marlowe1: (Serenity)
So now I've seen the ending that I forgot. I thought that they went back to that alternate universe, but nope. Henry just sees a demon and puts his alternate universe brother back in jail. The end.

Mid-season stinger - Jackie Torrence is going to the Overlook. Wouldn't that have been an interesting story. Way more interesting than "bad shit happens and it probably has something to do with alternate universes" for ten boring episodes.

Stephen King adaptations are notoriously difficult because the books are always in people's head spaces. But maybe don't fucking call your show Castle Rock if you aren't going to do anything with Stephen King besides elude to it every stupid episode.

No. I don't care if Lizzy Caplan is playing Annie Wilkes and that is the best casting ever. There's no way I'm watching season 2. Besides as far as the Wikipedia episode recaps suggest, it's about Annie Wilkes being a really good person who has bad things happen to her.

So Ratchett 1.0

Because killer nurses need fucking origin stories.
marlowe1: (high school reunion)
Yeah. There are many articles that I could put on Medium if I didn't give a fuck. This is one of them.

I bought Castle Rock season 1. I think I even liked it. I liked it enough to watch it a second time. I'm watching it the second time. And oh do I wish that the memba berries on South Park still had cultural significance but fucking Trump made everything about him so all Trump adjacent items like the Memba berries (memba Star Wars? That was great) are practically erased.

But this definitely explains why Disney gave Abrams Star Wars but also why they should have NEVER let him direct anything after the first Nostalgia driven movie. Abrams banks so heavily on nostalgia that there's really nothing left for him.

And Castle Rock is nothing but "hey remember this Stephen King story?" They reference the shit out of Stephen King stories. The weird guy is in Shawshank Prison. There was once a dog attack. So what's happening now? A lot of shit about a lawyer being blamed for his father dying but his mother is Sissy Spacek (CARRIE!!!! Isn't that so fucking amazing) and she's dating the Sheriff from Needful Things - the book where Castle Rock is utterly destroyed by the devil shop owner (if only Rick Sanchez had been in town).

But ignore the Stephen King references - at least the ones that have nothing to do with the actual story - and it's a fucking JJ Abrams alternate universe plot. I remember kind of liking these fucking things when he was making Fringe, but even then the alternate universe was actually fleshed out.

In this one the lawyer and the weird guy (Skarsgaard) are both Henry Deaver but from alternate universes. And for the last episode we get the twist that Skarsgaard was imprisoned for decades in Shawshank but lawyer as a child was imprisoned in the house in an alternate universe - the same one that Skaarsgard came from. So they were both prisoners in the alternate universes and the whole show crawls up its own ass.

Also there's a scene where a woman says that there was a serial killer (Dead Zone) and a killer dog (Cujo) back in the day, but that happened before she was born. NOw the town is boring. For just a second I thought that the show reached self-awareness and admitted to the fact that it is boring as shit and running on references to much better stories. Then she mentions the uncle that tried to kill his family and she took his name to annoy her parents. So she's JACKIE TORRENCE!!!! Get it. Isn't that awesome!!!

You know if you watch Rise of the Skywalker in a big ass movie theater with big ass speakers you don't necessarily think about how fucking stupid the plot is. You think of an alternate movie where Finn is the lead and Rose is actually doing things. You can also laugh about the Palpatine Sex Dungeon. Seriously that's a Palpatine Sex Dungeon at the end.

Sadly, there's not even a sex dungeon in Castle Rock.
marlowe1: (Spinning Tardis)
Youtube's automatic next video feature combined with the fact that I can play youtube on my television (whether or not it is on) means that I can play Youtube Telephone where I just let the site lead me through dozens of videos just to see where they lead. I will play a Lorde video and it will end up on a Korean pop group in 24 hours. I will play an episode of Boogiepop Phantom and end up at a douchebag judging the videos by how many upskirt illustrations are in them (it's not always a winner). So when I started with a Bad Writing Advice video (videos that mock crappy books with advice like "make sure that your dystopia has a love triangle") I ended up on other videos with serious writing advice. Like the person who made the videos went through a lot of thought to come up with a weekly "vlog" about writing and how to create compelling characters or ramp up tension. She was actually better in the early ones I saw where she talked about bad female characters, etc. The writing advice was either very basic or very specific to her writing style.

The only thing I learned about writing advice is that it's good for some things but you cannot take it as a gospel because writing advice can be contradictory for a major reason. Everyone writes differently. And often their writing advice reveals their weaknesses. Stephen King says to just write without an outline and you can see how this plays out in his books. On one hand the plot does feel like it comes organically from the characters instead of a need to pigeonhole them into a plot and yet he rarely ends a book in a satisfactory manner. The longer the book, the more likely there will be an explosion that kills off most of the secondary characters.

Also amateur writers are the ones more likely to give writing advice. It's like how people who can't stay with their boyfriends or girlfriends more than a month are just full of relationship advice. In the case of this youtube channel, the woman has a self-published book with mixed reviews. It's like she thought of the success of being asked about her process without fine tuning her process.

But then this leads to the youtube debate over whether youtubers should write books. There are two themes that I noticed in the youtube videos entitled "Should Youtubers write books?" (go on google it). First, there was some woman who got a publishing contract and then a ghost writer for her book. Second, the videos are fucking painful. Like the people who are doing them can't be bothered to write down a script or even rehearse. So they just go around the subject and never get to the fucking point. They also think of exceptions to their statements as soon as they make them. Probably when they are making them. Sometimes they mention John Green but then kind of say that he doesn't count because he was already writing books or something. Anyhow, they probably aspire to be John Green who writes pretty good YA books and has a well produced set of videos.

The part that fascinates me is the fact that it's obvious that almost every single one of these youtube "personalities" (I'm sure they have fans) would love to make money in the book writing business. After all, book writing actually pays better than patreons if the books are bestsellers (big if) but they are probably just as bad as writing books as they are at speaking clearly with purpose when the camera is on. Only they can't write one and they are jealous of those youtube "personalities" who do get book contracts, citing the anonymous youtube personality (why the fuck doesn't anyone name her) who got a ghost writer. So they try to say that writing a book when you have a youtube channel is unfair, like you are jumping in front of the line or you are taking focus away from legitimate book writers. Of course, there are plenty of celebrities who write books so the "it's unfair" debate is pretty moot.

THere are also youtube channels where teenagers review books. It's actually kind of weird to see them want to talk about a book but take forever to get to it. It's even worse in the 10 Most Hated Books when you find out that the first book is a Twilight book.

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Tim Lieder

December 2023

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