Resolutions and Reflections

I never was much for New Year’s Resolutions. Like, sure, I understand the appeal -- the drive ever-towards self-improvement is an admirable one even if the stereotype is that these things never make it past the thirty-day mark -- but I’ve slowly developed a “Why wait for the new year when you could do it now?” sort of mentality. It doesn’t always work -- I still procrastinate more than I probably should -- and maybe it takes the fun out of some traditions, but it has served me well enough.

What I do do sometimes, then, is use the turning of the calendar to institute challenges to myself. Four years or so ago, I made this whole plan for cutting soda out of my diet, basically daring myself to not drink it. And yeah, the mechanics of that are remarkably similar to, you know, normal resolutions, but I find the slight mentality difference works better for what I try to use these for.

This year, the dare was to have a pair of brother-blogs, this one and Secret Asian Man, each one posting weekly. And for the most part? I think it worked! It definitely helped keep both of us honest, and I did learn a lot about what I do like to write about: spreading the word on things I like and complaining a whole lot about things (read: work) that I don’t, with a hint of writing about writing and maybe an honest-to-god story in there somewhere too. Overall, I thought it was a lot of fun!

So what’s next? Well, I guess I have a week to think over and finalize what next year’s challenge to myself should be. And maybe I won’t manage it. I can already see how parts of next year might pose a challenge. Hopefully, it’ll be the type of challenge I enjoy doing.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and I’ll see you next week.

-F

Tin Can Space Machines

Airplanes are bunk.

Like, I don’t mean to disparage the concept of aviation as a whole, especially when my sister’s going into aerospace engineering, and I especially don’t want this to come off as a “dumb millennials don’t know what older generations had to put up with” kind of piece (at least, without acknowledging early on that that’s the kind of piece it’s going to end up being). I really do enjoy being able to go to places at speeds people less than 100 years ago would consider impossible. But that doesn’t mean that new technology doesn’t come with a host of new-technology problems.

• • • 

I just boarded a plane. It’s a small one, only forty-eight passenger seats and maybe two attendants at best. We’ve all boarded and the captain rings the intercom. Apparently, our destination has some low visibility issues, so if we could all just get off for, well, they don’t know how long but if we could leave the plane for now, that would be great…

• • • 

There’s a reason comedians have made entire routines starting with the simple phrase, “What’s the deal with airplane food?” And sure, huge strides have been made to make sure that those specific jokes are a thing of the past. But jokes about airplane food are a symptom of a larger problem about how these companies aim to make money, and just because this particular symptom has been downplayed does not mean the sickness overall has been quelled (#eattherich).

Besides, comedians will move on to other things to poke at in the airport system. John Mulaney, for example, has an entire bit where he imagines himself dealing with a fictional airline service he calls “Delta Airlines” and their perhaps excessively malicious customer service. It’s kind of their job to do things like that.

• • • 

I’m at 36,000 feet. Flight attendants are handing out little sandwiches -- turkey or veggie -- to all the passengers, but they seem to be paying more attention to each other as they bicker about who needs to get what for later (maybe someone in First Class needs more coffee? Probably, it’s always someone from up front…). When they get to me, I get the same question this woman has asked everybody: “Turkey or veggie?” she says.

“Veggie,” I say. 

I get a sandwich. I take a bite. It’s turkey.

• • • 

I write all this with the, if not the memory of, the awareness that things were probably different back when flying was a luxury or at the very least something of note to do. Again, it’s mundane now. Flying is boring, and Icarus wouldn’t have flown like he did if it was boring, so maybe there’s something to that idea. That’s why comedians get so much mileage out of it; because so many people have had similar experiences.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t want them to be better, right? Like, until we make that technological leap to teleportation (and get over the related ethical problems), this is what we’re stuck with. The least we could do would be making it the best hours of our life.

• • • 

As I make my way past customs, one bag in my hand and the other on my back, I see her face, and I remember why I came all this way in the first place. All these petty grievances, from that kid two rows up who would occasionally bawl his lungs out to how frequently they seemed to cycle the cabin lights on and off, that’s all washed away. I smile. She smiles back.

“How was the flight?” she says.

“Fine.”

-F

A Premature Countdown But A Countdown Nonetheless

It feels weird making a “Top Five” list before the year is quite over yet. Like, as I’m writing this, movies like The House That Jack Built, Roma, The Favourite (yes, with the “u”), or If Beale Street Could Talk haven’t quite come out yet, which means that some of these could easily get bumped off or shifted around if I get around to seeing them. But this list has been on my mind since somebody asked about it at work, and I’m not sure where else this would fit into the schedule, so I thought I’d give at least a go at explaining myself here as well.

So without further ado, here are my five favorite films from 2018:

5) Thunder Road / Eighth Grade
(Thunder Road trailer) (Eighth Grade trailer)

Okay, I lied, it’s six films. But I liked these two for similar enough reasons that I couldn’t bear cutting one and not the other. It’s true that neither of these films is especially well shot (though Thunder Road does start with a reprise of the short film it is based on (which you can find here) which is a particularly impressive ten-minute long one take), but the writing very much makes up for it.

It’s actually interesting how these two films complement each other. Eighth Grade is about a girl’s final days in Junior High, dealing with the classic struggles of adolescence like not relating at all to her father or wondering why she’s not popular, but with a little bit of writer/director Bo Burnham’s wit mixed in there. On the other side of the coin, Thunder Road is about a father separated from his wife, sharing custody of a daughter the father has trouble relating to. But then he realizes he didn’t really know his mom that well either, and a large portion of the movie is him reconciling all that.

Anyway, they’re both really good with especially strong lead performances, so check them out if you can.

4) Thoroughbreds
(trailer)

It’s really easy to not care about what happens in Thoroughbreds, and I say that even as I put it on this list. There are simply no likable characters in the film, with even the two closest to sympathetic being a drug dealer and a literal sociopath. But the film (written and directed by Cory Finley), understands this and is shot in such a way to always keep the audience at a distance. The experience turns into a kind of helplessness, as you watch a series of events that was doomed to happen from the start.

And again, some people won’t like that. To those people, Thoroughbreds is a bunch of Rich, White People Problems with spoiled brats for characters, and that really is an acceptable reaction to this film. But once you get past that, the film just pulls you the rest of the way in.

3) Les Garçons Sauvages (The Wild Boys)
(trailer)

Oh, you thought the characters in Thoroughbreds were unlikeable, rich brats? Well, I’m one of two minds recommending this movie then. On one, some of the things not shown, only implied, in Thoroughbreds take center stage here, which means that the first third of this movie is just showing five terrible, terrible people doing horrible, uncomfortable to watch things. Thoroughbreds would just be a boring film without its audience’s engagement. The Wild Boys would have those same people leaving in disgust.

It also doesn’t do as much to draw people in, though that’s perhaps to be expected of a literal French art-house movie. It’s going to be pretentious and if you’re not into that, this probably won’t be an enjoyable watch. What the film does offer, though, is striking imagery and a Lord of the Flies-like energy that will leave those still in the theater with a peculiar sense of awe.

2) The Other Side of the Wind
(trailer)

I actually wrote a lot about this one already in my Blue Curtains post, but to summarize here, it’s fascinating how this film was made, it’s fascinating how it finally got all put together, and there’s enough of Orson Welles’ spirit to shine through, even if all the jokes and references land forty years too late.

Shot in a documentary style (almost ten years before Cannibal Holocaust and This is Spinal Tap popularized the mockumentary genre), The Other Side of the Wind describes to us the character of Jake Hannaford, a once-big-time film director who may be desperately clawing at relevance? It’s all unclear, of course, as Jake won’t let anybody into his private life without a fight, but on his seventieth birthday, there are cameras everywhere. I think some of the pieces are out of place, sure (the opening monolog practically begs to be respected for even releasing the film at all), but as I said in that post, I still can’t get this film out of my head.

1) Madeline’s Madeline
(trailer)

It was the trailer that first attracted me to this film, its cutout montage and constant “Hey Na Na” evoking that perfect sense of weirdness that I just had to see play out. And in that regard, I got what I was expecting. But what I wasn’t expecting was, to put it bluntly, the entire rest of it? Everyone’s performance is great, especially Helena Howard’s; it looks great, with a special commendation to make the images actually more focused as the film hits its weirdness stride; and its story slowly evolves in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way that perfectly models the perspective of its main character (and, if you watch a couple of interviews, also the creation of itself).

It’s weird. I mean, I knew I was pretentious (or at least enjoyed art people tend to call pretentious), but having it listed out like this made me realize it just a bit more. Like, the most accessible films are at the lower end of this list. Not that they’re bad, mind you, just that they’re listed lower than the more experimental fare. But at the same time, I do want most people to see most of these movies (The Wild Boys being the exception, again, you really do need to know what you’re getting into with that one), if only to help them find something new to enjoy.

