Trey Willis's Blog

Or: Tales of Human Triumph and VHS Pornography

In my younger days I worked at a mom and pop video store in my home town, where I spent my time in a state of perpetual shiftless bastardom. There, I didmy best to channel my spirit animal, one Randal Graves, of Clerks and RST Video fame.

The owner was a boisterous and imposing woman, who had grown to hate movies after years of owning the store. It was 2004, but she obstinately insisted on ordering movies on VHS instead of DVD. I would see her ma...

I’m overly fond of talking about hubris, especially in regard to how well my fellow snowflakes and I embody the term. A while back, I came across the term Eudaimonia, so in my short tradition of relating Greek terminology to self-esteem, let’s talk about that for a bit.

Eudaimonia has traditionally been translated simply as ‘happiness’ but the term itself had a deeper meaning than that. The current translation is ‘human flourishing’ which is a pretty substantial change, while still conveying...

Last year, I came across thisReason articlethat summarizes data from a recent survey, which included some questions about how Millennials are perceived. The fact that 65% of Americans feel that snowflakes are entitled isn’t all that interesting or surprising, but the 58% percent of Millennials that agree is kind of alarming.

More than half of us think we are entitled, and 71% of the population (inclusive of our generation) feel that the term selfish accurately describes us. While I’m sure tha...

Despite his eternally white (albeit grubby) garb, Andrew WK is not a snowflake. In fact, he’s pretty much the opposite, whatever that is. A flake of party lava, exploding with good vibes and a positive message, maybe? He’s definitely not a snowflake, but not in that uber-masculine Ron Swanson sort of way. Sure, Swanson isn’t real, but Nick Offerman seems to embody the character much in the same way that WK embraces his party god-persona.

I’ve been fascinated with Andrew WK’s recent rise to fa...

Despite having many revolutionary ideas, Sigmund Freud is generally known for only a smattering of his stranger concepts. Introductory psychology courses rarely mention him beyond the obligation of teaching that he devised psychotherapy, had stages of psychosexual development, and is largely discredited in modern psychology.

One of Freud’smore enduring conceptsis that of the construction of human consciousness. He theorized that the human psyche consisted of three parts: Id, Ego, and Superego...

Or: President of the United Snowflakes

Much to my chagrin, it’s almost president season again. It’s one of my least favorite times to be a person with a television and the internet, because it manages to bring out the worst in everyone. Social media is filled with would-be pundits rabidly spewing their opinions as the truest of gospel and attacking anyone that cares to disagree. I can already see the ramp up in general stupidity as politicians announcetheir intentions to run.

As much as I cou...

Or: Snowflakes and Privilege

I pretty unapologetically love video games. Most of the time I don’t even have the decency to feign embarrassment that it’s one of my hobbies. I have been known to go on long and frequent rants against the idea of video games are only children’s entertainment. We think of it in this way because we are the first generation of adults that grew up playing them. As we have aged, the medium has changed to accommodate our taste. But I digress.

Because I’m a gamer, I log...

I published The Snowflake Effect on July 5th, 2014 and started this blog the following week. Since that time, I’d like to think I’ve learned a thing or two, even though I probably haven’t. It seems fittingto commemorate the occasionbylooking back on what I’ve gleanedfrom the experience.

I’m not kidding at all. I was shocked at how easy it is to publish a book. For months I procrastinated, refusing to research ways to publish a book, mostly out of fear...

Remember those scam emails that would show up in your inbox every now and then, where some down-on-their luck prince or princess is asking for your help to recover their fortune? Sure you do, we all do. These messages, usually from Nigeria, were always from shady looking email addresses, and littered with grammatical errors. I haven’t gotten one in a very long time, and I kind of miss them.

Since the first one hit my inbox years ago, I have been fascinated and confused by them. They must have...

Or: My Nana was Better than Yours

Josephine Genevieve Croftcheck Posta Anderson. That’s a very big name for a very small lady. But that’s how it was with my Nana. She was five-foot-nothing and carried herself like she was twelve feet tall and would crush you into dust if you crossed her.

She died two years ago, yesterday, and there hasn’t been a single day since that I haven’t talked about her, thought about her, laughed about her, or cried for her. I still pick up the phone to call her somet...