Shoes at the Door

Category: Video

  • Have You Ever been Affected by Positivity… ?

    Have You Ever been Affected by Positivity… ?

    From today’s title, you may have guessed that this is a follow-up to my last post about how a little hype can go a long way in helping us enjoy things that we actually enjoy. Last time, I talked about how the pervasive negative attitude surrounding video games at the moment might actually be affecting my will to play them, even good ones. Today, I want to talk about how a short, fun, positively toned video can help you enjoy something that isn’t actually all that good.

    Meet Cecil from GoodBadFlicks. He’s been making great videos for years that are mostly about silly horror films made on a shoestring budget. To me, what makes Cecil stand out is all the background work he does in his research, often reaching out to the cast and crew of even one-time projects filmed in the 1980s. It’s amazing how often people are willing to talk about that one silly horror movie they made over thirty years ago. As he is a professional editor, the videos are all well-made and his unpretentious, positive, emotive voice goes a long way in charming you into his perspective for a few minutes.

    Not that Cecil doesn’t extend far outside of my range of appreciation at times, as some movie awfulness is irredeemable beyond even what a charming and sympathetic backstory can add. However, I can’t undersell the effect these stories can have on me in adding to my appreciation of an otherwise badly received film. These short videos can actually help you enjoy some movies well beyond their face value by adding a lot of human context. One might say, however, that this can draw you out of a movie, making it less immersive and experiential. True, but this is exactly what some movies need. You see, Cecil’s videos don’t make the movies good, but they do make them more fun to watch. And for that, he deserves a spot in my little internet hall of fame.

    But now I want to be clear about what I mean regarding what I have said about positivity and negativity. Like any good and worthwhile conversation, some people have seen fit to take things too far. Like I said in the previous article, many of us don’t want to admit how certain dialogues affect us on a subconscious level. We want to believe that we are completely in charge of our minds, and that our perceptions regarding our immediate, personal area of control are unflawed. A few years ago, I had a roommate that began to rely on a show of anger as a coping mechanism for all of the life situations he found confusing or difficult. Obviously, as most coping mechanisms will do, this led to the further obfuscation of the core issues and, indeed, negatively affected his personal relationships and ability to be promoted at his job. Nothing new there. But what I didn’t realize, even knowing all this, is how much the experience was affecting me, even though I wasn’t always the target of his anger. When I finally moved out, I noticed a big change in myself and in my overall mood.

    Though this is something important to consider, I don’t believe that positive vibes are a worthy or healthy lifegoal by themselves. They are the perks of true accomplishment and rewards for maintaining good relationships by relinquishing self-centeredness, grudges, and personal criticism while embracing grace, forgiveness, and sacrifice. It is also worthwhile to discuss how negative vibes can distort the clarity of what I just mentioned, subverting good goals and good relationships for toxic, codependent ones, which can include ridiculous, self-prescribed goals for achieving happiness that can’t and never do pay off and enslaving relationships with the imbedded goal of trying to keep an unappeasable person happy.

    Ironically, this downward spiral can also be caused by seeing other people as a means to an end, with the end being positive vibes only. Though it would require more investigation on my part to know for sure, this seems to be the idea behind groups that desire to turn positivity into a movement or even a sociopolitical obligation. Positive vibes at the cost of truth are made of the same substance that cause the same psychoses brought on by pervasive negativity. The fact is that positivity doesn’t necessarily cancel out negativity in the context of living a healthy, flourishing life of meaningful goals and relationships. Negatively criticizing people for not positively affirming your toxic relationships and debilitating life goals, for example, will thrust you into an unnavigable world of negativity incomparable to even a temporary relationship with a negative person. Truth, however, cancels out lies, and it provides a cornerstone for a life that can enjoy positivity with no strings attached. What I mean here is that we often need friends to offer a second pair of eyes on things that may seem obvious to us in our present predicament. Good assessment on their part might not be too positive or affirming, but it could lead to enjoying true positive feelings together in the long run, which should linger far longer than those forced out of others and consumed like an addictive drug with all the diminishing returns natural to such things.

  • There’s Plenty of Old Anime

    There’s Plenty of Old Anime

    There’s plenty of old anime out there for those who know how to find it. Thankfully, there’s a lot on YouTube that’s easy to find, and not all of it is old rips. But I want the old rips, too.

