The Venom Stinger!

Working a shift at Fallon Theatre, taking people's concession orders and initiating the projector bootup sequence and helping figure out how to add items to the inventory system. And all that. I did have to miss VENOM but I did get to catch glimpses of the endier part, and, VENOM, man! 

Going back into the theater after the audience had all left but while the credits were still going on, we also got to catch the post-credits stinger. And... it's exciting. It's very, very...

It's a chunk of thing from Into the Spider-Verse, is what it is. There's a tag, like a comic book panel, which says Meanwhile in an Alternate Dimension... and there's a clip from Into the Spider-Verse. Or something. The events that happen in it don't occur even remotely close to how those same plot points play out in the trailers, so I don't know what's going on there, but...

There's, before the stinger, like how the licensed music is credited always at the tail end of the credits? The last of the songs listed was "Music from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" which I thought was interesting, wondered how that fit in there. I'm not sure if it's making credit to music that occurs after it or not, or if there's even Into the Spider-Verse music elsewhere in the film, but anyway.

It was great, obviously. The whole scene there. And the bit or so I saw of the rest was compulsively watchable (and the guy who directed this is the same guy who directed Zombieland? so there's that?) but that's not what I'm talking about (I just love monster movies, and this hits the right thematic beats for me, so I'm digressing on it) so watch me make a cognizant point here:

I don't know if there's Spider-traces elsewhere in this film, but I wouldn't need them even if there were, as much as I love Spider-Man. This is enough for me. Because knowing that Spider-Man is out there somewhere, even if in an alternate reality, makes Venom feel like it's the same universe as the Spider-Man. The same universe as the Webb Spider-Man and the Raimi Spider-Man and 616 Spider-Man and yes even the MCU Spider-Man. Just, any Spider-Man, the same way LEGO Batman is every Batman.

And it feels, exciting. This stinger. As exciting as the vague titillating promise at the end of Iron Man 1, the notion of a crossover franchise when such a thing hadn't really been done before. That exciting. Before it became commonplace. Christmas all over again. I'm not joking here.

It also kind of reminds me of there being a legally mandated X-Men stinger randomly after ASM2, but this one's the same company so it actually makes sense.

On the 90s and the Notion that Mistakes Just Happen

(10/11 9:50 am)

Alright so spilling the ink was pretty suckish, but it wasn't my fault because Mom sad accidents and mistakes just happen. Like, she breaks a plate and spills some milk and it's fine and she doesn't blame herself because these things happen. But it blew my mind, the idea that mistakes just happen; I blame myself for everything. That plate being there at the edge of the counter? My fault somehow. My team losing in Overwatch? My fault somehow. The current political state? Not my fault. I do have some notion of what things I have control over or not.

I think it (meaning why I tend to blame myself) may have something to do with a) mental health stuff or something, or b) my growing up in the 1990s. A lot of my life can be pinned to one or both of those things. The 90s thing with this one though: maybe it's a generational difference? Specifically, all my elementary school years I hear the news, and it being the 1990s, all the news is about frivolous lawsuits. Or Pokemon cards. Or Elian Gonzalez. Also, celebrity scandals and crap. But mostly, frivolous lawsuits! And we made fun of them and whatever, ha ha of course it's not the defendant's fault, it's got to be the plaintiff's fault, but that still placed firmly in everyone's mind the unspoken notion undergirding the entire assumption: well, somebody's got to be at fault! That accidents don't just happen. And sure there were lawsuits back in the 1970s, but like nothing of epidemic proportions, that the national stereotype would be of Americans as litigious. 

Maybe the mocking of these lawsuits also went toward the millennial generation being so friendly with strangers and stuff. I don't know. Things can have upsides too.

Sold-Out Skies

(10/11 2:55- this and "tomorrow's" are backdated because like being busy with Inktober and stuff like that.)

Alright or maybe the idea that I don't want to see those numbers come in (of hits and stuff) is because of how those numbers got there. They got there through hashtags!, because I hashtagged them!, so that people interested in that kind of content would notice them!, because honey this is web 2.0, and that's the price of admission; and that's fine and everything but I'm setting myself up to be noticed when of course there's still that part of me which is all, no don't be noticed, don't let anyone see your artses, they're (hahaha, and the word of the day is precious today, the prompt for inktober!) they're inadequate anyway, and sure maybe they'd be adequate if nobody noticed them, but you're hashtagging them!!, and setting yourself up to be noticed when you're not quite adequate for that yet.

