I got tired of writing cover letters so this is the one I just used for my new application. I think it's art.


Dear Hiring Manager,

Hi, hello, how's the Crisis Of Infinite Bad Times going for you? I hope your office/or computer room is well stocked with the cures for what done gone and ailed you.

Here's the thing, let's just get it out of the way-- my resume is as full of banal, algorithm-catching keywords as the copy for whatever website I need to work on this week, but the important thing is that they're the right ones. They're all true, of course, but. Eh. So if you don't mind, I'm going to explain here why I'm a good candidate for this position in human language, or at least in the native tongue of what once was a man who went into buildings and had no issues with gas stations.

I can do the googles. I can do the numbers. I can do the words good.

I did not receive my degree in marketing. I went to school to write (the last few sentences are from my thesis), and then I ended up using those skills instead to sell people screen doors and cheeseburgers. I did really well with both of those-- last year I sold $28,000+ dollars in screen doors that have bears and ducks carved into them on a $4,000 dollar budget. I'm sure that's tiny for your company, but to my client it wasn't. To them it was their complete and total year long budget for marketing. That, to me, was important. It was their best year of screen door sales to date. I'm proud of making that money for them, proud of a bunch of ads and analytics sheets I wrote for them to explain how their money worked. I enjoy doing it. I'm good at it.

I can work with the worst clients on the earth, and I know this because I have. My friend and former coworker, Hayden Grindstaff, who suggested I apply for this position, can attest to this, because he worked with them too.

I can do whatever you need me to do. If it's writing content, I can do that. I can fit my voice to accomplish whatever they want. I wrote blog entries for a food charity and ad copy for a really angry guy who sold drag racing parts and wanted to appeal to other super angry guys who like drag racing. I can write ads, I can nail the keywords, drive traffic, do whatever you need. I've worked on Facebook, Bing (They wanted it, okay?. And honestly, the ads are extremely cheap because no one else cares.), Instagram, the whole package. I haven't done tiktok yet but I know the day is coming, God bless us.

I have some limited experience with coding-- mostly HTML but some other stuff I can refresh myself on. I can read it even if I can't speak it all the time.

What I want to stress to you is that I'm capable of meeting your needs, and I'll be happy to do it. I've spent more than 3 years BEING the marketing department for my agency. I've had to do it all, and I'm more than capable of growing into this position as well. Problem solving is what every task comes down to in the end, and that's what I do best.

Thank you, sincerely, for considering me for this position. I hope to hear from you soon.

- Morgan Stewart

PS if no one else who has applied for this position in their cover letter admitted that resumes are total garbo they're already lying

Obviously spoilers for the whole show

I just finished Bly Manor-- time to write about it because my feelings about it are complicated.

So, first of all, The Haunting of Hill House was really, truly excellent. First of all, I like that the horror of that house was never really explained other than just, dude, it's just evil. It's an evil place. It's a place where evil just dwells. It was an emotionally captivating story about a family dealing with itself in whatever way it could or can and just-- it's beautiful. It's also scary as shit. I love it. 

So Blye Manor drops a couple of days ago.

While the show is not outright bad in any way, it's also most certainly not as good as Hill House for probably the same reason that most "Second Things" usually suck. For one, when you're making your first book, your first album, TV show, whatever it is, you generally have what amounts to Infinite Time to create that thing. It's a success, and now you have... 8-10 months to create the follow up.

Where before it may have been a story, a song, whatever, that you were sitting on for ages, maybe almost your whole life, now an executive is holding a bag of money and saying "Do it again". AND WHEW. So maybe you rely on your writing tics a little more. Maybe kind of wallow back into the same sort of tropes your familiar with. Looking for a bit of comfort in the process.

This is a lot of what you see with Bly Manor. One thing, certainly to note, is that it's lost its intense sense of direction. This show isn't aimless by any means, but it attempts to juggle a number of stories with little to no additional benefit to the show overall.  No further example of this is needed other than that of GOOD OL' UNCLE HENRY.

So, Henry is a failing lawyer of some sort or another. Please bear with me on this. It's convoluted but that's my exact criticism. Henry's brother, and Henry's brother's wife are dead. They died in an airplane crash while attempting to re-do their honeymoon when it was discovered by Henry's brother that Henry was doin' his wife and his wife had his daughter.

