It’s not the Rapture, it’s magical thinking
I don’t think I believe in "The Rapture," but it does seem as though the best people are being called home before Big Trouble happens to the rest of us.
I mean, ever since the deaths of Alan Rickman, Chadwick Boseman, and Betty White, I’ve had a sense that all the best people were being picked out of the herd and sent on to a better simulation before the demons break out in this one. And now we’ve lost Dolly Parton and Tim Curry, and I feel the looming sense that bad times are coming.
But I’m pretty sure it’s all just magical thinking.
All the best people from my childhood are old now, and it’s a sad fact of the matter that old people do tend to pass on. It’s the cycle of life.
I’m just really sad at the passing of Dolly Parton. She was such an angel.
She would have been a billionaire if she was selfish and horrible, but instead she was a millionaire because she went out of her way to use her excess wealth to help humanity and the world. She gave books to children. She funded vaccine research. She was always kind and considerate and I’ve never heard any accounts of her being unpleasant or mean or a source of negativity to another person.
She lived her life with grace and beauty. And the world is a lesser place without her in it, but it became a better place for once having hosted her presence.
And I’m heartbroken over the death of Tim Curry. I love "Clue" and "Rocky Horror" and he was absolutely terrifying as Pennywise the Clown. He was a grand talent, and we have all suffered a loss with his passing.
It’s sad when the legends of our youth pass out of our lives, but it is part of the cycle of life. They have moved on to a beautiful afterlife. They will be missed.
Japanese vending machines
I’ve been watching the videos of "Dig Dig JAPAN" on YouTube, and they’re no-dialogue videos that come with subtitles telling you what’s going on. And it’s the creator trying different products and experiences in Japan.
I’ve enjoyed watching the various trials of products from Daiso and other 100 yen shops. And I’m not saying I’m jealous we don’t have those shops here… but I am very envious. I wish we had those kinds of shops and products here.
Plus I’m learning a lot of stuff about Japanese snack culture.
Did you know they call minute rice "alpha rice" in Japan? And it’s seen as an emergency food?
It was while watching Dig Dig JAPAN trying "emergency curry rice" bought from a vending machine that I found out minute rice can be made with cold water. You just add cold water and let the rice soak for 60 minutes and you have "cooked" rice to eat. And it works because minute/alpha rice is precooked dehydrated rice.
So if you put minute rice in like a plastic jar or something, it would make a good addition for your disaster preparedness kit. Just include a few small cans of side dishes to eat with the rice or some dehydrated miso soup packs and voila. Or if you were really fancy, you’d include a few packs of ramen, then when you’re done eating the noodles you could add the rehydrated minute rice to the soup for a second serving.
Anyways, Dig Dig JAPAN went to a BANK that had a whole section of food vending machines inside. That way you get some cash money and spend it before you even have a chance to leave.
And those vending machines! There’s food you microwave, food you rehydrate, and frozen food. There was oden in a can where you slightly pop the top then put the can in boiling water to heat it up, then you can eat it right out of the can. There was frozen cake rolls, emergency curry rice, frozen soup from a local restaurant, and frozen chicken wings. There was even a carton of raw eggs!
Talk about a bank of vending machines.
I wish we had that kind of technology here in the United States. But we can’t even count on being able to get lettuce that won’t cause debilitating diarrhea.
Vivarium
The movie "Vivarium" is an interesting movie. It’s about a young couple looking to buy a house, so they follow a realtor out to a new housing development. And then he leaves them there.
You can feel their sense of shock and disbelief as they try to figure out what is happening and why.
I don’t want to spoil the movie in case you want to watch it, though I’m really kind of desperate to share my opinions on the movie because I have lots of thoughts and feelings. It was very fascinating.
So down at the bottom, past my signature, I’m going to include spoilers and thoughts. Please ignore them if you haven’t seen the movie or if you want to see the movie first.
"Vivarium" starring Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg.
I had the vending machine and "Vivarium" topics first, but I reorganized things because I think more lighthearted topics following sadness and grief can help lighten the emotional load.
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"Vivarium" SPOILERS
In the movie, Gemma and Tom visit a realtor’s office to see about houses, and immediately, the guy is weird. Like, you can see Tom catching the vibe and being like "We should get out of here," but Gemma overrules her any sense of wariness and agrees to follow the man out to the new housing development to see the model home, number 9.
They go, and there’s hundreds of identical green houses arranged in a mazelike pattern. When they get into house number 9, the exterior and interior are decorated in shades of green. The most noticeable difference is the one room with blue walls: the baby nursery.
And like, I immediately noticed in the living room that there were two identical table lamps RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER on a table. Like, the minute I saw that, if I hadn’t already fled the second I met the realtor in his office, I would have been out of there.
If I was able to leave.
Because the realtor opens the sliding door to show them the backyard, then when they step out to look around… they turn back to find that he’s gone.
His car is no longer in front of the house. And without him to show them the way, even though they drive and drive until they run out of gas, no matter which direction they go or what turns they make, they keep ending up back to house number 9.
Finally they go into the house and spend the night. Because what else are they supposed to do?
