potofsoup

Well, I've been back in person since Aug 11, but school officially started with students on campus on Aug 23, so it's been 2 weeks of teaching full classes with everyone masked but not distanced. At least our campus is 98% vaccinated, which is good. The bad news is that we still had a few students test positive, which lead to quite a lot of anxiety and furor. The students who tested positive were asked to stay home and not return until confirming a negative COVID test, but the entire campus of ~500 people are considered "close contacts" because between 8 classes and no distancing rules, it was easier than doing contact tracing. And the guidance has been that vaccinated close contacts merely have to self-monitor. This has, naturally, made people who have unvaccinated children at home super nervous.

( some rambling about testing )

Well, I restarted Firefox and it insisted on reasserting the horrible Proton tab look on me, which... no. I want spacer lines between my tabs. When they pushed the new version in June, it was a pretty simple setting to undo in about:config, but this time it's a multi-step process. ::shakes fist at firefox::

Anyway, here's how you fix your tabs, in case anyone is still on Firefox: https://winaero.com/disable-proton-in-firefox-91/

COVID:
Oh man, some of the latest data on COVID is ... not great -- that study from Israel of Long COVID that says 20% of the vaccinated people who got COVID ended up with Long COVID, egh. (Although the study did point out that it means 0.5% of those who were vaccinated got Long COVID, which sounds slightly less worrying.) Long COVID sounds absolutely dreadful. Also, just read about the Massachusetts outbreak, which confirms that vaccinated people can still spread the Delta variant. It does have the more reassuring info that "35,000 vaccinated people a week in the United States are having symptomatic breakthrough infections out of a vaccinated population of more than 162 million", which comes out to 0.02%. I think that we'll be fine as long as we don't do stupid things like get drunk in bars with the mask off. In my neck of the woods, 84% of those eligible for the vaccine are vaccinated, with Asians being a whopping 95% vaccinated (!!). Cases have ticked up in the past few weeks, but deaths remain low. Spouse and I still wear masks in crowded areas and indoors, but we've started eating at restaurants outside when it's not super crowded. It's beginning to feel like that might just be the norm.

Writing:
I recently completed an event wherein I wrote 8 fics of ~5k each, totaling 42k words! It was a lot of writing for me, but as a result I feel like I've made some progress in the "learning to write" struggle.

I break learning a skill into 4 stages:
1) being able to recognize that something is wrong
2) being able to diagnose exactly what is wrong
3) being able to figure what needs to be done to fix it
4) having the skills to execute the fix
(huh, that's basically the 4 noble truths, isn't it?)

Anyway, steps 1-3 is basically Valley of Suck, where you can *see* that you can do better, but aren't *quite* able to do that. I feel like, half a year ago, I was at step 1, which is mostly being discontent because I know my writing lacked *something*. Since then, I've started getting better at recognizing what the problem is (whether it's at the pacing/story level or line-level). This past month, I think I've gotten to the point where I can say, "Oh, it's a pacing problem, and the fix is to move *this* emotional beat from the beginning of the fic to the end, and I need to tighten up the action here and divide up the fluff." And when I'm doing those sort of massive restructurings, I doing so with more confidence and less flailing. I'm also, extremely slowly, starting to get a sense of *how* to zoom in or zoom out with words, which is how I think about the line-level stuff. It's definitely helped me to think of the line level stuff like comic panels. "I want to do a close up on this guy's face here to show emotion" translates pretty well to "Oh, I should dwell on the emotionality of this moment here by adding a few more sentences and slowing the pace of the narrative a bit."

I've also been beta-ing for an author in Witcher fandom, which has been instructive in its own right -- being able to workshop the pacing of the story and discuss themes and pacing is lots of fun! And it's interesting to see how they think of it as "scene" vs "summary". I think what I do is I sketch out the bones of the thing first and then go through and identify the places where I need to "zoom in". Of course, this results in me leaving the kissing scenes for last, which meant that there was a day last week where I wrote 3 kissing scenes for 3 different fics. Writing about kissing is soooo weird. I can't not think about it as licking each others' tongues.

