxa, not religion, or perhaps zeitgeist, though I think that word gets too much attention.

It is the core beliefs we hold, good, bad, or just junk, that compel us to face off against those we do not know because, well, we don’t know them. And for memetics, that is unforgivable. Huh, I guess it is about apple-pie.

So

Pisssssed.

All of the articles that cover the subject assume that it is a wonderful thing for twenzies to be living at home with their parents, still stuck in college, and working half-shifts at the local fast-food joint; you know, the kind of thing it was barely okay for you to be doing your senior-year summer fifteen years ago.

The underlying theme of emerging adulthood is that young people are getting the chance to decide where they are going in life, and to have a few years off from responsibility before diving back into the waters of life. And like all things proposed by psychologists in their off-time, it’s complete swill.

One author, Robin Henig, posits that this is a natural state of being that has been repressed over the centuries and is developing because there is now the opportunity. She implores us to remember how children and adolescents were freed from responsibility and to tender the same to the technically mature.

there was a time before the periods of adolescence and even childhood were recognized, a dark age when people had to marry and bear children young, start working early and never stop, and otherwise do the things that we can now put off; otherwise, they would starve to death or be eaten by bears. Because these young people were not free to choose these burdens for themselves, they were never truly happy. But then man developed technology, and through it, luxury and a growing GDP, and found that he no longer had to subject himself to the grinding impositions of nature for his entire life.

What Henig and many like her fail to realize is that the emergence of adolescence is not a positive occurrence. Numerous articles have already long since been written on the subject focusing on the mistake that extended enforced infancy turned out to be. Articles talking about how minimum-wage, child-labor, and universal-education laws have castrated the young, cutting them off at the knees and forcing them to rely on their parents for longer and longer times. Every one of these writers that enjoys the idea of emerging adulthood runs off the principle of Weltschmerz to a paranoid degree. They all believe that to experience pain is to become a worse person; those who never experience any kind of defeat or disappointment become the best people. It is the rejection of exceptionalism and the unwavering acceptance of blank-slate ideology. It is this worldview that fueled participation trophies and no child left behind, helicopter parenting and baby-Mozart. It is the idea that life can only harm us, that we have lost Eden and can never get it back. It is terribly, sourly pessimistic. I’m with Schopenhauer on this one, “life without pain has no meaning.”

You want to know the real reason your kid is turning into a hipster? The real reason he’s never going to get married, have a career, or develop any kind of a life til he’s past thirty? Because you wouldn’t let him, dumbass! High school wastes away our life by forcing us to “learn” dumbed down minutia and the correct method for taking tests, and nothing else. From birth children are told they can be whatever they want, and so are paralyzed by the sheer number of possibilities, never making any choices until well past the time they should have a career. You go through life doing what you’re told because no one expects you to be capable of self-reliance, and then when you get to college you’re supposed to pick a major! And you’d better not fuck up and choose the wrong one, or you’ll be in debt and have to go back through the process. Why on earth would anyone do anything when to do so requires you to pick a seemingly-random direction in a wide-open plain filled with landmines? And you’re not even sure there’s anything at the end of the path you’ve chosen. No wonder the youth of America has turned to irony, their very existence is ironic.

Twenzies are listless and directionless because they’ve never had a direction, their lives have been mapped out since birth by hyper-concerned parents scared out of their minds by shock-media and now they’re just supposed to make a life? Seriously, Baby-boomers, your expectations of this generation continue to be insane, excessive, and more than a little, ironic.

You brought this abomination upon us, YOU!

The inspiration for this post is a wonderful article by Rita Koganzon, which I implore you to read because it does a better job than I could ever hope to of deconstructing the idea of “emerging adulthood.”

Philosophy is the emotions and rambling thoughts that graze across our minds like buffalo, without any seeming order until that one moment where every animal runs in the same direction. Science, however, is like an ant colony: ceaseless, self-correcting, and unwavering. It is facts, the pure nuggets of unchanging meaning that influence and respond to all forces around it. One without the other is boring, inhuman, and lackluster. How often have you sat in a history class, and wondered to yourself how anyone could ever want to be an anthropologist or archeologist? How often have you had an art class and sat there wondering what in the hell you were going to draw? A quick field trip where you got your own shovel and dug around in the dirt for arrowheads suddenly made that history feel more real, and being assigned a project in pointillism suddenly made ideas spring into your head and onto the canvas.

