writing

Weekend

Last night, my parents and I went out to eat with my aunt and uncle to celebrate my father’s birthday, which was Friday. The restaurant was quite small, and the only reservation I could get was at five o’clock, but the food was good, and it was a nice evening.

I came home and watched The Magnificent Ambersons. They don’t make movies like that anymore. I’m not sure that they ever did.

Today was an ordinary Sunday. I wrote this:

[cut]

And I did the crossword puzzle, more or less. That was my weekend.

Time off is over

I go back to work tomorrow, although luckily not yet back to the office. I’ll be working from home on Mondays starting this week, and also starting summer hours. So that should be interesting.

The weekend was okay. I watched Die Hard again on Friday night for some reason, not that anyone really needs a reason to watch Die Hard. On Saturday, I watched Greenberg, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that. I’ve also been watching episodes of Better Off Ted, Orphan Black, and The Fall. It’s amazing that I actually also got some reading done — Under the Dome and World War Z, in preparation for both their adaptations — or writing. But I did:

I wasn’t born on Mars, not like my brother, who nearly died when the borders were closed — he says — and the space ports stopped letting refugees like our parents escape off the planet. They made it as far as Phobos, thanks to a pair of forged visas, my asthmatic brother in tow, and that’s where I was born, in this half-built lunar colony that was never supposed to be anything but a staging ground for the red planet below. If the government of Mars even knows we’re still here, they haven’t publicly acknowledged that fact in fifteen years, just like they’ve said nothing about the military listening posts that are supposed to be someplace on the far side of Deimos, either on the moon’s surface or in near orbit, radioing back to Earth. I don’t know how you can be afraid of someone who’ll keep their head in the red sand like that for so long, but my brother says we’re lucky they don’t turn their attention towards us.

“You weren’t there at the fall, Mary,” David says. “You don’t know what it was like. When they wrested control, it was bloody and brutal and — ”

To be honest, I sometimes just tune him out. David has a flair for the dramatic; and while sometimes that’s fun — it’s maybe the only flair this old abandoned moon base has going for it — it can get a little tiresome. He’s too cautious, which I guess I understand. He’s not wrong, I wasn’t there, and I didn’t see what the new regime did to dissenters less lucky than my parents. Whole villages reduced to dust, like reverse terraforming, the tools of the original Martian settlers turned into weapons by Kendall and his followers. We still have some of the footage, and David’s right about the bloody and brutal part. Kendall was a maniac, vicious and power-hungry, and he forced good people like my parents to flee to this ramshackle little moon.

But is he even still alive?

That was the weekend.

And this is my monthly music mix for May:

  1. “Q.U.E.E.N.” by Janelle Monáe (feat. Erykah Badu)
  2. “Dayton, Ohio – 1903” by Randy Newman
  3. “The Rains of Castamere” by the National
  4. “Buildings & Mountains” by the Republic Tigers
  5. “The Dark End of the Street” by James Carr
  6. “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” by Milan & Phonenix
  7. “Mr. Spock” by Nerf Herder
  8. “Au Revoir (Adios)” by the Front Bottoms
  9. “Dead Against Smoking” by Admiral Fallow
  10. “Always Alright” by Alabama Shakes
  11. “My Love Took Me Down to the River to Silence Me” by Little Green Cars
  12. “Dougou Badia” by Amadou & Mariam (feat. Santagold)

Saturday and Sunday

Yesterday, I read a bunch of Kaleidotrope submissions, and I finished playing the very enjoyable Bioshock Infinite. Then I capped the day off with a couple of movies: Silver Linings Playbook, which I liked a whole lot, and John Dies at the End, which…well, it wasn’t terrible. (Although I do think Noel Murray is right in that it’s “meant to appeal to people who are either chemically altered or sleep-deprived.”)

Today I did the crossword puzzle and wrote this with my weekly writing group:

“Because he was angry,” Bill said.

“What does that have to do with anything?” asked Jake. “He’s always angry. Every time I see him, I think he ought to be wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Hulk Smash.’”

“Is that some kind of pop-culture reference I’m supposed to get?” asked Bill.