Anyways, my writing is far from *good*, especially on the line level, but I'm beginning to see the way out of the Valley of Suck. :) (Of course, once I get out, I'll be back to stage 1 again lol)

1 week comics class:
I taught a 1 week comics class to middle schoolers last week! It was ... surprisingly okay. It's always funny after a few weeks of struggling with writing, to come back to things that I'm good at. "Oh hey! I'm actually skilled at this thing called 'teaching'!" I can meet students where they are and then push them a bit further! I finally figured out a good way to teach middle schoolers to be aware of the margin and how their panels line up. (Apparently the magic words are "draw a big box on the page first, then draw lines to divide it into panels", because "margin" is not a helpful concept). I also managed to get them to brainstorm a collaborative story!

- I first created a template: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TJtuRReI0HPUOHpcrvLpq_066SXgv4qfzX_8F5XbxC4/edit#slide=id.ge3124e4c45_0_190
- And then I let the kids pick one box and fill it out in a sort of chaotic burst of 12 kids typing on the same Google Slide. It was actually pretty cool because they could see what others were typing as they were typing, and so could adjust to fit: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TJtuRReI0HPUOHpcrvLpq_066SXgv4qfzX_8F5XbxC4/edit#slide=id.ge3124e4c45_0_208
- From there I wrote it into a paragraph with the kids' feedback (there was a bit where we had to pause to vote on who the main character was -- the kitten, the sandwich, or the Astronaut).
- And then I listed out character and setting assets for the students to claim and design. While they were doing that, I roughed out what each page would be: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TJtuRReI0HPUOHpcrvLpq_066SXgv4qfzX_8F5XbxC4/edit#slide=id.ge5eda0e308_19_14
- And then each kid dibsed a page and drew that page, using the character and asset designs as a guide. They posted wips on their own Google Slide so that they could see what the other kids were doing. It worked surprisingly well, despite the completely different art styles that each kid had.

Here's the final result for the 7th graders if you want to see:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hw0kdkshx8cn89k/NS21-Kittens%20Adventure-single.pdf?dl=0
(also available in booklet form for anyone who wants to print it out)

Not bad for a few hours' work!

Miss Rutabaga and the End of Summer:
I restart work in less than 2 weeks! And then 2 weeks after that, Miss Rutabaga will be starting Kindergarten at the school that I work at. I thought I'd be more blasé about it, but starting kindergarten actually feels like a significant change from dropping her off at daycare every day. There's going to be new friends! A new campus! A new commute! I've bought her a new lunch bag and a new backpack, and I'm like, worried about the shuttle between campuses. (I teach at one campus and she'll be at the other campus. There's a shuttle that goes between the two that she'll be taking herself.) Just... I can't believe Miss Rutabaga is 5 now and will soon be navigating the elementary school campus as her own individual person. (She just lost her first baby tooth!)

I still have a bevy of work to do in the remaining time -- lay out my Wong Kim Ark comic, do some more sorting around the house, do lesson planning, plus camping with the fam and a work retreat with mom, but it's been a fruitful summer. :)

Now that I've spent the day reading about it, I feel like the tragedy of Wong Kim Ark is that, even though he won birthright citizenship, the immigration laws at the time made it basically moot -- Wong Kim Ark was one of very few Chinese Americans to be born in America, and he himself went back to China to find a wife, since Chinese women were basically not allowed to immigrate. He had 3 sons over 5 trips to China, and only got to see them once every 5 years or so. The Supreme Court decision was very much about guaranteeing that Irish and German immigrants were able to retain birthright citizenship. So... yeah. I'm not saying it didn't have a lasting effect, but it had a very limited effect on Wong Kim Ark's own ability to have children born in the US.

Watched some "retro" anime stuff last night and WOW the way the opening song to Weiss Kreuz whips me back to high school, sitting on the grass with my group of friends talking about the hot gay assassins and staying up late to read horribad fanfiction. KareKano opening brings me back to first time attending anime club in college. The opening to Last Exile takes me to that year of living with gf and deciding that I shouldn't cosplay blonde characters.

It's also so weird to me that back then, given my parents' restrictions on media consumption at home and my financial inability to buy VHS tapes and mail them to other fans that I found on Geocities, my consumption of anime was primarily through reading extremely detailed episode summaries and fan fiction, back when it was like, one person's website with whatever fanfics and character bios and wallpapers they felt like putting up. I think I watched <3 episodes of Fushigi Yuugi, Kenshin, Weiss Kreuz, Gundam Wing, but I sure as heck can still name all of the characters based on a still image ensemble shot.

