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.

I’d like to think people don’t judge others on their personal preferences, but that’s just not the way it is. Smokers are assumed to be morons even more quickly than artists are assumed to be gay. It would be really nice if we could all realize that what a person chooses to spend their time and money on really doesn’t say very much about who they are. I’ve met plenty of smokers who are perfectly rational people, and far more than my share of dickheads who would insist that tobacco is the devil’s blood and should be outlawed.

Yes, smoking is dangerous. I know it, you know it, and every smoker knows it. They’ve decided to take the risk of getting sick in thirty years in exchange for some short-term pleasure. Stop pretending you don’t do the exact same thing. You do, and you should keep doing it. It is never a poor choice to want to be happy.

So, for fuck’s sake, stop pointing at every person you see with a cigarette and telling me all about their bad life choices. It’s their life – let them do what they want.

You see a bunch of schlubs taking Scientologist happiness tests in the subway, you read about how a lot of Americans think their president wasn’t born in the US, or sometimes it’s just that people are generally watered-down, dull, stupid people who don’t think critically about anything and can’t spell. What the fuck is wrong with these people?

The beauty of human interaction is that even relatively stupid people can empathize with this frustration, as intelligence is not black and white but a gradient, and arguably it isn’t linear either, but more some abstract pattern which curves and spikes due to various outside influences, such as upbringing and genetics. In other words, no matter how fucking stupid you are, you’re always smarter and more insightful than someone else, because you happened to be somewhere where a lesson was learned, and they missed it by not being there. This is why even dumb kids know not to brag to their parents about getting pregnant, or walk into traffic, because they learned through first- and second-hand experience that neither of those are very good ideas.

But simply being in the right place at the right time with your eyes and ears open isn’t enough to save most people from the rapidly expanding black hole that is their own ignorance. This is evident from the fact that there are plenty of people in their old age who are still as stupid and diluted as the hood teenagers who bag their Depends at Rite-Aid, and who they just love to admonish and put down for not being successful. The difference is that these assholes have had seventy years on the Earth to figure out their shit, but instead they can’t even figure out when they have to shit.

So what is it that makes some people smart and some people incompetent? Though a lot of people would like to believe it’s all genetics and God and thetans, the truth is that it’s actually rather simple; the basis of intelligence is interest. People who are successful and intelligent and “geniuses” aren’t really endowed with something you don’t have; that’s just something we’d like to think because it gives us yet another excuse to feel deprived about something. The truth is that these people are simply interested in learning; they’re curious. If you aren’t interested in the world and how things work, you won’t learn about it. Who would have fucking thought, right?

And it’s not even something that’s terribly difficult to ascertain when you look at every day occurrences of stupidity. Many people are intense sports fanatics who follow every facet of every game and can debate these components with a shocking amount of insight and perspective, yet they will vote a make-believe cowboy into office because he reminds them of their buddies. They are clearly capable of understanding why that’s stupid, but they choose not to think about it. Again, it’s about interest. Anyone can figure out that the real reason kids don’t know how to spell beyond a first grade level on Facebook is not because they’re mentally challenged but because they simply don’t give a fuck; i.e., they have no intrinsic interest in the medium we use to interpret the world and communicate with each other: language. Now that’s the definition of stupid.

It’s really a shame, too, because aside from various exceptions due to pathological causes (autism, retardation, etc.), it’s pretty well established that kids are born curious and interested in what goes on around them. The problem is that a lot of parents are more concerned with making their child’s existence convenient for them than actually nurturing an intelligent, innovative future generation. Fun fact: your kids didn’t choose to be put on the Earth and they have no inherent obligation to you whatsoever. On the contrary, they are owed an upbringing that allows their individuality and natural inclination towards learning to flourish.

So, unless you want smug blogger assholes like me to harbor infinite amounts of disdain for your offspring and write angry rants about them on the Internet, I suggest you either invest more care into their mental and social development, or wear a rubber. Either would be a smart idea.

The website’s mission page states that their dream is a new generation where people are “able to see those with Schizophrenia and other mental illnesses as men and women, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives; a generation that allows people to look beyond the myths, misconceptions and pre-judgements that confuse and frighten people”. I’m going to tell you why this is going in completely the wrong direction. If you are the sort of person who plugs their ears and hums when they hear anything they don’t like, do me a favour and stop reading here. You won’t like what I’ve got to say.

