The Last Thoughts of a Busy Mind

In this episode I sit down and talk to one of my friends from my new uni and the director of the current project I'm working on, Mobina. We met each other in online classes in the early days of uni, and then finally got to see each other face-to-face earlier this year; and despite having not-the-best-first-impressions of each other, managed to hit it off pretty quick and become friends through Wes Anderson movies, juvenile jokes, and board games. So we decided to sit down and discuss our experience in uni and in Iranian educational system regarding art in general, our love of movies, the troubles with making a movie, and of course our board game adventures. Check out Frame Art Studio's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frame_artstudio/

Being "professional" is a sought-after label. It gives off the vibes of prestige and quality, no matter the reality. That label, can also give tools to opportunists and con-men to exploit their co-workers, underlings or people with less experience. It is a powerful tool as well, because in all honesty, being "professional" is meaningless. It can mean anything and everything, mostly to the detriment of those who try to be honest with themselves and those around them.

When one has felt an emotion towards an activity that one has neglected for so so long, it awakens certain thoughts and feelings in one's brain. When one looks at all that one wants to do, and realizes that there's more to see that can ever be seen, or more to do that can ever be done, those thoughts and emotions evolve into something a little more grotesque. They become fear, and fear is an unending chasm of thoughts.

Sometimes, during times of duress and stress, one has to wrestle with thoughts that would try their best to diminish one's agency. The belittling self-disappointment and the monstrous weight of self-deprecation. When one is faced with such uneasy feelings that keep nagging away at one's soul, it's hard to look around and see the true accomplishments; or worse, it's hard to look around and see the actual problems of one's surrounding.

When one peruses the seemingly infinite shows that appear on a weekly basis on an ever-growing list of different networks, sometimes there are shows that one finds in solitude that seems to speak with one. They're quirky, and cooky, and maybe a little spooky; but they are special to one. So, what happens when that show is deemed "not worthy" by its parent network? Well, that is the fate that befell Our Flag Means Death, a show of romance and comedy about pirates and piracy.

The Best Strategy Game You Never Played: Age of Mythology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27-tJxIepmo The Gentleman Pirate | Sundance Rejects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrGf4nJWVOU

The human body can suffer physical ailment for extended periods of time, to the point of humorous absurdity. These ailments can bring about physical weakness, irritable behavior, mental anguish and above all else a lack of peace, both of mind and of soul. Sometimes one finds itself in the throats of sickness, that has been going on for an absurdly long time and has caused so, so, so, SO many damages to one's plans, life, and physical rest. Also, RIP Dariush Mehrjui.

When one has a deluge of ideas and unrealized projects, it can hurt one's mental state massively. It can make sure one has to think of the many failures that one has experienced on a daily, if not hourly, basis. But when one is involved in an idea, it can sometimes bring about a spark, even a little one, to the glowing embers of passion and desire for more projects to be involved in. It can even bring about Leo Bloom style musical interludes.

They Were Just in the Way | Indian Removal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5P6vJs1jmY Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw

Sometimes one's life falls behind of a perceived track constructed days, weeks, months and even years in advance. Sometimes the journey of life seems to not match up with expectations that one has for oneself. When those times rear their heads, the balance of one's life can be thrown out. When one falls behind on one's plans, desires, goals, and highly regarded future, one can experience life as cruel and uncaring, even if all one needs, is some self-compassion.

When one starts their journey of creativity, oftentimes the joy of creation even without a tangible result can be rewarding in its own rights. Creation of minute details of little to no importance, or creation of the most elaborate systems to do the most mundane of things, is just part of the experience of making tiny worlds for imaginary people to inhabit, and is part of any artist's course. That part is more prominent when one is in its teen era, and it can prove fun to return to those tiny worlds and explore them after some years.

One is surrounded by boundaries; societal boundaries, geographical boundaries, physical boundaries, emotional boundaries and mental boundaries. What happens in those boundaries shape one's life and experiences as a human being, and there are times when one's life inside those boundaries will find trouble adjusting to itself. There are times when the mess inside those boundaries becomes impossible to manage.

One of the ways one can find solace in the mundane and normal is by creating a fantastical goal, a fantasy of achieving something so out of ordinary that the act itself would become absurd to think about. But they won't become too big that achieving them would be completely impossible. They live in that sweet spot between too much effort and not enough results, which makes them nothing more than mere fantasies.

IDOLS of TORMENT - A Dark Skirmish Game from Black Magic Craft - Official Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cRAd7DvIDw

There are times in anyone's life when it seems that everything that could go wrong, will go wrong. No matter the amount of effort, mental resilience and physical prowess; when things start to go awry, they will take everything down with them. When one gets inside such a storm of fecal matter, the toll can be massive. It's important to acknowledge one's shortcomings and failures, but to be wary that ss the old adage says: when it rains, it pours.

