Taven Moore's Blog, page 41

Question 3: Movie Recommendations

What movies have you all fired up lately?

What are some recent films that have tickled your imagination and you think others might like?

Go!

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Question 1 : Book Recommendations
Question 2: TV Show Recommendations
Don’t Watch This Movie

[Perry] I Met Her Last Christmas

I met her last Christmas.

My cousin introduced us. It was one of those awkward first meetings, you know? Like, I’d seen her around here and there, always very casually and very occasionally. We’d never actually been introduced before.

My cousin knew though. He’s one of those guys, you know? He uses some large and exaggerated gestures but despite his lack of subtlety, he can be pretty perceptive.

So he arranged things, got us together upstairs in his room and introduced us.

She was a little shy, at first. And of course, I was pretty damned nervous. You know that feeling when you admire someone from afar and you sort of think to yourself that there’s no way you’ll ever be together?

Well, let me tell you something. The feeling that happens when you’re standing next to the object of your affection for the first time is just…trembly. That’s the word I’d use. You feel trembly.

It’s a little awkward at first. I know you’re just nodding your head indulgently now as I tell you that but I mean it. Neither of you know anything about each other, she’s all new and crisp to you and I’m an unknown to her too, you know? I know you hear some stories about the way people treat things and you kind of wonder when you meet someone new as to whether or not they’ll let you down as well, right?

But trust starts somewhere and maybe both of us extended it at the same time.

I proceed slowly, carefully. I can’t just read her like a book, you know? You’ve got to take these kinds of things slowly. You approach them with care, like a deer you see in the woods.

But we got to know each other, at least a little better in that public space, both of us knowing that we’d get a lot closer later on that night.

The family Christmas party took forever to end. Normally it would have been a pretty fun-filled night with family but filled with the desire to spend some more private time with her, it was a bit of a slog to get through the night, you know?

Eventually, the night ended.

I took her back to my place and got her upstairs.

We just kind of sat on the bed and looked at each other, tension building up between us like a line of electricity.

I reached out, my hands soft on her cover as I slipped it off and felt the soft black leather beneath it.

Just as I was about to open her up and really get into it, she stops me.

She tells me that she’s just as into me as I’m into her but there’s just one problem. Before we really start getting to know one another, maybe I should meet her four younger sisters first? Who are all dying to meet me? She’s sure we’ll all get along and that we’d all have a MUCH better time getting to know one another if we were all together at once instead of me just getting to know them one by one.

And damnitall, it made sense, you know?

So I let her go, ease her away from me and help her slip back into her black leather and her covers.

One day…one day soon, we won’t have to stop.

One day, her sisters will arrive at my door in that Amazon packaging box, looking all fresh and clean and on that day, we’ll just push forward full speed ahead and damn the icebergs in our path.

Because one day…

One day, Absolute Sandman Volumes 2-5 will join the Volume 1 sitting by my bookshelf.

One day, they’ll all be mine.

Related posts:

Christmas Music
[Perry] Be Careful What You Leave Out
[Perry] Judging a Book by its Cover

Question 2: TV Show Recommendations

(sensing a pattern?)

Today’s question is thus:

What TV shows have you all fired up lately?

Again, make them something you’ve watched recently so your memory of them is fresh. I loved Transformers as a kid, but memory vs reality is not a pleasant comparison.

Go!

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Question 1 : Book Recommendations

This week will be a special week. Short blog posts on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday — and hopefully some fantastic commentary.

Today’s question is this:

What books (or short stories or novellas) have you all fired up lately?

What are the BEST, most memorable and enjoyable stories from the pages (e-ink or no) of books that you’ve come in contact with in … say the last year?

The book doesn’t have to be recent, just your memory of it.

You may choose more than one, but limit it to three if you’re overzealous (like myself).

Go!

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When Should You Stop Planning And Start Writing?

Me

So. That little bar in my sidebar has been stuck at 90% for a while. (With luck, by the time this post goes live, I’ll have begun actually writing the story. Not holding my breath.)

Why, you might be wondering, has it stagnated?

Have I been spending all my time watching tv shows and playing Borderlands 2 and reading books?

*cough*

No.

