Right when I had started to do okay financially for the first time in my life - I say "okay," not "well," because I still had no chance of ever owning a home or retiring - the cost of everything in my country is about to skyrocket because the undocumented immigrants who pick our food are scared to go to work and the orange taint has put tariffs on our biggest trade partners. I take a lot of comfort in knowing that the morons who voted for this because they thought the orange taint would only hurt other people are going to suffer as much as I am, sometimes more. I have no patience or empathy left for them. If someone sets fire to the neighborhood to get warm, I'm not going to cry when her house burns down.

But here's something totally random and apolitical to lighten the mood. Sometimes I make movies in my head to entertain myself instead of interacting with people. They're not very effective because I'm not a very visual thinker, but if I live long enough, I'll be able to make them real with AI. Then I'll have to keep them to myself so I don't get sued for a bunch of stuff, but I'm not in it for the money anyway. I bring this up because I was clearing out my Downloads folder in a probably vain attempt to make my computer less crappy, and I found these pictures I made with AI to go with my favorite movie idea, and I decided to share because they're random and apolitical. I don't use image generators much anymore because they're bad for the environment. I hope that gets resolved by the time movie generators are a thing.

Synopsis (also partially AI-generated because I was lazy):

The movie is set in the eighties because everyone loves eighties nostalgia, and it's set in California because all eighties movies are set in California. It's a celebration of metal music and a satire of the Satanic panic that takes some inspiration from the eighties cult classics "Trick or Treat" and "The Gate." Emma Forbes (Kiernan Shipka) is a shy, nerdy, clumsy high school girl with a passion for anime and metal. She hides her true self and tries to act "normal." The movie opens with her performing "Cum On Feel the Noize" at a crowded concert. For some reason, I've long thought that would be a perfect movie opening. The screen is black, she yells "Baby baby baaaby!" Then the guitar kicks in as the studio logos appear, and then the opening credits play over the crowd rocking out. Perfection. Of course, it's just a dream, and her alarm wakes her up, and she's late for school. Womp womp.

She has a crush on Jake Rodriguez (Noah Centineo), but she's too shy to talk to him. Principal Victoria Harding (Sandra Bullock), a strong believer in discipline and order, rules the school with an iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove. Tiffany Wong (Chloe Bennet) is the school's reigning queen bee whose sharp tongue and icy stare could freeze the sun in its tracks. She wields her popularity like a weapon, using it to maintain her social dominance and strike fear into the hearts of those who dare to oppose her, particularly the "unconventional" Emma. Her entourage consists of two equally vindictive sidekicks who are as devoted to Tiffany's cruel cause as they are to their matching pink backpacks and designer sneakers. Brittany Hart (Sydney Sweeney) is the sly strategist, always whispering sweet nothings of spite into Tiffany's ear, while Hailey Castellanos (Madison Beer) is the brash enforcer, never one to shy away from a confrontation.

One day, following the strains of Black Sabbath, Emma enters an abandoned house and finds a demon named Azazel (voiced by John Mulaney), sort of an evil version of Robin Williams' genie, who promises to give her power to fulfill her dreams. With his help, Emma starts gaining confidence and standing up for herself. She gets into an escalating prank war with Tiffany. She starts a metal band with some other students. When Principal Harding hears them practicing, she comes out of the closet as a metalhead and asks them to perform at the Halloween dance. They're thrilled, but Azazel grows more powerful the more Emma plays, and her personality starts to change.

Tiffany goes to the dance with Jake just to make Emma jealous, but Jake secretly overhears her telling her friends that she's using him and doesn't care about him. Now, eager to get revenge for Emma's pranks, she's attempting to sabotage the band's performance out of spite. She sneaks backstage with Brittany and Hailey, trying to mess with their equipment. Emma, discovering Tiffany's meddling, confronts her. The tension rises as they argue, their conflict as jarring as the discordant strains of metal music that Emma adores.