    Lately, I’ve been catching up on some Cat’s Eye on @AnimeonTMSOfficialChannel (Tokyo Movie Shinsha). I guess they figured they’d make more money on YouTube views than trying to sell this oldie. But it’s a win for those of us who want to cozy up with some city pop skylines. Cat’s Eye also has one of my favorite, and not overused(?), anime tropes, what I call ‘the cafe’ or ‘the hub’. A lot of the episodes have the characters returning to their cafe between story beats. Sure, other shows have characters going back to an office or an apartment, but that’s not where you want to be. Besides, it’s too Charlie’s Angels. You want a good hub. You want to go to that familiar place where everybody knows, well, probably just your face. And what’s with the highway outside? This is one of those cafes you need a car to access, isn’t it? That’s why it’s always empty. Who doesn’t dream of working at a bookshop-cafe with no customers?

    You can also find some anime feature shows on private channels, and uploaders like to add in some period-appropriate Japanese commercials for fun. You can find shows of varying quality on Group Therapy PodCast and Orbital Bacon (the links go to the playlists). When I find some others worth mentioning, I’ll try and post them as well. One thing I like about Orbital Bacon is how he pays tribute to the old Saturday Morning Anime show on the Sci-Fi channel. But for old rips that are of mostly decent quality, check out English Dubbed [VHS] and VHS Era Anime. There’s some better-quality stuff on archive, but we’ll get to that later. The reason I like seeing this stuff preserved and available is that a lot of old anime distributers are not around anymore and the dubs they licensed had to be redone for present day streaming, for copyright purposes. The problem is that since these are no longer big, expensive productions, localization dubs seem to be going to the lowest bidder. Now, the translations are overly stiff and snooty (for weaboos only), and the voice acting is vapid and emotionless. Even if the old dubs did sometimes take a few too many liberties with the content and the translation, they were still sometimes pretty fun to watch.

  • Have You Ever Gone on an Adventure Game… ?

    Have You Ever Gone on an Adventure Game… ?

    Well, Dan Avidan has.

    So, in my last post, I reminded you about how I was putting together this internet hall of fame, but I didn’t elaborate on it much. The reason I want to bring this up again is because I somehow want to extend to you, the reader, the experience of how this sort of curation can yield certain dialogues that you might not have expected when starting out. For example, I started out with the kind of videos that I understand the most, that is, videos created by writing, editing, and performing. We started with video games and then we added movies, and there will be more stuff coming from other new categories, as well. But what about videos that don’t really require editing or writing? Obviously, the internet has a lot of those. Do we add to the hall of fame Sparks the kitty, that does that cute little thing with the box? It doesn’t really seem to fit. But what about Game Grumps, the YouTube channel that features a couple of guys playing video games – and that’s it?

    What do we do when we are observing something with a perhaps unidentifiable and unquantifiable quality that, although having no discernible label, is noticeable in both its presence and absence? Not only that, but how do you pin this quality onto something when it’s not always there?

    Sometimes, Game Grumps is pretty good, but not always. But then, I’m not sure if I fit into their biggest audience demographic. And that’s okay. They should be thankful for having an audience demographic, perhaps more so if that demographic is a little different from themselves. And they do seem to be thankful. But in terms of entertainment, some episodes really knock it out of the park for me. And maybe the simple fact is that these guys just are entertaining, except when they’re not. Perhaps the problem has something to do with the art of improv. I also tend to think that when the dialogue gets off of the game in front of the people playing it, the entertainment suffers. For example, in one of the most entertaining episodes to date, the P.T. demo (10 million views), the dialogue stayed on-game the whole time. At any rate, when deciding for the hall of fame, I want to see each candidate for their best. And for me, that’s going to be Dan’s solo adventure game series.

    Now, I usually go to Game Grumps for laughs, but these videos are special. I really wish Dan had kept going with these, but I’m not sure how big of an audience there is for this kind of thing. While playing through Sierra’s Space Quest adventure games, Dan shows himself to be quite the capable host, taking the audience on a tour of what might be a rather inaccessible experience for most, all while keeping the dialogue going with his smooth, mellifluous voice. And it’s a tour that’s worth taking. It is worthwhile to experience old PC gaming in its best possible light instead of complaining about its lack of modern conveniences because putting the games in this light helps us understand how they were first played and enjoyed. This is almost, if not equally, as important as game preservation by itself. How many books have been preserved in libraries without most people ever having known how to appreciate them? Of course, I do take that to be the bigger problem. Nevertheless, we may have learned something from Dan, here. And that makes Game Grumps good enough for the Internet Hall of Fame.

  • Have You Ever Created a Hall of Fame?

    Have You Ever Created a Hall of Fame?

    Well, this is my first one. Since I started working on this blog, I’ve wanted to create a little “Hall of Fame” to recognize the internet’s creators and performers that stand out most to me. I started with Games Sack and Iron Pineapple, and I tried to start some interesting conversations about what perhaps makes them stand out over the rest. Today, we’re meeting Oliver Harper, a creator and performer that uploads classic movie retrospectives to YouTube.

