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Really bored people who actually plumbed the depths of my blog will have noted that I posted a fairly esoteric post a while ago that dealt with the economic model of Borderlands 2. Specifically, I was talking about arbitrage between the slot machines in Sanctuary vs. those in Tiny Tina's "Assault on Dragon Keep" DLC. That is, I'm a Borderlands geek.
Tiny Tina's DLC was so popular that they started selling it as a standalone game. People didn't want to have to buy Borderlands to get that DLC. It's a testament to what a great job they did with that DLC. So when 2K announced that they were coming out with a game designed around that DLC in Borderlands 2, I was very excited. I spent months waiting. I pre-ordered the game on Amazon. Three days after I received it, I sent it back for a refund. Wonderlands is a train wreck before you even get to the content. They made all the technical mistakes they made in Borderlands 3. Said another way, they never fixed all the things they broke in Borderlands 3. Let's review those mistakes. First of all, Borderlands 3 is unplayable for the simple reason that the user interface is unusable. In couch-coop mode, I couldn't read the screen. At times, I would walk up to my 50-inch plasma screen, put my eyes right up to the screen, and I still couldn't make out some of the text. So, in technical terms, 2K has given the middle finger to all the co-op players out there. It also didn't help that Wonderlands doesn't have a way to calibrate screen position, so I found certain things on-screen clipped at the edges. If those two technical problems don't sway you, there's also the issue of the vending machine interface. Since Borderlands 1, the vending machines have been a sink hole for computing cycles. You go into a vending machine and the rest of the game--often your partner sitting next to you on the couch--starts to stutter. It is so bad that sometimes my girlfriend and I take turns going into the vending machine interfaces because otherwise it brings the console to its knees. Let's say none of that sways you. Let's say you only use single-player mode and have phenomenal eyesight. What's wrong? Answer: everything else. The game has no story. The game has no characters. The game has no objective. It has only the barest skeins of missions which aren't compelling because they don't tie into any story. If you're used to the Borderlands model, it's bizarre to navigate. When I first started playing Wonderlands, I was dropped into a mission. Disoriented and annoyed with the interface, I played on in the hopes that things would get better. When I finished that mission I was transported to her "Overlands" area which is the weirdest gaming thing I've run into in a professionally produced game. In Overlands, they change the animation style so that your character becomes a little anime bobble-head figure walking around what looks like an old fashioned board game. Different spots in Overlands give you access to different areas with local missions. So, once in Overlands, you might wonder, "Where should I go next?" I didn't know. After a few days I didn't care. The entire game is an incoherent mess. The only good in all of this is that Amazon let me send the game back. I didn't have the presence of mind to do that for Borderlands 3, so now it's a coaster. My message to you is: DO NOT BUY TINY TINA'S WONDERLANDS. This movie is too long, too busy, too fast in many places, and incoherent much of the time. It's a glorious mess.
I write 'glorious' because it's creative, funny, brave, and unpredictable. It starts out as a conventional drama about a harried laundromat owner's tax problems and devolves into an abstract rant against nihilism. There's a lot of room for fun in there, and they make use of a bit of it. As the movie progresses, the visual style accelerates until the audience is subjected to a staccato barrage of imagery that races by so fast that it barely registers. In places, that's a smart fun way to do it, but after an hour and a half of this movie, you're still in for another forty minutes, and I felt every damn one. WARNING: Spoilers ahead. The conceit of the multiverse was fun to see. That's how far sci-fi has come. We can now throw the multiverse into a wide-release drama and everyone pretty much gets it. Their trick of transferring from one verse to another was weak as hell. They'd have someone do something wildly improbable and that would trigger a jump to another verse. I was willing to let it go, but then they got stupid with it. There were two separate characters that had to shove trophies up their rectums to jump verses, so we get these stylized shots of ardent fighters ass-slamming the trophies. It's sorta-kinda funny, but tonally it's at odds with telling a serious tale with serious consequences. The notion of a character that had access to all their selves across the multiverse was also interesting. They chose to go to a dark place with it. The main character's daughter becomes a multiverse terror because with access to all her selves, she becomes indomitable. The downside is that with access to all that, she still can't find satisfaction. Having seen all things everywhere, all versions of herself, she becomes a nihilist. In none of those universes can she find a variation of herself worth living for--the very definition of nihilism. The plot problems start when the mother acquires the same power as the daughter. Neither can defeat the other. It's the immovable object meeting the irresistible force. The upside of that problem is that for us to get resolution, there really must be a meeting of the minds, not subjugation. The downside