At the risk of infantilizing one of the more interesting directors of our current generation, there’s something undeniably cute about Guillermo Del Toro. That perception of adorability was only heightened earlier this week, when the The Shape Of Water director confirmed an anecdote from the set of his giant monster…
Good news, you primitive screwheads: Ash Williams, the cocky, moronic, and ultimately badass hero of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films will be coming to TV screens next year. The previously rumored Evil Dead TV show—now officially titled Ash Vs. Evil Dead—will be airing on Starz, with Raimi directing the pilot and Bruce Campbell returning as horror’s favorite grizzled, chainsaw-handed S-Mart employee.
The show, executive produced by Campbell, Raimi, and original Evil Dead producer Rob Tapert, will once again pit a now-middle-aged Ash against the hordes of gore-filled, nastily cackling monsters known as the Deadites, as an undead-inflicting plague is unleashed upon the world. The show is currently set to run for 10 half-hour episodes of blood, slapstick comedy, and expertly growled one-liners. Starz previously worked with Raimi and Tapert for the equally bloody, but slightly less cartoonish Spartacus, which the pair executive produced.
I just recently managed to codify my theory about how pro wrestling is unique as an art form – not just Max Landis’ thingy about why pro wrestling is special, which is notable largely because it is one of the few times where Max Landis is not entirely insufferable, and because it (correctly) connects pro wrestling to performance art. But performance art still exists; pro wrestling is just a commercially successful version of it, and that is not unique.
What is unique about pro wrestling is this: it is the only creative endeavor where the audience affects the work in real time. A long time ago some smart aleck described pro wrestling as “a LARP where the wrestlers are playing athletes and the audience is playing the audience, and everybody’s in on it.” And that’s exactly true. Now, of course, pro wrestling is still a scripted affair and on a case-by-case basis the audience doesn’t usually change the outcome of a story as it happens – although this is something that can happen in retrospect, with the most obvious example being Batista being obviously scripted to be a triumphant returning hero at this year’s Royal Rumble and the crowd instantly turning on him because they had believed they were finally getting the Daniel Bryan push they had demanded – which eventually led to the “Boo-tista” movement, Batista turning into an arrogant heel (because it was the only way to get a crowd reaction they could use) and WWE eventually writing Bryan into the World title match as the fans demanded. But it’s more than just simply cheering for the guys you like and booing the guys you hate; the crowd is an integral part of wrestling now.
Consider, if you will, the Bray Wyatt entrance.
Bray Wyatt is a great character with a great hook, but booing him as a baddy doesn’t exactly work because he’s supposed to be creepy and scary; booing him would, in a way, reduce him, make him something less than the figure of awe he was supposed to be. This tied into his entrance: a slow, creepy walk in darkness, lit by his lantern, with Mark Crozer and the Rels playing in the background. The crowds at first tried to figure out how to properly express their appreciation for this character, because you couldn’t just boo him. An early attempt was slow, measured claps in time with the music, which worked reasonably well but still somehow lacked gravitas. At WrestleMania the company tried to amp up that atmosphere by having Crozer and the Rels perform live, which was certainly a glorious one-off but obviously not replicable on a regular basis.
At some point, though, fans gradually figured out that when their cellphones were on in the darkness during Bray Wyatt’s entrance, they kind of looked like fireflies, and fireflies are nothing if not thematically appropriate for a southern cult leader’s entrance, so they ran with it. And it worked absolutely perfectly – and WWE responded very smartly by rapidly moving to sell very cheap little Bray Wyatt lanterns at their events, so fans would have something to sway with, and so WWE could make a little side money off this phenomenon, and perhaps have light sources which might look a tad more ghostly and spooky on television.
Which led to what we now have every time Bray Wyatt comes out:
This is the thing: no other art form does this. None of them come even close. This is not to say that, say, makers of movies and television and books and comics and every other art form with a narrative bent do not interact with fans, or consider their desires, or even change course if they think they have made a mistake due to fan response. But no other art form engages with its audience at this rate or changes their story and presentation based on fan input in mid-course – not even most other forms of performance art, frankly (a field that can be shockingly static in its presentation and conservative in its refusal to deviate from original intent).
That’s why wrestling is unique, and only one of the reasons it is great.
