Geriatric cat needed to go to the vet. He's having issues eating. It does not seem to be appetite, but something else. He, and the other two as well, are also due for an annual exam, possibly shots, whatever. Vet appointments are part of my division of household labor--we usually both go (carrying three carriers is a bit much) but the scheduling and prescription re-upping &c is my domain.

But I had not done it because every time I looked at my calendar, it was one thing too much (there was also the fear what the vet might tell us). So Spouse did it one morning when I apologized, again, for not having done it yet.

By choice, Spouse only looks at my primary calendar in his calendar view. This means he sees the events and appointment and engagements that I am 100% committed to. He does not see the Invite calendar with things I plan to do but may not if I can't swing it. And he does not see my work calendar. He also does not see the "Work calendar of things that affect when I'm home or at the office or WHEN I'm NOT AVAILABLE TO GO TO THE VET" (which, yes, is a separately maintained calendar).

So he scheduled the vet appointment for a usual work-from-home day that was disrupted by a conference he did not know about. Though I am slightly embarassed to admit it, I had a full-on toddler melt down when he IM'd me about it. Not because he'd done anything wrong but because I just cannot cope with my calendar.

Below is a facsimile of what May looks like--or, rather what it looked like the day this happened. May was, at that time, a relatively unscheduled month (it's changed a bit since the screenshot). A couple major events (plumbing repair at the rental condo, grantmaking for the board I'm on, a party we're throwing) but not much beyond the usual and some social engagements. A few things not on the calendar as "reminders to schedule" that need to get scheduled soon or won't happen. Like the vet.

And I was very much thrown off-balance when Spouse picked the one usual work from home day I would not be working from home to schedule a thing I had been neglecting because of stress, anxiety, as well as general feeling of not enough time.

It made me start thinking about calendar bankruptcy. Can I? Dare I? What happens if I just delete ALL THE THINGS in my calendar and start over? How about if I just find the first week with nothing (except possibly one of those "repeats on this day" events) and mark all times as busy?

Will that finally allow me to schedule a trip to Cleveland to see some friends we've been trying to visit for a year? Will that get me back in the habit of the three yoga classes a week I used to go to? Will that let me find the right time to start rock climbing lessons again? or finally get into a Spanish class? Or. Or. Or.

As my friends and I say to each other, at least once a month, Calendars Are Hard.

(By the way, geriatric cat is losing weight because of a thyroid issue, although he does appear to have a bad tooth and the pain medication appears to have solved the issue of him howling for food and then not eating it. Luckily, the thyroid medication can be applied to and absorbed through the ear. Once that's under control, we'll do the dental. He's got a bit of a heart murmur, which had me afraid of anesthesia for him, but the vet thinks that getting the thyroid under control will help mitigate some of that risk which she thinks I'm a little over-anxious about)

In the eighth year of every decade since I reached adulthood, I find myself at a transition point. I look at the things that have been influencing my life decisions, the signs of success in whatever world I've found myself in, and I realize that maybe they aren't quite as important as I felt they were even a year ago.

When I look back at my life, I can see that there's a trap I've gotten caught in several times. The cycle goes like this:

Find something I truly enjoy doing -> Get caught up in someone else's idea of what "success" means -> Take "career advancement" steps that move me away from what I love -> End up doing nothing I love and lots of things I actively hate

It's the eighth year of this decade and time for me to think about what I want to do next. I still feel this strange external pressure to take a next step that isn't the right next step for me, because it is the thing that people in a certain small segment of my already small industry would point to and say, "Wow, that's a huge leap forward!" And I think back over my life, and think of how many times I've felt a pressure to take a certain step because I felt the world expected it of me. Only it wasn't the world. It was a teeny, tiny group of people in one industry or subculture. That next step might have seemed like success to them, but the larger world was indifferent. The larger world doesn't know or care what the signs of success are to that little group.

I'm reminded of a story I heard once about Studio 54. At first, being able to get past the incredibly selective door at Studio 54 was a sign of success. But when people got in, they discovered that there was a VIP area. You might be in, but if you weren't in the VIP area you weren't really "in." Then those select people acheived the VIP area, a dank and drippy basement with plastic chairs and a pinball machine. But it turns out, that wasn't the most exclusive space. There was another area, a VVIP area. Legend has it that there were several of these spaces, each more exclusive and unattractive than the last. But people labored to achieve the next level, to reach an epic level of VIP-ness. And...if you were incredibly successful...you would reach the most exclusive VIP room of all, the inner sanctum that almost no one was allowed to enter.

