Category: Longform
You are viewing all posts from this category, beginning with the most recent.
Damn You, Walter Becker
" “>
Why'd you have to go and die, man. I get the news this morning from Rima via Telegram. I can't believe it, but it's true. So many people have passed in the last few years, it brings mortality into sharp, unpleasant focus. Since it would be ridiculous for me to suggest that you haven't heard Steely Dan, go ahead and have a fresh listen to an old friend, the Dan's Gaucho, my personal favorite (if you deem valuations based on tenths of a degree valid, otherwise ALL Dan records are my favorite).
Steely Dan was really two bands. One was the studio iteration where Becker and Fagen crafted their amazingly textured albums, staffed with a never-ending assemblage of guest artists from all walks of music. The other was the band they ran for live shows. It would be easy to misunderstand that the two are not one in the same. I guess you could say that the live band played covers of their own music. I don't mean that as an insult. The albums are individual works of musical art, impossible to replicate live, even for Becker and Fagen.
I am near tears as I write this, but my very first album ever was Can't Buy A Thrill and I have loved, adored, and revered Steely Dan every day of my life ever since.
Much love to you for all you have ever given me, Walter.
Wonder Woman? Meh.
" “>
So, I've seen Wonder Woman now. As was common in the Golden Age of comics, there's a lot of cannibalism. WW effectively is DC's Captain America, complete with a cadre of hardened war vets with distinct personalities, even a Scot with a funny hat. That, however, is NOT why I ultimately didn't like WW. It starts simply enough (don't worry, no significant spoilers).
The Black nanny.
Does anyone in Hollywood know what's going on? We're having a lot of issues with all kind of civil rights things, like trying not to marginalize Black people!? The top of the film features a young Diana Prince (she gets the last name later) running, only to find that she's run away from her Black mammy. Oh please. Diana is white. The Queen is white. Most talking parts are white, though there's one "senator" who gets, what, five words? Then there are issues with the special effects.
Amazon flies off galloping horse, shooting an arrow while flipping, and landing on her feet. That would be nothing except she magically need not obey physics and the laws of motion. A horse is traveling at around 20 MPH, you jump off and try to land on your feet, what happens? If you do it like the Amazon, you smash your face into the ground. A bit later, a high leaping Amazon throws a pair of knives down towards the camera. If you look closely you can see that they leave her hand and minutely correct direction.
The racial and social aspects are also a mostly subtle aspect of the film. First, there's the contrivance of sparks between Gadot and Pine. It's more staged then natural, though that's more a side effect of the less-than-elegantly formed dialogue. If that weren't cliche enough, there's the team. First, we get the Native American who talks earnestly about how the white man took their home and how he is better being free waging war in Europe. Seriously? Here's an idea. Don't steal homes from people, not that we can fix that now (though we can make reparations). Then there's the Middle Eastern fellow, Sameer, who chooses to fight as a mercenary since he isn't allowed to be an actor because of his color. These scenes don't have any honesty in them. They feel spliced in with a blunt butter knife. It's demoralizing.
Then there are aspects of WW that don't add up. In the first battle scene, a sniper is suppressing WW and her team in a courtyard. Mr. Scottish sniper seems incapable of actually sniping (why is he there, again?), so Chris Pine hatches a plan. Three mortals run out and grab an enormous sheet of metal. They hoist it over their heads, and Diana uses it as a springboard to smash the bell tower to bits. I mean, it really explodes. The entire top of the building, gone. So, if she can do that, why can't she jump, what, 80 feet? Besides, she jumps higher than that earlier.
Worse yet is the subtle, almost imperceptible misogyny. Simply put, you can't be a good woman, even a super powered woman, unless you have a man to coax it out of you, even if that man complacently supports the repression of women. While Chris Pine's performance is wonderful, his ultimate role is to be a guide to the real world outside of the sheltered world of Themyscira, the hidden island home of the amazons. They dance. They do it. He navigates her around. She, the nubile naif who doesn't understand the world as it truly is.
I know these feel like nitpicks, and some are. The story, overall, is good. Most people who don't read comics likely don't know it, so it feels fresh. Gal Gadot is great as WW, though there need to be fewer SLOMO scenes of determined walking. Chris Pine is also great. Others have said that he is comfortable playing any role, leading or supporting. I think it's more than that. I believe that he's comfortable in his own skin and enjoys pretending, but doesn't need it. It's like any craft, and he is skilled. I don't, however, believe we've seen what he can truly do yet. I look forward to those days.