I hate Microsoft Word. I want Microsoft Word to die. I hate Microsoft Word with a burning, fiery passion. I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother. Our reasons are, alarmingly, not dissimilar ...
Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use. Worse: it is a near-monopolist, dominating the word processing field. Its pervasive near-monopoly status has brainwashed software developers to such an extent that few can imagine a word processing tool that exists as anything other than as a shallow imitation of the Redmond Behemoth. But what exactly is wrong with it?
I've been using word processors and text editors for nearly 30 years. There was an era before Microsoft Word's dominance when a variety of radically different paradigms for text preparation and formatting competed in an open marketplace of ideas. One early and particularly effective combination was the idea of a text file, containing embedded commands or macros, that could be edited with a programmer's text editor (such as ed or teco or, later, vi or emacs) and subsequently fed to a variety of tools: offline spelling checkers, grammar checkers, and formatters like scribe, troff, and latex that produced a binary page image that could be downloaded to a printer.
These tools were fast, powerful, elegant, and extremely demanding of the user. As the first 8-bit personal computers appeared (largely consisting of the Apple II and the rival CP/M ecosystem), programmers tried to develop a hybrid tool called a word processor: a screen-oriented editor that hid the complex and hostile printer control commands from the author, replacing them with visible highlight characters on screen and revealing them only when the user told the program to "reveal codes". Programs like WordStar led the way, until WordPerfect took the market in the early 1980s by adding the ability to edit two or more files at the same time in a split screen view.
Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, research groups at MIT and Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center began to develop the tools that fleshed out the graphical user interface of workstations like the Xerox Star and, later, the Apple Lisa and Macintosh (and finally the Johnny-come-lately imitator, Microsoft Windows). An ongoing war broke out between two factions. One faction wanted to take the classic embedded-codes model, and update it to a graphical bitmapped display: you would select a section of text and mark it as "italic" or "bold" and the word processor would embed the control codes in the file and, when the time came to print the file, it would change the font glyphs being sent to the printer at that point in the sequence. But another group wanted to use a far more powerful model: hierarchical style sheets. In a style sheet system, units of text -- words, or paragraphs -- are tagged with a style name, which possesses a set of attributes which are applied to the text chunk when it's printed.
Microsoft was a personal computer software company in the early 1980s, mostly notable for their BASIC interpreter and MS-DOS operating system. Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates to write applications for the new Macintosh system in 1984, and Bill agreed. One of his first jobs was to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer -- Microsoft Word for Macintosh. Arguments raged internally: should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there.
Over the late 1980s and early 1990s Microsoft grew into a behemoth with a near-monopoly position in the world of software. One of its tactics became known (and feared) throughout the industry: embrace and extend. If confronted with a successful new type of software, Microsoft would purchase one of the leading companies in the sector and then throw resources at integrating their product into Microsoft's own ecosystem, if necessary dumping it at below cost in order to drive rivals out of business. Microsoft Word grew by acquiring new subsystems: mail merge, spelling checkers, grammar checkers, outline processing. All of these were once successful cottage industries with a thriving community of rival product vendors striving to produce better products that would capture each others' market share. But one by one, Microsoft moved into each sector and built one of the competitors into Word, thereby killing the competition and stifling innovation. Microsoft killed the outline processor on Windows; stalled development of the grammar checking tool, stifled spelling checkers. There is an entire graveyard of once-hopeful new software ecosystems, and its name is Microsoft Word.
As the product grew, Microsoft deployed their embrace-and-extend tactic to force users to upgrade, locking them into Word, by changing the file format the program used on a regular basis. Early versions of Word interoperated well with rivals such as Word Perfect, importing and exporting other programs' file formats. But as Word's domination became established, Microsoft changed the file format repeatedly -- with Word 95, Word 97, in 2000, and again in 2003 and more recently. Each new version of Word defaulted to writing a new format of file which could not be parsed by older copies of the program. If you had to exchange documents with anyone else, you could try to get them to send and receive RTF — but for the most part casual business users never really got the hang of different file formats in the "Save As ..." dialog, and so if you needed to work with others you had to pay the Microsoft Danegeld on a regular basis, even if none of the new features were any use to you. The .doc file format was also obfuscated, deliberately or intentionally: rather than a parseable document containing formatting and macro metadata, it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures used by word, with pointers to the subroutines that provided formatting or macro support. And "fast save" made the picture worse, by appending a journal of changes to the application's in-memory state. To parse a .doc file you virtually have to write a mini-implementation of Microsoft Word. This isn't a data file format: it's a nightmare! In the 21st century they tried to improve the picture by replacing it with an XML schema ... but somehow managed to make things worse, by using XML tags that referred to callbacks in the Word codebase, rather than representing actual document semantics. It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and [usually] competently-managed as Microsoft making such a mistake by accident ...
