Wants vs. Needs, aka Growing Up

"I could eat ice cream eeeeeeveryday if I wanted to", I'm sure you've heard this spluttered by children when their parents deny them of  a second helping. If it's not ice cream, it's candy, or some other addictive substance for children. You know you've grown up when you realise you can't have these things every day. Remember the childlike joy you experienced when you dug that spoon into a big bowl of your favourite flavour, and the sweet warm feeling that cold cold ice cream would give you, you tell yourself you could never have enough of the stuff. And surely enough, when you got older, and you had the means, and your parents weren't looking, you'd just help yourself to more and more. But one day you start feeling sick, as is often said, there can often be too much of a good thing, especially when having too much of this good thing can be bad for your health. As a child, you pretty much only do things because you want to.

Yeah, they're evil. Just give them to me so you won't have to deal with them.

You know you've grown up when you realise that it was just a want, you realise you didn't need it. And this is the difference between children and adults. Children, or if you don't have children, think your pet cat, or dog, will do what they want, sometimes, you are just powerless to control them in the face of it, a new toy on the store shelf, a pork chop on the dinner table, and they would get so upset if they don't get it, because they wanted it so much. But you as the adult, know what they need, and a lot of the time, these things are very far apart. As an adult, there are things you don't want to do, but you know you need to.

You want me to distract them again? You'll share this time right...?

Needs are universal. A human being needs very little to survive, water, shelter, food and warmth, but what we want is very telling of character. If you are a grown adult in the working world, I'm sure there are mornings where you have wanted to throw the alarm clock down the toilet, and just go back to bed. But you know if you do that, you'll be late for work, and if you turn up late, you won't have a job to work at for much longer. You know you need to wake up, so you do. You get out of bed with that dreary feeling, brush your teeth while looking like you'll fall asleep at any moment, get dressed, have breakfast, and trudge unhappily to work. You need to do this, you need to earn money for a living, to support yourself, to support the people around you. But you don't want to. And this dictates how you behave. You have a poor attitude at work, and if your day has gone particularly badly, you'll have a poor attitude to your partner or children, and generally, you'll be an unhappy person to deal with. Luckily, if you have an understanding partner, they won't pack their bags and leave you because you've had a bad day. They don't need to be able to put up with you, but they want to.

These two have a very clear idea of what they need and what they want

There's always a little unhappiness or anxiety that stems from doing what you need, but not necessarily want to. But you can blame these feelings on two things, your external circumstances and your personal attitude. One is very easy to change, one is hard. External circumstances are hard to change, anyone who has spent any amount of time looking for a job, or suffering with an unreliable car can attest to that. Your attitude however, can be easier to change, the ubiquitous adage that, beauty is in the eye of the beholder can have relevance to this as well, how you view the world shapes the realities of your world, fixate on the negatives, and you will be inordinately unhappy. Fixate on the positives, and you may not feel ecstasy, but you will be a little happier. The positives and negatives are all there laid out in front of you. What you focus your attention on is up to you. But on the other hand, your attitude can also be the more difficult to change, the heart wants what it wants, humans are irrational things, just think of the torment you brought yourself by falling in love with someone that didn't necessarily love you back.

How you see your world! Harharhar

We don't need fancy cars. What is a car, but a 4 wheeled conveyance to get you from A to B, and last I looked that was nearly every car out there, why this particular one then? At the same token, we don't need lots of money, it just allows us to do what we want. When we think we need those things, and we don't get them, we become unhappy. But in fact we just want them, really badly. I'm not trying to tell you those things are bad, but if there is unhappiness in your life, I have a strong feeling that it stems from this confusion. Want is a largely self centred thing, you want it because of how it makes you feel, but sometimes you need to do something because of what someone else wants. As any of you out there in a relationship knows, there comes a time (very early on) where what your partner wants, does not necessarily align with what you want. How you tackle this problem can arguably have a direct effect on how your relationship works.

As an example, I'm a typical gamer geek, there's nothing I like more than to unwind in front of the warm glow of a computer monitor chasing lap times or defending the earth from invasion. I also work a blue collar job that gets me home regular hours, so often I'm home earlier than my wife. I don't like to cook, I don't enjoy it, but on the days that my wife comes home late from work, I have two choices, keep aiming for that high score until she gets home to feed me, or turn the computer off and cook, or try to have things in some semblance of readiness by the times she gets back. I don't like to cook, so I don't want to cook, and I seem to be able to cope for long stretches without hunger, so it isn't a question of need, for me. But if my wife is working late, she's not going to be in the mood to cook for us both when she gets back. What I need to do at this stage is very obvious, even if I don't want to. So I do what I need, boil some 2 minute noodles, maybe throw some roughly cut vegetables in with some diced Spam, that would be the bare minimum right. She'd have to be happy with that.

