David Dubrow – Page 25

Legoland Florida: Things You Need to Know

May 9, 2017 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

My wife, 6-year-old son and I recently returned from a 4-day, 3-night trip to Legoland Florida, which included a stay at the Legoland Hotel. It was an extraordinary experience for the most part, and my little boy had a terrific time. Still, there are things you should know about the place before you commit to a stay as lengthy as we did. Pleasantly, we’re locals, so it’s just a car ride up and back; the rigors of air travel, with the attendant expenses, frustrations, travel time, and potential for physical assault weren’t concerns for us.

Kids: It’s awful for me to say so, but I don’t have a great love of children other than my own. I don’t hate them, and as a parent I understand them more than I used to, but I could take or leave other kids. Other parents are much easier with other children, and I envy them that skill. Anyway, Legoland is specifically aimed at little kids. So naturally they’re everywhere and into everything and you can’t get anywhere, especially when it’s crowded. Which is fine. You’ll see unacceptable public behavior that you thought only your kids did, which is a relief. You’ll see parenting styles that will make you feel like Mom of the Year. You’ll see tantrums and shrieking and laughing and oblivious cutting in line and uncovered sneezes and deliberate cutting in line and uncovered coughing and demands for this and that and everything else. Get used to it.
Service: Mostly good, mostly friendly. If you’re waiting in line for food, there’s a southern slowness that makes everything take about ten minutes longer than it should. Combine that with a small child’s natural impatience, and it’s a pain. The ride attendants are all quite nice and patient. If you eat at the hotel buffet (Bricks Restaurant), the servers tend to hover, waiting to snatch up your empty plate so you can go back to the buffet and fill up again right quick.
Food: The best thing I can say of the food is that your kid will probably love it. For me it was an epic fail. For dinner, the Bricks buffet cuisine is about as bad as you’d expect for a buffet mostly catering to small children, with trays of mac ‘n’ cheese and baby corn dogs for the kids and fajita-style chicken and vegetarian fried rice for the adults. The breakfast buffet was typical for a hotel breakfast buffet. The Skyline Cafe sit-down restaurant wasn’t a whole lot different from the buffet, quality-wise. At the park, the Fun Town Pizza & Pasta Buffet is mediocre, the fried chicken restaurant is okay, and the Panini Grill is inedible. Avoid it and its partially-toasted sandwiches at all costs. Do get the Apple Fries, though. If you’re just doing a day trip, bring your own lunch: your stomach (and wallet) will thank you for it. I was nourished mostly on sunlight, dinner buffet petit fours, and Apple Fries during our trip.
I…I had to get this.
Rides and Lines: If you’re horrible like us and go during the week when school’s in session, thereby robbing your child of precious education days, you’ll have so much fun that you’ll get tired of having fun. The lines for rides were short to nonexistent, so we could just do any ride we wanted with little waiting time. Lego Ninjago was terrific, with playground-style stuff outside and a 3-D ride inside. My son liked Beetle Bounce so much he did it six times in one day. The Island in the Sky was broken this week, but we’d been there on a previous visit. Driving School was fun, as were the Royal Joust and the Lost Kingdom Adventure. Basically, all the rides are great. You will get soaking wet on the Lego Chima ride (my son did, and as it was a cool morning, got super-pissed at the cold and shivered and grumbled his way through the whole ride). Wait for a warm day to do the water park, but do the water park. Make Lego boats to sail on the track, swim in the wave pool, go down the enormous water slides. The $10.00 for a locker rental is worth it. Bring your own towels.
The Hotel: We got an adventure room, so it was decorated in the style of ancient Egypt. With Legos. My son loved the bunk bed and his own TV. The room’s quite cramped. If you swim in the pool or go to the water park, your stuff won’t get dry overnight unless you’ve got a balcony room, so bring extra towels/suits. The lobby has a big pool of Legos by the columns, where kids build stuff. To the left of the front desk is another play area, half castle and half pirate ship. This also has pits of Legos. I was heartened to see that the number one thing that the boys built with these loaner Legos was guns. So we haven’t beaten healthy aggression out of children just yet. All of them built guns or short swords and chased each other around the area, shrieking like banshees. The hotel pool was warm, with plenty of chairs around. You need to go through the pool area to get to the fire pit if you want to do s’mores after 7:00 PM. The front desk has s’mores packages for sale, complete with wet wipes.

