Babysitting the Interweb.

on 18/12/2017

so, i was playing overwatch the other night, cause i still haven’t stomped out the last ember of hope that people might not completely suck, and some guy blurts out the main spoilers for the new star wars movie. just like that. and there’s nothing you can do, you can’t unring the bell. it’s done. luckily, i just came back from my company holiday party, so drinkin’ helps me not exactly recall what was said. it didn’t help my ability to play, but i guess it’s a bit of a wash. too bad we have to count on a numbing shield of whiskey to help us navigate past the shitty people on the internet these days.

i’ve noticed something weird lately. within the same 1 week span of time, i’ve watch 3 different movies on netflix, at random, in the horror genre, that all have the ‘babysitter premise’. they’re all different, sorta, but they all revolve around a babysitter. i wonder sometimes when i see trends like this, if a bunch of different writers all read reports by the same focus groups. maybe they all think their ideas are unique enough to make it to the top of the heap, or more amusingly, that this is some underground subculture, growing large enough to support multiple movies. what’s the new hit trend to take over from vampires, and kid wizards? why, it’s babysitter horror, or course. it’s a rich yet to be tackled field of interest!

i saw valerian: city of a thousand planets recently. i mean, mixed reviews, but undeniably good looking. well, expensive looking. thing is, it kind of resonated with a book about story writing i’ve been reading lately. starts out by talking about how troublesome pitching a movie can be, how new intellectual property can be a gamble, and producers don’t like a gamble, so they stay with sequels, and adaptions of well love novels and comics. so, when someone take a 200 million dollar chance on a french comic, and it bombs, it’ll become the sign at the edge of the quicksand for such endeavors for the foreseeable future.

don’t get me wrong, valerian isn’t ‘scratch your eyes out’ bad. the vfx is pretty, and the plot was ‘meh’, and the main actors had all the chemistry and warmth of gutter slush, but it’s worse sin was not making it’s money back. and that touches upon on of the things that bugs me in film that i’ve mentioned before. just such a wasted opportunity. maybe it’s because people get excited about trailers, and trailers look nice, but are rarely an accurate taste for the story, so why work on it?

here’s some art.

so, i drew a sketch about 10 years ago of some creature. i always planed to render it, but i never bothered. but i kept the sketch in my ‘in progress’ folder, and it haunted me. so, the finished product bears little resemblance to the sketch, but i feel like i exorcised a ghost from my art career.