Weekly Update 3/21

 3/15
I did sit-ups for, like, four minutes.  It shouldn't count as exercise, but I'm counting it.
I also got my recorder out to podcast for the first time in a couple of weeks, and discovered that I'd left the microphone on, like I always do.  But this time, the battery had actually run out.  I had to buy a new one, and they don't seem to sell them individually anymore, but in overpriced three packs.  That's how they get you.

3/16
I did some writing tonight!  And heck, I'm gonna go for a run.

Wow, I did some sit-ups and my run.  This week may be better than last.

When I was a kid, HBO would occasionally have a free preview weekend, where the channel was available to everybody, and they'd pack it with the most exciting movies and specials, in the hopes of gaining new subscribers (who'd think the channel was usually this chock full of treasures).  Well, it turned out that Apple+ has done the same thing this week, and you can watch either all or a sampling of their programming for free, in the hopes that you'll sign on permanently.

Because of this, I was given the chance to see Ron Moore's "For All Mankind," an alternate history Space Race series I'd heard about for years.  I put on the first episode . . . and was utterly confused.  It took place in the middle of the action, with a ton of in-process storylines going, but without ever stopping to explain what is going on, who the characters are, and what their relationships to each other are.

I was utterly baffled, and stopped the show to make sure I was on the first episode.  It claimed that I was ("Red Moon"), so I continued, but I just got more upset as it went along.  How were we supposed to follow this action if we didn't know who people were?  How was I supposed to care about people seeing their loved ones again if I didn't know who knew each other and how?  How could I follow the action if I didn't know what any of it meant?

At one point, I turned on the subtitles, because I couldn't keep anything straight in my head . . . and the subtitles didn't match what was going on onscreen.*  So I turned them off again and continued the show, focusing as hard as I could to figure out who was married to whom, who was in charge (apparently, Ted Kennedy was president), how they got to be there, and what the situation in the world was.  Hell, I didn't really even know what year it was supposed to take place in . . . because the show didn't tell me.

I became very angry.  I consider myself a savvy filmgoer, and have more than a rudimentary understanding of storytelling, but I had never seen this before.  I was confused, and frustrated, and if I was confused and frustrated, how in the green hell is the regular, more casual viewer supposed to enjoy what he or she was seeing?

I stopped it again, just to make sure this was the first episode.  Yes, this was Season 1, Episode 1, "Red Moon," but goodness, I was tempted to turn it off, especially when a new group of characters was introduced about forty minutes in, that we've never seen before, but are not told who we're looking at.

Ron Moore was the greatest writer of "Star Trek," and because of that, I followed him through the various shows he did afterward (like "Carnivale," "Battlestar Galactica," and "Roswell**"), but this was asking too much of its audience, like if you watched MEMENTO but Nolan never clued you in that it's happening in reverse.  It broke my heart a little because it made me feel stupid, and I have worried over the past six months that I have gotten dumber (around eighteen IQ points).

I started to watch the second episode, which takes place in 1969 (years earlier than the previous one), and didn't include a "Previously on..." to clue me in.  And that episode actually took pains to tell you who people are and what is going on in the world.  Before turning it off, I remembered how FOX didn't like the pilot episode of "Firefly," wherein everybody meets and goes off in space together, and commissioned a second episode where the characters have a typical adventure (which they aired first) . . . but even that introduced the characters and worked as a stand-alone episode (which this shit did not).  It breaks my heart a little to type all this.

3/17
So, following up on yesterday's post: I went back to the TV to continue the second episode of "For All Mankind," and was again baffled that the second one worked so much better as a pilot than the first one did, and I thought, "You know, I think I'm going to go online (instead of continuing to watch) to see if anybody else felt as upset about it as I did.

So I went online, and to my horror, the description for the first episode, "Red Moon," did not match ANYTHING that I had seen the night before.  The description was of an episode that did what a first episode of a television series is supposed to do: set the stage and the characters so that the audience can understand and root for its protagonists.

I kept reading.  To my further horror, the episode I watched last night appeared to be Episode 10, the season finale of the first year of the show.  Again, I hung my head, convinced that I was an idiot.

I went back to the television to double-check: According to it, I had already viewed the first episode, and twelve minutes of the second.  The tenth episode was unwatched.

I no longer blame myself or Ron Moore.  And not really even you, to be honest.***

Now I'm at the library again, where I chose to write this rather than write fiction.  But ah well, I can do both.

