On Children's Television

Hello blog, my old friend.

Abominable life duties such as finishing my tertiary education have kept me from paying you much attention as of late. We have much to catch up on.

That said, let's talk about Power Rangers.

For those of you not in the know, Power Rangers as we know it in the West was actually adapted from a Japanese series called Super Sentai. As if the giant robots weren't something of a clue.
It was brought to English-speaking countries as the Power Rangers we all know and love (or just know...), 'brought to' here meaning 'shamelessly ripped off'.

The show must've been an absolute cakewalk to make. Sure, they had to film the various scenes with the normal teenagers- all of whom looked around 25- going about their business, but as soon as they suited up, it was stock footage galore. Entire fight scenes and plot lines were simply yanked straight from Japan and dubbed over with English dialogue, producing a mixed bag of results. A typical scene might have gone something like this:

Ranger 1: Look, that bus full of children is about to go over the cliff!
*inexplicable pause*
Ranger 2: Oh no!
*Ranger 2 places their hands on their head/helmet in a contrived fashion*
Ranger 3: (pointing at some vague point off-screen) The bus is about to fall!
Ranger 1: You're right!
*apropros of nothing, the entire team erupts into a series of intricate poses that perfectly resemble a choreographed dance sequence. There are fireworks. No one knows why*

And a bunch of sane, professional adults working in the television industry in the 90s all stood around a screen, with their multicoloured overalls and criminally boofy hair and said 'yes, this is a thing that kids will love.' And then they cranked up the Spice Girls and celebrated with a round of slap bracelets. Because it was the 90s.

                                               Oh c'mon, those things aren't even sharp.

Oh, and love it we did. Using the magic of the internet to look back upon what was, I can scarcely believe that I adored Power Rangers as much as I did. The dubbing was awful, the plots repetitive, the special effects nonexistent. Yet even now, as my relatively-adult brain registers the opening strains of the main theme (the greatest part of the show), I'm struck by not just nostalgia, but also respect. This show was a crucial part of my childhood. Some of the love still remains, even if I'm a tad more critical at age 21 than I was at age six.

It's the same with a lot of TV programs I watched as a kid; Digimon, Animorphs, Teen Titans...all of which I look upon in retrospect and feel a swell of fondness for the quality productions they were.

I still enjoy kids shows, as long as they're done well. I have not yet fallen down the rabbit hole that is Adventure Time, but I might be willing to give it a go. Because in the end, what  really defines a 'kid's show'? Colour? Simplicity? A lot of unnecessary yelling?

                                                             Dogs with mustaches? 

Sure, there are plenty of shows that I can no longer watch. But a sure way to tell which ones were truly great are those for whom your loyalty never really dies. Adult society might tell me that Big Brother and American Idol are proper shows for grown-up people, but a cursory glance will tell you otherwise. The themes of some of the shows I watched as a child were more mature than most mature programming. The morals are certainly more beneficial.

And so I salute you, Power Rangers. Your spandex was hideous, your monsters piecemeal, your acting abysmal. But you, and so many other TV programs, taught me about friendship, teamwork, and the value in not taking yourself too seriously. And these are lessons I shall never forget.

Meanwhile, what do you learn from Big Brother?
Being an awful human being = popularity?

Ha. Checkmate, maturity.

Kids These Days...

So, iOS7 has been released. I can proudly declare that, after a moment of thought, I know what it stands for. And...that's about it.
I know that it makes my phone's screen fade in and out in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. It makes my apps fly in and out like Yoda tanked up on Red Bull. Some things are different colours, some are different shapes, and iTunes is now even more of a pain to use than before.
But as for what it actually does for my phone's inner workings, I wouldn't have the foggiest. Soak it in Apple tech-juices? Something to do with nanotechnology? Reversed the polarity of the neutron flow??
Oh, how little we know about our world.

I'm not really what you'd consider to be a tech-head. Sure, I know my way around an iPhone, can solve most computer problems experienced by over-40s and I don't enter panic-mode when confronted with HTML, but by the standards of my generation, I'm not a technical whiz. What I do have is a curiosity regarding how things work.

I often imagine I'm explaining technology to a person from the middle-ages. Obviously time-travel shenanigans have ensued, and this very confused squire is wondering exactly how cars work.