And if you did...you'd find yourself with Andy Warhol and Liza Minelli, the only two people fabulous enough to have exclusive access to the greasy, smelly, dank, tiny boiler room (yes, a literal boiler room) that was the ultra-VIP spot. The ultimate sign of success at Studio 54 was the opportunity to hang out in a space that was objectively horrible.

Our jobs are just a fraction of who we are, and yet it's very easy to get into a headspace where our entire lives are controlled by the need to be the person sitting in that dingy, stinky boiler room. Many of us will never have the opportunity to get beyond that. But if we have the privilege to get the chance to do so, to think about what we want most out of life and how work can fit into that, we can then make a plan to build a life where the end goal is something more delightful and open than that boiler room.

Right this moment, I have the time to focus on a few questions. What are the things I find fulfilling? What are the situations I can put myself in where I'm challenged to learn new things? What is the work I can do that will give me the kind of discomfort that is the sign of stretching to a new level of growth, rather than the discomfort of shrinking oneself down to fit into someone else's confining box of expectations?

I'm starting to come up with some answers, but there's no clearly defined roadmap here. I fully expect that I might take a few detours, hit a few dead ends, wind up taking a couple of missteps onto The Road of Someone Else's Expectations. But this time, if that happens, I'm determined to quickly get myself back on the path that is the right one for me.

I'll bite: 

I DAAAARE CM Adams post about the story of the Wallingford House.  I gotta know.  

(Many apologies and thanks to Anne Mollo ​​​​. :-D  )

Ted and I were sorting a bedroom. I found a fancy box of fancy drawer liners.

ME: Oh, Jesus, why?

TED: What is it?

ME: Drawer liners.

TED: What are drawer liners?

ME: they're big pieces of paper that you put in your drawers to keep your clothes clean. 

TED: Define... "drawers." 

Of course, I pulled out the waistband of my pants and shoved the whole box in. 

Yeah, I like how much this reminds me of LJ. Maybe that's part of the point. I love the smell of a beta site. So full of potential.

I write this maiden post at a time of significant transition in my life. Not sure I'm inclined to detail that much right now, but I _am_ sure that my tendency to run my mouth beyond the point of discretion will take over soon enough. Suffice to say that my self-care is improving, and there is just a lot more interesting content in my life then there has been in quite a while.

I look forward to seeing what you guys decide to share here. I would love to see this take off, and perhaps add more features like interests lists and groups to facilitate networking.

Hello, everyone who I just invited to OPW! I want to wish you a warm welcome. There's lots of people posting smart stuff on here. I'm not one of them. I encourage you to go out and look at the other people on this platform who are way more brilliant than I could ever be.

...so in response to my request for more invites they have given everyone 50. I guess can everyone verify.

"As in, cancelling it so you can reuse it? I think I could do something simple like making sure you get the invite back if it is not used after n days. Of course that would limit your friend's ability to be lazy-but-still-interested. I gave everybody 50 invites yesterday, hopefully that will help. (:

-- 

Tom Boutell"

By request (!), everybody here now has a metric crapton of invites.

There are burner conferences. MALC i.e., Mid Atlantic Leadership conference is one I just attended. Words that I captured (not mine mostly, but the resonated):  

"We are in the practice of creating safe space for the expression of the full spectrum of human experiences"

"We have the Demonstrated ability to create the world we envision"

"It's not my job, it's just my turn"

"Allows you to be, Invites you to do"

"Exclusive to people who want to be inclusive"

"Play!"

BEAUTIFUL SIDE PROJECT < I want this to be my burner name

ART CLAVE < I wanna do a popup store called this. Is this possible in my town??​​​​​​​

The difference between me and my campmate exemplified on day 2 of the conference: ME: I lost my notebook. HER: I lost my vape

He did a Pop up maker space? Who'd have thunk it? Is this possible in my town??

Housing gentrification: things to think about. 6 values: Equity, Inclusion, Creativity, Self determination, Responsibility. Also "Triple bottom line"

------------------

Below, my more detailed notes/musings:

We have evolved (are evolving) from throwing kick-ass burns into extending our culture into the outside world. Just look at what is happening at Museums like the Heritage Norfolk or the Renwick in DC. WHAT IS OUR CULTURE? (insert a lot of fuzziness here) AT WHAT POINT IS THE MAINSTREAMING TOO MUCH? (inserts more fuzziness here)

Acculturation. Partnering with the Burner Adjacent fold.  (meso cresso, figment, all those others I'd have to look up)

HOW DO I BRING THE AWESOMENESS OF A BURN BACK TO MY COMMUNITY? I personally struggle with this, because I'm a smallish town burner, where we lack critical mass. It's natural to want to share an awesome experience. It's natural to want to share what one has worked on.

