#vectoresque

send me a 🎧 and I'll give you a 3 song playlist from songs shuffled from my music library!

twitch.tv/moxperidot

I have watched about half of them. Here’s what I wrote about it on my Facebook:

My friend, John, has three stories in the new Netflix series Love Death+Robot, so I watched a bunch of it last night.

I found John's stories to be amusing, entertaining, and enjoyable, but I was kinda turned off by the other stories I watched, because they seemed to be gratuitous, Male Gaze fantasies for adolescent boys.

So that's like SUPER harsh, I know, and a strong argument can be made that they're paying homage to Heavy Metal, which was deliberately erotic, gratuitously violent, and fucking AMAZING in the 70s and 80s. But while I loved (and still love) Heavy Metal (the movie and magazine), I feel like things we accepted then are things we should not be accepting now.

The reason I'm posting about this today is to ask if anyone else felt the same way I did, or if I'm just too sensitive and so out of the demographic, I missed the point of the series.

Consensus on my Facebook was that it *is* a adolescent male gaze-y series, but maybe we are reacting strongly to it because we’re nearly 50 (I’m basing this on demographics I have seen in analytics) and we’re out of the demographic. 

It’s not bad, but I don’t like it as much as I expected I would. I haven’t been in a hurry to watch the remaining episodes, because what I’ve seen kind of turned me off, and since I have limited time to devote to TV, it’s sort of slipped down my priorities, since I’ve recently discovered Brooklyn 99 on Hulu and it’s consistently entertaining.

I’m so sorry. That’s awful.

I remember when I turned thirty, I completely freaked out because I hadn’t done any of the things I wanted to do by the time I turned thirty. But I realized that it’s still very young (I know it doesn’t feel that way, but when you’re 45 like I am it will), and it really is an arbitrary age we tend to set for ourselves to have a bunch of stuff figured out and accomplished. 

The reality is, for most of us, we don’t get there by thirty, so it’s a damn good thing that thirty isn’t the finish line or the deadline! Like, we still have AT MINIMUM fifty years to do stuff, and that’s a lot of time.

I’m so sorry that you’re working so hard and don’t feel like you can get ahead. I know it doesn’t help to hear this, but I understand that your generation is really struggling, because my generation and my parents’ generation ruined the American Dream and did our best to yank up the ladder behind us. I don’t have a good response to that, or good advice, because I genuinely don’t know how to change it. Maybe someone else who is reading this can offer some strategies that have worked for them.

Above all, please remember that Depression Lies, and it does its best to tell us that we are never going to get out of a rut, we’re not worth fighting for, and that we deserve to feel bad. It’s a big dumb stupid lying liar, though, and if you only take one thing away from this answer, please let it be this: you are worth it, you will get better, and feeling depressed doesn’t have to define you and your self esteem.

I hope this helps. I don’t have an answer for you that feels like The Answer, so I feel like it’s a bunch of words, but that could just be my anxiety talking.