horror flicks

A while back I posted a comment about this on a Rogue's Gallery post, and it came up in conversation with the new guy at work while talking about movies.

Horror movies, why they scare me, and why they don't.

And no, not in a all horror movies kinda scare me and kinda don't way. But rather, how certain movies scare me, and others not at all. For example, the flicks that actually scare me are some of the creepy Japanese flicks like Ringu, Ju-on, and Ju-Rei.

So what is it about these movies that scare me? Well to a good degree it's the tension and suspense. These movies do a great job at establishing a mood, putting you in the characters shoes, not knowing a damn thing about what's going to happen or when it's going to happen. Drop the dramatic music for dead silence and some eerie ambient noise. No screeching violins. They build you up to the point where you can't take it anymore then hit you with a giant "what the bloody hell was that?". Which brings me to the second point, the wtf moments. Nothing is scarier for me then those moments where you kinda see something in the background, the glimpse of something that shouldn't be there, that perhaps even the character in the movie doesn't see. Particularly reflections, and I don't know why. But a good part of it is in the presentation. The subtle cues, the fleeting glances. I suppose that's what makes it scary, it slightly pulls it out of the context of the movie. Because it's not so direct, it makes it that much more believable.

Which brings me to the second half, why other horror films don't scare me. And I think this has two main components, context and disassociation. And thanks to the nice segue, I'll start with context. In a zombie movie, you can pretty much establish what's going to happen. The dead have come back to life, and they eat people. So when Bobby Jo's arm gets ripped off, it's not exactly a surprise. Exciting, sure. Bereft of suspense, not exactly. But, you know the zombies are everywhere, you know they can attack at any time. You know what the monster is, and you have a pretty good idea of when the attach is coming. Same things with slashers. You may not know what Jason Vorhees is , but you know what he's going to do, and how the victim is going to react. They follow a formula that you can adjust to.

So here's the question. The Japanese flicks follow a formula as well, so what makes them different? Which is, I guess, where the disassociation bit comes in. In Ringu or Ju-on, I'm somewhat forced to associate with the victim, whereas in the slasher, I'm free to disassociate, pull back and look at it some an objective point of view. In Ju-Rei, I'm the scared teenage girl, in Friday the 13th, I'm the camera. Why? That's a good question that I don't really have a satisfactory answer for yet. I need watch all these movies a few more times :) but I think a good portion of it lies in the presentation. Nightmare on Elm street is very upfront and somewhat surreal in it's violence, whereas we never really see what Sadako does with her victims. Perhaps it lies somewhere in the lack of information. Ju-on was wonderful about this (as opposed to the US The Grudge). It gave you just enough information to know that something very creepy, very evil happened in that house, but with only skillfully played hints at what exactly it was. And I still don't have any clue what was the prime mover in Ju-Rei. But that's not what made the movie scary either, to which I can only put the cause back to mood, direction and tension - insane levels of suspense.

Perhaps I'll look at this again after watching a few movies.

Atheism

For the better part of a decade I considered myself an agnostic. In the end, when you drill down deep enough nothing is truly proven without a shadow of a doubt. And I do mean nothing, our very percepti0n of the world around us is an abstraction of an abstraction as interpreted by our brains, so there are multiple points of possible misinformation just in what we see. But I'm not about to go all nihilist on you. To disbelieve everything is to not function at all. You have to stop somewhere and take your perceived reality as an accepted truth in order to live in it. So what stops you from taking that extra step and taking God an accepted truth? Nothing for most of the population, which is kinda sad. I suppose that if I look back a few sentences where I said "take your perceived reality as an accepted truth", because to many God is an integral part of reality as they see it. But these people are also letting the filter of religion color what their eyes see.

I have had a problem with organized religion since I took the path of the agnostic, so to speak, back in high school. For a long time I felt that ones belief were very personal, and as such must be found on ones own. Regardless of what organized religion you choose or how you view it, at some level someone is telling you what you should believe, which I found fundamentally wrong. No matter how much you may say you feel that the religion is your personal truth, someone somewhere down the line planted all those ideas in your head, you just chose to agree with them, or in the since of children brought up in a faith, not even that.

