Monday, December 31, 2018

scrap snippet: perfect impossibilities

There's a lot that I want to say on my YouTube channel but that's okay I guess when the thing I have to say isn't particularly suited for a visual medium over any of the other things I want to say. I can go to my Pretzelize Me Cap'n! blog but that also feels like it needs to be more official. So here's a thing, scrap of thing really, and maybe I'll have other use for it one day but it'll be here for now till then:

It's weird how some things would be so perfect, but then turn out to be impossible for the exact same reasons that they would be perfect? Let me give a couple of examples.

Like, it may seem a shame that David Bowie died before he could play Tamatoa in Moana, instead of the character being played by Jemaine Clement, but the only reason "Shiny" was written so Bowie-esque-ly is because it was inspired by Bowie's passing itself, and there's no conceivable world in which Bowie would thus even be around to play that glittery boi. But Jemaine Clement is cool too, so there's that at least.

Or the neighbor kid in Spider-Man 2, (looks up,) Henry Jackson, how they wasted the opportunity for that random neighbor kid to have been Miles Morales instead- only, Miles Morales was only invented after Donald Glover wanted to play Spider-Man because they were replacing Tobey Maguire after Spider-Man 3, and Henry Jackson could never have been Miles Morales, and Henry Jackson is from Queens and Miles Morales is from Brooklyn besides. You totally know, though, that Henry Jackson is probs gunna be some Spider-Person swinging around the future of Earth... (looks up,) 96283. Like, maybe.

Sunday, December 30, 2018

New Vlog Up

https://youtu.be/DA3Z3n5iZbQ
This randomly generated URL is not bad. Can dig, can dig.

The thumbnail I made for the video is my best yet, and the editing isn't too shabby on this one either; my vlogs get consistently little hits, but that's fine, I didn't have much to say this month.


Saturday, December 29, 2018

A.0?

The new laptop will be coming in anywhere between like the beginning of next month to the end of next month. 3.0 is so far on its last legs that it's at 3.1 by now I'd say, and I may never get it working again. If I do get it working, that is to say, it will be by getting it back to 3.0 again somehow. It doesn't even bother flipping to the BIOS screen when I boot it up; it's asking for my keyboard layout preferences at the start. Awesome.

Haha, I got it to the BIOS screen!

In the meantime, since I'm getting a new... nuts, it's at the keyboard layout selection screen again... since I'm going to get a new laptop (at a price greater than the fisheye lens... but I really do need a new laptop, I just proved it with the 3.1 stuff, so nevermind...) it's going to need a name as well, not 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever. Maybe A.0? Or something? I should start another one of those polls, like how I did with the 2.0 branding...

And this time I'm going to have the background you voted on! Never actually did get around to it on 2.0...

Friday, December 28, 2018

Ssusspense

watching greak british bakeoff and how do they get it so watchable? that's hwat I'm tryign tto gifugre out suspense but you still want to see what happens before 'what happens" happens so that criteria for what happens makes sense. the editing as well is jjust topnotich. rewatching some of my stuff my edititns's been getting bnetter at least.

Continuity is evidence against lady last Thursday, but deja vu fits into continuity??

Had a third idea but can't remember it now. 

Thursday, December 27, 2018

Super Smash Family

There was a family reunion Smash Ultimate tourney this afternoon. I came in third place somehow. There were some pretty major upsets.

writing right now is physically painful to me. i'm going to bed gnight (maybe update this post in more detail later)

EDIT Alright so I've got motivation to write right now but not this. Uhm I got a dairy queen blizzard mini, for free (coupon was third place prize.) I started off facing against a number one seed, when I was third seed- coming in third place probably won't change my seed rankings, because I'm still definitely third seed tier, but well I am a lot better one-on-ones than in multiplayer FFAs.

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Snippets (on) Wisdom

Alright, so let's... there's only a few days left in the year now, less than a week, but if the rest of the year has been an indication this week is going to last two somehow. Things are so strange.

I have a lot to say but none of it really belongs here. Snippets, maybe. Wisdom doesn't exist for its own sake, not even as a practicality so much as a guiding principle. We call wise those who speak of love because loving is something we do every day. Wisdom requires us to worship, in order to appreciate it or in order for it to be wisdom. But in order for us to take wisdom into ourselves we must also open ourselves up to take folly in as well.

My dreams haven't been as strange as they should be; it's my waking that's strange, but these influences don't offer up immediate strangeness in itself. Seeds for later.

Any detail could save a life. Pray in all things that everything you do has wings of its own.

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Christmas Card 2018


Scan turned out a lot crisper than I was expecting. It almost makes me want to add in a layer of digital coloring...

Monday, December 24, 2018

twas twasn't it

I think I know where my phone might be (I've been missing it for like half the month??) so that's good. I was worried about doing a Christmas card each year (and this year I could IG that!! but alas, no phone) but that's acceptable to do on the day of, so I'm going to bed peace y'all (no pun intended, but, peace!)

Sunday, December 23, 2018

"C O N T E N T"

b r a i n w o r k i n g

so trying to vid-a-week i guess only two videos this month though TIME TO VLOG but really should still be working on C O N T E N T otherwise; writing future videos etc (other blog has answers other blog k  n  o  w  s  ) really focusing ideas to get audiences to care, studying building channels and all that

is this what i'm d o i n gw i t hm yl i f e good question

okay time to give up on all dreams i guess

right now i feel like doing NOTHING it's a bad time to plan the way that shopping on empty stomach is bad time for that except opposite. shoppinglist this is

all i want out of life right now is to make it through christmas. plan later.

n ewy ea r s??  ?

Saturday, December 22, 2018

Shepherding

The nativity pageant thing is over. I played a shepherd in it for, each performance that I was in, which was all but one. I think I'm the only one who cared that much about historical accuracy in the pageant, wearing sandals instead of sneakers and taking my glasses off for the performance, but it is what it is. I got to shave my neck now that this is over (shepherds didn't shave their necks back then, like, probably?). I'd been going to trim my beard further but this is good and feels good and looks good and maybe I'll keep it fuller.

Weird to think Christmas is only a few days away.

Friday, December 21, 2018

YouTube Vagaries

You know those vague technical problems I ran into but can't talk about? They're good now. The project isn't over with, but we can continue with it. I want to talk about YouTube stuff now.

Doing a video a week but not having time to really record anything this week, not anything cohesive that is; I'd wanted to talk about Spider-Man once I'd seen it, just a hot take on that which I'd be able to edit together quickly, but I wound up not seeing Spider-Man yet and you know how that turned out, and I could do something on Aquaman similar but that's so complex I would need to focus on one specific element or something, instead of the gestalt of the thing but it's too compact for now.

Building up an audience I need to figure out who that would be, and why they should care, and that's more difficult than it sounds. Similarly to the Aquaman thing, I need to find some common thread to focus on, pursue that. Research the playing field. Find an entry point. Et cetera.


Thursday, December 20, 2018

Fresh AquaMan Hot Take

I watched Aquaman today. Spider-Man will be on Saturday. 

Boy is there a lot to unpack.

It's certainly one of the most unique films I've seen in my life, and I'd like to believe that's saying something. I'd have to rewatch it if I want to articulate exactly what I mean when I say it's not quite like anything I've seen before, but it's a loooooooooooooong movie, so I'm not champing at the bit to see it again too soon. And it is a lot like things I've seen before, of course, like watching it I'm going, hey I understood that cinematic technique, I see what you did there, deal, but. It is a pretty unique dang thing here.

Like, TRON is a lot like Star Wars in a lot of ways, but it's the only movie that looks and feels like TRON, you know?

It's not so much throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, as, throwing everything at the wall and not caring if it sticks or not. And it is glorious. The director James Wan got his start in horror films, and people who started in horror are some of my favorite directors, because for some reason they just, first of all have the craft down pat, and know how to work with the artists and craftspeople under them, but also have really fresh takes on everything, know how to maximize the creative potential of any given property and any given scene. Peter Jackson. Sam Raimi. James Gunn.

Aquaman is also unique in that it's very much a product of its time. Like, it could only ever get produced now. This age of cinematic universes, and mass-scale special effects, and learning from what went wrong with other fellow DCEU films and what went right with other competing MCU films and just going gonzo at worldbuilding the way the Mummy did, RIP Dark Universe. While also feeling like the cinema of a decade ago, the Avatars and Dark Knights of the landscape, with 2+ hour runtimes and epic plotlines and dense worldbuilding (the thinking being, the longer the runtime, the more we can monopolize the movie screens, maybe put this movie on multiple screens in your cineplex if you want more showtimes, leaving fewer screens for our competitors. Business! (Show business!)) (Maybe they're doing it here because Aquaman is the only DCEU film to have come out this year, and so they need to cram this one movie to bursting with all the DCEU they can muster?)

And like there's no way this movie didn't cost a billion dollars to produce. Look at the hairs flow! CGI flow like that doesn't grow on trees!

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Thea'r Work

buncha second gears wanna come in here I'm their little field trips and eat out popcorn and but or concessions. And watch their fieldtrip movie. Just Grinch, but there's Spider-Man tomorrow. Finally.

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Wishlist

Mom's getting on our cases about getting her our wish lists; I'm hosting it here because I've got links to preferred vendors. Mostly I want video equipment, and that can of course run the costly side, but I think I've found some pretty swell deals.



A new laptop for video editing etc- or, old laptop really, I'm thinking an Apple this time, looking at used MacBook Airs (link on Amazon to what I have in mind; that second guy has good quality and $0 estimated tax!)

So yeah.

Monday, December 17, 2018

Avatar! (The James Cameron One): The Theme Park: A Video Essay: An Analysis

This came out a week ago. It's a long video, about 56 minutes I think, but this is good stuff. The kind of stuff (not the exact kind of stuff, but the quality level) that I want to produce. So let's dissect it a bit, shall we? 

The video quality is only pretty alright, not terrible or anything but pretty baddish (she's not that washed out in the video itself as in the thumbnail, but she is just as vaguely not-quite-in-focus) but the audio quality is great. People are willing to forgive middling video quality; it's all about the audio quality. (How was the audio quality in my latest video btw? I ran a noise reduction to remove the background hiss, and I think it turned out well.) There's very little music, none non-diegetic except over the credits. (I experiment with music in, music out. I don't know. I could see arguments going either way, in my own videos.)



