Thursday, December 12, 2013

Lost in the woods

Last week we got a tree. It looks like this now:

It's displaced me from what Girlfriend "affectionately" calls my "nest," that alcove by the window which was just the right size for a big, squishy chair or a decorative conifer. I guess they'll take turns.

It happened that the closest Zipcars to our house was taken the day we decided to get the tree, so we went along the trail to the metro station, where the next closest ones were. The trees on either side of the path were bare for the first time that I'd been around to notice, and I could see pretty deep into the forest. Something square caught my eye. Bricks, apparently. An oven? A fireplace? What looked like a foundation around it. We didn't have time to check it out just then, but it made for an interesting change in our impression of the formerly impenetrable woods, which had seemed to contain nothing but spawn points for deer. It's easy to forget that forests aren't necessarily old, and this one had sprung up where something had apparently been built. Had someone lived there? Had there been a road there?

On the way back from dropping the car off, we had more time, so we veered off the trail to see what we were looking at and maybe take some pictures. It would have been silly to expect too much, but I will admit to harboring some residual fantasies from my interest a few years ago in ruins photography. I wasn't hoping for anything spectacular, but some pictures of an old house abandoned in the woods, two stone's throws from my own house, would have been tremendously neat.

An aside, to point out the first thing I learned, which is something I knew objectively but have instinctively forgotten lately because I've been playing Skyrim: it's really hard to get anywhere when you go off the path. Sandbox games may have taught me to make a beeline for the floating triangle in the distance, but in real life bees make lines because they don't have to push underbrush aside. And on the subject of floating rectangles, once we were in the woods we didn't end up exactly where we had set out to go anyway.

Which was odd, because we did sight a square pile of bricks and go more or less directly toward it. But it wasn't an oven or a chimney, it was just... bricks.

And nearby were more bricks.

Also one of these:

But mostly the woods were just full of bricks!


The bike trail had once been a railroad track, so we figured this must have been the remains of some railroad-connected building, but that was as far as we could speculate. Chunks had fallen pretty helter-skelter. This one block may be what I mistook for a fireplace from the path, but I never did get my bearings that precisely.

Not everything was strewn around like that. Some foundations were in place, particularly some walls around a hollow that looked like they went pretty deep. Maybe this hinted at the purpose of the whole mess of structures, or would hint if I knew anything about railroads.

A culvert? Was there a bridge here? Only just now am I regretting not going deep enough into the woods to look at this from the other side. But in my defense, it was cold, and we were nearly out of sight of the path, and the bricks just kept going.

So the mysterious bricks remain mysterious, at least to me, and my dreams of ruins are... well, not ruined. Tempered?

The next day, our trudge through a Maryland forest still fresh in our mind, we decided to do what any reasonable people would do: we watched The Blair Witch Project. Which I'd never seen, despite being the perfect age to have been scared bejeezusless by it when it came out. Now that I am a fogey, I was able to watch it and keep most of my bejeezus, but that last image did get under my eyelids as I tried to go to sleep that night.

And when geese go overhead (it's weird to me to have geese still going overhead this late in the year), I imagine their honking as an ongoing argument, the one in front shouting, "We are going south! We've been going south!"

Thursday, December 5, 2013

How I spent my Thanksgiving vacation

The week of this Thanksgiving I visited my family up in Long Island. It happened to be the final week of NaNoWriMo (or ShoStoWriMo, in my case), with me planning on busing back to Maryland on the 30th, meaning I would have to either hit 50,000 words a day early (unlikely) or cross the finish line in transit. I would be getting home so late that trying to get in a day's writing after I arrived would surely tempt the wrath of the muses, and possibly defy logistics outright.

The day before I left--a day which I had earmarked for a long push in an involved freelance project--my laptop began acting sickly, clicking and stalling and generally toying with the idea of becoming a brick. I was able to do some necessary work in Safe Mode, and then I spent my first day with my parents like this:


I didn't intend this picture to be a selfie when I took it, but there I am. As might be gathered, I was not feeling too great myself at the moment, a heating pad wrapped around my neck like a brace. The bus ride up north was pretty nice as these things went, but it had left me pretty sore and I probably had a cold too.

What my computer is doing in this picture is mostly magic to me, but I did find a way to conceptualize what I think it was doing and explain it to my parents:
Inside my computer lives a cloistered monk, in the medieval style. He sits at his table with a quill and ink, and a massive tome containing all the information on my computer. When I ask my computer to do anything, this monk finds the information I want through a convoluted series of cross-references, or else writes whatever else I want to record wherever he can find enough white space on the nearest page.

In the centuries of computer time that have passed since 2008, this tome has been through a lot. Some of the pages have been marred by water and others by fire. Vandals got in on a few occasions and their additions have been meticulously crossed out. But in all that clutter lately my dutiful monk has spent more time squinting at certain hard-to-decipher passages than he has actually doing what I ask him to do.

So the work my monk is doing here, if I understand the process correctly, is to go through the entire book, from one end to the next, and wherever he finds a page or line that is hard to read, to figure out to his satisfaction what it actually says and then re-write it clearly on the blank pages in the back of the book.
Anyway, that was how I described the process to my parents and to myself, and it made me less likely to rail against fate for how long the process actually took--four or five hours. There's a lot of data in this computer but that monk can scribble pretty fast.

Whether or not I had it right, the process revivified my computer. I still kept the computer in Safe Mode while I worked; I was walking on eggshells. (And if hearing that makes you want to bang your head against the wall, rest assured I suffered for my ignorance... I think. Read on?)

So in the last four days of November I put out almost 15,000 words. Ironically I think these were some of the best words I had gotten down the whole month. My graph, courtesy of Nanowrimo.org, ended up looking like this:

With the highlighted part happening at my parents' house. The days on either side were spent on buses. The day in the middle was Thanksgiving.

It seems a shame not to mention Thanksgiving itself, but the day was not the stuff good stories are made of. My extended family was good company and all the food turned out well. I discovered that my father actually prefers marshmallows on his sweet potatoes, which I had previously dismissed out of hand as a barbaric custom, but beyond that what's to tell?

When I got on the bus to go home and settle in for my final lap of the month's writing, I discovered that the last 10,000 words or so of the project were gone.

Why? I'm not certain. Did they refuse to save because I had been working in Safe Mode? Perhaps, but that doesn't some things that didn't disappear but should have. I don't have a better theory, anyway. Maybe the end of story number 4 and the beginning of story number 5 are still knocking around inside my computer, but they are beyond the reach of my own feeble magics. To adapt an old saw, God and I were both there when I wrote the first draft, but I fear that now God has the only copy.

But I'm taking credit for the words because dammit, I wrote them.

As I said, this was intensely frustrating because I think what I lost consisted of some of the best writing I had done that month, including several thousand words of Robert E. Howard pastiche that felt (I'll probably never know how they stand up to rereading) pretty spot-on. Luckily, I do think I remember enough of the content and the feel that the stories themselves won't be lost to the world.

The five short stories, for the curious, are as follows:

1 - Three Go players try to slip out of human space to play a game with an enigmatic race and prove that human beings have souls.

2 - In a world crisscrossed by traveling storytellers, one boy in a village that executes them as blasphemers becomes obsessed with what he's missing out on.

3 - Humans develop humanlike AI and promptly find a way to have sex with it. One programmer wants more.

4 - When a nigh-omniscient computer takes on the utilitarian calculus of governing a country, its citizens come to worship it as God and set out to conquer the rest of the world. An ambassador visits their capitol to sue the computer for peace.

5 - An author with a telepathic link to a sword-and-sorcery hero tries his darnedest to kill the character off.

Anyway, it was a fun month and an... exciting last week.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

2/5 at the 1/2

At the halfway point of NaNoWriMo, I breached 2/5 of my target word count. I don't know what my exact stats are for years past, but I think I've done better and worse. Yesterday also marked the end of the month's second story, since I'm pacing them out at about 10,000 words each. I've done a bit of hemming and hawing about what my next story should be--should I do my next clearest idea or save that one for the end, when I'll be rushed? I decided to fall back on the maxim to write today's best idea today and trust that you'll come up with tomorrow's idea tomorrow. So I will have to trust.

