!!!NEW Teen Sexting Codes That !!YOU!! Should Know!!!

Howdy everyone. Please take a moment and watch this quick video I made about the best film of last year; Sorry to Bother You. If you enjoy it, feel free to give me a sub/like/share/the good stuff! If you don’t like it, pretend you didn’t see it!

Hey everybody. Here’s a video I made about animation, what it means to me and the psychological idea of “Flow” - or when a task becomes meditative. 

If you enjoy this video, please feel free to let me know if there’s another topic you’d like me to talk about. Similarly, any advice/general comments are much obliged. 

Oh! And I went and did a twitter now because people on my videos kept asking. Feel free to follow me @The_Infranaut

Thanks everybody!

Looking around online, I found a LOT of people were left stumped by the ending of the film Personal Shopper. I get that - it’s a weird one! In this video, I examine the film as a whole, and try to find out what exactly we can gleam from those perplexing final seconds.

If you enjoy my video, please feel free to subscribe, or follow me on Twitter here https://twitter.com/The_Infranaut

In response to the “Star Wars: The De-Feminised Cut” (which was an edit of The Last Jedi made by some weirdo that removed all female characters), I created “Star Wars: The De-Sci-Fi-ed Cut”. This version of A New Hope removes anything in the film remotely Sci-Fi or Fantasy related.

It’s five minutes long. Please enjoy A New Hope the way it was always meant to be seen.

Happy Halloween y'all. This is my low budget Gravelord Nito costume. Or, I’m “skeletons”.

Yo at this point I think I’ve seen enough desolate Russian landscapes in cinema to reconstruct the whole country from memory

What is a Script Consultant - and do you need one!

This is part of a new series in which I reveal my ugly mug and give writing advice, talking about my experience as a Script Consultant and work on reading and editing screenplays.

If anyone has any thoughts, questions or suggestions please do let me know! Would love to have some feedback on this series, and know what people might be interested in me covering in the future.

The Cradle

We assumed we were in the box.

It was only natural, after all. It’s what anyone would have thought. We had been away for almost six years. A little silver glint in space; not even enough to catch the eye. The CAS system kept us asleep most of it, of course. If we’re talking waking hours, we had been away from Earth maybe eight months.

Space is full of radiation. There’s a reason so many old astronauts have cancer - it comes from everywhere. Our ship had a ridiculously simple monitor, a light really, that was meant to alert us when radiation levels were about to get too high. The trouble was, when we were under, something went wrong. No way of knowing what, but this little green light was on the fritz. We looked at it and no one could figure the thing out - our chief engineer, after some tinkering, told us that the thing was garbage. That there was a 50/50 chance it was accurately indicating high levels of radiation. When you’re in a little metal tube, surrounded on all sides by death, those odds really don’t sound so bad.

Still, it was enough to get to you. It turns out an even chance was the worst thing we could have heard. I would gladly have taken 90/10, or even 99/1 odds. The certainty of death would have been infinitely more comforting.

After a few days, someone brought up we were exactly like the cat in the box. I’m sure everyone is aware, but if you’re not, I can give my two cents. Schrödinger’s cat is a kind of tawdry metaphor that was never really meant to be taken seriously, but the basic premise is as follows; a cat is placed in a box with a Geiger counter containing a trace amount of some radioactive substance. In the space of an hour, it’s equally possible that the substance  remains unchanged as it is the substance decays. If the substance decays, a flask of poisonous shatters and kills the cat. In the hour before the box is opened, the contents of the box are a superposition, wherein the cat is both alive and dead. Upon observing the contents of the box, the superposition “chooses” an outcome. It was a metaphor that, to my foggy recollection, was meant to mock the idea of a contradictory harmonious state. However, it caught the public imagination and became accepted into the vast sea of pop-science.

What is interesting, however, is the notion that an action in the present, ie opening the box, can in fact change an event in the past, in this case whether the cat has been alive or dead the last hour.

We were currently the cat in the box; there was a 50/50 chance that we had been poisoned. The monitors on Earth would know for certain whether we were or not, but we were not due to communicate with them for another six months. It was funny, in a way. We joked about being zombies. That we were just waiting for the boys back open to crack open the lid.

After a month, it stopped being funny. I became unsure whether I was feeling the effects of radiation poisoning. Maybe it was a placebo, maybe it was all in my head, but I swear I could feel it. I could feel this looming dread, this decay deep in my bones. Examining the path the ship had taken, one of my peers figured out exactly where the radiation source must have been, if it indeed existed at all. After two months of uncertainty, we decided to open the box ourselves. 

It was not our decision to make.

We put ourselves to sleep and turned the ship around. We had a six month timer; that would put us in range of Earth.

In that sleep, you are meant to dream. I had nothing. When I think back to my time under, I recall nothing. Only the darkness and a strange anxiety.

