Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Road Tripping

I’ve ridden my fair share of long car rides and am about to go on another one. I don’t really have any advice, or super secret tech, though. Like, ten hours in a car is still ten hours in a car no matter how you look at it. But at the same time, it almost becomes like a sort of ritual? “Here are the things I’ll do in the car,” I say to myself every time, and some of those things even come true!

I’m also relatively young -- maybe that’s part of it. I can stand being in a car for hours on end while the world just passes by me. I’m also rarely the one driving. I can offer, and I have offered, but I frequently get turned down. So it really is just an exercise in staying in one seat for a while and the relatively young bones certainly do help.

There has also been an uptick in things to do. Books were always an option if one isn’t the type to get motion sick but various handheld devices can make the hours whiz by. And there’s always the hope for more sleep. Or the notes I have to read from various writing workshops. Or composing something wholly new. Any of these can pass an hour or two.

And other people? It depends on the people, I guess. But if you don’t want to deal with them, well, that’s what headphones are for, right?

-F

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Fragments

When picking topics to write about on this blog, I find myself tending towards already having an expanded enough take to get at least the first few paragraphs down. Unfortunately, this leaves some topics doomed to fall through the cracks. What I thought I’d do this week is just throw out three of these not-completely-formed ideas just to give an idea of what I tend to think about. And who knows? Maybe I’ll come back to one of these in the future.

There’s a lot of online discourse about how some adaptations and remakes shouldn’t be made. For the former, there’s generally some sort of “unmakeable” label attached, like Watchmen (until 2009) or the philosophy of Alan Watts (until the video game Everything), and for the latter, people tend to ask, well, what’s wrong with the original? But in both cases, like the parentheticals already implied, aren’t there enough counterexamples to shut down these arguments? I even wrote about the two Suspiria movies on this very blog and talked at length about how they could be considered companions to each other.

After years in the foodservice industry, I came to the realization that restaurants very rarely operate at one hundred percent of their capability. Especially the chains and fast-food places. It’s a meme, for example, that the McDonald’s ice cream machine is always broken. It’s the same where I work. Sometimes the problems are more hidden, like, nobody needs to know that the ice machine gets in moods where it just won’t make ice, but sometimes you just need to tell customers, “There were actual bones in the meatballs so you can’t have any. No, I don’t know when we’re getting more” (for the record, that particular problem has since been resolved).

I just talked to someone who didn’t have a snow brush for their car. Who doesn’t have a snow brush? I wondered how they were going to get home in the blizzard that was going on at the time if I hadn’t been there with mine. But their car was newer, so maybe they just hadn’t gotten one yet?

-F

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

An Open Letter

In the parlance of our times, this is a “callout post”, and while I know people spend a lot of time trying to avoid that particular label, but it’s probably best if I just say what it is at the start and let the rest of the world think about its contents.

To whom it may concern:

You know that screen right before the movie starts that’s all like, “Hey, silence your cell phone and don’t use it during the movie, it’s super annoying”? Did you think that it was just talking about everybody else? I’m trying to not start out super mad here. I mean, there are stricter theaters than the ones we’ve been in, where you can get escorted out for the sort of stunts you’ve all pulled. But seriously, I like to think of myself as a pretty tolerant theatre-movie-watcher and I’ve never been as close to kicking someone’s seat as I have after you decided that the middle of the movie was the best time to check your emails.

You know what I’m more forgiving of, actually? A cell phone ringing, or vibrating, or otherwise making noise. Maybe that’s because I’m self-conscious of my own watch beeping in the middle of intimate scenes or I’ve been to movies with people on-call with a hospital and so, of course, have to have their phone on vibrate. And even without those caveats, I can forgive that sort of thing as an honest mistake. Those people didn’t mean to break my immersion, they just did accidentally. To err is human, and all that.

But pulling out your phone, that’s a deliberate action. And seriously, just leave the movie, eh? If you don’t like it, that’s also fine. I’ve not liked movies too. I haven’t walked out of movies before, but that’s certainly an option. Like, if you don’t like a movie, I won’t think less of you if you stop putting yourself through it. Leave! Just leave. Your phone will be right there in your bag or purse or pocket. So don’t! Just don’t. You’re older than me, generally. You should know better.

I hope the next movie you see is as enjoyable as you hoped it would be, and I hope your phone stays perfectly in your pocket.

All the best,
-F

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Remember Remember

I’m not saying I don’t get why people outside of England say “Remember remember” to each other on November fifth, and I’m not saying that people should stop (it is kind of fun. Why else would I put it in the title?), but it did get me thinking a little bit about how holidays or remembrances change over time. This isn’t even like Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play levels of change over time (or, more recently, a joke about Illumination’s minions in Mortal Engines) as those are both a longer timespan than I’m talking about (yes, the four-hundred-plus years since the gunpowder plot counts as a not a long time in this instance), this is more looking at how pop-culture changes a thing.

And I bring this up now because of how obvious the inciting incident is. Without Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, I doubt people would have ascribed much significance to the fifth of November, even within England. At the very least, I imagine it’d probably stay around the significance of Cinco de Mayo if the same rhyme managed to permeate popular consciousness.

But at the same time, wasn’t that one of the points of the book? One of V for Vendetta’s major themes was attacking complacency in the inner workings of its country. The newscast sequence (for both the book and the film, though your mileage may vary on the effectiveness of either) basically spells it outright. And yet…

And yet now it’s V for Vendetta day. A chance to post Guy Fawkes masks on the internet, and even that’s generally devoid of the more anarchist-friendly side of the work. Do people know about the treason that inspired it anymore? That’s really the thing I try to wrap my head around. But then again, isn’t it fine if they don’t? Perhaps it isn’t in some sort of “people who forget history are doomed to repeat it” sort of way, but at the same time, that’s just culture, isn’t it?

-F