Bryce Moore's Blog, page 189

The Evolution of Time Travel Movies

In honor of #FutureDay, Denisa and I watched the entire Back to the Future trilogy with TRC and DC. I had forgotten just how fantastic the first movie really is. Compact, fast moving, great characters. Really just a gem. Absolutely loved it. But today’s post isn’t about the first one. It’s about the second.

When BttFII came out, I remember hearing a fair bit of complaining about it. (Disclaimer: I was eleven when it came out, so I could be off on my memories.) Looking over some of the reviews from then, critics generally accepted it for the zaniness that it was intended in, so maybe my recollections are wrong. Personally, I recalled the movie being pretty thoroughly confusing. Multiple timelines, alternate presents, repeating pasts, duplicate characters. It was hard for me to keep them all straight.

TRC had no trouble with it at all when we watched it. Now, of course there’s a chance that he’s just plain smarter than I was (a fair possibility), but I also think time travel has come a long way in movies since the days of Marty McFly. What movies did we have before then? Time Bandits, Terminator, Time After Time, The Time Machine, Philadelphia Experiment, Peggy Sue Got Married, and the like. Bill and Ted came out the same year as Part 2 did. The majority of those time travel films are pretty straightforward affairs. People go back in time or forward in time, and that’s about it. Pretty vanilla, when you get right down to it.

Think about the time travel movies we’ve had since then. Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, Primer, Terminator 2, Donnie Darko, Looper, 12 Monkeys, Midnight in Paris, FAQ about Time Travel, Interstellar. I’d argue that time travel has come a long way. The movies that explore it aren’t content to just have characters go one direction. They’re exploring the possibilities. The science. The pitfalls.

Watching Back to the Future Part 2 wasn’t confusing at all for me now. Was the original Doctor Who full of time travel zaniness? I wonder if I’d been a Whovian earlier, if the film wouldn’t have left me dizzy when I first watched it. Even if it was, the fact is that popular audiences have gotten the hang of time travel. There’s no longer a need (typically) to have a Doc character explain what’s going on in long swathes of exposition. We’re up and running with new and crazy plots in no time.

At least, that’s how it seems to me. What about you? Am I missing some key movies? Does this hypothesis hold water? Let me hear what you have to say.

Deep Thoughts for a Friday

Believe it or not, sometimes I have thoughts that I just don’t want to put down on this blog. Big thoughts. Deep thoughts. But they’re thoughts that I don’t really want to explore too much. Whether it’s that I don’t want to think about them too much, or that I superstitiously worry that by writing about them, I might attract the attention of unwanted things. Though really, I think it all boils down to one thing: that I worry that I won’t be able to get the essence of what I mean down into a form that other people can understand what I’m trying to say.

We read things online, and we want to label them. We want to file them away and forget about them, ignore them, agree with them, but be done with them. At any one point in time, I might be reading about the most recent quantum theory discoveries one moment and then learning what an old friend’s dog was up to the next. You’d figure one of these would get more attention from my mind than another, and they usually do. But you’d be hard-pressed to know which one. Sometimes it’s the discoveries and sometimes it’s the dog.

If I can’t even pay attention to important things for longer than a couple of moments, how can I trust other people with some thoughts? What if they only read them for a moment and then dismiss them? Or what if (even worse) they never even feel like clicking through to read them at all?

Writing a blog the way I do (and following the page count statistics as I try not to but inevitably do anyway), it’s hard not to boil down my posts into categories of my own. Successful. Thought provoking. Quickly forgotten. Ignored. Controversial. There have been a few times that I spent a good deal of thought and effort on a post, only to have it get swallowed up and forgotten. Was it not as interesting as I’d thought it had been? Did I say something wrong?

It’s not like I lose sleep over the idea, but the feeling isn’t something that goes away. It’s there in the back of my mind each time I write a post. Each time I put some of myself out there. I don’t generally mind putting myself out there. That’s why I write, after all. But it’s why I can’t write some things. Or at least, why I haven’t been able to write some things yet.

What sort of things?

Fears, often. Worries. Personal concerns. Ironically, they’re the sort of things that I’d probably benefit the most from sharing. The sort of things that other people have experience dealing with, and that I’d be helped by exchanging ideas about them. But no one talks about them. No one seems to discuss them. And so the thoughts end up like Middle Schoolers at a dance, all of them wanting to do something, but none of them actually daring to start it. Too worried about what other people are thinking.

