Dustings #73
/I need to start this post off with an apology. Look, I know I like to have fun on this site, but for once just let me be serious.
In the most recent issue of the Love Letters monthly, I wrote about Matt Baker’s Vanishing Inc. Masterclass.
Matt is a mathematics professor and he frequently combines his two loves, as he did in the Masterclass which featured magic with math-based methods.
In that issue of Love Letters I wrote the following:
I’m going to be honest with you, Matt. You know who I feel bad for? Your parents.
Can you imagine, you have a kid and he starts going to school and you find out he has a real love of math? So you’re desperately trying to get him into football or racing BMX bikes or something at least somewhat cool. And then one day he comes home and he’s like, “I’ve got a new hobby?” And you’re praying it’s not something dorky. And then he’s like, “Now I like math and magic!” And you’re just like, “Aw shit. Well...I guess we can put off that sex talk for another couple decades.”
That was wrong of me to say. It was wrong of me to suggest the combination of these two hobbies would necessarily cause Matt to be a social pariah who had a “girlfriend in Canada” for the bulk of his high school career and had to see a specialist for prescription cream to heal the rash he received from all the wedgies inflicted on him.
That just seemed to be the most likely scenario when you’re into math and magic. To put it into terms Matt would understand, I thought there was something of a square-cube law situation going on. So that as the number of geeky hobbies you were involved in doubled the time before you touched a booby would increase by a factor of 8.
This was just a theory of mine. And now I know I was way off.
You see, someone reached out to me with photographic evidence that I could not have been more wrong about how cool Matt was in school.
Behold…
Mmmmmmm…
Look, I’m not gay, but your boy ain’t blind either.
The hair? The outfit? The subject matter of his presentation?
Some of Matt’s former classmates wrote to inform me that—as that picture suggests—this guy slayed more beaver than the North American fur trade.
Here I was assuming that his interest in math and magic probably meant that his mom had to convince his cousin to accompany him to prom. As I’ve learned, I couldn’t have been further from the truth. I don’t want to get into all the stories I’ve been told about Matt’s younger days (I don’t want this site to get busted for peddling such raw smut). But let’s just say the “nomial-geometric series” wasn’t the only thing that was “poly” in this picture. One relationship was simply not enough to satisfy Matt’s burning passions and oozing machismo.
So, again, I’m so, so, so sorry for jumping to conclusions. And I will try not to make that mistake again.
When the new version of Color Match came out recently, I asked people if they had any particularly strong use cases for it.
I had completely forgotten that I had pitched an idea for such a trick a couple years ago.
It would take some doing to pull that off, but now that a much less expensive (although still fairly expensive) version of that effect is available, I figure I’d re-mention it because it would be a good spooky effect for this month.
As I’ve done in the past, I’m watching a different horror movie every day in October. I was using this list of the best horror movies of 2021 to help me pick what to watch, but that was a mistake. It’s not a good list. Look, when I first got into horror movies in the 80s and 90s they were generally the most fun, exciting, sexy, and (obviously) scary movies you could see. That’s why I loved horror movies. Perhaps my taste in movies should have evolved since I was 14. But, sorry, it hasn’t. And I don’t really connect with this new style of horror that is slow-moving, humorless, and not particularly scary.
Not every horror movie is like that, of course, but the list I was working off certainly tilted in that direction at the top.
At this point in the month, I don’t have a ton to recommend. But for those horror fans who have communicated with me in the past, I figured I’d keep you abreast of what I’ve seen so far. Five days in (as of this writing).
The best one so far: Saint Maud. This was well made and well acted, and gradually ramped up the scare factor as it went on. I just thought it was okay for most of it. Then, in literally the last half-second of the film, it jumped up in my esteem from “okay” to “pretty good.” That it could do that in just a few frames of film was a pretty cool trick.
These movies were fine, but not at all scary: Antlers, Bloodthirsty, Werewolves Within
The first two of those were slow and not scare-less. Werewolves Within is a horror-comedy. And as much as I like horror and comedy, the two rarely mix well for me.
The worst one so far: Dementer. This one looks like it was made for about $45, which I have no issue with. Budget doesn’t matter that much with horror movies. And there was a legitimately creepy vibe throughout it. But the story was just too vague to interest me. I don’t need everything spelled out for me, but when everything is sort of ambiguous (what happens before the story, during the story, and at the end of the story) that’s a sign of bad writing. It’s very easy to “make people think” by not giving them any answers. The real achievement is being able to give them the answers and still have their mind racing.
I abandoned the list I was working off of originally for one of my own creation which will include more commercial horror films. I’ll let you know if I stumble on anything particularly good.