Monthly Archives: September 2012

I’ll never get mugged

I’m unrobbable. Like I don’t think I can be robbed. Actually, I know I can’t be robbed. Or mugged. That’s the same thing, right? What if someone breaks into your apartment and steals your computer? That’s being robbed. OK I’m getting it now, just by explaining it to myself. And if you’re walking down the street, and someone pulls out a knife and takes your wallet, that’s getting mugged. But isn’t that also a robbery? Couldn’t you legitimately scream out, “Help! I’ve been robbed!” I guess it’s like squares and rectangles and parallelograms, like all muggings are robberies, but not vice versa.

So it would be slightly more accurate to say that I’m unmuggable. Because, whatever, I guess I have to leave the house eventually. And it’s not like I’m living at Fort Knox. So theoretically, yeah, I guess I could get robbed. But that’s not my point. My point is, I don’t think it’s possible for anybody to mug me. I’ve thought it out a million times in my mind.

Although I’ve never been mugged, my default scenario, the way I play it out in my head, it’s pretty ingenious. As soon as a mugger approaches me, or reaches in his pocket, or pulls out a knife or a gun or whatever type of weapon, he’ll start to say something, “This is a stick up, see?” Well, that would be a little old-fashioned. It would probably be more like, “Give me your wallet! Your phone!” But step one of my strategy would be immediately cutting them off, mid threat.

My whole defense would be to pretend like I’m an undercover cop. No mugger is going to want to get involved robbing a cop. It’s career suicide. It all depends on how it would go down. If the mugger is coming directly at me, and I can see him reaching for his weapon, I would bring my hands to my waist, pretending like I also have a weapon, and I’d say something confident, bold, like, “I’m not the guy you want to fuck with buddy.”

Chances are, if I play it confidently enough, that guy would take off running. But what if this mugger is a little smarter than your average degenerate? He might say to himself something like, wait a second, if that guy’s a cop, wouldn’t he be arresting me right now? And so I’d have to add another layer, like, “I’m not the guy to fuck with buddy. Now scram, this is a stakeout.” That would probably be enough to send him high-tailing it out of there.

I think pretending you’re a cop is the way to get out of ninety percent of life’s problems. And you don’t even have to tell anyone. Just tell yourself. Say it to yourself in your head. I’m an undercover police officer. And then act like it. You’ll be surprised how many people suddenly don’t want to be fucking with you anymore. Your whole persona, your body language, your real language, it’s screaming, begging for somebody to fuck with you. Just try it.

What if the mugger sneaks up behind you and catches you off guard? You might not get a chance to act as cool. In this case, just scream out, “I’m a cop you idiot!” Your mugger will at the very least be surprised, and that’ll give you the opportunity to reach for your waist and do the whole “I’m on a stakeout, scram!” routine that I talked about before.

But what if the there are more than just one mugger? What if it’s two, or three, or a whole crew? In this situation, your one imaginary gun might not be enough to ward off the very real threat of a whole posse. In this case, and I think I’ve written about this before somewhere, but all you have to do is fake a seizure. Collapse to the floor, start flailing wildly, pee your pants if you’re not too bladder shy. I’m pretty sure these hoodlums weren’t planning on actually having a dead body to deal with, just a scared victim to steal from. Once you make it look like you might die, they’re sure to make a run for it.

But there’s one imaginary stick-up that I’m afraid is too tough even for a fake police badge or a fake seizure. What if, you’re walking down the street at night, and some guy comes out of nowhere, not with a hidden gun, but a real gun, and he just comes up and puts it right to your head and he doesn’t say anything, because he doesn’t need to say anything, you know exactly what to do, absolutely nothing, because either this guy’s going to go through your pockets, or he’s going to tell you to empty them for him. What are you supposed to do here?

