Anybody over a certain age from the PNW has some kind of memory of The Shane Company’s dry, dry radio commercials. I remember he was at the corner of 4th and Stewart, and I remember that slogan: “Now you have a friend in the diamond business – the Shane Company.” Anyway, they finally gave the bear an English voice in Duolingo and he sounds exactly like those commercials. No growl, no fun allowed. I’m annoyed.
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It’s hard to judge what a reasonable level of fear is in reaction to shitty events, and there are plenty of extremely shitty events going on in the world right now. (Thanks, fascists! Please eat shit and die at your earliest convenience.) That said, there are a loooot of people on the internet right now stoking panic. Like Putin makes a lazy threat about hacking our shit and tweets and subreddits explode, telling you to run for the hills immediately lest you fall victim to supply chain banditos.
Harden the fuck up, you ridiculous cowards. You make it harder for people to judge what that reasonable level of fear is, by ratcheting every little thing up to “cannibal holocaust.” You spread anxiety and dread and turn stomachs and ruin people’s days. The way you talk, I imagine you trembling like little chihuahuas with urine running down your thighs as you clack out your terrified tweets. Yeah, especially those of you with guns.
Do you live in America? Are you not a member of an oppressed minority at the moment? (No, xtians don’t count.) You’re going to be fine. Some bad stuff will happen. Wildfires burning up your cabins, rising tides taking out your timeshares. But compared to people in Ukraine, or Russia, or anywhere near the Equator? Your life is going to be a cakewalk – at least until you’re old and infirm enough to be considered disposable by republicans. Drink in the freedom, manbabies. Calm the fuck down.
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Seems like the internet isn’t being very productive for me today, but I’m intentionally not following politics. I wonder if the people I follow on social media are all glued to TV wondering if it’s time for hot war with Russia. What are you doing today?
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CONTENT WARNINGS: Horror Content.
After the last day of our Monster Hearts Challenge, my writing group got to do one more monster, choosing from the following categories that had not previously won any round of voting. Which would you write about? Which monster would you grant the gift of human romance?
ANIMALISTIC — EXAMPLES: Cat people, Sneeple, Ninja Turtle, Easter Bunny
BODY HORROR — EXAMPLES: Tetsuos of Iron Man and Akira type, Blob, Cronenbergian
CONSTRUCTED — EXAMPLES: Frankenstein creatures, Golems, Homunculi, Pinocchio
CRYPTID — EXAMPLES: Bigfoot, Mothman, Chupacabra, Jersey Devil
ELDRITCH — EXAMPLES: Lovecraftian, Elder god, Tentacled
GIANT — EXAMPLES: Kaiju, Ogre, Giant, Troll
HYBRID — EXAMPLES: Sphynx, Chimera, Egyptian God, Naga
INCORPOREAL — EXAMPLES: Invisible man, Incorporeal alien, Imaginary friend, Ghosts, Poltergeist, Patrick Swayzes
INSECTOID — EXAMPLES: Brundlefly, Mimic, Wasp woman, Giant Spider
J-HORROR — EXAMPLES: Grudge, Sadako, Split-mouth woman
LEGEND — EXAMPLES: Slenderman, Candyman, Bloody Mary, ManDoorHandHookCarDoor
LIVING OBJECT — EXAMPLES: Living mannequin, Christine, Chuckie, Magic Mirror
TINY — EXAMPLES: Sprite, Miniature Humanoids, Gnome, Gremlin
VIRTUAL — EXAMPLES: Rogue AI, Hologram, Vocaloid, Max Headroom
YOKAI — EXAMPLES: Long neck woman, Tengu, Kappa
If you remember how I did last time, you know I tried to use all of them in one concept…
Content Warnings: Horror Content, Unhealthy Relationships, Ironic Ableisms
My writing discord did an event called Monster Hearts, named after an RPG that’s probably too racy for people like ourselves to actually play. The idea is, like in our Spooktober, to take a monster type and come up with a story idea to go with it – one for each day of the month up to and including Valentine’s Day. This time, though, the stories have to involve a passionate relationship between a human and a monster. I give you my monster hearts. Happy lovin’ day.
I was trying to remember the name of the AI in Portal and was like, “the cake liar in the hole shooty game.” Y’all know what it is.