I'm a little surprised that this is a blockbuster, to be honest. It's more like a Marvel film, if not quite so tight and lacking the easy banter. DC has set a low bar for entry, though, and Hollywood's latest entries have been, well, crap. So much money spent to achieve so little actual value. Sadly, I don't think Wonder Woman represents a turning point for the DC cinematic universe. I have a bad feeling that this is just an anomaly.
Bummer.
Apple has jumped the shark
" “>
It wasn't long ago that you couldn't walk down the street without tripping over some new Apple rumor or buzz over the latest and greatest Apple gear. Now, it's all about the white noise we hear from the tech industry as a whole. Are we living in a politics-style news bubble, is Microsoft beating Apple at their own game, or does the Cupertino megalith have something up its sleeve that would make the ghost of Steve Jobs giggle.
I remember, albeit vaguely, when Steve Jobs rolled out the brand new iMac in 1998. You really had to be there to see it live, but I did manage to see it eventually. I was, at the time, an Apple "phanboi", Ever since my first Apple ][, I had loved Apple. I've had lots of Apple products. I drank the kool-aid, as it were. After all, Apple was just dropping new products like creepy old ladies drop candy on Halloween. The iMac, the PowerMac, then the shift to Intel and the advent of the MacBook. Then, like a bolt from the blue, the iPhone and the iPad. The computer industry was having a hard time keeping up. It looked like Apple had a crystal ball and the competition tried and failed to copy Apple's formula, but Steve beat them handily, time and time again.
Then Steve Jobs died.
I'm sorry if that seems harsh (you might want to have that looked at), but it did happen. Tim Cook was installed as CEO to shepherd along what was already one of the single most valuable companies in the entire world. It didn't take long to see that Apple did not have a crystal ball, though. What they had was Steve Jobs. That's because, despite all of his ludicrous flaws and foibles that are common to genius, he had a crystal ball in his head. He could see the trend-makers and beat the competition to the punch, but the one thing he couldn't do was teach that trick to anyone else.
Even with annoying British designer Jonny Ive at his side, Tim Cook has been struggling to define a course for Apple that still pops out innovations. There was no Steve micromanaging every tiny detail every day, all day long. So, they just plodded along and started to copy what others had done while chasing them. The iPhone got bigger. The iPad got smaller. The Apple TV added voice and games. The Mac Pro got more expensive. Every exercise that used to produce real innovation melted boorishly into iterative microchange with a premium price attached for good measure. Apple, in my estimation, jumped the shark around the iPhone 6s and/or iPad Pro.
While the rest of the industry has now long been hawking the 2-in-1 lappy nee tablet in full awareness that the tablet industry is tailing off, Apple still makes nothing more than traditional laptops. Where you can get a tablet that runs full octane Windows 10, your iPad Pro still runs tablet software. Grab yourself an overpriced Samsung Galaxy S8 and you can take it swimming, where Apple still slaps you on the wrist if you get their gear damp. If you want something hot and new in Apple products, just grab yourself the new MacBook Pro with it's amazing Touchbar, a video strip that replaces the function key row. huzzah.
And, of course, everything Apple does is promoted with breathless intensity. Every event is Bob Hope's presentation of the recently risen Jesus Christ atop a gleaming, floating cloud hovering over Trump's Maralago. Yet, there were few showmen of the same caliber as Steve Jobs, and Cook has not followed in his mentors footsteps. Nobody has. The only person in tech today I can think of who has a presence as compelling as Jobs is Microsoft's Panos Panay. Panos is a natural on stage, speaks in an unscripted manner, interacts well with the crowd, and is enthusiastically hyper about Microsoft's Surface product line like an amp cranked up to 11.
Now Apple rolls out a $5000 iMac Pro?! Is this Apple's response to Microsoft's astonishing, if subtly flawed, Surface Pro? I'm not going to dig into the world of pain that is Intel's i9 X-series multicore mega parts clusterfuck, but Apple has bought in completely. The stupid thing is that the X-series gear is designed for enthusiasts (sorta, more cobbled, but then I'm quibbling) and is meant to be built, not presented. Apple "presents" gear. You are meant to take it as it comes, use it as long as you can, and replace it with another steeply overpriced gadget they've breathlessly announced. In a sense, Apple is lucky that the mobile phone blew up, since that kind of gear is right up their alley.
