Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Another Countdown

Surprise! I can make another post.

Last year’s “Best Films I Watched” list went over pretty well, I think. I mean, “That I Watched” is a pretty big qualifier, especially when I, either by accident or deliberately, missed out on some pretty big-name affairs. Big names from the summer like Avengers: Endgame or even the December darlings like Uncut Gems or Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of Little Women are getting left by the wayside here, though I have no doubt I’m going to try to seek those movies out once I find the time.

Disclaimers out of the way, let’s get it started!

Tuesday, December 24, 2019

One Of Those Coinky-Dinks

Hey everyone,

This is going to end up sounding like another excuse post (because it is), but it turns out there are fifty-three Tuesdays in 2019, not the standard fifty-two, so between that, an itinerary that'll probably keep me away from being able to update this blog next Tuesday, and, well, a host of other things I'm not really interested in going into here, I figure next week would be as good enough as any for a break week. So that's exciting! Or it's a new kind of exciting anyway. A different kind than the promise of one post a week.

It's entirely possible that the way things are planned out and how I've been operating this blog, I might get the itch to post some sort of update next week anyway. That's also a possibility. I just don't want people to be expecting something late if the deadline rolls around and there's nothing new on the front page. But hey, the week after that, it'll be a new year! Isn't that something to look forward to?

Best wishes this holiday season, and I'll see you all when I see you,

-F

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

From Road Trip To Plane Flight

Planes are entirely different beasts compared to cars. I know I wrote something like this last year but it bears repeating, especially when I’ve experienced two particularly long trips of both varieties in the past few weeks. The lack of a view of the outside speeding by on a plane for example, unless you’re lucky or quick or both, is of particular note and only serves to exacerbate just how long you’re expected to be in one spot. And even when you can look out the window, at thirty-thousand feet, there’s not much else to see besides clouds.

Cars also have the option of stopping, while planes do not. And sure, not every place along the interstate is particularly interesting, but it’s the stopping that matters. Maybe more important than that, though, is the starting. Packing either way is the same, but there’s a lot more hassle in the act of getting onto an airplane.

I guess that’s the trade-off? Like, planes go quicker, but there’s also this feeling that I’m just accepting how air travel is these days. Which is often- well, there’s a reason comedians make quick jokes about it. So it’s not quite “unacceptable,” but it’s not the greatest. And outside of dedicated road-trip comedies, there isn’t the same amount of angst built in to travel by car.

But that also could be just a bias for the thing that’s been around longer. People have traveled for as long as there have been people, and (from my uneducated viewpoint) the jump from walking to horse to car seems like a natural progression. Flying, on the other hand, despite the mythologization of flying cars in media, just doesn’t fit that progression.

I am, of course, overlooking buses, which people do angst about on occasion. I will say I don’t personally have too much experience with the long-distance bus side of travel so I don’t know if that’s a better comparison or not. But I’ll close by wondering if there’s a way to find the best aspects of all three (or more?) and combine them into a new form of travel that’s much easier to appreciate. It’s certainly nice to imagine, at the very least. I can also imagine, though, that new mode just getting added to the pile of options, and the rest of the world just driving or flying along.

-F

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

A Joke

Hey everyone,

I'm a little late, but just after Thanksgiving trips are all the Christmas trips and my plans are no exception. There are enough things I still need to do that today's post is basically just this update, but I did want to at least leave a quick joke to justify posting at all or something like that.

*Ahem*

A pony walks into a bar. The bartender immediately recognized the pony and says, "Hey, aren't you Bubbles the Singing Pony? Why don't you give us a song?"

The pony shakes their head and says "No, sorry, I'm a little hoarse."

Thank you, see you next week.

-F

Tuesday, December 3, 2019

A Bit Of A Shill

This seems like something at least some people who read this would enjoy: I’ve recently been following a miniseries done by Canadian sketch comedy troupe LoadingReadyRun called Road Quest. What it is is basically having six of their members going on a road trip across British Columbia together in a style reminiscent of Top Gear and though of course it was scaled down to a more reasonable budget, there’s clearly a lot of heart that’s been put into it.

What I especially like is that it’s clear all the participants are actually friends with each other, like, when Top Gear’s hosts sniped at each other over walkie-talkies, you could occasionally sense some actual malice behind it (to my ears, at least). And maybe it’s my own projections onto the lives of each on-screen personality, but that’s not really there in Road Quest. Sure, there are moments of unfamiliarity -- a few of the duos admit that they never truly interacted with each other before the trip -- but that adds its own layer of charm to the proceedings as we, the viewers, watch that relationship grow over the course of ten days.

I don’t want to leave out the cinematography, either. There are several beautiful drone shots throughout the series that really emphasize the landscapes that these teams come across. But those you’ll have to see for yourself.

I’ve put a link to the first episode below. There are twelve planned episodes -- they’re up to Episode Seven now -- with a new one posted every Monday. I really hope you all enjoy it as much as I have; I wouldn’t share it if I didn’t love it.

-F


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

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Delay Late And Delollar Short

Hey all,

So the post planned for this week has to be pushed back, unfortunately. It's disappointing, I know, but there are so many things I had and still have to do that there wasn't much time for Halloween blog-related things. I don't intend on giving up on it any time soon, but today just wasn't going to work out, unfortunately.

-F

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Five): Tigers Are Not Afraid


Like I said last week, this was supposed to be where I talked about Robert Eggers’ new movie, The Lighthouse, but I messed up the dates -- it comes out this weekend -- so instead let’s take a look at a different movie that came out this year (in English-speaking countries, at least), Tigers Are Not Afraid, or Vuelven, directed by Issa Lopez. And while we’re still on the theme of “reflections,” we may as well start drawing comparisons to a similar magical realism movie with horror elements, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.

To be fair, the movie kind of invited the comparisons itself by having a quote from Del Toro in its trailer. Besides, if you were going to invite comparisons, you could do worse than a movie like Pan’s Labyrinth. But let’s start with the differences, first.

Tigers sets itself in the modern day, with its magical elements coming from the three pieces of chalk the main character, Estrella, comes into possession of. Each piece of chalk represents a wish that she can make, but she quickly learns that what she says and what she wishes to happen are never quite the same thing.

Also different are the child characters aside from the protagonist. Pan’s Labyrinth intentionally only had one child character (the baby doesn’t count), portraying its Spanish Civil War setting through the eyes of a child who could not be more isolated. Tigers Are Not Afraid, meanwhile, has four other children supporting Estrella as she tries to cope with the world around her. It’s a different dynamic; it promotes a sense of group unity that Labyrinth lacked.

What Tigers Are Not Afraid keeps, though, are a lot of the things that made Pan’s Labyrinth so strong of a movie. Magical realism stories like these are traditionally Hispanic/Latin American, and without meaning to say the originals do it better, these movies replicate those same sorts of feelings. The way the movie plays out, it’s plausible that the chalk simply had no effect at all, and that Estrella’s experiences with the supernatural were simply hallucinations, possibly as a result of trauma.

On top of this, Tigers also has to keep one final story plate spinning: its own nested story about a prince and a tiger, using it as an allegory for everything that’s happening. And again, it’s rather effective, and the two combine at the end for a final sequence.

The only reason this movie might be a difficult recommend (provided you’re not a heathen and deathly opposed to reading subtitles) is that it’s currently only on a fairly niche streaming service, the horror-focused Shudder. But if you do already have it or you otherwise have access to it, this should be on your list.

-F

Next time: Something different…

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Four): Suspiria (2018)


How do you look at a movie like Suspiria (1977) and think “You know what this needs? Less color and a more intimate soundtrack. And also it needs to be at least an hour longer”? Because that’s what this is. Just after the trailers play and the logos announce who made the movie, a title card appears: Six acts and an epilogue, it says. This movie has no shame.

One of the most prominent pieces of marketing material I saw for this movie was this quote by the director, Luca Guadigno. He says that this is not an attempt to remake the 1978 Giallo film, but to recreate the feelings he had when he first saw that movie. And look, I don’t want to read too much into that -- like, drawing one-to-one comparisons between the two films gets pretty difficult pretty quickly -- but it does open up the possibility of a new label for this sort of movie: the “spiritual companion piece”.

