ey i'm blogging here a blog by alex daily

Author: Alex Daily

Some deleted drafts

Posted on by Alex Daily

A running thread you’ll notice in this selection of post I’ve deleted from my drafts tab in ClassicPress, thereby officially abandoning all pretence that I’ll do anything with them, is that these are all fandom or fandom-related essay ideas, really? Do I do that here? I did it once, I guess, though I feel like I kinda crapped out on the conclusion. There’s also a layer of a specific type of frustration to some of these that I generally don’t think lends itself to good writing.

Anyway.

From oldest to newest.

Who’s behind the mask? On identity concealment in “Star Wars.”

This one was just a title — I was annoyed Star Wars fandom took one look at a Stormtrooper with a cool gold mask and immediately decided they must be somebody1The emphasis was mostly on the idea that it was Ezra Bridger, but I saw several other names come up. hiding their face, and so I decided to write a rebuttal, because Star Wars doesn’t really… do that?

The Clones’ faces are never a secret, kindly old Palpatine being the monkey-faced hologram fella from the original films is only a twist if you’re watching for the first time in episode order, and Vader taking his helmet off is a serious health condition reveal, not an identity reveal at all. Phasma in the sequels never turns out to Be Somebody, The Mandalorian is about helmets and never, to the best of my recollection, pulls that type of twist at all.

In fact, it never really seems to happen that much in long-running sci-fi franchises at all — Doctor Who lets the Master do it sometimes, as a treat, but that’s a throwback to the 70s, Star Trek doesn’t really do it, it was very obvious on WandaVision it was gonna be Agatha all along, not fucking Mephisto, who would’ve come out of nowhere— *takes a deep breath*

But “Alex is annoyed with a fandom they’re not really in” makes for lousy writing, and also, I didn’t feel like doing the research, which I’d really have to do properly if I’m gonna pick a fight with nerds, so here we go — I didn’t write the post, and now I’m just doing the complaining, anyway, that’s that particular craving answered.

Interview with the person whose house the weary travellers stop at to recharge and eat a good meal

Inspired by a Mastodon post, this seemed like one I might get some mileage out of, but really, much like how I’m not really in Star Wars fandom enough to pick a fight, I’m just not in either fantasy or, like, longform profile pieces enough to really do this one justice. The joke would’ve been that the weary travellers stop at the interview subject’s house while the interview is happening, I think?

Doctor Who: 14 reasonable expectations for the RTD2 era

It was August, I saw a lot of people projecting their every hope and dream on the RTD2 era, and I thought I’d be a more reasonable voice in the discourse — but a week out from the first of the 60th anniversary special airing the vibe has changed a lot, and I no longer feel any need to try to throw a reasonable wrench into anyone’s spokes. I also remembered I simply do not wish to be part of The Discourse.

And anyway, I got to one (1) reasonable expectation and looking at it now I’d probably cut it if I was gonna try to finish it.

Notes on a Multiverse: “Iron Man” (2008)

For a while there I found it really frustrating to talk about the MCU on the internet2See amongst many other things the Mephisto thing. Exhausting., to the point that my Letterboxd reviews were just “Enjoyed it.” with a 5-star rating. I’m mostly over that frustration now3Leaving a certain web forum behind, and quite a lot of my exposure to clickbait and “look at this stupid opinion”-type posts with it, seems to have helped., and I can feel a substantial rewatch approaching at velocity. I wondered out loud on Mastodon if that rewatch might involve some kind of writing project, using the phrase “a Psychochronography in Spandex” to specifically evoke El Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum as a model I was thinking of.

But, let’s be honest with myself here, that’s massively overestimating my current ability to commit to a long-term writing project of what would at the bare minimum be hundreds of posts.4How do you get to hundreds of posts from 35 movies? Agents of SHIELD ran for 136 episodes. The Netflix shows put out 161 episodes. Even doing some condensing this would be a massive undertaking. I’m very interested in finding an angle on the MCU from which to talk about it in a way that doesn’t drive me fucking insane.

I’m gonna do the rewatch at some point, and I’d like to do some kind of project around it? I like the title Notes on a Multiverse. But whatever shape that takes, it’s obviously not gonna be hundreds of essays, so the project I saved the draft for will not exist, and so — into the trash it goes.

