Work has been going through something of a restructuring recently. Now, to be fair to them, it’s a new business quarter, so it’s probably the right time to, but the fact that they’re all seemingly happening at once means that they border on overwhelming. Some of these I’ve mentioned to people already, but just for the sake of completeness, let’s go through each of them:
Staff changes aplenty have happened. In addition to losing six workers due to various reasons and having to hire en masse for those, we’ve also got a new shift manager who’s been acclimating themselves to the new environment. Everyone seems good so far, though it’s still pretty easy to tell who has been around for longer than who.
We’ve also switched up our menu. We’ve swapped out three or four dishes for new ones, and though I would have liked to have seen us maintain the split between geographical regions we had before, I do have to admit that the new dishes do taste pretty good. One of them, though, has the awful corporate portmanteau of zucchini and spaghetti, and “zuccheti” is not ever going to be a thing, I guarantee it. I’ve spent more time explaining what it is and how to pronounce it than taking orders for it.
With the menu change comes an aesthetic change as well. The old menu was confusing, yes, and this one may or may not be better (I get too used to these things too quickly to tell for sure), but it does certainly clash with the rest of our labelling. Now, I’m not saying I would have done better, but I would have thought about all the smaller, yet noticeable details in the redesign. For example, a lot of our wall decor now references dishes we no longer serve. But maybe we’re saving that particular change until we run out of cups and bags and chopsticks with the wrong restaurant name on them.
On a more “sausage is made” level, we’ve gotten new equipment! Well, some new equipment, and by “equipment,” I mean, “stuff that doesn’t work/fit/something else.” I won’t go into too much detail on that, but suffice to say, we’ve had a couple things that just don’t work and it’d be nice if they did, thanks.
We’ve also tried moving extra supplies around. I’ve been told that this will be a “one weird day where we can’t find anything but will be better in the long run” sort of deals, but I’m not entirely sure about that. So far, it mostly just seems like people have been moving things around just to move things, just to change things up. It’s all the same stuff and it’s all the same nooks and crannies, so I don’t know.
I don’t mean to be complaining all the time. A lot of these, in reality, are just minor gripes stretched out into paragraph-long problems. I mean, the store still runs like it used to, so things haven’t really gotten worse. But things are happening, even if I don’t write about them right away.
-F
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Trailers (Not The Park Kind)
If you want you can think of this as a follow-up/rehash of that spoilers post I did a few weeks back. Not that it covers the same material per se, but it covers similar internet reactions to similar portions of media. Instead of talking about the merits of not giving away the final moments of certain stories, let’s talk about the opposite: the parts they show before the movie or game or show is even out.
In fact, spoilers and trailers are more related than one might realize. There are numerous people on the internet that swear by not watching trailers, believing that they’re either deceptive marketing out to trick you or give away way too much of any given movie. There are people say that theaters play too many and people that say they have to see all of them.
There’s definitely an art to a good trailer. The one for Suspiria (2018), for example, seems like one you’d get tired of seeing after a certain point, but I never seemed to. Madeline’s Madeline (2018)’s trailer, too. What makes both of these work, I think, is how instead of describing the plot, they’re big on conveying the emotion of the film. For Suspiria, that was dread. For Madeline’s Madeline, that was its dream logic.
We’ve certainly moved on since “In a world…” (not the 2013 movie (obligatory trailer link)).
There are other, similar promotional materials as well. Blade Runner 2049 (2017) had a few prequel (interquel?) short films before its release, as did Alien: Covenant (2017). These tend to be the more nostalgia-driven films, I’ve noticed, but it’s something I’ve noticed as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), which had an additional scene with a character who otherwise starts the movie very much dead. There’s not much to say about these because they’re exactly what they are: superfluous to the main story, which is why they aren’t in the film.
But that brings up an interesting idea. Trailers don’t have to show what’s in the movie. Like I mentioned, this can cause some consternation among audiences who feel lied to. It seems like every horror movie A24 produces falls victim to this, including It Comes At Night (2017), which I’ve talked about before. To elaborate, it seems like they prefer slower-burn horror, but they always want to market it as more standard fare to attract an audience. The most recent example of this was High Life (2019), which has a trailer promising space-horror, but it’s written and directed by Claire Denis, a French arthouse filmmaker. Now, I understand being frustrated, but one does have to remember that they’re being sold something.
