Category: Film

One year ago, I rebooted my life. Has it worked?

Posted on 29 September, 201629 September, 2016 By Wil

Sometimes, I feel like I don't look terrible in a photo. — Sometimes, I feel like I don’t look terrible in a photo.

Just about one year ago, I took an honest look at myself and I didn’t like what I saw. I needed to reset a lot of habits, make some significant changes to the way I approached just about everything in my life, and keep working at it, even when it was hard.

I can’t even believe that it’s already been a year, and that it’s only been a year, because time feels like that when you’re 44, I guess.

Here are the things I decided to address:

Drink less beer.
Read more (and Reddit does not count as reading).
Write more.
Watch more movies.
Get better sleep.
Eat better food.
Exercise more.

Some of these things have been easier than others, and from month to month (and even day to day) what happens to be easy and what happens to be hard are constantly changing. I know that’s an obvious thing, but I say it because we can forget that, and consequently be unfairly rough on ourselves when we don’t live up to our expectations.

I know a lot of you who are reading this have been doing reboots of your own, and I want you to know that, no matter where you are in your personal journey, I am super proud of you. I’m not the boss of you or anything, but I give you permission to be proud of yourself. Go you!!

So let’s dive in here and see how things are going:

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Film

Because you asked: some thoughts on Star Trek Beyond

Posted on 26 August, 2016 By Wil

I was asked on my Tumblr thing what I thought about it, because I didn’t like the trailer at all (I said something like “I just saw this trailer for a generic sci-fi action movie, but everyone was wearing a Starfleet uniform.”)

Before I get into Beyond, some context: I’m the guy who worked on TNG, but was a massive TOS fan growing up (and still is). When I watch Star Trek movies, I don’t watch them as someone who actually went to Starfleet Academy (class of 2389 REPRESENT!) but as someone who loves Star Trek and cosplayed as Spock before he knew what cosplay was. So, that said, to recap: I loved the first rebooted Trek movie. It had its flaws, but none of them were big enough to upset me, so I give it 4 out of 5 jars of Red Matter. I really enjoyed Into Darkness when I was in the theater, but the more I thought about it after, the more it fell apart until I now have to give it 2 out of 5 tribbles-on-a-stick.

Star Trek movies are always going to have a hard time with fans of the series, because when we think about Star Trek, we think about 79 episodes of the original series, or our favorite 30 episodes of TNG, or the last season of DS9. We take something that’s been spread out over days of on-screen time, spread out across years of releases, and then compare all that character development and nuance and series of individual moments with something that has to be a fully-told and completely self-contained story in 90 or 120 minutes, and it has to be accessible (as defined by risk-averse studio goons) to as wide an audience as possible. So I think it’s unfair and unreasonable to directly compare the film installments of a long-running TV series to that series. I won’t do that with Star Trek Beyond. I’ll just compare it to the two previous installments in this series.

Without holding Beyond next to the hundreds of episodes of Star Trek we can watch on TV, and just looking at it as part of this current film trilogy: I was really disappointed by it. Unlike Into Darkness, which was a lot of fun for me in the theater but fell apart upon reflection, Beyond just fell apart while I was watching it. You can read more if you’d like to know some of my reasons. There are spoilers.

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Film

broadcasting on the deep space network

Posted on 16 July, 2016 By Wil

This is another one of those visual background noise things I like to make.

I used some public domain moving images that I found at Internet Archive, did a bunch of editing and filtering in iMovie, and then replaced the sound with a classic out-of-print ambient track from Earth to Infinity called Memphis to Mars.

I’m surprisingly happy with the way this turned out. When I watched it all the way through, it made me think of syncing Dark Side of the Moon with Wizard of Oz or Echoes with Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite. That wasn’t intentional, but I’m happy it turned out that way.

blog

I’m the boss of me. (Or, how’s that reboot working out for ya?)

Posted on 31 May, 2016 By Wil

It’s been about seven months since I decided to hit the reboot button on my life, and it’s time to check in and see how I’m doing.

The real challenge this month, and the 54,000 dollar question is: is it worth it?

The fact that I’ve waited until the last day .. even the last half of the last day … of the month should give some indication as to where I’m at, emotionally, right now.

I mostly feel good. I’m mostly sleeping well (other than a couple of intensely terrible nightmare nights), I don’t feel like I’m missing out on any food I want, and I haven’t really missed beer that much. But I feel like the reboot curve has flattened out, and now I’m through the part where I see and experience dramatic results all the time, and I’m in the long dark teatime of the soul.

That’s, uh, that’s not where I really am. My fingers just typed that because it was amusing to me. I’m in the long and boring maintenance part of this, while I adjust to a new normal. I feel really good in my body, the exercise is actually fun, cooking healthy food is fun and delicious, and I can have ice cream almost every night, because I’m taking good care of myself in every other aspect of my life and if I want to have ice cream then goddammit I am going to.

But when someone tells me that I look really good (“ten years younger” is the most common thing, which is nice) and they want to know how I did it in such a short period of time, I tell them that I just took everything I liked and replaced it with water and exercise (which isn’t my phrase, I heard it somewhere else). It’s one of those funny-but-not-ha-ha-funny jokes that isn’t a joke. It’s true … but is it worth it?

I honestly don’t know. I know that I feel good. I know that I look better than I have in years. I know that I’m in really good health, so I don’t feel trapped in a body that’s aging and trying to prevent me from doing the things I want to do.

Strangely, that all feels external and not as important as it was four or five months ago. I don’t have creative and artistic satisfaction, and I know that that is entirely my fault, because I’m not nearly doing as much as I want to do creatively. I still feel like I’m doing other people’s work, even though a lot of that work is intensely satisfying and rewarding in every way. Maybe this only makes sense inside my brain, but I feel like writing for Tabletop and Titansgrave, and doing voice work for the projects I can’t talk about is work and I am expected to do work. Writing stories and making podcasts and putting together films and junk draws from essentially the same creative well, but … I don’t know, it tastes different. It’s more satisfying, I guess. It quenches a different type of thirst.

I’m doing that kind of work a very little bit at a time, but it really does feel like my phone and my email and my texts are constantly pulling me away from it, and the year is nearly half over, and I haven’t published a single short story.

Anyway, that’s a lot of first world problem complaining that I am reluctant to even share in public, but honestly assessing how this is all going is kind of important, so there it is. Let’s check in and see how my grades are for May.

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blog

The March Reboot Check-In That Happened In April

Posted on 10 April, 201610 April, 2016 By Wil

I had this epiphany at the beginning of September: This thing that I’m doing? This series of choices I make every day? It isn’t working. I don’t like the way I feel, I don’t like the way I look, I don’t like the things I’m doing. Things need to change.

So I took a long, hard, serious look at myself, and concluded that some things needed to change.

Drink less beer.
Read more (and Reddit does not count as reading).
Write more.
Watch more movies.
Get better sleep.
Eat better food.
Exercise more.

It’s been about six months since I decided to hit the reboot button on my life. I’ve checked in about once a month since then, to see how I’m doing, celebrate the victories, and identify where I can do better.

Let’s see how I’m doing.

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