There are folks who do this actively. Bring some of the values home: immediacy, gifting. Showing artforms that are less familiar to new audiances. 

THE TOPIC OF ARTIST PAY: the artist says "If I feel strongly about the event, especially a free event, I'll gift my time/effort. And sometimes I'll work for minimal pay for the joy of sharing my craft. One key to this is having clear expectations set and payment defined before we start"

"Attainably priced workforce housing" goes over some much better than the "Affordable housing" term.

And also we gave out $1500 in grants. (Our comminity needs coaching on grant writing). 

Gotta run, more later. (maybe)

So, this is probably going to be a longer, more in-depth, more passionate post than necessary about a film that does not deserve more thought than whether or not to upsize your combo, but I feel like saying a few words about the slightly-earlier-than-summer summer blockbuster “Rampage.”

To start with, this movie does something that I quite like in general. Readers of TVTropes will no doubt be familiar with such concepts as the obligatory dumbass that does something stupid at the beginning of the movie to show how smart the protagonist is in comparison, or the obligatory hot woman who shows intense interest in banging the protagonist, again early in the movie, to show how amazingly hot HE is, or the obligatory nerdy guy who exists purely to say “You’re supposed to do things THIS way”, just to demonstrate how the protagonist is a loose cannon, man, and you just can’t control him, man, he’s like the wind.

Rampage has those elements. No question about it, they’re there. But they aren’t overplayed. The dumbass is dumb, true, but his dumbness is resolved in about three seconds and information is imparted during the sequence that comes up again later in the film. The hot woman is dealt with in three sentences, and she’s done. The nerdy guy has a legitimate point, and he’s not dismissed as an obstructionist moron like Peck in Ghostbusters. Everybody in the film - with one glaring exception - is doing things as well as they can, at that point in time, with the cards they’re given. 

The one exception is, unfortunately, the primary villian of the piece, a evil nefarious sinister muahahahaha psychopathic woman who may be a scientist or might just be an evil businessperson, but is so over-the -top evil that she’s hard to take seriously. She starts off telling a woman in a exploding space station that she won’t let her off the station without the Plot Device of the movie, and winds up getting her killed, and follows that up with a (admittedly necessary for the screenwriters) incredibly stooooooopid decision to bring all the giant monsters - I’m assuming that anyone reading this is at least vaguely aware of the premise of the film, but for those who aren’t, a brief summary is “giant monsters wreck Chicago” - to downtown Chicago instead of, say, a hundred miles outside of town, which would have been trivial to arrange for her. She’s basically in an entirely different movie from everybody else - only genetics prevent her from twirling her moustache and tying women to railroad tracks - and it’s somewhat jarring. 

To be honest, she’s the reason I suspect that people who don’t like this film don’t like it. The actress who plays her and the director and the screenwriters all made choices for the role, and they chose ... poorly.

I have to admit, though, her sidekick/henchman/brother plays off of her unstoppable evil well - he’s basically the eighties businessman from Futurama, and he’s just as confused by how eeeeevil his sister his as we are, even though he’s willing to go along with the general business plan of “make giant monster-izer/???/profit”. 

I can’t say enough about this particular aspect of the film: the people in it are not stupid. They may be wrong, they may make mistakes, but they are not, Big Evil Businesswoman aside, doing things that put up a big flashing sign that says “I Am Doing This Only Because The Plot Needs Me To Do It Now.” I respect that entirely - it’s one reason why I like Die Hard, and it’s one of the few things that I don’t like about the original Ghostbusters (Walter Peck has a point, goddamnit.)  

The second point I like about this film is that things are not belaboured to death. So, in the film, three canisters of Giant Monster-In-A-Can land at three locations across the US. One of them lands bang in the middle of a forest in Wyoming, and is discovered by a wolf. The Evil Nasty Businesswoman sends her Unstoppable Killing Machine Of A Henchman and his cohorts to go get the canister and/or the wolf. The UKMOAH is depicted as these guys usually are - we see how many attachments he has on his gun, we see how professional he is in the field, and we see exactly how tough he is. Heck, in another movie, he’d be the hero. Hell, basically he was, in a little film called Predator.

It’s a nice, tight little sequence, seeing him and his crew find the impact point, get spooked by animals, all the usual things ... and then the wolf shows up and we get the entire rest of Predator happening in about two minutes as his entire team gets eaten, culminating in the UKMOAH himself getting killed by the wolf. Bang, we’re over, done, and out. Nice, tight, well-constructed, showing how much of a threat the wolf is without making us watch twenty minutes of unneeded characterization and/or padding. This happens several times, actually - we get a setup, we get the information that moves the plot along, we get a pretty-well-done action sequence (although this director is no McTiernan, he does an okay job,) and we move on. I know that, in most movies, we need to have a heightened sense of emotion to make sure the threat is clear, but here, we don’t bloody need it. We have a giant goddamn wolf, we have a city, we need to get’em together as fast as possible, let’s get cracking. 

