Last night, I showed The Fly from 1958, starring Vincent Price. I got some bad intel that it’s copyright had expired and not been renewed and was therefore safe to air as part of the Midnight Movie Presentation segment of my Twitch Channel. This morning, I found it odd I could not similarly verify it’s sequel, Return of the Fly, thus clearing it for airing next week. I found it so odd, I double checked that The Fly was indeed public domain as I had been informed, and sadly, found it to be not true. So, I had to remove it from my channel’s VOD.

There was no copyright strike, no take-down notice issued, I just did this on my own, because I found out I was wrong. The consequences of my action will likely be that since very few people saw it, and I removed it immediately upon discovering my mistake, nothing will happen. Or Twitch may be like, yo, 5 whole eyeballs scanned this thing, you get your first strike. Whatever. It wasn’t an intentional attempt to air something on my channel I shouldn’t have. But I also won’t be able to show the sequels, which were going to be the remainder of this month’s Midnight Movie Presentations.

They are great movies, in my opinion. Maybe not the first franchised horror, but a really decent attempt at it, and while the second doesn’t live up to the first, that’s normally how these things go in Hollywood. Seek these movies out on Amazon Prime Video or wherever videos can be streamed and rent them if you get a chance. They’re worth watching, is all I’m saying.

But that’s not all. Today, I intended to finish brushing up on my tkinter module knowledge to finish presenting a comprehensive tutorial on the subject this week for the Codes segment. Well, I was busy. Busy chasing down if the movies I had planned the rest of the month could be watched or not.

And I missed my nap.

So now, I’m tired, and cranky, and I have to come up with a new plan for the rest of the Saturdays for November, and finish studying tkinter, so I can still present that, and get my son ready for school this week.

It’s not all playing video games on the internet for strangers. Anyone who tries to tell you being a content creator isn’t real work has never tried it, and doesn’t speak from experience. I still wouldn’t trade it in for a normal 9 to 5 on the corporate ladder.

I feel like society has gotten into a bad place where folks should “feel lucky to have a job”. Like, that’s not an incredibly insane thing we all do now. But it is absolutely insane. Here’s why.

If you’re supposed to just feel lucky to even be employed, you are being conditioned to value yourself, your happiness, and the value of your time, health, and own freedom less than the few dollars you get in exchange for giving those things up. You’re lucky, and this is somehow a more than fair exchange. If it were the case that everyone’s making a living wage, sure, but that’s actually rarely the case. And you are giving those things up, or at least the free time you would have had to work on those things, which is what you may be doing if you weren’t working.

I understand we all need to earn a living. But we also need to value the time we give up to do so enough that a living is what we actually get in exchange for that sacrifice of personal time. Being conditioned to “just feel lucky you have a job” undervalues your time, undervalues you.

I’ve worked some shitty jobs in the past where I wasn’t a valued employee, even though the higher ups liked to say it. They proved they didn’t mean what they said however, by cutting benefits, and treating us like we were constantly under performing. The mentality around those sorts of places that prevents people from quitting is always that same mantra “I’m just lucky to have a job.”

It creates an environment that justifies abuse, and exploitation. Do not buy into that garbage and do not be a sucker. Plenty of businesses have been built by regular folks who decided to monetize doing what they loved. Find a way to do that, and you will start to understand what you gave up being a call center phone jockey.

And let’s stop idolizing the super wealthy because they “make jobs”. Its a further extension of this idea we should all be lucky that some benevolent genius will save us all by simply making enough jobs, and that excuses them from paying their fair share. Its called a “fair share” for a reason, it’s simply fair. And they aren’t the only ones making jobs. They don’t even make as many jobs in relation to the resources and money they hoard to justify this idea that they somehow deserve a pass. You think Tesla is gonna hire everyone? No sir. But Elon’s “fair share” could provide funding for several school districts in his new home state of Texas and give the kids there a shot at a better future, and jobs at places that pay a living wage that aren’t Tesla. This benefit outweighs the jobs he creates, by a lot, actually. And he will still have plenty of money left over to keep making the few jobs he does make, regardless of what his twitter tantrums might lead you to believe..

Society, like myself, has made some mistakes. We’re capable of fixing them. We just have to be smart enough to reevaluate these things we are lead to believe.