Still, though, an hour longer? Before I’d seen both movies, I had to wonder, what got added in that extra hour that justifies itself in some way. The answer, I think, lies in the extension of some of the original movie’s themes. For example, Suspiria (1977) goes out of its way to mention that Helena Markos was a Greek Immigrant to Germany, and was shunned by the locals for fear that she was a witch. The 2018 film expands this to set the film specifically in West Germany post-World War II and introduces a subplot involving a character looking for their partner after the war separated them.

A lot of the movie, then, goes out of its way to present itself as the more mature option, from its own “kills”, to its muted aesthetic, to how it’s mentally aged up its characters. But at the same time, changing the plot like this reinvigorates the mystery to those who have seen the previous movie.

Susie, Sarah, Olga, Markos, these characters are all here. But they’re in a whole different movie, and I noticed as I watched these films back-to-back, they complement each other really well. Whether you want a sometimes-too-long dirge about the holocaust or a bright and colorful mystery slasher, Suspiria is there for you.

-F

Next time: This is a little awkward. The intention was to talk about Robert Eggers’ new movie, The Lighthouse as a comparison to The Witch (hence the “reflections” theme) but it looks like I miscalculated. I’ll still talk about a horror movie next week, but now I need to figure out what.

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Three): The Witch


This is, like, the horror movie that got me into horror movies, if that makes sense. I hope it does, because, while The Witch (stylized at The VVitch for reasons we’ll get into) does do a lot of things right in terms of horror -- especially in creating and maintaining dread -- a sizeable chunk of its audience did not take well to it. It has the same problems, I think, that It Comes At Night -- a movie I talked about last year -- had. It was marketed in a way that lead people to believe it was something it wasn’t.

So what is The Witch not? Well, it’s not over-the-top, for one thing. It’s a very subdued sort of horror, the kind that you have to make when you’re working on a rather small budget and with uncooperative animals. The fact that it looks as great as it does is definitely a testament to how well they used the money the filmmaker’s had.

But when I say subdued, I also mean in how it presents itself. The titular witch, for example, doesn’t really show herself for much of the movie. I mean, she’s there pretty early on and the camera is never demonstrated to be unreliable so the audience knows she’s there throughout the movie, but the way the movie plays out, much of our protagonists’ misfortune could easily be attributed to mundane problems.

This is something that I think is actually to the movie’s detriment. It’s not decisive. It can’t seem to decide whether the events are all because of some hallucinogenic corn rot or because the devil himself is destroying a puritan family, and that threatens to tear the movie apart.

I criticize The Witch a lot, but that’s only because the rest of it is so great. Like Suspiria and other well-made movies before it, it has a very specific aesthetic in mind and uses that to carry most of the mood. This isn’t just in the muted tones or the dress or the cinematography, but also in the characters. How they talk, what they talk about, everything that could be done to transport the audience back to the seventeenth century, this movie tries to do, even extending to the marketing materials. People thought The VVitch really was how you spelled the title, because that's how people did back then.

“A New England Folktale” is the movie’s tagline, and it plays out like one. I don’t want to spoil more than I already have, but when watching (or rewatching, if you’re good and watching these movies before I write about them), look at each character’s most obvious wants. William wants to experience mortal grief to further his eternal reward. Caleb is going through puberty and the sexual ideas that go with it. Thomasin longs for the pleasures of England. Each of them (and the other characters) receives these things, but in a “be careful what you wish for” sort of way.

Plus, there are only, like, three jump scares. If that, like me, was your barrier from seeing more horror, this is certainly a good place to start getting past that to the good stuff in the middle.

-F

Next time: Suspiria (2018), directed by Luca Guadigno

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Two): Suspiria (1977)


Let’s start with this: “The only thing scarier than the last twelve minutes are the first ninety-two” is one hell of a tagline, even if it’s not strictly speaking true. From just looking at the plot summary, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, not to be confused with the 2018 version directed by Luca Guadagnino, takes the form of a pretty by-the-numbers slasher film, though that itself requires some moving around of the timeline a bit. It’s about seventeen years after Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho started codifying the genre, but calling Suspiria a “by-the-numbers” slasher movie ignores the timeline, where the glut of that genre that started after Halloween’s release a year later.

Mentioning Alfred Hitchcock is actually rather important, though. The genre of cinema Argento’s work falls under, “Giallo”, professes that it owes quite a lot to Hitchcock’s style of filmmaking. Giallo is a pulp-y style -- it’s Italian for “yellow”, as in, the color of pulp novella pages -- and strives to match Hitchcock’s methods of doling out information and creating suspense. And this is something that Suspiria does quite well. If there’s any reason to watch Suspiria, it’s for the atmosphere.

If you haven’t actually seen this movie yet (i.e., if you didn’t watch it in the week between when I said I was going to talk about it and now), at least take a look at this still frame:


It’s almost overwhelming to look at, and that’s the point. Almost the whole movie, especially during the movie’s more violent moments, looks like that. And when it’s not the environment, it’s the lighting, and even when it’s neither of those, the soundtrack provides an additional layer of tension. There’s a specific eighteen or nineteen note melody that is set to trigger an almost pavlovian response in its audience.

If there’s one thing that Suspiria (1977) does poorly, it’s in the other half of the Hitchcock method I mentioned earlier: the doling out of information. It’s a slasher movie, but it also wants to be a mystery movie, it wants to invest its audience in who is killing these people and how. Putting aside the forty-plus years of pop-culture osmosis that this movie has been through, there’s also the fact that the same theme, that same overarching nineteen note melody also contains hints of a rather spoilery word. I won’t repeat it here, just in case, but seriously, it’s right there in the theme. You’ll know what’s going on before the opening credits are over if you’re paying attention.

But that still sells the movie short, I think. Because it is an exercise in atmosphere more than anything else, and some might argue that knowing the answer to the movie’s mystery only makes it all the more intriguing of a film. There’s a reason it’s survived as long as it has. It’s still a pleasure to watch, and I’d recommend it to just about anyone who is interested in its sort of horror.

-F

Next time: The VVitch, directed by Robert Eggers

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Spooks

Next week is going to be the first day of October, which, despite what some corporations will tell you, means it will be officially spooks season (this is shade at big-name haunted house companies that open for business in late September) (this is a joke). Now, last year I made a pretty big deal out of it. I made a bunch of Raindrops on Roses posts and I told a spooky story in the same vein as many others on the internet.

This year will be mostly the same, though I’d like to note the differences now. A lot of it comes from the fact that I get the extra Tuesday to play around with. The first difference, hopefully to the relief of some of my readers, is me talking about it upfront like this. A warning that something will be coming on that last week.

The second difference is in how I’ll be doing Raindrops on Roses posts. I’ve mentioned before how I’ve enjoyed splitting each trio up into a theme of film, movie, and book. With four weeks instead of three, though, and my history of talking about movies (rest in peace, other blog), I thought it would be fun to talk about some horror movies -- some old, some new -- with its own subtheme. Call it “reflections” or something like that. And maybe that won’t make sense until week four when I explain myself, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now and I’d like to get it all written down.

You can watch along if you like. The first movie is going to be Suspiria (1977), directed by Dario Argento and written by Argento and Daria Nicolodi. There are a couple films with this name, actually, so make sure it’s this one.

I’ll see you there!

-F

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Writing Spots

I don’t actually write in the same place I live in all too often. During the late-night updates, sure, when there’s nowhere else to go, but I find it can be a little stifling to sit in the same spot every time I need to get words on a page. In fact, I’m writing these words from one of my preferred spots on campus. It’s well-lit, not too many people use it, and you can stay there as long as you want so long as you don’t bother anybody.

But I’ve also gone back and forth on starting a project involving some of the nearby parks, so I’ve been going there on occasion. And the library also works for a simple change of scenery. Or some other spots around town. Each place has its own pros and cons. Coffee shops, for example, are a good place but a lot of people know that so they can be crowded.

