The story concerns Max (voiced by Jason Marsden, singing voice by Aaron Lohr) and his relationship with his father, the classic Disney icon Goofy (voiced by Bill Farmer). Max is in high school and wants what most teenage guys want: to fit in, have friends, and get the girl. In the first act, he highjacks a school assembly to ask out the girl of his dreams, Roxanne, but in doing so ends up getting in trouble with the principal. When Goofy hears that his son is causing trouble, he takes parenting advice from his neighbour Pete and tries to get his son “under his thumb” (i.e., earn his son’s respect) with a little bonding time on the open road.

If someone told you that there was a Goof Troop movie, would you expect much more than a made-for-TV cash-in? Surprisingly, this movie is more than that. Yeah, it’s a goofy cartoon (get it?) with tons of slapstick, but it never forgets to include the undercurrent of drama required to maintain your attention for the running time. When the film needs to be quiet and mature, it can be — and there are quite a few touching, insightful little moments thrown in — but A Goofy Movie never forgets that it’s essentially a big-screen Saturday morning cartoon. Personally, I think that’s what makes it so good. I don’t want Goofy’s movie to try to be The Lion King. As a family road trip movie, it works.

The film is also a musical, and though the songs aren’t the greatest tunes you’ll ever hear, they’re not too bad either. They work within the context of the film, and one or two of them do stand out as being memorably good — most notably the first song, “After Today”. The song that marks the beginning of the road trip, “On the Open Road”, isn’t that spectacular on its own but is accompanied by countless visual gags that elevate it. There’s isn’t much to complain about, but nothing to write home about either.

The animation, as I said, is a bit bad by Disney standards. Watch the backgrounds and you’ll see extras conspicuously frozen in place, elements that are clearly painted onto separate cells (having mismatched colours as a result), and there’s even a few sequences that appear to have been artificially slowed down in post-production, causing the frame rate to drop erratically. It’s nothing worse than you’d see in a TV show, however, and the movie makes up for it with some very clever use of colour; I especially like the red light that illuminates the map every time someone looks at it dramatically. It isn’t subtle, but that’s what makes it fit this style of animation so well. For a feature film, a bit more effort could have been put in, but it’s passable.

A Goofy Movie isn’t a grand epic tale that digs deep into important issues — it’s a fun little tale about a boy and his dad. Goofy is definitely my favourite Disney character, and the script does an incredibly good job of keeping him ridiculous while still making me feel some genuine emotion about him. Like in Goof Troop, Goofy is a single dad, but now that Max is a bit older, he finds himself struggling to maintain his relationship with his son. Max is embarrassed by his dad in that way teenagers frequently are… and when your dad is Goofy, it’s a pretty believable embarrassment. I can empathize with Max’s desire to gain some independence from his parent, but I can just as easily sympathize with Goofy. The relationship is done very well. Some people might have wanted something with a bigger scope, but I think this modest story does the movie a favour: the emphasis is on what made the TV show good, while still expanding it to fit a movie format. Maybe a “Goof Troop Saves the World” movie could have worked, but that formula has been done to death. This works fine.

Is it a masterpiece? Probably not, but A Goofy Movie is still one of my personal favourites, bias taken into account. I grew up with those old Goofy cartoons, and I can see a lot of myself in Max and his relationship with his father. Sometimes, it is hard for a little boy to tell his dad, “I love you.” If you don’t understand that, you probably won’t understand what makes me like this movie so much. And if you don’t like Goofy… well, don’t expect him to suddenly endear himself to you.

If you’re a fan of Goof Troop, or if a father-son road trip movie with Goofy sounds like something you would enjoy regardless, check this one out. Maybe it’s not really the best Disney movie, but it’s far from the worst.

Jesse Eisenberg stars as James Brennan, a shy, introspective nerd who plans on going to grad school after the summer. But after the unexpected job loss of his father, Brennan finds himself taking up a summer job at the local amusement park, Adventureland. Here he meets the mandatory assortment of kooky characters: the snarky slacker Joel (Martin Starr), the hot chick Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), local macho man Mike (Ryan Reynolds), and the love interest, Em. Kristen Stewart plays the lead female role of Em in her typical lip-biting style, but it does work in this instance, proving that she really doesn’t deserve the hate she gets from being in Twilight. She can act when her character actually has a personality.

Where Superbad tried to be a straight comedy with only small dramatic elements to keep it afloat, Adventureland tries to do the opposite. In this, the film is fairly successful.

