The other night, my mother treated David and me to the production of Jesus Christ Superstar that’s playing Broadway right now. We did this because somehow, despite living in the New York Metropolitan Area all his life, David had never seen a Broadway musical before, which was in serious need of rectification. I, on the other hand, have seen quite a few, and I’ve always been fascinated the most by shows like Superstar: the ones with minimalist staging.

Many Broadway shows use elaborate sets, realistically depicting the surroundings and location of wherever the characters are supposed to be. The process of changing these sets mid-show is often just as elaborate — the stage crew scrambles to move props and backdrops offstage, move new ones on, sometimes using pulleys to drop them from the rafters, elevators to lift them from below the stage, whichever. The most impressive productions automate all of this, with setpieces that seem to magically roll on and offstage without the aid of crewmembers.

This is expensive.

Because of the cost — or sometimes purely for artistic reasons — many Broadway shows resort to minimalism. They don’t have a set. They don’t have a backdrop. The few props and setpieces they have are often multi-purpose. In lieu of backdrops, they set the scene with lighting and writing. For example, Superstar handles scene-changes by scrolling the location across a big text marquee; “STREETS OF JUDEA – FRIDAY” scrolls across the stage the way stock prices glide through Times Square. The RBC production of The Threepenny Opera used neon signs. And both times I saw Company — the 2006 Broadway revival and the 2011 Lincoln Center thing with Colbert and Neil Patrick Harris — they basically just moved props around to indicate a scene change.

In 2009, I remember asking myself, why not do this kind of thing in film? The result was the clusterfuckity failed experiment of Bright Black, which is something I’ve vowed to revisit someday when I’ve actually had the chance to coherently plan it. Getting another look at minimalist theatre got me thinking about it again, though.

First, actually, let me answer that question. Why not stage a film in the style of minimalist theatre? Because films don’t have to deal with set changes, time constraints, or any of the other things that makes minimalism advantageous in theatre, for example. Also, theatre has a rich tradition of the audience suspending their disbelief and filling stuff in with their imagination, whereas films have to depict absolutely everything or risk seeming unrealistic. To which I retort, or do they?

My idea for Bright Black was a film lit entirely with black light. Costumes and props would be painted with UV-reactive paint, while everything else would be bathed in dark blue if visible at all. This lends itself very well to minimalist set design, because most of the background is going to be shrouded in darkness anyway.

And besides, the plot would be about wisecracking, katana-wielding Illuminati assassins who have sword fights in Belgian dance clubs. So any pretense of realism has already left the building.

Now, I’m definitely not the only person who’s ever had the idea to stage a film this way. I’ve seen it in Adrian Noble’s 1996 adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and…well, that’s it, really. Rob Marshall’s Chicago kind of did it in a few scenes. Spike Lee’s Passing Strange movie (pictured above) was actually just a recording of the Broadway show, so that doesn’t count (By the way, watch Passing Strange. Right now. I firmly believe it is the most spectacular piece of performance art that anyone has ever staged in any theater, anywhere, ever.). Hitchcock’s Rope was a film staged like a play, but not like a minimalist one. So minimalism on film is, from what I can tell, fairly uncharted territory.

It’s interesting, because when film was first invented, the medium struggled to be anything more than recorded theatre. It wasn’t until Griffith and Kuleshov that the idea of film as a narrative medium distinct from live theatre really took off, only for it to regress back into emulating the stage for a few years as soon as talkies appeared. It seems like film has ever since been trying to loudly proclaim “I am not theatre!”.

So I was thinking, during the intermission of Superstar, when I decide to pick up Bright Black again and really do it right, why not stage it like one of these minimalist shows? And not just borrow the sparse set design, like I was originally envisioning? Why not totally go for broke? Don’t cut to the next scene, have a bunch of ninjas in the background change the set while the actors are still there. Use spotlights and stage lights, and have them all be very noticeable and visible. Let’s make the head of the Illuminati be called “the man behind the curtain”, and literally open a curtain every time Jarod Bright walks into his office.

It’s kind of like how the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill was clearly designed by an architect who knew the choreography of the sword fight that would one day happen there. But even further off-the-wall and thoroughly divorced from reality, concerned only with the abstract aesthetics of what’s happening on screen.

My dad used to tell me about capping video with a camera. You got one vantage point, and that’s it. If you wanted to move it, you have to do that with your hands. If you wanted a second view, you had to get the actors to do the whole scene over again. Can you believe that’s what they train you on in the academies? Sure, it’s classic, it’s old-school, and it’s great to get an appreciation for the traditional way of doing things. But even the biggest auteurs have all moved to fog.

I glance down at my tablet and swipe left. The view’s rotating around me, standing there in the middle of Johnny’s living room. I step to the left, and where I once stood I see zebra bars. But Johnny’s got the fan turned on, so the bars fade away in a second or two.

“How much we got left?” Johnny asks me, walking up to me with the can and looking over my shoulder.

“That corner right there,” I say, pointing towards a patch of zebra bars still showing up over by the big grandfather clock.

“I did that corner like five times!” Johnny says.

“Really?” I ask. I’d been going over lines with Theresa and Craig for the past hour, so I hadn’t really been paying attention. “Is there airflow or something?”

“You wanna check?”

Johnny hates the fog filter. It makes him dizzy. Can’t say I blame him; it’s not really meant to run on lenses, and we kind of had to hack it to get it to do so. Someday I’ll be able to afford a pair of goggles. But for now, this clunky lens port will have to suffice.