Even when I’m still at home, I’ve been trying to find good alternative places to be while writing. The porch works for short bursts of time, I’ve found, but longer sprees are out of the question. The seats in the kitchen are a little awkward but the rest of the area works really well.

I think changing up locations affects my mood and motivation a lot when I write. It’s probably the act of getting there that gets me thinking about the project ahead, a sort of preamble to the actual writing project. Not that I do anything else special -- I’m probably closer to a “pantser” than a “plotter” -- just the right frame of mind is enough to get me thinking.

-F

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-One): Logicomix

I kind of kept mum on the “theme” for this set of Raindrops on Roses posts, not because I was trying to avoid admitting that there wasn’t one -- there is -- but because I didn’t really have a “third option.” This is going to be a bit of a preamble, but I’d like to go into why.

The theme is “unconventional coming-of-age stories,” and for newer mediums like films and video games, that’s an easy enough find. Frances Ha has a significantly older protagonist than most stories like these and is so hipster it criticizes the previous generation’s perception of millennial culture before it was cool to do so, and Gone Home relied on environmental storytelling to tell the bulk of its story; the majority of the main characters don’t appear at all. But coming-of-age stories still generally have a set structure to them and stripping away the more visual elements makes it a bit more difficult to find something that separates them.

So maybe it’s cheating, then, to spend this slot on a graphic novel instead of a novel novel, but it’s my blog and the part I’m interested talking about isn’t specifically related to the pictures (though the pictures are nice). If you do want a novel novel recommendation, though, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami is a magical realism story about a cat, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and male pattern baldness and it’s good enough that it probably deserves its own post one of these days. But anyway, back to the topic at hand.

If coming-of-age stories are about coming to terms with a more cynical view of the world, watching as the protagonist grows out of their childlike optimism and accepting a more complete worldview, well, then Logicomix’s story of Bertrand Russel’s search for the fundamentals of mathematics appears to follow that guideline rather well. But it’s not just about that. There’s also a meta-story at play involving the comic’s authors and their own understanding -- their own search -- and it’s this intertwining of narratives that enhances both of them. If Logicomix was solely about Bertrand Russel, I don’t think it would have worked as well; the main theme -- that it’s hubris to try and understand every facet of reality -- becomes much weaker when it’s presented in the past, while the present-day story ends up being the author’s own commentary that, left alone, just begs for context to be put alongside it.

And then there’s the book’s own framing story which ties it all together. The authors aren’t portraying their story of Bertrand Russel, they’re presenting a talk by Bertrand set right at the outset of World War Two. The question, “Should America go to war with Germany?” is brought up frequently as the example of the questions Russel is trying to solve through his search for mathematics’ fundamentals. “When presented with a problem, we should just be able to say, ‘Calculemus! Let us calculate’” one of Russel’s colleagues says. But the war question isn’t an easy one. It’s answerable, as evidenced by history, but nobody ever uses math to solve it.

At the end of the book, the authors go see The Oresteia, a play that presents its own problem. Orestes has killed his mother in revenge for his own father’s death, and the goddess Athena rules that a jury of Athenians should decide his fate. Even with this problem -- should Orestes be punished? -- the jurors are tied, however, and only Athena can definitively rule for or against.

For a book about reason and the search for truth, Logicomix is actually a quite spiritual book. Not in an “Only God knows the answer” sort of way, but in a “Life’s mysteries are boundless and the search for understanding is difficult but still worth trying” sort of way. A splash panel about two-thirds of the way in shows this fundamental tenet: Ludwig Wittgenstein realizes, “The meaning of the world does not reside in the world!” only after a bout of existential extremism.

That’s the coming-of-age story. Of reason itself. It’s not a moral that some people can accept; one could apply its message as an argument against a lot of twenty-tens ideas, especially those involving deplatforming hate-speech. But Logicomix’s promise, of a better world as long as we constantly try to seek out what meaning we can, still keeps me coming back.

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Miscellaneous Smiles

I’ve started taking Tuesday shifts at work, during what would normally be peak blog-post-writing time for me. I don’t anticipate having too many issues getting posts out in a timely fashion, but if there are any, that’s why.

In the meantime, I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed with negative news, some of which I may comment on here if things blow over (I’ll be fine, I more meant the state of the internet), so in an attempt to balance that out a little bit, here are a few positive things from my personal life in no particular order.

I’ve recently discovered the joy of listening to a Neil Cicierega album. If you don’t know who that is, he is one of the creative forces behind the Potter Puppet Pals series and is all-around a pretty funny internet person. He has a band, Lemon Demon, who are most famous for their song The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, but what I’m talking about are the “Mouth” albums created under his own name, Mouth Sounds, Mouth Silence, and Mouth Moods. All three are basically one long mashup, borrowing from dozens of artists to create a fifty-minute-and-change musical stream of consciousness, and they’re all great.

Speaking of music, I’m going to a Welcome to Nightvale show soon, which I’m very excited for. If you can imagine a weird town with, say, a dog park only hooded figures are allowed into, an endless expanse of desert, and a miniature town underneath a bowling alley, all described through the medium of radio, that’s just some of the weirdness to be experienced in Nightvale. The live show promises to be more of that, but bigger and for an audience.

I’ve been integrating into my class pretty well. I sometimes have difficulty offering criticism in a group setting (which is difficult given that that’s basically the entire class), so the fact that I haven’t had that much trouble here is a good feeling overall.

So yeah, that’s three things. Again, I’ll be fine, but like I wrote a few weeks ago, sometimes I need to balance out all the down with some up.

-F

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Raindrops On Roses (Part Twenty): Gone Home


A lot of people would argue that Gone Home was only good when it came out. That, back in 2013, game designers hadn’t really explored the quote-unquote “environmental narrative” game -- or “Walking Simulator,” if you’re feeling less charitable -- outside of thechineseroom’s Dear Esther and therefore any competently put-together work not just put together as a source mod like Dear Esther was would of course be hailed as a demonstration of how good game storytelling could be.

The problem with that reading is hopefully obvious, though. It detracts from the merits of Fullbright’s game and instead focuses on the media surrounding it. So while there is something to be said at least for how it paved the way for later narrative-focused games, there’s still the game in front of us. Paratext is important, but what about the text?

The text of Gone Home is straightforward enough. You play as Katie Greenbar as she comes back from college to a house she’s never seen before (her family moved in the interim). This would likely be a weird enough experience, but Katie also arrives to see the house seemingly abandoned and all of the electronics missing. The goal, therefore, is to explore the house with the hope of at least understanding what happened while you were away.

Exploration is the main mechanic at play here. Taking cues from point-and-click adventure games, progress is impeded by locked doors Katie has to find a way through, though unlike those games, the solution is invariably finding a key with the right label attached (i.e., the attic gets “key to the attic”). The only other measure of progress is a series of narrated letters from Katie’s younger sister, Sam, describing her own experiences after Katie left.

That isn’t to say that’s the only story, though. The designers had two stated goals when creating the environment: First, they had to make the house feel like an actual house instead of a series of video game rooms, and second, the environment had to tell a story as much as the narration had to. So in addition to Sam’s letters, there’s also the story of their family’s dirty history, their father’s job search and alcoholism, their mother’s trouble at her own job and more. These stories intersect throughout the game, weaving in and out of the spotlight with each unlocked door.

Gone Home wasn’t the first game to have this sort of approach to how its players interacted with it. Dear Esther came out five before it, and there have been other precursors to this sort of genre (the most (in)famous of which being a PS1 game entitled LSD (Lovely Sweet Dream) Dream Emulator). But it and The Stanley Parable, another high-profile game with an exploration focus, did bring the concept into the public consciousness. There are countless games that possibly owe their entire existence to this foundation, and amongst those peers, Gone Home still presents itself pretty well.

-F

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Every Movie In The Entire World, Ranked (Part One)

I’m kidding, of course.

