Brought To You By Samsung

This afternoon I got hired to work as a PA on a three day shoot for a Korean Samsung commercial - I just got back from eight hours of prep work and I have to get up at 5:30 tomorrow so I can drive a rickety white rental van to Universal City and pick up a prop surfboard. You know how it is.

Point is, I'm going to sleep instead of write a blog. I'll get back to you on this one later, folks - probably with a story about shooting a Korean Samsung commercial.

PETA Porn

All the Google Image Search results for PETA were disturbing/too racy, so instead I typed 'Ron Swanson Meat.'

Generally speaking, I’d say that PETA – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – is a group of confrontational idiots, run by confrontational idiots. I like animals as much as the next guy and I’m very much against factory farming; I’m just also against handing out violent, disturbing comic books to children of fur wearers, running campaigns comparing animal consumption to the Holocaust, and suggesting that murder victims and animals killed for food are one and the same. I think that there’s a line between being committed to something and doing stupid shit because you love attention, and PETA flew across that line years ago in a rocketship powered only by their own insanity.

For a long time, PETA has championed against human consumption of animals by having attractive women take off their clothes in public. I guess their idea is that beautiful naked women will draw attention to their cause at the expense of the womens’ dignity – and Lord knows, you can’t make an omelet without exploiting a few daddy issues – but I think their plan has backfired, because thanks to them I now have it in my head that if I continue to eat meat, PETA will continue to show me naked women, and that is the textbook definition of a win-win situation.

I mean, they’re essentially rewarding me for acting contrary to their cause. What’s phase two of this operation? If I wear a fur coat, they’ll pay my credit card bill? Kill a dog and I get free gas for a year? Look, I’m not suggesting that killing a dog is something I’d want to do. It’d probably be a real crisis of faith for me. But then, it costs easily $40 to fill up The Mystery Wagon, and, I mean, it’s not like we’re about to run out of dogs or anything…

PETA’s most recent counterproductive publicity stunt is their announcement that they’re going to start a porn site. Read on:

(From nationalpost.com)

The nonprofit organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) whose controversial campaigns draw criticism from women’s rights groups, said it hopes to publicize veganism through a mix of pornography and graphic footage of animal suffering.

This, I believe, is a bad idea. It betrays a poor understanding of economics, and an even poorer understanding of pornography. Now, I’ve gone on record many times as saying I can’t/don’t/won’t understand economics, but I do know a thing or two about porn, if only because it’s way more fun to study than economics.

There’s a lot of porn out there. Every 39 minutes, a new porn video is created. According to a statistic that’s at least a couple years old, there are 4.2 million porn sites online. To put that another way, 12% of the entire Internet is porn.

This is where limited economics comes into play: There’s a lot of competition in the porn market. We haven’t cured cancer and there’s no flying cars yet, but at least feel good in knowing that if you want to see something dirty, you’ve got more options and variety at your fingertips than anyone else in human history.

My point is this:

If a man wants to look at pornography online, I’d say it’s pretty unlikely that he’s going to go to a website where his smut is mixed in with pictures of bleeding, tortured to death animals. When a person looks at porn, he isn’t out to have his mind changed about his dietary habits or ponder the ethicality of animal testing.

So yeah – this plan would work like gangbusters if PETA’s porn site was the only porn on the Internet, but it’s not. If you show a guy slaughtered animals when he really just wants to look at some tits, he’s less likely to consider your point of view and more likely to go to any of the 4.2 million other porn sites on the Internet that don’t have an animal rights agenda.

It’s an ineffective plan, to say the very least – PETA’s going to invest a lot of time and energy and nudity into a website that nobody is going to use, right? Well, actually, no. People are going to use it. And this is where PETA’s plan stops being ineffective and starts to downright backfire.

Crushing is a sexual fetish in which people get turned on by watching small animals get tortured to death in various erotic or sexual settings – usually by getting crushed underfoot. The government has done its part to stamp out (so to speak) crush films by legislating against them under various animal cruelty laws, which is one instance where I think we can all agree that government censorship is a beautiful, warranted thing.

So: There’s a not insignificant subculture of Internet perverts who specifically seek out and encourage animal cruelty for sexual purposes, and now PETA, the radical front dedicated to stopping animal cruelty, is making a porn site full of sexy naked women and animal cruelty photos. In other news, the DEA is going to start handing out free meth.

I eat meat because I really like the taste; I hate the idea that in factory farms, a lot of the animals providing this meat die terrified and in significant pain. I don’t think women wear fur coats because they’re jazzed up at the thought of animals being messily skinned, nor do I think people who take insulin do so because it was tested on animals. The vast majority of people, I’d say, benefit from exploitation of animals and acknowledge that it’s a bad thing, but also acknowledge that there’s only so much we can feasibly do to completely stop it while maintaining our own quality of life.

And for this, PETA guilt trips all over us with their ad campaigns and their pie throwing and their support of the Animal Liberation Front, but then they turn around and create a porn site for people who are specifically aroused by the thought of animal suffering and pain – People for the Unethical Treatment of Animals.

I’m all for activism as a means to kick off social change, but I think at this point PETA’s goals have taken a backseat to shock value and spectacle, as evidenced by this most recent stunt. And it’s fine by me if they want to humiliate themselves and become irrelevant; I just wish they’d do it a little quieter so I don’t have to hear about it.