-F

The Long And Short Of It

One of the lesser weaknesses I have in my writing is how I put titles on things. Now, I call it a “lesser weakness” because I know it doesn’t really matter and could probably be perennially ignored or put off until the rest of the work is finished, like, I didn’t have a good title for Write What You Know until I had nearly finished the thing. But there are other times where I flounder -- without a title to attach a central theme to, I sometimes lose track of what I was writing about.

One way I’ve found to get around this is to use longer titles. Generally, they’re just more detailed versions of what I would already use, often with an “or” stuck in there somewhere. For example, this post could easily have been titled: The Long And Short Of It (Or: How To Keep Focus When Every Other Method Fails You (And Yes, I’m Aware Of The Irony)).

That’s another thing that I like doing, actually. I like how titling things can add a little bit of humor to the proceedings. I don’t do it to things I need to seriously show other people. I don’t snark when writing a college paper on it but I did at one point have a paper with the concise title: Moving The Goalposts: Clarke’s Third Law Shows Its Age.

The closest I can think of for where I got the inspiration to do this is Kurt Vonnegut, with such classic either/or titles like Slaughterhouse Five Or: The Children’s Crusade and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater Or: Pearls Before Swine. Or maybe my inspiration is closer to Philip K. Dick who graced us with such titles as Doctor Bloodmoney, Or How We Got Along After The Bomb and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. Obviously, I’m not trying to compare myself to these authors in any more than a superficial level, but that is where I got the idea. Probably.

I don’t know if there’s a conclusion here. Like, this post was more of a reflection on a thing I do, and I’m not going to keep doing it (or the other way, doing it more) just because I wrote 404 words about it. But I did want to write it in case longer titles do start showing up in these posts. So I guess be on the lookout for that? No promises, though.

-F

Christmas Music

This is sort of a follow-up to the last post I made about music in the workplace, so the first thing I want to say is that, while it hasn’t gotten better by any stretch of the imagination, it also hasn’t really gotten any worse. I can narrow down the songs I don’t particularly enjoy down to a select few, noticed and appreciated a few more, and the rest I can easily tune out at this point.

But of course, all that gets thrown out the window once the holiday season rolls around. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, I walked into work and was immediately greeted by what I can only describe as somebody drunkenly mumbling their way through Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

This has happened for three Christmas seasons in a row and it still catches me off guard. Like, I know our playlist is bad, but the sudden (if not unexpected) addition of holiday cheer still finds new ways to disappoint. I can’t even give a good example of the type of music they play there; just looking for it would probably make me want to one-up Van Gogh and chop off both ears.

So far, I have been able to identify two leading factors in why this is the case (that is, why not just normal-people Christmas songs?). The first is that repetition would probably breed contempt for just about anything. It hasn’t happened to the songs I do like in the playlist because they only come up so often.

The second is that, as I learned recently, the playlist is actually a Youtube Music playlist, which means it’s curated by someone, and the someone that puts together the normal music set probably also picks the Christmas songs. So really, the entire store has to suffer because of one person’s bad taste.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. There’s no Carol of the Bells on there to terrify me, for example, and some good songs do make it through. But just like the rest of the list, the ratio of good songs to bad is very lopsided.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe our music is designed this way so that the good songs stand out more. I doubt it, but that’s one of the ways I keep hope alive in this minimum-wage world, I guess. It’s certainly a better thought than the alternative.

-F

Blue Curtains

There’s a movie I can’t get out of my head. Not because I think it’s a great movie (though it very well may be (I’d have to get back to you on that)); it’s more like when you’ve got a song in your head and all you can remember is the chorus and maybe a riff or two, and if you don’t sing about it (or, in this case, talk kind of adjacent to it), it’s just going to get worse.

The movie in question is The Other Side of the Wind, the last film by Orson Welles (now available on Neflix!). It’s a frenetic piece; its conceit is that it’s footage from a bunch of cameras all trying to get a hot new scoop on a Hollywood director on the night of his seventy-fifth birthday. What I can’t get over is how prescient it is for being shot in the 1970s.

But let’s take a step back for a moment. The title of this post is based off a tired joke that goes a little something like this:

An author, in a fit of self-indulgence, decides to sit in on a class teaching his own work. The professor goes into a long, impassioned speech about the curtains in a scene. “The author made the curtains blue here,” the professor says, “because it symbolizes the purity of the scene, while also foreshadowing the tragedy to come.”

Upon hearing this, the author shouts “The curtains are blue because I like the color blue!”

This was also at the heart of The Beginner’s Guide, the subject of a Raindrops on Roses post I made a few months back. In that game, Davey, for as much as he tried to demonstrate his understanding of Coda’s games, didn’t know Coda as well as he thought he did and so ruined their friendship because of it.

But there’s something wrong with both of those conclusions, right? The term “Death of the Author” still has meaning, right? Like, I remember discussing the briefcase in Pulp Fiction with a friend. We were both talking about what we thought was in it and I said, “Well, Quentin Tarantino says…”

He interrupted me with “I really don’t care what Quentin Tarantino says.”

I feel much the same way about The Other Side of the Wind. Taking it as a 2018 movie about 1970’s Hollywood makes it very much a period piece in the same way that Barton Fink (directed by Joel and Ethan Coen) is. It certainly helps that many of the characters are played by their inspirations up to and including John Huston in the lead role.

What makes it prescient, though, is how little some things have changed in the intervening years between filming and release. For example, sex and sexuality is one of the themes that permeates throughout the movie; one of the things all the cameras are trying to figure out is the relationship the main character has with the women in his life. But as the movie goes on, it’s revealed that not only is that kind of a touchy subject, but shades of modern-day’s difficulties with sexual assault begin to crop up as well.

Another example would be the opening monolog, especially as this one was added near the end of the arduous editing process and by making mention of otherwise anachronistic items like cell phones, it only adds to this bridge between the old and the modern.

But, again, these interpretations on certain contexts were certainly not Orson Welles’ intention. Sometimes the curtains are just a nice shade of blue. But I never really liked how that joke villainized the professor. They’ve presumably developed their own context for the piece after years of study, and suddenly someone shouts back a retort with nothing but some perceived authority. And in most cases, I find it actually weakens the piece. The Other Side of the Wind goes from a period piece spanning multiple periods to its own inside joke that the audience can never be a part of.

-F

A Follow-Up

With better planning, this would have been last week’s topic, but there were ah, more pressing issues. Though, to be fair, this also gave me a bit more time to reflect on the writing experience. This is something I actually don’t get to talk about much. Normally all my fictional pieces go through the college workshop-level process, where authors are specifically not allowed to talk about their work.

So now, two weeks later, let’s talk a little bit more about Write What You Know.

One of the things I didn’t mention in my Raindrops on Roses post on creepypasta was how enamored I am with their structure. It’s a basic structure, sure, but I think that’s why it’s so easy to copy down and use. While The Hero’s Journey is used to mold longer stories, all a shorter story like a creepypasta needs is a series of spooks that slowly escalate, and an optional denouement at the end.

I knew I wanted to write a Halloween-y story for this blog, if only to prove that I could. That’s a feeling I get sometimes, often when a story has a false start and I end up dropping it. I started this blog for the same reason, to give another example of this. The next step, of course, was the subject matter.

I do have older false starts of horror stories, mostly involving weird sounds that keep showing up around me. Spotify glitching out was the one that I had actually part of an introduction written for but there was also this weird hum at work that I obsessed over for about a week before dismissing it as “worth noting, but maybe not worth writing more than a sentence or two about” (oh hey!).

But what I also have is a bunch of stories about “Nancy.” The “Finlay story” was the most memorable, and it took a little memory digging to find the other ones, but I mean, those aren’t that scary by themselves. Like, I’m fine now. I’m fine.

I’m fine.

So then all I needed was a conceit, and that one I concede I was a little less creative on. Demons and blood and pentagrams and all that are kind of cliche in creepypasta, but I mean, I have to convince people that my English teacher is a demon spawn somehow, right? The point was, these stories I had were the type.

The climax, of course, is where things diverge from reality. At some point, you just need to creep people out, real life be damned. I’m reminded of this line from Adaptation.:

“The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end and you’ve got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”

So yeah! I had a lot of fun writing it, stringing events together like I did, and I do hope that everybody enjoyed reading it. Unless being scared isn’t your thing, in which case I do apologize. But I’d also want to know what you were expecting the day before Halloween.

-F

Your Vote Matters

Oof, this is going to come off a little cynical, isn’t it? I guess I should lead with this, then: Yes, I voted today. Despite all this essay might say, I still vote regularly. But…

In an online town hall, Bernie Sanders described this midterm as “the most important Midterm of our generation,” kind of like how two years ago was “the most important election of our generation” and while I don’t really remember the rhetoric of four years ago the midterms were probably important then too (not important enough, of course, to get the average American to vote but ehhh…).