Forgive me for getting a bit broody today. Friends of the family have been dealing with the death of a child, and that can’t help but make me introspective. I look at my own children sometimes and I wonder. Do they know what I feel about them? Do they know how much I’d love to just hold onto them and never let them go, but at the same time how much I want them to be able to fly off and succeed and never look back? How I worry some nights that something might happen to them, and worry other nights that something might not? Sometimes it feels like my family (loving wife, happy children) is like a wisp of smoke. Visible, present, but fleeting and gone the moment you try to hold onto it. The slightest puff can make it disappear, but if you try to hard to keep it a certain way, it dances around your fingers and is gone just the same.

In the end, life is something that can only be done by living. You can try to video it, or record it, or write about it, but none of that really replaces what lies at its core. It’s Wily Coyote running out over that ledge. Think too hard, and it all becomes incredibly difficult. Just keep pumping your legs, and you can go on running for miles.

Like I said. Some thoughts, I just can’t get down on paper. No matter how hard I might try. Catch you all on Monday. Maybe I’ll be less introspective and reflective then.

Movies to Avoid: Lucy

I know I typically just review things I like. Things I enjoyed. That’s mainly because I don’t have time for anything else. If I’m not enjoying something, I don’t finish it, and if I don’t finish something, I don’t review it. But when I’m sick, those barriers fall down. I have nothing but time, so I’m less picky about what I watch. Anything to take my mind off being sick.

Although sometimes I might wish I’d spent my time differently.

Lucy is one such time.

I hadn’t heard great things about it, but I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Scarlett Johansson. Luc Besson. Morgan Freeman. It couldn’t be all bad, right?

Wrong.

It wasn’t a complete failure of a film. There was enough in it to eke it up from a 0 star experience to a single star experience (out of five). The actors gave the script a solid effort, but the script just kept getting in the way.

My biggest beef with the movie was the loose way it played with the superpowers Lucy gets. The plot is simple. Lucy gets drugs that unlocks the full potential of her brain, and she’s being followed by people who want to kill to get those drugs back. Sure, the science is garbage (people use 100% of their brains all the time), but I’d hoped to get around that by just treating the film as a superhero movie. No one demands to know what kind of radioactive spider bites Peter Parker, after all.

But it doesn’t work even for that. Her powers are conveniently all powerful when they need to be, and then conveniently impotent when that’s called for. With a wave of psychic energy, she can incapacitate a room full of people, and yet when a single person comes to attack her with a gun, there’s not a thing Lucy can do.

Garbage.

It’s a pet peeve, I’ll admit it: people who dive into fantasy with no real understanding of how fantasy actually works. “It’s magic,” they say. “It can do anything we need it to. Just keep blowing stuff up, and people will love it.” Blarg. Without rules, then none of it makes sense. Without rules, I feel no tension for the main characters. Try playing a board game without rules. The pieces might be shiny, but pushing wooden doodads around a cardboard tray gets mighty old mighty quick without rules.

And so Lucy is ultimately a failure. Which is sad. And it made money at the box office, which is even worse. Because it means we’ll be subjected to more approaches like this one.

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

The Wire 1:9 and 1:10

Man. Now we’re really getting into the thick of things on the show, at least as far as the first season is concerned. Lots to discuss this week, so let’s dive right in.

Episode 1:9

Bubbs is an awesome character. He’s someone we like. Someone real. He’s one of the most likable characters on the show. Maybe *the* most. He has a good heart. He cares about other people.

He just happens to be a junkie.

So when we have Walon talking about “hitting bottom” and how that’s usually something that doesn’t happen until druggies get older, it’s easy to see Bubbs thoughts as he hears it. And when Bubbs almost dies in an effort to get drugs that don’t even turn out to be drugs?

We can understand why he suddenly really wants to get clean. We sympathize with him. Root for him. And the only real thing standing in the way of Bubbs and a cleaner life is . . . Bubbs. There’s no red tape for him to deal with. No evil henchmen who he has to answer to or provide for. There’s just Bubbs and his addiction. But unfortunately for Bubbs, those addictions can be much worse than red tape.

It’s hard to have any real hope for Bubbs. And yet we have it anyway.