is that the audience is subjected to a seemingly endless fight in which these two super-multi-verse mavens slap each other around across the multiverse. The notion of reaching a crescendo is achieved with pacing. The little set-tos come faster and faster with flashes of imagery that gets old in about ten seconds. Unfortunately it lasts like half an hour. It's maddening to sit through. The ending was a cop-out to me. Mom and daughter tearfully make up, and the world resumes it's heartening, sloppy course. There's just enough time for mom to confront her own father with her daughter's homosexuality. It felt like a PC happy-horseshit add on to me. Ostensibly, her mother's ability to confront her father's bigotry is supposed to demonstrate growth on her part. To me, it was just pandering. They seemed to want to drop back into this one dreary existence and pretend that the wider multi-verse didn't exist. Their insistence in having these enlightened women stooping to address pedestrian bigotry was a statement to me of how far they haven't come. The mom's father is a shit that should be happily ignored. Where is the wisdom of letting the ignorance of mean people undermine one's sense of well being? You might not agree, but the larger point is that they had a decent resolution that they muddied with politics. If we're going to address bigotry against gays, one of the best ways to do it is to let our gay characters in movies be gay without making a big deal out of it--because it isn't. The grandfather didn't care about the granddaughter's sex life. He was a misogynist. They have a scene of him disappointed at his child being a daughter, so the fact that his daughter's daughter is gay is a non-event to that asshole. They all lost him with their gender long before they developed a sexual orientation. So, summing it up, we have a movie that has great bones, but was badly in need of a hard-nosed editor and a creative team less interested in farming for political brownie points at the expense of story. Someone could probably come along and edit that 139 minute monstrosity down to a brilliant 90 minute flick. If you do watch this movie, I recommend intoxicants.
So, here I am, a minor author with some stories sold. I have a novel approaching publishability. I have enough stories to put out a collection. This posting is the article I wish someone had written for me to read, a primer on author newsletter logistics. As with most learning, I like to start with the big picture, the context. While I like to think I know something about writing, I knew next to nothing about publishing or marketing. So I bought a book about how to self-publish. The over-arching advice, rule number one, the bare minimum thing every self-publishing author must do--according to this book anyway--is build a list of email addresses for a newsletter. Unless you're fairly famous, your books don't sell themselves. It's trivial to upload a file on Amazon and call yourself published, but after that? Who exactly will buy that book? The short answer is: almost no one. Even your potential fans won't know to look for it. Of course any self-published author must do their own marketing. For some people that means giveaways. For others it means Facebook ads. But apparently the cheapest, most effective thing to do is send out a newsletter to your registered fans. The 'conversion' of newsletters to purchases runs pretty high, so they say. I'm a technical guy (Computer Science MS), but I didn't understand how it all works. It's not rocket science, but I found it interesting to dig into. Author newsletters are a big segment of the email business. There are companies that are dedicated to managing newsletter subscriber lists, creating snazzy looking mailings, and even transactional stuff like giveaways. Step one is to have a website or webpage somewhere from which you can collect email addresses. It's a simple idea, but there's a big difference between posting static content for readers, and quite another to implement transactions which require data storage and retrieval. I used to work in IT, so the idea of setting up a server with a database and coding transactions was a painful thought. It might be more painful to me because I know, in detail, what it takes to do and maintain. Imagine how your less technically inclined writers would feel about it. Even if you're clever and maybe think up a cheap way to code it, what if you're successful? Then the volume of those transactions shoots up. Will your little kludge of a system scale up to meet demand? And how much of your time to you want to spend maintaining and monitoring those systems? You get the idea, not fun to even think about. Like all common tasks that no one wants to do, there are people you can pay to do it for you. You've probably heard of MailChimp. They are one of the companies that does all this email related stuff I'm talking about. MailerLite is another one, the one I decided to use. Collection of email addresses is achieved by embedding a form from a mail service into a webpage. In my case, I log into MailerLite and use their GUI builder to create a page to collect email addresses. Really I only have to customize one of theirs; they provide templates because it's the basis of a ton of their business. Once you layout the page, your mail service gives you code to embed in your webpage, literally. You cut and paste that code into your webpage/website. In my case, I use Weebly to host my website, so I go into Weebly's GUI builder and insert 'header code' and 'control code'. The header code is for establishing page-scoped CSS setup. The control-scope code is to actually manifest the mail-service interface (screen/page/popup). Then when the user goes to that page of your website, the embedded form shows up. That gives the user a chance to enter an email address and click a button to send it to your mail service. In my case, if I log into MailerLite and go to 'Subscribers', I'll see the newly entered email address. Simple, right? Conceptually, yes, but you do have to figure out your mail service's interface and your web-hosting company's interface to embed code. In my case, when the form popped up on my Weebly site, the paragraph ( "<p>" in HTML) content was the wrong style. Some sneaky combination of CSS settings polluted the embedded page. I had to spend a few hours trying to figure out exactly what bit of code to tweak and how. Unfortunately, MailerLite doesn't directly support Weebly. They have 'integrations' which is to say partnerships among these companies. So MailerLite plays with Wix fairly nicely and Weebly seems to play nicely with MailChimp, but MailerLite and Weebly gave me some grief. That's the kind of thing that would put off a non-techincal author. Imagine someone like that having to debug the form embedded on their website. It's one of a thousand little things that pushes authors towards traditional publishing or hiring a 'web guy.' I got through it, cursing a little. As usual, I'm happy to have done it because now I learned some important things in the process. At that point, users of my website could go to the newsletter page, enter their email address, and those addresses would pile up in my MailerLite account. In my case, when I publish short stories, I get to tell readers my website URL. The idea is that they get a tickle out of a story, go to my website, looking for more and signing up for my newsletter which will hopefully turn them into a book purchaser some day in the future. Did I mention I've never sent out a newsletter yet? It turns out you need email service to send out newsletters. Yeah, I know, you have an email, right? You don't need simply an email address, you need your own email domain. That may sound like a big deal, but if you have a website, you likely already own a domain. By 'email service' I mean that the DNS (domain name servers) entry of your website domain (e.g. lbspillers.com) will now contain the records that direct email correspondence to servers willing to take them. Strictly speaking, you don't need your own email domain. The thing is, that free email services don't want to do bulk mailings for you and a lot of email client software gives the stink eye to emails coming from those free services. How many emails does it take to make Gmail balk? I don't know. A lot, I suspect. But more importantly, how many people will take your email seriously? There are authentication protocols like DKIM and DMARC that email clients can use to decide if an email claiming to be from you is authentic. Using your own email domain allows your email service to participate in these kinds of authentication protocols, ensuring that no one thinks your newsletters are spam or from a spoofed address. Cursing again, I went to my internet domain seller, the people who manage my DNS entries, and discovered that basic email service with one glorious mailbox would cost me $11 a year. For that price, I was willing to get with the program. I purchased email service and spent a few hours setting up my one email address--l.b.spillers@lbspillers.com. Now I am finally positioned to send out newsletters. Even better, those newsletters will have the very professional looking "unsubscribe" links that will let users opt out. That's not just a nice feature, but required unless you want to be accused of sending out spam emails. It's another little thing that your mail service takes care of for you. Did I mention that MailerLite is free until you reach 1,000 subscribers? Yeah, pretty cool. So my total cost for setting up for author newsletters so far is $11 for the year (renews at $14…it was a sale) and some fairly aggravating hours learning the nitty-gritty details of all these vendor interfaces. Now I just need readers. Over the weekend I went to see Uncharted with my girlfriend. I was surprised that the theater was nearly sold out. I had probably only seen one preview for it. Ostensibly Tom Holland is pulling Spiderman fans to the theaters. Sloppy is the word I'd use for this movie. Sloppy writing, sloppy plotting, sloppy storytelling, sloppy character work, and a sort of general disdain for believability. So, yeah, gimme a popcorn movie with eye candy and tension and…stuff, but does it have to be so sloppy? The movie in a nutshell is that the Scooby Gang is on the trail of lost South American gold. Of course, so is our cliché bad guy played by Antonio Banderas. But don't worry. They won't bother with building any tension with that bad guy. He's just the sugar daddy that can supply the toys that this movie's visuals demand. We open with Tom Holland in that preview scene where he Kong-jumps from palette to palette in 400 MPH wind behind a cargo plane. It's so god damned impossible that I can't watch it with any interest. Anyone being dragged behind a plane would be hard pressed to hold on. They certainly can't leap against that wind from palette to palette like a preening gymnast. I watched it, of course, but it wasn't affecting to me. It was just ridiculous piled on ridiculous. There is no, oh crap that guy might shoot him, because the entire scene is bullshit. It's just a question of what ridiculousness will they show next, a shrug. Then we get to Holland being recruited by Wahlberg. I won't bother with the details, but it tracked about as well as Holland Kong-jumping in 400mph winds. The best bit is probably