1. I had a very distracted weekend one way or another, hence an extra late Flotsam this time.

2. The more I read about the Civil War, the more I begin to wonder whether Abraham Lincoln was really the amazing and wonderful leader he is made out to be. He certainly could give a good speech, but I think when looked at objectively, his judgment is often highly questionable. Like calling for volunteers for three months; did he really think he could train an army, march it down, and conquer the whole South in three months? And even if he did, what did he think was going to happen when the Federal army melted away immediately after?

I also notice a pattern where his generals warn him not to do something, he insists on it, and it proves disastrous, so he fires the general. McDowell warned him that the men weren’t ready to fight, and sure enough the Union embarrassed itself at First Bull Run. McClellan warned him not to try to march south overland to Richmond, and he spent the next two or three years doing just that and failing each time. He kept pressuring his commanders to keep on attacking Lee after each battle, then when Grant did it the result was the army being mauled repeatedly.

Now, the latter was ultimately a successful strategy, since the North could afford to lose as many men as it liked. But I don’t know that not caring how many men you lose as long as you win in the end is really that admirable of a trait.

3. Which is to say, I am undecided about Lincoln, though I am fairly certain that I’ll end up with a lower opinion of him than most Americans, whatever happens.

4. With the way things have been going recently, I’m increasingly realizing that our society is corrupt far beyond what I had imagined. Not only that, but I’m starting to take it a step further to wonder how many of today’s baseline values – the things almost no one questions – in fact have their origins in this same corruption. Looking back, how many of them were championed by socialists, degenerates, atheists, and the like? And if so, what does that mean for the society we’ve constructed over the past hundred years or so?

I won’t get specific this time, but this seed is growing in my brain.

5. In positive news, we may be witnessing a revolution in filmmaking. To cut a long story short, YouTuber Markiplier decided to adapt an indie horror game called Iron Lung. Being one of the higher tier of YouTubers, he was able to fund it entirely out of pocket and leveraged his 30-million-plus subscribers in order to secure distribution without going through the Hollywood system.

The result was that this completely independent film was number-one at the box office for part of its opening weekend and earned over ten-times its budget.

I’ve often thought that we are on the cusp of a new era in filmmaking, in which the monolithic studio system will fall and we’ll see filmmaking become much more accessible as an art form. Because the technology is no longer prohibitively expensive, and the main bottleneck is more the distribution. Once there is a pathway to profitably release films without going through the Hollywood system, then film will become much more widespread.

6. The ideal, I think, would be for the film industry to more closely resemble the gaming industry, in which it is relatively easy to release independent games to a widespread audience, allowing individual developers with good ideas to compete with and even outperform the ‘mainstream’ corporations.

7. In any case, I haven’t seen the film (I may try to catch it this week though), but I wish Markiplier nothing but success. It helps that he has a very positive reputation among the YouTube community and seems to have done this purely from a passionate desire to make something good.

May this film be the first of many.