‘Mental illness’ – what does this mean? What is a mental illness? Most people would agree to the following definition: “a mental illness occurs when the mind is not functioning in the way it’s supposed to.” This begs the question, “how is the mind supposed to work?” and the only answer is “like everyone else’s.” So a person with a mental illness is a person who doesn’t think in the way that society has decided is acceptable. A person with a mental illness is anybody who happens to be too different from the norm.

Does this sound outrageous? Yes, and rightly so, but it’s true, and I can back it up with a historical example. Until the 1970s, homosexuality was officially classified as a mental disorder and ‘sick gays’ were treated on a regular basis. Did any of the treatments turn their patients straight? Hell no, but that didn’t stop the doctors from trying. Meanwhile, charities were working to raise money for homosexuality treatment research.

Now we have the same thing being applied in a million other situations. If a person is very reclusive – more introverted than is deemed acceptable – then they’re not just shy any more. Suddenly they have Autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. Furthermore, psychiatry makes the claims that these ‘symptoms’ can be cured and also that they should. Why can’t they just be shy? And what if they’re perfectly happy to be shy? Why should anyone interfere with another person’s state of mind?

Arbitrarily defining unusual behaviour as an illness is not science. Using drugs to dampen the mind’s ability to feel emotions is not medicine. Locking people up and forcibly drugging them when they haven’t done anything except be different is simply evil. This is what charities like Light the Way are funding.

Here’s what ‘mental illness’ is: it’s a term doctors use to make you believe there’s something wrong with you when there isn’t. We already know that every mind works differently. Some people’s minds work very differently. These people are said to have schizophrenia, or Asperger’s, or some other non-existent disease, when the truth is that they are just different, nothing more. Further, trying to ‘treat’ these non-existent diseases doesn’t work and never has.

This is what really bothers me about the above quote. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the mind’s functioning. We shouldn’t have to look past people’s mental illnesses. We should be acknowledging that they’re fictitious and irrelevant.

In the future, maybe there will be a drug that will permanently change how people’s minds work, but would you want it? I wouldn’t. I’m happy with the fucked-up mind I’ve got, thanks.

There are some outrageous disgusting unforgivable acts going on in the world. Back then, we would have burned these people at the stake, but today, it is far too often overlooked, almost acceptable to commit these kinds of atrocities. And in these dark times, I can only cling to my bible for protection against the evils of the world.

I want my children to be able to grow up in an environment where they can feel safe. The last thing I want for them is for them to feel pressured by society, which is getting increasingly dangerous, not to mention sinful.

By this point, I’m sure you’ve all figured out what this great threat to our liberty is. This is a disease – a disease so powerful that when good young boys contract it, they instantly kill themselves. Yes, I am talking about the gay.

Over the past century, the gay has become one of the most deadly forces facing Americans. It has been known to turn ordinary, God-fearing people into murderers, criminals, and atheists. We need to come together and put a stop to it, right now. For the sake of our future. Because, damn it, I will not have my children marrying anyone of the same gender, whether they want to or not. I know what’s best for them, even when they’re forty years old.

So what can we do? The only way to stop the spread of the gay is to kill anyone showing symptoms on sight. Get out your gun – if you’re a true American, you have at least three of these – and shoot them before it’s too late. Kill them before they kill you! Or worse! YOU could catch the gay! Or your family! DO YOU WANT YOUR WIFE TO CONTRACT THE GAY???

I just watched Princess Mononoke for maybe the third time in my life: this time, in Japanese. The copy came with both audios, but only one set of English subs: so I was watching the Japanese version, subtitled with the text of the English version. But that shouldn’t be a big deal, right? They’re roughly equivalent, right?

What I saw was a portal opened to the greasy, cavernous depths of human evil.

You really don’t understand, until you have happened to watch a movie this way, just how disgusting the dubbing process really is. There is an opening shot of a forest, music plays. I am looking at subtitles telling me in an omniscient, authoritative tone (I can imagine a Disney trailer voiceover just reading them) about an age of gods and demons. This narration is not present in the movie I am watching. But it had to be there for the English dub, or we might not have known what the movie was about.