None of this bodes well for a company that has long been playing at the edges of marketshare. I don't mean to suggest that Apple will go away. Far from it, but it does risk sliding back into the same tasteless, colorless mire it did when they first lost Steve Jobs. It's a fascinating history and if you don't know it, go look it up. You'll be amazed.
TL;DR - Steve brought in former Pepsi head John Scully to make corporate things work better after Apple's early success with the Apple ][. Following the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984 and after a lot of grief in the executive suites later, the board votes to fire Steve and put Scully in the CEO spot to replace Mark Markkula (yeah, Steve wasn't CEO). Steve goes off to found NeXT and Pixar, while Mike "The Diesel" Spindler was screwing up Apple's next gen OS and mobile aspirations. This led to Gil Amelio signing his own pink slip by suggesting Apple bring Steve Jobs BACK to consult. Then iCEO Jobs cut loads of fat from Apple's projects roster, started work on Mac OS X, ushered in the iMac, and began the road to making Apple one of the most powerful companies in the world before he died. Crazy, eh.
Yes, Apple has a huge share of the market in the iPhone, but all of the momentum they built over the years with desktops, laptops, and mobile devices is starting to catch the edges of reality and slow down. I don't think Tim Cook has much longer as CEO, and somebody needs to hand that Ive dude a severance check. His moody crap is really starting to bother me.
Why outrage doesn't matter anymore
" “>
Here's the thing. We, as Americans, have lost the ability to lash indignant hellfire at those who violate our collective sensibilities. Cops outright murder Black people almost every day, and we get mad, but nothing changes. Our politicians lie, cheat, steal, and send dick pics to minors, and we get mad, but nothing changes. Companies like Facebook, Google, Uber, the entire oil industry, the entire pharmaceutical industry, the medical establishment sell each of us for $12 a year, tricks hundreds of thousands of people into indentured servitude, skirt the law with impunity, and price gouge with lip-licking voraciousness, and nothing changes. Banks, housing, dialysis, the battle for a living wage, the death of education, the abandonment of the separation of church and state, and much, much more is killing us all every day.
And nothing changes.
Sure, we get mad, we harangue people on the internet, we watch "news" programs that are little more than shills for an ideology, and nothing changes. That's because, those who benefit from the status quo have discovered a simple truth. As long as there are enough Americans making enough money to maintain a decent credit score and there's enough "white" noise in the media, nobody gives a fuck.
Americans have their interests predetermined. Get born, go to school, get a job, buy a house, raise two and a half kids, buy a few cars, take a vacation every year on your tax return, enjoy blockbuster movies at your local cinema, keep the riff raff out of your neighborhood, keep your head down and go to church every Sunday, or at least on the major Christian holidays. Most of all, however, is don't question anything outside of your little sphere of reality.
We've been conditioned to be selfish and think that's okay. There are many, many, MANY things wrong with American society, politics, education, social justice, healthcare, and a billion other things, but one of the biggest, simplest pieces is this grab, grab, grab ideal we have (that was an intentional reference to capitalist in chief, Trump). If we cared, stopping rape would matter. If we cared, women would have the same chances and choices as men. If we cared, we would make real reparations to native Americans and the descendants of slaves. If we really cared, we'd recognize that all of us are descended from immigrants, except the people we stole this country from in the first place, of course.
So, until we decide we aren't going to be selfish and share just a little with everyone else, things won't change.
And that really sucks.
America's Ghost in the Shell really sucks
" “>
As for the whitewashing, it's just plain stupid. Everybody is hating on it, and Hollywood isn't listening. Dumb. You idiots are already losing tons of money because people don't want to spend $50 to watch TV in a big room for a few hours. There's TV at home, and it has better stuff playing. Whitewashing is also racist and puerile. We've got enough hate going around without having it shoved in our faces by what's supposed to be entertainment.
If the racism wasn't enough, there's the shitty, moody pacing and the constant, nagging remedial reminders that "Major" isn't really human and that's what the story is supposed to be about. So, GITS 101... What makes a human human? Can a thing be human if it contains the mere consciousness of a being, or is that just a clever copy that only seems alive? Ultimately, it questions the soul and where it resides, if at all. This is a subtlety that American filmmakers just can't seem to grasp.
