Friday, March 18, 2022
7:07 a.m. Room 3, Lilu Hotel
Pai, Thailand
Over the afternoon, evening, and night, I’ve learned about a few other things that make Room 3 less attractive than Room 5. The air conditioner works, but it is a bit loud. It rumbles and grinds and makes other noises and turns on and off somewhat randomly. The toilet in the bathroom occasionally goes nuts. There is a sudden eruption and suction of water accompanied by a lot of loud gurgling. The first time it happened, I rushed to the bathroom, worried that the toilet was backing up and was going to flood the place. But it was no big deal. The toilet just drained and then filled up again and made a lot of noise, but it never overflowed. And I discovered that the refrigerator takes a delicate touch with the controls to keep it working. I put things in there to get them nice and chilled, and then I found that the refrigerator had shut off and nothing was cold. I woke up again this morning to find that my water bottles in there were at room temperature. The fridge had shut off during the night for some reason. And the room definitely doesn’t have the feeling of Room 5. In Room 5 in the morning, I went to the many curtains and threw them open to let in all the morning light to greet the day. But in Room 3, the curtains remain closed. There is no light out there, just neighboring buildings, and I’d rather not have people in those buildings staring at me through the windows.
It’s funny that there really are many reasons why Room 3 is not as good as Room 5. So it made sense that the woman at the desk hesitated to make the switch. She made sure that I agreed to the switch. But at the time, only she knew the details of the differences between the two rooms. And since she couldn’t speak English, she didn’t even try to explain them to me. She simply said I could check in early if I stayed in Room 3. She knew that there were advantages to waiting a bit longer until Room 5 was ready, but I didn’t know that. Not really. I could guess, of course. Why else would she even hesitate? I suspected Room 3 wasn’t as nice. There would be no other reason for all this discussion. But I saw no reason to care. The advantage of getting two extra hours in the room was very attractive, especially since I had just arrived at the hotel and was eager to move into my new home.
I didn’t do anything yesterday. I just worked on videos. I’m still very slow at that. And using my smartphone to edit and upload videos is becoming more and more of a bottleneck and barrier. I’m starting to see that more clearly now. The editing itself works fine. But it takes a very long time to copy video files to the phone, export the final video, and upload that video to YouTube. It takes hours to do all these things. And when the phone is busy doing those things, it can’t be used to do anything else. I really should have made an effort to switch over to laptop editing before.
With that in mind, I tried to do something yesterday. One of the reasons I haven’t started editing on the laptop is that this MacBook has very little memory. It even has less memory than my phone. And my phone’s memory can be upgraded. I can double or quadruple the amount of memory I currently have in the phone. But this MacBook is fixed at 250 gigabytes of memory and tons of that is filled up with something. But I was wondering if it was possible to edit a video while keeping all the source video files on an external hard drive. I’ve heard of people doing this. They usually use a super fast SSD to do that, and I don’t have an SSD. All I have is a standard mechanical hard drive with a spinning disk. But I thought I’d give it a try. It seemed like it was working for a while, but then the MacBook ran out of power. I didn’t realize the battery was nearly dead, so I should have plugged it in for this experiment, but I didn’t, and the whole thing shut down. And then I moved on to do some other things. Perhaps I’ll try again today. One issue is that in order to edit on the laptop, I’ll have to buy the editing program I’m using. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll do that.
While my phone was busy copying video files and exporting the final video, I watched some reaction videos on YouTube. I’m still hung up on this Spider Man movie No Way Home. And I watched the reaction videos from a few different YouTubers as they watched the movie. They can’t show the whole movie, of course. They can only show about ten minutes of the movie, and they will include only the best or most entertaining or most important moments in the movie to show. I enjoyed that a lot, because as I mentioned, this Spider Man movie is very fan friendly. It is almost total fan service from beginning to end, and it absolutely delights hard core Spider Man and superhero fans. So watching their reaction and their enjoyment of the movie is fun.
However, watching a bunch of reaction videos meant that I had ample time to contemplate how deeply and completely the plot of the movie made no sense at all. I could write a book about that. And it’s interesting to note that the fact that the story is nonsensical doesn’t matter in the slightest. No one seems to notice. Certainly no one cares. It doesn’t have any effect on their enjoyment of the movie. People tend to let the movie flow over them and just accept whatever happens. And there are even layers to this. Just the basic events of the movie and the actions people take and the things they can do make no sense at all. But, as with all superhero movies, there is a deeper level of convenience where things make no sense. It’s kind of funny how we all just accept this and enjoy the movie anyway. I’m thinking, for example, that the places where all the action happens in a superhero movie is always perfect for that superhero’s powers. Spider Man can shoot webbing and swing through the air, and this is a big part of his fighting ability. So I guess it is a lucky thing that all the bad guys do all their bad things around skyscrapers and other tall structures. The entire movie takes place with tall structures around so Spider Man can swing around. I often think about what would happen if one of his super villains starts doing bad things in a typical small town or out in the prairies. How would Spider Man even get there? Walk? Drive? He can’t swing there. And once he is there, there won’t be any tall buildings to swing from. How could he even fight? The bad guy just has to run away really fast and Spider Man could never catch him.
