Some Casual Banter

Lacking any further inspiration I decided to do a casual ask of what people would want me to talk about - not a full blown Reader's Requests, but more of a... Pals Postulate?

I got some good ones.

The first one, though...

See I could have gone my entire life not knowing this existed. And then it was brought to my attention by the birthday boy - happy birthday Chris by the way - and now I have to acknowledge its existence, and so do you.

Thanks, r/crappyoffbrands - I guess.

Random Acts of Kindness :) - See, this is nice. This is real nice. Random acts of kindness are great. When the current state of the world is so cruel - and I am not looking at anyone in particular, but the government doesn't help (pick one, any one) - the kindness of strangers can be that little thing that makes your day. So a challenge for all my readers: be kind to someone you don't know in the next week. In a small way. Just try it. In whatever way you can, given our current pandemic scenario.

One thing that has made you happy (or smile) today. - This image of my villager in Animal Crossing surrounded by ill-gotten wealth.

Self isolation self care - Christ, uh. ...I don't know. ...do the things you need to do, don't be too hard on yourself if you don't or can't. Be kind to yourself. That's the important thing. Try and do something each day that you want to. Don't beat on yourself because of the state of the world. It's not your fault, and it is going to affect your mental state. Specifically if you are tired and lacking a creative spark, that's a trauma response. You can't just "oh well bugger it" your way through that. Be kind to yourself.

Favorite piece(s) of escapist fiction. - I find myself going through and reading comics and books that I already know, at times. Like I'll go back and read Lovecraft or Rising Stars or similar. I like watching movies I am familiar with, too, or chortling through old MST3K episodes. Remember that cheesy movie from the 80s/90s that is awful but that you kind of like? Bang THAT on. I like stuff like Empire Records, or Blues Brothers. Something with good music is a must.

Gardening (my potatos just started sprouting!) - I am AWFUL at gardening, which is probably no end of shame to my mother. Physically incapable of engaging in it for more than two minutes at a time, I don't know my Gardenias from my Chrysanthemums, I could probably keep a cactus alive but that's only fifty fifty... but I'm glad you are having success! Especially with potato - one of my favourite things ever.

Concellation, how to get over con cancellation blues - ...see... I have difficulty with this because I find myself having to cancel so much myself. Have done for years. It sucks. I don't really have an answer for it; not a good one, anyway. In the end I had to dial back my expectations of things I could do, health and budget considering. Though the thing that I would probably comfort myself with, over the current crop of con cancels and event cancels and stuff - I could use the money I was spending on that to, when isolation has been over for a week or so, rent a house for a weekend with the people I was gonna see at Con and have a RIOTOUS party. This shit WILL end, and when it does, it's going to be so sweet.

Having more time on ones hands, but suffering even more lethargy while everyone else seems to be learning new skills or doing fabulous buildy things. - Ah, two fallacies to defeat here. One: Not everyone else is doing fabulous amazing things or learning stuff. Sure, some people are, but a lot of people aren't, and - honestly, some people are just like that. They always have something going on. Two: You aren't a worse person because you aren't doing that shit. Everyone is on low ebb and low energy right now. We as a nation - as a SPECIES - are currently undergoing a combination of anxiety and depression brought on by external factors. As someone that suffers from both of those on a daily basis and has done since for over two decades, not being able to learn Italian when you are afraid for the health of those you care about and crushed by the state of the world isn't a crime, it's normal. Focus on what makes you feel better and helps you cope, not what other people are doing.

Glad it's not just me - See above.

Isolation meme's - I haven't really kept on top of these but I will present a couple below that I liked.

"This Is Us", An Article In The Washington Post - Yeah. Like I read this and just nodded the entire way through. I am very privileged insofar as my mixed race hasn't led to any actual problems in my life, really. But this is just... yeah. Accurate.

Favourite toy lines and when they bringing em back - Gawd. M.A.S.K., Jayce & The Wheeled Warriors, Centurions, Starcom, Transformers - all of those NEED bringing back, aside from Transformers, which only had a lull and never really went away. The current line is frankly amazing compared to G1.

Question people lack of commitment to Sparkle Motion. -

What is it about your 20's that screams, ' itll never happen to me/mine"? - Hate to say it but that isn't a 20s thing, that is a people thing. It's across the entire generational spectrum, even if it is mostly prevalent in your childhood years and bleeds out when you hit your mid-20s (because by then it HAS happened to you or yours). The majority of people fucking about in this current climate of nonsense are certainly old enough to know better. Most of the 20 year olds have been told they are essential and forced to risk their lives with no pay rise or protective equipment. They are keenly aware it may happen to them. They just don't get a choice - it is that or be made homeless and starve.