Henry sinks into debt and alcoholism afterwards and is guilt ridden over the fact that he kind of sort of inadvertently caused the actions that led to their deaths. He eventually overcomes his alcoholism and, in the end, .... doesn't really do anything. He has a great life with his daughter and nephew. The end.

Okay, so what was the point of Uncle Henry here. Well, the show, as its predecessor did, uses ghosts 'n ghouls as a metaphor for the sorts of things we carry with us. Whether they be guilt, shame, lies, etc etc. Henry gets haunted by... an evil twin version of himself in his run down office building while he drinks. At one point he is in a memory of himself getting a blowjob from his brothers' wife while his evil doppleganger looks on with delight.

This is not played for laughs. It's very tragic, or at least thats what the soundtrack wants us to believe (It's VERY funny).

So what the fuck is going on here? Why is this character in this story? He serves initially as a function to get the main character, Danielle, into the Bly Manor, and then periodically just wastes screen time. He dies at one point in the show and then comes back moments later because ghost magic. He does not effect the story at all, nor does he add to it in any meaningful way other than his function as a plot point, so, I don't know. But this is all part of what I mean by the story, and consequently, this blog post, not being as efficient with its storytelling.

Ultimately the time we spend on the parents' deaths is used only to really enhance Henrys' story, which as I've just said, has no real bearing on what this story is really about at all.

At its most basic level, this is a love story about a nanny and a gardener falling in love one summer at a mansion while the overwhelming hatred generated by sin and rejection overwhelm those living in the present.

The love story is given approx. 12 scenes overall towards the last half of the series' run, and the horror of this old pain from phantoms long dead is wrapped up in about 45 seconds once the main characters get involved. There is a whole other supplementary love story weaved in between two other characters whose story also does not have any real central meaning, only additional "Love can be toxic, love can be cruel" sort of subtext thrown in the spice up the "Love can be life, love is what we live for" message the rest of the story carries.

There is one really truly great episode, "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes", which just quite reaches some of the fantastic elements from last season. It's essentially a Victorian ghost story in which a vengeful bride overcomes the grasp of death itself in order to extract from the living that which she demands. This, of course, being their lives. It's fantastic.

This woman, confined to the literal empty space of a promise she made in life, continues to hunt for those she loved in death to the point where she becomes nothing but hatred incarnate. A function of a function, acting out of a habit she can no longer remember forming, abandoned by all, time and death included. It's so great. It's too good. There's a lot of talk here about the gravity of events, about the gravity of how people live and move through the world, perfectly framed by this simple, beautiful ghost story.

Of course how this story concludes is a whole other thing.

In the final episode, our main character, who previous to this was tied up by the clown squad of Skeleton Key bad guys, IE: literal children possessed by former lovers, overhears the ghosts say "not me, not you, us" as in invitation to the dead to occupy the bodies of the living, decides in the spur of the moment to save a child from being drowned, to shout, NOT ME, NOT YOU, US at the ghost. This of course, invokes the spirit to occupy her body for the course of about 15 years before eventually drowning her in a lake.

In a literal, up front story-telling perspective, this is, to put it eloquently, fuckin' stupid. What the show is going for, allegorically, is that many people find themselves with partners who are haunted by the spirits of those they let live within them previously in their lives. Or, perhaps, simply depression. Dani talks about this thing within her continually taking pieces of her away. Haunted by a sadness felt but never seen, within and never shown.

Except of course, in the actual events presented to us in the show itself, its a faceless water zombie that eventually literally drowns her in a lake and keeps her from passing on to the next world. Or, doesn't, it's hard to say.

So the shows story didn't work. It has pieces that do. Hannah as "ghost who doesn't know she's dead" is fine, the weird C-tier Skeleton Key rip off story sucks, but at certain points their story is at least interesting on a human level.

The problem with this season is that it wants so badly for its ghosts to not be literal, but they are EXETREMELY LITERAL. We see like six people get killed by a water dwelling nightmare ghost, but also she is a metaphor, and also she will LITERALLY KILL YOU. She dwells within you like a mental illness, but she will also LITERALLY POSSESS YOUR BODY AND DRIVE YOU ACROSS THE GLOBE TO DROWN YOU IN A VERY SPECIFIC LAKE.

You could make the same criticism of the last season, I think, but the storytelling was so tightly focused around this family and the choices they made and how they all relate to each other that the wrapper story about a haunted house added nothing but further suspense as to "How they got to be the way that they were". Why did this one bad night with your mom in an evil demon mansion ruin every member of this family in very, very, specific ways.

