Resolutions

I guess I should talk about what I’ll be doing instead of this blog, you know, since it’s the last of these regular posts. I’ve got a few different interests, actually, which aren’t quite writing the same way as just typing into a word processor. I feel like I want to be dabbling a bit more, you know, while I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing.

The one I’ve been interested in for the longest is a program called Twine, which is built to make text-based games, the sorts where you read a passage and move on to the next by clicking a hyperlink or one’s choice of hyperlinks. So it’s kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but there have been some very creative uses. I’m not saying I’m getting too creative with something I’ve only dabbled in so far, but this is the first time I’ve had a concrete idea for what story I’m telling, so I want to give it a try.

I also had a comic idea. It isn’t much and it’s definitely borrowing too much inspiration from someplace else, but that’s part of the point, I think. At least, that’s what I’ve got written down in my outline. I admit, I never really got into drawing, but that’s also accounted for, actually, so I’m excited to try.

And this is all on top of a few other writing projects -- the normal kind, I mean. But when I say I’m keeping myself busy, it’s mostly with stuff like those first two. Honestly, I’m pretty excited to get to work. I’ll miss this blog, and I’ll definitely come back to it when I have something to say (especially if that is “I finished this thing and other people are seeing it!”), but this blog was always about helping me finish thoughts, and this seems like a good place to end this one.

See you out there,

-F

The Smell of Gingerbread

 It’s a little difficult for me to trace my direct journey from “person who likes doing gingerbread houses” to “person who makes faux-pretentious statements about gingerbread houses”, but I guess that’s part of my Christmas identity now, so let’s talk about it. I know that, once upon a time, it was just “how much sugar can I put on this piece of graham cracker, and is the answer all of it?” and so I would spend multiple hours crafting during one of my elementary school’s many winter fundraisers. There was one year I remember where making houses at home where I envisioned tiling the entire roof with Necco wafers, which were a pain to eat afterwards (Necco wafers are pretty low on the candy tier list).

Eventually, we as a family moved on to these instructional make-your-own kits, and what probably happened is that I couldn’t figure out how to make one properly so I just attached the house pieces willy-nilly and called it a day. The artistic statements came from a place of, I dunno, I guess I wanted to justify myself somehow, and people found it funny so it stuck.

So that continued for a few years. This year’s, like so much of this year, was different, and again we’re back to pre-built houses. I thought about just taking a hammer to the thing but had this vision of propping it upside-down using some candy. Titles are weird for things like this but as long as I’m uploading pictures, I might as well. Named after the Billy Bragg song, this is “The World Turned Upside Down”:

I dunno if I’m actually going to eat it. The gingerbread has historically tasted terrible for these sorts of things and my samples of the provided candy did not turn out much better, but it is nice having the smell of gingerbread this holiday season, even if everything else is falling apart.

-F

Old Christmas TV

 The Rankin-Bass Christmas specials are kind of bad, aren’t they? Now, I’m going to be upfront and say that that opening sentence is definitely misleading for the final product of this post, but at the same time, I do think that has to be said. They’re the adorable sort of bad, but I don’t think they’d air as frequently as they do if they were made today. I also should say I understand that one of the reasons they do still air is because they’re old. Old content draws eyeballs for a minimum amount of work (the games industry is actually undergoing this revelation as well for certain rereleases of games, but that’s another blog post).

What I want to talk about is how I think these draw eyeballs because they’re old as well. They’re similar to A Christmas Story in that way, how being played over and over for free programming at Christmas makes them more associated with holiday traditions every year. Because they’re traditions, then, they become associated with the past.

A Christmas Story is kind of about this already, being made in the eighties about some mythical American forties, though it never really interrogates its own nostalgia (there’s a whole Dan Olsen video about this so I won’t dig into it too hard). But the Rankin-Bass specials, accompanied by A Charlie Brown Christmas don’t even have that excuse. They just got bought up at the right time by the right company.

I think the biggest indicator that this is what’s going on is every time they try and introduce a new Christmas special. I remember this big marketing push for something called Arthur Christmas, and after that, it was something I can’t even remember the title for about Elf on the Shelf toys. Both of these fell flat. They haven’t melted into the popular discussion in the same way, and I think they’re doomed to stay down there, at least for a few decades.

-F

Christmas Cheer

 As soon as I finish writing this, I’m going to start setting up Christmas decorations. Nothing too fancy, just a tree, some spherical ornaments, and the presents that have come in so far. There aren’t going to be any exterior decorations to my knowledge, but other people certainly have put theirs up. A part of me does wonder why, especially with fewer people (supposed to be) out and about this year, there certainly won’t be as many eyeballs on light shows.

I mean, the rest of me -- the less cynical part -- gets it. They’re traditions, and better still, they’re traditions that don’t involve more people showing up and being in close proximity to each other. Maybe they are a bit silly, but they can provide stability, right? Thinking about it like that also led me down this path of separating them entirely from the reason they were started, though. Like, if this one is one we can do in the middle of a pandemic, and this one isn’t, that’s two separate qualities. That means traditions can be ranked.

I mean, that seems against the point of traditions like this also. The way it was taught to me, at least by modern media consumption, traditions are just something you do. I know that means you’re not supposed to think about them, but in that way, they do feel kind of secular, now completely divorced from the thing they celebrate. “We put lights up for Christmas because that’s what we do every Christmas” creates its own circular loop.

Again, I’m not trying to bash these things. Like I said, I’m about to do some of my own. Besides, maybe just wanting to do these things is enough. Completing a task like this, even if it is odd to think about, still provides the same sort of happiness.

-F

The Beginning of the End

A phrase that comes up a lot when I’m scrambling to put a blog post together is “something I still probably need to interrogate”, a shorthand I’ve been using to mean “I can’t really go into this right now, but this post is about something I’ve noticed.” Sometimes the phrase stays to completion, sometimes it gets erased and replaced with something else, but what I want to do today is examine exactly why I’ve been using it. A meta-interrogation, if you will.

Some of it, I think, is that I’m torn. Some of this stuff I do legitimately want to go back and think about more, but while I recognize that blogs can be useful for long-form content, it’s not what I really think of them as. Maybe it’s a mental block I still need to get over, but that is certainly part of what stops me. This is especially true as I start wanting to be a writer in ways other than just this blog. “Is this a good blog topic or is this something I should save?” is always at the back of my mind.

The other part is a bit more personal. That is to say, I’ve interrogated it and it’s not something I’m willing to put here.

As time has gone on, then, I feel like I’ve lost sight of where exactly I want this blog to be. Originally, it was a project meant to make sure I actually finished something, tired as I was of starting a writing project and then losing steam immediately. And on that front, things have happened! I try not to keep a definite word count of things but my writing outside of this blog has extended into the high five-, maybe even six-digit range, taking up more of my time. Meanwhile, this blog has become more “something I sputter out every Tuesday evening or so.”

I think you can see where I’m going with this. I’d rather continue to focus my energies elsewhere, so when this year ends, so will the regular updates to this blog. There’s some careful wording there -- I won’t be taking this blog down, nor am I vowing to never post in here again, but I won’t be posting weekly anymore. This still feels like the place to drop media criticism every now and again, for example, especially when I’ve promised at least a few more of those.

This also means I’m going to make sure these final few regular posts go out with a bang. I’d dare not just limp along, say I’m stopping, and then limp a little bit more. This is more like that final burst of speed when the finish line is in sight.

Talk to you next week,

-F

Cooking

 Cooking new things is fun. You don't really know what things are going to taste like until it's finished. I mean, you can guess, and I'm sure as one gets better as a cook the guessing gets better, but until then it's a mystery. I imagine that's part of the joy of it, the not knowing, I mean.

But at the same time, right now? Right now I'm all about sameness. I like being able to know exactly what something's about, something I can control because the rest of the world surely isn't giving it to me.

-F

Decisions Other People Have To Make

 It's weird watching things close down again. Not that I'm saying they shouldn't -- they absolutely should -- but I am commenting on the speed at which it is happening. I got an email the other day from the local theatre that they'd be shutting down again, and yet other places who updated me before have not. It was these same places that were really big on sending me reopening emails or new policy emails in the first place, that's why it's worth noting.

I imagine the reason there's a lot of feet-dragging here is that the optics of reopening for, like, a month or two and then immediately shutting down again are incredibly bad. So there's a fine line to walk between all these factors, they might say, even if one of them is keeping people safe. What surprises me more, then, is that few people I'm aware of seems to question the systems that encourage these sorts of decision matrices.

That is to say, I wonder why there's a tough decision to be made at all, instead of wondering why it's taking so long to make.

-F

A Voting Dilemma

 Being a poll worker feels weird if I’m being honest. Some of that is intended, you’re not exactly a necessary part of the process so much as making it easier for other people requires being as invisible as possible. I can get used to that, though, that’s normal in other jobs. But it’s weird in other ways as well, such as this weird thanks that comes with it. Now, I want to make this clear, it’s not like I don’t understand why people thank other people for doing their civic duty or whatever they say. And certainly this year of all years I can understand thanking people for doing essential jobs. But to me, it still feels kind of hollow.