Sometimes in one's life, there are many facets coming together to create an atmosphere ripe for a breakdown. A sickness prolonged, and in need of medication; an array of projects being produced and put aside that take time and effort to the point of exhaustion; and videotapes of digital variety in producing movies and online videos. When all those facets come together, one has to see how they have shaped and ruined one's life.

Guilt is such a strong feeling that it can hamper everyday life incredibly easily. It can make good experiences come off as shameful and bad, and it can make one feel inadequate in a variety of different tasks. When one descends to the pits of guilt, one can find himself stranded. In reach of what one needs to do, and what one does. Guilt is such a strong feeling, and it can also appear from nothing at all.

Sometimes one ends a season with a sickness, and starts one with yet another one. One of peculiar origin that is not likely to be found in this time of year. When that happens, one has to sometimes persevere and still go forward with a plan. A plan that has been some time into making, and one has been looking forward to it. This is one of those times.

Alpha Protocol Review | AKhamseh88: https://www.backloggd.com/u/AKhamseh88/review/959036/

In this episode I sit down and talk to the guy who I've had the privilege of working with numerous times, Mohammad. We met each other while we were both contributing to a now defunct gaming website, and despite our differences in taste, were drawn together through a shared love of entertainment. So we decided to talk about our unpopular opinions on entertainment properties, our gaming/movie making experiences, Mohammad's dislike of GTA V, and way way more wrestling lore and opinions than you might think.

Check out Wait, I've Seen it Before!: https://open.spotify.com/show/52LtWqhgQCEQQrqPwL9fyP

When one is sick, the events of that sickness is burnt into one's memory vividly. What happens at what time, and what lead to what event, and so on and so forth. It also brings forward the mood to plan for a future where health is plenty. Planning for the future is always a gamble, a big one, but when one is sick, everything is put into perspective. When one is sick, health seems like a good opportunity to do the things one never did before out of apathy.

One's relation to nature can be incredibly personal, and incredibly consequential; especially when one is travelling. The contrast between cushy life in the developed city and the arduous but rewarding life in nature is one that has compelled any human being to find a personal opinion on the matter. The beautiful vistas of nature, but with no accommodations? or the unbreathable air of traffic, but with every service just a phone call away?

Movies are great entertainment products, but movie making is oftentimes not very entertaining. The end results are heartwarming and great, but the process can sometimes be miserable and destructive. Movies are also expensive entertainment products. They cost a lot of money, and need a lot of humans to make them work, and that's what makes them so big and so daunting, but also when done incorrectly, a massive pain.

Needlessly busy is something that one can describe one's life with occasionally. When life seems a mess with a torrent of unfinished tasks and upcoming tasks weighing heavy on one's soul, one can feel the fire that will lead to an eventual burn out. When one's life is needlessly busy, even good moments will be pushed aside to showcase the tiredness.

When one bottles emotions and keep going with a daily routine, sometimes those emotions will need a vent, and when that vent is provided it will erupt like a volcano. It's not always a bad thing, as an erupting volcano can also empty out a lot of negativity. So, when one is helping form a volcano, one can look back at a lot of conflicting and deep emotions, and let them run loose. Maybe even try to plan ahead now that the avalanche of feelings is over with.

Though one can try, one cannot separate mind from body. When body is in pain, mind wanders and mind tries to look at body to see what has caused it pain. When that pain is from physical activity, one goes into retrospective of one's life choices and lifestyle. Physique is a two-fold question, one from beauty and one from health. When there's pain involved, health becomes more apparent, and it does push one to look at one's own physique with a more critical eye.

Emotions are hard to telegraph, and they are even harder to express when put in front of people one might have an inkling of those emotions for. Like many choices in one's life, the choice is down to a mix of risk assessment and courage. When one might lose a friend, one might gain something more; but is that risk worth taking? Questions like that make expressions what they are: small acts with big consequences.

There's an old adage of "everyone is truly alone", where it deposits that even when one is surrounded by other presences, one can still be alone. The adage might appear as cynical or pessimistic, but cynicism and pessimism can infect the most hopeful and optimistic of minds too. When one sits in the corner of a room looking at people one loves, and feels disconnected from them, one feels truly alone.

The act of videomaking is something between writing an essay, conducting a research, and creating art. It might not rank high on the "high art" chart when compared to other forms of visual media, but it still does factor in creation. It still has framing, pacing, rhythm, substance, form and style. So what happens when one who has been away from that act of creation for a number of months, decides to return to it? How will one cope?

TGTBTI - We Didn't Start the Fire, Part 1: https://youtu.be/qmNh8Ygn29s

Physical pain oftentimes punctuates many things, from mental anguish to existential crises. Excruciating physical pain can even make day-to-day operations invalid and impossible, and when it comes to excruciating physical pain there's seldom a more troubling suspect than tooth. A good toothache can knock even the strongest and most virile down, let alone when one has the lowest threshold for pain imaginable.