The editing here is awesome, on a macro and micro scale- she's not afraid of jump cuts, and she places them well. The flow from ideas to idea is coherent and well-segued. The ideas themselves are well-researched, but the content only relies partially on academics. A lot of the information comes from personal enthusiasm on the subject matter; most of the runtime deals with personal experience.

Presentation-wise. She's both humorous and informative. 

I try to inject humor into my videos. And also like, information. Both of these things I excel at in real life, but neither of which I can quite translate to any of my videos with any consistency. Make that, any success at all. Need to curate that better, but not sure where to begin. A lot of my humor comes out in interactions with others, what makes others laugh, and also other people giving me a springboard to bounce lunacy off of. The things of my own which I find side-splitting may not translate to others even realizing the inherent humor. And I know the things I know, so of course I'm not sure what information would even be valuable to share with others, or what things people just sort of already know.

Though of course that's an effective content model, listicles of things the audience already knows. So that they can say, "ha I knew that," watch the video or read the article to see if their own knowledge of the situation gets brought up, if their own opinion is shared. (Do people already know that that's why they read listicles? See man this is hard. I don't know if what I know is like common knowledge or what, which is why I usually do vlog things. Because I like vlogs the best, on the channels of hosts I care about; and also because of course such-and-such a personal detail of this last month is going to be unknown to the audience. It's low-hanging fruit.)

Also, she's got loads of Patreon patrons. Loads and loads and loads. Just, like, loads. But less than 400k subscribers. There must also be a content model, some effective business plan on how to maximize social networking content, but that would require further digging. It's something I've been meaning to look into, how different channels effectively use social media platforms. 

Sunday, December 16, 2018

On the Growing of a Channel

My YouTube sub count grew by 50% this evening just by Kaellen and Hannah subscribing. I may have more YouTube subscribers than followers on Instagram; I don't know, I haven't had my phone to check.

I was taking photos for their Christmas card and Kallen just asked me if I was working on a project involving SpongeBob, he'd heard somehow, and so I him, and they both looked it up separately then and there, and we just sat there for a few minutes as they went through a couple of my videos with me just sitting there instead of taking photos, them watching my videos around me. It's a weird experience.

I'm not sure why I don't tell more people or whatever. It feels like I should be actually doing things with it. It feels like I could be a little bit better, on writing and directing and acting and editing and videographying everything. Just a little bit better on each of those, and then I'd be ready to share my stuff more. 

And the videos themselves being viewed by and through other eyes. It feels simultaneously too personal and not personal enough.

People watch YouTube on their phones a lot. I need to keep that in mind from now on. I'm not sure how that would affect anything any different, but it does make me feel better about my latest thumbnail; it actually looks pretty good on mobile, when I'd been thinking, on desktop, that it could have been a little bit better. 

The act of shoving the content out involves loads of compromise, but learning to make that compromise was part of my making a video a week in the first place now. 

Next vlog title idea: "Now where did I park." Eh?

Saturday, December 15, 2018

New Christmas Video

It's been two weeks, on a one-a-week ideal schedule; I severely underestimated how long it would take for me to edit everything together, and also my idea of what the video was to be shifted several times through the creative process. Maybe I'll tell you more about it on Pretzelize Me, Cap'n!
My First SpongeBob (Hospitalized at Christmastime)

Friday, December 14, 2018

?????feel liek tiping lik this

Like I wanna go see spider mans but like im the shepperd in this live action nativity pagenat and like i'm not even sure the times on that so like its so hard to schedule stuff and like CRAP why do things have to be so difficult 

i havnt see my phone in over a week now i dont know were it is 

Thursday, December 13, 2018

Comparisons Between Driving Tests

I failed again. It gets easier and easier. Today marks six months to the day since renewing my learner's permit, but it doesn't mark its end. It's fine; the only downside is that I have to wait to see Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse tomorrow instead of today, because there was nobody to drive me into town (or more accurately, nobody to drive me in and back out again.) I guess it might as well be time to review what I need to fix for my rescheduled appointment next month.

My first driver's test, I kind of went too fast, didn't slow down, still think it might have been the slope of the road causing me to roll down faster and not slow as fast; this time, I think I did a pretty reasonable job of staying within the speed limit, but my decelerations left a lot to be desired. Waiting way too long, when pulling up to a sign or a light, to start slowing down. My first driver's test, already going to flunk, I was still asked to try and parallel park; this time, not even.

My second driver's test, pulling out of the DMV parking lot at the start and failing because I pulled in front of a car down the road (it was very very far down the road, so I'm still not sure why she instaflunked me for that); this time, pulling into the DMV at the end, I overshot the parking lot and had to pull into the parking lot of the hotel beyond instead, then back out and try to make it back in again.

Traffic has a massive butterfly effect, effect, but it's nice to know that I still probably would have failed that second test anyway, seeing how I failed this one more than five years on.

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

A Brief History of Driving Tests

My driver's test is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon at 3:30. I'm trepidatious.

I honestly don't know how solid my chance is at passing. I'm either going to pass it or I'm not, which means that to the best of my knowledge it's like 50-50. That really is how statistics works. It's wild.

You need to be able to parallel park, and I've done that before, but I'm nowhere near the "don't practice until you get it right, practice until you can't get it wrong" zone. My first driver's test I instaflunked that section. I did manage to parallel park, but I pulled up partially onto the sidewalk to do so. I'd accumulated enough frowny points by that point that I would have failed the test regardless, but this was icing on the cake.

The second time I took a driver's test I instaflunked as we pulled out of the DMV parking lot. I'm probably some sort of record holder for quickest failed, so that's one positive out of that situation at least.

Passing my driving test is like dying. It's something I've never done before.

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Solid Salad Day

Blastin' through the Foldable Human let's play archives. There's a lot of material there so I don't think I'll ever get the 100% completion achievement or anything, but I've already taken a huge chunk out of the backlog. Finished the Undertale pacifist run let's play just a few minutes ago; he said he was going to do genocide route next but that was three years ago by this point. Has Undertale really been around for that long? Guess it's not that long in comparison to other things, but.

Anyway, though I didn't really watch any less let's play today than the last few days, it's definitely been a lot more productive of a day for me. Today felt really good, really solid.

Monday, December 10, 2018

Folding Video Games

I have been watching SO MANY DAN OLSON LET'S PLAYS lately. He streams every Monday on Twitch, hosts archived streams on his YouTube channel (most unlisted but accessible as a playlist) and has a  super obscure secondary channel I only discovered today that has even more archived streams, not unlisted but with not-that-many hits on any of them, this super obscure thing. His main channel is mostly about movies, but he plays a lot of video games as well: he likes to stick with more obscure, kinda crappy titles when he plays, generally movie tie-in because of course; as a sort of archive of all this ephemera that would otherwise be lost or else overshadowed.

He also streamed his playthrough of Undertale for the opposite reason, because it's so good.

Today he played that crossover fighting game that everyone's talking about: PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale! I actually kinda like that game but yeah it sucks.

https://www.twitch.tv/foldablehuman

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Input/Output Balance (and other balances in general)

I think the technical difficulties I was talking about yesterday (and the other, unrelated technical difficulties which I'd decided to work around later) have been fixed. Sweet! Now onto talking about other difficulties I guess?

I haven't posted a really hardy post on this blog in a while. I just need to outcrease (increase my output!) in many media generally, but I've been caught in a rut lately of falling back onto familiar, input-based habits instead of artistic creative output-based ones. Even during NaNoWriMo, my non-writing time was just awful in terms of input-output ratio. 

I really don't know how to solve this problem, other than perhaps gamify my outcrease, hack the parts of my brain that just want to fall back onto small trivial tasks to get them to work toward large non-trivial ones? I've looked vaguely into gamification as a lifehack, but no one app or system really stood out to me. It needs to have a good balance, for one; not just the way it fits into one's life but in the way that intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation needs to be balanced. A lot of these cryptocurrency things look really kinda pyramidish to me.

Even reading my scriptures daily is at this weird zone between active and passive, too involved for casual input such as YouTube watching but too passive for involved input such as gaming.

If I go to bed right now, it will be the first time in days that I'm going to bed before 2:00 a.m.


Saturday, December 8, 2018

Vague Technical Difficulties

Oh gosh that may actually be a Christmas spoiler so never mind. I don't know who all reads this. But in as vague of terms as possible (but you don't even know whom the gift is for, so I really don't need to be that vague, because even if you knew it wouldn't really be a straightforward guess beyond that) there are some technical difficulties, and not just because 3.0 is so far beyond being 2.1 anymore, but other truly baffling computer problems. You may think I'm some kind of tech expert, but 90% of the time I'm just as baffled as you; I just push forward and find the obvious solutions and stuff. And a different machine entirely would be the easiest thing to do, in this situation. Which tech wouldn't be that easy to track down anymore, so it's not thaaat easy??

Friday, December 7, 2018

Driving and Unskills

Been "busy" playing Smash Ultimate, which came out yesterday. There are a few things I need to do. Taking my driver's test in less than a week now. I failed the first two times I took it, but those were years ago. I now what fails you instantly now; I've done basically all of those. Driving around occasionally, for practice, there are frightening gaps in necessary thinking patterns; my instinct is to slow the car down when there's a dispute at an intersection, instead of speeding up, and it's kind of a miracle that I haven't been t-boned three or four times over by now. I'm not very good at the things I'm only just starting at, and apparently at the things I've practiced hours and hours at either. Even the things I think I'm good at, or I should be good at, I'm not very good at. But I guess maybe that's like the Dunning-Kruger effect. Or maybe the WHAT'S THE WORD FOR IT ARRGH the thing where you only show your greatest work to others and feel like a pretender and a fraud all the time in the presence of other artists?? Whatever that is. See, I just proved the, thing. However.

imposter syndrome, that's it

oh and see also the peter principle? that's another one that may have effect

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

metaphorical cordyceps

I don't want to be ready for anything. I'd rather spend  my time doing merely the technically productive, instead of actually producing anything. They're very good at hijacking your brain. Like the fungus genus Cordyceps, but looking it up now, what it's doing is hijacking the body of the ant directly, circumventing the brain entirely? So never mind. Other than, I learned about Cordyceps through meaningless puttering around, so, it is a necessary part of my creative process. Like I said. It's technically productive. But it only enlarges the hole of I-should-be-doing-something.

Like, Instagramming? I said I'd IG twice a week, and Wednesday would be perfect for that, but I didn't post anything. Hurh.

