Finis Principia
“Is this the end of the beginning?
Or the beginning of the end?
Losing control or are you winning?
Is your life real or just pretend?”
"End of the Beginning"
Going through my writings for the past year when I kept coming across instances where things just do not make sense to me. Not the words I write or topics I talk about, but rather ‘some’ of the takes of these topics by the random minorities of INTERNET TROLLS, Internet Subcultures, and others. The problem in general with Internet Subcultures are Internet Subcultures. However, I have already written about that and those extremely short and not very well thought out opinions of said topics of mine.
This year was marked by life after Hurricane Ian, with damage to the house, only now being repaired. Due to inflation, rising insurance premiums and cost of living going up while monies coming in are either static or going slowly in reverse we had to make serious concessions as to what we wanted for our home. The house is forever changed. We won’t get the pool cage replaced. The insurance pay out was half of what it will cost for a new one and the insurance for it could buy a brand new pool cage every three years. We went over a year without one, adapted our lives and maintenance around that and it has worked out to a point where we had the time to think about what we actually wanted and how much we had to pay with for it. Now that we have a real concept of what we want we are slowly getting that done.
I started the year’s Blogging on my fitness history and journey over the years. I am still at it. I have learned to train smarter, around my current limitations and I feel I look good for what I have had to go through with my ability to still train at a high level. This past year I wrote about the Buffalo Bills more than I have in the past over a one year span. I am probably not done. With how Buffalo is these days, there is usually something worth discussing every few weeks, let alone months. I wrote a lot about redefining Woke-Culture as ‘(Whoa)ke Cult-Lure.’ I wrote about that subject enough to be a target of trolling then doxing by a very persistent but small group of 40+Don’t-Matter-Progressives on a stupid platform that no one really uses called SpaceHey. SpaceGhey, is what most that know the platform call it.
“Reanimation of the sequence
Rewind the future to the past.
To find the source of the solution;
The system has to be recast.”
~BLACK SABBATH
I did more movie reviews this year than I have done in recent years. I think I will continue this trend in 2024. When I do a review I tend to write about movies that I knew nothing about going into it and being very surprised at how good it was. I will also write about movies I saw that I thought were going to be good from the trailer and/or the plot write-up and the movie being so terrible that I had to write about all the things I hated about it. In great detail, of course. I do not always review films that everyone else has seen or is popular. I go by what I want to watch, not what the mass media and YouTube reviewers say I should watch.
Movies I wrote about this year:
• Infinity Pool (2023)
• You People (2023)
• Knock at the Cabin (2023)
• Nefarious (2023)
• Choke (2008)
• Oppenheimer (2023)
Movies I briefly talked about this year:
• The Elephant Man (1980)
• The Thing (1982)
• Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
• Altered States (1980)
• Tightrope (1984)
• Communion (1989)
• The Fourth Kind (2009)
• The Entity (1982)
• Prince of Darkness (1987)
• Galaxy of Terror (1981)
Along with my thoughts on politics and political ideologies I also dove more into religion/faith using Christianity as the main example. The only reason Christianity gets mentioned the most when I talk about religion is because it tends to be the most popular or most obvious. Most of everyone has heard of the rumored, “son-of-God,” Jesus Christ. We have all heard the stories and all that. It is the easiest one to prove wrong as well, but we’ll save that for 2024 and beyond. I spent just as much time writing about Social Media, Music and technical blogs with aspects of using smart devices and using older accounts with those devices. It is sort of pain in the butt when something newer comes out and it isn’t exactly compatible with your main accounts because your main accounts are now two decades old. I have newer accounts sure, but none of them are as used as my main INTERNET accounts that have most of everything signed into them. Sometimes the process is overly complicated and I will take detailed notes as to how I came up with the solutions. I will write out the notes in the form of a blog to tell the tale or just a backup for myself if I ever have to deal with the problem again. I prepared another medical update that handles the past/present of my medical conditions in a better, more thorough, breakdown. I had to take a break from everything during the months of June and July due to being sick. A combination of getting the flu and medications having adverse effects on my body for my diabetes. We still have yet to get a real handle on controlling my blood sugars. Granted we have made some strides in the right direction but my sugars continue to be higher, even with the medications they give me. At the beginning of June is when I started receiving harassment from that contingent of hypersensitive 40+Don’t-Matter-Progressives on the SpaceGhey. After I handled that, went on vacation, came back, got sick again, did I begin writing again. I was sent an open survey by my county’s Democratic Party and they made the mistake of allowing the survey takers a textbox for every question to give people a chance to say what they want to say. I will tell you; I wish ALL multiple choice tests or surveys did this. I have always had a problem with the multiple choice approach. It lacks contextual-value. Not all questions are written with context in mind and they should. Anyway; I sent them a very detailed survey back with why I would never register to vote or vote for a Democratic Party representative in any form of Government. This sparked a little bit of a debate, as most assume if one isn’t a Democrat then by default they must be a Right-Wing-Trump Supporter, which isn’t true either. I do not support either one of them as my main way to express how I feel about politics.
