Fairy Tale Spotlight: Action vs Reaction

Who are you? Are you human? Are you bothering? Are you becoming all that you can be? There is a difference between the concept of acting and the concept of reacting.

Reacting is a product of instinct. Instinct is what dumb animals rely on. Animals never act. They only react. Do you bother? Do you actually try to figure things out, or do you cower away because you are living your life only to check off boxes? Who made these boxes? Did someone else do it? Did you? Did you create your own hell? Are you even here anymore? If you have already stopped caring, then perhaps not.

Do you act? Do you explore? Are you prepared to fail again and again? Are you prepared to try even after failing? Do you bother even though it didn't work out before? If you do, then you are acting. If you learned your lesson and don't bother anymore, you are reacting.

Reactionists rely only on their instincts and a state of reactionary learning. Fire bad. Don't touch. Doing this hurt my feelings. Don't bother. Ouch. Run away. No real thought here. It's just caveman reactions. It's pretty much how a dog learns to behave. Negative reinforcement. It's a good way to keep people in line. People can become paranoid after a number of negative incidents. They base their actions purely around those memories. They build their box and sit on it. No more risks. No try. Cynicism.

Actors are wild and full of energy. The cause pain and suffering wherever they go, but they are not always hated for it. They smash every wall and break every barrier. People cry. People scream. People hate them for ruining this perfect world that had been prepared for them. Actors are cruel people... at least they are seen as such. But the truth is... we look up to them while we are yelling at them to end the suffering. We can't help it. Their far too noticeable. And sometimes... we vote for them. We make them our leaders... and love them.

Actors hurt others, but the pain let's us know we are alive. I ask for it. I want it. I prefer the actor to the reactor. Reactors are pointless. Their just animals. I'd rather someone show up and tear this world apart if it means that freedom and justice ultimately prevail.

Thank you for reading my blog! Did you enjoy it? Either way, you can comment below, or you can email me at tkwadeauthor@gmail.com. You can also visit my website at www.tkwade.com. Check out my books! Thanks!

Fairy Tale Spotlight: Energy, Killing, and Death

In a previous blog, I talked about the potential energy of human beings. I want to dive back into the subject for a little bit. Only this time we will talk about energy and how it relates to death.

Upon conception, human beings contain a certain amount of energy. There is energy being used, and there is energy on standby. The standby energy is known as potential energy. I once likened it to a rubber band being pulled taut, which I still think is a very apt analogy. The unborn, babies, and children likely have the most potential energy of all when you consider how far a human being can go. If we did not have any potential energy, we'd spend our entire lives a vegetable.

Energy itself is the ability to do work. And humans can do quite a bit of work in groups as well as individuals. We sap from our energy pool as we work through the day, but the potential energy tends to remain full. I mean... it has to otherwise we'd never peak at the highest point of that journey called life. We'd never win any wars or go to the moon without letting that rubber band slack a little. And the best people who have lived on this earth didn't lose their potential energy until the moment of their death, at which point the rubber band gets cut.

A man or woman spending their entire life doing amazing things tends to have quite a bit of potential energy upon their death. People who spent their lives doing very little tend to have their rubber band slack a lot. At the moment of their death, there isn't much of a snap. It really depends on how they lived their lives.

This is where we get to the young and innocent. The unborn, infant, and child is really just a powerhouse of potential. They haven't had a chance to face cynicism yet. They have yet to make their life's decisions. The rubber band is pulled all the way back. So when they die, the snap is pretty powerful, and on top of that, the bands are pretty fragile to begin with. The reason for this is that, at a young age, children need to be protected until they can become self sustaining. Although horrible, it is rather easy to murder a child and snap the rubber band. All the potential energy is released in one go.

Now, what's all this about? Why is the release of energy upon death so important. Should you care? Sure! It's important to everybody, good and evil. When a man who has spent his entire life doing amazing things--a hero, if you will--the release of his potential energy gets released into the people his actions have touched by way of inspiration. If his death was a murder, it can become a martyrdom. His energy discharges quite powerfully into many people in a surprisingly equivalent way. It is likened to an explosion that can transcend time. It always tapers off unless the source of energy comes from a higher power.