them knocking around Barcelona trying to find the map to the treasure. That involved a lot of fun Indiana Jones style exploration with interesting eye candy. Anyway, the Scooby Gang, riddled with mistrust as it is, eventually breaks up and separately get to the treasure about the same time as the bad guys. In a shot straight from The Goonies, there are two Spanish Galleons sitting in the back of a nearly closed grotto with sunlight streaming onto them. It was a a glamour shot of two wooden ships that have come through 500 years of weathering completely unscathed. And yes, they sat there, visible from above for 500 years with no one finding them and the ships' magical wood never succumbing to the elements. Not only did that wood not succumb, but it's strong enough that two straps on each ship is enough for it to be hoisted into the air by some mythical helicopter capable of lifting a ridiculous tonnage of ship. It's stupid. What you get in this movie is a string of startling visuals which completely lack verisimilitude. They constantly will pull you out of a plot that itself is asinine and populated with characters doing things humans don't do. This movie's quality will increase proportionately with your level of intoxication. Do not watch it, but if you must, don't watch it sober. "Consider our contract void," was what a recent email told me.
For those of you who aren't in the business of submitting stories to magazines, let me tell you, it's difficult. Americans don't read much short fiction these days, so the number of outlets for sci-fi shorts is small. That's not even talking about those which will pay the SFWA's pro-rate of eight cents a word. You read that correctly. Eight cents a word. Sound like a lot? Well, let's say you sold a six-thousand word piece, that would earn you $480. That'd be great pay if you could write, edit and get it accepted somewhere in ten or twelve hours. Of the 238,777 words of short fiction that I have tried to sell, I average 1.93 words/minute to turn out submission-ready copy. For our imagined 6K word story that would be 51 hours. Of course, that's an average for all my writing. For my most recent story near that size, I produced 2.43 submission-ready words/minute. That faster speed, ostensibly garnered by experience, would still have me spending a little over 41 hours on that story. That translates into a wage of $11.70/hour--less than minimum wage in some states. I know, write faster, right? All that's to say, it's a difficult, low-paying gig, writing is. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of places that will take a story for free and slap it up on their website so you can call yourself nominally published, but to get someone to actually pay for your writing is quite difficult. That's why it was so much fun to receive an acceptance from Mythic Magazine for my story "Slivers" on October 11th. They were only paying a penny a word, down from three cents a word when I submitted. Since the story had already been rejected by the more lucrative outlets, I was happy. At least my work wouldn't be completely wasted. I signed the contract and waited for issue #18 to arrive. Imagine my surprise when on December 21st I got an email from the publisher saying that he was closing the magazine indefinitely; I should consider our contract void. Thankfully he didn't actually write "Merry Christmas." Of course, publishing a magazine of short speculative fiction is an even worse gig than writing for one. Getting Americans to pry open their wallets and actually pay for written entertainment is extremely difficult. The internet is awash in free content. Some sci-fi writers actually give away the first book in a series to get people to buy the others! People borrow/steal their friends' and family members' streaming passwords. Most video entertainment and books can be pirated on the internet. So getting those same people to pay for a periodical is outrageously difficult. People are more and more used to not actually paying for what they read, and often what they watch. That is, I sympathize a little with the publisher, but only a little. Let's say his magazine runs 50K words of content an issue. To pay a penny a word for those 50K words would cost him $500. Said another way, to close out his last issue would cost him about $500 in content and a lot of elbow grease to get his electronic-only magazine published. My point is that it would have cost him on the order of $500 to keep his word to perhaps a dozen authors who he strung along for months. But, wait a minute, his business failed (again). You can't expect one man to bear the responsibility of the entire enterprise. Maybe. Maybe it's my fault for not seeing that a magazine that just dropped its rates is faltering. And let's not forget that over-arching fallback of every crappy businessman: it's perfectly legal. Yeah, it's true. The reason we have corporations and LLCs is to protect hard-working entrepreneurs from having their life destroyed by a business failure. So, there's no black-and-white in this little teapot tempest of ethics. There's an incompetent, well-meaning guy who I admired for his tenacity and pluck right up to the point where he screwed a dozen writers three days before Christmas because he couldn't cough up $500 to shut down his business gracefully. How much is your integrity worth?  My house was built in 1903. It was originally something like 700 square feet. Over the years it had an addition put on the back, and a basement dug out. At some point, someone paid to put in eight-foot tall ceilings, leaving the ones at ten feet in place to form an odd dead space. The point is that it's old and heavily modified.
