A Plague of Insecticons

I got an email this morning from Orkin. It contained a graphic I'd never noticed before and almost couldn't help but laugh at. 

It's the most pestilent time of the year.

Remember this? 

Hands down, everyone. We're going to go over why this was dumb.

Created following the September 11 terror attacks, the Department of Homeland Security created this color-coded terror alert system to notify the public of the current threat level. This system was in effect for nearly ten years before being scrapped in favor of a more "text-based" alternative that would offer more specific information than a simple color. At no point during that time did the terror threat fall to green or blue. 

From the start, I think we were all asking similar questions about this scale. What exactly would a "low" threat level look like? What in Hel's Realm is a "general" risk? What exactly makes a terror threat more or less threatening? Moreover, if your job was monitoring terrorist activity, wouldn't you almost always see some kind of threat somewhere in some form? It's like that saying about how giving someone a hammer causes them to see only nails. This is a problem inherent in communicating a lot of information in a clear and concise way to a lot of laypeople. It's a messy process with a lot of trial and error, all while balancing on a knife's edge of trust and authenticity. Too much certainty, and you set yourself up for a fall. Not enough certainty, and there's no confidence in your abilities in the first place. It's an "Us vs. Them" scenario that shouldn't exist. The worst part is it's nothing remotely new. 

Ever heard of this thing?

At least we're not arguing over colors.

The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by a nonprofit organization called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a name so simultaneously cool and boring it alleviates all doubts I may have had about the involvement of actual scientists. It was in response to growing public concern over the use of nuclear weapons following the end of World War II. Unlike the terror alert system, this has been more or less completely unchanged in form since its inception, showing the upper left fourth of an analog timepiece, the minutes hand representing how close we are to a man-made doomsday scenario. The "time" is updated in an annual announcement, currently sitting at "100 seconds" from midnight. In case you're wondering, the hour hand has never moved, and probably isn't meant to, depending on who you ask. The minute hand, meanwhile, started at about 7 minutes from midnight and has moved 24 times up to the present day. 

The lowest it ever got was back in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. It was practically off its own scale at "23:43." I guess we weren't too concerned with climate change back then, despite what Captain Planet would have had to say about it. In fact, climate change wasn't officially added to the threat  list until 2007. This 17 minutes to midnight streak lasted until 1995. Exactly what happened in 1995? In a way, nothing. Military spending remained at Cold War levels and there were growing concerns over a power vacuum created by the Soviets packing it in. Many of the changes to the clock in the subsequent years could probably best be summed up as, "Little has changed, therefore it's getting worse." That said, since the clock was only concerned with nuclear armaments, neither Three Mile Island nor the Chernobyl disaster had any impact on it. 1988 did see a little improvement in the United States' relations with Russia, doubtless because of the awkward position they were in during the cleanup of the disaster. 

Jury's out on whether or not the Pandemic has or will have any effect on the clock. I mean, the virus wasn't man-made (despite what conspiranoids would have me take on faith), but the spreading across the globe was pretty much squarely on us. 

I don't necessarily have a point beyond my usual advocacy for media literacy.  I just thought it interesting to see a pest control company using such a tactic in their marketing. Granted, I'm no expert on pest control or the life cycles of various insects that fall under their purview, so I don't doubt there's merit behind the data. I've used Orkin for years and I don't begrudge them for doing their job. It's only the perspective and priorities I question. 

"I would only agree that a symbolic clock is as nourishing to the intellect as a photograph of oxygen to a drowning man." -- Watchmen

Goodnight, and good luck. 

The Peanut Butter Jam Session (second reading)

Foreword: This was initially published to my WordPress account a few weeks ago. In the time since then, JIF has been slowly replenishing their stock across many grocery stores. I've also read the poem. It's all right. 

While the title of this blog is a reference to an indestructible journal by an explorer trapped in an invisible maze on a jungle planet, I am by no means an expert on lost media. In fact, the name is meant to be somewhat ironic as I’ve actually got a rather unpopular opinion when it comes to archiving or preserving our art and media, idealism versus pragmatism, that sort of thing. It was also made to coincide with a YouTube channel that would focus on obscure pieces of media that didn't fit into proper categories. Speaking of ephemera and miscellanea... 