Like, what am I supposed to respond with? “Thanks for your support” feels weird because I don’t exactly feel morally supported by it. “You’re welcome” almost feels sassy in its presentation. Part of me thinks that this is because of that initial thought, that as a poll worker you want to leave as little an impact as possible on people, but also maybe this is just an “I can’t take compliments well at all” sort of deal, where it’s just another form of positive attention that I find difficult to accept.

The latter would put it into the sphere of “we as a culture need to normalize neutral compliments” but that’s something, like, if I’m not ready to do that for myself, I’m not entirely sure what I can do on a cultural level besides I guess just doing it more? Or at least accepting that people are going to do it.

-F

Part Two

 A firefighter said that someone accidentally setting a pizza box on fire happened all the time. They’d even done it themselves. For those wondering, this is the thing that happened last week, and, like, four firetrucks just showed up. Some of this I attribute to being pretty close to a fire station, but also it’s pretty surreal seeing four. You expect a pretty big fire for something like that. I have this image in my head -- probably because of the media -- of this raging full-scale house-fire where the objective isn’t to fight the fire, it’s more to contain it and get survivors out. Which this wasn’t.

But I also keep thinking about that “happens all the time” comment. The last step, the “forgetting to take the box out when you turn the oven on” bit, that I can understand. I might even do the same. But, like, the idea of having pizza boxes in an oven is so foreign to me. It’s not something I really understand at all.

Everyone was fine, though, fortunately. I mean, the oven was on fire and then doused in water so it’s probably not fine but if we’re anthropomorphizing kitchen appliances maybe we’re deeper in quarantine than we even thought possible. 

-F

Part One of Two?

Had some unexpected excitement tonight, got to be away from updating the blog. I'll try to tell the story next week.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Six): The Lighthouse

(trailer)

If you remember, this is something I wanted to do a year ago, alternating between comparing both the old and new Suspiria movies and comparing Robert Eggers’ previous work, The Witch (or The VVitch) with his then-upcoming film The Lighthouse. I managed those first three, but my schedule didn’t line up for the last, most recent movie and I defaulted to another horror film. But it’s been a year now, and I’ve seen the light… house and now is the time to talk about it.

What a strange movie.

I don’t mean like “strange” in a bad way, of course. If I did, I’d have attached it to a different blog series. Plus, most of the choices it makes are conventional. It’s filmed in black-and-white and with a 1.19:1 aspect ratio, which is outdated but not unheard of in modern times. It has a minimalist cast of three but one can easily conceive of that working. What I find most interesting, though, is how it deals with building up and releasing tension.

If you’ve seen The VVitch (or most any horror movie; I’m using this one to compare the same director) this might be something you already understand on an intuitive level. This movie works towards increasing the audience’s awareness that something scary might happen before giving them the catharsis of actually being scary, whether that’s a brief moment of action a la a jump scare or delivering on narrative payoffs. One can find a similar structure in comedy movies, which is why horror-comedies like Shaun of the Dead can exist and be popular.

This is not true of all movies in either of these genres. For example, It Comes At Night barely releases any tension for most of the movie, which is probably why it is so divisive. And the reason I want to talk about The Lighthouse is because it does the same thing horror-comedies do, building up scary tension to a comedic release. But I wouldn’t call it a horror-comedy. Now, to be fair, the line is blurry, but also the comedic aspects of The Lighthouse are more used to draw even more tension for the scarier moments.

A lot of this is in the framing. The movie is about two lighthouse keepers who, isolated from the rest of the world for months on end, go insane, and it’s this insanity that leads to the funny moments. But that means that each comedy beat in the movie only serves to amplify further tense moments. Sure, the moment was dissolved now, but what does that mean about the next moment? Or the next after that?

Is it better than The VVitch? That’s a difficult question. They’re so different from each other, only really connected by having a small cast, an isolated situation, and a folk tale atmosphere. It isn’t like the two Suspiria movies where, you know, one’s technically a remake of the other (and even then I think I declined to answer). I will say, though, I am excited to see whatever movie comes next.

-F

 

Costuming

 I can’t remember the last time I actually dressed up for Halloween. Well, that’s not entirely true -- I had a plague doctor costume two years ago that’s hilariously out of taste now, but I didn’t wear it in public. The year after that I just had a Pikachu hat on while passing out candy. And I don’t think I’m wearing anything this year.

It’s weird, like, I still get the urge to, like as a “It would be cool if” but there’s never anything more than that. I don’t know who I would be if I did; it never gets that far. Maybe what I admire then is the artistry, the creativity of it, and I like projecting onto someone else’s. I also -- and I know this is weird -- might have this aversion to being looked at, to being conspicuous at all.

There’s this hoodie I own that’s very flashy, like, in a colorful nebula sort of way. It’s comfy, and I enjoy wearing it, but I also don’t really enjoy wearing it out and about. I know intuitively that nobody cares, but I still feel like I’m drawing eyeballs.

That’s okay. I’m cool living vicariously through others. I mean, I better not this Halloween, and I don’t plan to encourage it, but in other moments.

-F

Spooktober (Introduction)

 October doesn’t feel as spooky as it used to. Some of that is, you know, how obviously scary just going outside at all can be without precaution, but also, I don’t know how to describe it, actually. It feels like the veil has been lifted. I’ve seen multiple people criticise “spooky season”, trying to push all the scares on just the 31st. And maybe that’s a general societal pushback because of that first point, but I never really noticed anything about it until it happened. I’d seen more “Halloween is on a Saturday this year!” which then turned into “Halloween is on a Saturday this year, so don’t screw up quarantining or there’ll be hell to pay.” which has now become “Dang, and Halloween is on a Saturday…” at best.

The past few years, I made a habit of doing some media discussion on spooky things I liked in October, and while there are certainly still some plans for that, there’s some other stuff in the tank for this month. Here’s to hoping at least a little Halloween spirit returns, and may your pumpkin patches be as sincere as they can possibly be.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part ?): Journey

(trailer)

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I wanted my next bit of media criticism to be for Kentucky Route Zero as part of the Nostalgia series. For the record, I haven’t forgotten about it, but that series was always interested in criticisms of American systems versus the promises those systems make and that was easier to make before many of those systems started more visibly struggling. But I do want to keep doing media criticism, just as a distraction from writing about the real world. I don’t have film and book companions to this one or anything, it’s just a nice game I wanted to talk about.

I’ve talked before about how wishing to experience something for the first time always seemed kind of off to me, but if there is one counterexample to that, it might be the first experience playing Journey. thatgamecompany doesn’t make the most technically demanding experiences from a controller standpoint -- Journey uses two joysticks and two buttons, while their previous games, Flow and Flower, used even less -- which means that with responsive enough controls (which these games have), it’s very easy to become associated with your little avatar. The experiences in Journey turn from the little Journeyman’s into the players.

Another reason this is important is that the story is also intentionally basic. The “journey” in Journey is the archetypal Monomyth straight out of Joseph Campbell, with each segment based on a certain step in that process. It’s abstracted, to be sure, but it also creates a sense of familiarity; the player already instinctively knows the story.

So a familiar story well told with easy immersion would already be worth talking about, but these aren’t the only qualities the game has. The game is also cooperative, two players at a time going through the story. Unlike most cooperative games, though, the interaction between the players is inherently limited (again, there are only two buttons). The point here was to strip away potential negative interactions, so only player bonding remains. The minimalism might seem like it removes interaction entirely, but without negativity, emergent positive interactions remain. The classic example is the potential to draw a heart at the ending, but there are examples to be found all throughout.

What inspired this post, though, was the soundtrack. It was nominated for a Grammy, but I only mention that to preface its pedigree; that’s not why I wanted to mention it. I got some of the songs stuck in my head out of the blue recently and immediately had something akin to a madeleine moment, immediately thrust back into the moment of running through the sand or riding on one of the fabric creatures. One might even call it synesthetic, where hearing “Apotheosis” or “Road of Trials” becomes unconsciously associated with the moods of the levels by themselves.

So would I want to play Journey again for the first time like I said I might? I’m not sure. My instinct is no, actually, because of how intense those associations are. All I would really need to do is listen to the soundtrack again and experience it again. And if I did want to replay it, it’s right there and I’m ready to relive it.

-F

Seasons of Change

 It’s fall now. Autumn, whatever you want to call it. There’s always an air of change, I think, with the equinox seasons, not just in palette (though that’s certainly there too) but in the general mood as well. And maybe that’s because the palette informs the mood. I’m certainly not calling that out of the question. I don’t know, that’s not something I’ve thought about. But autumn also seems like it’s normally “the bad change.” It’s a lead-in to winter, which is typically this symbolic psychopomp (unless it’s holiday season but we’ll leave that aside for now).

At the same time, though, fall’s supposed to be this season of plenty, right? Harvest festivals and stocking up a surplus for those upcoming winter months. And the new colors on the trees aren’t treated as the trees dying or even hibernating, but the marker of this specific atmosphere.

It’s a weird dichotomy. I thought it might be a glass-half-full/empty situation where it depends on how you look at it? And you have to choose? But that doesn’t sit right with me either. What might work, though, is a synthesis of these two ideas, like, you need to prepare for hard times, but that doesn’t mean you have to be sad about it. The act of preparedness is promising enough, or something like that.

I don’t know, it’s just something I think about.

