One of the first lessons I learned about writing nonfiction is to almost always give yourself time between what you’re writing about and when you start writing, just to get your feelings in order. It’s this reason that I waited until we finally got a new oven mitt at work before complaining about it on the internet, and it’s the reason I’m posting this two weeks after The 90th Academy Awards instead of the Tuesday after.
I sometimes joke that The Oscars are awards that everyone likes to say they don’t care about, but secretly they do. It’s certainly how I feel about them. “It’s just a popularity contest,” people like to say. “Good Time and Wind River weren’t even nominated.” And that’s certainly true, especially in certain categories. But there’s still something to be gained by knowing what’s popular and what’s not, especially in a cultural touchstone like American cinema.
What’s popular, for example, is giving awards meant for individual achievements to people with good careers despite a lackluster single performance. Sometimes this turns out positively, such as Roger Deakins winning Best Cinematography for Blade Runner: 2049, but it can also lead to snubs like Allison Janey (I, Tonya) or Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour) winning over stronger competition like Laurie Metcalf (Lady Bird) or Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name).
To be honest, though, that’s just me complaining. On a more positive note, I do enjoy seeing the buzz surrounding the nomination announcements. I like those controversies much more (The Lego Movie was snubbed!), maybe because cutting the field from hundreds to five is much more exciting than cutting from five to one. It also is much better at making potential watchlists. When I found out I had seen seven of the nine best picture nominees before the nominations were even announced, I became much more interested in seeing those remaining two.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I like watching movies, and I am always looking for new, good movies to see -- I generally rely on the quality filters of people around me for the older ones (“You’ve never seen Gone With the Wind?”). The Oscars, for better or for worse, are another way to find those newer movies. So even if I disagree with the eventual winners in some subjective way, at least it’s good for that.
-F
Tuesday, March 20, 2018
Tuesday, March 13, 2018
Ars Somni
(The Art of Sleep)
For lack of a better way to phrase this, despite it sounding either punny or cliche or both, I dream of dreaming.
That isn’t to say I don’t not dream. There are times when I wake up and distinctly remember the feeling of dreaming, or at least feel similar to how dreaming has been described to me. And sometimes I can remember the smallest glimmer of what my subconscious had been fantasizing about. But it’s never enough to motivate me to keep a dream journal, so even those glimmers fade away over time.
I’ve found people are generally fascinated by things they don’t have. This is true in both the politics of consumerism to media (a pivotal sequence in The Shape of Water is the mute Eliza wishing she could say “I love you” to her fish monster boyfriend). The same applies to me as well. When I write fiction, I’ve found that dreams work their way into the work. Heck, any project I take manages to get some reference to dreams in there. This blog, of course, now joins that list.
Of course, I don’t really know what dreams are like anymore. These days, all I know are the dreams that my characters have, and who knows if that’s accurate to a dream I might have. I’ve never fallen forever, or suddenly become naked in the middle of a class presentation. But if Naviim’s Daniel can participate in a prophetic vision that dictates his entire life, I am all about that.
-F
For lack of a better way to phrase this, despite it sounding either punny or cliche or both, I dream of dreaming.
That isn’t to say I don’t not dream. There are times when I wake up and distinctly remember the feeling of dreaming, or at least feel similar to how dreaming has been described to me. And sometimes I can remember the smallest glimmer of what my subconscious had been fantasizing about. But it’s never enough to motivate me to keep a dream journal, so even those glimmers fade away over time.
I’ve found people are generally fascinated by things they don’t have. This is true in both the politics of consumerism to media (a pivotal sequence in The Shape of Water is the mute Eliza wishing she could say “I love you” to her fish monster boyfriend). The same applies to me as well. When I write fiction, I’ve found that dreams work their way into the work. Heck, any project I take manages to get some reference to dreams in there. This blog, of course, now joins that list.
Of course, I don’t really know what dreams are like anymore. These days, all I know are the dreams that my characters have, and who knows if that’s accurate to a dream I might have. I’ve never fallen forever, or suddenly become naked in the middle of a class presentation. But if Naviim’s Daniel can participate in a prophetic vision that dictates his entire life, I am all about that.
-F
Tuesday, March 6, 2018
Necessity
I had this good idea for a post. Like, a really, really good idea. But I didn’t, because I needed to talk about this instead. This feels more necessary.