Another common piece of rhetoric is “Your vote matters. Your vote always matters.” And yes, there are a myriad of examples where this is true. Anecdotes abound of ties and near-ties and coin flips and recounts, but where I think these go wrong is not providing examples of the other side of the coin: The times when it’s almost unanimous but not quite. Sure, these examples negate the general argument the “Voting Matters” people are trying to make (you can make a difference), but perhaps consider this alternative argument: “You should let your voice be heard.” This, I think, can be demonstrated very well with these sorts of overwhelming defeats.

So here’s my story. It’s nothing so dramatic as a federal or even state election; it was a high school student-level forum. Now, my high-school was a little different in that they tried to let their students have much more of a say in the goings-on of the school. Every one of these meetings, somebody tried to move the school’s dress code away from business casual, for example.

The big-name item on this particular meeting was the school’s schedule. The high school was in many ways an extension of the big-name college in the city. Seniors and even many Juniors took a lot of college-level classes and the high-school had a lot of oddities to accommodate that. The one most specific for this essay was the trimester-style scheduling, which itself mirrored the college experience at the time.

But times change. The college was moving to semesters, with an auxiliary “May-term” to accommodate missing any credit hours that might be lost in the schedule change. The proposal for the high school was a similar semester schedule, but with a “January term” or “J-term” for… reasons I don’t really remember anymore.

I remember Freshman-age me not being a particular fan of this change. The tentative schedule proposed still didn’t sync up all that well with the colleges, and J-term seemed needlessly complex. I also wasn’t really convinced by the arguments to change. The most egregious argument came from one then-Junior who really wanted to go sailing over summer break and this schedule would… cut into that I guess? By a week or two? The point was, I felt it was in my best interest if the school kept going with its trimester-styled schedule.

Voting was something of an embarrassing experience. Instead of counting “ayes” or ballots, they had all in favor of a particular motion stand up and those running the meeting would gauge the results from there. Voting in favor of trimesters went first, so up I went.

Nobody else stood up with me.

Some people laughed. I heard somebody yell “Sit down!”

The next morning, the results of the forum were announced. The semester schedule won in a unanimous fashion. Now, a quick google search of the word “unanimous” will yield this:

u·nan·i·mous
/yo͞oˈnanəməs/
[...]
2. (of an opinion, decision, or vote) held or carried by everyone involved.

Uh huh.

I tried not to cause too much of a disruption, but I do remember saying, “It wasn’t unanimous.”

The response was, “It was basically unanimous.”

These sorts of fora at my high school died out within a few years and I think this was one of the reasons why. Even at the level people reference when attempting to convince people to go to the polls, the most micro of levels, votes can get discounted.

Again, this is going to come off as cynical. One could easily read this as a cautionary tale against democracy. But to me, I think about this as trying my damnedest to get an opinion across. Sure I failed (and, as a schadenfreude-y aside, J-term did turn out to be a needlessly complex addition to an already weird high school), but I did try. And when I filled out my ballot today, that’s what I thought about.

-F

Write What You Know

I had this story idea. The main character (told in first-person, of course) was going to be wandering their old elementary school when they remember that, as a kid, they never went into their school’s basement. Nobody did. Because, you know, of what kind of story it would have been, when our main character inevitably explores that lower level, they come across all kind of demonic imagery. There would have been blood, either molded or crusty with age (I didn’t do any research and wasn’t sure) all over the walls, sometimes forming a pentagram, sometimes, just there because, well, that’s what you write about when describing a room like this.

There was going to be something else in the room, too. Something alive. Something contained in that basement that, now that the door had been opened could escape and enact whatever sinister plan it had.

I never got that far. I never even knew what the creature was going to be. I just knew how I would have felt descending into that basement, and I knew what had to be at the bottom. You see, I never had to deal with demons or other such monsters in elementary school, but I did have to deal with my third-grade English teacher.

Nancy was, from what I remember of her, an okay English teacher. Like, she certainly didn’t go above and beyond fostering her students’ latent interests in writing, but she, you know, did teach us the ins and outs of sentence structure and hey, I guess that’s all you can ask for in third grade. And by the way, Nancy’s not actually her name. But if I’m going to speak ill of the dead, I’d rather not use more identifiers than I have to. You see, Nancy had an, ah, other side to her. And when trying to remember events from my elementary-school life, she tends to dominate my thoughts.

Sometimes, for example, Nancy told these old wives tales. Which, you know, is fine. But to impressionable eight or nine-year-old minds, well, when you tell them that cracking your knuckles leads to brittle bones and your mother cracks her knuckles all the time, well, it just might drive a kid to tears.

But there were also these other, more sinister moments. We were talking about street names once, and Nancy polled the class asking what type of street each person lived on. “A street? A road? An avenue? A boulevard?” I never raised my hand to any of those. I lived on a “Way.”

Nancy never asked what I lived on, though. At the end of those four questions, instead she said, “Well, I don’t know what else you could live on unless you lived in a bag.” And I didn’t know how to respond to that. Because I knew I lived on a way. But I didn’t have the words to express that at all.

In my story, the demon was going to torment the protagonist in largely the same way. The demon was going to present these illusory worlds, at once both grotesque as they were beautiful, and it was going to be these visions that would prompt the protagonist to investigate in the first place. Because the world couldn’t be wrong by itself, right? Somebody had to be at fault, right?

There’s this recurring dream I remember having during my time as a third grader. I don’t remember too many details now, obviously, but I do remember lying on my back, arms outstretched like some sort of horizontal crucifix, being bathed in a dim red light. And then, well…

So the basement at my school was full of rumors. Nobody ever seemed to go down there, and the few times that somebody did open the door, there was this weird red tint over everything, like somebody had put red tissue paper over the single lightbulb down there. And the smell! The rumor going around was that teachers like Nancy snuck down there to smoke cigarettes.

It always smelled like brimstone to me, though.

• • •

There’s one specific moment that sticks out when I think about Nancy. I remember staying a little after class as a sort of detention for not turning in homework on time. Now during this detention I remember Nancy not really referring to me by name at all, just saying things like “Sit here and do your homework.” Which, you know, is fine. She was mad at me. Whatever. But as I was packing up and getting ready to go home, she said, “See you tomorrow, Finlay.”

My name’s not Finlay. But when I said that, she said, “Well, you don’t deserve your name.”

In my dream, I remember a claw reaching out and making a cut right around my left temple, tracing my face in a single blood-red line down to my chin, then back up and around, following my hairline just so before returning to its original starting point. I remember how loose and ill-fitting my face felt in that moment, and how I tried to scream as the claw started peeling it off. But I couldn’t. That’s the thing about dreams, if you’re not lucid, you’re completely helpless against them.

I wanted to translate that feeling to the protagonist of my story, too. I mean, if I was basing it off myself it should have been easy, right? I could have this character who would lose his sense of place and identity to this… this thing, and I mean, I still remember those feelings well enough, right?

• • •

There’s one final story I remember about Nancy. You see, near the end of the school year, she would lead all the third graders on an overnight field trip up to the lake. This was “the big thing” back in third grade. Kids spent a month preparing for it and even longer talking about it. It even infected schoolwork, with science classes spending time talking about fish biology and all the math word problems having a “lakeside” theme to them.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a great time! I mean, when you’re nine, every time is a great time, but this was one of the first times I had ever been up to the lake, and with so many different things scheduled, it was hard to not enjoy it. But at the same time, there’s this one moment.

It was late. I mean, I don’t remember exactly what time, but I had just woken up to use the restroom, and Nancy was standing there right over me. There was a dead look in her eyes, like this time, of all the times, she had slipped a little bit further into the abyss.

“Nancy?” I said.

And she just kept looking at me for a long while, as if she was still deciding what to do with me. For the longest time, neither of us moved. We just stared at each other, me. helpless, barely under the covers and her, well, I don’t even have the words anymore to describe her. But then she spoke:

“The angels are gone,” she said.

It was barely a whisper, but it was deafening in the silence.

The next thing I heard was Nancy slowly turning and shuffling back out of the room. In the morning, she was fine! I mean, she didn’t mention anything about the previous night (and I didn’t dare bring it up) but she was, you know, normal! She was back to telling us how dangerous leeches were and how her sister once nearly got eaten alive by the things, back to getting overly fussy around docks and all those other things old teachers do.

• • •

Nancy retired a couple years after I graduated elementary, but when I was in college, I would come back and volunteer with the after-school program. It was easy enough, take attendance and then play with the kids until their parents and/or guardians picked them up. After that, I just had to clean up a little and I could go home.

I never had to go in the basement, but it always tempted me. I could always see that familiar red tint under the door. But I always told myself it was none of my business. And it never was.

One day, though, well, I figured just a peek wouldn’t hurt, right? I mean, Nancy had tormented me, not just in these moments during the school day, but in my dreams as well, right? I had to know what was going on down there because there had to be something. She was down there all the time! What was she doing? Acting solely on this whim, I marched straight to the basement door, threw it open, and went down those final stairs.

But there was nothing. It was just a smokey old storage basement. And when the door creaked closed behind me, I was left alone, just me and my thoughts.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Fifteen) -- Creepypasta

I promised three posts ago that one of these horror-themed Raindrops on Roses posts wasn’t going to be strictly-speaking good, and I think even just looking at the title might give the impression that this one is the one I was talking about. But before we get into why I kind of adore these b- or c-grade stories, I have to do talk a little bit about the etymology of the internet.