-F

Masks and Mask Acessories

 I feel obligated to look at other people’s masks. I wrote before about how there’s this silent judgment that happens when you spot someone not wearing theirs (or worse, wearing one improperly), which is probably why that happens, but, at the same time, I haven’t seen too many unique ones? I have friends who wear some, sure, but the vast majority I’ve seen are just common cloth masks. They might be a nice color, but not much more than that. No designs, no fandom markers, nothing.

Maybe that’s a product of demographics? A lot of the other people I see are at least one generation above me, and expression is (at least stereotypically) a youth thing, so maybe that’s it? There’s also the fact that many have not worn these sorts of masks before, and so this sort of fashion is going to have to build itself from the ground up.

I speak of fashion like I know what I’m talking about, of course, and I don’t really. Maybe everyone else is like me, because while I have a mask with a design on it (a Guy Fawkes mask, for the curious), I never really wear it. I always feel like it draws more attention than I want. I mean, what I want generally is to not draw attention unless I start vocally looking for it, but that feels like another topic for another time.

The last possibility is that there just aren’t that many, and that the internet has only amplified the ones we do see. I could believe that as well -- the internet certainly amplifies so many other low-lying areas, why not what masks exist as well? But in all these cases, I see hope that they’ll become more widespread. I’d love for one more reason to check what’s on everyone’s faces right now.

-F

Drilled Into My Head

Every Wednesday at noon there’s a siren that goes off throughout the area, the weekly test of the weather warnings that’s not too hard to tune out once you get used to it. It only lasts about a minute anyway, so even if you don’t, it’s still not big a deal, to the point that it generally doesn’t get remarked upon at all outside of the joking question, “What happens if there is severe weather and it’s also the scheduled test time?”

And like, obviously there are serious answers to this question. “They don’t have a drill when there might be an actual threat,” is the actual answer, though my particular favorite is saying “Well, when you hear it, what’s the sky look like?” in a particularly smarmy tone. But the joke answer, “we’ll all be doomed,” still seems to permeate. And this isn’t just a local thing, either. I’ve seen the joke made in entirely different states to the one I’m in.

I wonder if the joke has turned into a memetic device of sorts, reminding people to pay attention to the siren in the first place. Sure, that instant recognition also comes with hearing it all my life, but the additional association makes it harder to ignore when things matter.

-F

See You At The Movies(?)

I wrote a little bit about this a month ago, about how, yeah, I missed movies and going to the theatre to see them and all that, but also, like, I understood why places were closed and I was content with being patient, with even perhaps a bit of moralizing judgment towards people who wanted them open. Circumstances have changed now, and I’d like to revise my stance a little bit.

The biggest change was my preferred theatre reopening. It’s a lot easier to make decisions when the riskiest option is inherently off the table, after all. I can understand the impetus to reopen, by the way. I’m not blaming anyone involved in that particular decision-making process. It’s near a pretty big college campus, one that’s welcoming back students right now, so of course they would want to be there for that. And the precautions look reasonable in terms of trying to keep people safe.

So I should want to go now that it’s open? Well, I guess I’m still hesitant about going out into the world for anything I would deem unnecessary. Things like groceries are fine, maybe even going to a cousin’s first communion, but movies? I won’t say every outing I’ve done has been strictly necessary, but it still feels like a wide gap. But at the same time, the fact that the option is there feels like a temptation. It means I can sympathize more with people who do feel like they have to do these things, at the very least. A casual want (“I can’t wait until I can go see a movie.”) has become an active consideration (“I can’t wait until I’m comfortable seeing a movie.”)

It’s weird, that’s all. Like a lot of these blog posts, I don’t have a solution or anything. Maybe I will slip a mask on and sit two rows away from anyone else. It’s a closer possibility than I realized, but it still feels like so many things are holding me back.

-F

A Weird Online Chat Quirk of Mine

There’s an old internet phrase (that is, old by internet standards, it’s probably only, like, a year in real-life time) that, boiled down to the essentials, is just “Imagine X” where X is some action you’re trying to downplay. It generally has negative associations, even when it tries to be humorous. “Imagine eating grilled cheese with ketchup,” is one, for example. “Imagine wearing those toed shoes,” is another. There are occasionally follow-ups, like “Couldn’t be me” or “this post brought to you by the Y gang” where Y is obviously opposed to X in some way, but again, this is the memetic phrase in its most basic form.

I don’t know what happened, but I’ve started using it an awful lot online, which wouldn’t be so bad, but like I said, it is kind of a negative phrase, and I think that might have translated over to my general mindset. Or maybe it’s that I’ve been feeling more negative lately and that’s why it’s been creeping in. Either way, I kind of wish I wasn’t doing it. It’s gotten to the point where I’ll type it out, realize exactly what I’m doing, and delete it again. Nobody else wants to see it, I think.

It is getting better, though. Deleting it without posting has meant that I’ve ended up not using it as much in normal online chats. And it hasn’t gotten into my normal speech patterns, so it hasn’t become that sort of habit, just an online one.

-F

Christ In A Cup

I haven’t been attending church for, well, a lot of reasons, but I did end up going to an outdoor service over the weekend and while I could probably talk all about it the same way I talk about grocery stores and their procedures, I’m more interested in talking specifically about one specific aspect: the sacrament of communion. It was the first thing on my mind when I decided to attend, and I was interested to see how the inherently physical act of passing out wafers and wine was translated.

The answer came in the form of this little plastic container of grape juice. The peel-off lid for it came with an extra pocket containing the wafer, so it was all prepackaged and ready to go. If you’ve seen, like, a kids yogurt cup that comes with a spoon, it was kind of like that but smaller. Now, fortunately, this was a denomination of Christianity that believes more in the symbolic nature of the act rather than literal transubstantiation -- we didn’t have to watch the Holy Spirit seep through the plastic and into the juice or anything like that -- but it still is a wholly different act peeling off a wrapper and slipping it under your mask.

Communion glasses feel like shot glasses. I mean, I guess they always were like that but it also feels supremely odd to take off a facemask to down a slug of grape juice. There’s a feeling of immediacy. You don’t want a mask down for longer than you need to. There’s no ceremony at all.

At the same time, I wouldn’t expect any churches to do any differently. I don’t think people would rather have no communion at all when these are an option. But for me, personally, sitting there toying with the cup while waiting for permission to partake, I still couldn’t help but wonder if maybe there was a better way to be blessed.

Maybe we could all be spritzed with holy water or something.

-F

The Grocery (Part Four)

Am I going to do one of these every time I make a grocery run? Probably. I mean, it’s as good a marker as any for how things are going in a general sense. I’m not being scientific about this at all, though. I don’t visit at the same time, I don’t have, like, a set routine where I look for the same things, and, perhaps most importantly, I don’t really want it to be. These are purely anecdotes I just pick up while pushing my cart around.

The most obvious point of interest is that masks are pretty much universal now. I imagine some of that might be to do with the two people that could possibly be greeters who could bar people from entry should they not be wearing one, but it’s a nice change of pace from a few weeks ago. By the same token, however, keeping one’s distance is less of a thing now, which is weird when the cart is such a handy measurement device. You’d think just being a cart-length or two away from other people would be easy for everyone but I still got people trying to pass me getting rather close for comfort.

Some of this I still blame the store for. One-way aisles have been more respected, but the intention behind them -- reducing clogging in these narrow areas -- perhaps less so. The architecture of your standard grocery doesn’t seem to support a pandemic, though I’m sure they only thought about that in retrospect.

-F

The Walking Dance

Like many, I’ve started going on walks more frequently to stay active, and I’ve noticed that there’s this little interaction, this little dance that everyone does when two people are approaching each other on the sidewalk. Because you can’t just cross paths, obviously, that would mean getting too close. Instead, here’s what happens:

First thing’s first, you have to spot them. This generally happens when you’re still far away from each other but sometimes there’s some low-hanging foliage obscuring your sightlines so be ready for that. What follows are calculations between both you and the other person that wouldn’t be out of place in a middle-school math textbook. “I’m going at such and such a speed and they’re going at such and such a speed which means we’ll intersect…” That sort of problem.

If you’re really mean, you can turn it into a game of chicken. Who’s going to cross the street or get out of the way first? Not you! But what’s more likely to happen next is this sort of size up where you’ll check to see if the other person is wearing a mask, and if they aren’t, you get to give them a good solid glare that should last for about as long as you feel comfortable giving them the attention. That’s not that long for me, personally, but I’m sure for other people it’s different.

Once that’s out of the way, the next thing to look for is traffic. You should generally be aware of the oncoming sort anyway, but be sure to look behind you as well. Once you’ve gotten the hang of this in a general sense, you can even try to be as simultaneous as you can with the other person as well. See how close you can get!

Now, based on all these factors, you have to wordlessly decide who’s going to go out of their way. The default should be you, obviously. Yes, I know I mentioned chicken 180-ish words ago, but come on. Whoever it is, though, should obviously start drifting closer to the road in preparation to do so, also subtly indicating that they’ve elected to cross. One more check that the roads are clear, and that’s that.

Or is it? There’s a difference between a half-cross and going all the way across the street. I’ll leave that for you all to discover, though. In the meantime, stay safe, stay well, and I’ll talk to you all next week.