When a child is either killed or dies of natural causes, there is a powerful snap and release of energy. If the act was caused, the energy is forced into the one causing the death. Satanists love the killing of the unborn and children because it provides them with a good source of energy which gives them power. Since Satanists are usually hedonists, the energy is often wasted on stupid stuff which is why they usually need to keep these rituals up as often as possible.

One really clever trick is convincing mothers to kill their own children or unborn. The resulting energy burst does not, in this case, go to the mothers, but to the ones who convinced them to do it. At the very heart of it, this is a form of potential energy farming. These killings are all tragic and horrible, but the real point of it is the harvesting of energy. Human beings become nothing but a collection of numbers, which is already how a lot of people think about themselves anyways.

And what about those people who died after not doing very much in their lives? What sort of potential energy snap occurs upon their death. Hate to say it but... not much. Pointless lives lead to pointless deaths. There is still energy released which will probably effect the direct relatives and/or friends of the deceased. It fizzles out fast and can sometimes just drift into the ether to be reused by the environment only.

Finally, the death of a human being is likened to a moment of completion. Everything they ever were in life gets summed up. The rubber band is measured and released to the appropriate people or to nobody at all. In this way are we, in physical terms, judged and our legacy carried through into immortality. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Everything we do carries over in one way or another, so we must be sure that our acts effect the world in the right way. And we must especially make sure that all of those acts are our own and not the suggestion of someone who should not be trusted. You only have a small time in this world. From the moment you realize who and what you are, you need to act. Otherwise, it was hardly worth having you here at all.

Thank you for reading my blog! Did you enjoy it? Either way, you can comment below, or you can email me at tkwadeauthor@gmail.com. You can also visit my website at www.tkwade.com. Check out my books! Thanks!

Fairy Tale Spotlight: Neoteny

By definition, the word "neoteny" means in basic terms that the juvenile features of someone, usually an animal, remains present as they become an adult. The term does really apply to animals, but it has since become something universal to all living forms, humans especially. And why not? It is something that can happen to humans.

Anybody remember the actor Buddy Hackett? [I'm a big fan, by the way.] Buddy Hackett is a benefactor of the concept known as neoteny. When he was born, he had a baby type face like we all did. Only he never lost it. Throughout his life, he looked like a baby, and that gave him his charm. When he makes a goofy face, it tends to be extra funny because of his own personal neoteny.

In this way, neoteny is a very good thing that worked well in the case of Buddy Hackett. But I do have a problem with it in modern animated films. This criticism goes especially well towards modern presentations of fairy tales such as Frozen and Brave. A lot of animation studios have been using forced neoteny to give grown adult characters baby faces as an artificial means to make them interesting, when in reality they may be far less interesting as you think.

The human mind is wired in such a way to care for things that are cute. We tend to treat adorable things with kid gloves, because to hurt them would hurt us. To see them hurt would hurt us as well. We are coded to protect these adorable, little creatures, and we just can't help ourselves. Without our specialized response to neoteny, we would probably end up dropping babies a lot more or leave them out in hot cars. No, instead, we go out of our way to protect children... and puppies... kittens... you get the idea.

Nearly every single animation studio out there are adding neoteny to their characters to assist you in caring about them. and my problem with this is that it was never needed before. I cared about Cinderella in Disney's original film, and she was almost flawless in human realism. Today, the idea is we can just give them baby faces and not worry too much about working on them as people. The plot can be a lot lighter. People see the big eyes and all the colors and hardly notice that there isn't really that much plot happening. I mean the plot can still be there and be important in some way, but nobody is really relating to any of it on a deep level.

Neoteny is presently being used to just artificially make characters endearing. It does work, but that doesn't make it right. At the end of the day, we will never really relate to any of these weird big-eyed creatures. It just comes across as a lazy way to string along viewers who aren't really there for substance anyways.

