Another strange dream, but first...

[altivo]

A moment of mourning for what the human race has become. I'm not going to say that depictions of violence in media and games are a direct cause of this sort of thing, but it is certainly true that when we glorify this kind of behavior, some individuals really do get weird ideas and run with them. I'll never really understand, though. This stuff is so alien to me I feel like a visitor from another planet.

So last night I had another movie script technicolor dream. This one was as surreal as if it were designed by Salvador Dali, though. It all took place in a huge convention center, where I was apparently supposed to be attending a furry con, though only one vaguely furry scene took place. Mostly it consisted of wandering from room to room and down corridors and stairways looking for things and never finding them.

It was a huge place, all designed and decorated by some very contemporary designer because there were areas where the walls and even the ceilings were covered with shag carpeting and things like that. The colors were vivid and ran the gamut from heavy purples and indigos in some areas to bright yellows in others. I think the actual guest rooms and corridors were done in blues and purples while the meeting spaces were more often yellow, beige, and orange. Several of the auditoria featured stage areas that were filled with architectural miniatures of some sort of futuristic complex of buildings that, I think, were supposed to represent the center itself, and people were there talking about them and pointing out features. It seemed as if in many cases the only way past such meeting halls was by entering from one side and going out the other, so you had to walk through whatever event was in progress.

One large portion of the building was some sort of contemporary art museum, and it was laid out as a whole series of rooms furnished and decorated as if they were living space of some kind. There were even dining tables set with place settings and various sorts of fresh bread put out. While wandering through this area I had the only furry incident. A group of people were sitting at one of the dining tables eating and talking, and next to the table was a smaller round table with long curving spindly legs, like what some of our grandmothers used to hold a flower pot with a fern in it. Except instead of a flower pot, there was a very canine head on the table, growing apparently right out of the table top. No body was evident other than the table, but the head was engaged in the conversation and had a female voice. In form it resembled a Newfoundland or maybe a Great Pyrenees, but the fur was a sort of turquoise green color.

As I approached, I realized it was going to be difficult to squeeze past this group, but as I edged past the table with the canine head, it noticed me and said "Oh, excuse me, sorry," and shuffled on its table legs out of my way to let me pass. Talk about an Alice in Wonderland kind of experience...

As this strange and surreal thing continued, I got into an area where people were constructing something, rather like stage sets for a play. Then I arrived at a set of doors to the outside, with signs indicating that they faced "EAST". I stood there trying to remember the layout of the place and figure out where I must be if I was at an east facing exit. Then more people came along who were wearing con badges (no fursuiters though) and I went with them, thinking they must know where they were going. We only arrived in a large lobby area with clumps of people standing around asking each other "Is this the panel?" or "What panel is this?"

I realized it was already Sunday, and somehow I'd missed the fursuit parade, and didn't even know the way back to my room. I hadn't had my own suit on at all yet, and the con was nearly over. Very confusing and disappointing, and that's where I woke up. ;p

The interesting thing though, was the dog head on a table. It seems like I've really seen something like that but I can't recall where. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would usually come up out of my unconscious mind.

Comments

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

Crazy dream but foul despicable cruel 'trench'

I haven't seen a dog's head on a table but I have seen in a picturing food type post a waiter's head popping through his costume that was made to look like a table loaded with many fruits - in the same sequence of photographs wasa woman waitress with the large marie antoinette skirt-table jutting out from the waist and covered with desserts.

It's a mad mad mad mad world.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Hmm, which calls to mind the scene in the BBC production of Hitchhiker's Guide, at Milliways, when Peter Davison was the beast who had been roasted and was trying to convince the diners to have a slice of his rump. ;p

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

ah yes - milliways, the restaurant at the end of the universe.

I have only watched the beeb's production so automatically place those particular actors in those rôles.

Was that scene the start of the phrase 'do you want a piece of this?'

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

If it makes you feel any better, there's no fall of man involved, we've pretty much always been like this. Right now we just have the technology to advertise the kind of animal we are far and wide. Back in the day we didn't know about some guy in Thailand getting stuck and dying in a peat bog, we had our own peat bogs to worry. But, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, information has been set free(r) and we're well-fed enough to put some time and effort into things that really interest us, like violent entertainment (like chess, which is about war) and reading extensively about the gruesome and violent things that happen elsewhere.

If violence didn't capture our attention, how would we ever learn to run from predators and whatnot?

[alaskawolf.livejournal.com]

you always have the most interesting dreams. i think i dreamed about green bell peppers last night for some odd reason

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I believe that's a much older expression and they just took advantage of it in the screenplay. If I recall correctly, it isn't in the book.