That is, if I ever get as far as tomorrow. Today so far (I say at a quarter to ten p.m.) has consisted of me waking up at one in the afternoon, Girlfriend reassuring me that I shouldn't feel guilty because I'm probably sick (and probably have been sick all week), walking out to get lunch (which turned out to be dinner), and reading a fat chunk of Stephen King's On Writing, which is not the same thing as writing at all. It has, at least, made me glad that I am not an alcoholic, which is something I had never thought to be thankful for before.

I just realized that the two stories I have just written, and the one I intend to start imminently, are all science fiction, as opposed to the fantasy that has been my style so far. Not that the borders between the two genres are well guarded anymore, but it is strange to look behind you and see a boundary.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Spooky deadlines

October draws to a close, and November swiftly approaches. This means several things. First, it means that I and everyone else who agreed to write a story about mermaids in September are late. The end of October also forms something of a hard deadline for that, since everyone who had planned on writing a mermaid story is also doing NaNoWriMo, so new adventures will soon take precedence. I already talked about my own plans for the month.

But the end of October also brings us the yearly ritual of gouging the innards from a gourd and carving it into a human semblance. This year, because there is so much television and only so much time, I did my brainstorming while watching the episode of Angel with the killer tree, and then did the scooping and carving while watching the latest episode of The Walking Dead. But my creative mind, apparently, was elsewhere.

I was pleased with the result.
a dapper o'lantern
A dapper o'lantern.
And here is the gentleman in his natural habitat.
hullo children
Hullo children.
That was yesterday. Sadly, he has been nibbled on a little by the ravenous beasts which scour our neighborhood at night, but the result is merely that his mustache is a bit lopsided.

Today Girlfriend and I realized that a pumpkin on our stoop would of course be an invitation to roving packs of children tonight, and if we didn't want to be paid in the currency of "tricks" then we would need to acquire some "treats" with which to buy them off. Thus I ran out to Target today to pick up some candy, half fearing that they would be thoroughly picked over by the time I got there. Fortunately, they were still well stocked, and wisely so, because I wasn't the only adult in the candy aisle.

However, enjoying the capabilities of my new phone, I did take a surreptitious picture of the Target's "seasonal" section.
Winter is coming.
Winter is coming.
The staff were already at work converting the display. I remember when it was fashionable to complain about this happening the day after Thanksgiving. Apparently if we had wanted to hold that line, we should have instituted a policy of exchanging Thanksgiving gifts or something. Because this year it looks like T-day's just getting a pass.

Friday, October 25, 2013

NaShoStoWriMo

I'm slowly, quietly, growing my collection of rejection slips for different stories. The latest was less disheartening than the one before, and perhaps the next will be even less so. I'm trying to learn to burn this sensation as fuel; receiving a rejection yesterday, today I chose my next target for the turned-down story, and I've come to the sense that what I really need is more stories. Still, a part of me wishes that my time as an English major had included some equivalent of iron shirt kung fu training, with instructors breaking sticks over my ego until what remained was impervious to pain. We're getting there.

As I said, my experience trying to get these two stories published has brought me to the idea that what I really need is more stories (kin to, but not identical to, the eternal exhortation to write more).

Around the beginning of October I get the feeling that NaNoWriMo was coming at a bad time for me this year. It's coming the same time it does every year, of course, but what I mean is that less that a week from its start I don't have an idea for a novel that I'm excited about, but there are several smaller stories I'd rather write.

After I had complained fruitlessly to Girlfriend about this, she pointed out the solution that was too good for me to come up with myself: to use November to crank out a series of short story drafts in the same spirit and volume as the novel I would have otherwise attempted. I slept on the idea, and now I have seized on it: this November I will put out five 10,000-word short story drafts. At this point I have two ideas I definitely want to pursue. The rest... will be an adventure.

Girlfriend wisely did not name the resulting event "NaShoStoWriMo" and I will honor her forbearance in this matter by making the mistake for myself. This year, NaShoStoWriMo is on.

Saturday, October 19, 2013

More ways to keep an idiot in suspense

As problems with the house go, clogged drains aren't so bad. At least it's something I have experience with. (One might call my experience with clogged drains "extensive.") With an apparent dearth of mice and cockroaches for the past week or so, I started showering in an inch of standing water for a change.

Anyway, Girlfriend and I went looking for some sort of product with which to unclog the clogged drain. One of Drano's iterations made a promising claim:
(Sorry it's blurry.) If it doesn't work the first time, it's free! You don't see claims like that very often these days. But where does that cute little asterisk lead?

I expected a block of legalese, but I found something more modern.
Well that makes sense.

Anyway, we didn't go to drano.com right away. It's not like this is so expensive that you necessarily chase down the possibility of a refund, anyway.

Since I'm blogging about this, you may have guessed that the stuff didn't clear our clog. I did ultimately go to drano.com, where I found this again:
I wonder where that asterisk leads?
I see...

Sunday, October 13, 2013

A haul of books

I doubt I will ever forgive this area for its lack of bookstores. When I lived in Seattle you couldn't swing a sack of spiders without hitting a used book store. You could not walk down the street with certain people (who you love very much) without being pulled aside into a bookstore for an indeterminate period. (If the store was Twice Sold Tales*, which had cats, your day was pretty much spoken for.)

Living in the University District of Seattle, it seemed natural to be surrounded by entertainments for literate folks. One would expect no less of College Park, Maryland, the municipal albumen of the University of Maryland**. Indeed, the only book store in apparent striking distance of my new place (or for that matter my old place, a stop south on the green line, in Hyattsville) was the UMD college bookstore. The only time I can recall going in there was to buy a board game, of which they had plenty--I don't recall them selling any books although I'm sure there must have been one or two. Anyway, that's gone now too. They uprooted to relocate and, like a demon eight miles from a suitable host, vanished quietly from the mortal realm.

There is a library nearby. The Hyattsville library is actually quite nice, even if it's a bit of a walk away now--but then I learn that it's to be closed for complete destruction and rebuilding soon. I don't know what makes that necessary, and apparently I'm not the only person who isn't in a hurry to see the place torn down.

But I didn't come here to complain about that. It happened that the church which I have recently (if sporadically) been attending had a used book sale, and Girlfriend and I resolved to descend upon it like locusts. As she has a classroom library to stock, she did the most damage, but I am pleased with what I turned up for myself.

I picked up the February 1989 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction, apparently the only issue which had been donated. The stories in it would have been current when I was four years old, and I certainly wonder what the genre was like at the time, when the internet was nascent and the Hubble Telescope was still being put together.

I found a large hardcover collection of Dashiell Hammett novels, and I hope to get in touch with some of the stories that I know from retelling and pastiche. One, Red Harvest, is a story that comes up again and again (in Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing, arguably the Conan the Barbarian story "Red Nails," and other, less notable iterations), and which I may try my own hand at if I get around to it.

Perhaps the most interesting find of the day was The Thorough-Bred Poor Gentleman's Book; or, How to Live in London on £100 a Year, a reprint of a slim handbook from 1835 which is essentially what the title claims: a guide to living frugally as a gentleman. It has that offhand wit that seems to happen naturally in books over a century old, but also seems to be a legitimate study in the plight of the declining English nobility in the 19th century. What a dilemma is is, surely, to be constrained in one's income and to be "above" doing anything for oneself--never mind taking definite action to earn more money!

What's said is interesting. What's not said is perhaps more so. One piece of straightforward advice reads: "Never get into a cab or hackney-coach when you can possibly walk." But it is never suggested that you would consider eating fewer than two meals a day outside your own home, make your own bed, or wash your own clothes--although you may apparently brush your own clothes without demeaning yourself, and the maidservant will appreciate it.

It makes me appreciate the freedom of the middle class, to eat my own spaghetti on occasion and do my own laundry without being thought less of.

This, of course, is part of the pleasure of used book sales as opposed to your typical bookstore. Foraging encourages a varied diet.