Whereas here, in Bly Manor, it's why did this long bad Victorian marriage result in a lesbian couple in the 1980's experiencing marital tragedy 15 years into their relationship. Do you see what I'm saying here? There are elements at play that I'm simplifying, for sure, but the tragedy is not that Dani died, the tragedy as the story presents it, is that a woman opened up a box of clothes in her attic 400 years ago. These are not the same.

Anyway, 6/10 I'll watch the next one.

 

PS I really did love Episode 8 so much as a "The Origins of Ghosts" kind of thing. This is a whole other topic for me, but boy fuckin' alive did I love it. Also, if the whole season had been about the romance between Dani and the gardener, I would have liked it much more. But it wasn't.

 

PPS I didn't even talk about the fact that Dani is haunted by the guilt she holds for her ex-fiance who got killed by a bus which is whole-heartedly dropped after the mid-point when Dani accepts that she is attracted to women.

I powered through the second half of Spiritfarer through the last couple of days--

I do think once you sort of break through the literal brick wall on the edge of the map that SOME of the resource frenzy the game is going through sort of alleviates itself. However, it then opens up to other problems.

Just to finish off my issues with the management system, you eventually do unlock the WORST little minigame yet which is the hammering materials into sheets thing. The game is like, yeah, every material has a different way to hammer! but this is not true. They all take an extremely long time, some of them just take more extremely long times.

Whatever-- by the point you need to use it if you've been blowing your dick off gathering shit in mines and on islands you probably just have enough to finish off the last few houses.

Here's where the real downside to the game really sets in.

Once you finish the various animals' fetch quests/upgrades, it seems like they're suddenly desperately reaching for reasons to exit the story.

Just for comparisons' sake, here's one that I feel was done well: Alice. Alice is clearly suffering from a degenerative condition that makes her life harder every single day. Her house has to be on the ground, she loses the ability to recognize the player, just total loss of quality of life. At the end she barely seems cognizant of the fact that she's moving on.

However, by comparison, many of the others have pitiful if any conclusions to their stories.

Stanley seems to barely be opening up about the state of his life when he suddenly decides that due to lackluster feedback on his play that it's time to forgo the afterlife and give up. He's the spirit of a child so immaturity is part of his characterization, but it is so weakly presented that it seems like the writer (or writers, I'm unsure) just said, okay, Stanley is complete and you need an upgrade flower, time to hit the road.

Similarly, Bruce and Mickey just give the fuck it reasoning as well. You are tasked with obtaining an obscene number of items, only for them to just say, ah we should never have worked with you, let's roll. And this FITS with how they've been presented, but is it as GOOD as something like Alice?

And I'm not suggesting, for instance, that every single character needs to have a tear-jerking conclusion to their stories, but in so many instances the game just seems to be opening up their narrative before they give you the time to go speech.

I couldn't help but think throughout the latter half of the game that perhaps it would have been better if there were fewer spirits fleshed out in more elaborate and interesting ways. Stanley's was just appalling to me. I'm not even really particularly clear on what exactly happened to him. The game can be so dense with metaphor and vagueness sometimes to its own detriment. I have zero clue what the dragons actually represented in Summers story. Traditionally this is a trope that suggests addiction, yet she doesn't speak of them that way at all, leaving her passing also in very much a ??? kind of situation.


And then, after all that, you unlock the third cosmic owl cutscene. The owl says next time you come back to the gate, it'll be time for you to go. 

At this point, we know nothing about the player character other than some EXTREMELY basic images that appear on galactic glass cubes. She appears to have been either very sick, or a nurse. That's all I can really garner. At first I imagined these were some images of the character we were bringing to the goodbye gate, but this is not the case.

You can then end the game at any time, leaving characters on your boat entirely unresolved. And-- what did it all mean?

It's hard to say. The game is a mess but it has so many other things actually going for it... I don't know man. I'm conflicted about the whole thing.

I don't hate it, but I wish it was better. 

Okay so I want to talk about this electronic video game because I need to.

So in this game, spiritfarer, you are a girl who takes on the role of boat pilot on the river (waterworld?) styx who boats people to the afterlife, and they take on the form of animals. You help them work through their trauma (or not), and then they move on when they're ready. That's the general idea anyway. 

It starts off and you have these three very good guests, and you're talking with them and helping them do stuff, and then, honestly sort of abruptly, both of them are ready to head on out. 