Sometimes the internet really likes a certain turn of phrase (or, perhaps more accurately for the purposes of this post, a certain turn of text), and when that happens, it tends to spread rather quickly. In cases like “john is kill” or “He Boomed Me”, these phrases are mutable enough to become memes in their own right, but sometimes the actual text is deemed perfect in the eyes of the internet and becomes the go-to text for expressing an often sarcastic version of a particular emotion. Fake outrage, for example, draws the “Navy Seal Rant” (and yes there are variations on Navy Seal, but unlike the first two examples, they’re far less popular than the original text). These instances are referred to as “copypastas” or simply “pastas”, which itself originates from “copy-paste”.

But not every copypasta wants to associate with an asterisk everytime it wants to evoke an emotion. Especially with an emotion like horror, which needs to be taken seriously (at least the ironic sort of seriousness that a comedy-horror sort of story like Shaun of the Dead might go for) or risk utterly breaking its audience’s immersion. Because of this, these viral horror stories have distanced themselves a little from their copypasta roots and now tend to go by the name “creepypasta”.

So what makes a creepypasta? More specifically, what makes a creepypasta different from, say, a normal horror short story? Perhaps the most glaring difference is the insistence on a first-person past-tense perspective. Creepypastas want the reader to believe that this truly happened (as opposed to media like It Comes At Night which describes a post-apocalyptic scenario that might happen), and one of the ways they do that is with “I”. This also lets the author skip by a little bit of character establishment. Sure, the “I” might have an occupation or friends that spooky things also happen to, but their purpose is better served as the metaphorical cameraman, guiding the reader through a series of events.

The consequence of this, of course, is the same consequence that lets cameramen (in most cases) not die during action movies. The main character in creepypastas seldom dies, so the horror generally has to come from elsewhere. One of the ways they do that is downer endings or, in some cases, no ending at all. Frequently this hinges on a Shyamalan-like twist (As an aside/fun fact, the plot of Sixth Sense was originally going to be part of a horror anthology TV series, so the ancestry is certainly there), which lets the author narrate a proper resolution before pulling out the rug and going “Surprise!”

Just like Shyamalan movies, though, these twists can easily be marred by how out-of-nowhere they are. The novel Penpal by Dathan Auerbach, itself a collection of six connected creepypastas tends to fall prey to this, with each chapter describing a spooky event and then going “Haha! It was a pedophile!”

Lastly, creepypasta itself has its own subgenres. The most popular is what I like to call “corruption of the innocent,” which takes a piece of media and twists it. Some of the more famous examples of this are “Lost Episode” pastas like Suicide Mouse or “Haunted Video Game” pastas like Ben Drowned or the incredibly poorly titled Godzilla NES Creepypasta. The problem here is that if it is popular enough to spawn its own subgenre, it can easily breed familiarity, and familiarity can easily break immersion, which as previously discussed, can kill the reception of a pasta.

Do you recognize the pattern yet? Every trope that makes a creepypasta a creepypasta also can easily be a detriment to its quality. So why do I like them? Well, some of that I admit is because of how I consume them. I generally get these stories in audio form; I listen to them while doing more menial tasks where my mind would otherwise wander (closing up shop at work, for example). And in that way, it transforms these stories into almost campfire stories, where the focus is less on the quality of the story and more on the act of telling. So sure, creepypasta is generally on the lower end of the quality spectrum compared to a lot of horror, but just like everyone has a favorite campfire story to tell, everyone has a creepypasta they like to share around the internet.

I close, then, with links to and comments on some of my own favorites.

Candle Cove: This is one of those creepypastas that often comes with a the (italics included), as in the creepypasta. And that’s not without a good reason. Its forum-post style makes it easy to spread around, it moves deftly from beat to beat and is able to recontextualize old low-budget children’s tv in a way pastas like Suicide Mouse or Squidward’s Suicide never could. It was also expanded into a miniseries as part of SyFy’s Channel Zero, so that’s a fun fact as well.

Killswitch: I don’t think Catherynne M. Valente intended for any of her posts on her Invisible Games blog to be viewed as truth, but the legend of a game that is only playable once certainly stuck around. In my head, it influenced the creation of games like One Chance or Execution, though that’s just me guessing. I don’t even think it was the best story on the now-defunct blog (the link before goes to archive.org, which may not have grabbed all of them), but it certainly was a good introduction to the stories it wanted to tell.

Godzilla NES Creepypasta: Yes, the title is garbage. Yes, the plot has been done a thousand times down to the specific beats. But just like the game in the story itself, the narrative just keeps going, adding on more and more, slowly weaving its own mythos. Add on some creative sprite work to simulate screenshots from this haunted game, and it’s at least worth a look.

SCP-1981: I don’t generally like the SCP Foundation subset of creepypastas. They have a faux-scientific style that reads to me as more dry and boring than scary, and the community tends towards being fascinated with potential world-ending catastrophes as a source of horror, which, you know, doesn’t work if the world’s still here. But sometimes the foundation comes across something more mundane, (say, a videotape with some odd properties) and in those instances, I think the writing style can work.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Fourteen) -- Anatomy

(purchase link)

I noted what could perhaps be a poor response to the opening paragraph of last video. I made what some considered to be a leap in logic between the title of certain films and phallic imagery. So instead of leading with a similar paragraph here, let’s jump straight into talking about… Anatomy.

One of the weird things about video games is that, because the medium is so new, there isn’t much clout behind, say, some of the “B games” like there is behind “B movies”. Sure, there are rather large-profile independent games (for example, Fez, Super Meat Boy, and Braid, as featured in Indie Game: the Movie), but the large majority of games go unknown and unloved.

One of the more recent “B games” to break out is Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, which actually commented on this. Bennett’s game is actually an interpretation of Sexy Hiking, and in the game he talks about his fascination with creation on a personal level. Getting Over It is his, and not just because his name’s in the title. He talks about how some games don’t really care about the player because it’s more of an expression of the creator’s intent than the ideas the player puts into it.

Anatomy by kittyhorrorshow doesn’t care about the player. Not because of anything Bennett Foddy says (though that’s certainly part of it), but because really every moment in the game expresses how much it doesn’t want the player there. This isn’t even the first kittyhorrorshow game to tackle this theme, 000000FF0000 (that's, uh, hexadecimal for Black Red) managed that a little earlier, but it doesn’t do so as completely as Anatomy does.

Anatomy is about a haunted house, which is exactly the type of house that one would expect to not want the player there. But it’s not the type of house that has spooky ghosts (though technically it does have one), it’s more about emptiness and loneliness. I asked last week, “What happens to a house when it is left alone?” and that’s what I was talking about.

But what’s more is that Anatomy is about familiarity. At every point in the game the player is exploring some facet of the house, wandering around the house searching for some unexplored nook or cranny. But when you go back to where you’ve been before, you realize that something’s off, which in turn only gets worse and worse as the game goes on.

And by the end, it’s all the player can do to not be consumed.

-F

Next time: Short, not often sweet, but worthy of discussing nonetheless.

Raindrops on Roses (Part Thirteen) -- It Comes At Night

(trailer)

Perhaps one of the odder observations to come out of distribution company A24’s choice in horror movies is how closely they match slang terms for a penis. The VVitch is perhaps the furthest away but in this particular take gets by as a pet nickname one might give their own, Hereditary is pretty self-explanatory, and then, of course, It Comes At Night. I don’t bring this up because any of these movies are about penises themselves, it’s just something that I found amusing because secretly I’m twelve.

It Comes At Night is a deceptive little film. I almost considered not providing a trailer link because of how misleading the trailer can be (another problem some people have with A24-distributed horror movies). But even past the marketing more focused on getting people into seats than knowing what they’re in for, the movie is still deceptive. I would almost call it a zombie movie without the zombies.

The best thing a piece of zombie-related media can do, and I’ve talked about this before when I was writing about The Walking Dead, is focus as little as possible on the zombies. Oh, they can be there, sure, and all the awards for best makeup or effect can certainly help sell a show, but a zombie story is still a human story, generally about mistrust in a post-apocalyptic setting, and the disasters a mistake as simple as waking up at the wrong moment can cause.

The fact that there are no monsters in the traditional sense is almost a spoiler. Like I said, this movie is deceptive. Even the house that is the setting for most of the film doesn’t have a specific architecture, almost as if changing based on the subconscious whims of its occupants (an idea I’ve touched on before and definitely will again by the end of this month). This makes the movie dreadful to watch (and I say that in the best possible way). Everything seems to be designed to lie to the viewer, and it can be difficult to find out what’s actually going on and why. You see things happening, and you know what’s probably going to happen next, but no, that wouldn’t happen, right?

