1) The weird physiological trait that suggests a young person is prone to violence.
3) Volleyball or fire extinguisher?
4) An oral history of the Justice League.
5) Classical art, now available gluten-free.
6) How Alfred Hitchcock blocks a scene. Video. I’m really loving this genre of short documentaries about filmmaking techniques.
7) “The Worst Game I’ve Every Played.” Video. Bought off of Steam, this game is amazingly shoddy work.
I saw Batman v Superman on Friday, despite the reviews. as expected, it was full of (dark) spectacle, but as I said on Twitter, it played as if it had been made by people who didn’t understand how stories work.
Screenwriters talk about structure all the time, which is a concern that goes beyond the usual cause and effect of plot and character. How does each scene play out? What effect will this have on the audience? How does this scene play in relation to the scenes that came before and after it? For example, if you watch the scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier where Nick Fury is attacked in his super spy van, you see a standard (and effective) escalation of threats. First, Fury faces a squad of well-equipped gunmen and kicks their asses. That extended scene demonstrates that he’s a badass. The scene ends when the Winter Soldier takes Fury out in a second or two, sending Fury running.
First, you establish a character as super capable, then you present someone who outdoes them.
The similar scene in BvS, where Batman in his Batmobile dismantles Luthor’s security team on the road, only to be stopped by Superman, tries to hit the same note and fails. You don’t need to establish Superman’s power level. He’s Superman. And Batman isn’t being a hero in that scene, he’s being an anti-hero (because he’s stealing from a villain and murdering his henchmen), so we’re glad he’s been foiled.
And it just doesn’t work on multiple levels, and that’s just one scene.
But a number of reviewers are calling it incoherent or saying the plot’s baffling, and that’s a separate issue entirely. It’s extremely common for viewers (critics included) to see a movie, decide they’re not enjoying it, then mentally check out. They stop caring, stop paying attention, and quickly get left behind by the plot.
Why didn’t the protagonist just kill that guy? Why did they have that long scene in the courthouse? Why this why that? Why not fly the giant eagles straight into Mordor?
For viewers who are paying attention, the answers are right there in the film. For viewers who aren’t, their self-inflicted confusion is just another strike against the filmmakers. Although of course this happens with books, too.
There must be a name for this phenomenon, but I don’t know what it is. But whenever I hear someone say “I didn’t like this movie, and it made no sense” I always believe the first half and remain agnostic on the second.
On Tuesday, I hit 100K words on the work in progress, currently titled ONE MAN, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to assess where things stand in a general way. No encouragement or advice, please, especially about the medical stuff.
Me, personally
I turned 50 last year, which I guess is supposed to be a big thing but it didn’t feel like it. Mostly, it felt (and continues to feel) like a timer ticking down. As more and more of “my” pop culture figures pass away (and more and more of them are closer to my own age) I’ve become increasingly aware that my own time is growing short. Right now, somewhere inside me, I probably have a cancerous tumor that’s lying quiet, small for the moment, but ready to expand aggressively under the right circumstances. If I’m very very lucky, I’ll live long enough to see my son married and living a stable life, to have earned a sense of accomplishment with my work, and to feel as though I’ve lived enough.
I can’t really imagine that, but that’s my hope.
The petty medical issues that have plagued me since 2012 haven’t gone away, but I’ve decided to work through them to focus on my weight. I’m down 10lbs in the last two weeks and plan to continue. The first few are always the easiest, of course. We’ll see.
Finally, for a long time I’ve pretty much avoided social situations. I talk to my wife. I talk to my son. I order coffee at the cafe. Beyond that, it’s extremely rare for me to speak to anyone aloud; all my interactions have been online. I guess the only exceptions have been the two-hour SF2W meetups that Django Wexler arranges, and I’ve been to, I think, two in the past year. Once in a rare while a reader drops me a note and we’ll meet face to face. Very rare.
Aside from that, I’ve been actively avoiding social events. I don’t go to conventions. I haven’t contacted the roommates I had 20 years ago to suggest we grab lunch. It’s been a very quiet life, and I like it.
But a week ago I cashed in the Christmas gift that my niece gave me: a tour of some of her favorite brewpubs in Ballard. It was extremely mellow, and we got the chance to just hang out and talk, which I don’t do much.
The following Friday, I had the event at the UW Bookstore, where a number of authors in the anthology Unbound signed books for readers. I suspect most of them were there to see Terry Brooks, but people were nice and it was good to talk to them. It had no noticeable effect on my book sales, but I enjoyed myself, and I enjoyed hanging out with the other authors afterwards. (What I could hear of it, anyway. People in bars are noisy.)
