Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 11/22/24
Should’ve Had Turkey Already edition
Everyone here at the bunker is out of sorts, in that way that you get when you are walking down a flight stairs and you think there’s one more step before you touch the ground, but there isn’t, and so you stomp down jarringly and for just a second you wonder if the stairs are trying to pull a fast one. This out of step feeling is the result of not having Thanksgiving this week, like how it’s supposed to be on our internal calendar. As much as we love good holiday food, I’m ready to just skip over next week’s feast and move straight into Christmas tamales.
Tag and Release
A few people have asked for my socials, so here they are. I don’t have any interest in adding to what I am already using, and if I could scrap all but one, I would have done it already.
Blue Sky: @markfinn.bsky.social
Instagram: @northtexasapocalypsebunker
FaceBook: @finnswake (ugh), @northtexasapocalypsebunker (ugh)
Tumblr: northtexasapocalypsebunker
I really loathe what social media has turned into, but even before that, I was wildly irritated by New York Publishing’s insistence on having a “platform” with an undisclosed “reach” of fans before anyone would talk about publishing a book from an author with no agent. Alas, that’s not gotten any better; in fact, the whole idea of anyone needing a platform is repellent to me, especially if you’re trying to be ‘famous,’ whatever the hell that means. “Influencers.” Ugh.
I don’t begrudge anyone who has a robust platform or who has the time to maintain it, but I’ve never been that person. Any time I start to recommit myself to the task of “growing my digital footprint,” or whatever they are saying this week in the marketing meetings, I hear a small voice in my ear saying, “Shouldn’t you be writing?” or “Isn’t there a project you need to finish?” and then yeah, that’s what gets the remainder of my energy.
By my reckoning, actually doing something to completion was always the most important thing. I think writing one-liners for Twitter is nice work, if you can get it, but isn’t going to help you with groceries. And yet, how are people going to know who you are, and think you’re clever enough to buy a book from you? I have no idea. All I do know is that it’s much, much harder than everyone thinks it is, and I never decided to become a writer because of how much I loved selling books to people, one at a time.
I remember a few years ago, I wrote an article on one of my blogs that I thought should get a wider reach. I don’t remember which one it was, but it was likely something to do with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Anyway, I bought a Facebook ad, and I chose people whose interests would align with the subject matter. I remember the utter lack of traffic it generated because I got an alert, a day after I started running it, saying that there were comments. Well, it was only one comment, but it came from some rando woman who asked, to no one in particular, why she was seeing an ad for a wordpress blog that she didn’t know anything about? The dig was “wordpress.” You know, a free blog site, rather than, I dunno, ScreenRant or something.
It was my url that kept her away from my brilliant observations. How can I compete with that level of capriciousness from someone I had never met?
All this to say, I can feel everyone getting tired of the constant ads and bots and the increasing lack of control and the increasing sense of being rats in a Skinner box, and it gives me hope for more direct, less wriggly and random, online interaction. I mean by that you will have to type a website into a search engine and you must subscribe, or bookmark it, so that you can find it again. Was that so hard to do before? I don’t think it was.
It also means you (all of us, the royal you) are going to have to start sharing your knowledge with others. Word of mouth is about to be a thing again, because you want someone to help you bypass whatever profiling algorithms are being flung at us from the sites we used to enjoy with a modicum of utility. Hell, I love the idea of actually buying Facebook as a small monthly subscription, if it meant no more ads, bots, AI, or junk.
We are going to have to push back on all of this. And it can’t be just us, either. Whenever someone complains about Facebook, Xitter, or any of the rest of it, use it as a way to start the conversation of getting off some or all of these sites. Why use them if they no longer work for us? It’s silly. Especially since we all have the tools to keep connected with one another, sans social media platform. Sure, the cat videos and the viral dance videos would dry up, but the trade off, namely, being able to talk to friends and family without being constantly pitched to like on Shark Tank, would be so worth it.
I know this is wishful thinking, but how great would it be to actually impact one of these giant corporations’ bottom lines for a quarter or two or three? They would have to look at what’s gone wrong and how to fix it and these people aren’t skilled, nor smart. They’d rather rip something out, as it’s easier and quicker, than trying some nuanced work around. You want to get rid of A.I. in everything? Stop using it. They’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars in developing these machine learning modules. They need to eat it in order to make it go away.
Think of it as a Christmas Present to Me
This newsletter is free, and always will be. Some of you, though, have elected to support my efforts in a more direct way, for which I am most grateful, and to show my appreciation, here’s a link to a 25% discount on a one-year subscription, if you wanna: https://ntab.substack.com/5fe3c81c This link is only good until November 30th.