Truman Capps made it through this whole update without making any jokes about veganism, and for that he apologizes.

So You Want To Write A Screenplay...

"Poop joke sex scene Danny McBride."

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve written script coverage in LA for a couple of different production companies. What this means is that I get to read a lot of scripts by a lot of lot of writers with varying levels of talent and experience. It’s taught me a lot – both about how to write a screenplay, how not to write a screenplay, the sorts of things people think they can put in a screenplay to make it sell, and the myriad of ways writers have found to make sex scenes cringe inducingly awkward.

From my experience, here’s some parables for those of you who may be interested in writing a screenplay - for the record, all examples in this update have been kept vague to protect the creative juices of the writers who got on my shit list in the first place:

=

You know in media res? When you start your movie at the end, briefly, and then flash forward to the beginning to show how you got there? Just because it was cool in Sunset Boulevard, Fight Club, and The Hangover doesn’t mean you need to do it in your script – it was a cool device because it was unconventional, but now everybody seems to want to start their script in a weird place and immediately flash back to how we got there. I recommend drawing viewers in by having the beginning of your script be interesting, and then progressing from there.

Please try to have had sex at least one time in your life before writing a sex scene. Descriptions like ‘she sexily grabs his crotch’ or ‘he takes off his shirt and starts making love’ will only get you laughed at.

Likewise, never use the phrase ‘explores her body’ – too creepy.

When the lead character is a young professional who rides a scooter and loves French New Wave films, you’re not allowed to derisively refer to the people outside the nightclub as ‘a crowd of hipsters.’

If it’s page twelve and the protagonists have boned four times already, you’re writing a porno whether you know it or not. If you want to make a porno, make a porno – just don’t make me read the script.

Characters nonchalantly shitting themselves is not comedy.

If after reading your script one of the most glaring plot holes to me is, “Wait – why didn’t she just use a dildo?”, your script might have some problems.

The only people who will ever read your screenplay is the cast, crew, and me, so don’t write the fucking thing like you’re William Faulkner – the first assistant director doesn’t care about ‘the sun shimmering beautifully off the surface of a pond flat like a pane of glass, waves softly lapping at an ancient dock constructed in a bygone era’; he cares about what the setting is and who the characters are so he can shoot the fucking thing.

Once and awhile, your characters should have sex not standing up. Just for variety. It’s cool the first time the hero fucks a girl up against a wall; the fourth time I think even the girl is getting tired of it.

If your screenplay is a faithful, autobiographical account of some trying time in your life that you wrote as therapy to recover from your hardship, I can almost promise you it isn’t going to be very interesting to anybody but you. It’s great that you wrote it – writing is a wonderful way to exorcise demons and get your head straight. What you shouldn’t do, though, is try to sell the disjointed contents of your soul. No matter how eccentric you think your friends are or how inspiring you think your story is, it’s probably not good enough to be a movie because your midlife crisis probably didn’t have snappy act breaks, a car chase, and a couple of engaging subplots.

Two characters can only fuck each other so many times before we start getting impatient to learn who they are and what the movie is actually about.

The proper number of exclamation points is one. Once in a blue moon, you may use two exclamation points. More than two exclamation points will make you look like a jackass – that’s not me talking; it’s science.

Less than half of one percent of American women use a diaphragm, so you should probably stop having the female characters in your movies use them. Nobody’s impressed that you’re a scholar of contraceptive history, or (more likely) that you saw that episode of Seinfeld.

Your script should be about one thing. If your script starts off being about a dorky guy pretending to be gay to get hot chicks, it shouldn’t end as a buddy cop horror film – it should end as a script about a dorky guy acting gay. If it’s a teen house party movie, it shouldn’t become a casino heist movie halfway through. This may seem obvious, but I’ve seen it happen in multiple scripts. Star Wars didn’t morph into American Beauty on page 52 – it was about spaceships and aliens the whole time.

Just because Tarantino movies are chock full of pop culture references doesn’t mean you need to do it too. That’s just how he rolls – he likes to mix little chunks of other movies into his movies. It’s his thing now. He owns it. When you do it, it’s not going to be cool – it’s going to be an excuse for you to not come up with your own content and instead use somebody else’s work as a crutch, which makes you a jackass. When you rip off Tarantino by using pop culture references to Tarantino films, you’re an Inception jackass.

Truman Capps awaits the inevitable onslaught of bullshit when people realize how many of these rules he broke with Writers.

Liveblogging The Emmys, 2011

Yes, it’s that time of year again – like Christmas in September, the Emmy awards have arrived, and we can once again gather to watch the annual celebration of Mad Men and several made for TV movies nobody has ever heard of.

This year’s liveblog is going to be a little more difficult, seeing as we don’t have TV at our house and Fox isn’t streaming the ceremony online. Admittedly, this seems a little hypocritical given that they’re touting their new media friendliness, what with hashtags and Tweeting and Jimmy Fallon and all, but in their defense, it is 1983, after all. There’s no such thing as an Internet, so it’s obviously not a terrible business decision to neglect a gigantic, youth-oriented market like this.

Oh, wait. It turns out it’s 2011, there is an Internet, and Fox is just making an immensely stupid move.

