I watch bad science fiction and action films on purpose. I am looking for cliche’s to rework in a humorous or surprising way for my novel. That is why I continue watching the trainwreck that is La Brea.

Every episode could be a Mystery Science Theater episode. It is a disaster about a disaster. Watching this show is like holding a hot coal until the pain becomes too much. Its the Terra Nova of sinkholes, but with worse acting and special effects. Did you know that it is shot in Australia? I guess the sinkhole goes all the way through the earth and they landed down under.

This Lost wannabe even ripped off the golf scene from Lost in the latest episode, copying it but changing it to baseball and doing the whole thing badly and removing every ounce of charm that scene had with Hurley. And remember in Lost how Charlie’s heroin was used to help an injured person? Yes, they do that as well, except they find the drugs in a trunk, with a terrible subplot about the owner of the drugs. Are they just rewatching Lost trolling for ideas they can execute badly?

One of the aspects of Lost that was so unique is that you got caught up in the characters and yet any one of them could die at any time, and they did, and it was usually gut wrenching. Here there is not a single character that I would care at all about if they died. In fact, a lot of them are more annoying than anything else.

I do a great deal of research for my writing. I think the writers here did none. Military uniforms are wrong, they don’t understand what ambulance’s actually carry, they don’t know anything about medicine or recovery time, they don’t seem to understand paleontology and how museums work, they don’t understand how predators hunt, and they have no idea how people actually act in a crises. Yes, some of this might be a prop or costume department problem, but accuracy for anything seems remarkably slipshod.

These characters do nothing smart to protect themselves. Considering that they are being attacked by wild animals, they might want to make some weapons, organize lookouts, see who has survival training, protect their food from scavengers, find out if anyone is an experienced hunter. Instead, they just wander around aimlessly, squabble pointlessly, and consistently make the wrong choices that only put them in greater danger, like characters in a cheesy horror film.

The special effects don’t quite reach Asylum’s level of winking with “we know these effects are terrible and it is on purpose.” Why the effects are so bad is one of the show’s many mysteries, and I believe that the answer is that the effects time traveled from the 1990s.

Speaking of bad and derivative, I watched Tom Cruise’s Oblivion last night. It is a master class in science fiction movie making. Watch closely, and don’t do what they do. Okay, the special effects were quite polished, but all in service to a script written using a cliche-o-matic to make sure they included almost every science fiction cliché imaginable.

It also inspired me to coin a new word: Starcicist. That is when a star has a certain amount of power and an overwhelming sense of self love that ultimately negatively impacts a film. I think Cruise believes that we just can never get enough Cruise. Long tracking shots of him walking, shots with the camera locked down just watching him walking away. There is even two of him, a la fellow starcicist Will Smith in Gemini Man.

As I was watching this trying to remember if I had actually seen this forgettable 2013 film before, my wife pointed out that I had seen it before- just in a lot of other movies. She nailed it. Towards the end, Cruise runs through a tunnel ahead of an expanding fireball only to just miss being barbecued by jumping out of the end of the tunnel at the last second. My wife, who was half asleep and only occasionally watching out of one half-opened eye, chimed in, “Thank goodness. I thought they might not get that cliché in.”

There are spoilers here, but frankly, I doubt it will harm the viewing experience or ruin the muddled plot for you. We get a tie fighter style chase through a canyon almost straight from Star Wars (even the silhouettes of the vehicles are similar), the cloned worker bee concept at the heart of the 2009 movie Moon, and the caretaker/repairman on ruined Earth (too many to list). The female characters are spectacularly underdeveloped (a common problem in science fiction written by men, and in Cruise movies in general). Morgan Freeman is there for the sole purpose of dying heroically. There are bits and pieces from so many other movies it is like they threw them all in a blender and this is the result. Did I mention that the special effects are nice?

My story is filled with cliches, but on purpose. Some of the cliches I include in my story but twist around are the classic car chase in San Francisco, a speeding car going towards a slowly lowering door, the evil bad guy threatening to kill one character in front of another if they don’t talk, a shoot-out in the villains lair, and the countdown timer to a big explosion. These all go in ways that I hope the reader will find unexpected.

