I spend a lot of time wondering whether my interpretation of something is totally unique. Which is a fancy way of saying I spend a lot of time wondering if I really am completely insane or I just do a hell of a job faking it.
Usually, it's song lyrics. Not a huge deal at first glance. I mean, it's essentially poetry with a soundtrack; of course everyone has a different interpretation. But then I hear a song and the first thing that comes to my mind is something that's so utterly batshit psychotic, and yet if I were to argue for it I could totally back it up.
Exhibit A: "Man In The Box", by Alice In Chains. I totally think it's about a gay kid. See, ridiculous. It's played by a grunge/heavy metal band from the 90's, and the writer already admitted that it's about censorship and he was high as the Goodyear blimp when he wrote it anyway. But I will explain my interpretation, and it will make sense, god damnit.
Okay, so here are the lyrics, and how they each fit into my interpretation:
/I'm the man in the box
Buried in my shit/
The kid's treated like a freak in his home environment/school (a.k.a. he's put on display "in a box"). Because of these constant reminders that this behavior is "wrong", he feels like he's "buried" under this wrong behavior and no one sees past it.
/Won't you come and save me, save me/
He wants someone to see past those stereotypes, or at least tell him that it's okay to be who he wants to be.
/I'm the dog who gets beat
Shove my nose in shit/
Now it's definitely abuse in his home environment. Maybe his parents' religion says homosexuality is a sin, and they believe that they can change him into a normal kid. So they continually push all the "you're going to hell" stuff in his face to try and teach him that it's wrong.
/Won't you come and save me, save me/
Same as before. He wants acceptance.
/Feed my eyes, can you sew them shut?/
He constantly sees reinforcement of the thoughts that homosexuality is wrong, and he doesn't want to see it anymore.
/Jesus Christ, deny your maker/
Major religious tie-in. If he's gay, he's going against the will of God.
/He who tries, will be wasted/
Anyone who tries to rebel against the popular opinion will be ignored or "wasted" (killed...reference to homophobic violence).
/Feed my eyes now you've sewn them shut/
Continuation of the first line of the chorus, signifying that he has given up and allowed societal pressure to convince him that there is no hope of him ever being truly accepted.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Makes sense, doesn't it? Well, for God's sake, don't tell me if it doesn't. Partially because I like having my little green bubble of blissful unawareness of any semblance of normality...but mostly because I'm not done yet.
The song "Hey Bulldog" by The Beatles is about a serial killer. That's right. I just went there.
Okay, so again, it's a Beatles song, so pretty much any interpretation of any of their songs will fly. So because of that, I'll be brief. The song constantly makes reference to how "some kinds" of various things like innocence and happiness are measured out in the same ways for everyone (i.e. age, level of success in life). Now, a serial killer, taking into account the critical job requirement of being an absolute nutjob, would obviously not fit into those molds. His happiness could be obtained by killing people; his "innocence" is that he doesn't understand that what he's doing is wrong. And then there's this line:
/Childlike, no one understand/Jacknife in your sweaty hands/
I mean, come on. Dead giveaway right there. So you can just shut your mouth about throwing that crap together from three different song ideas, Mr. John Lennon. You're talking about a serial killer whose childhood friends/tormentors gave him the name "Bulldog" because of his ability to bark and howl like one (yep, that's what that random interlude is near the end), and who now maintains a childlike misunderstanding of death and believes that he is making his victims part of him by killing them.
/You can talk to me/If you're lonely, you can talk to me/
It's a goddamn serial killer, and you will never convince me otherwise. With the possible exception of the Internet search I will conduct tomorrow that will most likely tell me that everyone else already figured this all out ten years ago and what the hell took you so long. But for tonight, I feel like a genius. And you can never take away from me, Internet.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
My British Teenage Spy Can Beat Up Your British Teenage Spy!
Reading trashy literature is an interesting experience. And no, I'm not talking about Twilight.
I'm talking about the CHERUB series, a set of quite horrendousy edited books written by a Brit named Robert Muchamore. If you've read any of the Alex Rider books, these are that times about twenty; as in, more teenage spies, more shit getting blowed up...and surprisingly, in some cases more depth in both character development and plot. "But which series is better?", all of you who live in my fantasy world where people actually read my blog are probably asking. Well, let us compare our young James Bonds-in-training, shall we? Spot on.
