Disney Should Have Kept Han & Leia's Twins for the Sequel Trilogy

 In the first three "expanded universe" books--Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command--Leia is pregnant and then gives birth to twins Jacen and Jaina.  And then the kids grew up over the course of the books.  Then Disney came along and replaced them with Ben Solo, aka Kylo Ren.  And that was a mistake for a number of reasons.

One big problem was they never really gave Ben much of a backstory.  As previously noted, there was more backstory in a Lego Star Wars Halloween special than any of the movies.  He went to Luke's academy and turned to the dark side for...reasons and recruited the Knights of Ren to kill everyone.  That's about it.

One day a couple of months ago I had one of those idle thoughts that really they should have kept the twin thing.  Because that could have provided some motivation on how and why he turned to the dark side.  My basic idea is pretty simple:  Ben and his twin sister both go to the academy and train.  One day they're out in the woods or whatever and his sister is badly injured.  They get to Luke, but he's unable to save her.  And so Ben gets all pissed off and bitter and turns to the dark side.  I suppose you can complain about "fridging" in that the girl mostly exists to provide motivation, but it's still better than what they did.

The deluxe idea would have been to replace Rey with his sister, only we the audience wouldn't know they're related right away.  The backstory is that they both went to the Jedi academy but Rey was much better at the Force than Ben.  He got jealous and that led him to the dark side.  He tried to kill her, but Luke helped her get on a ship to escape and she crashed on Jakku.

You could even take it a step further and have her lose her memory in the crash.  And then it's kind of a Bourne Identity thing as her memory starts coming back when Ben, aka Kylo, shows up on Jakku trying to find her because this "dyad" thing would make them super powerful.  Or just that he wants her out of the way because she and Luke are the only ones powerful enough to stop him.  Basically then it's like his own personal Order 66 as he hunts down Force users.

This idea actually helps with motivation for other characters.  Instead of Luke going to the Jedi temple and being a whiny bitch, you could say he was out looking for his niece.  At one stop, Kylo found him and there was a fight and Luke was badly injured.  He found the Jedi Temple place so he could learn knowledge to pass on when his niece found him, because he wasn't able to take Kylo on himself.  And he didn't tell anyone because he didn't want Kylo to find him.  And losing one child to the dark side and with another one missing would put a strain on Han and Leia so they break up.  Han reverts to his smuggling ways in the hope that he can find some info on where his daughter might have wound up while Leia stays with the New Republic to work through official channels until the First Order shows up.

It is of course too late to do all that, and it's probably too much serious human drama for a Disney movie, but it's just a thought I had and it's Memorial Day so it's not like anyone's reading anyway.

The Quick & Dirty Way to Make Paperbacks is Back!

 For a while I used Draft2Digital's format to make my paperbacks.  They weren't always the best format but they were quick and easier than doing it myself.  The header and page numbers always looked better than when I made them myself because Word is such a pain in the ass about it even after 35 years.

Then one day their print book option was relegated to one of those endless beta tests (like the "new" KDP Reports that had been on beta for about 3 years and only this week went online as the main reports--unfortunately) and you had to ask to get in, which I wasn't going to do.  So I went back to formatting myself for a little while.

Then one day I put a book I was doing for free (a collection of Kindle Vella stories I have to give away since I can't publish them or Amazon will cancel my story on Vella) on Draft2Digital so I could get the Mobi, ePub, and PDF files.  When I downloaded the PDF, I saw there are a variety of sizes available.  Check this out:

The 6x9 size corresponds to the default on Amazon.  So it's pretty easy then to just download that and upload it on Amazon for your paperback format.  There are other sizes too if you want one that's not the default.  D2D does all that formatting with the headers and so on so you don't have to.  Like before it's not always the best, but it's quick and easy.

The only caveat for me is the ebook usually has some stuff I wouldn't want in the paperback, like the dreaded ad, the table of contents, and more "Also By" stuff.  So I might want to trim that out in Word, save a separate file, reload it, and then run it through D2D.  Or not.  I'm lazy sometimes.

When you're putting your book in, you can find the page above by clicking the "View Book" link under the PDF preview on the Preview page:

Otherwise, if you exit out and log back in and click on your book it should bring up the "View My Book" page so you can get the PDF in whatever size.  It's a lot easier but if you want a little better formatting, my guide to making paperbacks in MS Word is still really useful--at least for me.

It's the Little Things That Chafe the Most

A couple months ago I rewatched Due South on my cheap DVDs.  The third season (or sometimes like on YouTube they call it 3rd & 4th seasons) featured some major changes as the show moved from CBS to CTV in Canada.  I never really liked this third season.  The last time I rewatched the show in 2018 I didn't even watch it but I decided to give it a watch this time to see if I liked it any better.

The answer:  not really.  It's more than just casting changes.  There were little things that bugged me.  A lot of it had to do with the main character, Benton Fraser of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  In the first season the character comes to Chicago from the Northwest Territories and so is a bit naive about how things work in a big American city.

In the second season it starts to get sillier but then in the third season, by which time the creator and other major producers and writers had all left, it goes even farther.  For one thing, Fraser often seems like he's on the autism spectrum now.  I mean every time someone asks who he is, he starts saying, "I came here on the trail of the killers of my father but for reasons that don't need explored I've stayed as a liaison at the Canadian embassy."  He never said that in the previous two seasons, so why is he doing it now?  And when he wanted to get his partner Ray's attention, he would say, "Ray, Ray, Ray..." like he's the freaking Rain Man or a little kid.  And what happened to his brown uniform?  It shows up in one scene but otherwise he's always wearing his red uniform, which while recognizable would be like a Navy/Marines/Army/Air Force officer wearing his/her dress blue or white or black uniform everywhere.  Which they don't do.  I mean that would also be like you or I wearing a tuxedo or cocktail dress when going grocery shopping or to the gas station or whatever.  It doesn't make sense.  

Then there's the way everyone in the police station yells, "Gun!" every time someone pulls a gun.  They never did that before.  And just the overall tone of some stories.  The two-part episode "Mountie on the Bounty" uses an actual Scooby-Doo plot where some polluters create a fake ghost ship to scare other ships from their dump site.  Jinkies!

