Jay Peterson
  • Home
  • Acting
    • Headshots
    • Resume
    • Press >
      • C3 Tweets
    • History
    • Reels
  • The Gruntverse
    • Three briefings before a crisis
    • The Preliminary Report of Marshal Bennett
    • So your kid turned out to be a mage
  • Jay at Play
    • Nonfiction
    • Other videos >
      • Just Blanks
      • Tommy That
      • Machine Gun Shakespeare
      • Igor
  • Blog

Personal brands and branding

10/24/2017

0 Comments

 
On the one hand, it's fascinating. My childhood self would be boggled at the idea that everyone would effectively have their own editorial column, billboard, TV show, and bathroom wall to graffiti on before I turned 30. Yet that's where we find ourselves. Sociologists are going to have loads of fun deciphering the ramifications over the next couple decades (and here I thought they were going to have to get real jobs eventually).
But in particular, I've been thinking of those in the entertainment industry, how they handle their personal brands, and how those govern interactions within the industry.
The fact of multiple platforms that all cross multiple audiences with multiple messages to convey is a part of it. That is, FB is inhabited by your non-industry friends and family, your industry fans, coworkers and colleagues, and (supposedly) this nebulous concept of "fans."
This is where amateurs run into the paradox of advertising being the only way to reach a potential audience, but nobody likes advertisements (particularly if they'd rather see something else).
The worst cases of these are performers who treat social media the way Nice Guys(tm) treat the female half of the population. Whereas the Nice Guys(tm) will insert kindness and attention tokens into the spaces of ladies they find desirable until one of them dispenses sexual attention, the clueless performer throws their market materials onto any group, wall, discussion, or PM they can bring themselves to participate in until one of them dispenses a career opportunity.
The same stench of insincerity mixed with desperation follows both characters around, like axe body spray and ball sweat.
I don't mind keeping in the loose contact of a friend's list. But if we were on one set together, "friend," don't talk for a year, and the first I hear from you is a crowdfunding call for yet another boring indie? Piss off.
I realize I've just arbitrarily declared an action a faux pas here, but I don't think it's an untoward declaration.
Slightly better are those that never talk, but every post they make is a commercial for their career. Yet another inspirational quote or suchlike. Nothing of substance.
In which case, that's what unfollow is for. No hard feelings, I just don't have the inclination to see commercials for those I've met maybe twice.
Again, this is an etiquette wild west, and a lot of people are riding roughshod. And, like the old west, people used to riding roughshod get pretty asshurt at the first person who dares put up a fence.
Nor do I have a "good" solution for the advertising paradox listed above.
Closest thing I have is a notion of playing the long game.
Yeah, I'd like people to see my latest project.
But I also want people seeing projects I do in five years, ten years, so on.
Being a jackass of any stripe inhibits that. Hence erring on the side of missed advertising possibilities rather than anger potential customers.
Or, y'know, people who aren't customers, but people I like anyway. Those still exist, y'know?
0 Comments

Hollywood Hoplophobia

10/19/2017

0 Comments

 
For years, I've described the way the film industry treats gun culture as an unhealthy relationship. And it's only gotten worse.
Hollywood still loves guns as long as they're exciting. As long as they're cool. As long as the audience can't get enough of them.
Then a tragedy strikes and they suddenly grow what they think is a conscience. Hoplophobia at it's most ironic.
It's like watching some straight laced college fuckhead hooking up with a lady that cheerfully helped him check off three-quarters of the boxes on his sexual bucket list in a single semester, then refuse to acknowledge her presence when in polite company (let alone admit that he couldn't find her clit with a map and a wanted poster).
It really is fucking pathetic sometimes.
Eh, I'll be over here in the corner. Smiling because I taught their girlfriend that thing they like.
0 Comments

An observation

10/15/2017

0 Comments

 
Only in the commercial arts can a man post a job listing for an attractive young lady to get naked on camera for no pay, for a project which he will try his level best to sell and enhance his own career; and he will not only have a multitude of applicants, but the audacity to call himself a producer instead of a pimp.
0 Comments

Just to make your brain hurt...

10/13/2017

0 Comments

 
When a citizen kills another citizen in self defense, our legal procedures nearly reverse themselves. After all, self-defense is in one sense an admission of homicide with a worthy reason for doing so attached. The "confession" proves to the state the crime was committed. Now it's up to the citizen to prove their reason valid. Their experience at the scene may vary widely, and they may well be arrested on homicide charges immediately. Should the D.A. choose to press charges, neither a grand jury nor a trial jury will have a single member on it who has experienced violence outside of a film or TV screen.