The characters are, for the most part, well-written and well-developed throughout the narrative; even the archetypal hot chick has a little more depth than you would expect, dating the main character for a brief time and letting some details spill about her background and outlook. The movie has something in common with Lost and Delirious, in that the characters act so consistently stupid and make such obvious mistakes that you want to slap them — but their actions fit their age and situation, and you can’t help but relate to them. If you were ever a teenager, you’ll recognize the people in Adventureland. Even the two-dimensional, undeveloped guy who punches everyone in the nuts is a realistic character, really: I know several people I met in high school who still act like that and never seem to have any depth no matter how long I’ve known them.

Drama is where the movie really shines. Where it starts to falter a bit is the comedy. The structure of the film pools a fair mix of drama and comedy into the first act and partially into the second, but it’s always in the form of a dramedy rather than a comedy — meaning that the scenes are mainly dramatic and have light humour to punctuate them, rather than being primarily funny. The problem is that the movie doesn’t really do this consistently, and ends up becoming a straight drama by the halfway point. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but when the movie starts out like that it starts to wear on your nerves a bit and makes you think, “What happened to the jokes?”

I’m not saying Brennan should wear a clown suit, but the tension is just a tad too much in later scenes of the movie, to a point where it almost starts to seem melodramatic. These are teenagers, yeah, they blow everything out of proportion and act like every little betrayal is a bullet to the head — but they’re teenagers, they’re supposed to be sarcastic and blow off a bit of steam while doing so. For a movie with so many stoners in it, there’s a distinct lack of funny stoned people and an overabundance of philosophical prats. It’s not too bad, but it kills a bit of the movie’s rewatchability — once you know what happens, you can’t muster up that edge-of-your-seat I-want-to-know-what-happens-next feeling, and it becomes a lot less entertaining.

Adventureland is a good film. Hell, it’s a great film that deserves way more recognition than it gets. Is it perfect? Not really; it does go a bit far with the drama at times. But it’s so much closer to being perfect than most movies like it, you have to see it at least once. It’s no Dazed and Confused, but how many movies are?

Splitting the source material into two films means that the final confrontation against Voldemort and the Death Eaters is allowed to span roughly five hours instead of the usual two and half, and this means that the story can linger and pace itself a little bit better. For a series as massive and epic as Harry Potter, a suitably huge conclusion would be needed to cap it off — and for the most part, the director David Yates succeeded once again. Part 1 is a leisurely first act that draws you back into the characters and setting quite effectively, with plenty of action creeping into the second act just to keep the viewers on their toes, then Part 2 is for the most part just a super-extended third act. And while my gut instinct for a situation like that would be to criticize Part 2 for stretching out what’s traditionally supposed to be punchy and to-the-point… I can’t deny that the enormous climax of Deathly Hallows just works.

That’s not to say that the two films are masterpieces. Being made in 2011 amongst the craze of pointless CGI and superhero movies, it seems like the post-production visual effects team decided to be lazy and just reuse some PlayStation 3 graphics instead of doing actual work. For $250 000 000, don’t tell me they couldn’t have made the effects look better than that. Half of the movie feels like a video game cutscene, Attack of the Clones style. But then, I’m really biased against CGI in general. I’ve always held up the other Potter films as my example of CGI done well (you either use it sparingly or have enough dough to make it look flawless), but Deathly Hallows hangs a big asterisk over my example, and that just annoys me.

There’s also a serious problem with the subplot distribution. For whatever reason, either the screenwriter or the director decided to put all that negative stuff about Dumbledore that was in the book into Part 1 — but then didn’t actually follow up on it satisfactorily in Part 2. Unlike in the book, Deathly Hallows doesn’t redeem Dumbledore, and his winking smile to Harry when we do get to see him one last time just sort of makes him look like a prick. What was that about? The majority of the story was done quite well in Deathly Hallows, and it’s not like they didn’t have enough running time to expound on everything they wanted. The humanization of Dumbledore is pretty important to the series’s themes, but if they wanted to cut it so badly, they could have at least cut all of it.

Overall, though, the two parts of Deathly Hallows are pretty good. Not incredible, but none of the Potter series was really incredible anyway. They’re just fun.

See also: my review of Half-Blood Prince, my review of the first five Harry Potter movies.

If you’ve read other reviews from me, you might have noticed that I have a thing for heavily flawed movies that manage to still be good. This is one of those movies.