We awoke, looked out the window, and realised we were wrong. We were wrong all along. 

We were never in the box.

A neutron star is the result of a collapsed star. While relatively tiny in size, their density is incredible. A neutron star with a radius of only 7 miles can have a mass of over twice our sun. They also give out enormous amounts of radiation. A tiny, blinding usher. A calamitous angel. The scroll, rolling up the night sky.

Swallowing whole the world entire.

Uncertainty was the curse. There was an even chance that there was no radiation source. There was an even chance the monitor was faulty. There was an even chance we were all fine.

But we had to know, and in our knowing, we became fate. We were the observers. We forced the choice. We changed the past and smashed the vial.

It wasn’t us in the box, it was the world. But we needed to look. We needed to.

Callisto

Sleek, silver. No shadow. Silver.

You acquaint yourself with what you’re looking at. The fog around the corners of your eyes dissolves. Slowly, the ceiling above you begins to materialise. “I am alive,” you think, “but too soon.”

This was wrong. Surely, this is wrong. You had heard that time doesn’t seem to pass when you’re under, but this seems distinctly different. Something was looming over you - the sleek silver ceiling that bore no shadow seemed like a distant, yet familiar threat. That was it - there should be a shadow there! If you in orbit of Callisto by now there would be a shadow. You turn your head -

No. You can’t. Something is wrong. You can’t move - you can’t even feel. Not like a numbness, no, like an absence. Your eyes dart down - the position of your body makes hardly anything visible. You just want to check - is it still there? Are you all still even there? Then you remember;

The Cells Alive.

The Cells Alive System was revolutionary. Loosely based on a process used in a Japanese Fridge of all things, the process involved freezing living tissue without the risk of damage or liquid crystallisation. For longhaul journeys like this, it was a Godsend.

By why were you awake? Why had your brain awoken without the rest of you? You wondered if something similar had happened to the rest of the crew - if you could just turn your head, you could check on them. A hot wave passes over you - or more accurately, your brain. Your mind. That’s the part of you you can feel. What was happening?

Sleek, shadowless ceiling. Just look at something else.

Memory ekes back in, slowly. You remember now - something had gone wrong. The ship lost power. You had no idea why - you were in a pod, for God’s sake. Either way, the hum of the ship was gone.

Well, “hum” is an embellishment. You have no sense of hearing presently, but when the ship is moving, you can feel the vibrations in your skull. If you can move your eyes, it’s a safe bet you’d be able to feel the ship’s engine, rocking them ever so slightly.

Or maybe your ears did work. Maybe there was just nothing to hear.

The ship was at a standstill - yet here you were. You remember, in your earlier days, before the mission, asking about the safety of the pods. In the dim blue light of a distant memory, nestled deep in the canopy of your faraway world, you remember, and are overcome with horror.

Early in the morning, the engineer reassures you. The pods run on a separate power source. They’ll keep you frozen, and keep you fed, even if the main ships power dies. Your body needs so little food in this state, and the machine will even exercise your muscles a little while you sleep.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Why are you awake? How long will you be awake? Does Earth know you are?

It is frustrating that the overwhelming panic that grips you has no outlet - no sweat, no swearing, no screaming - nothing. Even your eye control is limited - you can’t even blink. The pod is keeping your eye moist. Were the settings jumbled? Why was your brain awake? Why were your eyes?

“Send me to sleep,” you pray. “Send me to sleep, send me to sleep until we’re rescued, please.” Like a child, you wish you could tighten your eyes, to amplify the strength of the wish.

Then another terrifying thought overcomes you; what if they aren’t coming for you? What if, back home, all they see is that the power is out? What if they assume you dead? What if they never come? How long will you be this way?

Silver, sleek, featureless. This image would burn into your eyes until, even if you escaped, it would have long since shrivelled up your retinas. Please, you ask, give me a shadow. Give me a detail to latch on to - give me something.

“The CAS system will keep you going,” I remembered, “pretty much indefinitely.”

Send me to sleep and kill me. Please. Send me to sleep and kill me. Cut the feeding tube off. Let your muscles atrophy. Please. God. Please.

Deja Vu. You remember thinking this before. What time was this? Has this happened before to me? How long have I… You remember… Yes, this did happen before, you woke up. But something was different.

Christ, God, no. The ceiling, you remember now. It wasn’t featureless. There was a mural on it. Where was it? Where had it gone? It was a schematic of the ship, where had it gone?! Was this the same ship? had you been taken, somehow? Was I home?! Wait, no, have I -

had you just been here long enough for your eyesight to fade?

How long have you been here?

