ONLY AHSOKA IN THE BUILDING: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

“I’ll try spin-offing. That’s a good trick.” Ambassador Spock, How I Met Your Farscape. Episode Four: Back to the Middle of the Future.

In my last blog post I began watching a television show: AHSOKA. This is a STAR WARS spin-off. With two episodes available, I watched one and had to stop. I sensed something. Another TV show clouded everything.
   Hard to see, the references were.
   And so I unearthed REBELS. A long TV show in a galaxy…wait. It’s the same galaxy. We’ll come back to galaxies that are further away than galaxies that are closer though still far away from us. Or something.
   After 75 episodes of REBELS I was ready to return to AHSOKA. I started with the first episode all over again, and this time…I pointed at the screen in recognition like Lenny D. on a fucking mission.
   Now I understand who Clancy Brown is portraying. And the mural on the wall makes sense. The rebel with the purple hair believes Ezra is still out there in another galaxy that people could find if only they had a key…
   Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand let me stop you there.
   This Tomb Raider bullshit works well in Tomb Raider. Hell, it works in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But we’ve already seen that it’s a steaming pile of bantha excrement in a STAR WARS movie.
   Make that two STAR WARS movies.
   We need to find Luke Skywalker, and there’s a map and he’s far away. So we’ll revisit the DEATH STAR stuff from earlier films and tread water until the running-time brims over and then something, something, Dark Side.
   Okay. Character is far away. Mysterious map leads there. Been there, seen that, disbelieved it. Didn’t buy the T-shirt.
   And now, in AHSOKA, there’s a key that unlocks a map to a place where a character is far away. So far, so television.
   Back to the movies for a moment. STAR WARS: Episode (checks notes, counts fingers, ignores ROGUE ONE to reach a grand total of…) 9. Throw in the Tomb Raider dagger that leads to a DEATH STAR ruin at sea. Okay. (Not okay.) These movies and TV shows like to set up ridiculous things and repeat them. There’s this dagger, see. And if you take it to an exact spot after a mighty quest and you line up that dagger with the ruins, then…
   Raiders of the Lost Ark. Take a rod of a specific length and fit the jewel to it. Visit the map room at a certain time of day. You’ve found what you were looking for.
   I guess this location thing worked in THE MUMMY. Go somewhere and wait and you’ll see the lost city of Hamunaptra. In a lumbering western, I suppose it worked in Mackenna’s Gold. Let me dig through the archaeology for you. Tomb Raider weirdly inspires later-era STAR WARS, with the computer game quest item that matches up to a far-flung location, something, something, Darth Vader was redeemed for this?!
   Tomb Raider takes its inspiration from Raiders of the Lost Ark. This is true of The Mummy. It dips more than its bandaged toe into the world of Indiana Jones. Raiders of the Lost Ark, in turn, takes a grain of influence from Mackenna’s Gold. As does The Mummy.
   In Mackenna’s Gold, we have a rope bridge that George Lucas would remember when plundering The Temple of Doom, and there’s a hidden treasure revealed by standing at a particular spot come sunrise.
   Be at a place at that special time. See the hidden thing. The Mummy. Then the advanced variation on that is to be at a place with the item and see a hidden thing thanks to a Tomb Raider magic plot crystal. How lumbering is Mackenna’s Gold, exactly? The movie isn’t the most lumbering western I’ve had the misfortune to sit through.
   But it is a bit of a struggle, outstaying its welcome at over two hours. On paper, the idea looks great. The assembled acting crowd is definitely a once-in-a-lifetime cast. Too many great actors are crammed in there, though, and they all compete for scenes. Some more successfully than others.
   On paper? Find the hidden valley of gold. Treasure. Clues. Strange rock formation. Odd sunrise. A shadow from the rock finger, pointing to the hidden entrance. Was that much of an influence on George Lucas? He was present for the filming of the movie. So, yes, damn it. He cut his teeth on that film.
   Usually it’s the Charlton Heston vehicle Secret of the Incas that people point to as the inspiration for Indiana Jones, and not this Gregory Peck western. The truth is, Lucas and Spielberg took inspiration from anything and everything.
   Mackenna’s Gold. Rock finger at sunrise points to hidden entrance. See Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Mummy for similar. We’re in the general area. Never mind the specifics.
   AHSOKA. Here, Rubik’s Ball, a variation of his cube, is the key to the map leading way over there in another galaxy far from the usual STAR WARS galaxy…itself far from ours. And that’s where we’ll find Luke Skywalker Moff Gideon Blue Admiral butterfly Thrawn.
   Wasn’t Kaniska Canace great in that STAR WARS spin-off spin-off spin-off?
