A real thing.

here you can find charts and drawings of how cool fine and rad stuff is. aren't you glad I did not perish in that hotel fire up in Anchorage? I got some cool Star Wars stuff from that.

Saturday, August 19, 2023

Lessons from Dead Reckoning: Part One

This is like, Lessons from, Dead Reckoning. Part One. Not, Lessons from Dead Reckoning Part One. I'd planned on actually talking about Dead Reckoning Part One, but I need to talk about the preparation I made beforehand, beforehand, and it turns out I have a lot to say about, six movies, and besides I'm not even sure what "lessons" I have yet.

I love the Mission: Impossible franchise. Each movie is my favorite, they're on constant rewatch rotation- just rewatched Rogue Nation again, next up is M: I: II; I feel no compunction about my rotation being in series order, it's more about spinning the plates on those vibes. Rewatching all the other Missions in prep for Dead Reckoning Part I was probably the first time viewing the series in order, and thus there were certain evolutions I could track, so.

Like, the gradual proliferation of IMF technology. I always thought it was weird that Hendricks from Ghost Protocol, nuclear extremist and terrorist with zero ties to the IMF (former Swedish Special Forces in fact, I believe) had IMF technology in the form of that mask he wore to take on the role of his own enforcer Wistrom. There's a lot going on there, which I've already thought through (it needs to be really Hendricks to give a personal connection, but it needs to look like Wistrom and not Hendricks to prevent them from just nabbing the villain then and there, and Hendricks does this because Wistrom was the one scheduled to do so but Hendricks wants to oversee it himself, and he dresses as Wistrom in spite of the fact that Moreau and Wistrom had never met face-to-face because he's still very privative) but the question remained where Hendricks got the IMF technology in the first place- but in Mission Impossible 3 Davian uses an IMF mask to dress his translator/head of security as Julia, which was a little weird but made sense because Davian was working with/for Musgrave. So that (sort of) answers that question. Where Vinter in Rogue Nation got the contact lens camera technology that the IMF had been using in Ghost Protocol I don't know, but the Syndicate is comprised of former members of all sorts of Intelligence agencies; it makes more sense than the mask stuff at least.

But the great thing about these movies is how they manage to make every evolution feel, natural? Like, the first one and the second one and the third and the fourth all have vastly different styles, all the first four gradually honing in toward the latter four McQuarrie flicks; going back and rewatching episodes of the original TV series is like, this feels exactly of a piece with each of the movies. Mission: Impossible 2 was already smart enough early on to know that Ethan Hunt is exactly the kind of guy to free solo for funsies, and with that same scene laying the groundwork for the series' trademark practical stunts which wouldn't really get introduced until Ghost Protocol with the Burj Khalifa sequence- there was a bunch of CG and greenscreen and everything with the action set pieces earlier on, but the grounded approach felt present already. And all that. 

This is where we tie into, the Dead Reckoning stuff, which, is just insane how many evolutions that feel natural that film makes. The idea of The Choice, how the IMF recruits, there's this weird gap between Missions 2 and 3 that is now fully logical I think (like I said I need to rewatch 2): Nyah was given The Choice following her criminal past, Ethan trained her as a spy, realized he had a knack for it or something, and that's where he's at at the beginning of M:I:III! Maybe! I don't know anything about the Operation Surma video game other than it slots in around here, maybe it undermines all of that, I don't know. Anyway.

I've been binge watching Alias all day, I don't know how they manage to keep on ending on cliffhangers but they do. (I mean, it's easy to end on a cliffhanger, just, stop right before you resolve something. But I mean, they were like, fifteen years ahead of their time in terms of episode structure; at the end of almost every episode I said out loud, "that was it?!" and just had to continue watching.) Expect a Lessons from Alias post at some point in future?? 

Sunday, February 13, 2022

Administrivia 2/13/2022

I got my first blog on the same day I got my first e-mail address, Monday February 20th 2012. The first thing I did was apparently e-mail a photo of myself to myself, and shenanigans followed wherein I signed up for Facebook and Blogger (you know the story, right? Doing a play and my fellow castmembers were like, "you don't have a facebook ohkay we're signing you up for facebook what's your e-mail address you don't have one ohkay we're getting you an e-mail address." and I signed up for Blogger on the same day and made my first post.)

Correspondence 3/25/12 19:38 - 19:50 Correspondence I had over Facebook messenger:


7:48pm

Yeah, I don't think you ever told me about this. Also, the "cool kids" use Tumblr.


7:49pm

James Gurney uses Blogspot. And he wrote Dinotopia. So there.


7:50pm

That's pretty definitive evidence, actually.