There is no titular “It” in It Comes At Night. It’s not that type of story. What it is a story of is two families trying their hardest to survive in a world that has already ended. It’s a sort of nihilistic way to look at the world, actually. The world does not care about the characters in this film. In fact, it actively tries to kill them. The characters know this too. It’s all they can do to simply survive in the vain hope that things might get better.

-F

Next time: What happens to a house when it is left alone?

Adjectives That Describe Your Bones Sometimes

I hinted in my last Raindrops and Roses post that I wanted to cover something related to skeletons and the spookiness and/or scariness that occasionally describes them. So of course October would be the perfect month to talk about the theme for this month: horror.

I used to hate horror media. Even dystopian fiction -- a genre generally associated with horror even if it isn’t quite -- weirded me out. If I could remember my dreams, 1984 probably would have given thirteen-year-old me nightmares. I don’t think I got the same catharsis horror aficionados say they experience coming out of a horror movie, or if I did, I was more fixated on the “being in danger” part of being scared. When I was even younger, a particularly zealous performance in a for-kids production of Beauty and the Beast drove me to tears.

I can’t say exactly when the change happened, when I started being interested in being scared. I think I realized just how large a swath of media I was just dismissing off-hand, and wanted to at least take a second look at these films and games and stories before relegating the genre to “things I just didn’t ‘get’”.

I also understand that a large portion of my readers have already had their one or two experiences with horror, and didn’t like it that much. It’s probably going to be difficult to convince you to watch or play or read any of these in that case, but to help try and convince you, I wanted to talk about which specific horror I’ve found myself enjoying before we get into the specifics:

In regards to more visual media, let’s talk about jump-scares. They’re fine in small doses, but constructing a horror movie or game out of them just gets repetitive. They also have to represent the end of a particular scene. It’s the payoff, as it were. Cutting down on their frequency also reduces how predictable they are. One of the reasons I didn’t enjoy A Quiet Place, for example, is because every “jump scare scene” ratcheted the sound effects up and the ambient noise down, meaning you already knew the scare was coming.

The characterization has to be strong. This seems like an obvious point for any story, not just horror, but horror tends to lend itself to stupid decisions more often (“Let’s split up. We’ll cover more ground that way.”), and those have to be justified. Uncharacteristically poor decision-making isn’t a deal-breaker, but again, most stories have characters, so most stories should have good ones.

Lastly, I’ve found with horror movies that I’ve enjoyed them more before they introduce the supernatural aspects into them. For example, The Witch (stylized as The VVitch if you’re pretentious (which I am)), loses something when you realize the existence (or, at least, the confirmed existence) of the titular character could be cut entirely and the movie would be just as compelling, if not more so.

Again, these are just opinions. I’m certainly not going to say that any of these are the best things ever (or, in one instance, even strictly-speaking good), but they are things I want to share and talk about.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these next few posts, and if not, well, some stores already have Christmas decorations up, so you’ve got that to look forward to.

-F

Training Montage

(I don’t actually like the concept of theme songs for text-based media, but if this song doesn’t cross your mind, you’re missing out on the best Daniel Radcliffe film. This isn’t at all related the rest of the post, I just wanted to share)

We’ve had a lot of new hires recently in the workplace. Which is good, probably. I mean, corporate-speak would have me say plenty of people are getting their first hours of work experience in general and an introduction to the food service industry in particular. Which is good in a capitalist sort of way. But it also means that a portion of the people working, sometimes up to a quarter, are almost completely unable to function by themselves in a kitchen. Which means they need training.

Which means I’ve had to train them.

I’ve been vocal in person about how much I don’t want to end up teaching. A lot of that is my (personally) perceived inability to deal with more than, like, two or three people at a time, but I also worry a lot about having to explain my (or really any specific) thought process more than once or twice. Basically, I abhor repetition.

Training is a little different, of course. It happens seldomly enough and I’ve taught enough different positions that it never gets old or repetitive per se, but that only exacerbates the other problem I alluded to: explaining my mindset as I’m training.

When I’m working in the kitchen, I have a million things going on. I have two screens to keep track of, four appliances each with their own timers to be aware of, and five areas that each need to be individually stocked. Not to mention I also have to keep my area clean and get it as ready as possible for my closing routine which is a whole additional can of metaphorical worms. And it’s difficult, I’ve found, to properly relay all that to whoever is shadowing me for a day.

Most recently, I wanted to start the training session with a quick rundown of what and where everything was, but the dinner rush came early, and I was stuck explaining my thought process behind chickens and pasta cooking, while also rushing around my eight-by-eight foot area trying to get everyone’s food out in a timely manner. When things calmed down and I was able to ask, “Do you have any questions so far?” I got the “No” that probably meant “Yes, but I don’t have the right words to ask any of them.”

Or maybe that’s just my own insecurities. They did have questions later, and as far as I can tell they’re doing a good enough job with further training as far as I can tell. Although maybe that’s simply because after that day, they started training with somebody else.

-F

Weird Nostalgia

This was going to be a Raindrops on Roses post, but I decided against that for a couple reasons. First, I knew what theme I wanted for my movie/game/book set to be, and I knew that what I wanted to talk about here didn’t mesh with that at all. And second, I’m not actually sure I remember a lot of what I want to talk about at all. Which is kind of fitting, given that what I want to talk about is Neal Shusterman’s The Schwa was Here.

Like, I remember these moments, the set pieces as it were. There’s a kid who is functionally invisible, you see. Your brain can see and hear him, it just tends not to. And I remember the montage of moments as the people who do start noticing him test the limits of his power (for example, he gets through 2006-era airport security until he also tries taking a metal bar with him). But I don’t remember the actual characters at all. The summaries I could find online say this kid’s friends start taking advantage of him, and I have no idea how true that is.

But I also remember liking it despite knowing nothing about the plot. I remember really appreciating the third act especially as everyone learns valuable life lessons and our main characters find friends they never thought they would (if you’re offended at spoilers for a twelve-year-old book feel free to not write anything in the comments). So I’m in this weird position of having fond memories of no memories at all.

I had a similar reaction recently to the movie Annihilation (2018). I mentioned being a little low on the movie, but when asked why, I struggled to remember my initial reaction. When I did respond, it was mostly remembering what I had said before than actually remembering examples from the movie.

The common thread between these two examples, I think, is frequency and distance in time. I’ve only ever read The Schwa was Here once about eleven years ago. I only saw Annihilation once back in February. By comparison, I remember a lot about Madeline’s Madeline or The War of the Worlds because of how recently I’ve seen them, and I remember a lot about Upstream Color or The Phantom Tollbooth because of how often I rewatched or reread them. Which I imagine is not a new development in terms of understanding how memory works, but it seemed interesting in this context with how much media I consume.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twelve) -- 2001: A Space Odyssey

There are a number of science-fiction films with post-release novelizations. I myself remember reading through the Star Wars books, though I never dipped into the expanded universe outside of a few series that I barely remember (all I remember are the force-sensitive power crystals used in lightsabers). The point is, they exist. They’re a known quantity. So what’s different about this one?

It’s semi-well-known that Stanley Kubrick and Sir Arthur C. Clarke collaborated on the story, which means for the purposes of this post each of their respective creations is an adaptation of the other. While they both tell the same story (or, perhaps, the same, three stories), the way they go about them is significantly different.

Some of that is the medium. One wouldn’t expect a book to do a movie’s job in the same way one doesn’t expect a psychiatrist to do a brain surgeon’s job. The movie, for example, doesn’t use narration, instead relying largely on cinematography and audio cues to make the same points. But some would say that’s to the movie’s detriment. The first and third acts of the movie aren’t exactly viewer-friendly, often drawing out shots probably longer than necessary (especially the third act, I mean, have you seen that montage?). The book, of course, has to rely on it’s narration, which means that one can finally learn what that third-act acid trip actually meant, the alien intent behind the monoliths, and so on.

Some of this is simply a difference in style between the two creators. Clarke had a dry, technical style, obsessed with detail and trying to make everything fit after his sci-fi conceits were made. Rendezvous with Rama had an ambassador from Mercury, for example, but otherwise was able to fully explore an alien ship without a single thing in it seeming human. On the other hand, Stanley Kubrick was very visual (he started his career as a photographer, this should be expected), that’s part of the reason a bunch of these shots hold for so long. It also gives a sense of normalcy that Clarke’s adaptation couldn’t quite match. In the film, all the characters are used to the technology, so we believe this world is lived-in. The book, partly because of the writing style used, isn’t able to provide this, instead giving the reader a Rama-like experience.

But all this ignores the premise of this series. Why do I like this book and this movie? Well, some of it is because of those technical details, guiding the reader/viewer through a world that (at the time) was only forty years away. But I also enjoy it because of how the two compliment each other, each one adding (sometimes necessary) context that the other one would otherwise lack.

I’m reminded of how David Lynch reportedly passed out pamphlets describing the plot of Dune before his adaptation premiered. In that instance, there was a belief that the supplementary material was required for the piece to be comprehensible. These works defy that necessity. Even in the film’s more incomprehensible moments, even as the book runs dryly through unnecessary technical detail, they still present a complete vision of the world of tomorrow.

