Hey Everybody. Here’s A Video I Made About Animation, What It Means To Me And The Psychological Idea

A video I made on Nostalgia Culture and the representation of Millennials in film,  I’m quite proud of how this one turned out! If you like it, please do feel free to like, comment, share and subscribe. It’d mean a lot!

And, of course, check Brigsby Bear out if you’re interested! It’s a great little film, and I wish more people knew about it.

Hello everyone! In this video (which is probably the single one I’m most proud of to date), I examine one of the most famous shots in all of cinema and try to figure out what makes it so special.

Soy Cuba is a strange movie; a Cuban film funded by the USSR, meant as a piece of Propoganda but abandoned for not being radical enough. Check out my video and let me know what you think, and if you have any other suggestions for films I should take a look at, speak up!

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

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

Rolling

I always enjoyed the sound of the projector clicking and sputtering to life.

I work in an arthouse cinema. We show oldies and obscure flicks. A lot of what some people would call “classics” mixed with trash to appease the ironic, younger crowd. Personally I think if a movie is bad you shouldn't watch it, and if it's old... Well, older movies always me uneasy. I never liked seeing moving, colourless faces. The more faded and grainy the film the sicker it made me. Like I said, I'm not really a movie buff.

We do have them though. I've found that people can summon the most passionate responses to anything, especially things you don't understand. The cinema is small, but always full of people and rhetoric, a bustling hipster exchange where it's hard to even finish a thought.

Every night but Thursday. Thursday, at eight o'clock, the places is vacated. Completely empty except for me, and our patron. I never speak to the guy – I don't ever even see him, but he's worked something out with the manager. Every week on Thursday, eight o'clock, he has the place to himself, and he watches “his movie”. If it weren't on film, he wouldn't even need me there.

There's an uncanny aspect to these old movies that extends beyond the sound and visuals. We're the first people on Earth to be able to see these long-dead, moving faces. Have you ever considered that? For all of human history, when someone was dead, they were still. An image or a painting. That's not true for us anymore.

Though the people on the screen remain youthful, the stock expires and becomes grainy. I always felt like it's as if the film itself is trying to break the illusion of immortality we've granted these characters. The projector reassures us – it provides us with a distraction from our dissatisfaction whilst also allowing us to pretend for a while. We laugh at those zombies up there, and by doing so breathe life back into them, and into the audiences decades ago. The same feelings – things are alive.

The film itself, though? That's another matter. That's an impermanent, physical, fleshy thing that ages and dies just like us. It breaks the spell. Call me nihilistic, but I think the movement to abandon the medium in favour of  digital is laced with the sad tinge of denial. We need to preserve our idols, and in doing so, ourselves. When I watch those young-but-weathered faces up there, all I can think about is denial. How much of what I do, day to day, comes down to denying mortality? I don't know about you, but I feel it's... Something you can only ever not think about. It's not something to conquer. Maybe watching the screen so long has opened my eyes to it, but I think film is too honest to survive.

He needs me, you see, because it's on film. Maybe you've never seen anything on film before, but if you have you may have noticed a black oval appearing in the upper-right hand corner of the frame from time to time. That's a cue mark – it's meant to signal to me, the person running the projector, that it's time to change reels. I'm no good with just remembering or timing it, so I have to pay attention. I've seen this movie... Maybe a hundred times. It makes me afraid.

It's avant-garde. Or maybe dada? I'm not a humanities major, so I couldn't tell you, but it's... unsettling. There's no title card, and there are no end credits. Maybe the film itself isn't what gets to me, so much as that man's devotion to it. How can anyone care so much about something – about one, specific thing? How can anyone ever dedicate themselves like that? I wonder what's stranger... If he sits down there, eyes glazed over, in a routine, or if... He's down there, feeling it all. Feeling the things he felt before, again and again. That scares me.

Time to change over. Sounds and shapes I can hear in my room. Images that project on the back of my eyelids and echo through the halls of my apartment. They mean so much to that man, but to me they're abstract uneasiness, and they follow me home.

Sometimes I feel like my life is one long lead-up to a jump scare. The sinking and uncertain feeling that it could be coming any minute now. Now could be the moment when it – whatever it is – happens. I let my mind wander. I try not to pay attention when I don't have to.

Am I on the screen, am I in the audience, or am I up here, waiting to transition?