I activate the filter and I can see the fog now, glowing bright orange. Little specks of blue twinkle on and off within, representing individual nanocameras. I can see why it’s not getting into the corner now. There’s some kind of draft coming from the ceiling, blowing the fog away. Oh, right.

“Remember when we were wrestling up in your room that one time?” I say.

“What’s that got to —” he trails off. “I thought we fixed that hole!”

“Not entirely, looks like.”

“All right, I’ll get the ladder.” He snatches up a roll of duct tape and runs off to fetch a step-ladder.

We wouldn’t have to deal with this shit if I could afford active swarming fog. That’s the kind where the nanocams send out electromagnetic fields to keep themselves in roughly the same place, so you don’t have to worry about airflow. The downside is that you need special fans to disperse them, but those are pretty cheap. And it’s so worth it. You can even cap outdoors with that stuff. Last summer we had to hack the city’s surveillance fog to get an outdoor scene. It worked pretty damn well — that surveillance fog is high-res stuff — but the cops ended up chasing us and Greg got arrested. I think that’s why Greg doesn’t make movies with us anymore. But at least we got the scene.

Right about then, the front door opens. I hear Theresa and Craig talking about something or other as they walk back in. She yells out to me, “Hey! You guys ready yet?”

“Almost!” I reply.

Craig’s rolling his eyes as he ambles into the room. “Geez, what’s taking so long?”

“It’s a big room.”

“Do we really need all of it?”

“Hey,” I retort, “I don’t wanna be cutting this thing and all of a sudden realize I don’t have coverage for a spectacular angle.”

“And besides,” Theresa chimes in, “what about people who wanna play with the view themselves?”

“Who does that?” sneers Craig.

“I do!” I say.

“Well, yeah, but you’re a director.”

“And so are a lot of people who are gonna watch this movie!” I sigh. “Look, we’re almost done, see?” I point to Johnny, who’s climbing down from the ladder now. The hole’s all taped up.

“We all good?” Johnny asks.

I turn the filter back on and check. “Draft’s gone.”

“Good.” Johnny shakes up the can and sprays. The fog billows out into the air, silvery as it leaves the can but turning invisible as it disperses. Down on my tablet, I can see the zebra bars disappearing from the corner, replaced by the visual data from all of the nanocams floating through the area.

There. Total coverage.

“We are good,” I say, tapping the record button on my tablet to start capping. “Oh, shit, Johnny! Move the ladder.”

“Where?” he asks.

“Anywhere. Just away from where it is now.” Wherever he moves it to, I’ve already capped without the ladder in place. Now I just need to cap the corner with no ladder, and I can erase it entirely in post.

Craig and Theresa take their places, Craig sitting on the couch, Theresa outside the doorway. I take a few steps to the right to cap the spot I was standing without me in it. Johnny puts the ladder down across the room and takes a seat, watching.

“Ready, guys?” I ask.

Craig and Theresa nod.

“Action!”

While they do the scene, I play around with the view on my tablet, framing a closeup of Theresa, a closeup of Craig, a wide view of the whole scene, and more, splitting the screen between all of them. None of these are framed nearly as precisely as I’d like, but I’ve got all the time in the world to tweak that later. Right now, I’m just watching their faces, their bodies, listening to their voices, and realizing once again just how lucky I am to have such talented actors as friends. This movie’s gonna be great.

Okay, well, the writing and shooting took 20 minutes. The editing ended up taking a lot longer. None of the participants were able to stick around to watch me edit after we wrapped the shoot, so I started working on the train home.

The extended length of time I spent editing was only minimally related to the fact that I had the luxury of more time. It was predominantly related to the fact that I was editing on Final Cut X.

Believe the hype. It is that bad.

The reason I subjected myself to such torture is because Final Cut X is very good at pulling stuff off a Flip camera very quickly. (In hindsight, Final Cut Pro 7 would have let me use the Flip cam as an external hard drive, so FCX probably doesn’t actually have an advantage. Also, notice that I’m only referring to version 7 as “Final Cut Pro”. Final Cut X does not deserve to have the word “Pro” anywhere in its title, no matter what Steve Jobs says. But I digress.) However, I’m glad nobody had time to stick around for the editing, because struggling to get FCX to do the most basic of things easily quintupled the amount of time I spent editing.

It’s not that I couldn’t understand the differences between FCP and FCX. It’s that FCX is wildly inconsistent. For example, whenever I delete a clip in the middle of my timeline (I refuse to call it “storyline”), everything after that clip shifts back in time to fill the gap. Except when there’s another video clip on the second layer-thing, in which case nothing shifts back. Except when that’s not the fucking case at all and everything shifts back underneath the second layer for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Oh, and you can apply a black-and-white filter to every clip in your timeline at once. But if you decide you want to remove it? One at a time. Click on the clip, uncheck the box, click on the next clip, uncheck the box again, over and over and over. But what if you select all the clips, and then uncheck the box? It removes it from one of the clips. Which clip? Whichever one it fucking feels like, that’s which one.

It’s the same thing with color correction and automatic sound adjustments, which are sometimes helpful and are usually terrible. It’s not the same thing with image stabilization, which is always terrible. You can disable it, but you know what happens when you disable it? You wanna guess? Go ahead, guess. Fine, I’ll tell you. NOTHING! Nothing fucking happens when you disable the image stabilization! You are either stuck with the shitty distorted crap it outputs, or you have to drag the original unmodified clip back into the timeline and lose anything else you’ve done to it so far.