There is a poem by cyberpunk writer William Gibson called Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). It's not exclusively a work of literature as much as a kind of small scale performance piece. It exists in a few different forms, but all with the same gimmick, that it can only be read a few times before it eventually fades, leaving the reader with an impression of the poem rather than anything that can be directly referenced. What’s interesting about this is that when submitted to the Library of Congress, two copies of the book were submitted, one opened and one unopened. The opened version has long since faded and the unopened version remains as it is, putting the work in an odd quasi-quantum state of both read and unread. 

Speaking of pretentious existentialism, let's talk about Metal Gear Solid 2 for the Playstation 2. 

I haven’t played the game in almost 20 years. It’s one of the last marathon gaming sessions I ever engaged in before I got a rude awakening about managing my time. It wasn’t cutting into my college work by any means, but it put things in perspective. I started what was supposed to be a quick session in the early evening before bed, my expectation being that I would get stuck at a difficult boss or puzzle or something like that and would pick up where I left off the next night or likely later. I ended up beating the game. It was only when I stood up to strike an obligatory pose of triumph that I realized it was nearly morning and I had a class in a few hours. 

Speaking of rabbit holes, I went back shortly after beating the game and discovered a text file. When I say "text file" I'm not talking about a document that you access by putting the game disc in a DVD-ROM drive. That would be too obvious. I'm talking about a text log you access in the game's menu and you have to use the controller to turn the pages, which number something like 129. I read it, and like Agrippa, I've been left with an impression of the work. It's about an investigative journalist looking for a secret base in the arctic. At one point, he takes out a flask and explains that the liquor inside has been mixed with peanut butter. He goes off on this tangent about how much he hated peanut butter growing up, and actually still hates it. Back in his youth, in an effort to make himself like peanut butter, he gorged on it until he couldn't stand it. As a result, he now has to have it in everything, including his liquor. I thought of this passage a few days ago while grocery shopping. 

JIF is currently going through a devastating recall of the majority of their products thanks to a potential salmonella contamination. It’s estimated to have cost them millions of dollars and store shelves have been empty for weeks by this point. I wouldn't have even noticed or been at all bothered by it were it not for JIF being the only company that makes a peanut butter fortified with Omega 3. When you're a vegetarian, some nutrients' sources require you to get a little more creative, or at least flexible. 

Get Gex Going

It's not even funny how much I want this to be a real thing. I'm sure Dana Gould wouldn't have minded the extra work, either. 

Gex is a painfully short-lived series of games about a TV-obsessed, wise-cracking gecko. It began life on the 3DO console and, much like Crash Bandicoot for the original Playstation, became a sort of de facto mascot for the system (as well as for his developer, Crystal Dynamics). I only ever knew one person who owned a 3DO. He was a friend of a friend, and he got more use out of it as a CD player than a proper games console. This was likely a typical story as Gex didn't stay exclusive to the 3DO, getting released on the Sony Playstation, Sega Saturn, and PC. It was a serviceable 2D side-scroller, its main draw being a more diverse variety of locations beyond the typical terrains common to Super Mario Bros. or Sonic the Hedgehog (fire, water, ice, etc.). Gex's abilities to interact with these environments was also notable. Mario could jump high, Sonic could run fast, and Gex could stick to walls and ceilings. Reviews of the time were middling, at least when it came to the Saturn, Playstation, and PC ports. The 3DO version would be well-received, if only for the platform creating such a low bar for quality. 

I only played the first game a few years ago on the Playstation 3. Gex's moveset was definitely its best feature, but the level design left much to be desired. Playing off of Gex's wall crawling, exploration was encouraged over more straightforward, left-to-right layouts. Unfortunately, there often wasn't very much to explore, leading to a lot of backtracking. 

Despite a lukewarm reception, Gex did get a pair of sequels in fairly rapid succession, this time in full 3D on the Playstation and Nintendo 64. At this point, a number of well-known videogame mascots were trying to make the leap from 2D to 3D with relatively mixed results. Mario hit the ground running with Super Mario 64 and Sonic would have some awkward first steps on the Saturn (Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic R) before getting a decent foothold with Sonic Adventure on the Sega Dreamcast. 

