WISDOM OF THE SAGES
EPISODE I: WINTER 2023
Hello People of the World;
Here we are at the beginning of a new year. Hence, the name I suppose. Turns out, that this edition will be late again. I think I know why. I’ll explain a bit later on. The weather has turned colder of late and some, once again, seem surprised that it gets cold during the winter. Go figure.
As always: Stay safe. Stay home.
All right, let’s get going:
1:[ This virus really showed how equal we all really are: How self-important we all are. I’ve said this before and say it again – I am amazed at the amount of presumption we allow ourselves since we ended mask mandates and such. For some reason, we think we are the most important. Because of that attitude, others become less important….
2:[ WotS MOVIE REVIEWS:
M3GAN: Saw this in the theaters. It was the dumbest thing I seen in a long time, but it was also one of the most fun things I saw in a long time too.
Three Thousand Years of Longing: George Miller is a visual genius. It’s a story about telling stories and two very different entities finding commonality and love. It’s beautiful. I rarely describe movie thus. (I think).
The Banshees of Inisherin: Not as good as I thought it would be. Not the tour de force I was led to believe it was. Farrell does not deserve accolades for not playing a psycho.
The Woman King: Great moments bogged down by stupidity. Viola Davis and the rest of the Agojie were fantastic. Great fight choreography. Fictionalized history. But not for POC films….
The Pale Blue Eye: Acceptable fictional history…. An okay mystery that fails, for me, in the last act with the dead woman motivation trope. The twist was more disappointing than surprising. Also, someday, someone will make a movie where science is not evil or a failure….
3:[ The difference in writing for a weblog and in a journal. When I started writing this back in 2001, I sent it as an email newsletter for the friend in my email contacts that I had made. I have always been interested in intersecting my spheres of friendships and a newsletter was a way of, not only keeping me writing, but staying in touch with all my friends in Wyoming and Illinois. Back then, I simply typed the text into a message composition box. This was when I still had a Hotmail account. At some point, I decided to make it a weblog, which was popular then, making so I can build the whole thing in a Word Document. Much like I am doing right now. Then, Geocities shutdown. But I had found BlogSpot by then and it was attached to Google and continued until today.
It is a way of keeping track of my incredible thoughts.
Fast forward to now. I have a journal that I write in. I pen my thoughts and ideas in it and hold it sacred that I must have the deepest thoughts and philosophical enlightenments held within it, that I have begun to ignore the Word Doc File that hold Wisdom of the Sages. Journal writing feels more intimate and a computer file does not, not really. This is my heavy-handed way of saying: here’s another excuse as to way I am frequently late in posting these….
4:[ I have gotten too heavy into playing Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires. I loved the series proper – basically a button masher that takes you through the history of the Three Kingdoms Era in China. “Three Kingdoms”, as you know, is my most favorite book. I thought I’d take a chance on this game. I knew there were political and diplomatic things to consider as you conquer the map and establish or takeover different kingdoms. I have spent waaaaaaaay too much time playing this of late. Much like I did with the series proper. I guess I like the game then. Happy to have taken the chance on it. In the end, it’s still a button-masher, even in the political, human, and military choices you are required to make. You press buttons. The funniest thing is the Marriage Option. I like to play the women characters, including some I built and I find it funny how many male characters thirst for you once you gain power. Seeing the stoic Kongming declaring he loves me, is just funny. It make me think of how much of our bullsh*t women have had to put up with for centuries….
5:[ Finally saw the “Dark Winds” Series – Again, some great moments punctuated by long stretches of dumbness. When are we going to stop selling out our “sacred” Native cultural information? I guess all “Ugly” Navajo people are witches according to this series. Some very good performances in the human touch scenes, but it gets bogged down with actors, who are not action actors, trying to do action scenes. Not the bastion of Native representation as people are hoping it is. All the Native actors are fine and do a good job. I am sorry Native actors are not that bankable to be able to make changes to the depictions.
Plus, I saw and have thoughts on “Star Trek: Picard Season Two”. “Fans” have been hating these series for being “too woke”, whatever that means. They wanted dark and adult in their Liberal Optimism Space Show. That’s what Picard is. It deals with the emotional rather than the ideological. I can live with that. Though, I must admit, I never saw season one. This one was available in the library, so I checked it out. Was not disappointed. They added Guinan and Q to the mix about alternate timelines. Q was making an overly-dramatic point about “roads not take” in his exploration of what drives Picard. Thus, plopping him in an altered timeline where one of his ancestors does not make a choice. But Q was trying to express to Picard that if he too had made a different choice, that he and Picard could have been true friends. And Picard, having forgiven himself for a choice he had made in childhood, feels that he can now take that offered friendship. Pretty cool. Also, Q’s CAN die. There was a whole episode about it in the “The Next Generation”. They are OMNIPOTENT! They can do anything. Omnipotence does not equal immortality. Anyways, I enjoyed Season Two very much…
6:[ About all those folks getting mad about YouTube doing stuff – demonetizations and algorithms and data usages and copyright strikes; what did you think was going to happen when you clicked AGREE to the End User Agreement? Getting mad that you’re not making money because “I do this pretty much full-time now.” One of the things is, it’s not going to work out in a few years’ time as trends change. Your content will eventually become irrevelent.