   In The Rise of Skywalker Farms, Inc. our brave adventurers discover the dagger of Ochi the Bestie, or whatever the actual spelling is in the original alien language. They use it to conjure up a street-view scene of the DEATH STAR from 2019 – the latest street-view available – and they all head off to some collective destiny.
   The ultimate destination of that destiny is Exegol – which sounds like the sort of rogue galactic oil corporation that the Emperor would use to force Ewoks off native Alaskan land. Anyway, spoiler alert, the big ape falls off the skyscraper and everyone cries: #sadface.
   This isn’t the galactic map story from The Force Awakens you are looking for. But it might as well be. No matter the strange choices in STAR WARS, repeat your strange choices. This is the way. Apparently.
   Speaking of that way. In The Mandalorian, a show that squeezes every drop of juice from the character of Boba Fett – despite the bounty hunter’s appearance in STAR WARS amounting to less than ten minutes of screen-time in the original trilogy – we have a lumbering problem.
   One entire series of the Manda lore show was given over to the return of a character: Moff Gideon. And AHSOKA is a show that repeats that strange choice with recycled lore. We’re offered a series that is all about the return of the evil character Thrawn.
   It feels like a retread of the Moff Gideon storyline. Bonus content: the return of Thrawn means the return of Ezra. That’s Ezra from the 75 episodes of REBELS. I’m glad I watched all of those before returning to this live-action spin-off.
   Otherwise, when Ezra appeared, that would’ve meant nothing to me. It could be a thankless role for the actor who comes in to bring Ezra to life in a live-action performance. But the casting was perfect. He’s really Ezra. If you’ve seen, y’know, all the other stuff.
   All of which leads me to a point about a TV show. And that show is Only Murders in the Building. I prefer the STAR WARS spin-offs to be as self-contained as possible. Yes, there will be things in a spin-off that refer to the wider galaxy.
   AHSOKA fails in the requirement to stay self-contained. From the start, you really need to see 75 episode of REBELS or you’ll have no clue. No investment in character. Why should we care about rescuing Ezra? On the basic principle that we should care about anyone who needs rescue?
   Only Murders in the Building isn’t a spin-off. Yes, it stars two of the amigos – they turn the third amigo into Selena Gomez – but it isn’t a spin-off from ¡Three Amigos! Only Murders, or OMIT B, is its own story.
   If you are going to say OMIT B, then it should be for life.
   As I type this, Only Murders in the Building and AHSOKA both have one episode to go. The science fiction show depends heavily on lore from elsewhere. It is not self-contained. And the murder mystery show…
   Also depends heavily on lore from elsewhere. From everywhere. Luckily, I once accidentally caught a bunch of Sondheim musicals on TV, preparing me for murder off-Broadway. OMIT B is on its third series. In three runs of episodes, the murder mysteries are self-contained. No spin-off TV viewing required. They give you the TV show inside the TV show with Brazzos. Possibly Jane Lynch at her finest.
   It helps if you’ve seen STAR WARS to watch ROGUE ONE. For AHSOKA, the REBELS saga is essential viewing. That’s a lot of homework.
   Murder mystery show? Admittedly, you should have a passing familiarity with murder mystery movies, comedy adventures, New York as a city, musicals of the Broadway variety…
   That’s a lot of homework. Do you need to know the movies of any guest stars in the murder show? It helps if you see something by Paul Rudd and something else featuring Meryl Streep. They have a go at their own careers. A game cast, indeed. That’s year three. Very musical. This sends the investigation into a whole new direction.
   I’ve said elsewhere that it is difficult to feature murder stories that are all based around the one building in New York and…three years of the show is pushing it. As I am staying away from potential spoilers, I don’t know if the murder mystery amigos are coming back for a fourth run. It would be nice if they quit now, while ahead.
   One episode to go for both shows. I know which one is more memorable. It’s the crazy one, with holes in the plot you could drive the Statue of Liberty through.
   I need to be aware of stuff to watch both shows. But watching other shows is a requirement for the science fiction series. This is where STAR WARS and MARVEL fall to the dust, wheezing, under the corporate boot of Darth Homework.
   There was a time when this was not a requirement. Before the dark times…before the Disney Empire. What sort of TV fires me up, right now? Only Murders in the Building.
   I can’t discuss the plot, but it is memorable. AHSOKA has a plot that I can spell out. The return of Ezra/Thrawn. But it takes homework for something as basic as that. And it won’t be the more memorable of the two TV shows ending this week.
   The science fiction show should be a straightforward task. And the comedy murder mystery isn’t. Dying is easy. Comedy is hard. You can do both. Just search for Jack Lemmon’s grave.

