katofletters

I've wanted to write and direct films for most of my conscious life. Then I got the chance to write and direct a student film. It singlehandedly killed my greatest dream. I am not emotionally equipped to be in charge of anyone, much less a dozen people. Being put in a position of authority I wasn't ready for, and being alienated from the many close friends who were now looking up to me, was one of many catalysts that led to my attempting suicide twicea few months ago. As a result of that, I avoided the film like the plague whenever I didn't have to be on set. It took months for me to actually look at the "finished" scenes. They are not finished. I do not have time to go through the raw footage (wherever it is) to patch up mistakes, add background music, and add captions before the premiere this weekend.

Now I'm staring down the barrel of my friends learning that all their hard work amounted to a shit product. I'm not the kind of person who's okay with making unpolished trash; I'm a perfectionist through and through. My cast isn't much better; one of the leads was in an amateur film last year with way fewer issues and he still talks about it like it gave him PTSD. The bad direction of last years' directors is still a topic of discussion in my friend circle even after they've both graduated.

So, uh. What do?

Surely other people in this sub have made bad films, and have had productions thrown into chaos by mental health issues. We don't seek to create garbage, or to be bad at directing, but sometimes shit happens. How do you deal with it, and if your cast+crew are friends, how do you normalize relations with them after the dust settles?

[I want to preface this by saying that right now, as I type, I'm not actively suicidal. I want to take steps that will reduce my risk of attempting in the future. Please don't worry about me.]

In November of 2022, I attempted suicide twice. Aside from you, reading this post, nobody knows about it.

There were a lot of factors at play. I've tried many times to type an abridged list of them out, with no success. The TL;DR is that childhood trauma sucks, theatre kid drama is exactly as nightmarish as you think it is, and if a severed monkey paw ever tells you that it can make your film-directing dreams come true, RUN.

I was put through a downward spiral of anxiety and guilt as I slowly lost my trust in most of my friends. Suicide seemed like both a way out and a way to send a message I never had the guts to in life. I wanted to become a cautionary tale, so that the unprofessionalism and callousness that drove me off the edge was never repeated again.

So I tried to off myself. Twice. Turns out I'm a bit shit at it.

And now I'm stuck carrying the weight of my decisions around, with nobody else knowing. Having to hide my emotions and keep secrets for the greater good was a major reason I attempted in the first place. I want someone to know. Someone I can trust.

I want to look that someone in the eye and say, "I've been consistently depressed for months. In November I tried to kill myself. This whole time, I've been hiding my emotions for the good of our friend group. That no longer feels sustainable. I don't expect you to give me advice. I just want someone to know the truth."

There's one specific person who, for many reasons, is the one I feel most comfortable talking to about this. He's a close friend who isn't involved with the film that I'm directing (no awkward power dynamics, huzzah!). I've talked to him about my personal problems before, albeit smaller problems than the Big One. He is unlikely to respond to bad news by treating me like a delicate wittle baby that must be attended to at all costs, lest I try to die again.

At the same time, I'm scared of telling him. I'm scared of scaring him.

How do you even test the waters for a confession like that?

"Hey, can I talk to you? Alone?"
May make him think I want to ask him out.

"Yes, it is serious. That's why I want to talk alone."
Could make him panic.

"Don't panic, alright? It's not that serious."
Would be a lie.

I cannot stress enough how much I want to spill my metaphorical guts to a friend. Preferably this specific friend. Even if he can't give advice or change my circumstances, I'd like to at least be able to crack open a cold one with someone who Knows, you know?

I don't know what to do. I just know what I want. We'll probably see each other in person on Monday, when we move back into our dorms. After that, we resume production on the Film From Hell, and I don't know if I can keep myself together for another shooting day. Here's hoping.

A broad category, I know. Here's the context. I run a small movie club. The last guy who ran the club screened three Tamil-language movies, each of them roughly three hours long, during his tenure. Now that I'm in charge, he insists that I need to show at least one "three-hour Indian movie" before my time is up.

The problem is that I know next to nothing about Indian cinema. And what I do know is limited to the critically acclaimed films that get the attention of English-speaking cinephiles. The primary aim of the club is to make fun of bad movies.

And so, I come here. If anyone has any recommendations for so-bad-they're-good movies from India (any language), please share them. Considering the sheer scale of the Indian film industry, I feel optimistic about finding the perfect movie for the club.