It soon becomes clear that in every scene with humans, dialogue subtitles are appearing even when no one is speaking. This is not an exaggeration: every single time a human is present in a scene, and you don’t have a clear look at their mouth, they do not speak in the animation. And every single time this happens, the English version makes them speak. There can be no silence; these gaps must be filled by mediocre English voice acting, without fail. Otherwise the audience would wonder what was going on. Huh? Why are we looking at those people being killed? Oh, the character just told me it’s a massacre! Good thing, I might have missed that! I know when I watch animation, I close my eyes and just listen to the characters tell me what’s happening.

As you can imagine, an entire movie’s tone can be changed this way. Friendly interjections are thrown in where there once was formality. A simple call to a steed becomes “Yakul! Come here boy! Good boy! I have to praise you verbally or the audience won’t know I’m a kind person!” Ashitaka gives instructions to people, and they run off. The subtitles respond for them, “All right! Don’t get hurt!” Ashitaka later must leave his village; his tribesmen cannot go with him, cannot say goodbye, cannot even watch him go. He departs in silence; the subtitles say, “Farewell.” This is all in the first five minutes.

It only gets worse as the pacing increases. A convoluted battle scene: a caravan is attacked. It is very obviously a supply caravan. But there is bustle, confusion. Through the battle, the subtitles give, over the crowd’s grey noise, calming instructions. “Come on! Keep moving!” The attackers disappear; there is suspense. “Where are they?” the subtitles ask helpfully. Men have fallen off a cliff. “What about them?” The caravan leader’s response is given curtly, to leave them for dead. The scene cuts there, but not before the subtitles can add, “Let’s get the living ones home!” Because they might have been moving on for some other purpose.

Why? What is the philosophy that justifies making your own movie out of someone else’s work? Princess Mononoke was taken, with its spare dialogue, and visually driving style, and raped. It was bound to a table, legs spread, and violated with stuffing and folderol, crammed into its cavities by the sweaty fistful. Were the translators being paid according to how many words they produced? Would Billy Crudup and Billy Bob Thornton only sign onto the project if they got a certain number of lines?

Translators — perhaps this is the problem. The movie is not dubbed by translators, it is dubbed by dubbers. All this time I thought I was getting translations of Miyazaki movies, when I was actually getting adaptations. Adaptations with American writers, American producers, American actors. The American audience expects nothing less.

What’s sad is, the adaptation isn’t actually that bad. It’s still a good movie, good enough to be one of the best I saw as a child. About fifty times better than Lion King, and I liked Lion King. Maybe that’s why they get away with it. But I have a problem with the ethics of rewriting a text (and a movie’s script is a text) with the imposition of one’s own ideas, and representing it as equivalent to the original. Please have this in mind, the next time you are watching a dub, if you watch dubs (most people do). There is no regard for the original tone in the dubbing process.

Miyazaki himself has said he wants audiences to watch his movies in their native language, whatever it is, so as not to distract from the animation. There’s something to be said for this; subtitles do distract. But they do not corrupt and defile, hopefully. They do not add and inflate. This cannot be said for Miyazaki dubs. Watching Miyazaki dubbed is not even watching his movie, but something else, with a cloudy, veinous coating on it. I thought I had seen Princess Mononoke before, but I feel like I haven’t really seen it until today. And since I was still reading the story from the English dub, perhaps I still haven’t seen it.

• Being woefully out of touch with current trends.
• Somehow having no recollection at all of what being young is like.
• The belief that marriage is still of utmost relevance.
• Misogyny (especially the self-loathing internalized-inferiority mother).
• Inexplicable racism that only seems to appear when all the Arabs are out of the room.

Obviously not everyone’s parents are like that, but certainly most people’s seem to be. I actually have a cousin who recently became a parent and the change is startling; in a scant few years she went from a partying sorority chick stereotype to a doting, paranoid carbon copy of everyone’s mom. Unfortunately she was off-screen (and out of town) for most of this transformation, so the details are still a bit sketchy; presumably a cocoon was involved at some point.

My point here is that no matter how enlightened people think we are, we still have godawful parents. It’s just a fact of life. Parents are human; they’re always going to be really bad at something. They’re going to make mistakes over the years that will eventually result in a fucked-up kid — like you. Nobody is ever properly prepared to raise a child. Everyone just kind of wings it. And hell, if your parents broke up when you were younger, there’s a good chance that it was your fault, no matter what your therapist said. Kids are stressful, and stress ruins relationships.

