Oh. My. GAWD.

From Wikipedia's entry on the Hagfish:

However, a particular species, the inshore hagfish, found in the Northwest Pacific, is valued as food in the Korean Peninsula. The hagfish is kept alive and irritated by rattling its container with a stick, prompting it to produce slime in large quantities. This slime is used in a similar manner as egg whites in various forms of cookery in the region.

Netflix enables my worst habit

Netflix streaming is nearly my only access to movies right now -- I don't get cable, don't get Netflix DVDs by mail, and am too lazy to walk the few steps between my computer and my TV to plug the HDMI cable between them (which would give me YouTube on the big screen, and such gems as Cthulu Mansion, thank you Juan Piquer!). And Netflix enables my worst habit.

You see, there's no penalty for starting a movie, so I start movies. Mockbusters from the Asylum, quirky indies, overlooked classics. And there's no penalty for bailing on the movie after 15 minutes. Usually because the movie sucks, but as often because I just can't get engaged, or I'm hungry, or there's a moth I have to track down and kill. Or.

Here's the case of Atlas Shrugged: Part I. Worst movie ever, say many, or at least the 14 people who have seen it so far. Given that Ayn Rand's two major Hollywood efforts, the Fountainhead and Love Letters, are both hilarious, marrying A-list budgets to Ed Wood-style dialog & bizarre acting, hey, why not give it a chance? Sadly, there's bad and then there's bad. ASP1 is just dull, scene after scene of meetings in board rooms and restaurants as the rich and privileged Novacainely read from the Tele-Exposition-Prompter, with occasional cutaways to stock footage and fake news. But if I give up on this, I thought...

...if I give up on this movie, it's because I'm a brain-dead liberal, right? It's because I've been softened and corrupted by government handouts, right? It's because I'm weak. And I'm not weak. So I stayed with it. 30 minutes. 37 minutes. I even posted to Facebook that I was watching it. 45 minutes. My sister-in-law replied to my post, saying, "well somebody's got to watch it!" And that's when it hit me.

I wasn't watching ASP1 for any personal gain. Not education, not entertainment, not even the delicious shiver of shadenfreude that a truly Bad movie brings. I was watching it so I could tell other people, and then they wouldn't have to suffer through it. Watching ASP1 was itself an act of altruism!

And thus, the watching of the movie is condemned and despised by the very film being watched. So, yeah, I bailed at 45 minutes. It seemed rude to keep watching if the movie didn't want me to.

But I've been thinking, and I realize it would be more honest to say that Netflix enables my second worst habit. But that's not important now.