Here’s an anecdote to start us off. I listen to a weekly music stream. Think of it like a radio show, I guess would be the best way to describe it, where the host spends the first half of the show playing what she found interesting out of the week’s new releases, and the second half taking requests from the audience. Occasionally, something rather well-known will come through the filter of suggestions (I remember Yes’ Roundabout coming on the first time I tuned in), and she’ll always say the same thing whenever it comes up:

“Just think of all the songs that have ever been written, ever, and now remember that there is so much more music coming out every single day,” she says. “Nobody can listen to all that music. There are probably a bunch of songs someone thinks are must-listens that you’ve never heard of.”

I think the same can be said for every artistic medium, from food to theatre to paintings to, yes, films as well. Movies have a much larger buy-in, too, especially for the more niche or independent ones. You have to sit in a dark room for two hours, more or less, and just take in what’s being presented to you. A song is what, three or four minutes?

And yet, I’ve also noticed people get a lot more vocal about “the classic” movies. “You haven’t seen X? And you call yourself a cinema snob?” And my general response has been, well, first of all, a label like “cinema snob” comes with a lot of baggage that I’m not particularly interested in being associated with (nor is it something I’m willing to go over here), nor have I ever called myself that (I fashioned myself a critic once -- that didn’t go over well), and second, I guess see the above quote?

I just figure I’ll pick up the older movies by osmosis, really. The worst someone can really do in this situation would be to march me to a TV, sit me down and put the movie on, right? Done, watched the movie, you never have to bother me about it again. And hey, I’ll probably like it, too.

In the meantime, there are so many movies I’ll never get to see coming out every day. I can try and stem the flow somewhat, but it’s an impossible task. I just have to hope I catch some good ones along the way.

-F

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Sick Music

I don’t know if I’m sick or under the weather or just not feeling it and suffering from some writer’s block, but I’m not in the greatest of writing moods. I did promise something positive for this week, though, so let’s talk about music for a bit. Just some quick paragraphs about songs and artists I like and maybe you readers can find something you enjoy as well?

I’ve been on a pretty big electronic kick lately, actually. It started with Justice (example song: Audio, Video, Disco) which I’ve blogged about here before, which extended into synthwave and darkwave (I think those are the genre names? Genres are confusing, but that's a topic for another blog post) with artists like Carpenter Brut (ex: Le Perv) and Perturbator (ex: Birth of the New Model). About the same time this happened, too, someone recommended The Prodigy (ex: Memphis Bells) to me, and while that’s not really any of the genres of the first three artists I mentioned, it’s still within my personal wheelhouse of “things I like”.

That doesn’t mean I don’t listen to acoustic music anymore. I’m very much on the Black Midi (ex: Talking Heads) train, and I still go back to artists like Barns Courtney (ex: Rather Die) and Poe (ex: Haunted). It’s actually a nice feeling, going back to songs you haven’t heard in a while and realizing you still know all the lyrics, or well enough that you can sing along to the chorus at least.

What else? Well, there’s The Budos Band (ex: Old Engine Oil) if you’re looking for something jazzy. Or Katzenjammer (ex: Tea With Cinnamon) if you’re looking for something a bit more indescribable (Wikipedia says Country/Balkan? I guess that works. Again, genres are hard). Or there’s-

Look, the point of this exercise was to get something on paper for this week, and I think that part worked out.I’m not saying I could throw out recommendations until the end of time, but I am still, well, I am still not feeling the greatest. I do hope you enjoy what I picked out for you all, though. I tried to stay away from a given artist’s biggest hits in an effort to try and attract you to more of their music if you like what you hear. So give them a listen!

-F

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

What We Talk About When We Talk About Work

I’ve noticed that the quantity of work-related posts has increased on this blog recently. I wouldn’t chalk that up to more things to talk (read: complain) about per se, though we are approaching a couple of major changes that are worth bringing up. The menu is going to be changing soon, we’re going to be handing out silverware soon, and I’ve been told the employee roster is going to change in a major way soon, though outside of some new hires I’ve yet to see anything there that is really that significant.

I don’t really talk about any of that because, well, it’s much more fun to complain about things. Like how the grill is broken or how coworkers can be a bit too nosy. It also keeps things a bit more universal in application. Everyone has nosy coworkers and appliances that refuse to work, or at least can sympathize with the idea of them. Less so the minutiae of silverware logistics; there are definitely fans out there, just fewer, I think.

Taking the complaining route also benefits because it’s simply a stronger emotional reaction, one of the few ones left once one gets into a working routine. It’s a moment of catharsis, excising frustrations because everyone has those.

I have talked about before, though, how I don’t want this blog to just be complaining about random things. There’s a danger to a wholly negative mindset, I think. It can bleed into not only the work one might be complaining about -- becoming the cause of complaints rather than relaying them onwards -- but also the rest of one’s life. That’s one of the reasons I started the Raindrops on Roses series, just to be nice to things on occasion.

So while I could talk at length about how, instead of replacing the grill, we now have a new dishwashing machine, I’m going to just leave it at half a sentence in a concluding paragraph. And next week? I don’t know yet, we’ll see. But it’ll hopefully be something a bit nicer.

-F

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Diet? I Don't Buy It

I tend not to talk about diets, largely because talking about them leads to one of two scenarios. Talking about your own always feels preachy to me, like you’re constantly pitching it to other people, and asking about somebody else’s feels like getting too much into other people’s business. Especially the more diet-of-the-week types, where people can speak out in the interest of the dieter’s health. It’s a dangerous road and therefore one I avoid.

But sometimes, though, the conversations get weird. For example, I let slip that I’m a pescetarian (I eat fish but no other meat) at work and, because of how word-of-mouth works, now it gets brought up frequently, mostly in a joking “Oh look at him. He’s a pescetarian” sort of way. The weird came in the other day, though, when more or less out of nowhere, a coworker got it in their head that I only eat fish. And that train of thought lead to that I was some sort of connoisseur.

“Have you had halibut?” they said.

“I dunno, I guess,” I said. Which would have been fine if the conversation ended there. But that only opened the floodgates.

“What about cod? Salmon? That weird Japanese fish that swims around a lot?” And so on. It felt like a reverse Cheese Shop sketch. Like Monty Python, I wasn’t even sure some of the fish I was being asked about even existed. They stopped rather quickly, but it was the barrage that stayed with me, not the amount of time it took.

I couldn’t help but think about what would have happened without the diet conversation involved. Like, would I have been able to respond with my own questions about eating Serbian pigs that waddle around all day, or French cows that walk backwards and say “Oom”? It just got me thinking is all.

-F

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

If You've Got Cooking Problems, I Feel Bad For You, Son. I've Got Ninety-Nine Problems But A Grill Ain't One

It’s just one of those moods you get sometimes. You’re walking across the parking lot to work and you see a piece of paper stuck to the inside of the door. It says, “Unfortunately our grill is down so we are unable to make Parmesan-Crusted Chicken or Potstickers.” Once you read it, you get this sort of premonition. Today is going to have one of the busiest work shifts of your life.

I’ve mentioned this before, this superstitious rule I’ve developed working in the foodservice industry. It states that whenever something goes wrong or breaks, that’s when a rush happens. So the logical follow-through would, of course, be that with a broken grill, the entire day is going to more or less be one entire rush.

There’s a similar rule that says if we run out of something, the demand for that skyrockets. Now, in the kitchen, this is a little harder to track. Unless you manage to hear the customers give their orders ten feet away through the sound of two fans, an oven, and some vents, you can’t really know if the cashier had to explain why they couldn’t have their eighteen potstickers so was there anything else they would rather instead? Sometimes, though, you’d get an order online, where people not in the know spoke to other people not in the know and somehow we were the ones who had to apologize and ask for substitutes.

There are some other considerations too. Instead of chicken -- that’s the normal kind of chicken, not the parmesan-crusted kind that we can’t make -- taking two to three minutes to grill, now they take six or seven minutes in the oven. Which on paper should be fine; we’re expected to get orders out six minutes after they’re placed, but there is some wiggle room occasionally, especially in circumstances like these. But we only have one oven, and there are enough other menu items that require it that throwing the frequent six-minute periods where it’s helping restock just throws the whole system out of balance.