One thing both series have in common is the type of plot. Both involve plucky young heroes (British, of course...because American spies just go around making poop jokes and crappy 3-D movies, right? Freaking Robert Rodriguez...) going around doing super-spy type things. But while Alex Rider generally depends on a vast assortment of tricky gadgets and secret super-spyin' skillz (all of which are used exactly once and then shipped off to the land of bad plot devices), James Choke/Adams (the new CHERUB recruit who changes his name a little ways into the first book for the semi-plausible reason of creating a new identity) has nothing but highly specialized training and his own wits, which just as often screws him over than actually works for him. Meanwhile, Alex is busy tightrope-walking over a steel wire with a giant tarp flapping from it. Piece-a-cake.
That's actually one of the main issues with Alex Rider, honestly: every single one of his skills, usually the type that take years of hardcore training to master, was apparently taught to him by his uncle in a thinly veiled attempt to train him as a spy. When he was eight. Which really does make me wonder what the scene would've been like if Alex had wanted to be, I don't know...a firefighter or something. Guess he'd be a very acrobatic fireman. James, on the other hand, is pretty much your average 12-year-old suburbanite, except his mum's the morbidly obese head of a shoplifting ring, which results in young master James being more loaded than every single one of the Gates kids put together. Luckily for us, this giant flashing Mary-Sue alert is nullified fairly quickly, and once again James becomes slightly below average save for his talent with numbers. So in the preliminary battle of who's got the better character, the trash literature comes out on top.
The gap widens when we take character development into consideration (though admittedly, not by much). Alex Rider is certainly a nice kid with some kick-ass karate moves, but even after seven or eight books he's still pretty much the same kid. Literally. The only thing that could even be considered close to character development is when he finds out his dad was supposedly an assassin for a terrorist organization...and that doesn't happen until the fifth book. Likewise with the supporting cast: the first hint we get that the various MI6 chiefs and agents aren't cardboard placards with voice synthesizers is when Alex catches a glimpse of a photo of one of them with a couple kids. In the fifth book. That's it. We get a great introduction and an awesome idea thrown at us in the first book...and then we get the exact same thing for the next eight. The only thing that changes are the exotic locales and the exact method that Alex almost (but not quite) gets offed. It's entertaining, but if it weren't for the dramatically different settings I think I'd have a really tough time remembering when a certain event happened, regardless of how important it was.
Unfortunately, CHERUB isn't a whole lot more creative with its character design. James and his supporting cast, for the most part, don't go through any soul-searching moment either...but at the same time, you do get to see some subtle changes in personality after certain events. They're small, but the development is actually happening, and most of the time it's as simple as James screwing up and learning something from it (I mean, he's still an idiot for the most part, but over time he becomes a much more good-natured idiot).
Perhaps the most damning aspect of the Alex Rider books, though, is the complete and utter Mary-Sue that adorns the majority of its pages. From the beginning, Alex is a pretty face, and once he goes through the tragedy of losing his uncle, it doesn't take long for...nothing to happen. He's lived with this man his whole life, and yet at the funeral he's more concerned with the weird people with the big black cars he doesn't recognize. Maybe one of those super-spying exercises was about having no emotions. That is no way to be like Bond and screw everything with a pulse and a pair of tits, young man.
And then, of course, we have the missions themselves. In every case, Alex is a bit like Rambo: either those guards are drunk out of their minds, or he is the luckiest bastard to ever walk the earth. This kid takes down one terrorist organization after another, and escapes with hardly more than bumps and bruises most of the time. Even that time he got sniped in the chest, he managed to live...and escape a burning building and tightrope-walk across a hundred-foot gap several hundred feet more above the ground. Also, he never screws up. Every dangerous situation always has some special talent, gadget, or combination of remarkably quick thinking and damn-fool luck to negate it. He's like Iron Man, except without the cool suit and the Robert Downey, Jr. In other words, he's just a magnificently talented douchebag who has a tendency to make things go boom. Fun to zone out with when it's raining outside, but not too great for water-cooler talks.