3/18

I did check again last night to see if, maybe, the first episode had been fixed, but no, it was still the tenth.  And I tried watching the tenth, just in case they were switched (it's the sort of mistake I would make), but it was also the tenth episode.  So I just went ahead and finished watching the second episode, then went on to the third.  And I really, really like it.  The Soviets beat America to the moon, and so the Space Race continues, and at the end of the second episodes, Russia puts a female cosmonaut on the moon, and suddenly, America needs to put their own women (including blacks, lesbians, and be-otches) into space as well.

There's really no way I'll be able to watch all of the episodes in the hours I have left (of the free preview), but I almost never get to the end of any show anymore, whether I want to or not.

Oh, and I went for a run again tonight, not that that's what I came here to talk about.

3/19

I watched another two episodes last night.  I like it so much, I think, if the first episode had shown up first (like it was supposed to), I'd be on episode nine or ten by now, instead of episode five.

I've said this before and I'll say it again: a lot of people decide they want to be writers when they see something really bad (and realize they could do better) or see something great and are inspired to imitate it.

For the last hour, I've sat here at the library, thinking about writing but not necessarily writing, and spending (wasting?) a ton of time reading about the fates of the characters on "For All Mankind" in our universe.  I did, however, submit my short story ("Fountain of Knowledge") to the contest, after having been informed by Marshal Latham, that he beat me to it (and good for him).
It will not win, but I didn't really write it for that.

3/20
I couple of days ago, I got one of those emails that said, "There was a data breech at our company, and it is recommended that you change your password."  I ignored it, which is my solution to everything.

And then, today, I got an email that made me pause and reconsider.  The subject line was my password.  I clicked on the email.  It was a blackmail message that said it had hacked my computer some time ago and it saw the naughty websites I'd been going to.  Unbeknownst to me, it had activated my webcam and had some incriminating video of me that it would release publicly . . . unless I paid them $4800, after which, it would destroy the evidence.

Below that, was another email with the exact same subject line and message, except a slightly different link to where I could send my forty-eight hundred dollars.
You may think I took this seriously, since the email specifically mentioned my birthmark, underdeveloped phallus, and sexual fetish featuring the music videos of Ke$ha . . . except I don't have a webcam.  So there.

Anyway, it gave me enough pause that, after I deleted the emails, I went through and changed my password on a number of websites, resetting them and trying to replace the corrupted one with something I could remember.

And dang if that wasn't a real challenge.  First off, some sites wanted a capital letter or a number in there, or worse, both, and how the devil could I keep them all straight?  After all, I've had the same password since Hector was a pup, and we tossed Hector into the deadfall past the Pet Sematary just last August.  I imagine it will vex me for the next few weeks.

3/21

I had planned to go to the library and write (probably finishing this blog there), but I called Big and he told me they were expecting a tornado (or several) in Houston and he was stuck at the station until one o'clock, waiting around for the worst to happen.  We ended up talking for quite a while, and when I realized this, it was too late to hit the library.

So, I did my usual 1.6 mile run and no writing at all.

Today was the last day of the free Apple TV+ sample, and I started watching "The Morning Show," a series about the morning news with Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon.  Because I worked in the news for a brief space of time, I've enjoyed watching shows about it, and I think Big has expressed the opposite feeling (of course, I was there less than a year, and he's been there more than twenty). 

Aniston and Witherspoon have very similar on-film personas, and I've always suspected they were playing themselves in most of their projects, and (whether it's a cruel double-standard in Hollywood or not) that has made me like them less than some of their contemporaries.  Regardless, I didn't make it far into the show (I had intended to just watch the first episode, since I knew I didn't have time for more) before the free trial expired, and they hoped I would subscribe so I could watch more, but I wasn't hooked.

Later at night, I got sick to my stomach, and even though I'm an old, old man now, I had that silly internal debate I used to always have of "Should I make myself throw up so I can feel better, or should I just tough it out?"  I seriously do not get how I could have not learned this lesson yet.  The last time this happened to me (jeez, it was so recently, I'll bet it wasn't even February, but March 2022), I thought, "Nope, I'm gonna throw up now," and suffered for less than one minute before hitting the bathroom.

And yet, tonight, I groaned and wandered around, trying to continue watching television, hoping the nausea would go away.  And when I finally went to the sink and had at it . . . I felt instantly better (like you do, what, 75-90% of the time).  Will I never learn?

*This should've been my first clue that something was terribly wrong.

**Apparently, he came onboard in the second season, a while after I had stopped watching the show.  Huh.

***It reminds me of the time Jeff and I watched EASTERN PROMISES on DVD, and struggled to make sense of all the Russian being spoken throughout the film.  Finally, Jeff clicked on one of the options, and English subtitles showed up whenever a character spoke Russian from that point on.  I felt like a dumb guy then too, except, to be honest, I could follow the action a lot better in that movie than I could on the tv show last night.