Our poetry class was pure philosophy, and it was infuriating. I’m by nature a more scientific sort of mind, and this was maddening. We were given a number of poems to read each week, and then we’d send in our opinion of what we thought one pre-chosen poem meant. That’s it. We’d say what we thought, and then hover around making comments on that opinion (it was an online course. Never again.) I paid for what was effectively a circle-jerk. Say something that made you feel good, like you actually had an existence that mattered, and then bask in people half-heartedly patting you on the back because they don’t want to make waves. Here’s a paraphrased quote common to this pathetic excuse for a “class”:

Nice post! I liked how you thought of [insert concept] as the driving force of [name of poem]. I always pictured [name of author] as a more [insert different concept] sort of writer, but you’ve changed my mind.

See how this reads as a mad-lib of pure ego fodder? At no point in the course were we pointed towards sites with interesting essays that drew attention to socially poignant passages, never were we given any sort of information as to the movement the poem or author belonged to, never were we told how certain poems related to each other or differed across authors and ages, never were we shown how a change in the cadence of a stanza implied an emotional state, or even simply asked to identify the type of meter used. Never once were we challenged with the concept of us not knowing Jack Shit! I could have used the book of poetry I got at the Goodwill for a dollar and googled the poems and ended up with the exact same education, for free. The worst part? This was what we also did for our four essays, and the final! Broker an opinion, and then defend it. Oh, and skim the forums for a quote that supports your hypothesis. I did a lot of quote mining. When I saw that the final was a timed version of the shit I had done all semester and worth a fifth of my final grade, I nearly broke down crying. At least with the essays I could take a break and bang my head against the wall in impotent frustration at this waste of time, but not here. There was no structure.

In life you are of course expected to work in a pure state of either degree, but only after a great deal of experience has gotten you into the habit of easily flowing from one to the other; an artist chooses a popular form of expression in order to test his creativity, a scientist comes up with a brand new way to consider natural forces and formulae in a theory that is well established. You are comfortable with your chosen mindset. In a class named Intro to Anything you cannot work in the extreme, you must balance the two. You cannot throw someone into the sea of art and expect them to start swimming, nor can you bury them under facts and think that they will be capable of movement beneath it. You must give your students the tools necessary to continue in a given field and drill them relentlessly in their use, all while leaving them room to process and store the information in a way unique to them. You must make them comfortable with the subject. It’s why Biology has a lab almost immediately after the class, and why Portrait 2 goes over lines, negative space, and the basics of color at the beginning of the semester.

But, my 102 teacher seems to have a good understanding of this. Our first project on the very first day at the end of class was to fish out a fortune cookie, crack it open, and then use the message inside to begin or end a short story, and then when time was up (I estimate about ten minutes) you passed what you had written to someone else and they finished it, ending on their fortune. Creativity under constraint. We had a nice petri dish made out of an insipid quote and we smeared it with whatever and watched what grew. We had a seed to work with, a constant in an ocean of variables.

I understand that teaching doesn’t come easy to everyone, but isn’t everyone required to take a class on teaching to be allowed to teach? What are they covering in this class? It certainly isn’t the necessity of basics. The left hemisphere is just as important as the right, but you need both to have a brain.