I mean, yes. But also no. Steven and I have been working on the worldbuilding and the planning (and a short story for a writing competition that I didn’t tell you guys about. Gosh, I suck at keeping y’all in the loop. *blush*) and we’ve been stuck in what Larry Brooks calls “The Search for Story”.

Larry Brooks

Larry Brooks has a great website (storyfix.com) and a great book on writing (Story Engineering) and another great book on writing coming out soon (Story Physics).

I recommend Story Engineering for anyone trying to get a handle on the basics of storytelling (not grammar, but key elements that build a successful story) and I’m pretty sure I’ll end up recommending Story Physics for people who understand everything in the Story Engineering book.

What I’ll talk about here, I learned from him and he freely offers a ton of fantastic advice on his blog. I recommend it.

/plug

Core Dramatic Question

One of the things Larry talks about rather a lot is making sure you know what your story is actually about.

He offers a lot of tools that help you go from the BAD “this is what my story is about” …

A woman who can speak to living plants.

… to a GOOD “this is what my story is about”

One of the king’s undergardeners, a young woman gifted with plantspeech, overhears rumors of a plot to overthrow the king and poison half the city’s citizens. Her warnings ignored, she and her plant friends must find a way to stop the disaster even when she herself becomes a target.

The difference is more than just the level of detail. It’s in what that detail says about the story.

“What is this story about?” can be answered in too many ways.

An Exercise

Take your current Work in Progress and answer the question “what is this story about?”

Take your answer and rephrase it as a question — the core dramatic question that the reader will be asking themselves as they read the story.

In our plant example, the rephrasing might be :

Will the undergardener be able to use her plantspeech to save a king a stop a plague despite the fact that nobody will believe her, before the villain’s henchmen manage to kill her?

Okay, not my best work, but you get the idea.

This is the Core Dramatic Question.

We need to set this question up in the reader’s mind early in the book, then spend the entire book working towards the answer.

Yes, the story features a girl with plantspeech, but the STORY is ABOUT this plague and whether or not she’ll be able to stop it in time. We’ve got stakes, we’ve got conflict, we’ve got antagonists …

And yes, the fact that she flirts with apple trees is a good hook, but it’s not enough to build an entire story around.

When Do You Start Writing?

Start writing when you can build an effective Core Dramatic Question. Until then, you don’t actually know what your STORY is about, even if you know the hook and some details and characters.

You need all those things to write a story, but we’re not character portrait artists.

We’re storytellers.

What story are you telling?

 

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[Perry] How to Create Mulled Apple Cider

The Very Perry Wednesday theater company proudly presents this Wednesday’s attempt at entertainment.

A snippet of an email conversation between our very own esteemed Lady Moore and myself.

*Curtains rise*

Perry: DO YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT TO MAKE BEFORE IT GETS WARM?

I want to try making some mulled apple cider.

Have you ever tried that?

Tami: I have never tried it but now I want to. How do you mull an apple? Do you stare at it pensively, mulling it over?

Perry: Honestly, Tami, my dear.

Sometimes one listens to the words you utter and can’t help but think that you are deliberately attempting to be a silly goose.

But being the soul of courtesy and wit, my dear, I shall try to answer the question in the spirit in which it was uttered.Of COURSE, one does not mull over an apple in order to turn it into cider.

What purpose would such an act serve?

If you were endeavoring to create a mulled TAMI apple cider, then yes, you would mull over the apple before some enterprising fellow (perhaps, one such as myself) would come along and pop you into the pot to simmer and boil, apple and all.

To create mulled APPLE cider, one must provide the curious circumstances required to let the APPLE mull over its fate.

To do this, one must take an apple and first treat it gently.

Provide it with a nice all around wash, being not ashamed to ensure that every bit of it has been completely cleaned.

Then, one must draw out a lean and utterly wicked looking knife and menace the apple for a period of greater than three minutes but no longer than five minutes.

This serves the purpose of getting said apple to work up a bit of a glucose-drive ‘sweat’ so to speak but too much will render the fruit sour due to fear.

Once this has been accomplished, you must use the knife to cut the apple into slices.

Be advised, one must approach the apple from behind when coming up with the blade. If the apple were to see you coming, it would defeat the entire purpose of the exercise and one must begin again from scratch.

