Allegra Sloman's blog

DO NOT WANT TO GET OUT OF BED TODAY. But I have ten minutes to get dressed and catch a bus.

Goddamn but there’s a lot of wonderful web content out there. There’s shit too.

Ron Howard and Brian Grazer started a company a few years back called New Form Digital and they are starting to bring interesting entertainment to various sizes of screen. I didn’t clap for their ‘all our shows’ teaser ad.  It was everything I FUCKING HATE about H-style advertising; loud, bozoid, and did I mention loud.

The most successful of the new content development, aggregation and production companies like New Form do three things: they leave the copyright with the creators, they pair inexperienced storytellers with experienced, collaborative production overseers who know how to make the most of their budgets, and they do what seems like incredibly intrusive market research in quantities that drop-kick my brain into orbit.

Mass markets do exist, still, but they seem to be making like tortillas under the weight of behemoth brands.

Niche markets with deep pockets are perfectly matched to the new kind of content delivery.

The Canadian government subsidizes digital content production and some of the material thus subsidized, like The Drive, is made by a small number of people with a small budget (they didn’t pay for most of their locations, or maybe none of them, which might annoy extended family members) who make intelligent decisions about acting, directing, lighting, writing and yes, locations.

Over the last ten years, I’ve had more and more moments when I’ve said, “My tax dollars at work, out-fucking-standing,” when I’ve seen the subsidy bugs scroll by at the end of the film. Yes I watch credits, but for cool character name ideas. Why do YOU watch them?

People’s attention spans get shorter and shorter and they want their stories little. But they also want to binge watch, depending where they are. Depending on the demographic, they might be taking a break from their work, or outside having a smoke, or waiting for a bus, or for a friend outside a concert hall, or on a bus, and these little bits of story work because they provide a weird kind of continuity in an otherwise chopped up day. Screen related media, scaling up to a Jumbotron and down to a watch, is where it’s at.  It’s being driven by kids, but there will always be a screen for the market. You just have to know what kind of a screen your target is next to and wants to look at, when they have the time to watch (or can make it).

I predict when movies in theatres, as currently distributed, are facing too much competition from small screens, there will STILL  be movie houses, and there will still even be chains, but they’ll have to play anybody’s content on the basis of what the people who live closest to the theatre poll. So if New Westminster citizens say Here’s What We’ll Sit in A Theatre to Watch and the list reads as follows:

Three Classic Arnold Schwartzenegger action flicks in a row in one theatre on special

Titanic and The Rose double feature

The RIGHT version of the English-dubbed My Neighbour Totoro and anybody who understands this knows the burnination that I feel even having to say anything about that other hellspawn travesty

The fancut remake of Star Wars

Die Hard

A simulcast concert of whichever band babydykes are swooning over this year

And one newly released Hollywood movie. Maybe two.

And of course I have no idea about the demographics of New West but I could find out. In greeesome detail.

To me the shortening of the story cycle makes no fucking sense because you’re just asking for the intrusion of a commercial at that point. Sell advertising, after all, is what stories are supposed to do.

Keith PITCHED SOMEBODY today at the VWF which makes me so astonished and happy I don’t know what else to say about it.  And shouldn’t — it’s his story to tell.

There were falcons in the media room for most of the day.  I didn’t go near them.  Keith loved on them for a while.

GROSSLY INAPPROPRIATE COMMENT which combines the worst of “Kids these Days” “Allegra’s inappropriate fear of handicapped people,” “Entitled parents make me puke” and “Who cares what I think so I might as well say whatever racist, obnoxious, anti-social or mean-spirited thing comes into my head and why are you always upset with me?”  Aren’t you glad I gave it to ya at the meta level instead of actually making the comment? Pah, I amaze myself at times.

Managed to squeeze some writing in about George, Harri and the Oldest last night and this morning.  #VWF2016 is proving to be a good investment for me. I paid for Keith but he’s been too sick to attend.

There were talks on lighting, audience capture, metrics, entertainment law and it was very informative and to my mind well done.

Buster has assumed the position, so it’s time for cat videos.

Ayesha is still very sick.  If she doesn’t start eating she’ll probably die.  Paul, who’s only had her for a couple of years, is heartbroken, and I can’t say I blame him.

In a couple of hours I’ll be off downtown in the rush, bleargh, but there you go. Keith may be joining me for part of the festival.