  • 1
    The emphasis was mostly on the idea that it was Ezra Bridger, but I saw several other names come up.
  • 2
    See amongst many other things the Mephisto thing. Exhausting.
  • 3
    Leaving a certain web forum behind, and quite a lot of my exposure to clickbait and “look at this stupid opinion”-type posts with it, seems to have helped.
  • 4
    How do you get to hundreds of posts from 35 movies? Agents of SHIELD ran for 136 episodes. The Netflix shows put out 161 episodes. Even doing some condensing this would be a massive undertaking.

On long Mondays

Posted on by Alex Daily

I haven’t really done traditional journalling-style blogging here, so let’s find out if that’s a thing I do. Some things, maybe, aren’t best served by a weird joke on short text-based social media.

For the past… probably eight months1This started between semesters last year. my schedule at school has included a… very rough 9:30 to 21:30 Monday. Last year that last class was Art History, with just the six of us.2I’m in the short version of the art teacher course, because as a fully licensed cartoonist I’ve obviously already got a diploma for the art part and I just need to do the teacher part. This 2-year version typically picks up between six and a dozen people a year. Last year most of our classes were just the six of us — this year most of our classes are with the third years of the 4-year version. Come next semester we’ll legally be fourth years. That specific configuration, with a fairly relaxed teacher who had the whole year to convey information to us, worked pretty well. Acceptable execution of a shitty situation nobody was happy about.

But this year, that last class has been Education3Or “Onderzoekswerkplaats,” technically, if you’d like a great word for Hangman or Scrabble, but that’s really just the other half of the class we call “Education.”, which means, a lot of fairly heavy information in the philosophy and pedagogy zones, which means, class from a teacher who is great but also a sentient bouncy ball even at literal night.4Esther! Calm down! All of this, surrounded by 25 energetic third-years whose primary passion appears to be to generate with their mouths a bed of static noise that makes it impossible to think. If you’d ever wanted to experience cognitive overload, room 4.18 at my school was the place to be on Mondays from 18:45  to 21:30.

I’m not kidding when I say cognitive overload — it’s like it was scheduled specifically to totally fry my brain. The volume of the information we were supposed to take in ratcheted up through the morning and afternoon, then came essentially to a total stop for Media5For me, anyway, because, like, video editing and HTML, please, in my sleep, I’ve got an exemption, I could teach this class, but even if you’re new to all of that it’s honestly a fairly chill couple of hours. and a lengthy dinner break, only to then launch right back into the HARD KNOWLEDGE of yer BILDUNGS and yer GERT BIESTA and yer THE BANALITY OF EVIL. This didn’t do justice to the great, well-prepared, informative classes, and it didn’t do justice to us as students who would be eager to learn and work with all of this information under better circumstances. I’m sorry, but after a full day like that you were just never gonna pull anything meaningful about the banality of evil out of me at 21:00.6In the morning I’m a writer, in the afternoon I’m a poet, in the evening I’m a comedian — but at night I’m a haunted shell of a person, apparently.

But that’s all in the past tense, because as of next week7No regular classes this week. Media8And the third-years’ Music class, too, I… have to imagine. is moving to Tuesdays, which makes space for that late, late class to move to the much more reasonable 15:30 – 18:00 slot. And thank fuck for that. It’s a little like, and this is definitely a metaphor that’s way too heavy for this specific scenario, I’ve been told the war is over and I’m now just waiting to learn when we’re being shipped back home. This war, if you’ll continue to allow me the metaphor, has taken its victims — by what we now know to be the last battle9Last late class. half of my little Six of Us gang wasn’t showing up any more. One of us was approaching a burnout, one chose to prioritise their family. I was being a real trooper, but I’ll definitely need a real refresher on this info before the end of the semester, and, like, by that last class I was giving a presentation lying down on a table because that was the only way it was gonna happen. What would another few months of this have done to me?