I’ve thought about this, and it’s a little riskier than my other solutions, but I think it’s totally doable. Think about it, the guy has a gun to your head and he’s thinking to himself, I’ve got this guy. Nobody in their right mind would try something here. The mugger is overconfident, and it’s going to be his undoing. Because seriously, what is a gun? It’s just a stick. So imagine it being just a stick. Couldn’t you just reach up really, really fast, grab the guy’s stick, and push it straight up? He’d probably pull the trigger, but it would be way too late, the gun would be pointing up, and so it would be a shot straight up in the air. I’m figuring this guy would think to himself, shit, gunshots, the cops’ll be here any second. I better beat it. Or, if he decides to struggle, I’ll be in the dominant position, completely in control of his gun hand. It would be no simpler than wrestling a Nintendo controller out of the hands of one of my screaming younger brothers, something I’ve spent years mastering. And if he does stick around to wrestle it out with me, that bullet that he shot in the air has got to come back down eventually, and as it comes back down to the earth it’ll be just as fast as it was going up, and it’ll probably hit him right in the head. Right through his left eye. I’m absolutely unmuggable.

Remember when I said that I had never been mugged before? That was only partially true. One time I was in Ecuador with a few people in one of the country’s smaller cities. It was like two in the morning and everyone was drunk. We were walking maybe seven blocks back to where we were staying. After a block or two, all of the lights went out. It was a blackout. We kept walking. Another block or two later, this group of four or five guys comes up out of nowhere and surrounds us, but without stopping. We’re all walking, with this group walking around us, like a walking fence.

Things definitely didn’t look good, and I thought, how can I defuse this situation, fast? I was about to shout out, “Que tontos! Somos la policia!” but I noticed one of the guys had a cigarette behind his ear, and since they were all much, much shorter than I am, I simply grabbed it, put it to my mouth, and asked that guy for a light. Nobody said anything for a while. Finally, the leader of the group, I’m assuming he was the leader because he’s the only person who opened his mouth, he said, “You know, we were just about to rob you gringos.” Everybody kept walking. And I said, “That’s funny, because me and friends were just about to rob all of you.” More walking. Maybe a block or two later, the whole group broke apart and started at a brisk pace down a different street. High-fives all around.

I don’t consider that a mugging, more like a conversation. Nothing ever got past the hypothetical. But it’s all about how you carry yourself. I’m pretty sure that if they really did have any weapons or whatever, I could of gotten us out of that somehow. Please try it. Just try to mug me. I’ll act surprised. I’ll act scared. And then I’ll turn it around on you so fast you’ll have no idea what’s going on. If you don’t wind up seriously hurt, or worse, dead, you’ll definitely be behind bars. You can’t mug me. Nobody can. I’m unmuggable. A hundred percent.

Get on you knees and grovel before the lords of soda

I just went to see a movie. All of the employees at the theater were wearing t-shirts about choice and personal liberty, all decorated with slogans about how New York is a city of freedom. Then, when I sat down in my seat to be force fed all of those nonsense commercials that play before the movie starts, it was a lot of the same deal, don’t let anyone take away your freedom, blah blah blah. Normally I’d just zone out, but in a movie theater, I’m actually kind of forced to sit and pay attention to what’s playing in front of me. And what was playing in front of me? I realized that this wasn’t just any freedom or liberty we were talking about, this was about soda.

New York made headlines a couple of months ago after the mayor introduced a measure banning really big sodas at movie theaters and restaurants. And so this must have been part of the corporate backlash. Whatever, I think Mike Bloomberg is a dick, but not because of this soda issue. There have been a lot of professional opinions about soda drinking since the Mayor passed his law, and most of them say that people will always automatically go for the default option, in soda’s case, it’s always a large.

A large isn’t even really large. It’s gigantic. And it’s what everybody gets. Have you ever tried to buy a small soda? First of all, it’s only usually around three to four cents cheaper. And you order the small soda and the cashier immediately tries to stop you, gives you that don’t-be-so-cheap look and says, “Come on, you sure you don’t want a large? It’s only three cents more!” Of course you’re going to get the large. One time I insisted on the small, the cashier had to go back to some storeroom to see if they actually kept any small cups in house. She found one, and it was still bigger than any cup I have in my house.

Can you imagine what it would be like if everyone had giant glasses in their houses? You could buy a two liter bottle of Coke and pour the whole thing right into one of those cups. It’s not fair. Only at shitty restaurants and movie theaters is it OK to hold a cup that you literally can’t carry without using both hands. That’s not normal. That’s not how normal people eat and drink in their houses.