Both are poor choices for social societal evolution.
I took mid-October and the first part of November writing about the Israeli/Palestinian War. I wrote about 8,791 words on the subject. I studied the history. I looked at opinions on both sides and I fact-checked most of the things that are being spewed as semantics but really are just rhetoric, where semantics is the study of real and true meanings of words and phrases and are based on credible facts. Where rhetoric only has to appear it is based on credible facts, but doesn’t actually have to include anything real, true or fact, merely that it only sounds plausible. I take the same approach when talking about ALL forms of religion. That is why religion is such a tough sell and extremely easy to dismiss when looking really hard at the science, logic and common sense on the subject. If one is Pro-Palestinian they will be very triggered by what I got to say, but if one is Pro-Israeli they will be just as disappointed in my resolve or opinion on the matter.
I finally got around to defining what “Two-Step Flow Theory for Idiots” is…
One of the last big things I talked about this year are the Ten Things That Terrified Me in Film/TV. Things I remember that freaked me out in a Movie. I am 45 now and a lot of these were seen when I was a kid. So 80s baby all the way. I really harp on “conceptual horror” over just visuals. “Conceptual Horror” would be imagining you as a child, in bed, feeling this sense that you are being watched. You cannot see anything, but you look in the darkest corners of your room to see BLACK and feeling there is something there that wants you to be terrified of its presence upon you. You get the distinct feeling this thing, this entity, wants to do bad things to you or at the very least make you do bad things to others or yourself. That to me, this uncertainty, this distinct feeling of “a harmful force upon you,” is terrifying and really the only thing that truly haunts me. That unknown feeling of dread by something you cannot quantify, but is in your space that is supposed to be yours and safe.
2023 was a year where I looked into AI more than I ever have. Both with using ChatGPT, and writing prompts or, “cheat codes,” for ChatGPT. I wrote a few blogs about AI and I will continue to do that. I also listened to the audiobook versions of the “Remembrance of Earth's Past” or known as (The Three-Body Trilogy) by Liu Cixin. Three-Body is a mind-bending existentially terrifying sci-fi journey that explores humanity's encounter with an alien civilization. From the deep of cosmic concepts to intricate political and philosophical threads, Three-Body is an exploration of the unknown, challenging our understanding of the Universe, reality, perspective, perception, existence itself. Very few science fiction novels actually change how I think. This series absolutely did that with its concepts of first contact, the dark forest theory, game theory, nihilism, time, relativity, relativistic time, reality possibly being an infinitely long loop, love, death, infinity, multiple-dimensional realities, macro and micro quantum reality, religion not being real and existentialism. I will do a bigger BLOG-breakdown of the series with heavy spoilers at some point in the future.