Can you imagine if you were reading a fairy tale and all the main characters were described as having huge eyes and tiny mouths? I'd question from what alien planet these humans were from. It isn't normal and it isn't necessary. Forced neoteny is a disaster. It's lazy as hell. Please stop this. Please just make humans look human again. That's all I ask. Maybe then your writing will actually be worth a damn because you won't have to fall back on all those big-eyed baby faces,

Thank you for reading my blog! Did you enjoy it? Either way, you can comment below, or you can email me at tkwadeauthor@gmail.com. You can also visit my website at www.tkwade.com. Check out my books! Thanks!

Fairy Tale Spotlight: Beastars

[Minor Spoilers]

I have been watching this anime on Netflix called Beastars. I very much adore this show for everything it tried to do. But I have been in a disagreement with a friend recently about it. I don't want to name any names, but I want to lay out my case here for why I consider this show to be a genuinely good series that is well worth your time. So this blog is more me just trying to make clear how I feel about the show than a simple review of it.

Beastars is a show featuring anthropomorphic animals in a private high school setting. Although the animals are clearly civilized, the writers chose to keep their feral instincts 120% intact. The crux of the story is about a tall and lanky wolf named Legoshi falling in love with a dwarf rabbit named Haru. It is an unnatural relationship, because the natural instinct of the wolf is to devour the rabbit and this is taken very seriously in the show. And even if this is true in Legoshi's case, there is something very interesting about him that changes everything: he is legitimately a wonderful person. And that's what makes this whole thing work... but not without incredible challenges.

But now we come to the criticisms of my friend. I want to lay them out the best that I can and then make my case.

The criticism was how the writing of the show was garbage. There is a moment later on in the show where a character who has never fought a day in his life suddenly fights with amazing skill as if he had been trained for years. And this particular character is known for being extremely passive and antisocial. The complaint was that the writers just had him fight good to simply shock the viewer and did not explain it in any rational way.

Where I agree that Japan is well known for being over the top most of the time, I put forward that this show was in absolutely no way forced in its presentation aside from the actual setting itself. It is my believe that my friend was comparing these clearly animal characters to humans far more than they deserved. Indeed, they lived human lives and did human things, but they were first and foremost instinct-based animals. Civility was only an afterthought.

So how in the world do docile characters with no training in their entire lives suddenly fight so well? How do animals in the wild fight? They were never trained even once. When animals in our world face an enemy, something just clicks. Pre-programmed information gets activated and all of the sudden they know exactly what to do and even fight quite well.

The way these animals fight in the show also seems to happen in a feral way. Claws come out. They use their teeth and go for the neck. It's all based on the way animals really fight. And there is a good chance that any of the same animals in the show would fight in a similar way because the instinctual programming would be the same for that animal. The writers were basing them not on humans but on the animals they were based on. All the instinct was there and was the predominant part of their nature, not their human likeness.

There is more I could go into, but I don't want to spoil things that happen between specific characters. But the point is that every single ounce of writing in this show is based on the fact that these characters have their feral animal natures completely intact. They are not human. They were never meant to be human. They are animals pretending to be us, and they can only keep up the charade for so long before their true nature switches on, and then who they really are will finally come out.

Beastars is a well-written, gritty, and honest show. It is well worth your time. I am very happy I watched it. I hope I made my case clearly.

Thank you for reading my blog! Did you enjoy it? Either way, you can comment below, or you can email me at tkwadeauthor@gmail.com. You can also visit my website at www.tkwade.com. Check out my books! Thanks!

Fairy Tale Spotlight: That Place

In some fairy tales and in a surprising number of more modern tales, I have noticed a theme about a place that's there but kind of not there. It goes by a lot of different names, but the concept is the same. These places are out of phase to our own reality and are usually there to entertain creatures that are not our kin. I'll name a few from popular fiction.