"Simple!" I say, with a short burst of laughter that suggests I'm watching a kitten trying to inflict bodily harm upon its own reflection. "They have something inside them called an engine that drives the car along."
"But how does the engine work?" the squire replies.
The laughter dies on my lips. I hurriedly move on to an explanation of why he should never, ever, ever take YouTube comments seriously.

After all, cars are commonplace. There has never been a time, and there has rarely been a day in my life, that I have not traveled inside them. Yet I open the hood of my own automobile and it's like I'm staring into a warp-drive from Star Trek. Apart from making me feel thoroughly devoid of masculinity (as if the Star Trek metaphor didn't accomplish that already), I'm struck by how little I know about cars. Y'know, those things that are absolutely everywhere that we rely upon every single day.

The squire, who has not yet done me the decency of either tumbling back into the vortex that will take him home or having a shower, asks how my phone works.

"Simple," I reply, sipping my tea with an imperious air. "Electricity."
The squire frowns.
"Is that some form of dark sorcery?"
The mug freezes halfway to my lips. I think for a moment and realise that I have no better explanation.
"Yes," I say, warily nodding. "Sorcery indeed."

Then he'd teach me the motion to ward off the evil eye, and I'd teach him the fist bump.

But our hypothetical squire raises a valid point, and that's that we often don't have the slightest clue how the world around us functions. We are adept at taking technology for granted, as if it were handed down to us one day by the gods of Olympus as our eternal right.

Who here knows how a toaster works beyond 'it heats up'? How does a bulb produce light? Why have projectors and printers worldwide taken it upon themselves to be the bane of mankind?

Few people know, and even then it's mostly because it's their livelihood to know. So does this make us a race of ignorant, ungrateful toddlers who demand gadgets and do nothing but stomp our feet when they fail?

Well, not exactly. If you're reading this, and you're a human person (congratulations?), you have only a finite number of years to live. We can't possibly understand our entire world- there's just too much stuff. And more of this proverbial stuff is created every day. Imagine trying to learn the full names of everyone in the world, including correct pronunciation. Not only is there too much to learn, but people are constantly being born, so the learning never ends (printers and projectors are French names in this analogy, because obviously).

Technology is the same. This planet is so complex and brimming with information that one lifetime simply isn't enough to learn all of it. It's folly to even try.
And that's why it's okay to take technology for granted. Knowing that will allow you to bear the scorn of IT professionals who think their knowledge of SEO makes them somehow superior to other humans (just ask them how many pull-ups they can do. That usually shuts them up).

It's a big, scary, wonderful, incandescent, indescribable, mysterious, adjective-filled world, and you won't so much as find knowledge as it will smack you in the face. Especially if you're a frequent visitor to Wikipedia.

There's no grand moral to this tale, except perhaps that you can rest easy knowing that lots of intelligent people in white coats are working around the clock to bring you a USB with even more storage space.

No, that's a terrible moral.

Beware of gaps in the fabric of time?
People from the middle ages lacked a proper understanding of dental hygiene?
Have you tried turning it on and off??

Take your pick from any of those.
I might go and see if I can fix the wifi with some medieval curse words.

Reflections of Reflections

Lefou, I'm afraid I've been thinking. A dangerous pastime, I know.
(I'm not even going to aplogise for opening with a Disney quote. You can't make me.)

But it's true- I think a lot. And so, I assume, does everyone else. They keyword there is 'assume'. Because Professor X is a fictional character and Uri Geller is an idiot, humans have never been able to read each other's minds.
I should say at this point that is an extremely good thing, in my opinion. Fiction (such as the aforementioned Professor Xavier) likes to present mind-reading as a rather trite, clean-cut affair. The user will frown, place two fingers to their temple (to...massage the psychic juices? Bonus points if they use BOTH hands) and suddenly the audible, perfectly formed sentences of the target's mind shall unveil themselves. Then the guy with the laser eyes will blow something up so the kids don't get bored. But can you imagine actually reading a mind? If the average person's mental processes are anything like mine, the result will be less coherent information and more like:
DIDIBRUSHMYTEETHTHISMORNINGTHATDOGISSOCUTE*THEME FROM ANIMORPHS*HANGONTHEREARETWOWEEKSLEFTTILLIHAVETOHANDINTHATASSIGNMENTOMYGOODNESSIDIDN'TLOCKTHECARDOORIFDINOSAURSSTILLEXISTEDIWOULDRIDEONETOWORKIWONDERWHATDOGFOODTASTESLIKE*THEME FROM SOME ANIME*DOCATSHAVEDREAMSICAN'TBELIEVEIT'SNOTBUTTEROOHANOTHERPUPPY*INCESSANT K-POP*

Sorry, professor. You now have an aneurysm.