I’ve been trying to talk about the better side of trailers because I’m firmly in the “I enjoy them,” camp. Really, the only trend I’ve found annoying about trailers is how they tend to announce themselves online. As advertisements, I mean, there’s been a huge push to have the first five seconds be an ad in itself so that people don’t skip past them on Youtube (for an example, see that Blade Runner 2049 trailer). It’s like how jpeg compression can slowly ruin images, combining bits together saves data but it means it ends up as a flash of incomprehensible images and sound. I imagine some poor editor, having made what they think is a pretty good trailer, being forced to hack away at it until only the explosions and thrills remain.
But there are also the bad ones. The ones people can only wonder how bad the movie’s going to be if it’s going to sell itself like this. Sonic the Hedgehog (which I’m not going to link here) had a trailer so bad it’s causing artists to probably go into a crunch period to fix some of its more out-there aspects, and even without those its best selling point is probably hoping that people see it to laugh at it (or Jim Carrey, I guess). Because again, it’s an artform. It’s meant to be judged.
Again, these things are trying to sell something. I don’t want to downplay that. When I say I like watching trailers, I’m still participating as a consumer, not so much as a critic. So that’s at least one reason to be wholly against them. But at the same time, I wouldn’t have seen some of the smaller movies I’ve seen without some of these trailers, so the idea of completely ignoring them just seems completely foreign to me.
-F
In fact, spoilers and trailers are more related than one might realize. There are numerous people on the internet that swear by not watching trailers, believing that they’re either deceptive marketing out to trick you or give away way too much of any given movie. There are people say that theaters play too many and people that say they have to see all of them.
There’s definitely an art to a good trailer. The one for Suspiria (2018), for example, seems like one you’d get tired of seeing after a certain point, but I never seemed to. Madeline’s Madeline (2018)’s trailer, too. What makes both of these work, I think, is how instead of describing the plot, they’re big on conveying the emotion of the film. For Suspiria, that was dread. For Madeline’s Madeline, that was its dream logic.
We’ve certainly moved on since “In a world…” (not the 2013 movie (obligatory trailer link)).
There are other, similar promotional materials as well. Blade Runner 2049 (2017) had a few prequel (interquel?) short films before its release, as did Alien: Covenant (2017). These tend to be the more nostalgia-driven films, I’ve noticed, but it’s something I’ve noticed as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), which had an additional scene with a character who otherwise starts the movie very much dead. There’s not much to say about these because they’re exactly what they are: superfluous to the main story, which is why they aren’t in the film.
But that brings up an interesting idea. Trailers don’t have to show what’s in the movie. Like I mentioned, this can cause some consternation among audiences who feel lied to. It seems like every horror movie A24 produces falls victim to this, including It Comes At Night (2017), which I’ve talked about before. To elaborate, it seems like they prefer slower-burn horror, but they always want to market it as more standard fare to attract an audience. The most recent example of this was High Life (2019), which has a trailer promising space-horror, but it’s written and directed by Claire Denis, a French arthouse filmmaker. Now, I understand being frustrated, but one does have to remember that they’re being sold something.
I’ve been trying to talk about the better side of trailers because I’m firmly in the “I enjoy them,” camp. Really, the only trend I’ve found annoying about trailers is how they tend to announce themselves online. As advertisements, I mean, there’s been a huge push to have the first five seconds be an ad in itself so that people don’t skip past them on Youtube (for an example, see that Blade Runner 2049 trailer). It’s like how jpeg compression can slowly ruin images, combining bits together saves data but it means it ends up as a flash of incomprehensible images and sound. I imagine some poor editor, having made what they think is a pretty good trailer, being forced to hack away at it until only the explosions and thrills remain.
But there are also the bad ones. The ones people can only wonder how bad the movie’s going to be if it’s going to sell itself like this. Sonic the Hedgehog (which I’m not going to link here) had a trailer so bad it’s causing artists to probably go into a crunch period to fix some of its more out-there aspects, and even without those its best selling point is probably hoping that people see it to laugh at it (or Jim Carrey, I guess). Because again, it’s an artform. It’s meant to be judged.
Again, these things are trying to sell something. I don’t want to downplay that. When I say I like watching trailers, I’m still participating as a consumer, not so much as a critic. So that’s at least one reason to be wholly against them. But at the same time, I wouldn’t have seen some of the smaller movies I’ve seen without some of these trailers, so the idea of completely ignoring them just seems completely foreign to me.