One of my earlier projects was to put in a pull-down ladder so access to the attic was easier. At the time, one of the reasons I did it was so I could use storage space up there. After insulating it--none of the house has any insulation--I put some plywood down so I could store boxes above the 'new' (like fifty years old) section. The problem was that while I was up there I got a look at the original chunk of the house. It still had knob and tube wiring. Thankfully, it was only for one branch circuit. Everything else was modernized or installed much later--from the basement (that didn't exist when this stuff went in). I've posted a picture so you can get the idea. The name comes from insulating knobs that hold the wires and insulating tubes that they insert through joists/rafters to run wires through. In my house, they ran buses of wire on ceramic insulators. Note that these insulators were nailed to the rafters where any roofer might damage the wiring. Then, when they needed to run power to a fixture or receptacle, they ran a set of wires (one hot, one neutral; this is long before the notion of grounding) down the insides of a couple of ceiling joists. The best part is that any time you need power, you just splice into those buses. After perhaps eighty years of service, this left endlessly spliced wires all over the place. The modern National Electric Code requires all wire junctions to be in a junction box (with a few esoteric exceptions). That's not to say it wasn't a valid way to do business. A properly installed K&T setup is nominally safe. In my case its served for likely more than eighty years without the house burning down. What creeped me out about it personally is that the wire insulation becomes brittle. When I was installing a new bathroom fan (inline in a six-inch duct), I had to deal with this stuff and I had the experience where you flex a wire and the insulation just snaps like a twig. The wire remains fine which is the problem. It will happily carry voltage through that insulation break, ready to do some real damage. No doubt that explained a lot of seemingly needless applications of electrical tape that I kept running into. So, after almost three years of vaguely worrying about this, I decided to fix it. I bought a hundred feet of 12/2 (I know I only need 14/2 but I purposely installed heavier wire), a hundred feet of EMT (electrical metallic tubing), and climbed up there with my fish-tape and bender to replace it. Ten junction boxes later I had gone through about 70 feet of EMT. I'm sad to say it took me a total of about twelve hours. No doubt an electrician could have done it in half the time. Most of the receptacles and fixtures are still wired with lines that are older than dirt, but the bus is all up to code. Baby steps. I worry less now. Like most people, my girlfriend and I are trying to lose weight. We have finely tuned our eating for a gentle glide into lean healthfulness.