Getting back on topic, until we invent some clever, technological method of rendering a person's thoughts in some kind of tangible, comprehensible form, they remain our most private possessions. And this means that our understanding of other people will always rely on empathy.

Often I find myself performing a mundane task and wondering if I might have been doing it wrong my entire life. How did I learn to butter toast? By observation, but it's been a while since I keenly paid attention to someone else's procedure. For all I know, there is a socially acceptable way to spread butter that I am entirely unaware of, and for years I have been spreading in utterly the wrong way, and I will soon be hunted down and made to pay for my crimes of butter wastage by the Supreme Council of Effective Dairy Usage, which probably exists only for the purposes of this analogy but may, in fact, be a thing.

I feel like I'm off-topic again.

So we can never know another person fully. We often go about our lives under a number of assumptions, but if these are ever examined, we would find that many opinions we believe to be common are actually exclusive to us.

Everyone hated Harry Potter 7 Part II, right? Well, actually, it was beloved by all. I hated it, for reasons I have been able to make abundantly clear to my friends (did you see Voldemort and Draco's hug? Did you actually see it??) but in this matter, I know I'm truly alone.
How is it that we can differ in opinion so radically? Does this make each of us fundamentally different as humans, to the point where it's a wonder we can even pretend to understand one another? Does Ralph Fiennes even know what a real hug looks like??

Okay, back up. To answer that last question first, no. He does not. You ruined the concept of hugs for me, Ralph Fiennes, and you should be ashamed.

As for whether we're so fundamentally different...well, depends on the depth. Culture is a huge factor. I have a lot of friends from various parts of Asia, and while this may be partly due to my general introversion, I've always found a cultural block that prevents our friendship going past a certain point. We were raised to think differently, and that's a difficult thing to change.
But as humans, it's a different story. In the end, we all want the same things: to be valued, to be part of a group, and to be needed. We want to be respected, we need companionship (some more than others...) and we simply want to feel loved. We also occasionally want to see videos of cats doing stupid things, and I include this for the reason that I have not yet met an exception.

So what it boils down to is this: we can't fully understand our fellow man's thoughts. We won't all hold the same opinions, we can't all come to the same conclusions, and we can never expect people to simply 'see things our way'. But what really matters in the end is that we know this. That's what empathy really is; not understanding a person's inner workings, but simply knowing that we are all different and bearing that in mind when dealing with your fellow humans. We can make an effort to put ourselves in other people's shoes, certainly, but the first and most important step is knowing that those shoes are almost definitely a different size, shape and brand to yours. And the laces won't be done up quite the same way.

I'm going to finish this metaphor before it becomes as awkward as one of Ralph Fiennes' hugs.
That's pretty awkward.

Is Anyone Surprised?

So you might have heard, but Australia has a new prime minister.
Hey.
OI.
GET BACK HERE.

No, this is not a political blog. I'm actually about as non-political as a person could possibly be. Somewhere, sometime during the election weekend, a very confused government worker unfurled a ballot slip to find my carefully worded explanation on why a monarchy would be so much simpler.
So no. No politics. I do not care for them.

But the significant thing about the election was the landslide victory that firmly ousted the Labor Party and saw the rise of innumerable Facebook groups whining about Tony Abbott that will inevitably become entirely redundant within days (he won the election. He is Prime Minister now. Your vigorous clicking of the 'like' button won't change a thing. Kindly get over yourselves). It was almost a given that things would turn out the way they did. All the polls pointed to the same result. And so things happened as they were predicted. The Liberal Party won. Kevin gave a speech conceding defeat despite wearing an expression that suggested he'd just received definitive proof that both Santa Claus and unicorns were real (there is such thing as laying it on too thick, Mr Rudd).

