Satire

What’s the difference between satire and parody?

Well, what’s the difference between Family Guy’s first and fifteenth season? Or Shrek and Shrek: The Final Chapter? And no, the answer is not better animation.

If you’re inclined to say “well, first of all, it used to be funny”, you’re kinda right. Kinda. 

Satire has a point. It’s what makes a lot of things funny to people over the age of 15. Even if you can no longer find the humor in fart jokes and puns, you will always find the humor in making fun of people for good reason. It’s why so many people get their news via John Oliver. Everything is an in-joke if you’re on the right side. If you’re making fun of someone for a good reason, it’s no longer a mean parody. It’s satire.

Once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy to establish one from the other. Except then you realize that satire and parody are not mutually exclusive and it gets confusing all over again. SNL can bounce back and forth from skit to skit with ease.

I still can’t believe I missed the day we watched Shrek in class.

I love Shrek.

I got back from a week of sickness and hiking up a mountain to find that I was supposed to do a project on satire. I can do that! I love being mean in a way that nobody can get mad at you for because it’s true!

Though I honestly couldn’t think of anything to do a satire on. The assignment said to base it on something I’m passionate about, but I don’t think I can satirize One Direction since they don’t really exist…

After some brainstorming with my dad (thanks, dad), I decided I was going to do it on climate change deniers. My idea was pretty simple: A newscaster is doing a story on why climate change isn’t real but keeps on getting interrupted by breaking news that is proving him otherwise.

I didn’t wanna be in a video, though.

Uh, dad, can you drive me to Granville Island and buy me a puppet?

Thanks again, dad.

I named him Jimothy.

In class, I wrote the script and all that jazz. I knew I was going to have to use a green screen, but for some reason, I didn’t want to film at school, and someone else claimed the green screen for the weekend so I had to become a crafter.

Building your own green screen is really annoying when you don’t have a light green sheet.

Okay, it’s really not that bad. I only had to drape a sheet over a couple CD shelves (yeah, my family still has fully stocked CD shelves), use masking tape to attach green construction paper to the sheet, and get like three lamps so it’s well lit enough.

And here’s the final product:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWWwd4bNCeo

Here’s the thing: I don’t think my video is actually very funny. I didn’t really know how to make it funnier. It’s only ironic, not funny. I don’t know if it can count as satire if it’s not funny. Either way, it’s here, and….and I made it. So, uh, yeah.

RIP.

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Tomato Potato of Lizards (TPoL)

Does art imitate life? I don’t know, but monopoly does. Monopoly was created to teach the public about the consequences of the economy and taxation. It’s not supposed to be fun, yet every day, families sit around the table to play a four hour game of monopoly. There’s better games out there, yet we come back to this game that just makes us angry and spiteful. Why do we do this?

People love to compete, and people all have different strategies when trying to win. Some people buy everything they land on and don’t use any buildings. Some people only buy certain properties so they have enough money to buy high rises. Some people barely buy anything, focusing on avoiding properties of others. Some people just do what feels right in the moment. Some people play until they begin to lose, throw and tantrum and ruin the game for everyone else.

But when it comes to monopoly, it doesn’t really matter what you do or how you play. No matter your strategy, the roll of the dice makes it random. You can’t train at monopoly. You can probably get better, and if you look at analytically you’ll probably figure out which strategy works best, but monopoly isn’t chess. You could have the best strategy in the world and still, lose to someone playing on the basis that they’ll buy the blue properties because that’s their favourite colour. Monopoly isn’t a fair game, but neither is life. No matter what you do to try to avoid it, there’s always a chance of rolling the wrong number and getting sent straight to jail, without passing go.

I always get criticized for this being pessimistic in these things, but I don’t think what I’m saying now is pessimistic. There’s a difference between pessimism and realism. You can’t control everything in life, and that’s what I think I know now that I didn’t know last year. I mean, I always knew that, but I never accepted what I could and couldn’t control. And it made me afraid of everything.

At first glance it might sound like I’m saying that I’m no longer taking responsibility, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that there are some things you can control, and some things you can’t, and focusing on the things you can’t control is idiotic. I can’t control if iMovie crashes and I lose all my progress on a video. However, I figured out that I can control if I use iMovie or not, which is why I ditched my first southwest video and downloaded Final Cut Pro. I’ve realized there’s not one path to success, and there’s always other options.

I never played to my strengths because I refused to acknowledge them, and then I would get upset because everything was awful. For the first time, I am going to take responsibility. I know exactly why my work was the way it was. I always know why my work is the way it is, even if I pretend I don’t. I promise you, I’m actually pretty self-aware. It was just easier to pretend I wasn’t.