The next day, they try escaping the housing development on foot, but even though they cross from backyard to backyard in a straight line outward, they end up back at house number 9. Where there’s a cardboard box waiting for them in the street.
Inside the box there are vacuum sealed and canned foods and hygiene products. Which clearly shows they’re expected to be there for a while.
Tom used the cardboard box to start a fire and burns down the house.
They fall asleep in the street while the "smoke signal" burns, but when they wake up, the house is back the way it was. And there’s a cardboard box containing a maybe 8 month old infant that’s naked and covered in fluid. And the box says "Raise the child and we’ll release you."
So Gemma and Tom are stuck raising a fast growing baby, though we don’t see that part because it cuts to "the boy" being around 10 years old after 98 days.
And the kid is weird. His voice is weird. His mimicry of Gemma and Tom is weird. His skulking around and spying on them is weird. He’s just… weird.
It’s clear that while he is human-shaped, he is anything but human.
He screams when he’s hungry. He follows them around. He watches the TV which shows weird fractal patterns and makes sounds that aren’t quite white noise. And his black hair is always slicked back with "gel," even though I don’t think any gel was included in any of the supply boxes. So like, does he produce his own hair gel?
And after 98 days, Tom flicks his cigarette at the boy, and it bounces off his shirt and falls on the grass in front of the house. And the grass immediately disappears in a circle. And Tom discovers he’s able to dig through the weird non-dirt but dirt-like substrate. And it seems like dirt mixed with some kind of yellow foam or something.
And for the next 100+ days, Tom spends all his time digging a massive hole, deeper and deeper. Until finally, when the boy looks like a man, Tom finds something. And it turns out to be a vacuum sealed body bag. Which he never tells Gemma about.
The two of them are looking rough by the 98 day mark, and they get worse and worse as time passes. The sky is always "sunny" during the day, and there’s these perfect puffy white clouds that never move or change. The food they get is always the same, and when they first tried it they said that it tastes like nothing. It looks like beautiful, delicious food, but it tastes like nothing. And from the way they seem to deteriorate, I don’t think the food had very much nutritional value.
As time goes on, Tom gets big bruises on his back that don’t seem to heal, and he’s got a near constant cough. So it’s no surprise that he dies first.
Like, he used all his energy to dig and dig, entirely focused on the idea that down was going to be their way out. Plus, he keeps thinking he can hear sounds under the ground in his hole.
And when the boy is a young adult, Gemma says, "I wish I would have let you kill him when he was still young."
And it’s sad, because killing the boy wouldn’t have done them any good. Because if they had killed him as a baby or as a 10 year old, they still wouldn’t have been able to get out.
Because, from the title, they were clearly being kept in some kind of giant terrarium or something. A "vivarium," an environment created to trap humans and force them to raise whatever the boy and the realtor Martin are.
And when Gemma chases after the boy and makes her way under the street and passes through all those different colored houses and environments where she sees other couples raising other boys, it is never explained whether they are aliens from the stars or interdimensional beings or what their purpose is other than to fit into our human world without being noticed and killed while they are still vulnerable and weak in numbers.
We never find out if it’s an invasion or if they’re just looking to eek out their own niche in our world. But whatever their purpose, part of their growing cycle is to kidnap a woman and a man–a mother and a father–and give them a cuckoo baby to raise.
And part of their growth cycle is the human parents dying–being "released"–after the child is successfully raised.
At the beginning of the movie, the opening scene is a cuckoo bird hatching out of an egg and immediately pushing the mother bird’s real eggs and babies out of the nest until it’s the only one. And the smaller mother bird exhausts herself feeding the giant baby that fills the entire nest.
And Gemma is a teacher of small children, and she finds a small girl sadly looking down at two dead birds that haven’t even had a chance to form feathers yet. And the girl asks who could have killed the baby birds, and Gemma says "Maybe it was a cuckoo." And she tells the girl that it’s not evil that the baby cuckoo did that, it’s simply nature, and sometimes nature doesn’t seem very nice.
So those weird "aliens" are simply following their own nature. Using humans to raise their young so they can better fit amongst the human world, even though their best attempts at passing for human still leaves them coming across as weird af.
It’s a very interesting movie. It’s only like an hour and a half. It does drag a bit near the end, but before that and after that everything is snappy and fast. So there’s like a 10 minute span that could be more interesting. But through the whole thing, Imogen Poots eats her scenes. She really sells the idea that she is Gemma, and Gemma is going through the worst experience of her whole life and death.
And when the grown up boy leaves the vivarium, you can see above him where the clouds go from being those perfect fake clouds to being real clouds. And there’s no other sign that he’s passes from one reality to the next. So for all we know, there’s some kind of dimensional pocket or there’s a stealthed spaceship or something. We don’t know. They don’t tell us.
It’s left to the viewer to decide what they think the creatures are and what their purpose is. We don’t even know how many there are and whether it is simply one child replacing one adult, or if there’s millions of them being born and spread out amongst humanity.
But we do know that they quickly grow from baby to adult. And while their lifespan seems fast–"Like a dog! Woof woof!"–that could also be bad for humanity because they could be more like rats and quickly outbreed our population.