“Well it’s not fashion advice, grandpa” said Jake. “I just think you should have told him. He’s going to find out eventually.”

“That’s if the Medusa Project even keeps running. Oversight has been asking difficult questions, and at this point, all the other funding is almost dried up.”

“When the hell were you going to tell me this?”

“When ‘almost’ turned into ‘all but.’ Don’t worry, you’re still more in the loop than Anderson.”

“I should hope so. He just has to get injected with the stuff, I’m the one who has to manufacture it. Which we can’t do without money, by the way.”

“I know. I’m not shutting you down.”

“Just shutting us out. Keeping secrets. First you don’t tell Anderson that his wife has died, because it might make him angry, and now you’re telling me the purse is all but empty.”

“Almost. It’s a subtle difference.”

“We’re not working with tuning forks and salad shooters down there, you know. If Medusa is going to work — ”

“You need money, I know. You need equipment and staff — ”

“And more of the compound.”

“Well there I can help you. There’s been another outbreak. And this time we’ve taken some of them live.”

“What? And you waited this long to tell me? When? How many?!”

“Seven. They’re en route, and will be here before nightfall. Apparently the outbreak happened someplace in Romania.”

“Well that’s hardly surprising. That’s not far from where we think Patient Zero was — wait, seven? And they let themselves be captured?”

“We sent in a strike team.”

“You mean you sent in Anderson. Damn it, Bill, the man’s a lot of things, but he is not field-tested yet.”

“The man’s a Marine.”

“Was a Marine. That’s before we started sticking needles in him, giving him a taste for the compound. We haven’t even moved him into the second phase of Medusa yet.”

“As of 1800 hours yesterday, you have. Frank Wilder administered the injection.”

“Whoa, whoa, Wilder? Tell me you did not let that quack into my lab while I was out. We don’t have any idea what phase two injections could mean long-term. You think Anderson is angry now? What happens if he goes full-on bloodsucker?”

“Wilder — and for that matter, your notes — suggest there’s only a small possibility of that. I didn’t make this decision lightly.”

“So it was your decision.”

“We’re running out of time, not just money. Besides Romania, we’re seeing scattered cases in Madrid, Beirut…Omaha. God, Jake, do you really think we’re going to be able to keep quiet on this much longer if we don’t start using our secret weapon?”

“And that’s why you didn’t tell Anderson anout his wife. Because he’s a weapon you don’t want going off in your face.”

“You didn’t see the footage from Romania. We’ll tell him — I’ll tell him — when we’re sure he’s stable. And if Medusa does get shut down…”

“He won’t be that easy to kill,” said Jake. “Not anymore. Even if he’s stable, he still might be a threat.”

“Well, we’ll decomission that bridge when we come to it.”

And that was the weekend. Well, except for the tomorrow part of it, anyway.

Sunday

The weekend went by pretty quick, but it was pretty decent, the rain notwithstanding.

Last night, for reasons that seemed perfectly sensible at the time, I watched the first Tomb Raider movie for the first time. (It was on Netflix.) The movie was…I hesitate to say bad, because there were things to enjoy about it. I like Angelina Jolie, and she at least seems to be having fun throughout most of it. And I’ve also grown to like Iain Glen’s work on Game of Thrones (which I’m close-ish to being caught up on). But the film is maybe one of the silliest things I’ve ever seen. I thought I knew from silly movies, but this is something else. Let’s just say that Daniel Craig’s American accent is one of the least ridiculous things about the movie and leave it at that.

After that, I watched the…I guess we’ll call it “season finale” of Doctor Who. I liked a lot of it in the moment, not least of all because I think it explained a lot about what I guess we’ll also call “the Clara era.” But out of the moment, actually taking a look at what I’d just watched…well, I think Alasdair Wilkins of the AV Club gets at a lot of what I think does and doesn’t work, about the episode, the season, Steven Moffat’s writing in general. I’m a lot more forgiving of the episode that Wilkins is, because I did genuinely like it, and it played to classic Who in some fun ways, though I do agree with him on its weaknesses and missed opportunities. (Seriously, casting Paul McGann in a cameo would have been inspired, if only because it would have meant a weird Withnail & I reunion on screen.)