That's the problem not just with this show but a lot of sequels or prequels or revivals.  In TV, movies, and books.  Because so often the property is changing writers and/or actors and are taking place sometimes decades apart.  There are all these small differences that make these things annoying to watch or read. 

Like the Star Wars prequels or Star Trek Enterprise or the Star Trek reboots where it's supposed to be the past from previous stuff and yet everything looks better.  Or in Discovery where the Klingons and uniforms and displays all looked a lot different than the original Trek that was supposed to be just a few years later.  That's a pretty massive leap backwards.  Or in The Last Jedi where suddenly we were going by Neil deGraase Tyson rules of space travel and Luke could use a power no Jedi had ever used before.  In the old Star Wars and Star Trek novels it was frequently a problem where a new writer would take over and their characterization would be off with people doing things out of character.  Or like Dave Wolverton's infamous Courtship of Princess Leia where the Rebels suddenly had dozens of captured Star Destroyers they were using and shit like that.

Common sense fails can be annoying too.  Like when I was watching an episode of the quirky Canadian drama Being Erica.  The titular character and two friends (one of them very pregnant) go to a movie.  the pregnant friend has been complaining about having to piss a lot...so she sits in the middle of the row.  Then she ends up pissing herself because she can't get out in time.  Um, wait, if you knew you had a weak bladder, why the fuck didn't you sit at the end of the row?  So you could easily get out and go piss?  Duuuuuh.

Maybe I'm just too anal but the little things matter.  When characters act different or the sets or technology don't make sense in the context of what already exists or people just act like morons, I get annoyed.  Maybe it's just my accounting brain that wants things to add up.  Or maybe it's my writer brain that wants stories to be consistent.  No matter what, this kind of shit really irks me and I wish they would stop.

Marvel has been less guilty of this stuff than most.  Though sometimes it's annoying how plot points from the solo movies and Avengers movies don't really fit together all that well.  Like at the end of Spider-Man Homecoming where he rejects the offer to be in the Avengers and then a couple months later in Infinity War he's hanging out with Tony Stark in space in the "Iron Spider" armor he had rejected.  Or like at the end of Dr. Strange he's still a novice at magic but in Ragnarok and Infinity War he's suddenly a Sorcerer Supreme.  Maybe he used the Time Stone to learn faster?  There's other stuff I've probably noted in reviews.

I think what helps Marvel is they have been making these movies consistently for 14 years now without any huge gaps.  And a lot of the same people like Kevin Feige have been involved from the beginning so there's at least someone around who might be able to manage some consistency.  It's too bad other franchises can't do the same.

(On a side note about Due South Season 3, it's also pretty stupid how they replaced Fraser's partner Ray Vecchio.  They say he had to go undercover and then bring in a guy to pretend to be him who looks nothing and sounds nothing like him.  And then it's confusing because some people would know him as Ray Vecchio but other people would know him as Stanley "Ray" Kowalski and so wouldn't they blow the secret?  Especially since Kowalski as a rookie was involved in a high-profile case that went to death row and was getting a lot of media attention.  The whole thing was dumb and pointless.  They could have just said Ray Vecchio had gone to Washington or something for some big task force or something and this other guy was transferred in to cover his cases without taking his name or anything.  Fraser and new Ray work a case and become friends and everything else just works normally from there.  That's just another thing that stuck in my craw.  But then I have a pretty sensitive craw.)

How Long Should You Keep Your TV Security Blankets?

Like a lot of little kids, I had a "security blanket" that I had from pretty much when I was a baby, until I was probably 6-8 years old.  Then I think my mom finally gave the thing to the cats or dogs or something like that because it had become pretty worn by then.

After FXX announced new seasons of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Archer, I got thinking that so many of these TV shows that have gone 10+, 20+, or even 30+ years (or 42 "seasons" like Survivor) manage to do so because they're like security blankets for viewers.  No matter how much else changes, there's always The Simpsons or South Park, or Always Sunny, or Survivor, or The Bachelor, and so on and so on.  In the bad old days when TV schedules were more crowded, networks were like our moms, ripping our security blankets away once they started getting worn.  But now that there's so much more competition, they seem to be coddling us, letting us keep these shows until apparently everyone involved in them dies--and then they'll reboot them.

I got thinking, how long should we keep these security blankets around?  My answer:  10 seasons maximum.  Why?  Because I can't think of any show I watched that got better after its 10th season, except for Archer and that's just that the 8-10th seasons were  so fucking awful that it was hard not to improve on them.  Simpsons had started to drift into meh by the 10th season and by the 10th season of South Park and Family Guy I was barely watching.  Always Sunny still had some good episodes in its 10th, 11th, and 12th seasons but when Glenn Howerton went missing for some episodes in the 13th season to do AP Bio and maybe some other stuff it kind of fucked up the chemistry and it just hasn't really recovered.  And with a live action show like that it just kinda gets sad after a while.  I mean when they were 20-something or early 30-something their antics were fun but when you're 40-something and doing the same shit it's just kinda pathetic.  Which is probably why it's good Seinfeld quit after 8 years, because them doing the same shit in their 50s or 60s would have just been sad.

By and large I don't think any show has really been so great after 10 seasons where I would desperately miss it.  Most shows don't need to hang around even half that time; a lot of them have pretty much strip-mined the premise bare by the time it gets to season 6.  In family sitcoms you get that problem where the kids start growing up, so those definitely don't need to be on long enough that the kids start having kids of their own.  And really, with streaming and DVDs and whatnot you can always revisit those old friends whenever you want.  You don't need them to basically do the same shows from 10, 20, 30 years ago over and over calling it "new."

I'm sure I mentioned before my breaking point with The Simpsons was seeing the episode description saying Selma was going to marry some rich guy.  Which they had already done at least once, if not more times before.  How many more times is she going to get married?!  How many more times can Lisa do something desperate to fit in?  How many stupid pranks can Bart pull?  How many more times can Homer quit his job and get a new one and then go back to his old one?  How many more careers can Marge try?  I mean, Jesus God, we've been over this same ground six hundred times by now!  How many more times can you watch the writers of South Park take some headline from the previous week and have the adults overreact to it and the kids be far more sensible?  Or for Cartman to play the adults overreacting to some stupid shit?  Or everyone overreacts to something until Kyle and Stan learn something?  Or have Family Guy basically do a lot of the same shit as The Simpsons with more R-rated humor and stupid cutaway gags?  How many times can you watch people bickering on these dumb "reality" shows?  The talent show ones at least you have slight differences, but isn't every season of Survivor just a bunch of bickering and stupid "challenges" until someone wins?  And isn't every The Bachelor just skanks throwing themselves at some hunky dude until someone wins--though they never actually get married because the show wraps months before it airs?  What the hell is wrong with you people?!!!  You have all these options and you keep watching the same shit, year after year after fucking goddamned year!!!

