My friend Dr. Valensky recently posted about his own buttersteak adventure, having learned about it here and here.

Dr. Valensky cooked his steak with margarine. This was a supply failure, rather than an ambitious attempt to subvert butter’s dominance in the world of delicious steak-frying. I have never purchased margarine in my entire adult cooking life, but its bread-spreading-ease cannot be questioned.

In the spirit of failing to comply with butter-steak cooking practices, I decided to branch out as well. I bought a small filet
and I had some leftover bacon from brunch last weekend
it was time to make: Buttersteak Mignon!

Your pan should be over a little less than medium heat this whole time.

Step one, pre-fry the bacon. Don’t crisp it up though, otherwise, it will be unwilling to passionately hug your filet.

Step two, in the bacon grease, fry the sides of your filet, not for too long, just long enough that your bacons aren’t rubbing all up against raw meat.

Step three, remove the steak from the pan. Put a few cloves of garlic and a couple tablespoons of butter in the pan, and start frying. Wrap the bacon around the filet. I pinned the bacon to itself with a toothpick. Place it on the pan, and fry it on its edges to crisp up the bacon

and then fry each side for five minutes.
From the pictures, it’s obvious that I did the faces first, and then the edges… but I think this wasn’t optimal.

Let it sit for five minutes.

And you’re done.

Put it on a plate

with a salad

everyone knows steak is more important, though.

The salad, well. No one cares about salad. 1 cucumber, 1 avocado, handful of parsley, handful of green onions, a handful of mixed greens, red bell pepper, (I would have put tomatoes in it too, but Sandra hates raw tomatoes),salt, pepper, the juice of 1 whole lime, the juice of one whole lemon, a splash of sushi soy sauce, a splash of olive oil. That makes more salad than you see above. Way more. I’ve been eating that fucking salad for days.

DELICIOUS!

(I suggest following this to YouTube, and watching it in all its HD glory)

The contest is pretty fun, and we had a pretty good time doing it, and some of the other teams produced pretty excellent films.

Our film was submitted somewhat later than the 48 hour deadline, and was thus disqualified. In this, and other matters, lessons were learned. Some of these lessons really would only apply to future time-limited short film contests, others we can probably use generally. Here are some of those lessons:

Editors are important… if you are directing and acting in a film, and you have a 48-hour deadline, you must not also be the editor This can actually be generalized to a number of problems we encountered. In my excessive enthusiasm, I tried to take on as many roles as possible. It turns out, that starting to edit after having spent your entire previous 24 hours generating the raw footage behind and in front of the camera, leaves you with neither sufficient time, nor mental energy to do a particularly good job of editing. In these time-constrained scenarios, it is really vital to have someone dedicated to editing who starts that business up while you’re still shooting.

Dialogue is not your friend… or, Don’t Make it Better … we started with, I think, a very solid script that was almost entirely visual, with just a bit of dialogue in the scenes that bookended the visual middle… the dialogue wasn’t exactly catchy or natural, but it was functional. While we were shooting the middle, wordless section of the short film, Jordan was rewriting the dialogue, making it snappier, making it more show, and less tell. This seemed like a reasonably efficient use of everyone’s time.

Do not do this!

You end up with more dialogue than you can fit into the 7 minute time limit, and with more dialogue than you can memorize in the amount of time you’ve allotted to shoot the dialogue bits and finish up, and with an actress who arrives already prepared to speak the lines from the original version of the script and so on. When I got Jordan’s updated draft I tried to pare it down some, suspecting that the dialogue expansion might spiral into massive schedule damage, both during the shoot, and in editing. I was right on this account, but paring down wasn’t the solution. The correct solution would have been to revert to the original script. Not because Jordan’s draft wasn’t better, but because with the kind of time constraint we were working with, “making it better” is a pale third-tier priority, placed well below “getting it done”.

Even in the dialogue heavy 48 and 24 hour shorts I’ve seen, there is a common thread. One is that they all had Editors (something we really do need to fix for next time), and two, the dialogue was rarely good. Often functional, sure, but not much beyond that… and with good reason. They had to write the thing, and then they had to shoot the thing, and then they had to edit the thing. The script needs to be done as soon as possible and into the hands of the actors as soon as possible.