Meanwhile, other ares of the plot continue to unfold. I love the sequence where Lester describes the efforts the cops need to go through in order to trace the money of the case, even as I remember how that ended up the last time the team tried it. Money connects to unexpected people. People in power. Daniels clearly doesn’t want to go there. He’s seen what his higher ups think of that and how they respond.

Lester doesn’t care. He finally has a chance to start doing what he’s always dreamed of doing, and so he goes after it with a dogged determinedness. Prez is all too happy to go along, just excited that anyone has anything resembling a compliment for him.

Omar, meanwhile, continues to show just how good he is at playing this game. The only thing that can get in his way is bad luck. If Wee-Bay hadn’t come back when he did, Avon would be nothing more than a corpse leaking blood. But Wee-Bay did. Even Omar can’t plan for everything.

I really enjoyed this episode. Plot advancement across the board. Interesting things happening everywhere you look. Characters developed. Television operating on all cylinders. You get pampered, watching TV like this. Compare it to some of the other shows out there. Shows with plenty of padding and fluff.

9/10 for me. Great stuff.

Episode 1:10

Wow. I’m kind of wishing that somehow things had worked out for this not to have been the second episode I watched this week. It feels like an awfully long time to be stuck with this cliffhanger. Then again, this is really an excellent example of how well this show is working by this stage of the game.

Then again, as I think about it, I’m hard pressed to know exactly why this is. The “cop in danger” storyline is far from new, and the specifics of how this plays out aren’t groundbreaking in any way. True, we know Kima, and we like her a lot by this point. She seems much more vulnerable in her “cute girl” get up. Much less like Kima. But even so, what’s different in The Wire that made me have a sick feeling in my stomach as this all played out, despite the fact that I knew at this point what was going to happen in advance?

I think the biggest thing is how this show treats reality. It does its best to show us things as they really are, warts and all. How frustrating is it to see the Wire division start to make real progress in their efforts, only to be continually shot down by higher ups who don’t want to try anything too risky. Who want this all done and shuttered, so they can go back to the way things are. Why can’t it be different? (There will be answers to that in the seasons to come. Though they’re not spelled out for us, typically.)

In this episode, Omar does a very non-television thing: he leaves town. In your typical series, the Omar/Avon plotline would end with one of them getting killed. With the violence escalating week after week until there’s a dramatic showdown and climax. In this? He hops on a bus, because he knows full well that Avon’s people want him dead, and he doesn’t want to die. A character making a decision in his own best interest? That doesn’t feel very Hollywood to me.

Wallace is brought out to the country to live with his aunt, because the police don’t have the budget or desire to put a teen up for six months, even if that teen is a key witness in their case against the Barksdales. On your normal detective show, they’d have the money. They’d protect Wallace, and then Avon would figure out a way to try to kill him anyway. In this show? They send him off to his aunt with a pat on his head and some discussion about crickets.

So it’s because the show is so firmly rooted in reality, in normal decisions, that Kima’s peril is so real. (It also helps that she’s Bubb’s big chance at getting clean and staying clean. She can’t die now. What will Bubbs do?) The whole operation is a mess to begin with. It’s too hard to have this go down without a hitch. It would require our drug dealers to be stupid, and they’re anything but.

Because Avon and Stringer are such good villains (so smart, so cunning), the show is able to break out of its stereotypes and become something much more. Though let me reiterate: The Wire is so much more than a cops and robbers show. It’s not Law and Order, even if at this stage of the game you still think it is. There’s been nothing to make us believe otherwise.

Just wait.

Anyway. This is a fantastic episode of television. It gets a 10/10 from me. What have you thought?

Sick, Sick, Sick

Sorry folks. I’m just not up to posting today, which ought to give you a good idea of how I feel. I’ve been sick over two weeks now with a bug that seems to keep switching up on me. It started with tired and dizzy, moved into a bad head cold, and now this morning decided dizzy was what it really wanted to be after all.

So I’m headed to the doctor, where I’ll mostly be told to get plenty of rest and drink lots of liquids. But on the off chance that it’s something else, I’d better get it checked out.

In any case, I leave you with this short clip that about sums things up for me at the moment. Things worked out pretty well for Cameron in the end. I’m hopeful they go that way for me, too.

30 Years of Nintendo

The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is 30 years old today! Hard to believe I was seven when it came out. It went on to play a significant part of my life, as I’m sure it did for many other people my age. When I look at my kids and see what they have available to them as they’re growing up, it’s hard for me to imagine where gaming will be 30 years from now. But for today, I just wanted to take a minute and go over my fondest NES memories.

