I know a lot of people (cough Millennials) feel like they need to START a thing, START a food bank, build a little free food pantry.

My friends, my loves, my dears.

Don't start.

JOIN.

These exist. They have community ties! They have some funding! Accountability! Regulations!

There are 5 different Bluetooth speakers playing 5 different things on all sides of me. The people who do conventions every weekend are maybe not human?

“Did you forget all the important stuff you needed” yeah I forgot all the important stuff I needed. YEAH

for me, a person too cheap to pay for psonline, they could not have invented a better mechanic than spirit ashes. What If You Could Summon A More Competent Player. And It Was Literally You, But Actually Good At Timing Your Ashes of War. dog bless <3

anyway in conclusion - to write compelling stories with hypercompetence, you have to balance it out somehow, either with a matching absurd world (john wick) or by giving your competent hero, incredible weakness in other ways (Barry HBO). do not tell me this guy is a master industrial designer. jfc

i'd also love to hear about the props procurer for the saw traps lmao. "we need 45k used syringes for uhhhh no particular reason" "on it boss" like who is THAT guy. what's HER story. amanda young is managing a Pizza Hut to pay for electricity for the murder warehouse. it writes itself

they have a general contractor on hand for the more difficult builds, and he's the worst person on earth, rapist or whatever, and they keep being like "heyyyy can you pls test this machine real quick" to kill him, and he JUST KEEPS LIVING because building simple machines is hard!

this is p similar to my dream Saw reboot, which is a weekly hourlong TV show about kramer & the apprentices just fuckin' building and testing the saw traps lmao. it is SOOOO SO SO HARD to build simple machines, dude, it is SO difficult, you got endless potential for comedy & drama & gore right there

tonally i think it'd be very heightened and absurd, nathan fielder, Barry HBO. "guy whose only motivation is murder but he will happily spend 2 years judging dog shows about it" uhh rules? i love that guy. what's that guy's deal

he cannot fit into the world. he can only access humanity through stolen, false lives, through the lens of murder. he could have a life anywhere: he could keep the lie going. but he would never do that, because he's The Best, because it was almost perfect, because the next one WILL be, god damn it

he never quite gets there! he never quite deploys the knowledge correctly. & he spent so long fitting into the target's world, at the end of every episode he has to drop everything & shatter his relationships & just fuckin' move on, tough luck buddy

beginning of every episode, we meet the target, & hero establishes the mad-specific way he will kill them. he spends the WHOLE episode gaining skills & fitting into the target's world. endless training grind, endless waiting. at the end, the target dies, but it's never quite the way he wanted --

HBO miniseries. maybe 6 or 8 beautiful, 90min episodes. our hero is an assassin whose whole thing is going deep cover, and motherfucker, he goes DEEP. gets hired at the target's company, works there 18 months. dates the target's sibling for 3 years.

SO ANYWAY, i keep spinning on "how would I write a hypercompetent ubermensch action feature that doesn't suck" and man, frankly, i'm nailing it

what specifically made me so angry was the industrial machining stuff lmao. at least in your John Wicks, they have the decency to not get specific. "yeah he's good at everything, idk, whatever" like great! good! that series also has tarot-based dueling, who gives a shit

oh AND he's an art collector & professional rich guy & very handsome and whatever. "guy who's really good at stuff" is normal storytelling kit, but man, they could not have shattered the suspension of disbelief any harder, or in a more joyless way. the character is ridiculous but the universe is not