Spontaneous Musings

1. There's two bits from LEGION that continue to haunt me, and you don't need to watch the entire series to understand and I found to be rather brilliant:


A. Plato's Cave



This may well be the best explanation of the modern narcissistic disorder that I've seen and how it comes about.


B. Delusion, Reality and Madness and how it occurs in LEGION



Which is highly philosophical and borrows heavily from various Zen and Greek philosophers.

If you are a frustrated philosophy/psychology major, you should check out LEGION and THE GOOD PLACE.

2. Suffering from increasingly painful IBS. I think I may be causing some of it with a tendency to over-eat the wrong things -- like tonight I had half a gluten free pizza, a smoothie, and a chocolate bar. My stomach hates me. Plus the anti-boitic from heck.

3. Soap fandom

Fan: Faison didn't make Peter put on a bullet proof vest, and manipulate Lulu and Nathan into revealing Nathan was Faison's son, so that Faison came out of the woodwork and killed Nathan in Peter's office, because Nathan followed Maxie there to save her from Faison who'd gone there to confront and kill Peter.
ME: eh. Peter wearing a bullet proof vest does not equal killing Nathan. Nor does manipulating Nathan and Lulu into revealing Nathan's parentage. Faison showed up to kill Peter, he had no idea Nathan would be there or Maxie. Neither did Peter. Peter had no way of foreseeing that. Granted his manipulations of Lulu and Nathan were horrid but they didn't clearly lead to Nathan's death. Peter put on the vest and worked to get his father to confront him, so he could use Jason to kill him. That's it.

Sigh.

This is why I'm opposed to jury trials now. People don't think logically or critically. They think with emotion. And emotion is seldom logical or even rational. In fact it usually is insane and makes no sense whatsoever.

Of course the word fan and logic hardly go hand in hand as it is. And before you say, oh, you are on a soap opera board, what do you expect? I was on the Buffy and Angel boards, also with Doctor Who and BSG fandoms -- they are crazy too. People, ignoring story-thread completely, had decided Angel was the nicer and better of all the vampires, the most redeemable, and obviously the most morally outstanding. Even though the story and all of it's themes ran directly counter to this view. (He's set up as the WORST VAMPIRE EVER, a pure Charles Manson of the Vampire Genre. The only reason the curse is so effective is how horrible he was. The series Angel was about whether a truly horrible person, the worst ever, could be redeemed, could change, and could become a better person and get past his flaws. IT wasn't about a so-so guy who had a bit of bad luck, wasn't so bad, trying to do good in the world. I watched intelligent fan after fan fail to get this simple point. I mean it's not like the writers didn't constantly comment on it, somewhat didatically, they did. But alas, the fans identified with the big doofus, and refused to see it. I found it hilarious. The story does not work, unless Angel is less redeemable than Spike, more horrible than Spike and Spike is basically the nicer guy. If it was the opposite the series would have been about Spike.) I've also been on comic fan boards and political boards and diet boards, etc...people don't think logically. Also I'm learning that what makes perfect sense in one's head doesn't always make perfect sense outside of it. See LEGION videos.

The above was a joke of a sort. What happens when a Fatelist and an Extentialist walk into a bar..I'm guessing they'll share a bottle of scotch, and debate the odds of the universe ending tomorrow.

Difficult day. But beautiful. So there's that. Even if it was spent inside a cubicle.

The following meta - you can blame or thank atp_omn (aptomn) who wrote a meta on the latest Whedon Buffy comic - from an existentialist/athesist perspective (which by the way is Whedon's). I'd link to it, but his journal is locked. But he did inspire this - so I'm giving credit where it is due.

Existentialism as defined by wiki, because the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's definition was so couched in academic speak, it gave me a head-ache. But you are free to go there if you wish. This is the Modern view - established in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences,generally held that the focus of philosophical thought should be to deal with the conditions of existence of the individual person and their emotions, actions, responsibilities, and thoughts. The early 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, posthumously regarded as the father of existentialism, maintained that the individual is solely responsible for giving his or her own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many existential obstacles and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, alienation, and boredom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

Presdestination also known as pre-determinism, although slightly more religious in aspect, is a 18th Century concept. It's religious connotation separates it from free will and determinism.

Predestination is the Divine foreordaining or foreknowledge of all that will happen; with regard to the salvation of some and not others. It has been particularly associated with the teachings of St. Augustine of Hippo and of John Calvin. Predestination may sometimes be used to refer to other, materialistic, spiritualist, non-theistic or polytheistic ideas of determinism, destiny, fate, doom, or adrsta. Such beliefs or philosophical systems may hold that any outcome is finally determined by the complex interaction of multiple, possibly immanent, possibly impersonal, possibly equal forces, rather than the issue of a Creator's conscious choice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination

Joss Whedon is an interesting writer, I do not always like him, but I will grant that he is interesting - because he melds his philosophical beliefs into the fabric of his writing. In an interview - he stated that he first realized he was an existentialist when he read Sartre's Nausea.(Firefly DVD commentary) He also said when asked if there was a God: "no," but "I don't believe that's the end of the story - it's an important and necessary thing to learn." (The AV Club Interview) And in one of the Buffy DVD commentaries, Whedon comments: "I don't believe in the sky bully" referring to God. And with fans in Sydney, Australia - he identified himself as an atheist and an absurdist. Whedon also identifies himself as a humanist. In April 2009, the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard presented Whedon with the 2009 Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism.

In the Buffy and Angel series, Whedon does something interesting he creates two male vampires - with the same name - William. But one goes by the full name William or Willy and as a nickname "Spike", while the other is called Liam, until he becomes a vampire then never anything other than "Angel" or "Angelus" unless he's talking to Spike, who calls him "Liam" in Angel S5, Hellbound.( Read more... )

(No time to proof-read, must make dinner, then veg, then sleep. So lots of typos and I'm certain errors. Also spoilers for all of BTVS and ATS, as well as the comics.)

TRADING CLOTHES & RINGING PAVLOV’s BELL

I have never attempted a meta quite like this before. Oh sure, I’ve written metas about Spike and about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a cult television series that ended in 2003 but I still love with wild abandon, but not a meta that includes embedded videos and screen shots, which take up space. This is my first Web 2.0 meta or essay. Also, a confession – every time I write and post a meta – I am afraid. Afraid no one will read it. And if they do, they won’t like it enough to bother responding. I find myself counting the responses – to see how good the post was or how well it was received. Which is silly of course – a sort of behavioral conditioning if you think about it. If a post gets no responses, I will often decide to either delete it or never write anything like it again. It’s almost as if in my own journal, much against my better judgment, I am trading clothes and ringing pavolov’s bell. (Sigh, writing like painting, is a difficult love, chock-full of rejection, and the lucky few get past that. Also, much as the saying goes - does a tree fall if no one sees it, does a post or a piece of writing exist if no one but you reads it?)

The below is a meta on behavioral conditioning, the soul or conscience and its effects on the persona in relation to the character of Spike, a vampire on the fictional television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was inspired in part by conversations with people on my flist, as well as fanfiction regarding the character, and the tv series itself. In a way it expresses why I prefer the television series version of Spike or Canon!Spike to the character most people have written about in their fanfiction. [Warning: Long and may be difficult to download on dial-up.]

( What follows is an analysis of the character of Spike aka William the Bloody, aka William Pratt, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, spoilers only include the television series, will also include bits on Angel/Angelous for purposes of comparison only. )