Anyway, here's a nice retrospective:



(I fell into this youtube hole from "guess the anime opening" videos, of which this one is not bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wyQpSDls5E . I of course failed all the ones labeled "super easy" because I have not watched anime for a while.)


((and then somehow listening to old anime openings lead spouse into a conversation about optimism vs. naivete, cynicism vs. being realistic, and how he thinks we need to sell the house and move to either Canada or New Zealand by 2024 because California will burn and America is a failed state. SIGH))

( random thoughts, not organized )

Now I just have to insert Steve back into these things so that I can once again ship Samstevebucky properly :)

I was kinda meh about ep 3 and so didn't update, but anyway:

( spoilers for FATWS ep 3 and 4 )

I'm pretty happy with myself -- it feels like I've cleared out a lot of pent up feelings about Endgame / pent up comicking desires!

It started with someone adding a comment to Cadillac asking where part 5 was (tumblr-bot had thought the sand was nsfw), which then lead me to say, "hey, let me see if I can just finish this real quick." And I did! What helped was just saying "hey, past-self put too many arbitrary restrictions on this. Let me just ignore all those dumb things." (Arbitrary restrictions like that it had to be all close-ups. Dear self of 2017 -- that's just called Bad Comicking.) That took 2 evenings.

And then, since I'd finished a 4-year-old project, I decided to finish a 2-year-old one, which was the Thor part of my Endgame fixits. For this one, the blockage was that I needed to look up reference video, but didn't want to buy Endgame. Thankfully I found the necessary clip on youtube. Huzzah! (That was mostly Tuesday.)

And then, I realized that Bucky's birthday (Mar 10) was coming up, and for once I remembered more than 1 day in advance. So I re-read my previous ones, and drew the comic over ... ~5 days? Maybe a bit longer -- the comic was slippery, and unlike the previous 2, there wasn't a thing that's been sitting in my head for a few years, just waiting for execution. First I'd wanted to do some fluffy reminiscing, but then I realized that it's too early for that. Then I wanted to do something about Steve watching over Bucky's family in the past, but then I realized it wasn't logistically practical. Then I got upset over the fact that Steve lived 70 years without Bucky, and realized that I still have residual annoyance at Steve to deal with. And then I had to figure out a way to address that with the right tone and keep things hopeful. So... that took a while, but I got it done by Wed night!

And then yesterday afternoon, I drafted Vormir after the idea settled in my head as I wrote responses to some AO3 commenters, and somehow between last night and this afternoon, I as able to draw it a post it! :D!!

So yeah, it's been a lot of comicking -- the adrenaline rush is pretty great, ngl. :D

So, I got into Western fiction pretty late, and I still remember reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in high school and hitting the end of the book and saying "wait, the story is just beginning!" (Yes -- I completely missed the humor of the book completely). Then I read The Golden Compass and was like, "wait, this book ended on a cliffhanger???" And, like ... I know I'm supposed to read the next one, but guess what? I never did, because I was so pissed that I went through ALL that effort, only to read the beginning of a story. I felt so betrayed by the fact that the book didn't have a complete story arc. This isn't to say I don't like multi-book series -- I'm fine if I know ahead of time how many volumes it takes to have the complete story told (such as LotR), or if the books in the series, while featuring the same universe and the same people, are telling discrete stories.

But it's incredibly frustrating to me when I'm offered a unit of a thing that I expect to tell me a story with a beginning, middle and end, AND IT DOESN'T. I think this is what I find frustrating with what Spouse calls "Netflix pacing", which is the recent trend for 10-13-episode seasons that you're supposed to binge-watch. It usually takes 3 episodes to set up the characters, another 5 for the core plot, and then a final 3-5 for whatever climax/denouement. In these cases, the unit of the thing is not an "episode", but rather, a "season." But it's still pretending that the unit is "episode." If someone said to me, "hey, do you want to watch 1/10th of a movie tonight?" I'd be like, "No." But if someone said to me, "hey, wanna watch an episode of something tonight?" I'd be like "Sure." And it used to be that while episodes would have some time devoted to the season-long arc, it would still be standalone -- DS9 was like that, A:TLA was like that. But now more and more shows seem to forget to have a story for the episode.