Cue mark. I reach out to change reels but there's nothing there. I look down, and my hands look old.

Whatever Happens

In what we would consider a long dead universe, the last quark hangs in existence. Really, it cannot be said to hang or float, or be described with verbs at all.

There is nothing outside the quark. There is nothing beyond it. When we imagine this, we may imagine an expanse. A white void that stretches into infinity. This is incorrect. Outside the quark, there is nothing. There is no void, no expanse. The lack of existence is not something the quark inhabits; it is a force pressing down on it from all sides. The quark, in this sense, is all existence. The Quark is now everything.

This is what he would imagine, if he could. Never shutting his eyes, he watches Seychelles disappear beneath the bow as the ocean gently lifts and releases the ship. “It’s a small thing”, he thinks without knowing exactly what the thought refers to. To Seychelles, his ship was indeed small. To his home country of Somalia, however, Seychelles was perhaps even smaller. He continued on like this in his head as he watched the crown of the archipelago blink in and out of existence over the waves. To France, Somalia must seem small. He wasn’t sure, he assumed it must be so.

When someone does wrong, scale can be very comforting. He avoids eye contact with his fellows, and instead finally turns his gaze to the other ship. So much larger, so many more people. He takes comfort knowing that, to the sea, they are both small. I his mind, he moves up. Up to where the two boats are dwarfed by the ribbon of islands, up still to nothing but the ocean, up still until he can no longer picture the map. If he could have imagined that quark, he would have felt very comforted. To what hadron was it once attached, he might wonder. What he does consider is that there will eventually be something that will be the last thing to exist.

It could only take him so far, though. There is a hungry pain and a looming fear that disturbs the serenity of scale.

It is a mistake to think Nihilism comes easy. It would have been a great comfort for him to picture that quark at this moment, and felt the embrace of insignificance. To imagine his own cells, on the microscopic level, and travel back a quarter of a million years with them. To imagine the light from the very same moon hitting Mitochondrial Eve‘s eyes for the first same. To picture the Old Mother when she herself was new, before her genes branched off into a million directions, one artery of which lead him here, to this ship, on this night, holding this gun. How would any of this unease matter to him then?

You can be hungry, but you can’t steal. You can steal, but you can’t hurt anyone. You can hurt people, but you can’t kill them. How far back from that print do you have to stand before you can’t read it anymore? What could be done that Eve or the Quark would ever know?

He knows what it is that he has to do whilst feeling what he is told he has to feel. “It would be a blessing”, he might think, “to be small and to know it.”

Instead, he imagines the ship, sliding across a granite sea. He moves back until it disappears into the glint of the moon on the waves, and then further back until the light itself is gone. He could do anything.

He could never shake the calamity of time from his face, nor the persisting ache of life from his demeanor. Without knowing a thing about the man, you would look at him and think "My God... he survived all that?"

Stage notes from "Lilytooth”, a work in progress

I, a lesbian, find you very attractive

This is a strangely consistent demographic for a skeleton to have. 

At the moment of conception, the story exists as a superposition of possibility, idly waiting for someone to crack it. Waiting for someone to skip to the last page.

Martingale Episode 1: Cold Open | RPG Roulette

The year is 1886, and the place is Montana. The Great, Mythic Frontier lets out one last stifled gasp before the cold sets in, and the final nail is hammered...

An actual-play podcast where we’re playing DEAD IN THE WEST, a game of my own creation! Please give a listen and tell me watcha think!

The year is 1886, and the place is Montana. The Great, Mythic Frontier lets out one last stifled gasp before the cold sets in, and the final nail is hammered down into the Old West's coffin. Join RPG Roulette and me for an acyual-play miniseries where Our intrepid players set out into a world of deceit, desperation, and unforgiving winter.

If you want to listen to the podcast elsewhere, check it out here (a rating or review would go a long way!): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rpg-roulette/id1403097671

Or here: https://rpg-roulette.simplecast.com/episodes/martingale-ep-1-cold-open

And also Spotify!

If you're interested in DEAD IN THE WEST, you can download or order a hardback copy here: https://deadinthewest.gumroad.com/

If you wanna support RPG Roulette, you can do so here (they’re good lads): https://www.patreon.com/rpgroulette

More episodes soon! Thanks for listening and lemme know your thoughts!