Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 1/28/22
Snow Big Deal Edition
Few things can bring a spring into one’s step like a change in the weather, and this week, the head of Bunker Ops got her first taste of how North Texas likes to hold up its end of the apocalypse: by snowing fiercely and then melting away before you have time to put on your sweatpants for a snow day.
I was all ready for a long winter’s nap, but the pastoral majesty of a blanket of pure white powder soon gave way to slush and wetness as the sun came out and liquified what few flakes that didn’t instantly dissolve into a mush when they first hit the ground.
It seems strange to be disappointed by the absence of a Snowpocalypse, especially with what happened last year, but everyone at the bunker was more than ready to ride the storm out, to no avail. On the plus side: we have approximately three years’ worth of bottled water, breath mints, and Slim Jim’s, should the unthinkable happen again. Make that, when it happens again.
Bunker Command Structure Updates
All of the department heads have been working non-stop on the NTAB Command Structure and I am pleased to report that we have succeeded! This new, streamlined tree prunes redundancies, simplifies the chain-of-command, and allows for greater inter-departmental cooperation. A number of small, orphaned agencies and bureaus, rather than be dismantled, have been absorbed into the new Division of Field Assignments. This includes, but is not limited to: Gorilla Suit Maintenance, Literary Repatriation, Epistolary Correspondence, Zine Creation, Bullet Journaling, Podcasting, and Quidditch.
We will be announcing the new mechanisms for bunker staff and friends of the bunker to participate in field assignments and increase their rank and status in this new command structure. If you’ve ever wanted the title “Director” or even “Executive Director” to a vast bureaucratic institution with hazily defined goals and little to no commercial value, with appropriate stickers to denote your exalted status, then watch this space for further updates!
Gobsmack! Review
Section 84 (Zine Creation) has reported the following YouTube video from Matthew Pooks, talking favorably about Gobsmack!, my zine from last year’s ZineQuest 3 project. For those of you who are hoping for a ZineQuest 4 project from me, well, that event has been moved to August by Kickstarter, which is actually great for me, since I am working on getting Polite Society ready for Kickstarting in the coming months. If I can pull it off, I will be launching a support zine for Polite Society during ZQ4. Aggressive? Yeah, a little bit. But I am confident I can hit those targets, as Polite Society is mostly written already. My work on it post-KS will be largely production-based, rather than creative.
Action Figure Fatwa: Neca On Notice
I got a nifty King Kong action figure for Christmas (from Jes) and was in the process of “setting it up” which is man-talk for “I’m taking it out of the package to play with it” and this happens:
Now, these aren’t cheap figures to begin with. And I am fully aware that they are aimed at grownups like myself, who either won’t take them out of the package or who will, pose them a certain way, and then leave them on their desk. That means the joints need to be stiff, in order to hold the pose. I know this. I’m an adult collector. This is not my first rodeo, nor my first Neca action figure.
But this arm snapped off at the pin after some gentle rocking to loosen the elbow. I am irritated. This is why we can’t have nice things. I’m not sure what my recourse is, other than to suck it up and buy another one, but I don’t feel like rewarding Neca for that, as I am fairly sure they won’t send me a replacement figure, because action figure collectors make it hard to love them. I guess I’m going to glue the arm back on and leave it. But all’a y’all in the action figure world, starting with the toy makers, need to do better.
In Other News...
The assimilation of the new staff member is going swimmingly. We are knocking out small projects daily and making plans for larger ones, such as painting. There are three tests of any relationship, and they are iron-clad: meeting the family, traveling in a car for more than an hour, and painting any room in your house. If you can find someone who does all of those things with you and you don’t want to throttle them in their sleep for perceived transgressions, then you need to marry them as quickly as you can.
That being said, there are a few things that have been introduced into the bunker that, while aimed at improving Quality of Bunker Life, have fallen a bit short of the mark. I’m speaking, of course, about the toilet light.
Maybe you’ve seen one of these, or perhaps you have such a contraption in your own bunker, bolt hole, or enclave. For the uninitiated, it’s a motion-activated LED that shines bright, colorful light into the bowl of your toilet, creating a beacon for your late night fumblings and stumblings. Just walking into the doorway of the darkened bathroom triggers the light—and it works. Maybe a little too well.