I first saw an NES at my cousin Dave’s house at a sleepover. It was pretty much the best thing ever. Those graphics! That sound! The gameplay! He had a few games for it, including the requisite Super Mario Bros and Duckhunt, plus a wrestling game, and . . . some other ones I’ve forgotten. My gaming up to that point had been on the Atari, so pretty much anything was a step up. (Sorry Pitfall Harry. Just keepin’ it real.)

After being exposed to the wonder of 8 bit gaming, I immediately went into wheedle mode. How could I get my parents to get me one of those things?

Long story short? I couldn’t. Not for several years. (Was it years? I’m not honestly sure. It felt like decades.) Until, that is, the family bought a conversion van. You remember those? The behemoths that had TV/VCRs built into them? Not to mention an NES? Car driving would never be the same. My siblings and I burned through many a happy game in that van. I remember pleading for a drive to last a little bit longer so that we could find a save point in the original Final Fantasy. Going to the video store to rent a bunch of games before a long trip. Teaching my brother Wilson how to play Big Bird games.

Those were heady times, my friends.

Zelda, Mario, Final Fantasy, Metroid, Double Dragon, Contra, Duck Hunt. I still own a fair number of my old game cartridges. Because pack rat. Amazing that 30 years later, my son would recognize those same games, and many of those series are still going strong. (I don’t miss blowing into the cartridge to get it to work, however. Glad those days are behind us. Now we just have to deal with scratched discs occasionally. (Though the last few games I’ve bought have been completely digital, so I suppose the only things left to worry about are bugs and crashes and corrupted save files.)

I remember getting every issue of Nintendo Power and devouring it for cheat codes and strategies. Swapping gaming stories with friends at lunch in sixth grade. Wondering in awe at the glory of the Konami cheat code. (UUDDLRLRBA, baby!) Watching The Wizard, stunned by the brilliance of Mario 3.

We’ve come a long way, peoples.

In any case, happy birthday, NES! Thanks for countless hours of time successfully wasted. Any of you have any particular memories of the system stand out?

Book Review: Shadows of Self

Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was in Brandon’s writing group back in the day when he was originally drafting Mistborn. As such, I never really got a chance to read the series the way most people have. I saw it stretched out over months, as we tackled a chapter or so a week. That’s how I read half of the first and all of the second and third books in the series. To this day, I still haven’t sat down and read the final versions of the second and third books. (I own them. Maybe I should get around to doing that. The thing is, I talked about those books and the ideas behind them with Brandon and other writing group members for years. I’m much more familiar with them than I am with any other book I’ve just read once. It’s the same reason I typically don’t reread books of my own once they’re finished. It’s hard to approach them fresh and get the same enjoyment out of them, even though I love them.)

So it’s a blast for me to be able to read new Mistborn books the same way everyone else does: all at once, after they’re all polished and shiny. Shadows of Self is a fantastic outing in the Mistborn world that Alloy of Law explored. More than that, it’s a great book in its own right, and the start of a new Mistborn trilogy.

One thing Brandon has always done extremely well is plotting and being able to chest his cards until the right moment. He’ll leave tidbits and hints peppered throughout books, and sometimes those hints don’t make sense until multiple books have gone by. That’s what Shadows of Self felt like to me: the pay off of some setups Brandon had hidden way back when. It’s the sort of book that makes you want to re-read earlier books, just because it’s changed the way you view those earlier books.

And somehow, he never fails to surprise me. There are things in this book that I didn’t see coming. Things set up long before. Very nicely done.

What’s it about? The book traces the conflict and struggles of a large city in a wild west setting. A city on the brink of rebellion and anarchy. There are huge class struggles and corruption in the government, and it’s up to one law man to solve a mystery, find a killer, and bring everything to a happy ending. What does he have available to get the job done? Quick wits, six shooters, and some killer magic.

Will you like the novel? If you’re a Sanderson fan, then of course you will. That’s a no brainer. If you’ve never read a Sanderson book, the good news is this is a great place to start. It’s the beginning of a series, and it’s a fast paced book that I think should make sense regardless of whether you’ve read the earlier Mistborn books or not. Better yet, it’s so different from typical fantasy. Hard magic in the wild west? How can you not like that?

In any case, do check this one out. It’s a fast read and a lot of fun.