Once slices have been removed from the (surprised) apple to expose its insides to the water, simply place the mutilated fellow into a pot of water and set it on a low heat.

This will give the apple time to ‘mull over’ its fate and hopefully, come to terms with its eventual demise but the acceptance of his fate is not completely necessary. So long as the apple mulls over its impending doom as the water heats up, it will have the desired effect of transforming the water around it to a mulled apple-y flavor but it is always a nice bonus if the apple accepts the inevitability of its own demise, is it not?

Continue to leave the water at a boil for a few minutes past the apple’s death and serve in tea mugs with a stick of cinnamon for flavor.

….Alternatively, one can follow this simple recipe, add a shot of brandy or rum for some heat and an added kick, and enjoy while cuddled up under a warm blanket and a fantastic book on a cold winters night as the snow falls thick and silent outside the window just to the left of the couch.<

…..Either way really *blandface*

*Red velvety curtains fwoooomp down onto the stage*

This has been a Very Perry Wednesday Production

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Turning Your Music Into A Ringtone Via ITunes

I’m blogging this because I am going to forget, and I might as well help anyone out there like me who really (really) doesn’t want to go through the same research pain that I did.

This is complicated, but not difficult. Lots of screenshots are provided to try and at least make the complex stuff easy to follow.

Apple? I love you, but fix your shit. This is ridiculous.

Step 1 : Choose your Music

You probably already own a lot of music and don’t want to buy a ringtone based on it … or maybe you can’t find the .m4r extension required by the iPhone.

(Yes, I have an iPhone and I love it. Apple-frustration is allowed in the comments. Apple-hate is not.)

In the above image, I have located the song I want to turn into a ringtone. It’s Zanarkand, from the Final Fantasy X soundtrack.

Not being a huge fan of the newest iTunes UI (it’s just as confusing as the old one, only they moved where everything was so now I have to relearn the new UI. Not awful, just … irritating.) I will point out a few things that you may or may not know.

Sort of in the upper left, there’s a dropdown. In this screenshot, it’s set to “Music”. That’ll be important later when we need to change it. On that same horizontal bar, but in the center, there are little pill buttons for changing how you are organizing your current view. Right now, I’m on “Playlists”, which gives me a menu on the left side of the screen where I could choose FFX in order to find my song.

Step 2 : Shorten Your Song

You cannot have more than 30 seconds of music for a ringtone. At least, that’s what I’ve been told, and I’m sticking to it. Obviously, most songs are rather a lot longer than that. To “shorten” the song, you right click on the song and select “Get Info”.

Inside the resulting menu form, select “Options” from the horizontal menu, then fiddle with the start and stop times to get the exact fragment of the song that you want, making sure that your selected song fragment is no longer than 30 seconds. In the case of Zanarkand, I wanted the opening part of the song, and I found that the 25 second mark was a decent cut-off. The ringtone won’t chop off in the middle of a note or anything.

Once you hit okay, remember that you have not CHANGED your original song. You’ve just told iTunes that when it plays this song, you want it to only play that section. You can listen and keep fiddling with the start/stop times until you’re happy.

Important! When you are done creating your ringtone, go back in and remove your start and stop times. Otherwise, you’ll always only hear that tiny fragment.

Step 3 : Create AAC Version

This next step will either be easy, or stupid. In my case, it was stupid.

Right click on your newly shortened song and select “Create AAC Version”.

Everyone who was capable of doing that step can just skip merrily along to the next bolded header. The rest of you will need to keep going here.

There is a chance that your right click menu does not include “Create AAC Version”. In that case, I am sorry but we need to jump through some more hoops. Almost certainly you have an option that says “Create MP3 Version”, right?

Well, we need to change that.

Go up to your iTunes menu and select “Preferences”.

Inside the Preferences window, you’ll need to be in the General tab, then down at the bottom where it has “When You Insert a CD” click the “Import Settings” button. Then in THAT window, change the setting to AAC Encoder using the dropdown.

Accept the change and now you should have the “Create AAC Version” in the right-click menu off the song.

Are you feeling the stupid yet? Right about here, I was pretty sure I didn’t even CARE what my ringtone was. I kept going though, because I am stubborn.

When you’re done here, you might want to change that setting back, assuming you want mp3s to come out of your CD imports.