What’s Up With Us

My wife booked a dozen magic shows for October, making it a very busy month. Her last one is this weekend, a special event for a casino in Palm Springs. We are also taking a few extra days while there, as we have been going seven days a week for awhile now.

The non-fiction book I am writing is going well. I am close to 75 percent done. Should be finished sometime early 2022.

I am trying to learn the new 3D software I recently purchased, but I really need a more powerful computer and a much more powerful RTX class or better graphics card. The RTX means you can do real-time ray tracing, which blows my mind.

Unfortunately, these high-end graphics cards are also being used by bitcoin miners, who snatch them up at any price. Because of covid, manufacturers decided to reduce their inventory when instead there was actually higher demand as so many needed to buy or upgrade computers for working at home. There is also a global semiconductor shortage.

The bottom line is that this is the perfect storm and the worst time ever to do a computer upgrade. If you can find a graphics card it will be triple the MSRP price. You probably won’t find what you want, however, at any price.

I have been waiting to upgrade until it could be a major one. I have literally been waiting for years because I thought that AMD was on the right track with the architecture in their Ryzen processors. They botched the initial version but have worked hard to improve it and I think it is finally at a point where it is worth upgrading to. I am looking at the AMD Ryzen 3950X, which right now seems to be selling at a couple of hundred dollars higher than normal retail.

I had a pretty big budget in mind for this new system. Triple monitors with the center one at 4k. A super fast CPU with a killer GPU. These price increases and limited availability have blown that to smithereens. The cost of the graphics card alone now exceeds what I planned to pay for the entire computer. I guess I will have to wait until next year. Sigh.

One of the things that is often ignored in science fiction is consequences. Comic book movies are probably the worst offenders. The characters go through rough experiences, cities are leveled, and yet there is little emotional impact on the characters.

In the just finished jungle sequence, every character has gone through hell. I will take a chapter to deal with how the events of the previous chapters affect them. Spoiler alert. They are all a mess. Grace will have to pull them back together as a team. How that happens will take some thinking on my part.

What I have been doing is trying to see the last few chapters from each character’s perspective. At this point I know the characters quite well, and I know their weaknesses, and what they would find challenging from what they just went through.

For Wall, he feels like he does not have the tools he needs to do what he does best- quickly make almost anything needed. Grace resolves that for him by helping him get all the tools he needs with a nearly unlimited budget.

I personally don’t have an unlimited budget, but this part of the story was inspired by our building our own workshop. My wife Belle is a magician and she makes and develops her own original magic effects. We have not really been able to do it properly, as things were a disorganized mess even with the tools we had. My dad is in his 90s and not able to use his workshop (a lot of which came from my grandfather’s workshop), so some of those tools are moving to our workshop.

We have decided that for Christmas we are going to get a 3D printer, which we have wanted for ages. The first time we saw them in action was when we visited Cal Tech years ago. They had a bunch, including some that could print enormous parts that would eventually go to Mars. As impressive as it was, 3D printing has come a long ways since then. There are now seven different types of 3D printing, each with many variations.

The type we are getting uses material extrusion, called fused deposition modeling (FDM). It prints things using filament that is melted and extruded through a nozzle onto a print bed. This is the best starting point as it is the lowest cost and has the widest variety of materials you can print with.

Different printer types have different capabilities. There are many types of vat polymerization, all of which use lasers to solidify objects in a tank of resin. This is generally known as stereolithography, and is the oldest 3D printing technology, developed in 1986.

Powder bed fusion selectively heats areas of a powder to solidify it. This is great for very complex geometries. It can use metal, ceramic, and plastic powders. The powders can be melted together or fused together on a molecular level.

Then there are more exotic and expensive methods. Material Jetting is faster but more expensive. Binder Jetting uses droplets to bind the powder together. It can use sand or metal powder. Sheet Laminating uses layers of thin sheets of paper, polymer or metal. It is fast but not very accurate. There are many variations on these technologies and other technologies for more specialized applications.

In my story, the bodies are printed using specialized 3D bioprinters. This is not that far away. Researchers can already 3D bioprint skin, bone, vascular grafts, tracheal splints, heart tissue and cartilaginous structures and even organs.