* Now, sadly, a Chase bank.
** Which this year broke into Playboy Magazine's list of America's top 10 party schools, wouldn't you know.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

The hourglass of identity

Twentysomething and post-twentysomething fans of Joss Whedon from days of yore, prepare to feel old. I have stumbled upon a fact.

Remember David Boreanaz?
Yeah, this guy, Angel. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's swoony first love, appearing in the first three seasons and sporadically thereafter in a total of 57 episodes, later the lead singer of a rotating angst band on his own eponymous show, which ran for 111 episodes

Well, this Monday, September 30th, marks the day that Angel is surpassed by this guy:
Special Agent Seeley Booth, who has appeared in every episode of the crime dramedy Bones. All 169 episodes, this coming Monday.

So while in our hearts, it may always be the case that that guy from Buffy and Angel is on a crime show now, the truth as of Monday is that that guy from Bones was in some vampire shows in the late 90s and early 00s.

No offense to Mr. Boreanaz, who is great, by the way.

Monday, September 23, 2013

A momentary digression of Disney-rage

While I am busily butchering The Little Mermaid for the amusement of my friends, I discover that Disney has, of course, outdone me. People. People. Have you seen this? Put in your mouthguards and stretch out your teeth-gritting muscles.

 
For those who don't want to watch, lemme sum up: Disney is bringing The Little Mermaid back to a few theaters for a limited run. The twist is that they are inviting children to bring iPads to play with a special app that will give them games to play (and sing-alongs to sing along with) synced to the movie--that is, while the movie is on.

As an aside, here, again, are words I've seen or heard too many times: "Experience the Disney classic... like never before." Is that what people want? If the trailer said, "Experience the Disney classic... exactly like you did in 1989," I don't know who wouldn't shell out.

(A parable, perhaps, for our time: I became aware of animated movies, more or less, in 1989. The "Disney Renaissance" was not a thing that was happening; it was simply a law of the universe that Disney made an excellent animated movie every year. Thus it had always been, for as long as I could remember anyway, and thus it would surely continue until the end of time. Thus it continued, anyway, until I was about ten, and I learned about the transience of things.)

I don't begrudge Disney the drive to innovate, in the abstract, but I think that this is one of those things, like cloning velociraptors, that science has made possible but human wisdom ought to prevent. I don't imagine that there is any shortage of rage about this. The idea of watching a good children's movie in a darkened theater filled with children who are distracted from the movie by glowing tablets is a horrific one to me.

Part of what frightens me is the thought that the folks at Disney didn't think The Little Mermaid could hold today's children's attention on its own. What frightens me more, though, is the thought that this is a test case and might catch on. The real potential of this gimmick isn't to enhance children's movies that don't need enhancement, but to pacify children during movies that couldn't otherwise hold their attention. There's a whole subset of the movie industry that serves no purpose but to temporarily hypnotize antsy kids during the summer, but don't think movie makers would pass something up that might let them get away with making even less interesting movies.

Today a children's movie has the relatively simple goal of holding a child's attention for about 90 minutes. But it still takes some work to do that. Even children demand a certain degree of novelty, coherency, and even intelligence (of a sort) from their entertainment. But what if the movie only had to play in the background while the child played a reskinned version of Bejeweled?

The app would be provided at the usual movie theater markup, of course.

That got grim. But don't mind me. All roads lead to the zombie apocalypse in my imagination lately.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Dis- and re-assembly

At some point in the recent past I agreed with some friends to spend this month writing a short story based on a fairy tale. It's a venture we attempted once in the past but didn't follow through on as a group--although I personally came out of it with "The Long Dance," a longish short story that I am quite proud of and that would be in the mail on its way to an editor right now if not for some frustrating events at my local FedEx place grumble grumble never going back there again grumble. This time, everyone is more on board, I think.

The seed this time is "The Little Mermaid," which I initially protested was not a fairy tale in the strictest sense, but a children's story by Hans Christian Andersen. (My strictest sense of "fairy tale" is a subset of "legend," so having a single, definitive author is a disqualifier.) I was outvoted, though, and there are worse things than having to temporarily swallow my personal flavor of pedantry. I had never actually read the original story anyway, so my education in things everyone except me has already read continued.

It will be fun to see how other people interpret the task. Although I complained at first, the source material is rich enough to offer different solutions to the problem of what to keep and what to throw out. And that's without getting into the rich and varied tradition of other stories about aquatic females.

After some headbanging, a partial inversion, and a transportation to a fantasy world that I was already working on, my mermaid story (ahem) grew legs. Then, as is apparently inevitable, it stalled out around the halfway point. Today I started from the beginning and realized that I've done all this before--in fact, it may even be my "process" to write half a first draft and then start over with a second draft of the first half, and continue that straight on into a first draft of the second half.

Once I can see what the story is starting to be shaped like, I know how to tear it apart and shape it like something else, I guess.

I still don't know how this story ends, which vexes me, because given the source material I have no confidence that it will end happily.

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Aspirations of outlying

I've found a new thing to aspire to in my work. Or maybe it's an old thing. Or maybe it's what I've always wanted.

So much art happens because that sort of art is happening now. That isn't to say that it's necessarily bad--the last decade's wave of superhero movies produced a few with actual artistic merit; some of the young adult fantasy literature flooding the market right now is actually worth reading; there are even some Dutch oil paintings of historically insignificant aristocrats that are enriching to look at, in their own way--and I'm certainly not saying that I hope never to cash in on a convenient industry trend.

What I mean to say is that a lot of art that is produced seems inevitable. Ideas floating around the culture collide randomly like molecules and react in ways that are random and original, but predictable. (This happens in more practical spheres like science and politics as well.) When zombies became a "thing" they spread, zombie-like, across the culture and combined with everything. It produced some interesting combinations such as zombie romantic comedies, zombie adaptations of classic literature, and zombie Shakespeare kung fu musical theater*, but that says more about the zombie image's penetration than anything else. The question isn't whether or not something will happen, but who will do it.

On Friday night I took the time out to go see The World's End with Girlfriend, and when the credits rolled I said to her that it was nice to see a movie that, if these specific people hadn't decided to do exactly what they did, would not have happened. I don't think the stars were aligned to produce a movie about a bittersweet, nostalgic midlife pub crawl in a town that's been taken over by robots. Edgar Wright and company made that happen.

That's what I'd like to do. Maybe not exclusively, but I would like to add at least one thing to the culture that wasn't just going to happen anyway. I don't think I'm just talking about "creativity" either. Or "originality" for that matter. There is plenty of both at work in the main stream of culture. And tasting the zeitgeist and knowing what art will speak perfectly to the moment is another ability I would like to have. But it's a special thing to find a combination of ideas that works that lies outside of the main currents. Something like that may not be imitated--and perhaps shouldn't--and may only be remembered as an intriguing footnote at most.

If God had delegated the creation of life, and I had been involved, I would be proud to have created the platypus, perhaps as much as the redwood or the tyrannosaurus.

* My thesis aside, I admit that if Qui Nguyen didn't write Living Dead in Denmark it probably wouldn't have happened.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Of Foxes, Whedons, and agents on the inside

I have been watching Dollhouse at a remarkable pace. Halfway into the second season (or 3/4 through what would have been a regular season of another show) I come to a question that has been asked many times before.

Why would Fox keep cancelling Joss Whedon's series?* I have heard the theories. The suits at Fox are idiots, the common theory runs. With Firefly, and then Dollhouse, their increasingly atrophied senses of taste responded to masterful storytelling as the deepest of cave fungi respond to the light of the sun. It was terrible and incomprehensible to them, so they sought to extinguish it.

Well, that theodicy satisfies some geeks, but in my paranoid ramblings I've come to a theory of my own. And I'm going to lay it on you after the jump.

Warning: This is probably going to contain vague spoilers for Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Serenity, and the first season of Dollhouse. But then, if I'm right, it could contain spoilers for everything.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

The inconveniencor

I don't want this blog to end up being entirely about vermin, but lately it feels like my life is entirely about vermin.

I know that, as far as squalor goes, our case is relatively minor. We don't have rats, for example. We don't even have bedbugs, our imminent appointment with exterminator notwithstanding.