Azazel takes over Emma completely. In a surprising twist, Emma drags Tiffany on stage by the ear and exposes her attempted sabotage to everyone. The crowd, initially shocked, starts to cheer for Emma. Brittany, ever the strategist, attempts to sweet talk her way out of trouble, offering to help Emma and become her new best friend. But Emma sees through her deceit, recognizing the venom behind the smile. With a flick of her hand, she sends a burst of demonic energy that knocks Brittany off her feet, her perfectly curled hair now a mess of tangles. Panicking, Hailey charges at Emma, but her brashness is no match for the supernatural forces at play. Emma catches her in mid-air and slams her to the ground.
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Then Azazel does some bad stuff, and everyone, including Tiffany because I want everyone to have a happy ending, has to team up to defeat him in the final showdown, but I haven't figured that part out yet. And of course there will be lots of eighties metal and hard rock music in the soundtrack. "Living After Midnight," "Crazy Train," "It's Inevitable," "Heart of Steel," etc.

These are the pictures that I actually wanted to share. I don't know why, but Kiernan Shipka looks perfect as both a cute nerd and a hardcore guitarist. It's a crime against humanity that this movie doesn't exist.

Yes, she has to take her glasses off to go from nerd to guitarist. That's just how movies are. It's the law.

Yesterday, the Russia-supported regime in Syria collapsed after well over a decade of civil war that the Western world had almost entirely forgotten about. Russia was unable to continue supplying the regime with weapons because it's getting destroyed by Ukraine. This is Assad day for Putin and a happy day for almost everyone else.

Also, I played with my adorable nieces today and saw the new one for the first time.

Also, Spotify Wrapped is out after two months of useless "When will Spotify Wrapped be out? We don't know" articles.

This year I listened for almost 93 days, two more days than last year. I gotta keep getting those numbers up. Xeen Music and the Beatles were in my top five artists last year as well. To reiterate, Xeen Music publishes the soundtracks of computer games from the 80s and 90s, and the Beatles are an obscure 60s British rock group. David Arkenstone is a prolific New Age composer whom my family often listened to on Sunday mornings and long car trips. Pete Seeger was a prolific communist folk singer who fortunately didn't live to see the rise of fascism in his home country. Steve Horelick is the main credited artist for the songs sung by the jukebox band on the old children's show "Shining Time Station," and he's in my top artists simply because I listened to every one of those songs after I found them, though I was actually looking (without success) for the original version of the show's theme song.

​My top songs:

Popularized by the dancing doll in the horror film "M3GAN." I used the 12" version because for any song worth listening to, longer is better.

This is hands down my favorite song from Robin Gibb's solo career, but it wasn't on Spotify for a while, so when it was, I listened to it several times.

The original version by My Mine isn't on Spotify, which is a crime against humanity. This version is fine, though.

With the guitars, the synths, the vocal style, and the iffy messaging around consent, this is the quintessential 80s rock song and deserves to be a lot more popular than it is.

This year, I randomly remembered this song from a trailer at the end of the Pokémon VHS tapes my mom threw away, and I nostalgia'd the hell out of it.

PSA: I watched "Heretic" the other day and intend on writing a full review in the near future, perhaps after I've seen it again. I'm not sure yet how I feel about the third act, but the characters are great. Hugh Grant is a phenomenal villain, somehow equal parts charming and douchey. The missionaries are intelligent and resourceful beneath their surface naivete. The themes provoke a lot of thought and discussion. I recommend.

To reiterate for anyone out of the loop, I get high for spiritual purposes. The recreational aspect is just a (substantial) bonus. I was going to write a whole post to go with this, but I simply can't find the motivation. Every time I get high is more intense than the last, and attempting to describe it would be hopeless. I guess people just need to experience it for themselves. Or not. I don't encourage anyone to do drugs. I just try to break down the stigma and share my experiences. At this point, I think I can say that the gummies have permanently altered my brain. I was willing to take that risk because it's not like my brain was in great condition to begin with. I laugh more often now. I've always appreciated humor, but it rarely surprised me enough to trigger the laughter reflex. Now I lie awake at night laughing as I reminisce about a Key and Peele video I watched the previous day. (The lying awake part isn't new. If I can't sleep either way, I may as well enjoy it.) So that's been a delightful surprise.