That would be significantly less of a big deal if the simple act of inserting a clip into the timeline weren’t so awkward and cumbersome. Yes, you read that right. The act of taking a clip and putting it into the fucking timeline, which is the video editing equivalent of moving a fucking pen across a piece of paper, is awkward and cumbersome in Final Cut X.

And don’t get me started on audio. You wanna know why some parts of the video sound too quiet compared to the others? Because I was done fucking dealing with this program, that’s why.

See, much like Final Cut Pro, Final Cut X allows you to put audio clips into different tracks for different channels: left and right, for example. This would be great if I didn’t have to find that out by exporting my video, at which point I began to wonder why all of the dialogue was only coming out of my right speaker. The different tracks aren’t labelled. For that reason you have absolutely no idea which sound is going to come from which speaker, but also because Final Cut X exports audio differently from how it sounds when you’re actually editing.

The default audio setting for a new project is “Surround.” Because this is a Pro application. And Pros like to edit surround sound. However, if you accidentally start working without knowing this, it creates all sorts of problems, such as making certain sounds not come out of random speakers. Want to change your audio settings? Tough shit. Because you cannot change a project’s resolution, frame rate, or audio setting after you have created it.

Why? Who knows? It’s certainly not to prevent format problems, because just about the only thing Final Cut X is good at is dealing with a clusterfuck of formats. Want to run 29.97fps interlaced video at 24fps progressive? No problem! Oh, and is it in some weird-ass obscure MPEG-2 format that FCP7 can’t even wrap its head around? Don’t worry about it! See, I like that. Why can’t I have that in an editing application that lets me fucking edit a video?

However, against all odds, I managed to use FCX to produce a silly short film about Occupying shit. And I never, ever want to experience that again.

• Rerecord some of Dave Lanz’s dialogue for Blake
• Record a few lines with Mike Luiso for Shaun the Intern
• Start animating

It’s that last one which is really bothering me. I was planning to start animating a few weeks ago, right after we finished recording Alex Green’s dialogue for Andrew. Then, some family drama cropped up, which didn’t turn out to be great for my mental health. It’s gotten to the point where Tuesday night, I didn’t go to sleep. I’d been awake for a little over 36 hours straight when I finally lay down last night. And then I woke up at 4:45 PM.

The weird thing is, what kept me up on Tuesday was the fact that I was working on a completely unrelated side project. So I’m definitely not impaired from working on stuff in general. I don’t understand my brain sometimes.

Now, I’ve felt bad before for slacking off on YFIAS. This time, though, my inbox or Twitter feed occasionally pops up with comments, messages, and engagement from adoring fans. It makes me smile every time, while at the same time making me feel like I’m letting them down.

So, that’s why I’m publicly stating that I’m going to take this weekend to decompress, and then I will start animating Episode 3 on Monday, April 30th. There. I’ve set a hard deadline that the Internet will be mad at me for missing. Now I have to do it.

This is part of the reason I’m trying to build Plankhead into a larger organization: I don’t operate very well all by myself. Mike won’t be able to really assist with animation till the summer (assuming we can get Motion to stop crashing on his Hackintosh, but that’s probably related to the fact that XFX mailed him two faulty graphics cards in a row); Dave and Erica (Frohnhoefer, who helped animate Episode 2) don’t have Macs. So I’m essentially tackling the animation alone.

That’s also why I’ve started to regret getting addicted to Motion, because it limits our animators to the following very small set of criteria:

1. Mac users
2. Who have a Mac that’s theoretically powerful enough to run Crysis (without patches!) on the highest graphics settings, because that’s apparently what Motion requires to only whine like a little bitch occasionally as opposed to constantly

Sadly, learning Blender is just another thing on the list of the bajillion things I need to do besides animate Episode 3. It is, however, essential to the future of this project. I have a lot of eager friends and fans without Macs, and you know what? Motion really isn’t cut out to do the type of stuff we’re pushing it to do anyway. We’re building full 3D environments in this thing. I really need to stop blaming the lazy developers for all of the problems I’m having with it, and start blaming them for only some of them.

Then again, I’ve heard horror stories about how horribly unoptimized Maya is (unless you pay Nvidia an extra seven thousand dollars to give you the un-DRM’d version of their graphics card, in which case it’s only vexingly unoptimized). So perhaps you can’t get away from this stuff. When is John Carmack going to make an animation program? That would solve everything.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on. I love all you guys and stuff. Now I should probably have breakfast. Or is it dinner at this hour?

The surrealist movement focused predominantly on letting out all of the absurd, crazy thoughts in your mind. The result was a slew of bizarre, dream-like art, fascinating and highly entertaining. But after than the 1960s, other than a few David Lynch films here and there, surrealism seemed to disappear from the public consciousness.

But now it’s back.

When I was in high school obsessing over surrealism, I wondered why it wasn’t a speculative fiction genre right alongside sci-fi and fantasy. Unbeknownst to me, a lot of people were wondering the same thing at the same time, and started writing bizarro fiction. Weird books that are weird for the sake of being weird. It’s wonderful stuff.