THE CASE OF THE SPLIT BOOK: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

In August 2015 I blogged about the best and worst books on my shelves. Not in terms of content. Best-preserved. Worst-preserved. There are hundreds of books that I’d categorise as well-preserved. And hardly any books that are truly falling apart.
   At the time, I lamented the disintegration of a movie guide compiled by Leonard Maltin. If you are the sort of movie snob who sneers at Leonard Maltin and his cinematic output, preferring Leslie Halliwell’s dissection of cinema greats, note that even permanent grumpy bastard Halliwell acknowledged Maltin as someone who paved the way for so many writers in that field. Including the many writers who contributed to Maltin’s guide…
   Maltin comes across as a bright and breezy team-player. Halliwell was more of a lone gunman at a funeral, looking to settle non-existent grudges with the friends of deceased movie directors.
   The chief criticism of Halliwell? Still doing the rounds on the internet. In the case of Maltin and his crew, at least Maltin and his crew watched the movies they wrote about, whereas Halliwell, er, didn’t always see the stuff he panned.
   We can say that about him. He’s dead, and unlikely to sue.
   After that, the other criticism of Halliwell is that his view of cinema had a severe before and after phase. He liked the stuff he watched while growing up, and came to detest the stuff he saw floating past him as he grew old.
   What a grumpy bastard.
   I view Halliwell’s legacy as more about bringing old movies to television. That was his job. If you watched a black and white film on Channel 4 on a rainy day, chances are Halliwell was the guy who brokered the deal.
   No, I don’t have Halliwell’s guide on my shelves. Reasons. I saw his books on the shelves of movie snobs whose taste in films had clearly disappeared up someone else’s arsehole, never mind their own arseholes. And so, my perception is a little tainted.
   So. I have these Maltin guides. They are slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate interpretations of the source material. (John Donne, reviewing Hamlet for Leonard Maltin’s guide. The Zeffirelli version of the play. Three stars, with slightly catty comments in iambic pentameter.)
   Why do I use Maltin’s books? They list the movie running time very clearly, unlike many a Blu-ray cover. I see, glancing at the reference shelf, that I inherited an encyclopaedia on film personnel by Ephraim Katz. Had to move some dust out of the way to access that one.
   What don’t I use? Clearly, dustily, the Katz volume. I don’t put faith in star-rated movie review systems. Neither, it seems, did Halliwell. For roughly the last twenty years of his life, he stopped handing out four star awards to movies.
   Tell me the year of release and how long the picture runs. Note if it is in black and white. Don’t put spoilers if you can avoid them. By all means, give me your view of the film. Don’t tell me my view of the film, though. I’ll provide my own appreciation of the movie, thanks all the same.
   Without spoilers.
   Halliwell in particular had a reputation for spoiling movies. He gave zero stars to Titanic, and noted that this sort of Hollywood depiction of a real-life boat crash in 1912 was constructed squarely with one eye on a sequel.
   I made some of that up. He died in 1989. His books survive on reference shelves to this day. Turning to another work on my reference shelf – the Biographical Dictionary edited by Magnus Magnusson – I see there is no entry on Halliwell.
   Magnusson himself was such a figure of note, translating breezy Icelandic sagas to English, that he could have included himself in that dictionary, but, presumably, was too modest to say anything.
   Maltin’s crew served up enough atmosphere in short entries on cinema to satisfy the grumpiest tastes. If anything, Halliwell reminds me of Thayer David in Save the Tiger, meeting in a dive of a cinema to arrange a plot-based activity that I will not spoil for you here. Jack Lemmon wants him to (REDACTED), as that would save a lot of bother.
   I don’t know why Thayer David reminds me of Leslie Halliwell. Add glasses and a beard and you are nearly there. You could say that of Leonard Maltin, too, I guess.
   Don’t look at me. Watch the screen.
   Wonderful advice from Thayer David, for all professional movie writers. It’s not about you, but about the movie you watched. Or think you saw…
   I’ve sat through movie reviews in newspapers that dropped American political assassinations into the wrong year, put the wrong Bruce on the battlefield at Bannockburn, set forth a view on a movie based on the music that didn’t actually surface in that film – invalidating the point, and, most tellingly, threw a spoiler into American Beauty – Annette Bening’s character kills him.