I’m never going be a 95% student in everything, because I’m never going to try that hard, in that way. I no longer expect myself to do that, because I know I’m just not going to do it. It’s not because I’m a bad student or a bad worker, I just can’t bring myself to care about stuff I don’t care about. I could go off, and blame the education system for how grades work and how it’s not fair and everything, but I’m also not going to do that. I am who I am. I am going to work hard next year, but I do not expect to be a perfect student. I am going to get good grades, get into university, and I’ve decided that that is going to be enough. I don’t need to be the best because I have other things going for me, and I realize that I’m still growing and changing and I don’t always have to be the best version of myself in high school.

Despite this, I don’t have bad grades. I’ve always been on honour roll with distinction. That’s not because I work really hard at everything, It’s because I choose to spend my extra time doing extra classes where I do get 95%, and those classes push me over the top, canceling out my weaknesses. And I know that if I really really tried, I probably could get at least 90% in all my classes, so maybe I’ll try that next year, but if life gets in the way it’s not going to be the end of the world. This year I had a complete mental breakdown and I managed to bounce back. Sure, some of my work took a hit but honestly I really don’t care because I’m happy again.

In grade 12, I’m going to stop setting ridiculous expectations for myself that I know I’m never going to meet. I think I can actually try harder and do better when I stop doing that, because I can start focusing on what I actually can do. I’m getting to the age where I’m almost ready to leave high school, and if I enter university still doing things I don’t like, or I’m not good at because I think I should be good at it, I’m going to be miserable.

Next year, I plan to focus on myself as I am, not who I think I should be. I spent a lot of years having people tell me I was smart, and then some-odd years having people ask me what happened. I know a lot of stuff, but it’s not stuff that most people deem important, so in a lot of peoples eyes I went from smart to vapid. That doesn’t make you want to learn, it makes you want to quit, constantly. Whatever “potentional” everyone wants to me to fulfill, I don’t care anymore. I’ve got my own goals, and at this point, that is going to be doing a good job at my prerequisites to leave high school.

When I do leave, I hope that I’ll know how to deal with it when I get sent to jail.

(That’s another monopoly metaphor, I’m not a criminal)

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This Post Sucks! No It Doesn’t!

Public speaking is a weakness for some people and a strength for others. When it comes to myself, I can’t decide if it is either. I’m not afraid of getting up in front of people and giving my opinion, but that can almost be a weakness when I’m not carefully thinking about what I say before it comes out of my mouth. Although, with this specific assignment, that was probably a good thing, because you probably didn’t have to time to think before you spoke anyways.

The way this project was presented made it nearly impossible to prepare like you would for a normal debate. We didn’t know our questions beforehand, and we had to think up all our examples and answers on the spot. Oh, and who won was pretty subjective. It was based on judges who didn’t truly understand the assignment and an audience who just voted for their own kids.

When it comes down to it, these were not debates. They were informal arguments. I’m pretty sure the point of the assignment was to assess our public speaking, and not our debate skills, so the actual project seemed to suffer. Anybody who had any fear of public speaking would not go up and say anything because they didn’t have much time to go off of. It is because of this reason that my group’s first and only debate ended up just being a screaming match between me and Matthew Seed.

I still believe that my team should have won because my arguments were better than his, and he contradicted himself at least three times. However, he took advantage of the audience vote by delivering zingers instead of actual points. This won him the argument because I got caught in a loop of trying to derail all his random points while he just threw out more.

The same issue occurred in the second debate we did. In the “losers” debate, my team again lost because we got attacked by zingers and those debates were decided only by audience vote. What I can say is that the team that won the whole thing did win by actually debating correctly.

My point isn’t that I’m mad that I lost because we didn’t deserve to win those debates in those formats. Although, they were not debates, and I’m pretty aware that being debates was not the point of them. It was for an exhibition, therefore it was designed to be entertaining. However, if the teachers were to do this same assignment again, I would hope they would take these concerns into account. I don’t like the idea of teaching these as debates because they are not. They are not debates in the same way that the 2016 presidential election didn’t hold a single debate.

Although we see it all the time in our class, and on YouTube, and in politics, I am appalled at the fact that anyone would be taught that a roast counts as an intellectual debate. If you want to teach public speaking, teach public speaking, but do not use it to create a world where we are brought up to believe that anything like that should be okay in a formal setting. If we decide we believe in that, we have truly lost our democracy.

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Is Innocence Beneficial or Detrimental to Society?