While I’m not sure if it was influenced by bizarro fiction, Ugly Americans is probably one of the first truly bizarro shows on television.It depicts a world where humans, zombies, demons, wizards, koala-people, robots, floating-brain-things, and pretty much anything else the writers decide to come up with coexist (semi-)peacefully in modern-day New York City.

Also, it seems to be on some of the same wavelengths as Your Face is a Saxophone. (From Season 2 Episode 13)

Meanwhile, Dadaism — the inbred father/sister of the Surrealist movement — is seeing a resurgence as well. See, Dadaism was about doing stuff like turning a urinal upside down, signing it, and declaring it to be a sculpture. Now have a look at this:

That’s kind of Dada, isn’t it?

Last year, I posted a script excerpt from the upcoming second episode of Your Face is a Saxophone. This bit of the script shows off the evolution of Andrew’s character since I wrote the first episode; an evolution which is, for the most part, a careen in the exact same direction.

There’s a very specific reason that I didn’t merely stick to Andrew’s character, but rather turned it up to 11. Shortly after the first episode of Your Face is a Saxophone debuted, my life imitated my art.

In Episode 3, Andrew will make this rant, which is I swear to god almost verbatim something that the person I’m about to tell you about said to me. I can’t make this shit up:

I met a guy — let’s call him Deuce Shmagner, because I’m not looking to call him out by his real name, tempting as it may be — who was running a small, in-person Bitcoin exchange. This was back when Bitcoins were a dollar each, and there was no online way to turn small quantities of them into cash (besides the kinda-sketchy Liberty Reserve option at MtGox). I was raising money for Your Face is a Saxophone at the time through Kickstarter, and some people wanted to donate Bitcoin. For people donating outside of Kickstarter, I was having Dave hold onto the money and pledge it to the project, so it’d end up counting. Hence why I needed to convert the Bitcoin to dollars.

So, I met Deuce in his apartment, sold him my 6 Bitcoin, and we ended up talking. As it turned out, we shared a lot of the same ideas and ideals (or so I thhought at the time). Technological optimism. Money as just a means to an end. Skepticism of authority. An entrepreneurial spirit. A desire to empower people. Deuce ended up watching Your Face is a Saxophone later on, and thought it was brilliant.

Several days later, I was beginning to freak out about finances. I’d burnt through a lot of money working on YFIAS non-stop for the past several months, without any income to offset my expenses. The Kickstarter campaign had stagnated, and the Intarnetz wasn’t nearly as excited about the whole thing as I’d hoped. Living in my parents’ house was taking a psychological toll on me, and I’d no idea where I could get the money to get out.

Then, Deuce spoke to me again. He had a business proposal for me, about selling Bitcoin to people for him and taking commission; if they liked, we’d set them up with a MyBitcoin account, and manage it for them. I responded by saying I had a business proposal of my own: redesigning their website, because despite the fact that they were legit, the site was kind of sketchy looking (For example, describing one’s company as “an extremely reputable Bitcoin dealer” has sort of the opposite effect).

Instead, Deuce told me that their Bitcoin business was a side project, and offered me a job in something more my speed. He and his boyfriend, who we’ll call Ted, were looking to found a new Internet TV network (which we’ll call “DeuceTV”) a la Revision3 or TWiT, but for the masses. There’d still be tech shows, but they’d be aimed at non-geeks, and among a whole slew of others on non-technical, more mainstream topics. And it’d have a global focus, with some Spanish-language shows, and eventually expanding into whichever other languages we could find people to speak. As icing on the cake, it’d all be CC-BY licensed. He wanted me to come on as the VP of Programming.

Pay would be low; they were funding it all from their bank accounts. We agreed on $1200 a month, which was about minimum wage for the hours I’d be working. That was enough to afford rent and food (but not much else) in an apartment I’d found with a friend in Harlem (The hours I was to be working meant commuting from Long Island wasn’t much of an option). It would be tough, but Deuce assured me that this rate would be temporary. Pay would go up as soon as the profits started coming in, which wouldn’t take too long.

We’d work early mornings till noon. After noon, they needed the apartment free for Ted to work as a chiropractor, and Deuce to do, um, IT consulting or something; it was never quite clear. Those were their pay-the-rent jobs. Once DeuceTV was profitable, we’d shift hours.

I was skeptical, but maybe, just maybe, this guy knew what he was doing. And I was desperate to get my own place and start becoming self-sufficient. So I said okay.

It felt good at first. Deuce would greet me with a hug every day I came in, because that’s just how we members of The Homosexual Agenda roll. He was my “boss” technically, but also a friend, it felt like. He and Ted and I could talk to each other on the same level. Just three guys starting up a company together.

It was around day two that everything started to go downhill.

Apparently, we were going to start with twelve shows, and we’d be launching on April 1st. This was on March 1st when Deuce told me this. This prospect was objectively insane.

Oh, but don’t worry, it’s okay, Deuce said. They’re basically going to be the same show, but about different topics. We’ll just sit down in front of these webcams with guests and talk. Or talk about stuff by ourselves. We don’t need “fancy production values”. As you can imagine, this is the point at which my excitement began to evaporate.

You see, I’d taken a look at Deuce and Ted’s previous work. It was blurry, grainy webcam footage of them sitting behind their computers, sometimes with a guest uncomfortably sandwiched between them, or a 4:3 image of a Skype chat stretched onto the 16:9 monitor (aaaagh) behind them. It was completely unedited — there were no titles, no graphics, and no removal of the ten seconds at the beginning where Deuce was pressing the frigging record button and waiting awkwardly for the opening music cue to start. I’d assumed that I was being brought on to improve some of this. Apparently, not to a very great extent.