The Show Don’t Tell thing is bullshit anyway. Show and Tell, prioritizing for effect or efficiency depending on the situation… in the case of a 48 hour short film contest, generally prioritize efficiency.

Sounds need a sound-person… also, it’s time to buy a shotgun microphone … this is just a result of really poor planning and general lack of cleverness on my part. We had no one explicitly and exclusively responsible for sound. We did not have a good shotgun microphone. The sound quality of our short film is, as a result, quite sucky, all the way through. This cannot be helped now.

Oh, so that’s how fat I am if you choose to star in, and then edit your own short film, and were not exactly 100% aware of how fat you are, you will be. It will be rendered quite clear. I could say that it’s leftover Thanksgiving weight, but it’s isn’t. Not primarily, anyway. Although the early October reintroduction of Eggnog into store shelves in time for Thanksgiving certainly didn’t do me any favors.

Take your fake blood seriously our one really good blood spray scene, at the film’s climax, loses some of its effect because the fake blood is not red enough, and too translucent… it shows up as a semi-invisible purple-pink spray on the original footage, and with heavy colour correction in the final version, is only a little better. The initial thought, here, was that excessive fake blood thickness would have clogged the super soaker, so we emitted our standard opaquing agent (chocolate sauce)… I’m not sure why we assumed this without testing. We might have also loaded the supersoaker with some of our store-bought fake blood, which is fairly fluid, and unmistakeably blood-coloured. The shot is alright, but it could have been amazing.

When you are going to have a shot of red blood dripping onto a green shirt please remember that your cinematographer is red/green colourblind … this is pretty much self explanatory. All of the footage from the first half of the day looked so good… I forgot that there wasn’t much in the way of red/green contrast to challenge Gordon’s vision. Our final shot is of red blood dripping onto a green shirt. Only the red blood is black. The exposure could have been adjusted to fix this, but I was in front of the camera, and Gordon is colourblind.

Test everything testable before you start … the deliverable format of the movie was a DVD playable in a standard DVD player. I’ve never really done this. Ever. I haven’t rendered a film of any kind on my computer in quite some time. Months, if not a year. I have, maybe, forgotten some important settings. I have perhaps lost my intuition for how long certain renderings should take. Somehow, I thought that everything would just work out, when editing was done.

It did not.

We had renderings of video without sound. Renderings of video with sound far too quiet to hear. DVD burning software stating that the DVD had been burnt and popping the DVD out of the drive, but with the DVD still magically blank.

Awesome.

This is all stuff that can be tested ahead of time.

Camping … Steve’s house is very close to where the DVD drop-off point was meant to be. I should have camped out at Steve’s house to do editing. This way, I’d have only had to jog down to the place to deliver the DVD… I might have actually made it on time… also, Steve would have been there to trouble shoot the DVD burning bullshit issues, my mind having already been completely fried… we could have definitely had the thing finished and handed in on time.

The sound would have still been pretty terrible.

Steve always makes it better.

Wait. Feel yourself out, get a sense of your body, your environment, your feelings. Surely, you must know at least one more thing, you must know something beyond this most tired of cliches.

Your stomach growls.

You know that you are hungry.

Every character worth the words that make him wants something. Your protagonist must want something badly enough to propel him through the hell to which you are about to send him. You know about hunger. You know about wanting…

A delicious turkey sandwich.

So you are downstairs, in the kitchen. You’ve pulled the good bread out of the bread box and inspected your two slices for mold — better to risk moldiness than screw up good bread in the fridge. From the fridge you’ve retrieved your grainy German mustard. You smear it on thick. Lettuce and tomatoes are placed on the table, but not married to the sandwich; you eat a slice of each separately. Turkey and Mustard and Bread… a holy trinity of tastes… they deserve no flavour interference.

Lastly, you open the meat tray, and lo: There is no turkey there to speak of!

For every protagonist that wants, there must be a universe that conspires against him. You see, where you expected thick deli-chopped turkey meat, waits thin, grocery store roast beef slices, slick, and dull to the tongue. You must make a choice, eat now, in mediocrity, or move forward, overcoming whatever increasingly improbable obstacles rise before you.

This wouldn’t be a story if you settled.