Isolation.... People who live alone in isolation.... How to cope and not go mental in isolation... - I count myself lucky insofar as I cope with being alone really well - I like my own company. I know other people that aren't so lucky. I don't really know the answer to this, aside from trying to make sure you stay in electronic contact with the people that you can. I know it isn't much, but it's way too easy to slip into not doing that, too, so keep it up. Voice-call people that you know would be okay with talking. Play games with folks. Download Virtual Tabletop, pay cards with folks. That's about all I got... oh, and listen to music literally as much as you can.

Best ways to represent passage of time in movies/series. - Okay, there's a lot of good entries for this one. But for propriety, I am picking Red Dwarf, Season 5, Episode 4...  Quarantine. When Lister is marking up the days on the chart, and turns around, with a fucking great black eye, looking awful. That's all of us right now.

Something light maybe - a list of the cutest baby animals?? The best reasons for day drinking? Ways to show you love someone? Most uplifting music of the last 3 decades? - The cutest baby animal is a Skunk, there is no contest, though raccoons and pigs are close. The best reason for day drinking is the song Never Forget You by the Noisettes. Lots of way to show someone you love them, all sorts of kinds of ways - touches, words, sharing music, gifts, thoughtfulness. All sorts of ways. The most uplifting music of the last 3 decades is a hard one but have some Hozier, because this song is amazing.

Eddie vs Thor - I think that given who asked me this, this is the Eddie vs Thor that you are talking about. But instead I am going to deal with Eddie Brock vs Thor, God Of Thunder. Thor wins that fight because Eddie Brock is a journalist and Thor is the God Of Thunder.

And now a personal statement.

My people. We can get through this. I know it sucks, right now. It does. But we can do this, and there might just be a better place waiting for us afterwards.

If any of you need me, drop me one. I'm here.

...also if any of your friends have patreons or kofi accounts or are selling art, take them up on it. We're all hurting right now.

Yes, that was a cheap plug.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

We Manufacture Those, By The Way

If there's one thing the movies of the late seventies through early nineties taught us - especially sci fi and horror movies - it's that we know exactly where humanity's enemies live.

No, not this one.

"But John," I hear you cry. I hear you because we're in space, and everyone can hear you scream. "But John. The bad guy in this movie is the aliens! Or the people that made the aliens! Or Ian Holm! Or humanity itself!"

A likely story.

So a little background. This is stuff that, if you like the Alien movies but you don't like Prometheus, you might have missed - but it quite cleverly frames how the entire universe came to be the way it did, and why things are done the way they are done.

This is Peter Weyland.

Yes, I am using his old-man picture, rather than the dashing flashbacks we are treated to in the TedTalk spinoff video and in the beginning of Alien Covenant.

So - we all remember the beginning of Alien, when the crew all wake up in those sleeping pods, blinking sleep out of their eyes, finding out where they are, how long they have been out. We remember Aliens, wherein Ripley's pod is discovered drifting in space, and she is all safe and secure inside.

Those sleepers exist because of Peter Weyland, because Peter Weyland had two wishes: 1) to live forever and 2) to meet the beings that made mankind. Literally, the technology was developed for him, and in part by him, to allow him to survive long enough to make this happen. This is because Peter Weyland - founder of Weyland Corporation - has a god complex, further shored up by him being obscenely wealthy.

He made his OWN life, obviously. The Weyland line of android synthetics, beginning with David. Why wouldn't a man believe he was god if he could create his very own servant underclass that was expected to be superior in skill and capability but inferior in power and importance?

And in part, Weyland's quest for those creators - that he fully believed existed - led to a colonisation program that spread mankind across the stars.

Of course we are perhaps more familiar with the merged company, Weyland-Yutani.

While the first AvP film features one of Peter Weyland's predecessors, the second (vastly inferior) AvP film features one Ms. Yutani, of Yutani Corporation - who takes possession of a piece of Predator technology. While the Alien vs Predator movies are of questionable quality, they do actually thread reasonably well into the canon of the rest of the movies (with the potential exception of Predator from 2018, which I haven't actually seen yet - perhaps I ought to change that tonight).

