#anyway new dog's full name is okay boomer

[scithemodestmermaid]

i take my dog for a walk in the afternoons that i’m free.  down the road from us was a dog that looked almost exactly like her, except a boy.  she absolutely loved him.  she would body slam him with glee whenever she saw him.  i didn’t really like his humans though, they were off.  but hey, they had a good dog and he was cute playing with my dog.

one day, he stopped showing up on our walks. a couple of weeks ago, the same dog showed up on the website for our local dog shelter.  he was an owner surrender with a bad leg and heartworms and nipping issues.

long story short, i have two visually similar dogs now. 

[dontdowhatisayandnobodygetshurt]

I’ve been thinking about Dante a lot recently so here’s some random Dante things (under the cut because it’s p long. don’t worry, they’re all SFW!!)

He has a nice singing voice. It’s one of those voices that is perfect in its imperfections, mostly only heard at night between friends, without any instruments to accompany it. He has sung both his boyfriends to sleep on numerous occasions (though Vrox will never admit it.)

He doesn’t mind drinking, but he’s very careful about how much. He only ever gets tipsy.

He has a routine and he gets edgy if it’s disrupted, even if he tries to hide how it affects him.

His hair is curly and soft when he lets it grow out (part of the reason he keeps it cropped is because it genuinely does make him look less intimidating and that’s bad in his line of work.)

He is very practical.

He can hellgate (it’s very hard for humanborn demons to learn), but it takes a lot out of him. In general he doesn’t enjoy hellgating.

He had a Hmong dog as a child, named Hoàng. They did everything together.

Sometimes when Vrox is trapped in his hound form and Dante has a spare moment, Dante will go down to his cage and sit with him and read to him. Since Vrox can’t tell the difference like that anyway, he mostly reads Vietnamese stories to him. Jesse is still better at calming Vrox down (and hound-Vrox only associates Dante with Dante yeeting him bodily into a cage) but it does help a little, and it makes Dante feel better about the whole thing.

One of his closest friends is a hound called Amelia. She was close with Dante’s late partner Fain, and the two mourned together and grew very close. He trusts her enough to help him run the pack, since it’s impossible for him to do everything by himself (even tho he hates that he can’t.)

He’s extremely fluent in English but he misses Vietnam and his mother tongue so much occasionally he’ll hellgate back to his home country on his days off, just to be surrounded by it all again.

His skin is a dark olive tone.

He is a great listener and a reassuring presence. He also gives surprisingly good advice.

He typically sleeps on his back.

He’s a bit of a boomer when it comes to memes but he does his best and supports whatever crazy shit Jesse texts to him on the regular.

On top of his usual work load, he also teaches self defence classes on earth.

His biggest scar is the one across his left shoulder. He got it on one of his first days as the pack’s enforcer, he didn’t get an out of control hound into a cage fast enough and it mauled the shit out of his shoulder/collarbone/chest. It’s healed and faded now but it’s still noticeable.

Have I ever mentioned that his ears stick out a bit and it’s adorable???? yes??? what do you mean I’ve said it 500 times???

His favourite colours are green and pink, but his signature colour is dark grey.

When anything bad or stressful happens he stays very firm, calm and in control, but everybody how knows him knows to check on him afterwards, because he will not take a moment to think of himself otherwise. A lot of the time he doesn’t properly process what happened and that leads to trouble down the line.

In general he always puts others before himself.

He has thought about having kids before, but he knows it’s unrealistic, given how dangerous his life is and the fact that demons are infertile. He considers the pack his family instead.

He was 28 years old when he died, but he always looked mature for his age.

He’s 5′10. Vrox will not let him forget that he’s a few inches shorter than him, even if he’s still tall.

He cHUGS HIS RESPECTING WOMEN JUICE

He is very protective but knows his boundaries and is always happy to play a role of simple support to somebody instead of barging in and trying to fix their problems. He just always lets people know he’s there if they need him and to never hesitate to ask for help.

He knows every member of the pack by name, also every member’s history, temperament, struggles and growth.

He tries to be very mentally stable and kind but underneath that person he wants to be is a man who loves violence and doesn’t know how to live without it.

He only stopped participating in each and every war that rolled around because he was almost killed, June dragged him out of danger and had to risk their own life to save him, and gave their first real command as his superior to knock it the fuck off. So he threw himself into his work instead.

Despite being earthborn, he is extremely proficient with his hound form, able to change to it and back in under a second, which makes him devastating in combat. He is also far more in control of that side of himself than others, since he’s had a lot of practice keeping his more vicious side contained.

He has severe PTSD but over the decades he’s gotten very good at hiding it, and the signs of it are far more subtle than most people would know to look for. He does go to therapy on and off when things get particularly bad, more to stop himself from hurting or damaging his relationships with his loved ones than for his own health and safety.

He always tries to get both sides of a story and is a pretty good mediator, until he decides one side if definitely in the wrong.

Like other hellhounds/most demons, his eyes glow in the dark. It can be very unsettling.

His voice is deep, quiet, and even, and can be very expressive. When he gives a command, people don’t tend to ask questions, he has a kind of innate total confidant authority that he has absolutely earned. 

((He’s kinda thicc like a bowl of oatmeal))

One time he literally threw somebody who wouldn’t stop misgendering Jesse out a window. Unfortunately it was on the first storey so the dude lived.

((Seriously he could throw you across a football field it’s gREAT))

He has violently and quickly murdered a few people. Just a few. A light smattering. A handful. A thimble’s worth of murder.

Yeah okay, he should probably be in prison at this point.

He has 4 of the exact same outfit and he rarely wears anything else. Just black tank tops for summer, a few grey shirts in the winter, and cargo pants. That’s it. Well, the pack did buy him a pink shirt for his birthday and he wears that a lot too.

He has a bomber jacket but he rarely gets to wear it because his boyfriends and Amelia shamelessly steal it all the time.

June also steals his shirts (half because it’s an act of dominance, half because his scent is comforting to them because they associate him with safety but they would rather die than admit that)

His real, full name is Giang Văn Diệu, Dante was a joking nickname given to him by Fain when he first came to Hell that just stuck.

People try to get him to react differently by calling him by his real name but he never reacts the way they expect him to and that has disappointed a lot of hounds over the years.

He sees through bullshit pretty well.

He can be absolutely hilarious when he tries to be.

On another one of his birthdays the pack collectively got him this mug:

and it’s his favourite material possession in the world.

He hates formal suits, so of course June crams him into one gleefully at every given opportunity.

He plays the guitar but he’s self-taught with only a few lessons from Fain, so he does everything wrong, but all in all it sounds okay.

He would die for any member of his pack without hesitation.

He’s an early bird and he doesn’t really know how to sleep in, but he still enjoys it when he can, even if it feels weird. (Yes he lowkey judges and doesn’t understand both his night owl boyfriends.)