So I’m thinking I should put more energy into that sort of thing. Talking to people. I dunno. Maybe.
Family
My wife is doing pretty well, especially now that she has an APAP machine to help her sleep through the night, which she can do now, sometimes. She’s also spending more of her time painting. Making art was hard for her after her father died. She and her siblings inherited his canvases, which no one outside the family wanted and no one inside could bear to dispose of.
She began to feel the same way about her own work. Our apartment is already crowded, and she didn’t see a point to creating more stuff that her kid will have to deal with when we die. Slowly, she’s moved past that and is doing the work for its own sake, which is fantastic and makes me very happy. She’s also gotten into a couple of shows. Did I say it makes me happy? It really really does. Now I just need to write a hit book so we can afford a place with a studio. North-facing, naturally.
My son turned 14 a few months ago and starts high school in the fall. Homeschool is coming to an end, and I’m hoping that a) he’ll make more real life friends and b) I’ll have more writing time. It’s going to be a rough transition, but he’s ready for it. His sleep schedule might not be, but he is.
Games
I’m still playing Sentinels of the Multiverse on Steam. In fact, I’m playing it too much. I should probably download a program that will block Steam for most of the day. I’d get more done, and do less obsessive clicking.
BUT! I should say that, when I’m playing SotM, I don’t feel hungry, or itchy, or sad. I’m almost completely absorbed, even moreso than when I’m writing. It’s worth keeping around just for that. I just wish it was less irresistible.
Reading
After several years of feeling burned out on reading inside the fantasy genre, I’m finally feeling burned out on crime and mystery. It doesn’t help that I tried to shift from old classics to books that are popular and current, and really really did not enjoy them.
Django Wexler’s The Thousand Names, which I picked up solely out of a sense of gratitude for the social events mentioned above, is a flintlock fantasy that I enjoyed way more than expected. Recommended. At the moment, I’m reading Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon because everyone on reddit loves those books passionately. I’m 80 pages in and mostly enjoying it, despite the fact that I’m not usually fond of high magic settings.
Watching
I took the family to DEADPOOL, which is an objectively bad movie, but hugely enjoyable anyway. It’s been a while since I saw a modern Hollywood film (that wasn’t SPY) that made me laugh really hard. Now I hear that the people behind Batman v Superman are planning an R-rated version, because… I don’t know, they think it was the rating that made DEADPOOL a hit and not the humor? Don’t know. Don’t care all that much.
I’ve also dropped a number of TV shows that I was watching through sheer momentum, not because I enjoyed them. Most of what I found compelling in season one of ARROW is long gone, and I just don’t have space for it anymore. After trying both LUCIFER and LEGENDS OF TOMORROW, I’ve decided that they aren’t going to do that Star Trek thing where it takes them a little while to find their rhythm and they become awesome. Both are dropped. At this point, I’m only watching ELEMENTARY, FLASH (which has been way less fun this season) and AGENTS OF SHIELD (which has been improbably improving).
I’m looking forward to season 2 of DAREDEVIL, even though it will probably be a disappointment. We’ll see.
No one in my family is remotely interested in the upcoming DC adaptations. We’ll see, redux.
Writing
As I mentioned above, last week I crossed the 100,000 word mark of ONE MAN. What I didn’t mention is that last August 26th, I was at 31,000 words.
I know this because of this horrible new record-keeping that other authors suggested I do. All it does is tell me things that make me unhappy.
For example, last fall I took a month-long trip to Portugal, and my plan to squeeze out a few pages during quiet moments never worked. I got zero new words done that month.
After Thanksgiving, I stopped writing the first draft and went back to revise what I had. Revise it extensively, which took a month and a half.
When that was finished, I realized the game supplement I promised my Kickstarter backers was way overdue, and I spent three weeks revising that.
When I returned to ONE MAN, I re-outlined the rest of the book (using the virtual whiteboard app Scapple, which I like) and now things are tearing right along.
It’ll take another long revision process, and it’s going to be a long-ass book: at 100K words, I’m still looking ahead to the beginning of the climax. Still, I feel like this is good work. I just hope the market agrees.
I haven’t decided what I’m going to work on after that. The next book in the series is TWO DRAGONS, but I have a short story due for an anthology (soon) and I might want to write something else in between. Plus there’s that game supplement.
I wish I could be more prolific.
And that’s where things stand.
1) Why you don’t want to wear metal inside an MRI. Video.