Of course, no punitive food plan is sustainable. You might last a month or two, but eventually you will find yourself wanting an indulgence. In that sense, weight loss is a psychological pursuit. You need to build in indulgences. For my girlfriend and I, one of those indulgences is that every Wednesday when we go shopping at our local King Soopers, we get a 9-ounce bag of Ruffles Original Potato Chips. Every Wednesday night we gorge on potato chips, rhapsodizing about the glorious taste and texture of our favorite chips. Last week they weren't there, so we bought the larger bag conveniently on sale for $3.50, fifty cents more than our normal bag. It's more calories, but we did it. Thankfully, this week the Ruffles in our size returned. At least I thought they did. Being the suspicious curmudgeon that I am, I was suspicious that an entire line of Frito Lay chips could disappear for a week, ever. So I looked at the bag and found that the nine-ounce bag is now eight and one half ounces. The thing is there is no substitute for Ruffles. The closest mass-market alternative is Wavy Lays, but they are made by the same company. Ruffles are simply the best potato chips available. Now I have a grudge against Frito Lay. I even went to their website to complain, and guess what? I was asked to specify what product I was whining about, but their website only lists the 9-ounce bag. Even their own IT systems can't keep up with the perfidy of upper management. In bulk, potatoes cost on the order of twenty cents a pound. Frito Lay peels and fires them and turns around to sell them to us rubes for--depending on exactly where you buy--anywhere from $6 to $15 per pound. You'd think there was enough value added in there so that they wouldn't have to chisel people like us out of half an ounce of chips. And before you even ask, no, there was no "Now with fewer chips!" banner on the bag. They were sneaky little shits about it. I am annoyed. I am insulted. I am depressed that there is no alternative. I will have my revenge. Credit goes to the people who came up with the very compelling trailer for this movie. It was a complete bait-and-switch that fooled my girlfriend and I. Ha ha, you got us. I hope you reap what you sow. In colloquial terms, this is not a "normal" movie, not a movie designed for mass market appeal. You might call it artsy, but to me it was self-indulgent dreck that I hope to scare you off. I'm serious, I don't think any amount of drugs can turn this movie into an enjoyable experience. Let's start with the music. Sad to say I don't have the lexicon to specify it precisely, but they made use of loud, high-pitched female vocals that sounded vaguely religious. It certainly felt medieval, but they used them constantly. Instead of using them tactically to underscore or enhance a scene, they just kept assaulting my ears with it more and more as the movie progressed. It was akin to reading triple exclamation marks after every sentence. The story is a very abstract hero's journey. The main character, Garwin, is not a knight despite being the king's nephew and the fact that everyone addresses him as one. That's sort of the point. He wants to prove himself. A chance comes on Christmas Eve when the Green Knight comes and lays down a challenge: see if you can land a blow on me, but whatever you give me I'll return to you in a year's time. Quickly establishing his stupidity cred, Garwin takes its head off using the king's sword. Now's a good time to mention that they throw up a lot of text messages during the movie. Being artsy asses they wouldn't dare use voice-over, but they make abundant use of chapter headings and place indications. Normally I wouldn't complain about that, but in their case they use a very stylized sorta-kinda gothic font that is very hard to read in the half-second that they flashed these messages on screen. Several times my girlfriend asked me what they said because she couldn't read them. I could often only provide her the first word or so because the damnable font is so visually confounding. I took it as a personal screw-you from the moviemakers. So the movie sets Garwin on his quest to be a knight or man or something other than the slimy piece of shit that he is. Slimy? Oh yes, he has a paramour that he uses badly and discards. He also spends the year leading to his next meeting with the Green Knight getting drunk every night. He is not an underdog. He is not likable. He is not interesting. He's a boring, weak, spoiled rich boy (with a witch mother) with nothing engaging to observe in him. It doesn't help that the movie is shot in relentlessly depressing light. It's like the part of Excalibur when, the king being out of favor with the Lord, the land is blighted. Seriously, there isn't a single shot with the sun in it. I noticed one peripheral scrap of blue sky in one scene. It's bleak. And these guys don't do anything subtle or understated, so that bleakness is one long blazing note of shit through the entire movie. Anyway, Garwin goes on his quest. It's shot in the same landscape as Monty Python's The Search for the Holy Grail. At least it looks that way, all scrabby browns and mud and desolation. He gets robbed. He starves. He's befriended by a fox. He generally has a miserable time until he's almost there. He literally falls down on the doorstep of some manor house where they patch him up. What does our knight do? He bangs his host's wife because, you know, he's so tragically flawed. To the asses that made the movie, no doubt that woman represented a test for the 'hero' on his Campbell journey. I don't care. The execution was bizarre and off-putting. You get the vibe, right? My girlfriend suggested we walk out, but I kept watching both because I paid my money and I'm trying to be open minded about it. We get a bizarre ending to the movie, but WAIT, there's more. That ending was just a vision. So after suffering through a very surreal, bizarre, bleak vision of Garwin's future, we rewind and get the ending I originally expected. I say to hell with the false ending. I say to hell with the unreadable font. I to hell with the relentlessly depressing tone. I to hell with the ear-splitting singing voice over and over and over. This is the point where I might point out specific mistakes and highlight the good bits that shine through, but this movie doesn't deserve any analysis. Also, there weren't any good bits. This was the worst movie I can remember paying to see. Watch it at your own peril. Once again HBO saves the day. If I had driven to the theater to see this movie and paid for admission, I would have been very upset. Thankfully this movie is one of those COVID-19 era releases that hit both theaters and HBO at the same time.