He has almost died more times than he can count.

He is colourblind (I haven’t figured out which type yet tho) and he will laugh very, very drily at any dog jokes you throw at him for that.

He will never turn away a person in need (unless that person doesn’t deserve any help.)

He is surprisingly good at video games.

Yes he has carefully moved any new hellhounds that fell asleep from exhaustion into more comfortable positions and covered them over with blankets and gave them a gentle pat on their hair/shoulders.

He just likes taking care of people (in both ways those words entail lmao)

[bigloquatthoughts]

Thoughts While I Watch The Nintendo Direct A Day Late

Thoughts on the Nintendo Direct: Yoko Toro is an interesting person, that card game looks interesting but Y wouldn’t I just play Talisman? Cool to see more isometric RPGS on switch.

Hyrule Warriors is fun! Age of Calamity is where I really fell in love with the musou formula again - I played a LOT of DW Empires 5, so taking over a map / doing stuff on a map before combat is fun. The silly weapons like the broom etc also make this really fun. I’ll gladly play more of this. the new scientist warrior looks sick! Who asked for Chocobo GP? This looks like Garfield Racing re-skinned and with better physics maybe. When they said Chocoboooooo! I was hoping for a Chocobo’s Dungeon. My buddy Ted got that game with his PS1 and we though it was soooo cool, especially after playing Azure Dreams on Gameboy.

Thanks for telling us when we can see the new Smash Fighter which is probably more Sword boy / Sword gorl why won’t you put any interesting fighters in this game I am moving to Smash Bros CatDog Edition. Kirby washing up on an island is the most unlikely thing for a being who summons giant warp stars to fly through the universe on but okay. this looks INCREDIBLE. Kirby + Nier vibes with the busted up environment. what bums me out is that we saw the same enemy like, 10 times in the first 10 seconds of that one area. The giant snakes / fish are cool, but lets see some more variation maybe 3D Kirby boss fights look pretty freaking fun! 3D Kirby looks pretty great. It will suffer from Kirby things and also be fun. I will play it.

Hey, don’t worry. We’ll tell you some things about Animal Crossing in October. Not now - but in October. U will have content in November. Just hold on pls, be on the lookout for all ur rotten turnips in ur house

Lets move on, to more stuff second free update for Mario golf, which I would LOVE to play but can’t afford rn. I played it at my neighbors the other day and it’s pretty damn good. new courses and seeing little ninji run around will be very fun. Cool, kid Disney game. Dope. Old Republic for Switch looks great! Dying Light 2: Mirrors Edge edition. Oh, we can play with other people? That seems fun. Do we scavenge together? The Control cloud game demo felt okay on my wifi, but IDK about these cloud games as something worth getting on the switch when PC’s are a thing?

Triangle strategy looks dumb, Disgea does that shit better now right? Metroid Dread looks really cool, excited to run from big robot and make Samus Very Strong Hopefully u get to crawl around as big robot at some point in the game. Love the lore dump we get. Dude, Chozo were here! That’s sick!

Many people have been using switch online… Oh, giving out their old roms gathering dust for “free,” with their current sub was too generous for Nintendo I suppose. New plan for N64 games seem sick - the playing together online thing is very cool. Starting library is standard but nothing too exciting. Very excited to see how the emulation handles these games in relation to how they behaved on the console, as all the cool sped running shit we see in these sorts of older games vary depending on the version of the game.

I’m more excited about the Genesis line up than I am about the N64 one, save those two games I don’t recognize. We get Castlevania, a Contra, some puyo, Beatem ups, and playing this version of Gunstar Heroes might sell more of the other one. Expansion Pack is a name.

Notice how Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon and Comix Zone are not on these lists? They are too afraid to give us the best of what both platforms have to offer and it’s a shame.

WIRELESS CONTROLLERS FOR $60 EACH? ARE THEY BLUETOOTH SO I CAN USE THEM WITH OTHER STUFF? WTF

I was just talking to my friends about the Shadowrun Isometric RPGs last night! Cool. Castlevania collection looks dope. Button mapping is huuuuge for me. Love that. An Almighty Classic Returns: Actraiser - even the SNES game was hella off my radar, this looks dope. I’m down to side scroll and then town build. Deltarune + Homestuck are games that I really really want to play but my depression is such that I just sit and stare at the starting screen and nothing happens. One day I will consume Toby’s works and be better for it. But until then, I’ll just be excited for my friends and listen to the baller soundtrack. god dammit I love that dog.

new story of seasons looks cool but Natsume is dead, no hope left cept for Stardew #doomer NAMCO Hamster - yes. Rune Factory 5 might be good on the switch. The 3DS versions were sooooo sloooowwwww for me. I’ve heard really good things about the franchise as a whole though. MARIO movie thoughts: THIS CASTING IS GREAT EXCEPT FOR CHRIS PRATT WTF. WHY IS HIMBO WHO HATES GAYS MY MARIO?

CHARLIE DAY AS LUIGI WAS WRITTEN IN THE FUCKING STARS EXCEPT HIS SHORTER THAN FUCKIN CHRIS PRATT, HOW THE FUCK COULD YOU MESS THIS UP. CHARLIE DAY AS MARIO AND CHRIS PRATT AS LUIGI BECAUSE HE BUSTS GHOSTS WHICH IS SUPER THEOLOGICAL ANYWAY GOD DAMN DUDE. THIS ISN’T THAT HARD.

KEEGAN MICHAEL KEY AS FUCKIN TOAD MADE ME LAUGH SO HARD. I AM SO EXCITED FOR THAT.

JACK BLACK AS BOWSER - WOULD HAVE BEEN A BETTER MARIO BUT ANYTHING THIS MAN TOUCHES IS GOLD.

Movie is saved by Seth Rogan, I bet you 1 full bitcoin that DK saves this fuckin movie.

FRED ARMISEN AS CRANKY KONG IS ACTUALLY PERFECT. He is a real life hipster Cranky Kong and I love it. Dude playing Kamek looks familiar? Who is that

After seeing Wreck it Ralph, doesn’t Mario sound more like a Kenneth the Page than a Starlord? IDK man. Boomers are weird. Splatoon 3 looks cool, bummer it’s still 4v4 but whatever. the story mode for 1 and 2 were great aside from the difficulty spikes. stoked.

THE WAY THAT BAYONETTA IS REVEALED IS ONE PUNCH MAN TIER COMEDY.

Also, ya’ll spoiled it for us with the capcom font.

WAIT A GLOVED HAND PUNCHED, NOT A DEMON HAND? YOOOOO MOMMYYYYYYY THIS HAIR.