And Pretzelize Me, Cap'n hasn't been updated since the beginning of October.

Do you think that adding another social media account for me to do will make me more likely to social media ever? Or like would it do the opposite? Because tumblr is... aw heck, never mind, not tumblr. But as a, medium. As a canvas. When I can't even with the others. nvm

Apparently with most people it's that they social media too much??? My goodness.

Or maybe that's also just a distraction. Maybe it's good that I don't ever social media. sure it would force some productivity into my life, a means to an end and not the end itself, but who needs that means either

in other news , with this computer (the one where you have to ctrl+alt+del and go into task manager in order to open anything because trying to open up windows explorer itself "references a token that does not exist") if you try to type more than four characters into the URL it exits out automatically, and if you so much as click on the URL if you're on a site that has more than four characters (read: all of them) the same applies.
weeeeird

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

New Video (Dec 1)

https://youtu.be/bGFEt2bpZDM

This was supposed to go up on Saturday- with the idea that I'm doing one video a week- but it usually takes me, longer than a single afternoon, to edit everything and upload it. Obviously I couldn't do any of that until I shot the video, and I couldn't shoot the video until December being too busy writing to get any video shot in between. I still need to do another video for "this" week, but I already know what it's going to be about and everything. Expect that on Saturday.

Alex says my thumbnails are getting better. More clickable. That's great news.

Music and Graph Paper

Thinking of adding music to the backgrounds of my videos; trying to compose my own but it's slow going arranging MIDI instruments to sound good. I've already a video or two with my early hands at it, and it doesn't sound very good!

Royalty free options are available; I already have a track from bensounds.com downloaded on my computer from the YouTube workshop from college, the one class I managed to attend. Did you know that incompetech.com also has royalty-free graph paper, for all your graph paper needs? I'm not sure if there are any companies out there charging for digital graph paper, but, if there are, it's also available for free, and maybe they should have considered that before they based their business model off of ripping people off for digital graph paper?

A lot of royalty free music doesn't sound much better than the stuff I come up with, so... there are some gems, but they require digging. Plus you have to match the mood to the content of your video and stuff? But it looks a lot more professional right out of the gate, with music.

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Video??? (Blog!)

Meant to have a video yesterday but I didn't even get it in today. So??

Also wouldn't this be better for Pretzelize  Me Capn since its about that? Maybe. I decided today that that should be about graph design, and furry stuff.

Saturday, December 1, 2018

Word Count Overshot

There was a ward dinner last night when I was trying to write, and it took a couple of hours but it was fine apparently because I made 50k by the end of the month (if you include The Funny Home in that word count, because I wrote most of that Halloween story, past midnight on Nov 1st technically...?) and that's only the words on my blog anyway, because I did fill in a few blanks in there into a copy of the first draft file directly, found the bracketed content and edited that, in chunks too small to bother posting up.

But I also wrote past 50k words as far as I could, just to be on the safe side, and I'll tell you the story behind that. This new crop of words, I also had a little bit of bracketed content, for one, and decided not to have that as part of my official 50k. For some reason. There were also a couple paragraphs of content I'd written previously, outside of NaNoWriMo, which I could interpolate into the bed of word count here though it didn't technically count as November word count.

And also the NaNoWriMo word count tabulator counts "*"s as being individual words, when Google Docs did not, nor was I intending for that to be the case. There were 69 of those in total, in the Doc.

So there we go. 155 words I needed to overshoot. And did so successfully.

There was, like, some stuff from Halloween, that I'd actually written in time... but it's impossible to say which is which, by this point, so, we're saying it was ALL November. Yeah.


Friday, November 30, 2018

have this

In ALex's dream there was a flashforward, narrative technique we don't think about just accpe it as we accpet most dream logics and evne when we don't accpet something our dream logic comes up wit h a more dreiculous explainaiton and we accpte that one. When black and white tv was invented, a whole generation just dreamed in black and white. And now we dream in cinematic techniuqe. I wonded hoe a preicnudstirnalized civiliaztion mucst dream, whatt nattratiove technigcuwe anre neing used there; somethimes i think we're too mhonomiziniginiazed,

TRANSLATED: In Alex's dream there was a flashforward, narrative technique we don't think about, just accept it, as we accept most dream logics; and even when we don't accept something our dream logic comes up with a more ridiculous explanation and we accept that one. When black and white tv was invented, a whole generation just dreamed in black and white. And now we dream in cinematic technique. I wonder how a pre industrialized civilization must dream, what narrative techniques are being used there; sometimes I think we're too homiginized.

 There are probably mind blowingly creative cinematic techniques in the dreams of those who don't know what cinema is.

(Can you believe that spellcheck correctly guessed every word I'd meant to say? Except for "pre industrialized" it just wanted to render as "industrialized," so I had to split off the "pre" there. And also it had no idea what to do with my rapid-type spelling of "homogenized." It's not even marked with red underline.)

a toad man is a man who tells the future by throwing toad bones into a stream and reading the portents

the "fig" and the "bird" are signs against the evil eye. A sheela na gig is a carving of a (heavily stylized) woman exposing her privates as a ward against evil.

Thursday, November 29, 2018

writing like mad

cool so don't have much time but I think I may seriously make it? wish me luck woo

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Great Big Boney Fingers

I know I've already shown you this video, but it was like a year ago and HOLY HECK this is still a GREAT song.



That "work their fingers to the bone" part, that part randomly came to me at some point a while ago, and I was all "that's a great line, what song is that?" so I tried looking it up but couldn't find it and, surprise, it's this song. Though it is how I discovered the song "Boney Fingers" by Hoyt Axton.


I know it was a while ago, my trying to track down A Great Big Sled, because I sang Boney Fingers at Camp Fleischmann this summer! So, you know, it had to have been before that. So, you know. A while ago.

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Not Much Today, Either; Have You Been Reading My Writing Blog?

The films I'm excited for next year. SHAZAM, Artemis Fowl (I just realized Artemis is a chick's name, what the heck Eoin,) The Kid Who Would Be King. All about 12-ish year old boys who gain extraordinary powers or else fight against the supernatural in some way.

I forgot to paste a day's worth of work into my official NaNoWriMo '18 doc, so I have a thousandish more words than I thought I did? Alright!

Monday, November 26, 2018

Dance Rita, Dance!

9imagine rita is dnacing here alreighT?)

Sunday, November 25, 2018

The Origins of A Few Witch Icons

Researching magic stuff for NaNoWriMo. I've mentioned some of this before, but it's really neat stuff.

Witches float because the water is allegedly rejecting their satanic butts from baptism, making it impossible for them to be submerged.

Witches have boils and warts because the warts act as teats allowing their familiars to feed off of their blood.

Broomsticks, cauldrons, and pointy hats were all symbols of "alewives," women who brewed ale. It was one of the few respectable occupations that women were allowed to hold down on their own. Alewives, spinstresses, maybe nuns of course, although nuns live together and not alone, and charges of witchcraft tended to come against women who lived alone, such as alewives and spinstresses...

"Cunning folk" were "good" practitioners of folk magic whose job it was to guard against evil witch powers. That's something just so cool and we don't discuss it nearly enough, in the witch dialogues.

Friday, November 23, 2018

Delighting in Fatness

I weighed myself before Thanksgiving. I was at the lowest I've been, all year, as far as I know.

Weighing myself today, I'm about the heaviest I've been all year.

Yaayy.

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Thnksgvn n wrtng

Maybe doing things other than writing has fueled me. Not with prompts and ideas or anything (though shoot going into the Thanksgiving day feast I had several good ideas I'd wanted to write down, I think I remember them,) but just with, like, life or something. There was something of an empty hole, but that's just the feeling of having something you need to do but not doing it. (Maybe that sentiment was one of the ideas that came to me for me to write down, I don't know. Wouldn't doubt it.)

Also I realized today I may have a very mild peanut allergy; I always thought that the scratchiness at the back of my throat after eating peanuts sometimes was just like peanut crumbs getting stuck back there somehow, but I only realized today it might be like a rash or something. I'm still gonna eat peanuts, of course; eating thanksgiving trail mix later on in the day with peanuts in it, my throat was totally fine. Allergies are for the weak.

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

27 Topics (here they are)

I didn't write at all today, except for this list. And misc non NaNoWriMo stuff (I have a new IG post up, and my latest YouTube vid is now transcribed.) I won't write much tomorrow. But I think I'll be able to write some. I made it easy for myself, now that I have Writing Prompts!™ Seriously my biggest ocstable.

And hopefully more than enough prompts to get me through 27 thousand words. Yesterday I said 27 prompts needed, with 1,000 words per prompt; it could also easily be just 18 prompts seeing as how I stretch 1,000 words into 1,500 getting it readable after the write or die logorrhea. shawty.

But it turns out I need 60,000 words and not 30,000. Which is weird because I only need 50,000 words at the end of the month, which means with all this time I've been writing, I've written -10k words. And that is a lot of words to have negative of.

Hold on  let me do the math again...

Alright, so I still need less than 3,000 words a day in order to make it, and everything's fine as long as I continue consistently.

I do not know how that happened, with the, 60k words thing. There's 26,000 words to go. More than half a month's writing if we're going a steady pace, but, eh. I've got 27 prompts for a thousand words each; that's more than enough.