Finally, here’s the worst part about all of this: the grill has been fixed. Multiple times -- with presumably different repairmen, though I can’t say for sure on that front -- has someone come in and fiddled around with it, and we’ve dutifully waited with the signs already taped to the doors. Then it’ll start working, and we take the signs down.

But then it doesn’t. It just stops. The grill breaks again. Thankfully, these times have been just after a rush, so there’s a bit more time to prepare for the next one, doing things like calling who we need to call and taping up new notices. The end result is the same, though: we’re back to where we started.

Maybe it’s fixed now. Like, actually fixed instead of temporarily fixed. I guess we’ll have to see.

-F

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Raindrops on Roses (Part Nineteen): Frances Ha


The coming-of-age genre has always felt to me like it’s deliberately tearing itself apart towards two extremes. At its core, it breaks down childlike wonderment, presenting a cynical view of reality with a very firm “This is the way the world is” message. But it also -- more often than not, it seems -- comes with a happy ending attached. The “comer-of-age” grows up and adapts to the world, finding things to replace the ideals they left behind.

By those metrics, Frances Ha would be a relatively standard coming-of-age film. But there is a key difference here. The protagonist of these sorts of stories is normally a teenager, matching their mental turn towards adulthood with their physical one. The titular Frances is twenty-seven. This may not seem like much, but it means Frances has wildly different issues she has to overcome. Compare this film, for example, to writer and star Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film, Lady Bird. While Saoirse Ronan’s character is dealing with the trials and tribulations of her final year of high school, from friendship drama to relationships to her equally strong-willed mother, Frances finds that all of her friends are moving away while she’s trapped in a career she no longer finds satisfying.

One might note, though, that the basic structure remains the same. Despite her age, Frances Halladay still has a lot of ideals that just don’t work in a cynical world. Some might read that as a failure on the part of the writing, creating a woman-child who might as well be just out of college if she’s going to act like she does. But that’s part of the point, I feel. One of the major lessons that Frances needs to learn is that life is perfectly fine moving on without her.

There’s also a charm that goes into the various episodes of Frances’ life, another thing that extends to many coming-of-age stories. There isn’t really an antagonist. There are low points, yes, and characters fight, but everything is mended by the end with that same resolution I mentioned at the beginning: Frances grows up. And yes, there’s some melancholy attached to that. But there’s a hopefulness to it as well. She’ll figure it out.

-F

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

One And Done

This is going to be another one of those “I think it’s interesting that this phenomenon exists but I don’t have too much more to comment about it other than saying, ‘Look at this cool thing.’” But its neatness is also why I’m talking about it. So temper your expectations, I guess, but not too much.

I think it’s weird how often I go one-and-done with movies. Like, I go to a cinema, stare at a screen for two hours -- maybe more, maybe less -- reflect on my experience a bit, and that’s it. That’s the entirety of my experience with a movie. Sometimes I’ll talk about it later, generally in a, “Oh, have you seen this,” sort of way, but once I’ve left the theater, it’s very likely I’m not going to see that movie again.

Take Madeline’s Madeline from that top five/six I did last year. Or even The Proposal, which I just wrote about. I found both of those movies to be very affecting and occasionally technically impressive. Both of them are also ninety minutes I’ll never experience again unless I get exceedingly lucky and come across them by chance. It won’t be by myself, either; I’ll be forcing these movies on a friend or family member.

I bring these instances up in comparison to a similar phenomenon: the idea of “wanting to unwatch something so as to experience it for the first time again.” How I understand this concept (to be really clinical about it) is people yearn for their stronger positive reactions to things, given that they’re impossible to recreate even on a second viewing. Their glee at a season or series finale, for example, or their shock at a particular twist.

This isn’t something I’ve experienced myself. Not because I’m not really into certain pieces of media, just because, well, I don’t know. Maybe because of how seldomly I rewatch things? But even in terms of music, songs that I listen to over and over, I don’t think I have thought of any of that. As rad as the intro to Justice’s Genesis is, I don’t ever think I’d wished it was the first time I’d heard it.

I also don’t think I don’t have very strong reactions to things. I mean, I spent almost an entire blog post selling The Proposal to anybody who would listen. Every post on my now-defunct review blog was about a film that I enjoyed. What I like, I really like. The only other cause I can think of, though, is just because of the number of movies I’ve seen over the course of, say, a month has only increased. The idea there being that each viewing of a new movie is a new chance for those highest of high moments.

But that seems a little elitist when read like that. It reads like, “Oh, you people just need to watch more movies/read more books/listen to more music.” And I don’t think that was my intention at all. If anything, I’m all for that feeling. The way I experience these movies, I wonder if there’s a hint of “art is disposable” mixed in there in a way that I don’t think was intended by the artists. Not everything has to be a complex sandcastle just waiting to be washed away by the waves, right?

Like I said at the beginning, I don’t know what any of this really means. I just think it’s a neat dichotomy of ideas. It’s always useful, I think (and if you excuse the pretentious phrasing), to consider just how one goes about consuming media.

Come back next week to, ironically, read about a film I have watched a couple times.

-F

Tuesday, July 2, 2019

The Moving Experience

I guess after mentioning last week that I was helping a friend move I should talk a little bit more about it here, huh?

I’ve noticed a sort of apathy towards helping a friend move that I’m not entirely sure I understand. Like, I get the “waste of a Saturday” sort of deal that I guess if I was working a nine-to-five I might disagree with, but on the other hand, like, they are still your friend, right? There are literally t-shirts and jokes to that effect. “A friend is someone who helps you move a sofa,” they all say.

The punchline generally is, “A true friend is someone who helps you move a body,” and maybe I’m not entirely comfortable with that, but I think my overall point still stands: one of the key features of friendship is that friends help each other. There’s value in that relationship. So yes, I did spend my Tuesday last week hauling a mattress and some chairs and a desk or two up a flight of stairs.

But at the same time, maybe there’s such a thing as too much help? I’m not trying to suggest that (a hypothetical) someone doing all the work while everybody else can only look on helplessly is a good or bad thing, no. Instead, I noticed that there wasn’t always something for me, personally to do. Once all the boxes had been marched up, it slowly became more of a “waiting to be told what to do” sort of deal.

And maybe that’s my fault for not taking the initiative. But if that’s the case, there was a whole lot of not-initiative-taking going on. A lot of the moving-in process was deemed by the tenants as “something we’ll do tomorrow/later” so trying to find something, anything to do became a bit of a process. You couldn’t ask, “What do you need me to do?”, you had to outright state, “I’m going to do this.”

Eventually, I helped build a bookshelf.

Look, I don’t want to be completely negative about the whole thing. Like I said at the start, I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but that doesn’t mean I can’t also wonder about the experience. When I left that evening, exhausted though I was from the work I did do, it seemed like there was a lot more that needed doing.

-F

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

The Last, Best Escape Room

I spent the day helping a friend move into a new apartment, so I'm pretty exhausted. I wouldn't say too exhausted to actually write something down, but I guess it's close enough that at this point it might as well be an off day. As with the other times this has happened, though, I don't want to leave you with just this paragraph of excuses, so here's a semi-story I haven't shared on this blog yet.

Escape rooms are still popular, right?

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Champion Of The New

I don’t really think of myself as a film critic. I watch a lot of movies, yes, which I think inevitably means that opinions are going to change and develop as I express them, and there was that one time I tried to have a weekly review blog that we don’t really talk about anymore, but, I don’t know, I guess the label just never really stuck.

But one thing I have realized I enjoy doing from that whole process is telling people about movies they otherwise wouldn’t have heard of. Not in an “If you haven’t watched this movie you haven’t lived” sort of way (see below), it’s more of an “I don’t think this movie gets the respect it deserves” idea.



I think that’s why critics like to do Top X pieces. There are other reasons, sure (lists are both easy to make and easy to consume, search engine optimization and clicks are the driving moneymakers in the gig economy, etcetera), but at least ideally, there’s also the drive to promote. To take from Anton Ego at the end of Ratatouille, “The new needs friends.”

So with all that said, let’s talk about something new.

