Month: May 2016

Thoughts on The Turman Show

I just got done watching it and it doesn’t quite hold up.  It’s still a great film but the tone is more comedic than I remember.  In my memory, there was a build up of things going wrong and Truman beginning to notice the patterns of the extras around him leading up to his ‘father’ returning.  At which point the backstory and setting are revealed in the interview with the director.  I know the idea of The Truman Show wasn’t really a reveal but it could have heightened the tension in the beginning if it wasn’t shown right away.

This probably less the movie not being what it could be and more my own views of reality changing over time.  I’m sure the first time I saw the movie I thought it was funny that Truman was living in a manufactured sitcom world.  Now I watch it and I can’t help but feel horror at his situation.  To discover that everyone he knows; his best friend, his wife, his neighbors, his mom, the guy he buys his newspaper from, the woman that passes him on the street; is lying to him is horrific to me.

The Truman Show is a good movie but I would like to a version of it that abandons the tv viewer pov and keeps to Truman’s pov.  The movie often switches to “hidden camera” shots to remind the viewer that Truman is always being watched but I feel like it distances me from Truman.  It’s another layer between me and Truman when I want to be right there next to him.  I want to see him find the cracks in his false world.  I want to see him question his reality. I want to see everyone around him insist he’s crazy.  I want to see him break out of his cage.  And I want to see him pull back the curtain and show us the man pulling the strings of his world.

 

Working on my first ebook

The first that I’ve made personally that is.

I spent yesterday working on turning my story Love and Comets into an ebook.  I did a lot of reading about how to format the text and how to put it into xhtml.  Some of the process I read seem a little overly complicated but I think I’ve gotten the gist of how it works.  I also spent time creating a single file of the story and cleaning it up, removing spaces at the end of paragraphs, fixing typos.  I am going to have to edit the versions on my website after I’m done.

Today I’m continuing learning and hopefully starting to work on the xhtml.  I’m honestly doing this in the wrong order because I know the text needs a few more passes to be as close to 100% as I can get it.  I should be doing that before even starting on the xhtml but yesterday and today are days off so I’m using the extra time and energy to learn how to do this.

What time was I suppose to be at work?

On my tumblr I’ve written a little about the few “glitches in the matrix” I’ve experienced.  Most of them revolve around me knowing without a shadow of a doubt something and being told no you’re wrong.  It’s never major things like who’s the president or what month it is.  It’s things like what time does this store open or how long a season of a tv show was.  Mostly I just try to forget them or ignore them.  Sometimes it’s harder to ignore.

Monday evening I checked the picture of the schedule, on my phone, to see what time I had to be at work.  I saw 9:30 am.  I always give myself half an hour to get to work and an hour to get ready.  So I knew I should get up at 8 am.  I’m not a morning person.  Getting up before 11 am is not part of my natural rhythm.  Before I went to bed I set my alarm and because I wanted to make sure I looked at my schedule again.  9:30 am.

I woke up the next day, got ready for work, even took time to eat something, and walked to work.   I arrived at 9:10 am.  I don’t know if I left early or if I was unconsciously power walking but if I had left at 9 am I should have gotten to work at around 9:15 am.  That was the first weird thing.  I was let in by my manager, the store doesn’t open til 9:30 am.  She didn’t say anything to me other than “Good morning.”  I walked through the store to the break room.  On the way I stopped to check the daily line-up to see when my break was going to be.  I find my name and see it lists me as working at 9 am.

I head for the break room to clock in because apparently now I’m running late.  I clock in and check the schedule on the wall.  It too says I work at 9 am.  Someone most have changed the schedule without telling me, I think.  So I check the picture of the schedule on my phone.  It says 9 am.

I know I looked at the picture on my phone at least twice on Monday.  The second time I was very deliberately reading the time because I have made this mistake before.  I was looking at the :30 making sure it wasn’t :00.  I’m baffled by this ‘mistake’.

Here is where I give the evidence that mostly sinks my story:  The picture of my schedule is blurry.  The numbers are readable just not perfectly clear.  There’s a touch of blur but you can read 9:00 easily enough.  If you were checking the time carefully you wouldn’t think it read 9:30.

I now I will start to sound really weird:  I don’t remember the picture being blurry.  I read the time clearly on Monday and on Tuesday when I checked it again it was blurry.  Blurry in a way that might make me think I had just misread the time.  While writing this I looked at the image a few more times and noticed the blur isn’t across the entire image.  It’s a band of blurriness that runs straight over the row of my schedule.  The schedules above and below mine are less blurry.

It’s subtle.  The top of the image the farthest from my schedule is clear.  The picture of next week’s schedule I took at the same time is perfectly clear.  I normally retake schedule pictures if they look blurry, so why didn’t I retake that one?  I don’t know.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter, I guess.  Whether my schedule was changed through some sort of reality glitch or I just misread the time, it doesn’t make much of a difference.  The end result was the same: I was late to work.