Childhoods End

 I think my parents are disappointed that I don't have a girlfriend and kids by now. I think my dad thinks I'm gay and hates me for it. They don't realize that I am so attracted to women that I can't get the nerve to ask one out, and now I'm over forty.

I see how people look at me when I go out to eat with my best friend. They think we're a gay couple. Wrong, I just can't find a woman, and I've got social anxiety disorder. If people want to misinterpret what's going on, they can go ahead and get AIDS. At least it won't be me getting it.

I used to think this was me failing as a human being, but today I've become thankful that I don't have kids. 

I never had to deal with the excruciating inconvenience of remote learning due to covid.

I never had to send a kid to school that might potentially get shot up by some punk teen with a gun. Or gives trenchcoat mafia drills in school in addition to the fire and tornado, just to keep safe.

I never had to send a kid to a school that teaches emotion as fact. 

I never had to send a kid to school that teaches kids it's okay for a kid to have two mommies or two daddies, or that they can pick what gender they want. They now have classes about that.

I don't have to worry about them teaching my kid that being gay is somehow normal, rather than something immoral and unnatural. I view being gay the same as people who have compulsive shoplifting problems, but the schools would actually encourage the abnormality. And try to convert my kids. Glad I'm not dealing with that.

I don't have to worry about my kid growing up too soon, learning about sexuality, especially gay sex, or what gay is, from some stranger at school before they even have questions about it.

 I don't have to fight to keep them on the right moral path when everyone is teaching them wrong.

I don't have to worry about telling my son or daughter not to smoke pot when it's now legal and all over the place.  I still think it shouldn't be legal.  They're not even taxing it like cigarettes. I think it should be taxed out of the public at the very least. But no, it's something kids can easily find out about, just like how there's no way to stop them from accidentally finding adult material on the web.

I don't think I'm in the endtimes or am going to experience it, but I definitely will experience a scenario similar to Childhoods End: Where the country's morality erodes so far away that they will welcome an undisguised Satan with open arms, and allow their children to be made into soulless drones beneath his control.

Today's Violence

 https://youtu.be/b3cqhNJkmIs

I was thinking about this clip from the OA when I saw the news today. I considered posting it to Facebook, but decided it in poor taste for anything. I figured I'd be in Facebook jail again.

Now that I think about it further, I often use humor to insulate myself from things that make me sad. It almost got me beat up in highschool, some kid died and I made a joke about it.

Anyway, I realize I should actually allow myself to feel and stop trying to laugh things off like that.

But then I wondered, what would happen if teachers and students really responded to school violence with freakish dance routines. It certainly would distract the shooter. Maybe allow them to become disarmed? Guess it didn't work out so well for the hero of the show, however.

Moody Moose Buttons

 The Sweet Pickles book, Moody Moose Buttons is the only children's book I've ever seen about bipolar depression. Moody gets sad at a random time, gets happy, and gets manic-angry, yelling and chasing around the alligator.

The solution is simplistic. Moody wears a button to show everyone what mood he is in. It's a nice idea, but I don't know if it's practical. I have bipolar disorder, but wearing a button to show everyone what I feel... I'm afraid I'd jinx myself into becoming depressed or manic-angry if I wore a smiley face.

His buttons read "sweet" and "sour", like he's Sour Patch candy. Not sure how I feel about that.

My directorial debut

 As I read about Patrick Mcgoohan and his conflict with staff during the production of the Prisoner, I was reminded of my own difficulties with making an interactive movie.

I had a computer class in college where we worked as a team to make a sort of video game. The trouble was, nobody really got my vision. They were all in college for different things, and this was just an assignment for a grade to them. I was the only one who really wanted this to be a cool entertainment product. It also went into some creative detours I didn't like, and the graphics and some other stuff didn't go the way I wanted. 

The plot of the game was that aliens were taking over Kansas City and using those hair curler things on top of bartle hall as weapons. Your job was to locate pieces of an alien weapon scattered through Kansas City history and use it to blow up the hair curlers. Sounded cool in theory, but it didn't turn out very good.

I don't know if the educational content was required, or just a suggestion at our planning meeting, but I didn't like it. We did a sort of time travel thing with it, but the game wasn't very interactive or fun. In one scene, we pretended to be mobsters from the 1920's, but we recorded the scene in a restaurant that just so happened to be playing the Beatles on the jukebox. That's one thing I'll always regret.