    Like the previous two hall-of-famers I covered, Oliver’s videos are a product of editing, writing, and speaking, and, as before, he does it very well, naturally and concisely, and without the use of overly emotional blathering and creatively debauched and tiresome youtuber language. The experience is quite smooth, and the harmony between the writing and the editing is nice and punchy. A lot of the experience is down to Oliver’s choices, his curation of material, if you will, that reflects some thoughtful deliberation on what would be most interesting and engaging to his audience. Part of this material includes a great deal of thought-provoking context and history for each film, and this is one area where Oliver really stands out. I don’t know where he is getting all of his information, but it’s not from Wikipedia, and it’s not full of the copy-and-pasted errors and rumors repeated on so many other, similar channels. No, this is good reporting. As someone who has collected a lot from books and interviews and a variety of other published material over the years, I have to say that curating such material well is a significant skill that cannot be neglected when doing this kind of work. We should be thankful for those who have it.

    One other thing that makes Oliver interesting to me is the fact that he shares my birth year. Where I grew up in the United States experiencing these movies, he grew up with them in England. The similarities and contrasts between these experiences are fascinating to me, and it truly adds to the viewing experience. The film commentaries on Oliver’s channel are also a nice bonus, but many of his recent partners are a little lacking in charm, for my tastes, that is, except for comedian Nick Helm. Nick actually had his own TV series at one point. It made me laugh, but it was a little too nihilistic for me. I’ll put their Judge Dread commentary below for you to sample. At any rate, I heartily recommend Oliver Harper for some lunch break viewing.

  • Have You Ever Eaten Soggy Cereal…?

    Have You Ever Eaten Soggy Cereal…?

    Well, this guy is done with it. It’s food day here on ShoesAtTheDoor.com. No, it isn’t, but I should have posted this under Cereal Man. This is okay, though. It gives me a chance to talk about this show separately from its channel, The Dice Tower, which I plan to cover later.

    This is Crowd Surfing, the panel show that covers pertinent information about crowdfunding campaigns that are, at the time of recording, live. Most of the campaigns are related to board gaming, but, as you can see, they have also been working on covering the weird and wonderful as well. This is also another opportunity for us to point at someone and say, “Look, they’re doing what we’re doing!”

  • Have You Ever Been Handed a Wet Towel and Gone, “Arrggghhh!”?

    Have You Ever Been Handed a Wet Towel and Gone, “Arrggghhh!”?

    Well, Dr. Mitsuo Ando has.

    I finally finished reading Spiral, the second novel in Koji Suzuki’s Ring trilogy at around 5:50 p.m. yesterday, and if you’ve read that book before, you know that it leaves you with something. But it’s not time to say exactly what that something is, yet. I’ll first have to read the last book in the series before I try and articulate any thoughts, but I suspect that the end of the second book might be trying to leave me in a similar place as the end of the first book. Asakawa was wrong. Now, how about Ando?

    You really have to love that towel scene. I’ll never forget it.

    But I think I can say without spoiling anything that one of the most interesting things about the sequel to Ring is the fact that it mentions the Ring movie and the Ring video game within its own universe. It also mentions why the movie and the game must be different from the book! Say what you want the series’ perspective, but I can’t remember the last time I encountered something so incredibly clever.

    Speaking of such, the title of this blog post has gotten a little too clever. It started out in my first post as a Hot Fuzz reference that Dr. Ando has unwittingly completed. Well, I’m not done with it yet, but this is probably the last time I’ll mention it.

    So, to me, Spiral answers the question that this video most certainly imparts to the viewer as, “What’s with all this wacky different Ring stuff?” For years, I’ve wondered how someone might explain what I call the Rashomon aspect of Japanese media. We have all seen how different video games, manga, and anime will have different sequels and spinoffs that, to the Western mind, disrespect the original cannon. However, this particular criticism seems to be an imposition of the West, demanding something of Japanese culture with which its people have no interest in producing. It is also worth noting that this sort of story variation was also popular in the West, during what is commonly referred to as the “silver age of comic books.”

    Perhaps a better question, then, is, “Why are we demanding canonicity now?”

    Was Ryuji right? Are we being pulled apart, with one pole being an innate desire for conformity and the other being the unequivocal human dilemma of boredom? Is this the tension that drives humanity forward? Carrying with it the unasked, but unavoidable question left hanging at the end of the spiral: Why now?

    But as for Grimbeard, not now. He’ll get his own post later.

    Maybe it was that thing Sadako’s mother found in the water.