See, there's this thing in Japanese storytelling, and even I don't fully grok it but I believe I'm well ahead of the curve for Westerners, that focuses on the experiential aspects of a tale. For example, in Mamoru Oshii's 1995 theatrical version, there are extended scenes which feature nothing but Kenji Kawai's haunting vocal track and scenes of New Port City in Japan. Not a single aspect of this sequence adds anything to the story, considered criminal in Western film-making, but adds both a layer of familiarity and presence to the teeming locale and injects a deeply emotional tone through the score.
Japanese storytelling often features the seasons with special attention to Cherry blossoms in Spring, the beach in Summer, festivals and fireworks in Fall, and Christmas in Winter. My intuition tells me that this is derived from the strong sense of tradition in Japan as native Japanese people culturally seek out the beauty and significance of life, the world, nature, and even human works. These are the bits and bobs that get left out or wholly misunderstood when translating Japanese media into American fare.
And that's all I have to say on that.
How Pixar killed traditional animation
" “>
It's hard not to think of Pixar and, by extension Apple, as amazing American institutions built by the astonishing, guiding hand of the late Steve Jobs. Pixar, after all, has churned out a steady stream of box office smashes, with the occasional stumble. Yet, at the same time, Pixar has become a cancer that has infected the Western World's lauded history of traditional, hand-drawn animation like an invasive species. We are paying a very steep price for Pixar's success today, and for the foreseeable future.
There is no question that Steve Jobs was a visionary and reshaped our expectations of computers and technology. He and friend Wozniak almost single-handedly created the personal computer market in the mid-70's. However, by 1985 he was ousted from his own company because he didn't fit the standard corporate mold. Steve didn't rest, however. He created NeXT Computers and later, Pixar. Pixar had a megahit with Toy Story in 1995 and Jobs sold NeXT to Apple in 1997. In that same year, Steve Jobs returned to Apple as Interim CEO.
While Jobs was reshaping what we understand as personal technology, Pixar was hard at work creating a new kind of animation using 3D rendering technology it had invented. That, however, is where the two diverge. As Apple created an environment where other manufacturers would start to compete with Apple, Pixar was starting to carve out a niche that would eventually become the entire market, forcing all comers to migrate to 3D or fall behind.
It's hard to ignore a studio whose every release rakes in hundreds of millions worldwide, time after time, almost without fail. Even the films considered relative failures by critics made tons of money for Pixar and distributor, Disney. Spielberg, Katz, and Geffen's DreamWorks SKG was the first real studio practically formed to take Pixar head-on, and eventually it zeroed in on a number of critical hits, namely the popular Shrek franchise. Others would start to make their marks, as well, like Sony Animation, Blue Sky, and Universal. Even Disney started making 3D features in-house.
1995 saw the theatrical release of six traditionally animated films and Toy Story, the first feature length 3D animated film. Toy Story went head-to-head with Disney's Pocahontas and A Goofy Movie and Amblin's Balto. By 2012 Pixar pitted the Celtic-themed Brave against seven CG-based and three stop motion films.*
2011's Winnie The Pooh from Disney, was the last significant traditionally animated feature to be released in the US.
2015 saw the release of Nickelodeon's The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water which featured traditional, CG, and live-action sequences, so can't be counted as a traditional film. Feel free to poke around the lists yourself, though it's quite depressing. In fact, Japan is the only major media producer that predominantly uses traditional animation, though it is commonly blended with cost-saving CG backgrounds and other non-character elements. Most Japanese feature-film releases are also traditionally animated, and Japan's most applauded animation director, Hayao Miyazaki, only rarely applies the use of CG animation, and never to anything important.
So, the result has been the almost complete dissolution of Western traditional animation studios. Period. It's not really a matter of the efficiency of output, after all, Japan produces a literal fuckton of animation over four seasons each and every year. It seems like it's come down to mere one-upmanship, and that sucks for animators or anyone who wants to go into animation.
Traditional animation is an art form. It is based purely in art as a creative, visual outlet that springs from human hands and is viewed by human eyes. While 3D animation can, and often is, beautiful, it is far less organic in variance, creative and/or cultural diversity, and frequently devoid of emotional impact. That last bit is critical. Sure, a story can be strong, and when edited together well, with good voice acting, and a compelling soundtrack, a CG film can be emotionally engaging. They simply lack the additional tonal quality of analog.
