The Supervillain Team-Up

(archived from tumblr)

I just want to see one of those dopey supervillain team-up things where instead of everybody being like “All right, time to fight us some heroes!”, every last one of them has an existential crisis because somebody lumped them in with the rest of these fucks.

Dr. Doom’s all “Doom will usher in a new age, a golden utopia, free from the burden of want or indecision or petty dissent!  Doom knows what’s best for mankind and will bring it about!  These peasants are mere jailbreakers and thieves!  How has it come to be that Doom is numbered among their ranks!”

And like Sandman’s sitting there going “Dude, I just... I steal shit.  Sometimes I team up with guys who also don’t like Spider-Man.  Worst thing I ever did was slap an old dude, and I felt really bad about it for weeks.  That guy’s been sanctioned by the UN three times and counting for running death camps.”

“The skulls of Doom’s enemies pave the road to a better tomorrow!”

Three guys’ve got their hands up like “We literally just fight the Avengers for kicks.  Pretty sure that ain’t even illegal.”

General Ross is sitting there glaring at everyone and going “I’m still a general.  I work for the US government.  I’m being paid, right now, out of taxpayer funds.  You’re all going to super-jail as soon as I get my phone back.”

Everybody’s side-eyeing Kraven like, it’s 2016, bro, stop killing endangered animals for fun, and he’s looking at them like he doesn’t even know what to say to someone if it’s not about hunting.

Wolverine and Deadpool are somewhere in the back, bickering with one of the roster-guys about how it shouldn’t count if the hundreds of dudes you’ve knife-murdered were knife-murdered for good reasons.

It’s just the most demoralizing thing since Osborn got elected president.  Super-crime plummets 50% in the next three months as everyone takes some time to reflect on their lives and try to get their shit together.

A brief list of Magificent Seven (2016) cut-scenes

(archived from tumblr)

Bogue: I need an army.

Posse Depot clerk: Okay.  Purpose of the army?

Bogue: For...normal army things.  You know, just perfectly ordinary, army purposes.

Posse Depot clerk: Oooookay.  Do you maybe just need the Army, then?

Bogue: No.  Absolutely not.  It would be terrible if the actual Army showed up.

Posse Depot clerk: So you need an army, and definitely not the Army, for perfectly legitimate and normal reasons.

Bogue: Yes.  I need an army to accompany me on a three-day ride to the middle of nowhere and do legitimate, completely legal army things there.

Posse Depot clerk: Sounds good, please sign here.

 

Cut for: Continuity.  An earlier re-write clearly shows Bogue delegating this task.

---

Townsfolk: You can’t do this!  These are our homes!  This is our land!

Denali: Oh, suddenly there’s a problem with forcibly relocating entire communities with little to no compensation for lost property or livelihood and no concern for the well-being of those displaced? That’s a thing we take exception to, now?

Townsfolk: ...

Bogue: ...

Hired goons: ...

[credits roll after forty minutes of increasingly awkward silence]

 

Cut for: Time.

---

Bogue: Hello, good morning, I need another army.

Posse Depot clerk: Wait, another army? What’d you do with the last one?

Bogue: No, sorry, I misspoke.  I need an army.  My first army.  Ha ha, what a slip of the tongue, who even needs two armies.

Posse Depot clerk: No, I think I remember you now.  Bartholomew Bogue, wasn’t it?

Bogue: No, no, you’re thinking of my brother.  He hired an army here a week ago.  He said this place was great, and that he was very happy with the army he got here, and they’re definitely still all riding around somewhere and positively not blown to bits by a weird pack of outlaws.  I’m...Shmartholomew Shmogue.

Posse Depot clerk: If you’re brothers, why’s your last name different?

Bogue: Um.  The doctor who filed my birth certificate was very drunk.  But we’re definitely brothers, and this is definitely my first army.

Posse Depot clerk: I’m charging you a deposit this time.

 

Cut for: Continuity.  This scene was shot before script revisions calling for Bogue to be killed on-screen during the climax were adopted.

---

Denali: *laughing to himself*

Bogue: What’s so funny?

Denali: You know how you asked me how I got so many men for so cheap, and I said ask me later?

Bogue: Yeah.

Denali: I told them all we were going to Six Flags.

Bogue: Well, that’s just mean.

Denali: *laughs louder* I told them all they could go on El Diablo, even if they had a bunch of corndogs first.

Bogue: Jesus, Denali.

Denali: They’re going to be so mad when they find out the truth.  Those townsfolk don’t stand a chance.

 

Cut for: Characterization; historical inaccuracy.  As much as a large band of frontier mercenaries would have doubtless enjoyed them, corndogs were not invented until the 1940s.

---

A prolonged argument between Chris Pratt and Denzel Washington over a scene in which Chisolm is supposed to do Red Harvest’s warpaint for him.