Also? Those of you on Android phones? You’re free to preen like crazy right now because Androids allow you to use mp3 clips for ringtones.

Moving on.

Step 4

Find, copy, and rename your ringtone.

Find your song by changing that horizontal pill menu to “Songs” and sorting so that your newest songs pop to the top of the list. Do NOT scream incoherently at your computer because the song you created is not in the playlist you’ve been staring at. That doesn’t help.

I checked.

Now that you’ve found your newly-created song clip, I want you to drag it from your iTunes window to your desktop. Don’t worry, it won’t live there long. As soon as you see the copy on your desktop, you can delete the new little song clip from inside iTunes. (I like to keep my stuff tidy).

On your desktop, you should have [filename].m4a.

You need to change the file extension to .m4r.

You can do it manually with the keyboard. No need for extra software or weird steps. You DO need to make sure this step happens.

Step 5 : Add Your Ringtone To Your Phone

Change your iTunes to look at “Tones” using that dropdown I mentioned earlier, kind of in the upper left.

Once you’re looking at your list of custom ringtones (it may be empty right now), drag the newly-renamed file from your desktop into iTunes.

Here’s another stupid thing. If you did this correctly, you’re fine. If, however, you forgot to rename the file on the desktop? You drag the file in and it doesn’t show up in iTunes. Or rather, it DOES, just not in your Tones. At that point, simply renaming the file on the desktop and dragging it in again doesn’t work. You actually have to go into your songs and delete the one you just dragged in before it will allow you to drag the m4r song into the Tones.

Yes. I know. Super ridiculous stupid. If I chose to jailbreak my phone or use illegal software, I’d have been done with this an hour ago.

Moving on.

So that’s what my Tones looks like now. Yes, I have the baby murloc gurgle as my text message sound. Yes, it’s adorable and I love it.

Also, bonus points for anyone who knows the Bastion song Build That Wall (my normal ringtone). Jenny is probably the only person who might see the singham tone up there and laaaaaugh. Jenny, that’s Steven’s ringtone. (She probably didn’t even read this far down. Alas! A wasted joke!)

Also in there is a MLP song and some ringtones from Borderlands 2 (offered already in .m4r format for free off their website. Anyone who loves Tiny Tina should check out the mp3s there)

Anyway. Now, you’ve got your ringtone in the Tones area of your iTunes. Congratulations! Now you need to plug your phone into the laptop and tell it to synch the Tones.

After that, you just synch the phone and you’re golden.

Yes, my phone is named Victor. Two reasons for that. One: The “Wictor, Wictor” gag from the recent Star Trek movie. Two: The character from Dollhouse whose actor needs to get a LOT more work.

Step 6 : Set Your Ringtones on your Phone

No screenshots for this one. You can access your default ringtones from the Settings app, and you can set individual ringtones and sms alerts for people by using the Contacts app and editing a contact.

As an interesting side note, the tone I created for this tutorial was done to replace my alarm. We use my phone as the alarm clock in the morning, and I need something gentler than the default iPhone ringtones to wake me. Zanarkand is pretty, soft, and has all kinds of happy FFX memories wrapped up in it.

All Done!

Hopefully, that saved someone who wants to do this a lot of time and frustration looking up all the other tutorials I used while doing this. They changed enough stuff with the new iTunes that the old tutorials weren’t 100% correct.

Even if future-Tami uses this one time, it will have been worth it.

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[Steve Hall] Tophat and a Tale

A guest post by the illustrious editor Mr. Steve Hall, who loves me even though I persist in using multiple punctuation when communicating with him!!!! *wink*

Here, he describes a new tool of great use to writers and editors alike.

* * * * *

I’m about to make a short story long, so you may want to brew another cuppa before you continue reading.

I am, to use Tami’s term, a word nerd. I love learning about words, their etymology (that is, their history and evolution), and how they are changing, even today. So before we really get started, a little quiz.

Without typing them or looking them up, guess which of the following words is not/are not found in Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary: spellcheck, tophat, commenter, trenchcoat. I’ll supply the answers later in this article.

Because I am a word nerd, I follow a lot of blogs about words. No surprise there, eh? One of the blogs I follow is Fritinancy, by Nancy Friedman. Nancy is in the business of naming: she creates brand names. She also writes about (mostly unfortunate choices in) brand names.