-F
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Raindrops on Roses (Part Eighteen): The Hypothetical Screen-Novel
To reiterate what I said in my introduction post (see Raindrops on Roses part Fifteen-and-a-Half), I wanted to talk about adaptations of computer screens, but I couldn’t think of a good book that did something similar to match the film/game/book sets I had been doing. So instead I plan to describe how the aspects that make Searching and Secret Little Haven work might translate over to a less visual medium.
Some books aren’t entirely without visuals, of course. The graphic novel medium could potentially use the computer screen quite well. It presents a similar limitation to Richard McGuire’s Here, where instead of a single place presented over multiple time periods, the novel could depict a single screen, following the cursor around just like a film might. Individual windows could be treated like different panels and such, for example.
This does run into the problem of separating itself wholly from its filmic inspirations. At best, what I’ve just done is describe a storyboard for something like Searching. And, I mean, it works. I could see something done like this, but that’s not what I was going into this piece trying to explore.
We learned from Searching that introducing characters before reducing them to IRC messages helps the audience, largely by letting them get to know that character in a different context first. And we learned from Secret Little Haven that a sort of melodramatic earnestness goes a long way. If all your characters have their emotions written on their sleeve, interpreting their messages as anything other than the obvious becomes difficult, if not impossible.
Both of these lessons operate under the assumption that the aesthetic problem gets solved, i.e., how do you make a book look like a computer screen? The closest I can think of is the “documentary novel” Nothing But The Truth by Avi. It’s written in a semi-script format, which serves to hide both critical details about the truth behind certain events but also many of its characters’ motivations. So even that example is not perfect. It runs counter to the emotional honesty that the previous two examples provided, obfuscating rather than illuminating.
What we’re looking for, therefore, is a novel that eschews traditional formatting in favor of (probably) text messages, IRC chat, or some other format that reduces description. It preferably needs to have earnest characters, each of whom get little introduction scenes before being pulled into the larger narrative.
I don’t know if that book exists yet. If it does, I haven’t read it yet. It might be a bit of a mess, to be honest, though I also think a lot of books sound like a bit of a mess when you boil them down to a paragraph of description. But it would be neat to see if it matches the same mood that those other examples do.
-F
Some books aren’t entirely without visuals, of course. The graphic novel medium could potentially use the computer screen quite well. It presents a similar limitation to Richard McGuire’s Here, where instead of a single place presented over multiple time periods, the novel could depict a single screen, following the cursor around just like a film might. Individual windows could be treated like different panels and such, for example.
This does run into the problem of separating itself wholly from its filmic inspirations. At best, what I’ve just done is describe a storyboard for something like Searching. And, I mean, it works. I could see something done like this, but that’s not what I was going into this piece trying to explore.
We learned from Searching that introducing characters before reducing them to IRC messages helps the audience, largely by letting them get to know that character in a different context first. And we learned from Secret Little Haven that a sort of melodramatic earnestness goes a long way. If all your characters have their emotions written on their sleeve, interpreting their messages as anything other than the obvious becomes difficult, if not impossible.
Both of these lessons operate under the assumption that the aesthetic problem gets solved, i.e., how do you make a book look like a computer screen? The closest I can think of is the “documentary novel” Nothing But The Truth by Avi. It’s written in a semi-script format, which serves to hide both critical details about the truth behind certain events but also many of its characters’ motivations. So even that example is not perfect. It runs counter to the emotional honesty that the previous two examples provided, obfuscating rather than illuminating.
What we’re looking for, therefore, is a novel that eschews traditional formatting in favor of (probably) text messages, IRC chat, or some other format that reduces description. It preferably needs to have earnest characters, each of whom get little introduction scenes before being pulled into the larger narrative.
I don’t know if that book exists yet. If it does, I haven’t read it yet. It might be a bit of a mess, to be honest, though I also think a lot of books sound like a bit of a mess when you boil them down to a paragraph of description. But it would be neat to see if it matches the same mood that those other examples do.
-F
Tuesday, May 7, 2019
Spoiler Alert
There aren’t any actual spoilers of any recent pieces of media if that’s what is keeping you from reading this post. But I do want to talk about the culture that surrounds spoilers, especially recently, so I might be talking, you know, around some.
Way back in 1960 when Psycho was coming out, Alfred Hitchcock famously tried to keep people from entering theaters after the movie had started screening, going so far in some cases as to lock theater doors. Hitchcock felt that the then-current popular method of seeing movies -- seeing the middle and ending before looping around to the beginning -- would be detrimental to the experience of his movie. Even before that was (and is) The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie’s long-running play that famously asks its audience members not to reveal its secrets. In each of these cases, not giving the game away was part of the artistic intent.