YOOO BUTTERFLY SHIT HELL YEAH

THERE IS MY BIG HAIR DEMON YES OH SHIT WE GET TO MEGA ZORD FIGHT WITH OUR DEMON?! THIS IS FUCKIN SICK

OH DIFFERENT DEMONS TO FIGHT WITH THIS IS SICK. THIS IS HOW I WANT POKEMON TO PLAY. 100% NOT JOKING. BAYONETTA: GODZILLA EDITION

HOLY SHIT THAT IS TIGHT

UHHHH IS DANTE GONNA BE IN THIS

WHO IS THAT BOI WITH THE SWORD

UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Alright. There have been better directs, Christmas line up is looking p weak so far. Hopefully they can give us some bangers for holiday.

[tearasshouse]

Mostly vidya ramblings pt 3C

Previous post here.

Right, software time. A cursory glance at my PSN Profile will show that I’ve met my personal quota of getting the platinum in at least 10 PlayStation titles over the year, with a few PC titles sprinkled in for good measure since hey, I have access to a Windows machine again (though it’s not exactly a games machine, unless your definition of a “gaming rig” is something with a 15W Core i3 and modest laptop Radeon graphics). While I didn’t start out meaning to rank these games, I find I have a tendency to do so anyway and while I’m certainly not saying these games are outright bad, they were absolutely lower on the rung, so I’ve dubbed this part “C” (again, no disrespect to the devs or any who rate these games higher than I do; these are just my personal assessments). These are OK games.

The Darkness 2 (Steam)

Enjoyable, somewhat! I put this down like, ages ago when I picked it up for a song on PC, feeling it was too basic and uh “console shootery” at the time. Often times, having restrictions placed upon something can net great results, and hamstrung as I am by my less-capable hardware, I’ve only been picking up Steam games that could run on lower end hardware, or anything released prior to say, 2015. Surprisingly this runs at something stupid like 200 FPS on my machine with V-Sync off and all settings on High at 1080p, so go figure. Anyway, it’s a short and enjoyable shooter. I don’t know anything about the comics upon which the game(s) are based, but Jackie is a likeable character, the Darkness powers are fun enough, the locations are varied, the supporting cast surprisingly interesting and the plot was actually pretty cool too, with a major sequel hook that we’ll probably never get. 

Ori & The Blind Forest (Steam)

It sorta hovers a bit below 60fps while running at 1080p, but it’s all just a bit reductive when one spends more time looking at the framerate counter than playing a game, no? The blessing and curse of PC gaming I suppose. Anyway, as a Metroidvania the game is a bit annoying. As a piece of interactive fiction, it’s too saccharine and feels like a B-tier Dreamworks production for children which, I suppose shouldn’t be a knock against the game but I have to say --  wasn’t my cup of tea. Reminds me a bit of Child of Light by Ubisoft -- gorgeous to look at, benign if not frustrating to play (those escape sequences can piss off), and young gamers would probably find more to like in the...emotional tidbits than most adults.

Crysis 2 (Steam)

So apparently this got delisted off Steam but now it’s back up or something with EA deciding to put their back catalog on the platform or something? Anyway, like this list implies, Crysis 2 is an okay game, nothing more and nothing less. The nanosuit energy depletes a bit too quick for my liking, and you’re really made to feel like a badass only some of the times, in quick and short bursts, not unlike BJ in the new Wolfenstein games by MachineGames (any more prolonged exposure to hitscan weapons and other bullshit will quickly send you to the loading screen). Thing is, I don’t want to feel like a badass only some of the time? I mean, you put a ripped supersoldier type doing the Badass Looking Back At the Viewer Pose on the cover and I expect to be able to do certain things without stopping for a breather every 20 seconds, ya know? If you’re going to give me the power fantasy, commit to it. Or, find ways to keep the flow up and reward mastery to make players earn said fantasy (something the new DOOMs  have done and why those have been so successful). I certainly don’t envy game devs for having to balance this shit, but id Software showed you one way of how you might do that while the Crysis games and those of their ilk just feel slow and unrewarding. 

Quantum Break (Steam)

Really surprised I was able to get this running on my PC but hey, it runs on the Xbox One so how hard could it be? I dearly love Remedy’s games, even if they’re a bit straightforward at times and you get the feeling they’d rather be in the business of non-interactive fiction than games making at times. Well here is a TV show hybrid! Made exclusively in partnership with Microsoft as part of their TV & STREAMING, TV & STREAMING, SPORTS & STREAMING strategy of the 2010s. I didn’t care for the plot, nor the endless email / audiobook / loredumps scattered around, nor the characters, any of it. I will say the final stage with the super high tech offices was a delight (boy wouldn’t I love to live the corpo life in such beautiful, clean office environs). Lance Reddick was a treat as always. Peter “Littlefinger” Baelish shows up to do a thing. Yeah, it’s a Remedy joint through and through. 2019′s Control was such a highlight for me that I’ll take any kind of prototype-y take on it (and QB certainly feels like a rougher, worse version of Control, at least mechanically).

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs / Dear Esther: Landmark Edition (Steam)

These titles were certainly...things that I installed onto my PC and sat through... Yes. Look, I’m not one to dog on walking simulators, and I know the devs have faced tough times recently but I still feel these are acquired tastes and could be appreciably improved in too many ways to name. Of the two, Dear Esther is the one I’d rec because at least that one was quite pleasant to meander around in while Amnesia left me disappointed that I’d wasted my time, physically sick with its subpar performance and muddy graphics, flaccid with its stodgy plot and left absolutely disappointed that I’d wasted my time on such a bizarre and confusing payoff towards the end. Chinese Room, I mean this in the most constructive way possible: maybe try a different type of game next time.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein (GOG)

I remember putting in some decent time into the DEMO version of RtCW’s MP mode, being amazed at the time by the particle effects, with child-me just running around the D-Day map with the flamethrower out. Anyway, years later and I finally played the SP campaign. It’s maybe better than Allied Assault’s? It feels more consistently entertaining anyway. Hell I think I like these boomer shooters better than MachineGames’ recent efforts (which isn’t saying a whole lot because I find those games just merely okay). I promise you I’m not just being a crotchety old fart.

Ys: Memories of Celceta (PS Vita)

I’d been playing through this over the spring on my Vita TV, before it bit the dust eventually and I’ve been meaning to go back and wrap up the cheevos. I was a bit lukewarm with Oath in Felghana (my first Ys), but could definitely see the appeal in the series, as boss rush games aren’t really my cup of tea (ie. it’s the journey and not the destination of say, a Souls game that is the meat for me). Definitely a game that would benefit from a 60fps refresh and cleaner graphics than what the Vita can provide. I’ve already got a copy of Ys 8 in shrink wrap and have my eyes set on emulating Ys Seven or grabbing the GOG version. A game where action is king and story or character development is secondary; I would prefer more of the latter to make this more of a JRPG and less of a “predominantly Japanese action game with superficial RPG elements”.

