Yeah, no 5th dimensional stuff today, either. It’s Sunday, I feel lazy, and I am still missing an important piece of the puzzle re : the plot going where I want it to go, so, not yet.

Tomorrow for sure.

I watched X:Men : Days Of Future Past via good ol’ Netflix recently, and I will join the Internet chorus by saying this : it’s an okaymovie, but holy crap is it full of plot holes.

And most of them don’t even have to do with the ever-vexing subject of time travel!

Like, they make a point of having genocidal maniac Boliver Trask (played with extraordinary dinklage by Peter Dinklage) assure the White House people that there is not an ounce of metal in his Sentinels.

But then, later in the film, they have Magneto using the Sentinels like giant marionettes.

How hard would it have been to just snip that line about them being metal-free?

And true, the scene in question comes right after Magneto does a lot of dumb shit in front of the world’s TV networks, and I guess someone said “But how can he sell the idea of the Sentinels to the White House if that ‘mutant’ can just use them like puppets? We need a scene where he says they are metal free!”.

That person should have been told to sit down and shut the fuck up.

Speaking of “Magneto”, in the movie they have redefined his power as “being able to control metal”. And I approve of this change. You get the same kind of powers without relying on the vaguely defined term “magnetism” and all that can imply if you really think things through.

In theory, massive magnetism could give one god-like powers to do pretty much anything. Electromagnetism is one of the primary forces of the universe. Control that, and you control the world.

However, if you take magnetism out of the equation, you are then left with this question : why the hell is he called Magneto?

If anything, his name should be Metallo!

And there’s this sequence where Bad Future Xavier talks to 1973 Xavier and it makes absolutely no fucking sense. They do absolutely nothing to explain what is allowing this to happen. It really seems like the sort of scene that the writer and possibly the actors (and/or their agents) want to do, but should not be done because it makes no fucking sense.

And they went and gave Kitty Pryde the power to project people’s consciousness back in time. Waddy Fug? That’s not her power! She phases through solid matter! I understand the need for someone to be able to do this in order to get the plot in motion, but why change an existing character to do so? Why not invent a mutant called Flashback, and have THEM do it?

I guess Kitty Pryde’s agent should have been told “no” as well.

And then we come to the time travel bullshit. At the end of the movie (spoiler alert), Wolverine succeeds in preventing the terrible mutant genocide human slavery future, and wakes up in the nicer future where Xavier’s school is full of students and everyone is all happy and stuff.

Only Wolverine remembers everything that happened both in the movie and the backstory. The whole bad future that started in 1973 exists only in his head now. And he walks around the school marveling at how much nicer everything is now. Fine.

But then he talks with Xavier about how he will have to learn everything that happened since 1973 since it’s all different now.

Except he doesn’t. He’s been alive and living life that whole time. He even has some grey around his temples^[1]. It’s not like when Xavier saw him, he said “My god, Logan, where have you been for almost 50 years??”. No, even Chuck seems to think Wolverine has been around all this time. Even tells him he has a class to teach.

So what the fuck happened to the version of Wolverine that had been alive all that time? Did This Movie Only Wolverine’s arrival erase that guy’s mind? If so, isn’t that more than a little fucked up?

The only thing that makes sense and doesn’t involve identity murder and a terrible case of retrograde amnesia is having Wolvie remember both timelines, in which case, he would not need the update on what has happened since 1973.

He would, however, need way more psychotherapy from Prof X due to having two versions of reality in his head all the time.

This kind of shit is why I hate time travel. It just plain can’t be written to make sense!

Other mutants got their powers tweaked besides Metallo. They have this clumsy device where Hank “Beast” McCoy has invented a formula that suppresses mutant powers. This both gives them an excuse for him to be a regular human most of the time (rather than the rather ugly CGI Beast) and for Prof X to not have his massive mental powers when Wolvie shows up.

Otherwise, a lot of bullshit about convincing Prof X he’s really from the future could have been skipped. How terrible!

All in all, the movie suffers from a lot of lazy writing and bad decisions, and that’s a shame, because the story is interesting, the acting is a lot better than it needs to be, and of course, the effects are fucking spectacular.

And I love seeing a whole bunch of Marvel mutants on the big screen. They even had a cameo appearance by the Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants. And a mutant called Sunspot who I thought would be Sunspot from the New Mutants but who the movie apparently decided is actually just a knockoff Human Torch.

Look, Sunspot’s power (solar based super strength) kinda sucks, I agree, but you should have either used the real Sunspot or change the goddamned name.

One last nit to pick, and it’s totally the kind of thing that requires a very specific kind of nerdiness to notice and be bothered by : They always refer to Storm as “Storm”.