The film follows a quiet, introspective girl named Mary, played by Mischa Barton. In the beginning of the movie, Mary tells us that her mother has passed away, and her emotionally-distant father has decided to enroll her in an all-girls boarding school. Arriving there, she soon meets her roommates, Tori (Jessica Paré) and Paulie (Piper Perabo). In shocking juxtaposition to the main character, Paulie is outspoken and open about everything, never flinching when the truth needs to come out — except, of course, when it comes to Tori, whose parents can’t be allowed to know the true nature of their relationship.

The first time I watched this movie, I thought it was pretty damn good, but it gets worse on every subsequent viewing. The reason, I think, is that it’s extremely lopsided — movies are a combination of plot, characters, visuals, music, pacing, and theme (the last three forming the broader category of atmosphere), but Lost and Delirious doesn’t do many of these aspects well. The plot scores an absolute zero, hitting nearly every single cliché in the queer and feminist books and being as boring as humanly possible. The visuals are fairly bland, with only one scene being memorably well-composed and many, many scenes which comprise a series of heavy-handed visual metaphors. The music is… well, there’s a reason critics have called it melodramatic. Even the theme, though it’s not done terribly, is kind of… generic. Are you surprised that a movie about lesbians and a shy girl is about feminism? Surprised that a movie set in an all-girls boarding school has something to say about patriarchy?

No, I understand fully why critics hate this movie. It’s very, very flawed, doing many key aspects of filmmaking utterly and completely wrong. But it does one important thing right: characters. The characters are amazing.

Regardless of what you might personally think of them (trust me, you’ll probably want to slap them a few times during the film), one thing you can’t deny is that they are completely honest. Yes, the overwrought musical sequences are melodramatic… but the movie is about teenagers going through what is, to them, the end of the whole damn world. The lengths Paulie goes to to win the heart of her girlfriend are absolutely insane, but I can name three people in my life who would actually do that.

Does that mean the movie can be forgiven for all it does wrong? No, not at all. A great movie takes a personal, emotional scenario, blows it up, and turns it into an experience that accurately conveys the complexity and meaning of the situation to the audience, including and especially outsiders who wouldn’t have understood the situation otherwise. But Lost and Delirious just isn’t a great movie — it’s a cult movie, or maybe you’d call it an insider movie. A movie made by a lesbian, for lesbians; by a woman, for women; and it makes no attempt to include the outside world in its equation. You’re in, or you’re out.

So no, Lost and Delirious isn’t good — but it isn’t necessarily just the clichéd mess that people claim it is. If you can relate to the characters, relate to the melodrama, relate to the age and place where a trite visual metaphor seemed supremely poetic — then you can get swept up in the movie and walk away feeling like someone just stabbed you in the heart. But if you can’t relate to it, you’ll be throwing popcorn at the screen. That’s just how it is with this one.

For the record, I’ve never read the source material myself so I can’t comment on why and how the movie could have been improved in that manner. However, I read that the newest edition of the book has a foreword by the author praising the movie, despite its differences. Take that as you will.

Below the $75 000 per year income line, happiness increases with money, as you might expect. But after $75k, it plateaus — if you’re only counting money, at least. Once you get beyond a certain point of having enough money to get by, your happiness has more to do with your own personal feelings of autonomy and mastery in your life. This has to do with your mind’s interpretation of intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards — the former being your inner motivation to do things because you genuinely want to, the latter being your motivation to do things because you serve to gain something (e.g., money, social status, experience points).

A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology involved researchers separating artistic children into three groups and giving them different instructions: the first group was told that they would be rewarded if they drew a picture during play time; the second group wasn’t told, but was still rewarded if they drew a picture; and the third group wasn’t rewarded no matter what. The findings reported in the study showed that the last two groups drew just as many pictures after they began the study as they did before — but the first group, the one that had been promised a reward, drew less pictures.

When you have a carrot dangling in front of your face, the carrot becomes your motivation. It doesn’t matter if you would have enjoyed running without the carrot. This is due to something called the overjustification effect: your mind only attributes reasoning to your actions after you’ve already done them, so when there’s an extrinsic motivation, the mind will assume that it was the source of your satisfaction, robbing you of your personal accomplishment. This is why people being paid by the hour do the least work possible to get their money, even if they enjoy the work. (This also might be why politicians seem to get so much worse once they’re in office, getting paid.)

If you’re making less than $75k per year, money might be a potent extrinsic motivation. But once you have enough money that you don’t really need it anymore, your personal satisfaction in gaining that money starts to disappear. Continuing to gain money after a certain point will not only not make you happier, it can actually poison your enjoyment of things you previously enjoyed due to the overjustification effect.

