Today has been slightly sucky.

Mostly because I miscalculated regarding my supply of Wellbutrin and I ended up with only half my usual dose Sunday and none whatsoever today.

And Wellbutrin (or Bupropion to its friends) is my get up and go pill. It’s the marvelously magical pill that overcomes depression’s evil energy draining properties and gives me energy and focus and drive.

So I have not had a lot of that recently. No Wellbutrin, no energy. It’s always slightly humbling and/or humiliating to realize just how dependent you are on a chemical in order to function even at a low level.

And considering how bad I felt this afternoon, I have had my lesson  for what I hope is a very long time.

My recent Netflix viewage didn’t help. First, I watched Bee Movie.

Now I knew going in that nobody really liked the movie. That’s what made me curious about it in the first place. I wanted to see if it was as bad as both the critics and the box office said it was.

And yup, it’s pretty damn bad.

It lulled me into a false sense of complacency because the first half hour wasn’t too bad. There were a lot of cute bee jokes, like the main character Barry’s parents saying “You were always such a good student…. straight B’s every time!) and they established the idea that a bee gets one choice in their life : choosing the job they do in the wacky cartoon honey factory that is their hive. They will then do that job till the day they die.

Our hero Barry feels like that is wrong and doesn’t want to choose, so he goes out with the Pollen Jockey^[1]]s, aka the bees that actually leave the give to go get nectar for the hive, and gets to see the big beautiful world full of things he never imagined could exist and that even has colors other than yellow, brown, and black.

The hive has a very small palette.

Imagine my surprise, then, when in the second half hour of the flick ^[2], they completely abandon the plotline about him choosing a job in favour of a rather unsettling plot in which he falls in love with a human woman voiced uninspiringly by Renee Zellweger.

Now I am a furry and I may or may not have dabbled in trans-species love a time or two, so I am not normally one to frown upon relationships that cross the species (or in this case, phylum) barrier.

But he’s a freaking bee. An  insect. I mean ewww.

After making us all uncomfortable with that, the plot lurches into a third plotline where Barry the Bee discovers that humans are stealing the bee’s honey and selling it.

He then sues the human race to get the honey back. And wins. And then it lurches in a fourth direction and becomes about how all the flowers are dying because the bees don’t need to go collect nectar any more.

Each one of these plot lurches costs the movie a massive amount of credibility^[3] and plot momentum, not to mention likability.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The script is a terrible mishmash of ideas and overall the movie has a feeling of incoherence and by the end I just plain didn’t care enough for the ridiculous and clearly ill thought out ending to even both me.

That was lunch. With supper, I tried out Bill Nye’s new show, Bill Nye Saves The World. 

It stinks. On ice.

I really tried to like it. I really wanted to like it. I had been reluctant to try it because I knew damned well that last vestiges of my respect and love for Bill Nye were on the line. But today was the day I decided to give it a shot.

The show is just plain awful. The pacing is incredibly leaden. Segments end at arbitrary moments and there is no structure to the show at all. Nye constantly mugs in a way I am sure he thinks is funny, and the laugh track and/or well trained audience agrees. They laugh at a lot of things that aren’t even jokes, and that’s total comedy death for me.

Clearly, Nye has been inside the echo chamber of his “skeptic” fanbase for far too long and has no idea how he’s really coming across. The show is a real stinker that is made without skill or wit, and seems to be running on Nye’s nostalgia for the time when he was relevant and doing something interesting with his life, and nothing else.

And that’s frigging depressing.

I wonder if I could position myself as the pro-science anti-skeptic. The person with no ties to religion whatsoever who nevertheless stands up for the faithful when they are being bullied and abused by some goddamned troglodytes with neckbeards and fedoras who think that it’s fine for them to dole out the same kind of intolerance they have suffered from their whole lives because, unlike them, these people deserve it.

Absolutely fucking unacceptable. I am a humanist through and through, and that means I stick up for all victims of abuse, regardless of who is doing the abusing.

And I could fill this role because I am a person they cannot dismiss as some kind of religious nut or new age guru. I have a very strong scientific mind (stronger than a lot of scientists, to be honest) and a zest for argument bordering on the psychotic. I would love to take these Dawkinite assholes to task.

I would relish being a lightning rod for their hate.

I guess that’s kind of fucked up, isn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

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