This time, I felt so blissful and so out of my body that I think my fear of death is almost entirely gone. In those moments it seemed so obvious to me that I don't have consciousness, I am consciousness, and when the body I'm stuck inside stops working, I'll go somewhere else and it won't be a big deal. Then I had all these other profound thoughts and felt moved to reach out to someone I hadn't talked to since high school whose partner killed himself. And I also listened to some music. While I listened to the Michael Stearns track "Encounter," I imagined myself in a field at night seeing a spaceship, then in the woods knowing there were aliens all around me. It wasn't like a real vivid hallucination, perhaps because I'm not a very visual thinker to begin with, but it was intense. I was thinking, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God... It was like a VR horror game that you know isn't real but still get you swept up in the moment. Frightening, but in the best way. And then I just listened to some other stuff that came to mind.

Yeah, as hard as I'm trying to be spiritual and enlightened and stuff, I haven't yet figured out how to generate any tolerance, patience, or love for pathologically stupid people whose pathological stupidity directly makes my life worse. (I did take the time to make sure this one was actually a Trump supporter and I wasn't misinterpreting soem kind of weird sarcasm.) And if being so unkind to her was wrong, why did it feel so, so good? By the way, this is probably the only purple-haired woman on Earth who supports Trump. She's probably unaware that right-wing misogynists use women with unnatural hair colors as a derisive shorthand for everything they hate about liberalism and/or feminism.

ADDENDUM: Literally today. These people have never had an original thought in their lives.

Speaking of "Fantastic Man," that's also the name of a cool documentary about him that I want to share with everyone but can't because I don't know who else cares about such a niche topic. I just think history and culture and music are really interesting. It's only half an hour, so you don't have much to lose. I found it by accident while trying to find information about "Crashes in Love," a movie he claimed to have made in 1977 that nobody has ever seen because that's just the kind of person he was.

Now here's a little mystery that's gnawed at me this week, and possibly nobody else in the world cares, but this is my blog and I'm going to write about it. When Catherine Warwick was fourteen, she sang a few songs on the soundtrack album for the game known as "Mother" in Japan and "EarthBound Beginnings" in the US. The most famous of these is "Pollyanna," a deliciously optimistic number that's perfect for forgetting about how screwed we are, but "Bein' Friends" is almost as good.

After that, she had a couple of unsuccessful attempts at a music career, then reportedly became a music teacher and started a family. I only know that because of my recent unsuccessful attempt to find out if she sang a couple of songs in the Lego Island Xtreme Stunts game. The uncredited singer really sounds like her to me. The voice is perhaps just a touch deeper, which makes sense because she would have been twenty-seven instead of fourteen. These songs were both as good as anything on the radio in the early 2000s, so you should listen to them even if you don't share my curiosity. The first is a chill techno track and the second is a sweet love ballad. Honestly, LEGO media from the 2000s included so much good music that deserves to be on streaming platforms but isn't.

Months ago, my great-aunt told me that my great-grandmother loved me so much and said I was a good listener and had a deep soul. That came as a surprise because I saw my great-grandmother for a few hours every other year, I don't remember ever having a conversation with her, and she died too young to read my blog. She wasn't wrong, though. Since that revelation, I've become more intrigued by her. I prayed to her once to see if anything would happen, I tried to communicate with her telepathically while I was high, and this past week I read a scrapbook that she made probably in the early 1960s. Kept on a shelf in my grandfather's house alongside several binders full of her journal, it's an unusual scrapbook with far more text than pictures. It doesn't contain a single picture of her. It doesn't so much as mention her own wedding, though it contains invitations for other people's weddings and baby showers. She spelled her name, Geraldine, as Jeryldeane or Geryl Deane, and sometimes people addressed her as Deane, though I remember my great-grandfather calling her Jerry. Since she was far from illiterate, I can only assume this was either some kind of joke or an attempt to mimic Shakespeare's inconsistent spelling of his own name. Also, sometimes she used her parents' last name, and sometimes she used her mother's maiden name. I don't know if that was some proto-feminist thing or what. Those names are hyphenated in FamilySearch.