Catherine: Full Body (PS4)

I paid $70 for this on day one and I’ve gotta say... should’ve waited for the price drop. I’m a somewhat lapsed Atlus mark, and I still hold the original Persona 5 as my no. 1 in the PS4′s lineup (with Dragon Quest XI possibly being a tie), yet I bought this knowing it wouldn’t really be for me. Why? High difficulty in a genre I don’t play, like at all, a relatively short clear time (in itself not an issue and frankly welcome these days HOWEVER...), and a somewhat unsatisfying payoff despite being a supernatural romance thriller. I bought this as seed money for Atlus’s P.Studio/Studio Zero, in the hopes that Project Re: Fantasy will knock my socks off just like the latter day Persona games have. Because in spite of the contents not really appealing to me, it’s still supremely well made, and it’s not everyday that games like these get made, so there you go. Look, if I could go back in time and put this money towards 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, I probably would, but then the Catherine steelbook is ever so pretty... 

Tearaway Unfolded (PS4)

The OG game is one of the most charming little 3D platformer/collect-a-thons out there, and as far as children’s games (or er, “games that also appeal to children”) go, more of these and less of those please (your Child of Lights and Oris). I’d go as far as to say the OG version is better than the PS4 version, though the PS4 version is also quite good. Really, if I wasn’t going for that stupid Misplaced Gopher trophy, this would probably be an easy shoe-in for the B-tier list, but I place this demotion firmly at Media.Molecule’s feet. That cheevo is cursed.

The Missing: JJ Macfield and the Island of Memories (PS4)

I’d almost forgotten about this! If that doesn’t qualify for making the C-tier list then I don’t know what else does. I only know of Swery65′s qualities through osmosis, having watched the 2BF’s legendary LP of Deadly Premonition and the gone-too-soon D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die. He’s an interesting person with interesting ideas but crucially, as a game dev, his output is just... kinda mediocre? If not outright bad? Case in point with this game. It looks and runs like garbo; it plays like garbo; the character designs are cute; the dialogue is pretty good; there is a wonderful and gradual “twist” to the main character that was super spoiled for me when people were discussing and promoting it (like, that is my bad, but also internet discourse on any kind of entertainment media is just *fucked*); there’s a lot of semi-colons in this sentence so I’ll stop here. 

And the balls to charge like, what, $40+ for the game on PSN?? I’d gotten it for way less on a sale but in a day and age when $1 could buy you 3 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and MS might also throw in a curio like this in there just to fill in the gaps, it makes you wonder if these kinds of games can ever turn a profit, especially when the end product is this jank. And these are commercial goods, make no mistake, any aspirations to being an art piece or social critique notwithstanding, so that also brings to the fore the whole aspect of pricing games, relative value, production and marketing costs, blah blah.

IF you like something different, can appreciate games made on a shoestring budget with arguably bad gameplay and technical deficiencies, but has...heart? Then look no further to the output of this man. The most C-worthy of all the titles listed here. 

[citizentruth-blog]