Is "exterminator" the right word? He has yet to exterminate anything, to my knowledge. I think he managed to inconvenience the mice, but since he hasn't been around in a while they've come back at least as strong. Given that tomorrow's bedbug treatment is theoretically the first of three, I'm not sure he plans on doing more than inconveniencing the bedbugs either. Of course, now that we've packed our clothes and bedding into plastic bags, taken the pictures off the wall, and arranged to be elsewhere tomorrow, he's unarguably managed to inconvenience us. So perhaps I should refer to him as the inconveniencor. He's doing a bang-up job.

My landlord is supposed to be the one paying the inconveniencor, but now that I think of it, I've never actually seen that happen. Perhaps it's my recent reading material turning my thoughts conspiratorial, but how do I know whose side he's on? What if it's the mice who are paying him to get rid of me?


Friday, August 23, 2013

The Gamers: Hands of Fate, or Gamers 3 for the non-particular

I have been trying to watch The Gamers: Hands of Fate since last Friday night, the soonest I possibly could. After all, I Kickstarted the thing (full disclosure) and I'm friends with one of the actors (fuller disclosure) and I've had drinks with some of the others (even fuller) and one of the backer updates flat out asked everyone to write reviews (fullest disclosure). I wanted to watch the stupid thing, and not even just so I could write about it.

Well, my review of the movie's web hosting, or perhaps my bandwidth, is that it sucked harder than a diamond vacuum cleaner. I got well acquainted with Vimeo's loading animation (I was not the only one who marathonned The Spinning Square Show last week) and, at length, the first 15 seconds of the movie. And the first 15 seconds are not that interesting the first time--I knew that before, since the opening was released as a sort of preview--but after a dozen times I got well and truly sick of hearing "Countermay: Where several threads converge in the tapestry of worlds."

At this point I became pessimistic. I loved the original The Gamers, a student film only marginally more coherent than Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The sequel, The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, was a relative disappointment for me, afflicted as it was with fits of taking itself seriously. It benefited from the addition of some actors who I enjoyed seeing live before (or in some cases, since), but on the whole I came away with the fear that the movie's larger budget had been its undoing. Given the chance to make a "real" movie, the Dead Gentlemen's reach had exceeded their grasp, and they had reached the wrong way. So about half the time I laughed as hard as I was supposed to, but the rest of the tie I found myself "giving it a chance" for the sake of the friends of a friend who had made it--which I know artists hate, and I hate to do. As a result, my memory of Dorkness Rising is perhaps unjustly negative.

Before I go any deeper into this I should probably throw a bone to those readers (Hi!) who don't know what The Gamers is. The first two movies focused on a tabletop gaming group. Half of each movie followed the players, and half followed the fantasy world of their game, with the players and their fantasy avatars played by the same actors. Most of the humor came from the familiar (to me, at least) travails of a game master trying to keep his carefully crafted and deadly serious story from descending into farce at the hands of the players.

That should be enough to go on, especially since Hands of Fate mostly jettisons tabletop roleplaying for a new hobby: collectible card games. This movie follows Cass (Brian Lewis), erstwhile antagonist of the previous movie, as he tries to win a card tournament. It's half sports movie in the style of The Karate Kid, and half Dances With Wolves with the card players playing the noble savages and Cass as their initially contemptuous but ultimately assimilated savior. (Neither of these derivations is lost on or un-remarked-upon by the film itself.) And of course, the third half is the fantasy plotline, now concerning the characters on the cards (with their own actors, somewhat disappointingly but appropriately) as their fates are repeatedly reshuffled.

Believe it or not, I think this might be the most widely accessible of the three Gamers movies. (I may not be the best one to judge this since I have a grounding in both RPGs and CCGs--I'll have to try it on my parents.) But even if it isn't that, I think it really is the best Gamers movie: the best written, the evenest in tone, the most interesting, the best acted, and the most consistently funny. It makes me glad, unlike its predecessor, that the Dead Gentlemen had come up with a larger budget than before--they seemed to know what to do with it.

So, for those of you who are waiting for the actual value judgment, thanks for staying with me. The Gamers: Hands of Fate is good. I realized that I never found myself "giving it a chance" like I did Dorkness Rising; I just enjoyed it on its own terms.

Watch it. If you want to watch it for free, hurry up and use the link at the top of this post, or look it up on Zombie Orpheus, or watch it on YouTube, before the end of the month.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Abominations both eldritch and insectoid

I did a good bit of vacationing this summer vacation, which is why there haven't been posts here. I'll make this round of blog apology brief and get to the more interesting stuff.

First of all, while canoeing with Girlfriend in Cape Cod I ended up taking my cell phone out for a swim. I also learned something from the experience about how deep you can sink into mud, and how hard it can be to pull your feet back up out of the bottom of a lake.

It was certainly time for my phone to go. I was still using the phone I got in 2006, which made it about 140 in phone years. So although it did not prove absolutely necessary, my unpremeditated swim provided a good excuse to get a new, "actual" phone, which is to say a small computer that is also capable, with some coaxing, of making phone calls.

What's more fun, the experience in the muck informed the Heroes' Tears adventure I was working on. It's a very swampy adventure, and/but I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I'm hoping I will have the chance to share it with the world, and not just with the people who will be paying me directly for it.

What else? I wish the saga of my house and its vermin was complete, but it is not. The mice, I think, heard about the bedbugs downstairs and decided to leave. But bedbugs there are, and the Great Inconvenience has been scheduled for next week. And the week after that. And the week after that. Our landlord probably could have arranged for a less onerous treatment, but, of course, no inconvenience is too great when it's someone else's problem. If I'm overly bitter about this (and I'm sure I am), it's likely because there is still no sign of bedbugs in my house; this is all because of what's going on downstairs.

Enough of that, though. I'm writing an adventure.

Monday, July 29, 2013

Marriage, mice, and manuscripts

There are three kinds of sequel, although for the purpose of introducing this post I'm going to ignore the correct definition of "something which follows or continues" and focus instead on the more common usage, as "a rehashing of ideas previously explored to their logical conclusion."

So, there are two kinds of sequels, generally: those which improve or expand on their originals and those which fall short. Terminator 2 on the one hand, Speed 2 on the other. In terms of the themes it addresses, this post may be considered a sequel to the previous one, and in that regard I hope it falls into the former category rather than the latter.

A week ago I came home from the wedding which had occupied my time, one way or another, for the whole week previous. The wedding was successful, and a married couple was produced. The accompanying party was perfectly lovely (and on a boat, no less), marred only by one of the groomsmen reading a rambling speech made up mostly of in-jokes.* My friends continue to show a talent for having relatively sane and enjoyable weddings, and the weather in Seattle even cooperated to the extent that it was sunny when it needed to be.*

Before leaving I had been relieved to discover no evidence of bedbugs in the house. On my return we continued to not have bedbugs, much to our relief. When I stepped into the kitchen, however, I startled a mouse who must have thought he had the place to himself.

You would think, given the geometric way that these problems expand, that exterminators would make appointments on very short notice. This does not seem to be the case, however--at least not with the exterminator who our landlord prefers. We eagerly await his arrival this Saturday, almost two full weeks after our discovery of the problem, and hope that our furry squatters are not too fecund in the mean time.

While we wait we (well, Girlfriend, primarily) have attempted to drive the creature(s) out by blocking holes and spraying liberally with peppermint oil, including placing mint-soaked cotton balls in strategic corners. The hope, if I understand correctly, is to persuade the mice that our home is the lair of a cotton-pooping peppermint beast.

I worry, though, that we have attracted a singularly worldly mouse, who knows a good thing when he sees it and has no truck with tales of peppermint beasts.

So we lock our food up more securely and wait for Saturday. Our landlord helpfully asked if he could check our mattresses while he's here, because our downstairs neighbors are worried that they have bedbugs.

Bedbugs. Thought we'd dodged a bullet there, for a minute.

We still don't have bedbugs up here, so far as we can tell, but it will be very frustrating if they manage to make their way up here between now and Saturday. Not least because we leave on Sunday to visit my ancestral lands in Massachusetts, and I don't want to bring the little buggers with me.