As much as I'd like to say it was ideas such as this that pushed me away from Christianity, it was really Christians like the recently departed Jerry Fallwell that initially pushed me out and set in me a certain level of hatred for the religion. And what really set me apart from it was a certain dislike for the Christian deity. The whole bit about the apple from the tree of knowledge really got me, where God punished humanity for, in a since, trying to learn. And eventually, as I moved also away from deism, I found a dislike for the very concept of god. How can something be at once all powerful, all knowing, perfect, and have a will? To be perfect and know all one would be able to do no wrong. One would always have to do the right thing, and as such one would have no choice, no will, in what to do, as it would always have to be the absolute perfect correct thing. If God is all powerful, all knowing, and perfect, he must always do the perfect right thing for any situation. If you were able to know what the perfect right thing was, you could easily predict all of God's actions - he would be little more than a robot. To have will is to have the ability to do wrong, to choose between right and wrong. You can be all powerful and not all knowing. That way you have the ability to do wrong innocently, but then you would no longer be perfect. If if you were all knowing and all powerful, but consciously chose wrong, well that far from perfect or innocent.

Still within me was a desire to believe. It's just 'what' that was the problem. At this point I called myself an agnostic, but was what you might call and agnostic theist. I had a tendency to believe. I always felt it was something, perhaps multiple things, not conscious in nature. Some kind of force or forces which flowed within and behind everything. I suppose kind of like the eastern idea of Chi, but not quite. But at the same time I was living my life without belief.

Really, when I go back and think about my life, all the way back as far as I can remember in my childhood, Christianity wasn't something that had a deep meaning to me. It's just something I was, no different from the color of my hair or my eyes. It was a part of me, but it didn't have any significant impact on my life. Going to church was something that we just did on Sundays before going to see Grandma. For a brief time in middle school I did actually pray, but that was out of fear more than anything else, after a friend told me that if I wasn't saved and prayed all the time I would go to hell. And once I was confirmed, my parents didn't make me go to church anymore, so I didn't. I had better ways to spend my Sundays. I had never really needed religion to function, so when I became agnostic, it really didn't change anything about who I was. So in a sense, I've been living most of my life without religion. And it was that, along with my desire to believe, oddly enough, which recently pushed me towards atheism.

Until recently I had always looked at religion a a social creation. Created way back at the dawn of time to explain the unexplainable and to convince people to do things they might otherwise not. Like follow a particular person, or destroy another tribe. It wasn't until recently that I saw that evolution might have a part in it as well. A couple of videos I saw online clued me into this. I t started with Richard Dawkins talk at TED on militant atheism (which I saw on videosift, and introduced me to TED), and then some other videos from TED conferences by Dan Dennet, Michael Shermer, Helen Fisher, Dan Gilbert and others. It made me see how the many things we hold sacred, such as religion, love and morals had a purpose in the evolution and survival of our species. That my brain is hardwired to believe, and my lingering desire to believe seemed to prove this for me.

NOw you may say this this revelation is not all that dissimilar from a religious conversion. I said that one should discover their own beliefs and not let someone else tell you what to believe. And here I am letting a few scientists do just that. And to some extent I guess that is correct. But at least science has within it the ability to update itself, to toss out the old and bring out the new. To correct itself when it finds discrepancies, and acknowledge when a complete explanation is lacking. Still this revelation was kind of freeing. The idea that so much of what I desire is built into my brain, in a way, frees me from having to acknowledge it. My built in desire to believe is unnecessary as I can, and have, lived without religion. The desire to find romantic love, get married, and reproduce is rather unnecessary as there and plenty of people on this planet already. (Not that I've given up as such, the that it's unnecessary somewhat quells the need to actively pursue this desire). I can look at what I desire, what I feel is wrong with my life as the influence of external social and cultural influences combined with hardwired internal desires. And that reaffirms the idea that there is no right way to live one's life.

These ideas helped me change my definition of atheist. Once upon a time I saw that to mean an active denial of the possibility of god. I can't prove that, and I think the denial of god is just as much belief as a belief in god. Today I call myself atheist as person who lives his life without god. As a lack of belief in god, not a belief that there is no god. Or, if you will, you could call me an atheist in that I am not a theist.