The Proposal (2018) is a documentary about an art installation, the installation itself about an artist and their relationship with their own artwork after their death. That’s its primary question, one that features prominently in its trailer: “What happens after the death of the author?” But that message has two meanings. The first is the obvious: An artist’s work is their legacy, but art can be a commodity. So what happens to that legacy when someone just… buys all of the art? And doesn’t let anyone see it?

The second, question, though, is a bit more physical: Does their body reach similar sacred heights? Filmmaker and visual artist Jill Magid has an answer to both questions already in mind. Her goal is, by taking you through the same steps she did, by showing you the same pieces of architecture that she has seen, she wants to guide you to that same conclusion. Or, at the very least, think harder about why your answer might differ.

But presenting a perspective and defending it is an obvious selling point for documentaries. What makes The Proposal stand out is just how pretty everything looks. Luis Barragán’s work is treated with the reverence it deserves, with special lingering looks at his Satelite Towers and his El Bebedero fountain, and they emphasize certain voiceover moments as perfect moving images.

One thing I want to point out specifically is how Jill Magid seems to take special pains to try and always film herself from behind. By doing so she becomes an observer, just like her audience, even if she herself admits that by even presenting this story she is forever changing its history and future. She also makes an aside towards the more controversial aspects of her project (“I know my offer is unorthodox” she says in the opening narration). I mention these because, again, depending on how you view the questions the movie poses, you might find yourself hesitant to view further after a little research.

I don’t know how easy or hard this movie will be to find after its limited theatrical run. The way I figure, you’ll probably forget this post by the time this movie re-enters your consciousness. But if you haven’t forgotten it, I hope that this sways you to watch it.

Really, that’s all I can do.

-F

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Things To Do Instead Of Writing A Blog Post

It’s an odd situation to find oneself in, only remembering a deadline you’ve set pretty hard for yourself only after the fact. But let’s not dwell too hard on the past and instead focus on things that could be done instead of focusing on deadlines -- the things I was doing instead.

1) Sleeping in! I do this especially after having to close at work, where I just sort of plow through the next morning and straight into the afternoon. There are a lot of other factors, especially in the summer when it’s less likely that I’ll have scheduled obligations in the morning, but it certainly happens.

2) Grocery Shopping! This kind of happens on a by-need basis. I guess that’s just what happens when there are two stores just down the street. This also means I tend to shop a little light. After all, I can always go back and buy more.

3) Seeing a Movie! I saw Meeting Gorbachev, a film by Werner Hertzog and Andre Singer exploring its titular subject over the course of three interviews. It’s an interesting watch, I think. Hertzog at this point is known for his narration and affect which translates well, and the subject matter is something I’ve been tangentially interested in (or interested in because people I know are interested in it). What the film doesn’t do, really, is display too much content from the interviews themselves, so if that’s what you’re looking for, I’d suggest steering away. If you’re looking for an (admittedly biased) overview of Cold War Russian history, though, this is a good one.

4) Cooking! People around me say I’m good at it but I’m not so sure. Like, I can, and it (mostly) tastes good, so I suppose if you call “anyone who cooks,” then yes, I’m a cook. But in terms of personal identity, I don’t know. I’ve never thought of myself as “a cook” even if I do the things a cook does on occasion.

5) Writing Other Things! I have other things! I can’t show you them yet (or, for some of them, ever (sorry!)), but I have talked about some of them in the past. For example, just last week I talked about a sort-of memetic lighthouse and that, well, that still hasn’t gone away. That’s kind of the point of it, really.

One does have to eventually buckle down and get back on schedule, though. That’s what this is for: a list of excuses and a promise to do better. And hey, if you go by the timezones on Blogspot -- a Pacific Time Zone company -- I technically wasn’t late just yet.

 I’ll see you next Tuesday, for real next time.

 -F

Tuesday, June 4, 2019

Terraforming (Part Four): The Lighthouse

I’ve recorded in the past how I tend not to remember my dreams and how that’s lead to them becoming something of a minor fascination of mine. Most of that is still true, though I do occasionally catch glimpses now. I remember having them, at the very least. This post is still about a fictional dream, but it’s one that pervades my thoughts and demands a setting to be placed in.

It’s been a while since I’ve written here about Naviim, that fictional kingdom I throw so many ideas into, throwing worldbuilding elements into it like they’re all magnets on a fridge, rearranging them as I see fit. That’s what happens when you’re working with two or three periods in the kingdom’s history. In this case, I imagine this particular element as a sort of bridge between the two.

What I imagine is this ethereal lighthouse haunting people’s dreams, a sort of eldritch location that just shows up. It doesn’t do anything malicious (at least, not yet), but it does seem to cause people to obsess about it, desperate to find its physical manifestation even though one might not exist.

Now, astute readers might notice how in the first paragraph I introduced the lighthouse as something that “pervades my thoughts,” while later introducing the same elements into the fictional world as well. One might presume that it’s sort of memetic trap similar to, say, The Game (the one you just lost) or Roko’s Basilisk (don’t look that one up). But I don’t think so. It’s probably just me. Though that’s probably what they always say right before it starts.

In any case, because of its probable lack of, you know, corporeal-ness, it could easily withstand the apocalypse. As long as there is somebody to look for it, it exists. What happens after that? Well, I haven’t quite figured that part out yet. I just wanted to get something about it written down. I’m sure I’ll let you all know, though.

-F

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Change For The Better(?)

Work has been going through something of a restructuring recently. Now, to be fair to them, it’s a new business quarter, so it’s probably the right time to, but the fact that they’re all seemingly happening at once means that they border on overwhelming. Some of these I’ve mentioned to people already, but just for the sake of completeness, let’s go through each of them:

Staff changes aplenty have happened. In addition to losing six workers due to various reasons and having to hire en masse for those, we’ve also got a new shift manager who’s been acclimating themselves to the new environment. Everyone seems good so far, though it’s still pretty easy to tell who has been around for longer than who.

We’ve also switched up our menu. We’ve swapped out three or four dishes for new ones, and though I would have liked to have seen us maintain the split between geographical regions we had before, I do have to admit that the new dishes do taste pretty good. One of them, though, has the awful corporate portmanteau of zucchini and spaghetti, and “zuccheti” is not ever going to be a thing, I guarantee it. I’ve spent more time explaining what it is and how to pronounce it than taking orders for it.

With the menu change comes an aesthetic change as well. The old menu was confusing, yes, and this one may or may not be better (I get too used to these things too quickly to tell for sure), but it does certainly clash with the rest of our labelling. Now, I’m not saying I would have done better, but I would have thought about all the smaller, yet noticeable details in the redesign. For example, a lot of our wall decor now references dishes we no longer serve. But maybe we’re saving that particular change until we run out of cups and bags and chopsticks with the wrong restaurant name on them.

On a more “sausage is made” level, we’ve gotten new equipment! Well, some new equipment, and by “equipment,” I mean, “stuff that doesn’t work/fit/something else.” I won’t go into too much detail on that, but suffice to say, we’ve had a couple things that just don’t work and it’d be nice if they did, thanks.

We’ve also tried moving extra supplies around. I’ve been told that this will be a “one weird day where we can’t find anything but will be better in the long run” sort of deals, but I’m not entirely sure about that. So far, it mostly just seems like people have been moving things around just to move things, just to change things up. It’s all the same stuff and it’s all the same nooks and crannies, so I don’t know.

I don’t mean to be complaining all the time. A lot of these, in reality, are just minor gripes stretched out into paragraph-long problems. I mean, the store still runs like it used to, so things haven’t really gotten worse. But things are happening, even if I don’t write about them right away.

-F

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Trailers (Not The Park Kind)

If you want you can think of this as a follow-up/rehash of that spoilers post I did a few weeks back. Not that it covers the same material per se, but it covers similar internet reactions to similar portions of media. Instead of talking about the merits of not giving away the final moments of certain stories, let’s talk about the opposite: the parts they show before the movie or game or show is even out.

In fact, spoilers and trailers are more related than one might realize. There are numerous people on the internet that swear by not watching trailers, believing that they’re either deceptive marketing out to trick you or give away way too much of any given movie. There are people say that theaters play too many and people that say they have to see all of them.