In this and many other similar situations, it's often our hope that we'll be taken by surprise. Despite insurmountable odds, the underdog will pull through and score a shocking victory, cementing the event in the pages of history. We're certainly fed this image enough in fiction; our entire understanding of conflict is that the hero must be at a severe disadvantage, lest their story not be worth telling.

Remember that one film with the sports team? The one where they were the underdog, but they managed to set aside their differences and come from behind to score a tear-jerking, fist-pumping victory against a group of arrogant rivals?
Oh, right...that's every sport movie ever. People raved about Remember The Titans, otherwise known as 'that one film that you totally have to see' and 'omigosh you haven't seen Remember the Titans yet you TOTALLY have to see it because it will change your life', or sometimes 'you've seen it seven times well you need to watch it again because you REALLY get the message on the eighth watch'. I got a lot of recommendations for that one, is what I'm saying. But despite being based on real events, the stakes were wildly exaggerated. The real-life Titans breezed through their entire season and utterly destroyed the team they were facing in the finals. Which is nice for them, but not so much for Hollywood.
In real life, they were simply the better team, so they won. Barely scraping a dramatic victory outside of a movie means that you may not have been the best, but simply played better on the day.
NO, Hollywood barks, slamming its metaphorical fist against its metaphorical desk. DRAMA. EMOTION. INTERRACIAL COOPERATION. And that's what made them all the money. Well, that and Denzel Washington.

But real life is devoid of such surprises. It always is. Even fiction is predictable, in that we know that the good guys must triumph. Call me a cynical old man, but I believe that the world is a very, very predictable place. Elections, sporting matches and anything of the same ilk almost always have a transparent result. We even predict the weather with rapidly growing accuracy.
And sure, we'd love to see a blazing, glorious underdog triumph over adversity, but it never happens. The world's events play out as they should, because that is the way of things. If just once we were allowed to be surprised - genuinely surprised, in the sense that even the informed/educated were unable to predict- the world would cease to follow its own principles.

This realisation doesn't mean that my life has been deprived of all joy. After all, while every conclusion is a foregone conclusion, I can't see the future. I don't have all the answers, nor does anyone else, so surprises are still par for course in life.
It does mean that I don't hang out for the impossible, or waste time wishing for an unlikely resolution. So when everyone is reeling from an utterly expected development, I can simply shrug. Because despite being inhabited by unpredictable people, the world is still a predictable place, and that's something that physically cannot change.

Although I should mention that anyone who says they can predict Melbourne weather is lying. That is something no man shall ever accomplish.

Culture Clashes

Culture is weird.

No one knows how it started. A bunch of nomads hiking around in the desert thousands of years ago didn't just decide to invent culture because they were tired of living in tents and wanted to speed up the invention of board games. Culture permeates everything, from music, to status, to the proper etiquette regarding moist towelettes (a complex, layered process).

Despite all this, people STILL don't have a clue how it works. We all follow a set of nonsensical, unwritten rules that seem designed by a cruel mastermind in order to confuse us and cause us emotional turmoil when it comes to tipping the taxi driver.

Case in point: the happy birthday song. You know exactly the one I mean, don't play that game. Chances are you've heard it hundreds of times in your life. Muttered your way through its lyrics as you eye the delicious culinary creation that has for some reason been set on fire to celebrate the anniversary of birth. A set number of times you will have borne the weight of having it sung to you, your name inexplicably slotting perfectly into the song's third line as if it were penned for that very occasion (unless your name has anything other than two syllables, in which case you're in strife. Heaven forbid your title contain only a single syllable, thus forcing the assembled well-wishers to perform an awkward feat of elongation. Thanks for ruining the party, Mr Monosyllabic.)

My point? No one likes the happy birthday song. No one person is even vaguely fond of it. It is arduous and childish to sing. It is embarrassing and cringe-worthy to have it sung to you.

Part of this derives from the song itself; in case you hadn't noticed, three of its four lines are identical. Including the substituted name, the entire composition is comprised of six words. The melody is grating. Its chances on the iTunes charts, were it introduced today, would be nonexistent.