surreal

Thing is about living in your own head, going through the same shit day in day out, focusing on little things to hide the real issues from yourself.. things can get pretty surreal. There are times that I step outside and look at my life and think, "there is no way this can be reality, this has to be some kind of dream, I'm really someone else." Hell just thinking about thinking about it it is fucking with my head right now. Has all this escapism with tv, books, movies, and video games messed with my sense of reality? Or have I simply deluded myself to the point where reality doesn't feel real anymore. Maybe it's just the core of me so wants to be something else that I'm subconsciously waiting to wake up form a dream. I mean I know what's real, but I so muh don't want to believe it that I can't bring myself to accept that truth to the point where my knowledge of that fact seems shaky at best. At times like this I almost feel like I'm going insane... but if I clear my head of such thoughts, and go back to being the consumer drone focusing on what I want to buy and my part in the corporate machine, yaddda yadda yadda. Seriously though. If I focus on the little shit, like I always do, like everyone does I'm fine. But the moment I step outside tha comfort zone and really think about my life I get this really panicy feeling of not really know whether I'm asleep or awake - of what reality really is and if I'm currently experiencing it or not.

Maybe I need to see a shrink or something, and maybe he'll say it's some weird syndrome and give me a pill to make me stop thinking about it. Maybe what I need to do is just ship myself out to some Buddhist monastery for a few years, find some kind of control and understanding of my own consciousness. Not that I'm really a spiritual person, but I don't think medicine is really the answer to this kind of problem. I dunno. I've always really felt somewhat opposed to any kind of organized belief system, but I find myself leaning towards Buddhism here and there. I really need to study up on it a little bit. I guess I really want to believe that through training and a concerted effort I could find some kind of inner peace. But in a way it makes sense to me. Just because I beleive hard enough that god will take me to heaven after I die doesn't mean it will happen, but if I beleive god will give me courage, I give myself that courage. The power of self-delusion. So in a similar vein, maybe I can never prove or count on true enlightenment or ever reaching nirvana, but if in the process of trying to achieve such a thing, I find some degree of inner peace, then that in itself is it's own reward.

omgwtfbbqhsisu

I need to do something more with this blog, maybe even post, but nobody reads it anyway, maybe even post, but on the holy shit it's still up front I found the following links of shit I used to (try to) sell on cafepress that are surprisingly still up. I more then likely won't make any money off them if anyone bought anything, since I don't even remember the account password. But for those who would like to see em:

http://www.cafepress.com/nullheart/
http://www.cafepress.com/nullified/

new and improved

You probably didn't notice, but this was once my old blog on my old website. The website will eventually be dismantled, or fall into disuse or something, the important parts saved and possibly resurrected elsewhere. I was just going to forget about it and focus on my other one, but sometimes I want to write, and I can't write like that all the time, and sometimes I like analyzing things, explaining a thought process and what not. This blog did however get some severe editing. Heh, I mentioned something about not trying hiding things that were in my blog in my last post, and then I went and deleted most of my posts. Went from something like 75 down to 15 posts. But the real reason why wasn't because I wanted to hide things. I just wanted to slim down those damn archive links on the right. 75 posts sporadically placed over a time frame of 3 years or so, and considering archives are monthly, even if it's just 1 post that month, yeah, that's a lot of archive links. Most of it was crap, but I tried to save the interesting stuff. Well, here's to hoping that this blog doesn't end up like the one it spawned from.

i only write when i feel bad

I'm actually posting! Gasp! Why? Cause I'm sort of feeling bad. Apparently that's the only real time I tend to post on this damn thing, which is kinda sad, but nobody reads it, so there's no one there to care. But then again I guess that's why I can feel so comfortable writing about such things. It's a way to get things out, kinda like a journal of some sort, except it's not on paper, cause paper kinda sucks, and I can't read my own handwriting half the time. Also it's kinda of a way for me to look back on what I was thinking at certain times. That and in a way it kinda makes up for when I used to talk to a certain somebody who I've kinda lost touch with [*cough* though I doubt she's reading] but I guess it's really my fault that I lost touch, I never really made any kind of effort, though neither did she. Oh well maybe in the near future I'll catch her online or something. Strange though, If I did, I wonder how it would go. I really haven't changed at all, at least not like I should have.