Anyway, the only access I have to the Emmys is ‘Emmys Backstage LIVE!’, a slapshod backstage stream showing blurry images of people in tuxedos walking around the green room, and also some tearful extended acceptance speeches from winners on the ‘Thank You Cam.’ It’s like they cut all the bones and gizzards out of the delicious roast chicken they’re serving to the TV audience and threw the refuse online for me to watch and make fun of. Regardless, it’s all I’ve got, so here we go!

5:41: The camera backstage is pointed at a TV playing the Emmy ceremony, and we’re watching the crew watching it, while some guy tries to do terrible voiceover commentary and what he thinks of Charlie Sheen. Thanks for this amazing media experience, NBC!

5:45: The guy they hired to do commentary on what's happening backstage is clearly being punished for something, because they've given him the most thankless job. "What's... Okay, well, I can't tell who just won... Hey, look in the green room! It's Ashton Kutcher! Do you think he and Charlie Sheen hung out? Think they did the Maverick/Goose high-five? Woosh! Woosh! Charlie and Ashton talking. This is amazing." I hate this. I hate this already.

5:47: "Meanwhile, Charlie is STILL talking to Ashton... What could they be talking about? Stock tips?" My God. This guy makes sports commentary look like Kurt Vonnegut.

5:48: You have been livestreaming a conversation between Ashton Kutcher and Charlie Sheen for three minutes. And we can't hear what they're saying. We're just watching them talk. This is online content.

5:49: Commentator just revealed that he's drinking. Say! That gives me an idea!

5:50: Emmys Backstage LIVE! drinking game: Take a drink every time this doesn't suck.

5:51: Ahh, the good old Thank You Cam - it allows Emmy winners to continue crying and prattling on about people we've never heard of for as long as they want to with no orchestra to play them off.

5:54: Joel McHale is doing some singing and dancing thing, apparently. In response, the backstage stream changes to Ty Burrell at a press conference talking about gay rights. The commentator, meanwhile, repeats everything Joel McHale is saying, just so he knows that we got it.

5:56: Just because a thing exists doesn't mean it needs commentary, NBC.

5:58: Is David Spade going to win an Emmy for outstanding achievement in creepy goatees?

6:01: Ashton Kutcher is so posturing for the lead role in the new 'Passion of the Christ' movie with this long hair/beard combo.

6:02: Commentator: "This is obviously live, because I've made about a thousand mistakes. But mistakes are fun!" No. Mistakes are not fun. This stream was a mistake, and I am not having fun.

6:05: The producers of The Amazing Race are at the Thank You Cam, and one of them looks like Ebeneezer Scrooge.

6:07: I'm watching a shitty stream with terrible commentary, and writing commentary about the terrible commentary. INCEPTION.

6:09: A bunch of garishly dressed 80s looking dancer girls milling around backstage. Maybe my joke about NBC in the intro wasn't so far off...

6:11: Commentator: "There is Scott Caan, who was eating cookies earlier..." BRILLIANT. COMMENTARY.

6:14: I'm missing a Lonely Island tribute. Goddamn it. How fast can I get cable?

6:17: So long as I've got you here and nothing is happening, I should mention that I thought Winter's Bone was overrated. Meanwhile, the guy from Big Bang Theory is doing a press conference. But yeah - pacing just wasn't that great. I get it; everybody's doing meth and Missouri sucks. Not Best Picture quality, if you ask me.

6:20: The back of Jon Stewart's head as he makes an acceptance speech. Now there's a man with a good back of the head, am I right? Oh Lord, I hate this.

6:23: Jon Stewart on the thank you cam: "Why are you not watching television right now?" I know! Don't rub it in!

6:28: Outstanding writing for a drama series... Mad Men? Let me know if Mad Men wins. I'm watching the commentator put on a plastic football helmet.

6:32: Friday Night Lights? Really? I thought that whole show was just buff dudes swaggering around going, "Football football football football football."

6:35: If not for the Thank You Cam I wouldn't have seen any hysterical crying women today. Near thing.

6:39: Jane Lynch looks younger now than she did in The 40 Year Old Virgin. How come?

6:41: Boardwalk Empire took a bold step by focusing their promotional campaign around pictures of Steve Buscemi, if you ask me. Amazing actor and a genuinely good person, but Christ, I do not like seeing his face on a bus bench.

6:43: The only exciting thing about watching this stream is that if some celebrity comes to the thank you cam and says something racist, I'll probably be the only person to see it happen. Silver lining.

6:45: The feed has been flawless all night, but as soon as Martin Scorcese goes to the Thank You Cam, it dies. Great. The ONE PERSON I wanted to see thanking people tonight.

6:48: Peter Dinklage clearly hates the idea of a Thank You Cam as much as I do, hence why he only said, "This is heavy. Thank you." And then the Commentator: "Peter Dinklage, keeping it short." Wow. Classy joke, Mike Kosta.

6:52: The whole time I've spent watching this, I could've been watching a documentary about maritime disasters and probably gotten as good of an idea about what was going on at the Emmys.

6:54: Watching Scorcese walking out with his Emmy. "Yep, guess I'll just put this on the pile of other awards I've won. No big deal."

6:57: For every drama category, I just go with the assumption that Mad Men is going to win. I'm usually right.

