Hiya Skeleton Crew,

I was gonna go on my li’l road trip last Friday … but then I realized I didn’t actually have anyone to tend to the Skeleplex while I was away! Silly me, right?

Anyways, I finally got Gene the Djinn up to speed on the whole operation, & I’m gonna roll out just as soon as I post this here trivia. & just in case ya were worried: I’ve got some kinda wifi router thing in my Airstream that’ll keep me hooked up to the Internet while I’m on the road, so I’m not plannin for any newsletter interruptions.

Trivia 1

Didja ever watch that Blair Witch Project movie? I remember when it came out & everyone was all confused ’bout whether it was real or not. That was fun! It’s the sorta thing ya couldn’t really get away with nowadays, now that the Internet’s kinda sucked out all the mystery from this sorta thing.

Now, I’m not gonna say Blair Witch INAUGURATED the whole subgenre of “found footage horror” – but I think it’s fair to say it was a pretty big step in popularizin the whole aesthetic. Another big milestone was what 2007 movie that’s sometimes cited as “the most profitable film ever made” in proportion to how much it cost to make?^[1] The whole thing was shot on a home video camera & IMDb lists it as only havin five credited cast members!

Matter of fact, at some point the plan was actually to remake the whole movie at a bigger budget, with the original production bein basically a kinda “demo tape” that’d only see the light of day as a DVD extra. But apparently the movie spooked people SO MUCH at a test screenin that they decided to go forward with the low-budget version after all.

Trivia 2

In the previous trivia, when I talked ’bout the movie’s financial success “in proportion to how much it cost to make” – well, I coulda saved some words by just sayin ROI (a.k.a. “return on investment”, in case financial jargon ain’t yer strong suit). It basically means just what I said – how much money an investment makes compared to how much money it cost to make in the first place. A 0% ROI means the investment didn’t gain OR lose any value; a 100% ROI means the thing doubled in value.

Another way of measurin an investment’s profitability is somethin called the IRR. That one’s a fancier calculation, ’cause it takes into account somethin called the “time value of money” – basically, the idea that a dollar today is worth more to ya than a dollar a year from now. So IRR is maybe a bit better to use when ya wanna know whether it’s better to tie yer money up in Investment A vs. Investment B over different lengths of time.

Anyways, can ya tell me what IRR stands for?