Category: Self-ish

When Sick, Observe Who


Despite having a long list of things to do, I just couldn’t clear my head yesterday enough to do any of them. So I went to the DVD rack and watched a Doctor Who story I’ve never seen before: “The Sea Devils” starring Jon Pertwee as the Doctor. It was exactly the right sort of thing to be watching when home sick, because it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense but had lots of running around and some amusing stunts.
This, after all, is the reason why I’ve been slowly building up a collection of Doctor Who videos and DVDs – for sick days. Ahhh, lovely.
Anyway. Feeling much better today so going to try and do things. THINGS.

How karma works

It’s really good that I didn’t tease stronger for locking herself out last week, because the very next day I lost my own keys. That’s karma! No wait, that’s not right – the karma wasn’t that I lost the keys, it’s that they were returned to me so quickly.
The quick return was because of this:


This keyring tag was a gift on my 21st birthday, waaaay back in ’97, from the redoubtable Rob Moon. I’ve carried it with me ever since, all over the world. When my keys slipped out of my pocket at a conference, they were handed in to the woman co-ordinating everything. She thought to herself “there’s only one person who would have that on a keyring tag”.
So thanks Marie, thanks Rob, and thanks karmic principles. That could have been an annoying turn of events but it turned out just fine.
Related: got the Facebook username to suit. http://www.facebook.com/morgue. Just fancy, no-one else had taken it!

Assorted notes

Got Filament issue the first in the post. It’s really nice! Well-put together physical artifact = awesome. Content is smart and has a good rhythm. We liked it very much. Can get your copy here.
It was Bloomsday yesterday! Here is a comic of Ulysses with neato notes and guides. Related: Ulysses as a Twitter feed.
And here is the meal Dan of Freshly Ground made for me and Cal. OMG NOM NOM.

Review: I Love You, Man (2009)

You want to know one of the worst feelings in the world? Walking out of the cinema after sitting through the credits gags for Paul Rudd-starrer I Love You, Man and seeing your wife on the floor surrounded by worried people. Yeah, that’s down pretty low in the emotional state rankings.
ILYM is a bromantic (zing!) comedy that carefully hits all the beats of the standard rom-com, but sets them between two guys who may or may not end up being friends (SPOILER: they end up being friends). The cinema was pretty hot, and Cal said she wasn’t feeling well and was going to head for the toilets, so I went to join our other moviegoing buddy, Pearce. He’d had to bail on sitting with us because on his other side was one of those guys you really don’t want to sit next to during a comedy. He laughed a lot at the comedy beats that weren’t really laugh-out-loud funny, and made I-don’t-know-what noises at the comedy beats that were actual LOLers. I don’t blame Pearce for bailing, because this movie was setting the guy off regularly. ILYM delivers some good gags, some real pearlers, but really that’s not the main appeal here. The charm of the movie is, in fact, its charm. Paul Rudd is great, all the more so for wrapping his everyday-guy persona around markers that would normally be signals of deviance in a Hollywood movie – he gets on way better with women than men, he’s not into drinking too much alcohol, and he liked Chocolat. Jason Segel as The Friend is even better, working his trademark overlong bro-hugs and expressive shoulders into a character who is just plain likeable, even when he’s being annoying. (And to its credit, the film knows exactly when he’s being annoying.) So we stayed through the extended gags in the credits, good fun but inessential, and went out of the cinema and I was hoping that Cal would be all right, and then I saw her on the floor, sitting in a bit of a daze, surrounded by people. I tell you what, that’s not a feeling you want. And I still sort of feel that I should have walked her out of the cinema to the toilet when she said she wasn’t feeling well, even though I know that really there was no call to do that, and it wasn’t neglectful of me to sit down and watch the credits and laugh a bit more at Jon Favreau’s minor role as the mean guy, and Andy Samberg as the cool gay younger brother, and to consider how the perfect RomCom ending itself served to highlight the hidden complexities of male friendship.
Cal’s okay – of course she is or this would be a very different blog post – it was just the heat, we figure, she fainted and was still woozy for a while. A nurse and her boyfriend who were also in the cinema had taken charge and called an ambulance so we all waited around until they came, and the officers ran a whole battery of tests and gave her the thumbs up. So that was good. She’s okay. The nurse and her boyfriend, it turned out, were sitting right behind Pearce and the Weird Laughing Guy and when Pearce got up to move they figured he just hated the movie. So did Cal, actually, because he leaned over and said to her “I have to get out of here” or something like that, but he just went and sat up the front. He enjoyed the movie. So did I. It will not rock your world, it isn’t a stunningly clever comedy of manners, but it is some good laughs and good times and it delivers with sincerity, the guy friendship felt genuine and even more surprising the romance between Rudd’s character and his fiancee felt lovely and honest too. It was just a nice film to watch. I recommend it. But if as the credits roll your wife says she isn’t feeling well, go out into the lobby with her, just to make sure she’s okay. The closing gags are good fun but seriously, you don’t want to laugh away and then walk out and realize your wife has been down on the floor without you there to help. That’s a pretty uncool way to end your night watching this three-stars-out-of-five, maybe-three-and-half-stars movie.