So while I liked the episode, more or less, I kind of hope that next season, Moffat goes smaller.

Oh, and in between those two, I watched Hannibal. So it’s altogether possible my brain was in a really weird place by the end of the evening’s entertainment.

Today, I went to see Star Trek: Into Darkness. (Maybe you’ve heard of it?) I think the movie is a lot of things, like shiny and fast-paced and entertaining. But like its predecessor, there are a lot of things that it’s probably not, like smart and consistent and, ultimately, Star Trek.

Wading into spoiler territory here, I think the movie does some interesting things in the way that it quotes from the original series, Wrath of Khan in particular, but in the end that’s all those feel like: quotes. As I watched a pivotal, climactic scene, I kept thinking, “well, yeah, but Wrath of Khan did this first, and better. There’s no great accomplishment in proving that you’ve seen that movie, too.” The movie’s fun, I won’t deny that. It’s well acted, looks great, and Benedict Cumberbatch owns basically every scene he’s in just through voice and glower alone.

But there are things about it… For one, Felicia Day’s not wrong in asking “Where are the women?” But even beyond that, looking deeper into the movie, the philosophy of Star Trek — those tenets and deeper questions that made it something special, if sometimes a little hokey — that really does seem to be missing. I realize, as I did after the first movie, that while this is the future of the franchise, it doesn’t really feel like the future of Star Trek. There are more interesting places for it to go, I think, than a shiny, lens-flare-filled re-imagining of its past.

Oh, and before the movie, I wrote this with my writing group:

[deleted]

So it was a pretty decent weekend.

Sunday

I wrote this today:

“Are you going to finish that?” she says. His coffee has grown cold while she’s kept him waiting, and for that she apologizes, but they really do need to be going. She takes the cup and places it next to her own untouched coffee on the desk. She’s spoken with his direct superior on the phone and confirmed his credentials — she’s sure he can understand her precaution — but now they only have a limited window in which to talk with the prisoner.

“I’m not completely sure what you hope to accomplish here,” she says, staring at him. Young, eager to please, no doubt exceptionally bright, but also obviously naive. They always are, the ones they dispatch here to investigate these things. She has seen his sort all too often. She doesn’t know exactly what his bosses at the Bureau have told him, but it will almost certainly not have been enough.

“You can’t tell who he is just by looking at him,” she says. “You could stand right next to him, have a long conversation. You could invite him into your home, and you still wouldn’t be able to tell. And I still don’t know if that’s because he’s so good at hiding it or because we’re simply so eager not to look.”

”I’ve seen his kind before,” he tells her. He is impatient to begin what she thinks he will foolishly call in his notes after this is done an interrogation.

“No,” she says. “Not like this. You’ve seen remnants, the broken armies of the Shard. Those were echoes, whispers in a distant room, compared to this. This is darkness. This is evil.”

“I didn’t take you for the superstitious sort, Doctor,” he says.

“I just want you to understand,” she says, “that the man in there isn’t a man. Whatever he may tell you, whatever lies he may spout, you need to understand that much. But he also isn’t like the animals that you’ve rounded up and killed.”

“They’re extra-terrestrials, Doctor. Not demons or ghosts…or whatever it is the fanatics are believing these days. The Shard came to Earth to conquer it. And they failed. If this man is what you say he is — if he’s committed the crimes you say he has — then he’s just another one of their fallen army that we need to quarrantine and eliminate. There’s nothing special or mysterious about that.”

“He isn’t one of the Shard,” the doctor says. “This is what I have been trying to tell you. The thing in there is much, much more dangerous. He’s one of their gods.”

There’s definitely a little bit of the influence of Hannibal running around in there, the sfnal elements notwithstanding. I watched this week’s episode this morning, after the Sunday crossword puzzle kicked my brain’s ass, and it really disturbed me. I say that as a good thing, as the show has thoroughly surprised me with just how good it is, but these folks are not kidding with their “viewer discretion advised” warnings.

The silliness of Iron Man 3 helped, I think. It’s pretty slow to start, and probably more silly than intelligent, but the second half (or last third) at least is genuinely entertaining.

And that was Sunday. I haven’t looked at my work e-mail once since Friday.