There’s definitely an art to a good trailer. The one for Suspiria (2018), for example, seems like one you’d get tired of seeing after a certain point, but I never seemed to. Madeline’s Madeline (2018)’s trailer, too. What makes both of these work, I think, is how instead of describing the plot, they’re big on conveying the emotion of the film. For Suspiria, that was dread. For Madeline’s Madeline, that was its dream logic.

We’ve certainly moved on since “In a world…” (not the 2013 movie (obligatory trailer link)).

There are other, similar promotional materials as well. Blade Runner 2049 (2017) had a few prequel (interquel?) short films before its release, as did Alien: Covenant (2017). These tend to be the more nostalgia-driven films, I’ve noticed, but it’s something I’ve noticed as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), which had an additional scene with a character who otherwise starts the movie very much dead. There’s not much to say about these because they’re exactly what they are: superfluous to the main story, which is why they aren’t in the film.

But that brings up an interesting idea. Trailers don’t have to show what’s in the movie. Like I mentioned, this can cause some consternation among audiences who feel lied to. It seems like every horror movie A24 produces falls victim to this, including It Comes At Night (2017), which I’ve talked about before. To elaborate, it seems like they prefer slower-burn horror, but they always want to market it as more standard fare to attract an audience. The most recent example of this was High Life (2019), which has a trailer promising space-horror, but it’s written and directed by Claire Denis, a French arthouse filmmaker. Now, I understand being frustrated, but one does have to remember that they’re being sold something.

I’ve been trying to talk about the better side of trailers because I’m firmly in the “I enjoy them,” camp. Really, the only trend I’ve found annoying about trailers is how they tend to announce themselves online. As advertisements, I mean, there’s been a huge push to have the first five seconds be an ad in itself so that people don’t skip past them on Youtube (for an example, see that Blade Runner 2049 trailer). It’s like how jpeg compression can slowly ruin images, combining bits together saves data but it means it ends up as a flash of incomprehensible images and sound. I imagine some poor editor, having made what they think is a pretty good trailer, being forced to hack away at it until only the explosions and thrills remain.

But there are also the bad ones. The ones people can only wonder how bad the movie’s going to be if it’s going to sell itself like this. Sonic the Hedgehog (which I’m not going to link here) had a trailer so bad it’s causing artists to probably go into a crunch period to fix some of its more out-there aspects, and even without those its best selling point is probably hoping that people see it to laugh at it (or Jim Carrey, I guess). Because again, it’s an artform. It’s meant to be judged.

Again, these things are trying to sell something. I don’t want to downplay that. When I say I like watching trailers, I’m still participating as a consumer, not so much as a critic. So that’s at least one reason to be wholly against them. But at the same time, I wouldn’t have seen some of the smaller movies I’ve seen without some of these trailers, so the idea of completely ignoring them just seems completely foreign to me.

-F

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Raindrops on Roses (Part Eighteen): The Hypothetical Screen-Novel

To reiterate what I said in my introduction post (see Raindrops on Roses part Fifteen-and-a-Half), I wanted to talk about adaptations of computer screens, but I couldn’t think of a good book that did something similar to match the film/game/book sets I had been doing. So instead I plan to describe how the aspects that make Searching and Secret Little Haven work might translate over to a less visual medium.

Some books aren’t entirely without visuals, of course. The graphic novel medium could potentially use the computer screen quite well. It presents a similar limitation to Richard McGuire’s Here, where instead of a single place presented over multiple time periods, the novel could depict a single screen, following the cursor around just like a film might. Individual windows could be treated like different panels and such, for example.

This does run into the problem of separating itself wholly from its filmic inspirations. At best, what I’ve just done is describe a storyboard for something like Searching. And, I mean, it works. I could see something done like this, but that’s not what I was going into this piece trying to explore.

We learned from Searching that introducing characters before reducing them to IRC messages helps the audience, largely by letting them get to know that character in a different context first. And we learned from Secret Little Haven that a sort of melodramatic earnestness goes a long way. If all your characters have their emotions written on their sleeve, interpreting their messages as anything other than the obvious becomes difficult, if not impossible.

Both of these lessons operate under the assumption that the aesthetic problem gets solved, i.e., how do you make a book look like a computer screen? The closest I can think of is the “documentary novel” Nothing But The Truth by Avi. It’s written in a semi-script format, which serves to hide both critical details about the truth behind certain events but also many of its characters’ motivations. So even that example is not perfect. It runs counter to the emotional honesty that the previous two examples provided, obfuscating rather than illuminating.

What we’re looking for, therefore, is a novel that eschews traditional formatting in favor of (probably) text messages, IRC chat, or some other format that reduces description. It preferably needs to have earnest characters, each of whom get little introduction scenes before being pulled into the larger narrative.

I don’t know if that book exists yet. If it does, I haven’t read it yet. It might be a bit of a mess, to be honest, though I also think a lot of books sound like a bit of a mess when you boil them down to a paragraph of description. But it would be neat to see if it matches the same mood that those other examples do.

-F

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

Spoiler Alert

There aren’t any actual spoilers of any recent pieces of media if that’s what is keeping you from reading this post. But I do want to talk about the culture that surrounds spoilers, especially recently, so I might be talking, you know, around some.

Way back in 1960 when Psycho was coming out, Alfred Hitchcock famously tried to keep people from entering theaters after the movie had started screening, going so far in some cases as to lock theater doors. Hitchcock felt that the then-current popular method of seeing movies -- seeing the middle and ending before looping around to the beginning -- would be detrimental to the experience of his movie. Even before that was (and is) The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie’s long-running play that famously asks its audience members not to reveal its secrets. In each of these cases, not giving the game away was part of the artistic intent.

But that’s a weird thing to be direct about, right? Like, of course a creator doesn’t want their work spoiled, right? Now, in both of these creators’ defense, they both created rather spoiler-prone works, an attribute that not all pieces of media have. Nobody needs to be told, for example, that the computer voice in the video game Portal is out to kill you. The opening monolog in The Other Side of the Wind tells you exactly what happens to its protagonist.

I’ve noticed a shift, though, recently, and I’m not entirely sure if I’m able to fully explain it. In 2016, video game company Atlus released the much-anticipated Persona 5, though it came with a caveat: If you were going to record yourself playing the game, you couldn’t share large parts of it without facing legal action. We’d gone from “Don’t spoil our ending; it’s the only one we have” to “Don’t spoil our ending or you’re going to get sued.” Atlus would later walk back these statements, and in the end, it didn’t really affect the game’s reputation, but the events still left a mark. Persona 5 was in the public consciousness for longer in the runup, and surely other corporations took notice.

Avengers: Endgame came out about two weeks ago now, and the runup came with a large number of pleas to “Don’t spoil this for people.” Which it should. I mean, it’s technically the finale to a decade-long story arc slash experiment, the final act that gives away the game. But there was also a lot of that incorporated into the marketing that didn’t make sense in retrospect? Like a sizzle reel that got leaked to the public days before the scenes were confirmed in a new trailer, or how only two weeks later a new Spiderman: Far From Home trailer already reveals part of the ending to Endgame. It reads to me like, while there was some artistic merit and public need for no spoilers, marketing ended up using that to push for the largest opening box-office possible.

I realize how this makes me sound, but I’m really not trying to go “old thing artsy and good, bad thing corporate and bad.” It’s pretty well accepted as common courtesy to ask for permission before spoiling just about anything. And spoiled or not, Endgame will probably be one of those things that people talk about for a good long while. But it still seems like a marketing shift is happening right now, and I’m not entirely certain if where it’s going is any good.

-F

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

A Callback I Didn't Want To Make

This post is going to be shorter than normal because I had to finish up some schoolwork and had a final earlier today. While I’m busy not thinking about school, though, let’s talk about work.

One would think that, after not having an oven mitt for a good month once upon a time, a restaurant would stock up on them. Maybe order, like, five at once and just go through them intermittently until the next stocking period. I say this because once again, there isn’t a single oven mitt in my workplace.