 What... this is quality work for me!

The problem is, when you don't want to do something, that is virtually a guarantee that you don't do it well, and definitely not as well as you could. The experience is at least a little irritating to you, so you spend as little time as possible, and put in as little effort as possible because you'd rather be somewhere else, doing something else. You need to be wanting to do something to do a good job of it. I was raised in a Chinese family, and a major cultural facet is that you do everything to a standard, in this world full of conflict and liberality however, you can only do this for so long. Toiling away at a job where your work is unappreciated, or unrewarded is a prime example. I'm sure we've all been in a situation where we thought we were working towards something important for someone, only to have them turn around to show you a token amount of gratitude, or even take you for granted. We all remember how shattered we felt at those moments. This is the beginning of growing up. Sometimes you just need to be able to do something for the sake of it, not because you want to.

 I'll need those reports Wednesday now instead of Friday, alright? Thanks

So this goes back to the idea that you need to change your own attitude. You have to want to do the things you need to do. Don't just fixate on the task, but think about why you need to do it, will this make someone else happy? Will this make other things easier? Is there some greater good that this is working towards? If there are positive notions to be found there, then what you're doing is in fact worthwhile, even if you don't necessarily feel like it at the time. On the other hand, you just need to do what you want to do sometimes. Growing up, and living the life of an adult, you start drowning in the sea of things that you need to do, and end up not being able to do the things that you've wanted. For the simple reason that it will make you happy, sometimes you just need to do, what you want to do.

So long as you do what you need to do first...

 Wheee...!

Elysium - A commentary review

As a big fan of District 9, it was pretty much a given that I would go along to see Neill Blomkamp's second full length directorial effort, Elysium. If you loved District 9, or are a sci-fi fan in any capacity, you will not regret buying a ticket to go see this movie. Unfortunately his second effort doesn't quite capture the spirit created in the first movie, as it's a little clumsily written, but that's not to say Elysium was especially weak, District 9 is just one of those hard acts to follow.

The Halo, I mean, Elysium.

To set the scene, Elysium takes the classic upper class, lower class struggle narrative and gives it a decidedly sci-fi laser edge. Earth is post apocalypse, wracked with pollution, disease and crime. Elysium is a utopia in space, where rich people who look like the token American upper crust, live with technology that knows no bounds, in an unending, disease free life of parties of the Garden and Pool varieties, free from the unending squalor of Earth. Max, played by Matt Damon, grew up as an orphan on the dystopian Earth, but with one eye firmly on Elysium, was destined to mix with the wrong crowd as he grew up. A life of stealing cars, robbery and assault, sees him serving parole which is extended in the opening scenes in a scuffle with Earth-side law enforcement robots who behave alarmingly human-like. Trying to earn his keep working a line job at the local Weyland Yutani if it were operating in Detroit, Armadyne plant, he is involved in an industrial accident, that's a laughable send up of today's OHS vs. productivity at all costs culture. Dosed with a lethal amount of radiation, he is given 5 days to live, and told to have a nice day by the plant's hilariously deadpan medic-bot. There's also a sub-plot of Max's old flame Frey, played by Alice Braga doing the best with what she's got, needing her daughter to go up to Elysium to use their life-saving Medpods. This only serves to artificially heighten the stakes, as the ending renders this device largely meaningless. Having to delve into the criminal underworld again for a ticket to Elysium, Max must espionage his way up. By a confluence of circumstances he must face the shadowy might of a Secretary of Defence, Delacourt, played by a positively conniving Jodie Foster, that's planning a digital coup on the Elysium infrstructure. On top of all that, Max must literally fight through her right hand man, sleeper agent and enforcer, the excellently named Kruger, played by Sharlto Copley in a convincingly sociopathic turn, who has seemingly taken on the spirit of Koobus in District 9, eventually turning into the loose cannon and final boss fight.

Now who's the wimp...