-F

Icebreaker Jokes

I’ve talked about icebreakers way, way back when the blog was young, but one specific subset of “say something interesting about yourself” type vagaries is the “tell a joke” section. Just like having one good interesting thing about oneself to just have in your back pocket is a good idea, I’ve found it’s also a good idea to have a joke ready just in case. Of course, it should be short and sweet -- you’re not going to get any friends by rattling off Nate the Snake on command.

One of my personal favorites is one I heard at summer camp, and it’s a freshly squeezed take on an old classic.

Knock knock (Who’s there?)
Banana (Banana who?)
Knock knock (Who’s there?)
Banana (Banana who?)
Knock knock (Who’s there?)
Orange (Orange who?)
Knock knock (Who’s there?)
Banana’s back!

There are some problems with this particular adaptation, though. I mean, I’m not a jokesmith by any means, but the fourth iteration (the one after “Orange”) loses a lot of anticipation value in its unexpectedness. The normal punchline is so ingrained that it’s hard to imagine anything else. Really, the only solution I have to this is to be extra jubilant in your delivery of the final line, which I guess subverts expectations in an irony-poisoned world but definitely isn’t for everyone. The other option, I suppose, would be to cut one of the initial “banana” lines, but that means there’s no buildup at all.

On the other hand, maybe that’s everyone else’s punishment for demanding you tell a joke in the first place.

-F

The Tenets of 2020 Movie Releases

So Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s upcoming movie, got delayed indefinitely. Finally, if you ask me. There was a good long while where it looked like marketing (people assumed Nolan himself but I haven’t looked into things enough to confirm this) wanted this to be the “movie that saves theatres this summer,” whatever that means, and while it was pushed back a few times before this, there was always the impression that yes, whatever happens, this movie is going to be played in theatres this summer. And then, of course, the world continues to have ended, so somebody finally pulled the trigger and put it on hold.

I admit I wasn’t really excited either way? I didn’t see the marathon of a trailer that showed in front of The Rise of Skywalker and the one spot I did see didn’t look all that exciting. In general, I like Christopher Nolan as a writer/director, but not amazingly so? I don’t know where that puts me on the “filmbro” scale, like, whether I’m elitist or hipster or both. I’ll still probably see Tenet if I have an opportunity.

But that’s the thing. Cinemas are closed right now and for good reason. I only really watch movies in theatres. So I’m stuck between really missing this thing that I really enjoy and knowing that not only that I can’t indulge, but that I shouldn’t want to indulge right now anyway. It’s something I think about from time to time, and that event has only brought it to the forefront.

-F

Fermat's Last Blog Post

I have discovered a truly magnificent topic for a blog post, of which the margins of this webpage are too narrow to contain.

-F

(thought of this dumb joke at way-too-late-o'clock and couldn't help myself)

Working on Finishing Things

When I started this blog, it came with this idea that I needed to at least “finish something.” That is to say, that’s probably not something you’ll find if you go through my opening posts, but it definitely was something that was going through my head at the time of this blog’s conception two and a half years ago. And, given that it’s a popular piece of advice for writers just starting off, I imagine it’s a popular need. But I’d like to interrogate why I needed to be told that in the first place, because I definitely did, and I think it’d be fun to talk about.

Some of it probably stems from how I start writing something in the first place. Generally, I start with a vague idea that either has a few opening lines attached or some set-piece that takes place near the middle or the end of the story. In the first case, well, it’s probably obvious to see why I stop there. The easy lines run out, and eventually, the whole thing just gets moved to the scrap pile to be used later (I have occasionally found uses for such things, at least). Pushing through there is largely a question of motivation and sometimes I just don’t have enough. I suppose that’s why another piece of advice is to just not tell people what you’re working on, because that can trick your brain into thinking that it’s already finished, which cuts down on the motivation juice.

Other times, the “set piece” times, I think that’s a problem of too much planning, or, at least, too much time spent idealizing just how cool the scene might be even though it’s thousands of words away. If I do manage to get to that scene eventually, the characters have inevitably changed in some way from how I initially imagined them, and I can’t help but feel like the scene is stilted because of that. I think I’ve talked about this part before, like with how I still think of something I’ve written as all the things I’ve cut in addition to what’s on the page, and how of course someone else reading the same thing wouldn’t see any of that.

But, at the same time, there are exceptions to this that I can’t define either. Like, sometimes I just… do well enough the first time around that I’m happy with that scene and I’m not sure why that might be. I could see it being related to chronological distance, maybe? Sometimes the idea for the scene will come up close enough to when I actually write it, or, better yet, I’ll have the idea as I’m getting to that point that I can just… start writing it. Maybe, in that case, it’s my insistence on writing things literally from start to finish that gets me in trouble; I have the interesting bits in my head but I can’t add them in yet (outside of some vague planning document) because even I haven’t gotten that far.

I have started to change this? With shorter works, mostly, or with shorter chunks of works. I don’t think I’m at the point where I can move around a planned outline with ease, but it is something I’m still working on. And I think that’s good? I sure hope it is.

-F

The Grocery (Part Three)

It seems like the store has gotten used to operating as it has been these last couple weeks. I went in late at night and it almost felt normal. Of course, there are still signs that direct you which way to go down which aisle and all the staff wear masks (the same cannot be said for the customers, unfortunately), but it’s a month later. It’s different now. The feeling is different. I mean, I still wouldn’t go in there unless I had to. As I alluded to in that parenthetical, I only saw three people (not including myself) wearing a mask, and I’m not sure one of those wasn’t just a duplicate. And now that I realize it, the direction markings aren’t conspicuous enough if I can accidentally go the wrong way down one and not realize until halfway through.

Some of this might also be, well, because it was late at night and, therefore, much less crowded than the store’s maximum, which is almost five-hundred. One-way aisles work much better, I am sure, when there isn’t just one person in them ever. The mask thing is less excusable, and it almost makes me want to see if another store nearby does have a mask policy. They already have an employee wiping the handles of the carts, and they already have a security officer, it stands to reason one could inform the other on certain matters of civil protection.

In fact, as I was checking out, I overheard a conversation between someone and this security, talking about this very thing. But I don’t think this is the time where friendly conversation is going to get anything done. We’re seeing that in other arenas of the country already.

-F

In the Middle

I’m at this point where there are so many things I know I should be writing about and yet I can’t find the words for any of them. Some of that is, like, hesitation, waiting until situations resolve themselves (hopefully for the better, and I have tried to do my part to make that happen) before tackling it and some of it is worry that a recap of the events just isn’t my story to tell. That’s why this post is late, by the way, and also why it’s probably unsatisfying as all get out to read.

I do have ideas for what I want to be saying and how, though. It’ll probably end up turning into something longer, in which case you probably won’t see it on this blog for a while, if at all. But I’ll keep you in the loop for it.

-F

Online Spaces

When I started this blog, one of the sub-resolutions I had going along with it was “put myself out there on the internet more”. This wasn’t, like, a “get involved in social media” sort of deal, but I have noticed this tendency of mine to stay on the periphery in social situations and the barrier of a computer screen seemed like a good way to get used to, well, not doing that.

I mean, the inevitable problems are still the same; there’s an already established in-group in online communities, and I’m not sure anonymity has really helped in overcoming that. Usernames, after all, are almost as ubiquitous as actual names in certain circles, and while the option to just create a new account isn’t prohibited (and sometimes, oddly, even encouraged), that does mean pretending to be a new person, and I’m not sure I’m able to do that for long periods of time.

What’s weird, even to me, is that I still don’t intentionally link my name with my online username. That doesn’t mean they aren’t connected, but I tend to avoid drawing that connection if I can help it. So I’m still playing someone, even if that someone is just “me, but online”. And “me, but online” still has all the trouble real me has getting into an “ingroup.”

I don’t have a solution to this or anything, though it is slowly getting better. I guess this blog post becomes a progress update, in that case? In which case, progress is okay. We’ll see what happens.

-F

Books I'll Never Read

I’m sitting near a copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as I write this. It’s a book that is not only almost six-hundred pages long, it also has a reputation of being at times incomprehensible to those not taking an entire university-level course on the subject thanks to the author’s questionable prose. It’s not something I plan to read anytime soon, and indeed, when I picked it up, I joked about how it could sit on my shelf of the books I have but have never read.

To be fair, it’s not like I went out and bought a copy of Hegel. The exact circumstances with which this book came into my possession aren’t really something I feel comfortable talking about on this blog, but the closest analog, I suppose, would be something akin to a gift. The important thing is, I didn’t spend any money on it. If I had, I feel like I would have a different attitude towards it; I don’t generally go out and buy books I know I won’t read. If I bought it, I’d be more likely to at least give it an honest effort.

If a book cost me twenty dollars and I don’t read it, then I feel like I’m out twenty dollars. If someone else bought it, then I don’t feel like that person’s twenty dollars matters whether I read the book or not. That probably sounds flippant or ungrateful, but I guess a better way to think about it would be this: if I bought it, I spent twenty dollars so I could read a book. If somebody else bought it, they spent twenty dollars so they could give me a book. In the latter, the transaction is already completed -- I got the book, didn’t I?