-F

Next time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTgFtxHhCQ0

Great Artists Steal (Part Two)

I know that everything good has been done before. I know that. But just like how internet advertisements seemingly know what you’ve been thinking about buying before you even search for it, it seems like when I’ve been sitting on a writing idea for too long someone else just sweeps it away and means that if I do end up using it, it looks like I’m inspired by something I probably wasn’t at best and plagiarizing at worst.

For example, I’ve been interested in Prospero’s final monolog in The Tempest since I saw it performed. I wasn’t sure where I was going to use it (I don’t generally write about plays from the inside (a “don’t write what you don’t know about situation)), but I did keep it around as something to consider. Though now that Lady Bird’s out, with Lucas Hedges’ interpretation appearing as a turning point in the movie, that enthusiasm has died a little.

Similarly, I had at least a semblance of an outline involving a film about the creation of a film (because I like meta stuff like that (I know what I said last week and I meant it)), but it turns out a film called Madeline’s Madeline just premiered at Sundance this year that in interviews the director describes as an interpretation of her own process of filmmaking. So it’s a bit more subtle, but it’s definitely there. And if that doesn’t count, there’s also Synecdoche, New York.

I wouldn’t be as upset (to be clear, I’m not that upset) if they weren’t all really good movies. Which means these ideas haven’t just been done, they’ve been done well. I can’t even justify keeping these ideas trying to do better. I mean, I can, but it feels like I’m lying to myself when I say that.

But on the other hand, I feel like I’m selling myself short a little too. Like, this sort of thinking surely isn’t the sort of confident thinking that gets ideas onto paper, right? Because the alternative is looking at these movies and thinking “I totally could have done that” and not doing anything about it. And that’s a stagnant style of living that I’ve been trying to avoid by, for example, starting this blog. Or writing regularly, at least. What I should be doing is treating these as inspiration. Maybe it will be better, maybe it won’t. But it’ll definitely still be my idea.

-F

Here's an interesting blog about Japan: https://ohiomiyazaki.blogspot.com/

I Am A Cruel God

There’s this meta-trope in media (“meta-” in that it relates to the creation of media rather than the media itself. Adding the prefix “meta” to things doesn’t automatically make it super cool, kids) called Creator Backlash, which basically describes the process in which the maker of a thing comes to despise it, sometimes going out of their way to destroy it. For example, Herge, the creator of the Tintin comics, felt he could never surpass Tintin in Tibet, and so the remaining stories either take a silly (and, frankly, unforeshadowed) dive into science-fiction (Flight 714), or were written to deliberately change nothing about the world or its characters (The Castafiore Emerald, Tintin and the Land of the Picaros).

As I’ve started taking writing more seriously, I’ve noticed this trend in certain genres (it’s always the “nerdier” genres, though that’s its own discussion) that’s perhaps a creator’s hatred of their own work starts even earlier than that. I have to wonder what Alan Moore thought of Barbara Gordon before he had The Joker shoot her (though I don’t have to wonder too hard; he wrote DC Comics asking if it was okay to paralyze Batgirl and editorial’s response was apparently “cripple the bitch”). I have to wonder how George R.R. Martin felt when he killed off your favorite character (this one’s a little trickier to find).

I think this is starting to affect me as well. Way back at the beginning of the year, I wrote about Naviim, the continent-and-a-half fantasy setting that I toyed around with from time to time. And in the second of those three posts (“The Video Game that Never Was”), I wrote about the saga of Daniel and Joan.

I hate both of them. I think it has to do with the fact that they make decisions that make sense for them, from their perspective, but as the omniscient god of their universe, I know the longer-term consequences of their actions, and because I’m not as compassionate as, say the Abrahamic God, I hate that they can’t see how this’ll all end.

Saying that the willingness to write bad things happening to well-intentioned people is the mark of good storytelling (or, to be more direct, that I am a good storyteller), is probably too prideful (it’s not Impostor Syndrome if you literally haven’t published anything). But I do find myself taking a sort of sadistic glee in it, in looking at how miserable my characters have become and justifying it to myself by saying, “You did this to yourself.”

-F

The Only Eyes That Matter

I have this fear in me, a fear that I’m sure I share with a bunch of other creative-types, on the nature of “completeness”. Even when I don’t have an outline for a piece, I still find myself making a list of things I want to mention in my head, a mental checklist of everything -- sometimes in order, sometimes not -- that I want to talk about. Another thing about me is that I am terrified of killing my darlings (though, to be fair, the phrase isn’t something easy like, “You have to sweep away your crap”). This means that whenever I put something out into the public eye, whether that be for assignments or this blog or anything else, I’m generally not thinking about how good the piece is as it stands, I’m too busy thinking about what content didn’t make it.

I remember at the beginning of one of my more recent workshops, I was asked: “Is there anything you want us to talk specifically about your piece?” I didn’t really have an answer to that. I remember saying, “No, I’m still in the ‘I hate this’ phase of editing,” but that wasn’t really true. I was thinking about how I didn’t really end the piece, it kind of just drifted off as soon as the main character ran out of people to talk to.

The workshop didn’t notice or at least didn’t say it during the workshop itself. Some people wanted to “know more” in a general sense, but they only really noted that in response letters I read later. They liked it. They really did.

What I forgot was that I was looking at the negative space of the piece, the parts that I had left out thinking everybody else would see them. But the audience never gets to see that part of the piece, just whatever’s on the page in front of them.

There was a time where I would be gently reminded to write more details, to make sure that everything in my head was written down so that the audience could see it. I think this fear comes from that, that feeling of not being able to translate those imaginary images into physical sentences.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, really. Just trying to put words to the knot in my stomach whenever I let other people see what I’m working on. I’ve definitely had to cut anecdotes from this post. I just hope you won’t be able to see where.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Eleven) -- Telltale's The Walking Dead

(trailer)
(purchase link)

The Walking Dead is a comic series that started in 2003 and has continued its singular story for the past fifteen years, chronicling the adventures of Rick Grimes as he wakes up from a coma and has to deal with a zombie apocalypse. Author Robert Kirkman has stated that he never was interested in how zombie media at the time demonstrated its endings. After all, even if the protagonists make it on a boat to some uninhabited island, there’s still a zombie apocalypse going on. Kirkman’s solution was, in essence, to not end the comic, at least until civilization was restored.

Video games don’t really have that luxury. There’s just too much downtime in between releases to hold people’s attention for more than one or two years, and that’s being generous. For a while, though, there was an attempt to match the episodic nature of serials by releasing a bunch of shorter games one after the other. The proven formula still has downtime between seasons (for examples of a failed formula, see this video about Half-Life Two: Episode Three), but it did a decent enough job at mimicking the serial format before the pressure to deliver forced the genre to collapse under its own weight.

But when it was in vogue, the pinnacle of this format was Telltale Game’s adaptation of The Walking Dead. Like Adaptation. from last week, we see an attention to deliver the themes of the piece rather than retell the story (a mistake Telltale themselves performed for their two adaptations of Jeff Smith’s Bone comic series) in its entirety. Instead of retelling Rick Grimes' story, Telltale instead decided to tell the story of Lee Everett.

Lee’s down on his luck. Once a history professor, he discovered his wife sleeping with a state senator and killed the senator for it. But while riding in a police car to his fate, the zombie apocalypse happens, and he gets a new lease on life.

In the comic, the focus is more on the relationships Rick develops with his group (the more cynical among the fanbase would say this is so it hurts more when they die (no that’s not a spoiler, it’s a zombie comic)), and the game takes a similar tack. It’s a point-and-click adventure game, sure, but more often than not the pointing and clicking is used to select dialog choices -- or other ways of responding (do you crush a man’s head with a cinder block or nah?) -- than solving obtuse puzzles. In fact, the most difficult puzzle is probably “use axe on zombie” so there’s a little hint for you.

More specifically than developing relationships with a group, though, is developing Lee’s relationship with Clementine. Clementine is an eight-year-old girl separated from her parents, and Lee takes it upon himself to find them. Now, conventional wisdom would say that child characters in video games are useless and terrible (in fact another character, Duck, is whiny and useless and generally very hateable), but strong writing and vocal performances from both Dave Fennoy and Melissa Hutchison make their relationship throughout the five episodes quite possibly the best thing to come out of video gaming’s trend of “Dad escapism” (see The Last of Us, God of War 4, and Bioshock Infinite for more examples of this trend).

The problem these dialog driven style though is that the replayability is terrible in the same way that Choose Your Own Adventure books are exciting. Playing The Walking Dead more than once reveals the cracks in the system; the places where your choices don’t really matter even if you think they did at the time. But for that one first, perfect playthrough, it’s all worth it.

-F

Next time: Possibly the space book.

Also if you didn’t know already my brother blog, Secret Asian Man has migrated over to Wordpress. You can now find him here.

Raindrops on Roses (Part Ten) -- Adaptation.