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I had a dream last night that I don’t remember well, outside of these few specifics. I’ve never had a pet mouse or rat or been interested to, but in this dream I had a mouse that was the size of a small rat. It died and we had to report it to some government agency. As a small animal, for proof of death I was able to submit his entire body through the mail. We received the body back along with a partially calligraphic letter offering official condolences on our loss.
I noticed his body was in perfect condition. While cool to the touch, I kept feeling like there were little movements in him. Lo and behold, he woke up. I was happy to tell my boyfriend he was, in fact, alive. The report of his demise was made in error.
I was so happy, in fact, that I felt a sense of relief and of love for the little animal, unadulterated by conscious self-awareness and bitterness. Pure love, quickly forgotten on waking. But I had a sense that I lost something in the transition to waking life, that I should have stayed asleep. You ever fall in love in a dream? Have a friend or lover or relative in a dream who does not exist in real life, where waking up felt like a real loss?
It’s nothing now, but funny how our minds can do that to us.
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I saw “You are loved” on a church sign. Not the first time I’ve seen this sentiment but it’s the first time I can remember this occurring to me. What’s being proposed here is that the all powerful super creator of humanity and the universe has particular care for each of us, as individuals. Anything good that happens to us comes from that care, anything bad doesn’t matter because he’ll make up for it when you’re dead.
What I realized is that this lets all xtians off the hook from genuinely caring about anyone. If young jeezy is taking care of everybody, we don’t have to do that at all. He exhorted people to care for the poor and the ill, but clearly that is just a hobbyist pursuit – not a genuine responsibility – because god’s love is enough.
That would be a good logical excuse for why xtians hate social services, but I suspect there’s no reasoning behind it. Rather they just don’t want to pay for the care of others and assume their religion endorses any given thing they feel as part of their conservative identity, without any need for actual knowledge of the words in the holy books. Much like “geeks” assume they’re intelligent because it’s part of the geek social identity rather than any useful metric (assuming such are even possible).
That’s all.
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I have a bad time thinking about climate change, clearly. Maybe that’s something I have in common with the blitherers who oppose action on it? Aside from love of pounds and pence, who knows what goes on in their unthinkable heads? Anyway, I intend to stop posting about it for the foreseeable. I expressed my main thoughts about it on this blog and in the FtB podcast on the subject, that should be enough.
But I want to leave one last prediction for the way this is going to play out, have this on record. There is going to be a holocaust heat wave at some point somewhere in the tropics. It could happen as soon as this summer, or maybe ten or more years from now, but it most assuredly will happen. There will be a heat wave so severe that literally millions of people will die within days. There will be mass graves, mountains of bodies in this incident.
I say this with confidence because where I live we, just last year, had a heat wave that smoked all previous records by more than ten degrees. A few small towns were disintegrated by wildfires so fast people barely had time to escape – certainly no time to pack. Hundreds of people died. This is the Pacific Northwest of North America, as moderate of a climate as exists anywhere in the world. What happens when a similar heatwave hits Delhi? Hyderabad? Jakarta? Jerusalem?
That’s my prediction. There was a major volcanic eruption this year and sometimes that cools the global temperature for a while, so we may have some reprieve on this. That’s time to prepare, to prevent deaths, but will it happen? It sure as fuck isn’t happening in Louisiana or Florida. Now that you’ve heard the prediction, hear my request, my call to action. Because this will not be prevented, due to greed and politics, it is a request for what you should do once those mass graves show up in your news feed.
If you are in the company of anyone who spouts off denialist or petrol-defending rhetoric after that happens, I want you to do them violence. At very least slap them hard, knock them upside the head. Preferably knock out one of their teeth, and I wouldn’t be disappointed to hear if you stabbed them in the gut. Spit on them. Curse them. Let them know what they’ve done and that this particular holocaust is the end of the line for tolerance of their worldview.
If there is one thing that will tilt majority opinion on the globe in favor of radical action, it’s another holocaust. It’s gotta be. I know it won’t convince everyone but it has to be enough to convince a majority of those in power. Right? Right? Maybe one more thing to say. FUCK YOU, JOE BIDEN. You fucking ignorant rich trash. You murderous greedlord. You fucking waste of space. I hope your death is painful. I hope you hate every second of it.
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Watching the new superhero show “Naomi” about teenage girl who finds out she’s an alien superhero like Superman. OK, I’m not the target demo. But still, the writing feels mighty half-assed and poorly conceived.