Life's Ballast Lost , Chapter Excerpt from Travel Memoir Roads From the Ashes

A Suitcase, An Arrowhead, and A Set of Red Underwear You don't keep extra clothes when you live in 200 square feet. It's a question of being able to put your plate down when you eat dinner or owning an evening purse. I haven't owned an evening purse since 1993, and the one time I needed one since then, I found a perfectly good pearled specimen at a thrift store in New York. It cost a dollar, and I gave it to a bag lady in Grand Central Station after a dinner party at the Knickerbocker Club. Okay, I confess. If you were to find yourself looking through my underwear box (yes, box— there aren't many drawers in motor homes), you'd find a red bra and pair of red panties at the bottom. They never move. I haven't worn them since before I owned an evening purse, but there they are. I can't throw them away. They're survivors. That red underwear, one suitcase, one husband and one dog are the only things I have that antedate the fire that ended Phase One of my life. It arrived with perfect timing. I was 40 years old, and I'd just been wondering if this— a nice house in a nice neighborhood full of nice stuff— was all there was. Just like a jillion baby boomers on the exact cusp of middle age, I was sick of exercise videos and women's magazines and nylon stockings. I was having a hard time believing that the road to serenity lay in losing ten pounds, highlighting my hair, or giving my kitchen a country look. And then, only a couple of months before I turned 41, Los Angeles caught on fire and didn't stop burning for seventeen days. My house was one of the first to go. One day, I had an answering machine and high heels and an eyelash curler. The next day, well, the next day things were different. The fires were headline news for weeks, as Altadena, Laguna, and Malibu each hosted a conflagration bigger than the last. In dollars, a billion went up in smoke. Over 1,100 houses burned to the ground, and 4 people died. My loss seems minuscule in comparison: just one average middle class woman's stuff. Yes, just stuff. That's all it was: high school yearbooks, photographs, wedding presents, diplomas, my grandmother's piano. I'd had ten minutes to pack ahead of the firestorm. I'd grabbed a suitcase. I'd grabbed— God only knows why— my red underwear. I did take one other thing as I left the house. I paused in front of a cabinet filled with silver and wedding china and keepsakes. I opened the door and took out an Indian arrowhead I'd found in Wyoming on Mark's family's ranch. I guess that's how you pack when you're off on a new life. You get ten minutes, and there's no second chance. I can't tell you why, as the flames roared nearer, I chose red underwear and an arrowhead that would have survived the fire anyway. I can only say this. Where I was headed, I was overpacked. One Crystal Clear Autumn Morning The fire started before dawn on October 27, 1993, and like most blazes near populated areas, it was set by a human, a homeless man named Andres Huang. He had hiked into the Altadena foothills during the night. He'd fallen asleep, and when he awoke before dawn, he was cold and shivering. He lit a little camp fire to warm himself up. It was a windy night, and the fire immediately got away from him. Frightened, he fled. Unable to see in the darkness, he fell over a cliff. At 3:48 a.m., someone called Fire Station 66 at the foot of Eaton Canyon and reported "fire on the hillside." It was impossible to know it at the time, but that call mobilized the first unit of a force that would grow to include nearly three thousand firefighters from 62 different agencies, 200 fire engines, 15 water tenders, four bulldozers, eight helicopters, and fifteen airplanes. Andres Huang was found, arrested and taken to a hospital. He was later charged with "reckless setting of a fire." Mark and I were sleeping at home, a couple of ridge lines to the east. The telephone rang a little after four. It was Mark's mother, calling from her house, a couple more ridge lines to the east. She had awakened early and seen a tiny bright spot on the mountain. "There's a fire above Eaton Canyon," she said. Mark and I got up and slid open the glass door that led from our bedroom to an outdoor patio. We could see a tiny, brilliant feather of flame on the dark slope. We'd seen fires on the mountainside before. We'd grown up here. There were fires every year. Even though we lived in the hills, there were houses and streets between us and the native brush. Our house was nearly a hundred years old, nestled on a slope overlooking a reservoir that held a million gallons of water. The mountainside might burn, but our house? Unlikely, we thought. If the fire got close, we had the reservoir and a pump and a hose. On top of that, Mark used to be a fire fighter for the forest service. Whatever might happen, we'd be able to handle it. "It's awfully windy," said Mark. And then we went back to bed. We couldn't sleep. We got up, and I set to work addressing invitations in calligraphy for a friend. Mark went outside to work on the exhibit we were preparing for a fair. He'd cleaned its large red carpet the day before, and we'd stretched it out on the driveway to dry. Mark started to vacuum it, and ten minutes later, he called me. "Look," he said, pointing at the rug. "Those are ashes falling on it." Maybe the ashes should have warned us, but we couldn't see any flames. There was no smoke, no noise. Only soft white powder kept landing on the carpet. "I give up," said Mark. He turned off the vacuum cleaner. The only sound now was the wind. "It sure is windy," I said. I went back inside and turned on the television. News reporters had started talking about a fire in Altadena, and they showed pictures of fire engines lined up on streets about a mile west of us. They weren't doing anything, just waiting. It was quiet outside. At about seven o'clock, Mark walked down to the end of our street. As soon as he left, I heard a new sound. It was more than wind. It was a roar, not loud, but huge somehow. Then I felt the heat. Just then Mark ran back. "Get in your car and get out of here," he shouted. "All of Kinneloa is burning!" Kinneloa is a community of big houses west of ours. "I just saw a policeman drag a woman in a nightgown out of her house!" Just then Marvin ran out of the house and headed directly for my car. He screamed and scratched at the door. Smart dog, I thought. No sense in leaving on foot when you can have a ride. I let him into the front seat and slammed the door. I ran back into the house and assembled the items that were to become my only pre-fire mementos. I grabbed some equally useful items for Mark, too: his least-comfortable shoes and a mismatched outfit. He didn't get any underwear at all. When I came outside, the eaves of the house across the street were blazing, and the house behind it was engulfed. The roar was loud now, the heat frightening. Mark screamed at me from the roof, where we was wielding a fire hose barefoot. I screamed back at him. "Leave!" he yelled. "I'll be right behind you!" Sixty foot flames were swirling down the hill above us. "You've got to come, too!" I yelled. "I will!" he screamed. "Just get going!" And so I left. As I did, I realized what had seemed so odd. There was no sound except the roar of the fire itself. No sirens, no helicopters. Just that quiet roar and the heat. Two blocks away, life was normal. Bathrobed ladies were just stepping outside to pick up their papers. How could they know that fifty houses were burning less than a mile away? There was no smoke, no sound, and we weren't on television. It was just a crystal clear autumn morning, and time for a cup of coffee. You Can't Go Home Again I headed for Mark's parents' house on Riviera Drive. Overlooking Hastings Canyon, it was square in the path of the fire. I'll tell you now that it didn't burn. Firefighters arrived in droves, and the sound of helicopters laboring up the mountainside went on all day. They couldn't contain the fire, and they couldn't direct it, but by soaking hillsides and roofs, they were able to save dozens of houses. It was a slow motion day, a surreal blur. I was mesmerized by the fire as it swept over the mountains in front of me. I watched a whole ridge line erupt in a series of explosions as the flames reached houses, cars and gas lines. Before the sun went down, the flames had blackened every slope I could see. That night Mark and I lay on a bed in our clothes. Through the window, we could see flames still burning on the mountain. We slept fitfully, and before dawn, we got up. "Let's go home," said Mark. We made a thermos of coffee and climbed into his car. At the bottom of our hill, a policeman was manning a barricade. He was surrounded by gawkers, but no one was getting through. "If you're a resident, you can go up in a police vehicle," he explained. "But you have to have identification." Identification. I had mine in my purse, but Mark had left home the day before in shorts and a T- shirt. He'd had no time to go inside. The officer looked at my driver's license, and then turned to Mark. Was it the sooty