While I was aware of these sequels, I never played them as I was busy with RPG's, racers, and fighting games. Also, rentals of Donkey Kong 64 and Banjo Kazooie put me off of the whole 3D platformer genre for some time, with their large but mostly empty levels and ludicrously lengthy laundry lists of largely insignificant items to collect. In any case, I was glad for some variety in the space, as Gex didn’t seem to share the same flaws as his lesser 3D brethren. Sadly, it didn’t have many strengths on offer, either. 

This N64 cover art was also used as a marketing image for the game. 

 

The operative phrase when discussing the reception of any Gex title is, "Not for any lack of trying." Some may argue it was the dawn of the internet that caused Gex to fall by the wayside, that a TV-obsessed gecko wouldn't be relevant in an era when more and more people were beginning to look to the web for content. For my money, Gex was never so topical. Many of his references were from sitcoms and shows predating his game by several decades, so being out of touch is par for the course. Frankly, the most topical Gex ever got was him becoming a secret agent in the sequels, as Pierce Brosnan's portrayal of James Bond was hitting its stride at the time with Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough. If newer efforts were to have him spouting modern memes or other varieties of internet humor, he’d likely be met with the same reception as a certain cartoon dog who died on the way back to his home planet. 

Speaking of sitcoms and animation, it may well be that FlippinDingDong’s tribute is more on point than anyone realizes. Both Mario and Sonic have had several animated programs dedicated to them, to say nothing of Mario’s overall longevity keeping him in the public consciousness. Even Bubsy had a pilot, and he’s gotten a revival in the last few years. Whether that translates to any long-lasting success remains to be seen, but it’s hard to ignore the correlation between having a mainstream presence and a gaming IP enjoying a longevity. Gex rose and fell within a single console generation. There were plans for a Gex 4 on the Playstation 2 and Gamecube, but it was canceled at the concept art stage. The most recent news about the gecko came in 2021 and 2022 when Square Enix registered trademarks for Gex in the EU and Japan, respectively. This was a few months before Square Enix sold off its Crystal Dynamics/Eidos properties to a holding company known as the Embracer Group. At the time of this writing, it's not actually known for certain if Gex was part of the sale. It's possible Square Enix held on to him and is planning some kind of revival. 

We'll just have to stay tuned. 

Final Fantasy Follow-Up

 OR:

When It Was Hip To Be With Square

I wrote my last entry about Square Enix’s legendary franchise before learning of the company’s most recent plan to sell FFVII-based NFT’s, a move that is quickly earning them a tumbling snowball's worth of backlash and criticism. It got me thinking about the history of the company, especially when the Playstation came on the market. This is by no means an exhaustive nor comprehensive history, merely a general impression from an outsider's perspective. During the 16-bit era, hey were known for publishing titles to the Super Nintendo, Final Fantasy III (technically VI, but that's another matter) being one of their most acclaimed releases. Squaresoft, as they were known back then, was leery of Nintendo’s insistence on cartridges over the CD-ROM format. On the other side of the great dividing wall between Nintendo and Sega, the Sega CD, despite not being financially successful, demonstrated how RPG’s and strategy games could benefit from the extra storage space, if only in the presentation department. Thus, their decision to abandon Camp Mario for the greener pastures of Sony’s gray underdog was made. 

Squaresoft went all in on Playstation’s promises of a bigger and better medium for their games, and I was there for it. I didn’t necessarily buy every single release, but I followed every announcement diligently. New games seemed to come out weekly. Not all printed money like Final Fantasy VII, but what hits they had were obviously more than enough to buoy their b-list brethren. It felt like the company was willing to take risks on more niche and obscure titles others would pass on, maintaining a faith the financials would work themselves out somehow. 

