It’s the pitch meeting for a Newspaper Movie, only it’s an Urban Fantasy

It’s going to be Twilight meets All the Presidents Men!  Exploring themes of freedom of the press, corruption, truth, and the undead.

It’s called All the President’s Vampires where one intrepid reporter will get the tip of a lifetime from the ghost of Calvin Coolidge’s pet raccoon Rebecca, which breaks the story that will take down a president.

We open on a grizzled old reporter moving out of his DC brownstone because his wife is an angel, like literally, but it turns out even angels have a limit — and being married to a  fairy who can always detect the truth who went to journalism school is hers.

That night, as he’s guzzling beer at the local bar for journalists, (different than the pub for cops, the cafeteria for politicians, the steakhouse for lobbyists, the blood bank for vampires, and the morgue for zombies), he gets a tip through his anonymous email to meet a source in a parking garage.

There are a lot of parking garages in DC, so it takes him a while, but when he finally finds the source at the Dulles Airport long-term parking facility, he learns it’s a janitor who can talk to ghosts. And the janitor has brought along a ghost of the long-dead Coolidge White House pet, Rebecca the Raccoon.

This janitor also speaks raccoon, being both an animal whisperer and a ghost talker and she says that the President has been drinking blood in the Oval Office.

Now that he thinks about it, the grizzled reporter realizes it’s a little bit strange that no one covered the fact that the President didn’t show up to the Iowa State Fair until the fireworks started, and no one has seen him since in the light of day, but he knows for sure there is a story here.

The meeting with his editor doesn’t go great because it’s right before lunch, and she’s a zombie and tries to eat his brains. And she’s worried about the reputation of the paper with such a bombshell accusation. She tells him he has to find a corroborating source who isn’t the ghost of a raccoon or a janitor.

And so begins a long montage of seeking a source and not getting eaten or hexed or cursed. There will also be shots of opening refrigerators in empty apartments to reveal a solitary half-eaten pizza and more shots at the bar and even at a different bar.  At one point he even hears about a super secret project in the wilds of New Mexico, but reluctantly lets that go, because it’s the wrong genre.

Finally, after five minutes of tracking shots, set to a score by the same guy who does all those disaster flicks, he tracks down the ghost of Zachary Taylor, who died in the White House after consuming insane amounts of green apples and cherries. 

He takes the corroboration back to his editor, who agrees that the ghost of a dead president is slightly more trustworthy than the ghost of a raccoon, but since the same janitor translated for both ghosts, they still had work to do.

And so begins yet another montage of pavement pounding, but this time various to various psychics and magical creatures around the city until he finds a tarot card reader in Chinatown who does not tell all of the politicians she sees that they will win the next election with her help, and does not tell all of the tourists she sees that museum esoterica that the costs $20 bucks, half of which goes back in her pocket, is better than any Smithsonian. Sometimes she mixes up the two messages, which results in quite a few politicians in photo ops at the esoteric museum, but the reporter deems her trustworthy enough to translate.

A dramatic meeting is arranged, this time on a park bench beneath bare tree limbs, which takes some doing because it’s the middle of July. But finally, the tarot card reader and the ghost of Zachary Taylor confirm that yes, the president is drinking blood.

And now, it’s all over but the writing, and the click click of the printing press, which is weird in a movie about an online blog, but the big bold headlines are the same crying the president is a vampire. After a last-minute call for comment to the White House press secretary who says she can get back to them after sunset. In the final editorial meeting, the editor says to go with that quote and that they are going to change the world, speak truth to blood-sucking power, and a few more inspirational cliches.

And as the reporter sits watching the news of the President’s address, the screen fades to black while small white letters tell you that this one article forced the President to say sorry and for one moment tell a little bit of the truth, before going on to win reelection by 20 million votes and two electoral college votes.

The post 1 Reason Why Movies Should Not Have Vampires and Reporters first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

The idea for this newsletter started when I got an author’s newsletter that my (marvelous) app Speaking Email read to me as “Out Now: New romance non-binary vampire non-binary vampire”

Excited, because that would be an awesome romance, but confused because it wasn’t exactly this author’s wheelhouse, I clicked over to my regular email and saw “Out Now New Romance ”

This has happened to me before, though never to such hilarious results. Audio descriptions of emojis often don’t mean what we think they mean.

Here are my favorites. (Try to imagine hearing these without the image for reference)

Face with tears of joy

Standing chick

Unamused face

Disappointed face

Sad and pensive face

Worried face

Confused face

Persevering face. (This is exactly how I look when persevering. I don’t know about you.)