-In Twin Peaks, we have a place called the Black Lodge. It was a place just to the left of what we are able to perceive. To enter into this place was to become a part of it forever. It's a bit like having your soul trapped there. It is not a good place, and you don't want to find it.

-In the same series, there was the White Lodge. On every level, this seems to be the opposing point to the Black Lodge, yet this is still not a place you want to be. The creatures living there may be on the right side, but they are still not human. In a likewise fashion, entering into the White Lodge means you get trapped. Not good. Stay out.

-In the movie Star Trek: Generations, there was the Nexus. It was a place that existed outside of time. Because of its timelessness, simply entering into it would mean that you would be there for eternity. Apparently the Nexus goes out of its way to make you feel happy. It's artificial though. Nothing is real. Don't go in.

-In ancient fairy lore, we can find strange witches or hags that could carry their homes around with them. These homes can sometimes appear out of cold shadows. To enter into one of these cabins would be a mistake. You might not get out. Your soul might be forfeit. In some lore they are considered an actual part of the body of the hag. Going into one of these building could be likened to being devoured. Scary stuff.

-In the video game Death Stranding, this place comes in the form of a beach. It exists between two worlds. It is not a good place. The beach is covered in death. Likewise, if you happen to find yourself there, you will always be there. Stay away from the beach.

-In the woefully disappointing movie for Aeon Flux, there was a room that was out of phase with the rest of reality. Although this was accomplished with technology, that doesn't make it any less significant. It only makes me consider the possibilities of finding places like this that are not of our own making.

In all cases, these places are strange, uncanny, and seem disconnected from our realities. They create an uncanny valley, a sense that we are somewhere we don't belong. What's more... I think these places really exist in some ways. Pray that you do not find them. They are not meant for us.

Thank you for reading my blog! Did you enjoy it? Either way, you can comment below, or you can email me at tkwadeauthor@gmail.com. You can also visit my website at www.tkwade.com. Check out my books! Thanks!

Fairy Tale Spotlight: Receiver (Game Series)

The Receiver games are a lot of things to me. They mean different things to different people. Some people only partially like them. Others hate them outright. Many are offended. But there is no denying that something very important is happening when these two games are played.

The Receiver series are a collection of two PC-Only games. They are classified as First Person Shooters. However they are extremely nonstandard FPSs. Most FPS games give you a gun that occasionally needs to be reloaded, usually by pressing the "R" key. In the Receiver games, every conceivable action you would be able to take in real life, pertaining to the gun, is bound to a separate key on the keyboard.

What this means is that the act of reloading a gun involves pressing a large number of keys. Things often ignored in more mainstream FPSs are necessary to understand and enact in Receiver. For example, you have to manually push bullets into the magazine, but you have to holster the actual gun first so you have the free hand to do so. Guns holstered while the hammer is back and the safety is off could cause the gun to discharge into your foot if you don't take the proper precautions.

The game simulates these guns so flawlessly that, when a jam happens, it isn't because of a random programming script. It happens entirely because of the simulation. And you have to know what keys to press to fix those jams. There is even a key used to tap the magazine to get the bullet into the chamber in the case of a bad magazine spring.

The point of Receiver is so that you don't just hold and fire a gun. You have to form a relationship with that weapon inside and out. You have to respect it for the weapon that it is so that it will serve you best. It trains you, not only how to use a gun properly within a dangerous situation, but also how important calmness is when handing a firearm. And here we get into the story.

One of the reasons so many people hate the story of this game is because it boldly goes into how the main stream media hypnotizes people en mass. The game's story attempts to explain how people tend to get caught up in the forced narrative of the media and end up turning into pointless people with meaningless existences. Because the plot of the game tends to be thrown away as a right-winged conspiracy narrative, people tend to hate on it. But ironically, the story itself explains exactly why people feel they should hate on it. These people are perpetually asleep to reality, and any deviation from the narrative that they have been force fed should and will make them angry and ultimately turn away from it. The plot of this game is actually based on fact, and I admire the creator of the game for being bold enough to just say it outright.