The park is great, the hotel is good. For day-trippers, save money on food and buy Legos instead.

Things You Should Always Do Before Writing Articles for Another Website

April 25, 2017 by David Dubrow 5 Comments

Congratulations! You’re a writer. You’ve written an article, published a short story, ground out a novel, gotten a piece linked in a magazine, or something similar. You’re on your way. Then you realize that for people to read you, they have to find you. You’ve got to get your name out there. Create that much-vaunted Author Platform. All the experts say that blogging is good, but who has the time to do it often enough to get noticed? That’s long-term, shouting words into the ether. What to do, what to do—wait: maybe you can write pieces for a more popular site and piggyback on their traffic! Yes. Lots of people will read your stuff and will like it so much that they’ll click on your name, find your author site, and start gobbling up your books like Joey Chestnut on a plate of hot dogs. And you’re contributing to the Community, whether it’s genre-focused, politics-focused, or whatever-focused. You’ll make friends, develop business relationships, maybe find new books to read: it’s all good. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but it can’t hurt.

Here are a few things to consider before selecting a site to write for, if they’ll have you. (They will have you: nobody turns up his nose at free content.)

Exposure: You’re doing it for the exposure, right? The sweet, sweet exposure. Just remember that you can’t spend exposure. Nobody has ever paid a mortgage or bought a cup of coffee with exposure. You want money, don’t you? We all do. You’re not offering your books for free, so why should you offer your articles for free? It’s a dilemma. But still…that exposure. Getting your name out there. So you take the trade. The hope of potential future earnings in exchange for hours of your time writing content for someone else’s website. Fair enough. Whatever you do, make sure that it’s good exposure: your name needs to be at the top and/or bottom of every article in clickable format that links to either a page all about you or your personal website/social media home of choice. Your articles need to be shared by the website on the most-trafficked social media platforms available, and on each share your name/handle needs to be front and center so people know that you wrote the piece. That’s only fair.
Gratitude: Along with the meager-to-nonexistent pay of Exposure, you should also be remunerated with gratitude, the coin of the volunteer’s realm. Each and every piece you write must be received with a thank you so you don’t get the feeling you’re pouring your time into somebody else’s ungrateful well. (No writer is an island; even loners work for psychic income.) Requests for your effort must be made in friendly fashion, with no pressure applied. Compliments are necessary. If the site owner doesn’t make it clear that he knows that you’re doing him a favor by providing free quality content for his site, he’s not worth your work. You’ve earned those thank yous.
Controversy/Drama: Some sites are controversial, either because of the content or the owner/editor’s personal drama. While controversy doesn’t typically devolve upon unpaid grunts like yourself, personal drama always attaches itself to you if you write for a drama queen on a regular basis. It doesn’t last forever, but it does cling to you like shit sticks to a blanket. Avoid all drama queens: the cost of doing business with them is never worth the Exposure. Drama queens are easy to spot as long as you don’t ignore the signs: lots of self-created enemies, passive-aggressive communication on social media, cliquish junior high school behavior, a constantly-expressed feeling of being attacked.
Values: Make sure that the site you write for shares at least some of your personal values. We don’t have to agree on everything, but when you find yourself significantly at odds with the site’s editorial slant, you’re eventually going to run into trouble. Even if you keep your personal beliefs separate from your work, others may not. Combine that with a lack of gratitude or a penchant for drama, and you have a combination that’s sheer poison. A casual perusal of the site and its associated social media accounts will show you if you’re a good fit. If you’re not a good fit, don’t risk it. The red flags are there to protect you, so do not ignore them.

I foolishly ignored my own advice some time ago, and as a result all the hard work I did was deleted by a hostile, ungrateful drama queen because I dared to express, on my own social media sites, deeply-held opinions that millions and millions of other people share. Pleasantly, the sites I write for now, including my own, are run by kind, generous people who behave like consummate professionals, and I appreciate it.

For now, I’m heading off to the bank to cash this month’s Exposure Check. Cha-ching!

Atmo HorroX Cards

April 18, 2017 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

In July of 2016, I reviewed the movie Atmo HorroX for The Slaughtered Bird, and said of it:

To describe the film is to destroy it, like cutting open a living creature to determine why it’s alive. The movie unfolds in its own pace, granting you its narrative in pieces that do come together, eventually, but only if you sit down and watch it. Which isn’t difficult, because there are parts that you simply cannot turn away from.

