A Good Story Is Like A Good Meal

For a long time I've believed that a good story has a beginning, a middle, and crucially: an end. And it's that last part that I feel a lot of media doesn't deliver today: it's all about franchises that just go on forever, constantly pumping out more sequels, dragging something that was once great throught the dirt to try to squeeze a little more profit out of it.

It's gotten to the point that many shows don't seem to pay any attention at all to wrapping up story arcs and giving any kind of closure; all they care about is constantly creating new narrative hooks to try to bait the audience into clicking the "next episode" button. Entire movies are made with the apparent singular purpose of transitioning the audience over to the replacement protagonist when the original actor is too old, so they can just keep churning out more and more sequels and spinoffs.

But we all knew that, we've all known that for a long time. That's not the point of this post. The point is I can't seem to find a good metaphor. Here's one I came up with today:
"A good story is like a good meal. It might just be a single course, or it might be several: starter, main, desert. But eventually the meal has to be over. You can't just keep adding more courses forever, instead focus on preparing a new meal."

OK, it's not a perfect metaphor. I think the problem is that you can take a property, like say the Avengers, and tell good stories for a very long, rotating characters out of the limelight and even the story as a whole as they complete their narrative arc. So if you see "The Avengers" as a story, then yes, in theory "a story" can go on for a very long time. But I think you have to break it down more: not everything written about the Avengers is a single story; the team can keep reinventing itself, serving as a framework for many different stories. And even then I'm not sure it doesn't get tired eventually; even then it might be better to end it all and start something new at some point.

Anyway. The point is, there are a lot of properties that I wish had gone out while they were on top, rather than trying over and over to go back to the well in increasing stale attempts at recapturing the magic of the original. The Terminator franchise should have stopped at the second - or at least it should have stopped trying to remake the second and continued to advance the story; I'll take Salvation over any of the later entries any day.

Perhaps the real problem is that motivations behind the endless instalments. Perhaps they are just not being created for the right reasons, the people in charge are making the wrong decisions because they have the wrong motivation - wrong for creating something great at least?

Eh, what do I know.

I Tried Watching Dexter: New Blood

I never finished the original series of Dexter. I thought season 1 was great, season 2 was good, I didn't really enjoy season 3, and I hated season 4, quitting just before the end. This was a while back so I couldn't tell you why I stopped enjoying it, but I randomly decided to give the new series a go. I didn't make it through the first episode.

First off, I didn't appreciate the constant forced "fakeouts". Dexter gets pulled over by a stone-faced female sheriff, he's confused and worried, nervously covering up the rolls of knives on the seat next to him, and then... it turns out they are lovers. Really? You don't smile when you see your lover? Yes, I am familiar with the concept of roleplay, but that didn't really seem to be what they were doing? Like, the whole act lasted about a minute before they broke down; if it was roleplay, wouldn't she, I dunno, cuff him or something? Plus I would expect him to at least smile briefly before he "steps into character" or whatever. It just felt like a cheap, forced attempt at fooling the audience.

This kinda happens a few more times, each time feeling weaker and more pointless. Did you really expect anyone to believe he was going to murder that butcher (who I guess doesn't sharpen his own knives)? Please. I dunno, maybe it's trying to lull the viewer into a false sense of security? I was just rolling my eyes.

We see Dexter running through the snow with a rifle on his back; he stops and shoulders the gun, taking a bead on a deer. Now I've never been deer hunting, but I'd always heard it involved stalking (i.e. moving carefully and quietly) and/or camouflaging yourself and hiding near places where deer are likely to pass, waiting for deer to come to you. I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve running noisily through the forest looking for the highly senstive animals, then trying to take a clean shot while you're gasping for breath.

Later in the episode we start to see some guy with his face hidden shadowing Dexter. When Dexter goes running in the forest with a rifle a second time, his stalker somehow spooks the deer. How? Dexter running around didn't spook the dear, but the other guy moving did? And why was that guy level with Dexter? If he was tailing him, and the deer was directly in front of Dexter, shouldn't the stalker have been farther away from the deer than the Dexter was?

So yeah, right off the bat there was just a lot of stuff that felt forced to me. But none of that was what really turned me off. Because right from the start something else had started to bother me. At first I tried to dismiss it; I figured maybe I was just being too sensitive, looking for problems when there weren't any. But it kind of kept happening. Each individual thing was small, harmless perhaps in a vacuum, but altogether it just started to build up. I think the best thing is to walk you through the beginning of the show.