What I’m saying is, don’t turn what you love into a meaningless job. If you make sure you do the things you love because you love them, not because you want money, you’ll be more motivated to do those things in the future. Always strive to be better: autonomy, your ability to control your own destiny, is a major part of your happiness; the other major part is mastery, your desire to improve at what you love. If you’re stagnating and sticking to a formula because you’ve been successful doing that in the past, you’re bound to fail. Even if the quality of your work doesn’t drop, you’ll have failed yourself.

As annoying as human motivation can be, look on the bright side: without our love of mastery and autonomy, we wouldn’t have open source software, we wouldn’t have Wikipedia, and we wouldn’t have Everything2. If we didn’t feel that need to create something great just because we can, we would be a lot worse off as a species.

Sources

1. Deaton, Angus. “Income, Health, and Well-Being Around the
   World.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2008, Vol. 22, No. 2. [link]
2. Lepper, Mark R. & Greene, David & Nisbett, Richard E. “Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward.” Stanford University, University of Michigan. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973, Vol. 28, No. 1, 129-137. [link]
3. Benjamin, Daniel J. & Heffetz, Ori & Kimball, Miles S. & Rees-Jones, Alex. “Do People Seek to Maximize Happiness?” Cornell University, University of Michigan. [link]
4. Easterlin, Richard A. “Does economic growth improve the human lot?” From Paul A. David and Melvin W. Reder (eds.), Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz. 1974. New York: Academic Press, Inc.
5. McRaney, David. You Are Not So Smart: The Overjustification Effect.
6. RSA Animate. The surprising truth about what motivates us

Okay, so that story had almost nothing to do with cunnilingus, but it’s relevant. See, it’s the experiences like that at a young age that made me such an eavesdropper as a kid. I was an only child and I liked attention, but no one gave a rat’s scrotum about my creative output back then, so I went for the other thing I liked: knowing stuff, which at the time meant getting good grades in school. And even if I got myself in trouble over it occasionally, I always learnt stuff faster than my peers because of it, and that made me feel smart.

Guess who ran around his Catholic school playground telling all the first-graders about sex. Me! I was a badass kid. I had to switch to public school in grade three, and thankfully they tolerated my crap a lot better.

Anyway, I liked being smart. I learnt a lot as a kid by spying on the adults. My mom would lie to me (as all parents do with young children) and I’d eavesdrop on her to learn the whole truth. Through eavesdropping and ignoring warnings that I wasn’t “old enough to understand”, I learnt how to tell when people were lying to me, why they were doing it, and how. I became an exceptionally good liar myself. By the time I was in middle school I could basically lie my way out of any trouble I got into at school. It was cool.

Now I obviously don’t eavesdrop on people anymore, nor encourage others over the age of 10 to do so. It’s a pretty rude breach of people’s privacy, and once you get older most of the things you’d hear from it would serve no purpose other than gossip or blackmail. But I still engage in what some call people watching.

When I’m in stores and other public places, I overhear snippets of strangers’ conversations. I’m not eavesdropping or spying on them, I just think hearing statements out of context from people I don’t know is fun, and by utilizing my aforementioned ability to piece together contextual clues, I can use it as a way to find creative inspiration.

• Nice date with a cool attractive person who holds a good conversation: good.
• Eye-opening discussion with life-long best friend: fantastic.
• Trying to piece together why that gangbanger and elderly Chinese woman are talking about the Spanish Inquisition: priceless.

Do this for a while and take some notes. I’m not saying you should sit in the coffee shop with binoculars and an ear trumpet, but just listen to the people around you during your everyday life. You’ll have a cache of different characters in your writing repertoire to draw from later, when you’re feeling lazy. Write a couple of weird strangers into a room with a normal person and they might tell you what you should write.

Then there’s, “I learnt how to perform cunnilingus while on holiday with my boyfriend.” The weirdest thing I’ve ever heard a gay man say. I mean, he had a pink v-neck, badly-dyed blond hair, and a lisp like Louis CK’s worst impression of a rollerblader. My brain’s just going to assume he loves men until I get proof to the contrary… and even then…

To this day I haven’t got a single clue what he was talking about. I like to imagine he had a Pulitzer-worthy heartwarming romance story to share with his friends in the food court. For all I know he could’ve been part of a “say something ridiculous and shocking” contest. Either way, he’s stuck out in my mind ever since, and I’m writing about him. Thanks for telling me what to write, Random Gay Dude. I couldn’t do it without you.