Which is why I get so pissed off when I go to see a movie and I’m bombarded by a political campaign about soda. Yeah, it’s about freedom, that’s it. It’s about, um, choice. Right, yeah choice. Who’s financing this counter-campaign? Why is it only at the movies that I’m seeing this nonsense?

Because you go to the movies and you have to get a snack. And you can’t bring in snacks from outside the movie theater. So you wait on line where the employees are making like three dollars an hour, and if I were making three dollars an hour, I’d be working even slower than they are. And by the time you finally get to the cashier, you just want some popcorn and a Coke. There’s no prices listed. There are never any prices listed. You just know that it’s going to be ridiculously expensive.

Popcorn and a Coke? Fifteen bucks. Awesome. Thanks for the popcorn and soda. I know it cost you like fifteen cents to produce this nutritionally hollow garbage. Fifteen bucks. Whatever, at least it’s gigantic. At least it’s so big that I’m probably not going to be able to finish it. And even if I do finish it, I can always get up in the middle of the movie and waste fifteen more minutes waiting on that line again for a free refill.

And that’s really the only way that these opportunist theaters can get away with charging ridiculously high prices for large cups of sugar water and bags of popped chicken feed. Because it’s so big. The word value just automatically pops in your head. Like when you go to Costco. Big. Value.

Can you imagine what it would be like if you ordered a large soda at a movie theater, then they handed you a sixteen-ounce cup, and then still tried to charge you ten bucks? The price would have to come down. And that’s what this whole campaign is about. Coke and Pepsi and AMC theaters don’t care about choice, or freedom, or liberty. They’re pissed off that a Mayor of a large city is trying to stop them from ripping everybody off. All they care about is taking your money, selling you a product that’s basically toxic in such large quantities, and not having to be held accountable for it. And when government threatens this normalized fleecing, they get all pissed and put together a campaign, try to rally up support amongst the people they are robbing.

I don’t get it. If you’re going to sell me a giant Coke, don’t take my money and then ask for help and support overturning a governmental proposal that would limit you from taking even more of my money. You should have collection boxes on the way out, asking your customers for donations. Please, give us even more money. Would you like to donate a dollar for cancer with your popcorn purchase? Screw you. You donate a dollar, because I just gave you upwards of thirty bucks on a movie and snacks. Don’t try to guilt me into giving up even more. Absolutely shameless. Does anybody ever go to the movies, spend thirty bucks, and then say to themselves, wow, that was totally worth it. Money well spent. I can’t imagine having a family, like two or three kids. That’s like a whole day’s work, down the drain.

Freedom. Give me a break, do I look stupid? How about hiring some more employees for the snack lines so I don’t have to wait around like an idiot? How about offering some better snacks? How about selling beer or cocktails. How about cleaning the floors once in a while so it’s not so goddamn sticky every single time. How much more money do you want from me just so I can see a movie and have some snacks?

Regular TV is the worst

I look around at the world, specifically, my world, more specifically, all of the advertisements around the city for the fall lineup of brand new TV shows, and I’ve come to realize that I posses what has to be a superhuman ability to look at just one billboard for a new program before being immediately able to tell whether or not it’s going to make it through even just one season. This power has to be worth something. I feel like the TV execs should be paying me lots of money to save them lots of money. I’m like a guy who can see a train wreck coming, but as of yet, I’ve just stood idly by and done nothing to stop the destruction.

Maybe you need some convincing. Well, my proof is going to be up for interpretation anyway. And since I’m just starting to see the advertisements for this fall, I can’t really point to a ton of this season’s new releases. But, today for example, I saw this billboard for a new show called Park Ave 666. I’ll bet any one of you a solid hundred bucks that this show doesn’t make it to seasons two. What’s it about? I have no idea. Here’s what I do know.

It’s on either ABC, CBS, or NBC. It doesn’t really matter, they’re all basically the same exact network. I see one of their logos and it automatically registers in my head as “regular TV,” like not-cable, like it’s more than likely to be terrible. But it would be unfair and not really that sensational if I were just writing off every single major network TV show. They do something cool every now and then. I’m trying to think of one. I mean, Lost was popular, right? Heroes, while it expanded too rapidly into a red giant of lame disappointment and bloat, it was pretty intense for at least two seasons.