In 1937, Walt Disney released the first fully animated feature film in history. What was seen as a massive risk paid off, with Snow White and The Seven Dwarves being such a success that 80 years later, the film still holds a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The film was revered by audiences and critics alike, as it was thought to capture a beautiful childlike innocence that was previously considered too silly for a full motion picture. A critic by the name of John C. Flinn Sr. would write “So perfect is the illusion [of the film], so tender the romance and fantasy,” predicting the success of Seven Dwarves and the entire career of Walt Disney. The entire world was in love with Walt Disney’s smart yet wonderful world, until suddenly, not everybody was.

The same people who were calling praising Disney’s work would turn against him in the years to follow. The praise of Seven Dwarves and Fantasia would slowly turn into bitter remarks of how Disney had lost his magic, murdering the classics like Peter Pan with his all too innocent take on them.  While the masses were still flocking to Walt Disney Pictures, critics and “intellectuals” began to criticize Disney’s films. They would begin to believe that “Walt Disney had the innate bad taste of the American public”. This criticism of Disney’s films would continue from the 1940’s all the way until the 1990’s, with some critics still believing that Disney is entirely too innocent.

But what does that mean? Does innocence really harm out society as much as the critics like to think it does? I asked some of my friends what they thought about Disney movies being too innocent,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrHO6lW51g&t=0s

although I figured that I should probably look beyond the people I sit lunch with.

In, Lord of The Flies, a novel that my class read this term, (and you probably read in high school, too), there is a very signifigant quote near the end of the book on this topic. The quote states that “Ralph wept for the end of innocence”. To me, this quote means that innocence is something that benefits society. Although I could directly say that if Ralph was still innocent, he would not be crying, there is more than that to the quote. This quote proves that humanity relies on innocence to be reminded of the good in the world.

This exact concept is also explored in the Shakespeare play Macbeth. Macbeth, at the beginning of the play, is a medieval lord version of innocent.  Although the man was a war hero, meaning he sliced off the heads of a lot of people, he was doing so out of what he believed was a true belief in the good. At this point, Macbeth was innocent to the corruption and thoughts of power that would overtake him once he was exposed to them. Once evil ideas were put into his head by the 3 Witches and his wife Lady Macbeth, he loses himself and becomes a completely different person, showing once again that without innocence, goodness is lost.

We can mirror this concept a third time in the novel Three Day Road. Before heading off to war,  both Xavier and Elijah are innocent to the horrors of war. Being exposed to these horrors is what turns Elijah into a ruthless and insane killer, while Xavier, who removes himself from the other men as much as possible, stays somewhat innocent and therefore does not go crazy like his friend.

All of these examples point to one thing: Innocence is beneficial. Perhaps not on a global, political, or community scale. However, innocence is important when it comes to personal well-being. Without innocence, we become shells of who we once were, as we are exposed to evils and lose the faith and hope we once had. This is why it is important for there to be innocent movies for our children, so that they may grow up believing there is good in the world. Without that belief, it is likely that nobody would strive towards goodness, and humanity would have been gone a long time ago.

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Is Nuclear Testing Bad For The Tourism Industry?

Hoooooo boy.

This one was a doozy.

I don’t know exactly where to start with this unit. It was a lot for me to take in, and I’m not really sure how to talk about it, so I guess I’ll just be honest with my feelings on the internet. That’s always a good idea.

This unit involved the concept of fear, the history surrounding the cold war, and, well, a whole lot of other stuff. With this, we were to create a video to answer this question: How does fear affect behavior?

Part of me feels like I lived the answer. Since I was a small child, I have dealt with a pretty big fear of natural disasters, global warming, war, bombs, black holes, asteroids, and pretty much anything that had the power to end the world. I’ve always been deathly afraid of the end of the world. Of course, our unit focusing on fear during the cold war all revolved around that topic. My anxiety got really bad, the worst it’s ever been. There was an entire weekend where I walked up and down the street all day, counting my steps because I couldn’t stand the thought of thinking about the reasons I was so afraid. Trump had just gotten into office, and the whole world seemed mad at each other (they still are, but I’m better at ignoring it now). While studying the cold war and looking at current events, I couldn’t help but see the parallels.

I learned a lot about how fear affects behavior in those few months.

Fear can stop you from going to class.

Fear can stop you from getting out of bed.

Fear can make you delete Facebook because you can’t stand to see a news article.

Fear can completely control your life.

Although you can’t let that happen. If you let fear completely take over your brain, you’re barely a person anymore. You become a shaking ball of anxiety that doesn’t have a life quality over that of a mollusk. That’s not okay. Which is why I forced myself to get better and calm down. Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that sentence made it sound, but I’m okay now. That’s really all that matters.