View all my reviews

Missions, Medicine, and Sensational Journalism

So an article appeared two days ago in Slate, detailing all the problems Mormon missionaries are apparently having with getting medical care while they’re out in the mission field. Not surprising, you might say. A lot of those missionaries are going to third world countries, and the access to top rate medical care would naturally be more difficult there. But you’d be wrong. The article isn’t about that kind of trouble; it’s about mission presidents refusing to let their missionaries go to the doctor or to the hospital, even when those missionaries have lost 75 pounds or more.

Before I really launch into this, I want to put up a disclaimer. I’m fully confident that some of these problems do indeed exist on missions. Any time you have 80,000+ people serving under 406 different mission presidents, you’re going to have a grab bag of results, plain and simple. (One of the best pieces of advice I got before my mission was “If you can think about it, a missionary has done it, and is probably doing it right now.” It helps not to go into a mission with rose-tinted glasses. They are far from perfect.) So I don’t mean to disparage individual stories or even call them into question. If the Slate article had been content to simply describe the problem that has been seen among some missionaries, I’d have been all for it. I’ve seen personally some examples

But it didn’t just describe the problem. It decided to make that problem as sensational and shocking as possible. Any article on Mormon health issues that manages to drop in facts like women not having the priesthood, missionaries not being allowed to masturbate (because it leads to the “gross sin of homosexuality”), and then claims the church refused to be interviewed for the article (implying a cover-up) leads one to question just what sort of an agenda the author of the story has. Or how anout this gem of a quote:

According to one former missionary, you can walk into any Mormon church in the country and hear of how a missionary overcame certain death with the help of the spirit. One tale recounts the story of a missionary who was run over by a bus. The wheels of the bus ran over this missionary’s head, the story goes—but he emerged unharmed, protected by the spirit.

Do I doubt that someone has been telling stories like this? No. But what I do doubt is that the story is told as frequently as the article claims.

And that’s my beef with the article as a whole. It went looking for stories about missionaries who had medical horror stories on their missions, and then it presents those stories as being representative of the whole. Cherry picking doesn’t make a case. It leaves you open to being criticized and ignored, which is exactly what this issue doesn’t deserve. As I said, missionaries need quality health care. They need to be listened to, and they need access to doctors when they ask for that access. (And even when they don’t ask, as far too many missionaries do seem to believe they’re invincible.)

Missions are difficult things to discuss as a whole. They’re hard to really put a label on, because each person’s mission can be so different. It’s not just a matter of different countries or languages. Different mission presidents can have a huge impact, as they determine the “rules” for the mission. In Denisa’s mission, for example, she wasn’t allowed to take any pictures on any day but p-day. My mission had no rule like that. There are strict missions, and laid back missions. Missions that focus on numbers, and missions that don’t. Missions with approachable presidents, and missions where the president is aloof.

And then there are the missionaries themselves. You have all sorts of layers of leadership and interaction with other missionaries. Assistants, zone leaders, district leaders, trainers, companions. Each one of those individuals can really affect the feel of your mission. And let’s face it: some people do not respond well to getting authority over other people. The more authority you’re spreading around, the more opportunity you have for abuse of that authority. (Especially when the ones who have it are 19 year old men from a wide range of backgrounds.)

So any article that tries to take isolated cases and make blanket statements about situations is overstating its case, regardless of what the claim is. Better to look at statistics as a whole and see what’s going on. (Then again, if those statistics aren’t readily available, that does tend to make things look shady.)

The bottom line for me is that missions can be difficult. We should do what we can to make them less so. Increase the communication channels. Make sure every missionary gets heard. It’s not a form of indentured servitude, and there should be ways to check and make sure that’s being avoided in each and every mission. Can it be perfect? I doubt it. There are too many moving parts. But it can be better. It can always be better.

And as for the stigma from coming home early, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Guilt is a terrible motivating factor to use over people, and it’s one that gets used far too often in religion. God is love not guilt. People will come home from their missions for a variety of reasons. Church members need to realize two basic principles:

They don’t know the whole story about any missionary and why he or she came home.
It doesn’t matter why they came home. They should be supported and accepted. If you’re that missionary’s parent, bishop, or stake president, perhaps you know enough of that story to be able to help him or her come to grips with what he or she should be doing from here on out. If you’re not one of those people? Keep your mouth shut and be supportive and loving of the decisions they make. (Come to think of it, that really applies across the board–not just to missionaries who come home early. It applies to people, period.)