  • 1
    This started between semesters last year.
  • 2
    I’m in the short version of the art teacher course, because as a fully licensed cartoonist I’ve obviously already got a diploma for the art part and I just need to do the teacher part. This 2-year version typically picks up between six and a dozen people a year. Last year most of our classes were just the six of us — this year most of our classes are with the third years of the 4-year version. Come next semester we’ll legally be fourth years.
  • 3
    Or “Onderzoekswerkplaats,” technically, if you’d like a great word for Hangman or Scrabble, but that’s really just the other half of the class we call “Education.”
  • 4
    Esther! Calm down!
  • 5
    For me, anyway, because, like, video editing and HTML, please, in my sleep, I’ve got an exemption, I could teach this class, but even if you’re new to all of that it’s honestly a fairly chill couple of hours.
  • 6
    In the morning I’m a writer, in the afternoon I’m a poet, in the evening I’m a comedian — but at night I’m a haunted shell of a person, apparently.
  • 7
    No regular classes this week.
  • 8
    And the third-years’ Music class, too, I… have to imagine.
  • 9
    Last late class.

Video: “Sequence One”

Posted on by Alex Daily

This was a video collage assignment in class. I’ve got an exemption for this class, but I usually just do the work anyway, just so I’ve got what everyone else is doing front of mind when someone inevitably requests my assistance.

Footage from 2007’s The Tracey Fragments used under a CC BY-NC-SA license.

As a film The Tracey Fragments is notable for three things — for starring a young Elliot Page before he was famous, for its extreme use of splitscreen, and for releasing all of its footage online under a Creative Commons license. It’s not a particularly good film, honestly, but it’s a good source of professionally shot footage starring real actors that you can both play with and legally release.

Let’s pick some clickbait apart

Posted on by Alex Daily

The thing that’s got Doctor Who fandom in a tizzy today is this article from The Mirror, (archive.is link, if you’d rather not give them the traffic) a tabloid that, to be fair, does have a better track record than you’d typically ascribe to a tabloid. The article purports to claim that Paul McGann is set to reprise his incarnation of the show’s titular character in a spin-off — and I’m gonna pick the article apart line by line. Let’s just get into it. All blockquoted text from the Mirror article unless I indicate otherwise. Headline.

EXCLUSIVE: Paul McGann set to make comeback as the Eighth Doctor in new Doctor Who spin-off series.

Wow, exciting. That’d be cool, wouldn’t it. Don’t even need to read past the headline to get the gist — the claim is clear: The McGann incarnation will be back on your screen in multiple episodes. And it’s an exclusive, too! Nobody else has this information! Which makes sense, because there will in fact be: No information. Next, the lede.

The Doctor Who returns later this month with three specials celebrating the 60th anniversary with David Tennant back as the Doctor and Catherine Tate as Donna Noble and now Paul McCann is set to make his comeback too

First of all, the quality of the copyediting is fucking appalling here — “the Doctor Who,” “Paul McCann,” and have they run out of commas at The Mirror? But that aside, all we’ve got here is a basic restating of both information you already know — Doctor Who is indeed back later this month with three specials starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate — and then of the claim made by the headline. (Though I don’t know who Paul McCann is.) The same claim is restated once again by the opening line…

Paul McGann is set to make a comeback as the Eighth Doctor in a new Doctor Who spin-off series.

The 63-year-old actor had the keys to the TARDIS for the 1996 television film, a co-production between BBC Worldwide and Universal Studios, which was an attempt to revive the sci-fi show after it was cancelled in 1989.

His incarnation of the Time Lord built up a loyal fan base since due to the audio adventures he has voiced. He has had two just TV appearances in the 50th anniversary special and a cameo in Jodie Whittaker’s final outing The Power of the Doctor.

…and the next two paragraphs are broadly speaking accurate restatements of things you already know, too, though I’d argue he didn’t actually appear in the 50th anniversary special but in a webisode, but okay, close enough.

The show is about to enter a new era with Russell T Davies – the man who rebooted it in 2005 – at the helm and Disney co-producing with the BBC and spin-offs are being planned to increase the Whoniverse.

