On Being Connected

I went from my place to my mailbox yesterday and was out of touch. It was scary.

In my apartment, I have wifi. Zoom, says the wifi. I get my phone calls on my cell phone through the wifi and I interact with the world from the safety of under the covers, behind a series of doors and locks, because of that wifi. There is, I have discovered, very little phone service at that end of the building.

The front of the building has better telephone connectedness, so when I get to the mailboxes, I can use my phone via the 5G network that I pay for. Clearly, my wifi won't reach, but I have this other option. But on the path between the two, I'm out of the loop, in that limbo between the edge of my wifi and the coverage of the 5G. "I would say I am exactly like a ship carrying a cargo that will never reach any port." Except I'm not Tom Cruise.

Yet.

This got me thinking (not the Tom Cruise part) and I realized a major technological shift which has impacted out sociological identity and expectations. Big words, I know, but I looked 'em up and they mean what I say, 100%. Here's the thing -- in the olden days, we called a place. When we wanted to reach a person, it was first, essential that we knew where the person was, is or will be. We contacted that place and hoped that the person was there and available. When a person was away from that place we could not find the person. If we didn't know what place the person was in, or didn't know how to contact the place, we could not connect with the person. We called operators to help us connect to the place, still unsure if the person would be there. The phone book, though it was listed by person, was really a directory of phones associated with locations. As such, our baseline was to anticipate being OUT of contact until we could get to a location and reestablish our anchor and then we could be reached at that place. But on the road, or taking a walk, or in the bathroom (in most cases) we could not be found. Once we left to go out and play, we were incommunicado until we ended up at someone's house -- we could neither be found, nor reveal ourselves to others.

But times have changed. Now, instead of connecting to a place, we connect to a person. We have a ratio of approximately 2.4 phones per person (according to a statistic which I just made up, but you get my point) so we have the ability to contact and be contacted when we are no place in particular, and no place we intended to be. This has forced us all to shift the way we see our interconnectedness and we now start off assuming that each and every person will be available to be found and spoken with (or texted to) at all times. This has rippld into changed expectations for workers who now are "available" at all times. This has led to a change in parental awareness of their children's movements (which of course has allowed the innovation of industries to both prevent and amplify this constant contact). Now, when I walk to get my mail, I have to fear that blank space, baby, between the wifi signal and the 5G.

Now we know everything when it happens if not beforehand. We need instant gratification because we live without having to wait. We can't let things sit because our clocks have been turned to overdrive and we have no "off" time. When we are forced to tune out we feel that FOMO because the world is still happening. Go back 100 years and where is the FOMO? If you wanted to visit a friend you had to send a letter saying "I'll be there sometime between 8AM and June." One might say that cable companies are just old fashioned because that's still how they schedule appointments.

Happy Trailers to You!

I spent a bunch of time last night working on a new business idea. I'm gonna pitch it to you so I hope you invest all you have in this.

So there I am, scrolling through the various movie options on all the streaming platforms that followed the binary brick road into my house. As I move through them, I says to myself, I says, "Hey, self" and then I says "What?" cuz what would you say? Then Howie Mandel shows up and punches me for stealing his line so I, in an attempt to defend myself, try to suffocate him by putting a rubber glove over his head but he just inflates the glove! It was hilarious. Classic Howie, amirite? So I channeled my inner Gallagher and got a sledgehammer and sued my brother. But that's not my idea. Or even anyone else's. (and if these references are lost on you, tough nerts, bucko) 

But anyway, it certainly does happen then I see thousands of images for movies that I am not sure about and I just don't have the interest in watching a 2 minute trailer for each to figure out what story is being told and whether I want to watch. So here's my service:

For a nominal fee (nom nom nom) I will watch and summarize/review the movie based only on the trailer available on my TV. For example, the movie "Double Trouble" from 1992. I watched the trailer. It is about two guys who are either brothers or at least go to the same barber who punch things and stuff. Viscerally engrossing and experimental in its use of camera angles and color scheme. And effing weird because there are two guys saying stuff and then other stuff gets punched. I recommend it fifth-heartedly.

If you have any concerns over the quality of my reviews, find the movie and sit through the trailer yourself! I know that once you have validated my opinion, you will know you can rely on it in the future and you will happily pay me money to slog through the crud so you don't have to.

I'll vet anything that my TV reports has a viewer score of 4.4 or under -- sign up for the premium package and you get coverage up to 5.0 out of 10. So all those also-ran movies. The Vertical Entertainments and the Asylum movies with fire and ice age tornado earthquakes (now with extra terrorists!). With foreign spies saving the world from estranged children, aliens and animated frogs. I sit on the couch for you!

