Thoughts on Pixar’s Inside Out

I recently watched Pixar’s Inside Out, which “is set in the mind of a young girl named Riley Andersen where five personified emotions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust—try to lead her through life as her parents move from Minnesota to San Francisco and she has to adjust to her new life” (as described by Wikipedia).

It had some interesting ideas about how memories and emotions worked and really got me thinking, so I thought I’d write some of these down. Needless to say there will be spoilers.

One of the things I really liked from the movie was the idea of emotions being in control at different times, and there being one dominant emotion.

What resonated with me the most was that the dominant emotion goes a long way to determining our personalities. For instance, in the movie Joy is the dominant emotion as Riley grows up and therefore she’s a happy child. I’m sure we all know people who have different dominant emotions, from positive people, people who are constantly angry and those who seem to let everything get them down. However our personalities aren’t set in stone and if we start thinking about which emotion dominates we can consciously change our personality.

Another idea I hadn’t really considered before was that our memories have different emotions attached to them and that the emotion can change over time, especially as the memory itself changes.
For instance, a happy memory can change to anger if our feelings towards the person involved changes, or we look back at sad times in our lives and feel nostalgic for them as we forget the things which made us sad and only remember the good things.

Near the end of the movie Riley decides to get a bus back to Minnesota where she was happy.
The movie seemed to be suggesting that ideas can come from different emotions, in this example Anger came up with the idea. When deciding whether something is a good idea it’s worth considering where the idea is coming from. Ideas from anger and jealously for instance are rarely good ones.

Finally, at the end of the movie Joy and Sadness make it back to HQ and having spent most of the movie trying to keep Sadness out of the way, Joy let her take control.
It was only after Riley let herself feel her sadness and give in to it was she able to deal with what she was going through.
Although it’s generally good to try and stay positive, sometimes we need to give in to our feelings in order to process them and move on.

All in all, I got a lot out of this movie and made me view things differently; it was brave of Pixar and Disney to tackle a subject like this.

The Wild West vs the Modern World

There's a part in the game Red Dead Redemption where the main character, a bounty hunter by the name of John Marston, comes in from the  country into Blackwater,  a large and still growing city in the area.
Up until that point,  John Marston has spent most of his time in a fairly typical wild west environment; dusty towns,  mines and ranches.

Blackwater is the closet thing the game has to the modern world,  with it's paved streets, electricity and automobiles driving around.
In one mission John Marston finds himself in the back of one of these automobiles in his full cowboy gear.
It was watching this that it struck me that living in the West at this time must have been a strange experience.

On the one hand you still had most people using horses as their primary mode of transport, living in small towns and eking a living out of the land.
At the same time you started seeing national transport in the form of the railroads, which was helping create the beginnings of larger businesses.

John Marston finds himself between the two words, the rough,  dusty world of the stereotypical cowboy which he understood. A world where owning a gun wasn't a statement but more a necessity of serving.
The other world, the modern one with its rules, order and safety, was slowly creeping in.

It was thinking about what it must have been like to see the world change like this that made Mr appreciate what survivalists, bikers and ranchers are trying to hold onto in the modern world.

A sense of freedom, of being able to settle differences for yourself, not knowing what the next day would bring rather than the safe,  dull predictability of modern life.

While most people would prefer the safety of modern life over the anxiety and anarchy of freedom, when your alarm goes off on Tuesday morning at the same time it did on the Tuesday before and the Tuesday before that, you can definitely  see the appeal of frontier life.

The day the Earth died

Once upon a time there was the Earth.

Well before that there was nothing, then a big bang, then eventually the earth.

Well, that's one theory, but it seems more likely than some bloke getting bored sitting around in the dark one day deciding to create the universe so he had something to fuck around with.
On this earth there lived some people.
A lot of people.
A hell of a lot of people.
Some would say, possibly too many people.
Which is probably why some of these people sat around writing stories about apocalypses, be they nuclear, zombie or pork related ones.

I could go into the pork related one, but then this would be an entirely different story.
So anyway, these people who lived on this earth, they decided one day that it would be a great idea that rather than eat their food raw, they should cook it.

So they invented fire.

And fire turned out to be awesome for a lot of things (warmth, cooking, clearing forests).

Buoyed by the success of fire, they then decided that being able to get around quickly would also be useful, so they invented the wheel.

And the wheel was also awesome.

Sometime later, someone decided tiny hats would be awesome.

No.

This is when shit started going wrong.

Very wrong.

Pork apocalypse wrong.