More established information. We know all this, and RTD was explicit about wanting to mirror the Star Wars / Marvel model of a whole range of spinoffs even before he took back over, saying in 2021, in Doctor Who Magazine #579:

RUSSELL T DAVIES: There should be a Doctor Who channel now. You look at those Disney announcements, of all those new Star Wars and Marvel shows, you think, we should be sitting here announcing The Nyssa Adventures or The Return of Donna Noble, and you should have the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors together in a 10-part series. Genuinely.

After the announcement of his return he’s been more coy, but the sentiment is clearly still very much a driving force behind the new Whoniverse branding — if Tales from the TARDIS does anything, it’s signal that it’s all one big show, one big story. A McGann incarnation spinoff would not actually be that weird. But let’s get back to the article.

The spin offs will work in the same way that Disney created series for Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe that stream on Disney+.

Literally explicitly something he said in 2021, sure. Still, to be extremely clear: No new information at this point.

A source said: “Russell likes the idea of bringing back McGann with his own set of episodes in the TARDIS. Disney are on board as they want more original content and want to fully exploit the franchise as they know how big it could become.”

Alright, see, here’s what we’re clearly basing this entire article around, but, is this new information? “A source” could be anyone, that could be my grandfather, for all we know.1Both of them are dead.

“Russell likes the idea.” Sure, who wouldn’t? It’d be really cool to see Paul McGann get his real, proper due, right, the idea comes up in fandom all the time. But liking the idea isn’t six episodes on BBC One by winter next year.

“Disney are on board,” well, yes, they’re spending a lot of money, they generally seem to get along with the RTD2 team very well. I’m sure if RTD shows up with a spinoff premise that he’s excited about and thinks will work, Disney are on board.

Other possible spin-offs include a series on UNIT, the Earth based military wing that works with the Doctor to defend the planet and a villain anthology.

Oh, we’re already moving on from the McGann incarnation spinoff, huh? The UNIT spinoff has been widely rumoured for a long time now, and the modern incarnation of UNIT could probably sustain a spinoff, so, sure. And I hadn’t heard the “villain anthology” one before, but if you’re going as vague as “other possible spin-offs,” you could say just about anything. “Other possible spin-offs include a drama about Dr Who’s biscuit supplier, a Zygon police procedural with a psycho-sexual twist, and a film about Professor Prudeish from off The Time Warrior as he fights his care home in court.” Sure, Jan.

Doctor Who returns later this month with three specials celebrating the 60th anniversary with David Tennant back as the Doctor and Catherine Tate as Donna Noble. Ncuti Gatwa is then taking control of the TARDIS in 2024.

More restatement of known information, though, small correction, Gatwa actually takes over at Christmas this year.

Speaking in an interview recently, Paul said he would be interested, adding: “I finally got to be in an episode. The fans tell me that they hope there will be a chance of some more, that would be nice. I would be well up for it.”

Actor wouldn’t turn down followup to job they’re famous for. Some of them say they wouldn’t, some of them seem somewhat desperate for it, but it’s not an uncommon sentiment, is it. Certainly it doesn’t sound like a man who’s in active negotiations with the BBC.

A spokesman for Doctor Who declined to comment.

They would, wouldn’t they, the sneaky bastards.

So, in conclusion: The only actual new information in this entire article: An unnamed source claims “Russell [T Davies] likes the idea” of a McGann incarnation spinoff. …Yeah, man, I’m sure he does.

  • 1
    Both of them are dead.

A simple sidebar word count widget for ClassicPress and WordPress, or, good lord, what have I done, or, perhaps Alex doth protest too much

Posted on by Alex Daily

Twice this past week it’s come up at school that writing a few hundred words has never been a huge issue for me.1Remember that the course I’m taking is aimed at or at least meant to be accessible to 19-year olds, which means the bar can occasionally be relatively low. Sure, often the process involves walking circles around my living room while I do it, but if there’s one thing I can do it’s put the words on the paper and get them in the inbox on time. Both times that came up I wanted to reference the existence of this blog; I wanted to say, “Well, I’ve written X words since this summer just on my blog, for fun, because I wanted to, so 1200 words about this subject shouldn’t be a problem.”