But don't think that CHERUB doesn't have its fair share of flaws too. While it may have better characters and a bit deeper of an overall plot, it more than overshadows its positive qualities with its shoddy presentation. I don't think I've ever read a published work that more resembled a mediocre fan fiction in appearance than this one (once again, I must emphasize that I have never read Twilight, nor do I ever plan to). The dialogue is decent (mostly because it's British), but the prose is bland and the diction is ambitiously basic at best. Not to mention, the entire series suffers under the unsteady hand of perhaps the worst editing job I have ever had the displeasure to come into contact with. And I'm not talking about a random glitch here and there; I'm talking about word omissions and grammatical errors almost every other page (stuff like putting "too" instead of "to", for God's sake). I almost feel sorry for Muchamore; he's got a pretty cool idea, but his editing team isn't helping him at all. Honestly, that's what makes me classify it as trash literature: not so much that it is, but rather that it just looks the part. I keep telling people that presentation is much more important than content; that's why Alex Rider is insanely popular and CHERUB is a back-of-the-teen-section-of-the-library deal with only six of the ten books even available in the U.S.
I guess that's all for my critique. Overall, I honestly do like the CHERUB series more despite the incompetence of its publisher. It's grittier, it's quite a bit deeper, and it's a hell of a lot more British than its more famous competitor. If you can find it, I'd definitely suggest giving it a once-over, if only for the sake of comparison to what you normally see in Barnes & Noble. Think of it as international literature study. Hell, you play that right and that's some extra World Lit credit right there. You're welcome.
I'm talking about the CHERUB series, a set of quite horrendousy edited books written by a Brit named Robert Muchamore. If you've read any of the Alex Rider books, these are that times about twenty; as in, more teenage spies, more shit getting blowed up...and surprisingly, in some cases more depth in both character development and plot. "But which series is better?", all of you who live in my fantasy world where people actually read my blog are probably asking. Well, let us compare our young James Bonds-in-training, shall we? Spot on.
One thing both series have in common is the type of plot. Both involve plucky young heroes (British, of course...because American spies just go around making poop jokes and crappy 3-D movies, right? Freaking Robert Rodriguez...) going around doing super-spy type things. But while Alex Rider generally depends on a vast assortment of tricky gadgets and secret super-spyin' skillz (all of which are used exactly once and then shipped off to the land of bad plot devices), James Choke/Adams (the new CHERUB recruit who changes his name a little ways into the first book for the semi-plausible reason of creating a new identity) has nothing but highly specialized training and his own wits, which just as often screws him over than actually works for him. Meanwhile, Alex is busy tightrope-walking over a steel wire with a giant tarp flapping from it. Piece-a-cake.
That's actually one of the main issues with Alex Rider, honestly: every single one of his skills, usually the type that take years of hardcore training to master, was apparently taught to him by his uncle in a thinly veiled attempt to train him as a spy. When he was eight. Which really does make me wonder what the scene would've been like if Alex had wanted to be, I don't know...a firefighter or something. Guess he'd be a very acrobatic fireman. James, on the other hand, is pretty much your average 12-year-old suburbanite, except his mum's the morbidly obese head of a shoplifting ring, which results in young master James being more loaded than every single one of the Gates kids put together. Luckily for us, this giant flashing Mary-Sue alert is nullified fairly quickly, and once again James becomes slightly below average save for his talent with numbers. So in the preliminary battle of who's got the better character, the trash literature comes out on top.
The gap widens when we take character development into consideration (though admittedly, not by much). Alex Rider is certainly a nice kid with some kick-ass karate moves, but even after seven or eight books he's still pretty much the same kid. Literally. The only thing that could even be considered close to character development is when he finds out his dad was supposedly an assassin for a terrorist organization...and that doesn't happen until the fifth book. Likewise with the supporting cast: the first hint we get that the various MI6 chiefs and agents aren't cardboard placards with voice synthesizers is when Alex catches a glimpse of a photo of one of them with a couple kids. In the fifth book. That's it. We get a great introduction and an awesome idea thrown at us in the first book...and then we get the exact same thing for the next eight. The only thing that changes are the exotic locales and the exact method that Alex almost (but not quite) gets offed. It's entertaining, but if it weren't for the dramatically different settings I think I'd have a really tough time remembering when a certain event happened, regardless of how important it was.
Unfortunately, CHERUB isn't a whole lot more creative with its character design. James and his supporting cast, for the most part, don't go through any soul-searching moment either...but at the same time, you do get to see some subtle changes in personality after certain events. They're small, but the development is actually happening, and most of the time it's as simple as James screwing up and learning something from it (I mean, he's still an idiot for the most part, but over time he becomes a much more good-natured idiot).
Perhaps the most damning aspect of the Alex Rider books, though, is the complete and utter Mary-Sue that adorns the majority of its pages. From the beginning, Alex is a pretty face, and once he goes through the tragedy of losing his uncle, it doesn't take long for...nothing to happen. He's lived with this man his whole life, and yet at the funeral he's more concerned with the weird people with the big black cars he doesn't recognize. Maybe one of those super-spying exercises was about having no emotions. That is no way to be like Bond and screw everything with a pulse and a pair of tits, young man.