3D printing technology is moving fast, and it will be an important part of Wall’s tool chest. I just have to dream up some amazing things for him to make.

What’s Up With Us

We have a friend through magic named Daniel Roebuck. He produces movies and is a well-established actor. While we were still under full covid protocols but much later on in the pandemic, Danny was trying to finish a film that he was making and needed to do a pickup scene. It was originally set in a magic shop, but that was not easily available, so he wound up using our house with a bunch of our magic props in the background. While we all stayed masked and followed the proper protocols, it was just really nice to have people in our house again, something we had not done since covid began.

That was awhile ago, and we recently got a showing at Danny’s of the initial cut. When you have friends who do creative projects that they are going to show off, it is always a great relief when they turn out to be good. His film, Lucky Louie, turned out to be quite good. It is so hard to know what to say when you don’t really like it. Thankfully that was not a problem.

Sadly, the star of the film passed away just after the end of shooting. Basil Harry Hoffman had a five decade long career as an actor, and he wrote two books on the subject. He worked with top film directors like Peter Bogdanovich and Carl Reiner. Some of his films include All the President’s Men, My Favorite Year, The Box, The Electric Horseman, Night Shift, Lucky Lady, Switch, The Milagro Beanfield War, Rio, I Love You, The Pineville Heist, Ordinary People and The Artist. He also did tons of television, with appearances on Kung Fu, The Rockford Files, Sanford and Son, Police Woman, Columbo, Kojak, M*A*S*H, Barney Miller and he played the fingerprint technician on Ellery Queen and Principal Dingleman on Square Pegs. He was on the Board of Directors of Screen Actors Guild where my wife used to work. He was an acting coach, loved acting, and got to do it to the end of his life.

For Danny, a major collector of primarily Universal monster memorabilia, and an actor who actually enjoys sitting in the makeup chair as they apply the prosthetics, being cast in the new Munsters movie from Rob Zombie as Count Dracula (that is who Grandpa was supposed to be) was a dream come true. The cherry on top was that it is being released by Universal. Being in a Universal monster movie was a lifelong dream for him.

Sadly, just after he got cast, covid hit, and the film had to be delayed for a year. The frustrating part was that during all that time, the details about it, including the casting, were being kept secret, so we could not tell anyone. The film has been shot, the promotion machine has geared up, and we got to see a whole bunch of set photos that Danny took. It looks great, and I am so looking forward to seeing the movie itself.

October continued to be crazy busy, setting a record for my wife of 12 shows in different venues in a month. That may be as much as she can do, along with her very high pressure job working for a major hospital during covid.

The title does not refer to an actual Dante’s Inferno musical. Sorry if you find that disappointing. It will make sense if you read this blog entry.

I am approaching writing this novel with a background primarily in live theater and a lot of training as an actor. I tend to think visually. I also have been writing most of my adult life. I am finding it interesting the many ways that my theatrical background has proven helpful in writing fiction.

I am working on a chapter that has no action, but is used to reveal more about the characters. As my wife pointed out, this is where the characters get to sing their “I want” song. That is an analogy to musical theater where typically the first or second song in the first act has the main character sing about what they want. Think Belle’s first song in Beauty and the Beast, Over the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz, Lion Tamer from The Magic Show or Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha. They help establish a character’s dreams, goals, or desires without needing to bring in Basil Exposition.

I don’t have my characters sing, and I needed to accomplish this with not just one but with five central characters. It also happens later in the book, as the first two acts focus on the group assembling and then their first mission. My characters do not know each other yet, which negatively impacts their unit cohesion. No, I do not do the old hackneyed bit if creating conflict by having the main characters dislike or fight with each other until they finally come together at a dramatic moment to save the day. They just don’t know much about each other yet or in what areas they can most count on the others to be helpful. They also do not yet understand how they fit in.

I wanted to mirror that difficulty for them in the first mission with the reader not yet understanding their goals or motivations. I want to reveal them in this chapter both to the reader and to each other, and at that point they are much better able to pull together as a team. The trick is to do that without making it non-stop talking or just plain exposition.