My laptop broke recently. Since a new laptop can be expensive and there didn’t seem to be any reasonably-priced person willing to do simple repairs for me, I opted to fix the issue myself. I’d already built computers in the past and had no problem understanding what it was that I had to do, but actually getting the laptop into pieces so that I could do it was something else entirely. It seems like every laptop model is built slightly differently, and I couldn’t find any good guides online that explained how to take mine apart without skipping steps. So, since I had to take the thing apart anyway, I figured I might as well take some photos and compile a tutorial.

I would recommend doing this on a table or something, away from things that would cause a bunch of static electricity to jump all over your laptop components. That means take off your fuzzy dressing gown, mom.

1. Take out the battery using the two clasps on the bottom. One of them locks into place after you move it, the other one you need to actively hold open while tugging on the battery. This is simple stuff.

2. Unscrew the 13 screws on the bottom. They’re all marked with a little circle that reads F6. You need a small enough screwdriver to actually do this, of course, but otherwise it’s fairly easy.

3. Remove the bezel above the keyboard.

The bezel is that strip of plastic between the top of the keyboard and the power button. It’s silver on my model, and has clean lines on either side so you can tell it’s detachable. Jam a screwdriver under there and use the leverage to pry it off with your fingers. It might be a bit hard to do the first time, but just keep giving it gentle tugs until it loosens.

4. Take out the 2 tiny screws that hold the keyboard in place. They’re located on either side of the top of the keyboard, the area that was formerly covered by the bezel. They’re extremely small, so be careful with them.

5. Remove the keyboard. First there’s a little clasp in the centre-top that you need to pull back on to release the keyboard. It’s really small and really hard to pull on. I recommend pushing on it with the head of your screwdriver if you’re having trouble with it.

The keyboard is connected to the motherboard by this:

See how there’s a bit of white plastic ‘handle’ sticking out of either side of where the wire connected? Gently pull on either side of that to loosen its grip on the keyboard connection. Tug on the wire and check if it slides out easily. If it doesn’t, try pulling out the plastic tab some more. Once you get the keyboard disconnected, it’ll look like this:

Carefully set the keyboard aside.

6. Disconnect the touchpad. Basically the same idea as the keyboard, but the wire is smaller so it’s a bit tougher. The black plastic on top is actually there for you to grab onto, so make use of it.

7. Disconnect the speakers. They’re a lot easier to do. Both of them are wired into one place. Just unplug that wire and you’re set.

8. Remove the 6 screws under the keyboard. Not the ones connecting actual components to the motherboard, obviously. Just unscrew the six that are actually holding the chassis in place (i.e., the ones that are screwed through the black part, not on any electronic part).

9. Open up the laptop!

I don’t know if there’s a certain method you’re supposed to use. I just jammed a fingernail under a corner and lifted from the bottom. Seems to work fine.

Now what do you do? I don’t know. Figure it out. What do I look like, someone who knows about computers?

My mom listens to country music. Somehow, that’s related to my thoughts on suicide and life itself. As absurd as that sounds — and I’ll admit, the connection is somewhat tenuous — it makes perfect sense to me. It all boils down to the fact that people aren’t computers, and the relationships and connotations formed in their minds during the course of their lives is too complicated for anyone to really understand, least of all themselves. But as long as it makes sense to them, it essentially is, in a pragmatic sense. Wait, let me start this story from the beginning:

I don’t really like country music very much; I wouldn’t say I hate it, certainly, but it’s not a genre I actively listen to. Still, for the first 10 or so years of my life it was, with few exceptions, the only music I listened to. When you’re a kid, you don’t tend to develop your own distinct tastes very much, and since my mom listened to it all the damn time, country music was the only music I knew until I entered the preteen years and developed my own musical tastes. As a result, there are a great number of emotional country songs that aren’t necessarily good, but stick around in the back of my mind just because I was exposed to them so much. One of these songs, which I sadly can’t remember the title of, is about a man who gets the chance to go back in time and change one event in his life, but decides that he won’t do it. He says that even though he did things he regrets, those mistakes are what made him who he is, and he has grown to accept them as an important part of himself.

Growing up, I always thought I agreed with that song. Nowadays, I’m not so sure.

There are so many what ifs, so many if only I’d justs, and especially so many should I have saids — without earnestly analyzing every situation, it feels dishonest to make a blanket statement about them all, as convenient as that would be. And while it’s definitely true that I wouldn’t be the same person if some of these events had turned out differently, the real question is, do I actually want to be the person that I am?