By contrast, if a police officer kills a citizen in the line of duty, their actions are considered legitimate until investigation proves otherwise. While their weapon may be taken for lab testing, a sympathetic fellow officer will be quick to offer a backup weapon. The investigation on them will take a known format, allotting a certain amount of time on immediate leave and making a statement at a known later time. And every investigator looking into the officer's case will be knowledgeable of what it is to wear a badge and not know if they will return home that night.


That an officer's oath calls them to run towards the sound of the gunfire is a shield that only covers so much, and has been cracking for years under the beatings of public opinion. Ignorant though that opinion may be of the particulars, they know the scent of "rule for thee but not for me," and have been increasingly unwilling to abide such a thing.

0 Comments

Harvey

10/12/2017

0 Comments

 
spent hours pondering what to say about Harvey Weinstein. But everything I can say always sounds like this:
MY CAREER: "Oh, look! A Hornet's nest!" *unzips fly*
The political mudslinging is happening in earnest, with plenty of stones being thrown in glass houses (hey Pennsylvania, your congressional Republican lineup is looking a little light there...)
But, as I was telling a friend earlier: knowing about Weinstein's shit wasn't new. Being able to talk about it publicly without torpedoing your career was. And it only happened because, amazingly, two major news outlets actually ran concurrent stories about it.
Which is frankly amazing, given that a small handful of companies produce 90% of the media you consume on a daily basis. But that's (slowly) starting to change. Even Harvey couldn't keep it out of the growing-in-respectability blogs. And any one person's influence only can stretch so far.
Because power in Hollywood rarely goes as far or for as long in the hands of any one person as most may realize. It's a land of illusions, for fuck's sake.
And the route to power or even stability is long, hard, and full of obstacles.
For those on that road, or who have finally come to a peak on it, the thought of throwing yourself off, even for the most noble of reasons, is terrifying. Especially when there's every indication that the one you stand up to will barely feel the wind of your passage as you fall.
I will say that Harvey isn't the only one.
He's just the one that's safe to talk about now.
0 Comments

Bump stocks and bad ideas

10/6/2017

0 Comments

 
So, another piece before I actually get some work done.
Today we're talking about bump stocks and about a phrase of mine.
Specifically,
"'Good idea,' 'needs to happen,' and 'needs to be a law' are not the same things."
To explain bump stocks, we're going to have to go into some history.
One of the reasons why yelling for "reasonable gun restrictions" will get you laughed at is that it's been tried before. Repeatedly through the 20th century. All of which in response to national panic at something or another. None of which were effective at actually preventing shootings.
Gangland violence during prohibition brought us the National Firearms Act of 1934. This brought extremely tight regulation of short-barreled rifles & shotguns, fully automatic weapons, suppressors, and offensive explosives like grenades and such.
You CAN own any of the above. By paying a special tax, filling out some paperwork, and effectively agreeing that the 4th Amendment never applies to you again.
Fast-forward to 1968 with the Gun Control Act. This established the Federal Firearms Licensing system, restricted interstate buying and shipping, and mandated serial numbers on all firearms. More or less a reaction to the deaths of JFK, MLK, and RFK.
Then comes 1986, with the passage of the Firearm Owners Protection Act.
Wait, protection?
Yep. Turns out when you give a government agency wide latitude to enforce regulations, they take that petty power and run with it. Which is what the ATF spent the 70's doing. Multiple gun dealers were effectively harassed out of business. Several of the rest took severe hits in sales dealing with audit after audit. After a congressional subcomittee meeting, FOPA was put together. It clarified exactly who was prohibited from owning a firearm, adopted safe passage for transporting guns between states, limited the number of compliance inspections the ATF could do at any given location and so on.
Then NJ Senator William Hughs (D) introduced an amendment: no more NFA weapons could be manufactured after that year.
The Republicans were faced with a choice: give up yet another chunk of the Second Amendment by legal means, or dump the bill and allow the ATF to continue regulating and harassing weapons dealers out of existence?
They passed the act. President Reagan signed it into law.
So, what does this have to do with bump stocks?
Well, the legal difference between automatic and semiautomatic is defined by what the trigger does. Semiautomatic means one trigger pull = one shot. Then the finger has to come off and the trigger reset before it can be pulled again.
Automatic means one trigger pull = as many shots as can be cycled through before the finger comes back off the trigger.
A bump stock doesn't change how the trigger operates. Instead, it attaches a moving stock slide to a cutout in the trigger guard. When set properly, it uses the recoil of a shot fired to push the shooter's finger off the trigger, then pull it back on to pull the trigger again. The shooter stops by straightening their finger.
So for those who can't afford to spend five figures on one of the dwindling number of legal full auto weapons in existence, a shooter can have a similar experience.
As an engineering challenge it's kind of neat. As a political statement it's mildly clever (The U.S. Patent office and the ATF under then-president Obama both approved them).
As someone who used to work with automatic weapons fire as a job tool, I think bump stocks are stupid. But I don't see a reason to ban them.
Not gonna go into why (at least not on Facebook I ain't), but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that bump stocks were a factor in why the death toll wasn't even higher.
I definitely don't see a reason to ban them as yet another knee-jerk reaction to a shooting. It didn't work in 1934, 1968, 1986, or 1994, it ain't gonna have the intended effect of stopping shootings now.
Nor is any other proposal I've heard. There's been a bill running through congress to remove suppressors from the NFA classification. Hillary Clinton of all people tweeted that the death toll in Vegas would be higher if the shooter had suppressors.
Hillary doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about. Not going to go into why, but it would've made him even less accurate AND wouldn't have made him any harder to hide.
Something stupid can be avoided.
Bringing the power of the law down on something should be reserved for what the law can effect and nothing else can do so effectively.
0 Comments