You take your half-made sandwich carefully in hand, and in your trousers you stuff your Glock, and a keen butcher’s knife. You open your kitchen doors, and make your way into the woods. Somewhere, over the eastern hills, the prophets say, lies a field untouched by the hands of man, home to turkeys enough to feed man until the end times.

You walk for hours, over boulders the size of houses, and through hollow logs twice size of office buildings. Something had better force you to act, to make a decision; something must challenge you. You arrive at a river.

The river is as wide as an eight-lane highway, and roars savagely. You kick off your shoes and roll up the cuffs of your trousers. You raise the gestating turkey sandwich high above your head, and step into the water. You are barely ankle deep when the water’s tug begins to affect your balance. You are not more than an eighth of the way through, and the water is above your belly button. You strain on the tips of your toes to keep the sandwich as far away from potential sogginess as possible. This, a mistake. The water drags you off of your toes and then under. Your body tumbles and you thrash your arms wildly.

You are sitting on the riverbed, opposite where you entered, if a little downstream. Your clothes are soaked, your hair is soaked. The soaked sandwich disintegrates in your hand.

All is lost.

You rise to your feet, and check your trousers. You still possess your glock and butcher’s knife. You begin to walk. At first, each step is strained, deliberate, but you pick up speed, purpose. You enter the woods. The ground slopes upward.

If you didn’t face certain defeat and keep going, this wouldn’t be a story either.

You happen upon some grain, sprouting from between two rocks. You take your butches knife and cut it at the stem. You grind it up between two stones, and add water by squeezing out your soaked shirt. You build a fire, and this evening, you bake bread.

The next morning, after travelling even further up the hillside, you encounter a wild mustard bush. You squeeze out the remaining water from your soaked trousers, and grind the mustard seed. After letting it sit for a while, you spread the fresh mustard onto your fresh bread.

After a full day’s climb, you reach the top of the hill. The sun has just dipped below the horizon, and all life is bathed in the purple-orange glow of magic hour. The trees open up to a field. Before you a rusted wire and wooden stake fence barely stands. The wire has decayed enough to split in several places, and many of the stakes have toppled over. All of it, is nearly completely overgrown with weeds. In the middle of this grassy clearing stands a lone turkey.

You draw your glock and point it at the bird; you can feel the cold steel of the belted butcher’s knife against your skin. Your bread is fresh, your mustard is fresh, soon the trinity will be complete and you will feast on the finest freshest sandwich every assembled by the hands of man.

Your finger squeezes the trigger. And then, you are overwhelmed by the turkey’s majesty.

Its tail fanned like a peacock, it’s feathers striped like a bold tiger, it’s face decorated with the wild colours of a gaelic warrior, all in the subdued tones of the puritans. The turkey is the most regal of all galliformes. A pilgrim king.

The glock lands lands among the weeds, unfired.

You fall to your knees and weep.

Also here’s a quick coloring of the girl with the gun that was posted in the last slew of uploads.

I tried to drink some coffee too soon after the dental work, and my frozen mouth drooled it all over my sweater. I guess this is what I have to look forward to when I get old.

The dentist said it was still drillable, but with a useless wisdom tooth, what’s the point?

“Dark Knight was a great movie, no?”
“Pizza Hut is greasy, no?”
“Being punched in the face is totally rad, no?”

Here’s what “,no?” translates to: “amirite?!?”

Fucking Stop It.

Grow some balls and make a fucking statement, or rewrite your sentence so that it’s an actual goddamn question.

“Dark Knight was a great movie.”
“Pizza Hut is greasy.”
“Being punched in the face is totally rad.”

OR

“Did you think the Dark Knight was a great movie?”
“How do you feel about the greasy-ness of Pizza Hut pizza?”
“I used to think that being punched in the face was pretty rad, but I’m having second thoughts; what is your position, apropos a punch in the face?”

“,no?” is lazy fucking writing, and every time I read it, I feel like I’m being insulted personally. It is simultaneously the mark of a will too weak, too desperate for approval to make a clear, and firm statement, while at the same time too disinterested in the eyes and minds of the sensitive reader to write AN ACTUAL BEARFUCKING QUESTION!

I imagine, in my mind, that anyone who ends a sentence with “,no?” sounds exactly like Alyson Hannigan’s flutist character from American Pie.