A-D-E-Q-U-A-T-E. That's with an a at the start and an e in the middle and an a-e at the end. Next time you want to spell that word. Don't even want to tell you my first crack at spelling the word; there was an "n" in there somehow...

But yeah hashing the tags feels like selling out and any engagement I receive from them seems invalid. Selling out!

I am, like, a naturally quirky person, I guess. Observing random things. Using the Chicken Dance as a means of transportation. Dressing up to stay in and dressing down to go out. I mean, I'm not consistently quirky or anything, I mostly walk places, but, maybe the fact that I am quirky only sometimes makes me... even quirkier? This is a problem I feel with like YouTube anyway; if I did any of this for the camera that'd be doing it, like, for the camera. But I see Hannah making silly videos and just like not caring?? So there's that concept.

Or Possibly Unfriendly Skies

Oh my gosh, people can be absolutely terrible to each other on social media, which is something I failed to take into account when I was trying to enumerate the reasons I'd refrain from keeping nose-to-nose with the twitches in my platforms' webs. It's not something conscious, obviously, since I didn't think about it, but maybe that's also a reason I'd set the phone down and walk away. The fear of being eviscerated. Or, no, the fear of being eviscerated and your critics being right. 

Which wouldn't be that off, I mean, the process of inking reveals I'm not quite as good an artist as I'd thought I was; for some reason there's nothing quite like laying down a definitive line to reveal underlying structural flaws.

But most likely your work is going to be met with indifference, which is warm and comforting at least.

I posted on both my IGs today, and each has but a single like at present... They are really hard sells, tough coming up with hashtags if I wanted to hashtag at all.

But the idea of making one's work palatable to an audience is quite a different discussion. Mmmnnng next time.

Flying the Social Media Skies

I almost forgot to post today; posting both a daily blog and a daily Inktober is kind of, well... (exhausting. it's exhausting, which is the prompt of the day, which is why I'm being so ha-ha funny about it.)

I've gotten likes on my posts, but actually haven't gained many followers. Like, one or two. It's just a week into this, and I don't need followers anyway, so, it's fine.

The first couple of times when my posts really began taking off (meaning receiving more than like two likes) I stuck around watching them pour in with alarming rapidity, but these last few days I've just been, not doing that. Putting the phone down asap and checking in much later to see what happened. And I'm not sure why, what motivates that. Is it a deliberate rejection of wasting time on social media watching something that I don't need to see played out in real time? Is it something else? Am I just afraid to be successful with a post or with anything?

Watching YouTube advertisements, it strikes me how many of them are about making lots of money; how many play to the audience's greed, in other words. It works on me for the first five seconds before I realize how naked it all is. (I knew I was opening a can of worms, but might as well just hammer out a couple of thoughts, even if I haven't though the issue full out yet.) To be rich is to be powerful (by the way how does "firing one's own boss" like the video title says even work???) Am I humble, or am I unambitious? And why, am I afraid of the responsibility? What am I working toward? I mean, I'm not working very hard but I am working; do I not work harder because I don't want the attention or what? I guess I'd be fine if followers just sort of showed up to my doorstep for no reason, but would I be willing to actually run outside and seek any down?

Anyway so I just checked my latest post and it's got five likes so far. Preettty goood. Four more people than I'll ever be, so I consider that so hecka famous.

"Ime" with a "T" in Front

Time is a valuable and precious gift, which we should always remember to invest wisely. What have I been doing with my time this evening then? I could have been using it to make art or listen to an informative podcast, discover new music or study a classic work of literature. Nope. Instead I hit 100% of my nostalgia markers rewatching an old learn-to-read educational video from my childhood. It's not very good, but I loved it.











The Readers' Palace was always the most vaguely unsettling place; maybe it's because the film is poorly structured (alongside other problems) and tie up all story threads before they enter into it, leaving it narratively purposeless and superfluous. Or maybe it's how Snoz Ali describes it as somewhere you'll always want to stay and never want to leave...