If a trailer is too wacky even for me, I will get someone on my crack team of subcontractors to watch also and provide a second opinion of the movie. Just last night, after watching the trailer for "City Hunter" (1993) I felt at such a loss that I had to phone-a-frond and called my brother (he's a plant in the audience) and his wife (they put the Love in H.P. Lovecraft). They watched it and agreed that I was not actually hallucinating and Jackie Chan is, indeed, dressed in blue as a female anime character and then it gets strange. One thing is for sure and that's that the trailer definitely exists.

This is a million dollar idea in that I will let you buy it from me for a million dollars (OBO).

Old Man Screed

 Technology is making us dumb. There, I said it. With each new technology we have this illusion that suddenly, our intellects will soar as we use the resources available to help us build a base of knowledge and skills. But that's not what happens. Invent GPS and turn by turn directions and people stop being able to read a map. Give them a calculator and they lose the thinking skills required to do lower level math which means they lack the understanding that would be foundational to developing higher order math skills. But all of this is well known. Today, I ran into a new one.

I have assigned to my class the task of making a flyer, a hand out -- a single page which outlines a societal issue and presents a current problem, its scope, history, consequences, and like that. I told them to imaging giving it out to people -- what could they do in terms of balancing statistics and data with emotional appeals and graphic design considerations. I expected many of them to use the standard excuse of "I'm not artistic" which I can deal with. But a different one came up. Students have no idea how to work on a blank piece of paper and put together anything which isn't just a (poorly written) paragraph. They all expect to look online, find a template and just plug in some of their own data and poof, out comes a completed flyer. They don't understand when I say that a page is 8.5 by 11 inches and they don't know what to do when all the free templates are not of that size. They, for all of their supposed technological acumen, have no understanding of how a document is laid out.

Technology is not, in their minds, a means towards a more intellectually satisfying end, but an end in and of itself. If I have the internet, I assume someone has already set me up to succeed so I just have to look up someone else's completed work and tweak it. Instead of working to build the skills, they assume that all the prep work has been magically done by "the internet." They think that google, which is simply a search engine, is actually giving them answers. When I ask them why they make a claim, they say "that's what google said" as if google was an independent (and really smart) entity, not that it is a search engine simply presenting algorithm driven website lists.

Students simply don't understand what is going on -- they expect to stand on the shoulders of geniuses but don't know who the geniuses are, whether or not they are actually geniuses, or how to maintain their own balance. When I started making a personal webpage, I had to learn basic html. When I found fancier components and I wanted to lift the code from another website, I tried to figure out how it worked so I could manipulate it. Now, students don't have the skill to make anything, they just want to take what someone else made and call it their own because they lack the skills to do their own work.

Sorta sad. Kids today...sigh.

thoughts on pronouns

 I don't think that I have any problem calling someone who asks to be refered to as "they/them" as "they/them." The pronoun label is a covenience of linguists, not a societal truth.

If you ask me to refer to you as it/tree/they, I'll do it because it doesn't matter -- it is your personal preference and I can respect that. So when do I develop a problem? When you think that you you are adopting an extant word and import its other baggage. I shall try to explain.

If a singular person wants to be refered to as "they," then I would change the sounds coming out of my mouth (in the same way that the sounds qwould change if I used a foreign word in the place of an English one). The arbitrary letters combined to make the sound by which I label you don't, inherently, matter. What matters is I am finding and using a specific and unique combination to define you and make you distinct from other potential referents. The word I use for you is a signifier of a single individual. Therefore, I should be allowed, or even required, to use the singular verb to agree with the singular pronoun, whatever the sound of that pronoun is. We are importing the sound of the combination of letters, not the meaning: "they/them" has 2 gramamtical dimensions in the 3rd person -- number-plural and gender-indeterminate. If an individual wants the label of "they/them" then either the person is demanding the full meaning (which is false because the individual is not demanding to be thought of as a plural) or the person is asking a new coinage, a new word which happens to share the sound of a pre-existing word but must be a different word as its meaning is necessarily different from the extant word.

Just because this new word is identical in spelling and pronunciation does not mean that it IS that older word. It is a new word which has the grammatical implications of its meaning, not its prior use. The word must call forth the singular structure regardless of the fact that it looks like a plural word.

So, sure, I can call you "they/them" but if you are uncomfortable when I say "they wants dinner" then maybe you should choose a different word as your pronoun which doesn't make the grammar confusing.

