The Year of Magical Thinking

Near the beginning of The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion promises that you will experience what she did in your lifetime. Specifically, she was referring to the feeling of disbelief following the death of someone dear. For example, following the sudden death of her husband, she described feeling that as long as she thought certain ways or didn’t acknowledge certain things, her husband would come back. She knew he was dead today but wondered, “What about tomorrow?” She saved her husband’s shoes with the thought that he would need them when he came back.

I can believe her promise and relate to her sentiment. Even five years later, it doesn’t seem real that I’ll never see my mom again. My cat Jiji passed away in June this year. I held on to a box of food I bought for her for months. I still have a baggy of her medications in a closet. These things are “special” in some way, a part of her, and can’t merely be thrown away.

A rant about smut and experimental writing

A friend recently recommended that I read stories from the Human Domestication Guide (HDG). This collection of stories takes place in a universe where Earth has been taken over by technologically advanced invaders. These invaders, however, have an imperative to reduce suffering, even if that means imprisoning a miserable person in order to take care of all their physical and mental needs. The stories are technically smut but 90% of their content examines disability, mental health, and gender expression.

It interests me partly because I like researching topics in mental health and gender expression. Additionally, at least some stories are written from the perspective of characters who desire to give someone else total control of their life. This ideology is the exact opposite of my own: everyone should have as much freedom to act as individuals as possible. A government-less society is the ideal… which is about as realistic as the society of post-scarcity, boundless resources, and total control depicted in the HDG. It interests me because I want to understand a perspective so different from my own.

I’m no stranger to picking through smut for other aspects of a story that interest me, but I’ve gotten rather annoyed with having to do so as evidenced by the following rant I gave my friend:

In regard to the Human Domestication Guide, is my fascination with experimental writing showing when I say I’m more interested in the methods the creators use to attempt to maintain coherence across thousands of stories and dozens of writers than I am in the stories themselves? At first I thought the Wiki (which I found first) was the HDG, but then, I found the collection of stories that actually compose it. If it had been the Wiki, that would have blown my mind. Non-linear writing is neat.

I’ve been slowly writing/adding to this “non-linear saga outline,” “digital garden,” thing: https://the-net-digital-garden.vercel.app/. Eventually, it will basically be a collection of my notes, backstories, character profiles, and other things that are too detailed or too irrelevant to put into any book I plan to write. They’re things I needed to flesh out to make the stories and characters that these notes support appear coherent (hopefully) though. At first I thought HDG was something similar that already existed.

I’ve imagined that some writer out there could find my notes and be inspired to write their own story within my universe. I don’t plan to flesh out six planets worth of things after all, just the parts that I need. There’s plenty of room for someone else to write within it… And then I think, “Someone is just going to use all these ideas as a backdrop for smut, aren’t they? I’ve certainly given them enough fuel to do that. -_-”

Smut has it’s place I suppose if it’s allowed HDG to grow as large as it has. It’s just annoying. HDG’s ideas sound interesting enough on their own without pandering to the reptile brain. It’s a plague within experimental writing, too. Even House of Leaves, a book objectively unique and interesting to look at without even reading it, has straight up porn in the middle of it.

I reread Vurt by Jeff Noon a few years ago and realized that it represents everything I dislike reading and everything I dislike about experimental writing. It’s a book about drugs and incest (and robo-dog-cop-vurt-human-shadow hybrids) and written from the perspective of a guy writing a book (that’s a different rant). Yet, I still loved the basic story, the characters, and the subtle experimentation with perspectives, which is what I remember most and remember liking a lot back in high school. I realized I’ve kind of spent the past twenty years trying to recreate what I liked so much about Jeff Noon’s writing but without all the smut.

400 Things Cops Know

I’ve been reading cop-related books lately for some writing research. Here’s a few relevant things I learned while reading 400 Things Cops Know by Adam Plantinga:

To kick open a door, kick it immediately beneath the knob.

Mediation Clinics offer mediators, often law students, to help resolve disputes between family members, tenants and landlords, neighbors, and other people outside of court. I had created a concept like this in a book I’m writing and was surprised that such a thing actually exists!

Cops don’t advertise that they’re cops outside of work because it attracts the attention of people who don’t like cops. This potentially puts the cop and/or their family and friends in danger.

Police are required to read someone their Miranda rights only after they are in custody, and they have begun interrogating them. They don’t have to tell them their rights immediately, contrary to what commonly happens on TV. What suspects say prior to being read their rights and interrogated can still be used in court.

The best TV show about cops is The Wire created by David Simon.

The best book about cops is Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon.

Frankenstein (2025)

When Victor Frankenstein kills his benefactor Henrich Harlander by mistake, I expected his death to play a larger part in the story. Perhaps Harlander would somehow become the Creature, or his soul would animate the Creature in bid return for revenge. Nothing really happened though. He was just dead.

