Author: Geoff

Founder, creator, guy what does stuff for and in Vintrock

April 10, 2023

When The Plot Twists

Warning: This contains spoilers from episode 3 of season 4 of Succession. Major plot points will be discussed, so read at your own discretion. If you haven’t watched the episode yet, don’t read any further. Seriously. Just stop now, watch it, then come back.

A Brilliantly Simple Plot Twist

It is amazing when a show’s team decides to take the story in a new and radical direction. This happened on Succession, in the most recent episode of the final season of the show. Episode 3 of the 4th season, Conner’s Wedding, starts off as expected. We see the first stages of a ludicrous and over-the-top wedding. Logan is plotting and scheming, testing his youngest son. Tom is trying to find more ways to stay useful and be important. The early scenes are basically a carry-over from the previous episode. The closest to a ‘surprise’ we get is that Logan tells Roman, his youngest, to let Gerri know she’s on the way out.

And while the plotting and scheming continue, we get the twist. Not the “Gerri is fired” twist. The “Logan is dead” twist. At some point, we knew that Logan would have to either retire or die. The show is named “Succession”, not “Game of Org Charts”. Someone has to succeed the old man. And for most of the second and third season, it didn’t look like Logan was going anywhere any time soon.

The whole thing plays out while the main characters are basically in no control of where they are going, physically. The children and Cousin Greg are on a boat, leaving dock and sailing toward the Statue of Liberty. Logan and his team, along with Tom, are in a plane in the air. There’s no hopping into a luxury SUV or limo to meet at some office, apartment, restaurant, or karaoke bar. Boats don’t turn on a dime. Planes can’t just park where they are.

The brilliance was, after a few minutes of “perhaps he’s faking it to test the kids”, it was clear that Logan really was going. There’s a body on the floor of a plane. A flight attendant is giving CPR. We hear the distinct sound of a defibrillator being fired. Doors are closed. He doesn’t just pop up, and there would be little point of playing out a lifesaving routine since nobody is using Facetime or Zoom for this. A visual performance wasn’t required. It was all done without the grabbing of chests, shortness of breath, or all the other trappings of an “old man death scene”. We see him get on a plane. We get to hear phone calls.

It’s Par For The Show

Really, this fits with how Succession has played out from the start. There is plenty of absurdity, over-the-top behaviour, a sense of entitlement, and basically no boundaries or limits. There are also virtually no consequences except those imposed by the limits of physics and what the universe allows, which does track for the most part with the real world. The ultra-wealthy are largely immune to the artificial consequences imposed by society. They only thing they can’t ignore is things like gravity and mortality.

I’ve been watching the show regularly from the start, but I’m still not certain I’m a “fan” in the conventional sense. All of the characters are irritating, there are no good guys here, and none rise to the level of anti-hero. Even Cousin Greg is, frankly, obnoxious. The writing and acting, though, are absolutely brilliant. Everyone in the show is scheming and plotting, and most of them actually aren’t very good at it. Having a real curveball thrown at them from time to time is how the showrunners keep the characters off-balance. This curveball, though is a doozy. While it looked like we would get more of the usual plotting and changing allegiances, the story takes a hard right turn, knocking over the crockery and spilling everyone’s drinks.

It Isn’t What I Thought

It wasn’t until I was reading some summaries during season two that I learned the show is meant to be a dark comedy. There was little I found “funny” in a sense that you’d laugh at it. The business elements are entirely fictional, and a complete and utter mess. Unlike Billions, where they actually get a lot of the technical aspects around markets and trading right (or at least close), Succession makes no effort to do so. And that is, apparently, by design. It’s meant to be absurd, not just in how the characters play our their parts, but in how their weird and twisted world works. And if anyone thinks “well, rich people get away with lots”, even rich people aren’t that stupid, and there are limits. You don’t get to be rich without at least a modicum of intelligence.

When I first started watching, I was sort-of expecting something like Billions, just focussed more on the family and business dynamics of who takes over when the old man is gone. It was clear after a few episodes that all the business jargon was used more or less at random, meant to sound “business-y” without worrying about details. Once I got a handle on that, it was then only about the characters and their interactions. The plots and schemes and twists and turns. And the sheer ineptitude of the of all these people.

Which is how the show is brilliant on multiple levels. That ineptitude isn’t necessarily that far from the truth. It’s further demonstrating that being rich doesn’t mean you’re smart. And it isn’t unusual to see ultra-wealthy people somehow believe that they are smarter than everyone else, when the truth is that they are just luckier. They were in the right place at the right time and stumbled onto something that let them build insane levels of wealth. But they succeeded in part because they were at least surrounded by smart (or smarter) people who could actually do the work. If you want to see a so-called “genius” at work, without the supporting talent, just watch the implosion of Twitter.