This planned obsolescence is of no significance to most businesses, for the average life of a business document is less than 6 months. But some fields demand document retention. Law, medicine, and literature are all areas where the life expectancy of a file may be measured in decades, if not centuries. Microsoft's business practices are inimical to the interests of these users.
Nor is Microsoft Word easy to use. Its interface is convoluted, baroque, making the easy difficult and the difficult nearly impossible to achieve. It guarantees job security for the guru, not transparency for the zen adept who wishes to focus on the task in hand, not the tool with which the task is to be accomplished. It imposes its own concept of how a document should be structured upon the writer, a structure best suited to business letters and reports (the tasks for which it is used by the majority of its users). Its proofing tools and change tracking mechanisms are baroque, buggy, and inadequate for true collaborative document preparation; its outlining and tagging facilities are piteously primitive compared to those required by a novelist or thesis author: and the procrustean dictates of its grammar checker would merely be funny if the ploddingly sophomoric business writing style it mandates were not so widespread.
But this isn't why I want Microsoft Office to die.
The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable. I do not write novels using Microsoft Word. I use a variety of other tools, from Scrivener (a program designed for managing the structure and editing of large compound documents, which works in a manner analogous to a programmer's integrated development environment if Word were a basic text editor) to classic text editors such as Vim. But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. They have warped and corrupted their production workflow into using Microsoft Word .doc files as their raw substrate, even though this is a file format ill-suited for editorial or typesetting chores. And they expect me to integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it's an inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job. It is, quite simply, unavoidable. And worse, by its very prominence, we become blind to the possibility that our tools for document creation could be improved. It has held us back for nearly 25 years already; I hope we will find something better to take its place soon.
Originally published March 26, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1323
I dunno why, but I felt like sharing this short one-act that I wrote some time back. I’ve dabbled now and again with producing something for the stage. That’d be fun, I think. Movies worship directors, television is enamored of the actors, but only in legit theater does the writer truly rule. In any event, the following is a little piece I call:
Shoeicide
We open with an empty stage. Then, slowly, Felice enters. She looks as if she’s lost her last friend in the world. She’s wearing a nice sweater, jeans, and very nice shoes. She’s scribbling something on a note. She finishes writing the note, then puts it down on the middle of the stage. She exits.
Moments later she comes back in carrying a chair and a thick rope tied into a hangman’s noose. She places the chair in the middle of the stage by the note. She places one foot on the chair, testing its strength.
As she’s testing it, Linda enters. Linda stands there, simply watching, hands draped behind her back, as Felice puts one foot on the chair, lowers it, puts the other foot on the chair. Then Felice tentatively climbs up on the chair—and then stops, noticing Linda for the first time. They stare at each other. Linda waggles her fingers at Felice. Felice rolls her eyes.
Felice: Do you mind?
Linda shrugs, exits. Felice steps down from the chair, picks up the rope. She pulls on it to test its strength, nods approvingly, then steps back up onto the chair.
Linda enters again, as Felice is looking down, measuring the distance from herself to the ground. Linda is carrying a bag of popcorn. She sits down, as Felice experimentally puts her face through the noose (but without draping it around her neck), and starts eating the popcorn as if she were at a movie. Slowly, Felice becomes aware of Linda’s presence and stares at her incredulously. Linda looks at Felice, looks down at her popcorn, and then extends the bag up, offering her some. Felice makes no move other than to stare at Linda as if she’s just landed from Mars.
Linda: (thinking to assuage her concerns) Don’t worry. It’s low-fat.
Felice: (incredulous) Low fat.
Linda: Yeah, low-fat. I saw this thing on the news where regular movie popcorn is, like, three million calories or something. So I get this stuff, instead. It’s low-fat popcorn. (looks down at it) Either that or it’s Styrofoam packing chips. Haven’t made up my mind yet.