And then, of course, we have the missions themselves. In every case, Alex is a bit like Rambo: either those guards are drunk out of their minds, or he is the luckiest bastard to ever walk the earth. This kid takes down one terrorist organization after another, and escapes with hardly more than bumps and bruises most of the time. Even that time he got sniped in the chest, he managed to live...and escape a burning building and tightrope-walk across a hundred-foot gap several hundred feet more above the ground. Also, he never screws up. Every dangerous situation always has some special talent, gadget, or combination of remarkably quick thinking and damn-fool luck to negate it. He's like Iron Man, except without the cool suit and the Robert Downey, Jr. In other words, he's just a magnificently talented douchebag who has a tendency to make things go boom. Fun to zone out with when it's raining outside, but not too great for water-cooler talks.
But don't think that CHERUB doesn't have its fair share of flaws too. While it may have better characters and a bit deeper of an overall plot, it more than overshadows its positive qualities with its shoddy presentation. I don't think I've ever read a published work that more resembled a mediocre fan fiction in appearance than this one (once again, I must emphasize that I have never read Twilight, nor do I ever plan to). The dialogue is decent (mostly because it's British), but the prose is bland and the diction is ambitiously basic at best. Not to mention, the entire series suffers under the unsteady hand of perhaps the worst editing job I have ever had the displeasure to come into contact with. And I'm not talking about a random glitch here and there; I'm talking about word omissions and grammatical errors almost every other page (stuff like putting "too" instead of "to", for God's sake). I almost feel sorry for Muchamore; he's got a pretty cool idea, but his editing team isn't helping him at all. Honestly, that's what makes me classify it as trash literature: not so much that it is, but rather that it just looks the part. I keep telling people that presentation is much more important than content; that's why Alex Rider is insanely popular and CHERUB is a back-of-the-teen-section-of-the-library deal with only six of the ten books even available in the U.S.
I guess that's all for my critique. Overall, I honestly do like the CHERUB series more despite the incompetence of its publisher. It's grittier, it's quite a bit deeper, and it's a hell of a lot more British than its more famous competitor. If you can find it, I'd definitely suggest giving it a once-over, if only for the sake of comparison to what you normally see in Barnes & Noble. Think of it as international literature study. Hell, you play that right and that's some extra World Lit credit right there. You're welcome.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Why Smart People Hate English...Or Something Like That
You know, I've noticed something in the past couple years. I go to an application-based school where acceptance is based on grades and teacher recommendations. In other words, it's a school for smart, antisocial people. BOCTAOE. (But Of Course There Are Obvious Exceptions...it's a Scott Adams creation.)
But there's one weird thing that keeps popping up around me, and it doesn't seem to be isolated. We have people that are gonna be doctors, rocket scientists, nuclear physicists, and everything in between.
But for some reason, the grand majority of them seem to absolutely loathe English class.
Okay, so I can understand that happening in a normal school. In your average high school English class, all you get is badly explained Greek classics, vocab lists, and reading comp questions. With a sub, you might get to see who can stick the most pencils in the ceiling tiles. That's about it.
But here, it's not like that. Here, English class is focused so much more on trying to get us to really understand and appreciate literature and creative writing. All the focus is on us maturing into capable writers and members of a society built on, inspired by, and centered around the written word...and for someone that's as big of a reading and writing freak as me, that's perfect. But for the longest time, I couldn't fathom why everyone else seemed to hate it so much. And today, I think I finally figured it out.
What happened today was about a test we're having next week on Indian Literature. One girl whom I shall call "Lisa" (obviously, not her real name) wanted to know what was on the test. Now, my English teacher is not the type to give us a concrete list of what to study for a test. She's a high-standing member of the "appreciate literature, don't memorize it" party. Remember, I love this, and everyone else hates this.
So when asked this question, my teacher replied with a speech about thinking back to what we had read and the connections we'd made between other works and looking over that again. Basically, she was just telling us to read what we'd already read and be ready to talk about it. Simple, right?
Apparently not. Because the first thing "Lisa" said in reply to this was along the lines of, "I don't want an analysis, I just want to know what was on the test."
