Short Pier Productions

So how'd we do in 2025?

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 17:05:20 GMT

Let's check in on those goals.

Read 20 books: just barely, got 21.
Watch 20 movies: blew this one out of the water with 51!
Clear one shelf of games and puzzles: nope, not even close.
Read Squirrel Girl: nope, not even close.
Restart Rock Band: got sidetracked by my basement receiving a surprise delivery of my entire childhood. Not even once.

Not sure what to do with all that. I'd like to set some non-media-consumption goals, but apparently I don't have a good structure to pursue those consistently. Hm.

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Captain Obvious Thinks About Cliché

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 14:35:53 GMT

At least for me, saying a story is cliché isn't a knock on the plot. It isn't a declaration that said story is inherently uninteresting and should never be told again.

"Cliché" as a criticism from me means that the storytellers took shortcuts to present the story. They didn't develop the characters in a way that supports their decisions. They skipped foreshadowing and payoff. They relied on genre assumptions to fill in parts of the narrative they didn't bother to show. They told the story but they didn't do the work.

"Cliché" for me means this story/these characters didn't get a real chance to fly.

(Aside: I feel like I've been having that emotional reaction a lot in the streaming era, to movies as well as television. It's particularly galling for me in cases where there's something genuinely good for me to latch on to and it's just not enough. (I'm looking at you, Wednesday. And Willow TV.) In some ways it hurts me more than truly amazing things getting canceled too soon. I definitely obsess more.)

Anyway. I needed to crystallize that, even knowing it's nothing new or particularly insightful. Captain Obvious out.

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T&T&T

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 23:21:03 GMT

I just finished Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which is superb. But there's this passage right near the end that really got me:

"I've been blue, lately," Sam admitted. "And I wondered, how do you get over that sort of thing?"

"Work helps," Sadie said. "Games help. But sometimes, when I'm really low, I keep a particular image in my mind."

"What is it?"

"I imagine people playing. Sometimes, it's one of our games, but sometimes, it's any game. The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I'm feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players."

I start Mage next week, and that's why. Thanks, Gabrielle Zevin.

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2025 Fun Goals

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 15:10:33 GMT

Dreamwidth just ate my lengthier post, so let's keep this simple.

Read 20 new-to-me books. Comics and roleplaying books don't count.
Watch 20 new-to-me movies. Probably need to find a regular timeslot to make this happen.
Clear one shelf of games and puzzles. Do them for the first time or play them again to see if they need to go to a new home.
Read the Squirrel Girl Omnibus.
Restart regular Rock Band. Preferably by April, just to give myself a deadline.

Let's see if we can get it done!

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WCJ Holidays 2024, Part I

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 15:58:57 GMT

This morning I was having breakfast and chatting with my dad. He's very much one of the "it's not going to be that bad" people. We survived the last Trump presidency and the world didn't collapse. There are still some people willing to do the right thing in government. The opposition aren't stupid. Good outcomes can still come from the ultra-rich and corporations as long as it's profitable for them. You know the type: smart enough to recognize the problems, but staying forcibly optimistic out of chosen ignorance.

My responses must have sounded a little shrill, but my dad probably doesn't realize that what he heard was me moderating my tone down from "internally screaming." When I hear any person-- Republican or Democrat-- say anything like "There's no way they'd do that," I have a visceral reaction. My gut clenches, my gorge rises, my blood pressure spikes. I want to physically shake them because of how wrong they are. I want to cry because that exact attitude is how we got to this point. I'm terrified of what happens when the enemy they actually does the horrific that.

I wasn't expecting that first thing in the morning. Welcome home, me.

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WCJ Gleanings: AOC Asks About Split Tickets

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 23:01:00 GMT

Link. She's doing the work: "sometimes you gotta dig in and see it to understand and adapt! Even if it makes you want to barf."

It's axiomatic for so many people that government is broken and/or corrupt. We are way, way past the point where incrementalism and strengthening the establishment will appeal to enough voters to win elections. The Dems have been making and breaking the same promises since Obama. People want something new.

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WCJ Gleanings: Popehat's "And Yet It Moves"

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 16:48:05 GMT

Just a tag for things I find on the internet that move me in a WCJ sort of way. These will always be positive or at least motivational; I'll have a different tag for the occasional terrible thing that I want to surface.