This isn’t a bragging moment, or even a “humble-bragging” moment, but in my line of work, I tend to work near really hot things. The only exact measurement I know is the oven, which frequently reaches temperatures of five hundred degrees fahrenheit or more. But I’ve been burned before on the other pieces of hardware. One of our previous cooks burned his arm so badly that he had to be hospitalized.
Of course, there are various protections against this. The most useful, in my experience, has been the dark blue industrial-grade oven mitt we keep in one of the building’s many corners. I used it for everything, from cleaning to transporting hot items to the back to cool down. Really, any time I could come in contact with something dangerously hot, I looked for the oven mitt. So, as you would expect, eventually it became a bit more worn. The thumb was especially frayed, though it still protected just fine in my experience.
Two weeks ago that oven mitt was thrown out. So for two weeks, we operated without an oven mitt. And there were workarounds, sure. “Just use a wet rag,” was a sentence I heard often over the course of these two weeks. Another one was, “We can’t just buy a new mitt because you want one, F. It’s not necessary.”
I never got burned, but I came close a few times.
Recently, our restaurant had its quarterly inspection. I wasn’t personally there for it, but the results were a very good ninety-two percent. I noticed this written on a whiteboard somewhere, and asked if some of the points off were because we didn’t have a necessary piece of equipment. The answer was no.
Two days later, we had a new oven mitt, and I feel like I’m the only one that noticed.
-F
This isn’t a bragging moment, or even a “humble-bragging” moment, but in my line of work, I tend to work near really hot things. The only exact measurement I know is the oven, which frequently reaches temperatures of five hundred degrees fahrenheit or more. But I’ve been burned before on the other pieces of hardware. One of our previous cooks burned his arm so badly that he had to be hospitalized.
Of course, there are various protections against this. The most useful, in my experience, has been the dark blue industrial-grade oven mitt we keep in one of the building’s many corners. I used it for everything, from cleaning to transporting hot items to the back to cool down. Really, any time I could come in contact with something dangerously hot, I looked for the oven mitt. So, as you would expect, eventually it became a bit more worn. The thumb was especially frayed, though it still protected just fine in my experience.
Two weeks ago that oven mitt was thrown out. So for two weeks, we operated without an oven mitt. And there were workarounds, sure. “Just use a wet rag,” was a sentence I heard often over the course of these two weeks. Another one was, “We can’t just buy a new mitt because you want one, F. It’s not necessary.”
I never got burned, but I came close a few times.
Recently, our restaurant had its quarterly inspection. I wasn’t personally there for it, but the results were a very good ninety-two percent. I noticed this written on a whiteboard somewhere, and asked if some of the points off were because we didn’t have a necessary piece of equipment. The answer was no.
Two days later, we had a new oven mitt, and I feel like I’m the only one that noticed.
-F
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
"World" Muzzak
Muzzak isn’t universally terrible, but it is generally subpar. It’s the sound quality, I think, the small buzzing that permeates throughout the song. The quiet atonal hum that distracts the mind from the melody. The worst song I’ve ever heard was a poor-quality rendition of My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion used as hold music for some company I can’t remember the name of.
The restaurant I work at has muzzak. I’ve been told it’s some radio station or streaming service that does the occasional updates to their playlist, but outside of the Christmas tunes added at the appropriate time (though I have learned there are some actual garbage covers of Carol of the Bells out there), I’ve yet to hear any song I haven’t heard a thousand times before.
Here are the songs that I like on our muzzak playlist: I Won’t Let You Down by OK Go, Cello Song by Nick Drake, and Booty Swing by Parov Stelar. And even then they’re ruined by either being mixed in with seemingly hundred of songs I dislike or, when they are all together, they’re still corrupted by poor speakers and just a little too soft to understand.
I’m not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination. I buy cheap headphones and when they inevitably break six months later, I buy them again. I just wish that these songs sounded better, or, failing that, better music altogether.
We’ve actually had this discussion before, or at least those of us who are nowhere near influential enough to change anything. We’ve talked about what songs we would add if given the chance. I’m not sure how I would answer. The restaurant presents itself as a gathering together of cultures. “Dishes from all around the world, and one from Wisconsin” adorns one wall, for example. And there is some variety in cultures in the music. Parov Stelar is Austrian, for example.