But Park Ave 666, I know it’s on regular TV. The billboard showed some old rich guy giving a devilish smile to the city. How do I know he’s rich? The title has Park Ave in it, and he’s wearing a suit, so I’m pretty sure he’s rich. Why would I describe the guy’s smile as devilish? Because of the 666 part. Without having read anything about the show at all, I’m assuming it’s about the devil living as a really rich person in some penthouse on Park Ave. It sounds awful. And even if I’ve gotten it wrong, the premise of the show, it doesn’t matter, it’s too late. Everybody else is probably already thinking the same thing, and so the advertisers, the marketing gurus or whatever, they’ve failed to make this show even worth trying out. I give it six months.

This is the problem with awful TV shows. They’re usually just copying something that’s already popular and then dumbing it down for regular TV. In the above case, there’s the blatant rip-off of the Devil’s Advocate. But whereas that movie was original, engaging, over-acted, sure, but still pretty original, I can guarantee this TV show is going to have more to do with generic soap-opera non-drama than anything to do with the devil or anything resembling an interesting story.

Everything is ripped off, and it never works. Remember all of the billboards for ABC’s Pan-Am last year? It’s four ladies, and they’re wearing 1960s stewardess outfits, and it’s an airline that doesn’t exist anymore. Could they have made it any more obvious that they were trying to rip off Mad Men? And Mad Men, a show about absolutely nothing other than cool costumes, booze, cigarettes, and non-characters doing non-action and having non-conversations, only marginally works because they were the first show to do it. I can just picture the genius green-lighting team at ABC. “Well, the 60s are huge right now. I’m thinking Mad Men, but let’s focus on the women. And also, stewardesses. And also, I’m terrible at my job.”

There’s a lot of good stuff on TV. But the other ninety-five percent makes me physically sick. What I don’t get is, it’s not like I’m even being controversial here or going against the grain. I’m not even talking about my own personal likes and dislikes. You notice I’m not talking about shows like Gossip Girl or Glee, shows I could never see myself watching, but that I can at least see how they attract viewers and stay on the air for longer than a year. I’ve never met one person that watched Kings or Ringer or Pan Am or any of the other non-shows that perennially sprout and die like weeds.

Can’t the networks just put together a couple of focus groups before they start throwing money at shows that’ll never make it further than a year? No, it’s much easier to look at already successful programs and put together a proposal, something like, “Well, Breaking Bad has never been more popular. So I’m thinking a show about a woman. And she’s bipolar. Right? OK, so she starts making heroin to pay for her bipolar meds. Cool? Terrific! OK, this show’s going to be on channel seven though, so nothing too explicit. And no syringes. The sponsor’s said no syringes. I don’t know, think of something. I don’t know, we’ll call it Shooting Up, or Nodding Off, or Nobody’s Watching. It’s going to be a smash hit!”

The uncanny valley is a lie

Has everybody heard about the uncanny valley? The idea is that the closer art gets to mimicking life, specifically in reference to human beings, the less likely that we are to find these representations attractive. OK, that was confusing, let me try again. I know you’re thinking, Rob, you’re writing, you can’t just write bad sentences and then write, “Wait let me try again.” There’s supposed to be some sort of editing process, where instead of telling everybody to wait, I should just rewrite the sentence and replace the bad sentence. But look, I’ve already gotten a whole paragraph out of this, whereas if I did an edit and a rewrite, I’d only have one sentence.

So let me try again. The uncanny valley. It’s all about computer graphics, about CGI humans, like digital animation, like The Polar Express or that Final Fantasy movie. Experts like to draw graphs, and the graphs always show that, when you’re animating something, the more lifelike the animations get, the more they’ll evoke a kind of negative reaction from the viewer. I know it’s confusing. I should just read an article on the Internet about it and paraphrase. But I’m not going to. You’re just going to have to deal with my half-baked explanation.

The actual term “uncanny valley” refers to these graphs that these scientists make. They correlate the realism of an animation with an audience’s positive reaction. Once the graph gets to a certain level of being too life-like, the graph drops, eliciting an almost entirely negative response from the audience. This is the valley, and it’s absolutely uncanny.