Several times now I’ve stepped into the bathroom, fully intent on turning on the light like a not-at-all-crazy person and making with the doing of the business. Even before I can reach the light switch, the toilet explodes in a Skittles-like burst of color, illuminating the toilet, the area three feet around it, and my shocked face. How adorable.
It’s when I’ve completed my transaction at the night deposit drop that I’ve been most aggrieved. With all that’s been happening to me of late, I’ve gotten into the habit of making a perfunctory glance into the bowl before I flush to make sure there are no swirls of blood, strange colors and/or odors, and any other signs that something is very, very wrong with me.
Ordinarily, this would not be a big deal. Only, see, when you stand up from a toilet with the toilet light installed, that counts as motion, thus activating the LED. The colored LED. So, you can imagine, being lost in thought as one frequently is upon spending any time in the loo, glancing over your shoulder, and finding bilious green light shining up out of the toilet like you just shit a bunch of Kryptonite.
Twice now I’ve stood up and glanced back to find pale, sickly orange-colored light in the bowl, approximately the same color of bloody urine, and my heart has done a double-take each time until I remember, Oh yes, there’s a novelty device affixed to my dumper, turning my water closet into the Molecule Chamber from Superman II. Neat.
In my 20s, this would have been a hoot and a half. Now that I’ve crested the fifty-year mark, and an alarming number of things of various colors have fallen out of me in the last few years, it’s a little less hilarious. Perhaps if it was always the same color, every time, I’d know to not freak out when I stand up from the head and red light shoots seemingly out of my ass, like the world’s worst X-Man mutant.
Suffice to say, I will be bringing this up at the next staff meeting.
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
The Last Duel (HBO Max)
I have, over the years, become increasingly contentious where director Ridley Scott is concerned. The brilliance of Alien is inarguable, but all of his obsessive sore-tooth-he-can’t-stop-tonguing fiddling about with Blade Runner has left a bad taste in my mouth. Still and all, he is a good filmmaker, however capricious, and with the right project in front of him, he deserves all the hype surrounding him.
The Last Duel would seem to fall in the “right project” category, with a screenplay co-written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (and before you freak out, remember they won the Oscar for Best Screenplay for 1997’s Good Will Hunting), based on the book by Eric Jager. Scott is comfortable with historical material, especially if it involves swordplay and a loss of honor. His first film, The Duellists (1977), seems to inhabit some of the same territory as The Last Duel, as does (well, kinda) Gladiator (2000). It’s to Scott’s credit that the battlefield scenes in this movie are full of frenetic, splashy violence, and the duel itself, when we finally get to it, is a white-knuckled action sequence that has to be seen to be believed. Scott has pulled off a minor miracle in that the duel manages to generate actual suspense; you don’t know which way it’s going to go.
What makes the story work is the Rashomon-esque technique of showing all of the different perspectives so that we might decide for ourselves the truth of the matter. Many of the key scenes in the movie are shown twice, once from Adam Driver’s side of things, and once from Matt Damon’s point of view. It’s to the credit of the actors that they don’t make that into a chore to watch; each version of the story plays quite differently.
My only complaint involves the focus of the narrative, or rather, the lack thereof. What we think the story is about is not what the story is about. And we’re two-thirds of the way into the movie before Scott starts making his point. It’s not a very original point, either; the idea of slut-shaming in the fourteenth century plays out as less revelatory and more “well, duh!” In fact, the way everything is resolved renders the point Scott makes rather moot, if not outright hollow. The title cards at the end of the movie literally spell out our takeaway, I guess, but if that is what the movie was only about, I’d have kicked the TV in the teeth—it’s a bit of a time sink to tell me something I already know.
Instead, there’s lots of petty intrigues, some occasional and fierce battle scenes, and several great actors doing great work to help carry the narrative along. Since Scott has to tell the same story three times, he uses a lot of editorial shortcuts that are, initially, a bit jarring, until you realize how much ground he’s got to cover. A less experienced director might botch the execution, but Scott is too proficient a technician to let that happen. For fans of historical drama and brutal combat, this is an entertaining movie, but I think in this case, Ridley Scott just got lucky.
It’s a lot of fuss just to watch Jason Bourne get into a swordfight with Batman.
But does it have a disco ball and does it flush to dubstep?