Their first mission turned into quite a cluster, and none of them are feeling particularly great about it. I think Wall has the most challenging issues at this point, so I have him approach Grace to talk it out. Her solution will also help advance the story later on. My plan is to write the scene with Wall and Grace, and then have Grace briefly discuss that and the other concerns from the other team members with Brian, who has already been established as an important sounding board for her. The story is very character driven, so it is important to get this right and keep it from being too wordy or boring. I think it will be more challenging to write than the action sequences, which are much easier to make interesting and exciting.

What’s Up With Us

My wife and I went to the Magic Castle (a world famous and amazing club for magicians in Hollywood) to celebrate our anniversary. Regular readers of this blog know that my wife is a working magician and back in the day both of us did that full time. We also worked in the theater and in television.

Since we have been happily married a ridiculously long time, I tend to avoid telling younger people just how long. For this one, I tell people we have been married the same number of years as Jack Benny was when he died. Most people of a certain age will get it, and typically it makes no sense at all to others. Now you know, maybe.

The Castle decorates for Halloween every year. This year they returned to a theme that they tried unsuccessfully before- Dante’s Inferno. They have all of the circles of hell, and every area is dramatically transformed, which is a lot of work considering that there is a lot of space to decorate. They have a great crew of member volunteers and they did a fantastic job.

The reason it failed when they tried it in 2011 was because, with irony lost on no one, that was the Halloween when the Castle caught on fire. For the first time ever, they had to close for Halloween and for awhile after to repair some rather extensive damage.

They had some outstanding performers booked for this week. Belle and I were hanging in the library and we realized we had to dash to make the Palace show. As we were going out the members only door, the librarian, Joe, mentioned that Chip Romeros was the emcee. He is the premier collector of the memorabilia of magician Doug Henning, including owning a great many of his illusions. I made it a point to meet him after the show, and shared with him my tale of literally sneaking backstage (or back-studio in this case) to see the very first Doug Henning magic special, which was aired live. I describe this in my book The Greatest Adventure (available on Amazon.) I had some memorabilia from that show that he was interested in, so he came by the house on Monday.

What I had were signed cards from the various close-up performers that entertained the Mobil executives who, with their families, made up much of the audience. Mobil was the sponsor of the special. Chip did not know about this aspect of the show, the show before the show, so this documentary material signed by the performers was another piece of the puzzle for him. It was cool for me to have, but I believed it really needed to join his collection, which includes items like the ticket for the evening signed by the cast of the show that belonged to Doug’s mom.

My experience at 15 will now become part of this archive on Doug Henning, so in a small way, I get to join the history of Doug Henning. As Chip enthusiastically explains and I fully concur, Henning’s first magic special changed the way people thought about magic and launched a resurgence in its popularity with the public. I believe that Henning had as big an impact on the popular imagination in the second half of the twentieth century as Houdini had on first half of the twentieth century.

This is not the first time some of the items we saved over the years have wound up in a museum. Some of our photographs from our time working in a sideshow went to the Sideshow Museum in Missouri. I checked and thankfully they managed to survive covid.

While Chip was here I got to see some of the items from his collection, including Henning’s diary from the 1970s. He wrote down a lot, even what he had for lunch as he struggled in his early years. Chip had the notebooks where Henning sketched out his ideas for the first special. I am so thrilled that Chip is preserving and archiving this material. It is an invaluable and important part of the history of magic. I am also a bit thrilled to be a part of it.

If you wondered why I included the not especially great song Lion Tamer from Henning’s The Magic Show in the list of I Want songs, now you know.

Day 595

I finally finished my three chapter jungle sequence. It was not in the original outline of the book and just sort of happened organically. After some additional tweaking, I am every happy with it. It is basically part of the characters’ first mission together, and things go very badly for them very quickly.

I thought initially that the first mission would take just be a couple of chapters, but the story went in a different direction. Sometimes you just have to follow the story’s lead. The entire first mission takes up 9 chapters, which I did not anticipate. It is also non-stop action, so the next chapter needs to give the reader a chance to catch their breath, the characters a chance to catch their breath, and me a chance to catch my breath.