Anyway See-a-lot was a babe, like, the hottest. Stone cold fox. Just saying.

Trench Out, For Legal

Alex and I podcasted about it immediately after we listened to it, so you can hear my thoughts there once it's edited and posted up.

soundcloud.com/whateverwewant7

Hammering Out My Thoughts a Bit More (More TLJ Stuff)

I ask if there's a political component to TLJ hatedom or fandom. The rhetoric does seem to reach political levels. 

1. There's a current brouhaha with Supreme Court nominee where absolutely everyone is falling down party line over which side they support, so that should provide a good metric if we want to get empirical about this. Go up to people, ask them two questions, and see if there's any correlation. 

2. Patrick (H) Willem's video about how he loves TLJ, not about how critics are wrong or anything but about how much he loves it and wishes that haters could see what he sees in it, somehow got proportionally more thumbs downs than the video specifically about TLJ criticism; even though there wasn't really any negativity in it, like they just hated how he could like it. Sounds political to me.

3. Of course part of the criticism against the padding on Canto Bight is political- the scene is much more effective if you bring outside opinions/baggage into it; the film itself doesn't do much to have us hate these war profiteers generally, barring some relatively light animal and child abuse from the horseything racers and handlers. If you're naturally disposed to hatred of, say, multi-eggsacked opera stars, you're going to get a lot more catharsis out of that sequence.

4. Thinking that The Last Jedi was a mistake is also much more likely to happen if you think The Force Awakens was a mistake and that Disney should just have... let the past die, kill it if they have to? (Which of course plays into the, people who hate TLJ for the opposite reason, because they loved TFA and TLJ undid much or all of what happened in that film.) Not sure if this is an indictment against capitalism or what.

5. I also asked if there's any part that TLJ haters can agree is good. The beginning parts, I guess? I'd have to look more into it, but for sure not the part where Luke is... I'm sorry, but when has Luke ever not been a whiny emo about everything? I'd have to rewatch RotJ I guess. And also, look into parts everyone can agree were good.

6. Speaking of the beginning parts, I loved the movie obviously but I wonder if I'm actually a hater. The part we theoretically can all agree on to be good, I might actually hate it because I love it? Explaining: I don't think that Poe's actions directly caused the fleet to be destroyed; there was a freak accident that happened to be while he was disobeying direct orders, but he was doing the right thing (the film presents his side of the argument clearly and competently so clearly wants us to be on his side.) Does my still loving Poe Dameron even though I see people arguing something about how this goes against his characterization or whatever, make me wrong and thus a hater because I'm loving the movie the wrong way? Well, no, but... thinking about opinions too much is confusing.

7 a. The non-film media, television and stuff. Do those who dislike the idea of new Star Wars films do so on the ground that they're films?, like we can just ignore the shows that's fine, but we can't ignore the movies? There's something about the movies and how they're a big part of the overall cultural dialogue, whereas television is just part of specific Star Wars and canon dialogues.

7 b. Anyway I want to tangent and gush about Star Wars TV for a bit. I could do a whole series just on the feels The Clone Wars gives me.

7 c. Resistance is premiering on Friday. Excited? Excited. Because of all the Poe Dameron in the trailers.

7 d. 1. Jon Favreau began shooting the new show The Mandalorian, coming to Disney's upcoming streaming service.

7 d. 2. Another tangent; Netflix has basically nothing anymore; Hulu is where it's been at for a large chunk of the past year at least. Disney's going to be better than Netflix for sure.


I just love the moment in A New Hope when Luke turns off his targeting computer. The character's need superseding the character's want. 

I'm not sure if there's a metaphor in there about anything; I just think it's excellent filmmaking.

Questions and (Un?)related Answers

What makes good television? Is there a political component to disliking The Last Jedi? Is liking La La Land over The Greatest Showman a "movie person" thing to do, with mainstream audiences more likely to lean toward liking the latter more? How much of The Last Jedi can we agree is good? Can one aspect of good television be termed, consistent character dynamic amongst the main cast, the plot the same every week, with the background changing occasionally? NCIS is hypnotic, but it can't be the formula that makes it so compulsively watchable, can it? Is it possible to bottle chemistry? Love and passion into a project of course being a prerequisite, is it possible? Or is the love and passion put into the project, itself the bottled chemistry?