But we don’t serve Austrian dishes. We don’t play music from Wisconsin. Outside of these rare example, the only memorable songs are some variant of country or hispanic (though we do serve a few spanish dishes such as an Adobo). An entire third of our menu, the Asian dishes, are entirely missing from our track selection.
I get that muzzak is meant to play in the background. That it’s supposed to go unnoticed until it isn’t there. But there has to be something we can do to create the same environment that our food does. Little things like music, I’m sure, go a long way.
-F
The restaurant I work at has muzzak. I’ve been told it’s some radio station or streaming service that does the occasional updates to their playlist, but outside of the Christmas tunes added at the appropriate time (though I have learned there are some actual garbage covers of Carol of the Bells out there), I’ve yet to hear any song I haven’t heard a thousand times before.
Here are the songs that I like on our muzzak playlist: I Won’t Let You Down by OK Go, Cello Song by Nick Drake, and Booty Swing by Parov Stelar. And even then they’re ruined by either being mixed in with seemingly hundred of songs I dislike or, when they are all together, they’re still corrupted by poor speakers and just a little too soft to understand.
I’m not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination. I buy cheap headphones and when they inevitably break six months later, I buy them again. I just wish that these songs sounded better, or, failing that, better music altogether.
We’ve actually had this discussion before, or at least those of us who are nowhere near influential enough to change anything. We’ve talked about what songs we would add if given the chance. I’m not sure how I would answer. The restaurant presents itself as a gathering together of cultures. “Dishes from all around the world, and one from Wisconsin” adorns one wall, for example. And there is some variety in cultures in the music. Parov Stelar is Austrian, for example.
But we don’t serve Austrian dishes. We don’t play music from Wisconsin. Outside of these rare example, the only memorable songs are some variant of country or hispanic (though we do serve a few spanish dishes such as an Adobo). An entire third of our menu, the Asian dishes, are entirely missing from our track selection.
I get that muzzak is meant to play in the background. That it’s supposed to go unnoticed until it isn’t there. But there has to be something we can do to create the same environment that our food does. Little things like music, I’m sure, go a long way.
-F
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Anime Music
Here are a few things I don’t really keep private, even if I haven’t mentioned them yet on this blog: I played soccer in high school, and occasionally I listen to music my parents not-so-affectionately refer to as “Techno-Bluegrass.”
That’s fine, though. That’s the stereotype. Parents aren’t supposed to like their children’s music. And Eurobeat -- the actual name for Techno-Bluegrass -- certainly leans more towards the “acquired taste” side of things. It’s certainly aggressive at times, and, to my mother’s chagrin, occasionally uses the banjo as part of its melody. But through various media, from cartoons to Sonic the Hedgehog, Eurobeat has become its own little niche of “pump-up” music best used for anything from workouts to simply staying awake in the car.
This is why, whenever I got the opportunity to run the booth during Junior Varsity’s pregame warmups, I went straight to it. I didn’t get to too many times, mind you, but I did take the opportunities I got.
This story takes place in senior year of high school. Our previous soccer coach had decided to retire after just having won us our league’s championship, leaving us with high spirits, but maybe more than a little tentative energy meeting our new coach. At one point early in the season, after a particularly disjointed practice, this new coach declared that we needed to write a one-page paper on teamwork. I half-assed it like any senior would.
I apparently made him cry.
We were coming in on the final games of the season, and this was perhaps my third or fourth time in the booth. Dave Simon’s Speed Man had just wrapped up, and I was going to pick another song when the head coach entered the booth.
“Let me play a song,” he said.
He played Jason Aldean’s The Only Way I Know. Which I would be fine with. I’m not the biggest fan of where country music has gone in the past few years (even if typing that sentence makes me the biggest snob on the planet), but its lyrics were relevant to the situation. It’s a song about winning. So yes, I would have been fine with it.
If he hadn’t also said, “Enough of this anime crap.”
I get it. I get how each generation hates every other generation’s music. I’ve had discussions on the merits of a brostep creator versus a symphony. I’ve internally tried to keep track of what my friends are listening to so I can avoid playing anything we disagree on aloud. But I’m not sure what’s accomplished by, when leading a team already falling apart at the seams, already ready to get the season over with, that specific comment needed to be made.