I liked the film so much that I rated it as my favorite movie of 2016.

The writer and director of Atmo HorroX, Pat Tremblay, liked that I liked his film so much, and sent me some Atmo HorroX trading cards through the mail. They’re extraordinary. I keep them at my desk so I can see them whenever I sit down to write.

My Atmo HorroX poker hand, as it were. Note Laurent Lecompte’s autograph; he played the unforgettable Catafuse.

Pat Tremblay autographed one card himself, and added a message that would only make sense if you watched the movie. Which you should, because it’s an experience like none other. It was most kind of Pat to send the cards along, and I hope he understands how much I prize them. Thank you, Pat!

Book Review: Whispering Corridors by Ambrose Ibsen

April 13, 2017 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

Whispering Corridors is a short novel by Ambrose Ibsen that tells the tale of a derelict house haunted by a ghost called the Upside-Down Man, and what happens when two college students try to film a documentary about both house and ghost.

Unfortunately, the premise was better than the execution.

Told in first person, the main character is Eric, a frat boy who has a healthy skepticism of all things supernatural. He’s dragged into this documentary project by his friend Lydia. I use the term “friend” loosely, because at no point in the novel does either character say anything remotely nice to the other. Every exchange is weighted with insult, hostility, or general smartassery, which makes their relationship puzzling. Lydia comes off as mean and unpleasant, with Eric as her punching bag. Literally, at one point:

“I guess so,” I replied, though apparently it wasn’t convincing, because she socked me in the gut. Lydia was pretty tiny, but she could throw a punch with the best of them.

Why does he hang out with her? She hits him and says nasty things to him all the time. Not only are they not having sex, but the subject isn’t even hinted at. So there’s not even any sexual tension to keep their connection interesting.

Eric is himself a strange character, and belongs to the only fraternity in the country that isn’t throwing a Halloween party on Halloween night. He also doesn’t like clubbing. Or hanging out with the other members of the frat. Or meeting co-eds. Or doing any of the things one might expect from a person who goes through the rigmarole of joining a college fraternity. His above-it-all attitude to college life didn’t sit right.

The writing needed work and included a lot of unnecessary verbiage:

Kenwood House looked to me every bit as dismal and uninviting as it had the day before, in the rain. (The whole book is told from your perspective, Eric, so everything looks to you like something. –ed)

It was a wallpapered kitchen; I could tell because the paper was peeling in several places.

…but from up close it was clear to see that she was in some trouble.

You get the picture. It’s not a big deal, but between that, the dialogue tags (“I urged,” “I warned,” etc), and some strange phrasing like, “There appeared to be four rooms on this level, none of them possessed of doors,” the writing took me out of the story.

We don’t learn a lot about the Upside-Down Man, nor do we see much of him at all, so the doom that creeps toward Eric and Lydia is rather toothless. Also, I found it hard to care about what happened to either character. Lydia’s big reveal did nothing to advance the plot or affect events in any meaningful way.

The book just didn’t do it for me. At the time of this writing, Whispering Corridors is available on Amazon Unlimited. Give it a try and tell me what I missed.

The Problem Isn’t Hollywood. The Problem Is You.

April 6, 2017 by David Dubrow 4 Comments

When I worked in publishing, the first question we asked before taking on any new project was, “Can we sell it to our current market?” That was the primary consideration. There were other factors, like subject matter (I once nixed a project that purported to teach people how to commit murder with a knife, for example); originality of the topic; quality of the manuscript/author presentation; etc. But it was always about how many copies we could sell.

But for politically-motivated agitprop projects that consistently fail, Hollywood is no different. It exists to make money, not art. As an adult, you know this.

With that in mind, all the “Dear Hollywood: Stop making reboots/remakes” letters and think pieces and podcasts have got to end. They’re a gigantic waste of time. These reboots make Hollywood money, so it’s crazy to ask an exec to make do with a smaller paycheck because you want more originality in your video entertainment. The execs look at sales figures and make their production decisions based on how much green they can rake in. As a heartless, malignant uber-capitalist, I applaud them. They’ve got a working business model.

So, like it or not, the Era of Remakes is upon us, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Wait. Actually, there is.