The Show Goes On is the most studio-mandated thing of all time, it's just absolute machine-produced garbage, and yet it still works somehow.

We recorded the pilot to the podcast today- not really even trying and it came out well. The fact that we didn't want any dead air, that we just had to speak what came into our mind, made it spontaneous and fresh, and produced instant running gags.

For Real This Time

Better. You can... you can look now.

Is the background music annoying? I think it's kind of annoying. I like the idea of it, but I think I could have composed more for it, instead of arranging one threadbare track to last for 11 minutes. I'm much better writing songs with lyrics than I am instrumental music. I've got years of musical snippets from dreams that I woke up to record, and I suppose I could arrange those.

september???? still kinda proud but what happened here

This one is like last month's, also unlisted. I wrote in the doobly-doo the reasons:



not listing this one either, *sigh...*
I think the issue with the OBS/Premiere interaction, how they don't play well together making the framerate all jonkity, detaching from the audio track so the lipsync floats randomly etc, is that my OBS had recorded at 30 frames a second instead of 24 (more precisely 23.976 that is)?? I could just look it up why it does that, but it's too late to save this one, and I'm pretty sure I'm right, because I've gone over all other variables.
And everything else was so good, too. The lighting was great, the editing was smooth, I'd composed music to go into the background but neglected to put it in actually but that's fine... Then, at the other end of compilation, all this hard work and, it undercranks on me like a Keystone Kops episode.

IT WAS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE, OH WELL.

Payments and Imaginary Walls

My Patreons are cancelled, my discounted ebook is ordered (but I'm not sure if the discount go through yet?) and the only active subscription I've got going on is the Adobe Creative Cloud. And the Amazon Prime student package, which they're still giving me.

Looking at the Amazon thing today, they have me being a student still until May 2020. Was that when I'd intended to graduate initially? It seems a little out there. I should correct that somehow. And start paying more, because that's the honest thing to do. Like I'm even paying for it myself.

It's bizarre how much money people make, and yet how expensive things are. If I had a job, I'd be able to cover everything I'd been paying for up till last month, on like a day's wages. Of course in real life there's a whole lot more to be paid for, but each individual thing would be negligible. I can see how it adds up, how people can get swamped by debt because they don't even realize it's coming on.

I think about that, seek ye for the kingdom of God, and after ye have obtained a hope in Christ ye shall obtain riches, if ye seek them. What the kingdom of God means. Really I don't want money for myself, I just give it away prodigiously, like the Patreon thing. But I need money also to live. And to make money would be to sell your goods/services, which is like, also blessing others, if you're actually any good. Speaking at least from an artist point of view. A w s t h e ti c. Not sure why people are spelling it out like that nowadays. I'm so rtired.

But wouldn't giving away that be better , you may ask? No, of course not, and this isn't speaking from like a Christianity-supports-Capitalism-somehow perspective (which I've never understood!?) but from a perspective of, Jesus told the dude to sell everything he owned, not give away everything he owned. Doesn't make it feel much better, to ask money in return for what I do (and this is hypothetical here, because actually I've never been paid for anything in my life, at least not anything anybody else couldn't do.) (Maybe that's why I'm uncomfortable with it, because it's literally never happened to me.) It's like there's a wall of pretended morality there, but my qualms are actually excuses/rationalizations masquerading as moral arguments.

Revisiting TLJ Criticism

Patrick (H) Willems is a YouTuber who posts on movies (you've possibly seen his series on hypothetical films directed by incongruous filmmakers, such as, What if Wes Anderson Directed X-Men?) I posted a link to his Paddington review about a month ago, him making a video on why it's so great. He also loves The Last Jedi, and has posted a couple of videos about it, why that's great, and why people who dislike it are wrong.

Why are people so wrong all the time?

Down in the comments sections... hoo boy, well this was bound to get at least a little contentious... down in the comments sections they have other ideas. I can't just watch a film anymore; I also have to look it up and learn more about it, and well I guess YouTube comments sections are kind of the same way, for me to interface with this content.

