#163 - Breaking the rules I made up

Zodiac is one of my favorite movies.

I skip the murder stabby scenes every single time I watch it.

I've had people tell me that means the movie Zodiac is actually not one of my favorite movies.

And like, uh, wrongo bongo.

Sure there's an intended way to watch a movie. But like, there's no reason that my insistence on skipping horrific visceral recreated violence renders my opinion about my own tastes inaccurate.

It's just that there are a lot of people who chafe at the idea of anyone not following The Rules at all fucking times.

And while some social constructs are there in order to maintain "polite society" (and we can argue that they're also bad but tbh that often becomes "I hate small talk" and like no I do NOT I love chatting about the weather with my super) a lot of people are just judgemental for no reason.

When you call them on it, or ask them to explain the deeper reasoning there often is none, because a lot of people parrot social standards without really thinking through the entire methodology or what it's trying to promote.

Back when music went digital, people were worried it was going to ruin things. And sure, some of the worst nightmares came true, like the sound quality varying by platform (and let's not forget that when iTunes first launched they faded each song into the next one). People had always made mixtapes (and it was way harder to do when you had to just wait for the radio DJ to play the song and stop talking over the fucking intro track!!! while poised over both the play and record button so you could override the system–and the struggle erased the urge to declare mixtapes were ruining music) but playlists were reviled.

Digitizing music has allowed music to reach new heights of global audience awareness. Rockstars are always the most famous people in the world. Music is incredible, you don't need to speak the same language to understand what songs are communicating, and we are all better for having easy access to the worlds greatest music catalogs.

The idea that e-readers aren't "real books" meanwhile the dyslexic font has allowed so much access to books that demonizing the way people read is so trivial. Like I think it used to be funny or something when people got in dogear arguments but now with the internet everyone is just so mean that it comes across way harsh, Tai.

Audio-books counts. Who the fuck cares??? We're not being graded and there's no "pure" way to do a hobby and reading and learning should happen and it's okay if you skim a few chapters or fly through romance novels I'm just so thrilled people still care about the written word and can use their imaginations and there's a huge market for 600+ page biographies and those get turned into neat properties because art is art is art and how dare anyone judge the way it's enjoyed.

There are no real rules.

There's only social pressure.

We're making all of this up.

So be sure to make yourself happy.

Skip the scene, read the ending, spoil the movie.

Just because you can, just because you want to, just because there's no one correct way of engaging with life and it's a series of choices so why not surprise yourself every once in a while?

Makes it more fun that way, anyway.