About halfway through the PS2’s life cycle, Square seemed to begin losing their way. The bubble birthed on the back of the PS1 hadn’t burst, but the surface tension was beginning to show signs of weakness. Focus was shifted to their major franchises like Final Fantasy while other established titles were allowed to languish by the wayside. The excitement of the new frontier was long gone, and they fell off my radar. I’d still keep an eye out for what was next for the Final Fantasy franchise albeit I’d stopped playing the games around the release of IX, last part of the great Playstation One Trilogy. Overall, though, I’d lost interest in RPG’s and started looking to other, more action-oriented genres. I often joked I had an abusive relationship with role-playing games, that I loved them dearly but had no time for them. Kingdom Hearts was probably my point of saturation. It was a good note to end the relationship on, an overall well-made game whose only real fault was an off-the-rails story that, as I've heard from even its most devoted fans, didn't get much more coherent in the sequels. 

I do genuinely love this image, albeit
I can't help but think they're up there looking for the lost plot. 

When it came to the PS3, I found myself practically ignoring Square Enix (as they came to be known then) beyond a passing fascination with Final Fantasy XIII and one of its spin-off games. After that, it was off the radar again. The next major piece of news that caught my attention was their acquisition of the Tomb Raider franchise, giving it a fresh, gritty reboot I met with almost complete indifference. Nier: Automata held my interest for a bit, but had much the same problem as Kingdom Hearts, with a gonzo story nobody seems to have a full and proper handle on. This was the time of the PS4. From what I can tell, the PS5 isn't going to see much from its old friend. Tomb Raider, along with a number of other IP's, has been completely sold off to a holding company in favor of some Crypto currency venture I don't pretend to be knowledgeable about. 

This is no longer a label that piques my curiosity nor captures my imagination. I don't recognize it from its heyday.

And this one just makes me sad. 

Calling them sell-outs is admittedly unfair. They're not so risk averse as to only bank on Final Fantasy and their merchandise which they're just as quick to advertise as any of their games. They have a wide range of titles currently on offer, and when I look upon Power Washer Simulator, part of me is assured they haven't changed as much as it may seem. Square-Enix has changed to be sure, but so have I, and maybe that's what I'm really sad about. 

What I really want to know at this point is, given the sale of their former Eidos properties, who owns the rights to Gex?

Blogger Boggles My Brain With Its Bungles & Blunders

 Well, I have absolutely no idea why the images in the last entry are no longer showing. You can see them if you click, hold, and open in another tab, but it's no go on the main event. I've scoured a few articles, most of which only apply if the images are externally hosted (which these are not), and attempted the ol' cache clearing and reboot. While my Mac is rebooting, I checked the site on my iPad and found the exact same problem. I'm now writing this entry from my iPad Haven't even bothered digging out my Bluetooth keyboard for it, that's how fed up I am. 

This is my overarching complaint about Blogger, that on the rare occasion something goes wrong, support is basically nonexistent. It's a rat's nest of forum posts from years ago that don't address my specific issue and actually getting someone somewhere to take a look under the bonnet is an utter pipe dream. 

The worst part is the images had issues when composing the entry in the first place. I had to paste them in again after having to take a break from writing for a day. This may well be a chronic issue (old entries don't have this issue) or I simply need to post the images through some other means. 

Can you see this image?

UPDATE: Problem solved via tedium. The image above was copy+pasted directly into the entry. The fix was to use the "add from Google photos" option (which is where the images were hosted in the first place). This did present a small problem as most of the images are from 2013, which meant a lot of scrolling. I ended up creating an album, which had its own headache of not showing the images since they were only recently uploaded. I had to go by file name. 

Maybe I should forgive WordPress.... 

First World Regrets: Videogame Hoarding

Final Fantasy VII changed my life in the most first world of ways. I had been impressed by the Sega Saturn and even though it was proving to be one of the less successful consoles on the market, I was initially undeterred, setting a plan in motion. I made a list of games whose contents are sadly lost to time beyond maybe the first two or three titles. The mindset was that if the Saturn market collapsed shortly the moment I walked out of the game store with it, I would have been set for life, or at least one or two subsequent console generations. Instead of shelling out for the latest and greatest of games, I could stick to the tried and true. You can keep your Crash Bandicoot and Mario Kart; I'll still be living it up with Panzer Dragoon Saga and Enemy Zero. 