Felice: (dazed) Low… fat.
Linda: Y’know, when you say it like that, it sounds like a bad guy from one of those cheesy Kung Fu movies. (she speaks in a deep, “Asian” voice) You have killed my karate teacher, Low Fat, and for that you must pay. (and her lips continue to move silently for a couple of seconds, as if she were badly dubbed)
Felice: Are you completely nuts?
Linda: That’s a weird question, considering the source.
Felice steps down and stands there, face to face with her.
Felice: Who are you?
Linda: I’m Linda. Who are you?
Felice: Felice. Now, would you get out of here please, so I could have a little freakin’ privacy?
Linda: Okay, sure. Fine.
She gets up, starts to leave, as Felice gives a sigh of relief. Felice steps back up onto the chair. Linda turns.
Linda: You really shouldn’t do that, you know.
Felice: Uh huh. Right. I’ve heard it all before. Live for tomorrow. The world’s going to get better. We love you, we care about you. Don’t do anything stupid. Well, y’know what, it’s all crud. All of it! The world sucks, and, if I want out of it, then that’s my choice, understand?
Linda: Oh, yeah. Completely. I just meant that you really shouldn’t step on that chair with your shoes. It’s leaving footprints all over.
They stare at each other. Then Felice steps down from the chair and removes her shoes.
Felice: Okay?
Linda: Fine. Just trying to be considerate.
Felice starts to climb back on the chair.
Linda: Can I ask you something?
Felice: What?
Linda: I mean, it’s kind of personal, and I figure I should only ask if, y’know, you’re really certain you’re going to do this—
Felice: I am.
Linda: And there’s no chance of you changing your mind—because this is really tough to ask?
Felice: What is it?
Linda: (beat) Can I have your shoes?
Felice: You want my shoes?
Linda: Yeah.
Felice: No!
Linda: Why not? It’s not like you’re gonna need ’em.
Felice: These shoes cost a fortune! Do you have any idea how long I had to save up for these? I had to work my butt off babysitting for, like, ever! These are my best shoes!
Linda: You can’t take it with you.
Felice: The hell I can’t. I wanna be buried in this outfit. It’s my best stuff.
Linda: I can believe it. Where’d you get the sweater?
Felice: Eddie Bauer.
Linda: Get out! Really?
Felice: Yup.
Linda: It’s really nice. (beat) It’d go great with the shoes.
Felice: I’m not giving you my shoes, my sweater, my pants, my socks, or my underwear! Jesus! Why don’t you just ask for the gold fillings out of my teeth?
Linda: (beat) Which teeth?
Felice steps down from the chair again.
Felice: What are you—some sort of ghoul? Some sort of—of depraved lunatic who finds teenage girls in trouble and picks over the bones of their rotting carcass to see what kind of goodies she might be able to find for herself?
Linda: I just don’t like to waste things.
Felice: Well, neither do I.
Linda: You’re wasting yourself.
Felice stares at her.
Felice: Ha. Bloody. Ha. (beat) I can’t believe this. All I wanted was a little privacy. Was that too much to ask?
Linda: I dunno. Why are you—y’know—
She mimes a noose choking around her neck.
Felice: Because nobody gives a damn about me.
Linda: So you’re doing it to be noticed.
Felice: Well, kinda, yeah.
Linda: Then why did you want privacy? Seems kind of stupid, if you ask me.
Felice: I didn’t ask you! I don’t know you! I don’t even like you!
Linda: I don’t blame you. I don’t like me, either. That’s why I tried to kill myself.
Felice: You?
Linda: Yeah. Buncha times. Here, look.
She holds up her wrists. Felice steps down to look at them.
Linda: See? One day I was kinda freaking out, because my boyfriend had left me for another guy? So I grabbed the closest sharp object and did this.
Felice: You got, like, a hundred little scars there. What did you use?
Linda: Toenail clippers.
Felice: You tried to clip yourself to death?
Linda shows a scar just under her ear.
Linda: When that didn’t work, I tried shoving my head into my mom’s blender and setting it to “puree.” That’s where I got this.