But ClassicPress, though it has the little word counter in the bottom of the editor, doesn’t really have any kind of overall word count statistics displayed anywhere, and so I kept it vague, and just said “thousands,” or “like fifteen thousand.” It doesn’t really matter, it got the point across. But it is good to be specific about these thing, I say, being the kind of person who likes to use their mouth to say sentences like “I’ve watched 1421 movies since the start of the pandemic” out loud to people.

At this point I can hear you thinking, wait, surely there exist many word count plugins for WordPress that are compatible with ClassicPress, and so I say to thee, local imaginary straw-person, alright, you try finding one that, one, actually does what I want, two, isn’t so over-featured as to demand a whole god-damned tab to itself on the admin panel, and, crucially, three, is actually compatible with and doesn’t break ClassicPress just by being five years newer than its codebase.

Look, I use ClassicPress because it does everything I need, because I can maintain it myself when I break it, because it’s familiar, but god, it being based on the now very old WordPress 4.9 sure does put some lines around how much of the wider WordPress world, which has long since moved on from 4.9, I can actually use — I had fun doing it, but, like, I had to make my own theme and everything.2Not because there aren’t hundreds of compatible WordPress themes out in the world, but because all of them turned out to suck eggs. The absolute state of these things. Sometimes this is frustrating, but more often than not running into those lines either makes me go “well, I don’t need that,” OR, I learn something new along the way. But I knew enough to know that doing the relatively simple thing I wanted would probably require a few hours of digging into documentation or existing plugins, and so I put it in the “well, I don’t need that” column. I didn’t need it, after all.

But it really bothered me that I couldn’t make the, again, relatively simple thing I wanted to do happen.

So I turned to the enemy: ChatGPT.

This is, I should say at this point, not a conversion post. I’m on the record as being very strongly against3I hate it. both the culture around large algorithmically generative models and against4I hate it a lot. the models themselves. Everyone involved, from dev to ev(angelist), seems like, and often just plain is, an absolute a-hole, the way people talk about these things is way overhyped and generally speaking unrealistic, and by definition the models are actively enabling large-scale creative plagiarism and academic fraud.5From the perspective of a teacher, though: If the essay assignments you give to your students can generally be written by or with the aid of ChatGPT, consider that that may be a failure on your own end and that you need to give more specific or more personal essay assignments.

But a concession I’ve often made is that the culture around them doesn’t match what these things actually are, which is tools. What ChatGPT is, to keep it focused on just the one thing, is a large database of text,6Stolen or otherwise. an algorithm through which those words can be rearranged into something that sounds plausible, and, on the front-end, a chat through which those prompts can be entered.7Not unlike Homestuck. What it’s not is intelligent, or creative, or, frankly, particularly apocalyptic.8Unlike Homestuck. There’s no knowledge there, no truth, no ideas, and if it ever plays a role in getting you killed there will always be a person, a person who made a choice, to blame. A lot of that baggage we put on it is external to the tool itself.9The plagiarism isn’t, obviously, and a lot of the rest, like how gender may be a construct but that construct still exists and influences the world, may still be a problem that needs to be solved. This isn’t about that.

None of this is ever going to come remotely close to writing a particularly compelling screenplay, right, I don’t think any version of this algorithm is ever going to write a great, good, or even particularly readable novel without substantial human involvement. Hell, even a believable essay is a stretch. This is, I could not be more clear, still not a conversion post; on a creative level, as an artist and writer, and now a teacher, I think all of this just kinda fucking sucks. But if you’re not trying to cheat at school or trying to get rid of your industry’s writers, having something generate plausible-sounding text — or code — can be pretty useful. (Again, I’ve always conceded this. Nothing has changed.)

Obvious examples include things that could be form letters you need to send for work, outlines for things you can totally write but that you just need the shape of, or writing prompts, or just the little push to the train of thought you need to get back to what you were doing. You don’t need to be creative or have ideas to write a letter asking the guy who’s in charge of that kind of thing and who needs a formal request letter on file to do so to make funds available to you to buy a second monitor for your workstation, but if you’ve never sent that kind of letter before it might be a real bottleneck to whatever the fuck else you were meant to do today. That, I think, may be what ChatGPT is for.