7:00: Well, okay, I was wrong on that one.

7:02 Emmys Backstage LIVE! is punishment for shoplifting in some countries. If not, it should be.

7:04: 11 different backstage cameras aren't worth shit if they aren't pointed at anything good.

7:15: Sorry for the absence. I had to put on pants when my roommate came in with his new girlfriend. That was far more entertaining than this entire livestream.

7:16: Well, since you asked, yes - it IS pants-optional here at Hair Guy.

7:19: I guess I should either get a lock for my bedroom door or start wearing pants more often. I'm leaning towards the lock.

7:22: Look, I recycle. I pay my taxes. I play by society's fucking rules, and after a long day of wearing pants in public, sometimes I just take off my pants and surf the Internet at home. It isn't weird. Lots of people do it. You probably do it, you just won't admit it.

7:24: Why are people under the impression that the 'Hallelujah' song from Shrek and Watchmen is a good song? It's not. It might have been before they used it in every sad or poignant scene in every movie, but those days are over.

7:25: Furthermore, I should point out that pants are actually sort of unhealthy for guys to wear. They raise your overall nut temperature, and that fucks up your sperm count. That said, I'm not planning on having kids, but this is at least indicative of the fact that pants are not, strictly speaking, our friends. Sorry for partying.

7:28: Half an hour to go. We can do this, people!

7:32: The presence of pants makes this program so much worse.

7:35: Maria Bello rocking a flask. Never has drinking looked that good.

7:38: William H. Macy is making long greasy hair cool again.

7:40: Open bar in the winner's lounge. If there's one thing I want more than to go to the Emmys, it's to go to an event with an open bar.

7:44: What's Gwyneth Paltrow doing at the Emmys? Furthermore, how the fuck do you spell that woman's name?

7:47: Mad Men, four years in a fucking row. In your face, haters.

7:49: If Christina Hendricks talks to the Thank You Cam, this will all be worth it.

7:52: Jon Hamm yelling 'Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou!' into the Thank You Cam was almost as good as Christina Hendricks.

7:53: It's going to be a real logjam for comedy. I'm pulling for Parks and Rec.

7:55: Goddamn. I need to start watching Modern Family. And with that, I'm going to take off my pants and make some dinner. Goodnight!

Truman Capps loves getting out of actually writing a blog by doing this shit.

Celebrity Revisited

I am the small Asian girl in this scenario. As usual.

This may come as a surprise to some of you, but during my senior year of college, I did some drinking from time to time. Once the party was over, though, I had a very strictly regimented post-drinking ritual: I would walk back to my house, fill a metal water bottle with tapwater, and drink it (and several other subsequent bottles) while listening to music through my headphones on my computer.

I don’t know what it was about drinking that immediately gave me a powerful urge to listen to music – maybe it had something to do with the fact that the bar I frequented had karaoke, and after listening to drunks literally murdering music all night I wanted to listen to those songs as they were recorded by the original artists (who, given my preference for classic rock from the 1970s, were probably under the influence of way more than just alcohol in the studio).

My playlist was different every time thanks largely to my mood, but the one song I listened to (and, occasionally, sang along with) every night, without fail was Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.

Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury and its accompanying music video are largely the work of Los Angeles-based improv comedian/actress Rachel Bloom, who parlayed an NYU theater degree into a viral video about her wanting to get nailed by a 91 year old science fiction icon. It’s catchy as all hell and hilarious to boot, and if I were to recommend you watch any Internet video, it’d probably be this one. (If I were to recommend you watch any Internet video not at work, it’d also be this one, followed by most porn.)

Last week, she mentioned on her Twitter feed that she’d be doing standup with a bunch of other comedians at The Improv on Monday, and, based on the strength of her music video, I bought tickets for me and my friends Dylan and Holly.

I feel like there’s a pretty thin line between ‘fan’ and ‘stalker’ – in both cases your ultimate goal is to get closer to a personality you like who doesn’t necessarily know you exist; the only difference is that stalkers are generally way better at it because they play to win. Think about it: Margaret Ray broke into David Letterman’s house and stole his Porsche; John Hinckley Jr. tried to kill the president to impress Jodie Foster. If you wouldn’t do that for Lady Gaga, then you probably shouldn’t call yourself her biggest fan.

The line is even thinner, though, with Internet personalities like Rachel Bloom, because by and large they’re everyday people whose fame is less high profile and who may not even have an established fanbase. It’s one thing to eagerly follow Tom Hanks’ career and go to events he’s at, because thousands of other people do the same thing; it’s a little weirder if you go to all of your bus driver’s intramural softball games and create a fanpage for him on Facebook, because you’re the only one doing it.

I mean, yeah, she publicized her appearance at The Improv on Twitter, but as I drove to the show I had trouble shaking the knowledge that at its most basic, what I was doing was driving to a location because I had used the Internet to figure out that a girl was going to be there.

It was a small venue and by no means a full house – there were probably 20 people or less in the audience. The comedians – Rachel Bloom included – all turned in solid performances, and overall I’d say the show was well worth the price of admission (admission was five dollars.)

Afterwards, the comedians were all gathered at the back of the room, chatting with one another as people filed out. Holly nudged me and pointed at Rachel, who was talking to two of her friends.

“You should say hi to her.” Holly suggested.