Like vinyl records.
* NOTE: All films noted or referenced were released primarily in the US market.
Disney, Stop Ruining Animated Classics
" “>
So, I watched Beauty & The Beast (2017) last night. Wow. Just SUPER wow, and not for the reasons you might think. It's a dud. A flop. I hate it. The entire opening musical sequence, so full of life and deeply engaging in the animated feature, is dead, limp, and lifeless. Everything after that is a disjointed, misshapen mutation of the brilliant, reinvigorating, emotional feature-length animated version from 1991.
Disney had a hit in 1977 with The Rescuers, but were having trouble with 1981's The Fox & The Hound, 1985's The Black Cauldron, and 1986's The Great Mouse Detective. They struck gold in 1989 with The Little Mermaid and 1991's Beauty & The Beast would be the first two steps in a long string of successes (barring 1995's Pocahontas, but that's just me). Had they not buggered about with their long history of storytelling, we might not have ended up with a 2017 version.
My recommendation to Disney? Stop it. Do NOT remake one of the most beloved animated films of all time, The Lion King. Stop all plans for other remakes. People don't want Live Action. They want new stories, not rehashed versions of old stories. If they hadn't remade Beauty & The Beast, then they wouldn't have invited discussions of misogyny and rape culture. It would have remained one of Disney's greatest films. Now it's just poop.
Hollywood is having a hard time making ends meet, with fewer people going to theaters to see films. It doesn't help that It costs nearly $50 for a family of four to see one movie and that TV series from Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBO, and others are far more engaging and far more affordable. It's also not helpful that most movies that come out of Hollywood these days are designed for the Chinese boxoffice. After all, the money goes where the money is, and America, you just ain't it anymore.
The bigger problem, aside from the economy and jobs not being where Washington would like us to think it is (sorta non-sequitur and kinda not), that, and I know you're not expecting this, Pixar ruined everything. In 1995, Pixar dropped a bomb on the animated film industry with Toy Story,and have since made precious few missteps until being acquired by Disney in 2006.
More insidious, however, is that Pixar did for Hollywood what Apple had done for technology, changed the two industries forever. There's no question that Steve Jobs was an amazing person, and he did usher in a wide range of technological advances via Apple, but the same can't be said for animation. The sad truth is that Pixar killed traditional, hand-drawn animation as an American art form.
I don't mean to suggest that 3D animation isn't a form of art. Indeed, it can be beautiful as Pixar, Blue Sky, Dreamworks, and others have shown, but it is not the evolution of animation. We've seen too many times complaints like those about the characters from Frozen looking exactly like the characters from Tangled, probably because they do. Traditional, hand-drawn animation allows for any number of styles.
Mulan features stylized Chinese art forms. Lilo & Stitch featured Chris Sander's unique character design and beautiful watercolor backgrounds instead of the traditional gouache. The Emperor's New Groove featured character designs based on South American art styles. Hercules drew from Roman forms of art and architecture for it's look. It's hard to say where any 3D animated film draws its inspiration from.
So, that's pretty much it. America needs to get back to its roots and stop trying to make shortcuts to everything. We need to stop killing art and demonizing the artistic. Disney needs to get back to creating amazing, hand-drawn animation and soon, or it will become the company whose pillars are Marvel and Star Wars and a bunch of old stuff they used to make. What a legacy, Bob. What a legacy.
Salted Wounds: The Ultimate Fuck You
" “>
I've talked about this before. I don't talk about being homeless a lot. It's painful, living in hotels for two and a half years. It's a short story if I leave out a lot of the detail. Two and a half years ago, around Christmas, we were evicted from our apartment in Mission Viejo because my publisher sat on their asses getting my advance check to me for my book, Getting An IT Help Desk Job For Dummies (available on Amazon, cheap plug). I worked my ass off to finish that book. 330 pages in three months. They didn't care. Companies don't care, so we were screwed. We figured we'd be out for a month or two then find a new place.
The thing is, nobody would take us.
It's easy. Just have the biggest recession since The Great Depression, mix in one guy with no college degree and 20 years of professional writing and IT experience, a disabled daughter, and a wife who has to take care of said daughter 24/7, then throw in shitty credit and families that lack any kind of real empathy, and you have us. By 2008 I was making $75,000 a year with full benefits. After the recession hit, I could barely make $20 an hour on contract. I moved from job to job, working my ass off, mostly for idiots who refused to listen to simple reason, but those are different stories.