After I got over that minor (major) hiccup, I had to focus on putting that to words, and to video. I wrote an essay, then re-wrote it, and I’m still not really sure if I re-wrote it better or worse because I don’t thin I got feedback the second time, but that’s okay. I’m pretty sure it got better. I’ll attach my final essay below.

Finally, I had to put it to video. I did my video twice, just like my essay, because my first video was kind of lame and also I decided to switch to using Final Cut Pro on my laptop instead of continuing with iMovie because iMovie and I have a long and complicated history and I no longer trust it. I’m not really sure what to say about making this video.

It’s not like it was super challenging. It was pretty time-consuming. I worked on it for many hours, over many days.

I’m tired. Here’s the end result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLxapP1D8FU

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Fear and Events

Radiation is something that the general public doesn’t know what to think. When I asked my friends what effect the word “radiation” had on them, most of them said no effect, with one person saying it makes him happy (I think he was just trying to screw with my data pool though). Then I asked about the word “nuclear” and they said it made them feel a lot more uncomfortable than radiation. Then, I tried to ask more questions and nobody replied, obviously done with my obnoxious mind games.

The only thing I can draw from this is that it’s likely that 16-year-olds in Deep Cove are more afraid of nuclear stuff than radiation. That’s something I probably could have guessed but it’s nice to have some not-so-scientific data to go along with it. This probably has a lot to do with the world we live in and how we’ve been brought up and where we’ve been brought up. If you asked a 16-year-old in Japan what they thought about those words, would they have a different answer? Would they have been shaped positively by how nuclear power has powered their country, or more shaped by the nuclear disasters that have affected their childhoods?

According to a study done by Yale University, male students that live near the nuclear fallout areas in Japan still have a high confidence in nuclear power and believe in the efficiency of the power source. This is compared to female students of the same areas, who fear nuclear power more than their male counterparts. The girls say they’re worried about the environment in the cases of nuclear fallout, which is something that does not worry the boys.

The same study also states that there is a public fear about cleanup, and moving the contaminated soil and materials. They public is worried about crop contamination, which is a very close to home issue for a lot of Japanese people. This shows that people most fear what will affect them directly.

Since the Fukushima disaster, the entire world has become timider towards the idea of nuclear power, with countries like Germany even saying they plan to phase out their nuclear programs. This attitude, however, has been around for a very long time. In The China Syndrome, which takes place before both the Church Rock and Chernobyl incidents. people were already uneasy towards the idea of nuclear power. The public in the movie already wants the power plants turned off, even though there was only one record of a nuclear reactor having any sort of accident at the time.

I believe that this proves that our fear is controlled by events, and exposure. The more fear we are exposed to, the more fear we have. This is explained by attitudes of the Japanese people and the global public towards the Fukushima incident.

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The Scottish Play

I may have put this post off a little bit.

I made a post at the end of my own Macbeth video experience. I wrote that post right before I left for New York City for my music trip. At that point, even the thought of the project was stressful, so I was happy I was leaving, but I did not want to think about how the whole situation was going to turn out. So much so, that I made Spencer, Luc, and Stan all promise not to speak of the project the entire time we were in New York. Luckily, we accomplished that goal.

Because we were in New York, I have still not seen the Macbeth video. I know it’s mostly done???

All I know is it hasn’t been posted, I haven’t seen it, and I want my SD card back.

Sorry about this post, I’ll fix it when I see the video.

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Here’s My Canada: My Story

I had a completely different plan for this video. Although, there is a problem with my brain. If I have a vision in my head, and I cannot make that vision come to life…well, then I can’t use that idea at all without thinking it’s absolutely terrible. So after an hour of filming and realizing that idea is never going to work, I had to think of something else. Fast.

The first thing I did was try to get inspiration from my footage roll. I figured I must have some video of Canda somewhere, so I dug out my hard-drive.

As it turns out, I have footage of every place I’ve ever been that’s not in Canada. I have Disneyland, Disneyworld, Seattle, NYC, Honduras, Oregon, The South. I even have Alaska! But I literally never film anything in Canada, because I don’t feel the need to remember anything here, because why would I?

Then I remembered that I actually do film my life, and so does nearly every single person I know. All the best bits of my day-to-day life are saved right in my Snapchat memories folder. So I went looking through my Snapchat memories to find the best things I could that would represent my life. It was simultaneously easier and harder than I thought. I put all the stuff I thought was good into iMovie, except I then learned I had picked over 5 minutes of footage for a 30 second video. To fix this, I first axed everything that was only funny because of the audio, or said anything even slightly bad in it (there wasn’t a lot of that, because my life isn’t very exciting). Then I just had to cut down and rearrange the video until it made sense.