  1. Moone exposed to the magical elements, attacked by Kissifer. Awesome fight! Use geography! Moone realizes how to defeat Kissifer, and they fight their way over to MacBeth.
  2. flashback to the Dreaded Eye
  3. College thing. Usenet as it stood in 1992. There is no cabal. The Jewish Pogroms had allowed sectors of the Cabal to grow- give broader historical overview of trend, maybe tie into broader theme of like-minded people get together, all setting up internet stuff.
  4. Infiltrate base. Framing the action on a rival paramilitary org.
  5. Flashback: Gef pees on MacBeth. Motorcycle. SUV. Maybe this leads up to the storming of the base? Or a different mission.
  6. Portal scenes: Unwin transports everyone to Babel. (Moone and SEAMUS going to Djinn world?)
  7. Goon squad sweeps in- in confusion, though, Moone's boon can activate, and he and Pontifex sweep out of the room, Pontifex grabbing the Mothman suit. They fly away. 
  8. Goon squad, seeing that Unwin had granted Moone some part of his aura, burns Unwin and his entire cell...? But then why would they let Mothman into the summit, if he's burned by this point? Maybe he doesn't get burned???
  9. How MacBeth did it. The bomb, the gunshot. Framing on Gef was deliberate, Moone would think Gef, everyone else would think Moone. Separates Moone from his entire team when Cloud dies. Does MacBeth not see Moone enlisting Pontifex coming?
  10. Moone makes his way up the stairs, but is spotted on the mezzanine floor. The suit gets damaged further- he tries to fly in it, down toward the lobby floor off of the balcony, but gets shot down maybe, gliding the rest of the way and ducking away again.
  11. Runs into Lovecraft somehow. maybe Gef-related; on elevators, goes down shaft instead of going up at first; grabs car, SUV-type maybe Jeep of some form, established from earlier mission, and starts it up.
  12. SUV drives, crashes, Moone escapes on motorcycle, drives that. Shoots motorcycle at guards, ducks back into the elevator shaft.
  13. Unwin Pontifex powerup moment. Uses one of his boons to defeat the assassin, who probably flies off of the hovercraft and dies spectacularly.Establish during hovercraft action scene that you can bestow Pontifex's gift off onto others if you have it, though Pontifex had to gift it himself though Moone could have. Pontifex going against Moone's wishes, real inkling that Pontifex is a danger.
  14. Give the pontifex more lengthy lectures on mythology as part of his character. Scene of Pontifex telling Moone the truth of a particular human myth to show his connection to world, prior to sexy werewolf scene where the truth about werewolves is revealed.
  15. Some solid scene of the Pontifex actually having to fight himself to keep himself from destroying Moone. Pontifex tricksterizes.
  16. The Poker Game!
  17. Team making their way through the labyrinth. Unwin's men have part in it, but not in heist itself. Maybe have a few close calls with guards down in these depths. Come up with a way to solve the guard problem.
  18. Two groups' heist plans: explain each.
  19. Maybe something about the tooth fairy himself coming down into the vault now. Maybe just a guard. They must surely realize that the air circulation is down as well. Gef has to reinstate it briefly? That would start kicking up the cold iron again...
  20. Two assassins; Slice hangs back while Slit attacks. Shapeshifter and everyone are pushed back (MacBeth's plans working against Brotherhood?), Moone fights assassin one-on-one.Boon torn off, Moone seeing more into the mechanics of how it works. Weird interaction between the team members' boons and the antimagical properties of the cold iron still swirling in the air in the sanctum sanctorum. Everyone's auras come into play, even Xemf's, which is surprisingly powerful. 
  21. Fight against Xemf: Moone has Gef reinstate the security system, fighting above the pressure sensitive floor; Kissifer comes back into play and Xemf levitates over the floor, fighting, the walls beginning to bleed, Kissifer's strength combining with that of Xemf's. Exorcism plan B, there's that trap activated from the pressure sensitive floor, trapping Kissifer, allowing something. Xemf and Moone now fight on level, upper area of vault, in front of vault doors, perhaps teammates also trying to assist.
  22. NOC list's backstory, or what Xemf is planning on doing with the list, Athena powers with NOC list equals not good. Moone explains the whole thing. And how he figured it out (there'd be forshadowing.)
  23. Characterization with Unwin's men. Each gets some, even Larry.
  24. Highway fight, swarms of baddies, turn them against each other to take out Slice. With boon back, dodges Kissifer himself. Demon dealt with (trapped back in phylactery?) Moone is victorious, and maybe uses Slice's spring-heels to travel back quickly to the Acropolis.
  25. Dreaming: climactic battle, or something more cloak-and-dagger? Xemf is defeated; Moone makes out with the NOC list. Something about Gaia, tie to Cloud.
  26. More weird dreamtime stuff. Whatever gets the pacing of the book to work, after so many climactic fights in a row like that.
  27. FBI (Unwin) investigating Moone for Iran-Contra work flashback, Moone learning Unwin's tradecraft. History with djinn brought up? Or is that a secret which Moone uses? 

If TETRAGRAMMATON and DoD are different, why is their SUV in the parking garage of a different agency entirely? URGH the whole sitch there is messed up.

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

27 Topics

I need a list of, there's 9 days left, three sessions a day, 27 topics each to write 1,000 words on. Usually I can get 800ish, tease it out to 1000. Had a spot of trouble getting 3,000 words in today, with my birthday and all. Thanksgiving is probably going to be tougher. But I'll be more prepared for it.

I have a Doc comprised entirely of the bracketed portions from last year, all 4,455 words of them. Expanding those 4,455 words to 50,000, I wondered over on my writing blog the technicalities of the word count there, whether they do or don't count and whatever. I already asked that question, so I'm going to ask a different one now.

What will those 27 topics be? 

There's a lot that needs to be done in the dreaming at the end; I've figured some of that stuff out. But I really want to read Gormenghast to see how that handles action, because I've got a very specific writing style in my head for how the dreamtime goes...

Also, need to do my vlog this month. And one more video. Though I've already filmed much for that, actually.

I haven't watched a single movie all month. I've seen one episode of the Office, and one episode of Burn Notice, but other than that, I haven't really had the time to invest in many other non-writing things.

I mean, I played a lot of Overwatch today. I lost 101 points playing ranked, just kept losing and losing and losing. I'm sure Blizzard would just, give those points back to me, if I explained it was my birthday, but I think my gift today is learning to live with the consequences, even if it's not your fault and it's your teammates who just suck and don't know how to group up and push the point, group up and push the point, it shouldn't be that difficult, and what the heck don't switch up the team comp now, we were balanced, we need another healer, dangit! Some people.

Monday, November 19, 2018

features over bugs

I realized in bed this morning, past midnight but before I went to sleep, that I'm turning, 27, tomorrow. It could be discouraging, to make it this far without really having accomplished anything. But that's not the way I see it, I mean, I've learned to see this as a positive.

Apparently I'm just so complex and awesome that it's going to take a while for even me to figure myself out, and I should be proud for even having made it this far. For example: I only realized last night, tossing in that Chilean Sea Bass thing, that those random tangents I go on to show off all the research I've done or whatever, maybe that's an intrinsic part of my writing style, or at the very least are a feature and not a bug. Maybe some of this information is actually new to people, I don't know. That doesn't mean they have to be structured as random tangents, sticking out as abruptly as they do, but that doesn't mean I have to get rid of them in order for the story to flow better. This month is about rounding things out anyway, and showing not telling. (which totally justifies all the telling I'm thus doing with the random research shoved in.)

Anyway cheerio

Sunday, November 18, 2018

New Writing Plan

It occurred to me only last night that I might not succeed this year's NaNoWriMo. Good news, I can still well over make it if I do put into effect that 3,000-word-a-day thing. I want to write, but I don't want to write that much.

Just charging ahead making up words on the fly like I'm doing right now, without any breaks except for like tiny little ones, maybe going back and correcting a mistype, I can fit in 50 words a minute easily. 50 words a minute, that's 3,000 words by the end of the hour, since 3,000 is 50 times 60. It's so convenient, the math just works out. All I have to do is free write for an hour each day, which is like totally possible. And terrifying. There's such a thing as INERTIA and it KEEPS YOU FROM SHIFTING GEARS.

Alright I'm back! I did one half-hour session, and yeah it worked out, but I should have done another... the day's not over yet, but I think we're good for now, just punch in 167 more words onto my 1500. Here's what I observed for the last few minutes of the writing session, going off the rails and writing about the process of writing instead:
I sort of ran out of juice. 20 minutes is good, 3 20 minute sessions instead of 2 30 minute sessions. Oh boy. But man, if I only needed to do like 1667 words a day instead of 3,000, that'd be dope, this'd be so easy, like you don't even. Because I just sat down, and raced, and fi I'd actually had a direction instead of just rambling freewrite, that's 1,500 words right there, well 1,400 right now, but just 267 more to go past that, and, the whole day's writing cranked out in half an hour! They design these to be easy. The goals to be reachable. All we need is the momentum to get going. 55 seconds until time's up; it won't get mad at me that I'm a little under my goal, right? I've gone past the time before, let's see. 25 seconds left.
 Moone thought, no, he spoke aloud! And then he read
here we go. Verbs. Well. 1500 words, right there, my goal was a little higher than that that's right. Only like a third of this is usable. That's the end.
I cut out the unusable stuff, and spent some time adding and shifting sentences and clarifying things, and it's awesome and it looks great, and it's definitely going to work with miminal hassle and guys, this is totally possible!


Raccoon Merch Time!


https://youtube.com/video/RiOHvPL13HE/

That link's never gonna be one; it's what I had for my video before I realized that like three seconds of audio were missing and I had to cancel that upload, fix the file, recompile it and reupload.


This is the link to the complete video and I am literally the only person who's ever watched it; makes me feel special. But I did so five times! Apparently. And I still couldn't get the closed captioning to come out the way that I wanted.

Saturday, November 17, 2018

Epilogue to today's A Real Thing

Starts here but I wasn't sure if the following I wrote was part of it or not; I'm a lot better at word count if it's unstructured idea generation.

She gets defeated somehow, from miles away, Moone possibly not even realizing it. It's amazing. Do we even need to show it? It's so inevitable that Moone come out on top that, like, it'd be so great if we didn't even show it, and leave it all up to the audience's imaginations. Anyway this is when they pull out the big guns with the time travelers, as was foreshadowed. Yay. 

The Brotherhood had hired Anyone, but it's MacBeth specifically who recruits Slice Slit and Slash, getting back into the Brotherhood's graces. Until they're defeated as well. And Xemf uses MacBeth to power the portal to Athena, to use the NOC list to... do something. 

He's a god here in myth, since every man is his ancestor in the dreaming, so which god has a special relationship with Athena? Hephaestus, obviously, but maybe that already happened (ie this is what's happening when Pontifex realizes someone's messing around in the Dreaming,) leaving half-snake Erichthonius to be the ancestor of the entire Brotherhood according to this version of myth; sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy (though not a time loop exactly; xemf just ensures that its ancestors are the gods, which is what allows it to go back as hephaestus in the first place... and hephaestus sprung from Athena's head in the first place?, so...? more time travel? maybe that portion of the myth would have counterpart in the lycaon thing, so that's what we see play out; oh heck Gaia is the one who brings back Lycaon's son and who is the technical "mother" of Erichthonius, it connects that way at least, but how to make that make sense?). 

How would xemf or whoever access the dreaming at that point, without having Pontifex's boon? 