I will say, I had this one client for six months. He ran a small business in Tustin. He wanted to automate his business operations, and had heard I was the guy. We talked and he told me he wanted a system that did X, Y, and Z and all for free. I told him that X and Y could be done but that Z would need to be handled by a different tool and there would need to be integration and that he'd have to spend some money. He hired me, but he didn't listen. I spent six months trying to convince him that there was no way in hell there was any system out there that would do exactly what he wanted, out of the box, for nothing. Nice guy, but dumb as a box of bricks.
Eventually, the jobs ran out. Nobody was hiring any more and the economy was changing. I was too old, had too much experience, and didn't have a degree. I worked for SendGrid for almost a year earning $65,000 with meager benefits, but was fired after I pointed out some marketing material lied about some stuff the company was capable of doing for clients. Learn that as a lesson, kids. Honesty doesn't win you anything in this world. I got a gig with Mirantis for a bit, but their own internal squabbling resulted in my position being eradicated before I could even get started, so there's that.
That's when the book gig landed on my feet, which ultimately resulted in us losing our apartment. We fought tooth and nail to get back on our feet. We begged and begged and begged. We fought with our respective fathers, Rima and I. I've personally spent what seems like months worth trying to convince my father that the help he was giving us wasn't helping. We made several abortive attempts to buy an RV to live in, one of which resulted in us getting robbed outright to the tune of $3,500, by a former OC Sheriff, no less. All the while, Rima is keeping Leah in school and getting a college education, and I eventually start working for Uber. All that time, we still have to pay the hotel, usually money we didn't have.
So, two years later, we're still in hotels and we get a letter from the Anaheim Housing Authority. They've pulled Leah from the California State Section 8 waiting list at the request of Regional Center of Orange County, the State services group that helps with her disabilities. So, we did as they asked and we started to feel as if things were finally going to change.
We filled out the application while at a hotel in Santa Ana. The forms said we didn't have to live in Anaheim, but apparently that's not how they feel internally, so we were declined. We moved to a hotel in Anaheim and applied again. They looked over everything and we were declined again, this time for insufficient information. Of course, we had sent the information, it's just that someone else looked at the file and didn't know what was going on, so they sent out the denial. Maybe I could get a job there making their shit work.
Finally, we get them to understand they have what they asked for and they finally approve our application! Good lord, the heavens opened up that day, but only about a fraction of a second. So, we go in, have a meeting, get our fingerprints taken, a background check run, and handed a voucher to go talk to a landlord at one apartment building. That's where we find out about Kathy. Kathy Nutter. Kathy Nutter, the head of the Orange County Community Housing Corporation, a non-profit group that has been operating in Anaheim for 40 years.
She was so nice. She talked to us, we told her our story, and she empathized! So few people were doing that, it felt new. She agreed to let us rent from her and we started doing the paperwork. She arranged to have some couches a board member was giving away moved in and it turned out her daughter had a fridge she didn't need anymore, so we got that too. We finalized things, got the keys, and started moving our stuff.
That turned out to be a mistake.
When we had first seen the apartment, we didn't see any cockroaches or smell anything, but by the time we started moving in, we found the roaches everywhere and a smell of urine in the kitchen that was just overbearing. We stayed in the hotel one more night. The next night, out of money from the move, we stayed at the apartment. We cobbled together sleeping arrangements and eventually fell asleep, only to be awoken by the screams of our daughter who had roaches crawling on her face and body. We haven't stayed there another night since.
We told Kathy what happened and she appeared to be shocked. She said she'd have the maintenance people over there in no time to take care of things. They sprayed something and went away. A few days later, when we checked, we found plenty of roaches so we told Kathy again. She sent her people over again and they put down gel and gave us bugbombs. We bagged up some of our things that weren't in boxes and set off about eight bombs. Two days later, we find plenty of roaches dead, but more than enough to sustain horror alive and well, crawling all over the place.
Kathy said she'd never had a complaint of roaches or bad smells before. Funny thing is, I spoke to a neighbor and she said they had roaches and had complained many times, and that a sewer line had broken last year and stunk up the entire building for several weeks. Wow.