Much is amiss

I miss my parents. I guess I'm allowed because they are currently not here but I really do miss them. One thing that reminds me of how much I miss them is when I need advice. Which is always. I didn't generally go to them and formally ask for pearls of wisdom, but I valued their opinions and statements because I respected their process, their approach and their values. They got me or, when they didn't, they knew to listen until they did. There are fewer and fewer people I can go to for that mind of understanding. There are fewer and fewer people whose imput I can esteem as highly. Fewer I want to emulate and fewer whose input is a valuable piece to help in my dealings with the world.

I miss that.

Time Travel

I just finished a series of 5 books by Allen Appel which focus on the adventures of Alex Balfour, a fictional historian who travels through time. He and others in his family have the gift/curse and it shuttles Alex to the Civil War, the Russian Revolution, WWII and other places. I found it quite enjoyable and am using it to round out my poorly thought out opinion on the impact of time travel. I have decided that time travel does exist but it doesn't work the way it is often thought to.

Now I'm no scientist so I won't try to explain how or why people can travel through time, but I'm going to deal with the question of "changing the future". We often think of time as a line and at moments of decision, there are potential branches. With each choice any person makes, a path is chosen and other branches represent other universes in which other decisions were made and they branch off onto the aither. Imagine a nexus point/focal point, and off of this there are infinite paths to take. Our universe is but one of the infinite ones that are born of each moment. A single past leading to multiple potential futures, so going into the past would change a whole lot of infinite realities.

But I'm gonna flip that right on its head. I believe that there are multiple pasts and that they get mixed into a single present/future at these nexus points. Instead of infinite futures branching off, time is the process of resolving infinite pasts and lopping off all other future possibilities. Instead of one moment into many, it should be many pasts into one moment. This then also explains another issue of time travel -- changing things.

If someone goes into one of the pasts and changes something, and that has an impact on the unified "real" present, then that change happens instantaneously and we have no idea that it happens. You see, at the moment of change, all of our awarenesses and memories shift as well. Imagine if the Orwellian concept of "Eurasia has ALWAYS been at war with East Asia" was an actual truth. When the past is changed we cannot know any difference -- things are as they always have been. For most time travel changes, this wouldn't even be perceptible to the casual observer. A guy in India goes back in time and buy Colgate instead of Crest? Screw the butterflies; that will not result in any real change to my life. But if something large enough or local enough happens, then the observer would see me sitting and living life while reality shifts around and inside me, but I can't sense it. I am probably shifting through tens if not thousands of universe versions every day as time travelers go back and monkey around (or primate around) but I can't know it because the present is constantly the reality for me in whatever version I see it. And my memories will always conform to the reality I am in and the past which generated it. I can't remember any other reality because, in each case, there has never been any other reality. 

If time travelers are here from the future doing stuff, I'll never know it because they are creating a future reality into which I will move, never knowing that things could have been any other way. The word "change" is wrong -- people who travel to the past are setting up my present, not changing it.

Now, as to traveling into the future, no dice. That's silly.

IRL? JK

I'm not much of a writer nor do I play one on the radio but I do know this -- I have an idea and good as dollars to donuts I'm just going to lay it out. And caution: I'm not a Broadway kind of guy. Live action plays make me anxious because I worry that the actors will forget their lines and my overactive empathy gland would explode...did you know that I was worried when (I think it was) Shannon Doherty was replaced by an actress who had been on Saved by the Bell on some show I had never seen I actually felt worried that the new actress would mess up her lines, a concern which seems empathetic until we remember that we are talking about the new episode of a television show which had already been filmed, using multiple takes. I knew that but was still worried. That's not empathy, that's just crazy. So I guess I'm handing the idea off to someone who can make it theatrical and I'll wait for the novelization of the movie.

I spend an ordinate amount of time (yes, I said it and I stand by it) engaging with the masses and multitudes in conversation of one form or another via web-based platforms. I use the written word on message boards, interest groups and forums (fora?) and talk about a variety of life issues as I balance all the threads, subthreads, side conversations, direct messages, and real life. I often center around discussions of Israel and of religion (to some degree of sectarian identification or another). The ebb and flow of the conversation can be surprising and both predictable and not. Knowing the players, following an etiquette, choosing the identity to establish etc are interwoven into the fabric of messages. I did research on this as it applied specifically to chatrooms and their impact on the creation of a new dialect of English. Let me know if that seems interesting to you and maybe I'll look in the old files (I wrote it over 20 years ago) and send it over.