No, I can’t have… This is all… Ah yes. Now you remember. Silver. Sleek. Featureless. You hadn’t woken up just now. It was… something else. A moment of clarity… You think. Alzheimer’s? Dementia? Not a physical thing, though. It was time, gnawing at me… Something… Else.

They say that time passes quicker the older you are. I wonder how long I have been here… Time doesn’t seem to be passing quicker, though maybe i would only notice if I had a point of reference… Something besides this ceiling… Maybe if I tried to have a conversation, everything would be moving too fast for me to follow. How long does it take a human brain to rot from the inside out, on its own accord?

I wonder if they mourned me, on the news… I wonder what a human face looks like. What do shapes look like?

The moments of clarity are the worst. I want it to take me over completely. I wonder how scared I was, the first time. The first time I realised this was everything… I wonder how different I really have it from people back home. This is ageing, this is just… Time… That’s all it is. The time we’re all afflicted by… condensed… into a…

How old are you? I remember now… Laying here… you remember the schematic fading… You could even notice it happening. Almost in real time, I saw it fade. Let me close my eyes.

Callisto, you think, must be beautiful. A beautiful silver. Sleek. Featureless.

What if the Camera Really Do Take Your Soul? Arcade Fire, Anthropology and Western Myth.

“Flashbulb Eyes” is not a particularly long song (especially compared to the others on the album), and lyrically speaking it... Well, it's eight different lines.

However, it is in this track where (I feel) the albums two strongest themes, fear or sociopathy and hatred of fame come together in the most succinct and straightforward way.

Though recently, this song has inspired me to think about something else; the idea that certain people once believe that “the camera can steal your soul”. It mostly seems to be colonial bullshit. 

What you're looking at here is a photograph from keen scientific writer and pioneer of Japanese photography, Ueno Hikoma. During Hikoma's life, he captured many iconic scenes of the Japanese countryside, as well as its inhabitants. His work was widely influential, and he maintained close relationships with and even taught many of the other great Japanese  photographers of the time (Uchida Kuichi, Noguchi Jōichi and Kameya Tokujirō to name just a few). At times, however, superstitions crept into his craft, and he had trouble taking the pictures of a number of his Japanese countrymen. You see; it was a belief in some areas that having your picture taken would also take your soul away.

Except, no, that's not really true at all, it's just how Western society seemed to interpret it. It's true, Hikoma had difficulty taking the pictures of some Japanese citizens, however it wasn't really for fear of a soul being stolen. It was in fact far closer to some of the Japanese believing that they could become sick from having their picture taken, possibly due to the bright flash – and even this belief does not necessarily come down to superstition as much as misunderstanding. The camera was still a relatively new contraption – especially if you were a farmer and had never seen anything remotely similar before – so general unease around it does not seem too absurd.

This example, by the way, happens to be one of the very few (documented, at least) examples of a people actually fearing the camera in this way.

Other instances of of civilisations fearing the camera seem to stem more from cultural misunderstandings. For instance, the Australian Aboriginal culture (much like the Iroquois) is an intrinsically oral one, containing no written language. History and stories pre-1788 were maintained through song and repeatedly told stories rather than through physical documentation (The Iroquois, conversely, would appoint “Sachem”, individuals tasked with remembering and teaching Historic events). As a result, the Aboriginal tradition has become a profoundly esoteric one. Due to this traditional, recording an Aboriginal ceremony, song or practise is a matter of extreme contention, and it is highly recommended (and really, just a mark of respect) you consult the host before taking pictures. The avoidance of the camera, for these people, is not a matter of fear, but of cultural preservation. 

In Janet Hoskins study of the myth, she theorises that the fear of the camera stealing blood is actually far more likely than the notion of a camera stealing a soul (Noting that the cameras “click” sounding similar to a sucking sound). This sounds a little odd, but makes sense – after all, the notion of a “soul” is not necessarily common to every culture, and even if a culture does posses a “soul equivalent”, who is to say their version is capable of being stolen? Is it not also possible that fear of the camera could also have begun out of fear of the power it represents – taking ones image forever, without their consent? Anthropologist Rodney Needham labelled the belief that the camera can steal the soul a “literary stereotype”.

In fact, the idea of a soul being stolen through a representative image is a distinctly European one.  During the Victorian era, it was common practise for all mirrors to be covered with sheets or rags at a funeral. This was due to the incredibly strong belief the Victorians had in “the soul” - notably that immortality was achieved through the resurrection of the soul. Mirrors were covered so that no reflection of the dead would be present at their funeral – the common superstition was that if any reflection were present, then the deceased soul could be trapped forever. It makes sense now, that many Westerners would have associated other culture's avoidance of the camera with the soul. This idea of the “reflection” representing the soul likely carried over to the introduction of the camera, where in stead of a “reflection” mirroring the soul, it was a photograph.

Ah yes, reflections. Reflektions.