And I guess that’s all I have to say about that for now.

The Wire 1:7 and 1:8

We’re smack dab in the middle of the season at this point, and that’s always a difficult spot to get through. You’ve got everything setup, and now you have to transition to the climax. Neither of these episodes are jaw droppers. but they’re consistently good television. On to the discussion:

Episode 1:7

One of the things that stands out to me from this episode is the whole idea of a “code” and the “game.” Omar brings this into focus (as is often the case), talking about what he will and won’t do. In one way, he means this quite literally: he doesn’t want to get arrested, and so he follows rules so that the police don’t begin to take too great of an interest in his actions. But at the same time, Omar also means it quite figuratively. There’s a code he lives by so that he can live with himself at night.

Contrast him with Wallace, for example. Wallace has been faced with the knowledge that he played a key role in Brandon’s death. It’s one thing to know about the game, but it’s quite another to see the effects of that game in action. And so Wallace turns to the only out he knows of: drugs. It’s incredibly sad, and outright depressing. It’s also (to tie this back into the On Our Minds book that started me on this series of episode reviews) a story that’s repeated all the time in the real world. Every addict has a history, and when you take the time to understand those histories, it’s hard to continue treating them as nothing more but numbers.

But then again, that’s also the way the police side of things handles the problem. Numbers. Statistics. Get too involved with people on an individual level, and you start caring too much. Instead. people like Rawls boil things down to simple digits, and they focus entirely on keeping those digits in the ranges they’re happy with. In other words, there’s a game the dealers are playing, and then a game the police play. Same board, but different pieces are important. (Kind of reminds you of chess vs. checkers, doesn’t it?)

The Wire never seems to miss a chance to remind us of actions and consequences. To force us to remember that these are supposed to be real people with real lives. Prez might be That Guy Who Likes Solving Puzzles, but he’s also That Guy Who Blinded the Kid. In a different show, they’d be too ready to let us forget about the blinding episode. Here, they go out of their way to remind us of it.

Doing this rewatch, I’m amazed at some characters being introduced that end up playing huge roles later on. The Narcotics Anonymous guy who gives the speech that Bubs connects with. Senator Clay Davis. If you’re watching these shows for the first time, keep an eye out for their return. I completely missed them the first time through. They seemed like bit parts. But again, as is the case with real life, people who end up playing a huge role in a story don’t always enter that story with a big set up and a fan fare.

8/10: a solid outing.

Episode 1:8

Speaking of games, this is our first glimpse of the dreadful world of politics. The team is ecstatic to nab $20,000 from the Barksdale crew, and is even more excited to see the carrier is someone related to a government official. But Burrell? He doesn’t see it that way. He sees the possibility that they might poke a sleeping bear of a politician, and he knows that if politicians suddenly take too much notice of what’s going on, then who knows what the side effects will be. (Remember this. It’ll be important late in the series.)

How is it phrased in the show? Keep your eyes on the drugs. Pay attention to the drugs, and you stay with drugs. Pay attention to the money, and you don’t know where you’ll end up. That becomes a continuing theme throughout the show. It’s also depressingly true. Even worse, without paying attention to the money, you’ll never be able to solve the problem of the drugs. The two are closely related, and the Wire will show us just how intertwined they are over its five seasons.

That’s what I love most about the show, I think. How it presents aspects of a greater whole, and only after seeing all the different facets in action can you really appreciate that whole for the dreadful mess that it is. It’s something that would be impossible to pull off in any other medium. But you don’t see that in this episode. You just see Burrell behaving like some coward. Too worried to go after anything important. I don’t blame you for having that reaction. At this point, we’re still liking McNulty. He’s the scrappy cop trying to bring down the bad guys.

He’s also the moronic father who endangers the life of his children on the off chance that he can get some more information on Stringer Bell.

Bunk sums this up at the end of the episode: “You’re no good for people,” he tells McNulty. Right now, we think he’s just drunk, but the more we get to know McNulty and see what he does, the more we see Bunk, who knows him best, might really be onto something. Protagonists are often far from perfect.

And at the same time, antagonists aren’t always evil. Here we have Stringer going to community college. Getting a business education. He’s living the American Dream, in a way that’s much more current than many would like to acknowledge. Put him in charge of something other than drugs, and he’d be considered an upstanding member of society, even if he still did awful, terrible things. (Again, keep this in mind for episodes to come. There are worse things in life than drug dealers. Or at least, equally bad things.)

