Silence of the lambs, the ring, the amityville horror, the conjuring
silence of the lambs. WHAT WAS SOMETHING YOU USED TO BE AFRAID OF THAT YOU AREN’T AFRAID OF ANYMORE?
Standing out. Not fitting in. Coming across as weird. Life is too short and I’m way too tired to give a single fuck about what random people think about me, so I’m just gonna go me. If I need to flap my hands, I’m gonna do that. If I want to sing or dance in public, you betcha I’m gonna do it, and nothing as trivial as, “what would other people think?” is gonna stop me. Because I stopped caring.
the ring. WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE TV SHOW? WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE EFFECT OF MEDIA ON PEOPLE?
I don’t really have a favourite TV show. My interests are always really extreme, I either enjoy it in the moment and when the moment’s passed, I don’t think about it again, or I love it so much that it consumes my every thought until I dream about it and I want to send every waking moment absorbing content from it. I’ve never had a TV show had an effect on me like the latter.
I think media reflects society, moreso society’s view on things, and it’s a good gauge of where we are and where we’re headed, especially with its reaction to it. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, as a lot of people like to believe. Certain media reflects certain parts of society, and the media you consume reflects who you are and what’s important to you, whether that’s conscious or subconscious. “It’s just fiction,” is a bullshit argument.
the amityville horror. WHY DO YOU LIKE YOUR FAVOURITE BOOK AS MUCH AS YOU DO?
So, my favourite books are a choice between either Physics of the Future, or Physics of the Impossible, both by Dr. Michio Kaku (whom I love). PotF I love because I’ve always loved speculation on the future, corroborated by fact. This is not a book about possibilities, what could be, rather than what will be, and it’s a book that does a unique thing for me: it can tear me away from this moment in society, which is honestly kind of shit, and it transports me into the future, into 2050, into 2100, where we’re actively using the sun as a power source, or further yet, the solar system. Space travel beyond the inner solar system, maybe even beyond the Kuiper Belt. The discovery of life on other planets, whatever that life may be defined as.
Physics of the Impossible does the opposite that PotF does; PotI shuts down speculation on the future. It takes beloved science-fiction inventions and explains why it just wouldn’t work, or if it could, why it would look different from how we understand it in the media we’ve gotten them from. For all the excitement and wonderment that PotF brings you, PotI grounds you again, it says, “we can do all these things, but then there’s some laws we’re not meant to break with our imagination.”
And I guess that’s at the core of my personality, this duality: a wonderment and excitement of the future that’s still grounded by reason and logic, and it’s why I loved both books equally, and why I see them as two sides of the same coin.
the conjuring. IF YOU COULD LEARN ANY NEW SKILL, WHAT WOULD YOU LEARN?
Complex mathematics. I’m dyscalculic, so maths is incredibly hard for me, and it took me 25 years to be confident with basic maths like adding and detracting in my head. It’s disheartening, because all my life I’ve been told I’m ‘so smart’, and on paper I’m a certified genius, but I can’t actually do math because of a learning disability and a history of terrible math teachers, and math is supposed to be the language of geniuses, if you can’t do math, you’re not smart, and you can’t be a ‘certified genius’. In high school, they fucked me over on this premise as well, I was failing math because of a shitty teacher and my (undiagnosed) learning disability, and they put me in the lowest level the following year, essentially making all other classes a walk in the park, and taking the challenge out of school. I was bullied for the rest of my time at high school for outperforming my entire class without a single effort taken, and stopped trying in school, to the point where I don’t know how to study for anything now. I didn’t even study for my exams and I graduated with few issues at 15 because of how unchallenging the material was, all because I was bad at math, and you can’t be smart if you can’t do math.