Or am I just stuck in a sunk cost fallacy, in which I’ve invested too much to turn back?

An event in question that comes to mind every time I think about that song is January 1st, 2010. I can remember the night of that day with crystal clarity. It was the first time I actively decided to throw away social inhibition. It was the first time I ever thought going to Pizza Pizza at 3AM was a good idea. It was the first time I ever smoked weed.

I’m from Cornwall, a small place sandwiched between Ottawa and Montreal. If you know anything about weed, you know that places like Cornwall are the hotspots of pothead activity. (Incidentally, I saw a fairly good indie flick about that called Daydream Nation just last October. Look it up.) I was never a stranger to weed; I’d had a massive stoner for a friend in seventh grade, and I even held his bong for him a couple of times. I knew what it was, I knew what it did, and I knew where to get it. But it wasn’t until several years later — January 1st, 2010 — that I made the decision to try it myself.

If I could go back to that night and make different choices, would I?

I thought I wanted to have “fun”. Huge parts of me rejected the notion that I wanted to “see the world in a new way” — one person even told me that I would do just that, and I hated him. Still do. Other, even huger parts of me rejected the idea that I was doing it out of peer pressure. I had, after all, felt no desire to partake for the past several years, felt no particular pressure from anyone, and had thought about it for weeks before doing it. It wasn’t a split-second decision made in the heat of the moment — except, in retrospect, that every day of your teenage years feels like the heat of the moment, and it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking a split-second decision was made in good accord. Maybe that was the problem.

If I had to give advice to kids, I’d tell them not to smoke pot. But that’s only because I know that half of them would disobey me anyway. The fact of the matter is, a drug is a drug is a drug, and it isn’t really good or bad, it’s what you make of it. Some drugs are just harder to make positive than others. I have conflicting opinions on pot, which are pretty apparent if you read my other articles on the subject. I do firmly believe that the substance should be legal, but when it comes to its actual use… I have no idea what to honestly say about it other than the hard truth of my own experiences.

Marijuana can be fun, it can occasionally be useful, but it can also, above all, be a profound waste of time. As a social lubricant used in the same manner as alcohol, it’s completely fine (in moderation), and the laws about its cultivation and sale are absurd. The one thing it has over alcohol is its ability to inspire introspection, which can be useful — however, it’s worth remembering that the vast majority of “introspection” can more accurately be called “pointless navel-gazing”. Some time spent in one’s own thoughts is healthy, but most people don’t really have thoughts worth mulling over for any significant length of time. Marijuana has a way of tricking you into thinking that you’re deeper than you are; that’s how people become hipsters.

I’ll beat you to the joke now: I’m sober while writing this. I’ve been sober for a long time.

Back to the point, though — my decision of whether or not I should try smoking pot is one of the decisions I think about the most because it’s one of the decisions I’ve made that I can directly link to many, many major events in my life. In many ways, probably even most ways, it was positive for me — but sometimes I still wish I’d never done it. The decision I made to try it for the first time was wholly fueled by a desire to fit in, even if it didn’t seem like it at the time. It wasn’t made through an immediate thought process that blatantly said “I want to be like these people”, but it was fueled by the increasing loneliness I felt being the only person not involved in the parties, the “friends”, and all the fun I was missing out on.

As long as we’re being honest, it was a lot of fun. But not at first. It’s not until I grew up and got away from the so-called “fun” that I was able to appreciate pot for what it is: a drug. Not a lifestyle choice. The people who think otherwise are no longer my “friends”.

Usually I conclude that my decision was good, even if the reasons for it were not. I spent time rubbing shoulders with the wrong people, but they were more shitty than evil, and I’ve gained valuable experience from it. The people I’ve met have been turned into characters in my stories — one of them inspired Different, and many more of them have inspired various characters in stories I’ve yet to publish. I can tie some of my greatest accomplishments to marijuana, but how do I know if it was actually a good decision to try it in the first place? Has the good actually been worth the bad? Or would everything have been even better if I’d just never tried it in the first place?

I’ll never know. You’ll never know. It’s pointless to think about. But it’s the kind of thing you think about when you think about suicide.

One of the things I learned from smoking pot, when I’d smoked too much of it, is that life is literally one experience after another, like sequential steps in a computer program. Never, prior to pot, had I thought about how I could feel the inside of my shoes against my feet while walking, or what the exact texture of either side of a pizza slice felt like on either side of my mouth, or other inane stoner thoughts. They sound stupid (and let’s admit that they are, profoundly stupid), but that’s the kind of thing that got me to thinking: if life can be boiled down to a series of precise events and experiences, can we actually be thought of as giant, super-advanced computers?