In For A Bumpier Ride

The ever-changing landscape of who is working with whom in Succession is now in new territory. The first half of season one was off-balance, in part because we’re still learning who the characters are. Things settled down into a pattern in the latter half, plus for the next two seasons. Sure, there were lots of small twists and turns. Characters would be loyal to some faction at one point, only to betray them when it looked like things were better on “the other side”. None of what we were seeing for the past two seasons was particularly surprising. It was, for me, getting a little stale.

They could have gone on like this for some time. At some point, though, they were either going to have to do something more radical. Of course, the showrunners could have simply introduced new characters to add a different dynamic to the show. It could have chugged along while we all waited for it to jump the shark.

But instead, they blew the shark up, and I’m thankful they did it. Not having Brian Cox on the screen is going to be unfortunate, since the man is a brilliant performer. The show, however, needed to get to the point. It was losing its focus for the past two seasons, becoming more of a soap opera (albeit with writing and acting that were several orders of magnitude better, and characters that weren’t glorified cardboard cutouts). In some ways, Logan’s death gets the train back on track. We’ve had too many side-trips that didn’t really advance the plot. Hopefully we’re done with those. We have seven more episodes to find out.

March 2, 2023

Tears on Silent Stone

A man stands silently. Wind ruffles thin and greying hair.

He thinks about the arguments, disagreements about arming, appeasement. The yelling. The elder wants to arm. The younger wants peace.

Then the first annexation. The first invasion.

Disagreement turns, becomes less vehement.

Another annexation, invasion under pretence.

The middle ground transforms to agreement, then passion, commitment.

Commitment followed by enlistment. Departures, see you soon.

The rain when the telegram arrives. Deeply regret to inform you… The tears. Sadness.

The Portland Stone monument. The name, the dates. June 6, 1944.

“I said I would see you again” spoken to empty air.

March 1, 2023

Not Among The Finalists

I got my email today from Writer’s Digest, informing me that I was not among the finalists for the short story competition. I would have been pleasantly surprised if I had been. The story I wrote was put together pretty quickly, and I didn’t have time for an outside editor to look at it. There are changes I’m going to make to the story, and I will get someone else to look it over. I’m considering trying to submit it to Clarkesworld, but they’ve closed submissions for now. They were flooded with “stories” cranked out using things like ChatGPT. If nothing else, I’ll post the story here.

January 16, 2023

Submitted My First Story

I’ve submitted a short story to the Writer’s Digest Annual Short Story Competition. It was something I wrote over the past week, and I probably rushed it. But all I have to lose is the entry fee, and it’s a start. The top 10 stories get published in Writer’s Digest, and that’s the main draw for me. Several of the top positions get prize money, and first overall gets a trip to their annual writer’s conference in New York and an opportunity to pitch work to editors and publishers.

Once I know the outcome, and if I’m not among those selected to be published, then I’ll post a copy of the story here. It’s a science fiction story, and set nominally in my Unimanse fictional universe. It was also an experiment: I chained together a series of drabbles (100-word microfiction stories) to form a larger story. It was fun trying to make it work, keep the plot focused, and make each 100-word section a story of its own.

January 9, 2023

Yup, I Have Been Quiet

I haven’t posted much because I haven’t been doing much. We had a death in the family (my father, after a long illness), so that and the holidays aren’t doing much to inspire creativity right now. However, I’m not worried. This too shall pass, and I know I will be back at it.

December 13, 2022

Social Media Ambivalence

I am experiencing some ambivalence when it comes to social media, although most of that is about Twitter. I use a few different platforms, for different purposes, and I am trying out a pair of newer ones.

What and Why

I currently use most of the common social media platforms. Facebook is mainly about friends and family, keeping up with what they are doing or thinking. LinkedIn is about professional connections, and keeping up with that community. Instagram is a weird mix of friends, family, and various celebrities or other notable personalities. I visit each of them once per day. On Instagram, once I’ve “caught up”, I don’t keep scrolling. I did for a time, and it was easy to lose a lot of time to that. No more.

Then there’s Twitter, Mastodon, and Post. The latter two I’m experimenting with, seeing if I use them differently than I did with Twitter. Twitter is, for me, an oddball. There’s no way to keep up with each and every tweet from the people I follow. I’ve reduced the number of accounts I follow there over the years, but even then, I usually didn’t read everything. It wasn’t hard for a thousand or more tweets to pile up in a 24-hour period, and that’s with me following maybe 50 people.