Felice: You are pathetic. I mean, you are really pathetic. I have met some unbelievably pathetic people in my time, but you—you look up “pathetic” in the dictionary, your picture is there. You didn’t really try to kill yourself. This is just—just stupid.
Felice plops down on the chair, shaking her head. Linda looks down at the note, indicates it with interest. Felice gestures that, yet, she can pick it up. Linda does so, starts to read it. Slowly, she nods.
Linda: I see. Yes—definitely—I see.
Felice: Well, hallelujah. I figured you’d read that over and give me more grief or ask if you could take something else off my not-yet-dead body or tell me I’m stupid. That it’s ridiculous for me to write things like that everyone dies, so I might as well just get it over with.
She goes to the chair and, as she speaks, steps up onto it, puts her head through the noose, adjusts it.
Felice: I thought you’d tell me that, if I just stick around, I’ll look back on all this in 10 years and be thankful that I didn’t go through with it. That this deep black pit all around me is just normal teenage angst and that I’m not alone. That everyone’s gone through this at some time or another, and if I just give the world a chance, I can find a place in it for me. That I’m just wallowing in self-pity, not considering the feelings of others, and—in short—being selfish and fatalistic in a world that needs more hope than ever before. (beat, then softer, reflecting on it) But, instead, you read that over, and you understand me. Thanks. I mean that. Thanks for reading it over and simply saying, “Definitely—I see.”
She closes her eyes, prepared to step off.
Linda: Oh yes, definitely I-C-I-D-E. Not I-S.
Felice opens her eyes.
Felice: What?
Linda: You spelled “suicide” S-U-I-S-I-D-E, and it’s definitely I-C, not I-S.
Felice: (she pauses a moment, then explodes) It’s a hand-written suicide note that I scribbled from the depths of my despair, for Chrissakes! Whaddaya want me to do, run it through Spellcheck?
Linda: Grammarcheck might not be a bad idea, either.
Felice: (fighting to remain calm) Okay, Professor—What do you think of the note, other than grammar and spelling?
Linda: Oh. It’s bull.
She picks up the popcorn, sits down and starts eating it again.
Felice: I rip my heart out and spill it all over the paper, and you say it’s bull.
Linda: (isn’t it self-evident?) Well—yeah.
Felice: I hate you.
Linda: More than you hate yourself?
Felice: Much more than I hate myself.
Linda: You gonna kill me?
Felice: No.
Linda: That, of course, raises the question—
They stare at each other. Then Felice draws the end of the rope high over her head.
Linda: You’re not gonna kill yourself.
Felice: Yes, I am.
Linda: No, you’re not. Not that way.
Felice: Here I go!
Linda: You’ll never do it.
Felice: Why do you keep saying that? Because you think I’m scared? Because you’re trying to goad me?
Linda: No, because you’re just holding the end of the rope in your right hand. It’s not attached to anything.
Felice stands there, staring out at the audience. Holding the rope taut, she jumps off the chair. She lands on the stage. Nothing, of course, happens. Linda patiently eats popcorn. Felice knows that Linda is watching and half-heartedly tries to mime choking while standing on her toes. Her head slumps over. Linda continues to eat the popcorn. Felice sways slightly from side to side, making little “creaking” noises desperately trying to maintain the illusion. Linda says nothing. Finally, giving up, Felice releases the rope, stands there, and sighs.
Felice: It was supposed to be symbolic. You were supposed to imagine it was attached to something.
Linda: I’m only good at imagining ways to live, not ways to die.
Felice: You’re lucky.
Linda: Felice—when you think about genetics, and people getting together at just the right time and everything—the odds against any of us being here are astronomical. We’re all lucky. You. Me. All of us. You just have to see it, that’s all.
Felice pulls the noose from around her neck, tosses the rope to the ground. She slips into her shoes.
Felice: So who’re you, really? My guardian angel?
Linda: Me? No. Just a life-loving, wandering teenaged smart aleck.
Felice: You’re good.
Linda: You’re not so bad yourself.
And Felice actually grins, shakes her head. She takes a handful of popcorn, chews it—and looks like she’s going to gag. She exits quickly, leaving Linda behind.
Linda picks up the rope, pulls on it experimentally. It’s pretty strong. As she exits after Felice, she calls—
Linda: Can I have your rope?
~
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., P.O. Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)