The game is extremely dense, to the point of being obtuse, with metaphors, some being so out there it's almost impossible to figure out exactly what they mean. 

Lesbian snake grandma, for example, tells you how she has been battling "the dragon" for most of her life. Normally, this would represent some form of addiction, but in this game apparently it turns out its cancer. You only know this if you buy the art book, btw. Or read the wiki. 

Whatever, that's irrelevant. Honestly the main part of this game, IE: taking people to the afterlife, is very moving at times and the tone is super super relaxed. You feed your friends, they go on quests to move on, you take them to the ever gate, they ascend, the end. 

Only, after awhile, that part of the game is totally absolutely superceded by resource management. It sneaks in innocently enough at first. You need to build a garden and upgrade the ship. The snake wants a garden. Okay. So you do that. Upgrade the ship. Then they all start pitching upgrades and buildings. They all need their own house. All need a fully upgraded house. Can't fit it so you need a bigger boat. Can't buy food, have to cook it, so you have to collect food. Have to sail the ship to resource islands to gather things to make things, turn those things into other things, combine them into more things.

What starts as this therapizing mission of solving these peoples' trauma through love and conversation (literally you hug them and show them affection), it just turns into this game of putting numbers into holes. It's so, so frustrating. 

The game works on a clock/day system so that every 20 minutes or so is an in-game day, and there are just timers and notifications going off constantly. The whole vibe of the game turns from this smooth low key gentle thing to TIME TO COLLECT THE COOKING FOOD, THE PLANTS NEED WATERING, THIS GUY WANTS UPGRADES, THIS GUY NEEDS CHICKEN PREPARED A CERTAIN WAY, RUN THE CRUSHER. 

It's a nightmare!!

When you load into the game the first thing you're basically confronted with is a housefire you have to put out for 15 minutes before you can do anything! Everyones hungry and mad and everything has to be watered, touched, hugged, investigated. What the fuck!

I have no idea what they were going for, but it's exhausting. The animal quests, which at first went way too fast, slow down IMMENSELY. To the point where I have some animals with whom I have basically zero relationship to because all their dialogues happen while the game is exploding, literally melting down with tool tips and alert icons. And essentially, you start rushing through their stories because when they pass on they leave you little upgrade tokens that you need to insert into your ship to do the next animals questline. 

The game is a mess. It's a beautiful idea that turns almost into a mobile game full of timers by the end. I strongly reccomend playing the first 2 hours of the game and then uninstalling immediately after. 

Just to show you I'm not being whiny, here's some of the materials you need to collect in ABUNDANCE to play this game about talking to people


Wood: three types. Need both logs, planks and sawdust. All have to be milled yourself and you have to sail to islands to chop it down. 
Food: Literally about 600 recipes. All of it needs to be cooked one at a time, and everyone has extremely different food preferences and they have to eat 1-2 times a day. You got 10 kinds of fish, 5 kinds of lobster, oysters, clams, shrimp. You got chicken, pork, milk, sugar, corn, wheat, oils 50 kinds of vegetables, fruits, etc-- and you have to grow all the food. All the tea leaves all the coffee beans, EVERYTHING has to be cooked and there is LIMITLESS amounts of this shit and half of them need OTHER buildings just to be usable
Fabrics: Cotton, wool, linen, special stuff, other special stuff. All of it has to be grown then you have to go to a tailor shop you make with OTHER materials and put those threads through THREE KINDS OF PRODUCTION
Metals: There's about 20 kinds of metals. They have to be mined, taken back to the ship, refined in a production facility, crushed, mixed, FUCK
Special event resources: Each spirit has its own repetitive event resource that has to be performed numerous times. This can range from digging rocks out of dragons, catching meteors, killing jellyfish, on and on and on and on and they almost all need further refinement and other resources to use correctly, and each time you do the quests they get harder and harder and longer and AUUUUGHHH

Do you see what I mean?? This is presented to you as a game about communication and feelings and by the midpoint its just, shit I need more numbers, I have to go get more numbers. Abandon all the feelings, it's time for numbers gathering.

It's exhausting dude. And it sucks. Underneath all that is a really, really interesting and heartfelt story. 

I'm gonna start recapping my thoughts on each AEW show here-- https://satyrn.live/blog/AEW

So that I can keep track of things in my head better and just get better at doing this sort of thing. 

mm, so complicated feelings about the show overall but let's just go through them.