“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea,” I said, glancing toward the exit. “It’d just be weird, and I already feel weirder than normal just being here, and I usually feel pretty weird anyway.”

“Oh, c’mon. Just tell her about how you listen to her Ray Bradbury song when you’re drunk. I bet she’ll get a kick out of it.”

Her logic was sound enough – after all, I like it when people tell me they’ve read my blog (thanks again, Dad!). Dylan and Holly departed and then I wound up standing a few feet away from Rachel Bloom for several minutes, trying to look nonchalant as she talked to her friends.

I’m not good at a lot of things, but I’m really not good at blending into the background and not looking awkward. I spent ten minutes standing there, pointedly not looking at her, Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ playing at full blast in the back of my head, and contemplating whether I should just interrupt her, say my piece, and run like hell. I eventually opted to wait, because the only thing more awkward than what I was already doing would be interrupting a genuine interaction she was having with her friends. (Plus, previous experience has proven that it's sort of a dick move.)

Presently, she finished talking to her friends and I caught her eye. She stepped closer and I realized, now that I had her full attention, that talking to her was probably the least creepy option at this point, compared to running away or perhaps vomiting.

“Hi,” I said. “You don’t know me, but I just wanted to let you know that when I was in college I watched ‘Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury’ and sang along every time I came home drunk.”

Immediately I realized what I’d said basically translated to:

”Hi, I’m an alcoholic stranger, and I just wanted to let you know that when I’m drunk I frequently watch the music video where you dance in a low-cut nightie.”

Rachel Bloom, God bless her, threw her head back and laughed, presumably getting a kick out of what I’d said, as Holly had promised. She seemed appreciative that I was both a fan and that I’d come out to see her perform, and in the course of our subsequent conversation she gave me some career advice and encouragement.

What is it that compels us to idolize and seek out famous people – that makes it so important to us that we force them to pose for pictures or write their name down for us as proof to our friends that we actually met them? Is it part of some greater urge to prove to ourselves that they’re actually real people who don’t just live in our televisions and computers? Or do we all just secretly fantasize about being best friends with Will Smith? (Protip: It's the last one.)

Driving home from The Improv afterwards, I felt surprisingly good. For somebody like me who spends so much time with his head firmly jammed up pop culture’s ass, it’s good to be able to say thank you every once and awhile – and I didn’t even have to shoot Ronald Reagan, so in your face, Hinckley.

Truman Capps will not retain any semblance of composure if he ever meets Nick Offerman.

Touchy-Feely

Man, how often do I use Arrested Development as my starting image?

I worry sometimes that my roommates think I’m depressed - which would be fine if I actually was depressed, but unfortunately I’m pretty happy and enjoying my life a lot. The thing is, my version of happy and enjoying life makes me look a lot like I’m depressed.

My roommates are a couple of friendly, good natured guys who play sports, go to the gym, work out, dance at nightclubs, and wear men’s fragrances. They are men in the truest sense, in that they do things that Truman Capps does not do. Do you know how much milk they drink? I can practically hear their bones mocking my bones.

I, on the other hand, like watching movies, surfing the Internet, writing, reading, and occasionally having a leisurely drink in a quiet, sparsely populated place with ample seating. The thing is, I can do most of my favorite things from the comfort of my room, and I frequently do. At this time, please feel free to make a joke about me masturbating.*

*By my own estimate, between half a dozen and a dozen of my friends’ parents read this blog, all of whom can expect handwritten letters of apology for that last line.

My door, also, tends to stay closed – my back is to the door when I sit at my desk and I startle very easily, so this is really more of a strategic concern to stave off my first heart attack until at least my early 30s. Also, I have the unconscious habit of mumbling everything I write out loud to myself as I write it – in fact, I’m saying the words I’m typing right now. Boondoggle. Monkeybutt.

So were a roommate to poke his head into my room, he’d see me hunched over my computer mumbling dick jokes to myself until he made his presence known, at which point I’d probably jump so hard I’d hit the ceiling. Closing the door is a much better option than having them think I’m a psycho.

The thing is, this doesn’t exactly look healthy to them. On one of my days off last week, a roommate and I had this conversation as I was walking out of the kitchen with a bowl of rice, headed for my room:

Roommate: So what’ve you got going today?
Me: Oh, y’know. Still just plowing away at that script.
Roommate: Cool. You going to do anything today?
Me: Besides work on the script? No. I mean, I might go to the bathroom later. Still thinking it over, though.
Roommate: Oh… Well, I’m off to work. Have… Fun, I guess.

Now, I feel great about how much work I’m getting done. However, I get the sneaking suspicion that my roommates think I’m spending the whole day lying in bed crying, because from the outside, writing and suicidal depression don’t look that different (and in some cases, they aren’t).

To try and counter this, I make an effort to bro out with my roommates every so often. We’ve gone to some bars and watched some movies, and it’s by no means an unpleasant experience – my roommates are genuinely good people, who I like. The main problem is that there’s some touching going on that I don’t really like.