So, it turned out we were going for quantity-over-quality. There would be nothing to differentiate us from every other amateur videoblogger, and certainly not come out ahead of TWiT or Revision3. And yet somehow this was going to lead to lucrative sponsorship deals.

Oh, but people like me, said Deuce. People don’t care about fancy production values, they just care about the content. Everyone likes to listen to what I say. Lots of people watch my videos. I have thousands of Twitter followers, and they’re totally not all spam bots or people trying to sell Internet Marketing Secrets, I swear. Pay no attention to Oybek, the kid from Uzbekistan who I pay $200 a month to mass-follow people on Twitter and then unfollow them if they don’t follow me back; I’m legitimately popular. We’ll have no problem and we’ll be making lots of money, just like how I said Bitcoins would be worth $1000 each before the end of the year. I know what I’m talking about, because I was a manager at a Fortune 400 company.

Note that he never specified which Fortune 400 company he worked at, nor why he’s the only person in the world who says “Fortune 400″ instead of “500″ or “100″. But I digress.

At this point, I had become what I hated: the guy only in it for the money. A shit amount of money — $1200 a month in Manhattan is nothing — but money nonetheless. The prospect of DeuceTV being anything that I could reasonably be proud of had evaporated by about day four, so I was only putting in the bare minimum amount of work that would get me my pay. Note the word “pay”, not “paycheck” — we’re talking off-the-books cash here, because we’re Libertarians and government is stupid and Ayn Rand is erotica.

Well, okay, I admit, I still had a small glimmer of hope. And you know what, for as aggravating as Deuce was, he was still a nice guy. Even though his business strategies were starting to bother the hell out of me, he still felt like a good friend to have.

Until I would wonder what the fuck I was thinking, after he did something like this:

I was helping Deuce set up a Podtrac account for DeuceTV, and as we looked through the FAQ, there was a question we had that wasn’t answered. I think it was something about iTunes integration, I don’t remember. So he looked up their phone number and called them.

It’s an answering machine. Of course it’s an answering machine, because he’s calling at 8 in the morning. This is the message he leaves:

Hi, this is Deuce Shmagner at DeuceTV, call me back at [whatever his number was].

No mention of the actual question. No reason for them to call us back. Nobody has actually heard of him or DeuceTV, so why is he acting like they have?

I mention these things to him, and he says, “Well, if they don’t call back, that’s their problem.”

Well, no, actually, it’s our problem because we’re the ones who are trying to find out if you know what fuck it I’m not even gonna try.

My cynicism was cemented when we had the SEO discussion. Deuce, through the extremely scientific and empirical means of some PageRank checker website, had determined that WordPress.com has a “nine out of ten PageRank”, whatever the fuck that means. Therefore, we’d need to create individual WordPress blogs for every single show, because that would be search engine gold or someshit.

The problem with WordPress.com is that we’d have limited control over the site design and user experience. If, as Deuce hoped, the ruse worked, and these WordPress blogs catapulted to the top of all sorts of search queries, then people would be confused as hell. They’d see these sites of radically different design to DeuceTV.com, and probably be under the impression that they weren’t affiliated.

I’ve seen some porn sites use tactics like this. Deuce wanted to use it for Oprah-like shows.

I started to get emotional in arguing against this. If, in fact, this search engine voodoo worked, it would be pissing on brand-building for the possibility of short-term ad dollars. To achieve his big social change goals, we didn’t want mindless search engine traffic stumbling on DeuceTV, we wanted people who actually cared about the programming and wanted to see it. Just because you get a lot of pageviews doesn’t mean they’re the ones you want. But who was I kidding? DeuceTV clearly wasn’t about making the world a better place, and Deuce was lying to himself if he thought so.

Anyway, it turned out that Deuce and Ted were going to be on vacation in Spain three weeks into us working together. Apparently they found some kind of travel hacking deal on plane tickets, and invited the entire family along. Great, Deuce, take a big vacation two weeks before launching your company.

Actually, it was okay, because that’s what I was here for. During the week they were gone, I would work from home, building the entire DeuceTV website all by myself, and create motion graphic opening sequences for all twelve motherfucking shows. The latter, I had pushed for — it was the one small concession of “fancy production values” that Deuce had allowed — but it was still quite a lot to do in a week. Especially combined with cobbling together an entire website, something I wasn’t very good at and didn’t really enjoy all that much.

Admittedly, I should have stood up and said it was too much work before accepting the responsibility. But he was paying me seven bucks an hour for it all, so I figured I had room to screw up.

Lo and behold, my work was complicated by a crisis. I don’t want to get too deep into it, but long story short, my roommate was moving us to a new apartment three weeks after I’d just moved into the new one, and didn’t think to tell me about it until it was happening. Also unpaid Con Ed bills and power outages. Needless to say, I was going to have to cut features from the website in order to get it done on time, and only finish motion graphics for the shows we were planning to tape the first week. I emailed Deuce explaining the situation. He didn’t seem to object.

And so, I got a functional and perfectly fine website ready, and prepared graphics for three shows, while somehow managing to scrape by with my mental health. I walked into Deuce’s apartment the day after they got back to New York, and showed off the website.