Perhaps this will all be sorted out with a minimum of further fuss, but I am conserving my optimism for other endeavors.

At the urging of Girlfriend, some friends, my own good sense, and the very universe itself, it seems sometimes, I have agreed to send off my novella "Nenle and Death" to a potential publisher this Friday. The length (almost 15,000 words), rules out many publications, but a few potentials remain. I may even be able to send "The Long Dance" out shortly after that.

This week it looks like I'll have my plate full, of work at least, the most interesting project of which is writing an adventure to be used in playtesting the upcoming D20 RPG Heroes' Tears. The game itself is not unlike 3rd Ed. D&D, but with an approach to classes and levels reminiscent of Shadowrun. I'm pretty excited by the chance to craft adventures for a solid system (and I don't think there's a better chassis available to the public than the SRD) that still has room to grow. (I think I will be making all my own monsters for this one, for example.)

All in all, I should probably get off my blog and get back to work.

* This was me.
** Girlfriend and I were both well reddened over the course of the ceremony and reception, though.

Monday, July 8, 2013

One definitely good thing, one possibly terrible thing

At the end of this week I'll be back to Seattle for... something or other. I dunno. I let Girlfriend handle these things.

Actually I'm more on top of my social schedule than usual at the moment (I bought a planner!) and I am well aware that my illustrious friends Bryan and Katie are getting married (to each other, no less) the Saturday after next. So I will be heading there to congratulate them, and also to catch Bryan's last performance in a universally praised The Importance of Being Earnest. It's not every week you get to see a live romantic comedy where one of the actors actually gets married at the end.

To temper the joy you are probably feeling at this moment, I choose this moment to reveal that I am currently investigating the possibility that my new house has bed bugs. I hope it proves to be otherwise, but after finding three small bug bites in a line across my stomach today, I've laid down tape at the edge of the beds in hope--no, not in hope, but fear--of catching a few as they go about their vile business. No, I do not hope to find bedbugs--and God knows the neighborhood is rife with other suspects--but if they are here my malice toward them is endless.

The good news seems to be, at least, that some of the more extreme bed bug remedies, i.e., arson and seppuku, are no longer recommended.

We shall see, and hopefully we shall sort it out quickly (as these things go).

Thursday, July 4, 2013

A simple question for the robots

I would like to know why, over the past month, there seems to be a steady trickle of traffic to my post from June 9, entitled, "A pretty boring post." Seldom have my blog posts been titled as accurately as that one.

Oh, it's the 4th of July today. Happy that, to my American friends. I seem to remember that the last time I addressed the issue of blog robots directly it was also July 4. I wonder if July is just the season when a young man's fancy turns to Blogger traffic stats. Or is there something more precise at work? Something... sinister?

Probably not.

Friday, June 28, 2013

New house, new frustrations

I can only hope I may be forgiven for neglecting to post anything last week. Rest assured that it was not that my life had finally become so boring that I gave up on telling anyone about it. Actually, I’ve been moving, and now I have moved. This week has been my first week after the move, dealing with unpacking, chores, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to in a new house. Or rather, an old house, as this place may be older than the Hedgehog House was. Not that that is a complaint. The house has a great deal of character in the non-euphemistic sense—perhaps the word is “charm”—and in spite of appearances about as much room as could be wished for. And holy cow, the yard. I might actually go outside sometimes.

Not that the past week hasn’t given me any stories. The new neighborhood reminds Girlfriend and me of Seattle, and as we have discovered, old houses in Seattle and Seattle-like environments attract two things: us and spiders. We have had fun discovering that there are keys that modern hardware stores cannot reproduce, cut as they are from obsolete shapes, meaning that there are exactly two keys to this house and until we replace the locks there will apparently never be any more.

My deepest sorrow of late has been discovering the downside of splitting utilities with the other half of our duplex: this morning I found most of the internet replaced with a gentle alert from our service provider that we had been cut off, for reasons discoverable only to a person with the network information, i.e., the people who live downstairs, but are currently elsewhere.

Surely this would be cause to panic, or at least take urgent action, if I were not still somehow* still allowed to access my e-mail and Elance.com, meaning I am still open for business.

And for all that, I’m still happy with this place.

Speaking, incidentally, of people’s houses, on Wednesday night Girlfriend and I saw Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing (which, in case my segue was too obscure, was filmed at chez Whedon). After much confusion and some false starts, I might add—we’d been trying to find a showtime since the movie ostensibly “opened” on June 7.

I think anyone who can tolerate my writing is well-situated to enjoy this Much Ado. I think I will dare to call it my favorite version, of three I have seen, although I reserve the right to say Bryan Bender remains my favorite Benedick and lord it over anyone who didn’t see him at Tacoma Little Theater when they had the chance. And surely Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson had better chemistry than this pair, and Branagh’s version has this and that, here and there, to recommend it over Whedon’s. (Whedon, for example, omits my favorite line of the whole play.**) But as for the whole movie working, and the absence of weak spots, for my personal criterion of everyone at all times knowing what the words coming out of their mouths mean, I think this recent one is the winner.

* I’ve sort of figured out how, and I’m using that knowledge to get to my blog. I had really hoped that by the time you read this my problem would, ipso facto, have been solved, but that is not the case.

** But truly, for mine own part, if I were as tedious as a king, I could find it in my heart to bestow it all of your worship.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Cyborg zombies are still the best cyborgs, and the best zombies

I feel like I should apologize for last week's weaksauce post. I've actually felt a little guilty about every non-robot pageview I've gotten this week; I'm sad because I disappointed all the humans and wasted their time. Not that I should get into the habit of apologizing to the internet.

As I said before, I've gotten back to watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I haven't been exercising the kind of arc discipline that I would have used watching Buffy or The Walking Dead, but ST:TNG doesn't enforce that kind of linearity the same way, either. It's actually kind of weird going back to an older show like this, after watching so many more recent dramas driven by season-long plot arcs, and find it of little consequence what order I watch the episodes in. The show's cozy status quo is as quaint as its 4:3 aspect ratio.

We skipped to Season 2, and skipped some of the lamer episodes there (though we blundered headlong into The Child, perhaps the lamest episode of them all!), and then on a whim jumped a season from the Borg's first appearance to "Best of Both Worlds."

It was interesting to watch the show face down futility, in light of the bleak, modern fare I've been watching. The relentless pressure of the apocalypse makes for good television, but not varied television. When TNG put the human race in danger, or seriously threatened a main character's life, it was special. (Though it occurred to me that if Joss Whedon had been at the helm, he would have had Jonathan Frakes re-record "Space... the final frontier" for Part 2.) TNG may only have visited the place where Battlestar Galactica lived, but I appropriately get the sense of the Enterprise actually flying around the galaxy from one kind of adventure to another.

I loved the Borg as a villain when I was young, and the way they were on TNG will always be the way they "really" are to me--before the Borg Queen deflated the ominous hivemind, before they got demystified and played out and tenderized. Looking back, it's actually interesting to see how much of what defined them wasn't there in their first appearance in "Q Who?" The words "Resistance is futile" were yet to be uttered. Assimilation was not mentioned or hinted at--I didn't even realize until Girlfriend pointed it out, but when [spoilers], that's actually the first indication that they have that ability. It makes me wonder if the writers knew what they had back in Season 2, or if they even had it, or if they only came up with the most important elements later.

The contrast between "Q Who?" and "Best of Both Worlds" is informative. Perhaps most importantly, the former spends about half its time telling us how scared we should be of the Borg. The latter spends its time better by having them do progressively scarier things, and giving the characters some time to be scared. It's a lesson I hope I can remember if I ever have as good an idea to work with.