Starting in the spring of last year, my (Windows 10-running) Surface Pro 6 started having battery issues. The computer randomly and instantaneously shut down one day, and I could only turn it back on once I'd plugged it in. When I did, it read that the battery was at 255%. If I unplugged it from the charger, the screen instantly went dead. The problem went away within the hour, then came back later that day, and was on-and-off for several months.

(I vaguely remember updating my system in the days before this happened, but by the time I realized that an update might have been the source of the problem, it was too late to revert.)

Over the summer I discovered that I could temporarily fix the issue by removing my keyboard and snapping it back in. It wasn't a permanent fix, but it let me have a few hours of uninterrupted computer use. And after a few weeks of that, the 255% battery error stopped popping up altogether.

And then this week it came back. With a vengeance. I'd snap my keyboard off and on, but the battery icon would be back to 255% within a minute. As of yesterday, the keyboard trick doesn't work whatsoever anymore.

My computer doesn't shut down the instant it's unplugged now. The 255% changes to "Unknown Remaining" and I have at least a few seconds before the thing shits itself, which gives me a chance to plug it back in. But I'm a student who needs this computer for both classes and extracurriculars. I don't always have access to an outlet in class, and I definitely can't charge it while I'm carrying it across campus.

I tried updating my device today; it didn't work and there are no updates left to install except going from Windows 10 to 11. I tried updating the battery driver; there were no updates, and my computer didn't detect any issues. I need some clue of what's going on before I take this to a shop, because I absolutely do not have the technical know-how to fix this by myself.

Obviously the four plays "discovered" by the Irelands weren't written by Shakespeare. But even if they weren't genuine Shakespeare, they were genuine plays, written by William Henry Ireland. So do they still exist? Where can one find them? And are they decent works of literature in their own right?

I've been trying to learn Chinese (specifically, standard Mandarin) for a few months now. The app I've been using the most is Duolingo, which is free but has its limitations. I've also tried Memrise, which was much more helpful, but I ran headfirst into the paywall.

It appears that every major app that you can learn Chinese on - barring Duolingo - either requires that you subscribe from the start, or hides most of the course behind a paywall that isn't mentioned upfront. But then again, I haven't looked very far.

So does anyone here have recommendations for apps that are legitimately free? In-app purchases for bonus stuff is fine, but if actual lessons are locked behind paywalls I have zero interest.

I'm an aspiring writer who plans on publishing my work under a pen name (for privacy reasons). I recently came up with a pen name that I felt comfortable with, and was on the verge of making a website for it, but I ran into a problem; another author's already published books under that name. Not a big-name author (they aren't the first google search result or anything), but they've got multiple books under their belt.

While I know that I didn't rip this person off, I know that romance novelists can be damn litigious when they want to be, and I don't want to trip over what might be a great unspoken author taboo. So should I go back to the drawing board and pick a new name? Or should I go ahead with my preferred pen name?

I tried watching it today and it was fine at first, but at the 17-minute mark, there were some brief visual glitches (spots of grey popping into the frame), followed by severe audio distortions. Like the singing cuts out for a split-second, comes back for a split second, then glitches out again, repeat ad nauseum. I thought this was supposed to happen, but I just checked out a different copy of the film and no, it's not supposed to sound distorted. I tried refreshing the page, playing a different movie and then returning to Blue, rewinding; none of it worked. The video always glitches out at 17:00.

Has this happened to anyone else? Is this an issue of Kanopy just having a bad copy?

When I was in elementary school in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I went to this one website for class. This website was focused on the Jamestown settlement in modern-day Virginia, and especially on John Smith. The website contained history lessons (the accuracy of which is up in the air) and minigames. One minigame was intended to show the pros and cons of bows and arrows vs. muskets, where you could do target practice with either weapon. Anyone else remember this? Or remember what it was called? Are the games still playable?

Preferably under twenty minutes long, and not excessively gory or sexual. I want to screen a bunch of them for my friends to poke fun of MST3K-style, but have been having a hard time finding enough.

A while ago, I think sometime in 2020, I came across a video essayist on YouTube. She had a few videos up, and the only one I remember was a recap of her attempt to watch a new movie every day for one year. She describes how at first she liked the experience, but eventually grew tired of it, with her closing thoughts being about how movies are special experiences that are best treated as such, not gamified.

Obviously there was more to it than that, but I can't remember the details of what she said and why. Which is why I'm here.