As usual, today’s experiment will be at the end.

First, I will share this intriguing list of 50 great films you’ve probably never seen.

I am always eager to dig into the vaults for lost media gems. There is an inexpressible joy that comes with discovering something great that time has forgotten. You feel like you rescued it from oblivion and are now keeping it alive by loving it so much.

OK, that sounds kind of creepy, but you get what I am going at.

So a list like the one I linked is a great place to start looking for lost gems that I might well enjoy. A lot of the movies on there sound either good, or bad in the fun way, and what more can you ask than that?

Demonstrating the deep maturity and seasoned wisdom that only comes by living these forty long years, the one I am most interested in is a cartoon about poop.

It’s an animated feature about a future where the ultimate fuel source is human feces. Unsurprisingly, it is from South Korea, the country that brought us a movie about an animated dog turd.

A movie based on a bestselling children’s book, mind you. A movie that is now a beloved children’s classic. I am beginning to think the South Koreans are going to give the Germans a run for their money when it comes to weird issues about poop.

From what I have heard from second generation South Korean immigrant kids, their culture is extremely uptight and very Catholic, two things which are not unrelated.

Next up we have a movie based on the premise “What if gay was normal and being straight was the exception?” They phrase it as “What if gay was straight and straight was gay?”, but to me that’s just like saying “What if black was white and white was black?

Then everything would be exactly the same, bong boy.

Oh, and trigger warnings galore. If you have every been bullied, whether it’s for being gay or not, this is going to be hard to get through.

It’s very earnest and not exactly subtle, but it’s well made. The people making it are obviously very sincerely concerned with the issue and I am sure that, in their minds, they are hoping this is a mind-blowing role reversal that will really make people think about the issue.

Plus plus points for including the line about “except in breeding season”. An all homosexual society just could not survive for pretty obvious reasons. It was bugging me.

Of course, for a forty year old sci fi fag like me, it’s all very old hat. The idea of this sort of role reversal is at least as old as The Twilight Zone, and probably a lot older, and so the idea of swapping social places with the straight people many times.

To me, the real lesson is that it would be just as bad. Swapping places with the oppressors might seem just in the short term (it isn’t, by the way), but in the long run, it just makes you the new oppressors and the world is just as bad as it was before.

Worse, even, because victory has caused righteous people to compromise themselves in the name of revenge and become that which they hate the most.

And then there’s this bit of pure uncut nightmare fuel from the always uncanny world of dolls for girls. (Dolls for boys are ‘action figures’. )

Warning : I am serious. This may haunt your dreams.

Of course, that’s what makes it so funny.

That’s not a normal laugh!

The creepy laugh is bad enough, but it’s the expressionless, almost robotic way the girls turn toward the doll that takes this out of “accidental nightmare fuel” territory and into “horror movie” land.

It’s like they are turning in dumbstruck horror to face the demonic fiend that will surely devour their souls so they can get one glimpse of their doom before they are consigned to a hellish oblivion.

And the narrator’s not quite convincing laugh is like Satan’s running commentary on the nightmare world he has made for what must have been some very naughty girls.

Oh. And the rocking motion of the doll is just the icing on the cake. It rocks back and forth like a rape victim in the shower, all while laughing a completely unhinged laugh.

I wonder what the hell it must be like to be the poor sap whose job it is to test those demonic toys before they were packaged.

Burnout rate would be high because inevitably, you start hearing that laugh ALL THE TIME.

Hope their worker’s comp system has a sanity clause.

And finally, today’s video experiment.

Not really happy with how it turned out. It could have been so much better, but problems got in the way and I had to just go with what I had.

First of all, as I suspected, video editors make lousy music makers. They make it hard to put the video clips (which are your samples, after all) exactly where you want them because the video editor assumes that you want all the piece to come right after one another.

When video editing, that’s a godsend. Video editing is all about that kind of serial sequencing and having to place every clip over and over again while arranging them would be a serious drag.

But music is all about precision placement, and while I tried to compensate with those black space you see in there, the final product is still not nearly as precise and funky as I wanted it to be.

But the real problem was that motherfucking Ulead kept crashing. That is the reason I had to just output the thing and add the intro and outtro.

I may try the project again some time, perhaps using the Cyberlink editor instead. I think it lets you add all the video overlay channels you want, which would be a big help when making video into music.

God I wish I could afford a decent new computer. Something modern with scads more memory and a bitching CPU. Something that could handle video editing with ease, instead of this old nag of mine that is always on the verge of breaking down from it.

Something with an SSD in addition to the hard drive. Video editing from a giant memory stick must be so much faster than doing it from a hard drive.

Oh well. Some day.

Talk at ya later folks!