Deuce was not impressed. And had quite a bit to say to me.

His tirade hit these major points:

• I don’t want to hear about your personal drama in emails. Go gab about it to your girlfriends.
• You’re not paying me. I’m paying you. If you were paying me, then you could tell me what to do. But I tell you what to do because I’m paying you.
• By “telling me what to do”, I’m referring to the fact that you told me that you were going to make cuts from the website. Oh, and that thing with the WordPress blogs last week. That’s not your decision, because I’m paying you.
• Oybek never says “this is how it’s gonna be,” he just says, “yes boss, whatever you say boss”, because Oybek’s not paying me; I’m paying Oybek.
• You know, in Spain, when I was having this really refreshing bath, I was telling Ted, I’m never going to hire anyone again. I’m just going to take unpaid interns, and they’ll have to prove themselves.
• Oh, and by the way, there are lots of people who are desperate to do work for me. Look at Mohammed in Egypt. He’s working for free. I’m not even paying him.
• Maybe we should give you less hours? Because this website doesn’t look like you worked eight hours a day on it, because I was inside your head after all and know exactly how long it took, and if you can’t work eight hours a day, maybe we should pay you less. Or do you want to be an unpaid intern?
• You’re not paying me. I’m paying you.

Now, given the fact that A) I was being treated as a friend throughout this entire endeavor, and B) my job title included “Vice President”, it wasn’t all that unreasonable of me to assume that I could A) actually mention why I would need to make cuts to finish my work, and B) make decisions autonomously. See, Deuce was paying me, but not to work for him — I was working for the company. Or so I’d had every reason to be under that impression.

But I didn’t have my wits about me to say as much at the time. Firstly, I was caught off-guard by this sudden outburst, and secondly, as soon as he started talking about cutting my hours and paying me less, my brain immediately went into calculator mode. With less pay, there would be no way I could afford to stay in my new apartment, and if I couldn’t stay in the apartment, this shit job was hardly worth dragging myself to the Long Island Railroad for.

So, after Deuce finally stopped talking, and a long moment to choose my words, I said, “I realize that there are many people who are desperate for this job, and would do more work than I have for less. But I’m not desperate.” And I walked out.

Not that there actually are all that many people desperate to work with Deuce Shmagner, but hey, I already said I wasn’t firing on all cylinders in the heat of the moment. Technically, Deuce still owes me about $200 for the work I did while he was in Spain, but I was more concerned with getting the fuck out than pressing the issue.

Later, Deuce ended up pissing off the Bitcoin community, and they found out that his last business had been involved in mortgage fraud. He was living in New York because he was on the run from the state of Illinois. So he was a convicted scam artist too. Lovely.

Ultimately, I don’t regret working with Deuce; it was a screenwriting goldmine. I will never, ever again struggle to write the character of a pompous, egocentric, hypocritical douche. But there’s one thing about Deuce which I’m not sure comes through unless you really get to meet him, face-to-face. I don’t think Deuce knows that he’s a douchebag and a con man. I think he genuinely believes his own bullshit, and really does feel like he’s working to make the world a better place.

In one of our conversations about corporate influence in politics, Deuce mentioned an idea to me: the “accidental conspiracy.” It happens when a bunch of organizations, doing what they believe to be right, end up entirely by accident causing damage so massive to the world that it seems like it was intentional and coordinated. That about sums up Deuce Wagner. He is a walking, talking, living, breathing, anthropomorphization of an accidental conspiracy.

My heart skips a beat as the words touch my retinas, the notification chime ringing in my ears like a flashbang. I start to sweat. My stomach ties itself in knots. All I want to do is put down my phone, back away slowly, and get under my covers holding onto a little plush Siberian husky. But I’m not at home right now. I’m out with friends. Good friends, but not the kind who can wrap their arms around me and tell me it’ll all be okay if shit goes bad.

Clear the notification. Leave it for later.

“New reply to your comment”

Which comment? Where? What did I say? Was it a silly joke, or was it a thoughtful opinion? My heart races again. No. I don’t want to look at it now.

Next day, I’m home. I open up my inbox. There they are. I’d forgotten about them last night. I turn white. I’m all alone now; just me and the comments. The words of random, anonymous people somewhere on the other side of the planet, judging me. Taking the communications I’d poured my heart and soul into and scrutinizing them. Scrutinizing me.

I’ll look at the reply first.

“Wow, you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.” Etcetera etcetera. Bashing me over the head with why I’m wrong. I’m not wrong, of course, and I clearly know what I’m talking about better than this guy. For some reason, the ignorance makes it sting more. And it really stings.

The knots in my stomach tie themselves into bows. My throat clenches. It was everything I’d feared: rejection, disdain, scorn, hatred. I know it’s meaningless and insignificant, but I’m helpless to stop the debilitating haze of gloom that overruns my senses. Everything looks flatter. Grayer. My head throbs with a dull pain.

I know people on the Internet are dicks, and I’ve seen it a million times before. But when it happens to me, it’s still a slap in the face. It still hurts.

This is why I wanted to let this wait until I was someplace safe. Because when you look at a comment on something you made — no matter if it’s the most insignificant thing — if it means something to you, then anything can happen. They can utterly destroy you in five words.

But on the other hand…

I open the reply to my video. “That was one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time.” He goes on for a whole paragraph telling me what he loved about it. I’m smiling. Beaming. Walking on air. I feel like I’m flying. Like I could take on the world.