We see Dexter lining up a shot on a deer, his finger starting to tighten on the trigger. But he doesn't take the shot. It seems he can't bring himself to? This is the guy who used to kill animals when he was young, and killed humans for YEARS, purely because he felt the need to kill! I'm not sure what they were trying to say about Dexter here; initially I assumed they were saying his drive to kill was gone, but then when he's dealing with the rich punk later it seems like he's struggling to control his murderous desires? And from the dialogue it didn't sound like this was sudden resurgence of his desires, it seemed more like they never went away

I assume there will be some sort of payoff later, maybe he finally kills a deer signifying that his killing instinct is back or something, I dunno. The issue I have is that it kinda sorta feels like it's... throwing shade, let's say, at hunters. If Dexter, the serial killer who gets his kicks from chopping people up, can't bring himself to kill a deer, what kind of monsters does this show think actual deer hunters are?

On his way to town Dexter meets the sheriff. The sheriff (the person in a position of highest authority that I saw in my brief time watching) is a Native American woman. She's played by Julia Jones, who I think is a great actress and I was enjoying her in the role. So that's great, I was happy to see her cast in what seems to be a major role here, and so far I like the character.

He gets to town where he runs into a friend, who, let's say, seems to come from a hotter climate. A climate where people are naturally more tanned. Dexter then delivers a knife to an African-American client. He then arrives at the shop where he works, where his overtly gay boss tells Dexter about how him and his husband are adopting a dog.

Wow, this small rural American town sure is diverse, huh? That's nice, I like diversity, as long as it's not forced. But no need to worry, here's some white guys now (because "diversity" these days is code for "anything other than straight and white"). A couple of white kids walk into the shop to buy knives and guns. It's hunting season or something, but these are the only two we've seen who actually seem to be interested in hunting; everyone else we've seen is talking about dancing and stuff like that. One of the white kids immediately sets about making sure the audience knows he's a rich spoiled brat. He chooses a combat knife over the practical hunting knife Dexter recommends, because it looks cooler. He passes over a traditional hunting rifle that Dexter says would be perfect for his needs, and fixates on a "scary military-looking" rifle that Dexter says is "more than you need for any hunting" (or something to that effect). The kid says he wants to impress his friends with it, and tries to buy it, positively drooling over it.

But he can't because he's flagged in the FBI check. So Dexter tells him he needs to wait for the check to clear. He's not happy and tries to get Dexter to break the law and sell him the rifle. A few minutes later Dexter is at the sheriff's office, where the cops say that the FBI is swamped so a lot of these checks just get cleared up without actually being processed, so a lot of guns are being sold to people who shouldn't have them (something I find questionable, especially in a restrictive state like New York where it seems this is set).

It's not too long before the FBI check clears up and Dexter is able to hand over the rifle to the rich white kid. At which point we learn that he's not only a complete jerk, but also an actual murderer. His father, who we learn through an environmentalist protest is a bigwig in an oil company (which obvious makes him evil because oil is killing the planet), paid everyone off to keep his son free.

That sure is scary, huh? All these scary military-style rifles in the hands of all these scary white nut-jobs? These rich jerks with their white privelidge, buying off the corrupt police force? Sigh. It's all just so woke.

I've never hunted an animal and don't plan on it, because I'm too soft for that. But I eat meat and I have absolutely no issues with animals or people who hunt - as long as they do it responsibly and legally and the meat does not go to waste. I'm not white and I do like to see people of different cultures and ethnicities in the media, as long as you don't sacrifice good writing for the sake of diversity - and I DON'T have anything against white people. I support Greenpeace, I've joined in marches against oil companies, but I also realise that oil is essential to the world we live in, phasing it out is a herculean task, and working in the oil industry does not make you evil - even if a lot of oil companies have done a lot of bad things.

Again, maybe I'm being too sensitive. But this was all just the first half hour, and they hit so many of these woke political talking points, in a way that felt at odds to the setting. This is a small rural town, surrounded by forests, where we're told that hunting is popular - Dexter works in a hunting supplies store. Yet the only people going hunting are the "bad guys"; Dexter (who, once again, is a serial killer) can't even bring himself to do it. The show made a point to say people don't need military-style rifles, and to suggest they are being sold into the wrong hands over-the-counter. We see climate activism against the oil-company bad guy. All the characters we've seen so far that we're supposed to dislike have been white (and male). It felt deliberate, an injected political agenda.


Yes, I'm aware of the fact that I'm starting to sound like that some of those guys on social media that people like to casually belittle with terms like "far right". Look: I've always written rants complaining about problems I see in media. Bad writing, questionable morals, excessive reliance on sequels and reboots rather than taking risks on new properties, endless cliffhangers and dangling plot threads instead of self-contained story arcs and actual closure; there are a great many issues I see that ruin movies, TV shows, and videogames. The recent trend of writers focussing more on certain political issues at the expense of writing a good story is just one of my many problems with modern media.