There are times, sometimes far between and sometimes in rapid succession, where one feels isolated and abandoned. There are times, sometimes far between and sometimes in rapid succession, where the thoughts and actions of everything done and everything that will be done would break upon one's psyche like a crumbling foundation of a tower. There are times, sometimes far between and sometimes in rapid succession, where one forgets who they are.

Planning is an important part of preparing for the future of one's life. One plans for how to live, how to love, how to grow, and how to survive. But plans are not guaranteed to work nor guaranteed to work out the way they were planned. One might slip in adhering to the steps previously thought, and one might not get the result that was expected. But that is under normal circumstances. When one lives in a corner of the world plagued with abnormality, how shall one plan?

How does one develop an obsession with a media property? It might seem like a long process but all one needs is a combination of right time and right state of mind. One such obsession can be found in a game show that graced the UK television in 2014 and has been going strong since then. One such obsession can be the wonderous and exciting world which houses Greg Davies and little Alex Horne: TASKMASTER.

Alasdair Beckett-King: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq5btGtqdn4CpvU0xTXaelA

Nostalgia can be a powerful tool and drug; it's a drug that can draw your very own lifeforce and stick it in the past, and it's a tool that can mend a broken soul and make it better for a little while. But sometimes nostalgia is so strong in others that it influences one's perspective of an event or a location. When one is confronted with an attack of nostalgia, one needs to fight, while embracing.

P.S. This episode is about an hour or so late :D. I do explain the reason in the episode itself, but it is bugging me massively.

The new Persian year has dawned, and with it has come a brand new day. Though the revolving of earth around the sun for another 365 days may not seem like a significant event as situations surrounding one's life are not susceptible to change in any form or factor; it still is a good end point to at least take some time and search one's past for a retrospective.

Special Chapter #6 - God Leans a Little on the Side of Vandah: https://anchor.fm/akhamseh88/episodes/Special-Chapter-6-God-Leans-a-Little-on-the-Side-of-Vandah-e1vuqal

In this episode, I sit down (with one week of delay) and talk with a friend who I got to meet thanks to the magic of internet, Vandah. We met each other on Twitter, before Elon Musk got his grubby little hands on it, and started talking about music and movies, normal nerd stuff. We hit it off with discussions on certain musical artists, old movies, complaining about the state of affairs and talking about fiction. So we decided to discuss Vandah's major in the university, the current state of cinema and streaming services, a different cornucopia of musical performances and artists from different ages, and the difficulties of actually doing the recording that we're doing.

Check out Vandah's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vandahts/

Check out Vandah's Twitter: https://twitter.com/ShrinkingFigure

In the past few months since the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police in Iran, it's imperative to take inventory of what has happened and what barriers have been destroyed. The visage of Islamic Republic as this unbeatable monster has been shattered to pieces, and what remains is a more accurate visage of it as a wheezing walking dead. Hope reigns once again in the land, and hope needs to stay aflame.

A patriarchal society built on ideological roots that does nothing but to affirm those patriarchal desires, will always look for a way to gather power and wants obedience at all costs. Since the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police, the patriarchal rulers of Iran have tried everything to "punish" the insubordinate "children". They have mistreated them in jails, they have killed them and executed them, and they have laughed in the face of their wants; all for remaining in power one more second.

Stories are how we experience lives other than our own. They are how we look at the world through different lenses. That is why totalitarian regimes like the Islamic Republic try their hardest to censor and control them. Since the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police, the world has witnessed IR's attempts at creating narratives, and how they would punish anyone who stray from it. But censorship is so much simpler than that, and so much more sinister.

Since the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police in mid-September of 2022, many lives has been disrupted and many people have given up anything resembling sanity just to keep going; but why? Why do they care so much? Why it seems like the endless wave of cynicism and hopelessness has not affect them? Why do they keep going? Because one cannot escape the voices that one cannot forget, the voices taken by force by an inhumane monster.

One of the important things in the movement following the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police, is the disruption of many traditionalist values that felt "inherent" to the region. As one learns in an oppressive society under an oppressive regime, you need to wear masks to keep yourself safe, at the cost of keeping yourself sane and happy. Now it's time for people to recognize the masks they have forced on each other, and the masks that has been forced on them.

Sometimes life in a certain way becomes like second nature to one. Sometimes it seems it's always been this way, and thus it's fair and normal for it to stay that way. Sometimes it feels like change will never come. One of the most important aspects of the revolution following the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police is that it broke that feeling. It was never normal, and it always needed to change.