And I know it’s silly, but I always think about the webbing that Spider Man leaves behind as he is swinging through the cities. That stuff would be incredibly dangerous. In the movies, they constantly show how strong the webbing is. It is extremely thin, like a spider web. Yet it can hold many tons of weight. It is essentially indestructible. But as Spider Man swings through a city, whether he is fighting a bad guy or just having fun, he leaves behind hundreds of extremely long indestructible webs dangling from everything. These would inevitably cause a lot of problems in the city. Now that I think about it, they’d probably end up even killing a lot of birds.
Of course, it doesn’t matter. They would just come up with some scientific mumbo jumbo to explain how this webbing is specially designed to degrade and disintegrate to nothing. But that raises the question of how long it would take for this to happen. Spider Man is always tying people up and holding things in place with his powerful webbing. He wouldn’t want it to disintegrate too soon. It’s a complicated question.
And this problem with superhero powers has become more extreme in the modern era of the DC and Marvel universes. All the superheroes in the Marvel universe have come together to form the Avengers. Now they can fight larger threats as a team. But this begs the question of where the other superheroes are when one of them has a solo movie. In every solo movie, the superhero is facing a deadly threat and could be killed. Lots of people are in extreme danger. And if you could pick up the phone and call Ironman or Thor or Captain American or Black Widow or the Hulk or Hawkeye to come help you out, why wouldn’t you? But they never do. They work as a team when it is an Avengers movie. But then they all fight the bad guys separately when it is an individual movie. And that makes no sense. They have to come up with a dozen excuses every time for why the other Avengers can’t come help.
Another big problem is that in the modern era, much of their powers come from technology. And there is nothing unique or special about this technology. So they could easily share it with each other. But they never do. For example, Spider Man’s webbing does not come out of his wrist anymore. He makes the webbing himself from chemicals, and it comes out of a special mechanical device that he built. And if this webbing is a powerful weapon for fighting the bad guys, why don’t they all use it? Captain America is very strong, but that’s his only superpower. If he had the ability to shoot webbing like Spider Man, he would be a much better fighter. And in the modern era, Tony Stark (AKA Ironman) completely rebuilt Spider Man’s suit to make it extremely powerful. It is now built out of nanobots and uses nanotechnology and is essentially an Ironman suit. It has built-in AI, tons of weapons, is largely bulletproof, and on and on. It’s so powerful that it is practically magic. And if Tony Stark can build a suit like that for Spider Man, why don’t all the Avengers wear one? It would make them a hundred times more powerful. Black Widow is the weakest of the team. She is essentially a normal human. Her skills are in espionage and tactics and hand-to-hand fighting. But she can’t do anything else. Therefore, when they go into battle, she is vulnerable. She could be killed at any time. And she isn’t very useful in the fighting. Tony Stark is inside his Ironman suit. Bullets bounce off him. He can fly. He has extremely powerful guns of all kinds built into his suit. His suit makes him super strong. He’s pretty much Superman inside that suit. And in the movies, he makes hundreds of these suits. He creates an army of these suits that work independently using AI. And if he can make as many Ironman suits as he likes and as many Spider Man weapon suits as he likes, why not give one to Black Widow? It would make her as powerful as Ironman himself. Why not give Captain America an Ironman suit? He could really use one. Since so many of their abilities come from technology now, they could combine their technology into one package, and they could all be the ultimate superhero. They could all have a lightweight and complete suit of armor that makes them bulletproof, gives them the ability to fly, provides AI assistance, contains anti-tank weapons and machine guns and lasers and flamethrowers, gives super strength, and shoots indestructible webbing.
I prefer the old-fashioned approach to superheroes where the superhero has an ability that is innate and that no one else can have. The original Spider Man was bitten by a radioactive spider and therefore developed the natural abilities of a spider. He can climb walls and shoot webbing and has super strength and fast reflexes because he has genetically altered to become like a spider. And no one else can do this. It’s part of him, and he got his superpowers by accident. And the accident can’t be repeated. That keeps things simple.
Superman is the same. And Wonderwoman. And Thor. And the Hulk. They can’t give their superpowers to other people. Their superpowers are built into their bodies. And that’s logical. And I’m not an expert in Ironman lore, but I think the original Ironman suit was possible because Tony Stark had a special power source. He built a miniature nuclear arc-reactor or something like that, and this could never be repeated. And he could have his ironman suit only because he had this unique one-of-a-kind power source. I like that idea because it means he can’t build a second suit for anyone else. It keeps his superpowers unique to him. And then the storytelling stays simple and logical. But if everyone can have an Ironman suit, and everyone can shoot webbing, and everyone can have a Captain America shield, it makes it very difficult to tell a story that makes any sense at all.
If I were Black Widow, I’d be very annoyed that I kept having to go into battle with nothing more than a pistol and a sexy, skin-tight outfit. Why does Tony Stark get to fight inside a suit that makes him super strong, provides a ton of weaponry, and lets him fly, and she is as weak as a normal human and has to run everywhere? Why does Peter Parker get to incapacitate the bad guys with his powerful webbing when she can only try to punch them? Why does Captain America get to use his bullet-proof shield when she can get killed by any bullet? It makes no sense at all if you stop to think about it for even a second.