Daily Archives: April 3, 2024

Top Tens – Miscellany: Top 10 Youtube (5) Pitch Meeting

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Youtube channel banner as at 31 March 2024

 

 

(5) PITCH MEETINGS (CANADA 2022 – formerly part of Screen Rant USA 2008)

 

“Actually it’s going to be super easy, barely an inconvenience.”

 

Instead of the channel blurb, I couldn’t resist quoting its signature catchphrase – indeed so signature that the videos even originally went by the title Super Easy, Barely an Inconvenience – Screen Rant Pitch Meetings.

 

That catchphrase is routinely invoked by one of the duo of characters that appear in each video, the screenwriter played by Canadian comedian Ryan George, when pitching his film or TV series script in the titular fictional pitch meetings for popular films or series to the second of the duo, the film producer also played by Ryan George.

 

Invoked that is, by the screenwriter to dismiss the apparently irreconcilable narrative conflict or obstacle into which he has written his characters when the producer queries that very point – and seemingly accepted without any further argument by the producer.

 

Indeed, much of the exchange between them is the producer querying issues – being surprisingly “adept at spotting the problematic aspects of whatever he’s being pitched” – but fortunately for the screenwriter, is also easily distracted or deflected, usually by love of money as “a profit-obsessed doormat”.

 

One of my favorite aspects is how the screenwriter and producer seem to alternate playing the straight man to the other’s absurd thought processes or enthusiasm, only to be distracted or deflected by ulterior motives – usually profit for the producer and pride for the screenwriter, often to the detriment of the final product.

 

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mancy (5) Geomancy

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Free ‘divine gallery’ art sample – OldWorldGods

 

(5) GEOMANCY

 

O sweet spontaneous
earth… how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods…
thou answerest
them only with
spring”

Standing stones, ley lines and feng shui (although technically the latter translates as wind-water)

“Geomancy is a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed handfuls of soil, rocks, or sand” – which prompts me to speculate if it had origins in prehistoric tracking.

It might also extend to lithomancy, or divination by stones – or crystals, including scrying into crystals or crystal balls. Or to spelunking for visions in caves – or climbing for them on mountains (oromancy or divination by mountains). Shoutout also to topomancy or divination by geography or geological formations.

As a method of divination, geomancy seems somewhat, well, meh – lacking the versatility, potency or intensity of the other methods of divination in our top ten so far, which begs the question of its ranking above them.

To be honest, part of its top ten ranking was to complete the set of four classical elements – although that still begs the question of why it is ranked over pyromancy, hydromancy and aeromancy. However, the major part of its ranking is more as a school of magic or mysticism – channeling or harnessing the magical or mystical energy of the earth itself.

Of course, there is something of an overlap with divination, but what might be considered a more proactive form of divination – not passively attempting to divine good fortune from physical features, but actively attempting to channel or harness their energy to make good fortune, literally grounding the expression that you make your own luck.

The archetype of this active creation of good fortune is the Chinese tradition of feng shui – “manipulating the flow and direction of energy based on aesthetics, location, and position of objects and buildings”.

At its widest, that archetype of geomancy is extended to things that are broadly dubbed “Earth mysteries” in Western popular culture – including those projected back to megalithic or monumental history or prehistory. The megaliths or standing stones of Europe, pyramids in general and particularly in Egypt, so-called ley lines, and so on.

As a school of magic harnessing the power of the earth itself, geomancy ranks high in potency, even more so if one combines it with actual geology – not to mention such things as earthquakes, volcanoes, lava or earth’s molten core, geological time, tectonic plates, earth’s electromagnetic field, and gravity. Or the metaphorical or symbolic meanings of earth and ground.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mythologies (5) Egyptian

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Free ‘divine gallery’ art sample – OldWorldGods

 

(5) EGYPTIAN

 

“I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra…
“Who was that
dog-faced man? they asked, the day I rode
from town”…
Go get my eyelids of red paint.
Hand me my shadow
I’m going into town after Set”

If there’s one of two things I lament about Christianity, it’s the decline of the Egyptian pantheon. If only the Roman Empire could have gone the way of the ankh instead of the cross. Or if only the Egyptian gods had returned out of the desert, as opposed to Islam and swept Christianity out of Egypt!

What’s not to love about those funky animal-headed gods and those slinky goddesses? Especially the goddesses – lithe and svelte in their form-fitting dresses, with their golden skin and painted eyes, they would not look out of place as supermodels on a modern catwalk. Of course, Egypt was, quite frankly, the sexiest ancient civilization – admittedly perhaps not for its population’s vast majority of peasants who farmed the Nile or worked on those useless tombstones known as pyramids, but certainly for its elite, who pretty much invented style. You know it’s true – just look at the figures in their art!

Or what’s not to love how the gods kept shifting and swapping out with each other as they rose and fell within the pantheon? My personal favorite trinity of Egyptian mythology (well apart from Anubis, one of my favorite dog gods of mythology) – Osiris, Isis and Horus as they square off against their adversary Set. O yes – Isis. Goddess of magic who seduced the secret name from the sun god Ra and lover of Osiris who resurrected him after he was dismembered by his evil adversary Set to conceive the divine hero Horus (who then avenges Osiris)

Or what’s not to love about its different and contradictory creation myths? Particularly the one where the god Atum (who swapped out as supreme god from time to time) created the world by, ahem, mastrbating it into existence. Now that’s creationism! Indeed, Egyptian mythology could get downright kinky. Isis essentially s€xes up all her magic, including that briefly reviving Osiris to conceive Horus. Or how Set and Horus essentially strive to, ahem, out-ejculate each other…

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP-TIER)

 

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (5) Peter Dickinson – The Flight of Dragons

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1st edition, Pierrot Publishing, 1979

 

 

(5) PETER DICKINSON –
THE FLIGHT OF DRAGONS (1979)

 

Here be dragons!

And how! It’s like Jurassic Park, only even more awesome – with dragons! This is a work of “speculative natural history”, which addresses that most awesome question – how dragons might have really existed?

Or more precisely, is there an evolutionary hypothesis that could explain the existence of dragons of mythology and lore?

In doing so, it addresses the question posed by the title – the flight of dragons. Clearly, something extra is needed for the mass of dragons to be lifted by their limited wing area – and if not magic, what?

The answer is the central hypothesis of the work – that dragons were essentially fantasy dirigibles, held aloft by sacs of hydrogen, produced from their own digestive hydrochloric acid. From that, we have their evolution from dinosaurs to most of the tropes of dragons in fantasy, not least their fiery breath, evolved to burn off excess hydrogen but finding use as a weapon – although it also offers explanations for their toxic (or more precisely acidic) blood, their hoards and most other dragon tropes, with an element of legendary embellishment thrown in (intelligence and speech for example).

It also offers explanation for the saddest dragon trope – their absence from reality. Obviously, they were hunted to extinction by humanity and their acidic blood dissolved any bodily remnants that remained behind (so no dragon fossils – alas!)

It’s a nice fantasy theory, even if it seems somewhat contrived or forced at times by standards of biology – but damned if I don’t half believe it, and even more damned if I don’t totally wish that somewhere here or there be dragons…

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)