Anyway, I can imagine an empty stage and it is the physical space of forum incarnate. Different people walk on and off to say their messages, following the (il)logic of forum conversations. While 2 people are having a back-and-forth, even a heated one, a person may walk through and say something either irrelevant or only tangential and then try to insert himself...this then breaks into other simultaneous arguments or side conversations with actors using the physical space and the entrance/exit from the stage into a choreography as important as the content. Then a new person comes in and everything bubbles up again. The pacing speeds to the frenetic extreme and some posts are a single word or just an image and other times the battle grounds lay, fallow and simply waiting.

Having been in these threaded conversations for more years than I can count on the middle finger of my left hand, I can promise the right aspiring writer that this has the potential to be an incredible crystallization of an under-represented cyberculture - "Keyboard Warriors" .

Copyright 2024 Daniel Rosen All Rights Reserved, baby

Thinking about Last Night

Another Saturday night and I ain't got no filter. So here's the stuff I jotted down during last evening:

Peter Frampton was on an episode of Black Sheep Squadron (Season 2, Episode 13, from April 6, 1978 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0517357/?ref_=ttep_ep13). Who was the audience of the show in 1978 that would have wanted to watch a show about WWII pilots and wanted to see a rock and roll guy from the 70's? And did Frampton really have that bad of an overbite? And Ernie Hudson? Wow. Now, please have someone explain to me why they chose to paddle from the south Pacific to France instead of getting on a plane.

I am now creating a new definition of "aging" -- aging is the process of movement along the continuum of time, from short to long that expresses the wait between current cultural references that I understand. The older I get, the longer I have to wait for there to be something that I recognize.

There was an Intuit commercial on last night and on it, as woman says "I shook up generations of tradition with 5 words" (or something to that effect, but she specifically said "5 words"). She then recites what she said to shake it all up: "Mama, I wanna make perfume." So now "wanna" counts as a single word. Television has spoken.

I wonder how many of the things labeled "ms" are really the truth. MSG? MSK? MST3K? MSI? What about MS Word? I don't know what to believe.

Note -- in Hebrew, "emes" is one way of pronouncing the word for "truth." Get it?

Idea for a practical joke -- stand on a street corner  and "talk loudly to yourself" (or pretend to be on a cell phone) and say "Of wow! In this timeline Monroe WAS president?!" or even "Wow! In this timeline, Monroe actually WON??" Then walk around with a friend, go into a bar and say to the friend "Hey, is this the universe in which there's a bus crash now into this bar?" and then pause silently and say "ok, guess not" (or run out screaming as soon as you say it). And no, I am not being inspired by the guy from MIB3. Also (and not inspired by Doogie Howser), walk into a building and ask the doorman for the exact date. Then say loudly "Good -- there's still time" and run out.

Movie review time

This won't be an in depth review, but more a series of impressions and ideas.

I know that recently I have watched some weird movies. Alien Code was crazy weird. Wild Target? Weird. Strays was insane and weird and there were loads of others. Last night I watched a movie was weird in a really bad way. Not offensive but clearly an attempt at a puff-PR peace touting the rich cultural histories of China and India and their cooperation when mangling modern cinema.

The movie was called "Kung Fu Yoga" and it was a Jackie Chan film in which he surrounded himself with a crack team of wannabees (no, that isn't a reference to any Japanese actors). I like Jackie Chan and this film had a few flashes of humor in the writing (and some of the fight scenes were inventive and acrobatically intense, classic Jackie Chan) but on the whole, this was a horrible, horrible movie. It spans genres (awkwardly), has too many characters and backstory to keep straight and I couldn't really understand anything that was going on. Also, lots of different languages spoken so the subtitles are sometimes there and sometimes not.

In terms of plot, imagine stealing the general storyline and many specific scenes and devices from the first 3 Raiders movies and mix it with National Treasure. Then stir until it is fully nonsensical, throw in some weird future tech and a dance number and hope for the best. There might have actually been a reference to Rush Hour in one of the lines of dialogue ("You OK? You speak English?").

I wish I could have been in the writers' room when someone came up with and tried to sell this plot twist: "So then, Jackie jumps in the car and starts driving, only to discover that there is a fully grown lion in the car with him! So there is this high speed chase with a lion there!"

Was there automatic assent with sagacious nodding and "harumphs" from around the table or was there at least one guy who cautiously said "but, um, isn't that, well, stupid?"

Those were the nicest things I could say about it. I recommend that you watch it so that I'm not alone in my suffering and you can confirm that it really is as whacked out as I claim it is.