And the thing is, I don’t actually need to learn how to do this. I’m not a programmer, I’m not a web designer,10Have I been paid to do some website stuff a couple times, yes, but those are jobs you get because you’re the person somebody knows who can do the thing, not because you’re necessarily good at the thing. “Good at the thing” is secondary for those gigs. whatever skill I do have here I have because I wanted to do something else. I want to put a comic on the web, I build it a website. I want to blog, I build a blog. Heck, it’s not like I’ve never copied snippets of HTML and CSS before — that’s culturally central to programming in a way it obviously wouldn’t and couldn’t really be to creative fields. It’s a different equation, and so the solution can be different, too.

Which is how I’ve rationalised going to ChatGPT, which I hate, to generate some PHP to do a thing I could have but wouldn’t have bothered to figure out on my own. I’ve attached the code below the fold, feel free to use it or proofread it, or do literally anything you want with it — as far as I’m concerned, it’s as in the public domain as it can be. I’ve named it “Vaughn,” after Tobias Vaughn, who once made an alliance with evil as part of a plot to dominate Earth.

I promise I won’t dominate Earth.

Continue reading “A simple sidebar word count widget for ClassicPress and WordPress, or, good lord, what have I done, or, perhaps Alex doth protest too much”

  • 1
    Remember that the course I’m taking is aimed at or at least meant to be accessible to 19-year olds, which means the bar can occasionally be relatively low.
  • 2
    Not because there aren’t hundreds of compatible WordPress themes out in the world, but because all of them turned out to suck eggs. The absolute state of these things.
  • 3
    I hate it.
  • 4
    I hate it a lot.
  • 5
    From the perspective of a teacher, though: If the essay assignments you give to your students can generally be written by or with the aid of ChatGPT, consider that that may be a failure on your own end and that you need to give more specific or more personal essay assignments.
  • 6
    Stolen or otherwise.
  • 7
    Not unlike Homestuck.
  • 8
    Unlike Homestuck.
  • 9
    The plagiarism isn’t, obviously, and a lot of the rest, like how gender may be a construct but that construct still exists and influences the world, may still be a problem that needs to be solved. This isn’t about that.
  • 10
    Have I been paid to do some website stuff a couple times, yes, but those are jobs you get because you’re the person somebody knows who can do the thing, not because you’re necessarily good at the thing. “Good at the thing” is secondary for those gigs.

On constellations

Posted on by Alex Daily

I’d love for this whole thing to be more conversational.1This includes a missive to you, Dear Reader — please feel free to strike up a conversation either here in the comments or on Mastodon if something I say on here makes you think, or feel, or just want to say something. Don’t hold back. It’s the new 1999, there’s no rules — all we have is how we decide to go about things. Inherent to social media is that most of what you say is gonna be ephemeral — if the web is people, a tweet toot is a sentence whispered to yourself, and if you’re lucky somebody else hears it and you connect. I’m not a Dead Internet2From the Atlantic: “The Internet Is Mostly Bots” (archive.is) and “Maybe You Missed It, But The Internet ‘Died’ Five Years Ago.” (archive.is) truther,3Hm, a loaded word. but at its worst — my worst, maybe — I can’t deny that the Old Place sometimes felt like that. Being online, even though the web is not a sea, sure felt like a scream into the water sometimes. Unheard by all but nearby fish.

The opposite of that feeling, on the Old Place anyway, was the couple times a year somebody, often a bot, often a person doing very specific searches, would like/fave or otherwise acknowledge a post from Too Long Ago. And this felt RUDE. To confront me with my own words in the notifications column that should’ve been a safe space? I don’t even like myself from two weeks ago, and this is from two years ago? Wow, okay.4That’s why it felt rude to me, anyway, but I feel like this is a common sentiment.

But that’s not conversation. So let’s start talking.

I’ve been clicking around blogs. Old blogs, current blogs, pandemic blogs, blogs by people who you might have heard of, blogs by people nobody remembers, blogs the people who were there hold up as the great blogs, passion project blogs with two decades of dedicated writing on it. It’s funny how something from 1999 can resonate while something from 2016 utterly fails to. Allow me to quote the thing that inspired me to write this, a conversation between bloggers from 2010 that managed to resonate.

