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