[OK, I'll calm down now.]

I suppose some people would say, "What's the big deal?  Wet me keep my bwankie if I want!"  But the reason your mom doesn't let you keep your security blanket forever is it retards your growth.  You can't grow up if you keep leaning on a security blanket.  In the same way, you can't really grow if you're just watching the same stuff forever.

Unfortunately, networks aren't responsible like your mom and all they really care about is making money.  So as long as there are enough babies clinging to these security blankets, those shows will keep making money and networks will keep them on the air.  And that makes it harder for new content to be successful.

I guess the other way to think of it is like an addiction.  So long as they churn these seasons out, people won't break away from them.  But it is pretty easy to just not watch something.  Especially with streaming, where you physically have to select something.  So, you know, don't.  Just because they keep making The Simpsons or South Park or Family Guy or NCIS or Blue Bloods or Law & Order SVU doesn't mean you have to watch it.  Just say no.  And don't worry about "FOMO;" you're not missing anything important.  They're just TV shows.

You can make the same argument for books.  Everyone has a favorite author or two who's like their security blanket.  But if you only read Stephen King or James Patterson or John Grisham or whoever's books, you're only going to get their perspectives.  You need to read other books by other authors to get new perspectives.  I do try to mix up my authors a little bit so I'm not always reading Lawrence Block or Donald Westlake or John Irving books.  I will usually find my way back there, but just reading a couple of authors all the time would get boring.

But apparently a lot of other people don't feel that way.  So, what's your security blanket for TV and books?

Slugfest: A Very Brief and Incomplete History of Marvel vs DC

A couple years ago there was this new thing called Quibi where they had a bunch of high profile names like Kevin Hart, Anna Kendrick, Christoph Waltz, Kiefer Sutherland, etc who made these shows where the episodes were only 10 minutes apiece and you were supposed to watch them on your phone or tablet, not a TV.  There were a lot of commercials and a big rollout...that failed.  The company went under and like a year later all that stuff got bought up by Roku and added to the Roku Channel, which is free for Roku users.  

Anyway, Slugfest is a documentary from Quibi about Marvel and DC Comics.  There are 10 10-minute episodes so you can watch the whole thing in under 2 hours.  There are plenty of documentaries on comics already, but some of the episodes in this focus on smaller events.  

The first one talks about the creation of Captain America and how pissed off the Nazi Bund in New York got about it.  Writer Joe Simon and artist Jack Kirby received death threats, but the character's growing popularity finally had the mayor promise to station police outside their office.

Then there was the first "crossover" of Marvel and DC that happened in the late 60s thanks to a guy in Rutland, Vermont (known to MST3K and Rifftrax fans as the home of Edgewood Studios) who threw elaborate superhero costume parties.  Three comic book writers went to one of these parties and worked it into stories for two Marvel and one DC comic.  They didn't use the actual characters or anything, just kind of off-brand versions of them like "Nighthawk" instead of Batman.  

In another story, in the 70s Stan Lee was nervous about an issue of Dr. Strange where a guy goes back in time to the beginning of the universe and sees God.  One of the writers (probably while high) wrote a fake fan letter from a fake reverend and mailed it from Dallas, TX.  The letter fooled Lee into thinking that religious people were cool with the issue.

Another one was about the first real crossover of Marvel and DC where Superman and Spider-Man were to fight.  It took negotiating on the level of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt to get anything put together.  It illustrates why these "vs" comics are usually bullshit because they aren't really made to be realistic.  In this case neither company wanted their guy to look bad so all these rules had to be made.

Another story talked about the breakup of the legendary duo Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.  They had worked together pretty much since the beginning of comics from when Marvel was Timely Comics.  But they had different personalities with Lee being a lot more of the showman while Kirby was more reserved.  With the success of Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, etc Lee was getting a lot more credit in the press and so in the early 70s when Kirby got a huge offer from DC, he took it.  In the pages of Mister Miracle, he created a manager who was a parody of Stan Lee named "Funky Flashman."  Lee did not really like that, though I don't think they ever really had it out and probably had buried the hatchet years later.  This episode probably would have been better if both men weren't already dead so they could only interview other people like assistants and relatives and such.

Another interesting story was how in the late 70s DC hired a woman to help revive their struggling comics.  She had the idea to introduce a whole bunch of new titles and so a bunch of writers and artists were hired.  And then there was a big snowstorm that really messed up sales, which back then were entirely in paper and mostly at newsstands and the like.  So a few months later they had to cancel most of this new stuff and lay off most of the artists and writers hired.  Some of the writers and artists copied their material and put it all into an omnibus called the "Cancelled Comic Cavalcade" that there are a few copies of today, like in DC's archives.  (Ironically, DC made sort of the same mistake in 2011 with the New 52, introducing a bunch of new titles that within 2 years had pretty much all been replaced by Batman or Superman titles.)

There were some more high-profile things like the infamous contest to phone in and decide whether Robin (Jason Todd) would die or not.  This story was better in a History Channel documentary I watched in 2003 because they could still talk to Dennis O'Neil, the Batman editor of the time, who passed away by the time this documentary was made.  They could at least talk to writer Jim Starlin about it.  If you don't know, Robin received the death sentence by less than 50 votes.  And of course Jason Todd didn't stay dead but returned about 15 years later as the "Red Hood" who is sometimes a bad guy and sometimes a good guy.