But this article isn’t about Nancy, or Fritinancy, per se. Instead, it’s about serendipity. On Friday, she blogged about the name change of the company previously known as Wordnik, to Reverb, and linked to the Reverb blog article about the process of rebranding the company. Originally, I wasn’t going to read it, but clicked anyway—because marketing interests me almost as much as words do.* So, I read the blog article. And then I got intrigued about one of Reverb’s products, Wordnik. I’d heard of Wordnik before, but had never visited the site, and I doubt I could have told you what Wordnik is (I might have guessed that it’s a crowd-sourced dictionary, but I’d have been wrong: that would be Wiktionary).

So there I was, having found myself at Wordnik’s login page. It resembles google.com to the extent that there is a block to enter a word to search for, so I searched my brain for a word to enter, and tophat flashed into my mind.

Why “tophat”? Because, in editing Choose, Volume III, Tami had used the word (several times). However, Word was flagging it as misspelled. So I called up my trusty Merriam-Webster site and discovered that, indeed, “tophat” is not an alternative spelling for “top hat.” I was merely surprised; Tami was shocked. Or dumbfounded. Or flabbergasted. (Pick one.)

I typed in “tophat,” hit Enter, et voilá: I was staring at a whole litany of sources in which the word “tophat” appeared, together with a Wiktionary definition: n. alternative spelling of top hat. Excitedly, I immediately emailed Tami and told her I’d change all the occurrences of “top hat” back to “tophat.”

Her response? “Also, trenchcoat.” Um, yeah . . . and trenchcoat. As you may have guessed, Bones’s preferred article of dress, “trenchcoat,” is not, according to Merriam-Webster (and American Heritage, if you’re so inclined), an alternative spelling of “trench coat.” However, Wordnik likes it. And I had to laugh at the first citation for “trenchcoat”: “P.S. wearing shorts with a trenchcoat is almost as stupid as white guys with dreadlocks”.

Then I scrolled down a little further, and found this:

‘trenchcoat’ has been looked up 523 times, added to 5 lists, commented on 1 time, and is not a valid Scrabble word. [my emphasis]

Dammit!

My reply to Tami re: trenchcoat. “Actually, I agree on trenchcoat, too. Even if Windows/Google spellcheck objects. (It objects to “spellcheck,” too.)” So does Merriam-Webster. Wordnik, on the other hand, has a ton of citations for spellcheck. Eventually, it will pass muster with Kory Stamper** and her cohorts.

More from Tami: “And ‘commenters’ !!!” [sic] (How many times have I harped on multiple end punctuation, anyway?) To which I responded, “It’s 2013: we’re all commenters!” Even if M-W objects, Wordnik approves.

It was at this point I had an epiphany: for writers of fiction (and editors of same), Wordnik should be added to your short list of “indispensable resources.” Not just for the basic definition or citations, but for its “related words” feature as well:

I especially like the reverse dictionary (words that contain this word in their definition): in some cases, that can be more useful than synonyms.

You may use Wordnik simply by going to the homepage and entering your word to look up. You may also create an account, which will let you create personalized word lists and discuss the words you find.

You may be sure I’ll be using it going forward, as I continue to edit Choose, as well as the next volume of the Saucy Chronicles. So put on your tophat and trenchcoat, join the commenters here—and spellcheck be damned!

____________

* My favorite classes in my MBA program were the two semesters of Marketing. (My least favorite were calculus and statistics.)

** Kory Stamper is a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, and another whose blog I follow. I guess you could say Kory is the ultimate word nerd! The name of her blog is “harm•less drudg•ery.”

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[Perry] World War Z

I held off writing this post for a long time. I waited for the initial outrage to fade and the accompanying internet kerfuffle to die down as everyone who cared enough to follow the issue settled down in grim silence to wait and see what the finished product would look like.

World War Z is a book. It’s actually a damned powerful book. It’s the story of a reporter who goes around collecting the stories of the survivors of a worldwide zombie apocalypse.

Here’s the key word in that pithy summary: survivors.