But in the end, this is the best we’ve got, and how bad could it be? Parents are human, after all; they’ve got to be good at something. I wouldn’t want to trust the government with educating parents on proper parenting, anyway, given how much they’ve managed to ruin the school system.

There is one thing I’d like to bitch about, however: expectations.

Fact: Your kid is not going to be an astronaut. Your kid is almost certainly going to be part of the 99% of people who are utterly worthless and will be forgotten by history. Hardly anyone will ever give as much of a shit about your kid as you do. That doesn’t give you an excuse to “try harder” and motivate your kid to be the most incredible person ever born, because of yet another annoying fact: kids are human. They’re going to fail. A lot.

It’s really been getting to me recently just how much these expectations can hurt the child, though. And I’m not just talking about careers and moral values, but basic issues of self-identity as well. I’ve already mentioned circumcision a million times, but it ties directly into this. Parents get unnecessary and potentially harmful non-consensual surgeries performed on children because they think the kid will thank them later.

Repeat: Cosmetic surgery is performed on infants based on a fucking hunch. A case could be made for parents as psychopathic maniacs, stitching their kids into whatever shape they please because the voices in their heads say so. Now obviously that’s not what the intention is, but that’s what actually happens.

It applies just as much to other facets of parenting. Parents deck their kids out in pink or blue depending on their sex; buy them trucks or dolls and act shocked if they don’t like what they’re “supposed” to like; get them to play with other kids of the same class and social group; and teach them, firmly, consciously or not, that the world doesn’t want them for who they are, but for who they should be. I’m talking about sexism, mostly, though there’s that streak of homophobia in there too. The idea is for kids to be normal above all else; even if they’re also pressured to be incredible superhuman astronauts, they should do it in a conventional way.

How many people have parents who honestly explained why things were? For most people, their parents would come up with rules that should be followed “just because”. This blind adherence to authority may be helpful in the short term, but I dare you to find any legitimately successful people who got where they are by blindly deferring to others. If you want your kids to be independent, you have to teach them to think for themselves.

I’m trying not to bring my own parents into this post, since I do love them dearly and wouldn’t want to slander them on the internet. But draw your own conclusions and I won’t bother arguing.

Parents fucking suck.

I’m an eighteen-year-old university student majoring in Communication, Media, and Film; I’m also a programmer and a web designer who spends a lot of time on my computer. I know exactly where Vishal Singh in this article is coming from. I frequently get distracted from my schoolwork to edit videos, check Facebook, and post on this blog. I’m fully aware that I can sometimes allow my hobbies with technology to get in the way of my school work, and I have that oft-levied student issue of staying up too late. The New York Times brings up some good points, but comes to the wrong conclusion.

Who is to blame for the academic disinterest of students? The students are.

Of course, most people would point out that students are (primarily) young people who should be guided by the education system, not punished. And that all sounds great on paper when you’re trying to appease people’s parents for political reasons, but I know first-hand that this is not a stance that holds any water in reality. This sort of nonsense is exemplified perfectly by Marcia Blondel’s experience with her classroom, as related in the article:

“Who wants to read starting in the middle of Page 137?” she asks. One student begins to read aloud, and the rest follow along.

To Ms. Blondel, the exercise in group reading represents a regression in American education and an indictment of technology. The reason she has to do it, she says, is that students now lack the attention span to read the assignments on their own.

“How can you have a discussion in class?” she complains, arguing that she has seen a considerable change in recent years. In some classes she can count on little more than one-third of the students to read a 30-page homework assignment.

I did high school and I remember teachers like this. They’re incompetent. Novel idea for Ms. Blondel: if your students won’t work, FAIL THEM. If that seems like something that’s going to get you fired, you’re probably an awful teacher. Students need someone engaging to make them interested in the subject matter. Assigned to a mandatory subject that requires you to teach unwilling students? Get out the red marker.

As someone who knows how to read, my worst enemies in high school were the teachers that read to me, or got other students to read to me. It’s condescending and it slows down the entire class; stop doing it. I understand that you’re doing it to get everyone on the same playing field, but it’s not working. People need to help themselves.

The fact that parent groups force teachers to be “nice” to their students — which results in junk like this — is a very depressing one. We’re talking about high school, here, not kindergarten. I’m fully aware that most work in high school is busywork — the kind of pointless drudgery that exists solely to make schools look good to the government — but this is also true in the real world.