There was also one about the Death of Superman and another about the Clone Saga in Spider-Man.  The Clone Saga was just supposed to be a few issues but as the sales rose, they had to keep going.  Then everyone bitched that it sucked because the writers had to keep throwing in stuff to keep the story going for almost two years.  The Death of Superman is a pretty well known story:  the comics were going to marry Lois and Clark but then the Lois and Clark TV show came along and they needed to do something in the comics to replace the wedding.  Writer Jerry Ordway suggested they just kill the Man of Steel and so that's what they did, though they always knew they were going to bring him back later.  A lot of people bought issues of Superman's death thinking they would be worth something...but they weren't because there were so many copies.

The last one focuses on Stan Lee's "Just Imagine" comics where, after being released from bankrupt Marvel Comics, Lee was asked to write new origins for DC's iconic characters.  And then it talks about Lee's death not much before this came out.  

The segments feature some reenactments starring comic book movie/TV actors like Brandon Routh, Clark Gregg, Ron Perlman, Tim Blake Nelson, and Patrick Warburton.  And it's narrated by ubergeek Kevin Smith.  For some reason they interview people from the Netflix Marvel shows:  Vincent D'Onofrio, Krysten Ritter, the lady who played Karen Page, and the lady who played Misty Knight.  I don't know why since none of them are really experts on comics or the comic book industry, but whatever.  

Since these are only 10 minute episodes, it can't really give as much detail as a full documentary on the subject, so the ones about smaller things are better served.  I mean you could do hours about the Death of Superman or the Clone Saga in Spider-Man but most of those other ones I mentioned, 10 minutes is about enough time to cover it.  Obviously there's a lot more they could have done; maybe they can make a Slugfest 2 someday.  Though I would doubt it since Quibi went under.

When Are You a Writer?

 A couple of months ago I mentioned how much I hated the Amazon movie The Tender Bar.  The main character, JR, quotes someone as saying that you're a writer as soon as you think you are.  At the end of the movie he says that leaving Long Island to go to Manhattan makes him a writer.  Um...why?  It seems more arbitrary than Luke Skywalker declaring himself a Jedi because he fought Vader a second time.  And then arbitrarily declaring himself a Master later on.  

As for the quote, whoever said it might have been famous, but I don't agree that thinking you're a writer makes you one.  To me, you actually have to write something to be a writer.  And really I think you have to write something all the way through.  Once you type "The End" (or some variation) then you've actually become a writer.

Because the thing is, plenty of people can THINK of writing a book.  People all the time think about writing something.  Many of them never do it.  Many others will start but never reach the end.  I do not consider those people to be writers.

Think of it this way:  if someone enters a marathon but doesn't actually go, are they a marathon runner?  No.  Just because they thought about it doesn't mean they did it, thus they don't earn the title.  If they run part of the way and pass out and never finish then they might be a runner, but they are not a marathon runner because they did not actually run a marathon.

It should be pretty obvious but thinking of doing something doesn't mean you did it.  That's some pretty lame Millennial bullshit where you should get credit for something you didn't come close to doing.  What the kid leaving for New York has to do with him being a writer, I have no idea.  New York is filled with writers and people who might think they're writers but never actually DO anything and people who might start some writing but never finish.  All that along with plenty of real writers who actually publish books to make them authors.

Since JR published a memoir (God only knows why anyone published it) he did eventually become a writer (and an author) but just thinking he was a writer and leaving his home did not make him one.

But that's my opinion.

Amazon's Worst-In-Class Delivery Service Shows the Danger of Vertical Monopolies

 Back in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries there was a type of monopoly known as a "vertical monopoly."  This was where a company controls basically every step of the process for creating and selling its product. The best example of this was a steel company would own the mines to get the raw minerals, the transport to get them to the mills, and the mills to turn the raw materials into steel.  So they basically owned every step of the process of production.

Like horizontal monopolies--the type where say, US Steel would own every steel mill in America, or how "Ma Bell" controlled all phone service in America until it was broken up--this was outlawed early in the 20th Century.  That doesn't mean there aren't still vestiges of it.  For example, a few years ago Amazon switched from using UPS and USPS for its packages to its own fleet of delivery trucks.

This seemed like a good idea for Amazon because while there would initially be a cost in vehicles and employees, it would ultimately save money.  And in theory it might be more efficient and better for the customer, right?  Wrong!  Amazon's delivery service is the absolute worst.  Worse than the postal service!  And that's saying something.

It didn't start out so bad but as the pandemic progressed, it just got worse and worse.  I'm sure staffing issues are a big part of it.  The people they hire are probably the ones who couldn't get hired by UPS, FedEx, DHL, or the post office.  So they're just not very good at their jobs.  They don't seem to care at all, just half-assedly throwing stuff on steps or in doorways.  Where I live you're extremely lucky if they even get it in the right building.

The worst part is there is seemingly no accountability.  As a customer you can hit the thumbs down on your delivery, but you can't make a specific complaint.  You can contact Customer Service and they'll have someone call you.  Why?  Probably because they know their service is shit and don't want anything on the record for people to see.

One time when their driver threw my stuff on the middle of the steps in the snow I took pictures and posted them online to shame Amazon.  Of course I got one of those auto replies, "I'm so sorry, contact me and tell me what happened."  So it looks to other people like they're doing something.  But really that doesn't do anything.  I got an email back with boiler plate saying that you can include instructions for the driver.  So it's my fault because I didn't tell the driver not to throw my shit in the middle of the steps in the snow?

Sometimes I'll be coming home or taking trash out or something when they're delivering and I can watch in real time as they open a door and whip something inside or just dump shit on the steps.  They have no shame at all in half-assedly doing their jobs.  Why should they?

Not long after they started their delivery service, I came home one night and the driver was just staring at the doors to my building.  When I opened the door, he reacted with surprise and wonder, like I'd just unlocked King Tut's tomb or something.  Because apparently he couldn't figure out that there are two doors and the one on his right only opens if you open the one on his left first.  So I guess he never even tried opening the left door because it was unlocked and doesn't need a key card or anything.  That's the kind of intellect we're dealing with.

Twice in 4 days I had to track down packages that were left at an address ending in 600 not 601.  Because apparently they don't bother to really look at the labels and match them.  Which is literally a primary function of their job!  In my job if I don't match payments to the right account, I get an email or some bitch coming to my desk to complain.  But I don't think anything happens to these assholes because they do it again and again and again.

