state of the foot

I think I broke my toe (or at least sprained it, but the MEDICAL EXPERTS ON FACEBOOK say it's broken - but as it's the 4th toe, a doctor can't do anything I can't for it, except give me vicodin) on Aug 30th at 11pm, I tripped over a cord and it folded back ALL the way to the top of the foot. Woo fun, I stayed off it as much as I could, but then Bumbershoot and oh lord walking all day.

SO I have been gimp-walking, driving (ugh), and using Reg's cane when I feel particularly like House. But it got a lot better the second day, and it's a lot better now. I can almost put my whole weight on my foot (although I have to land on it funny) for a half hour of walking. I expect it'll keep improving, and I really hope that by Friday I can use it properly. I mean, even on the 2nd day, I could outwalk tourists, but I had to use all the muscles in my other leg to do so. I'm used to walking at least 2 miles a day, so I've been kind of grumpy about this. (Also, my period started this Saturday, so I was grumpy all week anyway.)

The weather turned Saturday night, but it's nice again now, and supposed to be for at least another week. I'm super excited to go backpacking again, and then the next weekend, hopefully camping WITH FRIENDS in the desert, and then THE NEXT weekend is Decibel Festival, holy shit ORBITAL and MATTHEW DEAR.

evil

So, I don't believe there are evil people in the main, just evil actions. The one exception is the sociopath, or psychopath. (Depending on what literature you read, the former word is simply a nicer word for the latter. Same with Narcissist, actually.) I think seeing Thor and The Avengers renewed my interest in these beasts (since I stopped reading The Last Psychiatrist a while ago). Even in Without Conscience, Hare points out that only people that ACTUALLY scored highly on the psychopath checklist(TM) can be legitimately called psychopaths. Otherwise it's just a cluster of behavior traits that are highly correlated but not necessarily sufficient. That is to say, just because someone appeared in this book as an anecdote doesn't mean they are an actual psychopath. So in the following paragraphs, assume "psychopath" == "someone who got a very high score on the Psychopathy Checklist".

The two most interesting things (to me) in the book were the results of experiments. One, in fact, got rejected because "these brainwaves can't be real". Psychopaths and normals were hooked up to EKG readers and shown both a jumble (UEHKAH) or a word (APPLE) on a computer screen, and they had to click as fast as they could on the real word. Normals scored higher in general, but especially on "emotionally loaded words" like LOVE or DEATH. Psychopaths scored the same on all words.

The other experiment involved scaring people - just with a loud noise or electric shock - and the psychopaths had NO fear response at all compared to the normal people. This is the result that is more relevant for humanity, I think. Because fear is how we condition ourselves. Reg saw one of his young cousins run and trip and fall, over and over again. Sure, young kids have less fear, but he also locks his grandparents out of their car for fun. "Wait till he starts torturing animals," I said. There was a case in the book of identical twins, one normal, one seemingly without conscience. She began flirting with older boys/men at the age of four to get her way.

And this leads into Chronicle, a surprisingly excellent film, and definitely the best "fake found footage" film. (If it's a mockumentary, it's in the style of a real documentary, not just found footage. Fakumentary? Have these people ever seen a documentary?) Also it takes place around Seattle, so you get lots of Space Needle shots. I'm a sucker for that shit, partly because it's also hilarious and unrealistic. "We're in Ballard! Now we're at the Space Needle!" "We're downtown! Look, the Space Needle!" Ok, it wasn't quite that bad in this movie, since it was filmed on location.

Anyway. Andrew Detmer is a loner whose mother is deathly ill, father is an unemployed drunk who doesn't see anything wrong with beating his son, and his only friend is his cousin Matt. Andrew decides to start filming everything (hence the title) that happens to him. The first twenty minutes are establishing this, showing the bullies find him as pleasing a target as his father does, and that he basically has no idea of how to interact with girls his age in the least. His cousin Matt is slightly more socially apt, and uses philosophy to try to pick up girls, and impress Steve Montgomery, the most popular dude in school.

The three of them find something weird outside of a rave, and the video futzes out, and when it starts up again, we see they have superpowers. Telekinesis, mainly. They have a lot of fun playing with Legos and other shit, that's the second third of the movie. Mostly just pranks and other funny stuff. But power begins to corrupt, and Andrew, who clearly already had some sort of dispersonalization traits, goes further into himself. He practices his abilities more and ends up the strongest of them. It's implied a little that "the alien" gets into him, but I personally thought it was just him. He uses the term "apex predator" to describe himself, and that is certainly a good description of a psychopath. (I mean, he still feels bad about his sick mom, but at the end that is all he seemed to give a crap about.)

Anyway, yeah, the ads made it look like a comedy, and the first half is pretty jokey, but it starts dark and stays dark, even during the humor. It definitely is not the happy-feel-good movie The Hulk was, for example. It's almost painfully realistic, but the guys bro-ing around makes it fun for as long as that lasts. And then it gets REAL dark. Highly recommended. (Superheroes, bros, and power corrupting? Yeah, man.)