Did you get that all? One of the main criticisms I see leveled at Elysium is that it tries to do too many things at once. And while I don't totally disagree, I don't think that it's necessarily to the detriment of the movie. As with District 9, Blomkamp has a way of weaving an intricate world with which to tell his stories. It's the rich detail that he fills these worlds with that makes his movies such excellent fare for sci-fi fans. He doesn't feel the need to explain away and justify every single piece of the world, he knows we're here to see a sci-fi movie and that there's a certain level of suspension of disbelief necessary to participate. The accessories with which he builds these worlds are also wonderfully creative and diverse, one notable example being what I would like to call the "Aperture Cutter" cycling through a square, a triangle, and finally a circle, much like one would do in a FPS game. Here, I feel the need to point out the inherent silliness of the need to cut out a triangle hole though, which I found a little jarring. It could have easily been replaced by a resizing rectangular hole before settling for the perfect circle as per the movie, but this did serve to heighten the sense of the "what is he doing... HOLY CRAP" moment, of which in this movie, there are many. But this is a minor quibble. The rate at which Blomkamp puts new plot devices into the movie and then quickly discards them helps to build an imaginative and colourful world that that aids greatly in our immersion. One place where we could do with a little less immersion though is his almost fetishistic depiction of explosive gib-filled splattery deaths, for the squeamish, you may find yourself looking away more than a few times.

 Kids, look away while Uncle Matt shows this nice man how this gun works

The weakest aspect of Elysium is its social commentary on refugee situations we, as a world, face today. In Blomkamp's previous effort, in District 9, the world was built around South Africa and its slum culture. Here he decides to point the finger at America and it's the "South American in North America" illegal alien problem that Elysium is built around. Because he chooses to address America specifically, he loses the good will one would give him when he dealt with South Africa, because he isn't judging his home country anymore, as per District 9. He treads dangerous territory by singling out someone else. One can't help but feel this is a little mean spirited as America is certainly not the only country in the world to suffer from the conundrum of illegal immigrants. My own native Australia is another example, and really any poor country that is in close geographical proximity to a more developed one can have this problem. His treatment of this comes off as heavy handed, choosing to use the words "deportation", "undocumented", and the far more obvious "homeland security" choosing to call America out specifically. Delacourt's french lineage and arguably Indian President serve only as lampshades to this notion, or a possible escape clause. Not to mention the fact that all the poverty stricken earth dwellers speak and look Spanish, (Max is the only "white" person there, with the notable exception of the line supervisor, again there's a whole paragraph of racial commentary inherent in there). Because of all this you don't even get to the halfway point of the movie before thinking "Alright, I get it". Blomkamp could have taken the high road and chosen to tackle the issue on a wider scale, and made us all look at the issue in more detail, but now he is in danger of alienating the specific people he is trying to speak to, who in turn become defensive and may end up ignoring what he has to say, this is a movie after all, not a political rally.

It's a horrible world up there, down here... you know what I mean...

And finally, the biggest issue I have with the movie is the ending. Some movies just wrap up everything neatly in a little package by the end, and we as the audience appreciate it because it was a particularly appropriate way to end. In this movie however, it comes off empty and once again, mean spirited.  

(Spoiler Alert)

Having multiple EMS shuttles suddenly fly down with dozens upon dozens of Medpods and Paramedic-bots, just because of a re-written line of code makes light of what would usually be the heavy subject of just why the class differences exist. As if the people on Elysium were just withholding them from the inhabitants from the Earth, when they had no use for them themselves. Why are all these shuttles even on Elysium if every inhabitant has a Medpod in their house? We have all the good stuff, we don't even need it, but you can't have it because it's ours. It's as if Blomkamp is saying the class struggle could be solved if America were to suddenly build piles of Hospitals in Southern America, because the only thing they need is free health care...

(End Spoiler Alert)

Stay calm, the undesirables have been apprehended, continue living your opulent life.

There is something poetic however in the fact that Blomkamp chose to solve the struggle between the classes in Elysium by requiring a literal reboot of the system. Very eloquent.

For all this negativity, I really did enjoy Elysium and it really is one of the more fleshed out sci-fi affairs in recent memory, it just suffers a little in trying to call out a social issue in a very specific way. Social commentary aside though, the movie is a great ride while it lasts, with a deep world filled with bizarrely diverse elements of world building, this really is excellent science fiction.