It can be inferred from the actions of the company during the movies that it is aware of both the Yautja (Predators) and the Xenomorphs by the time of the events of Alien. So it almost certainly knows just how dangerous interfering with beings like them can really be.

The company, of course, doesn't care.

In a world wherein you have multiple classes of people - and the Alien universe is one such universe, just look at how the shares are divided between the crew (half shares for the engineers, full shares for the people wearing uniform) - then one of the dynamics that comes about is risks taken being pushed downwards. It's why, when the stock market crashes, regular people suffer quite a lot. It's why, when a business goes under, the workers all get laid off and their pensions get raided, but the owner got to leave two weeks ago with a nice golden handshake.

If there's a catastrophic failure somewhere, it is always someone else putting in the work and taking the actual risk, so it will always be someone else that takes the fall.

So of course, Weyland-Yutani wants the creature. It wants everything it can get. Corporate culture has bred several layers of corporate individual who will do just about anything to gain a promotion or favour within the ranks, has been doing so since the mid-1980s. There's no end of individuals that will overlook the regulations, morals, laws, anything, in order to get a bigger cut of a pie - or a whole pie of their own.

There's always a Carter Burke.

Weyland-Yutani are the real bad guys. Without the immense hubris of Peter Weyland, none of this would have happened. Without a culture that we have cultivated as a society for almost forty years, shored up at every angle by individuals sympathetic to it and people defending it because it might one day profit them.

One of humanity's greatest enemies wears a suit, has an office, and talks about people dying as "collateral" and "PR".

Art imitates life.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

And The Ninja Is A Theoretical Physicist

I can't remember how long ago it was that someone introduced me to Ninja Sex Party, but it was a fairly long time ago. I had just started playing my favourite Pathfinder character ever so I think, about, nine years ago.

There's this band called Ninja Sex Party, right. And there's two people in the band - and one of them is called Ninja Brian, and he's a theoretical physicist, and the other guy is called Danny Sexbang, and this is one of their songs, it's called Dinosaur Laser Fight.

Okay, I say, and watch and listen.

Right.

Puerile? Yes. Nonsense? Yes. Infectious. Funny. Suspiciously packed with actual musicality, despite it clearly being a joke.

I must learn more.

I do learn more.

This is them.

Right?

Okay so their style is kind of poppy sexy funny haha whatever - but as I mentioned before. There's some genuine talent in here. Like Danny Sexbang (right, obviously) isn't just some guy laughing at his inability to last more than 180 seconds in sexual intimacy. He's an accomplished vocalist. He has a great voice, you KNOW I like great voices.

I only find out later that he's Daniel Avidan, of Game Grumps. But that's another story.

More and more, as their career as musicians progress, the music side of things comes to the fore. They fall in with a band named Tupperware Remix Party, who are futuristic superheroes from the planet funk (obviously). TWRP became NSP's backing band in 2015. They release cover albums - three of them so far - and those cover albums contain a wide selection of genuinely good stuff. Like, here's the NSP cover of Photograph by Def Leppard.

Right?

They don't work in isolation, either - Danny does vocal spots in a bunch of other songs. Ninja Sex Party plus Arin Hanson (internet shouter and animator) form a band called Starbomb that do a lot of video game parody stuff; Arin appeared as a vocalist on a TWRP track which also featured The Protomen (ALSO awesome), called Phantom Racer.

Danny gave vocals to this song by a band called Night Runner, called Magnum Bullets, which I have listened to once a day since this video came out.

Which...well where is this all leading me?

To my favourite Ninja Sex Party song, which is called, First Date.

Now if you go back and listen to the very FIRST NSP song I linked at the beginning here - you listen to that, and then... come and listen to this.

Just the sheer improvement between the two - the sheer development and evolution of the sound - you can't ignore it. Dinosaur Laser Fight is a fun bouncy rock-pop song about dinosaurs. First Date sounds like it could actually be a full-blown 80s style single release.

So the content of the song is still fun and jokey but it's less about penis jokes and the strange creature that stalks the band and tries to kill them. It's not the lyrics that matter so much. It's the melody, it's the instrumentation. It soars. It uplifts. It feels like driving with the top down. It feels like being Young And Alive, just like the song says.

It's great. It's feel-good. Danny gets to stretch his legs, vocally...

...and there is one part that I absolutely adore, that is probably not worth getting as worked up over as I do. But you all know I love a key change right?

"Let's kill five guys tonight! We'll share a cherry cola while we blast a savage drive-by!"

...key changes UP to the natural escalation of...

