The Cleveland International Film Festival is holding a short film screenwriting competition
September 18, 2025
The deadline is September 30, 2025. I heard about this a few days ago. Naturally I am scrambling to try and put together a script (or two or three) to submit. The submission fee is $30. It's a strange feeling, to know these two things simultaneously:
1. My writing has value
2. I will not win this contest
I don't think my writing holds up well under any form of judgment or comparison. Despite my belief that my writing has value, I do not actually believe that it is special. There are so many better writers out there. Writers who can take a ten page maximum and weave a rich tapestry of story and character and emotion. Writers who have already spent months crafting their ten pages, every letter of every world perfectly placed so as to create an evocative and moving reading experience. Writers who have already written perfect scripts for both page and screen, imaginable and digestible and novel and simple and interesting, all at once. I am not one of those writers. I do not have much to offer in the way of skill or perspective. I am just unconventional enough to be inaccessible, and just mundane enough to be milquetoast. So what, then, compels me to submit to a contest like this?
I can, of course, tell myself that submitting something is just a good excuse to actually write something, so that's worth thirty dollars. I can tell myself that it's good practice, it will build my skill, it will build my understanding of my work, it will build my portfolio. I can tell myself that knowing I won't win is a good opportunity for me to work on accepting my lack of extrinsic worth, and focus instead on my intrinsic worth. But none of those things would actually make me submit something.
I'm going to submit something because I think I could win. I know I will not, but I still think I might. Isn't that funny? Isn't the constant battle between the delusional hope of my childhood and the painful realism of my adolescence and adulthood an absolute laugh riot? I don't think it's actually funny. It's mainly sad. It's kind of beautiful though. I realized a few months ago that no matter what happens, I will always keep believing that someday I might make it. Regardless of the mountain of evidence stacking up against me, the years wearing me down and turning an uninhibitable future into an unimportant past, I will always keep trying. I might be ninety years old, in a nursing home, and I'll still be writing some new thing in an attempt to become relevant or important or known. There is a comfort in this for me; I am undiscourageable. It doesn't make the letdowns hurt any less, but it puts less pressure on everything I do. This contest doesn't have to be "the" thing, it's just "a" thing, and there will always be "more" things. So I can keep hope alive even though I definitely should not.
Here we are. I'm writing this instead of writing a script. But I will write a script, maybe multiple scripts, and I will be very sad when they do not win. I will rightfully toil in obscurity for years to come. I will try to accept and acknowledge the insignificance of my work while forcing myself to believe that it is still meaningful. Legitimacy may be unachievable, but I will not stop trying to achieve it. To what end, I dare not say.
anyway just listen to The Climb by Miley Cyrus you get it yeah it's like that
I have to stop going on instagram
February 2, 2025
Feels appropriate that I would post this on Groundhog day because I have been reliving this cycle for many years now. I think everybody should get off instagram and join flounder instead!!
or join my family discord server!!
it will be much easier to be off of the big platforms if I can stay connected without them. or I guess Bluesky too but that feels like a ghost town still. ok well anyway here's the post
I Just Spent Thirty Minutes Writing An Email And I Think That's A Good Thing
October 29, 2024
I was required by my work to take a Udemy course about Microsoft's Co-pilot for Outlook or whatever. I forget. This was a couple months ago. I listened to the whole series of videos while folding and decorating mini zines for a Labor Day party my family was hosting. I thought a lot about labor during that time. Labor, for its own sake, can be a powerful thing. Labor can provide meaning to something that would otherwise be hollow and inhuman.
Back to the training. The training was about how you can use this A.I. tool to make yourself a lot more productive. You can whip up emails at the tap of a button, re-word as needed, and send them off as quickly as is humanly possible. You can also summarize emails so you don't have to slog through someone else's words (which are, presumably, written by A.I.). Everything is faster, and better. A truly optimized, efficient way to function as an employee.
This is a dumb example, because it's literally just stupid, but I have actually been thinking about optimization for a long time. Learning how to write software kind of poisoned my brain. There are always opportunities to make everything better. You can always future-proof more. You can abstract functionality and modularize features. You can systematicize anything. And if you don't, if you're not perfect, you're doing something wrong. I have applied this thinking to all aspects of my life.
Most of my free time is devoted to thinking about the best possible way to spend my free time. If I want to achieve fulfillment in my life, maximize the meaning in my days, I have to do the perfect thing at the perfect time. I have to strike a perfect balance between family, creative endeavors, relaxation, self-care, career development, and every other pillar of what I think is some sort of model of what it means to be a good person. It's suffocating. Part of me really, truly believes that if I just zoom out far enough, and refine the vision and mission for my life to a perfectly-tuned, unimpeachable purpose, and then strategize and execute based on that purpose, I will be... what? I don't know. I guess that depends on my purpose. But I will be good. I will meet the expectations I have for myself. Did I already say it's suffocating? It's suffocating.
So here's my current stance: a complete rejection of all societal measures of success.
I want to decrease my productivity. I want to do things slower and worse. I want to type out every single letter when I'm communicating with another human being. I want to spend a stupid amount of time crafting the exact sentence I want because it's what I want to say. I don't want it to be fast. I don't want it to be optimized. I want it to be personal. I want it to be imperfect. I want to make mistakes. I want the work to be about the work itself. I want to work for the sake of work, not some larger purpose. I want to live entirely within the confines of this one moment, this one gift I have been given.
So I will never use A.I. to write something for me. I don't want to become a middle man between A.I. tools harvesting souls for profit. I would rather just be my stupid human self and be dumb and mess stuff up a lot but then not even worry about it because who actually cares? I want the work to be mine. All the work. And other than that, I don't want to worry so much about it. It's not going to be perfect but it's going to be me. And that's all it can be. like the us army
jmax.flounder.online/