This is how it goes. Every single time, when I open one of those emails, it’s a game of roulette. Am I going to feel stabbed in the heart for the next ten minutes, or king of the world for the next twenty?

Many anti-piracy technologies have been controversial due to their employment of a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system. CC0 works differently, by removing all copyright on a digital media file without modifying or locking the data within. This has the effect of severely limiting a consumer’s ability to do anything illegal with the content.

Plankhead was unable to track all downloads of Your Face is a Saxophone, but the CC0 technology makes this a non-issue. “It gives us peace of mind,” said David Lanz, Chief Operating Plankhead of Plankhead. “With CC0, we don’t have to account for every single download to be sure that none of them are illegal. We’ve consulted dozens of security experts, electrical engineers, and quantum physicists, and they’ve all agreed that it’s physically impossible to pirate our show. So we can be certain that nobody has ever done it.”

The group switched to CC0 technology in October of last year after Mr. Green voiced concerns with their previous choice of anti-piracy technology, Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY). “CC-BY is still much stronger than a DRM-based anti-piracy technology,” said Green, “but I was still able to conceive of a way that someone, somewhere might be able to infringe on our copyright with a CC-BY-protected product. CC0, on the other hand, is rock-solid.”

Green also believes that the technology has been a tremendous financial boon to the group. CC0 generates gratitude from informed consumers and digital activists, which differs from competing disdain- and hatred-based technology. “If we hadn’t used CC0, our revenue probably would have been halved,” said Green. “The goodwill it generates has been wonderful for our business.”

Plankhead is an organization devoted to the production, promotion, and proliferation of public media. In less pretentious terms, they make stuff, donate it to the world, and scream loudly about its existence. Your Face is a Saxophone is their first major release. For more information about Plankhead and Your Face is a Saxophone, please visit http://plankhead.com and http://yfias.com.

Contact:
Zacqary Adam Green
Zacqary@plankkhead.com
http://plankhead.com

###

We all know the basics of geometry. A line is one-dimensional. A square is two-dimensional, made up of four lines connected at their endpoints. A cube is three-dimensional, made up of six squares connected at their edges. And a tesseract is four-dimensional, made up of eight cubes connected at their sides.

Actually, you might not have heard of the last one. But take a look at the image up top: it’s a tesseract rotating through hyperspace. Whether that breaks your brain or not, the point is: there can be more than three dimensions to any given thing.

So how does this apply to characters in fiction? Let’s have a look at some examples.

First Dimension: Time

A one-dimensional character can be taken completely at face value, and never changes. They always react the same way, their mindset is always unambiguous, and they never learn from their experiences, alter their personality, or grow. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.

Second Dimension: Behavior

A two-dimensional character is, generally, one whose behavior does change over time. They literally have an arc.

If a character has both motivations and behaviors which don’t change at all over the course of the story, then they’re another variety of two-dimensional character. Speaking of which, let’s talk about motivation.

Third Dimension: Motivation

A three-dimensional character changes over time, but they may be more than what they seem at face value. They have subtexts and inner motivations which explain their actions and give a reason for their behavior, which may or may not be clear to the audience. Both motivations and behavior may change over the course of the story, but not always.

Other people may define “character depth” as the complexity of these subtexts and motivations. I’d say a better term would be “density” — a dense character has a rich, complex backstory, which leads them to behave in a variety of ways in various contexts. “Dense” is also a derogatory term that means “stupid”, though, which is probably why this hasn’t caught on.

Intermezzo: Who Sees These Dimensions

Back to geometry for a second. The world we live in is three-dimensional, but we’re only seeing a two-dimensional projection of it. Have a look at the palm of your hand. Notice that you can see every part of your hand on the X and Y axes.

Now — without moving your hand at all — take a look at your knuckles on the other side.

Can’t do it, can you? That’s because you’re only getting two dimensions of information at any given time. Your retina is a flat, 2D plane picking up a flat disk of light. You’re not seeing the entirety of the third dimension all at once, just a cross-section of it. To see what else is out there, you have to start rotating things, and build a mental model of what the totality of a 3D object — like your hand — actually looks like.

It’s the same with characters. The first two dimensions — time and behavior — are completely visible to the audience. The third dimension — the motivation — is only visible to the character. But sometimes, the actions of the character may reveal little bits and pieces of their motivations, and the audience can start to build a mental model of them.

But what about aspects that even the character can’t see?

Fourth Dimension: Consciousness

A four-dimensional character not only has behaviors and motivations that change over time, but also a varying self-awareness. The character may think they understand their own motivations, but in reality be very, very wrong.

I’m not going to draw a diagram, because visually representing a four-dimensional object makes my brain hurt. Instead, I’ll just describe an example: A bully beats up on an effeminate gay boy (behavior), because the bully hates gay people (motivation) — or so he thinks (consciousness). By the end of the story (time), the bully realizes (consciousness) that he’s actually gay too, and has been ashamed of it. So he apologizes and makes amends with the effeminate boy (behavior) in an effort to atone and find happiness (motivation).

In other words, the fourth dimension is the discrepancy between what the character thinks their motivation is, and what it actually is. In many stories, the character becomes conscious of their true motivation over time, which then alters their behavior and/or motivation.