Below the fold, other people’s words. Continue reading “On constellations”

“Wet Detective”

Posted on by Alex Daily

“Now, for the next ten minutes, write down whatever comes into your mind,” our Education teacher said to us all. The clatter of twenty-five keyboards reminded me of a waterfall. I don’t think this is what she meant.

We open on the detective’s office, which is behind a waterfall for some reason. Everything in the detective’s office is wet.

Their desk is wet. Their typewriter is wet. Their chair is wet, and the leather squeaks at the slightest move of their wet body. The paper is wet, in a newspaper, in a book, in a file, it’s wet, and it’s a miracle anything still holds ink or even shape. The detective’s shoes are wet. Just absolutely sopping wet, like somebody poured two glasses of water into them before they put them on. The detective’s socks are wet. Their feet? Wet as it gets. Their trousers — clean, tightly pressed, with a firm crease exactly where it should be — are wet. Their feet, their knees, every hair on their legs, and the legs themselves? Wet. Their underwear is wet. Their lower half squeaks slightly as it shifts, uncomfortable from wetness, in their wet chair.

Their shirt is wet. Their long trenchcoat is wet, as is the coat rack it’s hanging on. And just as the detective starts, briefly, to consider the poor choices they’d made that brought them here, to this wetness, there’s a knock at their door. Which, you’ll realise, is wet, because it’s behind a waterfall, which is not traditionally a place that keeps things dry. Wait, is it traditionally a place that has doors? No, it’s not, is it. Maybe the knock is at the waterfall instead of at the door. Knock knock. Splash splash. Wet wet.

God, everything is wet. It’s so wet. Why did the detective accept this posting from the agency? What made this seem like a good idea? Should probably open the door. No, not the door, the waterfall? Splash splash. Come in, the waterfall is wet.

Wet footsteps. It’s not a wet dame or a grizzled wet business man. It’s a firefighter. A wet firefighter.

Month of Sundays #1

Posted on by Alex Daily

New month, new recurring post concept. Happy Halloween.

Movies

  • It’s hard to do an October horror movie thing when you’re already watching horror all the time. On top of that, between the Rings, the Ju-Ons, and the Elm Street and Friday the 13th reboots, it’s been quite a lot of “watching franchises play their opening gambits over and over again” lately. And then Friday the 13th and Halloween also have a bunch of endings, too.
  • I’ll do, I think, the American Ring and Grudge films, and then maybe take a wee break from horror for a bit.
  • Caught up on Hunger Games before the prequel comes out, but I don’t think I’m quite the target audience for these. I think I’m struggling for the exact reason people often struggle with The Matrix, which I love because I can bring the emotional through-line into focus for myself while blurring out the world and the philosophy a little — but with Hunger Games, because I’m not 14, the emotional through-line doesn’t click into place in the same way so all I can see is the idea that this dumb system has been in place for 75 years somehow.
  • Blank Check status report: Finished Tim Burton. Hitting Michael Mann means I’ve also got Waypoint‘s Mannhunting to listen to, but I didn’t really click with Thief, so this one might be a real chore again. But I really should at least get well into Mann before Ferrari comes out.

Bits from Letterboxd

Saw X (2023):

I get why [Jigsaw’s victims] don’t appreciate John Kramer the Maker or John Kramer the Industrial Designer, but they could at least appreciate John Kramer the Puppeteer.

Past Lives (2023):

I know that tension between the past and the present. I know changing your name, I know becoming ungoogleable. I know being somebody else somewhere else. I know all the things that are harder to say in one language than they are in the other. I know translating for a friend. I know wondering. I know not going there.