Black Widow Movie Plot Summary

I saw this the other day. It has a lot of good things going for it, but it does kind of have a bit of a problem. So here's a quick summary. Obviously it's all spoilers.

Black Widow's family was fake, and her fake father let her be taken away when she was young by an evil man to be used as a tool.

A man with a military rank and a bunch of men with guns are trying to catch Black Widow. But she's so thoroughly outsmarted them that she's already in another country.

She then visits her simp who gives her everything that she wants, but who's a little annoying in that he seems to think they have a relationship when she's clearling hinted that they don't really.

She then gets attacked by a very dangerous and competant masked woman who is trying to steal the Mcguffin, but Black Widow manages to escape with it.

Black Widow then visits her sister, a strong intelligent woman who can match Widow move for move.

Her sister tells her that she, along with a lot of other powerful women, were being mind-controlled by the evil man, and the Mcguffin can break the mind control.

But the evil man is a coward who is really good at hiding, so they decide to rescue an informant who can tell them where the evil man is hiding.

The two women go back to the simp for the supplies they need, but the stuff he gives them isn't top-tier so they make fun of him and then set out anyway.

They give the informant instructions on how to escape, but the man messes it up so the two women have to take down an army of armed men and then grab the man and escape with him.

But the man they rescued - their fake father - doesn't know where the evil man is, so instead they find a woman who can tell them where the evil man is.

The woman - their fake mother - does know where the evil man is, and helps them go right to him.

The three women then take down the evil man and everything he's built, freeing the other women he's enslaved. The fake father loses a fight to the masked woman but one of the good women saves him.

The sister kills the evil man and all his evil hench-men while Natasha frees the masked woman from the mind control, because the masked woman was a good person too.

All the freed women escape safely and go to create new lives. The fake family make up and are happy now that the father has learned to keep his mouth shut. Natasha manipulates the stupid military man to clean up the mess. The simp finally gets her some top-tier gear, so he's OK and she's finally nice to him.

OK, so obviously I'm framing this all in a specific way, but everything I described actually happened in the movie. Every single female protrayed in the entire movie is a good person. The bad guys are all men, and most of them are shown as being physically inferior to the women and mentally inferior to Natasha at least, having established control over the women when the women were helpless children. There are two good men: the friendly arms dealer who is a helpfull support character who basically does what he's told by the female protagonist, and the father who is portrayed as being rather pathetic for comedic purposes and who does almost nothing useful in the movie, and who by the end basically learns he should just shut up. I figured that as "the muscle" he would at least get to defeat Taskmaster in battle, but no: he was losing and one of the others had to save him. The main antagonist is physically unimposing and of course gets outsmarted by Black Widow. He does have male henchmen, but they're apparently not important enough for us to even find out if they are being mind-controlled or not, and they are all just casually killed off. General Ross kind of serves as a secondary antagonist: not a real bad guy but a stupid misguided government official / representative of the patriarchy, who does not contribute to the plot in any real way and is really just there to be casually outsmarted by Black Widow to show her capabilities.

But the action is pretty good, and I really liked the human element of the fake broken family somehow pulling together into a real family. So yeah, it's not a bad movie, it just makes the classic mistake of confusing female empowerment with male depowerment. I mean, it's understandable when you're trying to right a balance to end up swinging too far, and I can accept that is what happened here. But it doesn't change the fact that it's a flaw.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I just started playing Horizon Zero Dawn. I've basically finished the tutorial sections and done a couple of the side missions. I'm enjoying it quite a bit so far; I love the aesthetic with the beautiful scenery and the strange robots, the story is very intriguing so far and it's being told very well. I'm not completely sold on the Farcry-like crafting system, and the experience/skills system looks a little bit light for something that otherwise feels like an RPG, but they should be fine.

The game controls well, though I wish I could remap a couple of functions, Specifically I would like to put roll on a shoulder button: if I'm rolling it's probably to avoid a charging enemy, in which case he's probably not in my screen anymore and I will need to spend time finding him again. With roll on a face button I have to stop controlling the camera while rolling, if it was on a shoulder I would be able to track the enemy while rolling, which would be much better. I've been saying this for more than ten years now: there's simply no excuse not to allow the player the ability to remap his controls any way he pleases. I'm thinking about picking up one of those fancy controllers, perhaps I'll be able to remap the controls that way if I do plunk down the cash for one.