Okay so this convo was ten years ago. Now both blogger and tumblr are dead! So with the tin/aluminum anniversary of my getting a blog being on the 20th, one week from today, that's when you can expect the link to start working. Maybe it'd be a good place to collect my notes like I mention I should be taking, I don't know.

This is what I emailed to myself by the way, this is what I looked like ten years ago:


So anyway hey didn't I start this very blog with a link to a website that wasn't up yet, either? And it was based on a dream of a website, which, huh. Memes of dreams are something they post to tumblr all the time. Full circle, I don't know.



Sunday, January 30, 2022

1/30/2022, 7:11 - 8:11 pm

 so i wrote on each of my other blogs at the start of the month and I guess I intended to blog more this month but that's fine, I'm writing on this blog right now. 

been watching hitchcock flicks lately
and shift+enter to softreturn your way into a non-double-space between paragraphs, that's right and we are back into it, it's like riding a bike it's like riding a bike.

So there are a bunch of Alfred Hitchcock films on the Criterion Channel right now, but leaving at the end of the month, so I've been catching a couple a day after work of the ones I haven't already seen. I notice that I've done writeups in the past of espionage/urban fantasy flicks that I watched, and like sure, yeah I finished his adaptation of the Leon Uris novel Topaz, yesterday, do I have notes on that?

Not really, no. Not till I finish Torn Curtain as well. He did, two cold war things back-to-back. Then he did a serial killer thing, then a whatever-genre-you'd-classify-Family-Plot-as, then he retired and then he died. 

So yeah mostly I've been doing that but it's almost over now! It's almost, all over, now.

oh hey i keep on meaning to do this 
but one of my professors from college actually has firsthand knowledge of driving in Athens and I've been meaning to contact him and ask about it. First I need to track down his name! Where's a schedule from that semester, let's see, Ancient Temples and Temple Texts, FDREL 390..., but what's the professor's name, we'll find it... yes, haha, Bruce K Satterfield, that's the one! Okay, well, I hope he's still alive and also not retired, that would make it so much easier on us wouldn't it.

intentions for writing for the year?
So anyway my brother was asking at the beginning of the month when we're going to see The Anachronominion as a published book, which was so far out of my brain thinking that it was like, whuuu?? like the first time that struck me as being even possible (you can write books for pleasure! it's a fun thing to do sometimes!) but like, why not? It's far from perfect, but there's a story there at least and that's, 20% of it. 

Need to work on the prose for sure; gotta study my Le Carre once the month is out and I don't have to scramble for Hitchcock (speaking of, it looks like there are a couple Le Carre adaptations on HBO Max that are also leaving at the end of the month? (okay but the thing about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 2011 is that it pronounces Esterhase something like "ester-house" when it's pretty objectively more like "ester-hazy")) and see how he (jlc) does it. That's always the goal, isn't it.

So: brush up on prose, work on prose and plotting and, everything, whip stuff into shape. And once that's done and everything is presentable we'll see where we go from there. 

And hopefully move on besides; as great a title Anachronominion is I like the titles for the second and third books even better, just refreshed my memory on their outlines and geeking out over those, but you can't have the second and third books if there's no first book! 

but then at the end of the third book there's a massive gambit that would theoretically tie up a bunch of incidental plot details from all three of them, and really I've got no idea of the mechanics of that

and also looking over the ideas doc I've got no idea what some of these could possibly mean. "he who walks among the dead" what did I mean by that? why did I not elaborate? 

so anyway one last thing

i actually want to start a tumblr,
see if this link starts working sometime within the week

thingsthatdontevencomebackaround.tumblr.com

because this blog is already so tumblry as it be, it's gunna beeee idk just more of the same, but hopefully with the shakeup it'll be less stressful on me to write etc. :: like, with this blog it feels like I need to write for a full hour, because of the way I title my posts it feels like I need to be more specifically time-working-on-it dedicated. And sometimes that helps my productivity and sometimes it hinders that. So     POR QUE NO DOS    as a tool? I',m just going to have. both .

Monday, April 22, 2019

Lessons from The Living Daylights

The Living Daylights, Timothy Dalton's first Bond film (out of two), is just solid awesome and one of my favorite 007 outings (to be fair the Bond series as a whole leaves little in "middle ground films" for me; I either love a particular entry or hate it.) If SPECTRE is Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation; and, frig i don't know one of the brosnan era ones let's say tomorrow never dies, is M:I:II; then The Living Daylights is the first Mission Impossible movie: tense, and twisty, with a level of hip that's clearly there but ages much less poorly than its immediate sequel's.

Dalton's Bond is darkest and truest to the books; The Living Daylights is the only Bond story I've also actually read the entirety of (it's a pretty short one; encompassing the events of maybe the first four minutes after the prologue and title sequence. (They had to add a lot in the adaptation.)) Also there's this nonfiction book from when I was a kid, "How in the World?" from Reader's Digest, that had a behind-the-scenes exploration of how they did some of the stunts I'm about to describe, and it was just the coolest thing. So there's all that.