We've taken pictures and videos. We've documented all of our communications with Kathy. We gave her every chance in the world to make it right, and she didn't take a single one. It turns out that the loving, friendly, helpful, generous Kathy Nutter we thought we knew was just another sleazy slumlord like all the rest. The rent for that place was $1400. We were going to pay less than $400 a month for our share, the Anaheim Housing Authority would cover the $1,100 remaining, and it was a pig sty at best.
Now, I haven't even mentioned the homeless guy living, literally, on our front doorstep or the half dozen or so drug dealers who were running shop in the alleyway behind the building. Everything about this deal just felt shady, and we were being screwed over royally. We thought we were safe, having made it into the helpful arms of a HUD approved group. Things just keep getting better, though.
We asked Kathy to reimburse us for the cost of the hotel. That was denied. We asked for compensation for the money we spent moving in. That was denied. We contacted AHA and asked them to come look at the place again. They did that, saw how bad things were, and said they would cancel their contract with OCCHC. They then suggested we move into another apartment, which looked good from what we could tell, but turned out to be managed by Kathy Nutter, as well. Isn't that a kick in the pants!?
So, we are now asking the AHA to help us get on another waiting list or help us fix this problem some other way, and so far we haven't heard back yet. It seems they might have hung us out to dry, as well. Only time will tell.
To get our money back, we need to take the OCCHC to court. Small claims. Yay. So that's what we're doing now. And back in a hotel. Me, three weeks into a horrible backpain episode. Leah still going to school. Bills have to be paid. Paychecks only come in when they do, and it's all hell.
So, this is that Fuck You I was talking about. It's the Fuck You that the Universe is giving us. The Jumbo Middle Finger of Fate.
I tell you, it's the most awesome thing ever.
Damon's The Great Wall isn't so bad
" “>
You know, if more Americans watched Chinese movies, they might understand films like The Great Wall better. I'm more of a Japanophile myself, but I watch a good number of Chinese epics. Netflix is loaded with them, and some of them are quite good.
The thing you need to understand about Chinese culture is that the ideal of working for the benefit of the whole has been around for a lot longer than Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution (communism, if you didn't learn about Mao in school). The other thing you need to understand is the Chinese love for tales of mythology. Chinese culture has been around for a very, very long time, so they've got a lot of them.
Now, before we get to the idea of whitewashing, I'll say up front, I disagree. Matt Damon plays a white dude who tries to get to China to trade for gunpowder. Despite being a highly skilled mercenary who is mad down with the bow and arrow skills, he loses all but one of his cohort, only to be taken into custody by the Chinese Army at the eponymous wall.
Without revealing any spoilers, I'll say that Damon's stonehearted mercenary is ultimately swayed by the amazing qualities of the Chinese people to connect and fight a shared enemy. He learns that there is much more to life than just fighting for food and money. I'm not suggesting that China has been this oasis from pain and fear and life as we now it all this time, nor that communism is a fix for our ails, but this is what drives a primary element of Chinese culture if you're going to watch these films.
On that note, if you want to see some subtly subversive Chinese film making, check out Chronicles of The Ghostly Tribe. On its surface, it looks like a love letter to the Cultural Revolution, but just check out the overtly hyper-positive attitudes and glassy-eyed recitation that makes it more clownish than oppressive. It's not a bad film, either.
The only thing I want to say now is that you should give this film a chance. It's an epic fantasy that might even be a little too short to tell the entire tale, but it works. You can even skip the beginning bit right up until they get to the Great Wall. That's where I would have started the film with a short, explanatory preamble.
Why Pharah Sucks
" “>
Pharah. That flying rat. The one and only flying hero in Overwatch, is the single most annoying hero of the bunch. Nobody else can fly. Mercy can glide and Winston can jump really far, but no other hero has flight capability like Pharah, which makes her suck. Pharah's missiles are also quite lethal, which means anyone playing her who is even vaguely good at twitch games can do a load of damage, and it's very difficult to counter her.
Counter her with a sniper, like Ana or Widow, and it works, but they have to be really good snipers. Counter her with Torbjorn, and her missiles can ditch that Swedes turret in a couple of shots before the gun's bullets can deal enough damage. Counter her with another Pharah, and its like watching two first-timers have a dogfight.
So, Blizzard. Dump Pharah. Having a single hero that can control the skies is just dumb. There's no balance. Drop Pharah like a hot potato. Ditch her like an ugly blind date. Be smooth. Remove.