This sort of thinking does discount libraries, of course, which (in the before times) I imagine would be a middle ground of sorts. I wouldn’t have spent anything besides the time searching it out, but that’s still my time, right? That’s not nothing.

There are definitely other factors I’m discounting by thinking like this. I’m just trying to make sense of what I’ve already been doing, reasoning out actions I’ve already taken instead of talking about the thought process that led up to a decision and this is where my mind went to first. Maybe I need to read more books about it.

-F

The Grocery (Part Two)

I noticed a few things on my most recent grocery trip. I figured I could write about them.

The biggest one is in the signage. Multiple signs now indicate that aisles are one-way only, though I also noticed that with all the management at the front of the store, there wasn’t much enforcement going on. I think I counted three times I saw someone going the wrong way? The signage is such that it’s hard to miss.

The mask policy is still the same, as in, there hasn’t been one. Most of the shoppers still do, as do all the staff, but I also noticed more people going without than last time. It could be that I wasn’t looking, though.

Lastly, there was a moment while I was bagging everything when someone else came up to the self-checkout station and started scanning, but was stopped and told to wait as I finished. I imagine this was in place before, but on previous trips, instead of being able to find out, a staff member came up and started bagging items after I had already scanned as I was still checking out, so I can’t say for certain.

I guess we’re surviving? So far, at least, yeah, we’re surviving.

-F

Collab

Writing collaboratively is an interesting process, especially once you’ve gotten used to having it be a solo activity for so long. Some of it is just a loss of control with regards to certain aspects of the story. If you’re both pantsing (that is, “writing by the seat of your pants”) then not only do you not know where the story is going to end up, you might not even know what’s around the corner. Sometimes I find myself floundering, unsure of how I can guide any of the characters in a way that helps my writing partner.

In general, the same techniques used in improv have worked. The most quoted, “say ‘yes and’” has been a good enough baseline and I’m sure with experience, others will follow. The opposite end of the spectrum is also helpful, though. Having an outline and assigning bits and pieces, so long as people understand that outlines can change, can also end up being productive and gets rid of that fear of ruining plans.

I don’t pretend to be an expert in any of this. I’ve only recently started doing it as a way to keep social with some online friends. It’s a good way to stay accountable at the very least, and it has helped.

-F

More Thoughts About Spoilers

I don’t know how I got into this mindset, but whenever someone tells me something they might consider a spoiler, if I ever read or watch or play that thing they’re talking about, I assume they were lying? The first example that comes to mind is a narrative game called Firewatch, which has a twist that can come out of left field if you’re not prepared for it. And even then, after watching a video where someone mentioned it, I had a hard time piecing together just how it had happened while playing. Like, I knew, but I hadn’t accepted it yet.

Maybe it’s that I just don’t care? That seems like an elitist way to phrase it, though. “Oh, you shouldn’t care what other people say happens to these people” seems awfully mean to the people who do really care, and have good reasons for caring. That’s one of the points of media, after all, to provoke empathy. And it’s not like I made a conscious decision to ignore knowing the ending, it just sort of happened, if that makes sense.

In a way, I might compare this to what I talked about when I complained about biopics because those are kind of spoiled by default. People know what happens to Freddie Mercury, for example, just like how pop culture has made the initial genre shift of Psycho less effective. But both of these can be made up for with good elements elsewhere, compare Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Gus Van Sant’s near-shot-for-shot remake and you’ll see what I mean.

This also ties in with a recent trend of creators feeling like they need to be smarter than the people they’re catering to. Westworld ran into this most directly -- series head Jonathan Nolan mentioned changing the twist of an episode because people on Reddit had already guessed the twist they’d been going for. And that seems like a weird way to be making something to me, just shoveling in twist after twist without a thought to cohesion.

The twist in Firewatch, upon reflection, is actually thematically cohesive with the rest of the work. I won’t talk about it here, but it does tie in with the game’s themes of coping with loneliness and dealing with familial issues. So maybe that’s why I didn’t mind knowing about it ahead of time. It seems difficult, to me, for something with a twist for a twist’s sake to have a similar effect, but those media will likely be hamstrung by the passage of time anyway. Once everyone knows what’s up, it’ll fade from the zeitgeist, never to be meaningfully talked about again.

-F

When I Can Do Everything, I Can't Do Anything

I’ve written about writer's block on this blog before, but what I didn’t mention as much was this age-old quandary: how hard is it to pick something with a swath of options in front of you? For example, imagine a menu with a seemingly limitless number of dishes, and you’re just staring at it unable to parse what any of the descriptions mean when the server comes up ready to take your order. Compare that to a similar scene but with only a few dishes on offer, which presents an easier decision.

Writing this blog is kind of like that, except the restaurant has a magical kitchen that can make anything you want, and you keep coming back week after week wanting to eat something different every time. It’s difficult to pare down the possibility space in that situation, even though, intuitively, each week reduces the possible choices by one.

This is what things like my Raindrops on Roses series are supposed to come in, reducing the options, but there are weeks I don’t really have it in me to write about what I like in the capacity that I feel these things deserve. So instead I just ramble on whatever topic and push it down the line. There are a couple solutions, and I’m trying some of them, but they haven’t started working just yet. Hopefully soon.

-F

Algorithmically Generated Consent

I’ve started listening to the algorithmically generated playlist that Spotify makes for me every week -- I’m actually listening to it as I write this -- and it’s been fun! It’s a lot of music that I’ve never heard before mixed in with some that I had, but only through other sources. It’s never anything I’d really go out of my way to look for on my own and that’s a cool thing.

And yet, it worries me a little, because while I do like most of the songs that have been thrown my way, it either means I’ve let the algorithm collect enough information on me to make some pretty accurate guesses or it means I have no taste and will like so many things. I’m actually a little partial to the second reason; it means unless a song is mastered poorly, I can just let it slide into the background. But the first fear is still right there and a bit more worrisome.

One of my resolutions for this and every year was to be “out there” on the internet a bit more, and that’s meant opening myself up to these sorts of metadata collection schemes. I’m sure Google knows all about me, and not just because Blogspot is a Google-owned property. Mostly I hope to just be ignored to an extent, with billions upon billions of people using the internet, the fact that I am probably just a bit of data amongst all that is actually a little comforting to me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t notice when personalized content gets thrown at me.

Youtube’s algorithm is a bit weird, for example. I don’t have the space nor the ability to go into exact details, but the things it tends towards more “controversial” (especially politics-wise) content being rewarded, especially at a quick output. So on completely unrelated videos, I’ll see something with a headline trying to be eye-catching and a little “Recommended for you” tag under it and all I can do is say “Huh.”

Maybe that’s comforting too, that they still guess wrong. Not all the songs on Spotify’s playlists are ones I like, though I’m sure they notice when I skip over them. I do think the black-box nature of the algorithm is scary, of course, but it also makes it difficult to do more than just gesture at it.

A bit of a disclaimer, though. There are algorithms that do more than just recommend media to people or sell ads based on interests. Credit scores, for example, have started determining more than just if someone can pay back a loan, which I think is harmful and dangerous for the same reasons I find the former ones ineffectually weird at times. They could get things wrong. But also for the same reasons, all I can do, from this blog, at least, is mention it.

-F

The Grocery

The grocery store just down the street from me by and large uses self-checkout stations. Presumably, this is to keep labor hours down, but also, in this period of pandemic, it helps minimize contact between employees and shoppers. If you ring up a large number of items, a manager will still step in and help out, but they’ll ask you to step back as they bag things for you. All this makes sense, and I appreciate it.

One thing that did throw me off, though, when I went earlier last week, was their policy on reusable bags. I’d brought a stack of paper bags with me because I was expecting to use a large amount of plastic otherwise, and got stopped at the door and told I couldn’t use them.

I get the idea. It’s a potential point of contact, a variable that the store can’t control. These things have to be minimized. I had already thought of this; if someone was going to ask to help with my bags, I was going to decline. They didn’t know that, of course, and outwardly, I looked like a young’un with no mask and some headphones on. I probably looked like I absolutely didn’t care.

It did get me thinking, though, as I went through the store, what other precautions were they taking? There was a maximum occupancy notice on the outside, for example (though I don’t know how they were keeping track), and there were stickers on the floor so you could stand a safe distance away from the deli counters, but also, policies I’ve seen other stores implement didn’t seem to be in effect here. Restricting aisles to one-way lines, for example, would help keep customers at a distance from each other. I didn’t see any of that, and there certainly were a lot of times it would have helped.

Or the most basic of cautions: If I had an item in my cart and changed my mind, what happens to the item I stuck back on the shelf? The freezer door handles, were those disinfected?

Obviously, I can’t expect any sort of public business to be absolutely safe, but I also know that this sort of business will do the bare minimum of safety if it thinks it can get away with it. I don’t really watch TV, but I assume they’re the type of business to praise the hard-working nature of their low-level staff in their advertisements without acting in their interest.

I don’t have a fix for this, or I didn’t in the moment, at least. It wasn’t like I was going to start an argument or try and run past with my paper bags. And I certainly don’t begrudge the effort that’s already been put in, nor do I want it to stop any time soon. If anything, I’d want more things like this. The thought of an essential service just keeping up appearances worries me, though, and that’s what I wanted to write about.