Anyway there's this really great sequence where Bond is escaping Soviet Russia with the assassin and cellist Kara Milovy, getting into this awesome car chase where he has to use his spymobile's gadgets in nifty ways. Using a side-mounted laser to cut a cop car's body from its axles, using forward-mounted missiles to blow up the blockade in front of them, pushing a shack onto a frozen lake and driving the shack around for a bit, getting a tire shot off and then using the bare wheel to carve a hole in the ice for a cop car to fall into, before lowering skids and skiing around like that until ultimately crashing into a snowbank, activating the self-destruct, and escaping down the mountain on Kara's cello case, using her Stradivarius as a rudder to steer.
It is delightful, just a treat.

And so like: why the aitch wasn't the car Moone drove around with for a bit a spy-mobile? I was thinking solidly in "Jason Bourne drives a hummer through a casino" mindset, when of course supernatural spy cars would in "real" life be equipped with all sorts of nifty rad magic gadgets and maybe I should have been keeping that in mind? But it's never too late.

As I was watching the car chase with the gadgets and all, I was thinking in my mind how I would have done it were I assigned to do the scene (and we can work off of that): have the powers established, have him go through them one by one, the way these things go; where each gadget gets used in the end and all are needed and none are forgotten about. Only, the last one doesn't get used in the way you think it's going to? Like there's a grappling hook, and instead of being used as a tow cable, it's used as a harpoon gun, or something?

I don't know, just a thought...


Thursday, February 21, 2019

I Just Really Love Merlin

The Kid Who Would be King isn't a perfect film by any stretch, but I'm a big supporter of the director (big supporter here means, I think he's a decently cool guy?), and I love the movie's character arcs; those were terrific. I'm talking about it here because it's got one of the most brilliant urban fantasy conceits I've seen in my life: Merlin needs a special potion to gain strength, specifically consisting of beetle blood, beaver urine, and bone marrow; he finds everything he needs at a fast food restaurant because of how specific food additives were sourced!

If you don't think that's astonishingly clever then you should kindly close the door behind you, thank you.

Also the casting was just great, real quality child actors here. And Merlin's gesture-based magic. And really just everything about Merlin. More Merlin in the sequel pls.

Friday, November 30, 2018

day 30 pt 9: xemf fight till midnight

155 words in ten minutes can I make it???

201 words YAASSS

day 30 pt 8: cambodian flashback

Kay so I haven't figured out how to get Gef to take a whiz on MacBeth or anything yet, but I've managed to build some connective tissue between a few flashbacks. There are a few continuity errors, but we can fix those in February, the official NaNoWriMo revision month.

technically I have over 50k words now, but I'm still on a roll to the end of the day, so hey

day 30 part 7: slit is defeated

Slit jerked to the side, his blade inches away from Moone's throat, and fell to the black tiled level a few feet below, landing perfectly on his feet. He stumbled back, as if made of magnets and repulsed physically by the iron particles, into the hall-like antechamber to the inner vault. The particles didn't affect Moone at all; there really was something inherently magical about these assassins.
The dust swirled around quickly in the warm air, spreading out to cover the whole room.Moone could only watch as Slit was pushed into the bottleneck leading into the room, avoiding the cold iron cloud. Slit may have been cornered, but now he was cornered with Moone's teammates, and without Moone there to help them.

day 30 pt 6: poker tourney prt 4

Sorry it took so long to get this up. I had a lot of this written, but it was all at the tail end, and I decided you'd probably want the final poker stuff to be posted up in order, so I took my time writing the front half as well instead of doing part 5 then part 4. So really these are parts four AND five for you here.


day 30 pt 5: meeting unwin


Setting things up for Gef's goon squad bursting in. original 2017 nanowrimo content in italics, for context.


day 30 part 4: how macbeth did it (topic 9/27)

marksmongoose is such a good word


day 30 pt 3: poker tourney pt 3 (variants explained)

You realize how difficult it is not to make "Omaha" the Cat Dancer references, when talking about Omaha hold 'em? It is extremely difficult. I mean, it's not like it would be anachronistic of me or anything, just... it would hardly be in character for anybody.

Also, Mutual of Omaha. Maybe Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom? But then I'd just be sorely tempted to bend it back around to the Cat Dancer again. Shoot man I don't know.


day 30 pt 2: the assassins attack

I'm making 500 words an hour, easily. 7,500 words left, that's... a little under. But I still have a thousand or so words of poker that I just need to polish up before I post up and add to my canonical wordcount, so we hecka good. A little over 600 words here of original word count; I'm adding context for your reading ease though.