How viable this plan would have actually been in practice is debatable at best. Sticking exclusively to a given piece of hardware is a pretty good way to give yourself buyer's remorse. I think of the PS2/XBOX/GCN generation, how each of these very powerful consoles ended up sculpting unique markets unto themselves. If you loved Role-Playing or Strategy Games, PS2 was the way to go given Square Enix's success with the Final Fantasy series. If you loved First Person Shooters, then you went with XBox and got chummy with all the other Halo fans. If you were a lifelong Nintendo fan, you obviously went with Gamecube and its first party IP's including Mario and Pokemon. When I think back to the Saturn and the games I was going to tough out the next few years with, I think my gaming tastes and habits would have changed drastically. I certainly would have favored quality over quantity, instead of the serious problem I came to have when I got my PS2. 

The PS2 had a massive library of games, a catalog befitting its position as the biggest seller of its generation. Ironically, the majority of PS2's I remember selling people on while I worked at Target had more to do with the console's capabilities as a DVD player than a gaming console. Obviously, it was cheaper to buy a standalone player, but offering the PS2 as a complete package seemed like a no-brainer for gamers and families alike. The XBox could play DVD's as well, but it required the purchase of a separate remote control to the tune of about 30USD. Adding to the irony, that's only a little more expensive than a PS2 memory card, while the XBox had a built-in hard drive for game saves. By comparison, the Gamecube basically sold itself since fans of Nintendo properties such as Metroid and Legend of Zelda didn't care about DVD's or any other multimedia capabilities. 

I went with the PS2 because I had the PS1. I went with the PS1 over the Saturn because I saw a commercial for Final Fantasy VII. I became obsessed with all things Playstation (apart from the occasional outings with the N64). I didn't simply love the Playstation. I loved Sony itself. I researched the company for an economics class and that leaned heavily on the potential of the PS2 becoming not only a games console and home media player, but also a small desktop PC thanks to its promised add-on of a hard drive. That would never technically come to pass; the Linux Kit was never meant to offer up a desktop experience on the level of a PC or Mac, and the hard drive would find more use with online games like Final Fantasy XI anyway. Nonetheless, and just like with the Saturn, I was undeterred. I held on to my PS2 for years, and  there was no favoring quality over quantity. At my worst, I owned something like 200 games. My justification was that I had relatively obscure taste and it wasn't always possible to rent certain titles. Moreover, a lot of the games I wanted had been on the market for some time, their prices typically dropping by half before I became aware of them. I very rarely paid full price for games, but also rarely bought used. In fact, the only used PS2 game I remember buying was Gran Turismo 3, purely because it was literally cheaper than renting it. 

Youtuber Caddicarus made a video detailing his unpopular gaming opinions, including such notable takes as, "ET for the 2600 is not the worst game ever made," and "mobile gaming is pretty cool actually." The one that struck a chord with me was his unexpected admission that the Gamecube was better than the PS2. Seemed like blasphemy given he's known on the internet as a Playstation fanboy to the Nth degree. I've only played the Gamecube within the last few years thanks to my roommate having one, checking out games that I missed because I was in camp Playstation. While the Gamecube had a smaller library than the PS2, it seemed like I had to go further and further out of my way to find something especially bad. That's true of any console, but with the PS2, it attracted shovelware in a way that would only be surpassed by the Nintendo Wii. Actually, the reason I was so hesitant to get a Gamecube back in the day was precisely because of its emphasis on quality over quantity. That is, I knew the Gamecube had really good games on it, but it was the fact that everyone was playing them all at once that kept me away. Everyone was playing Mario Kart. Everyone was playing Metroid Prime. Meanwhile, I don't know many people who were playing Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior or Stretch Panic or Kagero II: Dark Illusion on PS2. I generally stayed away from mainstream titles except maybe for some RPG's. Square Enix had left PS2 owners spoiled for choice, to say nothing of other publishers who recognized the console as the place to be for fans of the genre. 

Much like my Saturn plan, I banked on a number of RPG's for PS2 because I had it in my head that someday I'd have nothing but time on my hands and would need something that could fill that void. RPG's generally take a lot of time, what with being more story-driven and all, so it was the perfect solution to this problem I was convinced was coming sooner rather than later. Had the pandemic happened about 15-20 years earlier and I had a non-essential job to leave me waiting at home, I would have been fully prepared, if only in staving off boredom. 