The book stuck in my mind like a fishbone going down the throat because of that simple fact. World War Z is a story about the survivors and what they went through. It’s a story of a catastrophe that already happened. It’s a story of what people went through to survive when the world was crashing down around their ears.

The sense of poignancy as you read through the novel is staggering. By utilizing the simple method of telling the tale of the survivors of the greatest catastrophe the world has ever known, Max Brooks weaves a story that tugs on all of the right heartstrings.

Reading through the book evokes the same sort of feelings you’d get from looking at the crib where your two year old daughter used to sleep until she was killed.

Yeah, I went there.

The point I want to get across is that it’s a powerful technique and it works. You feel for the survivors and what they went through but there’s no sense as you read it of people thinking they could FIX the problem. There’s just…the weary resignation of the everyday person caught in a situation that’s completely beyond them and doing the best they could to simply survive it.

None of the survivors thought to themselves that they could STOP the zombie apocalypse. None of the survivors displayed thoughts of wanting to save the world.

What’s perfectly captured throughout the book is what normal, everyday people like you or I would feel when caught up in a crisis of such magnitude: Simply the drive to survive and to do what you can to get yourself and possibly your family out of the mess.

In case it hasn’t come through well enough just yet, World War Z is a novel that I very highly recommend.

So imagine the joy most of us felt when we found out that it was being turned into a big budget Hollywood movie.

Imagine how happy we were to find out that Brad Pitt had been cast as the reporter who goes around getting the stories out of survivors.

Then imagine what our faces looked like when the first brief plot summaries of the movie began to surface.

“United Nations employee Gerry Lane traverses the world in a race against time to stop the Zombie pandemic that is toppling armies and governments, and threatening to decimate humanity itself.”

That’s what it said.

Outrage.

Soapboxing.

Table flipping.

Brooding.

Resignation.

And now I’m writing this post.

Here’s the thing (and this totally is a thing from now on, k?). I get that in the course of adapting a novel to the screen, liberties must be taken. I get that. In the majority of occasions, I can agree with it as well.

The Harry Potter movies? I totally understand why they ended up cutting huge swatches of subplot from the movie because the books were simply too frigging long. In order to do a near scene by scene recreation of the book as they did in the first movie, the latter books would have had to have been like three movies long…EACH!

So I understand that.

In the currently running Game of Thrones adaptation from the George R. R Martin novels, there are a big batch of changes with scenes added and scenes deleted and given the length and breadth of the novels, I get that too. Hell, some of the additions to the show (Cersei and Robert talk about where the love went out of their marriage) are changes that I’d say were inspired. They were wonderful, added their own clever little bits to the sweeping narrative and most importantly, they FIT.

Now we come back to the World War Z movie.

What they’re doing isn’t just changing a bit of the plot. They’re not adding or deleting certain scenes. By turning it into what appears to be a big summer blockbuster action movie, they’re perverting the emotional tone of the story and that’s something problematic.

Think about how different it would be if the Harry Potter movies were a comedy. Could you get that kind of trepidation at the final showdowns if a laugh track was added to the scenes and Harry was cracking one-liners everytime he opened his mouth?

Take a movie like Transformers and turn it into a courtroom drama where the Autobots and Decepticons fight over the rights to Cybertron using their robotic lawyers that transform into gavels and pews.

Is it still Transformers? Sure it is…it’s got Autobots and Decepticons in it, right? But the real question to ask is, is it still Transformers? And the only proper answer to that is hell, freaking no.

It can have all of the elements of the source material but if you don’t put them together right, it’s got almost nothing to do with the source.

This is how I feel about the upcoming World War Z movie.

I mean, sure, it’s got zombies. And if you look at the trailer, it’s got a hell of a lot of zombies.

But just because it has zombies and the title World War Z doesn’t make it World War Z, you know?

You can go around calling your cat a dog all you want, but that’s not going to do a damned bit of good when you want that cat to get down off the curtains and play fetch with you in the park, you know?

My thing about the whole debacle? My pet peeve? If you’re going to pervert the spirit of the source material THAT hard, why bother licensing the novel at all? Why bother paying so much to get the rights to turn the novel into a movie if you’re going to do such a shitty job with it right out of the gate? If you’re showing blatantly right from the start that you just want to make a generic zombie apocalypse summer blockbuster, why bother calling it World War Z at all?