In the game, you play as someone called a Receiver. You are trapped in a sort of limbo of repeating rooms and hallways while various mechanical devices such as gun turrets try and track you and kill you. You are tasked to find these cassette tapes strewn about that will assist you in "waking up." Once you have fully woken up, you will regain your independence as a human being and see the lies of the media for what they are.

But there are little "trap" tapes hidden about that you need to watch out for. These tapes unleash something simply called "the threat." Instead of explaining something that the Receiver needs to know, it will often break into some depressing or cynical narrative that is more likely to put you back to sleep. If this threat gains a foothold, you will be compelled to draw your weapon, turn it to your face, and pull the trigger.

If you think that the tape has a threat in it, you need to unload your weapon extremely fast. Which means you need to stay calm while you do it. And believe me, it can be very hard to do it quickly with some guns. Take the Single Action Army for example. The chamber doesn't even pop out for that gun. You have to carefully spin the chamber and pop every bullet out separately in a timely manner. Miss even one, and it might end up in your skull. This is why calmness is so important in the game. Moments like those demand it.

I entirely recommend this series, but I warn you that it is very hard at first. I was able to get the game working on a controller after painstakingly binding every necessary key to a button. It wasn't easy, but I did it. If you had to choose between the two games, go with Receiver 2. It is the killer app of the series. It's narrative is far clearer than the first which tended to lean towards extreme subtlety. The name of the game is stay calm and know your weapon. If you cannot do these two simultaneously, then this game will kill you over, and over, and over again... and you'll never wake up. You'll just be one of the masses of people... all going through an endless and meaningless loop. I'd hardly call that life really.

Thank you for reading my blog! Did you enjoy it? Either way, you can comment below, or you can email me at tkwadeauthor@gmail.com. You can also visit my website at www.tkwade.com. Check out my books! Thanks!

Fairy Tale Spotlight: Knack (Game Series)

So Knack is a video game for the PS4 that came out in 2013. It was followed up by a sequel in 2017. I dearly love them both. I won't spoil very much because I am more interested in talking about the main character and what he is in this series.

The series is all about adventure and the fighting of evil. A lot of the themes are extremely cliché but not in a bad way. It takes place in a advanced world where humans went from primitive to advanced in a short period of time after discovering ancient technology. Interestingly they are still suffering attacks from a race of goblins.

Knack is a golem that was created by one of the human's leading scientists. He is a core that magnetizes little funny-shaped blocks called relics to himself which creates his body. The more relics he finds, the bigger and stronger he gets. This provides the main game play loops which has him growing in size as a level progresses. Loads of fun really.

In his smallest state, Knack does not have enough relics to process communication. Once he picks up enough relics, he is able to get some mouth-work going and actually speak. He has a deep and booming, yet friendly voice. He is 100% loyal to the humans that created him. This loyalty, at no time, ever sways. He is truly their creation, and as the game says many times, he is alive. He is life. And the humans created that life.

Now one of the biggest complaints these games have from some of the very critical reviews [almost none of them liked these games] is that the game seems to be more about the humans (that you never play) while the main character (Knack) just does work for them. The critics seem to prefer the game show Knack as more of a deciding protagonist rather than a pet that can beat stuff up and lift big things. A lot of people hate this game because of this.

Here is the problem with the argument. Knack is a golem. He was created to serve the humans. He has no interest in anything other than that. He is also a genuinely nice person... to the humans. To their enemies, he has no qualms about crushing and killing them.

Knacks loyalty even extends to what some people might call absurd levels. Lucas is the golem's best friend. He is also a confused and often tortured teenager. Lucas is often known for making rash decisions that put people in jeopardy due to his immature ego. Despite kind of realizing this, Knack always remains faithful to Lucas even when it seems like it's the wrong thing to do. He does this because he can't help it. It's in his programming.

