You don't need to see Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. It's bad. It's a bad movie because it's a bad interpretation of pre-existing characters.

It's so bad that people have taken it personally. I've written in the past (yesterday) concerning the lengths people will go to preserve their baby-brains, to remain psychologically childish, rather than develop into a forward-thinking headspace. Batman V Superman is an example of denial that certain comic book fans live and die by.

Fans see their favorite characters alive and human-shaped on the screen in movies like BvS. They take that as gospel. The sight is all they require. I'll stay to my orginal point that BvS was a bad movie because it's a bad interpretation of characters the audience is familar with.

Batman and Superman.

I'm not going to dissect just BvS here though. I'm going to do a spot-check on how well DC is constructing the shared universe for their movies.

When you read the words "style guide," you likely imagine a list of rules pulled from an outdated Chicago Style Manual by a fifth grade teacher desperate for an early Tuesday evening.

Someday, you won't need a style guide for your blog. It'll be as easy as tying your shoes. I'd say it'd be as easy as tying a necktime, but I think there really might be a shadowy cabal of YouTubers that are controlling the youth through lessons on how to tie a tie.

That's (only sort of) a joke.

In the simplest terms, crafting a blog style guide is an advanced energy expenditure to make your eventual blogging less of a freaking hassle. Less to remember, less time spent.

So, let's get down to it.

When the iPhone might have invented wireless, one-touch commerce in the 21st century, it also started the race to the bottom. I remember when they built the Apple App Store atop iTunes' rotting shoulders, piggybacking onto the success of selling one song for $0.99, and an episode of The Office for $3.99. I remember during that first Summer of iPhone when somebody sold an app that did nothing called "I'm Rich" for $1000 (NOTE: that might not be the actual price).

I remember when I bought the sublime endless-runner game progenitor, CANABALT, for $0.99. I remember when my friend started working at Zynga and reminded me every day to try Farmville for free. He didn't work in development, he worked in HR.

The mobile app now sits comfortably at the low price of Approximately Between Zero To Five Hundred Future-Dollars.

In the race to the bottom, we devalued digital goods. The whole farm was gambled on a whale falling from the sky, bones ripe for the picking.

Yes and no. Apps are now a platform, a storefront.

You'll have to indulge me for a moment when I state that a lot of people reveal on a regular basis that they cannot productively reconcile their annoyance with the world around them.

That's being too kind. The conversation should be narrowed: most people can't reconcile their minds with stuff that annoys them.

Nope, still too much. I'll split this atom once more. Please know that we'll get into exact definitions on just a moment, so as not to offend the sloppy-brained.

*ahem*

People are babies without the proper emotional means to keep from feeling fussy about annoying stuff.

So, we wonder how to write about stuff that annoys us...

Most are familiar with the Dan Brown novels starring the knowledgeable art history professor / symbologist (sic) / smart-dad Robert Langdon character. He's the hero of Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol, and Inferno. 

His adventures carry him to European cities including Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, and also to Cincinnati once, but we don't talk about that one, all while extolling knowledge on jerks who haven't opened a history book in a while.

People who just don't really think too much, alright?

Like James Bond, except American, and tweed, and definitely not a sexist jerk, Langdon always gets a new Gal-Friday in every story. One time, the female lead was a yoga master. Another time, the female lead might've been the descendant of Jesus (Christ).

In Book 4 of Langdon's adventures, Inferno, he finds himself with a gunshot wound to the head and retrograde amnesia in a hospital in Florence, Italy.

Despite this, he manages to overcome his concussion-like symptoms and be smarter than every woman he meets. He even manages to teach the sheeeeeple a little something as they run from deadly, who the heck cares?

He mansplains his way across Europe. Here's every instance of it, along with a few other male characters following his example:

I hate advertising. My dad sold ad space in bicycle and skiing magazines. Technically, that's sales. He was selling companies real estate for them to hawk their reductive ideas of their products.