Super thoughts

 Last night was the SuperBowl. I watched most of it and was non-plussed. No plusses at all, I. The DunKings commercial won the commercials and there was some football also but once we accept that the game is rigged, all that is left is Ben Afleck. That's a truth.

Before the game, I sat down to watch a movie which might have been called "Rogue Assassin." I'm not sure. It might have been called "War." Here are my thoughts about that movie (did you think I was really going to waste time analyzing the football game? Feh)

First, does anyone know if there are any handguns (semi sutomatic) which use rifle sized bullets? In the movie, Jet Li's hallmark is a "titanium casing with depleted uranium bullets" but in at least one scene, he only uses a handgun and yet Statham picks up what looks like a rifle casing which proves Li was there. Did Li plant it as a calling card? Do some hanguns use much larger (rifle) bullets?

On the whole, I found the movie very, very confusing. I mean, it is exactly my kind of movie except for the part where I have no idea what is going on. I'm not talking about the plot twists; I'm talking about keeping track of the characters from the very beginning. I also don't know the difference between the Yakuza and the Triads. Traditional schooling has failed me yet again.

At a certain point, there is a fight scene in which the characters appear to be using hammers and pushing barrels, like a scene from Donkey Kong. 

OK, enough of that. Then I watched some scenes from the Old Grey Whistle Test, specifically, a performance by then-not-bald Billy Joel. I watched a performance of Miami 2017. Man, I can't wait for it to be 2017 and all that stuff to happen. Should be epic.

Then a video by Krokus ("Screaming in the Night"). Oh my god -- it is like every 80's hair band stereotype rolled into one mediocre song. Hard to watch, hard to turn off. Like the 80's, themselves!

I have more thoughts but I shall scatter them around so as to share the wealth of my inanity.

A way for me to understand currency exchange rates

Yes, a rather pedestrian topic but I thought of it as I took a walk yesterday, so that makes sense.

Economics as a field is not an area of strength. In fact, I'm not clear on many things that are listed as "fields". I never understood the field of aerodynamics, I never understood the politics behind behind being a left or right fielder, and Sally and Kim have always been Fields I couldn't figure out. But enough about them.

The idea that different places use different currency seems wrong to me -- that's as reasonable as having different places use different words for the same thing. (cf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOJDNChwgBw ). Then you have this phantom notion of an exchange rate which, as best as I can understand it means that if I give you 10 dollars today and I get 47 Foreign Monopoly monies today, I might get 46 or 48 in exchange tomorrow based on the presence of other factors, like nuclear war. That seems rather complicated (the exchange; the war seems rather straightforward).

I need a standard (something that I can really relate to, so not a gold bar which, as far as I know, only exists in movies and iPhones) that can help me understand a more important currency trait, "buying power." So let's take a random household item -- Head And Shoulders Classic Clean Dandruff Shampoo, 12.5 ounces. I can get that at a store for 6 dollars, but I know there are differences around the country so we should take a national average and say that 1 bottle equals 6 dollars.

Now when I get ready to travel and I look up different currencies, I don't really understand this notion of "I give you 1 American dollar and you give me 3.4 million of your plastic beads" until I know what I can get with said beads. The exchange board could look more like this

6 USD=21.93 NIS which equals 75% of a bottle of H+S (I found it online for 27.90 NIS)

So now I know not how many shekels a dollar is worth, but what the buying power of my dollar.

As an extension, you can set the system up to automatically retrieve the average price in a particular country for a variety of products, or you can make a sample order from, say, Amazon, and have the system tell you how many American dollars-equivalent in local currency you would need.

Later, when someone says "it's a good time to travel because the dollar is getting a great exchange rate" I can have that person explain "six USD will get you 13 bottles of H+S in Greece because it is worth X drachmas and H+S costs Y."

The defense rusts.

Another unpopular opinion

Before I begin, I want to make it clear that I really like Raiders of the Lost Ark. I find the character dynamics compelling, the plot based in just enough of reality to seem remotely plausible and the pacing to be exquisite. There is rarely an unnecessary scene and the dialogue is crisp and the whole thing is a fun thrill ride.

But.