The cast is strong. The production values are strong. Where this movie falls down is the writing and direction. The first problem is that, in terms of story, everything is an abstraction. The flick opens with a murder of a district attorney. It's implied that the killing is to stop prosecution of a criminal case, but we don't get the details. Through the course of the entire movie, we never learn what's properly at stake or for whom. Then we get the first writerly garbage. Despite this being a supposedly high-stakes situation, the people who contract the killing of the DA are too cheap to pay for a separate team to get the accountant who supplied crucial evidence to that DA. There is this contrived sense of tension that the hitmen must get to the accountant in another city before he sees the news of the DA's death and runs. So, immediately, we're in the bush-league. Guess what? The guy sees the news and runs--with his son. By the end of the movie, the hitmen get instructions about the sky being the limit on what can be done to get their target. It's asinine. The movie opens with a problem that's not quite important enough to pay for proper manpower, but later on, golly you guys need to get on it. Those sort of ham-fisted story chunks litter this entire movie. There's a lot of ungrounded, unspecified, cognitively dissonant chunks of story that lurch through the entire movie. Where does Angelina come in? Good question. She really has no connection with the main plot. She is the random person that finds the accountant's kid and makes it her mission to keep him safe. However, to introduce her, we get a look at some firefighter camaraderie to give her flavor. It has a bizarrely random set piece where she sits in the back of a pickup truck with a parachute that triggers at highway speed. She gets pulled out of the truck, flails through the air, and lands on the side of the road. It's like watching Adventures in Stupid White Trash. Make no mistake, she looks great for her age--if emaciated--but her introduction is so stupid that it bleeds into her character. She, of course, is a tortured soul who can't get over those people she couldn't save last year. She's the super tough chick who, when it's convenient, is literally paralyzed by flashbacks of those nice people standing in the woods. She never sees them die, so all her trauma is their imagined deaths. That thing about Jolie's character's trauma is one of many directorial slips. If she is going to have paralyzing trauma, find a visual for it, otherwise people like me will nod our heads and admit that its a horrible situation but not feel it. That lack of punch in framing her damage makes the moments where its supposed to affect seem off. The trauma onscreen doesn't match the trauma in scene. Continuing on to the next writerly mistake, random guy connected to unspecified prosecution involving unknown bad guys who might suffer unknown consequences flees to the brother of his dead wife (making him essentially a stranger). See where I'm going with this? Everyone is unconnected, the stakes are unspecified, and the plot points are essentially random and filmed in the least exciting way. I could go on, but I think you get the theme by now. The characters are unconnected. The motivations are muddled. The direction fails to engender suspense. It's like someone's student film was given a real budget. I'd love to know the backstory about this production. It wouldn't surprise me if this project got a new director at some point, or the studio had to re-edit it into something plausible for release. The problems of this movie are so obvious that I imagine there's a story behind them. Don't watch this movie unless its as a cautionary tale in film school.  Well, it's spring. At least in the desert Southwest it's properly spring. I know plenty of other people around the US are still getting pummeled with snow, but here on the Colorado Plateau it's time for planting. Last summer we replaced a big area of river rock with soil. You can see the corner of that area in the picture of the planter. I didn't get sod for it, so you can see that it's still a fairly patchy chunk 'o lawn. Doris wants to grow herbs, and her arthritis makes kneeling down for a garden bed difficult, so she asked me about getting a raised planter. Having done extensive home renovations on this house and my previous house, I have a moderately robust collection of tools. However, as I've never done much fine woodworking or cabinetry, I don't have any experience building furniture--indoor or out. So I googled around to see what people were selling. It looked like I'd be spending anywhere from $200 to $500 for a decent sized planter, give or take exactly how big it is and how fancy it is. I'm as averse to work as anyone, but I'm also cheap. If I'm going to spend the money, I figure I might as well consider it an investment in tools and skills. So instead of giving my money to someone else, I spent about $100 on lumber and another $50 on router bits to put my own together. You don't have to be particularly handy to put together a 2x4 frame, but a planter has five panels to it (bottom and four sides). I had never done any joinery. Yeah, I could always use a crosspieces to hold together some slats to make panels, but I had visions of water and soil coming through the gaps. Besides, last year I bought a Mikita compact router (about $90), and I love to learn new, useful skills. I decided I wanted to do 'real' joinery on the planter panels. Specifically, I decided I would rabbet the panel pieces. I write that like everyone knows what that is. Two months ago, I didn't know the word. It's what you might call a 'stair step' joint. The picture below shows you the pieces of the end panels after I rabbeted them. If you look at the upper panel, you'll see how the wood comes together. Those are rabbets:  Unless you're a hand-tool maven, you'll use a router to create those edges. I'd explain the process, but YouTube is full of proper cabinetry experts who can explain it better than I.