It’s not enough to refuse to watch the remakes, the reboots, the reimaginings. They’re uniformly terrible anyway. If you really want the Hollywood panjandrums to offer original material, you’re also going to have to eschew the gigantic franchises: Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel superheroes, DC superheroes. Not only are these franchises way past their sell-by date, but they suck all the air out of the room for anything else. There is nothing less imaginative or original than another Avengers movie or Star Wars prequel, most of which were written to entertain children (or adults trying to regain that elusive sense of childhood wonder in their middle years).

Hollywood’s doing nothing wrong. They’re giving you what you want. What you have to do is tell them that you want something different. The problem isn’t Hollywood: the problem is you. You, as the paying customer, have to make a specific and deliberate change in your entertainment choices if you want something other than Captain America movies. And that’s to stop seeing Captain America movies.

What I can’t believe is the number of content creators who spoon up the big franchise pablum themselves, not considering the idea that in doing so they’re pushing themselves out of the marketplace. People don’t go indie because they love working with tiny budgets and minimal distribution: they go indie, in part, because the bigger studios want franchise pieces that will guarantee a larger return. Makes sense, right? Why should Hollywood go out on a limb producing your unproven stuff when the viewing public will watch anything as long as Iron Man’s in it?

People like what they like and that’s fine. Nobody’s policing your entertainment choices. But you can’t complain about lack of imagination/originality when you’re supporting the very system that produces unimaginative, unoriginal pap. Particularly if you’re trying to get your own name out there.

This is your culture. Take the reins and steer it someplace else.

Three Brief Science Fiction Reviews

March 28, 2017 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

Over the last ten days or so I’ve been dealing with an illness that has taken both antibiotics and steroids to return me to a semblance of health, so during that time I watched a good bit of television (in-between chills, cold sweats, massive headaches, and numerous other symptoms too tedious to describe). In the interest of making my recent unpleasantness a learning experience, I will review what I watched as I lay shivering on the couch.

Travelling Salesman: At the risk of sounding pretentious and lah-di-dah, I will label this movie an “intellectual thriller.” Not that non-intellectual thrillers aren’t entertaining; I liked John Wick and The Accountant, for example. Anyway, what makes Travelling Salesman an intellectual thriller is how much of the film takes place in a single room, focused on a conversation. Sounds boring, right? It’s not. What they’re talking about is an amazing thing they’ve done under contract to the U.S. government: they’ve solved one of the most difficult problems mathematics has available, and now must deal with the repercussions. The mathematician characters all act according to type: the stuffy professor complete with sweater vest, the quirky weirdo, the brilliant slob, and the wunderkind star who did most of the work. Everyone perfectly cast, particularly the government functionary who comes to negotiate the remainder of their contract: a smooth-talking, blandly handsome man who’s obviously over his head yet still tries to hold his own in a room of literal geniuses. Aside from a few incomprehensible bits it’s a great film, one that I enjoyed immensely. 5 out of 5 stars.

The Zero Theorem: It’s a kind of spiritual successor to Terry Gilliam’s earlier film Brazil, though utterly lacking Brazil‘s heart. Sharing the same bizarre, surreal aesthetic, it attempts to handle heavy themes like faith, purpose in life, and existential crisis, but fails to elevate any of them. Christoph Waltz does a good enough job with what he’s been given, making him the only thing in the movie worth watching. Matt Damon, despite his camouflage suits, doesn’t add anything. Everyone else is forgettable, particularly the love interest. I wanted to like it because I loved Brazil, but couldn’t. 2 out of 5 stars.

Travelers: A Netflix series of twelve episodes, it has a familiar premise: people from a future dystopia mentally time-travel to the present day, take over the bodies of people who are about to die, and work like heck to prevent the horrible events of the future from occurring. Been there, done that, right? Yes, but somehow this works. Part of it is the casting: everyone’s very, very good, including Eric McCormack, who pulls off his role with just enough humor and weakness to make himself believable. The stand-out performance is Jared Abrahamson, a teenager taken over by a much older time-traveler who, to his great credit, doesn’t do a George Burns impression from the movie 18 Again!. Even though Travelers doesn’t reveal its secrets until rather late in the series, which gets frustrating, there’s still a lot to like. If we don’t know the stakes, we can’t be depended on to care about what happens; nevertheless, each episode still manages to make itself an entertaining experience. The crew makes the best of a relatively low budget through acting, writing, and heart. And yes, it obviously takes place in Vancouver. It’s okay. You get used to it. 4 out of 5 stars.

Did I spend my sick time wisely? I hope so.