Ultimately, the movie has as its central theme the futility of man's struggles against fate -- we cannot change things (There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will"). It is a paean to failure. Consider the overall story arc -- Indy works to keep the Ark of the Covenant out of the hands of the Nazis. But each time he does, the Nazis get it back! Had Marian Ravenwood simply given the headpiece to the Germans and avoided all the bloodshed at her version of Rick's Cafe in Nepal, the Germans would have had the head piecee, found the Ark, taken it by Beloq's request to a deserted island with a convenient submarine base on it, opened it and all had their faces melted. The only difference would be that Indy would not have been there to not see it, and there would have been no one to box up the Ark and put it somewhere safe so top-men could ignore it for a while. 

Indy does nothing that ultimately causes the downfall of the villains. In fact, it is only their success at the endeavor and then their own bad judgment which leads to their downfall. The same, by the way, holds true for the 3rd movie (the Holy Grail movie). In that one, all of Indy's attempts to stay ahead of the baddies and find the grail lead the baddies right to it, and it is only because the head baddie is double crossed by his own femme that he becomes a fatale-ity. And then she, trying to leave with the cup, causes her own death and Indy fails to save her. Had the Jones boys simply led the bad guys there and then sat back, some result. The Crystal Skull movie has the same idea -- the evil lady with the bad haircut gets what she wants. She wins. But by winning, she loses, Indy be damned. 

So, yeah, I love the movie (movies, some of them) but they all seem to be more about the failure of Indy to achieve his own mission, but the heavens make sure that evil is repaid not by man's hand but by God's.

Word to your mother and father

A watchword for a new generation. 

By: A. Dad

For a long time I have taught people that empathy is an essential watchword in how we lead our lives and how we teach our students/children. I don't back down from that.

I also have spent a while trying to teach the young people that one of the most important skills is time management, and to an only slightly lesser degree, internal motivation.

But I have decided to add something to the pantheon of words to live by. I am adding "appreciation."

Many years ago, I made the pronouncement that a parent's success is measured by his grandchildren. But I'd like to amend that -- a parent feel his or her success through the expressed appreciation of his children.

And kids, you might not want to consider this (but trust me, many of your parents are thinking this), but at some point, your parent(s) will be gone and the time for appreciation will be gone. I wouldn't call it stroking a parent's ego (not that that doesn't feel good also) but a "thank you" for a measure of hard-work and relative professionalism.

We make all sorts of difficult decisions. We say things and do things that we know will cause you pain or sadness. But we do these things because we think it is the path towards a more successful adulthood for YOU so we bite back our own discomfort and do what we think we are supposed to. There is no parenting manual (or womanual) and no chance for a do-over so we worry that we have messed you up permanently or that you will rise despite, not because of our actions. So we apologize but we hope against hope that we didn't completely screw up and that you will be happy, healthy, safe and well-adjusted. Your appearance as a contributing member of society serves as that silent testament to your parents' not having kileld and eaten you and that has to count for something.

OK, maybe that last point was a bit extreme and I'm not expecting texts from my kids with little hearts on them, saying "Hey, thanks for not killing and eating me" but it would be nice to have them show the critical-analytic skills of adulthood and can look back at their experiences growing up and say "I now understand why you did that and I appreciate that you were thinking of me and my well-being." You can leave out the "no matter how ham-fisted and wrong-headed it was."

So, yeah, I want to be appreciated -- as a parent, a relative, a friend, coworker and teaching professional because I value myself by measuring my positive impact on others. So hearing that I have had a positive impact and that others recognize my effort feels really good. I try to express my thanks, gratitude and appreciation to the people around me because I hope it reflects well on them.

Keep the chain going and show some appreciation for people today.

What just happened

I just watched a movie. Don't ask me what it was called -- I don't remember the title and I think that that's my point.

This movie was instantly forgetable. I mean INSTANTLY. Not being facetious here (or, as the young people say, "not gonna lie" or even "I poop you not"...those young people, so lyrical), it was literally, as soon as the credits began, gone from my memory. I couldn't recall any thing at all about it -- any aspect of plot, character names or behaviors or lines; nothing. It was a black hole in my memory that appeared the instant the memory was created.

Was this a defense mechanism by my brain to protect me from reliving a truly horrible move? I think not as I have seen, and remembered movies that were way worse. Or at least somewhat worse...as my memory starts to seep back, I recall that this was, in fact, a pretty bad movie. Maybe it was such fluff that it failed to make any recordable impact on my psyche so it left no impression to become memory. But I recall movies by The Asylum with more detail than this movie.

I looked it up -- it was called Spy Intervention and reading the summary to try and refresh myself, I can absolutely confirm that it wasn't a very good movie. It had some parts that were really, really (really) weird. But was it the worst movie I have ever seen? Certainly not.

It just wasn't good. That, I now remember.