-F
That’s fine, though. That’s the stereotype. Parents aren’t supposed to like their children’s music. And Eurobeat -- the actual name for Techno-Bluegrass -- certainly leans more towards the “acquired taste” side of things. It’s certainly aggressive at times, and, to my mother’s chagrin, occasionally uses the banjo as part of its melody. But through various media, from cartoons to Sonic the Hedgehog, Eurobeat has become its own little niche of “pump-up” music best used for anything from workouts to simply staying awake in the car.
This is why, whenever I got the opportunity to run the booth during Junior Varsity’s pregame warmups, I went straight to it. I didn’t get to too many times, mind you, but I did take the opportunities I got.
This story takes place in senior year of high school. Our previous soccer coach had decided to retire after just having won us our league’s championship, leaving us with high spirits, but maybe more than a little tentative energy meeting our new coach. At one point early in the season, after a particularly disjointed practice, this new coach declared that we needed to write a one-page paper on teamwork. I half-assed it like any senior would.
I apparently made him cry.
We were coming in on the final games of the season, and this was perhaps my third or fourth time in the booth. Dave Simon’s Speed Man had just wrapped up, and I was going to pick another song when the head coach entered the booth.
“Let me play a song,” he said.
He played Jason Aldean’s The Only Way I Know. Which I would be fine with. I’m not the biggest fan of where country music has gone in the past few years (even if typing that sentence makes me the biggest snob on the planet), but its lyrics were relevant to the situation. It’s a song about winning. So yes, I would have been fine with it.
If he hadn’t also said, “Enough of this anime crap.”
I get it. I get how each generation hates every other generation’s music. I’ve had discussions on the merits of a brostep creator versus a symphony. I’ve internally tried to keep track of what my friends are listening to so I can avoid playing anything we disagree on aloud. But I’m not sure what’s accomplished by, when leading a team already falling apart at the seams, already ready to get the season over with, that specific comment needed to be made.
-F
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Terraforming (Part Three) -- Great Artists Steal
I still don’t know how Naviim was created (again, in universe. Of course I know how I made it), but I do know how it ends. To be more specific, I stole how it ends. I stole Naviim’s grand apocalypse from someone else.
That shouldn’t be too surprising, right? There are so many archetypal apocalypses that me having one isn’t that big a deal, right? If Naviim fell to the inexorable tide of Zombies, initially spawned in the capital and pushed east by their insatiable lust for blood, that wouldn’t be held against me, right?
Right?
So, I was playing some horror games to celebrate Halloween, and came across a text-based adventure called Hornets by someone who goes by Kitty Horrorshow. I’ve been a fan of hers for a couple years now, and I’ve specifically enjoyed how she manages to do more (in this case, creating the unsettling atmosphere of a city overrun with monstrous hornets) with so little (Twine is a valuable tool for creating interactive text-based stories, though she also uses a personal edition of Unity from time to time). I couldn’t tell you why the idea of Hornets -- that one single act of wrath caused the world to end -- appealed to me. Maybe it’s my latent fascination with purple prose. But I took it, basically wholesale, and inserted it into Naviim.
I couldn’t actually have it end, though. That’s the one thing I changed. Through some luck and a heavy dose of protective magic, a small community developed in the center of the main continent. And who knows? The hornets might die off and the world can develop again. But that would be my own story, and I haven’t gotten that far yet.
-F
That shouldn’t be too surprising, right? There are so many archetypal apocalypses that me having one isn’t that big a deal, right? If Naviim fell to the inexorable tide of Zombies, initially spawned in the capital and pushed east by their insatiable lust for blood, that wouldn’t be held against me, right?
Right?
So, I was playing some horror games to celebrate Halloween, and came across a text-based adventure called Hornets by someone who goes by Kitty Horrorshow. I’ve been a fan of hers for a couple years now, and I’ve specifically enjoyed how she manages to do more (in this case, creating the unsettling atmosphere of a city overrun with monstrous hornets) with so little (Twine is a valuable tool for creating interactive text-based stories, though she also uses a personal edition of Unity from time to time). I couldn’t tell you why the idea of Hornets -- that one single act of wrath caused the world to end -- appealed to me. Maybe it’s my latent fascination with purple prose. But I took it, basically wholesale, and inserted it into Naviim.
I couldn’t actually have it end, though. That’s the one thing I changed. Through some luck and a heavy dose of protective magic, a small community developed in the center of the main continent. And who knows? The hornets might die off and the world can develop again. But that would be my own story, and I haven’t gotten that far yet.