La Course (1896):

Good to keep a crowd between us and those horses, wouldn’t want them to rush out of the screen like that train.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023):

an hour in I thought, “really, it’s weird that Jesse Plemons isn’t in this somewhere” and then an hour later there he was

Resident Evil (2002):

this is so 2002

we were always getting stuck in stainless steel laser trap rooms back then

Mac and Me (1988):

at the end the aliens have truly integrated into American society — they’ve gone on a road trip, picked up a few cold ones and a gun, and get shot and blown up by the cops

Dark Water (2002):

quite a strong overlap here with the Koji Suzuki adaptation Hideo Nakata’s best known for, Ring — these huge psychic scars left on the world around a sad death, an intense situation involving a single mother and her daughter, psychic visions, and, of course, they’re both pretty wet films

they’re both also, of course, awfully sad, but Ring gets to be sort of fun, with its over the top silly cursed tape concept, while this one thrives more in its fairly serious depiction of the claustrophobic little world around its urban legend-esque ghost story

an emotionally destructive ending like no other

Television

  • Finished John Wick spinoff The Continental. As we’ve established, it’s mostly bad and boring — on the one hand it sucks that Mel Gibson (boo hiss) is in it, on the other hand it’s nice to see him get shot in the head at the end.
  • If even the Frasier can have a minor queer character casually refer to her wife, there are no excuses left for not having any queer characters on your show.
    Speaking of the Frasier reboot, enjoyed the first two episodes, but it does feel quite a lot like they went “well nobody really wants to come back, so this guy is the new Niles, the new Daphne,” etcetera.
  • Enjoying Goosebumps.
  • The problem with the Jon Hamm character on The Morning Show this year is he’s clearly meant to be Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos, except he’s capable of introspection and change and seems quite nice, and I just don’t think that’s plausible — fundamentally the problem with serialised dramatic storytelling about rich people is that it’s hard to sell them both truly as craven and inhuman AND as rich, developed characters. This is why Succession was so good.
  • Nearly done with The Fall of the House of Usher, whose answer to the above issue is “well, we’ll kill ’em off one by one.”
  • The new Our Flag Means Death suffers a little from everyone involved now knowing what everyone loves about it, but it’s still a lot of fun. I appear to exist in total isolation from its fandom this season, so I’ve no idea how common a theory this is, but: The endgame for all of this is that Ed is “erased” from history and it’s Izzy who becomes the “real” Blackbeard, right? That’s surely where this is going.
  • Wellington Paranormal seems to have aired a full season since I caught up to it. On it. …No, to it. Still a hoot.
  • I’m enough behind on TV that I’m making myself stick strictly (mostly) to broadcast order again — as of this writing it’s Wednesday the 18th in TV land.

Doctor Who

  • Finished Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Gods of the Underworld. Nothing wrong with it, per se, but it’s a real example of a bog standard Benny archeology adventure full of thinly sketched species and cultures, supported by a cast of unoriginal, uninspired characters nobody will ever give a shit about. The clichés are ripe on the ground here, it’s all war races and Blood Messengers and space gangsters, and references both structural and pop cultural to both Indiana Jones and Star Wars feel tacky in the Year of Luigi 2023 in a way they probably didn’t in 2001.
  • Third Doctor Adventures: Intelligence for War. Like all the recasts Treloar and Ashford needed quite some time to truly come into their own, but here they’re on top form. The “Liz may have done some treason” story never feels like the filler it could easily have felt like, and it captures the Pertwee era so well you actually can picture the quiet Norfolk village it’s happening.
  • Odyssey kicks off the Torchwood range’s Ood trilogy.1Yes, it should’ve been called the Oodbvious thing. Strong performances elevate a solid script, though the end is a little The Satan Pit again. Does this just keep happening to poor Ida Scott?
  • I’ve now listened to the full @60 concert, and god, Russell and Murray are gonna kill me from dehydration come November 25th.
  • Started the Zygon Invasion novelisation. All a little straightforward, hard to imagine it meaningfully adds anything.
  • After lying next to my bed for six months, picked up Legends of Camelot again. Rayner finds a really fun way to do all the classic bits of Arthuriana you want without contradicting previous Doctor Who lore, and it’s a hoot to have Dr Who and Donna running around in it.

Podcasts

  • Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later seems to have wrapped up its first season. “The Thick of It but in Roman times” is a solid premise that’s easy to fuck up, and they consistently do not fuck it up. Really funny.
  • I’m so close with Blank Check to catching up to where I was with Mobile Suit Gundam and Screen Test of Time, I’m so close.
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    Yes, it should’ve been called the Oodbvious thing.
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