So what's buggin me today? I just finished reading the Video Girl AI manga, well at least the Ai part, there' still video girl Len to go. Reading\watching stuff like bothers me sometimes, because it reminds me of what I do not have, and that in many ways I'm not as mature as these characters portrayed as being many years younger than me. This time though it kinda set a fire on me to take control of my life. I was going to go out as soon as I got up tomorrow and get me a job so I could get me some money so I could get out of my parents basement and take control of my life. But that was a few hours ago. That fire was burning too much for me to simply go to sleep, I had to do something - something productive, something that would amount to more than relieving boredom. Thing is I couldn't come up with anything, which in turn kinda sent me on a downward slope a little bit. I'm kinda come out of it a bit now, sorta pushing it out of my mind by analyzing it, I just hope I can stay out of it long enough to go to sleep soon without curling up into a ball and trying to hide. Kinda funny. When I get depressed I start to feel a little agoraphobic I guess, well more like I just want hide from the world, and make it go away. I want to find my own little place where no one can find me, where nothing can hurt me. heh, when I was in Roanoke, that place used to be my closet. Tim complained that I didn't put all the stuff in front of my bed in my closet, and just pull it out when I wanted to go in there. But of course he didn't know, because if he knew I was in there, if anyone knew, it wouldn't be my safe little hiding spot anymore. Childish, isn't it? But in many ways I've never grown up, I'm still a child. And while I"m sitting here in my parent's basement, that isn't changing.

That's why I gotta get out of here. But of course I have to get money first, and to get that I need a job. Thing is I hate looking for jobs. I hate filling out form after form. I hate pimpin myself out like some $5 hoe to employers, I hate bullshit, and I hate trying to pretend that I'm someone I'm not.

Oh yeah. I noticed on the blogger page a little thing about what to do when you mom sees your blog. I'm not really concerned though. I really don't care if she knows, I really don't' care who knows what I'm writing here. Just as long as whoever is reading knows whether or not to blab to me or try to help me about it. I mean I don't hate my mom, I value her opinion and trust her, but most of these kind of things I just wouldn't feel comfortable talking about with her. When I think about it, I'd have an easier time talking to a complete stranger. Why? Because I care less what a complete stranger thinks about me, because in the end I could always just say to myself they really don't know what they're talking about, and just not talk to them again. Not that I would, but because it's an option, because I could simply just walk away from it, I can be a little less cautious, a little less nervous, I don't have to care what they think of me. Of course the other option is a friend I know I don't have to worry about, which I don't really have any of right now, because it requires that I be innately comfortable with this person, and then have a layer of trust on top of that, not to mention it has to be a girl, just cause I'm like that [though I suppose theoretically it could be a gay guy, though I don't really know many]

blarg. Now my sister walks up and complains about my music and I completely lose where I was. Oh well. I suppose now is as good a place to stop as any. heh, It's 5:30 now. I wonder what my chances are of getting something done tomorrow at this point...

Waiting for a new beginning

a month later I make another post... days seem to blend together. Days weeks months, they don't seem all that different anymore. Time simply passes, and I really don't have much of a sense of it anymore. I'm just sitting here waiting for a new life to begin. But hopefully in another week or so, I'll get a job with nelson county public schools and I can start on a path towards that new life. I can get out of the house on a regular basis, I can be productive, I can make money, I can meet new people. I've given up my life up to this point for the most part... that is the people I've met, the things I've done are meaningless, gone forgotten, well with the exception of brandy who keeps popping in my head for some reason. I am ready, willing and able to leave that all behind. To erase the past and take who I am know into the future. To build a new life from the ground up. Because right now I have none. I'm sitting in some kind of purgatory between my new life to come and my past. Sitting on the shores of the river styx, waiting for the boatman to arrive. And in this, where I am now, I feel helpless and alone, though there is a dim light from the other side, I struggle to see it, but it is there. And I'm still waiting...

---

I suppose that's always the problem with me though. I'm always waiting for things to happen, never strong enough, courageous enough to make things happen for myself. And I keep waiting for something to happen to me, or for someone to do it for me. I guess what I really need to do is move out as soon as I am financially able. When I am on my own, when I am forced to rely on myself, I think I'll be, maybe not completely ok, but on the right path. Because when I am forced into a situation, when there is no backing down, I tend to bite the bullet. I tend to survive...

---

oh yeah, one more thing. I just finished watching the last 4 episodes of Saishuuheiko Kanojo today, and.. I dunno I guess I just watched it at the wrong time or something, cause I've been kind depressed ever since. I'd still recommend it, but keep in mind that anime is nothing but pain and misery. Not that is sucks, it's just really fucking sad. Anyone with half a fucking heart will be misty eyed at least through a good portion of the series. It's kinda funny though, the fansub I got off of animesuki, at the end of episode 10 (it's a 13 episode series) the fansubbers put a note that if you want the anime to have a happy ending, stop there and pretend there's no more episodes left, because it was all downhill from that point. I have a feeling I should've heeded that warning, at least for today anyway.