I feel like I should take a vacation. Not from anything in particular, but I’m just feeling a bit restless. Maybe I should just take a walk.
A Thing in my Possession: 99 granola bars I bought 99 chewy granola bars for kids from meh.com It was the sort of thing that really makes the website live up to the name. But I thought to myself, well I like granola bars, and this is a lot cheaper than it would have been otherwise to buy them. And they’re not bad! meh could get them and reset them for cheap because they are relatively close to their best by dates, but on shelf stable foods those are more of a suggestion than anything else. They don’t immediately become poison 24 hours after the date. But the funniest thing about buying 99 granola bars is that they came loose in the cardboard box. I mean each one is individually wrapped, but I kind of expected there to be some additional internal packaging. Nope! Just a big jumble of bars in a box. Of course there are fewer than 99 in the box now, because I just eave it next to my desk and when I feel the urge, I reach over and grab one out of the box. Stuff I'm Watching I bought the DVDs of Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation, which is the only live action Ninja Turtles TV series to exist. This show is not good, and in fact is widely regarded as terrible. I’ve watched the first half dozen episodes, and I don’t want to imply that it is anything approaching good. However, it is less terrible than I was originally led to believe. The crimes against Ninja Turtles it commits begin with the title, which very deliberately removes both Teenage and Mutant from the equation. Like we know that both words are included, but it is a bad decision to not include them, if nothing else because it makes alphabetizing one’s collection difficult. Do you just include them with the other TMNT shows and movies? Or do you drop them in the N section like a rube? I would probably do the former. But beyond the title, the show was clearly made with a budget of thirteen dollars. The turtles themselves look OK until they start talking, at which point I’m forced to ask if they even knew what the lines were going to be while filming, or if the dialogue was written entirely after the fact. The audio is clearly all dubbed in afterwards, but it feels like no effort was put into making the mouth movements match what was being said. The writing is pretty bad. They created a whole new villain for the turtles to fight, they explicitly state the turtles aren’t brothers (seemingly to make it less weird when they perv on the new girl turtle) and they added a girl turtle. Now having a girl turtle in the show isn’t inherently a bad idea. But the way they did it was not great. She has two main character traits, the first is she isn’t a ninja, but rather a shinobi, which to this show means a ninja but with magic, and that she doesn’t speak English well. There’s not an episode I’ve watched that doesn’t include the “joke” where she says a phrase wrong and is corrected by one of the boys. Plus the other turtles don’t use her given (Chinese) name, instead calling her Venus de Milo, who you might notice is an artwork rather than being an artist. I feel like I’m not doing a great job of convincing you this isn’t terrible. But effort was clearly being put into the show, and one thing I think they got pretty well is the characters. These dudes feel like themselves.
I’ve watched the H Bomberguy video about the CG animated pseudo anime show RWBY three times now. I have never watched a single episode of RWBY. I’m not gunna rehash the video, because it’s two an a half hours long. But I thin kit’s a fascinating piece of media criticism because he isn’t content to call the show bad, but rather he tries to understand why the show fails to be the best version of itself. I really like this style of criticism, breaking a thing apart to understand how it works, and comparing that to what it is trying to accomplish. Obviously this is a subjective process, as all criticism is, but when it’s done well it helps you understand why someone feels a way about a piece of media and can even grant the audience a deeper understanding of it too. So even though I’ve never seen any of RWBY, the structuralism and format of the analysis is enough to bring me back. on my recent third viewing of the whole thing there was a quote that really stood out to me, which is "at it's core, writing means making decisions and risking making the wrong one.” and wow did that hit close to home for me.
In a very literal sense of the word, I’m a writer. I come on here and put out roughly a thousand words every week for you my (very small) audience to consume. I hope you enjoy them but I don’t actually know if you do because I don’t get a lot of feedback. But I write words every single week and so I am a writer. But I feel very comfortable in this format because I can shorten the period between writing and publishing to basically zero. I often type directly into the post creation box, so I don’t have to go back and look at what I wrote more than once. And I don’t look back much either. After a post is published, I move on to the next one. Which means I never have to question if I made the wrong decision because I’m on to making the next one. Once I start thinking about the decisions I’m making I get vapor lock and the words do not come out as well. I have a play I’ve been writing on and off for *checks watch* 3 years. And the more I ave written of it, the slower I’ve gone. I wrote two pages last week, which were the first pages I had written in months. And if I were to hazard a guess I might be about half way done. And it’s because every time I open the document I start second guessing the writing choices I have already made. I’ve changed the (as of yet unwritten) ending three different times, and I have about two and a half different opening scenes because I can’t decide where to start the story. I’ve even thought of taking the coward’s way out and writing all three endings and letting the audience decide which one would be performed on a given night (or do the thing from Clue and show all of them) but I also know that it wouldn’t serve the story to do that. It would be failing to make any decision instead of doing my best to make what I think is the best choice and living with the consequences. (To be clear, I think it actually is the best choice in Clue, because it reflects the source material, and reinforces the inherent silliness in the whole endeavor.)
This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is: What'll it Be