I’m genuinely surprised at how long the movie is, as well as how short it feels. It works the same was as many of the best Bond films do; a book on Bond that I have calls in the Fleming Sweep - you get carried along from scene to scene and location to location, because you don’t overplay it and you don’t waste time on unnecessary elements, saving time for the bits that do matter. 

Lastly, and this is the thing that made me write this, and is the thing that I suspect nobody else cares about: I am awestruck at how well this movie evokes the feeling that the original source material - the video game Rampage - should have.

The game involves three people mutated into giant monsters - one Godzilla ripoff, one Kong ripoff, and a giant werewolf - who run around an 8-bit city climbing and wrecking buildings, beating up on the Army, and eating people. It’s fast (for the period it came out), mildly funny, and basically tries to capture the feeling of the best of the cheeseball Toho Godzilla movies (There are Godzilla movies that are horror movies, there are Godzilla movies that are science fiction adventure films, and there are Godzilla movies that professional wrestling looks at and goes “Really?”) where you’re rooting for the monsters and the set-builders. 

That’s why, in passing, the Evil Nasty Businesswoman attracted the giant monsters to Chicago. It would have made sense, in the real world, to have all three of the mutated animals of the movie come to some safe point in the middle of nowhere, but that wouldn’t be any fun. 

No, we need our giant ape, our giant wolf, and our giant lizard, all come to some place with buildings they can climb, punch, and grab people out of to eat. It’s incredibly stupid in any universe save the one of Rampage, but here, we get what we pay to see, and that’s a massive shitload of property damage and spectacular giant monkey-on-giant-wolf-or-giant-lizard action.

I am on record as being in favour of the 2014 Godzilla movie - it was designed around the idea of anticipation adding to the pleasure of seeing Godzilla open a can of whoopass, and for me it worked. The final shot of Godzilla giving the MUTO what-for was worth the entire movie, as far as I’m concerned. 

I’m also in favour of Kong: Skull Island, which basically gives you as much monkey action as you could want. Kong versus helicopter, Kong versus skullcrawler, Kong having a bath, Kong versus squid, you want it, it’s there. I love Kong: Skull Island to pieces, because it really understands what we want from Kong in the modern era, and it treats Kong’s status as a giant metaphor for something with respect. (In the modern era, it’s hard to write a story with Kong representing the wild, untamed, urge of the protagonist to get it on with the female lead, so they found another metaphor to use.)

Rampage is somewhere in between - more closely following the Toho paradigm of two-thirds of the movie being people talking about the monsters, and the last third being the monsters kicking ass and taking names. The buildup is good, the anticipation is good, and the payoff is - mostly - deservedly fun.

As a side note, at this point, if you know your memes, there’s a shot of a particular Air Force airplane in flight, during which you WILL say “Let me sing you the brrrrt of my people.” As a long-time fan of that airplane, I highly approve.

That payoff, though, is as close as you can get to the same payoff of the game. I don’t believe that every adaptation needs to follow the source exactly. I’m fine with changes ... as long as they respect the thing that makes the original worthwhile in the first place. 

Rampage does. In spades. It’s not impenetrable to non-players. You don’t have to know a damn thing about the game to watch the movie. But it’s a movie about monsters, buildings, and fucking huge destruction, and the fun you can have when you bring them all together. The goddamn SEARS TOWER falls down during the course of the film. A giant wolf jumps through one building to get to another one. A mutant crocodile tail-whomps a whole bunch of Army APCs into the next area code. 

This is not Super Mario Bros., which takes the game and pees on it. This is not Mortal Kombat, which takes the game and turns it into a pale imitation of Enter the Dragon. It’s not Street Fighter, which ... doesn’t quite work but also doesn’t feature much street fighting at all. This is Rampage. Period. And it does what Rampage does. No subtext, no distractions, just an honest attempt to put a relatable human face on a movie that pretty much exists to wreck as many buildings as possible and eat as many people as possible while keeping a PG-13 rating or under. 

I had a great time. I don’t think I’ll ever call it a classic, but it is so much fun (particularly in those motion-control seats. Really added to the fun) that it doesn’t matter. People who want sensitive human drama - yeah, not for you.

People who want giant monsters wrecking stuff? 

Why aren’t you already in the theatres, dude?