shirt, the wild hair? Without a word, he moved the barricade aside and said, "A van will be here in a few minutes to take you up." The van turned out to be a paddy wagon, and we climbed into the cage in the back. Another man we didn't know joined us, and we began the ascent. Everything looked serene and normal for the first half mile. Dawn was breaking on another cloudless day. Then we saw the first gap, a big black hole where a house was supposed to be. Then another, and another. By the time we reached the top of the hill, we'd counted at least a dozen. I'd known all day yesterday that our house had burned, but we'd had no actual proof. Now, as we neared the last corner, I wondered. Could it somehow have survived? The van turned the corner, and we saw our block. The two houses that were burning when I left were still standing. Ours was gone. The driver opened the door and said, "I'll be back later." Mark and I stepped outside. The ground was still hot. "Look, there's the shower stall," I said. Black and leaning, it was the tallest thing. Near the road stood two old chairs we'd set out for the Salvation Army to collect. "Well, that's handy, anyway," said Mark, and we sat down. It was time for a cup of coffee. Archaeologists in Tarzan's Garden How many glorious places have gone up in smoke? Athens, Rome, Chicago. As we sat on our cast-off lawn chairs surveying the smoldering wreckage, I thought of Aeneas fleeing burning Troy, carrying his grandfather and his household gods. No, I didn't. I can think of that now, but then, I just sat there. We weren't looking at the ashes of Priam's palace. Our smoking citadel was only a shower stall. It wasn't noble, glorious, or even tragic, just a shock. Even so, the archaeologist in me awoke immediately. "Look at the cars!" I said to Mark. We'd each left in a car, but there had been nothing we could do about two other vehicles parked in our driveway. One belonged to a man who worked for Mark's property management company, and the other to a friend who'd moved to New York. They had been parked right next to each other. The Volkswagen Rabbit was incinerated. The engine block had liquefied and poured out of the engine compartment, creating a decorative aluminum bas relief on the asphalt. The body was blackened, the windows were gone, and the inside was devoid of anything except a couple of seat springs and a skeletal steering wheel. Right next to it, the Chevette looked fine at first glance. Actually, two tires were melted and the paint had bubbled on one door, but two days later, Manny drove it away. "How could the fire be so selective?" I asked. "They were practically touching." We spent the morning poking into the rubble and marveling. Most things were utterly gone, but we found a few interesting artifacts. The heat of the fire had delaminated a quarter and puffed it up like a little metal balloon. A can of pennies was now a solid cylinder of copper. We stood where we guessed our china cabinet had been, the one from which I'd extracted the arrowhead on my way out. Fifteen feet long and eight feet tall, it had been made out thick slabs of Honduran mahogany by a friend whose cabinets were works of art. It must have burned like a dream. The concrete upon which it had stood was completely bare. "I thought we'd find globs of silver or something," said Mark, "Melted, like the car engine." But there was nothing. My grandmother's tea service was somewhere over Santa Monica in a big black cloud. We continued our exploration, careful to sidestep smoldering coals. We'd both melted holes in our sneakers by now, and the sun was climbing. It was shaping up into another hot, windy day. "Okay, here's the storeroom," said Mark. The piles of rubble and ash were a little deeper. We'd both picked up sticks, and I poked into a steaming pile. It was a large rectangle of what looked like bedsprings. "We didn't have a bed in here," I said. "What was this?" Mark picked his way over and had a look. "It's the Slinkies," he said. The storeroom had housed the inventory of a new retail business Mark and I had started a few months before. Wizards of Wonder, WOW for short, sold puzzles, games, and unusual toys at music festivals and county fairs. Our holiday inventory had begun to arrive, and most of it hadn't been unpacked. We'd ordered cases and cases of Slinkies, a perennially popular Christmas present. We picked our way over the rest of the cement slab that formed the footprint of our erstwhile home. My computer had vanished entirely. The only high-tech remnants were the little metal sliders from three floppy disks. Near where my desk had been a filing cabinet was still recognizable. It had cooled enough for Mark to touch, and he pried it open with a crowbar he'd brought along in his back pack. "You never know," he said. "And it sure would be nice to have our tax records." It was empty. Our house was unique. Built nearly a century before by Abbott Kinney, one of Los Angeles' early land barons, it had served as the livery stable for the Big House. The Big House burned down in the thirties, and nobody knew any more exactly where it had been. The stable building and the stone pump house on the edge of the reservoir were the last remaining structures of Kinney's estate. The hillside was studded with oaks, palms and eucalypti, and a stream carried water from a spring farther up the mountain to the reservoir, which was home to several hundred blue gill, catfish and bright orange carp. Legend held that there were bass in there, too, but we never spied one. Mark had created a home inside the redwood shell of the old barn, and turned the pump house into a cozy den overlooking the reservoir. He'd never thought his hillside retreat was big enough for two, but he found space for me when we got married in 1990. He'd lived there for three years when I joined him, but he hadn't been alone. He shared his jungle with a cat, three ducks, a pack of coyotes, a family of skunks, a raccoon commune, and an occasional mountain lion. Peacocks and a blue heron visited the reservoir, which had grown to look like a natural lagoon. Wild mint and raspberries grew along the stream. It was hard to believe that Tarzan's dream house existed in the hills above Pasadena. Few people had any inkling it was up there, only half an hour from downtown Los Angeles. We looked down the denuded hill past the black trunk of a headless palm tree to the old pump house. Built of native stones, it had a brick chimney and a shake roof. A perforated pipe ran along the ridge, and we'd left the water running the day before in the hopes that the roof might survive the fire if it were wet enough. The pipe was still there, bent and black, but intact. Little puffs of steam burst from the holes. The roof was gone, and we could see red clay floor tiles through the rubble on the floor. We climbed down carefully and stepped inside. Our eyes fell first on the iron harp of my grandmother's upright piano. It had smashed tiles when it hit the floor. Then we caught sight of something else. A ceramic vase was standing upright on a broken tile. Chartreuse and hideous, it was also intact and pristine. It looked like someone had just set it there. "That vase," I said. "Do you remember how we got it?" Mark couldn't remember. "It was one of the gifts at the white elephant party we had last year. It was so ugly no one would take it home. I stuck it into one of the cabinets against the far wall. It was on the top shelf. How the heck did it get down here without breaking?" "I think," said Mark, "That even forest fires have their standards. It took one look at that thing and said, ‘No thanks. Even I don't want that.'" When we arrived back at the top of our smoldering acropolis, we stood near our former kitchen sink, now a dented cast iron relic lying on its side on the ground. A eucalyptus tree nearby burst into fresh flames, and we looked down over the blackened lagoon. I said, "You know, Mark, this is, in fact, amazing." Mark says I said, "You know, Mark, this is, in fact, great." However I started out, I continued, "We're cleaned out. There's nothing here, nothing at all. We can do anything we want. Anything. Do you know what that means? We can go anywhere, do anything, start over again. Whatever. I think we should think of this as an opportunity. I think it just could be the most amazing thing that's ever happened to us. I think..." "Shut up," said Mark. "Shut up and give me five minutes to grieve." View From The Black Gap I shut up. He was right. I was chattering. I stood at the edge of the concrete slab and looked out over the San Gabriel Valley. I could see all the way to the ocean, which was a big change from the last time I'd stood in that place and looked south. Thirty trees had meant their end, but the view they left behind was terrific. I stood there and knew I was right. This really was amazing, maybe even great. All my stuff was gone, and that meant I had a clean slate. Yes, it meant that irreplaceable mementos were gone forever, but so were forty years of sediment, a serious buildup of tartar and plaque. Yes, my great grandmother's wedding dress was vapor, but so were thirty boxes