Baker/Swole - This should have stayed in the pre-show. It was not good. It was a bad way to start All Out. It wasn't really produced well, the sound was bad, and they didn't really take much advantadge of the cinematic style. It was a crutch for Brit not being as fully healed as she was expected to be. Swole won, though, and that was the right move imo. I dunno. 1/5

Jericho/Orange - Got this one too. I don't know if it was because of Matt or what but I just didn't get much from this. I honestly feel like the incident with Matt affected my viewing of the whole rest of the show really, so I don't know, man. It was good to see Orange win 100% and end this. I hope he does something a little less... I don't know, I hope he goes back to being a little more Orange Cassidy. 3/5

Omega & Page/FTR - This one didn't hurt as much as predicted but it was still kind of a bummer. I hate FTR. I expect we'll know soon enough what they'll be up to, but surely this was the end of Omega/Page. Omega is done maybe even with the Bucks. Not as good as their match with the Bucks, but what the hell is. That was a match of the century. 4/5

Shida/Thunder Rosa - This match was everything I hoped it would be. Honestly, maybe this and the mox/mjf match were my faves. Thunder rosa looked so good. I won a contest to get some exclusive merch from her so that's very cool and nice for me. I thought they both laid it all out. I wasn't as emotionally invested in this as I was for Shida/Nyla tbh, but it was a big BIG step above the usual women's division stuff. There's just so very little happening over there. Let Shida do something cool man, idk. This match was fun though, and a great showcase of how good both these women are. 4/5

Battle Royale - Lance - Can't believe I got this right considering how many people were in it. It was a hot fucking mess and basically besides seeing Darby get killed and that debut guy bust hiss on his very first move, idk. Hobbs looked good! I hope he's signed. Eddie was fun. I like that he's scared of snakes. Will make his interactions with Lance always fun. Plus Lance rules. I'm glad he won but this wasn't great. 2/5.

Dark Order/Nightmare Family - Honestly truly surprised DO lost this-- but it worked. There were two storylines here, DO and their efforts to better/build up Colt and the NF getting some revenge for what they did to them and Cody. It's leading to a Dustin feud with Brodie. That should be fun. Two giant old dudes just beating each other up. I have no doubt Brodie will win that initial bout but I imagine eventually Dustin is getting that TNT belt off of Dark Order, both as a continued revenge story and for Dustin to finally in his life win a belt. I think it'll be fun to watch. 3/5

Jurassic Express/Young Bucks - I initially went with them but switched to Jurassic Express. tbh I dunno how they're going to keep the young bucks away from FTR-- unless they're not. If they're committing to that feud right now I'm all for it, I just expected them to hold back a little more. Honestly like, years maybe. But it seems like this could be the entrance ramp to it. This was an exciting match, really good for Jungle Boy and Luchasaurus, and made the potential heel Bucks look good too. Just didn't carry a lot of weight. I did like seeing I think it was Nick absolutely fucking murder Marko Stunt. 3/5. 

Hardy/Sammy - This match what the fuck idk man. I'm glad Matt is okay. I wish they had just ended it and moved on, but they skipped the match and went basically to the finish after Matt could walk again. I feel like this whole feud is cursed. Matt's gotten basically two horrific head injuries from it, Sammy was suspended once, HE got a head injury, the whole thing top to bottom is just cursed. I feel like if they fight again one of them will just die. End this. 1/5

Mox/MJF - I picked MJF here and got it wrong but they did this match to perfection. It was just perfect. MJF got what he deserved, Mox fought like an insane person, the wrestling was good, the story was good, Mox CHEATED but it worked as an awesome ending, MJF got fucked up, idk what else I can ask for. Mox will face Lance probably as a TV opponent, but I couldn't be happier seeing the two of them fight. I think the potential there is BIG big. But like, idk what else you could ask for in a match. This ruled ass. 5/5

Overall the show was haunted by what happened to Matt-- I couldn't get back into it. I've rewatched some of it today but that moment just destroyed the show for me and a lot of other people, it was so gross and bad and scary and not good. That dude fell 10 feet directly onto his skull. I know the full match would have been fantastic but I just couldn't get back into it after. That and the absolute shit of an opener + some other middling stuff just weighed it down. Double or Nothing this was not. Overall, 3/5, my PPV rankings being


1. Revolution 2020
2. Double or Nothing 2020
3. Full Gear 2019
4. All Out 2020