It’s not the after school special kind of touching where somebody’s stepdad gets arrested, mind you – it’s the kind of touching where every five seconds somebody is slapping somebody else on the chest or the back or throwing an arm around somebody or grabbing a shoulder…

I wouldn’t say that I don’t like to be touched. I’d clarify it as saying I don’t like to be touched by men. And this couldn’t be further from homophobia – it’s not that I don’t like men touching me because I think they’re coming on to me; it’s because I feel like they’re trying so hard to assert their masculinity that they’ve resorted to recreational violence.

”That was a funny joke!”
SLAP
“I like drinking too!”
SLAP
“A nude scene in the movie we’re watching!”
SLAP

As mentioned above, I’m already pretty jumpy, so randomly slapping me or grabbing me is not doing anything to improve my quality of life. For those of my friends who may want to touch me in the near future but are now confused as to how I’ll feel about it, I took the liberty of preparing the following flowchart to help you decide whether you should touch me or not:

The question, now, is how to bring this up with them in a non-awkward way – they don’t know I have a blog, so the passive aggressive option is right out. Again, I like these guys. It’s hard to sit down with people you like and tell them, apropos of nothing, “Please stop touching me.” Hell, that’s an awkward conversation to have with people you don’t like.

It also doesn’t look good in light of the fact that I spend so much time holed up in my room. I can just imagine how they’d explain it to their friends later:

”Yeah, I don’t know what’s up with that Truman guy… He’s always in his room, and apparently he doesn’t like for people to touch him. All I’m saying is, if I smell anything nasty, I’m going in there to look for a dead body.”

And this would be devastating for me, because I’ve worked really hard to cultivate a certain non-serial killer image.

In the long run, I guess I’m pretty lucky – if my biggest complaint about my roommates is that they touch me in a non molesty way, I’m probably doing better than a lot of people.

Also, it’s probably only fair for me to put up with this one annoyance, given what sorts of things I’m doing that must be pissing my roommates off. Last week I had a nightmare where I was being chased and was screaming at the top of my lungs, and I woke up in the morning with a sore throat. I might’ve just been sick, but on the off-chance that I was actually sleep-screaming I probably owe my roommates a little patience.

Truman Capps hasn’t seen any mice yet – lucky for them.

Words With Friends

Goonie? Really? Goonie is a word? If this guy can play GOONIE, I should be able to play BATTLESTAR.

I usually regard Facebook games with the same resentment and disapproval I have for skinny jeans and recumbent bicycles. On the one hand, I appreciate the Inception style humor in people wasting time playing a video game while wasting time surfing Facebook, but on the other, I don’t care how many heroin pies you made in MafiaCafeWorld and I resent your attempts to make me.

But then, there’s Words With Friends.

We didn’t play board games much in the Capps household – my parents found them boring and pointless, and then video games got invented and I’ve never looked back.* Much to Hasbro’s chagrin, we ditched family game night in favor of eating dinner together, watching America’s Funniest Home Videos, and playing Mario Kart 64 virtually every night for three straight years.

*There was a monthlong period in fifth grade where Mom played regular games of Monopoly Jr. with me in hopes of bumping up my math skills to at least a first grade level – take a look at my SAT scores if you want to see how well that worked out.

So while I’ll kick your ass at Mario Kart 64, I’m up shit creek if you want to play Yahtzee, Sorry, Risk, poker, cribbage, or virtually any other game that doesn’t plug into something. I’m just inherently bad at formulating strategies for victory in a system where I have to remember all the rules myself. As a result, sitting down to play a board game with friends is usually a pretty stressful process.

Before we start, the other competitors will assure me that the game is pretty simple and then give me a quick rundown of the game rules, which I will simultaneously misunderstand and immediately forget. I’ll stumble through the first few turns and then, thinking I’ve got the hang of it, start to play competitively, driving for a landslide victory.

”Oh my God! That was the most incredible turn I’ve ever seen! Let me tally this up… Crap on a spatula – 987 points for Truman! And you say this is your first time playing? Are you a genius? Well, obviously, yes, but even by those standards this is very impressive. Here’s $7. No, take it. It’s the least I do after what you’ve shown me today.

Inevitably, before the game is up I’ll play what I think is my masterstroke, only for my friends to point out that what I’ve done is in blatant violation of half of the game rules.

”Truman, you can’t play the red card. The game is called ‘Don’t Play The Red Card!’ How could you possibly think that was a viable strategy? Here’s $7. Use it to buy anti-retard pills or something.”

Recently, though, my friend Dylan invited me to play him in Words With Friends on Facebook – essentially, a browser based version of Scrabble. In spite of all my hesitance toward Facebook games and board games, I gave Words With Friends a shot; after all, it’s a game based entirely around knowing big, obscure words. There hasn’t been a game better suited to my particular skillset since ‘Whose Hair Will Clog The Shower Drain First?’

My assumption has always been that the English language is so vast and complex that if you cobble together a series of consonants and vowels into an easily pronounceable form, there’s a better than average chance it’s a word. However, if Words With Friends has taught me anything, it’s that English is just sprawling enough to be confusing but just small enough that none of your seven Words With Friends tiles spell anything but CAT.

Take meandle, for instance. Looks like a word, sounds like a word, would’ve netted me 40-odd points if it was a word, but it’s not a word. Same goes for frandine and theaser – looking at them, you can imagine them being the names for obscure literary devices or penguin muscles, but as it turns out, they’re convincing looking nonsense (although in many cases when I Google my speculative words, they turn out to be the name of some 14-year-old’s deviantart page or YouTube channel).* In analog Scrabble, you could play these words off as real – in which case the actual skill on display wasn’t your vocabulary, but your bullshit artistry.