I've now sold off the majority of my PS2 games (hence the eBay photos I dug up, which aren't all of them). There's maybe a few stragglers I didn't get around to, but they're not taking up an entire foot locker and then some like they once had. The same goes for my Sega Dreamcast, which also had a substantial library at the time. The only games whose prices dropped lower and faster than PS2's were the Dreamcast's, and I was all in. In a way, I did with the Dreamcast what I'd wanted to do with the Saturn. The console wasn't performing well, so it was best to get it while the getting was good. 

My PS3/PS4 collection is substantial, though that's thanks mostly to Sony's Jelly of the Month Club, Playstation Plus. For the price of about a game per year, I can download a game or two a month. They're typically smaller, independent games or older titles past their prime. I allowed my membership to lapse back in January, which left over half the collection inaccessible. It didn't bother me as I was getting more out of my PS4 as a streaming device than a games console. I turned the service back on this month to start playing through some games I meant to finish.  

11 years, 12 months per year, 2-3 games per month...

I guess I never learn. It only makes me sad that you can't really sell digital versions of games. With my old games I can trust that they've all gone to good homes, to gamers like myself who can appreciate and enjoy them as much as I should have. Nowadays, my rule is that I don't buy a new game unless I've beaten one. That's the compromise I made with myself a few years into owning my PS3, and I've mostly stuck to it ever since.

Motivation

I've been having a lot of motivation problems of late. It's obviously shown itself in how neglected this weblog has become. I've got a number of unfinished drafts that I've attempted to tackle over the past several months, but I've given up on trying to finish them. January saw a change in my medications to coincide with a new diagnosis of Mania instead of Moderate Depression. My current mood stabilizer is doing a good job of helping me sleep, which was important. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be helping to stabilize my mood, so I'm going to have to try something different. I'm irritable, impatient, stressed, and my down spells are becoming longer and more frequent. When I try to be productive (especially at work), I get overwhelmed and mentally exhausted. If I'm not productive, I get anxious. While my visits to my counselor have also helped tremendously, it's not a full solution unto itself. Because of the time taken off of work, I made the mistake of setting my next appointment further out than I normally do. 

    Work has been a particularly large source of stress as there's been a change in our hierarchy and how things get done. It's put a lot of things in uncertain positions, and that's unsettling. It also doesn't help that I'm not at work right now and there's a lot I want to get done. I'm not at work because I'm at home, and I'm at home because just yesterday I tested positive for COVID-19. Over 2 years of hide-and-seek with this bastard strand of RNA and I finally lost. I suppose it was inevitable, and I'm beyond glad it's happened after I've been fully vaccinated and even boosted. My symptoms are persistent, but overall mild. Company policy requires me to isolate for 5 days, which means I'm off until Monday. 

    Discovery of my COVID status after a follow-up appointment over a small medical emergency I had at the start of the month. In the late evening, I began to experience unbearable lower back pain that did not go away. There was no position that alleviated the discomfort and eventually I realized I was going to have to go to the hospital. I was shaking so much I couldn't drive. Whether said shakes were from the pain or the fear that this may have been a sign of something worse, it was very hard to tell. A CT scan revealed a kidney stone measuring 2mm x 8mm had formed in my left kidney and was about 75% of the way down to my bladder. I was given painkillers and a medication meant to relax the ureter where the stone was lodged. This follow-up appointment was an attempt to see if I had passed the stone or not. Once a stone is in the bladder, there's not a lot that can be done for it. If one is still lodged in the ureter, this requires surgery. Fortunately, my X-Ray was clear. 

    This is the part where I say my medical scare was the kick in the pants I needed and started being more productive outside of work because my clean bill of health was a new lease on life and... No. There is nothing of the sort here. My vain hope is that by posting this, it will actually motivate me to write more so I can effectively bury this entry and I won't have to think about it anymore. It reminds of something YouTuber Wheezywaiter said about when he feels as if a video he's made is not up to snuff. His solution, he says, is to make more content, not less. I guess if you're worried about quality, shift your focus to quantity and see what happens. 

Goodnight, and good luck. 

Kayaks and Counselors: An Ad Review

Here's some free advice to anyone who wants to use mental health for comedy: don't. At least, don't do it when the service you're offering is alleging to help people with mental heath issues. 