"Let's kill ten guys tonight! ...you know what, first date, let's pump the brakes on the murders..."

...then key changes back DOWN to...

"Let's kill five guys tonight! I'll take you back to your place and we'll craft a perfect alibi!"

And you don't get just how happy that makes me, how much that made me laugh the first time I heard it.

I have an entire playlist of songs on Spotify that makes me smile like an idiot, here it is.

This is one of them.

Just an excuse for me to prattle about some music I like, because, why not?

I know that right now everyone is getting hit pretty hard by the lockdown, and the pandemic causing it. We're all hurting. Look after each other.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Taking A Minute

I don't think I need to elucidate the ways in which we are currently experiencing... let's call it stress, as a people as a whole.

And what a year it has been, right? Like this whole virus has been simmering away while all sorts of other shit happens and then - well, then came the spikes. And now it's all that we have going on, because it has swept a hand across our expectations and our plans.

Which is odd for people like me who had problems with plans and expectations in the first place, but I digress.

A significant proportion of people have been told to stay home - either no-access or encouraged to stay there as much as is practical. Of course there's certain sectors where people still have to go out, and I have huge respect for them. And there's certain areas wherein people are just going out and doing whatever they want anyway, because there always is, but the less said about that...

So. A lot of people's social interactions and leisure time, significantly cut down. Folks stuck indoors.

And into this perfect storm of the UK going from "it will be fine" to "rationing is probable..."

...steps this little crew of goombas.

What timing.

Games. I talk about gaming a lot. How it can be a help, or a hindrance. In times like this, though - in times where people feel like they are cut off, need something to focus on that isn't the news or what is going on outside - what better time?

Especially something that rewards social play like Animal Crossing New Horizons does.

I haven't seen such an outpouring of people getting together, exchanging details, playing together, just generally having fun since the Summer of Pokemon Go. It's that, but inverted, but also kind of not. Because we're playing this - we're all doing this - and we're enjoying it, and we want everyone else to enjoy it too. For once we aren't yelling at each other about bad games or shitty takes. We're just having a nice time, which is what we all need.

It's a way to stay in touch, too. A way to be doing something other than staring at our navels and swapping text messages. I mean that's good, we should be messaging - but isn't it more fun if you can also send your friends a squid or a fruit they don't already have?

I mean, if you really need something to help handle stress that isn't so sunny or social... maybe you are more interested in what this chap has to say.

What a weekend.

Even more than that, though, we're seeing people pull together in online communities. People forming and joining groups, en masse. People livestreaming things. Bands streaming concerts - the Dropkick Murphys streamed an entire gig on St Patrick's Day. I was invited to a group called Concellation, which is where all the folks who regularly attend a bunch of conventions that are now cancelled hang out.

My RPG gamers are taking to online services like Roll20 and Discord, because we still want to roll the dice. We have so many means by which we can take the things we enjoy and move them online that we are almost spoiled for choice, and all we need is the will to do it.

Which is, in its way, really wholesome.

It's a time of uncertainty. That's the worst thing. The uncertainty. All of a sudden, people that don't usually struggle with anxiety or depression are almost being forced to experience the symptoms. All of a sudden, people that don't have conditions that would force them to be housebound are indeed housebound.

We're finding our way, though - and I admit to feeling a certain amount of relief... and maybe hope? ...that the solutions to a lot of the problems we face as nations rather than as individuals seem to lean heavily to the left of the spectrum.

Maybe some lessons will be learned. Maybe there will be the political drive and push to provide a safety net for people, despite it being an affront to conservative tendencies. Maybe people will remember that the solutions to these problems didn't come from letting people die en mass because they couldn't afford private care but by doing the best we could to provide for everyone.

Maybe I can hang onto that optimism, for a little while.

In the meantime: I have cherries to pick.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

The Ones That Make It

A lot of you may be familiar with this particular graphic, but if you aren't, let me walk you through it.

World War II was - as with many other wars - fought by numbers. Statistical analysis was very important in the planning phases of most operations over a specific scale, and in the provision of weaponry and equipment. It was a war won as much by the production line and the numbers game there, as it was the actual combat.

As strategic bombing became more and more important, and the wave method of bombing in particular, many studies were done into this particularly high-attrition method of conducting warfare.

The graphic above is based on hypothetical data, and is the bullet spread observed on returning bombers.

It was theorised by those who made the decisions that - if that is where the bullets are hitting the plane, then we up-armour those bits of the plane, yes? I mean that's a good conclusion, given the data available. 

