February 4, 2025

Quitting For Power and Fun

This is Finish Your Monsters, a weekly blogletter about the creative process. I'm sharing adventures in art and life as well as setting CLIFFHANGER goals for myself, so--

DID I MAKE MY GOAL?

Big picture, I’m working away on the post-production of our horror film, Dead Media. I’m editing the film in chronological order. Last week, I committed to the goal of editing up to minute 16.

And I made it!

Editing is both very challenging and very rewarding. Each scene is like it’s own little film. As you gather the footage, it’s like you’re at the bottom of a mountain. You climb and you climb, you make the scene work and suddenly you’re at the top of the mountain, arms raised, throat rattling with victory cries. Then you start the next scene and it’s like a big gust of wind just HURLED you and your hubris off the summit and back to the base of the mountain.

Still, I had fun with it this week and the first act of the film is really coming into focus and that makes me extremely happy. As soon as I finish this newsletter, I’m back to climbing!

Last week, in an effort to encourage and celebrate little bursts of creativity, I asked readers to send in a sketch. Here’s one I got from a reader named Spencer. Spencer also included the backstory of the image, but I think it’s fun to let a little mystery into our lives.

If you’re interested in sending in an image, here are the very minimal rules: The image can be anything you want. Try not to take more than 5 minutes. Use a pen, marker, or other permanent ink. Send me a jpg of your image at joseph at jokingenvelope dot com and let me know if you’re okay with me sharing it. Onward!

ADVENTURES OF THE WEEK--

This week was very full. I did some taxes, multiple podcasts, got a haircut, contacted my reps in congress multiple times, saw a sold-out screening of David Lynch’s Wild At Heart at the Egyptian Theater, and of course, did some editing.

But the adventure I want to talk about this week is the adventure of QUITTING THINGS.

The last few weeks have seen a dramatic increase in corporations, social media sites, and mid-life crisis billionaires attacking the very concept of diversity. Bending the knee to neo-nazis and scapegoating the world’s problems on individual groups of people just living their lives.

In response, I have quit lots of things. Some things I’m still weighing. Some things I can’t quit without doing immediate financial damage to myself or others.

I’ve also struggled with how to talk about my zeal for quitting things. I want to just yell at the world to quit certain things. But I generally prefer sharing what I’m doing rather than telling other people what they should do.

Partially, because I think people tune out if you yell at them about their own personal choices. But also I don’t want to yell at people to quit specific things because I know some people can’t. Getting off a specific social media site might lose essential connection to a vulnerable community. Someone might not have the money or time to get basic needs from a different website. A specific big box store might be the only one within reach for some folks, etc.

So rather than tell people specifically what to quit, I’d like to encourage people to recognize the inherent power of their money and time.

So many of our stories are about the difference ONE PERSON can make. I think that’s sunk in pretty deep to the point where people feel if they don’t PERSONALLY slay the dragon with the ONE SWORD then they don’t have any power.

It’s hard to see the mark you make by not ordering your favorite hair gel from Amazon, but I believe each little choice is making a mark. Some dragons can die the death of a thousand cuts.

So I’d like to encourage people that even though it feels small and ineffective, you do have power. Your time is power. Your money is power. Your social media post that doesn’t go viral is still power.

And like almost everything I write in this blogletter, it’s stuff I need to hear myself.

Anyway, here are things I quit. I’m no longer posting on X. I think that one is pretty vital given the blatant neo-nazi actions and words of the owner. And it’s been made much easier for me by the growth of Bluesky. (Find me here if you’re interested!)

I want to leave Meta. I’ve stopped posting on Threads, which was very easy because I never liked it or trusted it in the first place. It always felt like a bad idea to prop up a THIRD social media site owned by the subject of the 2010 film The Social Network. We’ve known who this guy is for a while.

I’m very torn about leaving Facebook and Instagram. There aren’t ready replacements like Bluesky has become for X. I’ve got some community I would definitely lose touch with. Very soon, it will be vitally important for me to reach people to promote Dead Media and Facebook/Instagram are pretty essential to that. (Obviously, the film’s success means a lot to me personally but I also owe it to the investors, cast & crew to fight for the film.) Also, I’ve been able to make some political posts on Facebook that aren’t yet being choked so maybe it is still a valuable place for fighting the good fight. I don’t know yet.

I have stopped ordering my hair gel and anything else on Amazon. But the quitting that inspired me to write this post is the one that hurts the most. Target.

I’ve been shopping at Target since I was about 3 years old. Before my wife and I moved from Minnesota (the home of Target) to Los Angeles, I had to stop and google to confirm that LA had Targets. I once did an episode of my old podcast, Obsessed, where I interviewed my friend about his obsession with Target and I probably talked too much because I was just as, if not more, obsessed with Target than my guest was. And he was very obsessed.

Target is a corporation. It always has been. None of us are pure and clear of hypocrisy. Very few of us have the time, the money, the resources to build a life entirely free of big corporations. But Target has usually been at least performative about trying to be a progressive company. So when they announced they were bending the knee and ending their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, I really felt like an old friend slapped me in the face.

So I’ve made the personal decision to use the little power I have and join the boycott in hopes of the company changing its direction. We’ll see.

All of which leads me to this actual adventure of the week—on Sunday I was forced to do the unthinkable—leave my apartment. I had various things I needed and wanted that I normally would have ordered from Amazon or Target.

I went and bought a frame to hang up the drawing I did to honor David Lynch a few weeks ago. I looked for my hair gel. (No luck yet but the quest will continue.) I stopped at a brick and mortar bookstore to hunt for a specific book I’ve been looking for. And since I was out anyway, I stopped in a comic book store where I bumped into my old friend, the phenomenal comedian Jackie Kashian and her husband, Andy, who I haven’t seen in person in a long time.

The quitting is difficult. It’s subjective. It’s time consuming. But maybe there are some rewards as well.

Maybe instead of using the phrase “touch grass” to encourage myself to leave the house, I’ll yell at myself to go “touch comic books.”

LIGHT PLUGS—

The Nightmare Adorable! I wrote and directed this explicitly political short horror film back in 2023. It’s on YouTube now and getting more views will help with the eventual promotion of Dead Media. You can watch here!

Speaking of Dead Media, We’ve got a fiscal sponsorship with the great Minnesota organization Film North. They can accept one-time donations that will go directly toward finishing the film: SCORE, VFX, COLOR GRADING, etc. It’s like a Kickstarter where the rewards are A) a tax deduction and B) helping us make the film.

For full info, please check out the page for the upcoming horror film, DEAD MEDIA!

Or if you have any questions about supporting the film, feel free to reach out to me personally!

MY GOAL FOR THE WEEK--

I need to keep my focus on editing Dead Media so I’m going to risk going a round with hubris and up my goal. So my goal for next week is to edit up to minute 26.

YOUR GOAL FOR THE WEEK--

I would absolutely LOVE to hear what you're working on this week in the comments below. What's your goal? How can I help you literally finish your monsters?

A LITTLE SKETCH--

I’ve been thinking about how much I enjoy random comic book panels taken out of context. So I decided to sketch a comic book panel that has never existed! My apologies to any super-fans of Thunder-Bunny.