Also if Pontifex gives up his entire boon to xemf, does that mean that xemf gets the associated bane as well, since the boon would have no counterpart in Pontifex?

Thursday, November 15, 2018

tryna do action but i fall in love just a little ol little bit

I really need a prompt if I want to write, at least a vague vague understanding of how things are going to go. I hadn't been going to write at all today, finding it too tiring; writing anyway, because I'd set up an ambitious goal for myself, I found that the writing itself was rejuvenating; what was tiring was pantsing it, and as long as I had an outline of sorts I was good to go.

Which means that it's time to do action scenes, which I'd been holding off on because I felt unprepared, but I'm about as prepared as I'll ever be, and there's not really any research that can be put into them to stall them more. Finding new supernatural creatures with strange weaknesses that can be used to defeat them? Not today. I have beginnings and endings for the action scenes, but what I realized I needed to make them compelling are goals. An unspoken goal in action is survive, but Moone can do that, so what else is there? Also, solid geography, and, just writing about an action scene isn't writing a scene itself, this is more stalling, sorry.

Going chronologically through the book and finding the scenes that need to be blocked out, on the very first scene I hit a problem. A problem caused by, the research actually being important turns out.

In the first action scene, there's a character with a backup life, only they lose that life which leaves them without that lifeline. The way that suspense beat is set up, though, makes no sense with the research put in. The way that phylacteries would work is, when you die, your soul gets bounded to the phylactery, and that would act as an anchor to this world, so you could keep living? Essentially. But I'd had it, it's a backup life, already in there, which can be whipped out if you die. And thus things get dangerous when the phylactery breaks and there's no backup life. But the way they really would work wouldn't need that part, that's there to ratchet up the tension. So I can't write that action scene without totally restructuring the beats. Like, MacBeth is all, uh-oh, and gets made and there's that, but that doesn't make sense without the excuse to lose the phylactery.

Although the way those work does make using a phylactery to imprison a demon make more sense, over the, "oh it's cracked and it can't hold souls anymore, but I can still use it to hold a soul!" thing I'd had.

I wrote some non-action stuff instead.

Really I'm afraid of nailing down the geography, though. I don't want to make such decisions, and rather have it be vague...

Oh! Spirits by Strumbellas, from a few days ago! No, I remember now, that wasn't the song I'd been trying to remember, that was just going back through all the bands I'd listened to recently and going, Strumbellas? Was this the one? It looks kinda right, I guess... 

It was actually Hozier!



Anyway, looking at it TTDEBCA has its type justified by default; why can't I figure out the way to do it here? I've been doing it manually because I didn't know it was possible to have it be part of the template, but looks like it can be...

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

tryna succeed but i cant even breaks

Breaks are essential, and them's the breaks. But today I wanted to break from EVERYTHING. Not my best day, but it was pretty solid in terms of productivity, since apparently I DIDN'T take today to break from everything. I need to Instagram. I'll do it tomorrow. And, heck, YouTube this weekend? Not having a job is turning out to be a fulltime job.

I was up to 16 IG subs again, then back to 15, and I'd meant to charge my phone but forgot so I can't check it right now. I'd thought my latest video jumped from like 12 views to like 18 in a short amount of time, but I'd just misread 13, and I haven't gotten any since then, and like the first 8 views are from me, adding closed captioning and stuff like they said to, in this "how to grow your youtube channel" video. I guess they never said results were guaranteed.

how do people even i mean i just don't

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Greatest Fanfic Idea Ever and an Explanation of the Origins of *That* Aspect of the Moone/Pontifex Relationship

I structured the first book off of other story/ies, which featured mandatory romance elements, and there's a male part in the role that the female character had in the original, so that's where things went. Buddy cop movies have the same dramatic beats as romances, if you break it down, because it's all about two people getting together and learning to get along (hence the Zootopia Nick x Judy angle; hmm, I think I could very feasibly do a video on this,) and The Anachronominion very well could work as a buddy cop thing, but this NaNoWriMo getting into the characters' heads further, I'm like heck it, and that genie's out of the bottle now. Two dudes who are straight who happen to have the hots for each other. Like that movie Brokeback Mountain.

Also like that movie, French Connection? (no, Last Tango in Paris! Also like that movie Last Tango in Paris.) Which totally fits, right? Because this relationship is based structurally off of a heterosexual relationship in something else, and LTIP is the opposite. It's about a man and a woman and apparently umm a stick of butter, this heterosexual relationship, but the script was originally about a homosexual relationship and they just changed one of the genders is all, but the rest of the movie still totally plays like a homosexual relationship, permeating every other aspect of the film. Including and totally explaining, the stick of butter. I've not seen this nor Ghost, but I imagine the butter and the little clay pot should totally get together and hang out sometime? Oh my gosh, that is the greatest idea ever, and now I'm going to write a fanfic about those two, instead of doing my writing for the day in the form of NaNoWriMo stuff.

Mmm yes...

Monday, November 12, 2018

Pirates!

This new Thugs of Hindostan movie looks totally dope. Indian pirates fighting against East India Trading Company? And one of them is Aamir Khan? Yes please. Aamir Khan in everything, please. And another one of them is Amitabh Bachchan. Him too please. Looking at the film's IMDb page, it doesn't have a very high rating, like, at all, but that's just because for some reason Indian audiences aren't afraid to grade their movie scores on a curve. And also it's probably terrible. But it can't be any worse than, well you know.

But what I think we're all looking forward to is the return of Enthiran, in 2.0 coming out this month. Yeet.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

WRITING WRITE WRITERLY

I am on a writing roll right now. I should probably head to bed soon, or before 4:00 at least, because we don't want a repeat of the 1st, finishing off my Halloween story for hours and hours, it getting longer and longer, but...

There's an article here! Jack Kirby was quite the creative, telling you that.


I'm down to 15 IG subscribers! Guess I need to post again soon. Down one from yesterday but that's still a lot for me.

I'm not sure how many views of my latest YouTube are just from me. At least one of them isn't; I know that much. Doing everything they say to do, and I'm still having a tough time of attracting like anybody. Ah well.

Saturday, November 10, 2018

Latest Upload

I did all the things in this video that the algorithm experts recommend, and made the subject matter as clickable as I know how. Consider this an experiment in seeing if it's actually possible to grow my channel.



Meanwhile, in InstaLand, my IG account has like, 16 followers? And hasn't lost any like, all month? It's quite a surreal experience for me (you know, it's not, but... it feels like it should be; like, I'm just so accustomed to people dropping me like rocks, and having this, without having gained any additional likes on my latest post since I reported it to you, is just kinda weird, but I guess that's how the algorithms work or whatever.) In the olden days we personified the wind and sea and made pagan gods of 'em; now the vasty mysterious forces that rule our lives are mathematical.

Friday, November 9, 2018

Yeti Movies and Also Genesis (the band)

The trailers to UglyDolls AND Missing Link dropped today. Missing Link turns out to be not just 'squatch but 100% yeti, I mean he IS a sasquatch but he visits his yeti cousins as a plot point that hadn't been in the synopsis, so it's actually also 100% fitting into the yeti trend we're seeing lately, is what I meant by 100%.

SO I've been looking for another song, it's from the 80s, and the vocalist kinda sounded like Paul Simon, and it was awesome, but that's about all I've got? It occurs to me that it may have been Genesis, because Phil Collins kinda sounds like Paul Simon, but I think I would recognize Phil Collins but I can only kinda recognize Peter Gabriel?, but you guys Genesis have been around since the late 60s, apparently, and there's like such a back catalogue even in the 80s that it's like, nope, I think I would have recognized Phil Collins.

Thursday, November 8, 2018

Redaction (Spirits! In My Head!)

I got maybe half a paragraph of writing in today! I should just write during writing time, instead of spending most of it trying to track down a song I'd heard. But oh! such good ideas. I'll just have to do, FOUR DAYS WORTH OF WRITING, tomorrow. Or like spread it out, and not melt down and BSOD like I did on day one after spending into the wee hours of the morning finishing off my Halloween story.

So, anyway, the "not like a homosexual fairy" part of Miracle's backstory sucks and is unfunny, and I'd meant to delete before posting it but posted everything up anyway even the crappy stuff because hey that's a place to start; but going back today and trying to fit in what I know of how Unwin's powers would fit into that, didn't work with how it's written? (and I know I can always change that, but it feels like the feeling of  isolation and unreality being part of Miracle's character would fundamentally go away, if it was Unwin strictly that allowed him to realize he had a hidden past life, and so I have to keep it, that he just happens to start remembering that his childhood wasn't real, himself.) Revisiting the paragraph, instead of deleting that crappy unfunny "fairy" line, I just sort of crossed it out like this (I guess because, it had already been counted as part of my word count, so I couldn't delete it?) 

But that made that stupid line, suddenly and out of nowhere, side-splittingly hilarious again?! I don't know what it is. Maybe the acknowledgement that is is unfunny, making it funny, or something; but, oh, man.

It's like, redacting confidential information out of a document, as part of this text for some reason. (In the ~published version~, they'd just have the type set so that the strikethrough is extra thick, so that you get the "redaction" gist but still have the text be legible. And in the audiobook version... they'd, figure something out, I guess.)

This is great. Offers up so many horizons on how to get the humor that I'd been meaning to add into this draft. Most of my attempted humor is kinda dumb, and my humor in general doesn't really fit in with the tone of the rest of it, but now, it doesn't have to, and that makes it even funnier! I think at least.

Also, on the subject of Unwin's powers is it possible for "gifters" or whatever (must look up to see if there's a word for such a concept already) to bestow their boon on someone, but stow its accompanying bane and shoulder that themselves? Seeing how the story possibilities this idea opens up are aitch'a interesting, I'm gonna say, yes!

Anyway "Spirits" by Strumbellas!


Also that album art is just FAB.

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Wordcount Paradoxes

If I'm feeling inspired, I can churn out a little over 1,000 words a minute. Hour! I meant hour. Though how amazing would that be. Aiming for 50,000 words, that's 50 hours. One hour forty-five minutes a day on average, I can tell without doing the math, just from the knowledge that it's 1,667 words a day and 1,000 words is one hour (I mean, alright, there is some math involved technically, but it's basic conversion.) "Feeling inspired" is relative, because the most inspiring thing for writing is, writing, and churning up all these ideas too many to write at once. That sounds like a bad stressful thing, but it's not. It's the opposite. That's the best part.