Anyway. I’m out of time for the day. This was another 8/10 for me. Some solid episodes, but there’s more to come.

What do you think so far?

The Double-Edged Sword of Social Platforms

I’m fairly present online. I write this blog every day, I keep track of what my friends are up to on Facebook and Twitter, I scan the news reports as they come out. I consider myself to be pretty “plugged in.” (Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so plugged in at all.)

But one thing that I’ve noticed more and more is just how often we’re upset about things online. (And yes, I note the irony of me writing an upset post about other people being upset all the time. I’m not really upset this time. Just observing something and wanting to get the thoughts down on paper.) I mean, when I go through my Facebook feed, I see a lot of the same things pop up again and again: vacation pics, family pics, life updates, and then a whole slew of outrage.

Outrage over the Democrats. Outrage over the Republicans. Yelling about needing to end Obamacare and about needing to extend it. Outrage about Columbus. Outrage about people who are outraged about Columbus. If you can think of it, then I almost guarantee someone’s upset about it *right this instant* somewhere online.

I’ve certainly contributed more than my fair share to this stream of upsettedness. (Though I’d like to think that writing in-depth blog posts about something at least contributes more to the discussion than slapping a meme on my Facebook page, I realize that we all have different ways of interacting, and it’s not for me to say that someone else’s way is better or worse than my own.) And when I take a moment to step back, I have to wonder if any of it is worth it, or if it’s all like American Idol.

I used to follow American Idol faithfully. I watched every broadcast, from the start to the finish. I would talk to friends about who I wanted to win, and express outrage (there’s that word again) when something didn’t go as I thought it should. I enjoyed the show.

And then I stopped watching.

And you know what? I didn’t miss it at all. Everything that had seemed so important while I was watching it just ended up being . . . not. Who cared who won the next season? I didn’t listen to their music anyway. What did it matter if there was another “scandal”? None of it mattered. And in the end, I think (most of us) can agree that American Idol really didn’t matter. (Sorry, Clay Aiken.)

So is all this social media outrage the same thing? Is it nothing more than a bunch of us yelling about things into an echo chamber? Sometimes it can feel that way, especially when I see stories pop up again months after I first saw them. (It makes me wonder how these things spread–from friend to friend to friend, in a ever-repeating loop? Will we still be seeing warnings about Facebook charging fees decades from now?)

I’m not saying that the issues don’t matter. Racism, sexism, abortion, gay rights, health care. All of these things certainly are important and deserve to be discussed. But is the outrage and horror that’s expressed online worth it? Does it really get anything done?

So far, I’d have to say that in general, it doesn’t. We’re all well trained to be upset about whatever there is to be upset about. Share a post. Like it. Comment on it. Then move onto the next one. But it’s like we’ve somehow confused getting upset about something for a day or two to be the equivalent of actually getting anything done. Actually making a difference.

Sometimes we’ll identify a person or persons who have particularly angered us. Who are representative of some evil we’ve identified. And the internet as a whole will tear those people to shreds. Ruin their lives. What good does that do? Anything?

I’ve seen a fair number of friends step back from Facebook or Twitter and just take a vacation from it all for a while. Almost all of them are happier away from this, from what they report when they return. That doesn’t really appeal to me, however. I enjoy these blog posts (or I wouldn’t write them.) While the outrage or thoughts I might express on them might not make a difference in the world as a whole, they certainly make a difference for me. It helps me to think things through and come to a conclusion about what I believe, and occasionally someone calls me out on an error, and I get a chance to learn I was wrong about something. I can actually change my mind.

But that’s a conversation. That’s not just yelling into the Interwebs and then moving on with your life, forgetting it all the next moment, because you’re too busy being upset about the next thing to come down the road.

This is a blog post that doesn’t seem to have a point. Drat. I suppose for me it comes down to this: social media is changing us. It’s connecting us, and dividing us in ways society hasn’t seen before. Some of that’s helpful and good. Some of it . . . not so much.

If the things you believe and say and do aren’t any different because of what you’ve seen and been exposed to online, then maybe it’s time to take a look at yourself and wonder why. Are you having conversations, or are you just nodding your head to what others are saying in a never-ending stream of agreeing-with-those-you-already-agree-with.

Deep thoughts for a Tuesday.