Denzel swore never to lift a brush again after an incident in college and proposes the scene be rewritten to replace Chisolm with Faraday, but Chris feels his fifteen years of semi-professional watercolor painting is less important to the potential revision than Faraday’s lack of emotional connection with Red Harvest. 

Martin Sensmeier is asked for his opinion on the issue, but he pretends not to hear them and continues to eat his lunch as if the argument is not happening.  Chris claims that this is because Martin agrees with him, and Denzel says that after this display he regrets defending Chris’s character when he was ranked least trustworthy of all the Marvel Chrises.

Matt Bomer, back on set for a last-minute reshoot, suggests avoiding the scene entirely by hanging several very clean mirrors around the town to make it clear to the audience that Red Harvest can do his own warpaint, no matter how out of hand the make-up artists’ one-upmanship of each other gets.

Denzel apologizes for what he said about Chris, and Chris appears to accept the apology but is still obviously hurt.  Martin covers the ensuing tension by opening a bag of sunchips and eating them very slowly.

 

Cut for: Quality.  The argument was surreptitiously filmed by Vincent D’Onofrio on his cell phone while he pretended to be texting Ayelet Zurer about whether she’d bring her new dog on set for him to meet when Daredevil starts filming again, and is consequently poorly lit and badly shot and features no mic dampening once the sunchips are in play.  It will, however, be included as an extra on the blu-ray release.

Cranberry sangria recipe

(archived from tumblr)

So cranberry sangria? Cranberry sangria.  Absolutely delicious cranberry sangria.

What you’ll need:

• 750 ml of some fruity wine (I used Barefoot zinfandel because it’s cheap but not too jacked, make your selection based on how tolerant you are of sweeter/drier wines)
• 1 cup decent-to-good orange juice
• a batch of half-assed cranberry sauce

Boil 1 cup of water, 1 cup sugar (less if you like your cranberries tarter--1/2 cup is still pretty sweet) , and 1 12-ounce package of fresh cranberries.  Turn the heat to low, simmer for like 5 minutes.

Pour the bottle of wine and the orange juice into a pitcher.  Drain the liquid from the cranberry sauce into it, then squish the pulp that’s left until all the juice drains out.  Mix the juice into the wine, discard the pulp (or bake it into a dessert bread), chill everything for a couple of hours, then drink to your heart’s content*.

*You can’t really taste the alcohol in this stuff, so probably go easy on it if you have to get yourself someplace afterwards.

The importance of mediocrity in artistic endeavor

(archived from tumblr)

A friend recommended an article recently (here, if anyone’s interested), and it basically broke down why getting comfortable with feeling stupid is an absolute necessity for doing science.

But it hit me, as I was reading it, that most of what he was saying is absolutely true for writing, too.

You spend most of your formative years being rewarded for, let’s face it, fairly pedestrian, rule-following work.  The smart money’s on not taking big risks; you might not get an A for your solid-but-forgettable short story or essay, but you definitely won’t fail the assignment.  Most teachers and most professors, especially if you went to a large school with a high student to instructor ratio, are not out there encouraging students to go wild with graded assignments, and they don’t have the time to talk about what worked and what didn’t with all hundred and fifty of you even if they do encourage it.  At best, you’re discussing it in peer groups full of young writers just as in the weeds about this stuff as you are.

In this environment, there’s a point at which you’re done with the piece, at which it’s no longer your problem, at which some authority will look at it and assign it a concrete score and tell you how well or how poorly you’ve done on it.  These points are usually marked on a calendar, predictable and rational.  There can be a certain amount of comfort in that at the same time that it can be suffocating or restricting.  Even if you don’t like the outcome, you know where you stand.  You can argue with a bad grade or resolve to do better next time.

When you’re writing for yourself and an actual audience--people who aren’t earning class-participation points for this--the rules are very different.  Case in point, there aren’t really “rules.” There aren’t any directions.  Nobody’s getting paid to read what you write from start to finish.  You can do whatever the fuck you want, but nobody has to come up with a cogent reason for why they didn’t like it, or where you lost them.  The only criteria is whether or not it works, which you’re only going to figure out by trying and succeeding or failing.  And if you fail, you’re going to have to muddle through why that happened if you want to fix it.

Not to say that every writer’s an island, and we’re all in this alone.  Of course we’re not.  If you can get an audience, sometimes they’ll be kind enough to talk to you about how they felt about the piece in a coherent, helpful way.  Critique groups and long-suffering friends and reading buddies are life-savers who can frequently tell you where your project stopped working, and sometimes even why.  But the only person who can really fix your piece is you.

And, as with anything else worth doing, there’s never going to be a point where you can stop growing and go “I have reached the pinnacle of my potential and am now free to rest on my laurels forever.” You’ve figured out how to achieve various moods and communicate exactly what you want and do dialogue and nail plot structure and suck an audience in and subvert genre conventions satisfyingly instead of with great irritation?  Great!  There’s always going to be something else you want to try and some other thing that you always get hung up on.  Always.  You’re never going to look at your own work and just be happy.