One of the major issues with trying to do something like this is Amazon had no experience at being a delivery company because their fulfillment had been done by others.  To their execs it probably seemed easy enough:  buy some trucks, hire some people, have the people drive the trucks and drop packages off.  How hard is that?  It turns out to be pretty difficult, at least to do it more than half-assed.  Unfortunately the customers have endure Amazon's growing pains.

But what can you really do?  Not order from Amazon, pretty much.  Am I going to do that?  Probably not.  So there's really no motivation for Amazon to get its shit together to have an actual, professional delivery service and not something worse than Doordash randos.  Really we need to get back to outlawing stuff like this because while companies can save a buck, it doesn't make a better service for the consumer.

On another note, something I've seen in a lot of reviews since the pandemic started is that Amazon is cheaping out on packaging.  Complaints are especially high for action figures because people want them in "mint" condition and then they get figures with boxes smashed like something from the Amazon Warehouse discount brand, making the figures almost worthless.  I've had other things packed really badly, like a jar of peanut butter that was just thrown in a light bag so when it got to me the safety seal was broken open.  I got my money back for that screw-up.  So besides being bad at delivery, Amazon has been bad at packaging too.

It's unlikely to happen anytime soon, but when you let quality slip this way, it opens the door for competition.  Poor packaging and poor deliveries disillusion customers to your brand and so when they can find a better option, they will.  See the auto industry in the late 20th Century or KMart in the 90s.  Walmart, Target, Overstock, or some new player might start eating up some of Amazon's business.  The downfall might never happen or not happen for a while but the poorer your company's product, the better chances of your company's demise.

I'm just saying.

When Do You Cringe?

This is kind of a sequel to Wednesday's entry.  I was reading a review of ABC's Abbott Elementary on Roger Ebert.com and it mentioned this Vox article that decrees Parks & Recreation, Harry Potter, and Hamilton to be "cringe."

There are different reasons, all of which are really just the author's opinions and not really backed by anything like factual evidence.

• Parks & Rec is "cringe" because the author (who's probably a Millennial or Gen Z) is disillusioned with Hillary, Obama, and Biden because they didn't slay all the worlds ills, wave her student loan debt away, and buy her a pony.
• Harry Potter is "cringe" because the author revealed herself to be a shitbag transophobe.  (I'll agree to that one.)
• And Hamilton is just not cool according to an episode of Gossip Girl, which itself stopped being cool a long time ago.  And the cool kids think our Founding Fathers were all slave owning, Native American slaying psychopaths and this play somehow glorifies that.

The thing with Twitter and Facebook and whatever, is there are always people desperate for attention by ragging on stuff.  Which is really just an extension of what pundits and critics have been doing for centuries in newspapers, books, radio, TV, theater, and so on.  I don't listen to Twitter or Facebook or Vox to decide what I think is "cringe."

A lot of things that might be "cringe" to someone else I don't really mind that much, in large part because of nostalgia filters.  The original Star Trek, and the 90s shows, and the original Star Wars movies can look kind of cheesy these days, but I don't really care.  They're still good stories and there are a lot of good memories.  I can easily rewatch old episodes of The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, Twilight Zone, Married With Children, MST3K, Earth Final Conflict, Transformers, GI Joe, Robotech, and Due South without any problem at all.

There are other things that I do find "cringe."  Like trying to watch Dukes of Hazzard or PeeWee's Playhouse or American Gladiators.  Nope.  I cringed.  The nostalgia filter didn't work.  Or just they don't really have good stories or acting or...anything really.  I'm pretty sure I mentioned when I watched some old Price is Right episodes on Pluto TV the games were mostly still entertaining, but a lot of Bob Barker's patter--cringe!

I suppose there would be books that if I tried to read them again I might cringe.  Like Hardy Boys books or shit like that I read when I was a kid.  But stuff like the Wingman books or Robotech books that I know aren't written well are still fun to re-read on occasion as escapism.

Music I was never really into much that makes me cringe now.  I suppose Journey or Billy Joel or Night Ranger would make someone else cringe, but fuck them.  Don't Stop Believin!

But anyway, unlike the author of that Vox article, I don't really decide something is "cringe" because it's not cool or the author or an actor or producer or whatever turned out to be a piece of shit.  Or childish disillusionment with the political process.  It's mostly stuff that just doesn't work for me on any meaningful level anymore.  If that makes any sense. 

I mean I'll still watch a movie Harvey Weinstein produced or Kevin Spacey stars in or old episodes of Chapelle's Show even though he's a bigger piece of shit than JK Rowling.  (Not for any racial reason but because he's also a transophobe who recently blackmailed his town into not including low income housing in a development project because he didn't want poor people living near him.)  If you try to avoid everything that's "cringe" or "cancelled" in one way or another, you'd be left with almost nothing.  You pretty much couldn't watch any Hollywood movie since ever because there's always been shitheads running the studios, producing the movies, and starring in the movies.  Most rock stars weren't and aren't saints either.  And authors...well, there are probably a lot of those classic ones who make JK Rowling seem like a saint.  Even Shakespeare would be "cringe;" I mean, have you ever read or watched The Merchant of Venice?  And just the title Taming of the Shrew is pretty misogynist.  Cringe!  And it's not like Big Publishing was a squeaky clean industry in general.

Basically the whole fucking world is cringe, so like what you like and if it don't hurt nobody else then the hell with it.  Certainly don't listen to some lame Millennial probably living with twelve people in a studio apartment in New York who writes for some third-rate website for exposure.  And don't listen to me either.  Listen to the voices in your head--so long as they aren't telling you to kill or anything like that.

And really for Hollywood or Big Publishing or any of those, the problem when you try to appease people like this "author" is that it's only temporary.  As soon as it's not fashionable anymore they'll dump you and whine about it being "cringe."  And/or they'll keep pushing you for whatever their cause d'jour is.  But for that matter, the MAGA types will turn on you the second you don't go along with whatever their latest conspiracy theory is.  If you disagree even slightly or argue for common sense or decency, they'll proclaim you "woke" and dump you.  Like one day I saw the search engine DuckDuckGo that was heavily favored by the MAGA types because it wouldn't strain out fake news said that it was going to downvote Russian disinformation.  Not eliminate it, just move it down the list.  Immediately MAGA types start proclaiming it "woke" and fleeing to some other site to get their Russian disinformation.  So really catering to the far end of either spectrum probably isn't going to help you for long.