Sunday, June 9, 2013

A pretty boring post

The truth is, I feel obligated to write a post here before I go to bed, but this has been a pretty boring weekend. I've started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation again, and that's as good as it is.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Memorial Day Weekend

It's been a week. It being Tuesday now, the week I'm referring to would be last week, more or less. Going backwards, yesterday to Saturday my parents were here, so I was showing them around my stomping grounds in the Maryland area. (When last they had visited me here, more than a year ago, I had done hardly any stomping at all, so there was no stomped ground to show them. Now, on the other hand, when my parents want to know what I've been doing with my life, I can at least show them where you can get really good nachos.) Then, on Friday, was Girlfriend's 8th-grade class's production of Romeo and Juliet, which in spite of the odds was something many people could justly be proud of.*

We cleaned over the week, so the house is simultaneously comfortable and slightly alien. Things which I am used to seeing "around" have been put "away," which in this case could refer to either a place where they usually belong or simply a place where I would not think to look for them.

As is often the case after a long weekend, everything feels "off." Today is a Monday that is not a Monday; it is a Monday three days before Friday, a two-sided triangle. We have entered the non-Euclidian workweek.

* Protip: When watching live middle school theater,** sit closer to the front than you would for the same show performed by adults. Remember that the actors are smaller.
** Protip: When watching recorded middle school theater, drink.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Reviews (including one of mine)

Friends, fans, literati, and cinemaphiles will want to check out my review of The Great Gatsby over at Gent's Pub.

On the subject of reviews, I've run into a depressing phenomenon this summer. As some of you know, I follow movie reviews, because I would rather waste time reading other people's opinions than waste time watching a movie I won't like. Anyway, since I am one of the doesn't-get-a-paper generation, I read snippets and watch the aggregate score on RottenTomatoes.com. While it's not a perfect system (for example, I absolutely loved The Fall, despite its very mixed reviews*), it's served me fairly well.

I had high hopes for Iron Man 3 (spoiler warning: I still haven't seen it) given the presence of the director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Sir Ben Kingsley in addition to Professor Robert Downey Jr. I hoped perhaps (fantastically) that Marvel studios had been chastened by the silent rays of contempt I had been sending them over Iron Man 2. And I was heartened to see, a week before the movie's release, a healthy Rotten Tomatoes score of 90%.

The next day, I was a little less heartened to see a score of 89%. And a little less heartened to see each progressively lower aggregate score over the week, until it settled on opening day at its present 78%.

I'm neither surprised nor scandalized that a studio would solicit early reviews from people who will shill their movie. This is the first time I've seen it move the needle so profoundly, though. Is this new? I wonder. Has something changed? If Rotten Tomatoes has been compromised, who will tell me what to think? (Because, the bit of luck that I mention at the top of this post notwithstanding, there may not always be someone willing to pay me to form my own opinion.)

Perhaps someone who already understands exactly what's going on can explain to me why I'm being silly.

* I may appreciate exaggerated visual style more than most reviewers do. Or be more forgiving of uneven stories if they go interesting places. Ip Man is another place these things come together, and I seem to be the outlier in thinking that it is decisively superior to its sequel.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

A brief Mother's Day post

A year ago I posted this on Facebook:
We owe them a lot
Women who taught us to live
Word to your mother
I'm not sure my mom actually got it, but I have no regrets.

Monday, May 6, 2013

The Sun Also Dances, and so does Gatsby

Usually I resent physical mail delivery, since there is hardly ever anything I want in it and yet it never. stops. coming. except on Sundays, I guess. But I have in hand an advertisement for something I would not have thought existed: it turns out that the Washington Ballet is adapting The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway.

If it takes an English degree to think that's funny then my college education has done me some good. It's not merely that I am still uncultured enough to find ballet itself funny when juxtaposed with just about anything (although that is also undoubtedly true), but a Hemingway-ballet combination is the sort of thing one imagines exploding utterly, like matter and antimatter. Hemingway was such a strange animal in himself, a hyper-masculine and eminently taciturn writer; The Sun Also Rises itself is so bleak and uneventful that what I managed to read of it, in my two separate attempts, is largely a lacuna in my memory. To make The Sun Also Rises expressive, to make it flamboyant--I can hardly imagine that Hemingway would approve.

But then we live in an age of maximalism. The pendulum is at its far extreme from 1926, and if this generation is lost, most of us got that way without ever actually seeing the war that scattered us. Some of the best social commentary in the last 10 years has involved Batman. We don't do understatement anymore. So while Hemingway almost certainly wouldn't approve, maybe something as overblown as ballet would be able to expose the trenchant pathos that he was content to leave unsaid.

On the back of the flyer, the ad announces the ballet as "following on the success of The Great Gatsby." So apparently that was a ballet as well, but I missed it. (Not that I was going to go to Rises, mind you. I'm still in the process of coming to my main point. Thanks for staying with us.) However, I think that Gatsby is a more amenable story to bombastic presentation. Fitzgerald was more comfortable with stylistic flourishes, and excess is in the bones of the story.

In fact, it was the idea of just such a presentation that excited me back when I first got wind of Baz Luhrmann's movie version of The Great Gatsby. In a book that trades so heavily on prose and tone, any straight adaptation of the plot will fall flat--one of those increasingly self-evident truths that I think the brains of Hollywood are immune to. Linguistic flair should translate to the screen as cinematic flair: style and cinematography, of which Mr. Luhrmann at least has no shortage. At any rate, until a movie has come out, you can really only pin your hopes on mistakes that the production has apparently avoided, and I think it's a safe bet that Luhrmann's Gatsby will avoid the mistake of being dull.

I wish I did not have as many hopes for this movie as I do, but I have been pessimistic about the summer movie season so far. Recalling my intense distaste for Iron Man 2, I have few hopes for this year's vaunted sequels (the Iron Men and the Star Treks), precisely because I expect the expectation of money to have thoroughly crushed the life out of the spontaneous originals.

The irony is certainly not lost on me (is any?) that the movie I anticipate most this summer is based on a book that I am ambivalent towards. It read The Great Gatsby in high school, and then again when I was actually old enough to understand it, and I appreciated it but certainly didn't clamor for more. It is perhaps this lack of investment that allows me to hope at all. There is little threat of actual disappointment, as with The Hobbit. I have respect but not affection for the source material. The movie's failings should not gall me; its successes should entertain me. It's all gravy.

Except in spite of my protective disinterest, I find myself in a sort of informational purgatory. I want to read reviews, partly because they will help me determine what I'm doing with me weekend, and partly because I'm bored. Partly because while I'm not invested in the movie per se, I'm invested in my prediction that Baz Luhrmann is a good match for the source material, and I want to find out if people agree with me. All this in spite of knowing full well the aggregate reviews of this movie will be useless. 25% of viewers will hate Baz Luhrmann on principle. 25% of viewers will hate Leonardo DiCaprio on principle. 25% of viewers will want to flaunt their literacy by complaining about how the movie missed the spirit of the book. 25% of viewers will love it as empty audiovisual spectacle. 25% of viewers will be convinced that Gatsby and Daisy are a love story for the ages, no matter how shallow and awful they are supposed to be.

So we'll see. Or, anyway, I probably will.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

"All that matters now are the people we care about."

I've been coming up with and shooting down ideas for posts all weekend. "Well, I'm not sure I can talk about this without going into detail about my freelance gigs..." "Well, story topic doesn't reflect too well on me..." "Well, this story doesn't reflect too well on this other random person who... well, you never know..."

I've been thinking about Jurassic Park lately. A couple weeks ago Girlfriend grabbed her 2-D glasses (to shield her from 3-D-induced headaches) and we went to see it in 3-D, since that's the way it's in theaters. While it was sort of interesting, I don't think the third dimension added much, except (of course) an excuse for getting it back in theaters. This would be my second time seeing Jurassic Park in theaters, the last time being back in the day, when I was 8.

We rushed out on a Thursday because it was the very last day that our local theater was screening the movie, and we had the unique pleasure of being literally* the only people in the theater. That meant we could actually... well, talk through the whole movie. About the movie, mind you, and it enriched the experience. I'm glad we were able to.

Anyway, I noticed a few things. First of all, I noticed that Jurassic Park really is an excellent movie. It came out 18 years after Jaws and I think Steven Spielberg did much the same thing for another generation here.