My first thought was just a gigantic eye-roll and a silent lament over how thick-headed some people could be. But after a bit, I realized that this was actually a pretty monumental event. In one sentence, "Lisa" had finally revealed exactly why my friends couldn't stand English. It's all about how they prefer to learn.
See, even though we're "gifted" (I only put it in quotes because I think using the term "gifted" to describe smart kids is stupid. Everyone's gifted; for some people, it's in their ability to learn.), we're still products of the public school system. So even with all the freedoms we're given, we still want order. We still want to know what we have to memorize to get better.
It's kinda funny; we're smart not only because we can pick up on things faster, but because we've learned how to game the system. In past schools, we were expected to hit the minimum requirements necessary, and we could do that easily because we realized that all the current system required us to accomplish was rote memorization. This isn't really a "gifted" trait as much as a human one; no one wants to do more work than necessary. And after a while, that habit just gets ingrained in your mind, and it's pretty hard to break.
I think another factor is what career they're aiming for. Subjects like science and math not only encourage, but require rote memorization; you can certainly teach them creatively, but in the end the main goal is to make sure you know the quadratic formula or the various forms of carbon by heart. I'm not saying that isn't important if you want to be a doctor or such, but it does make that your preferred method of learning. So when something like an English class where this isn't any real way to write a true "study guide" for last-minute cramming hits that person that's used to trig study guides and concrete periodic tables, it blows their minds. Same with being asked to think outside the box: we have three core classes that ask us to think of concepts in a linear fashion, and one that tells us to color outside the lines every chance we get. It's the kind of paradigm shift that needs a real change in your thinking, and in these kinds of cases (like many things in life), the majority always wins.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've discovered that loving English class doesn't mean I'm crazy. It means I just think about things differently, and that other people that prefer science and math think about things different too. Others are practical, while I'm metaphysical. That's all there is to it.
Of course, you could always make the argument that we're all insane and the only thing that's measurable in this world is how close we are to the level of insanity that inspires daily robe-wearing and long conversations with magical pandas named Walter. I figure I'm about two crackfics and a bit of bad meth away from that, so that's officially the standard now.
But there's one weird thing that keeps popping up around me, and it doesn't seem to be isolated. We have people that are gonna be doctors, rocket scientists, nuclear physicists, and everything in between.
But for some reason, the grand majority of them seem to absolutely loathe English class.
Okay, so I can understand that happening in a normal school. In your average high school English class, all you get is badly explained Greek classics, vocab lists, and reading comp questions. With a sub, you might get to see who can stick the most pencils in the ceiling tiles. That's about it.
But here, it's not like that. Here, English class is focused so much more on trying to get us to really understand and appreciate literature and creative writing. All the focus is on us maturing into capable writers and members of a society built on, inspired by, and centered around the written word...and for someone that's as big of a reading and writing freak as me, that's perfect. But for the longest time, I couldn't fathom why everyone else seemed to hate it so much. And today, I think I finally figured it out.
What happened today was about a test we're having next week on Indian Literature. One girl whom I shall call "Lisa" (obviously, not her real name) wanted to know what was on the test. Now, my English teacher is not the type to give us a concrete list of what to study for a test. She's a high-standing member of the "appreciate literature, don't memorize it" party. Remember, I love this, and everyone else hates this.
So when asked this question, my teacher replied with a speech about thinking back to what we had read and the connections we'd made between other works and looking over that again. Basically, she was just telling us to read what we'd already read and be ready to talk about it. Simple, right?
Apparently not. Because the first thing "Lisa" said in reply to this was along the lines of, "I don't want an analysis, I just want to know what was on the test."
My first thought was just a gigantic eye-roll and a silent lament over how thick-headed some people could be. But after a bit, I realized that this was actually a pretty monumental event. In one sentence, "Lisa" had finally revealed exactly why my friends couldn't stand English. It's all about how they prefer to learn.
See, even though we're "gifted" (I only put it in quotes because I think using the term "gifted" to describe smart kids is stupid. Everyone's gifted; for some people, it's in their ability to learn.), we're still products of the public school system. So even with all the freedoms we're given, we still want order. We still want to know what we have to memorize to get better.
It's kinda funny; we're smart not only because we can pick up on things faster, but because we've learned how to game the system. In past schools, we were expected to hit the minimum requirements necessary, and we could do that easily because we realized that all the current system required us to accomplish was rote memorization. This isn't really a "gifted" trait as much as a human one; no one wants to do more work than necessary. And after a while, that habit just gets ingrained in your mind, and it's pretty hard to break.