So what do you find "cringe?"  (Besides this entry or this blog in general.)

Smoke

Smoke by Donald E. Westlake
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As someone who started out writing cheap, tawdry paperbacks in the late 50s and early 60s, most of Donald Westlake's books are pretty short, under 300 pages. For whatever reason this 1995 novel is 452 pages according to Goodreads. It would really have been better if it had been as short as most of his other books because the story just seems to drag for no reason.

I bought this because I had recently finished rewatching the first season of Syfy's Invisible Man series from 2000-2002. It had a similar premise about a thief who's shanghaied by scientists into becoming part of an experiment that turns him invisible. But in that show the thief is implanted with a gland that secretes a chemical to bend light to make him invisible, so it goes over his clothes and it wears off after a little while.

This is more like the old movies where Freddy is injected with a formula and eats another one and his body becomes permanently invisible. He can't wear clothes or else he'll be visible. Being a thief, Freddy soon uses his new superpower for personal gain by robbing a fur storage place and jewelry wholesaler and so on. But there are obvious downsides, especially with his ditzy girlfriend Peggy. And then he's chased by a corrupt cop and people working for the tobacco company that inadvertently funded his creation.

All of this as I said goes on far too long. There are complications thrown in that don't really need to be there. At one point Freddy goes to a party where the scientists who created him are and then makes some critical mistakes that he should by then have known would cause him trouble. In particular he decides to "hide" by doing laps in the pool? It makes no sense. If he were just floating in the pool then he wouldn't be seen, but he should have known by then that the act of swimming would make it easy for him to be seen. This was after he drank champagne that he should have known would give away his location.

The way it ends, it could have ended a lot sooner. It's a nice premise and there are some fun bits, but there's just too much of it.

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Who Says You Can't Say That?

January (really starting on New Year's Eve) I rewatched the first three seasons of Arrested Development on Hulu.  Along with that I watched the latest season of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, one episode of which commented on Hulu removing some episodes of the series like the "Lethal Weapon 5 &6" episodes because one character plays the Danny Glover character in blackface.  And before that sometimes I read older books by authors like Donald Westlake or Lawrence Block.  And sometimes I think, "Geez, you really couldn't get away with that now."

For me, I don't think any of the stuff I mentioned is actually racist or should really hurt anyone's feelings.  Mostly because of the context.  None of the things I mentioned was ever really putting racism in a positive light.  In Arrested Development or It's Always Sunny it's really more about showing how arrogant and/or dumb the white people are.  When Lucille Bluth adopts a Korean boy and thinks his name is the Korean word for "Hello" or when her and her husband order Guatemalan painters around or mistreat their Mexican maid we're not supposed to sympathize with the white people.  Just like in It's Always Sunny, the other characters call out Mac for acting in blackface so even in the show it's clear that this is not something positive.  That's really why I think Hulu overreacted taking down those episodes.  And it's why I think I can continue to laugh at the antics of the Bluth family.

Probably the most offensive thing in Arrested Development was the third season plot where Michael goes out with a British girl (Charlize Theron) not realizing she's mentally handicapped.  She wears a bracelet that says MRF which he thinks means Mr. F when really it means Mentally Retarded Female.  But still a lot of it was how oblivious Michael and his family were not to realize her mental handicap early on.  So we're not supposed to be laughing at her but at him, which is why it isn't really offensive.

I've said before that during the pandemic, Mike Tyson Mysteries has been one of my favorite shows.  But Mike Tyson in real life is an ex-con who has a lot of personal problems.  Recently he got into a fight with an annoying passenger on an airplane.  Am I going to stop watching the show?  Hell no.  It's a stupid silly fun show and I mostly watch it for Pigeon, voiced by the late Norm MacDonald.  The show does even reference Tyson's real life bad behavior, like at one point where Pigeon says, "I think sometimes we forget this is Mike Tyson.  He could literally kill all of us!"  So, yeah, the show's writers are aware of it and I'm aware of it and none of us give a fuck because it's a fucking cartoon!

Last October someone wrote a review of Private Dick (Gender Swap Detective #1) decrying the use of the word "colored" for black people saying:

The time setting of this story maybe they would have used these words. But don't do it now, in a fantastical story where the point isn't about racism.

I don't really think it matters how "fantastical" the story is; the point wasn't being racist.  Dixie, the main character, isn't any more racist than Philip Marlowe was; it's just that being from the 1930s that's how she thinks.  It would be jarring (at least to me) if she were to call black people "African-Americans."  Even "black" wasn't a term people like Dixie used then.  In Raymond Chandler's books, Marlowe actually uses "Negro," which I don't think is really any better; to me "Negro" is just another way of saying that other n-word, so I've never really liked using it.

Ironically I was already addressing this issue in Guardians of the Swapverse for Kindle Vella.  In that story Dixie is brought to the present day, which of course is very jarring for her.  At one point she calls someone "Oriental" and gets told that people don't use that word anymore because it's racist.

When I read Donald Westlake's Spy in the Ointment from 1966, I commented on Goodreads:

Cancel culture shouldn't read this because there are some anachronisms concerning race and geopolitics. You have to read it considering the context of the period in which it was written.

I don't really remember everything in that book, but there was nothing too egregious in my mind.  One I read from the 70s called Dancing Aztecs was a little more problematic in the black characters from Harlem using dialect to sound like Jar Jar Binks and the dumb, sleepy guy from South America could be considered stereotypical.  Most of the white characters use the n-word too.  But like the TV shows I watched, the white people weren't really very bright either, so it wasn't really looking down on non-white people.

It's just that these days some people are so overly sensitive.  Like people getting upset that Gal Gadot (who's from Israel) is playing Cleopatra.  Or that Javier Bardem (who's Spanish) played Desi Arnaz (who's from Cuba) in a movie on Amazon.  To me that's like complaining an American is playing a Canadian--or vice-versa.  Or it'd be like complaining about Patrick Stewart (who's British) playing Jean-Luc Picard, who's French.  Or Bill Shatner (who's Canadian) playing Captain Kirk (who's from Iowa).  In none of those cases is anyone going around in "blackface" or "brownface" or anything other than normal makeup and in no way is anyone playing that to make fun of a particular culture.

