The terrible movie continuum

I consider myself something of a movie buff, because I go to the theatre nearly once a week and I'll watch nearly any genre of film. I'm also pretty articulate when it comes to ripping apart bad movies, or better still, avoiding ones that look bad before ever watching them in the first place.

Anyways, I'm amazed that so many people seem to enjoy terrible movies, and I came up with a theory as to why. First of all, we have to assume that not everyone is an idiot who can't tell the difference between quality and complete crap. It's hard, I know... but necessary. Secondly, we need to consider the average moviegoer, who does not watch nearly as many films as I do. This is the jumping off point of the theory, because it's based almost entirely on the volume of movies that a person watches.

Pretend that you've only seen a single movie in your lifetime. That movie would be terrible and great at the same time, because you have no other point of reference to compare it to. It is literally the best and worst movie ever. Now add a second film to your viewing list, and one will surely be superior to the other. Things get slightly more complicated here though. There is more than one category by which a film can be ranked. Maybe the special effects were phenomenal, but the acting was atrocious (Transformers 2, this means you!). You have to average these aspects and look at the overall quality if you're going to rank a movie properly.

The point is, every movie you watch will fall somewhere on the scale from complete trash to amazing work of art. What's more is that the scale is not fixed. It adjusts based on the quality of the best and worst movies you've seen, and the number of films in between. Whenever you see a new movie that blows your mind, the scale lengthens slightly, and movies that were once decent now become below average by comparison.

The name of the game here is relativity, and it spawns entirely from personal experience. Because no two people have the same experiences, they are unlikely to have the same opinions. This doesn't mean that you're right or wrong in an absolute sense, but you can appear to be heavily misguided when your opinions are assessed on another person's rating scale.

Basically, the more you watch, the more accurate your assessments will be. It follows the same general rules as sample size in statistics. So, the next time someone gives you a bad reference on which movie to see, break out the bell curve and explain to them why their opinion is irrelevant! Oh, and if they've seen lots of movies too and STILL can't figure it out, don't worry. They're just retarded.

IRL Achievements!

Sometimes I have motivation issues, and I will find pretty much any excuse to get out of stuff. I've been struggling with this for a few years, but I may have found a ridiculous solution inspired by video games.

A few years ago I wrote an essay on video game addiction in which I argued that the virtual world can be more desirable than the real world because progress can be easily tracked in a simple, numerical format. For example, you can instantly know that you have 130/200 fishing skill, or that you need 5000 more experience to level up. Sadly, this does not apply to real life. You can't get a high score, or tell everyone that you're a level 12 guitarist.

I used to play World of Warcraft. Yeah... I admit it. I was pretty damn good at it too, ranked something like top 200 worldwide at my highest point. Anyway, a few years ago they introduced a feature in the game called achievements, where you earn points for doing all kinds of ridiculous things. Anyone who owns an X-Box knows all about achievements too - same idea. The thing about these points is... they don't do anything. Other than showing them off to your friends, they're entirely pointless. In fact, when they were first announced, I told all my in-game friends that I thought it was stupid and I was never going to bother with them.

Well, a few months later I was pretty obsessed with achievements, to the point where I was in the top 5 on my realm of something like 20,000 people. I don't know why, but I loved the little sparkles and banners that appeared everytime I did something difficult. In fact, I remember telling a friend that if there were achievements in real life, I would get a whole hell of a lot more done. How fucking badass would it be to get a little fanfare everytime you accomplish something, complete with a beam of heavenly light and a couple of points to add to your awesomeness? Best of all you would know exactly what you needed to do to get more of those points, and be able to track your progress in percentages.

I was telling my sister yesterday about some of my weird life goals, and she advised me to write a bucket list. While doing so, I had a flash of genius where all the stuff I've described above came together. Why not make every single life goal into an achievement, and make a little digital chart on my PC to track it? All I had to do was decide what was important to me, and make an achievement for it. Obviously there are nearly infinite numbers of things I could include, but by focusing only on things that I would actually be proud of showing off, I can essentially make a very manageable to-do list.

Here are a few of the ones I made up, just so you can see wtf I'm talking about:

Now, I realize that this isn't for everyone, but if it works for me then hell yeah I'm gonna keep at it.