Enter Abraham Wald.

Wald was from Cluj in Transylvania - that's Austria-Hungary, now Romania to you. He was a mathematical genius who was prevented from gaining any position in a university due to Austria's institutional antisemitism - and when Hitler's Germany came calling in 1938 he and his family fled to America.

Wald took a look at the data and stated that the proposed action was bullshit, and when asked why, he pointed out the data that had been acquired.

Where were the hits to the cockpit? The engines? The leading edges of the wings? How is it possible that the (at the time) highly trained and competent Luftwaffe pilots weren't hitting those? The answer is simple, and if you haven't got it by this point, you'll want to kick yourself:

The data was taken only from the planes that made it back.

In an alternate timeline, Wald never made it out of Austria - either he didn't make it out before the Nazis showed up or he was refused entry into the US for whatever stupid reason. So nobody noticed this particular point, planes were built differently, they got shot down more, and the war slowly, steadily shifted toward a potentially different result.

That is an example of what we call Survivorship Bias.

If ten people go into a situation, they all try the same method to get out, and only one of them makes it - to that person, this method worked. Because this is the person that came back to tell the story of how their method did the job and saved their life in the situation in question.

When people talk about how something was tough, but they made it through okay - well, great, but how many people made it with them? When someone brings up the Blitz Spirit, and carrying on with a stiff upper lip - well the Blitz Spirit didn't work out for the 40,000 people that died and the hundreds of thousands that lost their homes and livelihoods in London alone. Just shutting up and putting up gets people killed, in a lot of situations. Just those that aren't affected tend to shrug their shoulders and say: well, not ME.

If you take a thousand people, at birth; and you provide one of those thousand people with the privileges and good fortunes of a stable part of a country, supportive parents with a significant income that will let them take risks and push them into better academic and professional circles; then they will almost certainly, at some point, talk at length about how they started with nothing and how with some hard work and some graft, ANYONE could do it.

There's a statistic that claims that as you age, you become more conservative. There's another statistic that claims that people who own horses live longer than people who don't. Both of these are probably true, but miss out on two key points: that the greater your income or wealth, the more conservative you lean - and the greater your income, the better healthcare you can afford, leading directly to an extended lifespan.

Whenever presented with statistics, always query where they are from, how they were gathered, what might have been missed. Query what they are being used to prove and how that proof could be reinforced by - for example - asking a smaller sample size, or asking customers of a specific site or store. You might not want to believe a publication if they claim that 80% of people on earth believe the Earth is flat, if the magazine is Flat Earth Monthly, and they asked 200 of their own readers.

Oh yeah, and - if the xenophobes and the antisemites had their way - there'd have been a lot more downed bombers.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Microscopes And High Hopes

Today is International Women's Day 2020; an international holiday that began back in 1917 in the Soviet Union, but was adopted by the world in general in the 60s and 70s.

Because of the way the world works, many people will be aware of it for two main reasons.

1) Manbabies crying "But What About International Men's Day", while being unaware of its existence on 19th November, because they don't care about it on any other day of the year.

2) The joke in Deadpool.

So given that a significant proportion of the world is currently dealing with the effects (some of them very secondary or tertiary) of COVID-19, I thought I would take a look at some women of science.

For example, Ada Lovelace.

The only legitimate child of Lord and Lady Byron - like she literally came along a month before the two of them went their separate ways - she is pretty much the reason I can do the thing I am doing right now, typing letters into a computer to have them appear on the internet for all my lovely readers to see later. She took the work of Charles Babbage, and turned it into something entirely different. She took the difference engine, a mechanism for calculating nothing but numbers, and posited that those numbers could mean something else entirely. I mean it helps that she was a literal mathematical genius - Babbage himself called her The Enchantress Of Number.

While we are on the topic of mathematics and technology, this is Katherine Johnson.

Yeah, if you've seen Hidden Figures, you KNOW who this is. If you haven't, go fix that immediately. Katherine Johnson ran numbers on most space missions between 1961 and 1970. She made the Moon Landing happen - she got Apollo 13 home. She did so in an environment which was hostile to her for two reasons: she was a woman, and she was black, in Hampton Virginia in the 60s. Despite having to deal with her overwhelmingly white male colleagues being generally shit at her, she still did her damn job, and because of her contribution, we have walked on the moon.

You want your science more down to earth? Here's Mary Anning.