So... Rost has just sent Aloy off to find some stuff, and there seemed to be something bothering him. Now there's any number of things that it could be, but for some reason I have this strange suspicion that he's going to die, and he knows it. He mentions that there's something he hasn't taught her, and for some reason I just keep thinking it's a lesson that requires his death. Probably paranoid, but it's hardly unusual for writers to kill a character in order to provide motivation for the protagonist and/or free them up to go on a solo adventure.

Only one way to find out I guess.

Other days

I work in a very small team. Our project manager just left this week, which leaves our team very diminished and without guidance or direction.

The Khador forums, which I enjoy a great deal and visit five or six times a day, just closed down yesterday and might not be going back up.

I just got a phone call from my family a few minutes ago telling me that our cat just died.

Yeah, I just.... whatever. At this point it feels like nothing is going anywhere. I have neither direction nor motivation right now.




EDIT:
I needed some electrical connectors for my (currently non-functional) CNC machine. I went to the only shop that I knew to sell those kinds of things, that has been around for at least a decade (if not two decades or more). It had closed down. It was there the last time I was in the area a few weeks ago, but now it's gone. This really has been a time of things just going wrong. Not everything of course, but quite a number of things big and small have either suddenly gone wrong, or their slow decline has come to a head. At least that's how it feels.

Some days

I had a rather depressing thought today. First some context.


I just took a week off from work. I was hoping to relax and also to get a ton of stuff done. Stupid I know; relaxing and getting stuff done are two mutually exclusive activities. Well, tomorrow I go back to the office, and I have only managed to achieve a small fraction of what I had hoped to do, but I didn't get much "relaxing" done either. To be fair I had fun, I spent quality time with friends and family, so it wasn't time wasted, but... I don't think I ever actually stopped feeling stressed.


There's many reasons for it of course, but one of them is that things are really weird at work. I don't know what's going to happen next month; I could end up in a different team, a different company, a different sector, or just unemployed. Well, I've kind of felt that way on and off for... a long time now. This job just hasn't given me much in the way of job security.


Not having good job security is a bit uncomfortable when you're "trying to get on the property ladder". I've been investing in a flat for a while now. Well, it looks like the project fell apart, and I have currently started legal proceedings to try to get my money back. Fun stuff.


For several months now I've been trying to get into CNC machining. It's been harder than I expected; I'm trying to get into it on the cheap, but it turns out doing it that way requires certain skills that I don't posses. Well, I've been making progress, but it's been very slow. That's at least partly because I've just been having trouble getting anything done lately, for various reasons. Anyway, in the last couple of weeks I've finally managed to carve actual designs into actual wood.

That was pretty exciting; in fact it got me all fired up and I immediately put down a fair bit of money on tools and materials to hopefully allow me to produce actual useful items. While waiting for that stuff to arrive, I slowly started trying to produce more complex pieces, solving problems as they showed up. But one problem that I started to encounter was my computer just randomly crashing mid-carve. I figured this was a good time to update my operating system; perhaps that would make the issue go away? A fresh start seemed best, so I did a clean install of the newest version of the OS. Now it... still crashes, but in a different way. Sigh. Well, at least I was able to find some possible fixes for this new crash, which I will test out if it keeps happening.

A fresh OS meant re-installing the controller software, which was a pain - and probably used up most of my remaining internet bandwidth for the month. Oh, did I mention that I moved recently (one of the other reasons why I haven't made as much progress on the CNC thing as I would have liked), and so far they haven't installed internet yet, so I've been using expensive and limited bandwidth through my phone? Good times.

Anyway, I finally got it up and running again, ready to carve at last. And just as I prepared to try to run a job, the spindle stopped. No idea why, it just... stopped. I poked around the controller box a little bit, but I really don't know what I'm doing when it comes to electronics, so I couldn't fix it. I'm fairly confident that the problem is the controller and not the spindle; that could make it cheaper to fix (at least if I knew what I was doing), if not easier. But I'm pretty much going to have to spend some time online figuring out how to fix it, order some parts that will take weeks to arrive (possibly even a month or more), then hope that I was right about the problem and it starts working again, otherwise... I dunno, buy a whole new spindle, controller, and power source, and try to find a way to mount them on the (not very modular) CNC frame I currently have? Plop down a huge amount of money (that I can't afford) on a higher-quality system that should work much more smoothly right out of the box? I don't know, but I don't think I'm going to be making much progress for the next few weeks.


I was probably stupid for trying to get into a new hobby anyway, seeing as I already have one: Warmachine, and tabletop gaming in general. Well, I say that, but I haven't actually played a game in over two months, and it's been over four months since I've played Warmachine.