Heavy boots stomped down the corridor, echoing back and forth across the hewn stone. Torches jutted out of their brackets and sent long shadows dancing alongside the rebounding clamor. A small shadow detached from a larger well of darkness and padded softly down in the opposite direction of the patrolling guards.
The Earl of Dui’u strode around the map table in the center of his War Room, carved figurines representing platoons of soldiers in the field. The Earl moved a few with meticulous care, surrounding a company of opposing troops in a preemptive pincer strike.
“A most prudent maneuver, my lord.” A sycophantic retainer whimpered to the Earl. A modestly attired man-at-arms rushed in.
“My lord, someone has infiltrated the castle! He’s already killed five guards and wounded four others!”
The Earl gestured to the councilors and officers in his company, dismissing them. He turned to the messenger.
“Rouse the garrison, inform Captain Karle, and lock down the castle; I don’t want him to escape.”
“Yes, my lord.”
The soldier ran off to complete his tasks, and the Earl began donning his armor with the help of the few guards that remained. With his battle dress comfortably arranged, the guards took up position near the doors to the chamber. Sounds of clattering chainmail and marching boots rang through the castle, growing and fading as the soldiery searched for the intruder.
The Earl began to grow bored and annoyed, his castle wasn’t so large that this infiltrator could avoid his forces with impunity. The Earl was about call for a runner to find out what was taking so long when an explosion rocked his fortress. A messenger burst into the room and was nearly cut down by the guards at the door.
“My lord, someone has set fire to your oil supply!”
The Earl cursed, he had been planning on catapulting jars of flaming oil over enemy forces in the coming campaign, and oil was always a superior form of illumination to torches. Another messenger followed the first in at a dead run.
“My lord, they’ve set fire to the lumberyard!”
The Lord Dui’u slammed his mailed fists onto the war table and bellowed his frustration. Without that lumber, his plans for a Spring-march on the neighboring barony were pointless.
“Find this antagonizer and bring him to me alive! And put out that fire, I want as much of that lumber saved as possible! Well? Get out, all of you!”
The messengers and guards left the room to search and fire-fight as fitted their natures. The Earl paced back and forth, wondering who could possibly give him so much grief. Assassins would not have bothered with the oil and lumber, and a saboteur would not have riled up the guards first. A noble enemy would raise an army against him, and a spy would not have attempted any of this. So who did that leave?
The Earl was interrupted from his rumination by a commotion directly outside his door. Just as he reached for his sword, the door exploded open as a bloody and beaten guardsman flew through to lie broken on the ground. Framed in the doorway stood a young peasant woodsman, a mad fire gleaming in his eye and blood dripping from the axe in his hand.
“My lord Trellin of Dui’u.”
“Before you, Peasant.”
“I have come to lay a claim before you. You killed my family and burned our home down to cinders, and now I demand your blood in turn for the damages you have wrought.”
“You are a serf, boy, you have no right to demand of me anything.”
“I have the right of the strength in my arm, and I will have satisfaction.”
“Know your place, villein, I will strike you down here for your treachery.” The Earl drew his sword as he finished and launched himself at the youth. The sylvan avenger drew a short sword he had in his belt with his off hand and went to meet the Lord. The Earl’s blade was caught on the hilt of the boy’s sword, and he was forced to retreat as the gored axe swept up at his jaw. The woodsman pressed his advantage and rushed at the Earl madly, raining blows on his opponent that were deftly turned aside by parry or armor. The mad gaze never wavered from the Earl’s face as they chased each other around the room, trading superiority in a dance of inevitable mortality. The Earl tore an unlit torch from the wall and gained some small dominance, until the hunter who so thirsted for his death split it down the middle with his axe and tore it from the Earl’s grasp.
The youth’s sword was soon marked beyond hope, and the Earl’s as well. The boy made no effort to save his blade’s edge as he parried, and the Earls great sword was marked in turn as it bit edge to edge with the short arm. The axe gleamed evilly, still sharp and menacing, so great was the force placed behind it that the Earl simply dodged rather than chance a guard.
The Earl soon began to tire, his armor and the insane determination of his enemy wearing on him. He made the decision to trust fate, allowing his superior experience to guide him. On the next swing of the deadly axe, the Earl of Dui’u angled his blade under its menacing advance and killed its momentum. The remainder of the force behind the blade sent it into the Earl’s armor, and he felt it tear into his body. The Earl quickly freed his sword and sent it down to the boy in a mighty overhand blow. The young assassin brought his marked and tattered shortblade to bear, but the swing was too great, and it bit deeply into his collarbone.
The Earl drew back, but was halted as the damaged blade caught in bone. The youth grabbed his sword-arm in an iron grip. The woodsman drew his foot up and kicked his axe free of the Earl’s armor, then quickly brought it down on the Earl’s knee. With his leg felled from under him, the Earl dropped. Once more, the youth kicked his axe free.
“My father had no money to pay your taxes so you could run off and play war, we couldn’t even feed ourselves, so you killed him. ‘Make an example,’ you said. They killed my father, they killed my brothers, they raped my mother, and then they killed her too. I was in the forest when it happened. I defied your laws from that day; I stole your game, I killed your men, I watched them train and learned to fight as they did; better. Now I have burnt your home and dreams, as you did mine, and with my father’s axe, I put an end to all of it.”
The Earl tried to pull his sword out, but its notches were caught too firmly in the boy’s collar, and the grip on his arm was as solid as granite. The Earl drew a dagger from his belt, but the young warrior kicked it aside and brought his axe down in a mirror blow to the Earl’s. The axe bit deeply into the Earl’s cranium, splitting his head as deftly as all the logs it had split so many years ago. The boy released the Earl’s lifeless hand and picked up the short sword he had dropped just as a squad of guards rushed into the room. They all stopped dead as they saw their deceased lord before them. The boy stared at them and then smiled, his gaze adamant and humorless. With a quick motion, he plunged the sword into his heart. The guards stared at him in wild disbelief; in death, he stood, axe in hand.