But I don’t buy it. And that’s the point that I’ve been trying to get at for the better part of three paragraphs. Again, I could do some serious editing here, but I like to think that there’s something about me commenting about my writing process as I’m writing, in real time. Like it’s charming or something. And then I don’t have to do any editing. Sure it’s distracting, what am I talking about? Am I talking about the uncanny valley or am I talking about writing? I’m talking about both, at the same time. I’m weaving in and out.

I think the uncanny valley is bullshit. I think it’s a cop-out, a way for computer animators to write off their inability to make decent human animations. Look at my examples from earlier, The Polar Express, that Final Fantasy movie. Why are audiences turned off? It’s easy for a bunch of professionals to get together and say, “Well, it’s not that our animation was poor or that the movie just sucked, let’s whip up some graph and analyze and theorize and come to the conclusion that the movie itself wasn’t terrible, it’s that human beings are inherently predisposed to not enjoy computer rendered illustrations of human beings. Harumph.”

That sounded pretty scientific, right? I’m talking about my writing again, not about the uncanny valley. Well, I’m still talking about the uncanny valley, but I’m doing more of a little critique here. I feel like I’m actually suffering a little bit from the formula I’ve laid out for myself here, this whole, “Let’s write about something and then keep commenting on it.” It might have been interesting the first one or two times I did it, and I’m not even saying it actually was interesting, I’m just saying that it might have been interesting. Regardless of whether it was ever interesting or not interesting, I can look back at what I’ve written so far, I can think about the words being typed on the screen right now, and I can definitely conclude that, at the very least, there they are, a whole document. On bad writing days I could at least stop now and think to myself, whatever, at least it looks like a blog post. It’s the right length.

But wait a second, maybe this is like my own version of the uncanny valley. I’ve taken it to the next level. I’m commenting and critiquing my commenting and critiquing. And it’s not working out. Maybe it’s not my fault. Maybe it’s all of humanity’s fault, that there’s something in our genes that makes it impossible for anybody to see and appreciate the inherent genius in all of this. Yeah, that’s it. I’m also going to call this the uncanny valley. Who’s going to stop me? Is the phrase trademarked? I don’t care if it is or isn’t.

I think about the uncanny valley and I think about paintings, about great paintings, about masterpieces. One time I had to go to an art museum for a class, and I took a turn through this hall of Dutch realist painters. I think they were realist painters, but I’m not an expert on art, or on Dutch, and I’m not pretending to be. Names like Rembrandt are flying through my head, but I have no idea if that guy was even Dutch, or what his first name was. But it’s not important. What is important is that all you have to do is to take one look at a master painter’s portrait of another human being and you can say with certainty that the uncanny valley is total bullshit. These are illustrations and depictions of humans made with pigments and oils and brushstrokes, and when you look at them, you’re filled with a sense of wonder, like how can this be so lifelike? It’s a canvas. I know it’s a painting. But it looks alive.

I’ve taken painting classes before. And I’ve done some shitty paintings. I’ve done some shitty portraits. It would be really easy for me to look at a shitty portrait I’ve done and say, well, it’s not my fault it’s shitty, it’s the uncanny valley’s. And then I think about computer animation and I think, there’s no uncanny valley, there just hasn’t been somebody in this very new and very rapidly evolving medium of CGI that’s really shown us what it’s capable of. Imagine what painting was like before a truly great painter came around. It was probably just a bunch of terrible cave drawings, and all of the cave scientists came around and said, well, painting is just an inadequate medium. It cannot produce greatness. There is an unbridgeable gulf between what is possible and what we’d like to see.

And then a great master painter came along and was like, “Oh yeah? Well what do you think of this!” and he whips out a Mona Lisa or something equally brilliant, and everyone is just speechless. But not only are they speechless, they can now look at the technique, and they can begin to see how it was done, and they study it and replicate the success. And they’re like, “Ohhhh … so there was no uncanny valley. It’s just that nobody knew how to paint until this master painter showed us the way.” And to make my point, finally, this is what it has to be like with CGI. Someday somebody is going to make an insane representation of life with computer graphics and it’s going to be like, who was that jerk that came up with the uncanny valley? That severely limited intellect that tried to scientifically explain why art is simply impossible?

