It Can’t Be All Swamps and Marshes

Feb 16, 2026 12:30 AM PST

I cannot write about serious topics all the time.
I need to write about light stuff if I’m to write without real purpose but just to practice. The heaviness takes a toll.
Besides, things are not always so dark and gloomy and worth ranting and raving about.
So with this in mind, I will write about silly TV shows and movies from time to time.

Today’s post is about Legacies. I like to pronounce it Le-GAH-shees just to give it an exotice feel.

The first thing I need to get off my chest is the terrible amount of sex that drives the plot at times.
I do not mind the teenage angst or greed or jealousy but the sex is terrible.
No one seems to be able to keep their diks in their pants and it is frustrating when not even the adults in the show can set a standard for the kids. Okay maybe not everyone is having sex all the time but they want to and it is annoying.

If you know me, this may seem like a weird contradiction but I hate sex in movies and shows because I feel that the time it takes to talk about sex and even worse, show it on screen takes time away from the real point of the show. Rarely does sex and nudity do anything for the plot in this new era of entertainment. If you cannot write a show in such a way that you can imply the sex, maybe… I know. Who the hell am I to tell a professional show writer how to do things? I’m sure it has a lot to do with likes and watch hours but man, I still hate it.

Some of the best movies and shows before the 80s did not have any actual sex on the screen and were very much implied. Then came Porky’s and the like. That said, Legacies is not a terrible show.

At the surface it really is a sort of mash up between a few anime shows and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show does enough for those of us who watched BTVS the first time around to keep us around. The acting is not terrible. The writing ain’t bad except for the sex driven plot at times.

I tell you what does stand out for me is the camera work and the lighting.

Without trying to sound like a complete nerd/dork, I really appreciate some of the lighting experiments the show tries to pull off like not using reflectors to fill the shadows in certain shots. I believe the actual scene in real life would have looked that way to the characters in the show so they went with that look. That or budget issues. Either way I really appreciate the boldness of the camerawork.

The major point of frustration for me is the disobedience and lack of respect towards the adults from the kids. I don’t like that and truly think that this has to be a cultural thing.

In my house that type of disrespect and disobedience would not be tolerated. In fact I would not be here today typing this if I ever acted out like those kids. This sort of trope seems to be the same in a few shows and the plots are written in such a way that whatever the kids decide to do just happens to be the correct choice time and time again. There are no real consequences for disobeying not only authority but the better educated.

In these plot situations, it is not the fact that the adults have been around longer and know better but are better educated about the things in the plot and need to be listened to and obeyed instead of waved off. The situations these kids are placed in are not normal and they cannot be allowed to have normal teenage reactions since they are being held to a higher standard in the script and overall story timeline.

I can totally understand and accept the teenage reactions in films like Mean Girls and anything written by John Hughes but in shows where kids are on another level they should be held to a higher emotional standard since the power they wield is intense. But that’s just me not accepting the writing as is and getting frustrated with how these characters are written sometimes.

One of the great things about the show is the diversity of characters. I do believe the show is a metaphor for racism at times using monsters and witches in place of cultures but it does an excellent job of not making it the only thing. It does spotlight many times the advantages of teamwork and the importance of forgiveness.

I associate forgiveness with diversity because it somehow gives more weight and value to the act of forgiveness when it involves not just other cultures but other species.

I tell you what else I don’t mind: the ridiculousness of it all. Not just the monsters but the Deus ex machina aspects of the show. The convenience of “outs” to the danger scenes and the emotional ones as well. There are a lot of teenage relationships as one might expect from the show’s general entertainment purpose but aside from all the unnecessary sex and overdriven hormone actions, the show does a reasonable job navigating the teenage emotional disaster scenarios.

The music is pretty cool too.

I just started season two and I am actually very impressed at the reset button used to introduce new points to be explored and adventures to get into.

We’ll see how it goes from here but so far, I have been easily entertained.

Why I decided to write more

I wanted to just give a quick reason as to why I am taking up writing blog posts instead of recording podcasts which tend to do more often.

Recently, I went through a really serious medical issue that took a bit to heal in the hospital and then a health care facility. It felt like I was in jail for over 30 days and it is nothing that I would wish on anyone.

During my time in the pen, I met some unusual characters and went through some interesting situations. I took to writing my friends about these experiences in longer than usual phone messages and decided to give the long messages more of a prose-like feel so as to keep the stories from being completely boring.

The necessity to tell my stories was not so much as to tell my friends about the stories themselves although some are quite interesting. I wrote the stories as more of a necessity to kill time and keep my mind agile and moving.

Eventually I started to type these stories into the laptop as well as any random notes and ideas. Soon I found that I had a really good amount of material for a short story and maybe even a novella.

In order to embark on my new writing project, I decided that I need a ton of practice not only typing fast on the laptop but also just getting used to putting ideas down on the proverbial paper. I need to properly construct sentences or at least approach a better way to make my ideas and themes come across in the written form.

I read a ton in the pen and realized that reading allows our brain to make up a world that is very different from any world created on the television and yet have it be uniquely ours that no one can take away.

The written form has advantages that just are not possible in the pre-cooked visual format. It may seem obvious but it really was something that I forgot about since it was a while since I read something that involved using my imagination. As a side note, I have been trying to finish the book Big Sur by Jack Kerouac and I must tell you it is very difficult to read but not because of language but because of the story itself. I will do a book report on this at another time.

It is because of my extensive reading that I came back around to the written form. I have never been any type of writer in the sense that I really have never written anything on a consistent basis. I used to have a blog but most of the posts were about my photography and light writing, usually for explaining the photo of the night the photos were taken.