But that’s a weird thing to be direct about, right? Like, of course a creator doesn’t want their work spoiled, right? Now, in both of these creators’ defense, they both created rather spoiler-prone works, an attribute that not all pieces of media have. Nobody needs to be told, for example, that the computer voice in the video game Portal is out to kill you. The opening monolog in The Other Side of the Wind tells you exactly what happens to its protagonist.
I’ve noticed a shift, though, recently, and I’m not entirely sure if I’m able to fully explain it. In 2016, video game company Atlus released the much-anticipated Persona 5, though it came with a caveat: If you were going to record yourself playing the game, you couldn’t share large parts of it without facing legal action. We’d gone from “Don’t spoil our ending; it’s the only one we have” to “Don’t spoil our ending or you’re going to get sued.” Atlus would later walk back these statements, and in the end, it didn’t really affect the game’s reputation, but the events still left a mark. Persona 5 was in the public consciousness for longer in the runup, and surely other corporations took notice.
Avengers: Endgame came out about two weeks ago now, and the runup came with a large number of pleas to “Don’t spoil this for people.” Which it should. I mean, it’s technically the finale to a decade-long story arc slash experiment, the final act that gives away the game. But there was also a lot of that incorporated into the marketing that didn’t make sense in retrospect? Like a sizzle reel that got leaked to the public days before the scenes were confirmed in a new trailer, or how only two weeks later a new Spiderman: Far From Home trailer already reveals part of the ending to Endgame. It reads to me like, while there was some artistic merit and public need for no spoilers, marketing ended up using that to push for the largest opening box-office possible.
I realize how this makes me sound, but I’m really not trying to go “old thing artsy and good, bad thing corporate and bad.” It’s pretty well accepted as common courtesy to ask for permission before spoiling just about anything. And spoiled or not, Endgame will probably be one of those things that people talk about for a good long while. But it still seems like a marketing shift is happening right now, and I’m not entirely certain if where it’s going is any good.
-F
Way back in 1960 when Psycho was coming out, Alfred Hitchcock famously tried to keep people from entering theaters after the movie had started screening, going so far in some cases as to lock theater doors. Hitchcock felt that the then-current popular method of seeing movies -- seeing the middle and ending before looping around to the beginning -- would be detrimental to the experience of his movie. Even before that was (and is) The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie’s long-running play that famously asks its audience members not to reveal its secrets. In each of these cases, not giving the game away was part of the artistic intent.
But that’s a weird thing to be direct about, right? Like, of course a creator doesn’t want their work spoiled, right? Now, in both of these creators’ defense, they both created rather spoiler-prone works, an attribute that not all pieces of media have. Nobody needs to be told, for example, that the computer voice in the video game Portal is out to kill you. The opening monolog in The Other Side of the Wind tells you exactly what happens to its protagonist.
I’ve noticed a shift, though, recently, and I’m not entirely sure if I’m able to fully explain it. In 2016, video game company Atlus released the much-anticipated Persona 5, though it came with a caveat: If you were going to record yourself playing the game, you couldn’t share large parts of it without facing legal action. We’d gone from “Don’t spoil our ending; it’s the only one we have” to “Don’t spoil our ending or you’re going to get sued.” Atlus would later walk back these statements, and in the end, it didn’t really affect the game’s reputation, but the events still left a mark. Persona 5 was in the public consciousness for longer in the runup, and surely other corporations took notice.
Avengers: Endgame came out about two weeks ago now, and the runup came with a large number of pleas to “Don’t spoil this for people.” Which it should. I mean, it’s technically the finale to a decade-long story arc slash experiment, the final act that gives away the game. But there was also a lot of that incorporated into the marketing that didn’t make sense in retrospect? Like a sizzle reel that got leaked to the public days before the scenes were confirmed in a new trailer, or how only two weeks later a new Spiderman: Far From Home trailer already reveals part of the ending to Endgame. It reads to me like, while there was some artistic merit and public need for no spoilers, marketing ended up using that to push for the largest opening box-office possible.
I realize how this makes me sound, but I’m really not trying to go “old thing artsy and good, bad thing corporate and bad.” It’s pretty well accepted as common courtesy to ask for permission before spoiling just about anything. And spoiled or not, Endgame will probably be one of those things that people talk about for a good long while. But it still seems like a marketing shift is happening right now, and I’m not entirely certain if where it’s going is any good.
-F
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