I had a choice to be like Mcgoohan and start yelling at people and chewing them out for quality issues, but I don't think it would have helped, and it was a class so I couldn't fire people who didn't make the stuff the way I wanted. Plus they tended to get real defensive about things, sooo not ready for an actual game company. So instead I sort of mentally retreated, became apathetic and let them do their own thing. It didn't turn out to be a very good game, but at the end, at least I felt like nobody hated me for being a bad boss.

I ended up settling for second best so we could finish the project on time. I think I preserved some friendships that continue to this day, if they don't read this blog, but I wasn't at all proud of the finished product. I wouldn't show that multimedia product to any company that I expected to get a job from. Didn't want to tell our professor what I really thought, probably best that I never did. 

I think this got me into the mindset, like Mcgoohan, that "If you want the job right, you gotta do it yourself." Unfortunately, that mentality makes you overworked. 

In the end, I've decided that I don't want to produce video games or movies, because I can't trust the staff and don't know how to delegate. It's much easier to write a book, or make art, and have a hundred percent control of my artistic vision, and don't have to worry about people who do a job in a way you don't like.

In retrospect, I think I should have just done sort of a sesame Street thing with puppets and limit the computer game and 3d rendering elements so we could have great video and more fun and finish the project faster. Maybe touch things up with the extra time and put in computer effects in at the last minute, if the teacher required it for a grade.

Planting

 This coworker of mine lives in a co-op, and they removed her fence, said she couldn't have it. So we've been working on a solution for quite some time.

She bought these giant plastic vases from Builders Square. We started out putting bricks in the bottom to keep them in place while we thought out how to fill them. 

We looked at a few places, but money was tight, so suburban lawn and garden wasn't for her. We ended up getting some plants at builders square. 

These are big vases, and when she's pinching pennies, she has some strange ideas. Filling up the whole thing with potting soil cost too much, she thought about wood chips, but passed on that too. 

Eventually she got some evergreen things, and made me pack half the vase with styrofoam kernels from the U-Haul store. I didn't know U-Haul had a store until today, I just discovered she had giant bags of Styrofoam.

Anyway, packed in the styrofoam, covered it with some kind of black plastic that lets water through, then packed in the plant and miracle grow potting soil.  Did this for four vases.

Our last vase actually contained a fake plant. We packed that one with wood chips, I'm certain of it, but she doesn't remember that.

A heavy rain hit a few weeks later, and we had three pots full of waterlogged mud with worms in it. The plants all died,  and I ended up dumping slop water for hours. 

She wanted me to try again this year. This time I used a knife to poke holes in the bottom before filling them.

The fake plant vase still contained gallons of rain water and rotting wood chips. When I went to poke holes in the vases, I made a surprising discovery: The pots have a small patch on either side of the base, one a knife can go through with little or no effort.

When I cut open the patch on the pot containing the fake plant, all those gallons of stagnant water came gushing out.

The big lesson: Giant outdoor plant vases need to have a hole in the bottom somewhere, and often it's built into the design, if you just search for it.

Internet

 What people don't understand about any internet service provider is that nobody cares how much or how little you use the service. It's not like water or electricity where you have a finite supply to measure. They only charge you for having it switched on. To them, if the signal is going to the box adjacent to your house, it's on. In fact, unless someone reports an outage in the area, it's on. And they're not required to give money back when it happens. It's not like electricity where you get charged less for not using it.

This is good and bad. If you have your wifi plugged in for months, but can never use it due to the computer being broken, an Ethernet cable being kinked up, or you being in a coma, you will still have internet going to your house, and still owe money for having it on.

No one is big-brothering your usage. They don't have time to see what you do or don't do online, anymore than the water company would stand around watching what goes into your sewer. 

The one exception is premium content, because you pushed, or accidentally pushed a button that said "give me this expensive movie". Other than that, they don't have time to care.

Midlife crisis

 I think the midlife crisis is the point in which a person starts to revert to a baby from a teenager.

When you are born, you wear diapers, then you become a child, eventually go to highschool and become an adult a few years later.

When you hit your midlife crisis, it starts going back. You act like a teen for awhile, then dementia hits and you're like a little kid mentally. After awhile you poop on yourself.

And the clock starts bending backwards somewhere around 40.