-F

Ah Yes Tuesdays Are Made For Blogs

A common observation in this day and age is that with all the chaos consuming the world, one of the most difficult things to remember is what day it is. Twitter accounts like @And_Dads_Car reminding people of specific days (Saturday, for this specific account) have comments under each post praising that, if it weren’t for them, they’d have no idea what day it was. And sure, some of these comments are probably facetious, but not only are there a lot of them, but I’ve seen similar events have happened in real life, too, so it’s not like I can’t believe this phenomenon doesn’t exist.

All that being said, it’s not something I’ve noticed in my own personal life, and for a while, I was struggling to explain why. Really, I think a part of it has to do with these blogs. Not exactly the act of blogging itself, but when I do it.

Here’s a bit of “how the sausage is made” for you, I don’t really write blogs in advance. Sure, I might think of a topic or two, or have a backlog of topics (I already have an idea of what I want to write about next week, for example), but I don’t really have too many notes in advance besides that. I’m a “pantser” one might say. And this isn’t the only writing project I keep assigned to a specific day -- there are multiple. With only one at max per day, it’s been much easier to think about things like, “Ah, today’s the day I write my blog” or whichever project it is. I’ve been keeping up this pattern for long enough that it just works now.

-F

Birthdays

At some point, you don’t really feel older.

I know it’s a bit silly of me to be writing about this sort of stuff at the age I actually am to the audience I actually have, but it’s not like I’m the only one with this observation either. Patton Oswalt did an entire bit about only being allowed twenty birthdays throughout one’s entire life. It’s the same reason, I imagine, that businesses only really break out the special branding for “special” numbers, though I did a whole post about anniversaries way back when that argued against that part of that too.

And I get people look for any excuse to throw a party. I try to keep an open mind regarding the common complaints against “gender reveal” parties for that very reason -- though the lesser-heard complaints involving how they misuse the term gender and enforce a binary are legitimate, this is more against people who decry the pageantry of it all. But especially right now, when it’s hard to throw a party, it’s really hard to be especially interested.

I did get some nice presents, though, so there’s that.

-F

The Frozen Aisle

I’ve started making preprepared meals more because of, well, a lot of reasons that I imagine are obvious, and one thing I’ve noticed is a lot of them include these odd ingredients just for the sake of having them. A thing of fried rice out of a package has, like, corn and peas and all kinds of other things that I don’t find in fried rice anywhere else. I’m not sure what to make of this, honestly. Like, I imagine it would be cheaper if it just, you know, didn’t have these things in it. On a similar note, sure, some things I would expect in fried rice -- egg, for example -- might be a bit too expensive for the mass-production market, and maybe corn looks a little like egg if you squint, but still.

I wonder if that messes with the expectations of people who wouldn’t otherwise cook these sorts of foods. “Oh, I’m making fried rice, gotta go get some peas” is a sentence that’s surely been uttered at least once because of these products. But at the same time, it’s not like I’d want to argue too hard about a food’s authenticity, especially with something so easy to make. So while I could lean back in my chair and say something like, “My grandfather made it better,” that way leads to gatekeeping other aspects, and if I’m going to gatekeep anything, food’s not going to be it.

-F

Terraforming (Part Five): The End Is Never The End

You thought I was done with these posts, didn’t you? I mean, I described the end of Naviim in post three, and the only progression since then was talking a little bit about some odd supernatural element that had more of a timeless quality to it than anything. And even then, there was still a mention of the apocalypse.

Well, first of all, the worldbuilding process has never been particularly restrained by chronological order. A single element, such as, say, a pantheon of gods and the associated mythology, would use many points on the timeline, from the creation of the world to the eventual end of days. But that seems like an intuitive element of the process once you think about it for a moment. As a creator, you have the entirety of a realm’s history spread in front of you all at once, it wouldn’t make sense to go through things the same way your population would.

But the more interesting element that I want to talk about, one that I feel as if I’ve known for a while but only recently experienced in practice, is the lack of finality in anything. Not in a “you’re never finished, it’ll never be perfect” sort of way -- that’s just perfectionism -- but a “there’s always a ‘what comes next?’” And this seems a little antithetical to the first point, right? The previous paragraph was all about not simply going down the timeline and here I am now saying that you can, with the implication that you occasionally even should.

The resolution to this paradox is in the perspective and the size of the canvas, because the first point, in my mind, assumes a finite beginning, middle, and end, kind of like a story. The second point does conflict with this, but more in a “the canvas is infinite” sort of way. In my case, Naviim’s apocalypse wasn’t final. I mentioned a safe haven survivors could flock to. That could succeed or fail. The world could literally break apart and people could cling to the rocks and attempt to start anew. Until the universe is literally snuffed from existence, there will always be something going on.

-F

Ranking My Thoughts

I’ve been thinking a bit about Top X Lists. These are not to be confused with the “X things that will make you go, ‘whoa!’ Number Y will make you go, ‘gee whizz!’” lists that people associate with clickbait. That’s not to say that ranking things can’t be turned into clickbait -- there’s something authoritative about them that makes people crave either validation or something to be mad about -- but it seems like declaring something “best” or even “tenth best” has qualities to it even people who “take themselves seriously” seem to gravitate towards.

But at the same time, these people who take themselves seriously also, I think, find it the hardest to put together a self-respecting list? Like, I take movies seriously (though I wouldn’t call myself a critic or anything like that) and I still find it difficult to rank movies. I have to add some category on top of it, like “Top movies of 2019” or “Top 9 Best Picture nominees.” And yes, I understand there can be some methodology to these lists. Some places will poll multiple people in order to make a list in aggregate as if that’s any better than asking everyone in China how long the emperor’s nose is.

For the three lists I’ve made on this blog so far, I have to admit a little bit of not only recency bias but also interest in making a compelling list to read. I want there to be a decent mix of things people have heard of in case they haven’t seen them yet and also some unknowns. And when it comes to the unknowns, I mostly do it because I want to share these movies (this is the reason I tell people), but there’s also a bit of superiority in it. Like an “I’ve seen this thing and you haven’t” sort of feeling. I try to downplay it, but I can’t say it’s not there.

This sort of methodology does mean that a lesser-known movie is more likely to sneak onto a Top X list. That means it’s not really a Top X list at all, though. Because again, they present themselves as authoritative. These are meant to be “the best,” no matter if they are popular or not. But then I’m left with questioning why someone would even write such a thing. An objective piece (no critical analysis is objective but as something that wants to be speaking from a position of authority, Top X lists sure try to be) would mean a lack of need for anyone else to write one. We’d just consult the algorithm of rankings and that would be that. X is better than Y.

So maybe it is all just clickbait dressed all fancy and done by someone important. That seems like the far other end of the spectrum, though. Dismissing opinions on the internet that are written out like this simply for being opinions, or with a disingenuous word like “clickbait” seems a bit dangerous too. You can and should dismiss them for other reasons (being bad opinions is certainly at the top of the list there) but not that one.

-F

19

Joke’s on you, I spent most of my time indoors already. That’s about the extent I’m willing to talk about that right now, though. I mean, it’s difficult to talk about anything else, but at the same time, talking about anything else is what keeps spirits up, and if someone wanted to come to this blog for news, well, I guess my only question would be: why?

My time has been spent listening to music, mostly, which is a good way to take one’s mind off things. I just found out about this long-running prog-rock band called The Legendary Pink Dots, so I’ve been going through those. They’re pretty neat, I think. I’ll link a song below.

Between that, working, and keeping social online, I think I’m doing okay. For now, at least. For now.

Stay safe out there.

-F

Eurydice

If you’re unfamiliar with the evolution of vocabulary used by “the youths” (scare quotes mandatory), you might not know what a “hot take” is. It’s not an especially difficult phrase to parse once you break it down -- a “take” is an opinion on something (e.g. “What’s your take?”) and the adjective “hot”, well, that has a couple synonyms ranging from “controversial” to “brand new” or even “poorly thought out”, decided through context clues, but no matter how it modifies the take, it’s always something that will bring energy to a given conversation. The opposite would be a “cold take,” one that people have heard before and/or just doesn’t get the blood boiling anymore.

Anyway, here’s a hot take: Eurydice, feminist icon?

I mean, obviously not according to the text itself. The surviving versions of the Orpheus myth paint his wife as not much more than an object for Orpheus to desire. She dies on her wedding day, having been bitten by a rattlesnake, and a major plot point in the myth is that Orpheus isn’t even allowed to look at her as he rescues her from the underworld. That’s Greco-Roman mythology for you. But as time has marched on, I’ve noticed both a resurgence in tellings of this myth in general and interpretations of Eurydice specifically.

To preface all this, I wouldn’t call myself either a classics expert or a feminism expert. I didn’t even know it was pronounced “you-rid-i-see” until earlier this year. But when you experience two pieces of media like this in relatively quick succession, you kind of have to make note of it.

The first is Hadestown, this year’s Best Musical according to the Tony Awards. On its surface, it’s a retelling of the Orpheus myth replacing ancient Greece for depression-era America, creating a narrative distance between Ovid et al. to justify a couple things: its folk-opera aesthetic, and the ability to reinterpret the characters as it pleases. Hades, for example, is depicted as an oligarch who signs people into his employ permanently in exchange for a pittance while the Fates and Hermes are made into dueling narrators, each trying to influence the story in their own way.