On top of the panel pieces you'll see my cheap-ass pin nailer from Arrow. I'm happy to report that the $30 nailer has performed flawlessly for me. The bigger name tool companies want something like $100 for a pin nailer. I used the pin nailer when I glued up the panels. You might ask: Why nail the boards if you are gluing them? Well, the pin nails are so tiny that you can hardly see them, and they make the gluing process a lot easier. Instead of clamping up all the panels carefully, I just glued them and nailed them with 1/2" pins. The nailer is driven by a compresser. I use a Porter Cable pancake compressor. You can get one of those with a couple of nailers for about $300. When I bought mine fifteen years ago, that's what I paid. I was stunned to see them selling the same compressor with three nailers recently for $300!! Those same Porter Cable guys still want over a hundred bucks if you just want a pin nailer. That's why I bought the Arrow one. If you don't have a compressor, I highly recommend one if you do a lot of moulding or door installations. That's almost all I've used mine for until recently. Getting back to the planter. In my Googling, I found that everyone said to use cedar for the planter body because it resists rot. You can't use pressure treated wood because you don't want the chemicals to leech into the soil and consequently the food you grow. The thing is, good cedar finish wood is expensive, and I'm cheap (frugal really, there is a difference). One piece of 1"x4"x8' cedar is about $12 at Home Depot. I couldn't help but notice that everyone uses cedar for fence pickets, and those are cheap enough to fence a yard with. At my local Depot, a 5/8"x6"x6' cedar fence picket is about $3.50. Bingo. I designed my planter around those. It's about one picket long, three picket-widths wide, and about three picket-width's tall. The planter pictured is a 2x4 frame holding five cedar fence picket panels. Being eager to do something cool with my router, I didn't just nail the panels to the frame. I grooved the 2x4 frame to receive the bottom panel, and I rabbeted the outside of that 2x4 frame so the four side panels would be flush with it. Since I don't have a router table, it was a huge pain in the butt to do all that. Having never grooved or rabbeted with a router, I enjoyed it. With some scrap lumber and clamps you can set up jigs to get it done. Again, people on YouTube can guide you if you're eager to explore that pain. Other than the frugal usage of fence pickets for the panels, I incorporated one other cool thing into the design. If you look at the corners, you'll see they are 4x4s that have had 2x2 chunks cut out of them so the frame corners could sit in them. That was surprisingly hard to do without a table saw. The short story is that I used a circular saw. Mine cuts to a depth of 2.25 inches. So on each post, I made long cuts 2.25 inches in from the edge, and then one at the end. Of course, a circular saw doesn't cut a nice vertical line, so when you cut the surface as far as you want to go, the kerf underneath is shaped like a sector of the saw blade. That is, none of the cuts meet neatly to excise a perfect inside corner from the 4x4. A small bit of wood remains, holding the chunk you are trying to remove. Worse, if you try to lever it up and break the wood, you quickly find out that you don't have any space to pull. There's only one kerf (about 1/8 inch) of space before you are jamming the piece into the rest of the 4x4. What I did to solve this was simply make a few extra end cuts. That gave the chunk being removed more room to bend up and snap the little chunk 'o wood holding it to the rest of the 4x4. The only downside is that instead of a perfect little concave corner, you have little imperfections where the blade didn't cut and you ripped the piece out. So I was stuck chiseling that inside corner smooth. It only takes a few minutes per corner. Anyway, that's my little build-a-planter adventure. The money I might have given to a manufacturer to do the work for me was spent on some nice router bits. The time it cost me to do it I chalk up to educating myself. The satisfaction I get from the finished product is a nice offset for all those story rejections I get. I'd post the plans, but I didn't make any formal diagrams, just a lot of notes and some hand-drawn bits with sloppy dimension lines on them. Besides, if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm not really qualified to tell you how to build a planter. |