Hello, friends! Happy Labor Day!

I have two new bits of free reading posted on Stuff to Read:

• Chapter 4 of The Failed Technomancer is live!
• A Dinner Diabolical, a short story about a guy who invites a demon to dinner, is also live!

A Dinner Diabolical was meant to be posted with an EPUB that you can sideload onto your preferred ebook reading device, but apparently WordPress won’t even let me upload such a file to my media archive, let alone put a link in that webpage for downloading the file. As such, if you are interested in getting the EPUB you can contact me and request it via email. (It’s a very pretty EPUB—I made it in Vellum.)

Every once in a while, I’m going to share quotes I keep on my wall (I started with a Musashi quote), but I might expand this to other quotes I store in other ways. We’ll see.

Anyway, here’s today’s!

Life is already hard.

Don’t make it harder than necessary.

Anonymous

Most of the time I make my life harder than necessary with my attitude, followed by dumb decisions. Keeping this quote on my wall helps remind me to stay away from the things I do that make my life harder.

Bloggyness Review: The Ultimate Gift

I don’t recommend this movie.

The Ultimate Gift is a 2006 film about the grandson of a recently deceased billionaire. This grandson needs to jump through a series of hoops to acquire his inheritance—sorry, he needs to learn a series of lessons to acquire his inheritance. Along the way, he does change and become a better person, as well as… find love?

I believe that The Ultimate Gift is a well-meaning film that needed a lot more time in the oven. I go into faith-based films expecting a little preaching or moralizing (though I wish that weren’t the case), so I wasn’t bothered by that aspect of the film—even though it kind of felt like the film was trying to sneak its faith messages in?—but I did have issues with other areas: specifically, I found the journey of Jason Stevens, the grandson trying to earn his inheritance, full of weird jumps in his emotional growth, and I found the entire romantic subplot between Jason and Alexia cringy.

Jason Stevens grows from spoiled brat who thinks the world revolves around him (and that he’s owed everything) to an all-around good guy philanthropist. While this arc has the potential to be compelling, I felt that each shift in Jason’s growth was jarring. Rather than seeing a transition through stages of emotional growth (as well as backslides), Jason makes large leaps between scenes, sometimes explained away by short montages, sometimes not. The result left me often unsure of whether he was actually growing and improving or whether he was struggling at faking it into his promised inheritance.

I was also left confused at the end by his “big dream idea” of a hospital dedicated to children going through long-term care, with employment opportunities for parents—the entire idea seemed very rushed and half-baked, and I didn’t believe for a moment that it would actually work in any way, as nice as it sounded.

As for the romantic subplot, the entire thing left me cringing. Alexia is a single mother with a daughter (Emily) who has leukemia. She has no connection with Jason whatsoever beyond her daughter being in a hospital ward funded by Jason’s deceased grandfather—as far as I’m aware, she didn’t even know Jason existed before her daughter met him in a park while he was living as a hobo. Despite this, she nearly instantly—in a manner that felt obligatory on a script level—strikes up a relationship with Jason and serves as a key part of many of his lessons for growth. Her daughter serves as a driving force in this, because this weirdly adult-like little girl arbitrarily decides that this hobo she met in the park is the perfect man for her mom to get with before she dies. (Low standards for her mother, apparently.) Alexia doesn’t feel like she has any agency in this, and Emily feels like she has very little; as a result the entire subplot came across as exploitative to me.

And, of course, Emily dies. What is with faith-based films and giving little girls terminal diseases?

Anyway, I thought a small fix that would have significantly improved the romantic subplot would have been for Jason to be Alexia’s ex. Them already having a pre-established relationship would have helped with some of the weirdly rushed parts of their growth as a couple, and might give Alexia more of a reason to give Jason the time of day initially. A lot more work would need to be done to make Alexia feel like more than just a prop, but I didn’t feel like doing a deep enough script doctoring to fix that issue.

The Ultimate Gift is filled with a lot of feel-good moments and is largely inoffensive. I do think it’s a pretty good choice for a family looking for a clean movie with an uplifting message, especially since they can watch it for free on Prime. I just wish it represented faith-based filmmaking better. Maybe I’m comparing apples to oranges here, but take a look at Veggie Tales—especially in its prime, Veggie Tales was the ultimate example of how faith-based storytelling and filmmaking can wear its beliefs on its sleeve and still appeal to literally everyone. Veggie Tales was actually great on its own merits. That’s the standard that all storytelling should strive for. No story can justify its existence by saying it has a message and not much else.

Writing Updates

I am at about 4235 words in The Betrayed Technomancer—which is not even relatively close to my (admittedly optimistic) goal of 7000 words. Unfortunately, travel and a family emergency kept me from hitting the keyboard as much as I would have liked, and that family emergency left me with a backlog of work that I’m going to need to make up this week. My much-more-conservative goal for this week is to be at 6000 words by the start of next week, and then hopefully I will be able to grow how much I write each week from there.

If I were to turn this into a percentage, The Failed Technomancer was about 150,000 words, and 4235 is almost 3% of that. Assuming The Betrayed Technomancer ends up about the same length, that means I’m about 3% of the way through draft 1.

Inner Demon is still sitting in a slush pike, and likely will be for a long time coming.

Send-Off

If you read A Dinner Diabolical, let me know your thoughts! And, in general, let me know your thoughts on short stories—if you like them, if you dislike them, why, whether or not you want to see more, or whatever else strikes your mind.

Addendum

Apparently WordPress has an AI Assistant that you can use to get suggestions in improving your blog posts? I think AI assistance is a little overrated, but out of curiosity I pressed the button. I thought the responses were amusingly surface-level, no-duh, or otherwise mussed the mark, but I found the below funniest:

“Consider implementing the suggested improvement for the romantic subplot in your review of ‘The Ultimate Gift’.”

Am I supposed to interpret this as the AI telling me I need to find the script for this movie and rewrite it with my suggestions? How on earth is that supposed to help my blog? Um… no. No, that sounds like a terrible idea. No thank you.

AI isn’t half as smart as people make it out to be.