But, again, I'm a middle-aged white guy, so no one really cares what I think about this, do they?

Meet the New Racism...Same As the Old Racism

 Especially recently, there's a new form of racism:  whining about anything that talks about racism!  It started with Florida banning "Critical Race Theory" in K-12 schools...despite that CRT is for the most part a specialized class for college students majoring in Law.  Other red states took up the cause, as did Fox "News" because there's no bullshit bogeyman they don't like.

And then it goes further with Texas and Tennessee and other red states wanting to ban teaching about the Holocaust and banning the graphic novel Maus, which naturally spurred people to buy that in droves, though probably that was mostly people in blue states where it won't matter.  Florida, not to be outdone, also passed a "Don't Say Gay" law where you basically can't talk about homosexuals in any way or you get put in the stocks--not really, but that seems not far off.  Then Texas, in this race to the bottom, decreed it would have Child Services investigate parents who encourage their kids to be transgender.  And Idaho said, "Hold my beer" by passing a law saying anyone who tried to give aid and comfort to transgender people could be charged with a felony--even if they do it in another state.

One day on my Facebook, this post appeared, despite that this is obviously not something I would be interested in.

To me the irony is that you have (mostly) white people whining about a book called White Fragility.  Hello, self-awareness?  What this post really is is about breaking the teacher's union, which of course is mostly pro-Democrat.  If you can use this to get fragile whites to try to opt out of the union, then that will decrease the union's power.

See where it says "No diverse viewpoints?"  That's what the new racism is.  It's something that trolls used on message boards like 15 years ago--if not longer.  They say something terrible about Obama or repost some terrible meme.  I say they're a racist.  They say, "No, you're the racist!  You hate whites!"  To which I say, "That's weird, because I AM white."  And then they say something like I'm a self-hating white or something stupid like that.  Blah, blah, blah.

By "diverse" viewpoints they mean that if you have a book complaining about white racism, you need some racist white screed too.  Because, sure, if you teach kids the light side you got to teach the dark side too, right?  They make this same argument with evolution vs Creationism where if you teach evolution you have to teach Creationism too!  It's only fair!  So we should probably then teach every creation myth that exists, right?  Right?  No?  Oh, right, we should only teach your mythology.  And then someone would say that you just want to teach your mythology--evolution--to which I would say that's not mythology, that's science.  And then they'd say "Nuh-uh" and make a bunch of bullshit arguments.  Blah, blah, blah.

Former NBC football reporter Michelle Trafoya whined on Fox "News" about CRT that she wants her kids to be "colorblind."  Well, no, making kids ignorant of slavery, the Civil War, the civil rights movement of the 50s-60s, and the Holocaust doesn't make them "colorblind;" it just makes them blind.  The idea is it's easier to persuade blind, ignorant young people to join racist causes than kids who might understand the history of racism and bigotry.  Only we wrap it up in a positive way by saying we want to protect kids.

Sadly, this tactic comes right out of Fascism 101.  In one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, the ghost of Adolf Hitler coaches Dennis Hopper on how to sway people to his fascist cause.  One of his tactics is this same sort of thing of turning arguments around.  "They say we're the minority?  I say we're the majority!  They say we're racist?  I say they're racist!"  So this definitely isn't anything new.

And then you get the Tony Laplumes who think they're being clever by running around shouting, "Both sides!  Both sides!" to try to muddle things even more.

I have pointed out a couple of times on Facebook where the left's "cancel culture" can go too far.  Like when the Houston bus authority for Black History Month put in seats dedicated to Rosa Parks and liberal morons were on Twitter saying, "What about Texas's voting rights law?  What about their abortion laws?"  Um, idiots, this is a bus authority in Houston; they have no control over what their stupid legislature and even dumber governor does.  The proper outrage would have been to say that all the money wasted on decorative seats could have been used to pay for low income people to ride the bus to jobs or grocery stores or doctors.

Another time was people were teeing off on Applebee's because CNN cut to an Applebee's ad during coverage on the war between Russia and Ukraine.  It's not Applebee's fault that CNN cuts to their ad.  Sure they bought ad time but they don't call CNN up and demand their ad get played right that second--presumably.  You can be outraged at CNN but why make fun of Applebee's for something that isn't their fault?  Instead of you looking smart or cool, doing shit like that makes you look like a fucking ignorant dumbass--just like Fox "News" viewers and QAnon morons.

That's really the thing here:  outrage culture on both sides usually targets things that don't matter or in most cases don't even make any sense.  There's a lot to be outraged about, but CRT and decorative seats are not really among them.  And trying to whitewash history to cancel outrage is in itself outrageous.  If that makes any sense.

This is Income Inequality in One Handy Tweet

 Someone retweeted this a couple of months ago and it perfectly demonstrates income inequality for you:

To break it down, this ridiculous tweet says this guy has no debts and saved money to retire at age 40--and you can too!

Except as the article tells you, this tool went to work for his hedge fund manager father, making $250K a year as his first job.  My first job out of college I made like maybe $12/hour back in 2000.  I didn't have a lot of debt but because I went to SVSU on scholarship/financial aid while this guy's rich parents probably paid for him to go to an Ivy.

Instead of paying rent, he lived in his grandpa's empty vacation home.  I had to live in a tiny apartment in Grand Blanc for like $400/month.  And when he wanted to buy a home, he used $500K his uncle gave him as a gift.  My one uncle gave me $20 on holidays when I was a kid and that was a big deal.  Most of my uncles gave me jack shit.  And if my nieces ever read this...check's in the mail, lol.

And he ONLY vacationed domestically.  I didn't take a vacation until 2005 and that was just to Maine.  The farthest I've gone outside the country is Canada!

It's ridiculous but this is how the rich (and their media enablers) see us poors.  There is that strain of "let them eat cake" like when Mitt Romney suggested that people in debt should just get a loan from their parents.  Because we all have rich hedge fund manager parents.  Donald Trump and his enablers consider him a "self-made man" when in reality he got started with a $1 million loan from his daddy.  My parents could barely loan me a couple bucks for gas.