(trailer)

One of the biggest criticisms I’ve seen of Zack Snyder’s 2009 adaptation of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is how much disconnect there is between Watchmen’s meditative breakdown of each character’s philosophies and longing for a past that was just as broken as their present against Snyder’s melodramatic, hyperviolent style of filmmaking. Here’s a quote from one review I found:

“As a comic book, Watchmen is an extraordinary thing. As a movie, it's just another movie, awash with sound and fury.”
-Nick Dent, writing for Time Out Sydney

I mention this not because I’m going to toss my own opinion in on either the comic or the movie, but to talk about the difficulty of even trying to change a story’s medium. For example, what happens when you’re a screenwriter, fresh off the success of a surreal script about being inside John Malkovich’s head, and your next project is a script based off of a New Yorker writer’s encounters with an eccentric botanist with a flair for loophole exploitation? Seems simple enough. But Charlie Kaufman’s a writer with principles! He doesn’t want any of those Hollywood cliches infecting his art, he wants to write about the universe and everything in it, condensing it all into a story about flowers.

More specifically, he wants to write about orchids. The book is called The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, after all. But as Charlie experiences bout after bout of writer’s block, he discovers that The Orchid Thief is less of a story about orchids and more of a peek into someone’s life, somebody who has a clear passion that the author lacks. And the most important thing about these sorts of peeks is that they don’t follow a clear structure. They just end when the book does.

Let’s take all of this and wrap it into a single question: Books and films are wholly different mediums, so when presented with the impossible challenge of translating the two, like, how do you even do that?

There are people who say that you don’t. That you shouldn’t. That there are very thick walls between books, films, games, comics, etcetera that should never be broken, and they get upset when someone dares try. The Shining (film), for example turned Jack Torrance from a recovering alcoholic trying to make right with his family to, well, Jack Nicholson in every role he’s ever played (dude has serious eyebrows is all I’m saying). Even Stephen King at one point disowned the film (“It’s the only adaptation of one of my novels I remember hating”).

On the other hand, adaptation is practically its own industry. Once a thing is made, culture twists around it (see “No Accounting for Taste”), tacking on its own details and insights, replacing or editing out details to better suit its audience’s tastes (removing Tom Bombadil from the Lord of the Rings movies, for example). Even from pre-written word times, people have wanted to retell stories.

Charlie Kaufman’s solution for adapting the meditative Orchid Thief was to insert himself into the book’s narrative. By creating a fictional world only slightly unlike our own (one big difference is that Charlie has a twin brother in this universe), he gives himself ownership. Diversions from the narrative the book presents are allowed because he, as the sole author of this universe, permits it.

But remember, back in real life he’s still adapting someone else’s work. So these additions still deal with the same themes the book presents, that being the difference between a passion and an obsession. So let’s break it down:

• (The fictional) Charlie Kaufman is trying to get his own insecurities and his grand ambitions to meet halfway, trying to be true to himself but also continue to find work. For example, he believes himself superior to standard storytelling techniques, but still attends a Robert Mckee seminar about those techniques, and when he’s criticised for making a mess of his script, he immediately sets about trying to make things right.
• Donald Kaufman’s introduction is him finding a new money making venture (“This isn’t another one of my get-rich-quick schemes.”) in screenwriting, where he creates a film seemingly counter to every screenwriting value Charlie holds, but throughout the film he’s constantly seeking his brother’s approval. Notice that Charlie is the only person Donald returns to with his screenplay. Some might say that’s because they live together, but I say they live together so that (real-life) Charlie could have Donald constantly return to his brother.
• And (the fictional) Susan Orlean finds herself regretting her own life where she has everything she could ever want, so when she meets (the fictional) John Laroche, who himself has gone through so many obsessions, finally landing on botany and closing legal loopholes associated with them, Susan jumps at the chance.

Adaptation. is one part a retelling of the events surrounding Fakahatchee State Preserve in 1994, one part an observation of the facades we put up to hide from our own insecurities, and one part answer to the impossible differences between mediums.

What it’s not is a story about flowers.

-F

Next time: Zombies! Parenthood! Button-Mashing!

Pics or It Didn't Happen

I was employee of the month for July, which is exciting, I suppose. That isn’t to say I’m ungrateful or anything, but I didn’t even know until almost halfway through the month when my manager approached me and said “Hey, you’re employee of the month! I need your picture for our praise board.”

In the back of the restaurant is a board with nothing but compliments. Generally these are from customer surveys, from people who not only bothered to respond to the link on their receipts but also bothered to ask their server or cashier their names for the sole purpose of giving them a shout-out in the “additional comments” section, but it’s also used by managers who notice particularly “above and beyond” behavior and decide to write about it to the world. I’m actually not sure why customers can’t see it (maybe because it would set their expectations too high), but the point is that it exists, and right in the middle is a slot for a picture of whoever is that month’s top employee as decided by the managers.

It’s not that I’m against my picture being taken -- I’m against selfies, sure, but that’s a subject for another blog -- I just don’t pose for the camera when it’s out. The one time I did have my picture taken was for my birthday, but one of our chefs was having their work anniversary at the same time, which meant the managers couldn’t use that as a solo picture.

In addition to a prominent placement on this board is a gift card. But that had its own set of problems. For example, only the general manager could approve giving a card, he was on vacation that month, and nobody wanted to bother him by calling about a work-related matter. But even when the card was finally given to me, I still didn’t have my picture up. Managers just kept forgetting.

On one of my final shifts of the month, I decided to do something about it. I printed out an image of a similarly-named cartoon character and threw it on the board. On my next shift after that, it was gone.

I never got my picture taken.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Nine) -- The Frontiersmen: A Narrative

The first time I remember being warned that a theatrical production would have disturbing sequences, particularly involving “cannon and musket fire” was preceding the play Tecumseh!, a play written by Allan W. Eckert exploring the life of the titular chieftain. It was also the first time I remember being disappointed at such a warning, though I can’t remember for certain whether this was because I didn’t think the cannons were that loud or because I didn’t think the warning warned enough. But the play was decent enough for my eleven-ish-year-old tastes and afterwards my grandmother bought me The Frontiersmen: A Narrative, a book by the same author concerning many of the same events.

The Frontiersmen isn’t primarily about Tecumseh, though. Instead it focuses more on the life of Simon Kenton, and the trials of his life as he drifts between America’s then-westernmost towns and the wilderness beyond. With both of these works, it’s very apparent that when you focus directly on one single person in history, their life becomes very interesting just by the nature of being around events enshrined in history.

The (maybe apocryphal) story behind the writing of Tecumseh! is that Allan Eckert refused to watch any other productions or read any scripts until he had finished writing his own. He “didn’t want certain tropes or gimmicks to pollute his writing process” or something to that effect. And I’m not sure if I believe that, or if it is true, the roughness Eckert was going for has been sanded down over the years. A lot of effort is put into a flair for the dramatic -- stage lights cut from one side of the stage to the other on a dime to represent two sides of a conflict, the aforementioned musket fire is almost rhythmic in its cue. To be fair, the production I saw had been around for forty-five years, and Eckert has been dead for almost ten of them, so changes are bound to happen (hey, I wrote a blog post on that!), but it does mean that “miracle play” narrative falls a little flat.

Recommending The Frontiersmen is difficult, and not only because it’s physically heavy enough to kill someone if it fell on their head. Eckert pulls no punches describing scenes of violent gore, from scalping to the ritual gauntlet to things with intestines that I’m not even going to attempt to describe. You have to be really interested in American history, have a strong stomach, and the willingness to sit through what some might consider a lot of fluff to get to the really interesting moments.

Recommending Tecumseh!, on the other hand, well, you still have to deal with a prop scalp and some musket-fire, but the “sanded-down roughness” I mentioned is only for the better, I think. Things just click together, author license means that historical events still make a tight enough script (from what I remember, at least), and the things that weren’t that good will probably have been improved upon in the years since I’ve seen it.

I had this all in my head while laying out the theme of these three Raindrops and Roses posts, but then I got to thinking about that disconnect. More specifically, how can I recommend only one of these two media written by the same person about many of the same events? And that got me thinking more about adaptation and the differences in form between media. “Pondering adaptation and America” was the teaser last time, and I’m not really sure I have more than comparing these pieces of media. The nature of adaptation seems like a theme all on its own, so that’s what we’ll be taking a look at next time.

-F

The Kitchen of Theseus

My job is slowly becoming more modern as it goes along. Sometimes it’s purchasing an iPad that we never use, sometimes it’s adding chip readers to the cash registers so that the half-imagined epidemic of semi-fast-food employees frisking their customer’s credit information is finally put to an end, and sometimes it’s adapting its look to more modern sensibilities (though the phrase “Noodles from all over the world and one from Wisconsin” continues to be the opposite of funny). Now, finally, we’ve moved on to the kitchen, which has its own set of issues.