And that guy will be like, “Yeah … that guy was such a jerk,” pretending it wasn’t him, as he slinks off into the background of history, hoping that humanity will forget all about him, his name, his lackluster legacy in the unimaginative halls of uncanny stupidity.

Futurology Part XVIII

Let’s think about the future some more. The future used to be so much cooler. Look at Back to the Future Part II. Our optimism was running so high, that when Marty McFly travelled to 2012, it was a techno-paradise. There were hoverboards. You could make a pizza go from the size of a dime to the size of a real pizza, right there in your kitchen. Every wall was a giant TV. Cars could fly. And did I mention hoverboards?

This vision of the future wasn’t sugarcoated either. It wasn’t perfect. Future Marty McFly still lived in kind of a dumpy house. He still got chewed out by his two-tie wearing boss. There were still truckloads of manure ready to be crashed into. That future was wondrous and marvelous and all that, but it still looked real.

The worst type of futures are where everything is too perfect. Like look at Star Wars. Everything is crisp, deluxe, clean, a little too clean. I don’t remember seeing any dirt anywhere in the entirety of the two trilogies. Nobody ever goes to the bathroom. Tattoine doesn’t count, because that wasn’t dirt, it was sand. Also, the ice planet Hoth doesn’t count either, because it was frozen. Now that I think about it, even when Luke and Han Solo spent the night together inside of that mountain yak’s stomach, they made it back to the base the next day looking cleaner than ever. That doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s not a convincing future. I know, technically Star Wars took place “A long time ago,” but seriously, spaceships, droids, light-sabers. Call it what you will, it’s a vision of the future.

At least when my parents’ generation was making films about the future, they were at least somewhat optimistic. They had enough whimsy to think about hoverboards and self-pumping sneakers. Whenever people imagine the future now, it’s always dystopian wasteland this, apocalyptic nightmare that. The Road just came out a year ago. I didn’t see it, but apparently the whole world was shot to shit. The Hunger Games. I never saw that either, but I read the plot on Wikipedia, and it didn’t seem like they had a great outlook about humanity or society. Prometheus, well, I didn’t get to see Prometheus either, I’m still waiting for it to come out on Netflix, but I saw the trailer, and while all the technology looked cool, I mean, it’s a horror movie, right?

Look at Wall-E. I know that all of these movies have long-term hopeful messages about humanity, but it’s way too long-term. As John Maynard Keynes famously said, in the long-term future, we’re all dead anyway. In the short-term future, the best that we can think of right now is massive destruction and planetary relocation. And seriously think about Wall-E for a second. Everybody on Earth moved onto that spaceship? I don’t buy that for a second. There’s no spaceship big enough to hold every person on Earth. We can’t even feed or clothe every human being on Earth, there’s no way we’re going to have some sort of smooth moving process, an “OK, single file everybody, there’s plenty of room on the spaceship for everybody, no pushing please, we promise, nobody’s going to get left behind to die.”

I’m telling you, I bet like ninety-five percent of the population got left behind. Weren’t all of the people living on the spaceship white? I don’t remember. But weren’t all of the babies being born in test tubes anyway? Why would they only breed white test tube babies? What kind of a future is that?

Imagine that our Earth started dying, fast, and the government made a huge spaceship for us all to relocate to. We would all claw each other’s throats out just to make sure that we got aisle seats. And then there would be the deniers, the people that say, “This is bullshit! The earth is fine! I’m staying and so are my followers. And not only that, we oppose the creation of any spaceship for anybody! We believe that everybody should stay here on this planet with us!”

And the news would have stories saying stuff like, “Where are they getting the money for this giant spaceship? Are your taxpayer dollars being spent wisely?” It would never get done. We’d all go down with the dying Earth. Not all of us. The mega-rich would just build their own, private, luxurious spaceships. And they’d be the ones to repopulate the cosmos. Assuming that’s it’s not already repopulated somewhere else. It has to be. But that’s another topic entirely.

Man, the future is scary. Maybe it’s because the present is so scary. Maybe I’m scared of too much stuff. Wall-E wasn’t really supposed to be a horror movie, was it? I mean, it was a kids movie, right?