To make Knack feel like more of a humanized character might have pleased the critics, but it would have been wrong. It would not have shown golems in the correct light. As loving and faithful as Knack is... he is not human. He never will be. And yet, he is awesome to watch as he grows and beats the crap out of the bad guys... but the humans in the story are the real driving force, whether or not they be in the right. They are the ones really winning the battle. If they make the wrong decisions, so will Knack.

The fact that you play the golem who is bound by his human creators is likely what puts off the reviewers. They don't understand that the developers of these 2 games did it correctly. I applaud them for it. I am also very pleased that they made a sequel to a game that was panned from release. They even doubled down on the original message. They bothered, and the world is better for it. I whole-heartedly recommend the Knack series for its sense of adventure, lovable characters, and one of the best representations of a golem I have ever seen in fiction. Bravo.

Thank you for reading my blog! Did you enjoy it? Either way, you can comment below, or you can email me at tkwadeauthor@gmail.com. You can also visit my website at www.tkwade.com. Check out my books! Thanks!

Fairy Tale Spotlight: Golems

I feel like I sometimes don't dive into fairy tale aspects as much as I should. Part of the reason I end up talking about God, the bible, TV shows, games, and movies is because I kind of relate fairy tale lore to just about everything around me. It's a bit how I pinpointed an episode of Gotham with an old fairy tale called Bluebeard. Fairy lore is all around us, and for some reason, most people just shrug it off as meaningless fiction.

But I digress.

This is still a fairy tale blog, and I want to talk about golems today. I am not as interested in the origins of golems. I believe that come from Jewish folklore. Beings made out of clay and brought to life through magic. It is a very compelling ideal, especially when you consider the possibility that these were very early robotic prototypes. And I guess that's what a golem really is. It's artificial life.

But why clay? Clay is so... boring. Rocks are even more boring. The truth is that it can really be any sort of material. You mold it, give it a purpose, and then provide it with animation. How you do that can be any number of methods. We're not just talking raw magic here. It could be an electrical component as well. But whatever you do, it probably wont make it eternal. It should age and die like the rest of us once its source of animation runs out.

But during the time of this animation, it is essentially alive. Can it speak? Maybe. Did you give it that ability? Can it feel? Did you allow it to feel? Can it love? Did you allow it to love? A golem can actually be anything you want it to be. You simply have to imbue it with those specific attributes. And whatever attributes you give it are going to become a part of its core. Those things will be of the utmost importance to it. If you really want a golem to have the ability to love someone, it will love more than even you are capable of. It's like this because there is an intense focus there.

Is a golem really alive? What is life? Animation. The ability to think and choose one from the other. Yes, golems are alive, and they are even people. But there will never be human. They will never possess a soul. If they die, everything that they are is entirely in your hands. You can move them to another place or let them pass away into nothingness. That is your responsibility. This is because they are not a creation of God. They are a creation of man. So if they have a soul, you had to give them one of your own making.

For example, their soul could be similar to the embodiment of their knowledge and self-identity. Once they pass away, you could remove the part of them that contains this information and transfer it into either a new body or into a computer-based equivalent of Paradise. That is your choice. That's not really the golem's choice. They don't make the rules, they merely follow them.

It is very important to understand that golems are the creations of man just as man is the creation of God. God created us in a very specific way. He gave us the freedom of choice. We can do the same with a golem if we know how. But their fates are ultimately up to us. We decide those rules.

Most of the golems in lore are usually very robot like. They follow a series of programs and can only do things based on that programming. There is no deviation. This means that they are basically feral by nature. That doesn't mean we can't do it differently. It simply means that is what has been done so far. It is the way of the traditional golem. But it is important that you understand that the rules of making golems are only limited by how we construct them. Those are decisions we make.

The possibilities of golem creation extend as far as the imagination will let us go. It is dangerous, but it is also filled with possibilities. Something to think about.

More about golems in the next blog.

Thank you for reading my blog! Did you enjoy it? Either way, you can comment below, or you can email me at tkwadeauthor@gmail.com. You can also visit my website at www.tkwade.com. Check out my books! Thanks!