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Spooped: The Babadook (part 2)

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Sick! You decided to listen to me even more :) If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you probably didn’t read part 1, so here’s a link:  https://bramsfunblog.blogspot.com/2018/07/spooped-babadook-part-1.html Alright! So where to start? I don’t know rhetorical Bram, why don’t you decide? (Tricked you- both of those sentences were actua lly rhetorical Bram!) Shenans aside, there’s a lot to talk about because there are a lot of ways you can take this movie. Signs this movie needed to be spooped: Mr. Babadook the LGBTQ+ icon Here are a few ways you can look at it: 1) it’s just a scary story. It doesn’t mean anything. 2) Amelia is the protagonist, who is being haunted for some reason. 3) Samuel is the protagonist, who is being f orced to grow up because his mom is the true piece of sqib in the story. It’s a coming of age story 4) This one’s my favorite to think about. Mr. Babadook is the protagonist! Say what?!? How? You’ll see :) 5) Some minor character is t
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Spooped: The Babadook (part 1)

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Not sure why they're in a mirror, but I dig the aesthetic N This is the first post in a new “series” I’m planning to start in which I reanalyze movies to look for juicy, spoopy nuggets of wisdom. As you have probably guessed from the title, this post is about the movie “The Babadook,” directed by Jennifer Kent (yay! A female horror movie director!), which is one of my favorite horror movies. I like it so much that I’ve watched it 3 times even though it gives me a panic attack to watch, which speaks both to its merits as a horror movie and to how horrorble (sorry, couldn’t resist) I am at watching scary things. If you haven’t seen the movie, this blog will spoil it for you, so probably don’t read if you have even the slightest interest in ever seeing it. It’s on Netflix, so go watch it. I’ll wait. I’m literally just ASCII characters in a computer; I won’t be insulted (actually I will- ASCII characters have feelings too- but I’ve got good coping mechanisms like deciding t
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Nietzche and the quest for meaning

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The boy himself. Strong contender for the world's greatest mustache-wearer Anyone who knows me knows that I am absolutely obsessed with Nietzche, who I feel has been unjustly demonized both by religious people (who are so offended by "God is dead" that they stop listening, which is understandable. He could have phrased it differently) and by others who view him as a Nazi-sympathizer (which from the massive amount of study I've done seems to be because his sister Elisabeth was a Nazi and borrowed her brother's work in one of the most grotesque misappropriations the world has ever seen). Sorry (not actually- rhetorical sorry, but it's the thought that counts, right?), I'm a hard-core Nietzche fan and am deeply fascinated with his ideas. In my opinion, if someone read his "Thus spoke Zarathustra" and Simone de Beauvoir's "Ethics of Ambiguity," that would pretty well capture my perspective of what Existentialism is. Sorry, Sartr
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Bipolar and the real sickness of humanity

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Good luck trying to process what's happening to you at the moment, cartoon caricature The past couple of months (as you've probably guessed from my rapid flip-flops and general emotional instability) have been very intriguing to me. Severely painful and confusing to the point of psychosis, but when I try to look at it objectively, withholding judgement of the feelings, what I realize is that my brain cannot process the information it is taking in fast enough to match the rate that information is flowing in. And to me that's nothing if not interesting. I will attempt to explain this (the bipolar- not why I think it's interesting) through an extension of Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment. The original formulation of the thought experiment is this: imagine you are trapped in a room (but don't have any desire to escape for some reason). There are two slots in the wall. Through one of the slots you are given letters (as in pieces of pape
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What it's like to experience a psychotic episode

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I've been writing a lot about identities that are partially related to my core identity, but I had an experience today that inspired me to write a post about psychosis, which is a story I feel much more qualified to tell. If you're curious about my thoughts on why psychosis happens, I offer a potential explanation here:  https://bramsfunblog.blogspot.com/2018/05/pyschosis-narratives-and-human.html.   "Listen to this voice" "Don't listen to that voice" "How about this one?" This blog is not intended to offer an explanation. Instead, I wanted to report on the subjective experience as I percieved it in hopes that if you have the same thing I'll be able to convince more people that they are, in fact, psychotic ;) It started off as a not normal day traveling in the north of England with my family. Everything was fine. I started talking to my brother about a project he was working on and gradually got more and more excited. Everywhere I
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