But I can still paint, right? Yes, except... well, my first attempt this year ended in disaster. After that I decided to power through the X-Men, hoping to get to a point where I could try the Marvel miniatures game with my friends. But after the first one I basically stalled, getting almost no painting done in like three weeks. Then I found out that Knight Models has dropped the Marvel license, so the X-Men basically have a shelf life as far as gaming goes.


Since moving to the new place I've been trying to get into a better routine; waking up early, getting a bit of exercise, eating healthier, that sort of thing. For a while I seemed to be making a bit of progress, but in the last few weeks that's all stopped. I'm feeling quite guilty about how much sugar and junk food I've been eating lately.


I've been trying to find a really good pen. Long story, but in the last couple of months I've spent more than I would have expected to on a number of pens that I hoped would be what I was looking for, and they have pretty much all let me down. Like, I've bought reasonably expensive pens that just flat out did not work. What's up with that?


Oh, and my flat is suddenly full of flying ants or termites or something. This seems to happen like once a month? I don't know what it is, could there be eggs in the furniture or something? Or are they getting in from outside somehow?



So what was the depressing thought?
My job status is uncertain.
My investing in a home has fallen apart.
My wargaming hobby might not exist anymore.
My miniature paining is just not happening.
My CNC experiments are failing.
My attempts at improving my health, fitness, and daily routine have stalled.
I can't even seem to buy a damned pen that works well.

All of a sudden it feels like my whole life is failing. I've been dividing my time between several pursuits, and right now they all seem to be going south at the same time.

Somehow the idea doesn't have much impact though; I'm just kind of resigned to it I guess. Well, that and I do know that going through a rough patch isn't the end of the world. Honestly, I could use some change right now, so the fact that some things aren't working could be a good thing in the long run. For example, if I do get the CNC spindle working again, it might actually solve a big problem that I had with the system before and I was simply working around rather than putting the effort in to actually fix, meaning it could be a net gain when all is said and done. Perhaps the same could be true for some other items on that list. Right now, I sure hope so.

New Ghostbusters Trailer

I just saw the trailer for the new Ghostbusters yesterday. First of all, I have no strong opinions on the trailer; I did not particularly like it or dislike it, I cannot judge whether the movie itself will be much good or not.

But let's talk about the elephant in the room. The big thing about this movie, the first thing everyone heard and the main talking point, is of course the fact that it stars an all-female team.

Now, I've traditionally not been fond of new writers taking excessive liberties with characters that I love. This stems largely from some of the abysmal movies made from various non-movie properties of which I was a fan, where the movie displayed no respect or understanding of the characters it was milking for profit. So when I first heard of the gender-swap, my knee-jerk reaction was to shake my head and sigh.

However, in the last few years I've grown more tolerant to writers having a new take on existing stories and characters, as long as they respect the source material and there's a good reason for their changes. So thinking more about the female Ghostbusters, I decided that a lot of it came down to the question of whether being male was an important character trait of the originals or not.

If being male is an important aspect of their characters, then swapping their genders is either a bold new take that could breath new life into the old stories, or a disrespectful abuse of our beloved characters.

If being male is not an important aspect, then swapping genders is either a hollow gesture to try to look edgy, or just not very important and nobody should care either way.


Not exactly an iron-clad conclusion there, but the point is that it wasn't inherently a bad idea; I thought casting Lucy Liu as Watson worked out quite well, for example. That said, I still wouldn't have been happy if they had made such a big change to the characters that I know and love. Which is why the trailer made me happy for one big reason: it wasn't changing their genders.

As far as I can tell, this new movie is actually more of a sequel than a reboot, as it follows an entirely new group of characters. It's not retconning the old ones, just expanding the cast.

So what does it mean then that there's an all-new group of Ghostbusters who are all female? Is it a good thing? Well, while the all-male team was arguably sexist in an almost unconscious way, this new all-female team could be seen as being sexist in a more conscious way. If we're ultimately aiming for true equality, then wouldn't it be better not to be all-male OR all-female? Well, in theory yes, but I would say that an all-female team is fine here because it's kind of balancing the previous all-male team, nevermind the overwhelmingly all-male action hero bias of most popular entertainment.

So yeah, I don't have a problem with the team being all-female; you know, as long as it's well done. What I do have a bit of a problem with, however, is the team being all-white. Except, of course, for the token minority inclusion. Yes, that was true of the original, but that was 30 years ago, and instead of getting better about it, the trailer makes this movie look even worse; the white girls are all scientists and engineers and stuff, while the black lady "has street-smarts" or something. It all seems a bit cliched is all, in a bad way.


Well, I guess that's enough speculation. Overall I'm slightly more optimistic about this movie than I was before, but I'm still not expecting it to be anything more than mildly entertaining at best, and a disappointment at worst. Of course I'd be happy to be wrong.