The last man on earth sits at his computer. There is a comment on his blog...

A pitfall of not posting regularly which I am discovering is a glut of subjects which deserved their own posts, and which are destined to be glossed over or forgotten when I actually get to them.  Things keep happening, go figure.

I just deleted a few sentences about the most important thing going on in my life.  If you know me then you already know what it is, probably.  If you're one of my readers, at any rate, at this point you're either one of my closest friends or an Eastern-European robot.  (I long for the day when the majority of my readership consists of sentient human beings.)

I'm almost certainly not long for Seattle, although it's hard to know exactly how long "not long" is.  I've already stayed here years longer than I imagined I would, long enough to get a "real" job and make actual money.  Not what people generally refer to as "real money," mind you.  It's still joke money, but enough to weigh someone down in the elaborate practical joke that is the present US economy.

<Danger: Politics imminent.  Initiating automatic course correction.>

<Recalculating...>

<Recalculating...>

I went to see X-Men: First Class yesterday, and that was fun.  I am glad that that sort of movie is still being made: movies that are smart without being "smart movies" (defined here as movies that producers think only three people are going to see in theaters, like The King's Speech).

Usually when I take in any kind of media with other people my first reaction is to pick it apart and analyze everything that I didn't like about it.  Even with things that are mostly good, this is usually the conversational direction that interests me the most.  That said it speaks well of First Class that I didn't have a whole lot to say about it on the way out, except that it was good.  The same can be said for the production of Sweeney Todd that I caught a couple weeks ago at Lakewood Playhouse.  Later things begin to settle, and I can analyze what I actually like.  First Class is a pretty structurally sound movie, even though it sometimes (particularly at the beginning) has the conglomerate feel of a biopic.  It was capable of subtlety.  I was impressed looking back on a character moment that covertly educates the audience about things that will be important later.

...As I have put this post aside and just come back to it now, I'd like to wish a happy Independence Day to my human readers.

I'm about 3/5 through Dracula, which I last attempted with little success around 10th grade.  Looking back, I don't fault myself for losing interest.  Oh, it's interesting, but I had better things to be reading at the time.

There are good things about that book, but I think it will be more fun to talk about the things I don't like.  See above.

I suspect some people will disagree with me, but I cannot abide Abraham Van Helsing.  I am tempted to say that everything I find irksome about Dracula is united in the person of that insufferable Dutchman.  Bram Stoker, for instance, thinks accents are funny.  Witness the hijinks that ensue when Jonathan Harker interacts with the British working class.  But the various manual laborers Harker inebriates at least have a good excuse for withholding information (they are, to a man, too thirsty to remember properly) and are upfront enough when this is remedied.  Van Helsing talks a lot more, and says a lot less, and plumbs new depths of painful exposition by delivering his infodumps in fractured grammar.  Clearly it is meant to be funny, but the timing is generally rather bad and hilarity is limited.  At any rate I find no pleasure in the linguistic bloodsport that is a paragraph of Van Helsing's lecturing.

There is one thing that Bram Stoker does that I have begun to notice in films and the like.  Having never seen it pointed out, I will call this "technique" inexposition.

Bram Stoker is neither the inventor, nor the chief user, of inexposition.  It makes up a good deal of the dialogue in the first season of Heroes.  It is how, in Iron Man, Tony Stark's arc reactor goes from keeping shrapnel away from his heart to actually running his heart.  It is, as simply as I can put it right now, the attempt to convince the audience of something by having a character state it casually, so as to hide the actually substantial logical leap behind it.

Inexposition can be very useful in moving a story along.  While explaining an unlikely state of affairs could take pages or minutes of exposition, it takes no time at all to simply state a premise and hope that audience members will just assume they missed something and plow ahead.  Hopefully wherever you go from there will be interesting enough that they will let it go.  Better to ask forgiveness than seek permission and all that.

I'll tell you what, I think this post is plenty long right now, so goodnight fellow humans, and once again, happy Independence Day.  And to my other readers, when your Independence Day comes, remember that I was a friend.