I think another factor is what career they're aiming for. Subjects like science and math not only encourage, but require rote memorization; you can certainly teach them creatively, but in the end the main goal is to make sure you know the quadratic formula or the various forms of carbon by heart. I'm not saying that isn't important if you want to be a doctor or such, but it does make that your preferred method of learning. So when something like an English class where this isn't any real way to write a true "study guide" for last-minute cramming hits that person that's used to trig study guides and concrete periodic tables, it blows their minds. Same with being asked to think outside the box: we have three core classes that ask us to think of concepts in a linear fashion, and one that tells us to color outside the lines every chance we get. It's the kind of paradigm shift that needs a real change in your thinking, and in these kinds of cases (like many things in life), the majority always wins.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've discovered that loving English class doesn't mean I'm crazy. It means I just think about things differently, and that other people that prefer science and math think about things different too. Others are practical, while I'm metaphysical. That's all there is to it.
Of course, you could always make the argument that we're all insane and the only thing that's measurable in this world is how close we are to the level of insanity that inspires daily robe-wearing and long conversations with magical pandas named Walter. I figure I'm about two crackfics and a bit of bad meth away from that, so that's officially the standard now.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Schtuff That's Going Up Here
I'm planning on trying to put up a new post every couple of days. I won't just ramble on about my daily life unless something cool happened; mostly, it'll probably just be stuff related to FanFiction or a rant about something I saw in the news. I might post a few oneshots here or something too, but that's probably not likely to happen much until summer.
This is of course assuming that I haven't completely forgotten about this by summer. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
This is of course assuming that I haven't completely forgotten about this by summer. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
So...This Is New.
So I'm sitting here in my dining room floor staring at my desktop, and I think, "I'm pretty bored right here." And so then I start thinking, "Hey, I should do something so I'm not bored. But what?"
Well, obviously, going outside isn't gonna happen. It's literally a dark and stormy night right now...and besides, I live in the most stereotypic, row house, macadam drive, Casper white suburbs in the whole United States of America. And then there's the fact that I'm pretty comfortable here on this carpet, so getting up and doing something productive is also out. That leaves the Internet. And sure enough, the Internet doth provided me with this website. So now I've got this blog.
The only question left is what the hell I'm gonna do with it.
I guess a bit of bio would be nice for the three people that might accidently stumble across this. So here goes: I'm sixteen, I'm a guy, I'm currently in the fetal stages of a relationship with a girl at school whose father may or may not try to hang me from a tree when he finds out I'm dating his daughter, and I'm a writer. A big-time writer. As in, when you see me talking to myself in the middle of an empty room, that's because I'm muttering dialogue under my breath. Funny how often that gets misinterpreted.
Right now, my big project is a fan fiction about...you know what, this needs backstory. So when I was a little kid (like, three or four years old), I loved "The Lion King." Actually, I pretty much worshiped "The Lion King." I watched it every hour of every day for about a year; I had no clue what was going on, but I assume the bright flashy colors and infectious songs were too much for my nutso little brain to resist. Moving on.
So after a while, I finally began to understand that, behind all the dance numbers and African choirs, there was actually a PLOT to the movie. And that that PLOT could be best summed up by, as I so eloquently put it at the horrible moment of realization, "SIMBA'S DADDY DIED!"
Yeah. That didn't go well.
So skip ahead about a decade and a half, where I'm finally watching the movie again because my little brother had never seen it. Naturally, that old addiction came back in almost full force, and when a month of borderline obsession, a laptop with a word processor, and a hearty dose of sleep deprivation, my brain spit out "The Pridelanders": a vast, epic, and currently about 160,000-thousand-word-long fan fiction that allows me to stave off my psychosis by laying out the plot of the original movie and taking a few dozen pipe bombs and a sledgehammer to it. If you're interested in reading it (I don't know...maybe this doesn't seem completely insane to some of you), it's on FanFiction.net, where I have a profile under the same name as this blog (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5144804/1/The_Pridelanders). The earlier chapters, to put it bluntly, suck. But I think it gets better later on. At the very least, I've gotten a lot of positive reviews on it, which, as any experienced fan fiction writer can tell you, doesn't really mean shit. Meh. It's good for an ego boost. Like I need that.
I'm guessing most of you have stopped reading this by now, so I'll go ahead and end this post here. I'll probably make another one soon, though.
This Google-sponsored rambling thing is fun.
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