But let’s focus on Eurydice. With the major story beats of the myth still there, it’s not like she’s a main character, but she does get, you know, an actual character. The Hadestown version of Eurydice is a realist who is attracted to Orpheus’ optimism, and instead of being killed unceremoniously, Hades attracts her to his underworld by promising her steady work and food to eat. She’s seduced into it, but it’s still a bit more agency than Eurydice has in the individual myths.

These choices are made at the beginning of the story, though, and from Eurydice’s perspective, the story plays out largely the same way once she arrives in Hadestown. To contrast, let’s look at this other piece of media, a film this time: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (trailer).

Portrait isn’t a myth by any stretch of the imagination -- it’s a romance drama between two women and set in the eighteenth century -- but it does spend a lot of time commenting on the myth. The introductory scene to this theme features its main characters sitting around a table with one of them reading aloud. The question arises: why did Orpheus turn around? To paraphrase using some modern (and not French) parlance, “If it were me, I would just not turn around.” The answer the characters come up with is, “Eurydice told Orpheus to turn around. She wanted him to remember her as she was.”

Already, too, the film has emphasized the two romantic leads’ looks at each other. “How you see me” is a recurring phrase throughout the film, as well as several shots of following someone close behind, so this scene, in essence, serves as the thesis of the film. But an idea like “Eurydice said something to Orpheus” isn’t exactly supported by the text of the myth, so the film then serves to demonstrate its reasoning by itself. There are several more callbacks to the myth, but I’ll skip ahead to its conclusion.

The final scene of Portrait is of its two leads, Marianne and Héloïse, having in the meantime been forced apart, attending the same musical performance by chance. Marianne sees Héloïse, but, as the camera lingers, it becomes apparent that it’s a look they won’t share. Héloïse is distracted by the music. Now it is the audience’s turn to ask for a look.

As a reminder, the film is set in the eighteenth century. The relationship between these two women was doomed from the start. And yet, all we want is a turn of the head and a look of recognition in Héloïse’s eyes. Héloïse chooses otherwise, though. She stays with the memory of Marianne as she was.

The symbology is reversed, but the message is still the same. Portrait of a Lady on Fire presents Eurydice as a woman who recognizes that her relationship with Orpheus will fail -- on a meta level, it almost presents her as someone who realizes she is but an object of inspiration to him -- and chooses to live in Hades with the happy memories of their courtship than to have them ruined by the passage of time.

Bookending Hadestown is a line sung by Hermes: “It’s a sad song, but we’re going to sing it anyway.” This is one of the major themes of the musical: its own commentary on using old stories to make commentary on modern issues (a joke title of Hadestown that gets passed around is “Orpheus Starts a Union”). And I thought that was worth talking about in regards to one figure that these two wildly different pieces of media share.

-F

Super Tuesday

It’s Super Tuesday today, which, for the non-American readers out there, is a pretty big political event here in the race for our presidency. My state doesn’t participate, but that doesn’t mean I can’t relate a pretty funny story that happened around this time.

I went to a Catholic school growing up, which meant mass on many religious holidays. Ash Wednesday was one of those days. This was both a good thing and a bad thing, good because it meant an hour away from classes, and bad because, well, when you’re in Middle School, church is kind of boring. I’m not going to pretend I was paying attention the entire time, but one moment on this particular Ash Wednesday service stands out.

During the homily, the priest began by asking everyone what the day before was called. The answer he was looking for was “Mardi Gras” or maybe “Fat Tuesday” would also have been accepted. But Mardi Gras and Super Tuesday had happened to overlap that year, so I stuck my hand up and shouted, from the back of the church, “Super Fat Tuesday!”

Only one person laughed, but it was my English teacher so that has to count for something.

-F

The Mural

There’s a mural at a park near me. It’s of a bunch of birds local to the area -- I don’t know if it’s all of them or just the most common ones, but there’s certainly quite the variety. The most well-known one is one that, inexplicably to me, was painted with red eyes so it looks like an avian possessed by some sort of demon.

Calm down, this isn’t going to turn into a spooky story or anything like that (though that’s a pretty good hook to save for later).

My friends and I call it the “Demon Bird.” “Do you want to go see the Demon Bird?” we’ll ask each other when it’s nice enough to walk a block or two and then through the park’s one main pathway. I have to admit, though, we don’t even look at it most of the time. We’ll get caught up in our own conversation and not pay the mural any notice.

Recently, though, the cracks in the wall are starting to show. There’s even a part that’s been painted over, and I don’t mean, like, tagged or anything by someone with a can of spray paint, I mean just painted over the same color of the background. I wouldn’t call the mural out of the way, but it’s still, you, know, not visible unless you’re looking for it. I don’t know how many people care about this thing besides me.

I guess that this post is more about the nostalgia of it, which is probably ironic given what I could have been writing about this week. It’s my own personal memory of this landmark that I know isn’t going to exist for much longer.

There isn’t really much more to say about it than that.

-F

Nostalgia (Part One)

Alright, so it turns out that this is actually going to be a multi-parter thing. Length is still an issue, but I also have some concerns about my ability to talk about Kentucky Route Zero in a meaningful capacity given how recently it was completed (and how recently I completed it. I’ve got a lot to think about). In the meantime, though, I guess the other piece of media I recommended catching up on can serve as as good an introduction as any. Let’s talk It Makes A Sound.

But not right away.

Last week I mentioned that I was interested in dissecting a small piece of Americana. I was actually inspired by a set of posts I came across talking about how “western-centric” media has tended to be, especially “America-centric.” This was in response to Kentucky Route Zero’s release, which is why it’s so important to discuss in this series, I think, and the general reaction to these posts was, well, that may be so for a lot of media, but KRZ couldn’t really be set anywhere else -- it’s an Appalachian ghost story and it sticks to each word in that genre description very seriously.

I don’t want to link these posts here for a couple reasons. Firstly, it would have the potential to add fuel to an already (thankfully) dead discussion, but secondly, I’m more interested in the implicit question being posed here. What makes a story “American”?

We’ve seen attempts at this. Stephen King and Neil Gaiman have led the charge in terms of American Fantasy Epics in The Stand and American Gods respectively, and what they both seem to emphasize is the country’s vastness. America is huge and varied, and yet the central “American-ness” of an individual town or city’s location can be connected. The Road Trip Novel is this sort of genre.

But America has another feature that, for better or worse, has become a facet of the country’s identity: The American Dream. The idea that this is the place, more than anywhere else, where hard work is rewarded. Of course, the idea only had to be thought once before it was viciously deconstructed. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle ends with a massive plea for socialism (that went unnoticed because the descriptions of the meatpacking industry were too visceral), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby reveals that its titular character, despite his hard work, still didn’t get anything that he wanted, and so on, and so on. This is even ignoring a large number of black and other people of color’s experiences, or the native population’s experiences, or…

The point is, the failure of the American Dream also feels -- to this American writer, at least -- like an intrinsic part of quote-unquote American stories. It also ties in neatly with its last point: recency. America is a young country, and that youth means that locations can change massively at the whims of fate. There’s an entire subculture, for example, dedicated to exploring malls that were set up at the end of the last century only to collapse since the online shopping industry established itself.

I do want to stress, at this point, that these are large generalizations. Any one of these statements could easily be found to be overly broad. Some of that is the point, though. Defining a country’s “genre” is basically about finding its stereotypes, and stereotypes are nothing if not overly broad generalizations.

Anyway, It Makes A Sound is a podcast by Jacquelyn Landgraf set in the fictional town of Rosemary Hills. “Golf Capital of the World” it proclaims itself on its water tower, and yet, signs of decay appear everywhere, and the remaining population largely consists of old and sedentary people who have nowhere else to go. In the midst of all this, Deirdre Gardner (voiced by Landgraf) comes home and discovers a small piece of her childhood, a tape recording of a concert performed by local genius (her words) Wim Farros. It being one of her few happy memories as a child, Deirdre is desperate to share the music with the world.

One of the common initial impressions of It Makes A Sound is that, well, its first few episodes are a bit of a slog. Sure, it can end as strong as it wants (and it does end strong, I promise), but the first two episodes largely feature Deirdre waxing fake lyrical about her childhood crush without much to support any of that. And this is what attracted me to writing about it, because it’s in that instance that I think the nostalgia the story is going for takes hold. Remember Robert Mckee’s words from Adaptation.? “The last act makes a film. [...] Wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”

This actually goes one step deeper in the podcast’s album. A lot of attention is spent on Wim Farros’ concert, and so of course at the end of the podcast, the group’s next production would be a professional production of those same songs, performed by the cast of the show. And it’s a good album. I like it, at least. But what I find interesting is how different the show’s recreation and the recorded album sound.

It may be a bit pretentious for me to say, but I find it interesting that a show about memory and nostalgia creates its own nostalgia for itself. The early foibles are forgotten, replaced by a sort of “No, no, it was charming in its attempts to appear amateurish” and its brief nine-episode length also contributes to its quaintness.