Confounded face

Red face with censoring symbols over mouth

sad but relieved face with sweat

crying face (the nuance between these two!)

Expressionless face

  Surprised and dismayed face (with and without eyebrows). Why in the annals of emojis do we need one with and without eyebrows, who knows?

Sleepy face. (Why??) I thought this one was booger face!

Dizzy face with discomfort. (My favorite!)

Smiling face with horns (Is the word devil banned?)

Alien monster. (But he is so cute!)

Hand making the sign of the horn, which sounds like a serious Epic Fantasy: the Sign of the Horn.

Speaking silhouette head

Non-binary farmer

Man supervillain

Woman superhero. (Apparently, the difference between a superhero and a super villain is a mask with wings. Good to know!)

Information desk attendant ( you’ll be very sad to know this one is not raising the roof, it turns out.)

Polar bear face

Sauropod-like dinosaur (We don’t even have an accurate dinosaur! )

leaves fluttering in the wind

Flower (Yes, this apparently is the quintessential flower)

Ringed planet.  (There are eight planets but apparently, you only get a Saturn standing in for all of them. And not even called Saturn.) While we have every single western astrology symbol. () Sigh.

Roasted sweet potato (the only cooked vegetable amongst all the vegetables for some reason.)

Person doing a cartwheel (Not just a bad handstand as I’d assumed)

Sport utility vehicle

Car

Articulated lorry

Truck

Oncoming bus

Front-facing train

Umbrella stuck in the sand

Umbrella

Love hotel  (I am not making this up)

Cityscape at dusk pictorial card

Banded wad of American dollars

Postal horn. (Sadly this is not a French horn with legs. It turns out)

Calendar. (Why July 17th. Why?)

Lock with ink pen (Also why???)

Red heart as an exclamation mark

Beating heart

Pulsating heart

Japanese sign meaning acceptable. (We need one of these!)

Name badge. (The best name badge!)

Put litter in its place symbol

Input symbol for symbols symbol

Right pointing triangle symbol. (Aka play button?)

Eye in a speech bubble representing the anti-bullying campaign

White square (strangely enough)

As you’re typing out your emojis, may you never forget the audio description may be telling a story you have not intended!

The post Top 50 Strange & Unexpected Emojis Descriptions first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Sometimes it’s all in the genre…

Obligatory Forward

Three thousand years have passed since the dawn of the current age. Yet we have not exited the Renaissance, and the entire world got to the Renaissance at the exact same time. In another three thousand years, historians will know when the unraveling began, where the excesses of the moment grew too much and the Great Balancer of the world, lion, the Fates, (the synonym for some kind of God figure that’s never going to be expressly mentioned), will place his fulcrum and tip everything the other way. All to be unwound, unlearned, unknown. Like a seesaw, but epic.

But we do not know yet where that fulcrum will go, and whether the boy, for it is always a boy, fated to move the very lever of time itself, will succeed. Because it’s always fated and never just something some woman somewhere just gets done.

The “Random” Beginning

On this day, a boy named Patrick, who in the way of his clan, took as a surname the occupation of his grandfather’s grandfather‘s grandfather‘s grandfather, Smith, is graduating from the school of the protectors.

Gone, long gone, are the days of justice by combat, where wrongs were righted by the might of one sword arm, and punishment was doled out to only those who could buy the strength of that arm.

Since that time, a league of protectors arose in many a country.  First, they arose as the arm of kings on a small island in the northern ocean whose fingers circled the globe. They swiftly followed across the pond where Patrick’s ancestors were so hopeful for their descendants. Where the protectors started mainly as a force to corral runaway slaves, but we don’t talk about that.

Not to be confused with soldiers traveling to other lands to, um, also protect. For the ocean island, the soldiers wore scarlet and the protectors wore blue, making for an entirely different creature. Soldiers wore scarlet because that dye was the cheapest they could find and nobody else who wanted it, while the police wore blue because they had slightly better funding with huge collars to prevent garroting. An ocean away, the protectors and soldiers both wore blue because the protectors grew mighty in force after a great Civil War and they had a lot of leftover fabric.

Even when the kings were toppled and the slaves freed (mostly), the swords remained. And now, when those swords gave way to projectile weapons, they yet patrol the streets. Some say their protection is not worth the cost of their violence, and some say they are not the embodiment of justice but its opposite and shadow. And some say without protectors, neither justice nor injustice is possible, but only the might of a sword arm. This is but one question that may change the placement of the fulcrum that this 1000-page tome won’t weigh in on, because this is a fake world.