Stuff like this is definite media enabling by making it sound like this is some simple man we can all emulate.  Sure, if we all have millionaire daddies, grandpas with fancy vacation homes, and uncles who give us half-a-million dollar gifts.  Whoever wrote this should really be ashamed--from his/her crappy studio apartment that probably costs $15,000 a year where he/she is struggling to pay off hundreds of thousands in student loan debt.

As long as tools like this are held up as "self-reliant" we'll never really be equal.

Sometimes a Mistake is Just a Mistake

 It's May the 4th, which Star Wars fans corrupted into some kind of holiday.  So appropriately let's talk about "science fiction" and mistakes.  A couple months ago one of my Facebook "friends" shared this Tweet:

And as sometimes happens, I took a moderate point of view and got yelled at by someone else:

There's really no profit in arguing with people on someone else's Facebook feed so I just laughing reacted and left it at that.  But really I don't think the comment is valid.  It doesn't matter that the books came before the movies.  I was talking about how people see the book in 2021, not when it was written.

I think if you go out and ask 100 people on the street, you would struggle to find one who would label Frankenstein as "science fiction."  In large part because of the movies we've focused mostly on the monster aspect, not the mad science aspect.  So if you go out and ask people what genre the book is, I'm sure 99% of those who actually know there's a book would consider it horror, not science fiction.  Checking on Amazon it's listed under categories like Classic Literature and Gothic Literature these days.  Not science fiction.

I also have plenty of stories that feature weird science, like the Chances Are books.  Do I consider them science fiction?  No.  Technically could you call them science fiction?  Yes.  There is "science" and they are fiction.  In the same way there is "science" in Frankenstein and it's obviously fiction, so it can be described that way.  Is that how even the author would describe it?  I have no idea.  But when I shelved the Chances Are books I didn't put them in science fiction; I put them like in Thrillers and Paranormal Mystery or something.  The same is true for a lot of Eric Filler books.  A few like The Cage, Reunion, and Only Human I would consider sci-fi because they were based on sci-fi properties:  Star Trek, Voltron, and Transformers respectively.  The rest, even if they feature weird science, I don't consider them science fiction because the "science" isn't really the major point of the story.  

That's less true with Frankenstein because Victor's obsession with raising the dead is a major part of the story.  But it's not necessarily the core of the story.  Really it's about the relationship between Victor and the monster and, really, who is the actual monster?

So to me this idea that The New York Times is trying to "erase" her is false.  It's just our perception of what is "science fiction" doesn't tend to include books like this.

But in today's culture it's easier to jump straight to outrage rather than consider it might just be a mistake or oversight.  That's not nearly as attention grabbing, is it?  But then I'm a middle-aged white guy, so it's easier for me to be less paranoid about this stuff.  If you're a woman--especially a black woman--you're probably a lot more skeptical about these things.

Still, it'd be nice if we could just chill out a bit.  Not everything is a conspiracy to discriminate against someone or some group of people.  Sometimes it's just a...

A to Z Challenge Reflections on What Might Have Been

Part of a future "B" entry?

The A to Z Challenge is over, again.  What did we learn?  Probably nothing except that I have too many Marvel Legends figures.  Though not really in comparison to people who have like whole rooms and storage garages full.  And like with my other figures I buy most of them on clearance or at a discount unless it's something I really, really want.

If it's like other years, some random people might have shown up sometimes.  Last year one got all huffy because my final post said I wouldn't see those people after the Challenge.  Guess what?  I didn't see them after the Challenge.  Any that showed up this year are probably already gone back from whence they came.  It is what it is.

When I was setting up this challenge, I thought of doing like a Marvel vs DC thing and do a Marvel Legends and a DC Multiverse.  But when I set to doing the DC ones I had more problems.  I had to fudge more of them and couldn't really find much for I or Y and I really had to fudge X.  I think part of that is they haven't done those as long as the Marvel Legends, but also about 90% of the figures they do make are Batman, and another 5% Superman, Harley Quinn, and Wonder Woman so that doesn't leave much room for all the many other characters they have.  Here's the list I came up with at this point:

• Azrael
• Bats:  Batman, Batgirl, Batwoman, Batman Beyond, Batwoman Beyond, Batwing...
• Cyborg
• Dr. Manhattan/Dr. Fate
• Etrigan the Demon
• Flash
• Green Lanterns:  Hal Jordan, John Stewart, Kyle Rayner, Jessica Cruz...
• Hawks:  Hawkman/Hawkwoman(girl)/Hawk & Dove
• Inque/Injustice/Isley, Pamela (Poison Ivy)
• J'onn Jonnz (Martian Manhunter)
• Katana
• Lex Luthor
• Mera
• Nightwing
• Ozymandias
• Palmer, Ray (the Atom)
• Quinn, Harley
• Robins
• Supers:  Superman, Superboy, Supergirl
• Trevor, Steve (Seriously, there's not a better T?  Hmmm...Nope.)
• Ultraman
• Vixen
• Wonder Woman
• Task Force X (Suicide Squad)
• Y?
• Zod (Why is there no Zatanna figure?!)

I probably could eventually come up with something to fudge those other letters or maybe find something strong for some of the other ones.  Maybe McFarlane will help me out by making Ice or some Young Justice figures.  (I would seriously love some Young Justice figures.)  Come on, Todd, do me a solid!  Stop making figures from shitty comics storylines no one cares about like "Endless Winter" and "The Three Jokers" and do some good ones.  Is that too much to ask?  Probably.

Actually, why is it McFarlane has made figures from the movies, one from Arrow, a couple from The Flash TV show, and video games like Injustice 2 and Arkham Knight, but they haven't done anything with the other CW shows and HBO Max shows?  I mentioned Young Justice, but there's also Legends of Tomorrow, Stargirl, Batwoman, Black Lightning, Doom Patrol, and Titans that have pretty much 0 figures representing them so far.  Mattel made a Ray Palmer from Arrow/Legends of Tomorrow and a Supergirl from that show, but they really haven't exploited all those established brands while they churn out a whole line of "Endless Winter" figures.  What's up with that?  Does it have something to do with licensing the likenesses of the actors?  Who's in charge of deciding these things?

NOTE:  I was bored this weekend so I said fuck it and just wrote the entries for next year using that list.  I can always change some of it if they come out with something new.