Twitter The Outlier

I wasn’t sure about Twitter when I first joined in 2009. It was already 3 years old by that point, and appeared to be gaining traction. It was when social media was becoming more of ‘a thing’, and there was an expectation in some circles that you should be part of it. I followed a lot of different people and organizations, all of whom I was interested in, or sometimes connected with, in some way. But it didn’t take long to get buried in tweets. I would check once a day, and there were thousands of unread tweets. This was before promotions and recommendations started to appear on the site.

For the next few years, I would stop using Twitter for months at a time, or even for more than a year. Then I would come back, pay attention for a few weeks or months, then just sort-of “wander off”. I removed more and more of the accounts I followed to try to get the volume of tweets down, but it was relentless/ There were just enough accounts that I wanted to follow, and many are fairly prolific posters.

To Stay Or Go

I have been considering deleting my Twitter accounts for some time now, long before the Elon Musk Imploding Disaster Show arrived on the scene. And leaving isn’t really about the dumpster fire fueled with thermite that Twitter appears to be devolving into. Twitter was a mess before that, it’s just managed to get worse. I, fortunately, had been spared that, in part because I used TweetDeck, which doesn’t show ads, promoted or recommended tweets, or following suggestions. I rarely posted anything. What I did tweet was apparently uninteresting, so I wasn’t subject to the trolls that roam the Twitter landscape.

But I also found that I had little or no engagement from Twitter and my modest number of followers. I generally tweeted a link to my most recent blog posts, as I do on other social media sites. The number of visits to my blogs that were courtesy of Twitter were generally zero. I would get some from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. But almost nothing from Twitter.

The only thing holding me back is that I have a few connections on Twitter that aren’t on other social media platforms, and I’d like to stay connected to them. I go back every week or so and check for notifications on Twitter. But otherwise, I’ve stopped using it again.

Stay, For Now

For the moment, I’m going to keep my personal and Vintrock Twitter accounts. Part of it is to retain the Twitter handles. Part of it is because maybe, perhaps, things might change again. For now that appears unlikely, but who knows. But I’ve got the accounts reasonably secure, I’ve removed a bunch of personal information from them, and it costs me nothing to let them sit. Whether I also stay on Mastodon and Post is a question mark, but I need to give both a lot more time before I decide what I do next. It’s too soon to make any decisions on them.

November 29, 2022

More Progress

While I’ve already technically “won” NaNoWriMo 2022, the book itself isn’t done. I’ve crossed the 60,000 word threshold now. I’m working toward completing one of the other achievements, which is updating my writing progress every day for the month.

Ease Off The Throttle

I don’t expect to work on writing seven days a week. Like any task, breaks are a good thing. It keeps you fresh, and it helps you focus. Starting in December, I expect to focus on writing at least five days a week. The big lesson for me was understanding how productive I was (or wasn’t) going to be, and how much time do I need in a day for writing. I seem to be able to get a fair bit done in about an hour or two, hitting my personal goal of 2,000 words in a day.

Those words are, right now, first draft words. I’m working on getting the story told, knowing I have to go back and revise and revisit what I’ve created. The idea that I can create the “perfect” work on the first try is beyond optimistic. Moreso, since I’m still new to becoming a novelist. Writing itself isn’t hard for me. Writing well is where the challenge lies.

It’s Encouraging

This novel, so far, plus the one I drafted a few years ago, are proving to be encouraging. I enjoy the act of creation, whether it’s crafting a story, building a piece of software, or taking wood and making something. Building is part of who I am, not just what I do. Being able to build entire worlds is fun and a challenge.

I’m into the next section of the novel. One of the big events has now passed, but we’re building toward the finale. Sure, I’ve already planned generally how the story is going to end. But there’s an element of mystery, since I don’t know exactly how it will turn out. And the story has already morphed a bit from my initial vision. Here’s to the final few chapters!

November 25, 2022

Is Andor Near-Perfection? (Spoilers)

(Warning this contains spoilers on Season 1 of Andor, proceed at your own risk)

Season 1 of Andor wrapped up on Wednesday, and I am almost speechless. The consistency and quality over 12 episodes was breathtaking. It’s interesting because it’s Star Wars, but not Star Wars in the conventional sense. It’s like Star Wars, but with a real edge. I am keeping fingers, toes, eyes and whatever else I can cross crossed because I hope they can maintain it into season 2. And I hope beyond hope they don’t use the second season to hype up more spin-offs they way they did with season 2 of The Mandalorian.

