Working on this movie. Dialog is a wreck. Money ran out shortly before filming so their skeletal sound package got split up into two not-worthy-for-spares packages to be operated by unskilled crew. I'm tooth and claw on this thing, battling by inches. A machine gun fight on a sailboat took me half a day to synthesize out of whole cloth but I can do about two to three minutes a day of dialog cleanup.

The movie needs to sell for more than 3x its budget for my friends to get paid. It will; the last time I dealt with this shit I took an unsellable movie and created something that sold in 27 markets. But it's trench warfare.

Last night I dreamed the producer, a good friend of mine, had been convinced by Tom Morello to traffic biker meth. My friend huffed it instead, went paranoid and murdered his wife and baby daughter. It then became my job to bring him groceries and companionship while the LAPD kept him chained to a Peloton. Since they were the LAPD, they didn't restrict his access to methamphetamine (my dream my rules).

Probably 50% of my day is dealing with other peoples' bullshit. It's usually okay because the way I make that terrified, depressed, suicidal, bulimic teenager on the inside feel better is by making other people feel better. But when the only thing you can do is prevent failure, and the only way to do it is invisible, and there is absolutely.no.one you can turn to when shit isn't working?

I'm probably looking at three months of unpaid work to get this movie to the place it would have been automatically if they'd chosen to pay me to fly out and fucking record it as well as mix it. It's like that subplot in Argo - eventually, the Iranians will have pieced together the shredded documents but all you can do is watch them do the most pointless, demeaning, ridiculous bullshit in an attempt to murder our heroes. "Security through tedium" - if you chop it up enough, no one will bother.

You aren't supposed to do it to your friends.

I shattered a switchplate yesterday by slapping it into the wall. My daughter was giving me attitude about peeling potatoes. She's the one who likes mashed potatoes, I fucking hate them. When you're spending months toiling in obscurity for a movie that will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars if you don't, the simple approval of making fucking dinner counts for a lot. She's ten, though, what does she know. And her friends are spoiled rich brats. "You spent the weekend on the boat, that's nice, where did you go?" "I don't know." "Well, what did you do with your time?" "stayed in my room and watched Youtube." "your room... at the hotel?" "my room on the boat."

I'd hand over the dialog on this thing to someone else except I don't know of anyone else who could fix it. Which sounds arrogant AF but fuck you I've earned it. I'm fucking good at my job, have always been fucking good at my job, and no one will ever fucking know or care. "Why can't we understand dialog in movies and TV anymore? It must be because we secretly enjoy reading!" No, fuckers, it's because the entertainment industry is run by entitled manchildren whose principle qualification is Daddy Pays For My Shit. "ZOMFG you mean you need to MIX it after you edit it? but nobody made us do that to our recently-cancelled show!"

Friend who likes to shoot the shit with me about the history of the American watch industry is giving a paid lecture about the history of the American watch industry in front of one of the most esteemed groups in horology. Of my friends? He's probably the least educated about the American watch industry. This is the second time that organization is having him back.

Meanwhile I'm at a standstill so that I can Bakhmut the dialog on this movie.

On the plus side, we found out two months ago that our competitor to the north was going out of business, a month ago that our competitor to the south was going out of business, this morning that a competitor to the southeast of us is retiring in the spring and that a competitor directly north is retiring in the summer. We gave out bonuses. The year sucked and only the strong will survive, and we fucking survived. On the minus side, the pitocin shortage is getting way worse so not only are there about to be a bunch of pregnant women clogging the hospitals, they're that much more likely to bleed out and die.

Which makes it hard to justify giving a fuck about - wait for it - movie dialogue. But since I'm basically the quasimodo in the belfry of the birth industry around here, it's all I'm allowed to give a fuck about.

This was the first christmas I didn't have to have an awkward conversation with either of my parents. On the one hand, that was nice. On the other hand it would have been nice if they'd tried.