For 2024, I currently have fourteen Blogs scheduled as of right now. This doesn’t mean I will be writing only fourteen Blogs but that those are the ones I have multiple pages of notes on the subject for and want to tackle. I wrote 30 Blogs in 2023. Where only half of them were planned in advance. I do plan to continue to work on Fiction this year. I am hoping to complete something this year for sure. There has been and will be many changes to my life and how my family carries on its wayward son… I tend to say this every year that the year before was the worse year of my life. The same can go for 2023 as well but I think of it in different terms now.
On 12/22/2023, after I had just came back from one of my deep thinking sessions on my walks around the wooded area in my neighborhood, my father passed away. Dad would have been 70 on the first day of 2024. As a family, we elected not to post this on the typical social media posts on subjects like this. Being Friday evening and all, with Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and my Nephew’s Birthday a day after that we did not want to ruin anyone’s holiday. We didn’t want our friends and family to have to stop their lives for our misfortunes. The truth is my father has been extremely ill since 2004, even before that. I started noticing my Father’s health change in and around 1995-1996. During that time, and years to come, my father did very little to help himself with his health. The Doctor would instruct him to do A, B, C and my father would take that and create his own sense of D, E, F of it. Health declined every few years. Every few years the cycle would repeat itself. Every time he’d go to the ER or stay in ICU, he’d come back, a little bit less of himself and more zombie-like. 2021 my father finally hit a wall that he couldn’t just walk through and his strength and awareness around him would dwindle. The last thing to go is a person’s sense of self. Towards the end he would stop communicating like a normal person. He would talk to us sporadically but be less and less coherent and more and more incoherent. Finally, my father’s body could no longer hold out and he passed peacefully in his sleep. One minute he was resting then next he was just a vacant vessel for a human soul.
I am not exactly sure how to word all this to sound as it should. As I have said, largely my father hasn’t been around in the way we know him and all you may remember him for a very very long time. It is hard to really understand how I feel and think at this moment. I do not feel that sense of sudden loss that most tend to go through. Actually ALL my brothers feel like this about this specific situation. When I think about this now, on the last day of 2023 and the day before his birthday, is I revert to when I was a kid and we lived in Tampa, Sarasota and right when we moved to North Port, from when that all started in 1984-1991. That is really how I think of my dad now. I cannot really think about him as my father, near and after 1997. 1997-2001, I was just graduating High School, trying to figure out adulating, finishing school, working dead end jobs, then going to college and not having a single clue as to what I was supposed to do. My brothers were all in High School doing their thing. My mother was dealing with my father, who started his descent into what we ALL had to go through for the last 20 years. Guidance for me was non-existent and with friends that are no longer here in my life anymore. I picked film in college because I loved movies. I wanted to work behind a camera from the time I left High School to now. I picked that because of the love but also because it would get me away from here and having to deal with all this stuff my dad was going through and watching my friends’ transition into their current lives, both for the best and not the best of circumstances.
I never actually got out of here and my degree is/was a complete waste of time, energy, money, resources and false-hope. Granted I love what I know but wish I could at least make a living doing it over just writing about it. Now with my own mortality showing these same signs; I am the same age now that my father was in and around when he began his issues. I think about how much quality time I have to work on projects like this. Both time and the roadblocks that were there, that are no longer there, but other roadblocks still exist. I feel like 2024 will be an end of a new beginning and the beginning actually begins, now…
Reflections of the self and redemptive nature of living life and then eventually time catches up. The ultimate fate of us ALL is death, the light, the love, the life, the emptiness and despair of it ALL. "It's a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before. A far better resting place I go to, than I have ever known." ~1859 novel by Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities” reused in the final moments of the 1982 film: “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” The very first record/tape/music I ever purchased was Black Sabbath’s Paranoid per the recommendation of my father. I was 11…
Rest In Peace Dad…
1/1/1954-12/22/2023
“Release your mind.
Fast forward to the secrets of your code.
Your life's on overload.
Delete or save…”
"End of the Beginning" ~BLACK SABBATH
Writer(s): John Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Terrence Butler