During post-movie analysis, one of my friends surmised that Victor killed Harlander as short hand for him being an asshole. She recalled that in the book Victor is emphasized as being an asshole by repeatedly blaming other people for his mistakes. The movie, which was long enough as it was, didn’t have time to repeatedly show the Creature killing Frankenstein’s love interests and Frankenstein painting himself as the victim, so he killed someone instead.

It seems plausible, but still, I missed the significance of Harlander’s death, leading it to feel like a sub-plot that went nowhere. Victor didn’t intentionally kill him, which might have made him too much of an asshole to the audience. The intent seemed to be for Victor to either use the death to play the victim or to show his remorselessness or single-mindedness. There isn’t a character to be horrified by his behavior though (at least about killing someone by accident and not caring that much), so there wasn’t guidance as to how I should feel about it. In contrast, Victor’s treatment of the Creature and Elizabeth’s outrage with him quickly made him look like enough of an asshole to overshadow murder.

Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Continued

Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth is genuinely impressive. When I first started playing it, I thought it would recreate Final Fantasy 7‘s open world in HD, fill it with filler, and maybe move the story forward a little. That is, it would primarily be a vehicle to generate a ton of assets for the next game to use to actually tell a story. But no. There is SO MUCH of EVERYTHING! Even after all the filler filling the regions, there’s hours of content in Upper Junon, the Temple of the Ancients, side character backstories, etc., etc. And all of it is AAA garbage at worst, the finest, most polished of trash.

Around 2005, when Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children, Dirge of Cerberus, and Crisis Core came out, Square Enix released a tech demo for the PlayStation 3 I think. It was an HD recreation of Cloud riding the train into Midgar at the opening of Final Fantasy 7. Fans got really excited thinking that it meant Square was remaking the game, but Square shot down the rumors by basically saying they were never going to remake Final Fantasy 7. It’s open world was too big and it’s story was too long to ever consider remaking it in HD.

Twenty years later, they almost freaking did it! The regions in the original game were flat plains with occasionally a forest, a cave, or a town you could enter. They not only remade every region in the original game but filled them all with so much stuff! After all that work, why wouldn’t you retell the story, too? They were so close! It was right there!

I started playing Final Fantasy 16, and it feels lazy and cliche by comparison. I don’t know if that’s true, or if Rebirth just makes decent, closed-world RPGs look bad despite its infuriating flaws.

I’m still curious to see where Square is trying to go with all this and if they’ll make it there, so for sure I’ll stick around for the third game… and hope that it isn’t all AI slop since Square Enix laid off a large chunk of their workforce a bit ago. I’m sure people out there have gone to great lengths to explain that the multiverse stuff isn’t as pointless as it seems. I’m sure there’s other ways to interpret it, but I’m fine with waiting for the creators to finish their thought before I go to great lengths to find meaning in the madness. We will have to wait and see.

Closer

Closer is a new play based on The Day the Earth Stood Still. That’s Closer as in “he moved closer to it,” not “he was the show closer.” Contrary to what I thought when I tried to remember if I had seen the story before and what it was, The Day the Earth Stood Still is also not The War of the Worlds, which originated as a radio play that caused mass panic because people thought aliens had really come to Earth.

I’ve recently begun compiling a list of books, movies, and other entertainment that have inspired my science fiction saga over the years. I can’t remember if I’ve seen either the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still or the 2008 remake, but the concept of an alien coming to Earth and threatening to kill all of humanity unless they committed to changing their ways sounded very familiar. Hmm… That’s almost like something I wrote.

Then again, I’m sure this idea has been rehashed in multiple other stories and mediums. I just have yet to find the one that inspired me. There’s also a theory in the UFO-community that if aliens ever did come to Earth, it would be to encourage peace and harmony with the planet. I may have gotten the idea from that.

I do want to see the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still though to see if it looks familiar. Plus, Keanu Reeves is the perfect actor to play an alien.

Good Boy

When I watched Dog in theaters a few years ago, I realized I have zero tolerance for sad animal movies. It was marketed as a comedy, and some of it may have been funny. Ultimately, I found then entire movie about a dog with PTSD and an incorrigible man disturbing. Sure, the dog didn’t die at the end, but I didn’t see anything to be happy about.

I had a similar experience with Smile a few months later. The first half of the movie was uncomfortable and disturbing. When the protagonist found her dead cat gift wrapped in a box, I seriously considered walking out of the theater. Fortunately, it became a standard, silly horror movie after that, but I wasn’t tempted to come back for Smile 2.