​I took the liberty of photographing a few pages.

Her testimony touched me so much that I decided to return to the LDS Church and share this faith-promoting story with an apostle so he can share it in General Conference. Just kidding. As far as testimonies go, though, I like it. She acknowledges that her first reason for being a member of the LDS Church is that she was born into it. Most people who aren't born into it didn't and don't ever join, especially now that they can debunk its foundational historical claims with a few minutes of internet research. Then she says "I believe" and "I feel," not "I know" or "I know beyond a shadow of a doubt" or "I know with every fiber of my being." Throughout my life I've heard hundreds of Mormons say "I know" about things they didn't know just because they got the same warm, peaceful feelings in their church meetings that people get in every religion on Earth. I probably did the same once or twice. And in her third and fourth reasons, she basically just says that it works for her. She doesn't talk about its actual truth claims at all. That's respectable enough. Nowadays, of course, fewer women and girls are satisfied with the opportunities for self-development that the LDS Church gives them. The secular world, at least in theory, allows them to do anything men do - we'll see in a little over a week whether that includes being president of the United States - while the church won't even let them pass around a tray with little pieces of bread.

I'm now itching to find this manuscript, edit or finish it if necessary, and publish it. I hope it still exists. I can think of few things cooler than helping an ancestor posthumously fulfill her dream. It's kind of like the book/movie Holes. But what name should I put on the cover? Geryl Deane? Jeryldeane?

A letter was like an email, but on paper.

She would have been 17 or 18 when she wrote this for school. I have to say, it's dang impressive for a white girl in the 1940s who had probably never seen a black person in person. It makes me very proud of her. It gives her something in common with her future husband, who, I'm told, befriended a black man in the army after the black man walked into the mess hall and all the other white men got up and left. Here, she recognizes that segregation is inherently discriminatory, twelve years before the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that and at least thirty-six years before her church did. Even when LDS prophets and apostles paid lip service to racial equality, they opposed racial integration because it could lead to marriages between white people and black people, which would contaminate the white people's children with the curse that God had placed on black people. I'm dying to know if their bigotry ever caused her cognitive dissonance. Speaking of caste systems, Bruce R. McConkie was so racist that he included an entry for that term, which wasn't in the Mormon lexicon before or since, in his first edition of Mormon Doctrine in 1958.

What a delightful sense of humor she had. Mixed in with the hyperbole, of course, is a scathing critique of the American education system that remains just as valid 82 years later. Wait, that means more time has elapsed since she wrote this than had elapsed since the start of the Civil War when she wrote this. Holy crap. By the way, "queer" meant "weird" in the 1940s. It transitioned to its current meaning during the following decade, which allowed for a double entendre in the title of Ruth Wallis' song "Queer Things," which was considered risque just for acknowledging that gay people existed.

When I try to express my feelings about music, I usually just say that I want to marry it and inject it into my veins at the same time. So she's got me beat there. I had some brief musical ambitions, but I was too lazy to put in the practice, and now I'm content with the amount of music that already exists. I'd love to find her music scrapbook. It reminds me of my hobby of curating all the music I like into alphabetical order in chronological playlists from 1885 to the present. And now I have a crazy thought. Sometimes Spotify has the wrong years on albums because it uses the year they were uploaded or the year they were re-released or whatever. Often it's obvious that the music is from a different decade, but not always. Sometimes I feel prompted to check for no discernible reason, and almost every time, I find a discrepancy when I do. It's seemed for a while now like God was guiding me in that regard while being absent from every other aspect of my life, but why should God give a crap about the accuracy of my playlists? So now I have the crazy thought that maybe it isn't God but my dead great-grandmother.

Oh yeah, it's almost Halloween, so that's an appropriate note to end on. Ghost. Scary. Boo.