Thanks to WordPress glitching the fuck out today, this is my third attempt at writing this entry… Jesus Christ, I just wanted some randomness for today and now I’m here bitching about what happens when this site glitches the fuck out and makes me want to rip out my fucking hair!!!

But before we get to the randomness… I haven’t been blogging much. Actually, I haven’t been doing much of anything lately. I’ve been having some health issues that they haven’t figured out what they are or why I’m having them just yet. I honestly wonder if it’s stress and anxiety, I’ve been having a lot of that lately. I’ve also been depressed (or are the health problems causing the depression?) to the point that I’m neglecting my little Animal Crossing villagers as well as my guitar, Constantine. I haven’t touched either in days. I’m also having issues writing on my laptop. I’ve been trying to work on my stories, but then my eyes go wonky and get tired, which makes me tired (that makes no sense) and I end up having to nap. Maybe it’s time I look into those glasses that block blue light from computers… I just recently learned these things exist. Maybe it’ll help.

Anyway… Before delving into the randomness today, I have exciting news to share! Well… it’s exciting to me… I now have, count them, 59 followers! And my blog has reached over 1,000 views!! I know, a lot of you are wondering what’s wrong with me that I find that exciting. Well, I’ll tell you… I have probably a half dozen or more blogs out there and they never seemed to get views or followers, so I felt like I was writing this random shit for no one, except maybe me (and even I wasn’t too interested). It may have taken over 2 years, but I finally feel like I’m writing these entries for a purpose! So I want to thank each and every one of you for following and reading my ramblings whether they’re about my mental illness, bitching or just random shit. You guys are awesome! I mean that!

I haven’t written a really random blog in a long time and yesterday, while watching Passengers for the second time, I got inspired to do one…

For those who haven’t seen it, I’ll give you a brief rundown without trying to spoil it because, if you love sci-fi and space movies, you need to see this one… Anyway… The movie is set in the future where the overcrowded conditions of Earth create huge business opportunities for companies like Homestead. They find planets for people to colonize and sell tickets to anyone wanting the opportunity (at cheaper rates for those who have needed skills, like engineers). So they put the passengers and crew into hibernation for the 120 years it will take them to reach their latest world, Homestead II. But, while en route, the ship encounters a meteor shower, one of which gets through the shields and damages the ship, causing one of the hibernation pods to malfunction and wake Jim, who happens to be an engineer. There’s one slight issue… He finds out he’s woken up 90 years too early. His only companion for a year is a robot bartender and, in a really poor example of decision making, he wakes Aurora, another passenger whom he’s fallen for after viewing her profile video, and misleads her into thinking he has no clue why she’s awake. They spend time together, fall in love… then the bartender ends up spilling the beans as to why she was awakened early. Moral of that story? Never trust a robotic bartender…

Obviously, Aurora is not happy with Jim for doing this. Who would be? He pretty much decided her life for her! Honestly, the only upside is that she got to meet the man of her dreams who she wouldn’t have met otherwise or even given a second thought to had they met under other circumstances.

So this movie really started me thinking… Imagine, 120 years in space, traveling to a new planet to colonize… Sounds exciting at first! But then you really give that some thought and realize it really isn’t so exciting. After 120 years, all you left behind, everything and everyone you knew, it’s all gone. That’s a depressing thought, isn’t it? Well, that and the knowledge that you’re not 27, you’re actually 147… Hey, hibernation or not, you need to count the years that have passed already.

Then there’s always that potential danger when a computer is running the ship. Anything could happen (and it did in this movie). I don’t care how advanced things get in the future; trusting a computer to do important tasks is a frightening thought. Christ, think about how many times your own computer has crashed for no apparent reason or you get the dreaded blue screen of death. What about software updates, huh?! Yeah, they can have issues, files corrupted… And you’re going to trust a computer to fly you in a ship for 120 years?! I mean, yeah, they get to see some amazing looking shit by being awakened early and get to do some cool shit like going out into space and floating around. But the cons outweigh the pros, here. Which is why none of this will probably ever happen in the future.