Absolutely lovely evening at the Aerie, got about 45 minutes worth of back and arm massage, tried a new coffee flavoured doppelbock, etc, etc.  Anyway, feel like I’ve been restored to something resembling the cheerfulness I’d like to know all the time, and the sun is shining, pathetic fallacy, blah blah. Also, I wrote a song last night.  Mike was astonished when I told him, “No, I wasn’t practicing! That’s how it comes out sometimes! That’s why it’s so great to be me, every once in a long while I sit down and something like that emerges with an authority that is not mine… it is the universe singing to itself, and I’m just the fatty bony meaty critter that strokes the wood and metal box to enable it.”

I hope everybody feels as good as I do.  I know they don’t, but that’s what I wish for you today.

I HAVE FIGURED OUT HOW IT IS ALL GOING TO END. The trilogy.  I knew that the end is ‘getting George into space because that’s his goal’. What I didn’t understand is how. It’s going to make my universe bigger, and I love it. And all of the points I’m trying to make about reconciliation and communication and collaboration will be supported thereby.

Pleural effusion is the phrase of the day.  If you’re replacing somebody’s damaged lungs from the inside out, you are going to get lymph.

Lymph lymph lymph.

I am going to a web festival this weekend. (It’s about generating content and being involved with broadcasting creative content via the web, and a lot of it is local which will feed into the stuff I’m doing on the novels.) I am going to live tweet it and blog about it as well.  It will be interesting to get up and go to it every day as if I was going to work! It also goes late at night so I’m probably going to be a conzombie.

Went to my room at 4:30, crashed instead of taking a nap, woke at 2 am feeling wonderful.  This is an improvement.  I’m STARVING though, so I think I’m going to walk down to the convenience store and get some SUPPLIZE. Wrote a little but not much.

Hope everybody has a lovely and productive day!

Home to Burnaby today. Bengal farewell was wonderful. Getting off the bus in the wrong place and walking home through darkened Saanich was interesting, specially half in the bag as I was. (Power was out). Then I get back to the fOlks’ and can’t sleep, tossed and turned. Got up late (obvs) and now I am contemplating stuffing everything back in my bag and driving Alex and Katie home.  Alex needs to have a trip that is one day shorter next time; he blew an invisible fuse and has been cranky past words this am.

COFFEE GOOOOD.

This land is your land
This land is my land
From Obama’s White House
To the Hawaiian Islands
From the Sound of Puget
To the sound of silence
This land was made for you and me

Off to Victoria this morning with Katie and Alex. Applied for another job this morning, it’s just around the corner from here and it’s a temp contract, which has a lot of appeal.

Ah, rewatched CQB.  I caught a bunch of things – all tiny technical things that just make it SO GOOD – that I didn’t catch during the first glorious watch, when I was on the edge of my seat with excitement and happiness and terror.

Why do I ever stop taking vitamin D? I feel better right away, and the sleep is more solid although not long enough, as always.

I am mucking about with pluripotent stem cells and biocompatible carbon nanotube lattices.

Jeff and I loved the first season of The Expanse so much we are re-watching it the instant we finished it. Up next, the episode CQB, which has some of the best and most realistic “fighting in space” sequences ever made for television, and a memorably grisly and arresting shot of the consequences of taking a railgun round to the, er, person when the gravity is acting up. If you’re squeamish, give this one a miss. And when we are done with the rewatch, we have to wait until 2017 for more. Favourite line of the show so far from character ‘Amos’ as he’s strapping autodocs onto two fellow crew: “You guys are really messed up, it keeps trying to put you in hospice.”

Honestly, that sounds like a line I’d write, so, hellyeah I like it.

Joan Jett concert tonight with Mike, lunch today with Katie.  Thinking of renting a car to come to Victoria next weekend as the Bengal Lounge is closing and there is going to be a meeting of drunken lefties there and I’d like to see J. and the new kitties.  Plus my mother.  I can’t find the manuscript for the second book, which is crazy making, but it hasn’t left the house so I’m not worried.

It is possible but unlikely that I will bring offspring to Victoria but nothing is for sure.

Interview went well but there are many candidates.  Sounds like the church is a lot better at being a church for all nations than Beacon ever was.

Margot just came in and I put her in the window for a good view, and she actually stayed there and looked around for a while.  Buster watched cat videos with me the other morning.  He does that occasionally; he comes into my bedroom and ‘assumes the video watching position’ which is adorable. He is an extremely catly cat, and we loves him. Margot is just a pleasant fur generator by comparison, but she still has enough personality to make it interesting.