Once I came to the realization that the material I was accumulating in the pen, I decided that the written form would be a better vehicle for those stories whether I decide to write one short story, multiple posts and maybe eventually a short novella.

Practicing writing involves a few more things than just putting words to paper. As stated I need to learn how to type on a laptop but that involves other things. I need to learn how to not only sit but sit in a certain way for extended periods of time. This type of sitting is different when you are continuously typing than sitting at a desk at the day job. Breaks need to be taken more often.

The other thing is the concentration and attention targeting. I did start listening to meditation music as well as some drone type stuff in order to keep me from drifting off. Come to find out that a certain prolific writer has a technique similar to the one I came up with to keep my attention on the writing project.

So in order to be more efficient in my writing I decided to write blog posts about random subjects to practice for the big project and not waste too much time since I believe it to be a bigger project than what I imagined.

Hopefully I do not waste too much time with these random posts and not finish that other project. I guess everything is a balance.

If you need help falling asleep…

Feb 8, 2026 11:00 PM PST

I have recently started a sort of weird habit of falling asleep to these A.I. generated stories (at least I think they are generated) on YouTube. The stories are recanted by a computer generated voice most of the time and the ones that seem to be narrated by a real voice are probably just really good software doing the trick. L find it hard to believe that a person would take the time to narrate tons of stories a day about basically the same topic. That said the voices that are used to narrate the stories are very good and at times actually pleasant to listen to.

When I was younger, I used to fall asleep and wake up listening to music from classical to grunge. I listened to it all. However, one day my friend let me borrow the Alice in Chains box set and for a while I fell asleep listening to that which was a mistake.

In the history of my life up to that point, I never had any sort of horror nightmares or scary dreams about supernatural figures. But when I started listening to Alice in Chains, I had the most terrible dreams I’ve ever had in my life. I mean horrific. This is one of the reasons I am very skeptical with dream interpretation when we are supposed to only dream about the real life experiences that we’ve had. Well the figures and monsters that were running around in my dreams are things that I had never imagined before or since and that I have never seen in any film, play, or work of art let alone in real life. These dreams are the scariest and most tangible and realistic things I have ever imagined. Weird stuff.

After that I let up a bit on listening to music as I slept for a while and never really got back into the routine until recently when I came across some interesting channels on the YouTubes.

The channels that have interesting sounds to fall asleep to are nice. The channels usually consisted of the beach, rainforest, street traffic, meditation sounds and drone type of music also certain chants. However, recently I found the spoken word channels.

These channels are usually titles something like “Fall Asleep to the History of the Dark Ages” or whatever the subject of the long narrative will be about. The episodes usually last anywhere from one hour to four in contrast to the music/sounds channels that can last for longer than eight hours.

As you can imagine there are a ton of spoken subjects to fall asleep to. From history to philosophy the subjects seem endless. Recently I have found a new version of these channels. The reddit stories.

These stories are not only poorly written but they are also about terrible subjects. They are some sort of auditory crack that I cannot stop listening to but not because I am completely immersed in the story or characters in them but because I am fascinated by the sheer amount and publication rate at which these things are uploaded. Very interesting.

At this time, I will not tell you what the subject is that I’m listening to but I will make a proper post about it because it is part of a bigger issue that I have with YouTube and what it allows to be published.

While most of these stories are poorly written and boring there are a few that stand out and catch me cheering for the protagonist in a very surreal way. I catch myself and ask what the hell am I doing?!

If you need help falling asleep, I think you should give these channels a try but please be careful and pick a topic that won’t make you catch feelings for the mundane and crappy story.

If you need a source for your writing, I’ve found a great one!

Feb 8, 2026 10:00 PM PST

If you ever need motivation to write, all you have to do is watch YouTube videos about your favorite subjects or hobbies. The videos I watch the most include photography, cooking, music, and overall visual arts.

These videos are an endless source for writing reactions or rants if you so wish to practice your typing or just need something to write while you work on your real project. There is so much misinformation that those of us that know better get easily frustrated if not down right furious at the crap that is published for mass consumption.

I have a few essays (I guess that is what we will call them even though the writings are more accurately described as rants) that I have yet to finish and properly publish. The main reason I do not finish and publish is that I do not want to come off as a crazy man that watches YouTube and reacts endlessly to the garbage but I am becoming more and more comfortable with that moniker.

The usual suspects to these infuriating videos are the well produced shills. The ones that try to sell you something by misinforming the public and creating a narrative to put whatever widget they are selling as the saviour of the problems you never had.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some great and educational videos out there that are pleasant to watch and that I continually subscribed to. However, these videos are usually not as well produced meaning that they are not as pretty to look at and they are also not as frequently published as the bad ones. Usually the bad ones are very well produced and adhere to a strict publication schedule usually once or twice a week.

The frustration is not that they have an opinion on anything. I welcome the difference of educated opinions and open conversation. However, what is currently being published is the purposeful spread of wrong facts to gain views and comments. Some of the comments are corrections to the information portrayed yet others are praise and gratitude for the information. This practice has been around for a while but I think there may be a deeper reason as to why some of these videos exist.

In my world, there are a lot of people that have a catalog of work. These people usually want to call attention to their catalog or work for praise and ultimately compensation of some kind.

These people are the worst in trying to teach whatever skill you are interested in. I have come to a theory of sorts regarding these people that misinterpret important technical terms and have ridiculous opinions on works by established masters in their specific fields.

I will write about the specifics in another post but for now, I just wanted to let anyone that needs a source for inspiration or motivation it can be easily found in YouTube videos made by hacks.