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 30, 2019
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
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
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
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
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
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