🗞️ Bundling: Local Garbage Fire

👀 Watching: Project Hail Mary

📕 Reading: How not to make a jelly sandwich

🍔 Eating: Snack Shack

👨🏼‍💻 Analyzing: This guy’s neck

A man wears many faces. At least, that’s what Jaqen H'ghar told Arya Stark on Game of Thrones while showing her around his super magical, kinda creepy, incredibly impressive human face prop room. And, in the end, Arya got really good at wearing those faces and never once appeared on live TV with the mask poorly affixed to her face.

But in real life, can a man convincingly wear a fake face for a long period of time? And can he do so repeatedly on Fox News over several appearances? That’s what some people think.

Naturally (and non-prosthetically), I’m going to discuss it in a video this week. But first, as I do every Monday (or Sunday, if you’re a paid subscriber), here’s an inside look at my professional and personal life this week.

The world of legacy journalists is both big and small all at once. Since going independent, I’ve been almost instantly connected to a world of similar people, happy to connect and even happier to help each other. Even specifically in the independent video world, I’ve hugely benefited from the generosity of so many of my far more successful peers (shout-out to practically every ex-Vox-er from Johnny Harris to Cleo Abram to Phil Edwards).

And sometimes, we can all help each other! That’s what the Local Garbage Fire bundle aims to do. If you’ve been on the fence about becoming a member of a newsletter, this is a chance to support us and two other independent journalists at one price - and it’s 50% off.

Let me tell you about both journalists and their newsletters!

Kat Tenbarge is truly the best at what she does, reporting on media, pop culture, internet culture and everything in between (and there is a lot between that she expertly covers). While I live in explainer video land, Kat is constantly breaking news and getting scoops, all with her signature voice and fearless reporting. Her newsletter is Spitfire News.

Similarly, Ryan Broderick is constantly diving deeper into tech and internet stories with the Garbage Day newsletter. Ryan and his team are often the first to make sense of big stories, way before much larger legacy media organizations figure it all out. I’ve used his reporting multiple times while making videos. He’s been independent since 2019, but even before that, I was following his work at Buzzfeed News.

Together with Local News International, we’re forming on Mighty Morphin News Power Ranger to form Local Garbage Fire. I hope you’ll give it a shot! Sign up here.

Guys, I finally saw Project Hail Mary. What an absolute delight. I knew it was well-reviewed and received but I had no idea I would like it this much. It’s so well-crafted, which is unsurprising, given its directors. Phil Lord and Chris Miller are the geniuses behind many films, but most notably (in my opinion) The Lego Movie. Their thoughtful stop-motion style animation in that film, combined with their signature humor, birthed an entire franchise.

I am not advocating for a Project Hail Mary franchise. It’s a book after all. But I am advocating for the practical effects used in this film to create the alien. It was almost entirely a puppet, which I learned afterwards. We need more of this in films: practical effects that use CGI to enhance what’s on screen, not create it from whole cloth. This is the type of filmmaking that was missing from the latter Stranger Things seasons. Fully CGI demagorgons often made the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana feel bland and lifeless.

I’m also just a big Ryan Gosling fan. He’s more versatile than I think he gets credit for. Like Meryl Streep, he really can do everything.

So, go see it. Or rent it. Or stand outside a drive-in movie and watch it for free. It was a delight.

A former journalist is opening a delightful bookstore in Parkville, Missouri, just north of Kansas City and I feel obligated to tell anyone in the area, or visiting the city. Typo’s is mostly kids books, though there’s a whole wall of adult books, too. We bought ‘How Not to Make a Jelly Sandwich’ for my daughter and absolutely love it.

And folks, best of all? It’s dog-friendly.

Guys, guys, guys … guys. Guys. I ate maybe the best burger I’ve ever eaten? Granted, I was very hungry at the time. And it was Friday at the end of a long week. I also may be a bit of a labrador when it comes to my favorite things (usually the last thing that happened to me).

That said, the Snack Shack on Johnson Drive - a restaurant that didn’t exist when I went to high school just down the street - really delivered. It’s got all the magic of Winsteads, another local favorite. Even the menu is similar. But (and sorry about this, Winsteads), it tastes way better.

I got the ‘Down-Towner burger.’ I will be back.

Fox News has a long history of bringing on questionable guests, often bringing on people who completely lie about their backgrounds. This week wasn’t even the first time Fox has been accused of bringing on a masked guest lying about their identity.

That said, they’ve never brought me on with my decrepit donkey mask I purchased from a KCK costume shop called “Have Guns Will Rent Costumes” …

… but they appeared to get pretty close last week.

Nothing could have prepared Fox News Nation for retired SEAL Robert Hayward and his weird neck line, which very convincingly made many people believe he was wearing a mask and we were all seeing the seem.

In the world of misinformation and weird internet theories, this is the most inclined I’ve ever been to believe one, sheerly just because it realllly looks like the neck flap of a mask. Reddit is fully treating the face mask theory as fact, just based on Fox being an entertainment company that legally can’t be called “news” (fair enough).

But folks, as Snopes noted, it’s likely just poor lighting. Specifically, the lack of fill lighting. To avoid stark (or weird) shadows, studios will have lights from many angles. At least one of them is a “fill light” that helps avoid situations like this. I’ll demonstrate that in a video this week.

Hayward has appeared on Fox News multiple times. Here he his with a better lit normal neck. That same day, he went on Fox News from a different location and the lighting sucked again. No neck flap this time though, just sucky lighting. In other words, this isn’t a man-in-disguise problem. This is a guy that desperately needs better lighting.

Now, you may still be watching that video back and thinking, “c’mon Dave. This isn’t a fill light issue. It’s a flap!” I get it. It sure looks like it. So let’s pretend to ignore everything I said about fill lighting and follow that to it’s illogical conclusion.

If you’re in the cynical camp that Fox News would knowingly bring on a guy in disguise, then why Hayward? He’s not particularly offensive. He’s just another Trump supporter. There are literally thousands of ex-military Trump supporters that Fox could bring on. And if you’re realizing just now that you had no idea what he was even talking about in his #NeckFlapGate appearance, because you were too focused on the neck flap - you’re kind of proving my point. Conspiracy thinking gives us tunnel vision.

Let’s say you’re in the group that thinks this one time he was wearing a disguise, but the other times it was actually him. Why would Hayward be okay with that? What person, outside of a corny 90s sitcom character, signs off on that?

So while Snopes and other news sources are still waiting for comment directly from the source, we should also just ask the “why”s in this case. This is what happened with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a couple months ago. Not only did we debunk it, I also pointed out how strange it would be to fake his appearances. You may dislike Netanyahu or Fox News and think the absolute lowest of them, which helps you down the winding conspiracy path, but we have to keep asking why. And there is no good answer to “why?” in this case.