Amazing Material

The depth of the characters, the dialog, the pacing, the dialog (again), and THE DIALOG. Holy crap, it’s nice to see someone who can write high-quality dialog that is expository and exhilarating, and doesn’t leave you thinking “c’mon, just get to the point”. Luthen’s (Stellan Skarsgård) speech at the end of episode 11, and Maarva’s (Fiona Shaw) speech via hologram on Rix Road were both poignant, powerful, but still to the point. There was very little wasted dialog.

The dialog was further bolstered by the sets. Those that should be pristine were pristine. But not everything was neat and clean and orderly, and the disorderly or well-worn looked the part naturally. None of the settings felt contrived or fake. They looked and felt like real places that you could visit. You felt the depth and history for those sets that were old. Niamos (aka Space Florida) looked as it should, sorta-new but sorta-tired at the same time. Few resorts are as nice as the brochure, and this was no exception.

The acting for every single character was incredible. I didn’t see a single flat or phoned-in performance, and even the truly minor characters that had a few seconds of screen time felt real. But the main characters were each able to shine, even when you had groups of them together. Their energy and their performances seemed to feed off each other.

There was a single, brief space battle. And as short as it was, it felt special, it was exhilarating. I suspect its because we weren’t immersed in action, so it stands out. It’s uniqueness in the story makes it more dramatic, and it’s pacing and composition as a small story was incredible.

Not-so-Minor Characters

Syril Karn’s (Kyle Soller) arc in the story was incredible, not because it was so compelling necessarily, but because it was so well done. His narcissism having his rent-a-cop uniform tailored. Every scene where he is eating at his mother’s home is him eating a children’s cereal, never “grown up food”. His demeanour around Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and his uncertainty when dealing with other people in general was so well portrayed. I was sure he was going to kiss her after rescuing her from the street battle, and was impressed the writers had the courage to stay away from that trope. Syril had just enough growth to be plausible, but wasn’t entirely transformed, which is a good thing. People don’t change as much as we think in a short period of time, so why would he?

Watching Vel Sartha (Faye Marsay) switch between clean and coifed and grubby and ready for action was impressive. The first time, I wasn’t sure I was watching the same performer. Seeing a character that wavers between confident and tentative, from certain to uncertain, made that character more believable, more real, to me.

The droid B2EMO (voice by Dave Chapman) was made important, and had a personality. Watching the little guy reacting to Maarva’s death was truly emotional.

There are so many characters with limited time in the story, but that are still important to the story. You’d be hard pressed to remove any one of them and have the thing hang together. And every one of their performances left an impression. Kino Loy, Ruescott Melshi, Saw Guerrera. The list just goes on.

And Then There’s Cassian Andor

Diego Luna’s portrayal of Cassian Andor is simply spectacular. We can see someone who is still growing, still learning, becoming the character we eventually see in Rogue One. The man is an incredibly talented performer. He takes the amazing material at his disposal and creates a masterpiece on the screen.

The character’s strengths and flaws are there for us to see. Luna’s performance brings both the good and bad in Andor to the fore. And the storytellers never resort to cliche or stereotypes to get their tale told. It’s incredible.

Don’t Forget The Soundtrack

The music for the show is it’s own strength. The opening theme is the same melody, but a different performance each time. There are very few repeated musical cues, and none of the grand symphonic music from the rest of the Star Wars universe.

What’s equally impressive is the diversity of musical styles throughout the show. You have classical, synth, basic rock, and a host of other styles, sometimes all within one episode. I read an article (I’ve lost the link) that interviewed the composer, and he spent as much time making the music as they spent filming and editing. He spent hours on a piece that would only be heard for a few seconds in one case, but wanted to write the entire song to it felt complete. There is one song that they decided would be a “galactic hit”, so it appears in its original form, and in various forms including muzak throughout the rest of the show. Brilliance.

Hopes for Season Two

I have high hopes for season two. My wish is for them to put the same care and attention into it, and to avoid a sophomore slump. I hope beyond hope that Disney leaves them alone (and with Iger at the helm again, that may just happen). Don’t use it as a vehicle to push other products. Stick to the story.

If the producers, cast, and crew can make season two with the same stunning quality as season one, I will be thoroughly impressed. It can be hard to carry on something at that high level. At some point, there will be stumbles. That it never happened, at all, in 12 1-hour episodes is truly impressive. If they can repeat that in season two, then they deserve all the accolades possible.