A rough overview of the "anti-Patrick" camp comments is this: they say that when the videos are talking about negative criticism, he's attacking straw men; that he's taking for granted and dissecting the idea that TLJ isn't a bad "movie," just a bad "Star Wars movie." That the critics against the film (at least these ones) don't see TLJ as bad Star Wars films, just as bad films period. Which is a matter of opinion, as it always is, but, where in the world are they getting such notions? It's bizarre.

I'm genuinely trying to understand how people could hate The Last Jedi. 

At least they're just being wrong, instead of actively being terrible to people. There are worse things in the world to be, than wrong.

But seriously looking at the comments and suggestions as to why TLJ may have been a bad film, I'm getting, aside from "not understanding the characters" or whatever: it's tonally inconsistent. A lot of people didn't like the humor, or maybe they would have liked it, had not the humor been placed where it was.

I didn't get that one at all.

Are critic-y people and movie buffs such as I, just naturally more likely to be alright with  tonal whip-pans than mainstream audiences? Are people who don't watch that many films, or only watch mainstream faire, more sensitive to mood whiplash? Me, I love jarring tonal shifts. I watch a lot of Bollywood, and it happens there all the time, and you just learn to roll with it, and it makes the final product all the more epic in the long run. And so is my failure to see any mood whiplash in TLJ, even when specific examples are pointed out to me, a result of mood whiplash desensitization? And is that why I don't mind that? I don't know.

The other point, anyway. Maybe The Last Jedi doesn't understand its characters...? I'd have to rewatch The Force Awakens to see if the characterization was as thin there as I remember it being. I love that movie, of course, but I remember it being very much, not self-contained as far as characterization went, like say A New Hope was. I'd been going to do that today, actually, but instead I cultivated curated and annotated a selection of t.o.'d YouTube comments in an attempt to understand the viewpoint being portrayed therein. It's the good life.

View the curated list HERE.

+/- $1

I put a li'l bit of spare cash into my bank account, thinking that this subscription which I'd cancelled has its payment at the end of the period instead of the beginning, and the subscription costing exactly one more dollar than I'd had in my account. Only, the subscription didn't bill me, with today being the last day of it, so it looks like the payments are on the first day of the pay period and not the last- and thus I have the cost of that plus a dollar, in my bank account. Plus the other dollars I also put in just in case I was wrong about the "exactly a dollar" thing.

It's $3 credit toward a Kindle book anyway, so that extra dollar is, it's all exactly how much I'd thought it would be.

Pizlo Shouts Paradox

Mary Robinette Kowal hosts on her blog interviews with sff authors, consisting of one question: their favorite part in their latest work, and why. Lawrence M Schoen talks about his favorite part in The Moons of Barsk here; it is transcendently resplendently splendid.

http://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit-lawrence-m-schoen-talks-about-the-moons-of-barsk/

$4 Discounts and Littul Kittons

I learned so much today it's absolutely insane. Alright, I've got $4 in complimentary Amazon credit which I can use to purchase a book. I buy an ebook on Amazon, I get discounted $4, right? It goes away at the end of the month, so I've only got a few days to decide what I want to do with it. Obviously I want the best deal for myself, since the $4 only goes toward one purchase, so $4 and up is perfect; at the same time, I'm basically broke, so it shouldn't be more than that by, almost any degree of money. So I'm looking for a book of exactly $4, or $3.99 or something. Dead Alligator Lizard is $2.99, but I already own it. There's a book on my wishlist at $4.99, which, heck I'm probably going to do that.

But the next time I'm at a library I'm definitely checking out (because hypothetically I also have the ability to make checkouts from this library) at least one book by Cordwainer Smith; also, why have I not heard of this guy before? Alright, I've definitely heard of him, but, why is he not more famous? I don't know. Golden-age SFF tends to be undervalued anymore, is my best guess.

The gist of his work is, it's mostly all in this one shared setting, but spanning thousands of years, and not connected by a story arch or anything; everything just, happens to take place in the same universe. Just researching his stories though, it's the most crazy imaginative stuff I've read since Osamu Tezuka.

Like, who needs death lasers or nukes in your killsat when you can have genetically engineered bloodthirsty minks who have to be kept sedated otherwise they'll kill themselves and each other? There is absolutely no excuse or need to be cliche in science fiction.