Today's entry by the redoubtable Popehat.

I remember the various hot takes in 2016, and a lot of the core ideas haven't changed. Keep fighting in any way you can. Believe in things worth fighting for even when it's hard. Come together but don't insist on uniformity. But this time the sheer magnitude of awful is going to be so much worse. We were incredibly fucking lucky last time because Trump and his party were unprepared to actually win, but this time they have detailed plans. This time they have no guardrails. Some of us have a pretty clear eyed view of what's coming, but so many of us are repeating versions of "Oh, it won't be that bad."

Ken doesn't do that. He keeps the faith but he isn't lying to himself. And I'm grateful for his words.

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White Clover Journal, Day 4

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 23:07:07 GMT

As I was puzzling over what to call this journal, I thought about weeds: tenacious and disdained and and vibrant and absolutely amazing at finding the tiniest little crevices to turn into footholds. That sounded like what I need to be for a while. Poison me, chop me down, uproot me, and I'll just keep coming back to find the sun.

I liked the image! But calling this my "Weed Journal" seemed like it would give the wrong impression.

Fortunately, I've been doing a lot of gardening recently. We stopped using herbicides a few years ago now, and as a result a bunch of the invasive species have sprung up in the lawn and gardens. Some of them I rip up wherever I find them. Our morning glory is my botanical nemesis, and I'll gladly consign any spiky-leafed dandelions to compost. But some of them I let grow-- the ones that keep a low profile, that appeal to my aesthetics or my sense of whimsy.

One of those is a clover that's started intermingling with the Kentucky bluegrass that makes up most of our lawn. I googled a photo of it on my phone, and it turns out the type has a bunch of different names-- including shamrock, which pleased my Irish ancestors. But my favorite was "White Clover," so named for the flowers I've seen all my life without knowing what they were. It's simple and beautiful and grows bloody everywhere. That's a weed I can aspire to.

So "White Clover Journal" it is. I'll probably start abbreviating it to WCJ, but I'll grab a couple of photos from my lawn for icons just to remind you what the abbreviation stands for.

Now we just have to wait and see what grows.

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Unnamed Journal, Day 3

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 19:54:46 GMT

Spent Wednesday crying.
Spent Thursday immersed in routine.
Today I'm starting to think about the future.

I suspect I'll need a journal to process and remember and generally stay sane. My first job is to name it.

Back once I have that figured out, then on to the second job.

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Book Review: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 16:15:59 GMT

There's a certain type of book that makes me want to write again. Really good books I just enjoy for their own sake. Really bad books I can put out of my mind and move on to something else. But near misses-- books that deserve to be better than they are-- make me want to put my fingers to my keyboard.

This is one of those, naturally.

It's hard to pick apart the threads of why this book annoyed me, which seems only appropriate given the intentional and overwrought multi-threading of the story. Bits of the book are layered, nested, abstracted, and/or partially obscured in a way that manages to be complex without being intricate. The pieces pretend to be part of a meta-story, but they come off as just a pile of scenes. Even the central storyline feels random-- both in terms of narrative progression and basic comprehensibility. This is book-as-invertebrate: no bones to give it shape. There are a lot of symbols in the book, but not meaning.

The characterization is also shallow. The lead's defining characteristic is that he doesn't know what to do and follows other people. He falls in love because the book almost literally says "And then he falls in love." Subsidiary characters are thinly drawn archetypes and we essentially never understand their motivations. I found it difficult to care about anyone in the book because they didn't feel real or interesting enough for me to invest in.

Which brings us to the prose style, which isn't beautiful, sharp, or effective. It feels like a color-by-numbers of a painting you've never actually seen-- you get the picture but you're not exactly attached to it. The dialogue and the description both ring hollow, and you have to concentrate to keep pushing through the actual words.

Which, it's worth noting, I did. I wanted this book to work. There are mysteries! There's a secret world underneath our own! It's kind of about the magic of reading! The concept of the book is at least interesting and possibly great; the elevator pitch for this book would probably name-check some of my favorite fantasies. And having read it, I can say that there are things in the book that are worth reading and remembering.

But there could have been so many more.