As for the scene in which the dinner talks to the diner, we can look all the way back to Lewis Carroll and Through the Looking Glass for that.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced. It's not so much the gruesome appetite of the masses for bloody entertainment that bothers me, offensive and ancient though it is, as this business of individuals walking heavily armed into a crowd and just opening fire for no apparent reason. That's the sort of thing that certainly would have made news even centuries past, yet it seems to be happening much more since the mid-20th century.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

A craving for stuffed peppers perhaps?

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

Alice - yes

That's what they call me here as the actual name Allison is construed as a surname - I should'nt but do get annoyed when I explicitly say my name (I loathe shortenings)

My favotite Carrol is The Hunting of the Snark - an Agony in Eight Fits

and just as an afterthought:

covert marketing - the oxymoron of the day

[miktar.livejournal.com]

An event that seems wholly unique to the United States of America, for some reason.

I think every country has such things, locally, it's school beatings (to death), in public schools. You guys have random gunmen, Israel has... well. Germany has gang violence, Italy has rapists, Mexico has kidnappings, and the East is a whole bag of fun.

Things like this have always happened, to my knowledge - just the means, technology and media coverage have changed.

If a guy, in a town, somewhere remote, killed five people with a knife before the invention of the printing press... well, we wouldn't really know, would we?

As for the 'appetite of the masses for bloody entertainment'... well, that's a bit cum hoc ergo propter hoc, excuse my latin.

As for happening much more - I think we're just paying attention more. I did some weak research and didn't see any curves, just the sporadic spike.

I think the real big problem here is, how humanity responds to things like that. Especially the US.

[darkhorseman.livejournal.com]

Well aginst popular belief most of the problems I see with my generation and the ones after is just... bad parenting. The media dosent do much to help. I did a journal entry not long ago about it. We have become a culture of violence it seems

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

Except the school shooting happened in Montreal, Quebec, Canada -- depending who you talk to, one different country or another, but neither of which is the U.S. Granted, it's pretty close to the States and does not escape our influences.
There was a similar shooting at another Montreal college in the late 1980s.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Violence itself is certainly not new. That I agree with.

This incident was NOT in the United States, though. It was in Canada, in Quebec to be precise. Canada has had a few of these, though not as many as the US. England and Scotland have also had a couple that I can remember, though the motivations seemed a little more clear in those.

The nature of violence does seem to have changed. I disagree with you that we wouldn't know about the past. We do. Records of trials, newspaper reports, novelizations and plays, all tell us of such events in the US and England at least going back centuries. There have been a lot of barbaric actions, but very few of them have been as random in their nature as what we have seen since the middle of the 20th century (post World War 2, more or less.) The kind of thing where some guy with a rifle climbs a church steeple or tower and just takes random shots at people, without any concern about who his target is... that kind of thing is indeed on the increase.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Parenting certainly enters the picture, but this condition goes back a couple of generations now, so that current parents are insufficient because they in turn were not properly parented. The only fix for that is for society to step in and start teaching better social behavior, or else.

I haven't seen precise details about the weaponry involved in this particular case, but it does seem so far that the victims were selected entirely at random. The killer was not after specific persons against whom he held a grudge, he was just out to kill for the sake of killing, or so it seems. That's what bothers me about it. There are odd parallels between these kinds of incidents and suicide bomber attacks, really. Invariably the killer knows he will die in the end, one way or another, and perhaps even by his own hand. We are told that the Islamic fanatics do it because their religion tells them they will be rewarded in the afterlife, but I'm not sure that's really it. I think it's an upwelling of internal rage that demands this sort of satiation, and society in general does indeed bear responsibility for that situation.

I believe Canada bans handguns, but allows hunting weapons. Obviously that's enough that this will happen anyway. Previous incidents there have involved so-called hunting rifles, and this one probably did as well. One such madman went to a gun dealer, bought a high powered rifle and 100 pounds of ammunition, and said he was going after "small game." No questions were raised. He killed several people in a random attack a couple of weeks later. That was in 1989.

I don't believe weapon bans are effective, but I also don't agree with the gun lobbyists and manufacturers. Sure, guns alone don't commit murder. But by placing guns in the hands of unbalanced people, we make it too easy for those people to commit this sort of crime. Society is not taking enough responsibility for education and morality here.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. I think the Snark is the peak of Carroll's creativity and genius, actually.

[darkhorseman.livejournal.com]

Well... thats part of the problem. Parents for the past few generation expects society, computers and tv to raise their children... and well you see where thats wound up.

I am a firm believer that gun control means using both hands... The truth of the matter is if your hell bent on killing someone a wepon is available. They outlawed drugs completly. I can still get thoes within a matter of hours. Do you think a gun is any harder?

Getting rid of the guns isnt the answer but what is? What makes a person a murderer? I rember being driven to that point. Fortunatly I had understanding parents who allowed me to drop out of school before I took my rage out aginst the students. It was the right choice for me. But outside that. What makes a suicide bomber a suicide bomber? What makes a person climb the bell tower?