But then I really wanted it to feel like you were watching my Snapchat story, so I wanted to do a screencap of my phone. I didn’t know how to do this and I panicked for a second when I look it up and it said that I would have to jailbreak my phone. But then, I realized all that I had to do was plug my phone into my computer and use Quicktime. So that was a LOT easier than I thought it was going to be. The other thing I had to do was put my name and “2m ago” in the corner of the video, which was easy cause all I did was download some video making app called Vont and use that.

Originally, I wanted to put voice over over top of my video, but I decided that wouldn’t make as much sense with this kind of video, as I felt it kind of spoke for itself. So instead, I decided to find some creative commons music and put that over top. I think I found some that more or less expressed the mood I was going for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTcZnTEt1qo

I don’t really think this video will win, because whoever is judging this might not like it very much.

Then again, even our Prime Minister uses Snapchat.

Although I honestly really don’t care if it wins, because I like it a lot and think it really expresses what My Canada is.

UPDATE: Here’s my video on the site!! Go vote for me!

http://www.heresmycanada.ca/videos/heres-my-canada-my-story-2/

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The Concept of Intuiton

Surviving a war can be based on a number of things. Strength, luck, and circumstance can be major factors in living through rough times. Over that, there is one thing that helps us all yet is hard to explain. Human intuition determines nearly everything we do, even if only indirectly. We sometimes aren’t able to recognize this in our lives, because of the way it is viewed in our society. We are taught to not trust our instincts and use logic instead, although there are times when instinct is all you have.

When WWII veteran Helmut came to our class to tell his story,  he talked about a few things that related to the power of intuition. Everything from turning right instead of left, and staying still instead of running boils down to our instincts, because they are our immediate response. There is even a mixture of instinctive thinking and deliberate thinking. Because of Helmut’s intuitive thinking that his mother needed him, he made the decision to go find his mother. This instinct to return home changed the course of his own life and his mother’s life forever, as when Helmut made it home, his mother was quite sick. She truly did need her son in that time, and

Human instinct is based on recognition of patterns, which is something that is often picked up by our unconscious mind and body before it appears in our conscious thoughts.

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Fantastic Four is one of the worst reviewed superhero movies in the past few years, or possibly ever. The movie was made as an attempt to create a franchise out of the beloved comic book characters that would do better than their campy, 2005 and 2007 counterpart. Unfortunately, the movie seemed to further sink the hopes of these beloved comic book characters ever getting another chance at the box office. It proved to us again that Marvel characters are done best by Marvel. With a Disney-owned production, the issues that plagued this movie from the beginning may not have happened, and it would have prevented any further problems from arising.

The director of the film later spoke of his disappointment with how the movie turned out, as creative control was taken away from him by the studio in post-production due to inappropriate on set behavior such as being intoxicated while working. Other reports say that studio interference drove him to his breaking point and the studio took over. Despite all of this, he claimed that he had a “fantastic version of the film that would have been well reviewed” a year ago. While we may never know if any version of this movie would be well received, we can hope that there was once a possibility of this being good.

The Fantastic Four might have to wait another 10 or 15 years for a movie to finally do the justice (if the superhero genre hasn’t died out by then).

Why am I talking about a failed superhero movie that nobody saw?

Well, our class is trying to make a movie right now. We’re supposed to be adapting Macbeth to take place in WWII. So far, it hasn’t gone so well. We were originally given a tight schedule and lots of class time, but that didn’t work out because it’s been about a month and we’ve only filmed one act. Right now, we need to find a solution, because we have until spring break to pull something together. So far, I’m not confident in our abilities to do anything except for scream at each other or make extremely passive aggressive comments in a group chat (which almost immediately turn into memes).

Our problems remind me a lot of Fantastic Four’s.

We’ve been having a power struggle, and we don’t know how to work together in this kind of situation. We can’t cooperate or follow the structure of an actual film crew, because we all want all of the power with none of the responsibility. I promise you this isn’t me singling out anybody because that’s just how we all work. We’re teenagers! Our brains are still developing so we sometimes do stupid things like say we’re going to be somewhere and not go or argue over something that probably doesn’t really matter for 80 minutes. We’re teenagers with extremely high expectations set on us. What I can say is that nobody wants to give up, because we’re all a little bit afraid of failure.

I truly hope that some kind of good life lesson comes out of this, because so far all it’s done is make us angry at every little aspect of this assignment. Right now, all I can hope is that we don’t crash and burn. At this point, we have already failed our original assignment, so now we have to work around the problem.

I just hope we don’t turn out like Fantastic Four (2015), with a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Maybe we can hope for Fantastic Four (2005), because that at least has a 27% rating.

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