I'd dreaded having to sort. For every item I mourned, there was a corresponding bushel of ballast that had held me hostage. I felt the lightness immediately. I was a hot air balloon, and my tethers had just been cut. I gave Mark a full half hour to grieve. "Let's hit the road," I said as we waited for the paddy wagon to come and get us. "The timing couldn't be better. We've got no stuff, no business, and no house to worry about. Let's just start driving and see what we find." Mark didn't say yes, and he didn't say no. We rode down the hill and drove back to his parents' house. By this time, people were everywhere, surveying the wreckage. The policeman at the barricade was fending off a crowd of looters carrying shopping bags. Meanwhile the fire was still burning its way eastward unabated. The winds were still high. My parents' house in the village of Sierra Madre was in its path. Blocked roads meant we couldn't go there, but we spent the day watching television and the wind. By midnight, the winds pushed the fire north into the wilderness, and Sierra Madre was left untouched. The next day, the air was still. The fire did not leave a peaceful wake. Within hours, platoons of insurance agents arrived. Almost as fast came the contractors, carpet cleaners, "salvage experts" and "private adjusters," vultures attracted by a fresh disaster. On hundreds of scorched lots, men with tape measures and blueprints and clipboards brought bag lunches and folding chairs and stayed all day. I escaped for the weekend to a meeting I'd planned to attend months before. I had no house, but I did have a hotel reservation. I stopped at a shopping mall on the way and bought some underwear and a shirt and a pair of jeans. When I got back to Pasadena, Mark had joined a crew of volunteers who were preparing to sandbag the hillsides. Fire in Southern California mountains practically guarantees mud slides as soon as it rains, and they can be just as devastating as fire. We went out to dinner Sunday night. While we waited for the waiter to take our order, Mark said, "Let's hit the road. Let's just start driving and see where we end up." I have no idea what we ate that night, but we stayed a long time. The waiter filled our coffee cups four times. Fire. What a thing. Houses, trees, stuff, all gone in a flash. I'd been looking at the black gaps, but now, suddenly, I was looking at the view they'd left behind. I was a balloon, slowly rising over a fresh new landscape. The journey had begun. The Stuff of Life If life in the last decade of the century in America is a solar system, stuff is its sun. Our lives revolve around it, and its absence creates a powerful vacuum, the kind nature abhors. If you don't believe it, try this simple experiment. Divest yourself of all your stuff, and remain stuffless for a month. Okay, I'll allow you one suitcase, but that's it. See if you can avoid busting out of it for four short weeks. Maybe the simplest road to unencumbered success would be to buy a Eurail pass and relive the days when you traveled light and traded paperbacks in youth hostels. Maybe you can find yourself a monastery and embark on a month-long retreat in a cell without closets. One thing's certain, though. If you stay where you are and follow the stuff-attracting patterns that define American life, your suitcase won't just bulge at the end of a week. It'll explode. By the end of the month, you'll be the curator of a brand new archive. Inexorably following its law, your stuff will have expanded to fill all available space. Back in the seventies, when the Shah of Iran was sent into exile, hundreds of American expatriates left with him. A friend of mine was a teacher in Tehran at the time. One day while he was at school, he received instructions to drive to the airport, leave the keys in his car's ignition, and get on a plane. He left a large, nicely furnished apartment full of mementos of a life of travel and an Ivy League education. When I met him in Germany a few years later, it was in the living room of his large, nicely furnished apartment. Conspicuously devoid of Persian rugs, it nonetheless displayed ample evidence of a love of travel, a fascinating life. "Sometimes you have to swap possessions for experience," he said. After a disaster, a giant machine mobilizes, and its motto is, "Put Everything Back." Government agencies like FEMA and the SBA arrive in a blizzard of forms in triplicate. Insurance adjusters explain about "replacement value," and "policy limits." Vaporized homes are recreated on paper, and the stuff they contained fills sheet after sheet of foolscap. Everywhere, scores of people began work immediately to do what people do after catastrophes: make everything look the way it did before. But what if you were thinking, "Well, thanks, but I'm not so sure I want everything back just the way it was. After all, how many times do you get to start over in life? Isn't this a good time to stop and think a while? Isn't it a chance to maybe do something different?" A perfect place to think materialized magically for Mark and Marvin and me. It was a guest house on a secluded estate in the town of San Gabriel. Designed as the ultimate entertainment pad, it had a huge living room, three bathrooms, and one bedroom. Sliding glass doors opened on one side to a camellia garden, and on the other to a large swimming pool. It was beautiful, which made us smile. It had enormous closets, which made us laugh. Don't get me wrong. I love stuff. I love the people who brought us stuff when we had none. Family, friends, and strangers gave us clothes, furniture, dishes, pots, books, a bed, a table, food, a computer, and money. We were, quite literally, showered with gifts. Without them, life would have looked awfully bleak. After all, we live in three dimensions, where down comforters feel good on a chilly night, a dining room table is a great convenience, and china plates lend elegance to the simplest meal. I have never appreciated ordinary household stuff more than I did while I lived at the secret villa. It had appeared out of thin air. It was magic. It was love. Christmas Came Anyway We lived at "The Villa" for five months, from November, 1993, until March, 1994. One day in December, a package tied with string arrived, forwarded by the post office from our former address. It had German stamps and an illegible customs declaration stuck to the top. At first, I was baffled, but then I remembered. In 1990, Mark and I had taken a trip to Europe. From Athens, we'd taken a ship through the Corinth Canal north through the Adriatic to Venice. We rented a car and drove through the Alps to Bavaria. In Oberammergau, we stayed with friends who introduced us to one of the master wood carvers for which the town is famous. Before we left, we commissioned a Christmas creche. Each December, we'd be receiving a piece or two until we had a complete cast of characters. The first Christmas, we got the Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. By the time everything went up in smoke, we'd added two shepherds, a goat, a cow, a donkey, and a couple of angels. When Mark got home, I showed him the box. "Do you know what this is?" I asked. He, too, was puzzled for a minute, but then he smiled. "It's got to be the wise men," he said. We opened the package, pulled away the excelsior, and there they were, each holding his perfectly carved little gift, each looking intently in the direction of a recipient who wasn't there. "Sorry, no baby Jesus here," I said as I set them on the dining room table. "I'm afraid you guys came to the wrong stable." But they didn't, really. They proved that no matter what happens, Christmas comes. Christmas doesn't even require a baby Jesus. It comes anyway, and the wise men proved it that year by insisting on arriving at an empty rental cottage. And Christmas did come. By the time it arrived, we'd celebrated my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary and my birthday, and we'd announced our grand plan. We'd hung a huge map of North America on the living room wall, and we'd begun sticking pins in all the places we'd always dreamed of visiting. The wise men stayed on our table through January. Before I packed them away, I wrote to the wood carver to explain what had happened and ask him to start over. "We need a new holy family," I wrote, "And shepherds and animals and angels. Everything but the wise men." Next Christmas, even if we had no table to set them on, the wise men would have something to look at, a reason for bearing gifts. I figured it was the least I could do for them, since they'd traveled 6,000 miles on faith, and arrived just when we needed some. And now, we were about to follow our own star, with not much more than faith to fund it. We were fairy tale youngest sons, the ones who pack a bandana and leave home on foot to seek their fortunes. Maybe we should have followed their lead, but we were post-Ford children, and we needed something more. Before we could hit the road, we had to find ourselves a vehicle. The second e-edition to Roads from the Ashes: An Odyssey in Real Life on the Virtual Frontier is now available on Amazon.com

