loneliness + alienation + fear + despair + self-worth ÷ mockery ÷ condemnation ÷ misunderstanding x guilt x shame x failure x judgment n=y where y=hope and n=folly, love=lies, life=death, self=dark side

Dark Side is.  ¶ 6:24 PM 0 comments

  Thought For The Day

The more I learn in my Educational Psychology class about what "learning disabilities", "mental retardation" and the like are, the more I want to punch people. Why can't your kid pay attention? He has attention deficit disorder. Why can't your kid read? He has dyslexia (which basically translates to "can't read disease".) I'm not saying there aren't genuine developmental disorders out there, but to slap a Latin or otherwise sciency name on a statistical construct and then tell the parent it's treatable with medicine is the work of Satan.

  ¶ 2:21 AM 0 comments

  Catching Up To start, let's just say I'm not ready to talk about my mother yet, and leave it at that.

Anyway, in the past couple months a lot of things have happened. I've been more social than I have in a long time, thanks to a group of friends who, like me, were once members of the UH anime club but got very sick of the people involved. I ended up going to a nightclub where there wasn't a band I love playing for the first time in my life, and had a great deal of fun. Mike Wieringo, one of the greatest artists in comics, passed away of a shock heart attack at 44. Chris Benoit turned out to have massive brain damage from twenty years of concussions, and WWE continues to have segments where people get hit in the head with chairs, without putting their hands up to protect themselves like in the old days. [Come to think of it, pretty much everything WWE has done in the past three months with regards to PR and such has pissed me off, starting with a press release saying "they were arguing over how to take care of their mentally handicapped son" (who it turns out wasn't mentally handicapped).] DC reversed course and killed Bart Allen in a stupid fashion to bring Wally West back as the Flash, canceled the single best superhero book they publish (Stormwatch: Post-Human Division) and continued to shovel crap seemingly designed to harass the people who loved Infinite Crisis, 52 and Seven Soldiers. Devo put out a new single. I started school again, and ended up falling behind after the passing of my mother.

Anyway, lots and lots of stuff. Some of it I may write about, some not. But I felt like I should say something today.  ¶ 11:56 PM 0 comments

  "It's only time." This is officially the worst possible thing you can say to someone who, the hour before, had his first meeting with his mother's newly-assigned hospice nurse.

Screw you, relative-who-I-shan't-name.  ¶ 8:41 PM 0 comments

  All right, Sony. You win.

So I really didn't pay all that much attention to E3 last week, aside from the PS3 madness (I was considering buying one. Then I found out my PS2 is only worth $30 on trade-in.) Can't use the Wii, can't justify the cost of a PS3 or 360 when I don't have an HDTV, and won't be able to afford a game machine if I buy one (which would have to be a bottom-rung Vizio TV). So I kind of shrugged and caught what I thought were the high points, and pondered the fact that in a year I'd have nothing but obsolete gaming options plus my DS.

Then yesterday, just kind of poking around the Series of Tubes, I found something that I'd completely missed out on, what with getting much of my E3 info from the videogames sub-folder of a popular pro-wrestling and MMA forum and all. Sony announced a serious redesign for the PSP. It's lighter, may or may not have better battery life, and will definitely have the coolest ability ever--you can hook it up to any progressive-scan monitor (which lets my old TV out, but I should be able to use the video-in on my PC) and play with minimal loss of quality (Ars Technica said "the video quality was impressively clear even when blown up to epic proportions on Sony's main stage.") So yeah, I'll stop grumpling about Captain Marvel and buy a PSP.

I wonder if there are still UMD copies of Tron floating around the retail channels; it's pretty much the only movie I'd ever want to buy for it.

  ¶ 12:13 AM 0 comments

  Neurology and Evil

"To have any sympathy for a killer is an insult to their victims!"
--Steve Ditko's Mr. A

So yeah, it's pretty obvious to anyone who knows me what inspired, at least in part, this rambling. I'd like to say before we begin that this isn't an attempt to justify or exonerate someone I won't be naming in the post for the horrible crime I won't describe; rather all the talk of steroids and concussions and things has tied in with things I've thought about on-and-off since I saw A Clockwork Orange for the first time about fourteen years ago. (The last time I really stopped to ponder it was David Cross's "executing the retarded" rant on his 2003 album, Shut Up You Fucking Baby). It didn't help that I've been reading Ditko's late-60s Charlton work and rewatching the Cadmus episodes of JLU of late, leading me to ponder Objectivism (I'm far too convinced of the existence of God to ever truly be a Randroid, but a lot of her writings make sense to me in a purely nuts-and-bolts way; reading Ditko and listening to Rush probably contributes to this). Incidentally, Bill Reed of Comics Should Be Good has been doing a "Ditko Week" as part of his 365 Reasons to Love Comics series, which reminded me of the Mr. A quote above (which I first saw in 2005).

So my basic question is, in a purely mortal sense (since any religion will have its own rules--Christianity teaches forgiveness is there for any who ask in earnest for it and accept Jesus as their savior, while Islam is much more strict on what is or isn't forgivable and when), is there a line beyond which criminals become victims of biology? Not "nature vs. nurture," but a point where specific abnormalities in the brain render one incapable of doing the right thing or resisting a particular temptation. The courts say that if they're too deranged or mentally handicapped to understand the consequences of their actions, a murderer or rapist cannot be held truly responsible (though they're still kept well away from "normal" people). If you can point to a specific formation caused by head trauma, the entry of unwanted chemicals into the body, or a cancerous growth, can you honestly say "The man who committed this horrible act is not the man I knew" and be truthful in a more literal sense than it's usually meant? Or do we all have within us the power to resist any temptation on our own, meaning that to yield to these neurological abnormalities is a moral failing and we're culpable for the proverbial whispers they put into our ears?

I don't really have an answer, obviously, and nor am I looking for one from anyone else. It's just the kind of question I ask myself sometimes, especially when someone else says "I don't care what was wrong with his brain, he's a piece of crap for doing that and should go to hell."

  ¶ 10:13 PM 1 comments

  Bumblebee Beats Megatron?

So about six weeks ago, I was looking at the list of random Hasbro tie-ins for the Transformers movie. Nerf and Super Soaker guns, Mr. Potato Head (I love Transformers way more than I like Star Wars, but Optimash Prime is no Darth Tater) and the like. It got me thinking about how many re-brands of classic MB/PB board games have been done in the past few years, even discounting Monopoly. Operation alone has had Shrek, Simpsons and Spider-Man versions, there's Lord of the Rings Risk and I think Axis and Allies, and the list goes on. I lamented to my friends that my favorite of the second-tier board games, Stratego, was just MADE for a Transformers branding but was hard enough to find even in its original form that there was no chance.

Yeah, I'm pretty happy right now.

  ¶ 3:32 AM 0 comments