Logistically, it’s a nightmare. Certain things just can’t be made without access to an oven, or are at least more difficult to prepare. Without a grill, well, you have to take the “grilled” out of “grilled chicken” for example. And a lot of this is done through contract work, which is apparently poorly negotiated. Materials take forever to arrive (rumor is that this is a purposeful action, but I’ve yet to see any evidence), which means that instead of coming into work and seeing a new kitchen appliance, it’s entirely possible to see a printout with “We are undergoing renovations. Unfortunately we cannot serve chicken or potstickers at this time. Thank you for your understanding.”

Am I complaining about work again? I mean, some of this thought is based in negative thinking, yes. But it’s not like I want to deal with outdated equipment, and it’s not like the solution is immediately obvious either (I don’t think shutting down the store for a day to replace the kitchen entirely is something upper management would find particularly palatable, for example).

The weird thing is, I don’t think we’re losing that many customers over this, either. I mean, one or two groups have up and left because we didn’t have the meat they were looking for, but there seems to be the same amount of people each shift that there had been before these changes started happening, and the people that have left still end up coming back eventually. So maybe the only people really inconvenienced by these changes are the employees. And it’s certainly easier to inconvenience seven people than one hundred and seven.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Eight) -- Dr. Langeskov, the Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist

(trailer)

Imagine a one-man-show. This is going to be a pretty gross oversimplification, but in general, it’s the single person on stage running everything. There’s only one microphone, so sound is well-managed, and tech cues are generally minimal, maybe a sound cue or some minor special effects that someone else needs to handle, but by and large, one person has designed everything. The opposite, therefore, would be a one-audience-show, with a massive amount of work behind the scenes trying to give one singular audience member the experience of their lives.

This is the sort of analogy that Dr. Langeskov, the Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist attempts to make, when it’s being serious enough to make any sort of analogy at all. But hey, it’s actual free, so maybe consider playing it first, and we can go from there. It’s only an hour long, and this blog isn’t going anywhere, so hey, give it a shot maybe?

Ready? Okay.

So like Birdman before it, Dr. Langeskov is very interested in the production of media and the idea of keeping up appearances despite hardship. Despite almost everybody else having joined a picket line, the show must go on, and so Simon Amstell has to guide a random schmoe through the process of making sure whoever is actually playing Dr. Langeskov remains immersed in what turns out to be a pretty ridiculous experience.

During the first playthrough, it’s this reading that is brought to prominence. On the second one, though, a tape player becomes available, and we start hearing the perspective of somebody who would even create such an experience. Instead of the collaborative “the show must go on” nature of art, this second playthrough presents an auteur character, the singular creator, who everyone else is below.

It’s this contrast that I think makes the game a complete whole, because the second character (voiced by Justin Roiland of Rick and Morty fame, if you enjoy that sort of trivia) is a complete moron. It’s clear he’s in charge, but it’s his inadequacy that has lead to the situation his game is now in, with only Simon Amstell remaining to pick up the pieces.

-F

Next time: Pondering adaptation and America

No Accounting for Taste

I’m dropping the Raindrops on Roses label for a second because, although I’m going to be making a recommendation in this post, I’m more interested in reflecting on three different albums and the popular reaction to each of them. With that thesis out of the way:

Justice (or Jus✝ice if you’re being particularly pedantic), is a very popular French House duo, perhaps most well known for their debut album, “✝” (generally referred to as “Cross”, which even the non-pedants use). Songs from this album -- Genesis, D.A.N.C.E., and Waters of Nazareth in particular -- have been used in all sorts of media, from game soundtracks to trailers to even being heavily featured. The film The Square, winner of the 2017 Palme D’Or at Cannes Film Festival, for example, featured Genesis heavily in one of the more prominent scenes in the film (though it is erroneously referred to as “Track Five” when it has never, ever, shown up as the fifth track on any of their albums. Like, it’s not that hard to check that sort of thing, come on). They’ve also done a handful of remixes -- We Are Your Friends, a remix of Never Be Alone by Simian, being the most popular -- and a pair of live albums, but what I want to focus on more is the reaction to their two follow-up albums: “Audio, Video, Disco” and “Woman”.

A popular phrase I’ve seen used to describe the music in ✝ is a prog rock album where they forgot to add the melodies. Obviously this isn’t always true, the three songs on the album with vocals, for example, but Waters of Nazareth especially sounds like a droning baseline with drum hits. And people love it. So when Audio, Video, Disco started adding guitars and other melodious instruments, and when Woman added even more, there was a lot of push back from the people who wanted more of the same.

There’s this idea of fandom and how fandoms develop that revolves around this feeling of ownership. More specifically, people come together around a piece of media because they all like it, but when more media is produced, it naturally fractures the fandom group. Just because they all liked the first thing doesn’t mean they naturally enjoy the second, of course. But because the community exists in the first place, people desperately want the general opinion to match theirs.

So arguments happen. And gradually, as more and more media related to the fandom is released, as the fandom becomes more and more split, the arguments multiply and take over any influence the original creator might have had. I’ve noticed this especially with music, as length between new material is directly proportional to the amount of hype and subsequent backlash that can fracture a group. Audio, Video, Disco wasn’t “✝ 2.0”, so to many it was inferior and not worth even the single listen required to make that judgement.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Personally I like both Audio, Video, Disco and Woman, even if some of that appreciation is comparing them with their predecessors. I guess I just wanted to caution against this sort of fan-related groupthink that can occur. “Everyone has their own opinion” is one of those near-meaningless platitudes that people tend to hate, but I hope I explained the sort of viewpoint that leads to it well enough, and maybe in the meantime I gave you one more musical artist to listen to. Just don’t talk about it on the internet.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Seven) -- Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

(trailer)

So I lied a little. I said this was “perhaps the best Batman movie.” And, by every definition, this is not a Batman movie. It does have Michael Keaton, perhaps the best Batman; Edward Norton, a former Bruce Banner; and Emma Stone, Sony’s new Gwen Stacy, along with at least one explosion-filled set piece, so perhaps I wasn’t too far off the mark.

But I suppose calling Birdman a superhero movie comes with its own connotations. This isn’t a “stop the baddie” sort of movie (unless you count Edward Norton or Lindsay Duncan’s characters). It’s more of a long meditation on depression and obscurity. Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thomson had once starred in a series of superhero films for the character Birdman, though after declining an offer for Birdman 4, his life falls apart. He attempts to put it all back together by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carter’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and the movie is about those final days before opening night, as characters need to be recast, familial relationships need to be mended, and psychoses need to be dealt with.

To be even more specific, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is about Riggan Thomson, and every character around him is some facet of his personality. His daughter is his fear of his own mundanity (multiple scenes with her involve a prop that represents just how short humanity’s time on Earth has truly been), his producer/lawyer/best friend (played by Zach Galfianakis) is his more realistic side, Edward Norton plays the rock-star-like persona he wishes he had, and so on. Amidst all of this, there’s also the Birdman persona itself, still haunting Thomson, jabbing at him throughout the movie with doses of self-doubt.

Talking about the structure of Birdman is difficult. The most-talked about feature of the movie is how much of it appears to be shot in one take, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope style, making it appear like its own theatre production, and as the most talked about feature, it tends to drown out the other elements, like how each scene is generally only two people, never really involving more of the ensemble outside of very special moments. This means that, despite the movie’s large ensemble cast, the movie still feels introspective, again, focusing on the character of Riggan Thomson.

What I find interesting is the people that call this movie pretentious. Maybe Birdman is too pretentious for its own good, maybe it isn’t. I certainly don’t think it is (I wouldn’t have written about it if I had), but even if it is, when stripped from perceived symbolism, it’s still the story of a man desperately clawing at whatever influence he has left, the story of low points and only the vaguest promise of things getting better in the end.

-F
Next: Oranges and tigers and emeralds, oh my!

A Good Enough Place to Pause

This probably doesn’t mean what you think it means, or rather, it doesn’t mean what you think it means if you’re the one other person I know of who has been following The Familiar series and has been disappointed with the more recent updates. Instead, I offer a reflection on how the Raindrops on Roses series has been going on so far.

I think I’ve settled into the whole “Movie, Game, Book” cycle, offering three at a time in the hopes that someone who doesn’t like any one of them on principle will only have to wait a week or two to find something that more suits their interests. That being said, these are still my interests and no one else’s, so it’s entirely possible that none of these things appeal to you. If that’s the case, well, I hope you take solace in learning a bit more about me, then.

One of the things I noticed when writing the second set of three was how they shared at least a little of the same themes, or at least I tried to touch on the same themes. House of Leaves was kind of an outlier there; I wanted to write about how some people see the story as less of a horror and more of a romance (similar to Shaun of the Dead’s mix of zombies and romantic comedies), and that might have been forced in in the end. But I still wrote them as linked in the way they deal with broken relationships, and how the stories try to mend those relationships each in their own way (pigs, eldritch horror, or mythological monsters respectively). And that’s something I’d like to keep moving forwards.

So here’s the theme for the next set: Theatre. We’ll start with what many call the best Batman movie and work our way from there.

-F