I wouldn’t classify the Final Destination movies as great. They decidedly are not.

However, what I appreciate about them is that they focus on the implacability of death and even better that they are horror movies with no monster, no identified embodied antagonist and no one is ever sure if they’ve won — and know for sure in the long term they definitely have not.

The conceit is very clever, and the execution of some of the set pieces when death finds those who have cheated it are pretty darn genius.

Having no monster, nothing to fight except the world and the Moirai themselves — that makes the films completely sui generis. And breaking the pattern of those daughters of necessity means only that the doom jumps to someone else, just as in our everyday lives, just as if we cheat death we’ve only made sure we get to watch someone else precede us there. What sort of demented Boschian vulgarian thought of this? Of course, am I talking about the films or the world?

Yes. That is what makes them brilliant.

I killed a roach once with a cavalry sword.

Was in Florida and I am a Floridian, so I had to do Florida things. The environment requires — nay, demands it.

I had the sword in my hand already and the roach with great temerity crawled across the carpet in front of me.

What else was I supposed to do, huh? Tell me that.

Here’s what Stranger Things is about.

It’s about the nearly-complete loss of freedom in our modern “voluntary” panopticon.

This is something I’d been pondering before ST — that is, how the 1980s represented maximum technologically-boosted freedom before it transitioned to our current liberty-stifling all-surveilling all-consuming data-gathering dystopia.

You had cable or satellite but no one monitored what you watched – it was not technically possible, especially en masse. You had walkie-talkies but no one cared to or much monitored them either. You could still ride your bike — even as a kid — and no one attempted to arrest you or your parents. There was no Stingray, no mobile license plate readers, no ad tracking, no Google search history, no black boxes in cars, no constantly-tracked cellphones, no crypto locker and no damn Cortana.

Eleven of course represents the embodied loss of that freedom as she is abducted literally from her mother’s womb and lacks the de facto ability even to control the use of her own mind, not coincidentally much like our current situation where omnipresent surveillance and electronic confinement literally affects how we think. She becomes the tool of the system, beneficial even only to the co-protagonists for the most part when she is being exploited for her ability to do stranger and stranger things to their foes. Her presence and her often-unintentional path of destruction represents the invasion of the modern super-surveillance normalized paradigm into a time of maximal personal freedom.

Like us, then, she is both the system and exploited by the system and — the brilliant part of the show — that she is like us so enmeshed in this arrangement that even the tools she uses to fight it and how she understands it are all available only in the terms she already knows. Thus, despite her best efforts, she is still in fighting back only reinforcing the walls of her penitentiary.

But can you blame her? She’s only twelve years old.

What’s our excuse?

Both my partner and I requested to be registered to vote in NC when we got our driver licenses.

I checked online tonight and neither of us are registered in any county in NC.

Some more shenanigans, I assume. I registered as an independent and she almost certainly didn’t register as a Republican, so I’m guessing that’d be the reason.

That it happened to both of us and at different times indicates not a clerical error.

Not surprised, just reporting.

It takes a long languid time to think deeply. Sometimes I spend years pondering ideas and their implications. Scholars do this too, of course, but less so than in the past. They just can’t, and also do all the work of getting grants while constantly churning out pubs.

Our entire society in reality militates against this sort of extended thinking. The in itself partially explains the slowdown of interesting ideas — not just the “low-hanging fruit” hypothesis.

I watched the first episode of the Gilmore Girls. Mostly, I liked it.

Felt really uneven, though, but shows often feel that way in their first few episodes. I appreciated greatly the “master shot” filming style. Dammit, I want to watch the characters not meta-watch the camera jumping around like it’s doing a fucking Hopak.

It’s easier for me to get into a show that features mostly women rather then men. I just identify with women more. That alone I already knew made me more likely to enjoy the show. And Rory is bookish like me, and in an authentically-presented way that TV shows almost never portray.

About its choppy jaggedness, it’s as if in the first episode it can’t decide if it wants to be a sitcom or something more. And perhaps the creator didn’t know the answer to the question at the time. If it does metamorphose into a sitcom (which I don’t expect), I won’t continue to watch it.

Rory and Lorelei and the people in the town portrayed are really nothing like me at all, but are drawn with some care and some magnanimity toward all the flaws and ridiculousness of being human, and that goes a long way.

I will keep watching.

By the way, the media is greatly over-reporting the relatively-small #NeverTrump movement and completely ignoring the much larger fractures in the Democratic party.

This is not surprising — Bernie was a much larger real threat to the rich (who control the media) than Trump is or ever will be. Anything that can be done to minimize him while was in the running and diminish his movement now that he’s out is exactly what will be done.

It’s not some conspiracy; no more than it was some sort of conspiracy to give Trump outsized coverage during the primaries.

But it is happening and in many ways Hillary Clinton is just as clueless as Trump as she has no idea what’s happening in her own party and why. Trump at least understands that about his party.