   More accurate spoiler: she doesn’t kill him at all. What fucking film were you watching? Spoiler for the spoiler: Kevin Spacey’s character tells you, in his introduction near the start of the film, that he has less than a year left on the planet.
   Newspaper and magazine reviews of films. Yes, I guess they were a thing, once. Back in 2015, Leonard Maltin’s movie reference work lay just behind me, on the floor, in three chunks. I am about to remember the office layout. Just behind me is the wall. And I mean right behind me, right now.
   There was a time, in this book-festooned alcove, when the desk was turned to the left and I had space on the floor behind me. Space enough to leave the room, for that is where the door lives.
   The reference book was in three chunks. Now I write of the tome again, and it sits above me on a shelf, ahead, slightly to the right of this keyboard. Still in three chunks. Why mention it? I’ve only just replaced the book.
   But the new version isn’t a new version. It’s split in two chunks. I should say…in two volumes. Eventually, when Maltin stopped doing those annual paperback guides, the body of work was split into two pieces. The classic movie book takes us through silent movies up until the talkies in 1965. And the later, slightly thicker, volume goes up to the end of civilisation as we once knew it: revised, 2017.
   That was in the Before Times, when you could go to the cinema without catching the plague. For movie information, I head to the internet. This will always cover the latest releases, as if by technology. (Possibly, as if by magic.) If I want the Maltin-flavoured cinema observations of yesteryear, I now have those two books on my shelves.
   They are chunky paperbacks, and will not stand the test of time. Perhaps both volumes will split into three slices, as the earlier guide did. These replacement apples didn’t fall far from the tree. I described the broken volume as being a thick paperback made of thin paper with no more durable a spine than that of a liquidiser-fresh jellyfish.
   And I commented that the internet is the place I head off to for movie information. Maltin’s illness and the rise of the internet combined to bring his era to an end. It was a good run. He had decades out of publishing the guide, which went annual in the mid-1980s.
   But how to make money off that, in the digital world? Could it be done? Maltin and his team had a stab at it. But the book is the book. Creating an annual guide doesn’t translate into a minute by minute guide, online. The atmosphere is wildly different.
   Books like that, reference works, provide an alternative to just using the Wikipedia. (Shout out to Jennifer’s Body. Two stars from Leonard Maltin. Ah, taste is taste, opinion is opinion, and rarely the twain shall meet.)
   Reference works should be dead. I have a full shelf of them above me, with other reference books bleeding onto many a bookcase elsewhere. But they aren’t dead. I don’t want every snippet of information to come from the Wikipedia.
   Seek multiple sources. Granted, Wikipedia will provide you with multiple sources – nearer the site of the initial explosion of knowledge. If you are to read the Wikipedia at all, pay attention to the TALK pages. You’ll learn a little more.
   For example, if you accidentally stumble on a Korean pop-singer’s Wikipedia entry, you’ll note the invisible collision between Wikipedia’s standards and the standards of the average pop fandom.
   All those entries demanding the height of a poodle be returned to the main page as socially relevant…are cruelly crushed by soulless editors who simply state NOT DONE. The heartless fiends go on to complicatedly state, acidly, why Wikipedia is not a fan magazine.
   As for internet movie sites…
   No, I never go near Rotten Tomatoes. I only use the Internet Movie Database to check the extensive cast listings. Siskel and Ebert? Weren’t they on The Muppet Show…
   Metacritic? I don’t believe I have, though everyone’s a critic online. Including Halliwell, who is resurrected there. And who remains grumpy there, even when handing one of his cherished films four stars. Yes, I’ve read Halliwell’s line in movie chat…
   Offline? Halliwell? No thanks. Not on my shelves. Grumpy and Deaded. Deaded being one of the forgotten characters in that Snow White cartoon. (Four stars from Maltin. And from Halliwell. You can all stop arguing about this. Disney’s first gay character was the Wicked Queen from that cartoon. The end.)
   Movie guides provide opinions by teams of critics, reviewers, and space cadets wired to the back end of the moon. There are capsule overviews and space capsule overviews. You sometimes wonder which planet these opinions were formed on.
   But there are facts. Production details. Snippets. Trivial items. The overall writing style of Maltin and his crew appealed to me. And the book, falling apart on my shelves, bugged me. So I replaced that with two books that I reached for while researching films mentioned in this blog post. There. I’ve had my use out of them already.