Bur her name is Ororo, god damn it! They called Wolverine “Logan”, they call Cyclops “Scott”, they call Phoenix “Jean”, they call Iceman “Bobby”, they should fucking well call Storm “Ororo”.

So yeah. Could have been a way better movie if they had just decided to take massive plot holes seriously.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. In fiction form!

In fact, I have loads of missions. Dozens of them.

Okay, not really.

Sorry, no 5th dimensional hijinks tonight. Not quite sure where I am going next. I know some things, but not enough to put them together into an actual plot. So, think time is needed.

Hope everybody liked Silence Speaks. I know Felicity did.

Turns out my standup comedy thing isn’t till next Friday. Apparently Felicity did a far better job of reading and remembering the emails from David Granrier than I did. Do’h! Good thing I brought it up last night or things could have gotten very stupid.

It’s hard being a genius and doofus at the same time. Einstein’s wife, and all that. It’s hard to see the genius under the cluelessness.

I have decided, tentatively, that I am great.

And not just in the sense of “the new Daredevil series is really great!”, but in the sense of “some people are born great, some people achieve greatness in their lives, and some people have greatness thrust upon them.”

I have tried humility and it hasn’t worked out. And for whatever reason, I have a tendency to go from one extreme to the other. It’s like I have to wobble back and forth like a pendulum until air resistance drags me to compromise.

It’s like when there is an air bubble trapped at the bottom of a bottle of water. A tap on the plastic, and it goes all the way to the top with no stops in between.

Oh well, I have often suspected the reason I am such a passionate moderate is that I have to keep so many conflicting forces inside me in balance that it makes me always seek the moderate middle path.

What appears to be peace can turn out to be the result of powerful forces being carefully balanced.

So anyhow, I have decided that I am a great person, in both senses. I have spent so long feeling like I was worse than nothing, that I was actually a liability and a burden and the world would be better off without me (ouch), that I got all cramped up and stuck in that position.

It is shocking to realize that you feel guilty for existing.

So fuck that. I am an amazing person and I have nothing to be ashamed of. And I am going to keep saying that until it penetrates all the way to the core of my psyche.

And yeah, I know I have been down this road many times before in this very space. Sometimes you have to circle the block many times before you find a place to park, okay?

In fact, I may have said this before too : I think one of the big barriers to my accepting my extra-ordinariness is that I just don’t want to accept the responsibility. If I truly am extraordinarily gifted, then I would have to accept an obligation to do something worthy with my gifts, and I just can’t seem to accept that kind of burden.

It scares the shit out of me.

That’s why I keep asking people if they think intelligence comes with an obligation to use it.

I guess I am hoping they will say “no”.

But it’s not the world telling me that accepting my extraordinary skills would be accepting their burden as well. It’s my basic nature telling me that. I believe down to the roots of my soul that the only acceptable world is one in which power and responsibility are always in strict one-to-one parity, and so for me, fully accepting the good parts of being very intelligent without accepting the burdens is not an option.

I realize that is a somewhat rigid and limiting way of seeing things, but it’s what I’ve got to work with.

But what does it say about me that I would rather be powerless and hence free of responsibility than powerful and obligated? I have this deep reaction to anything that seems like it would restrict my freedom of action or limit my intellectual (or literal) maneuverability. Like it would kill me, or worse, trap me.

Maybe some things are worth being trapped for, though. Maybe all this “freedom” comes at too high a cost.

And aren’t I the person always complaining about option paralysis while also complaining about feeling like my life is a deep dark Gulag with exceptionally cruel Cossack guards?

There’s just a whole mess of mutual exclusivity there. Those can’t all be true at the same time. There has to be some kind of sane and rational middle path through this tangled jungle of psychological extremes.

Part of me thinks the only answer is to stop negotiating peace between all the conflicting influences and let them finally have the big WWII sized war I’ve been holding back all my life, and let the chips fall where they may. Sure, the war will be brutal, but when it is all over, the conflicts will be resolved and the tension will be gone.

The iron hand of self-control can easily turn into the hand on your throat choking the life out of you. Maybe it’s time I threw open the cages and let the animals sort it out amongst themselves.

And this time, I am not going to bring this all back to somewhere rational and safe at the end. No “Oh, but I could never… ” or “I don’t know if I am even capable of… ” or “I wouldn’t even know where to start…” or all that shit.

I have been safe and rational for a long long time. My overreaching superego is proof of that. I have brutally repressed myself on nearly every level for decades, compressing myself into an unnaturally tiny space in search of some elusive and impossible sense of calmness and safety.

And all the while, that Jagoff of mine, my eternal enabler, is there to convince me that it isn’t so bad and hey, it’s no big deal, we can still have fun in this perpetual state of home arrest.

Fuck that guy. I’m going to stop being content and start being angry enough to do something about my captivity.

Time to grow up and get moving.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.