2020-10-12 17:00
As I mature as a person, I am learning to integrate my disparities more fully. One way I'm doing this is giving up on specialization (a contrarian sensibility, in a world where I'm expected… Read More
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Benefit Of The Doubt Blog
benefitofthedoubt.miksimum.com
A "pop culture apologist blog," looking at mass media film, music, and memes according to their own merits.
2020-07-06 20:00
I see I haven't posted here in over a year (my last post was a discussion of Fantasy back in June 2019, which I've referenced to in several Twitter discussions since then).I occasionally upd… Read More
2019-06-17 23:30
I felt viscerally compelled to write a post after the Series Finale of Game of Thrones last night. The end of the show has peeled off the cover of Internet fandom and revealed the crawling a… Read More
2019-04-10 16:43
Some new poetry of mine has appeared this month:Sam Neill Vs. the Abyss on Drunk MonkeysFor a while I was planning to write an essay on Sam Neill's presence in several apocalyptic horror fil… Read More
2019-01-17 14:36
(Acknowledgment: this post was written toward the end of 2018, but I held off on publishing it until now, because I wasn't sure how to frame it)I pretty much devoted this year to poetry, did… Read More
2018-05-24 17:32
WARNING: Spoilers ahead for Star Wars, especially episodes VII and VIII.Fatherhood is deeper in the Star Wars DNA than Light Sabers, deeper than the Force and the Light and Dark Sides. It's… Read More
2018-02-12 17:14
A topical update on my creative endeavors lately: I've placed poetry in a few beautiful and respectable literary magazines (all online so far, which is cool, because it's actually easier to… Read More
2017-09-11 06:48
"Explanations place all apparent possibilities into the context of the necessary; stories set all necessities into the context of the possible." -James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games[1]… Read More
2017-07-27 08:56
Note: Spoilers below for Twin Peaks: The Return, Parts 1-11.1989 comes to a small northwestern town, just as it comes to every other place. This town, sheltered by the rains and forests of W… Read More
2017-06-22 02:41
In honor of the Summer Solstice, I'll go ahead and compile all my Twitter reviews for this year. These were all written within a couple weeks of seeing the film, and they all take up exactly… Read More
2017-06-21 17:07
I'm going to go ahead and post some more abstract notes, developing some ideas I've had floating around for a while. This is related to this post and this post, where you'll find what I was… Read More
2017-06-08 16:41
I'm feeling nostalgic for a time long before I existed... before most of Western civilization existed, really. It's a side-effect of listening to The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps (… Read More
2017-05-25 00:00
Yes, that's right -- armchair media critic raising a little girl has been watching a lot of Disney movies, and in the spirit of this blog, I can't help but appreciatively thumb through their… Read More
2017-05-09 00:30
Did we all write poetry? I know I did. I read them in classes, and I workshopped them among friends. I once got to read a few at a library event (some lyrical little remixes of lines from La… Read More
2017-04-30 07:21
2013 was a big year for doppelgangers. I had to check IMDB to confirm, but I shouldn't have bothered, the memory is so vivid: seeing previews at indie features, and noticing that there were… Read More
2017-04-07 18:47
Your style is a straitjacket.You've figured out what you think is beautiful, and what kind of work you're committed to, and what kind of character you have as an artist, and this is your pro… Read More
2017-03-11 07:46
John Crowley wrote about Sleep more perfectly than I could ever hope to rival, so I’ll use his words (culled from his novel Little, Big) as padding between my mutterings.“But lif… Read More
2017-02-22 07:20
A post shared by Jesse Miksic (@miksimum) on Feb 3, 2017 at 12:35pm PSTIt's hard to think about anything except politics these days.I'm not the first to notice this. It's a known issue, es… Read More
2017-01-06 19:54
Today, a sort of philosophy/media theory post on the CREATOR-CONSUMER-CRITIC triad, which I'm calling the Aspect Aesthetic. It provides a quick summary of the big picture, with the triadic d… Read More
2017-01-02 07:54
First of all, to head off any elevated expectations: this post is mostly about movies. The title sounds broad and philosophical, partly because I'm trying to stretch my frame a little, but m… Read More
2016-12-23 18:00
Published a piece on Medium called The Pendulum, about the shift from despair to tentative hope while I ponder all the catastrophic implications of the Trump presidency. I also mention the T… Read More
2016-12-07 17:16
Wrote a thing on Medium. Sounds very Guy Debord/Critical Theory, but don't worry, there's nothing particularly rigorous about it. It's just one more moment of me thinking I've "figured it ou… Read More
2016-11-28 15:56
I've been gone for some time, but -- this seems as good a time as any to come back, since this blog feels like the best place for my current musings. If this is the only post in a five year… Read More
2014-10-13 16:22
In response to an article from Kat Stoeffel on the Daily Intel.As an all-oppressor-classes human [cis, white, hetero, male, suburban, American, Yankee, upper-middle class, abled, neurotypica… Read More
