#6 Personal Update, Disney+, and The Best Car Commercial You've Ever Seen
Hello. Welcome to issue six. We had one unsubscribe last week, but two new subscriptions. If you’re reading this and considering unsubscribing, let me know why. My subscription rate is still low enough that one email might change the whole format of the newsletter.
As of now, I am DONE with my work for the first semester of my MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College. In a little less than five months I have read twelve books totaling 4,914 pages. That averages out to reading 1,000 pages a week. I also wrote nearly 200 pages during this time (not including this newsletter).
The next semester at Goddard doesn’t begin until mid-February. So I have some time off. Hopefully during this time I’ll find a lucrative job to keep me busy.
In other writing news, the December issue of Grit City Magazine will have an article I wrote about homicides in Tacoma. Grit City is a relatively new local publication, but they put out a product that is outright beautiful. I don’t know exactly who is involved in their graphic design, but they know what they’re doing. I expect this will be as good as my writing ever looks.
In still more writing news, the latest edition of The Pitkin Review has one of my short pieces of fiction in it along with work from other Goddard students. You can purchase a copy at this link.
Okay. Let’s move on.
Car Commercials
I am someone who enjoys anything done well. And car commercials are no exception. I encountered this first one not knowing it was a car commercial until the end. It is expert visual storytelling and deserves every view it gets.
This one is nice and silly with music by Haywood Banks, someone I’ve been a fan of for a long time.
This last one isn’t special in any way except that I think it’s a very effective car commercial.
Facebook
Those of you who pay attention to my Facebook page will notice that I haven’t kept to my self-imposed restrictions on Facebook usage, but I have been slowly lessening the amount of posts and time I spend on the site. My intention remains to provide no new content to the site as of January 1, 2020.
Disney+
The latest streaming service to demand your monthly tithe is Disney+. Disney owns Marvel. Disney owns Star Wars. Disney owns Pixar and National Geographic. And of course they have their own incredible back catalog which now includes 20th Century Fox. They have thousands of movies and episodes of television at their disposal.
And yet, the selection on Disney+ is sadly lacking. Don’t get me wrong. If you have children, then Disney+ is worth it at twice the price. But their omissions are somewhat glaring. Why not have The Last Jedi when The Rise of Skywalker is coming out next month? Why not have every Marvel movie rather than most of them? Why not have Condorman? (Okay, I realize I’m probably the only one who wants Condorman.) But still.
This has been my problem with both Disney and streaming in general. There is no good reason to rotate content in and out of a streaming service except to create a false sense of scarcity. It doesn’t cost Disney more money to allow content they own to be on their streaming service. Doing otherwise cheapens the service if you ask me.
This false scarcity is what makes me more in favor of a personal video library rather than relying on streaming services for content they may delete whenever the whim strikes them. Over on Netflix I hear they’re losing West Wing, but luckily I still have the DVDs.
Hell, I wouldn’t even have Disney+, but Verizon offers a year of Disney+ to their subscribers for free.
One Last Thought
With my birthday a couple weeks away I do what I do every year and take stock of the year that I’ve had. It has not been without incident.
When this year started I had a signed book contract with a small publisher, I had applied to the Masters in Public Administration program at Evergreen Tacoma, and I expected to graduate with my BA from Evergreen Tacoma. Only that last one actually ended up happening. I got accepted to the MPA program and turned it down. I was released from my book contract in August due to creative differences.
2019 became a very different year for me than I expected. Old friends I have known for decades stopped talking to me. New friends I hope to know for the rest of my life showed up. And there were people I thought I’d never talk to again who I now talk to regularly.
Perhaps the biggest change that 2019 brought was that for the first time in my life, my writing is a primary focus. I have been writing creatively since I was in third grade, but this is the year that it became more than just a hobby.
As I mentioned, I’m going to Goddard College for a MFA in Creative Writing. I have one finished novel I’m shopping to publishers and another I’m working on. I served as non-fiction editor of The Pitkin Review and had a story published in it. I have an article appearing in a local magazine next month. And I have this newsletter to keep everyone who wants to know aware of what’s going on in my world.
Unfortunately this year has also had a lot of death in it. My mother’s partner of twenty-five years died this past March, a friend’s mother just passed away a couple weeks ago. And far too many of my friends and family have had hospital visits this year. One day our past is much longer than our future. But as long as we’re here, it’s worth honoring those who weren’t so lucky.
Given how off the mark I was about this year, I’m not sure it’s worth my speculating what the next year holds. I know what I hope for. I hope for success for myself and everyone reading this. I hope for an impeached President and a Democrat President-elect. I hope for a new home for my finished novel and a good deal of work on my new one. I hope for good health, good friends, time and means to create, and the ability to have a drink or a smoke at the end of the day. Most of all, I hope we’re all here next year marveling at how much better things are than they are right now. I’d like that.
That’s all for now. It’s Thanksgiving this week. If you’re absolutely dreading going to your relative’s house, don’t go. Tell them you’re sick. Binge watch that show you’ve been meaning to watch. And I’ll see you here next week.
- Jack