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A fragment

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 20:23:02 GMT

"Writing a beginning is easy. Either write a person your reader will want to meet, a place your reader will want to go, or an event your reader will want to follow."

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Turning the crank

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 21:10:27 GMT

There's an accepted truism about creativity that you need to be able to let your mind wander sometimes to really be creative. But when you have anxiety, your mind doesn't really wander. It gets stuck in tracks. And the tracks are usually stressful and unpleasant.

This message brought to you by me lying quietly on the couch thinking "Gee, it would be nice to be creative again" and feeling the ratchet in my chest tighten instead.

I do want to be creative again, probably more than anything else I want just for myself. But it's proving to be more difficult than it ever has been for reasons I have a hard time articulating. I feel like I'm turning the crank on a old-school car but the engine refuses to start-- I'm sweaty but also not getting anywhere.

All I can do is keep trying a little bit at a time: a journal entry here, a poem there, a few pages of random thoughts scribbled on legal pads. Anything is better than nothing. Sooner or later something should start to catch, to spark. I just hope it's sooner rather than later. This is a lot of work when it doesn't come with the corresponding joy.

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Inside Out

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 21:22:02 GMT

In darkness I begin again.

There are two doors to open:

in and out, like breathing,

clamped shut like my ribs.

The left, in--

bricked up by days and weeks and fears;

a wall of real holding back the true.

I find a crack of hope within the mortar

and feel the breath of night.

The right, out--

cracked mirrors papered over

in silence that admits no music.

I whisper a rusted word

and see a wink of beauty through the keyhole.

I reach for flickers in the dark

and take them in to stir the dust of me.

The doors conceal, obstruct, remember;

but there is there.

Perhaps tomorrow I will open.

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Faith Meditation

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 22:25:38 GMT

Through a stained-glass window, the world is simple:

all things a few bright colors,

all things divided neatly,

all things part

of a larger picture.

But a woman walks into the world,

squints at me,

and leaves

the window unchanged

and my vision shattered.

I can move on to the next window,

lose myself again in beauty,

understand the same trees in the same five colors—

or I can open the door.

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Past and the Future

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 12:56:36 GMT

Two things.

1) My politics were formed during W's presidency, and I learned a lot of lessons then that are still with me. But I'd forgotten the visceral feeling of waking up angry every. single. morning. And that's going to be an order of magnitude worse this time around. With W I was basically just cranky, but this time I need to find some way to channel it or my anger is going to do some real damage to me and mine.

2) My wife said to me yesterday, "I can't believe it took Donald Trump to get you on Facebook." And... yeah. Facebook is too useful of an organizing and communication tool to ignore now. I need to be supporting my friends and facing my enemies, and my circle here is too small for that kind of public work.

Dreamwidth is always going to be where the really personal stuff is going to go. I don't want anyone seeing that other than a few people I trust. But Facebook is where the work is going to get done.

I'm still trying to figure out what that's going to look like. Do I repost news items? Do I reply to other people's thoughtless shit? Do I block people or try to engage them? I'm not sure yet (and I welcome any advice on this score.) But it's time for a little activism, and facebook is a reasonable place to start.

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Because I need to write something

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 15:52:33 GMT

As I process my shattering grief and my incandescent rage this election, I am only beginning to realize where I am in American history: namely, where we were a century ago.

We are going to relitigate basic human equality and agency again, as we have done every fifty years or so since the Civil War. We are going to fight to break the grip of the ultra-rich, just like we fought the monopolists and the Great Depression.

We are going to march, and riot, and protest. We are going to suffer violence and get thrown in jail. They are going to starve us and deport us, impoverish us and deny us. We are going to be hated and held in contempt.

In my naivete and privilege I thought this would not be my life. That this was not my America. I believed that we were moving forward a little at a time, even when it meant ignoring the voices crying out that it wasn't enough.

I was wrong. We are doing this again.

I may never get my dream of America back. Certainly I no longer expect to see it in my lifetime. I find myself thinking of the First World War, and how the rhetoric and feeling at the time said that it was the war to end all wars. But history repeats itself. I think of myself in fifty years, when the next revolution has truly come and been washed away, and I despair.

But it changes nothing. We will still fight, because the present is unacceptable. We will still fight because every human is worth defending, period. We will still fight because we have no choice.