Frustration Post (2)

I am pleased to report that after many hours of restarts, installs, uninstalls, variant drivers, permissions settings, IT addresses and cable connections, I have successfully restored my computer to the functionality it had before I tried to make the scanner work.
Hurrah! Who really needs a scanner anyway!
(No I haven’t given up on the scanner. I have given up on the manufacturer’s standard driver software, which seems to be clashing with some other setting somewhere. Pondering next step.)
Man, I’m really blogging like it’s hot this week. Ooh yeah.

The 48: “Dedication”

For our 48-hr film this year, Jenni’s Angel’s got the genre ‘revenge movie’. The requirements were a rock as a prop, the character Alex Puddle who was an exaggerator, and the line “It doesn’t fit.”
We had a big group at Indigo City to brainstorm when this info came in. My job as head writer was to pull some direction out of this process and winnow down to a solid idea we could all get behind and execute well. I found it really hard. There were a few new things we did that seemed to work well but we ended up spending a long time going almost in circles. It was my job to push out of the circles but I just couldn’t see a direction – not one of the ideas felt right to me. We eventually seized on one idea because, even though I couldn’t see how to make it work, I had a good feeling that we could find a way. Sure enough, we did, with some pieces falling into place in the final stages of the brainstorming session and the rest on the way to our writer’s retreat.
While everyone else slept, the writers punched out a screenplay. We were a new writing team – me with Jackie, Jenni and Steph. We had one person drive the laptop while we talked our way through the outline, then broke the outline into story beats, then turned the story beats into script. We were pleased to find that this went smoothly – the idea unfolded well into the space available, and unlike previous years we weren’t struggling to chop out whole characters and plot twists to fit into the time limit. Finally we went through the whole thing and challenged every word in every line of dialogue, which improved the final version a lot. We sent it out to the troops around 2.30 or 3.00 – which was somewhat earlier than anyone had expected.
We ate mostly healthy-type food while we worked. Mostly.
I was on site at Indigo City about 6.30am as the troops started to arrive. Talked through the piece with our directorial team and the actors, then sat down for a proper read-through where we identified a few dialogue changes to make, most pretty minor, but also adding one extra conversation between our main characters – I scurried into a corner to write that, producing what I think ended up as one of the best exchanges in the whole film, at least from hearing the actors run their lines.
As we set out to the first location I rushed home to write and print a prop, a page of half-written manuscript from an old-school typewriter (thank you free font libraries). After delivering that I hung on set for a few hours and kept working with actors and lounging in the sunshine, until finally bailing when Jenni appeared.
The plan was to go home and sleep but that didn’t work, so I just sat around in a daze for a few hours then went back down to the second location to help get that set. Mostly I was just furniture here as well – the well-oiled Jenni’s Angels team didn’t have much need of an extra pair of hands at this stage. When we broke for dinner I went home and that’s where I stayed while the rest of the team got it done.
We ended up handing in our ‘safety cut’ – the precautionary early version we send down to the hand-in venue in case our final cut runs late. Our safety cuts have always been solid versions of the film so I’m not worried that it wasn’t the intended hand-in version.
Now we have to wait for our heat on Thursday, which is when we’re allowed to watch the film for the first time. I’m looking forward to it. The 48 is a fun challenge every year and I have a good feeling about this year’s film. Its name is “Dedication” (chosen by Jackie) – appropriate to all of us, I reckon.
Thanks team, and especially writing team. You guys are great.