Call the movie something else. Stick in Brad Pitt and call it good. You’d have no outraged fans, wouldn’t be stepping on anyone’s toes and no one getting upset/annoyed.

Here’s my thing, the thing that really bugs me about the whole issue.

Why bother, you know?

I mean, why bother claiming that you’ll adapt the book to a movie when you ignore what’s (arguably) the most important aspect of the book? Make no mistake, zombie apocalypse stories are a dime a fucking dozen. The idea behind World War Z isn’t particularly original and the only, ONLY thing that made it stand out from the pack was the tone…and from the looks of it, the tone of the book is the one thing that they’re leaving out of the movie adaptation.

Sure it might have been hard. Actually, scratch that. It WOULD have been hard to nail the poignant tone that was present in the novel. But at least try, you know?

I would far more respect them if they tried, and tried HARD, to nail that exact right tone and failed as opposed to what’s happening now. As opposed to them apparently giving up, right from the get-go and turning what was an extraordinarily heartfelt book into what’s looking more and more like a completely generic zombie movie.

At least try. Maybe you won’t get it right and maybe it’ll turn out to be shit but at least try. Maybe you’ll get it right and maybe it’ll join the hallowed ranks of those movies that stayed true to their vision and did something different as opposed to just making the same old dross.

Just try. Maybe you’ll get it right and serve as a hero to everyone else who thinks that there’s just no way to get things exactly right.

I may be wrong.

I’d be the very first person in line to admit that the plot tagline might be misleading and it might be true to the book and it might do everything just right and leave me with a sad but hopeful hole at the center of my soul by the end of the movie.

I’m not expecting this to happen but I’m willing to acknowledge that it might.

But I’m afraid that it’s just going to turn out to be a generic and humdrum zombie apocalypse movie with NONE of the raw, heart-wrenching power that made the book such a sensation.

I’m afraid that it will just turn out to be mediocre and in a case like this, where the source material was everything but, mediocrity can be a tragic thing to be.

 

 

 

Related posts:

[Perry] Using An Unreliable Narrator
[Perry] The Power of a Good Threat
Milestone Reached!

Dropping Dietary Dairy

Milk

“Is milk good or bad?” asks comedian Lewis Black.

Advertising is more than happy to tell you that milk is not just good, you’re probably a bad parent if you’re not funneling the stuff down your child’s throat.

Diets and online research are equally quick to demonize dairy, quoting facts about saturated fats and caveman diets and that people are not equipped to properly digest dairy.

I am not going to be able to tell you whether or not dairy is bad.

I’ll present a little bit of information on common dairy thoughts, but I’ll finish up with tips for dropping dairy.

Anti-Inflammatory Example

One of the popular medically-recommended diets is the Anti-Inflammatory diet, which was created by Dr. Weil. The information handed out to patients includes the original food pyramid, which suggests low-fat dairy, or limiting dairy altogether.

This is despite the fact that Dr. Weil himself has posted a retraction of his previous assessment of saturated fats on his blog.

Quoting:

In addition, the findings from two other studies conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health on the health effects of dairy products are intriguing. One found that consumption of low-fat dairy foods contributed to infertility caused by failure to ovulate, while consumption of full-fat dairy foods may help the problem. The second showed that drinking skim milk was associated with a higher incidence of acne in teenage boys.

Given the results of these studies, I no longer recommend choosing low-fat dairy products. I believe the healthier choice is high-quality, organic dairy foods in moderation. My personal choice would be high-quality, natural cheese a few times a week. I don’t advise eating saturated fat with abandon, because the foods that are full of it (salty bacon, conventionally raised beef, processed cheese) are often not the best for our health. Try to limit it to about ten percent of daily calories. You may choose to use your “budget” of saturated fat calories on ice cream, butter or high-quality natural cheese, or even an occasional steak (from organic, grass-fed, grass-finished cattle, please). I still recommended skinless chicken and turkey because poultry fat (concentrated just beneath the skin) contains arachidonic acid, which promotes inflammation. I also still recommend strictly avoiding foods that contain chemically altered fats (such as hydrogenated vegetable oils found in many prepared foods), as these do appear to raise cardiovascular disease risk.

Continue to emphasize fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and limit sweeteners and other high-glycemic-load carbs.