The jungle sequence is set in Venezuela, one of the most beautiful countries in the world. It is also one of the most dangerous, and not just from the alligators, piranhas, and anacondas. Crime and corruption are so out of control that the State Department recommends that Americans not go there. In my research, I read countless stories of the horrors that tourists face. In my future world, things are not better there and perhaps a bit worse.

I wrote previously about mapping out part of the story that takes place on the streets of San Francisco. I could not go there to map it out, because of Covid, and used Google street view to work out my car chase. I was able to do the same for Venezuela.

I have never been to Venezuela, and I suspect I never will. I would love to go, as it has places like the tallest water fall (Angel Falls), and of course, the endless lightning of Catatumbo. This is where Youtube was so amazingly helpful. I found videos of people hiking there through the jungle, and got a better sense of the type of foliage their jungles have. I could also use Google maps to get a better sense of the terrain and elevation that my characters would be hiking through. There were also tons of videos of the lightning. It was enough to give me a sense of the place and write about it. I could not have done it without these resources. Actually seeing a place is always better as you get much more of a feel for it, but this at least made it possible.

What’s Up With Us

At night, due to my illness, I am limited in what I can do. That makes it a good time to watch really bad action movies, looking for cliches I can give twists to in my story. I also watch a lot of science fiction, because I enjoy it. I checked out the new NBC series La Brea, and like so many others, I was left wondering how the heck the thing got greenlit. It is basically a really bad bigger budget remake of the Saturday morning children’s show Land of the Lost. It is not exactly the same plot- instead of traveling into a land of long extinct creatures deep underground, they fall deep underground and then through a dimensional portal into a land of long extinct creatures. In the publicity it has been compared to Lost, and it would be interesting to watch the pilots for the two back to back. The Lost pilot is one of the best I have ever seen. The La Brea pilot is one of the worst.

It drives me crazy when science fiction gets basic science completely wrong. Manifest waited until the final season to reveal their religious agenda and at that point they started adding some scientists to the cast. There are few real world scientists who would immediately jump to the conclusion that the only possible explanation just had to be the magic powers of Noah’s Ark. Their take on science was hilarious, but it was not really an issue until the final season.

La Brea goes immediately to the hilariously laughable science. One of the characters drops a ring 10,000 years in the past and another character is immediately able to find it in the present, despite sitting on the ground for a thousand decades. I laughed out loud when one of the men now in the past claims to be a museum preparator and he saves several animals from going into the tar. He recognizes them as ones he worked on in the future. That is absolutely ridiculous. They have been pulling fossils out of La Brea for one hundred years, including some 70 camels out of 3.5 million fossils. Amazingly, the very camels he spots turn out to be the ones he worked on, and somehow he is able to recognize them. “Hey Binky, nice to see you with skin on and all in one piece.”

Okay, he did not actually say that, but one of the characters does make a Lost reference. I make a Lost reference in my novel, but it makes sense in context, and it references something that happens to a character who was played by a friend of ours, so it also has the added benefit of being an inside joke.

Both my wife and I went many times to the La Brea tar pits as kids, and her father knew one of the museum preparators, so she got to go behind the scenes there. She grew up digging up fossils in the Mojave desert. That is how she spent many of her summers, as her Dad was a museum preparator for the University of Riverside. Hand Belle a fossilized tooth and she could tell you whether it came from a horse or a camel. She could not go back in time and identify the animal it came from, though.

I’ve been watching a number of Youtube videos on visual effects where they critique the good and the bad. This has been helpful as I try to get up to speed on the pile of new 3D software I have to learn. The special effects on La Brea may wind up on a segment on bad special effects. By the way, dire wolves hunted in packs. Did anyone on this show bother to do any research? It took awhile for Belle to even recognize what they were supposed to be, and she knows her dire wolves. The animal character design is awful.

Add all of that to the ridiculous premise, the cardboard cut out and stereotyped characters that are poorly defined and yet still manage to be annoying, and the atrocious dialogue, and you have La Brea. As the only science fiction series on network television right now, it does not bode well for the future. Can’t wait for the next season of Upload on Amazon. Those people understand science fiction.