If you want a job, you’re going to have to put up with the pointless drudgery. Learn how to deal with it: that’s what schools should be teaching. This “regression of American education” is the system’s fault, not technology’s. It’s the consequence of politics.

I actually agree with a lot of points brought up in Richtel’s article. That computers and cell phones have an effect on students’ attention spans is a theory supported by scientific data, as the article rightly states. But the conclusion drawn from this theory — the implication that young people are innocent of sabotaging their own intellectual development, and that the nature of distraction itself is to blame — is obviously fallacious. Distraction has existed for all of human history, and just because it’s (arguably) easier to access nowadays does not make it something you can scapegoat. It’s a force of nature, not some malevolent entity that can be challenged.

If you’re going to report on how technology has changed our lives, do it factually. Don’t try to blame it for all our problems. Telling us that our relentless procrastination isn’t our fault is just enabling us; you’re giving us an excuse for our own stupidity.

As HAL 9000 would say, “This sort of thing has cropped up before and it has always been due to human error.”

And to really succeed, you need to learn how to walk this line carefully.

Your bed is allowed to be made, unmade, or nonexistent. No one gives a shit about how you sleep as long as they can’t see anything crusty.

The desk is one of the key parts of your home, where you store all your important paperwork, your writing supplies, and maybe even a computer if you have room. When it comes to desks, you’re generally in the clear as long as the stacks of papers don’t dwarf that old CRT monitor.

Having a messy desk is acceptable within reason, especially if you’re in a dorm. Schoolwork piles up on all of us, right? It’s okay to have a bunch of I’ll-get-around-to-it-after-this-party homework on your desk. Watch out for valuables, though; a messy desk might look like an impenetrable fortress to you, but people in search of your loose change and weed will search the desk.

If you’re in a dorm, your table is probably also your desk. There are two main states that a table can be in:

But not all forms of binging are appropriate. For example:

There are three main states that your trash can be:

Totally empty is acceptable. This is the ideal state, though you have to watch the states of the rest of your room. If your entire room is messy, but your trash can is clean, people will just assume that someone puked in there and you wanted to get rid of it, which can quickly roll it over into unacceptable territory.

Unless the trash can is in the middle of the room (UNACCEPTABLE), no one really cares if it’s full of junk.

After clearing the old gravy off your desk, you have to empty the trash. If people are coming over later, crumple a bunch of papers up to make the trash can look more full. If they ask why your bin is full of crumpled papers, tell them you’re an art major.

Pretty much everyone appreciates a good clean floor. This goes double if you expect people to take their shoes off when entering your room.

It might look kind of cool if you have so much junk on the floor that you can’t even see the actual floor anymore, but unless you’re willing to commit to such an arrangement you’re better off just keeping the place clean. Besides, do you really want people to get papercuts from walking barefoot on your I’ll-get-around-to-it-after-this-party floor-homework?

And that’s all the advice I have for now.

Sometimes you just want a coffee and a doughnut, and that’s what Tim Hortons is for. So it stands to reason that they need to have their own variation on the fast-food fountain drink. This is the Tim Hortons cardboard cup with a plastic lid:

(That’s the winter design; the rest of the year it’s just a shit brown colour.)

It’s actually a pretty good design — sometimes. It may be hard to tell from that picture if you’ve never been to Tim Hortons, but the rippled part of the plastic lid can be folded up to make a little hole for drinking. On paper it seems like a really neat idea, just giving the cups a means to open and close while still making them pollute-o-riffic. But there’s this one thing that annoys me: it only works when it feels like it.

The ideal use of the plastic lid goes thus:

But then half the time, step 2 is unfortunately followed by step 3:

This is not acceptable. Why the hell does the plastic lid not stay open sometimes? Can’t you hire some elite engineers to fix this? Hell, my dad is an engineer; just hire him! (Note: I do not know if my dad is qualified enough to design a small bit of plastic. I’m not responsible for any damage if you actually hire him.)

The solutions to this problem are many. A lot of people I know just drink with the plastic tab sticking up, like a barbarian. Some minority of people actually bend the tab to get inside the cup, thus presumably making the entire drink taste like brown plastic. Neither of these are acceptable solutions. This is like providing your website with multiple stylesheets so you can support shitty browsers. This is like covering the seat with toilet paper before you sit down. THIS IS NOT A SOLUTION.

No one I’ve ever pointed this out to has ever cared. Am I just insane?