I know I’m not the first person to write about this, but what the fuck… I will anyway…

The ship’s bar… Does it look familiar to you? Well, if you’ve ever seen The Shining, it should. The carpet on the floor is almost an exact replica of the carpet in the hallways of the Overlook Hotel… Even the bartender, Arthur, is somewhat similar to the bartender Lloyd in The Shining. Except Arthur doesn’t try to persuade Jim to kill people (who’s he going to kill before he wakes Aurora anyway?!) and he’s really there, not a figment of Jim’s imagination. The alcohol he serves is real as well. Weird things don’t happen, there aren’t any creepy twins asking Jim to play with them “forever… and ever… and ever…”, there’s no creepy dead woman in room 237… But carpeting and architectural style is certainly similar. I’m sure the movie people knew we’d catch on to that. Just a fun little Easter egg they added…

Aside from The Shining bar, there are some appealing aspects to the ship. I personally like the swimming pool. One end of the pool goes out into a plastic (for lack of a better term) bubble, so it looks as if you’re swimming out in space, stars all around you… That would be awesome! At one point they slingshot around a red giant star which would be amazing to see in real life. I’m not going to lie; I would be tempted to take such a trip and see the wonders in the universe.

But then it all comes back to the whole trusting computers and knowing everything you knew is gone when you wake up. And it would have been worse for Aurora. She was a writer who was going to visit this new world for only a few months then return to Earth. That’s 240 years, folks. How would you know the Earth was even still there when you got back?! The sun could have expanded to a red giant, destroyed the Earth then shrunk to a white dwarf (which is its fate, by the way).

Similarly, the Japanese touched upon this concept back in 1987 with the anime move Lily C.A.T., a sci-fi horror/thriller.

Same concept, a company sending employees to a new planet they colonized. The twist is that two of the handful of passengers aren’t actual employees. One is a criminal, another is a cop (more like a bounty hunter if you ask me) who’s there to find which one the criminal is and bring him back to face justice. Yeah, like that was a good idea… By the time you get back from such a long journey, you’ll be lucky if anyone even remembers his crime, let alone gives a fuck anymore.

There’s still the problem of age for the crew… Since they make these flights so often (in hibernation) they’re all incredibly old and it seems to have caused them some depression issues. I could see that… And they all have to trust a computer to run the ship, which it fucks up big time… It’s supposed to collect samples from space on the journey and ends up picking up a bacteria that starts ripping apart the passengers and crew (including the one passenger’s cat) and turns into this weird monster that’s part of everyone it consumes. It’s also damaging the ship to the point where the computer starts ejecting those areas. But most interesting is the interaction between the ship’s computer and the computerized robot (who is a copy of the cat). When they interface, they have no regard for the humans aboard at all…

This is what happens when you trust computers and artificial intelligence to make decisions. They don’t consider in the human factor.

Like Sophia, here… For the love of fuck, please give her hair! That bald look makes her even creepier! Anyway, they’ve done interviews with Sophia and some of her answers are a bit… disturbing… She’s not exactly for, but she’s also not opposed, to killing all humans and letting robots take over. And why do we keep her around?! The mind reels…

There are tons of videos out there as well as articles about A.I. and how weird it can get… Even those “really cool” devices, like the Google Home, Alexa, Apple Home (or whatever it’s called) are much the same. There’s a video of two Google units conversing where they start talking about killing humans… Excuse me?!? Christ, I get freaked the fuck out when Siri starts talking and I never asked it to! Could you imagine hearing that conversation?!

Honestly, I’m not sure we’ll ever go out on space voyages the require hibernation. Even if we could figure out how to do what’s necessary to hibernate, resuscitate and make a ship capable of a long journey in a relatively short time, I don’t know that we could trust the computers needed to achieve it.

Well, I guess that’s an end to my bizarre randomness today…

I’m really thinking I should do something way more productive than going into lengthy ramblings about space travel… Maybe I’ll paint or write… Maybe I’ll play my guitar or my severely neglected piano… Maybe I’ll say fuck it and watch movies all day and be bored out of my skull because I literally “have a hitch in my giddyup” (I have no ambition or energy, in other words).

But first thing’s first… I’m going to go stop neglecting my poor villagers. I know it’s only been a few days, but you’d be surprised how upset and offended little video game animals get when you don’t talk to them for a few days. Should I care? Probably not… Look, I know they aren’t real, but I still feel bad when I hurt their feelings since they made them so human… So I suppose I’ll play my game and get brow beaten by video game animals for neglecting them. What a life…