2001.02.19
The movie takes place in an old asylum, and one of the motifs is the use of Electroshock therapy. Watching the film reminded me of this one passage from Prozac Highway, a book I've been reading off and on. Much of the book is in the form of e-mail from participants in a mental illness support mailing list.
Spoken like a woman who's never worked night-shift. But the next one's bad. I went down to the drop-in centre and got in a fight about shock treatment with this old guy. He was saying how great it was and how it had really helped him. He had this voice, this voice you get to recognize. I told him, "Man, they have fucked up your brain. I can hear the damage when you talk." And he looked at me and said, "I've had a hundred shock treatments, I have to believe it was for something." I felt so fucking bad. What am I doing, rubbing this guy's face in it just to make my point.I find that really sad, a moving example of how people are forced to cope with some of the awful things in life.
Funny Dirty Link of the Moment
Ok, you have to be a bit of a geek to get this one. It's from a site for Adult Interactive Fiction. (Interactive Fiction is an old form of computer game, Zork and Adventure being the most famous examples, where the computer describes where your character is in words, and you type in what you want the character to do. I once reviewed an innovative piece of Interactive Fiction that describes the genre a bit more.) Anyway, This is the page that I find so funny. It's a set of instructions on what to type in to win one of the adult games. (I believe 'g' is the command for 'aGain', i.e. repeat the last command.) Without the supporting descriptions, it's just randomly lewd and goofy.