It’s in that, though, that I also find the most “American” (heavy quotes there) qualities. It Makes A Sound is set in a town that America has forgotten in its rush forward, and all it can do for its characters is have them look in that same direction. Always forwards, and it guides its audience there too, through its music and its hopeful resolution. Just something to think about.

I don’t know when this series will continue, but I do hope that it was a good enough introduction to the things I want to talk about through it. It’s kind of like Raindrops on Roses but with a clearer overall theme than just “here are some things I like,” though of course that will see its own continuation soon as well.

See you soon, and remember Wim Farros.

-r

Foreshadowing

This week’s blog post ended up taking a bit longer than normal, so much so that it’s going to be a next week thing as oppose to a this week thing, but in the meantime, I’d recommend looking into the podcast It Makes A Sound and the game Kentucky Route Zero, though I understand if you can’t make it very far into either. But we’re going to be discussing a specific aspect of Americana using those two media as examples, so it would do some good to be aware.

-F

One Brief Encounter Among Many

We have our standard regulars at work, but I only really know a few of their names. I do feel guilty, though, forgetting the others, because they always seem to recognize me. Though in retrospect, they never actually call me by name, so maybe that’s just my own personal worry.

In any case, what I’m more interested in are the dozens upon dozens of other people we see daily that we never really see again. I prefer these moments because they tend to make better stories after the fact, like, when I’m talking with coworkers in between (or during!) meal rushes. My personal favorite actually comes from my first day on the job, where someone came in asking for a refund on their sandwich. Unfortunately, the reason for their dissatisfaction is lost to me, but that’s not the biggest problem with their story.

The problem is that, for as long as I’ve worked there and, according to coworkers who’ve been there longer, we haven’t for a good long while. When this was pointed out to them, they sort of whirled around and then said, “This isn’t Chipotle?” and, like, they don’t have sandwiches either so I’m not sure what that was all about.

It’s a fun story, though, and I’m glad I have it.

-F

Ruminations on Oscar Gold (Part Three)

I’m a little early this year, but then again, I managed to catch all the Best Picture nominees pretty early. And hey, people like numbered lists, so instead of wandering my way through the same points as the last few years with only a little bit of added discourse -- my ideal Best Actress category would have gone a lot differently, for example -- I figured I could rank them all and give some general thoughts.

9) Joker
I like Joaquin Phoenix and I think he does a good job in this movie, but I also wish he had a better movie to work in. This is not a hot take, but it feels like the filmmakers tried to jam an 80’s Martin Scorsese plot into an origin story, and both of them end up wanting. Any moment Bruce Wayne shows up on camera was a moment I was left wondering why they were there besides justifying the title.

All this is also ignoring the paratext of the movie, how director Todd Phillips made this because, to paraphrase, he couldn’t make a Hangover Part Four, and it’s like, I’m sorry you can’t make the movie you wanted but that doesn’t mean you had to make a whole movie complaining about it. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake finding that out before seeing it, but I couldn’t help watching Joker through that lens and the movie was worse for it.

8) Ford Versus Ferrari
This is one of those movies that I call “aggressively average”. Its story is alright, the acting’s alright, its message is a little muddled but one can draw some conclusions from it even if they’re occasionally messy, and that just leads to a film without much that can be said about it. It’s fine.

7) Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
This was another film I knew a bit about before going into it. I knew that Quentin Tarantino’s next film was supposedly about the Charlie Manson killings, and even though the trailers seemed to be leaning away from that (though Manson obviously still makes an appearance), it was something on my mind as I went through the first two acts of the movie. And I really enjoyed the first two acts! It felt a little overindulgent at times, but so did Hateful Eight before it, and I still liked that a lot. But the last act, as flashy as it is (I know a lot of people who will only talk about the flamethrower, for example), felt so disjointed to me that I just have to wonder why the other acts didn’t just get tightened up and end the movie there. Maybe it’d end up too similar to Barton Fink or Hail Caesar! (both by the Coen Brothers) then, but I don’t think that’s bad company to be in.

6) Jojo Rabbit
We’re moving into the “films I liked” portion of the list. And there’s a lot to like. Most of the performances, for example, including Taika Waititi’s portrayal of Hitler that is both necessarily scary while still remaining as goofy as can be expected of the imagination of the ten-year-old main character. It’s a little paint-by-numbers in terms of plot, but still charming in its own way.

5) 1917
I so want to like this movie more. I feel like it hits a lot of my more pretentious buttons, and while it’s those buttons that push it higher than Jojo Rabbit, I also can’t really justify putting it any higher than this. This was the last movie I saw on this list, so I’m still shaking out my feelings as to why, but here’s an honest attempt:

So for those who don’t know, the movie’s shot a lot like Birdman was. That is to say, it uses multiple long takes and stitches them together to create two scenes seemingly happening in real-time. The immediate problem is that, well, I really liked Birdman. I did a whole post about it. And while 1917 is shot the same, it isn’t quite paced the same. A lot of the scenes are stretched out for characters to move around as they talk to each other, and the camera’s slow, methodical approach to following the characters around means this walking and talking has to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and it doesn’t quite get there. Compare this to Birdman, which I thought had snappier dialog and a camera that was a bit livelier.

I still recommend it, though. I’m sure it’s going to be somebody’s favorite movie on this list. Just not mine.

4) The Irishman
Okay, so first thing’s first: It’s really hard already to get people to watch this movie given its two-hundred-plus minute runtime. Like, you can like a movie as much as you want, but getting people to spend three and a half hours of their time is a big ask. In some ways, this movie is almost a mirror to Joker. Both that and this film really want to be an eighties Scorcese film, though, of course, this one actually managed to get the director.

I suppose I misspoke a little. The Irishman doesn’t just want to be an eighties Scorcese film, it wants to be the eighties Scorcese film. It wants to use all the elements that made its other films what they were, and there’s a lot of audience superstition in that sort of storytelling. What I find interesting, though, is how it seems to also kill off the same tropes it brings up. It’s based on a true story, but all the surviving characters in that story are either dead or dying. The movie wants us to think it’s the end of an age, and that, I think, is an interesting enough reason to check it out.

3) Little Women
I haven’t read the Louisa May Alcott book, nor have I ever consumed any of its various adaptations, but this still seems like a pretty good one. Sure, there’s a lot of snark I could give it (Timothee Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan keep friendzoning each other in Greta Gerwig movies, Laura Dern is 5’10” and that’s hardly little at all) but it succeeds very well in what it sets out to do, which seems to be revitalizing the characters many other adaptations lacked. Because it’s not just Jo’s story, and it’s not just Amy’s story, it’s all of their stories.

2) Parasite
Boong Joon-Ho is kind of a cult favorite and has been for a while. Snowpiercer is his biggest hit for understandable reasons (*cough* Chris Evans *cough*), but all his movies vary in style and genre. Theme, though, is another story. I don’t want to spoil too much about this movie -- if there’s one thing that people seem to agree on it’s that it’s best if you don’t know what’s coming -- but I can’t recommend it enough. As long as subtitles don’t ruin your experience, check this one out while you can.

1) Marriage Story
This one is probably a little obvious given how highly it ranked on my own personal list a couple weeks ago, but yeah. It’s just a really good movie. I don’t know if it’ll win Best Picture -- Hollywood is incredibly fickle (Green Book? Really?) -- but it’s something I can watch again and again.

-F

Blue Monday

I found out today that yesterday, in addition to being Martin Luther King Jr. Remembrance Day, it's also called "Blue Monday," which is not something I'd associated with an actual day before. I'd just always thought of it as that New Order song (or, more specifically, it's iconic bassline). I guess I can understand nobody in the US really talking about it when there's a whole other holiday with some pretty necessary themes involved.

I'm imagining somebody telling MLK, like, "Hey, when you die, they'll make a holiday after you, but it's going to be on the day that's regarded as 'the most depressing day of the year.'"

Anyway, it's never too late to reflect on the life of an important political activist and speaker or the events of or stemming from their life. At the very least, if thinking about one's own racial biases is too much self-reflection, you can ask people how it feels when they treat you like they do.

-F

The More Things Change

After spending so much time off, I finally went back to work the other day and, well, not much changed, really. The same people are still there, they might have different schedules but they’re all still there; the same equipment is still there, with all of their problems still left unfixed; and the same regulars still show up ordering the same things. And I guess this shouldn’t be too surprising -- I didn’t leave for that long in the grand scheme of things -- but it still feels like, I don’t know, like one of these things was supposed to change.

Maybe I’m just overlooking things. We used to have a pretty sizeable pothole in our parking lot, for example. That was paved over. A light in the kitchen now works again (even as the ceiling around it has gotten worse and worse). New dishes are about to appear on the menu. Change blindness could easily be in effect here for loads of other things. But the atmosphere overall still feels the same.

I guess, in a way, that’s comforting, though. After being away for so long, it’s not a and especially while I’m still a little jet-lagged, it’s not a bad feeling to immerse myself in the familiar again.

-F

Travel Post

Hello everyone,

Today's update comes to you all from the airport, because that's where the planes are, and I need the airplanes to get to where I want to be, or so they tell me. That's really it, although I admit I'm not super excited at the prospect of tens of hours in a little tin can.

In the meantime, please debate amongst yourselves the differences between an "airplane" and an "aeroplane".

See you again soon,

-F