I understand completely what BetterHelp is trying to do. A similar ad from some years ago used those Nigerian Prince scams as its focus. A woman is sitting by herself on a bus when an elderly man sits down next to her to tell her he's going to give her part of his fortune if she cashes a check for him, all using slightly broken English befitting an email put through a bad translator. Naturally, the woman shakes her head and gets off at the next stop. The narrator chimes in, "You wouldn't take this offer in person, so why would you go along with it in an e-mail chain?" 

It's a rather on-the-nose way of saying, "This is how you sound when talking about X" or "This is how X looks to everyone else." A series of comedy skits on YouTube take a similar approach: 

As of this writing, BetterHelp has 3 ads using this formula. I'll try to link them where I can, but as far as I can tell, BetterHelp doesn't have a YouTube channel where they would keep all of these videos to be used in pre-roll ads. The one with the weightlifter is actually the most subtle. Two men are working out in a gym. One struggles with a bench press, unable to lift the bar off his chest. Another man offers a spot. He is blown off at first, to which he counters, "There's nothing wrong with asking for help." He is dismissed again with what sounds like a non sequitur, "You don't know my family." There's no hyperbole or absurdism here, at least not to the extent of the other ads in this campaign. In fact, if it weren't for the other ads, I'd call this a very effective public service announcement. 

The next ad in the campaign is more comical, though I have to admit it's a bit of a guilty pleasure. A woman sits on her couch in a living room. The lights go out, then flicker back on a moment later. The woman's roommate calls out how long this has been going on. Like with the weightlifter, she is dismissed. The lights go out again. When they flicker back on a moment later, the roommate is now standing in the living room door and asking again about getting the problem fixed. The dismissal this time is much like the one the weightlifter gave, a call to simply cope with the situation. The ad is essentially playing off horror movie tropes, of people disappearing and reappearing with lights going on and off. I hate to admit it got a chuckle out of me. Much like the weightlifter ad, it's subtle enough to serve as a public service announcement on how to identify a person going through mental health problems. That is, the shorter version of the ad is almost effective. There's a longer version of the ad involving a book case getting toppled during a blackout. 

The third ad goes off the rails completely into slapstick comedy. A cowboy with a bandaged foot limps along to his horse. Another cowboy offers help, noting how deadly rattlesnake bites can get. The first cowboy starts giving some speech about "how his daddy and his daddy before him" did something or other. There's no message or theme here that isn't buried under the formulaic comedy trope of walking through pain. When King Arthur's duel with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is more subtle than you, you have failed in whatever it was you were trying to convey. 

You haven't highlighted the weight of the problem. You've put it on stage and made a spectacle of it. 

Kayak went from making fun of cryptomnesia (unconscious appropriation) to labeling people who speak out against their business model as "Kayak Deniers." The political overtones of this should be obvious. The targets are chiefly climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, and a few other conspiracy theories while it's at it. The ads focus on small family gatherings in which the "issue" of Kayak is brought up, at which point a verbal battle of words ensues, escalating to a shouting match before someone storms off, leaving everyone else rolling their eyes at the whole debacle. 

So, how can I defend one set of ads while another gets admonished for the same technique? Simply put, the melody is the same, but the instrumentation is different. Kayak is a travel planning service using socio-political tensions as a punchline. BetterHelp is an online/virtual counseling service using mental health as... well, it's not trying to make it sound like a punchline, but it definitely feels as though it's mocking it, or at least minimizing it. It makes me wonder who the ad is for exactly. If it's someone with mental health problems, it comes across as diminishing, painting them as a burden when that's precisely why they keep their issues bottled up in the first place. If it's someone else (i.e. the roommate, the spotter, etc.), it doesn't offer much insight into the problem, and certainly doesn't equip them on how to handle the situation. 

The Great Equalizer

Disclaimer: This entry discusses mental health, including medication and some clinical jargon I'm likely to get wrong because I am not a doctor nor do I play one on TV. This is not meant to be taken as medical advice nor given any more weight and credence than any other personal anecdote. Everyone is different. 

The lack of data on Friday is human error. I forgot to wear the watch.