-F
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Terraforming (Part Two) -- The Video Game That Never Was
This isn’t the origin story for Naviim. Well, technically it is, but it’s not an “In the beginning there was the word and the word was with God and the word was God” type of story. It’s a “here’s how the concept was created” story.
Video games are complicated. That much should be obvious. But a few friends and I thought we had enough free time and enough of a working knowledge of the Unity game engine to try and make some semblance of a medieval tactical game. I was not completely non proficient at programming, but I was far enough behind everyone else that I was designated as head writer and coordinator, while also taking part in the mechanical design process (“Designated” might be the wrong term; I was certainly more interested in these areas of design, but it’s still closer to the truth). So after the initial meeting, I opened a notebook and started crafting the world:
Daniel, on a pilgrimage to the western capital of Camaralin with the intention of pleading with the king to reinforce his hometown of Karkus, hopefully rebuffing the demon scourge that harrases the village, runs afoul of a group of highwaymen who beat him, strip him of all food and valuables, and leave him for dead.
I’ve never been one for town names. They always end up sounding a little too “made up” for me. This is probably because they don’t have as much information surrounding them as “Rivendell” or “Tatooine.” At least not yet. To counter that, I tried to make each character name an actual name (no Aerith and Bob situations for me!). The most obscure name, I think, was Thomasin, which is a name I’ve appreciated since seeing The Witch.
Daniel is saved by an angel named Joan, who is in the middle of waging a revolution against Camaralin. Joan then recites a prophecy which predicts Daniel’s involvement, ascension to the throne, and inevitable downfall (how I treat prophecies themselves is the topic of another essay). From there, the plot would have basically been various excuses for battles to take place. It was all very straightforward.
My biggest problem with this story, looking back now, was how little it used of Naviim. It started smack in the middle of its largest continent, and only really uses points west of that, never travelling along the eastern coast, and only really mentioning other continents in passing. At this point, almost a third of the world was completely blank. I sketched it out later, but I never really went anywhere with it in the text.
Naviim could have died when the project fell through. My friends and I had all been a little too naive, and we had bitten off more of what we could chew. But I still had this notebook full of characters and a third-full world. And I still had time to fill it. If you forgive the pun, I had all the time in the world.
-F
Video games are complicated. That much should be obvious. But a few friends and I thought we had enough free time and enough of a working knowledge of the Unity game engine to try and make some semblance of a medieval tactical game. I was not completely non proficient at programming, but I was far enough behind everyone else that I was designated as head writer and coordinator, while also taking part in the mechanical design process (“Designated” might be the wrong term; I was certainly more interested in these areas of design, but it’s still closer to the truth). So after the initial meeting, I opened a notebook and started crafting the world:
Daniel, on a pilgrimage to the western capital of Camaralin with the intention of pleading with the king to reinforce his hometown of Karkus, hopefully rebuffing the demon scourge that harrases the village, runs afoul of a group of highwaymen who beat him, strip him of all food and valuables, and leave him for dead.
I’ve never been one for town names. They always end up sounding a little too “made up” for me. This is probably because they don’t have as much information surrounding them as “Rivendell” or “Tatooine.” At least not yet. To counter that, I tried to make each character name an actual name (no Aerith and Bob situations for me!). The most obscure name, I think, was Thomasin, which is a name I’ve appreciated since seeing The Witch.
Daniel is saved by an angel named Joan, who is in the middle of waging a revolution against Camaralin. Joan then recites a prophecy which predicts Daniel’s involvement, ascension to the throne, and inevitable downfall (how I treat prophecies themselves is the topic of another essay). From there, the plot would have basically been various excuses for battles to take place. It was all very straightforward.
My biggest problem with this story, looking back now, was how little it used of Naviim. It started smack in the middle of its largest continent, and only really uses points west of that, never travelling along the eastern coast, and only really mentioning other continents in passing. At this point, almost a third of the world was completely blank. I sketched it out later, but I never really went anywhere with it in the text.
Naviim could have died when the project fell through. My friends and I had all been a little too naive, and we had bitten off more of what we could chew. But I still had this notebook full of characters and a third-full world. And I still had time to fill it. If you forgive the pun, I had all the time in the world.
-F
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