Of course, it should be pointed out that the “,no?” ending serves a similar function to the Canadian, “,eh?”. However, “,eh?” has a long cultural history in this great nation, and is a word exactly suited to its purpose. “No” is already a word. It already means NO. By using “no” in the place of “eh?”, one essentially says, “I’VE JUST NEGATED MY WHOLE STATEMENT IN THE DESPERATE HOPES THAT YOU WILL REAFFIRM IT!”

Stop. Stop it you jelly-spined crybabies.

It is, in short, a kind of linguistic submarine patent.

That said, the term isn’t that bad. He calls it the Red Baron Ploy, the use of a particularly standout evil villain to become the defining face of his otherwise vaguely defined countrymen (or group members of some other kind). Red Baron Ploy doesn’t sound very good, however… too many words. And in being so specifically about a black and white good/evil dichotomy, its utility is somewhat muted.

Instead, the term ought to be just “The Red Baron”. The Red Baron is often the villain, or at the very least, the antagonist, but his defining characteristic is his group membership.

A Red Baron can never work alone. The Red Baron is the representative, the face, the avatar, of a much larger group which the author does not characterize more widely (either because the group is so large as to make that unwieldly, or the author is simply uninterested).

The Red Baron is often flamboyant. Is often Jeremy Irons in Dungeons and Dragons o’er the top. It is in his nature specifically because he must become the character representation of tens if not thousands of other bodies (whom our protagonist perhaps slaughters by the dozens [if there are more than tens]). He must think for thousands. He must move for thousands. He must emote for thousands.

The Red Baron is a useful trope, and appears frequently. I recently watched a piece of shit called Death Race, a not-really-a-remake of a particularly good cult film called Death Race 2000. Our protagonist spends most of this malformed asshole of a motion picture in prison. There are fights, there are confrontations, there are various meetings with the wierdly-botoxed female prison warden: there are many events in which prison guards are obligated to appear, and frequently do violence to our cranky english hero. In exactly every single instance in which a guard interacts with any character onscreen (usually our main character), it is the same guard. He’s got kind of a freaky looking chin, makes his face look like a crescent moon in profile. In a prison the size of an island, day or night, at any far-flung corner of the prison, he is the guard to show up with his stick in hand, doing violence and muttering some lame Paul WS Anderson dialogue. He also appears at the right-hand side of our botox’ed warden whenever we see her. He is every guard. He is improbably, illogically sadistic… he is the sadism of every guard combined.

He is a Red Baron. Paul WS Anderson violated every rule of logic or sense just to make him so.

Don’t watch Death Race, though. It really sucks.

Look at the costume similarities between Darth Vader and the Storm Trooper. Darth Vader is a storm trooper in a black uniform and a cape. Also, with magic powers. Darth Vader is a Red Baron, effectively filling the characterization gap of a hundred easily slaughtered storm trooper infantry.

But it doesn’t stop at antogonism and villainy. Mel Gibson’s William Wallace very nearly acts as a Red Baron for all of the Scots in Braveheart, at least the bold, fighting kind.

Where the author chooses not to, for reasons good or evil, represent a large group as a diverse set of individuals, but instead, Superions them into a single, usually flamboyant representation, he has made a Red Baron.

It is a useful trope, with plenty of life left in it. Maybe an endless supply of life, really.

If you find yourself disheartened by the facelessness of your hero’s enemies — choose one of them to follow, one of them to deepen and grow. Let your audience learn to hate him, or love him tragically. Make a Red Baron.

In my out-of-conditionness, I may have accidentally read a couple of Michael Crighton (god rest his soul) novels.

From the two books, Michael Crighton appears to have supported two positions.

1) Nanabots are coming soon, and pose a real and significant danger to the human race.
2) Global Warming is an overblown myth believed only by people who haven’t had the time to do any real reading or thinking for themselves.

I’m thinking of writing a book called State of NanoFear, about a group of Anti-NanoBot activists who create a nanobot plague to show people the impending danger of nanobots. Either that or a lobotomy.

The thing is, I didn’t read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell today because I was feeling sick, and it looked too big, too daunting. Both of those Crighton (may he rest in peace) books combined adds up to not much less Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I have a sinus infection *and* I could have spent today reading a real book.

Christ.