Writing is stressful, but not the act itself; the idea of not doing it, and just feeling unproductive because I'm not doing it, and trying to fill that anxiety gap with things that aren't writing, which doesn't work and only makes me feel more anxious. Buckling down is 100% the hardest part, which is surprising because it'd seem like the easiest part, right?, but it's not.

What helps in writing is just turning the screen off, so there's no distractions and I'm forced to focus on what to write next instead of what I've already written. And no visual clutter, like, oh, look at that tab, time to goof of on the internet now! Though of course research has its time and place as well (turns out having magic wards embedded into walls like I had is a real thing that people did, man am I going to look like a friggin' genius, but no that's like a total coincidence) (like horse skulls and dried-up cats and shoes and jars of piss and things.)

I'm 3,333 words behind though, even with Funny House technically counting for NaNoWriMo. I have done a couple hundred words in notes and stuff, and filling in some small gaps from the original draft, but that's not really much. I got a great way into cracking Unwin's character today though, so I think I'll do his POVs tomorrow.

Tuesday, November 6, 2018

I Mean, I'm *Pretty* Sure *Cats* is Going to be Animated...

It's the Web Censor profanity filter! Also censoring out the word "queer," the word "porn," and the second half of the phrase "Moby Dick" (though it's up in the air whether I blame them for that one.) And it seems oddly selective, even random, over when it's going to censor words or not (it doesn't in Incognito mode, so...*) My sister logged onto the Chrome for some reason, and it imported her plugins and favorites tabs. That's got to be it, mystery solved.

So I want to talk about all the animated films that are slated to come out next year, anyway. Well, not all of them, but you know. Like, I'm not counting the "live action" Disney CGI remakes or anything, but, heck in no particular order:

There's going to be a Playmobil movie, and an UglyDolls movie, and I'd be a lot more excited for those if the Trolls movie and the Smurfs The Lost Village movie hadn't been so whelming. (UglyDolls is being helmed by  Kelly Asbury, the Smurfs The Lost Village guy, which to be fair I prefer of the two; Playmobil: The Movie is written and directed by WDAS's Lino DiSalvo, head of Frozen's animation department.)

Minecraft film. Detective Pikachu movie. Sonic the Hedgehog movie. Angry Birds 2.

Secret Life of Pets 2.

Lego Movie 2.

Frozen 2; Toy Story 4.

Emoji Movie 2.

no just messing with you, there's no second Emoji Movie coming out

or is there

no there's not

but there is a Wonder Park coming out, not to be confused with this year's live-action theme-park-based "comedy" Action Point. (zing!, Johnny Knoxville! oh wait that's right you make more money than I ever will; I'm sorry!)

The Addams Family! Yaaaay

You know how WAG came out with Smallfoot this year?, of course you do, because ZENDAYA IS MEECHEE


but Laika is coming out with "Missing Link" and Universal is coming out with "Abominable." Which I don't know anything about other than the title, but a lot of people are going to be sorely disappointed (me. I'm going to be sorely disappointed) if it isn't yet another sasquatch film. (I guess it's just an idea whose time has come.)

I just looked it up, it's totally going to be another sasquatch film. So.

Chris "Lilo & Stitch" Sanders is coming out with an animated Call of the Wild movie. Londonheads, be on the lookout, and rejoice with me!

CATS DECEMBER 20 2019 MARK YOUR CALENDARS NOW SO EXCITED GUISE

And of course, there's a couple films whose trailers are already out. Spies in Disguise, and

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON THE HIDDEN WORLD FEBRUARY 22 2019 MARK YOUR CALENDARS NOW SO EXCITED GUISE


Monday, November 5, 2018

You Got the Wrong Heinrich Hoffmann, Man, the Wrong Heinrich Hoffmann!

Alright, so there were three guys named Heinrich Hof(f)mann? At least. At least three guys. We all know the wonderful painter guy, spelled with one "f," but there was also running around, around the same time, a Heinrich Hoffmann who wrote disturbing children's stories where the Scissorman comes and cuts off your thumbs when you suck them.

And then a few decades on, a different Heinrich Hoffmann was the personal photographer to Hitler. What a doof. (Have you seen Hitler posing for a camera trying to look cool? Total doofus.)

It's best not to confuse any of these three people.

Also, looking up THE OTHER Heinrich Hoffmanns or Heinrich Hofmanns of the world...!


There was a Heinrich Hofmann who was one of the most famous and successful German composers of his time, and now nobody's heard of him except for you!

Sunday, November 4, 2018

Right/Left Hemisphere Hemisphere

I need to look into the left brain/right brain dichotomy thing, with left brained people focusing more on logic and bein' all right handed, and right-brained people focusing all on creativities and bein' all left-handed, because last time I checked, that was complete bunkum, but there are still parts about the theory that make sense, and I need to do a deep dive into it? Also, it being NaNoWriMo, haha, I need to do a deeper dive into a lot of stuff, a lot of the snags in last year's NaNoWriMo being research-based, and plus I want to get more creative with that overall anyway (jokes! with the second draft, I need to somehow add, jokes!, make it funny more consistently.)

But anyway I bring the left brain/right brain thing up because today I discovered a book from 20 years ago, 1998 (also from 20 years ago: And Now This, this one-off puppet show that aired on Nick and was intended to spin-off into its own series but which was quickly and quietly forgotten once it turned out to be nightmare-inducing levels of horrifying, forgotten that is until a brave group of adults who had been scarred by the pilot as children banded together online and scoured the internet dredging up as much information on it as possible. It's real!)

The book is called, like, Right-Brained Children in a Left-Brained World, specifically about ADD/ADHD kids, and this is from two decades ago remember so the science is probably totally outdated and not just the right brain/left brain thing, but like how they (ADD kids) do poorly in school because teachers think too inflexibly, in words, when ADD kids think in pictures, and hyper act and get distracted because they tend to get overwhelmed by stimulus, and underperform even though they can actually be quite bright the tests just don't work for their way of thinking, and, if I sound like I'm describing autists instead of ADD, ers, that's precisely it, and why I found the idea of the book so fascinating.

The author of the book presented neurotypical and neuroatypical thinking along a spectrum from right brain to left brain: teachers tended to be more left-brained, with extreme left-brainediness represented by schizophrenia and stuff; ADD/ADHD is more on the right hemisphere of the brain, with autism representing the extreme right of the hemisphere, just past ADD. I'd never heard or seen this model before, so it could be just some weird niche thing, but Temple Grandin herself gave a nice blurb on the back of the book, so...

Yeah, going to have to look into it more. If this is true, it explains so much. If it's not, it's going to require a lot of explanation.

Also, the word "phat" has been around a lot longer than I'd thought it had.

Saturday, November 3, 2018

Extended Edition Over at A Real Thing, Check It Out

So I don't have much time to write since I spent all my writing time this evening expanding The Funny House for NaNoWriMo, all the things that I thought didn't make much sense about the original story corrected, not really subtracting anything but adding a few scenes. I'm not that bad at action scenes, actually; I can write those this month finally...

The short story mentions SpongeBob though and that didn't come out until '99 and Anachronominion, time travelly as it may be, is still set in '92, so IDK.

Friday, November 2, 2018

Five Star!

It is the funniest ***** thing. Going through the Doc of the first draft, and I'm actually kind of excited for NaNoWriMo because it's reminding me why I loved the story and characters in the first place, but checking all the parts that I need to fill in and shifting them over to a fresh Doc, I noticed something. I'm not sure if it's Docs that's doing it, or a plug-in on this computer, or what, but checking Docs from my laptop, (which is working now!! but in order to do it I had to pry off the keyboard so until I screw it back on (if I screw it back on) I have to borrow an external keyboard from another computer, so there's that) it's fine an' it doesn't do this, so,  that's funny, and it's just in Docs too so it could be a that-Chrome-Docs-specific thing, but anyway I'm rambling now I really don't know what...

But it's censoring out all the naughty words in my first draft of Anachronominion, but it's mostly just catching non-naughty words?

Like, the phrase "cum grano salis," Latin for "with a grain of salt," was replaced by "***** grano salis." Because the Latin word for "with" also means, something else, in English... (Hm, speaking of, I should have a scene in the Funny Home puppet show where they drop gunge down onto people, perhaps when they say the SECRET WORD OF THE DAY; it's just so perfect why don't I have that yet am I allowed to add onto the story past its publication date?!)

It bleeps out the work "jerking," as well, because that word could be naughty if you use it right. So that's hm.

But the funniest one would have to be the mention of, the Mary Poppins actor (Quintupleasterisk) Van (Quintupleasterisk).

Anyway I just want to make Funny House TTDECBA canon now, can I do that?, that way the 4k+ words I wrote for it technically count toward NaNoWriMo.

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Art Observations On What I'm Good At Or Not (Inktober and Nanowrimo, but also can be applied generally!)

Writing that took a lot out of me. Urgh. It was, like, two and a half days of wordcount for NaNoWriMo,  completed in one day, completed at the expense of my Instagram post for the day. With the lingering effects of such a stiff writing session at the expense of my NaNoWriMo and my Instagram for today as well. I mean, there's still time left in the day, if I want to write some more and implode. And it also went in a different direction from what I'd anticipated?, for some reason my writing always manages to sneak in weird trivia facts and pop culture references into itself, which (if all goes well) turn out to have some weird symbolic connection to the themes and events of the story. May as well lean into that, I guess. Treat it as a strength of mine, build things around that. I guess I'm in the mood for some, maybe, "Finn Moone explores his feelings for pages and pages;" that wouldn't be that bad.

Also today, not part of Inktober but just drawing, for funsies, it's really good appealing stuff and it's like, why couldn't I pull that out for Inktober? I think it's because, well a) because I'm not very good at linework and inking is LITERALLY 100% LINEWORK that is except for the parts of it that are about value work, which I'm "eh" at, but b) or maybe c) because the value thing was b), I tried too hard, and maybe if I'd just worked in my own style or whatever (a style that doesn't go so hot with inking or something?,) that would have been "more authentic."

But they really were right, my characters do have an appeal to them, and I need to capitalize on that rather than try to draw in whatever style I may be technically proficient in but unimaginative. 