2) 15 things I learnt about Islam and British values being a gay boy living opposite a mosque. h/t James Nicoll
3) MRA Dilbert. Combining Scott Adam’s own words with Scott Adam’s art.
4) Poll results: The best video essays of 2015
5) Get rich or die vlogging: The sad economics of internet fame.
6) DIY Netflix socks will automatically pause your show when you fall asleep.
I know that social media will replicate the first few lines of a blog post, so I won’t put anything spoilery right here at the front. Also, I’ll use a cut.
But let me say that I mostly enjoyed it but didn’t think it was all that great. I certainly liked it less than John Scalzi did. Light sabers are still the most cinematic idea ever, but as for the rest of the story?
Meh.
And please don’t ask me to “turn my brain off.”
Continue reading
This post is going to be filled is SPOILERS for the movie KRAMPUS.
[Added later: Hey new visitors, after reading this, why not click the book cover in the sidebar? It’ll take you to the page showing all my books, and you can read click on one to read a free sample. That’s what this site is for, after all.]
I know. Literally zero of you care about this movie, but I took my son (for nefarious reasons[1]) expecting it to be a poor man’s GREMLINS, and I was mostly right. It wasn’t gory, but it wasn’t as funny or subversive as it imagined it was.
And the ending ruined the movie.
The beginning is pretty great: “It’s Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas” begins to play over a slow-motion door-buster shopper rampage through a department store. People get trampled, they fight over toys, employees with huge grins on their faces taze people. It’s stylish and fun.
Then the movie focuses in on a family and their awful Christmas. Briefly, upscale yuppie family awaits the arrival of their downscale redneck relations, and no one is even bothering to hide their contempt for each other.
Which means that the movie’s hero, young Max (who is too old to still believe in Santa, but believes anyway for the sake of the holiday) gets fed up and tears up his letter to the jolly old elf.
This summons Santa’s shadow, the demon Krampus, who “comes not to give, but to take.” Krampus himself doesn’t do much except carry around a bag full of evil toys and gingerbread cookies. He also has scary-looking elves. In all, people are killed, kidnapped, or devoured.
Of course the family bands together in the face of all this trouble and learn to care about each other. The movie forgets that Max is the protagonist, letting his parents do all the protagging, and, you know, it’s fine. It forgets to be a satire, but it does have a demon teddy bear so whatever.
But what really kills the film (in an interesting way) is the ending. I mentioned SPOILERS, didn’t I? Here’s the thing: the final shot shows the family in Krampus Hell. Basically, they’re celebrating Christmas around the tree, but they’re all trapped inside a snow globe, which is placed on a shelf with a whole bunch of others, suggesting that these people will be stuck together forever.
Which is a fine ending for a PG-13 monster movie, but they way they got there simply didn’t work.
First, you have the scene the backstory sets up: the whole family has been taken but Max remains behind as a cautionary tale.
But Max won’t have it. He takes the Krampus bell (which sort of works, given the context) and demands his family back. He throws the bell, it lands in the snow, the ground cracks open, and a fiery pit is revealed.
I’m thinking Krampus and all his elves and toys gets sucked into Hell? But nope. The pit to Hell is part of Krampus’s MO, and they pitch a cousin into it.
Which leads Max to weep for his family and ask for them back. Krampus reaches out with one of those fakey prosthetic monster fingers and wipes away the tear, leading me to think Will the monster undo everything for the sake of a real tear? Nope. He just laughs and dangles Max over the pit.
Then Max says he’s sorry. He apologizes for losing his faith in the holiday (which is bullshit, considering the shit he’s put up with) and I’m wondering if this could be…
Nope. Krampus drops him, and he does the slow-mo scream & fall into the pit…
And wakes up in his bed. It’s Christmas morning, and everyone is downstairs, and nothing is broken or ruined, and everyone is happy to be together. LOOK GUYS IT WAS ALL A DREAM.
At this point, my son leaned over and said: “He’s going to find a Krampus bell and realize it all happened” which is close enough to the truth to win the kewpie doll because when he unwraps a gift and finds it, everyone remembers, and the camera pulls back to show them trapped in the snow globe, and Krampus walking away.
But I was already soured on the whole thing. Teasing those other, softer endings (the tear, the apology, the dream) gave me the sinking feeling that I was going to see a shitty ending. Snatching away a shitty ending in favor of a different one/a pretty good ending isn’t fun or satisfying. At best, it’s a relief.
You don’t want me thinking “Thank god they did x instead of y.”