And then there's the context. Despite the inherent silliness of it all, the happy birthday song is not limited to children's parties. People all across the Western world are compelled to belt out its crude lyrics as if fearful of offending the vengeful god of birthdays, blissfully ignorant of the fact that their misplaced devotion is causing anguish of the highest degree. Having the song sung to you is nothing less than torment for most. To have your family do so is bad enough. Enduring it at a party leaves the average person with a savage desire to see the furniture set ablaze, purely to divert the attention. 

And then comes the birthday-ocalypse. The shameful scenario to rule them all. The restaurant.

If you haven't forcefully torn the memory from the chasms of your mind, the scene probably looked something like this.

The meal was finished. It had been wonderful. Let's say it was honey chicken, doused in vinegar with a side order of sweet potato fries, and a wine glass of vanilla milkshake, because it is both my birthday and my imaginary scenario and I'll eat whatever I like. You were pleasantly full, possibly even anticipating dessert. The latest Michael Buble song drifts through the speakers, because restaurants and contemporary jazz have a bizarre, almost symbiotic relationship that defies science. But still, a twinge of doubt tugged at the corner of your consciousness. A whisper had been passed to the waitress. Inexplicable smirks appeared on the faces of your companions, only to vanish like the morning mist moments later. 
You'd seen it happen to other poor souls, of course. You'd never imagined you yourself would become a victim. You may have even begun to rise, signalling that the night's revelries were to be relocated to a more private venue. Then you saw it. A cake, borne aloft on a doom-laden plate. It was a plate of doom. The plate's inherent evil shall be discussed another time. 
It drew ever closer. It was as the accursed cake was placed on the table, the light from the flickering candles illuminating the abject horror in your eyes, when it began. Those who had once been your friends were singing happy birthday. The entire restaurant turned to watch as Michael Buble's crooning was drowned out by the song which named you as the object of shame. The sweet honey taste turned to ash in your mouth. And then, as quickly as it had begun, though to you it had seemed an age, the song ended. Possibly, there was scattered applause from particularly vindictive onlookers before they returned to their garlic prawns. And when all was said and done, you looked down at your slice of cake and knew that all you would taste was cold, bitter shame.

I can't help but feel like Western culture dropped the ball on this one.
The simple fact that anyone must in any way participate in the happy birthday song beyond the age of eight stands as a testament to how a sliver of culture - despite being comprised of 98% puerility- can become so embedded it transcends criticism. It may be universally hated, but traditions dictates that we don't notice. We carry out our robotic compulsion upon the anniversary of every birth and go about our business, willfully forgetting what an unpleasant experience the song was for everyone. 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you mass-produce ignorance.
Don't even get me started on 'hip-hip hooray'.

(and thus ends my blog post on the subject of ridiculous Birthday traditions. That's what the title says, right?)

The Perils of Being an Author

No one knows what it's like to be a writer.
We are simultaneously exalted and repressed breed, thrust into the limelight only to be torn down when we do not meet impossible expectations.

Though it does kind of depend on what you write, I suppose.

Allow me to explain by way of analogy.

Imagine, if you will, a party. Soft jazz music wafts from the record player. The mood is casual, even lethargic. I'm there, wearing a red velvet dressing gown with a pipe tucked into the breast pocket, because this is my scenario and I can wear whatever I like. The laughter still hangs in the air from a stunningly witty-yet-inoffensive joke I have told only moments earlier. The joke has revealed that I am a writer of novels. Then someone has to go and ask the question.
"So, Stuart," she says, swilling her lemonade in lazy, concentric circles. "What are your novels about?"
My smile becomes as fixed as if I were a graven image. The ground is woefully unresponsive to my silent petitions to open up and swallow me whole (on second thoughts, I'd prefer it if the asker of the question was swallowed whole. Then I'd survive and the distraction of the earthquake would leave the query forgotten).