I don't hate my dad. I fact, I admire him. His work made me familiar with advertising at a young age. People, or companies, have a product that they want people to purchase. That product requires recognition. Ideally, you'd want a certain person to recognize that product, considering that certain person would be more inclined to purchase the product, rather than the billions of other humans on the planet.

Recognition is a fantastic sales tool. Recognition is the best salesperson imaginable.

It hasn't happened yet, but the salesperson is evolving. They'll be difficult to recognize alongside their contemporary form.

How is a salesperson evolving? Someday, they'll be singular individuals with good tastes on a certain topic that may just HAPPEN to work for a certain company. They'll sell solutions to a buyer's query, like a living search-engine. This is a fantasy, of course. The salesperson will always be at least somewhat compromised by their employment.

This is not the case with a good marketer.

While undergoing my ebook file creation experiment, I re-read the latest draft for Diffused States first chapter.

I liked it. I didn't love it. I'm trying to decide why. I've been reviewing a lot of my work recently. It's a comfort to realize how much I've enjoyed them. This is a sign that I've nearly cemented my writing style. I don't look at something I've done and regret the way a sentence is composed or a passage is paced.

Go back and read anything you wrote 10 years ago. It'll look like an airshow disaster's aftermath. Forcing your current creative brain to shake hands with your brain from 10 days ago, 10 months ago, or 10 years ago is an uncomfortable feeling.

This leaves us with a requisite call to action. I'm not in love with what I've written. I've drafted and edited the piece in question as recently as a month ago. What does this mean? What's the next step to engage with your work?

I took a few minutes today draft an .epub version for Suns Go Dark's most recent draft. I didn't decide to create an .epub file right out of the gate. That was what I ended up creating after exploring my options online for a moment.

More on that further down.

I had been idle for too long. This is good and bad for writing. Per Stephen King in his fantastic semi-autobiography / creative method guidebook On Writing, he always builds in a 6-month phase for a manuscript to sit in a drawer. He writes it. Then he lets it rest. Then he reads it again to see if it still entertains or surprises him.

Every time I re-read Suns Go Dark after letting it rest, it alarms me how much I enjoy it.

In Ghost Little's 2016 relaunch, I decided on a whim to create a wiki for the site. It's been a rewarding experience. It remains a work in progress. I've been adding and updating pages for each story's production history, as time allows. This has been a remarkable history lesson for me. Looking back at what has become 5+ years of writing for myself on the Internet, my growth, changes in style, changes in motivation, and the development of real direction.

And, hey, despite the rampant unchecked impostor-syndrome that any creative person worth their salt will feel, it's pretty reassuring that writing all this stuff did not literally kill me with anxiety for thinking I had a cool idea for a story.

The goal now is to do something every day related to Ghost Little. This hopefully means daily updates to the blog. It's a fun process. The very act of doing something each day keeps me honest. I also hope it might motivate others to realize that despite it being a difficult commitment, it's doable. Even if every day doesn't work, I owe it to myself to do some action with regularity.

Accessing point-of-sale data on hundreds of thousands of Target stores, hackers lifted the credit card information from 40 million customer accounts on Black Friday, 2013. Elementary malware bounced the seized numbers to a rented server in Russia. Target’s $1.6 million worth of Pentagon-level security proved insufficient defense.

In October, 2014, Sony Pictures was hacked, and intruders stole everything that wasn’t nailed down—production notes on The Amazing Spider-Man 2, personal employee data, and heated email exchanges between studio executives. It’s all indexed on Wikileaks now.

Most recent of all, 1.1 million personal electronic health records, valued at $60-70 apiece, were stolen in a cyber attack on Washington D.C.-area CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield servers. The data was reported stolen on May 14, 2015.

Trouble is, evidence shows the actual theft occurred in June, 2014.

Hackers have smelled the blood in the water. Customer data was snatched up. Millions were stolen. Public trust was weakened. The revelation that there was almost zero accountability or regulatory reformation afterward is perhaps the most upsetting of all.