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

The Funny House

SALLY LANGFORTH, SINGLE MOTHER OF ONE, lagged tiredly behind her son as she usually did, him bolting along ahead, through the doors and into the studio to join the other children. There were these tapings which Jay loved to go to, and she played along; though she was always tired and busy, she played along, because it made Jay happy, and if Jay was happy Sally was happy, and that's about as much as anybody could ask for.

Nine-almost-ten-year-old Jay had first gotten interested in the show a little bit before the divorce some three years ago; Langforth couldn't remember why or how, or wouldn't at least, from that particularly painful period; nor could she even recall having ever heard of the show before, though apparently it was quite popular. The production values, the size of these crowds. They filed in with the other children and families and classes, all joining the peanut gallery like the one they had at Howdy Doody time, to be a part of the show, the Funny Home show. There were always a good hundred young live studio audience members sitting and standing in the peanut gallery, but as far as Langforth could tell, she and Jay were the only ones who ever came twice.


There was a live host, a hyperactive middle-aged man wearing an overly loud suit and a not-bad makeup job to conceal his age, yellowy underneath the bright stage lights. There was a postman, a love interest female character. And a host of puppet characters. 

Everything about it was familiar, there was nothing she hadn't seen before, all in the old shows of her childhood and the parts of the childhoods her parents had shared with her. The lion was Pookie from the Soupy Sales show, the owl Charlie from New Zoo Revue, the clown Clarabell from Howdy Doody, the Grandfather Clock a blatant copy of the character from Captain Kangaroo. Everything was new to children, of course, but there wasn't a single detail of Funny Home that Langforth hadn't seen elsewhere.

Except for the House itself. 

Not the house set, of course. The set itself was largely Mr Roger's Neighborhood, sans Land of Make Believe and fishbowl. The House, the character.

The House was one of the puppet characters, a marionette, a modified dollhouse dangling from somewhere that Langforth could never see up in the ceiling, up in the blackness beyond the lights of the studio where the camera would never look. Just a generic two story suburban cul-de-sac house with arms and legs, dumb droopy noodle limbs, its entire body its head, the face taking up the entirety of its body, a crudely drawn mouth stupidly agape. Round oval eyes with droopy lids and a drawn-on nose like an upside down figure seven.

 Rack her brain as she might, Langforth couldn't think of any real other-show analogue to the House puppet. SpongeBob SquarePants or something. But why as a house? Langforth knew that there was a host of children's programming from all over the world instrumental in the upbringing of people everywhere, but it bothered her that the single most important aspect of the show came sui generis. Maybe the one true creative aspect of the show, it was possible.



Langforth shook involuntarily, as the lights dimmed and the show began. She didn't know what Jay saw in the Funny Home show, she really didn't. Not that she'd had any better taste when she was Jay's age, but something about the show here always seemed slightly off to Langforth. It was like Pee-Wee Herman from her own childhood, but even creepier. Living furniture was one thing, but Pee Wee's Playhouse never had the Playhouse itself as a puppet. A house inside of itself, somehow; Langforth had never wrapped her head around that. And sometimes they cut to inside of the house puppet itself, where there were smaller, puppet versions of the live action cast in there, alongside smaller puppet versions of the puppet characters, including the House.

In her nightmares they went deeper than that, cut to inside the puppet-within-a-puppet version of the Funny Home House puppet, and inside that, and inside that. On those nights, when she woke up she could never tell if she ever truly woke up, a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream, waking and waking over and over only to find herself still dreaming, still inside the puppet house surrounded by puppet versions of the studio audience. Like the song they opened the show with, deeper inside! deeper inside!

That awful little jingle they had as the theme song, the syrupy sweet song that the children were singing along to now. Come inside, come inside, don't CHU want TO come inSIDE? The Fun-ny Home! (Fun-ny Home!) 

* * *

Another date, another taping. Or the same one. It could have been any of them. How did they get in every time? Langforth never recalled paying for tickets. But they always got in. And never got chosen.

There were always these little segments at the beginning of an episode where a member of the audience was invited down and allowed to interact with the hosts and guests and puppets, and Jay always waved his hands wildly when they asked for volunteers, but they always passed right over him, eenie meenie minie moe. It was just like her, to connect everything to children's games. The television shows weren't enough. All so very important to her childhood, the shows were, only ever realizing how vaguely unsettling it all was as an adult.

This time, they were teaching a song, and needed an adult volunteer. Jay raised her hand for her; she was selected out of the crowd. Langforth didn't know how they selected her, but not Jay, after all this time. It was kind of sad, and kind of funny. A stage technician escorted her up.

She stepped out onto the stage, feeling naked and pale and alone under the stage lights, an island of brightness in the darkness of the studio. Feeling small, like it really all was a dollhouse. Not just metaphorically, the audience playing make-believe, the ratings and demographics forcing puppets to dance mindlessly for children's whims. But literally. Inside the House, the puppet onstage.

The host grabbed her hand as she stepped onto stage, sized her up and down, and clearly took a liking to what he saw. It was sort of a running joke (creepy, she didn't know why they let him get away with it) that he'd chase after anything wearing a skirt. Or, apparently not anything, judging by his next question:

"Are you single? Married? Widowed? Divorced?"

Tinker tailor soldier sailor rich man poor man beggar man thief, part of her mind cackled, while another part wondered what made them think that such a question was acceptable to ask in the first place.

Langforth nodded stiffly and numbly at the latter option, trying to keep her mind clear. Painful memories, which she liked to keep locked down tightly.

"Divorced, eh?" he slurred slightly, with an almost imperceptible hardness to his voice. Was he drunk? His face seemed particularly yellow today. Langforth focused on that thought rather than any thoughts of her ex-husband. 

Please don't press the point please don't press the point pleasedontpressthepoint...

Instead of pressing the point, the host just gave a big grin to the camera, slurred out "well alright!" (which got a hearty chuckle from the audience for some reason,) and escorted her away to stand face-to-face in front of the Funny Home House puppet.


Don'tcha want to come inside?

The House spoke this, its mouth flapping open and closed just out of sync with its voice but the voice coming from within the house nonetheless. That was another aspect that Langforth could never figure out, just as she could never see the puppeteers operating the marionette from the rafters and catwalks above. How did they get the eyes and mouth to move? The mouth, though it seemed drawn-on, could somehow open and close as the character spoke. A projection, maybe. Or a Magic Screen. Or particularly well-disguised puppetry, made up to look like scribbled crayon. Now that she was close enough to see more clearly at least, she could attempt to peek. Whenever it opened its mouth, it had always seemed that she could see into the mouth, to the interior of the dollhouse.


Deeper inside, deeper inside! Come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, deeper inside!

The House had the voice of a woman, and its tone grew sultry here. The puppet rocked and moaned, jittering ridiculously on its puppet strings as it said these words. Langforth was aware even as a child that children's shows frequently slipped in such parental bonuses, little jokes that would fly right over the children's heads, but this seemed overtly sexual to her, borderline obscene. It always made her feel weird as a little girl when they attempted such things, even just a little, even if she didn't understand what was going on. Suddenly sick to her stomach, Langforth shot glances around, but none of the expressions on any of the faces of the parents in the audience had changed. She looked at the face of the host again, and it was impassive, not even focused on her. There was always the possibility in seeing into these things, Langforth knew, that it's just one oneself that has a dirty mind.


Going deep inside could have been literal. Deep inside the house. As the mouth opened and closed, with the rooms of the dollhouse exposed, she could see herself inside the house inside the house inside the house, going deeper inside. She snapped her eyes away, up to the host again, who was watching her with his dark eyes out of his yellow face.

Langforth couldn't remember the rest of that taping.

* * *

Later, at home. Talking to her son. It's alright, Jay, they'll pick you next time; it's alright, Jay, they'll pick you next time. Trying to calculate finances and reassure her son and wasn't it awfully late,  what was he still doing up?

"You have to go, don't you?" he asked, once he seemed satisfied.

"Have to go where, Jayjay?" Langforth barely even turned to face him, barely looked up from what she was doing.

"Deeper inside, mommy."


Something out of the corner of her eye, something which caused her to bolt. For a flash, for an instant, but she jumped back and Jay jumped back as well, instinctively. She knew she must have been seeing things, calmed Jay down and sent him to bed.

But what she thought she saw was this: Jay's face being replaced by a crude drawing of a face, the mouth normal but the eyes scribbles of crayon.

She never saw his eyes normal again.


* * *

It was something from earlier that had triggered it, something that she'd noticed. The answer to the mystery, or at least the key to starting to unravel everything. She had been rifling through a stack of old papers she'd saved, all pertaining to her son. Trying to prove something, maybe for school, maybe to see deeper into the history of the funny house puppet show.

These were painful memories for her, going this far back; doors in her mind she kept shut and locked. So much pain and loss and anger. She rummaged through the stack of papers and report cards, further back into the past, third grade second grade first grade kindergarten, reports and paintings and drawings.

A voice sang in the back of her mind. It was always there now. Go down deeper, you have to, go down deeper...


Until she stopped at one paper in particular, the one she'd been looking for the whole time without even knowing it. It was a child's drawing, Jay's drawing, in crayon, from when he was 6 years old, from before the divorce, from before the funny house puppet show and the voices and the nightmares. Mommy and Daddy and Me, still together, and smiling, their heads crudely elliptical and their torsos boxy and their legs spindly lines, legs formed by dragging the crayon heavily straight down the page, practically carving wax into the paper. Mommy and Daddy and Me, Sally and Crispin and Jay, rendered with yellow skin and standing together in the greengrassed front yard of their old home. Their old home, standing in the background, itself smiling with a big goofy face, on two long spindly legs of its own.

* * *

Sally Langforth did not sleep at all that night, hadn't slept at all in days but that night the nightmares came back, sleep or no sleep. The drawing, the puppet, the drawing, the puppet, each inside each other. Back on the show, the puppet opening its mouth up to speak to her again, the camera zooming in and Langforth following with it as the camera's view went deeper, deeper, deeper. Inside the house, another house, another face, deeper and deeper houses recursing. Inside each of the houses, the face progressively off, more and more, the face getting more cartoonish and distorted and grotesque, becoming her son's drawing, then less cartoony, the house's eyes and mouth becoming disturbingly realistic. 

She remembered what they caught Paul Reubens doing, and she remembered that Clarabell the Clown spoke only a single line throughout the entirety of Howdy Doody, and she remembered that the characters of young children were frequently voiced by grown women, and she remembered that the characters in the Peanuts specials were voiced by real children and not voice actors or actresses. She remembered these things, but didn't know why they were important. She only heard the House chanting at her, come inside, go down deep.