Of course, none of this would be a problem if I wrote literary fiction. Fiction for intellectual, mature people. Then I would simply sigh and launch into my explanation: "Well, it's really an examination of life through the eyes of the archetypal every-man. One day he simply begins to see the world in complete grey, as if his purpose has been lost. He starts engaging in spiritual quests that all fail, and eventually he has to reconcile with his own crushing reality."
Here I would pause, taking a sip of my wine glass filled with Mountain Dew whilst gazing thoughtfully at the ceiling.
"The ending isn't really resolved...maybe I'm still waiting to see how his story ends myself."
Or some such tripe.
"Oh, how scintillating and simply thrilling!" one of the ladies in my conversation circle would trill, because apparently this is one of those 1920s role-play parties that are so popular nowadays. Whispers would ripple through the group as they struggle to fathom how such a humble, deep-thinking person such as myself is still single.

But I do not write literary fiction. I write books about super-powered police who fight monsters. There are explosions and swords, and most of the main characters are teenagers.
So when the question is asked, I am reduced to mumbling something that implies they wouldn't be interested. This never works. So I give my stock response of 'it's about a supernatural police force'. Their smiles become fixed. The conversation drifts. Whispers ripple through the group as they confirm their opinions that this is why I'm single.

Because as soon as you're revealed to write anything other than literary fiction, and (gasp!) you are not yet published, you are instantly relegated to the status of a teenage girl banging out Twilight fanfics then spamming her Myspace friends with review requests.

No one understands the hours you pour into writing, the weeks, months and years you spend making your work perfect, the formatting, the cutting, and then the agonizing, soul-crushing slog of sending out your manuscript to agencies only to have it rejected, accompanied by a letter that suggests they barely glanced at your submission.

Even worse, no one can comprehend the depth of your 'fictional' world, the sleep lost as you design your characters to their tiniest details, how you bond with them as you would with children, and friends. People who are not writers of fiction haven't experienced truly losing yourself in a world of your own creation that lives and breathes and consumes your every waking moment. They haven't felt the rush of writing a climactic confrontation, the shock as you write a plot twist that you yourself weren't aware of until you typed  the words, or the elation and relief that comes with concluding your story after the journey of a lifetime.

So say what you like about my childish hobby. Swish your lemonade and sneer at my dressing gown. All I have to do is close my eyes, and I'm in a different world. A world that is one-hundred-percent real, and without boundaries.

And for the record, no one can drink Mountain Dew out of a wineglass and make it look as classy as I do.

A Blog of One-Thousand Posts...

Well, it's finally happened.
I sincerely apologise for any instances of the stars exploding, the sun going dark (before it explodes, of course), earthquakes sinking all major cities and Lady Gaga being named ambassador of the United Nations. These are all cataclysms that I've come to believe would occur if I ever started a blog. Looking out the window, all seems calm. I'll just keep typing and see how things go.

I've always believed that blogs were for a certain demographic. I'l be blunt: that demographic was people who owned cats. People who owned cats and wished to let the whole world (that is, their circle of cat-owning online friends) know of their pet's wacky antics. I viewed blogs as a haven for cat-lovers worldwide to create posts lamenting their lack of acceptance in society, possibly because they owned too many cats.
There may also have been something about food.

Don't get me wrong: cats and food are great. Cat food isn't great, and cats as food is not even worth considering. But I'd always thought blogs were for the slightly aging demographic who had realised that ranting about current affairs online gave them a wider audience than if they did so verbally at the bus stop.

And yet here I am, twenty-one years of age, actually regretting that I haven't started one sooner. For one thing, I have so many creative ideas that my brain is in constant danger of shutdown. The last time that happened I managed to unload its contents into a five-part novel series before critical system failure. Next time I might not be so fortunate. Also, if I ever need to show anyone an example of my writing for any reason, I'd imagine a blog is slightly more convenient than dumping a 70,000 word young-adult action-adventure novel on their desk and waltzing out of their office with a cheery wave, never to return.
It's also healthier for the rainforest (are we still trying to save the rainforest? Is that still a thing? Or have we moved on to Kony?).

So here I am. Blogging. And not a single cat in sight. I do have a red and purple dinosaur, but more on that later. For now, I am Stuart John Alun (pronounced Ah-lin) McNabb: Youtuber, writer, dreamer, chocoholic, tea-enthusiast, retail assistant, uni student, die-hard patriot, Christian, flautist and probably a number of other arbitrary terms that would make this list far too long.

Welcome to my blog, where my insatiable creativity is allowed to run wild.

What fun we shall have.