The literal answer is… probably. I’m sure my smarmy ass of a high school science teacher would have said so. But the pragmatic answer is obviously no. Humans don’t store information in a sequential, defined manner the same way that computers do. We see life as a big cluster of emotions, thoughts, impulses, and sometimes the rare actual memory of an event. We live by connotations, not denotations; with every event being coloured by another one until we lose track of why, how, or when we got to be where we are.

Suicide is confusing because life is confusing.

Do I wish that I’d never tried pot? Maybe. When I realize that I’ve wasted an entire day getting high instead of studying, yes. When I realize that I might actually be even worse off without experiencing pot for myself, maybe not. I know people who never tried pot or alcohol until they went to university, and now they’re totally hooked and ruining what might be some of the most important years of their lives. If I didn’t try pot then, would I have tried it at an even worse time? My baby of a screenplay, the script for a movie that I have rewritten nearly five and a half times now, would never exist if I had never tried pot. But might I have written something better instead?

It’s easy to say that there’s no point worrying about the past. Except history repeats itself, and you can’t understand your future without understanding your past. Aphorisms seem to contradict themselves a lot, don’t they?

I’ve thought about suicide. Everyone has. Everyone thinks about it because life is hard. Life is really, really hard. Mainly because it’s confusing. What am I supposed to be doing with myself? How am I supposed to know?

How do I find the strength to do the right thing instead of the easy thing?

Suicide is logical. Life is far more pain than pleasure. My friends betray me. None of my dating ever goes anywhere satisfactory. I’m only passionate about career paths with no job security, and I’m not particularly confident that I’m good at them. Become a successful screenwriter? I’d love to see you do it.

I constantly find myself either being rejected, or having to grit my teeth and hate myself while rejecting someone else. I find myself writing long diatribes on the internet about my personal feelings, even though I know I look like a moron in doing so. I find myself doing all sorts of stupid, stupid things; why not suicide?

I’m not afraid of death. I never have been. It’s not denial or anything — for as long as I can remember, I’ve figured that, if I were to die, I’d be too dead to be sorry about it. But I don’t want to die. Maybe it would prove someone right. Maybe it would hurt someone I love. Maybe I just don’t know where to start and don’t want to ask.

Is the main reason I don’t commit suicide actually pride?

Suicide is confusing because life is confusing. And life is confusing because nobody know what it is, why it exists, or how to do it right. Everything just happens. I often let pragmatism dictate my actions; but if pragmatism dictated my thoughts, would I have killed myself long ago? Life is, after all, completely pointless.

Maybe that’s the point.

Or maybe I should go back in time and stop myself from ever hearing that damn country song in the first place.

Don’t pretend that you don’t know what I mean. Everyone has heard the counterexamples to this; plenty of successful, intelligent people smoke pot, and sometimes they smoke a lot of pot. That doesn’t matter. The vast, vast majority of people who smoke pot every day are lazy, stupid, and unambitious. If you disagree with this, don’t bother reading the rest of this article. I’m too busy being honest to care about people who can’t cope with reality.

There’s a very simple reason why people who smoke pot constantly are that way, though. It’s not that pot actually physiologically causes a person to behave like that (or if it does, I’m not qualified enough to know). As far as I know, it’s largely a psychological thing. Think about it: when you’re just sitting around, not doing anything, what tends to happen? You get bored. But when you’re high, you don’t get bored. Smoking pot is a great way to relax and escape the tedium of reality, but it’s also an escape from the things about reality that cause people to actually do things. If you’re just sitting around relaxing all the time, you’re being lazy. You’ll act stupid because you’ll be high all the time. You won’t be motivated to further yourself because you’ll be in a neutral state of relaxation all the time. That’s why stoners have the reputation that they have.

If you want to chase your dreams, you need the motivation to do so. If you smoke pot all the time, you’ll keep receiving the little burst of artificial happiness that being high gives you, and eventually you’ll forget how much more rewarding it is to actually do something for real. I know this because I’ve experienced it before. It’s very easy to smoke pot once, be happy, then wake up the next day and think “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun if I smoked pot again?” Pretty soon, you lose track of what you were trying to do in the first place and you end up settling for drug-induced happiness instead of actual happiness.