The Cheap Sports Car

With the arrival of the Toyota, Subaru, Scion, GT86, BRZ, FR-S triplets, there has been, great hype and fanfare, a new era of the "cheap sports car" had come. Entry level sports cars, that were financially attainable by everyone. As a long time enthusiast this was a very strange notion to me, because it never really occurred to me that they ever went away. Mazda has had it's MX-5 for years, only until recently had Honda discontinued it's Type R line in 2010 with the fearsome Civic Type R, while they still soldier on with the Si badge in America. And hot hatches seem as popular as ever in their home continent of Europe.

The new sports car messiah... apparently... 

How then, did the neo 86 turn out to be such a big deal? Supposedly, the key was that it was rear-wheel drive, bringing the sort of purity of concept that died with axing of the Nissan Silvia (or 200SX as it was known to markets outside of it's native Japan). Front wheel drive cars understeer and are boring. Rear wheel drive cars are tail happy and exciting. If you are the sort that believes these notions whole heartedly, you should find your way into the driver seat of any well-sorted hot hatch that has existed through the years. Even something as old as the Peugeot 205GTi has had the infamy of being able to spit ham-fisted drivers through hedges, pointing in the direction it isn't going, just like any well (or indeed, poorly) engineered rear wheel drive coupe. The hot hatch you see, has always been targeted at the enthusiast that just doesn't have the finances to splurge on something too extravagant. It is probably the simplest of sports car adages. Take one small car, and add an otherwise oversized engine. This is after all the driving idea behind such monsters as the AC Cobra and Dodge Viper. As an automotive category they have never gone away.

 A rare shot of a 205GTi pointing in the right direction 

But if you subscribe to the idea that front wheel drive cars just don't count, there has been another cheap rear wheel drive sports coupe that has been available right under our noses, OK, it was only available in America, and it came from the most unlikely of places. A marque whose original chairman has been quoted as saying, "I may not know how to build cars well, but I know how to build them quickly".  Hyundai did itself a great disservice by not engineering it's Genesis sports coupe for right hand drive markets. From all accounts, it was simple and honest fun, even if it was always singled out for lacking in polish, but what can you expect from a marque with so little sports car experience under it's belt? The 2 litre turbo was both torquey and adequately powerful for it's day, especially for a car of it's understated proportions, and it's chassis had more thought put into it than the average four wheeled conveyance. American automotive magazines even saw fit to pit the V6 version against Camaros, Mustangs (in V6 guise, obviously) and arguably more upmarket 370Z. Granted it did not conquer all those tests, but it deserves praise for even being considered to do battle with those legendary names. It deserved to be popular for the money they asked.

From the people that brought you the... Excel... hmm...

So why then did the neo 86 create such a big fuss? Because people expected it to be good. A giant of the Japanese automotive industry was throwing it's weight into the ring again, and engineering a sports car for the masses, how could it fail? I'd love this to be the part of the post where I told you the GT86 turned out to be horrible, but it didn't. It was very well received by automotive journalists, but it, like many other cars didn't escape without it's criticisms. The tyres were too skinny for going in any direction but sideways, the engine was notable for the fact that it could recreate the feel of turbo lag without actually having a turbo, and the fact that it was cheap, meant that all the money spent on engineering a communicative sporting chassis, came from the budget that would have been meant for interior quality, needless to say, inside the GT86, utilitarian hard plastics abound. Something had to give. 

But really, all the excitement boiled down to bragging rights. It is no great secret that the automotive enthusiast is a competitive breed. And naturally, some believe rear wheel drive cars are better, because the vast majority of high power front wheel drive cars all degrade into understeer when pushed hard, or rampant torque steer when overpowered. But really, this is an antiquated notion, a notion that's days were numbered in the early 2000's with the literally misguided Alfa Romeo 147GTA with it's massive (at the time) 250hp or the similarly powered 230hp Saab 9-3 Viggen who would straighten a corner if you so much as looked at the accelerator pedal. Fast forward 10 years, and with the benefit of Revoknuckle, Hiperstrut et. al. 250hp is considered par for course in the hot hatch world, with anything less struggling to keep up with the competition, Renault Megane Sport, 265hp, Vauxhall Astra VXR, 276hp, and only the current Ford Focus ST lagging at 252hp, the new ceiling having been found by Ford with their last Focus RS 500, it had 350hp...

I can do sideways, me

But bringing us back down to earth, those cars are in a completely different performance bracket let alone price range compared to the neo 86. It's natural competitors are more the Clio 200's and Fiesta ST's of this day and age, so what the neo 86 does then, is bring some well needed diversity back into the automotive scene. The 86 does indeed fill a void that has since been left empty in the automotive world, it just wasn't THAT big a void.