Recently, knowing nothing about the movie except that it was a horror, I went to a friend’s house to watch Good Boy. When the first scene depicted a sad, frightened dog, I wondered if I should leave immediately. Good Boy turned out to be quite tolerable though. The movie depicted a dog’s worst nightmare told from a dog’s perspective. I found it really interesting. And secretly, I wanted to coo at the screen the whole movie, “Look at that good boy!”

So for those of you with a similar sensitivity to animal movies, don’t be afraid to give Good Boy a watch.

Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth

Near the end of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth is about an hour and a half of cutscenes mixed with a quick time events, choices, and short battles. It’s also an hour and a half of pure nonsense, but more on that later. During this time, there’s a scene where Cloud has to choose a gift for Aerith and a type of candy to try. The result of the first choice is he gets a gift that wasn’t an option. The result of the second choice is he and Aerith get a candy that wasn’t an option, and they think it’s disgusting. At the time, I wondered if these two choices were actually a meta message from the creators to prepare the player for disappointment. My choices don’t matter, I won’t get anything I want, and what I do get I won’t like.

That’s kind of exactly what happened in the end. Because Square Enix is too cowardly to either commit to the original story or commit to pleasing the fans who wanted to save Aerith, Aerith is both dead and not dead, and both states are dissatisfying for existing at the same time. Presumably in the main multiverse storyline, she’s still dead and will continue being dead, but in another timeline and Cloud’s hallucinations, she lives on. So what if she’s alive in another timeline? She’s still dead in this one. Why introduce a multiverse at all? You don’t need a multiverse for Cloud to have hallucinations! He does that on his own! The only purpose the multiverse bullshit served in this entire game was to muddle its most emotional moments.

There’s a point in the original Final Fantasy 7 where Cloud goes crazy and beats up Tifa… or was it Aerith? Anyway, he doesn’t pin anyone down and punch them repeatedly in the face in Rebirth, which would probably be disturbing to recreate in HD, but he does throw Tifa into a pool of mako. I was totally on board with this scene being a replacement or supplement for how Cloud goes crazy… until Tifa fell into the mako and all the nonsense happened. I was so mad. I don’t give a fuck right now about the battle between the universes! If Tifa got thrown into, you know, a mako reactor and got mako poisoning, fine! Good! If you want to kill Tifa, I vehemently disagree, but make up your fucking mind and do it! Can’t I have my scene where Cloud goes crazy and attacks Tifa without alternate universe bullshit mucking it up!? God damn it!

The Tifa scene, the entire universe with Zack and Biggs, the hour and a half of nonsense, the timeline in which Aerith lives, all of it is so inconsequential that I can pretend none of it even happened, but I’m still disappointed that it exists. It’s not just adding nothing to the story. It’s detracting and distracting from it. I’m not sure how the characters got to Calm at the beginning of the game, or why they decided to reminisce about Nibelheim. I’m not sure how they got from the Temple of the Ancients to the Lost City or what prompted them to do so. I’m not even sure how Aerith died. Maybe if I didn’t have to wade through so much irrelevant crap, I would understand. Isn’t Final Fantasy 7 complicated enough without adding a multiverse side plot for no reason?

That said, I kind of hope Aerith continues appearing to Cloud and being inconsequential. Some people were so desperate for Aerith to live in the original game that they hacked the game so that Aerith could still be in their party and fight in battles. She just didn’t say anything and was kind of broken. I think it’d be funny if Square Enix made it canon. “We didn’t give you the option to save Aerith, but you can still see her all the time. Constantly. You don’t even have to hack the game anymore!”

Predator: Badlands

Predator: Badlands didn’t feel like a Predator movie. Granted, it’s been more than a decade since I’ve seen a Predator movie. Actually, I can’t remember if I’ve seen a Predator movie. Was it Alien vs. Predator? Was it Alien? Was it something else entirely? Is there a Predator movie? O.o I remember nothing about what I’ve seen of Predator except that it should be scary or at least attempt to be so.

Watching Predator: Badlands was like what I imagine watching modern Star Wars is like. Given that I also have very little experience with modern Star Wars, I’m basing this opinion entirely on The Mandalorian & Grogu trailer I saw before Badlands started. About at the midpoint in the movie, Badlands introduces a cute mascot character. From that point forward, I felt like I was watching a ripoff of The Mandalorian & Grogu: a brooding protagonist, a comedic side kick, and a cute mascot having a space adventure.

Also, there’s a series of shots of the Predator and his side kick walking through fields and over mountains. After the first couple shots, I predicted the next shot would show the Predator walking along a mountain ridge. Lo and behold, the next shot was the Predator walking along a mountain ridge. Hell yeah! I’m watching a Lord of the Rings ripoff, too!

Overall, I don’t know what I watched or what I expected, but it seemed like something else with the Predator brand slapped on it.