Side note

10/5/2017

0 Comments

 
The NRA is many things.
Spammy.
Unoriginal.
Kinda like that creepy kid you know doesn't mean to and you'll feel bad telling him to go away but seriously?
But if you think they're a terrorist organization, you need a dictionary.
Applied kinetically.
Upside the head.
You hoplophobic fuckwallaby.
Stop being part of the problem.
0 Comments

LV shooting, part 2

10/4/2017

0 Comments

 
So, part two: responding.
I'll start by saving us some time. If you've proposed a gun control measure in the last 48 hours, I can almost guarantee the following:
Your proposal is untenable, impractical, indefensible, unconstitutional, or some combination of the above. Pick whatever lets you sleep at night and move on. It's not going to happen, and you should be grateful that's the case.
(Seriously, you want to give the Cheeto regime MORE power and control over people? The fuck? Did we not learn after watching Bush and Obama take turns ripping the 4th Amendment to shreds?
And that goes double for anyone part of an oppressed minority. The U.S. just refused to sign an international pact condemning the death penalty for homosexuality and you want to give MORE power to these fucks? Where is your sense of self-preservation? Or history?)
Sorry if I sound arrogant and dismissive. But I've debunked every gun control proposal I've ever heard of, and I haven't heard a new one in five years. Life is short, fucking deal.
As far as what to do about mass shootings...
When I was still considering moving into bodyguard work, I listened to an old hand at the business give a lecture. and he said, "effectively nothing but luck or chance can stop a trained assassin who doesn't care if they survive once their mission is carried out."
The silver lining in that statement being that the skilled and the suicidal are very rarely the same person.
But I think that's changing today. I thought it starting with the congressional baseball shooter.
The skills aren't hard to learn, or to find.
And as a country, we have a growing population who despair enough to think they have nothing left to live for, and angry enough to want to take others with them.
And this goes across generational lines. We see it in baby boomers finding the safety net they've paid into their entire lives has huge rips and is spread over a concrete floor. We see it in Gen X'ers laid off, told to go back to school and getting out to find they've been replaced by a cheaper millenial. We find millenials sold a serious bill of goods, smart enough to discover exactly how they're getting fucked by the man and finding a dozen or more clever ways to fuck back.
And one in a million choosing to go out in a hail of antiheroism is still 320 of them running around the country at any given moment.
And I have no idea, culturally, how to change or stop that.
Individually, though? There's things that can be done.
This is one of our standard disasters now. In America, we haven't had a plague or a famine in over a century, but we have these. Best learn how to do what we can.
Don't want to be a good person with a gun? No worries.
Take a first aid class. Train yourself to do something when the blood flies.
CAT tourniquets, flashlights, Israeli bandages, IFAKs, Christmas is coming and they make great gifts.
We don't have the option to live in a world without mass shootings.
But we can do our damnedest to try and thrive in a world with them.
0 Comments