To put this image in perspective, some context. At the start of the new year, my doctor suggested that I may not have depression (at least not anymore, or exclusively...?), but instead a manic disorder. I won't go into the semantics over what a manic disorder is in relation to bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, or any other (dis)similar conditions. Suffice to say, as a rule, you don't treat it with antidepressants (alone). What's offered instead (or in tandem) is what's broadly called a mood stabilizer. I'll spare you the details of the first one I tried, if only because I don't remember it at all and it was thusly written off as ineffective. I'll also spare you the details of the second one except that it made me sick to my stomach, and not in the principled sense. It was written off as intolerable.

The Charming Third stands in stark contrast to the first two in that those medications are typically used to treat epilepsy, their use as mood stabilizers being somewhat serendipitous. Charming Third is what's known as an antipsychotic. I have no idea what it would do for epilepsy, but let's leave the happy accidents for another time. 5mg of Charming Third was taken Sunday before bedtime, a time bumped up in case the drowsiness listed as the most common side effect made getting ready in the morning a bother. On a side note: due to the tummy troubles from Terrible Two, as of this writing, I haven't touched coffee in over two weeks. 

As the song goes if you slur your speech in the right places, waking up is hard to do. 

Not only was it a struggle to get up and get ready for the day, but I spent the entire day at work on the edge of nodding off. I worried constantly about either shutting my eyes for too long or leaning too far back in my chair and dozing off right then and there. A solid 8.5 hours of sleep but with nothing to show for it. Fortunately, nobody seemed to notice, so I guess my anxiety filled me with enough nervous energy to counteract the sleepiness. After getting home, I immediately fell asleep on my bed. I slept for 3.5 hours, got up to change clothes and get into bed properly, and then slept until 5:30 the next morning, with the drowsiness finally wearing off around 7:00. 

Did I mention this was a single dose? 

Having literally slept through the window during which I would have taken my second dose, I naturally informed my doctor of what happened, full timeline of events included. By the way, special thanks to Fossil for making an alarmingly accurate fitness tracker despite being fairly low tech as trackers tend to go. Being me, when my doctor called, I apologized for missing the second dose. To her credit, she was extremely understanding, but wasn't ready to give up on Charming Third just yet. After all, as side effects go, drowsiness isn't the worst thing ever, unless you operate heavy machinery, which I don't. Problem the first was there didn't seem to be a lower dosage available. Problem the second was the makers of Charming Third not making their tablets breakable in any reasonable way. There's typically a good reason for this, Big Pharma skulduggery notwithstanding: Put simply, any lower and the medicine isn't effective at all at what it's supposed to do, much less what it does as a side hustle. A little more digging did turn up a 2.5mg dosage available, in small tablets obviously not meant for splitting, but far more inviting to the notion if we grade on a curve. Nevertheless, it was recommended I wait until Friday to take this new dosage, lest the sleepiness did not degrade along a curve. It was somewhat academic because I took the day off to get my car fixed, but I didn't want to tempt fate and reschedule a second time. 

It was suggested that, like any medication, there may well be an adjustment period, a time when the body has to recalibrate its various chemical processes to adapt to the new material in the carbon-rich macromolecular soup. The track record thus far was that Terrible Two got worse each time and Charming Third hadn't made the best first impression. Put simply, if 20/48 hours asleep was A New Hope, what will happen when The Empire Strikes Back? As of this writing, I've taken two doses of the 2.5mg. The first stuck to the statistics and resulted in 10/24 hours of sleep to awake, with only the most minimal of drowsiness to shake off afterward. The second took a little off the top with a more typical 8/24 proportion, though the drowsiness has been a bit of a slow burn throughout the day. That said, this is all completely ignoring the mood stabilizer portion of the meds, which I can't make any meaningful assessment of because it hasn't been long enough. Terrible Two's collected anecdotes mentioned the medicine's turnaround time of noticeable results being in the "months" range, to which I channeled all the Will Smith I could muster to utter an emphatic, "AW HAIL NAW!" Charming Third doesn't make any real note of when it begins to take effect, but I'll take a lack of detail as a sign it rarely tries anyone's patience. 

Time for Return of the Jedi.

Goodnight, and good luck.