The reasons for their founding and for their colors have been lost to time, and even those now wearing their uniforms forget their antecedents. Including Patrick, son of son of son of son of a son of son of a random Smith, who is donning this uniform for the first time before a looking glass. He affixes his hat upon his golden curls and admires his bronze skin of ambiguous origins, or perhaps just a mysterious substance known as Spray Tan. He winks at himself in the glass with his piercing blue eyes, because they are always blue. And always pierce.

Then he marches out with the indistinguishable masses in identical uniforms and mostly identical origins, though the state would press hard for the fairer sex to join the ranks.(The fairer sex were rather more likely to find injustice than justice at their joining and so did so in far fewer numbers.) He has no inkling and no forewarning of the part he will play in the battle for the balance of the world.

His childhood best friend waves to Patrick as they enter the auditorium and says, “Yo, Smitty.”

The best friend, whose name we will not learn for another three episodes, is a descendent of the slaves who built this land, but that history will not show on his face, filled as it is with a perpetual smile and perpetual jokes solely dedicated to supporting his friend, except for one future episode during sweeps (where two female recruits will also randomly kiss each other) when he will lose his temper and be weirdly regretful for another two months.

The fulcrum of the world, the linchpin of the final battle, the key to whether all of humanity gets a future or not, looks back at his best friend and says, “What’s up?”

“Is Mona coming?” the best friend asks.

Mona is fair of face and the third childhood best friend, improbably still in touch well into their twenties, who, when they were six, married Patrick in a Central Park ceremony with an illegally plucked daisy bouquet. And is still in his life to ensure Smith is tempted away from his mission repeatedly, and potentially brings about the destruction of humanity.

They will rekindle and then torch a relationship that really ran its course in high school. But they will not figure that out for two more years until the on-again-off-again relationship with a forensic scientist is far more interesting because she is far fairer of face. And taller. And Mona will die in a fiery explosion, ensuring Patrick can Feel Things, and be set properly forth on his quest. For now, she is a source of simple pain to Patrick Smith, for they are indeed off again.

He answers, “She’s not coming.”

He is shushed by an usher as he walks into the artificially flickering bright lights of the auditorium, a technology that will be lost to time no matter where the fulcrum is placed, and greets his destiny, this ceremony being the first in an inevitable series of events leading to the final confrontation with the destroyer of worlds.

The post If Law and Order was an Epic Fantasy first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Text version, in case you don’t do images:

The Manifesto of Manifestos

One: Categorize everything with price per pound and country of origin …. Sorry, wrong manifest.

Two: Synergize outside the box but in your wheelhouse to grab all low-hanging fruit and stretch your goals.

Three: Use variable fonts so the big words stick out.

Four: Don’t believe every stupid thought in your head and believe in your dreams and in people and in fairies.

Five: Manifestos should be short and sweet with under 5 points.

Six: Live like you are going to die, but probably not tomorrow, because you are likely one standard deviation away from 72.4 years old.

Seven: That does not prevent you from getting hit by a bus tomorrow.

Eight: The same statistic applies to success, financial security, marriage lengths, and nose lengths. You are often dead center but can’t know if you’re on the lip of the bell about to fall off.

Nine: Worry about what will probably kill you: cars, the sun, excess salt, sugar, saturated fat, viruses, bacteria, accident, injury, cell mutation, not moving, not sleeping, and not washing your hands.

Ten… Maybe, I’ve lost count: Don’t worry about the things that rarely kill anyone: planes, sunscreen, fiber, preventative medicine, criticism, dating, public speaking, performance reviews, HOAs, quitting, joining, starting, finishing, and the comment section.

Eleven… Probably: The stress of getting those two wrong will probably be what actually kills you.

Twelve? Don’t miss the stars, the strawberries, the hugs, or the leaves, but keep your nose on the prize and your eye on the grindstone. Don’t touch it, because ow, but keep your eye on it.

Definitely Thirteen: We are all the same and we are all different. Other people are not your business and the world is your neighbor.

14: But since you don’t speak to your actual neighbors… never mind.

Fifteen: You are perfect, imperfect, and perfectly imperfect, and imperfectly perfect. Is that a word?

Sixteen: Oh, dear.

Seventeen: End on an odd bullet to make things feel incomplete.

The End I mean Eighteen: Life is short and endless. Enjoy the shit out of it.

The post The Manifesto to End Manifestos first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.