This could also manifest itself as a character who isn’t conscious of their behavior. For one reason or another, they fail to see the consequences of their actions, and over time realize that they’ve actually been acting against their motivation. For example, the idealistic businessman who wants to change the world for the better, and fails to see that he’s actually become the very thing he hates until it’s too late.

Four-dimensional characters may not be all that uncommon after all. What examples in literature, film, or other media of fiction can you think of? Sound off in the comments.

A large group of devoted Mass Effect fans absolutely detested the ending to the game’s third, final installment. The outrage became so frenzied that developer BioWare announced that they were going to change it. This news has led to further frenzied outrage from game developers fearing that their artistic integrity will no longer be respected, critics decrying it as the death of games-as-art, and other general quasi-enlightened indignation.

The simple answer to all this is that video games are inherently a collaboration between author and audience. The more holistic answer is twofold:

1. An author’s intent is meaningless if they fail to communicate it to the audience
2. Art and meaning does not have to be intentional, and is often unintentional

The first point is a uniquely metamodern observation: it neither rejects nor accepts the validity of authorial intent, but makes it contingent upon its relationship to the audience’s interpretation. The second point is something that has been well-established since the dadaist and surrealist movements (but obviously not widely-understood). The result is that Mass Effect is not a mere series of video games. It is performance art, being unwittingly performed both by BioWare and their fans.

VAGUE SPOILERS FOR MASS EFFECT 3 FOLLOW

Mass Effect 3 tasks the player, as Commander Shepard, with defeating the Reapers: an ancient race of synthetic lifeforms which live in intergalactic space, and return every 50,000 years to consume all intelligent life in the Milky Way. The technology which makes space travel possible in the Mass Effect universe was placed there by the Reapers as a trap for intelligent civilizations, urging them to develop along a predetermined path. It’s cosmic horror straight out of H.P. Lovecraft: humans — and all intelligent life — are insignificant in the face of something much bigger than ourselves, which we can never hope to understand.

The Mass Effect trilogy is all about defying cosmicism: yes, we can understand it, the player says. Yes, we can defeat it.

This is especially prominent in the third game. In order to raise an army to fight the Reapers, the player must unite all of the alien species in the galaxy. This is nigh impossible; hundreds- and thousands-year-old conflicts divide these races, preventing them from ever wishing to work with one another. Some of the most alien and strange races are believed to be inherently violent and dangerous — the insectoid Rachni with their hive mind; the artificially intelligent Geth who exist as algorithms on a server, and construct and destroy robotic bodies for themselves on a whim. Throughout the game, the player as Shepard defies this impossibility. Yes, we can unite all of these races. Yes, we can solve all of these conflicts.

This is exactly what happens. In the game’s final act, all of the intelligent species of the galaxy have indeed put aside their differences as a direct result of Shepard’s — the player’s — actions. Galactic peace seems inevitable once the war against the Reaper threat is won. The player has done the unthinkable. They have solved the unsolvable. Intelligent life is significant in the face of the cosmos.

But then, in the game’s final moments, all that is thrown away. The player is presented with a series of events so illogical that many fans believe it must have been Shepard’s hallucination as a result of Reaper mind-control. While logical, this “indoctrination theory” still constitutes a sudden about-face of Mass Effect’s underlying theme: yes, we can defeat the undefeatable.

Critic MovieBob has compared this sudden about-face to the bleak ending of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, likely in an attempt to evoke the challenge that Gilliam faced in releasing the film with such an ending. What he fails to realize is that Brazil‘s ending was not a sudden about-face. The bleak, fatalistic tone is present throughout the entire film. Every moment of hope in Brazil is clearly false in hindsight, whereas Mass Effect 3 makes every effort to make its uplifting moments perfectly genuine. If Mass Effect 3 was trying to imitate Brazil, it only succeeded at imitating Repo Men‘s failure to imitate Brazil.

This is what the fans realized, as evidenced by the popularity of this alternate ending. Throughout the entire game, the player is able to make Shepard point out logical flaws in an effort to bring peace, but this option is suddenly gone at the 11th hour. When I played the ending sequence myself, I remember — halfway towards the green-explosion-ending-o-tron — turning Shepard around and having him fire his gun at the ghostly child. I don’t know why I thought it would do something. But I remember thinking, why should I have to make this false choice? I’ve never been forced to do this until now.

The game ended. But for many outraged fans, it did not. Before, it was Krogans, Turians, Quarians, Salarians presenting false choices to players, and they handily dismissed them all. Now, it was BioWare themselves. BioWare became the antagonist. And all of a sudden, Mass Effect wasn’t over anymore. The players had become Commander Shepard, and they refused to accept defeat; they were going to defeat the Reapers. But they could no longer do that inside the game.

Video games are a powerful medium because they are not stories about someone else. They are a story about you. For one hundred hours, BioWare had engulfed players in the emotion of defiance. For one hundred hours, players asked the question, why does it have to be this way? And for one hundred hours, their struggle against injustice paid off. The players had fully assimilated the notion that with enough effort, enough struggle, they could correct any perceived injustice against them, and make anything make sense.

What else did you expect they were going to do?

Mass Effect is about defiance, and its persistence in the face of a supposedly unsolvable problem. When I say that, I’m not talking about the games. I’m talking about the fans and BioWare. They are performers, playing the protagonist and antagonist of Mass Effect, on the stage of the world.

And the fans won. That’s not the death of art. That’s art on a level that we never could have imagined.