The Public Square for July 2025

Attention Citizens!

Animation continues apace, just yesterday I got through the most difficult and annoying section.  Should be all downhill from here, everything that’s left to do is relatively easy.  

One of the drawbacks of having a long-ass video is that it feels like I should be done, I’m sitting on about 40 minutes of animation!  But alas! A bit more to go.  

Once I’m done the animation process I’m always mentally (and physically!) exhausted, so I start this loop where I watch the entire video, make notes, make changes, and then the next day do it again.  I’ll continue this loop until I can get through the video with no changes required.  In a best case scenario I’ll do this for maybe 3 days, in the worst case scenario… I remember doing it for 10 days once and almost losing my mind.  

This is a much more relaxed process than the marathon that it takes to finish animation, but I must admit that psychologically it can be rough.  By the time I’m done I pretty much know the entire video by heart, so sitting down to watch it another 5-10 times can be…taxing.  Especially when it’s like an hour long.  That’s why I only make myself do it once per day, lol.  

So when I publish a Progress Update with Animation - 100%, you might be asking yourself, “why the hell isn’t the video posted yet?”  It’s because I’m stuck in a death loop, watching the same damn thing every day, reciting the lines aloud in sync with the video for my own amusement.  

Did you know that some people out there just talk into a camera and then upload it to YouTube?  

What’s that like? 

Progress Update:

Books I’ve Recently Enjoyed:

• Timequake (1997) by Kurt Vonnegut

  • I’m continuing to fill in my Vonnegut blind spots with Timequake (1997), his last novel.

    The premise of the novel is frankly bizarre.  He says in the year 2001 a “Timequake” sends everybody on Earth back to the year 1991, where they are doomed to re-enact the exact same events in the exact same way, but with full knowledge of how the next 10 years will play out.  

    It’s a disturbing idea, he spends a lot of time talking about characters who have made significant mistakes in their lives and how they are (literally) doomed to repeat those mistakes.  It’s bleak!

    And then Vonnegut appears to get bored with the premise of his own book, and just starts to tell the reader true stories from his real life.  I’d heard many of these stories before, he’s told them in other books.  This quickly becomes very confusing, since Timequake (1997) is an in-Universe book, he claims that he was doomed to write it twice during those repeating 10 years.  But then he also says that he wrote a different Timequake during that 10 year period and then threw most of it out, which I gather is actually true in real life.  So it’s a book about writing the same book twice, playfully jumping back and forth between truth and fiction.  

    It gets mind-bendie because at times he’ll be describing real things that happened in his life in the 1990s, and forget that in-Universe those events should have been effected by the Timequake and subjectively experienced twice.  Or maybe he’s forgetting on purpose.  Because in-Universe he’s ALSO written the same book twice.  Which means he’s written the same book 4 times if you include the in-Universe magical repeating Timequake.  I’m confusing myself all over again.

    The book probably sounds like a mess, because it IS a mess, but it’s also really amusing.  In all seriousness I really admired that he had the guts to fully abandon the premise of the novel whenever it suited him.  Because screw it, you only live once.  Or… twice…with the Timequake.  Hmm…

• Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven

  • This has been staring at me unread on my shelf for like 7 years, and I finally got around to it.  There’s a minor bit in here where, for cosmic reasons, Humans discover that Earth is facing certain destruction in 20,000 years, and collectively we’re like “ehhhh, ain’t my problem.”  Hilarious.  You ever feel like by every science fiction story must necessarily also be a story about climate change?  

    This is one of those books where it’s like “Great, perfect meal, 10/10, no notes.  Oh, you’re telling me that there are 4 sequels?  Absolutely not, over my dead body, go straight to hell!”

Films I’ve Recently Enjoyed:

• A Complete Unknown (2024)

  • I have to admit that I was a Certified Hater when I first saw this trailer, I thought that it looked embarrassing.  Regret to report that I was wrong, it’s actually pretty good.  Chalamet’s Dylan, which made me go “oof” in the trailer, completely works within the full context of the movie.  The portrayal of the 1964 Newport Folk Festival is honestly transcendent, maybe cheesy when viewed in isolation, but really effective.  

    I started to worry later on in the movie when they started ramping up to the legendary story (legendary in the sense that it’s fictional) of Pete Seeger trying and failing to cut Dylan’s audio with an axe at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.  It’s not true, it never happened.  It really looked like they were going to do that in the movie, and I was like “oh brother, they’d better not…”  But in the end Seeger just takes a good long look at an axe, and then doesn’t touch it.  I laughed out loud.  Phew.

Music I’ve Recently Enjoyed:

• Blood on the Tracks (1975) by Bob Dylan

  • Accidentally became Dylan–pilled through A Complete Unknown (2024), in the last few of weeks I’ve listened all the way through Blood on the Tracks (1975) maybe 15 times while cooking dinner?  Something embarrassing like that.  If You See Her, Say Hello is my sleeper favourite.  

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