Second, the special effects still hold up, 20 years later. In exactly one scene I thought the dinosaurs' skin wasn't as detailed as it would be in a movie made today, and they were occasionally slightly "floaty," but all the other examples of these flaws that I can think of were more egregious and happened in movies years later. If you had told me Jurassic Park was a product of 2008's CGI tech instead of 1993's, I could have believed you.

Last of all, now that I've filled my brain with meta knowledge in the intervening 20 years, I can start thinking about the underlying morality of the movie. I don't mean the message that everyone remembers, and that an entire generation took to heart--that we absolutely should not clone dinosaurs even if we could and even though it would be completely awesome. I mean the more subtle, probably unintentional, morality that a movie ends up displaying when its plot revolves around killing off the cast.

I would dare to say there's always an implicit morality in any story where the cast gets slowly picked off, either entirely or in part. Who lives and who dies? This is how we find the moral lessons of thrillers.

It's worth pointing out that which characters live and die changes dramatically between the original book and the movie adaptation. Presumably that changes the morality quite a bit, but I'm only going to talk about the movie, because I saw it this decade, and I dare say more people saw it than read the book.

Obviously, I'm about to talk about who lives and who dies in this movie, so spoilers ahoy.

At first blush the sorting algorithm of mortality seems congruent with the moral that the more likeable characters keep repeating: respect for nature wins in the end. Genarro, the "bloodsucking lawyer," is the most excited by the chance to exploit the dinosaurs for profit. He is ignobly noshed on by a tyrannosaurus. Nedry disregards the danger of turning off the fences, and even insults one of the dinosaurs' intelligence to its face--a mistake that no one else makes. He is then puked on and eaten.

So far, so good, but then the model breaks down. The next two deaths are Arnold, the non-scuzzy computer guy, and Muldoon, the game warden, and the only person who seems to "get" the velociraptors. If anyone should survive based on the respect-for-nature model, it's him--and incidentally (book spoiler) in the book, he does.

So what gives?

Well, to be fair, Jurassic Park is a popcorn thriller, and not much thought was probably given to the meaning of character mortality beyond what would please the audience, but having realized that and looked into it anyway, I was a little dismayed by what I saw. It's, quite simply what Dr. Sattler says to Hammond while he eats ice cream and muses about his flea circus: "All that matters now are the people we care about."

And that, it would seem, is it. Dr. Sattler's ambiguously romantic life partner survives, as does the charming mathematician who flirted with her, as do Hammond's two grandscamps, who are protected more directly by Dr. Grant's grudging psuedopaternalism (and whose affection in turn saves Hammond).

Who dies, then? Nobody likes Genarro or Nedry. Arnold and Muldoon are likable but professional. Since they're competent and emotionally unattached to anyone else in the movie, they're treated as protectors of the central cast, like the electric fences, and removed to raise the tension in the final act.

So as much as I loved the movie, I was a little saddened that in the end it doesn't seem to matter, really, that people died, since they weren't anyone we cared about.

I guess the only real thing to be done about an observation like that is to do better in the next book, movie, or whatever, that we make.

* Yes, literally. People who know me already know what I mean when I say "literally," but if you're just joining us, I'm unabashedly pedantic about that word. So I mean exactly, actually, and unhyperbolically what I am saying here.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

More work. Enough work? Work.

For the first time I can remember, when Spring Break came this year I really wished I could put it off. My freelancing had slowed down the week before and, all things being equal, I probably would have chosen to stay home and look vigorously for more work. But the vacation was set, and plane tickets were bought, and in fairness to my friends, it really was better to go see them--I like my friends.

And the time for vigorously searching for work came as soon as I got back home. Nervous as I was following the dip in my income, I didn't expect the work to come in as fast as I would have liked. Maybe I was wrong; maybe I've actually built up enough experience that people are willing to hire me, or maybe I just needed to redouble (re-triple?) my work search for a few days, but I actually got plenty of work after a few days, and I seem to have established a new pace for paying work.

Some of what I've landed is even creative, although as usual it's work-for-hire and the product won't be mine. (This remains why I have never bid on a straight novel or short story writing job. I can write novels, and want to, but when I do, they will be mine. Hengist & Undine is mine, and even if it only turns $1 profit that dollar is going to be mine, too.) I'm not certain right now if I can even brag about any of it, but if I find out that I can, you might hear here about some more places you can find writing of mine.

It's a weird thing about freelancing: you often have to hunt your work, and sometimes the hunting takes as long as the work itself. It's kind of exciting--I don't know if it's the sort of excitement a person wants all the time, but it makes you feel like you're actually doing something to stay alive.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

A week best finished

Since I came back from Seattle there's been the cold (mine), the other cold (not mine), the money stress (everyone's), the repair guy in the bathroom for two days, the bilateral pulmonary embolism (not mine), and taxes. I'm not even sure I have anything to say about it. I'm just glad the week is over.

On the plus side, yesterday was Hyattsville's 127th anniversary, celebrated with a fair and fireworks, both of which were loud, bright, and pretty.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

An unexpected disappointment

I had a sad realization today while walking through a Target. Actually, I had the realization earlier, and then I had it again--can you have a realization twice... I mean, I could say "I had a hamburger yesterday, and I had a hamburger today," but I guess if it were the same hamburger both times that would be gross.

Well. Anyway. Today in Target I passed a display of DVDs and Blu-Rays of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. My realization was not that, hey, The Hobbit is out on video now. My realization is that I had no desire to buy it.

This came as a bit of a shock for me. Understand that there was no question in my mind about getting any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy special edition DVDs. (Not that I bought it--but I made dern sure I got it for Christmas.) So did basically everyone I knew. Remember that when these DVDs came out I lived with three other people. Through most of college we had four copies of the trilogy between us. It wasn't a matter of having access to the movies--there were lots of things I never owned in college because one of my roommates had one.

I don't want to wax too exuberant about the connection my friends and I had with that movie--I really think a lot of people felt the same way--but it was something more than you can get from a really good movie, or from fully leveraging really popular IP. I speak now in the language of the enemy, because I think the enemy really needs to hear that. The reason the Lord of the Rings movies made so much money, and lasted so long as a cultural force, is because people loved them--in a sense that is not just a more intense version of "like."

What possibly makes me sadder than my disappointment in The Hobbit 1/3 itself is the sense that the people in charge of it made too much money to register that they screwed up. But I saw Return of the King three or four times in theaters. I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey once in the theater and, three months later, don't want so much to see it again as I would like to un-see about a third of it.

In the language of the enemy, take $10 for a movie ticket, multiply by two repeat viewings. Add the cost of a special-edition Blu-Ray. Multiply all that by the number of people who think more or less like me.

There's more missed opportunity than actual profit.

Back when it was almost timely I made my opinions on The Hobbit known. Specifically, I said:
I am more optimistic about the second movie than I might be. It will probably consist mostly of fanfic about the White Council and the Necromancer, but I will give that a go if Necky is a more compelling villain than Azog.

It's actually a little frightening how effective TH:tUJ's artistic triage was. Fred and Satan both knew what notes would have to play true in order for fans to come back for part 2/3. What absolutely had to work really worked, but there was lot of slack in between.
 That's what I thought just after seeing it. Three months later, if The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug came out next week, I think I'd read a few reviews. I'd wait and see.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Learning about fiction

“The best thing for being sad, replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learnpure science, the only purity there is.  You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economicswhy, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until is it is time to learn to plough.”
-T.H. White, The Once and Future King

I should frame that somewhere. I guess it's too much to embroider on a pillow. (I couldn't embroider a pillow with as much as a diacritic under my own power anyway.)

Every once in a while a seriously academic nonfiction book grabs my attention and holds it, sometimes to the detriment of other things I should be doing.. Last year that book was Lost Christianities, by Bart Ehrman. This year, so far, it's been Robin Hood, by J.C. Holt. Which is to say that lately I've been enjoying learning about the provenance and evolution of the legend of Robin Hood.

I would wax rhapsodic for at least a little while here about the pleasure of learning something--almost anything--but I decided to let Merlyn do it because he's better at it. What's left for me to say is that while Robin Hood is drier than my usual fare, it kept surprising me and I kept surprising myself by going back to it in preference of very well written fiction that I also happen to be reading.

