4/10 week in review (part 2)

4/6

I wrote a new scene on "Balms & Sears" this afternoon, bringing the total word count to 25,000 words.  Of course, I imagine I've written a lot more than that, and I'll have to look to see if there are still emails or notebooks with other scenes in them.  Such fun.

I've mentioned before how much my dad loved John Wayne (I think Wayne was for my dad how I'd feel if Ben Affleck, Bruce Willis, and Harrison Ford were merged into one dude), and how I've never been able to stomach him.  There's a shrine to The Duke at the family cabin (which I fully intend to transform into a shrine to Darth Vader, piece by covert piece), and that keeps my antipathy for the man rather high.

Anyway, I'd heard a lot of good things about STAGECOACH, the John Ford 1939 Western that (apparently) made John Wayne a star.*

The library had a copy, and since I'm a fan of John Ford, I gave it a watch.

Anyway, it was really, really good, from beginning to end, and so was Wayne in it.  I really appreciated that every character had a personality that you get to see as they're all forced together on this perilous journey.

4/7
I did some more writing, and pasted in two scenes I had written in 2019 and emailed to myself.  It got the word count up to 27K.  My goal for April is to get it to thirty.

I got Abigail Hilton the final re-lines she requested for her book "Distraction," and she sent payment immediately.  She also said that the sound quality was much better than what she was used to with me, which is high praise, because I do not have a professional set-up, and almost feel like one of those Punk bands in the Seventies who sneer at those that do.

At the same time, during the pandemic, I focused a lot closer on getting my audiobooks to sound better (not perfect, that's not really possible without going to a studio and having someone whose job it is to monitor and mix everything), removing mouth sounds and breaths and chair noises and background hiss.  We'll see if Audible feels the same when I start uploading files to them in the next few days.

Oh, I had been worrying quite a bit lately about how sore my legs were, but today and yesterday, they were completely fine.  I think I may have just overworked them, forcing myself to the top of the trail on that hike Sunday, and doing my full run on Saturday and Monday.  That'll teach me to exercise, right, kids?

4/8

Every Friday night, I come to the library and stay until they kick me out.  And every Friday night, I am the only patron still upstairs when it closes.  I know that should make me feel terrible (like, Rish-Outfield-circa-1997 terrible), but it's just one of those things.

I discovered a reference to Nobot, the evil protocol droid in Lego Star Wars today, and I could not stop thinking about it.  He's a grey droid who appears for about one second in THE PHANTOM MENACE, and a fan created a twisted backstory for him that was considered canon until the Disney acquisition de-canonized all of that stuff.  But some clever programmer put Nobot in the new Lego game, and he's there to freak people out in one little corner of Tatooine.

I discovered YouTube videos discussing it, including one poor sod who was complaining about how scary it is for children, and more than anything, I wanted to make a YouTube video of my own, where I complain about Nobot and how he terrified me so much I crapped my pants.  And not just my pants, but it leaked out all over the chair and onto the carpet, and damn you Lucasfilm for doing this to me.  I told Big Anklevich that, if he still lived here, I'd want him to film it, and I'd see how worked up I could get in the video, about how wrong Nobot is, and then my four year old nephew would pop up, with a C-3PO figure I had modified into Nobot, and I would crap my pants again, right there in front of the camera.

It would've been so great.

There's a toy show next weekend, and I wished it were right now, so I could buy a C-3PO figure and turn it into Nobot anyway.  I even went to the local toy store, right before they closed, but they only have carded Star Wars figures, and who needs that?

Anyway, I'm still almost tempted to do it, just to see what kind of response it gets (not that anybody watches my videos, when I get around to putting them out).

4/9

My sister's family went camping (again) this weekend, so I had Friday and Saturday night to myself.  I could've watched whatever I liked (including that Adele concert I recorded a few weeks ago, but haven't watched because I wanted to be able to turn it up loud), but I was curious which episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" were available for streaming, and ended up watching four of those.  AHP is a show I watched the 1985 revival of, and rented the first two or three discs of the DVDs, but never particularly liked it.  The first episode was pretty darn good (with Vera Miles pointing out the man who raped her to her vengeful husband), but the others were just too formulaic and old-fashioned for me (Hitchcock's show predated "The Twilight Zone" by four years).

But this time, with so many options in front of me (the show went ten fudging seasons!), I had the internet choose for me, the episodes that were considered the best.

It was then that I realized that, for some reason, the most popular episodes, like "The Man from the South" and "Lamb to the Slaughter" were NOT available to stream, and I had to make do with the also-rans.  I watched "The Cuckoo Clock," "One More Mile To Go," "The Right Kind of House," and "The Glass Eye," which starred young Jessica Tandy, William Shatner, and Rosemary Harris.**

4/10

Today, I was at the store, and I saw a dude (a young guy) in a hoodie with the phrase "If God ain't real, then real isn't" on it.  It really vexed me.  I double-taked, even walking around the aisle at Walmart to read the shirt again, and then racked my brain to interpret its meaning.  Then real isn't what?

Surely there was a word missing.  But if not . . . then what did it mean?  If God is not real, then real is not.  Is it a sort of "Cogito, ergo sum" type of argument?

Turns out, those are lyrics to a song by RF, a rapper who, well, performs a song called "Real."

I also discovered that you can buy a hoodie just like it on the internet:

I am still vexed, and pretty much wish death on that guy with the hoodie on for taking me on this mental journey.  However, in looking for an image of the sweatshirt, I stumbled upon this image, with uncontestable proof that God must exist:

Oh, and I went running tonight . . . which was the whole point doing this blog again, not (admittedly-fine) stuff like the above.

*Or a household name at least.  I'm aware he was working even in the Silent era.

**Who you may remember as the real Aunt May from the Spider-man movies.