Some of that’s because developing an eye for what’s good and what you want out of your own work is far, far easier and faster than developing the chops to put it into practice.  It’s like building something: it’s simple to look at an off-kilter, unsound structure and go “Pretty sure that’s not supposed to be happening” but complicated to pick out on the blueprints exactly where the architect went wrong.  We know our stories have gone off the rails before we develop the skills to keep it from happening, and that’s discouraging, to put it mildly.

But another big part of it is that you’re evolving as a person at the same time that you’re evolving as a writer.  The questions you’re asking yourself at twenty aren’t the same questions you’re asking yourself at forty or seventy.  The genres you’re working in or interested in or influenced by will be evolving, too.  So will the world around you.

The sooner a writer can get comfortable with the idea that not everything has to be good, or great, or consistent, or effective, or any number of five million other things that our writing can frustratingly resist being, the sooner we can get comfortable with the process of working toward eventual success.

EO Wilson

(archived from tumblr)

There’s this feeling you get when a story gives you exactly the sort of satisfaction you’ve been hoping for but not quite expecting out of it.  Kind of like sliding from cold tiles into a warm bath, or flipping the pillow over to the cool side when it’s ninety out and all the sheets are sticking to you.

Edward Wilson tells, in Letters to a Young Scientist, of an experiment performed to figure out how ants tell when another ant has shuffed off its mortal coil and joined the choir invisible.  He starts with the hypothesis that the ants are reacting to the smell of decay coming from their dead sisters, because ants can hardly see when they’re down in the dark of their mounds, and for all they know that unmoving ant they’re crawling over is just being very lazy.  It also takes a day or two postmortem for the removal process to kick in, so Wilson seemed reasonably sure that testing this mechanism would bear fruit.

He did some research, got a bunch of the chemicals typically present in decaying insects together, and started dabbing them on paper ant-substitutes to see which ones were treated more or less the same way a real dead ant would be.  Some provoked no reaction, some threw the entire colony into an alarmed frenzy, and eventually one proved to have the exact correct response.

Thus it was that he found that once an ant has decomposed to the point that oleic acid is present in detectable quantities, the other ants will pick it up and remove it from the nest like the garbage it’s become.  Ants are not, by nature, terribly sentimental creatures.  They are, in fact, mostly just terrible.

So, mystery solved, right?

Except.

(It may have occurred to you as I was relating this.  It may not have, too, and that’s fine.  Let’s agree not to judge each other.)

What happens when you dab a little bit of that same acid on an ant that’s perfectly fine?  What will her sisters do then? 

Raise the sort of ant-ruckus rarely seen without the presence of a magnifying glass, because it’s the zombiepocalypse and why didn’t they listen to the old queen when she tried to warn them? Ignore her, because she’s behaving like a live thing and working away at colony business?  Ignore her, because she’s moving and it’s only stationary objects that get this sort of treatment?  Ignore her while she tries to wriggle away from them and go back to work as they carry her out to the ant graveyard?

(There are ants that live in plant-provided nests which sacrifice their dead to feed the god-thing that sustains them.  There are spiders that war with them.)

These are the sort of things you think of, when a scientist tells a story about making ant-corpses out of paper.

But then sometimes the scientist goes on to say, “And of course, we wondered, what would happen if...?” and you get your answer.

Because this person, this person doing this thing across the gulf of decades reaches out, and says “I did this.  This thing you wanted to do, this thing you wondered about, of course I did it, of course I wondered too.”

What happens, when a perfectly fine, perfectly live ant is doused with oleic acid, is that the ant is picked up, kicking and protesting, and carried to the graveyard, and left there.  And when she gets up and, having no cause to believe herself dead, tries to go back home, some enterprising ant does the same thing.  Again and again, with no sign of fatigue or alarm.  She lives in the cemetery until a good cleaning miraculously resurrects her.

What's the worst that could happen?

I've decided to try edible gardening again, because successfully not killing a small handful of essentially unkillable plants for a month has given me an outsized sense of my likelihood of success.

I'm starting with more essentially unkillable plants--a handful of sweet potato vines my grandfather ripped out of his yard are soaking in jars in the hopes that they'll root and give me a half-dozen or so slips.  There's a packet each of asparagus bean and collard seeds on their way.  I put a couple of Everglades tomato plants in one of the planters last week.  Ordering the seeds means I can get free shipping on a half-dozen blackberry plants to put in along one of my fences, where they'll look nice if nothing else.

One of the big things I missed last time I tried anything like this was having anything resembling a habitat in my yard.  The food plants I was experimenting with were the only real plants around, which meant there was nowhere for the predator-bugs who tend to take care of pests to live.  That's more or less taken care of now, with all the full-stocked planters scattered around the property.