I took away a number of wait-what-no-really discoveries. The things that are original to the story aren't what you'd think. "Original" is a word I should use advisedly here--by the time anyone wrote any of the Robin Hood stories down (in a copy we still have), they had already spread and evolved. But the first stories already have Little John, Will Scarlett (or something like it), and the Sheriff of Nottingham. They also seem to be pretty emphatic about Robin's devotion to the Virgin Mary--not an aspect we see very often anymore. Go figure.

I'm not really going anywhere with this right now. I thought I would point out that, of all the characters in Robin Hood's band, Friar Tuck is the one with a claim to actually having existed. Also, the legend seems to have spread far and wide in England in connection with church fundraisers in the 15th century--of all things. It seems an actor would dress as Robin Hood and sell pins and liveries; people would buy these to get into his band, and then (one supposes) they would go around town shaking down their neighbors. Come to think of it, I kind of wish my church had done a fundraiser like that.

So, now I know that stuff.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

While I'm whining...

All the negative press about the release of the new Sim City game gave me a powerful hankering to play one of the older, functioning versions. Once upon a time I frittered many hours in my cool, musty basement building cities on my Super Nintendo. The Super Nintendo survives, and my copy of Sim City survives too, but apparently I never brought it with me to Maryland. So woe is me, and I must hanker on unfulfilled.

Maybe if Dwarf Fortress would hurry up and get the next update out, I could get my management fix that way.

Whine, whine, whine. Ah, well. While I'm whining.

With every passing year I become more convinced that Daylight Saving Time is an awful idea. Have people ever really been unable, en masse, to adjust their schedules to do their business when the sun was out if they actually cared about it?

In my brief research tonight, I discovered that a few countries (Iceland, Russia, and Belarus) have decided that DST is such a great idea that they have it all year round. The mind reels. In Russia, noon is just at 1:00 p.m. Do the people there feel better about getting up in the morning because their clocks read an hour ahead of what they should? Or is this one of those systems they've worked out because they kept being late to things?

Sunday, March 3, 2013

A spoiler-free (and information-light) update on Hengist and Undine

Fellow writers, have you ever been editing a book, possibly not for the first time, and found yourself thinking, "I hope that people other than me find something interesting in that scene where X happens, because I don't mean to do this but every time I revise it it gets longer?"

Incidentally, if I have never made my opinion on the matter clear, I think the British way of handling final punctuation and quotation marks is superior to the American way; however, I used the American style here. I don't think I have it in me to be a grammatical expat, though. While I prefer British punctuation, British spelling is not my favourite. And while I do consider my self to hold a black belt in the English language, being able to pick and choose among grammar rules is the rightful territory of 10th-dan linguists, not myself.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

I will be brief

Reading and writing continues. I just cleared a section of Hengist and Undine that I think was much improved by being gone over once more. I've also noticed that at some point I stopped finding it painful to re-read my own writing. I think this means I've grown as a writer.

Besides trying to edit down Shakespeare, I'm reading Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear. Like its predecessor, it's quite enjoyable. However, if I didn't want to beat Kvothe unconscious with a pool noodle before, I would now, and since I did before, now I want to do it twice. The reason is the same as before--Denna--only more so. More and more so.

Oh well. This is what happens when we get invested in characters. I should be so lucky as to inspire such frustration. Through my fictional characters, I mean. I've got people lined up around the block to beat me unconscious with pool noodles.

I went to the library today (with Girlfriend, who had to return books) and picked up Rashomon, which admittedly is not a book but a movie. I had to stop myself from looking down on myself as one of those people who only goes to the library to borrow free movies, reminding myself that the reason I don't take out books is that I have too many books at home that I still haven't read.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

My Shakespeare is shrinking!

Well, shame on me, first off, for delaying last weekend's post until the middle of this week. I should know better.

I've kept busy, if perhaps not on the things I should be busy with. Girlfriend (a while ago, actually) got it into her head to produce Romeo and Juliet with her middle school, and I consequently got it into my head to go through the script and cut it down into a middle-school-manageable size. It turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected, and I've spent a good bit of the last few days reading, cutting, and splicing the first three acts. Not rewriting--she was vehemently opposed, and it is probably for the best. Just presuming to cut the play in half is intoxicating enough in its boldness.

It's been a while since I had read Romeo and Juliet (I won't say how long) and it is better than I had remembered--not that I remembered it badly. It seems fashionable to knock R&J, perhaps precisely because it is the preeminently popular Shakespeare play of this generation, but I think it deserves its laurels. Re-reading it, and needing to really get a sense of the scenes and the lines, is forcing me to appreciate it.

On one hand, we have those who take R&J as a great love story. On the other hand we have the scoffers (not scoffing at the text, but at the people on the first hand) who take it as a deconstruction, pointing out that Romeo and Juliet are stupid teenagers who get entirely carried away and die in a hormonal conflagration that takes four other people with them.

I think the beauty of the play is that it's all of those things. I have insisted and will continue to insist that Romeo and Juliet's romance is a good and beautiful thing--or at least that it would be if the context for the romance weren't a murderous powder keg. The play also deconstructs romance, but without denying its potential beauty. Romeo and Juliet's love is simultaneously poetic and chemical, profound and superficial, innocent and lustful, redemptive and annihilative. The play is both a cautionary tale and a celebration.

It's actually misleading to say that Romeo and Juliet get carried away by their emotions. They do--oh, they definitely do--but so does everyone else. To dismiss Romeo and Juliet (or Juliet and Romeo, for the sake of variety) as overemotional teenagers misses the point. The play seems to say that they get carried away, not because they are adolescents, but because they are humans. That is the tragedy of humanity, and the tragedy of the play only comes about because so many major players act on their emotions at exactly the wrong time.

Juliet and Romeo's emotional vices are love, which has the potential to be a good thing, and despair, which--given their ultimate situation--is understandable. The emotions that rule their elders--spite, rage, and cowardice--are less forgivable.

Let's take a moment to consider how almost everyone who should be helping Juliet and Romeo screws the play up by being emotional.

First and most obviously, the anger driving the Capulet-Montague feud seems to touch everyone except Benvolio. Tybalt is supposed to be Juliet's friend, but he's a ball of hate from curtain-up to curtain-down. Mercutio is not much better. His anger on Romeo's behalf provokes him to escalate Tybalt's insults into violence, and where Mercutio draws a sword in Romeo's cause is where things actually start going downhill.

The next unforced error by a grownup goes to Lord Capulet. The problem isn't that he is so tone-deaf as to arrange Juliet's marriage on the afternoon of her cousin's death. The problem is that when Juliet objects he becomes enraged. His anger takes everyone else in the scene aback. His plan to lift his daughter's spirits becomes an ultimatum: obey utterly or be disowned. For fear of his anger, Lady Capulet will not even discuss delaying the wedding. Thus Juliet has to replace her original plan with haste.

And Friar Laurence--oh, Friar Laurence. Here's a man who knows what he's about, for the most part. In the safety of his cell he can lay a pretty good plan--heck, his plan for Juliet works just fine in Much Ado About Nothing. Maybe there's nothing he could have done to save Romeo's life, but he is there in the crypt when Juliet wakes up. He should be protecting her--she could survive. In fact, Laurence previously stopped Romeo from stabbing himself--maybe he could do the same service for poor Juliet?* But no--in Juliet's moment of extreme need he hears people coming and flees. His betrayal is so sudden and banal it must come from sheer terror. We never saw this weakness in him before because we never saw him in immediate personal danger. In the end he can give good advice, but the pressure of a do-or-die moment breaks him, and the flight reflex overwhelms all his well-intentioned schemes.

With these people around them, it really would have taken more than a cold shower to save Romeo or Juliet. A bucket of cold water in the face of Mercutio, Lord Capulet, or Friar Laurence at a critical moment could have saved their lives.

* He does exactly this in Act 4--which I had forgotten, having only gotten through the first three acts as of writing yesterday... I don't think Friar Laurence's official policy on this is "Everybody gets one."