Most of the other superhero shows have the advantage of featuring a cultural icon that comes with some measure of prior awareness. If you’re going to make a new superhero, you’re starting at a disadvantage, so you’ve gotta come strong. You need a hook.
That isn’t as hard as it sounds. You might not go with the very first thing that comes to mind, might take a few minutes to hit something good. Maybe a few days if you’re having a bad time. The hook isn’t the same thing as the fabled “idea” that will make your story the next big thing. This is just a basic entry point for the narrative, one compelling situation or mystery to get people invested.
Black Lightning had a good one. What happens when a rusty superhero is tempted to come out of retirement because the crime in his community affects his family? There’s the appeal of seeing a busted old dude recover a measure of his youth (relatable for busted old dudes, lots of movies about that theme), the current fight itself, the mystery of why he fell off in the first place, and a half dozen compelling character relationships hitting the screen in the same episode.
If we’re going to give it the benefit of a doubt, let’s say Naomi has a slow burn. We’ll find out about the hook gradually, parting veils of little mysteries along the way. Feels like a terrible way to start. Let’s look at the mysteries. Naomi is adopted – but it’s cool, family is nice. Naomi has a health problem and is fainting sometimes, but nobody’s worried enough to take her to a neurologist.
Naomi likes Superman and there was a sighting downtown that she missed. Superman is a fictional character or cryptid in this world so she’s investigating it on the assumption it was a “stunt” somebody staged. Basically the most exciting thing to happen in the show is a non-thing that the hero wasn’t even there for.
Let’s look at the relationships. Naomi’s adoptive parents? Nice. Not compelling. People in town are all on a first name basis, which is a bit weird, but they don’t know each other all that well, so… Not compelling. There are spooky guys that run a car dealership and a tattoo parlor. Ooh. Naomi has like three different friends who want to date her. Whaaat?
all my friends are hot for me
That could be interesting, if a bit insulting to the dignity of the suitors. But since she isn’t going for any of them, they could go for anyone else at any time without it having any emotional stakes for her. What if they fight each other, like when Odysseus trashed all those bozos? No, two of them are kinda terse with each other and the third never interacts with the other two. What if the suitors cause her strife? No, she’s just sorta awkward friends with all of them.
By the time it’s revealed in episode two she’s an alien with superpowers, it feels like, eh, whatever. Her BFF takes the news like NBD and that feels reasonable, tho by now her own mild excitement in no way mirrors that of the audience.
I’ve written stuff this tepid before and I’ll probably do it again. I’ve got this approach to writing where I ask myself questions and answer them. That can be good, or it can produce something as rote as a job interview. This feels like the result of that process.
Naomi wasn’t a story somebody wrote because of inspiration, it was written to order for a project – or off a pitch with no actual story ideas behind it that got greenlit. I understand it’s a comic adaptation, maybe the original comic was like that. Or maybe the adaptation eschewed enough of the original story that it was written from scratch in this way.
I don’t know how it worked in this particular writer’s room. Probably their process was kneecapped by time constraints, or interference, or budget? But there’s a lot of ways to prevent this. They mostly amount to the same thing. Don’t go with your first answer, your first impulse. Think about it – is this really entertaining? – or get input from somebody else, or do some kind of activities to stimulate a genuine feeling of inspiration and look at that story again.
Another problem which is bad, though less fundamentally bad, is that there are a lot of situations and scenes that strain credulity or just make zero sense, or seem like they’re only happening because shit like that happens in TV shows.
The most extreme example in episode two has Naomi and all her little suitors and friends in a spooky abandoned mill when the scary car dealership man shows up and says, “We gotta talk Naomi, I know your scoobies broke and entered my car dealership. That’s a misdemeanor.” She says, “If I talk will you let let my scoobies go?” The scoobies are like, “If Naomi says that’s a good idea we should all just go along with it, for reasons.” You might be wondering by now why car dealership man is scary, and the answer is mostly the way the camera frames him. This show is a sad mess.
i’m so scary that my suit don’t fit
I’ll probably watch more anyways. I’m watching the new Superman show for which I am *really* not the intended demographic either (namely people who want desperately to believe conservatives have redeeming qualities and can be reasoned with). I don’t have any streaming services and not much else to do in these interstitial moments. I’ll post on it again if it gets any better.
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