LV shooting, part one

10/4/2017

0 Comments

 
I'm divying this up in two.
Part one, what you're reading, is my analysis (or more accurately, a guesstimate) of the LV shooting.
Part two is about responding to it.
So, a 64-year-old multimillionaire with multiple planes, residences, and a longtime girlfriend, but no known ideology, political affiliation, or religion decides to do this.
Not a gun guy, which makes even less sense to go the route he did if a body count was his goal. Mccarran airport is right there and the guy was a private pilot. All he would've had to do was deviate after getting clearance to land and kamikaze straight into the festival.
Instead, he spends over a year and well over $20K on multiple rifles, ammunition and accessories. All of it legal and nothing NFA I've heard about.
He rents the ideal suite, sets up multiple firing positions. My guesstimate of the distance is maybe 400 meters. Hitting area targets especially with an optic is easy enough even for the untrained. Some of his rifles have bump stocks, and I saw at least one extended magazine in the scene photos.
Then he starts shooting. And his shooting is... weird. I've listened to some of the raw videos over and over, and they just sound wrong. He shoots for 12 seconds, then 35 seconds of silence. Then 11 seconds of shooting, 16 seconds of silence.
The man has almost everything he could need to shoot more or less continuously: multiple positions, stacks of magazines, multiple weapons at each position, bump stocks... yet those pauses are ridiculously long for shooting that way. He might have been running back and forth between positions, I guess. But it's inefficient.
The entire way he's set up feels amateurish, really. Like he started making the right decisions and then fucked up the execution. Or like he'd gotten the ideas out of books and never got the range time in to work on the rough spots.
The WaPo claims the shooting went on for 15 or 20 minutes. That's a LONG time to continuously shoot. Multiple news reports say the cops didn't know where his room was until he set off the smoke alarm, and that I believe. Either from the expended rounds or a hot barrel started making the carpet smoulder.
One of the conspiracy theories floating around points out that he had no real counter-police plan. Even though he'd set up cameras and shot at police when they first arrived, he committed suicide rather than barricade himself in his room. (which, at the end of a long hallway, would've let him hold out indefinitely and cause multiple casualties in the entry team.)
Personally, I counter that with two things:
One, amateur hour. Same reason his shooting was sloppy. He didn't plan for counterattack.
Two, if he was what I call an "Avatar" shooter, planning for resistance doesn't happen.
(Side note: we don't have enough mass shooters to really classify. My current system identifies two types:
"Avatars" rely on maintaining control from the moment they begin shooting. Resistance of any sort stops them and they either surrender or commit suicide. The Aurora Theater had a weapons malfunction. The Gabby Giffords shooter was dogpiled by bystanders. Sandy Hook and Charleston ran out of victims.
"Ideologues" don't happen as often but are more dangerous. Ft Hood stopped with multiple bullet wounds and paralysis. San Bernadino were killed by police in a shootout.
Then there's the Planned Parenthood shooter, who doesn't fit either, but is beyond the scope of what we're talking here.)
As far as a motive, nobody official still knows yet. Nor do I.
I suppose we'll have to see.
0 Comments

48 Hr rule

10/3/2017

0 Comments

 
Because there's been some questioning about it (including by one particularly disappointing fuckweasel who seems to think I'm one cranky thought away from becoming the Punisher), I might as well point out why I wait 48 hours.
Reason one: nobody's listening anyway. People are feeling scared, hurt, helpless, disgusted, or some combo of the above. And all the usual arguments come roaring out that have been heard a million times before. There's bullshit bubbling up I've been debunking since the first Ft Hood shooting (before then I was on active duty and couldn't make political commentary). Nobody is in a listening mood. They all want answers that will never come. They want crazy killer detector tests and phaser stun settings that don't fucking exist, and they haven't come to grips with that.
The second reason is that for the first 24 hours, nobody knows anything. Any commentary or analysis in the first 48 hours is shit: someone pulled it straight out of their ass and decided to show the world. Somewhat endearing in children being potty trained, unhelpful and disturbing in adults old enough to operate heavy machinery and buy intoxicants. Everyone who knows the facts is fucking busy. They're triaging wounded, clearing dead, investigating the scene, notifying families, and getting everything else done. At 48 hours, most of them have had the time to grab chow and maybe a shower, file a report and rack out somewhere. The media knows this and gives no fucks. A story gotten first and having to redact later is orders of magnitude better than an accurate story reported on last.
Thus, I wait.
0 Comments
<<Previous
    Picture

    Jay Peterson

    Musings on violence, storytelling, and humanity in general.

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    December 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    June 2013
    April 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    April 2012
    February 2012
    February 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    August 2010
    June 2010
    August 2008

    Categories

    All
    2nd Amendment
    Archer
    Armor
    Barbarism
    Blades
    Blanks
    Boobplate
    Book Review
    Chainmail Bikini
    Fight Scene
    Film
    Firearms
    History
    Killology
    Military
    Reality
    Safety
    Set Life
    Shakespeare
    Teacupping
    Theater
    Tucker Thayer
    USMC
    Viking
    War Stories
    Weapon Of The Week
    Workshops
    Wounds

    RSS Feed

Certa Bonum Certamen

Picture