Minorities have been an integral part of the revolution in Iran following the murder of Mahsa Amini by morality police. For so long the Islamic Republic has silenced the many minorities in Iran. They have shown them that they have no voice, and they have shown them that they will never care for them. When one looks at the Iranian public comes face to face with this fact, there's a ray of hope for the voiceless to finally be heard.

Life in the Middle East has historically been a struggle between powers for a chance at survival. A chance that led to many totalitarian regimes spring up in the region, and give the visage of Middle East as the land of "endless conflicts". When one is born here, one is told that conflict and restriction are normal; but they're anything but. With the murder of Mahsa Amini by the Morality Police in Tehran in September of 2022, that notion has come under scrutiny in Iran. Life is not normal here. One isn't living a normal life under oppression.

P.S. Uploading this episode was a long and exhausting ordeal because of the many internet restrictions. It's impossible to know what will happen, but if these restrictions continue and get worse it might be impossible to access the internet while inside Iran. If that happens please be our voice. Don't forget about us here.

Identity (especially cultural identity) for a system like Islamic Republic that is built on isolating its members and embedding them with hopelessness to keep them meek and servile, is like the plague. They try to cover up the roots and replace them with their ideology, because for divide and conquer you need to divide first. But all their works proved weaker, when after the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police in September, people realized they are more than ones. 

When trying to uphold a revolution as massive as the current one in Iran following the murder of Mahsa Amini by the Iranian morality police, it's easy to forget that sometimes it is literally a war of attrition. The Islamic Republic will use any means necessary to break the populace and breed hopelessness, and the best way to combat that is by learning to keep going. By caring about oneself as much as the whole movement. 

Remember the name Mohsen Shekari. He was executed by the Iranian regime, and they need to pay for what they did. Also remember and shout the name of Hossein Mohammadi, he is given an execution conviction and if the regime doesn't see the fallout of what they did to Mohsen, his life will end. Please be their memory and their voice.

Mental Health is a complex and nuanced subject, and it needs a complex and nuanced discussion; but that is harder and harder to happen in a patriarchal traditionalist society that has a patriarchal and traditionalist government at the top of it. Not only is the importance of mental health is undermined, the government and regime itself adds to the scope of mental problems. When a system is so pre-occupied with body that it sees it right to murder a 22 year old girl (Mahsa Amini), then you can imagine the barrage of mental anguish it can cause on its own people.

Throughout the revolution following the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police in Iran, it's important to look at multiple facets of society that would be enraged and try to change the system. Though cultural and societal reasons are the primary reasons, one cannot underestimate the economic sector either. With rampant mismanagement and corruption, the economic state of the people of Iran is so abysmal that any other form of management is preferred over the current one.

Keeping alive the hope that one day a new and brighter day will come is of outmost importance in times of revolution and civil movements. That hope can be sustained much easier when you know you are not alone, and moments of unification between people against a greater evil can be inspiring and hopeful, even if dampened by losses too big to comprehend. That is what has happened in Iran, following the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police. It's an old adage that: "People united are never defeated".

El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido - English Subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTZ1JaILitM

One of the things that the people asking for a change in regime in Iran, since the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police, have been asking for is a regime that doesn't hold their religious and ideological view so high that it gives them autonomy to execute and murder anyone who isn't part of their "group". Under the rule of an oppressive regime, one needs to stick to the "official" narrative; because thinking might land you on death row.

Since September 17th, 2022, there has been calls for a massive regime change and uprooting of the Islamic Republic in Iran. The events started since the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police for bad hijab. When the world is full of turmoil and the winds of change are blowing, it's hard for one to just return to life the way it used to be, and not look at it as a way to what life may need to be.

Special Chapter #5 - Let the Sunshine, Let the Sunshine In: https://anchor.fm/akhamseh88/episodes/Special-Chapter-5-Let-the-Sunshine--Let-the-Sunshine-In-e1p87um

For the past month, the Iranian public have been protesting in many shapes and forms against the tyrannical Islamic Republic regime, after the death of #MahsaAmini by the hand of the morality police. These protests have included people of all ages, all genders and all ethnicities as they once more show their contempt for the Islamic Republic and the draconian laws of the regime; but some have chosen to not participate in the current movement for a "variety" of "excuses". In this unusual episode, I sit down again with Kamiab (from the last Special Chapter), as we discuss 8 of the most prominent arguments against the current anti-regime movement in Iran and try to see if there's any merit to any of them.

Check out Kamiab's article on "Woman, Life, Freedom" for LGBTQNation: https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/09/3-words-sparked-revolution-iran/

Despite believing in a world of human nature first and human nationality second, sometimes one cannot escape the realities of belonging to a specific region of the earth and living under a specific government. That government can shape many things in the individual; from fears and beliefs to anxieties and in many cases, the cause of death. This is the tale of one's life under one regime, and the oppression it brings forth.

#MahsaAmini