[typographer.livejournal.com]

I have a lot of quibbles.

First: almost all of the case have been for very apparent reasons, once people stop being hysterical and actually investigate. A couple years ago the organization of states' attorneys general released a study that laid it out in stark terms what's behind the school ones: harassment, bullying, and teasing.

But the report (and others like it) tend to be repressed because almost of that bullying and teasing in schools directed at boys has a homophobic dimension--whether the boys are gay or not, the ones who get singled out are called sissy, fag, et cetera and ad nauseum. As the report pointed out, it tends to not just be overlooked by teachers and administrators, but is often perpetrated by certain teachers. Every attempt to do something on a policy or legal level to decrease these things has been opposed by the evangelical wingnuts because they want to protect their kids' right to torment "sinful" children.

The other common profile is another sort of isolated loner who lacks empathy, has rigid and inflexible thinking processes, and in general would be diagnosed as low-functioning sociopathic if they had been carefully examined before their spree (since they frequently get killed or kill themselves during said spree).

The technology to kill lots of people that quickly didn't exist three hundred years ago.

Population densities have also played an often underappreciated role. Two hundred years ago the majority of people lived in small communities where virtually everyone they met throughout their entire lifetimes were related to people they grew up with. Even fifty years ago more than half the population of the most industrialized countries lived further than 30 miles from where they were born. So neighbors were people you might know for a lifetime. People knew their extended families and the extended families of most of their neighbors, the kids they went to school with, et cetera. That changes the way we percieve and interact with each other.

[miktar.livejournal.com]

I guess.
So now what?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I can't answer that, obviously. As I said earlier, the entire thing is so alien to me that I have a lot of trouble understanding any of it.

I was bullied and pestered and even beaten physically all through the public schools, and even harrassed in college. It was indescribably vile, and very little was ever done about it. Yet I have never in my life had the least desire to pick up a weapon. Quite the opposite. There is simply no way that I want to stoop to the same level as those morons who abused me. (I do consider their very existence to be pretty good proof that evolution is true and humans are just apes wearing clothing.)

Many of my abusers are dead today, killed in the military, in car wrecks, or even, in one case, in a prison brawl. But the ones I know of who are still alive are wealthier than I am, have been married and divorced multiple times, and still think highly of themselves (and no doubt would sneer at me and my occupation.) I don't hate them, though I in turn might sneer at the smallness of their brains and their lack of perception. No doubt they achieved their success by applying the bullying skills they practiced on me toward other people or competitors.

The US, and much of the western world, does practice a culture of violence. We may react with dismay to events like this one in Montreal, but we think nothing of exposing each other to violent thoughts, violent metaphors, violent entertainment as if it had no significance at all. I disagree with that, and think it really is significant. Not in the sense that watching a bunch of Rambo movies will make you grab an assault weapon and spray a crowded street with bullets, but at a more subtle level. Some people simply do not have and maintain a sharp distinction between reality and fantasy. They know something is wrong if they think about it rationally, but they don't do a lot of rational thinking. They run on emotions and imagery, and those are much more easily swayed in the wrong directions.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You are right about homophobic bullying being a major problem in schools, but I disagree that it leads to this sort of violence. The victims of bullying are singled out by their antagonists precisely because they are easy marks, and unlikely to hit back. I was one, and I know many others who suffered the same. Not one I have ever known would be the type to hoard up weapons and ammunition and take their bitterness out on random people.

The other candidates, the loners who are isolated or isolate themselves from society are a larger factor, I think, and are not being identified and helped or steered in better directions or whatever until it is too late.

Is overpopulation and population density a factor? Maybe, but this type of antisocial spasm seems to occur just as often in lower density areas as it does in places like London or Washington DC. Are there too many humans in the world and should we stop making so many new ones? I think so, quite emphatically, but no one is listening.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

See my responses to others below. I don't know. I feel like a space alien marooned in some bizarre culture of which I am certainly not a part. I have never understood this stuff, nor the motivations behind it, nor the lack of social resistance to it.

[duraji-synth.livejournal.com]

I feel like an alien on my own planet, too...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I know. And at least partly for the same reasons that I do. However, since neither of us knows the way home, we have no choice but to adapt. XD

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I was surprised to learn that the killer in the current Montreal case was 25. Maybe bullying when he was younger had something to do with what led him to bring out the guns, but it surely couldn't be current. (Could it? Well, maybe if he worked in a factory full of rednecks, but then why take it out on a junior college....)

CBC Radio news this morning reported that one of his guns was a semi-automatic weapon, but I don't remember anything about the other two he brought except that by implication they weren't semi-automatic.

I'm doing my part to not make the population increase, but I'm only one guy...

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

One of the big regrets I have about this planet is that all territory is claimed by at least one existing nation. There's nowhere to go to start a new country. One can only resort to going someplace relatively remote and trying to live under the radar, I suppose.