Last week’s newsletter was a bit heavy in terms of subject matter, and though the events of the world have not changed in terms of the somewhat bleak direction we are currently headed, there are still areas where we need a little bit of light in our lives. Ideally, this newsletter would serve as one of those things, if only for the fact that you get to listen to my nonsensical ramblings once a week as I spout off my nonsense. So, let’s let this week be a bit more fun, shall we?

I have told you before about the film I wanted to make. Well, it looks like things are finally happening with that. In fact, we are currently in negotiations with a film company here in the city to make it actually happen. It’s pretty much a done deal, but I have to enter everything here with the caveat that all of these things could fall apart at any minute. Such is the way of making films, where it looks like everything is hunky-dory one minute and then people are ghosting you the next. I am fully-prepared for that to happen, but I can’t operate as if that is a given yet, so I continue to trudge along with the planning.

I have a wonderful producer named Dave on the film and we have been working together over the past couple of weeks to get the script in shape. It’s always nice to have a collaborator on creative projects when you get along with the person that you’re collaborating with. Dave and I are sympatico on the script and I am going to be spending my spare time this week figuring out how to get things in the proper order, story-wise, before we begin a breakdown of the film and the logistics behind making it.

It’s an interesting process. When I originally wrote Booth, I wrote it with the notion that this was pretty much going to be a one-man operation. I was going to write it, film it, and star in it, along with editing the thing. Because of all of this, I wrote with the notion of telling discreet stories…basically things that I could make super-cheap and with ease-of-logistics. Because of that, the script was very compartmentalized. Its stories were siloed off from each other for fear that I might only be able to make a couple of them, as opposed to all of them.

Now, I am having to make adjustments based upon expanding the scope of the stories. Dave is asking me good questions about the theme of the movie and how we might go about interconnecting the stories in the script to flesh things out a bit. I am in the middle of that expansion, and because of Dave’s suggestions, I’m starting to get a bit giddy at the possibilities of what we could do with the film. There’s a lot.

So, when you’re wondering what it is that I’m working on at the moment, it is this. My mind is constantly thinking about Booth. I’m thinking of the story; I’m thinking of the actors; and I’m thinking of how to get this thing done. I’m also trying to quell my fears about things falling apart. We shall see…

In other news, I was messing around with Google Gemini the other day and something very weird happened. I wanted to see what it would do with inserting me into a video. But I didn’t want the current me. I wanted seventeen-year old me in the video. So, I uploaded this photo:

That’s a cropped picture of me, age 17, in my high school typing class. Not a great photo overall. I uploaded it to Gemini and said, “Put this person in a video from 1988, where they are playing guitar in a bar with an uninterested crowd watching. Have a bassist with blond hair whose face is obscured because of headbanging, and give me a rotund drummer in mirrored aviator shades.”

Easy enough, right? Well, this is what it made:

Needless to say, I’m a little freaked out by that. It’s pretty good, but when I turn to the camera, I really get freaked out because…

…that’s me.

I mean, that legitimately looks like me. It matched my hair; it matched my shirt. I was a bit chubbier at that point in my life, but it’s pretty much spot-on in terms of looking like me.

In a way, this is joyful. There are practically zero pictures or video of me from this point in my life. (If you’ve got some, send them my way, because I have nothing). So, it’s a bit neat to recreate something that never happened or that there is no record of existing. What are memories anyway? We can rewrite history as much as we want. My dad did it all the time.

There are also terrible ramifications from this as well, but that is for another newsletter. Let’s just focus on how cool this is for a bit.

I tried this a couple more times, making attempts to get videos of me at different ages having conversations with myself. It didn’t work nearly as well and as with all AI experiments, the first iteration is the best one before the computer starts getting confused. Here’s one where the me of today is having a conversation with me at 22 years of age:

It didn’t quite nail that one. The guy on the left is certainly me, but the Randall on the right…well, I have no idea how I looked at that point in my life, so who knows? Maybe it looks like me? I’m not sure. The voices are most certainly not me.

What does all this mean? Who knows? I’m just experimenting.

All right…that’s all I’ve got for today. Have a glorious week.