TV shows used to be 99% episode plot, because you couldn't count on people watching for a whole season, and even now, procedurals and comedy shows tend to be that way. And then there were the TV shows that were 90% episode plot and 10% season plot, which was usually facilitated by the "Previously on..." segments at the beginning of an episode. With maybe a 2-episode season opener and season finale that have a bit more cohesion. But when's the last time a new show had a "Previously on..."? I feel like so many new shows are 99% season plot, which means watching an episode just leaves me feeling dissatisfied. Half the episodes are spent setting up things in the future, and the other half of the episodes are spent wrapping up, which means there's actually very little of each episode that actually tells a story.

Again, I'm trying to figure out what specifically I find frustrating about this, because I happily watched 26 episodes of Escaflowne, which is also a story that is told in a season length and not an episode length. Maybe it's, once again, the fact that I knew the commitment going in. But it might also be that Escaflowne was still expected to have some *story* happen in each episode, and not just some *setup*. Episode 1 introduced Hitomi, her relationships and friendships, and ended with her in a different world and already embroiled in the plot of Van and the guymelefs. All in <30 minutes. In comparison, we just watched the first episode of the Expanse, which introduced to us one (1) mystery girl, one (1) gritty detective, one (1) Indian lady who apparently is okay with torture, and one (1) freight ship guy who is trying to avoid having responsibilities. It ends with an explosion that may???? be plot????? but is mostly just mysterious???????? So after an hour of watching, I now know a tiny bit about 4 characters, have very little sense of the season-long plot, and I guess I'm supposed to ... keep watching? Let the 5 second countdown happen and binge for another 2-3 hours? Like, nothing against the Expanse -- apparently everyone likes it, and there's some good political intrigue in it. But I can't help imagining if the episode pacing would have been different if binge-watching is not the default. For example, what about starting with the freighter guy getting a distress call, and introduce the other characters as they become relevant to the core story?

I was talking to Spouse the other day about how Star Wars: A New Hope was one of the few Star Wars where you didn't have to read the opening scroll, where you can just jump into the movie and be as clueless as Luke and it wrapped up at the end and everyone got awards. In contrast, the first Star Wars movie I ever watched was Return of the Jedi, and oh boy that movie makes no sense if you haven't watched the other two -- I didn't know who the main character was for the first 10 minutes, I didn't know why there was a guy who was frozen in a slab of wall, I didn't know why only Luke had telekinesis powers. I was so confused when Darth Vader picked up the Emperor because I was like "um okay why didn't you do that in any time in the last 30 years?"

And as more and more movies are part of "cinematic universes" (I blame MCU for making it the "safe bet" in Hollywood), I feel like more and more movies are also falling into the trap of "Netflix pacing", except on a movie scale. Now, it's not about watching a 45 minute episode at home and feeling vaguely dissatisfied because 90% of the episode was building up to something else, but rather watching a whole 3 hour long movie and feeling a similar sense of dissatisfaction. What is the standalone story of Endgame, really? At least with Infinity War, the standalone part is Thanos' Fetchquest / Earth finally getting people together to defend against a world-ending threat, and the theme of "we do not trade lives" is threaded throughout. Endgame's standalone part is ... the Time Heist? or Tony having a heart? And if the theme is "misplaced nostalgia for the past", I guess they hit it, but if the theme is "what are you willing to sacrifice" then um give Nat's sacrifice proper weight, and give Steve a proper sacrifice. And if it's an ongoing cinematic universe, then each movie is just setting up for the next one or wrapping up the previous one, and there's an infinite number of next ones, which leaves very little space to actually ... tell a story. Or have sensible character arcs. (Tony's character arc was great in IM 1-3, but then he had to regress in order to fit the Avengers storytelling. Steve's character arc was short-shrifted by only having 2 movies and being too afraid of teh gays between Steve and Bucky)

Anyway, it's not that these "Netflix pacing" stories aren't effectively told in a 10 hour season or a 10 movie extended universe, but I'm one of those people who'd like to spend 30-45 minutes watching a show and feel like I got a nice tidbit of story out of it, and there are fewer and fewer of these types of shows out there. I feel like we're losing the ability to tell concise, effective stories in this show/film medium, which I'd like to mark and lament.