I lost a lot of illusions this week, and the truth is terrible. Half of America voted to step backwards, and that means that history is once again going to repeat. I don't think most of those people know what that means.

But I'm starting to.

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Null Point

Wed, 29 Jun 2016 12:53:18 GMT

At some point maybe I'll turn this into a meditation, but I don't have the time or focus for poetry just now.

There are times when nothing is a blessing-- when the absence of a thing is necessary and good. Today I look at the world-- at the things I have to do-- and the emotions that looking triggers are keeping me from doing anything.

The only way I can get started is to push the world away-- to find a small, still, empty place inside myself where there is nothing. Where there is no reason not to begin. From there I can decide to move, and when I open my eyes I find myself already in motion.

So.

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An observation

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 13:02:40 GMT

There are many kinds of negative life experiences you can make art out of. Exhaustion is not one of them.

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Tea Leaves

Wed, 06 Jan 2016 04:26:50 GMT

There are two times when I really want to get back to writing: when I find a story that's amazing and I want to make more of it, and when I find a story disappointing and think "This could have been so much better. I could have done this better."

This post brought to you by Divergent, for reference, and I'll bet you can figure out which type it was. Maybe I'll resurrect the Rules of Drama. :-P

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The inevitable Star Wars post

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:25:43 GMT

We finally got to see Force Awakens. I'm still thinking about it the next day, which is a good sign. It was definitely good enough to see, although I'm a little sad I didn't go with one of the super-pumped opening weekend crowds. The energy would have been awesome.

I'm in a place right now where the return of the old stuff really didn't do much for me other than elicit a few smiles-- and there was a lot of homage. The parts that gripped me were where they went somewhere new, and fortunately there was a lot of that too. Even better, unlike the prequels the heart was there. You care about the characters and what happens to them. Kasdan's presence in the writing room is palpable, and it's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that my favorite part of the movie was the humor.

I have some gripes and I'm not one of the OMG BEST MOVIE EVER people, but I definitely left the theater wanting more. I'm genuinely excited for the next one, which should break the mold more and use the excellent framework that this one sets up.

The one thing I'm wondering is how this movie works for kids who've never seen the other movies. I really hope this will be one of those movies for young people, like the originals were for me. But on that one only time will tell.

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Random noir

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 16:12:27 GMT

From my head this morning:
"The night was heavy. The fog settled in like a lead weight, and the streetlights flickered like the tips of half-smoked cigarettes."

Don't ask, I have literally no idea.

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Fifth, I think?

Wed, 18 Nov 2015 14:49:45 GMT

For resignation: Mistral

I've generally been thinking of this phase of my life as a temporary detour-- something that will pass in a little while and then I can get back to the life I had before.

This morning I am realizing that this is nonsense, and obviously so. My circumstances are forging me anew into some other person, and even when the fire has died the shape will remain. I will carry the marks of this for the rest of my life.

It's not an inherently bad thing; life is change. But the me that survives this won't want the same things-- won't be capable of the same things-- as the me that preceded it. There is no going back.

Since college I've thought of my life in regenerations: versions of myself that die and give way to new interpretations. I believe this will be my fifth. Today I recognize the change for what it is. I have no idea who I'm becoming, but it will be something new.

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Anniversary

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 13:55:43 GMT

Today is our third wedding anniversary.

I married her because she brings me joy. But we survived this year because she is a warrior.

All my love to my dauntless companion, with me in darkness and light.

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Ex Post Facto

Wed, 01 Jul 2015 16:13:24 GMT

So a few months ago I was denied life insurance twice-- by two different companies.

This morning I was for some reason thinking about it, and a thought came with startling clarity: they think I'm going to die.

It is an object of some small hope that the immediate follow-up thought was: well, fuck them.

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Prisoner's Meditation

Tue, 14 Apr 2015 18:24:52 GMT

I feel the limits with my fingers:
the chains of circumstance
that bind me to these walls,
this life.

They are unyielding, bitter, solid--
and I seem made of salt tears
in this cold place.

But if I am tears then I am water,
and water knows
that there is never one way, one shape;
water always finds a way.

No one will release me from this cage.
But cages are built to hold the strong,
and I am only water.

I fit my finger to the keyhole,
let myself turn,
and I am free.

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