THE ARCHIVE GAME: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

It's that time of the year again. Put the whole year's archive to bed, instead of keeping it in bits.
   What does that mean? Everything is backed the fuck up - for all time. Or until the rise of the Skynet computer replaces the human race with overly-muscled Austrian-accented killing machines.

*

Putting the whole archive to bed isn't about backing everything up. (It is. Not JUST that, though.) Archive bedtime is about making sure all the material I backed up is...well, at the very worst...semi-organised.

   Unfortunately, I'm Jack Lemmon. Watch The China Syndrome. Jack talks about defence.
   In depth.
   This is the second time I've mentioned that in a blog post. See what I did, there? If you haven't read the earlier post, it's okay. You caught on to the idea here.
   Your back-up system has a back-up system, and so on.

*

It's important for authors (and others) to save their work. The best form of backing a story up is still publication.

*

What changed, this time around? I shuffled the deck before I dealt new cards in the archive game.

   The emergency reserve laptop was still the machine of record as far as the archive went. Content grew there. I copied that content over to the internet-linked computer via an external hard drive.

   And files crawled from there to cloud storage. Two computers. One external drive. The cloud. And the odd USB memory stick, for core files.

   Time passes. Data requirements balloon. The smaller computer is no longer the best place to run the digital archive from. Every year, the process shifts and changes.

   This year, most of the over-duplication problem was dealt with when I converted  to the latest version of Windows. I always create too many copies of vital files...

   Well, that's better than the alternative. Two folders, with different names, housing the same effing files? Well. Damn.

   Annual archiving, putting the whole thing to bed, involves killing off screeds of duplicate files - without killing off the WRONG files.

   I put that crap in order when I jumped to the new operating system in 2015. So this January's final final check was not-so-secretly prepared way back in misty September.
   And this brand new year, my double-check of a double-check of a double-check spotted...
   Two rogue files.
   An hour spent scouring folders, and I nailed the problem. Problem solved. As I type, I am halfway through loading the most recent update onto the cloud, replacing the earlier cloudy version.

*

Always review how you archive things. Change for the sake of change is nothing special. But change dealing with a shifting tech situation beyond your control...at least you can dive in and have some input on what happens next.

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So. This year's lesson, at the last moment, is that I had a tail computer and a dog computer. Switching those labels around made more sense.

*

On a separate point...

   I'm about to have coffee. Though that sustains me, it is unlikely to send me soaring back to the giddy heights of weekly blogging. I'll continue to blog monthly, if I can.

   Too soon to say, in cold grey January. But. I hope to have something worth blogging about in dreary February.

*

Back up your work. Enjoy writing. Drink coffee. I think that about covers it. Except for all the other things I left out.