2014-08-12 05:21
How do you love an actor through their work? A celebrity, a public personality you've never met, never seen in their private moments, never known as anything but what they choose to put on t… Read More
2014-07-14 15:00
I just saw Lone Survivor, and I formed what I felt was a pretty solid, informed opinion of the film. Then, as one does, I went on Rotten Tomatoes to see how it jives with the rest of the wor… Read More
2014-07-11 15:00
I was going to post these around the New Year, but apparently I got hung up on a sort of micro-procrastination. Now seems like as good a time as any. I've been doing these for three years no… Read More
2014-07-09 05:30
Hello, if there are any readers left out there. I haven't written anything in a while. I had a video project I was working on for like a year, which self-destructed recently (hard drive, bed… Read More
2013-09-30 18:38
"It seems we cannot get enough of our mechanical mirror stage."- Peggy Nelson, Not a Bot (HiLowBrow.com)Things like "whimsy" and "dada" (and even the basic human capacity for "spontaneity")… Read More
2013-09-27 19:28
I shall begin this post with a confession: I loved The Matrix Reloaded. I was shaken by its wild ambition, and being an adolescent, I was a sucker for the absurd fight scenes and the renegad… Read More
2013-09-06 15:00
I've created the term "Crypticism" to describe my current fixation on things that are intentionally, aesthetically incoherent. I don't mean they literally can't be understood... rather, that… Read More
2013-08-18 04:59
Dear friend who lent me Xenoblade Chronicles (Monolith Soft, 2012) for the Wii:I have borrowed a lot of things from a lot of people, and... a confession... I've failed to give a lot of them… Read More
2013-08-17 03:09
Giant Robots everywhere in my life right now... having spent the last month or two playing Xenoblade Chronicles, I've been in the presence of some of the largest robot(-like entities) in any… Read More
2013-06-10 16:00
I did an analysis of BioShock Infinite, the recent FPS-cum-art-game from Ken Levine at Irrational Games. It can be found over at Berfrois, an always-excellent repository of essays and critic… Read More
2013-06-09 21:00
Back in May, I wrote a reflection on my favorite album for Evan's blog. I chose the Rx Bandits' The Resignation. If you want to give it a read, here it is. A selection:So here's what came to… Read More
2013-06-08 07:49
Back in March, I did a capsule for Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love for 366 Weird Movies. If you're curious about the film, feel free to go check it out. A selection:One of the great… Read More
2013-05-21 05:16
After yet another hour-long session surfing NetFlix, trying to decide on an Instant film to watch, I settled on Holy Motors, a big-spectacle plus high-concept art film that showed in an unex… Read More
2013-05-16 01:21
So I now have an active Tumblr account (rather than the TWO I was never using, having variously signed up for them and then never signed in again). This means I've started engaging with the… Read More
2013-05-09 00:55
Darius Kazemi published this presentation called FUCK VIDEOGAMES, adapted from a presentation he gave in March. Other commentators, like Ian Bogost, have already summed it up, but I'll try t… Read More
2013-05-01 03:33
I'm kind of fascinated by the beginning of Steven Soderbergh's piece on the current state of cinema, in which he talks about that moment of paralysis when you feel like every framework, ever… Read More
2013-03-13 17:30
This is the seventeenth in a series of blog posts discussing major figures in film and literature, based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot. I'll be using the 21 Major Arcana of the standard R… Read More
2013-03-12 15:00
So The Walking Dead is churning out new episodes, new zombies and little twists and candid conversations and artificially dirty sweaty actors, and there's a lot to talk about with regards to… Read More
2013-03-11 17:30
This is the sixteenth in a series of blog posts discussing major figures in film and literature, based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot. I'll be using the 21 Major Arcana of the standard Rid… Read More
2013-03-08 18:30
This is the fifteenth in a series of blog posts discussing major figures in film and literature, based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot. I'll be using the 21 Major Arcana of the standard Rid… Read More
2013-03-06 18:30
This is the fourteenth in a series of blog posts discussing major figures in film and literature, based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot. I'll be using the 21 Major Arcana of the standard Ri… Read More
2013-03-04 18:30
This is the thirteenth in a series of blog posts discussing major figures in film and literature, based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot. I'll be using the 21 Major Arcana of the standard Ri… Read More
2013-03-01 18:00
This is the twelfth in a series of blog posts discussing major figures in film and literature, based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot. I'll be using the 21 Major Arcana of the standard Rider… Read More
2013-02-27 18:00
This is the eleventh in a series of blog posts discussing major figures in film and literature, based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot. I'll be using the 21 Major Arcana of the standard Ride… Read More
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