You like dinosaurs? Who doesn't like dinosaurs? Mary Anning is part of why we understand the prehistoric world at all, let alone in as much detail as we currently do. She was so competent in the field of geology and paleontology that she was consulted constantly by others within the same field, but she - of course - couldn't join the Geological Society of London, because girls have cooties. They also constantly tried to make sure that there was a man somewhere nearby that could take credit for her finds. Not uncommon. Not uncommon at all. She discovered and categorised plesiosaurs, and often got her name dropped from the reporting on the same.

Moving on - this is Rosalind Franklin.

DNA and RNA are things that we understand because of the work that she did. She was cautious and fastidious, and opposed the creation of theoretical models without being sure that they were accurate and all possible biases had been removed. She was driven, passionate, and very, very thorough. She used X-Ray diffraction to image DNA itself. When she left King's College in the 50s her work on DNA had to remain behind, so she promptly went off and studied RNA instead. She also contributed significantly to the study of Polio and other viruses, only forced to stop that work due to ill health; I am as old today when she was when she died of ovarian cancer.

And that's just four. Not even touching on the works of Hertha Ayrton, Rachel Carson, Grace Hopper, Dorothy Hodgkin, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Marie Curie, Vera Rubin, the list is endless. The contribution of women to the sciences alone is utterly huge - to a society and community that is often male-dominated and considered a hostile environment to women.

Not to mention the entire rest of society.

Women: THANK YOU, and I'm SORRY.

Men: Let's do better.

Thank you.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Darkness On The Edge Of Town

Recently I saw Blinded By The Light, and really enjoyed it.

What's it about?

Well it's about a lot of things, but I guess the plot is about a young Pakistani man surviving the late 80s in Thatcherite Luton, trying to pick his way through life in between familial expectation, the National Front, and society in general - and almost accidentally finding a muse in The Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen.

Yes, Blinded By The Light is more famously a Manfred Mann Earth Band song from 1977. Yes, it is a cover of the Bruce Springsteen song from 1973, the first track on his debut album. It didn't do anywhere near as well as the cover. No big. I prefer the Springsteen version, honestly.

(It's either "Revved up like a deuce" or "Cut loose like a deuce", by the way. A deuce being a deuce coupe, a 1932 Ford hot rod.Yeah, like the Beach Boys song, Little Deuce Coupe. No, it's not an anal cleansing product.)

What did I like so much about the movie?

I mean the obvious thing is that I really like the Boss, right? Which I do. Also there's not a bad performance in this movie, like, anywhere. Really.

I LIKE it, though, because I FEEL it.

That's me.

Like okay. I know that we are meant to raise our eyebrow when someone points at a character and says "that's literally me", especially if that person is fucking Rick Sanchez or something - but at the same time - I have been in the places that Javed has been.

Or at least a lot of them. Like it wasn't as extreme, but my parents did have a specific set of expectations that I wasn't sure I could meet, or even wanted to. Sure, I didn't have to deal with the National Front, but there were plenty of arseholes to bob and weave around in life. And I did, so desperately, want to write. I wanted the writing to be the thing I did. I didn't want to have to slot myself into something else and be that and shelve the writing.

There's the urge to run away from the stupid town that you are stuck in, as well. Like that is prevalent. A big thing. Including the Born To Run section, which literally involves Javed and his friends... running. Away. Just anywhere.

The other way in which we're alike is musical salvation.

So - no spoilers but there's this one scene wherein Javed is listening to music while working at a market stand, and Thunder Road starts playing in his earphones. And his eyes land on the girl he's falling for real hard, and everything clicks into place. Just for a moment. Everything makes sense.

Thunder Road, by the way, is my favourite Boss song. (And I had never heard it before a friend of mine introduced it to me like twenty years ago. You know who you are.)

Sure, in the scene in question, there's some dancing and some singing and this is where you realise this probably qualifies as a musical rather than just a movie with music in it. That's not the only scene, though. There's the moments of total loss and confusion and anger and sadness and there's this one constant thread of music that guides him through all of it, and when I say Literally Me, that's what I am talking about.

It wasn't just one artist, sure. It was a few. It's real, though. It's absolutely real.

So it's a story that just speaks to me. Speaks to me intimately in a setting I am familiar with and surrounded by cultural tropes that I am also thoroughly familiar with. How am I meant to not love it?

It might not be for you. The plot isn't exactly groundbreaking - that isn't the point - and if you don't like Springsteen then you will hate it.

Me, though?

I had a blast.

What a movie.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.