*In all seriousness, I tried to play the word ‘pantsed’ against my friend Chloe, only for the game to cluck its tongue and tell me that ‘pantsed’ is not a word. Clearly Words With Friends didn’t go to middle school.

Dylan, it seems, has been having no such troubles, and he’s been linguistically cornholing me all over Facebook for the past week.*

*Neither Cornholing (action), cornholed (past tense), nor even the singular noun cornhole are accepted in Words With Friends, which is really painful whenever one of my friends plays ‘corn’ in the vicinity of a triple word score tile and I’ve got HOLE just waiting to get played.

In most cases I’m willing to accept defeat, because I’ve recognized that, like all people, I suck at far more things than I’m good at. But I’m a writer, goddamn it – if I’m not good at wordplay, then what the hell am I good at? Dylan is a great video editor, but we’re not playing FinalCut With Friends, here; he should not be beating me at all, let alone by such an embarrassing margin.

So I’m fighting back. I’m studying up on Scrabble theory, memorizing words with Q and Z but no U, and I’m considering making a looping recording of this list of 2 and 3 letter Scrabble words and listening to it while I sleep.

A lot of the reason I never got good at other board games was because, like my parents, I always found them sort of pointless – winning at Monopoly is great, but what have you gained in the long run, short of the ire of your bankrupted friends? I’m motivated to get good at Words With Friends, though, because in my eyes this is the sort of game I should be good at. When I win at Words With Friends, the real prize is cheap, petty validation, and I can’t get enough of that.

So to all of my Words With Friends opponents who might be reading this: Just let me win – it’ll be way easier for the both of us.

Truman Capps is theaser that he’ll be able to get meandle into the dictionary.

Duty Calls

All opinions stated by Truman Capps are not necessarily the opinions of his former employers; all facts stated by Truman Capps are not necessarily facts.

Yeah, you're welcome.

For somebody who enjoys violent video games as much as I do, even I’m kind of surprised that I was never able to get into the Call of Duty franchise. For my more well-adjusted readers who aren’t in the know on video games, the Call of Duty series is essentially one grand celebration of the storied institution of violence, spanning eight games in multiple wartime settings, most of which are simultaneously exploding and on fire, wherein players run around with high tech weapons trying to kill each other.

As of late 2009, the CoD franchise had sold roughly 55 million units and earned $6 billion worldwide, making it as profitable as three Avatars, six Titanics, or approximately 9.154 Ice Age 2: The Meltdowns. The game has spawned a robust, somewhat hostile fanbase united by their love of shooting one another in the back of the head and their hatred of any gameplay features they consider unfair, unbalanced, or ‘noobish.’

The Call of Duty games have single player campaign modes that attempt to tell a story, but they’ve generally got weaker plotlines than most of the scripts I pass on at my internship, and the enemy artificial intelligence is about on par with the paper targets at a firing range; by and large, the games are carried by their chaotic, fast paced multiplayer mode.

My roommates last year were avid players, and they coerced me into buying a secondhand copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 so I could game with them. I joined in a few violent, profane afternoons, but ultimately I lost interest in the game and exchanged it a couple months later to get a copy of Portal 2, which I found far more rewarding.

My problem with the Call of Duty games, I think, is that these meticulously researched military shooters are a little too realistic. Every game of Call of Duty I’ve played usually involves me running around, confused, disoriented, and scared, until I suddenly die, sniped in the back of the head by an enemy I never saw – which, I’m certain, is exactly what would happen to me were I ever placed in an actual wartime scenario; the only difference being that the Taliban is probably way less homophobic than the Call of Duty community:

From IGN.com:

First-person shooters and war games like Halo and Call of Duty seem to spawn the most homophobic behavior among players, notes De Marco. It's not the games themselves that are the problem; it's the kinds of players they attract.

"Derogatory words for gay are used almost constantly while playing online to insult other players, gay or not," he says. "If you make yourself known as a gay player, you can be snubbed, sent nasty e-mails, turned on by your own teammates, and verbally abused."

In short, playing Call of Duty online ensures not only that I’ll be hanging out with close minded douchecopters, but that I’ll be doing so in an environment where they can easily kill me. This is not my idea of a great time, hence why I stick to single player games like Fallout: New Vegas, where the most abrasive and intolerant asshole I have to deal with is myself.

I say all of this because I want you to get an idea of how ironic it is that what I was doing at my temp art department job for the past two weeks was converting a massive aircraft hangar into the venue for Call of Duty XP, the world’s first ever Call of Duty convention.

I’m really proud of the work that my coworkers and I did at this event – my department turned a couple of bland rooms into a gritty and atmospheric armory filled with prop guns from the Call of Duty series. We put a latex zombie head in a big plastic jar, and mounted replicas of heavy machine guns and .50 sniper rifles on the walls like big, dangerous trophies.

A lot of art department work, I should point out, is essentially interior decorating, and as such I’d say at least half of the art department was openly gay. Nothing faster refutes all the stereotypes about homosexuals you see in the media than two gay guys arguing about whether the 12 gauge shotgun should be mounted above or beside the bloody, severed zombie head.