Anyway, Krampus: an okay movie with a really underwhelming ending.
[1] Nefarious reasons explained: Giftmas is upon us and my kid wants nothing. There’s almost nothing to buy for him, and it’s a little frustrating. So, knowing that he needs clothes and that he has a particular taste, my wife and I figured he would do well at Old Navy.
She picked something that he could get her for the holiday (inexpensive PJs) and, while we were there, he asked if he could get some stuff, too.
End result, $150 of desperately needed clothes added to his Giftmas pile, and he thinks it was his idea.
1) Skimp or Spend, an Illustrated Mens’ Style Buying Guide
2) Seven Things I Learned Reading ISIS’s Magazine.
3) She can write like a man, they said, by which they meant, She can write.
4) Piecaken
5) I dressed like Cookie (from EMPIRE) for a week to get over my Impostor Syndrome.
6) Purple Rain, remade in a language without a word for “purple”.
7) That history of the Mork and Mindy show you didn’t know you wanted.
Until I do.
Here’s the trailer for Captain America: Civil War, and it looks really good.
Comes out May 6th. Wow.
With all the terrible news in the world right now (along with the deeply awful responses) I’m going to write about some personal stuff.
1. One of the regular features of this blog is the recurring Story Seeds posts: when I get a story idea that starts taking over too much of my thinking, I give it away here on my blog for anyone to use. Well, as I mentioned before, a writer ran with one of those ideas and sold his story. And now the anthology is out: Caped: An Anthology of Superhero Tales. His name is Stephen Kotowych. Check it out.
2. Everyone’s buzzing about the latest new awesome video game, so let me mention one I played right before my Portugal trip: it’s called PORTAL. Very fun and funny! I played Portal 2 immediately after, which was also fun and funny, although not as much. The cake is a lie! Right?
My kid has other ideas, and convinced me to preorder Fallout 4 for him. With our terrible internet, it took 2 days to download, but he’s been playing it regularly ever since and he loves it. Do you love post apocalyptic settings? You might like it, too, but if you wait ten years you can probably pick it up cheap and play it on an old computer.
3. For the first time ever, I figured I’d try NaNoWriMo, because I was having trouble getting momentum on the book after a month away. I’m supposed to write 50,000 words during November, and today is the 15th. The halfway mark. How many words have I gotten done? 8,000.
That would be fine if they were all excellent words in great scenes, but there’s at least one pivotal scene that I know I screwed up in a big way.
4. I mentioned this on social media, but I’m almost psyched to watch Jessica Jones on Netflix. I say “almost” because I don’t really have strong expectations, and might be deeply disappointed, but I still plan to start watching at midnight when it airs, just as I did for Daredevil.
This is the way I enjoy big corporate entertainments: I see them as quickly as I can, with little to no enthusiasm. This lack of excitement is why I usually find myself deep in online discussions of movies or shows without feeling even remotely like a “fan.” I think it’s also why online disagreements about a show, which usually feel clinical to me, can be so upsetting to other people, especially now that everyone has decided that casual conversations are “attacks from fans”.
5. The other video game that is taking over my life is Sentinels of the Multiverse, which started as a cooperative card game but was turned into a virtual card game last year. It’s a complex game, and frankly I found all the conditions impossible to keep track of when I had to jot them on pieces of paper. I much prefer to have the software keep track of all that for me, not to mention how much easier it is to read the cards on my screen.
Steam assures me that I’ve played this game for 83 hours this year, which doesn’t cover the many hours I played the version on my wife’s iPad. And while the graphics are colorful and the knock off superhero characters (pseudo-Flash, pseudo-Iron Man, etc) are cute, the different decks interact in interesting ways. Winning games becomes a matter of working out each deck’s strengths.
Anyway, Handelabra has created a free version of the game that you can download. You can play the free version with a tutorial that teaches you the game or you can turn that off. And while the paid version of the game comes with four villains, four environment decks, and ten hero decks, the free one has only a single villain and environment deck, with four heroes to oppose him.
So if you want to see not-Superman, not-Flash, not-Batwoman, and not-Iron Man take on not-Lex Luthor on Dinosaur Island, try out that game for free. There’s no time limit on it and you can play it as many times as you like.
1) Icons Unmasked. I liked the Goku one.
2) Theater from the back of a car during a traffic jam. Video.
3) The top ten Lifehacker posts of all time.
4) “If you were with me, you’d suffer.” Australia falls in love with Chinese dating show.
5) What it’s like to drive the worst car ever built.
6) Every country where James Bond has spied.
7)