The only visual expression I ever imagined creating is an amv. Most of my imagination runs along the lines of verbal expression. I think in pretty near complete sentences and rarely visualize anything unless I am forced to. I am hopeless for example at solving spatial problems or seeing through visual illusions.  My mind doesn’t work that way.

But sometimes I do imagine creating AMVs. In fact I’ve come up with quite a few ideas for them in my spare time and I imagine that one day I will be driven to try my hand at creating one. But the probability of that ever actually happening is slim so at the very least I would like to take the time to write down all the concepts I imagined that may or may not make interesting videos and then at least I would have a record of them. The thoughts would not simply vanish into thin air when I forget about them.

An amv by the way is a fan created video that uses clips from anime and set to music from wherever. Most commonly these have been whatever famous or modern song with clips selected from a collection of anime. However, the concept continuously expands and people now refer to videos consisting primarily of clips from video games, other kinds of animation, and sometimes even clips from movies, television shows, or even reality as amvs. AMVs are also not limited to simply expression of images that fit certain songs, nowadays people call videos set to the audio tracks of comedy routines or talk shows as AMVs.  Some of my favorites I’ve seen of late are videos set to the background sound of trailers to modern movies. A purest might object to this expansion of meaning, but I personally use this expanded definition when referring to amvs.

Lawrence Lessig once said something interesting about amvs on his blog. I believe he called it one of the next “fronts” in the copyright/ip wars. But he claimed that because in this case, most amvs are made by children exercising their creativity and wonder that parents will come down on the side of protecting their children’s right to exercise that creativity.

Who knows if he is right, but I do strongly believe that anyone who tries to restrict people’s rights to mix and mash works of art to create these kinds of videos is a horse’s arse. I mean really, why would you try to take children’s joy in creativity away from them? Who could imagine anyone doing such a thing and justifying it rationally?

Who can imagine? All of us should be able to, since it has happened before. The classic example is that in the old days when rap music emerged it was awash with clever artists reusing and remixing creative works from other artists pulling from one another and giving back to one another. The music was an exercise in creativity of using arts from a vibrant commons. Or such is the tale that Lawrence Lessig and others have told.  Now, however, you can’t use any part of another artists song in your song without shelling out the cash, unless it is a very old clip that happens to have fallen into the public domain.

Similar stories can be told with the emergence of the movie making industry, the explosion and subsequent crackdown on fandom websites and fan fiction stories and so on and so forth. We all know that companies have no qualms about suing children no matter how innocent and non-destructive their exploration of the powers granted them via the internet.

So its no surprise that amvs probably have and probably will yet be targetted by those who would hamstring it in the absurd name of their rights to their own property. And then we’ll be left with the satires, because I believe the courts have come down protecting our rights to reuse material for the purpose of satire. Oh what a cynical society we will live in then!

Luckily many many people have been fighting this fight to keep a rich and vibrant commons for people to enjoy and learn from. Although most amvs aren’t really pulling from material that is provided with licensing that protects their right to reuse it for the purpose of creative self expression, there is a growing quantity of such material so it is conceivable that some day even if there is a crackdown on reuse there will be enough out there licensed for re-use that people can still express themselves somewhat and won’t be completely hamstrung.

It is no surprise that this kind of a thing proliferates first with anime as anime companies have always been far more open with re-use of their materials. Fan made manga in japan is a huge phenomenon and I haven’t heard anyone say its letting up. In addition anime companies have been quite hesitant to crack down on fan subs in the past since these are often the a substantive way in which anime gains popularity in international markets.

That’s alway the part that gives businesses at least some incentive to let amvs and other re-use exist. Companies can and do benefit from the free advertisement these creative works provide. That’s almost certainly why amvs are still so prevalent.  But I personally don’t like this situation very much, where everyone who exercises their creativity is effectively breaking the law, and companies can perform a kind of selective censorship, basically choosing to attack those who are violating the law whose works they don’t like while letting the rest go free. If that’s the way it’s going to work, then those who are not sued should be paid by these companies since they are providing a free advertisement service for them. Alternatively we could just codify our rights to mix and mash creative works into law, a constitutional amendment perhaps?

Sometimes in my melancholy I think about the nature of death. Actually those thoughts don’t last very long since I have very little data upon which to base my thoughts. I can think a lot about what happens in the world after you die, what your legacy will be, what the significance of your life is, how people will react to your passing, but honestly those topics don’t interest me as much. They are important and interesting, yes, but also not in my not so humble opinion particularly difficult to understand.

No, when I think about death, I think primarily about the mythos surrounding it.  What we think about  what happens after our death despite our lack of evidence  in support of any particular  imagination and more importantly why we think it is a fascinating topic. Why think that there is an afterlife be it heaven or hell? Why suspect reincarnation? Why imagine that your consciousness might merge with the Universe or God and bring you ultimate awareness and universal peace? Why create a creepy scenario where you are alive within your own corpse fully conscious but everyone being unaware of it?  Why suppose that some time in the far future someone might build a device that brings all dead people’s consciousness back to existence so that you can exist forever in a vast computer network spanning the entirety of the universe, but you’d exist as a separate computerized life form like a character from the sims? Ok, maybe that last one is just me, but you get the idea. We seem to have a huge interest in not believing that there is a simple nothingness after death. We flee from the idea that all that we are doing here and now could vanish in an instance in some indeterminate future.