Holy crap, I love this movie. I’ll be honest, I’m a Nicholas Cage fan. I can’t really explain it, but I love the guy. He’s as bad as he is good, and at the same time. I’ll also say that Cage seems to get better the more facial hair he grows, don’t ask me how, and he sports some nice face-fuzz in this movie.

The movie didn’t start off well, opening matinee and I was the only one in the theater, not a good sign. The previews started with no sound, and the camera operator had to stop and restart the film multiple times in the first few minutes. After that, though, everything went smoothly.

I went into this movie thinking it was going to be another “stupid christians burning innocent people, haha” flick, but was pleasantly surprised that it was something else entirely. I knew that the main girl was a “witch” because of the trailers, but I wasn’t really sure of anything else beyond that, supernatural or otherwise. The opening sequence quickly made it clear that in this movie, there are fucking witches. Damn skippy, there are witches. This is less Lord of War and more Lord of the Rings. The girl herself quickly shows how manipulative and seductive she can be, playing at the protagonist’s heart-strings like a concert pianist. Nicholas Cage plays the main character, a knight who signed up for the Crusades and deserted alongside his best friend the second it was clear they were just slaughtering civilians. The friendship between Cage and Hellboy’s Ron Perlman is self-evident and well constructed; at no point does their relationship feel forced or phony. The two characters are caught traveling through a plague-town and are brought before the local Cardinal, who himself has the plague. As deserters, they are given a choice, transport the witch to a monastery to be cleansed, or face the punishment for desertion. After seeing the girl’s torture markings (obviously displayed for his benefit), he agrees to transport her on the condition that she receive a fair trial. The party enlists the help of a “relic” merchant, saving him from the stocks, and set off with personal priest in tow (pocket priests, three easy payments of $10.95, call now!) Along the way they pick up the altar boy they met in the Cardinal’s room who followed them and proves himself to be quite good with a sword.

The movie switches gears smoothly, starting out as your basic “religion ebil” picture that has the main character involved in one of the bloodiest religious wars in recorded history. This is focused by many subtle hints: the barbarism of the Medico Della Peste carving into the Cardinal (Christopher Lee, squeee!) offscreen as another priest loudly reads scripture, the devout belief that the plague is sent by a witch, Cage’s character mentioning that he is well aware of how the church finds its confessions, and endless shouting by the army’s priest that they are doing God’s work and that their enemies are disciples of Satan. Then things begin to get a little weird. The girl exhibits unnatural strength for a woman her size when she was supposed to be sedated, she speaks a little too eloquently for a simple woman in the condition and situation she’s in; and when she finally escapes, the tension rises as you wonder whether she’ll get away, or start picking off the group like space marines in an Alien movie. It becomes blatantly clear that the woman is a witch and suddenly it’s a race against everybody getting straight murdered by the bitch before they can reach the monastery. At the end, we have the best action sequences I’ve seen in a long time, even though I’ve seen them done before because in this movie they actually work. The pacing is fantastic and the middle half with have you squirming, with the last quarter clenching your fist in excitement.