The worst part is we just got the supply truck that would have had one, so I know we won’t be getting another one for a month or so. And because we also laid off six people (about a quarter of the store’s employees), I know I’m going to be working in the kitchen more often, which means just a little bit extra percentage chance I’m going to burn my hand.

This feels like my “sausage is made” situation. I mean, I could figure out jamming five or six teenagers and twenty-somethings in an open kitchen could lead to problems, and I kind of figured that’s what most restaurants were like anyways, but it seems like -- especially recently -- we’re operating by the skin of our teeth. Something will go wrong or we’ll run out of something and have to make do. A few weeks ago our water heater broke and that was the first time I’d heard about us missing a day.

So I don’t know. Last time I wondered what truly was necessary to run the store, but these days, I’m not sure I want to truly find out.

-F

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Voice Recording

I really don’t like listening back to the sound of my own voice. I have ideas of where that came from but nothing concrete enough to relegate here. To be honest, this seems like a common enough thing that it might just “be a thing”, that is, without a reason at all. But at the same time, I do like the act of recording myself?

Let me elaborate. Sometimes when I’m trying to outline something but I need to drive somewhere, I’ll open up a microphone app on my phone, toss it in the passenger’s seat, and head out, talking into my phone all the while. At the end, though, I just delete the recording. So really, it’s a useless gesture. But I can’t bring myself to talk in the same way without having it.

There are enough depictions of writers talking into recorders that I assume that part of the process is true to real life. But I’d liken what I do more to what programmers term “rubber ducking.” It’s a similar principle: you explain the problem with your code to a rubber duck, with the hope that the mere act of saying the problem out loud lets inspiration strike.

I frequently don’t remember all of what I say in these “rubber duck” car rides. More often than not, they’re 15-ish minutes of dead air and the occasional rambling punctuated by the sound of a turn signal. But the few moments of brilliance I do have, I think I hold on to pretty well. Whether that’s a single sentence or the skeleton of a plot point, that’s something I take and write down later, recording or no.

-F

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

"Sportsball"

I find myself of two minds about supporting sports teams as I enter the cynical period of my life, both centered around the “lol sportsball” jokes that inevitably come with the circles I frequent. On one hand, there’s a sort of social capital that revolves around nodding your head along sagely and rejecting team-based activities. You don’t want to be seen as the outcast in an online group comprised of a bunch of people who were picked last during recess’ basketball games.

But on the other hand, I can’t deny the excitement I get from watching games. I remember two instances of my twelve-year-old self crying themselves to sleep because the Buckeyes lost, for example. Groups of fans bonding over their shared love of a team, to paraphrase Bennett Foddy, that’s culture too.

I’m not going to say I live a weird double life or whatever, changing masks to better fit in with the people around me because honestly, that sentiment has been analyzed to the ground. I don’t even feel that way, really. In the places where “sportsball” isn’t talked about, it just isn’t talked about. If there is “man, do I hate sports,” it goes away just as quickly. There’s more discussion on the other side of the coin, obviously, like, “did you see the game last night?” sort of discussion, which still is nothing more than some quick small talk.

I’ve kind of lived my life outside of sports for a bit now. I only really watch when something big happens, and even then it’s generally not me turning on the TV. But I can’t say it’s not exciting to follow some of these narratives. The Blue Jackets are up 3-0 in their series against Tampa Bay and are about to play their fourth as I write this. They’re supposed to be the underdogs! Don’t tell me that’s not exciting.

-F

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Hollywood Tastes

I’m not an economist or anything like that, so this is more of an inference than anything concrete, but the “Dueling Media” trope probably takes a lot after capitalism-style competition. EA has the Battlefield series, Activision Blizzard has Call of Duty and ne’er the twain shall meet, or something like that. I say “probably,” though, because recently in the film world this has gotten a little weird? Like, Disney and Marvel have their Extended Universe and Warner Brothers/DC have theirs and I get that, but recently, well, let’s just go through some examples.

I first noticed this right around when the Fred Rogers documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was presumably filming/in post-production and an untitled biopic about the same man starring Tom Hanks was announced. A similar situation happened with RBG and what eventually became On the Basis of Sex starring Felicity Jones. But these are understandable. There are people who don’t like one of these two genres, which allows the other film to make a grab at those movie dollars.

But there also have been dueling biopics about the same person. Loving Vincent and At Eternity’s Gate are both about the same time period in Vincent Van Gogh’s life, with the latter coming out while the former was still fresh enough in my memory to know what was going to happen. Even then, though, Loving Vincent, being completely comprised of oil paintings, is impressive on a technical level while At Eternity’s Gate has Willem Dafoe and an arthouse aesthetic. It’s plausible that someone could be so against animation as a medium that they would completely ignore Loving Vincent (though I suppose the reverse isn’t really true; people who watch arthouse films generally have more inclusive ideas about animation).

What inspired this piece was a pair of films, Polar and Arctic. They both came out in the same month, both have one-word-cold-place titles, and, amazingly, both star Mads Mikkelsen. But one was critically panned while the other premiered at Cannes, and it struck me as I was looking at reviews for both of them -- many of them insisting that, no, this wasn’t the other movie, that I started piecing these trends together.

For the record, you can draw patterns between anything if you try hard enough. For example, I wanted to draw the creation of the two Van Gogh movies to the Doctor Who episode, Vincent and The Doctor, but realized it’s been nine years between that and the other two movies, so decided against it. I did try to at least keep a consistent time scale between the movies I mentioned.

I don’t have any big revelations as to why all these are so close together, What I can offer, though, is the moral to be as educated as possible when deciding on films. All of these movies are marketed to different tastes, and you don’t want to be caught seeing Mads Mikkelsen survive in an arctic wasteland when you wanted to be seeing him fend off would-be assassins. That’d probably negatively affect your viewing experience.

-F

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Raindrops on Roses (Part Seventeen): Secret Little Haven


Fun fact: In procrastinating on working on this particular series of posts, yet another 90’s inspired screen-only game came out called Hypnospace Outlaw. Just in case you thought I was kidding about this being a trend.

In my post about Searching, I posited that text conversations and a computer mouse were an effective way into a character’s mind and that knowing a character’s habits and personality beforehand allowed an audience to break through that “maybe sarcasm maybe not” barrier and get to the emotional truths lying underneath. To do that, Searching basically had to use a good number of tricks to get an actor onscreen, someone who could display that character to the audience. The biggest one was using multiple screens. Phone screens, surveillance footage, the filmmakers used it all.

Secret Little Haven doesn’t get any of that. It gets a single computer screen with a simplified operating system behind it. That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to do -- you can visit a few websites, play with a virtual cat and a simulated Tamagotchi clone, you can edit some fanfic or write your own, or a number of other things. The most important activity of all, though, is chatting with friends.

There are six people in total you can chat to throughout the game, and it’s in these chats that the story plays out. Again the question comes up: How can you get at the genuine emotion without the normal cues that come with a face-to-face conversation?

The answer creator Victoria Dominowski came up with was to be purely genuine in every scene. If a character doesn’t want to talk about something, they’ll say that. If they’re frustrated, they’ll say that. The word “melodrama” has taken on negative connotations, but this game employs the word’s original intent: exaggerated emotions driving pushing a piece’s themes forwards.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the game’s main character, Alex. In every conversation, in every branch of her dialog tree, she’s bursting with energy. Someone posts new fanart in a forum she frequents? That’s so cool! New movie coming out? Can’t wait! And on and on and on. It’s her belief in everybody else that makes the game’s sincerity actually stick because if she believes it, it gets the player to believe it as well.

That’s not the only device this game uses. The game uses its aesthetics as well to emphasize its conflict between Alex and her father. This part of the story occurs once a chapter, and every time it does, the game breaks down. The most noticeable change is replacing Alex’s bright and colorful interface with the most disgusting grey imaginable, but it’s not the only one.

Secret Little Haven is a game of many moods. Sometimes, it’s a silly game about beating your friend’s high-score. Sometimes, it’s a scary game about being told what’s best for you even when you know that’s not true (I definitely recommend heeding the game’s content warnings). The game is about taking those first bits and using them against the second ones because real life is scary. Don’t worry, though. You’ll figure it out.

-F