The simplest explanation is that we are afraid and not just a little. Even a eternity of torture and suffering is more palatable to us than this alternative for at least then while being tortured at least there is a “me” that is being tortured. Emptiness, nothingness these are the real nightmare scenarios. And we fear them being the case for others as much as we fear them for ourselves. No, that’s not right. We fear it more for others. The thought that someone we knew could simply be truly “gone” is too incomprehensible to face. How could anyone be so real, so important now and then become… just nothing at all.

Of course on some level we must be aware of how very unlikely most afterlife scenarios really are. Well really I shouldn’t say unlikely, rather simply unknown is the truth of it. Picking any one is as good as any other because we just have so very little data upon which to base a hypothesis. The very thing we are discussing, our consciousness, is an annoyingly intractable thing. It’s just hard to make true statements about it, harder still to make statements that can be verified through experience. Beyond “cogito, ergo sum”, there’s just not much to say about it in the world of facts and reasoning.

So instead we embrace faith in this matter. We say “I believe in the afterlife” or like statements and we grip them tightly refusing to let them go. “There is a heaven”. “God exists.” “The bible is the word of god.”  And there are like phrases in other religions that those who are more familiar with them can easily bring to bear. In a very real sense these are magical words. I have spoken of magical words before, but in this case I think they have a slightly darker aspect. Magic words are what I define as the language we use that has the astounding capacity to help us ward off deep seated fears. In this case they do so by letting us forget the terror we all face for a moment and instead focus on our devotion to our certainty about ideas that have no basis in facts or reasoning. It’s a lot easier to argue endlessly about the existence of God then it is to have to think deeply about what it might mean if there is nothing after the present. You can always drown yourself in imagining endless details of your just rewards that might be coming to you in the hear after. When you do this you can exercise creativity, wonder, imagination, and hope but very little do you engage in deductive reasoning or evaluation. In other words its just a lot more pleasant to believe in something rather than nothing. It’s easier. It can even be fun. At the very least it is rarely scary.

But do we really need to engage in self-deception in order to banish our fear? I’ve always hated that aspect of many things in the world. Far too often we pretend that someone or something will make the world a better place so we don’t have to be afraid. We purposefully ignore relevant details and close our minds to alternative perspectives and we do this fully believing that we are actually being fully reasonable and rational beings.  We deceive ourselves and 99 times out of a hundred we do so for the underlying reason that we are too afraid not to. And I believe 100 times out of 100 that self-deception hurts us both as a society and as individuals. It erodes our self-esteem, makes us feel worse about ourselves and makes us make terrible terrible decisions time and again. Only when we abandon self-decision and embrace facts do we manage to make progress.

If forcing yourself to reason about the underlying facts of a thing is the antidote most of the time to self-deception in the world of verifiable facts, how can we cure our self-deception about an afterlife where we have no facts to verify? The answer is that it isn’t that easy. To do it we have to make a great leap in conviction to begin to bypass the middle man of self deception.

You see when we adopt a faith in the afterlife, we apply our capacity for non-fact driven belief to a most likely made up or imagined scenario in order that we might have reasons based on our most likely made up or imagined scenario to be not afraid. That’s awfully convoluted. There’s an easier way albeit one that is not at all obvious to most people. You see as long as we are choosing on a basis of no facts, why don’t we simply directly choose to be not afraid on the basis of no facts.  Simply do not fear. Refuse to fear. Why not be afraid? No reason. None at all. Certainly not because there is a god or there is an afterlife or because my consciousness will be preserved in the great Universal computer network.  Just don’t be afraid. Declare. Assert. Say, I am not afraid! Why? Because I said so!

There is good reason to do this. Every moment of your life you spend with even the smallest of fears is a lesser moment. And we don’t have to. We cannot say what those who have passed on before us want now since we don’t know if they even want anything or care or even exist, but we certainly *can* say that the people we know who cared about us and have become deceased probably did want while they were alive for us to live without fear and certainly not to be burdened by it after their death. I know this because this is what I want for everyone who I know and care about. I don’t want them to feel one iota of fear after I leave. There lives will be better and they’ll be happier if they don’t. But there’s nothing I can say that will eliminate those fears. I refuse to lie to them or left them deceive themselves. I can only implore them that they not be afraid. Simply choose to abandon fear because you understand the nature of fear and reject it. That is what I want myself, for my family, for my friends, and for the world.

After the fear is rejected completely and totally on the basis of our simplest sincerest convictions, then I believe it can be a good thing and even a valuable thing to embrace the mythos. You have to have an open mind of course, and you should not try to impose one imagination of the afterlife upon another or support one over another. Certainly we should probably abandon mythos that are predicated on asserting value of certain people or peoples over others for the simple practical reason that most of those tend to cause a great deal of harm.  No, we can I think embrace the lighter side of the unlikely imaginings about death because they bring us pleasure, because they can bring laughter and joy and release. Death should always have been a much lighter affair than it is now. It is just enjoyable to imagine a person rolling around in there grave after hearing something said that would have offended them in life. Or to say that a person might float down from heaven just to smack you upside the head for doing something wrong.  These kinds of things can make fine jokes and can be great tributes to the persons memories and bring the survivors great comfort. We can only joke and laugh and play around with death if we imagine
facts or scenarios or myths about death with which to base our
laughter. Nothingness is certainly far more intractable.

So that’s the sum total of my current advice to people about how to think and deal with death. I can sum it up like this: Don’t be afraid. Why?  Because.  What should you do now? Laugh.