2025-W23 EOW Report

Anti-Goal Cycling

• Finished the fourth scene in prj:WAITE. That was rough. It took so long. Again, three side characters, adding more background stuff. I get it. So story dev took a little longer than expected. And then on Friday morning, I realized that one thing I kept avoiding and thought I could get away with by handwaving it… I could not. The story kinda hinged on me actually knowing what the ghost is and what was actually sad that caused said ghost. So then Saturday morning, snuck out to Starbucks and spent a good 90m just figuring out what the damn ghost was. (BTW - ghost is past trauma). Finally got it figured out by going through the “data” as in figuring out dates, when events occurred, the ages of the characters at each event. So I can move into the production of scene five this coming week. Maybe I’ll even hit the deadline.
• After the Saturday story dev session, had a good catch up call with Olivia. We did some back-and-forth this week, the GFP to nail down our AirBnB. Screwed up on the first one, didn’t have A/C. Still blown away that LL’s favorite film is “City of God”.
• Two thirds through the Great Cat Massacre. What an amazing book on how different and foreign people acted and behaved just a few hundred years ago.

Four Thousand Weeks

• Sunday was booking AirBnBs in Tokyo and Kyoto after a couple games of Steam Up (2023). Guess it got played after all. And can I just say… organizing these things is so much easier when your kids are technologically, logistically, and academically adept? They actually had good input and organizational skills. The middle one figured out that we should go to Ghibli Park from Kyoto instead of making a third stop in Nagoya. It’s amazing.
• Saturday got up early to hit up Starbucks for some story dev. Then hurried breakfast, drove middle one to Battle for the Bands, then bookstore, groceries, had just enough time to watch the recap of Andor Season One, and then pick up the middle one. Wanted to make burgers on the grill but had to clean up and sanitize a rat infestation. Didn’t wear PPE and now a part of me thinks I’m going to get Hantavirus and have a 30-40% chance of dying. Wife doesn’t like, never liked the grill to begin with. Maybe it’s for the better. Ended up broiling the burgers in the EMF stove. It was juicy, but not crispy on the outside.
• So ended up paying someone to mow the lawn. Nobody has time in the family right now. We’re all busy and stressed and the idea of a lawn, even though it’s this small L-shaped thing in the backyard is just too much to deal with.

Story Introspection

• Still enjoying Silver Age Superman! It’s my bedtime reading now ha ha. An issue before bed. The Leah Williams Power Girl issues I still haven’t read are finally on DCUI. Except for Spider-Man: Incursion, everything else this week was excellent. Enjoyed the heck out of Tom Taylor’s DCeased. It’s crazy what happens when you let writers actually mess with the status quo in a separate sandbox. It’s like they can tell stories of consequence or something. Weird, right? Actual stakes? Crazy.
• In short story land, Graham Greene’s “The Destructors” was excellent. Great power dynamics. Great character motivation “I don’t hate him, it wouldn’t be fun that way”. Gabriel Smith’s “The Incomplete” was also great in a modern-meta way. The Pope joke was great. Jonas Eika’s “Me, Rory and Aurora” was a bit too subtle for me. I thought the POV was a cat for the beginning bit.
• The Doctor Who episode I saw this week, “Lucky Day” was so… on the nose. It’s weird watching something you agree with thematically so much but executed so badly. Yes, misinformation is horrible. The Manosphere is horrible. Conspiracy theorists and incels are horrible. But surely, there’s a way to drive that message narratively without making it so… I dunno. What’s the P word? Not platform. Proselytize? Preach? Preaching. I think that’s it.

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