Getting mad about Copyright Strikes is soooo stupid. What did you thing was going to happen when you took copyrighted material and tried to make money off it without cutting in the artists on that? You took an artist, a musical group, a filmmaker, and film yourself reacting to it, and not contributing anything to the artistry of the piece by the way, that allows you to make money of the copyrighted piece. You are making money off of other peoples’ hard work to bring that piece into existence, whether it’s a game, song, TV show, or movie. You know that angry feeling you get when your reaction video is taken down for copyright, and now you’re not making money off it, because, “this is basically my job now”, that feeling? Welcome to Lars Ulrich’s world. That is what he was fighting when Napster stole music from artists. And we hated so much because we are entitled to free stuff because “we’re the fans…”
As for the shitty algorithms? Sorry, you’re getting sh*t recommendations, and your video is not getting recommended, because we watch sh8t videos. Everyone, all of us. That’s how algorithms work. I’m not even a computer/IT person and I figured that one out.
Losing access to your user data for tech reasons, so you complain that YouTube is doing nothing about it and giving you the runaround? It’s a huge corporation that “Aready got your content bro” to paraphrase Charlie Sheen. You gave it to them willingly, AND you agreed to how they use it and what options are available to you to contest things in the End User Agreement, you never read. Then, you say you already know YouTube does this and it has reasons to? Then, why the f*ck are you complaining?
The bottom line is this: YouTube made unimportant people believe they deserve special treatment because they bring subscribers to YouTube for advertisers. Truth being there are more unsubscribed watchers because videos go viral around the world and your subscriber base could never do that. Because YouTube cannot track non-subscribed watchers. YouTube made us feel important because they gave us a cheapy-made play button reward.
The Lesson is: You shouldn’t be using YouTube to make a living….
7:[ I’m writing a new horror script. More in the vein of Jordan Peele and making a Suburban Indigenous Horror Films. I already have a title: The Jet Tones. (My Arapaho peeps will get the reference.) I don’t see enough urban Native depictions in media. Most are of white-washed, sold-out to the academia Natives to be made fun of by the Real INDINS on the Rez. The first Native Urban horror film I saw was a short film called “The Visitor” in 2015 for the film festival. Most people forget about “Wolfen”, though not-Native directed, depicted Natives in an urban setting. Cool for the times. So, I thought, after being inspired by Peele’s oeuvre, that I would extend that depiction to the suburbs. I am a suburban Native. I live in Skokie. So, I thought I’d build a horror script around that. Most of my dramatic, sci-fi scripts are of urban Natives. We’ll see how it goes….
8:[ We cannot go back to “Normal” all after this: thinking that fresh water is an infinite resource. I wrote on “Wisdom of the Sages” over 15 years ago or more, that reservations hold the biggest reserve of fresh water aquafers in the world and that corporations were going to fight to end tribal sovereignty to get it. It’s happening now. They are trying to repeal ICWA in which many sovereignty issues sit.
9:[ I think there is a reason we say “Going into Politics”. It’s because we don’t want to say what that actually means. We have been brainwashed from say the fact of “I want to work for the government”
Isn’t that what all elected officials do, really, work for the government? They’ll say, “But I work for the people.” But they don’t. They don’t. Because politics allows one to work NOT for the People, but for ideologies. “Going into Politics” allows one to think they are to purveyor of morality over the public rather than a public servant.
We’ve been made to think that to “work for the government” is to be doing something nefarious, ie: conspiracies to hide “The Truth”. Yes, the United States government has done a ton of evil shit, but mostly because we never call out the real sh*t they do, and as a result, they’ve gotten pretty good at stamping that down, focusing us on “stolen elections” and hidden alien craft.
From what I remember from Civics, governments, in principle, are just supposed to be a large societal structure designed to provide citizens with the day-to-day basics of service to thrive: healthcare, education, housing, food; but we’ve been taught to think that doing these things, are evil, and that the business of the government is business whose business is to make money for those that already have money. Talk about lazy welfare cheats.
We’ve been programmed to believe a government that tries to provide those basics is evil. Hence, not “Serving the People”, not “working for the government”, but “going into politics”, which is code for using the government to press your ideology on the citizenry, and not doing the evil scheme of “serving the people”; or even “working for the government”, which they are….
10:[ I am pretty peeved DC made “Gotham by Gaslight” a canon universe. Let’s get something straight right now: “Gotham by Gaslight” is NOT STEAMPUNK BATMAN. It is a Batman story that takes place in the late 1800’s. I think there are few comic properties that show never get an adaptation outside of the medium: “Saga” is one. “Gotham by Gaslight” is another. But they did. DC made a tedious animated film of it. Now, it is a New 52 Reboot Multiverse where everyone is steampunk.
I don’t mind good steampunk. But grafting it onto pop culture characters may be novel, but it doesn’t make the IP stronger or cooler, it simply makes the steampunk weaker in that it strips it of its originality. So, I am peeved they made “Gotham by Gaslight”, my most favorite comic book story ever, into a canon universe….
That is it for this month.
I did have a really “profound” item ready for the number 10 item. I had written it in my head while walking home from work yesterday. But as usual, you think you’re going to remember such things. Then, when I sat down to write it out. Gone. Oh well. So it goes. Life’s impermanence.
As always, I invite you to comment, correct, or contradict anything I write here. I am open to a critical debate. Thanks for taking the time to check out what I write here and I will see you in a month.
Until next time, remember “I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control everything really are.”
2023 Ernest M Whiteman III
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