But also, like his prose is supposed to be really interesting too, and the way he constructs his stories...

Overcookies

So during the day I have all these crazy thoughts but when it comes time to write anything- it's not that I can't remember them, they just don't seem worth talking about. I mean, Solo: A Star Wars Story really is my favorite Star Wars film outside of the original trilogy, and in real life I could rave for half an hour straight about how much I love it and the details why, but writing that down, that expends a lot of energy, and it's not as fun as like saying the words out loud for some reason.

Made cookies. Overcooked them. Overcookies! Made brownies instead.

I brought a desk in from the garage, into my room. There had been two beds, but the day before yesterday one got moved out (like I said with the sleeping in the corner.) Big empty space, time to put it to use.

Bed on the side with the window now. East-facing. Wake up in the morning, a couple hours earlier than I had been without it. It's good for me.

Little Dots

54, why 54...? 55 has such a better ring to it, or maybe wait ten days after that and it's still going on, you get 64 with is 2 to the sixth power, much more mathematically significant. Oh well. It was late and I needed a post I could knock out quickly. I went to bed very early last night. Not really bed so much as, curl up against the wall and happen to fall asleep.

More on that later.

Polka dots! Now You See It has a recent video on the symbolism of stripe patterns, their use in costume designs in film. They mention stripes as being ambiguous (which color is the foreground and which is the background?), and also attention-grabbing. Making stripes the stand-out-iest out of all the patterns.

But me, I like polka dots.

Why did I curl up against the wall? It's something I've always wanted to do, lose all motivation and lie down then and there, even though you happen to be in the middle of the street when you do so. Cry yourself to sleep. Or whatever. It felt decently good, but in a dangerous way. Do this any more, and it may become a habit.

But polka dots gave me life. I was held in the palm of polka dots, and nurtured in their heartbeat.

I have a bed. It has a mattress protector now, which is what it lacked last night, which is why I curled up against a corner instead. The bed sounds nice. Even though I can't literally hear it.

There were things I wanted to get done yesterday. Too many things. They swam around, threatening to drown me. So I decided to take a break from them. In a corner. In the dark. And I remembered a lyric. It's funny how some distance makes everything seem small. The fears that once controlled me can't get to me at all.

I should still do those things, but they're not as complex or as time-sensitive as I'd made them out to be.

And in church today, I lacked motivation for anything too. I was lifted up by polka dots. It's the little things that make life awesome.

Day 54 of the "Check Out My Sick Elephant" Crisis

Wondermark.com

This is (Not Quite) My Life Now

Actually using hashtags and stuff in my latest IG post I managed to double my followers (still not a very impressive number but it's a start,) and linking my sites from the post, well I haven't gotten any hits from that but you never know. Which means it's time to STEP IT UP DOO-DOO-DOO.

My Instagram posts seem to go up every Wednesday, based on the not-pattern (but still precedent) of my last two posts posted. I probably should (and definitely could) make that more regular, but I'M POSTING AT ALL AT LEAST. And Inktober coming up waka-waka-waka facilitate that especially now that I have ink (thanks, ma!); I know how to control lines with a paintbrush so using a nib pen should be the same basic principle, right? I guess I'll practice tomorrow.

And also find time for editing and posting a video. I'd meant to get a YouTube video up today, but it looks like it's maybe a tomorrow thing, which would make it look like it's a Saturday thing if I want to go the weekly route. The last time I posted on Pretzelize Me Cap'n! was two weeks ago, on Saturday; should I continue with that also in posting regularly there, which would make those Saturdays as well...? 

And I'm not sure about regularity in terms of facebook, but last I posted there was Wednesday as well, same day as Instagram. (I'd had such a lack of activity on that page that it actually unpublished from the web, and I had to republish it again. Some weird thing Facebook does to make sure people are regular and frequent with their engagement. Booting my FB page back up, due to mentioning it in the IG.) 

Not sure if I should stagger these out; I've read website articles on the best times to post for MAXIMUM ENGAGEMENT, but I can't remember a thing other than: hey you should post more.

Or how about this: I work hard at making my yaargh content as quality as possible, and then see into regularity.