This event was essentially Mecca for the virulently homophobic Call of Duty community, and a major portion of it was designed and built by hardworking, talented, friendly gay dudes with some token heteros thrown in for good measure. As hundreds of attendees played the multiplayer demo for Modern Warfare 3 and called each other fags, they were sitting on wooden benches built for them by gay people.

I’ll bet that the bulk of the people who play Call of Duty aren’t necessarily any more homophobic than any other given American – the combination of anonymity and adrenaline pumping life-or-death combat probably encourages a special brand of situational ignorance.

If anything, though, it makes me want to give Call of Duty a second shot, mainly so I can confront the XBox live trolls with this information and maybe prompt some sort of chagrined self reflection. More likely than not, they’ll just call me a fag too and then shoot me in the face, but that’d probably happen either way.

Truman Capps can only imagine how many people at CODXP said something about the 'call of doody' on their way to the bathroom.

Because It's 11:30

Case in point.

The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.
-Lorne Michaels

And you know what? Maybe that’s why Saturday Night Live sucks these days.

A few months ago, I wrote about the fact that this blog, which I used to update strictly on Wednesdays and Sundays, has since slipped considerably in its timeliness. It started around my junior year of college, when I turned 21 and discovered that the Tuesday and Saturday nights that I had until then spent writing blogs were great nights for getting cheap drinks at the local college watering hole – updates started happening later and later on Wednesdays and Sundays until these past few months, when, with increasing regularity, I’ve been updating a day or two late.

Newer arrivals may be thinking, Jesus, he doesn’t update on time – is this really worth writing about? But you’ve got to understand, before I got a really active social life, you could set your damn watch to this blog. I made a point of staying up until midnight most Tuesdays and Saturdays, just so I could post the blog at 12:01 AM on the morning of my update day, which, given that my readership at the time was roughly 9 hits a day, was a lot like a five year old girl waking up at 4:30 AM to bake the imaginary cake for her afternoon tea party with her stuffed animals.

Even as my life got more complicated I was able to stick to this schedule. At one point I was working at the Oregon Daily Emerald, taking classes, shooting Writers, and writing this blog all at once, and the updates still came in on time. Late in my relationship with The Ex Girlfriend, she found a way to drag me into a heated shouting match about animal rights virtually every Tuesday and Saturday night, yet I was still able to hang up the phone and somehow put all that emotionally fraught nonsense behind me for just long enough to write a goofy blog update about pancakes or some shit and get it posted on time.

Now, though, I’m late on updates more often than I’m on time – now, when I work during the day and come home at night to no homework, no extracurricular activities, no significant other to make me too miserable to be funny. In April, I said I’d take my sweet time on updates because I wanted to spend as much of my senior year with my friends as I could, update schedule be damned – but my senior year is over, and as a new arrival to LA my social calendar isn’t exactly bursting and the bars are prohibitively expensive. That’s right; I can’t even use alcohol abuse as an excuse anymore. Fitzgerald never had this problem.

Here, I’ve realized, is why my updates are coming in late now:

I go back and reread my older updates sometimes, but when I do I don’t venture much further back than the past year or so. The further back I go, the more consistently crappy the updates are, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the updates that are the most consistent.

Some of that is because I learned how to write a blog by writing this blog, and so there’s a bunch of wobbly entries where I clearly thought using lots of big words would make me look like a hilarious genius. But a lot of it is because there are updates back there that clearly weren’t ready for the spotlight – they needed another hour or two of work, or maybe a good night’s sleep, before officially becoming funny.

But I posted them anyway, because the update doesn’t get posted because it’s finished – it gets posted because it’s an update day.

And I guess that was okay for me at the time, because I needed to do as much writing as possible in order to practice up and get good at it – something I still need to do. Now, though, the game has changed.

I can’t run fast. My cooking skills are mediocre to poor. I’ve never built anything. I can’t fix a car engine. I don’t know karate. The one thing I can do well is write, and this blog serves as my portfolio – essentially the best way for an employer to figure out whether they want to pay me to write or not.

So I can’t really afford to have a lot of crappy, half finished updates showing up on here just because my deadline has arrived – when you read something crappy with my name on it, it gives the impression that I’m a crappy writer.

And hey – maybe I am a crappy writer compared to my competition down here, but I’m far less crappy at writing than I am at virtually any other skill, so it behooves me to put my best and funniest foot forward in this regard, because that foot is guaranteed to go way further than my ‘ironing’ or ‘talking to girls in bars’ feet can go.

I’m slower on the updates now because I think it’s better for all of us if I write something good instead of something strictly punctual. I get that punctuality is important in the TV scriptwriting game, but there the reason to be punctual is because there’s a damn show that needs to be put on, not just because you’ve got some self imposed deadline to meet for some arbitrary reason. And I think I’ve demonstrated pretty well that I can be punctual – for reference, just see my first two years’ worth of updates.

The real solution here is to start writing earlier in the week in order to allow myself plenty of time to get a good update done before my deadline arrives. And so long as we’re talking about responsible things I should do, I should probably open up the shower drain and clean all my clogged loose hair out of it. If I ever get around to that, I’ll let you know with a timely, expertly crafted blog update.

Truman Capps prefers Drain-O, anyway.