So there’s a difference between organic dairy and nonorganic dairy and full-fat and low-fat and it’s enough to drive just about anyone crazy.

Drop the Dairy

It’s easy enough to drop dairy from your diet, though, whether because you’ve found that you DO have an unpleasant reaction when you eat dairy, or because your doctor says you should.

There are five primary places that most folks come in contact with dairy on a daily basis:

drinking a glass of milk
yogurt
cheese
cooking/baking
foods you did not prepare

I’ll start at the bottom, because I’m a rebel like that.

Foods You Did Not Prepare

You have very little control here. That morning muffin? Probably made with dairy. Chocolate bars? Dairy. Creamy soup? Dairy. Sometimes it’s even used as an uncredited “spice” on chips and in marinades.

If you truly need to zero out your dairy intake, you’re going to have to learn how to cook.

If you’re just drastically reducing your dairy, you would probably be fine just avoiding the obvious stuff (like cheese on sandwiches and creamy soups).

Cooking/Baking

For a very large number of recipes, you can substitute alternative milks (almond milk, soymilk, coconut milk, etc) without sacrificing any flavor at all.

Baking in particular is pretty forgiving on the fake milks.

Creamy soups and sauces are a little trickier, but not too bad. We have a fantastic Paleo-friendly cookbook that uses canned coconut milk (unsweetened, and yes, this is different than the coconut milk you buy in cartons next to the soymilk).

The real trick? Cheese.

Cheese

Cheese is not easy to sub. Cheese is a special thing that is proving difficult to replace. One brand, daiya, has a tasty, meltable pseudo-cheese. It’s expensive, and not-quite-perfect, though. It’s just worlds better than most of the fake cheeses out there.

We found nothing close enough to make us happy, so we eat organic, full-fat, strong-flavored cheeses (since we’re not lactose-intolerant).

If you currently eat a lot of cheese and you’re looking to drop dairy, you might want to start weaning yourself off the stuff and finding alternative recipes.

Yogurt

There are alternative yogurts — soy, almond, coconut — growing in popularity.

To my taste buds, they are … mmm, 60-80% as satisfying as my glorious greek yogurt. They’re also a dollar or more per yogurt pod.

My pocketbook cannot afford dairy-free yogurt on a regular basis, even if I got to where I loved the taste.

Drinking A Glass of Milk

Bad news.

Nothing comes close to drinking a glass of milk. (Well, maybe lactaid milk does, I dunno. Buying even-more-processed dairy wasn’t an option for me.)

There are all sorts of milk alternatives: soy, almond, coconut, hemp, etc.

The first thing to realize is that every brand that produces these milk alternatives makes it differently. So if you hate Silk’s almond milk, you might actually love 8th Continent’s almond milk.

You have to try and find out which ones work for you.

Beware of added sugars — if you’re making a bowl of cereal, you probably don’t need to buy the vanilla soymilk. The cereal itself will probably add plenty of sweetener. Even “soymilk” has added sugars. You have to look for the text “unsweetened” if you want to trim back on that.

Personally? I don’t like soymilk. I feel like it has an aftertaste to it. Also, if you’re the sort that cares about this, get organic soymilk if you can. Soybeans are one of the first products that became genetically-modified.

I DO tend to like almond milk. It doesn’t taste like almonds, but it tends to be a little thicker than soymilk (so it’s got a better mouthfeel) and the aftertaste is just a hint of nuttiness. I like it.

Coconut milk tends to be the wateriest of the three, but it’s got some pretty good health buzz behind it. I’ve started picking up an almond/coconut unsweetened mixture for using in my coffee, which is just about the only remaining non-cheese daily dairy in my diet.

Obviously, the sweetened stuff is tastier. A glass of chocolate almond milk is every bit as satisfying to me as chocolate milk.

Experiment. Try. But realize that your days of a tall glass of milk may be past you.

Recipes

I will add some of my new favorite replace-the-dairy recipes in some posts coming up.  Let me know if you have any specific requests … the one that immediately comes to mind for me is a glorious chicken curry with coconut sauce. Mmmm, curry.

Related posts:

Sounds Gross, Is Awesome – Kefir
Redefining Food
Interview With The Herbivore*