SAVE YOUR WORK. BACK IT UP. COPY THAT. AND DON'T FORGET TO PUBLISH: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Archiving on my mind. Or...
   On the brain.
   Once upon a then, I lost two computers to an evil kidney transplant. The evil kidney was a defective DVD player. It killed the donor and the donee.
   But I didn't lose data - only the primitive machine husks surrounding all my precious, semi-precious, and not-so-precious info.
   The info escaped in pods designed for catastrophe.
   This year I spent a long time archiving last year's material. The better part of three weeks, as I type.
   Save your data from the cold. Wrap the info in multiple layers. Watch Jack Lemmon talk about defence in depth in The China Syndrome.

*

So what did I back up, where, how, when, and why?

Why? To preserve my files.

When? Periodically. Often. We're appropriating a military term, defence in depth, and applying the notion to the saving of work. Let's run with that military theme...
   At the tactical level, I save stories paragraph by paragraph. Down at microscopic size, I may save after a witty line of dialogue.
   Up at the grand strategic level, I'll make sure I have the whole year's output saved come the start of a new year.
   Rising to cosmic levels of awareness, each year's archive is shunted over to a new year after saving. So the 2011 archive is the 2012 archive. And that's also the 2013 archive.
   The 2011 archive is saved three times over.
   This isn't of great concern in terms of size - Microsoft Word files may be wordy, but they are rarely massive. Just checking this, I see the 2013 archive has around a thousand files - and that doesn't amount to 400 MB of material.
   The 300-odd MB is mostly taken up by cover art experiments. Typically, a FICTION FACTORY story file uses 400 K.
   I'm writing this directly into Blogger and saving it. The autosave refused to work and gave me a warning. I saved.
   Whoops. For a few seconds there, the blog post accidentally published. Mouse took a spasm. I was able to revert to unpublished mode.
   Time to refresh my memory. AND DON'T FORGET TO PUBLISH. Perhaps I should add, WHEN YOU ARE READY.
   Okay, so you get the idea. The 2013 archive is the 2012 archive with more material, and the 2012 archive is the 2011 archive with more material.
   All of those archives are backed up. Copies of copies of copies. We'll hear from Swift...

So, naturalists observe, a flea, Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.

How and where? Digitally, for the most part. Files are stored on two computers, on USB memory sticks, on the (koff) external hard drive, on DVD, and on the mystical cloud.
   Non-digitally, some material is printed or written by hand.
   Organically, I store material in the mind.

*

Where else? On Amazon. My stories are published. Where else? As a matter of record, with the British Library. Where else? In the minds of readers.
   Just remembered, I gave a disc to someone for safekeeping. And there are printed stories in the clutches of assorted night creatures.
   Also, my two living hard drives from dead computers? They act as back-ups, even though they'll gradually fall out of date.

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I'm going to mention the external hard drive. It died. No it didn't. The external hard drive was there to act as an extra line of defence. (Though I archive annually for convenience, I don't wait the whole effing year to save files to separate sources.)
   Couldn't access it.
   Tried everything. (Koff.) The only way to make use of the device was to format the poor thing. Didn't work.
   What's the punchline? I removed the dead drive from this machine with the intention of trying, one last time, to access the drive from another computer.
   The second I unplugged the USB connection, my computer flickered. I realised, instantly (far too late), what I should have suspected FROM THE START.
   My USB cable was defective.
   And so it proved. I performed a simple transplant operation, sliding another cable into place. Suddenly my extra back-up facility was alive again.
   Immediately, I deleted files from the drive. Duplicate files that are truly redundant? Remove those. After that, I updated the external hard drive. An extra layer, protecting against the cold.

*

What happens if defence in depth fails?
   Let me think about that. All the paperwork would have to burn. And drives? Count them. Five separate hard drives must also burn beyond repair. Three USB sticks, too. The fireproof safe? Ditto.
   I'd have to lose paper stories out and about. And any discs I gave for safekeeping. Oh, and the cloud storage...
   If that stuff goes, yes, all of that, I'll step out into the glowing landscape and embrace the fucking meteor-strike.

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By far the safest method of backing up your work is PUBLICATION. Run a test. Go to AMAZON. KINDLE STORE. Type RLL. That's my back-up system.
   Make it yours. Publish your stories.