The scary thing is, this is an easy settlement to make. Drugs are a lot of fun.

What’s more fun than drugs? Building a house, writing a book, making a lot of money, or getting married to someone you love. What’s less fun that drugs? Doing the dishes, having a shitty job, going to class, or admitting that you’re not as successful as you always wanted to be.

Smoking pot can make all the less-fun things into more-fun things, but without all those little annoyances in your life you start to lose your motivation to achieve the actual more-fun things. Pretty soon it becomes easy to rationalize your drug intake with a line of thought that sounds an awful lot like, “Drugs make me happy without much effort, so I’ll settle for that instead of making an effort at doing something worthwhile.” That’s laziness. And the worst thing about it is, you won’t have very much respect for yourself. It might seem like you do, but when you see other people you knew in high school becoming the next Bill Gates, you’ll look at yourself and say, “What the hell did I do with my life?”

For some people, pot can cause the creative stroke of brilliance that lets them do things they only ever dreamed of. For most people, pot is just something to do for fun and really doesn’t help them at all. I always seem to hear the excuse that people are using drugs to “find themselves”. That sounds deep and meaningful when you’re sixteen, but when you get older it starts to ring hollow. How exactly are you going to find yourself if you keep using drugs to escape yourself? You need to put things in perspective in a way that indicates actual maturity.

When I see someone who has so much potential for long-term happiness throw that potential away in pursuit of short-term happiness, it’s so frustrating and depressing that I can’t put it into words. In one case, a person who did this was someone I loved like a brother, who had such an enormous impact on my life that I truly believed, even in my normally-cynical heart, that he’d be there forever. That person meant too much for me to ever fully let him go. In the end, though friendships can be repaired in time, damage is done forever, and I’ll never be able to forget the times that I’ve been lied to over a drug.

It’s easy to realize that there’s no real scientific or logical reason to make pot illegal. On paper, it seems like the people who build their lives around a drug that’s not even particularly potent or addictive could easily be ignored. It seems easy to realize that you don’t need to have them in your life. You shouldn’t have to care about them. In reality, sometimes they’re people that you love.

Their actions explain why pot is illegal better than any after-school special ever could.

With that out of the way, here’s something I’m completely sick of: the James Bond franchise.

For 20 straight movies, it had a consistent style. Whether or not you actually like it personally, it doesn’t matter. The objective fact of the matter is, all 20 of these movies had basically the same tone and meaning to them: a light-hearted story about a spy with plenty of humour thrown in, meant for entertainment only. As the times changed throughout the 30+ years that these films were released, they each updated the franchise to fit the times without completely altering the franchise. For that reason, every Bond movie up until Die Another Day was at least recognizable as a Bond movie.

But since 2006, Eon has produced two Bond movies (with a third currently in production), all of which are part of their “rebooting” of the franchise. None of these new movies are even remotely similar to the old movies, other than sharing one actress (whose character has been changed beyond recognition). Now, I really don’t care if people like these new movies. I personally don’t, but that’s not the point. The point is that this “reboot” is completely unnecessary and insulting — not just to fans of the old franchise, but to anyone who puts their money forward to Eon.

What they’re doing is part of a big trend nowadays: companies that have or gain the rights to a franchise, change everything about it other than the names, and claim it’s a “reboot”. People who liked the series before will buy the new rendition even if they don’t like the new direction the series is taking, so the company is successful. The thing that’s so insulting about this trend is that these “reboots” aren’t just a new direction that the series is taking — they’re entirely different series released under the same name solely for the purpose of making a quick buck.

Yes, I am aware that making money is the point of a company, but they’re supposed to hide that fact by making quality products that are actually worth money in the first place. If you need to defend a company by saying that they’re just trying to make money, you’re an idiot.

If you want to make a serious, true-to-the-books rendition of James Bond, go ahead and do it. But don’t call it James Bond. There’s already a franchise using that name. There might be an argument for using that name anyway if the new franchise were closer to the books (since the books had the name first), but that’s not the case at all. The Bond stories were trashy stories about a spy written for pure entertainment, and the original film series already is the movie adaptation of that. Even if the new Bond movies are superficially more similar, their tone and style is nothing alike; the new ones act like they have some kind of deep meaning behind them. That’s the only part that actually matters, not the superficial crap like whether Q should be named Major Boothroyd or not. If you don’t believe me, look up what Ian Fleming had to say on the subject: he was alive for much of the franchise’s early history and thought it was exactly what he wanted: a fun story about a spy.