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Note: we are almost finished with the 2024 Holiday Gift Giving Guide, and this will most likely appear, along with the annual admonition to Keep Your Nuts to Yourself, next week, on the bunker website. Please enjoy these capsule reviews in the meantime.
Interior Chinatown (Hulu)
A background extra decides he wants to be in the spotlight, and starts a chain of events that threatens to unravel his whole life.
Jimmy O. Yang stars as Willis Wu, an unassuming waiter at a Chinese restaurant who sees the opportunity to be more than his current self. He inserts himself into a police investigation first as a witness, and then as a special informant, so he can get answers to his brother’s disappearance, twelve years ago. His friends and family don’t quite grok what’s going on, and neither does Willis, but he’s picking at the edges of a much larger issue, such as why the lights change when the lead detectives walk into the room, and why he can’t access the police precinct without dressing up as a delivery guy.
This isn’t the first meta-narrative movie or TV show, but there’s something interesting about this particular show; Interior Chinatown is a love note to cop shows, be they police procedurals or those heavy-hitting character driven cable shows like True Detective. It’s pretty obvious they are taking the piss out of Law & Order, but the shout outs go further back into Stephen J. Cannell territory, along with a little Glenn Larson, too. The only thing that remains a constant here is Chinatown, and by extension, all of its citizens. This is the angle of attack in Interior Chinatown, and it does so by not clubbing the audience over the head, instead letting them figure things out as the series progresses.
Yang is fantastic in this series, the longest thing I’ve ever seen him in, and he carries the story quite well. His best friend, played by Ronny Chieng, is funny without ever being annoying, and Chloe Bennet (Quake from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) gets to be both a cop and a love interest and she plays well with everyone. Taika Waititi is one of the producers and he also directed the first episode, just to set the tone.
If you are a fan of police crime dramas, you won’t want to miss this. Also, if you love movies that peel back the fabric of reality to show off all of the inner workings, this is your jam; Interior Chinatown has consistent internal rules and logic, and when they all but spell out who or what is behind it, well, there’s the takeaway for anyone still enamored with Big Media. I think it’s one of the best versions of this kind of story, and it did something for me that I thought was flat-out impossible: it made me really like Ronny Chieng in a TV show.
Cross (Amazon)
James Patterson’s beleaguered detective gets an update and a new series starring Aldis (Leverage) Hodge as Alex Cross.
This is, what, the third or fourth attempt to get Alex Cross right and I think they succeeded far more than they failed. For starters, Aldis Hodge plays Cross with a mixture of rage and obsession, and the only time he’s ever calm is when he’s with Sampson (played with bags of charisma by Isaiah Mustafa). Cross isn’t even trying to get over the death of his wife, despite trying to date well above his weight class. Everyone who works with him thinks he’s an asshole, and petty politics color every police decision.
The story itself is one of those things where two seemingly unrelated cases turn out to be the same case, and while I don’t think there’s an overuse of clichés being deployed, it’s going to feel like a lot of familiar beats for fans of the genre. Where the series shines is in its villains, who are utter whackadoos and they tend to provide most of the twists and turns in the series. If you’re not a fan of the dark and edgy crime dramas, you know, the kind with cussing and blood, you might want to skip Cross. It’s not a police procedural; it’s a personality-driven detective story.
There’s a point in the series, about two-thirds of the way, where the plot thins out to the point of being able to read newsprint through it, but by then, you’re completely invested with Cross and his struggles to solve his wife’s murder and find the Fanboy’s latest victim before It’s Too Late. It helps that Aldis Hodge is already very likeable, which makes his portrayal of Cross come off as wounded, rather than unhinged.
The story is dark; the serial killer is evil in a really specific and triggering way for me. The actor has one of the most punchable faces around; he just looks like a Finance-Bro and he’s so smarmy, there’s no way he could be anything but the killer.
If you are a fan of series like Bosch, you can spot the story beats in Cross from orbit. Of course, he’s going to screw up a date because he’s worried about a case. Of course, he and his best friend are going to have a needless fight that won’t get resolved until they need to work together again. Right? We’re not watching this to be dazzled by the deftness of the narrative. We want to see Alex Cross do his thing where he stares off into space, sometimes with a voice-over, and figures things out that no one else can see. And Cross delivers the goods in that respect. Looking forward to a second season and a more tightly constructed plot next time.