* * *

She didn't remember getting into the car, only that she found herself driving, mindlessly, her instincts taking over as she navigated the twists and turns of the wide suburban streets. Almost before she realized it, parked her car in front of one of the houses, just one of a row of many pretty and indistinguishable homes. She could still read the address in the glow of her headlights, but didn't need that to know where she was.


Her ex-husband's house, Crispin's house. Which she now recognized as the same house from the drawing, the same house from Funny Home. Out of Langforth's memory, a voice emerged, the voice of the House from the puppet show, but realer and more tangible than a memory somehow, not singing but speaking. Don'tcha wanna come inside? Come inside! The house itself speaking to her. Not the House the puppet, but the house right there in front of her, silent and mouthless. But she didn't want to go inside. There was a reason she had left him, after all. Some parts of her mind she preferred not to touch.

She got out of the car and went up to the door and tried it and it wasn't even locked or bolted, just opened right up, and she went inside, but softly, as softly and as silently as possible. In opening the door, it also felt like Langforth herself had opened up, a part of herself, a deep intimate part that wasn't sure it liked being opened.

The quiet game, came the thought in her mind, the thought that spoke in games. A children's game, an innocent one, somewhat ironically employed by stressed and tired adults who wanted their little angels to shut up for a little bit. The implication of this voice was clear: Crispin was somewhere in the house, probably upstairs, and Langforth needed to be as silent as possible so as to not rouse him.

Inside the house there was no smaller house waiting for her, not as such. She wouldn't have been able to go inside, then, go down deeper. You have to go down deeper, go down deeper. She was never a puppet herself, in her nightmares.

But she was a puppet now.

You have to go down deeper. Instead of there being infinite recursion levels of House, there was only one, all meshed together onto a single plane and squirming over itself, tessellation in smaller and smaller fractal patterns everywhere, the corners of the walls and counters splintering out as each plane struggled to take up a single space, the roof tilings poking out the tops of horizontal planes. And the faces, the House's faces. Not the cartoony ones, but the realistic ones. Faces, and parts of faces, everywhere. The doors of the house were covered in eyes. There was a eye on the wall, giant and closed, struggling to open its lid. The furniture and items all around, all with their own faces, like in the Funny Home puppet show. There were faces everywhere.

And there also weren't. Layers of reality coexisted here as well. Maybe somewhere, in some layer of reality, she was insane, there were no mouths and eyes everywhere, there was no puppet that whispered her worst memories into her mind while she tried to rest. Penetrating deeper into the house, it felt like Langforth herself was being penetrated, pain too harsh to be unreal, so she kept such thoughts unspoken. Maybe somewhere, there was no Funny Home puppet show.

She remembered why she'd left Crispin; she'd remembered, she'd always known, but the sights and smells of the old house forced the memories back into her mind with a reliving freshness. The fear, the horror, the unproven accusations. What had happened? It wasn't a safe place for Jay; she'd managed to take custody, but Crispin had walked free. Somehow. 

Telephone, warned Langforth's mind sternly. What could that have meant? Something was distorted in the retelling. Something important. Something beyond a final locked door in her mind. Crispin... Crispin what?

A glass bottle sat on the dining room table, the scent of alcohol reeking from its open top. There was a mouth on the bottle. A human mouth, motionless yet whispering the final secret.

The mouth was moving. Not, moving like struggling to say something, like the eye that had been trying to open. Moving like, drifting around, rotating to face her as she circled around the table to get to the kitchen. At first it moved gently, then violently, like a drowner bobbing and flailing in the water, gasping and choking and saying stop, please, don't. It was the soft high voice of a child, almost indistinguishable from the House's feminine voice. 

Stop, please, don't. The message wasn't for her. The House itself still compelled her, deeper inside, deeper inside. But at the same time, her mind screamed, along with the mouth, no, don't, stop. The voice and the memories merging; the House compelling her onward, the locked doors of the house in her own mind telling her to run away...

Was her own mind correct in this battle? She stared at the lips on the beer bottle. And picked it up. Gingerly, painfully. And she watched the lips quiver, the voice rising to a fever pitch. Those lips, she recognized them, that was her son's mouth.

Just like that, Langforth decided whom to trust. Her son had been right. The House was a benevolent force, all along, the show was good, the Funny Home puppet show; the mouth on the bottle was shrieking now; the House, benevolent as it was, was still very creepy.

Langforth turned into the kitchen, and saw it. The door down to the cellar. Go inside, go inside. Go down deep, deep, deep inside. She set the bottle down on the edge of a kitchen counter.

There was a bump of something upstairs, as if someone had awoken. Langforth startled, brought her hand too sharply away from the counter, knocking the bottle over. The mouth stopped screaming, as the pot tumbled, in slow-motion, to the ground- she dove and grabbed it- it barely made a clinking noise against the floor. She held her breath.

The staircase light clicked on, and the giant eyeball finally managed to roll open.

Oh. Dear.

Hide and go seek, said the gamesmaster part of Langforth's mind, taking charge as footsteps thumped down the stairs. 

Crispin's voice rang out into the house. "Hello?" He sounded drunk. That slurring, though...

Langforth peeked around the counter to where she could see him clearly. Standing there tired and tipsy on the middle of the staircase, wearing an old pair of sweatpants and a stained white tee shirt. Grimly, Langforth realized she was somehow right; the host of the show, underneath the layers of yellow crayonlike makeup, and seeming years older, impossibly older, was her ex-husband. Langforth's face went numb. A flash of repressed memory filled her reality, pulsed and ebbed away again.

She backed and slid behind another countertop, as the footsteps came closer. How did he wake up so easily, was he expecting this? Was that his plan all along? She paused to realize that the footsteps had stopped. Heavy breathing from her left side.

Crispin was right there, just around the kitchen island's corner. She crouched behind it, her ex-husband standing feet away, her face at the level of his crotch. "I'm calling the police now," he announced to the whole house. Indeed, Langforth could see that he held a phone in his hand, unhooked from its cradle and held up as if proving that he could go through with his threat. 

Langforth realized her situation. She was, after all, breaking and entering, and would be in the wrong if the police did arrive. What would the police find? A real house? Her as a doll, in a house inside a house? She would be the one to get carted away,  not the yellow-faced children's show host. But she could act now. She was mere inches away, and Crispin didn't know it. If she wanted to act, she would have to do so immediately.

Attack him.

Ye- well wait. Attack him? Langforth halted. Attack him, that wasn't the name of a game...

Simon says, let the police come.

Oh. So it was that game that they were playing now. Well, luckily Langforth had been given pause. She listened, slipping around to the other side of the kitchen island, clockwise, as Crispin dialed and requested police presence at his house. From her position here, she could see it. The cellar door. Go down deeper, the House whispered again.

Crispin circled around the kitchen island clockwise, away from Langforth. She eyed the door nervously, as Crispin returned the phone to its cradle. Her brain moved onto another game.

Red light.

Langforth got on her haunches, ready to bolt for the cellar door. There was a sound of receding footsteps, as her ex-husband moved on to a different part of the house.

Green light.

Langforth erupted forward, bursting for the door. Crispin stepped out of nowhere and grabbed her by the wrist, grinning maniacally. Langforth grinned back. Freeze tag. With her free arm, Langforth swung the bottle, still in her hand, at her ex-husband's head, shattering the bottle and knocking the man out cold. The bottle bled blood, and bled booze, and bled memory most of all, and in shattering it, she had also shattered part of herself, and cut herself on its broken glass. The mouth quivered with blue lips, and went still. Inside the bottle had been the final secret, which now urged her along deeper into the house along with the House's voice.

Langforth stepped over the unconscious body, not a children's show host at all, nothing yellow about his face; crossed the last few feet to the door. Yes, yes. Come inside.

Langforth arrived at the cellar door to find it locked, the multiple eyes on its surface staring out plaintively at her. She kicked the door down, blood spurting from the ruptured hinges, a jolt in her stomach, vomit erupting from her mouth and staining the front of her shirt. The vomit continued to dribble down into her chin, flowing in a gentle steady stream, as she went in. Beyond the door was a flight of stairs leading down into the dimness of the basement below. It reeked of guts and death, stronger and stronger as she descended into the anti-glow of the basement, into darkness sucking out all life. Into the bowels of the creature that was the House. The railing felt warm, slippery, and it pulsed slightly, quivering under her touch, as though digesting something. A thick mucus dripped from the ceiling, absorbing up and digesting light and sanity and all. Deeper inside, deeper inside. The stomach of the house, soaking in acid. The floor is lava.

She ignored this game, and pressed forward into the burning lake, listening to the voice instead. You have to go down deeper. Dropping down to her knees, pressing her fingers into the lava, into the stomach acid, into the floorboards which were myriad interlaced fingers and floorboards just ordinary floorboards in an ordinary house, and wrapping her hands around the wood and prying up the boards. Burning her hands to blackened husks in the lava and acid, breaking her fingers against the splintering wood snap snap snap in her haste, snapping away and breaking the fingers of the floorboards themselves, tiny finger splinters worming under her skin, hangnails pulling all the way back, deeper and deeper down the fingers, up and over the knuckles, but still prying. Tearing the floorboards off, the nails of the wood of the floorboards jutting out from underneath, fingers reaching out down to their homes where they belonged, the nails of the wood of the floorboards literal fingernails tearing off as the wood was pried away. Prying away the hands, exposing the dirt below. Deeper.

Scrabbling furiously now, clawing out with broken and mangled hands, pawfuls of earth, deep down into the ground, hand over hand over hand. Dig a hole to China. You have to go down DEEPER. Deeper inside, mommy. Her hands, numb and bleeding and feeling only the coldness the dampness of the earth, the worm-sliminess of the loam, brushed now against something different, something grainy, yet soft. Something clothlike.

And just like that and all at once, the dirt was just dirt, the darkness was just darkness, the house was just a house, and the voices disappeared, every one of them, and the voice of her son as well, speaking to her out of the House, speaking to her out of the Funny Home puppet show, and drawing her downward. All went away. And when the police arrived to find Sally Langforth, they found her, sitting in the cellar, floorboards pried up, cradling the corpse of her son, a three-year missing persons case missing no longer.

They found her sleeping at last, dreaming of the swansong of a clown who'd never talked.

Goodbye, children.