. Read the full article

[swipestream]

The Mist: Surprisingly, Pretty Good. Okay, I’m Lying.

Fear. Bad. Storytelling.

It’ll probably shock none of you that the recently-launched and recently-cancelled The Mist TV show sucked. What may shock you is how thoroughly ghastly the suckage was. It permeated the whole show, and came in three varieties: entirely superficial suckage, suckage in central concepts, and suckage in execution.

(Spoilers below. Like you even care.)

Let’s start with the superficial suckage. The first episode of Spike TV’s Maine monster show throws out an array of virtue signals, enough to rival the light from several dozen Las Vegas casinos. There’s the small town teacher who loses her job for teaching Sex Ed against the wishes of the small-minded small-towners she lives among, the small-town Sheriff who covers for his Captain of the Football Team jock son after he’s credibly accused of drugging and assaulting the daughter of the fired teacher, the bisexual guy with heavy makeup who’s targeted for a beating by a bigot, the innocent Middle Eastern man who’s accused of terrorism by a racist jerkhole, and many more I don’t have time to go into. It’s like someone had a control board wired up to every single virtue signal IN EXISTENCE and his boss said “Hit ’em all.”

The thing is, all the many virtue signals are misdirects. Normally they’d indicate a plaster saint, a character who’s just more noble, virtuous, and gosh darn better at everything than everyone else. And yet, if you stay with the show—and Heaven bless your stupid blinkered stubbornness if you do—you find out there are two (count ’em, two) innocent people in the entire town, everyone else being some variety of scumbag, murderer, or psycho—even the people you’d think would end up as saints (or are the apparent main character).

The aging Leftwing Earth-worshipping Baby Boomer former hippie chick whose husband is casually abruptly brutally murdered by some random dude in the pilot? Absolute psycho. The bold, brave feminist Sex-Ed-teaching former teacher? You better believe it. The Goth bisexual assault victim? TOTAL PSYCHO. Everybody, the whole town, both sexes, all races, all sexual orientations, every single person in the entire village is a scumbag, murderer, or psycho. Sometimes all three.

It’s enough to make one cynical about small town America.

Which leads us to problems in the conception of the show. Contrary to what people say, all story ideas are not created equal. Some are good, some great, and some just plain awful. Great ideas tend to stand out no matter how terrible the rest of the material is, shining like solitary diamonds in a bucket full of dung. Bad ideas, in contrast, tend to propagate throughout a work of fiction, tainting everything else with their awfulness, like vomit in a wading pool. The Mist was built atop a pile of awful ideas.

The original Stephen King short story and the 2007 movie (a decent work fatally marred by one of the most nihilistic endings I’d ever seen until now) featured the titular mist descending upon a bucolic New England village, bringing with it a panoply of bizarre and unearthly monsters who proceed to terrorize the town. There’s no indication of what caused the irruption of the monstrous beasties—other than some half-hearted gestures towards a mysterious military project named Arrowhead—and no sign that they’re intelligent or coordinated. They just are. The scenes of the humans having to deal with basketball-sized almost-spiders, forearm-sized not-quite-mosquitoes, and creatures so massive they tear up the freeway just by floating past… well, they’re the only reason to read the story. (Heaven knows the stock characters straight from Stephen King Central Casting aren’t anything to write home about.) The 2017 show, however, threw all of this out.

Instead of an invasion of Lovecraftian creatures from elsewhere in space-time, THIS Mist features a fear-generator. The clouds floating about town intuit your deepest fear and, in thirty seconds to a minute (one of the characters timed it), it materializes out of the mist to attack and probably kill you. This makes for monsters that are COMPLETELY LAME. Leeches. Dogs. Somebody’s overbearing mum. Random hostile homicidal people. A literal dead baby. (Not a joke.) A figure made out of black smoke. A moth that kills a guy by crawling inside his mouth, giving him a moth back tattoo, and sprouting giant moth wings from his back. And the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (who appear but briefly, in silhouette, kill somebody, then disappear.) LAME MONSTERS IN A MONSTER SHOW RUIN THE MONSTER SHOW.

Moreover, the mist-born monsters are barely featured in the 10-episode series. The first trailer for the show made it seem like Spike’s answer to The Walking Dead: a bunch of survivors, walled up in various places about the town, fighting off an invasion of monsters. The Walking Dead, for all its flaws, was at least a zombie show that featured ACTUAL ZOMBIES. They appeared—sometimes out of thing air—ate people and were chopped or shot, then went away until the plot needed them again. They MATTERED.

The monsters of The Mist—again, the focal point of both the short story and the movie—barely make an appearance. All the above creatures count for, at most, 30 minutes of the 10-hour series. Oh sure, characters run through the mist, stare out at the mist, and refuse to venture outside into the mist, but the actual monsters in the mist are almost never seen. People killed in the mist pretty much always die offscreen. A MONSTER SHOW WITHOUT MONSTERS IS A LAME MONSTER SHOW.

The mist itself is also a problem. It’s simply too thick, too obscuring, too easy to get lost in, and too lethal. As the central obstacle / challenge / opponent of a continuing series, it sucks. It makes interesting shots impossible—you can’t see up into the mist to catch a glimpse of a skyscraper-sized thing striding past, tearing great gaping holes in the ground, collapsing buildings with a casually placed limb, you can’t see people running for their lives from some malefic threat, nor can you see the slow but steady advance of some new threat marching towards the last bastion of human life in the beleaguered town. Last, but not least, people can’t respond to the mist.

In the story and movie, people made plans. They utilized the tools available to them and made weapons to fight the monsters with. The utter lethality of the mist in this show means people can’t effectively scavenge for food and weapons, nor can they easily navigate the thick and obscuring clouds, nor can they fight back. All these things are the building blocks of an interesting series. Writers NEED them to tell decent stories. Yet the show makes all of them impossible.

Not that the writers of this show could tell a decent story anyway. The Mist is, as per the usual trend recently, less a series than a serial. One show leads directly into the next, and what plot there is gets spread out over all ten shows. Basically, it’s a ten hour movie. Now, ten hour movies can be done (I guess. In theory.), but not by the writers of this show. (Or Jessica Jones. Or Luke Cage.) Instead we get apparent plot movement that meanders back and forth for too damn long, eventually going nowhere. It’s long, tedious, and MEANINGLESS. In the end, a lot of things happen, but you just don’t care.

Somebody needed to send these jerks to TV screenwriting school. Teach them about a 4-act TV drama structure, mini-climaxes before commercial breaks, and A-, B-, and C-plots. When, and ONLY when, they master these basics (after having done it for a while), then we’ll give them a shot at semi-serial storytelling. LEARN YOUR CRAFT FIRST, MORONS.

Now all of the above is absolutely awful. But it isn’t the awfullest thing about the show. That, they saved for the series finale.

Our hero, the main character, has been trying to reunite with his wife (ex-teacher Sex Ed lady) and his daughter (little miss “got assaulted and then unknowingly made out with her half-brother”. No, really. Because there just wasn’t enough awful in the show.) Daddy dearest shows up at the mall to rescue them and—because of some wholly contrived and altogether stupid reasons—the people in the mall (about 50 or so panicking small town people who’ve been neighbors with them for decades) throw the lot of them out. Into the parking lot where he has a car warmed up and waiting to drive away. So he drives away… then rams the vehicle into the front doors of the mall, letting the mist in and ensuring all 50 of their neighbors meet grisly ends in the mist.

People scream. Blood flows. Lots of people die.

Your hero, ladies and gentlemen!

It’s an ugly and pointless ending, even more nihilistic than that of the 2007 movie, and reveals our main character to be a total and utter murdering psycho. Because THAT’S the kind of hero audiences root for.

The Mist is absolutely awful, beginning to end. If I was thrown out into the mist, my greatest fear would materialize as a small, featureless room where they force me to watch this series over and over and over again.

Jasyn Jones, better known as Daddy Warpig, is a host on the Geek Gab podcast, a regular on the Superversive SF livestreams, and blogs at Daddy Warpig’s House of Geekery. Check him out on Twitter.

The Mist: Surprisingly, Pretty Good. Okay, I’m Lying. published first on http://ift.tt/2zdiasi