The editing started off pretty bad. There was a scene in the beginning that just felt completely off, but the editor seemed to get his act together and the rest of the movie flowed well. The same could be said of the director, the beginning shots were poorly framed and slightly haphazard, but it improves and at the end you get some breathtaking visuals and cinematography. My ear has sadly rusted over the years, so I can’t really opine on the score, I simply never take note of it in any movie, really.

The choreography was fantastic, lending to some wonderful fight scenes throughout. I’m particularly pleased that they used the correct swords in the movie, and the correct manner of handling them. The fights feel good, and fit into the story well. It’s nice to see someone fire a crossbow bolt, and then smack an enemy with the damn crossbar afterwards.

The makeup is well done, everyone looks grubby and the plague is visceral, making it nicely realistic. The costuming is average for this type of movie, and you can’t really get better than that without looking ridiculous, so I think they did very well.

The special effects are muted throughout the majority of the movie, opting instead for good old makeup. But when it does start using CGI, boy howdy, does it roll out the graphics. When CG is used, you know that something evil this way comes.

The acting was split, the extras are half-hearted and pretty much useless, but the actors themselves all did fantastically. Cage kicks ass (further than he usually does), The priest, played by Stephen Campbell, does his job phenomenally well, and the girl who plays the Black Witch, Claire Foy, plays her part perfectly. She acts innocent and helpless but quickly turns manipulative and threatening the second the jig is up. Finally, the performance of the altarboy-turned-knight by Robert Sheehan was perfect, making you worry about the boy as being too young for this mission, and then completely turning it around at the end knowing that he’ll get the job done and watch his friends die if he has to.

The writing was fantastic, from beginning to end, and is possibly the only unmarred aspect of the movie. The story works fantastically, and builds on itself making you cheer for the good guys and cheer even harder when the bad guy gets it. It takes your preconceptions about religion, horror-fliks, witches, and Nicholas Cage and twists them until they dance to its tune, laughing as it does. You begin by thinking that christianity is naive and misguided, and in the end it is the holy that unquestionably triumphs. The movie covers many stories, from temptation and deceit to coming-of-age and redemption, and tells them well. The twist at the end is two things that are important in twists (Shaymalan, pay fucking attention): a) not very twisty, and b) shocking and surprising in a way you would not have thought.

It has to be mentioned that the good guys are definitely guys, and the baddy is a girl. Specifically, only girls. All the witches are women, and I can hear feminists across the land breathing in for a good screech. Well, if they ever actually watched a Nicholas Cage movie. The men who make up the escort party are all fine examples of honor, piety, respect, strength, and valor; well, except for the merchant, who at least tries. Cage’s character shows mercy to the girl, less because she’s a girl, and more because he no longer wants to see innocents harmed. Once he realizes she’s definitely a witch he stares her down with a loaded crossbow in her face. When the shit starts flying, all the men hunker down and plow through it, showing bravery and determination in the face of adversity and unreasonable odds. It’s not perfect, Cage’s character gets a little pc at the end, but overall it sends a good message to young boys. The knighting ceremony in particular will have some people sniffling (guilty).

So if you like thrillers where you’re never sure who’s going to bite it next, watch Season of the Witch. If you like fantasies where amazing and incredible shit flies at you from every angle, watch Season of the Witch. If you’re a Nicholas Cage fan, fucking watch this movie! If you need a film to get you in the mood for your D&D session (no judging here), buy this movie once it comes out. If you like a good old-fashioned story that doesn’t try to slam political rhetoric down your throat or coddle you like a child, you will love this movie. It’s intelligent, warming, and exciting at all the right points; this is a good movie.