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I forgot
what I was going to post
scotch!
Star Trek VI is really good.
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Popular
You know what blows my mind?
Realizing that you can now numerically quantify the popularity of anything in seconds.
For example, Death From Above 1979 < MSTRKRFT < Deadmau5 (according to Facebook fans)
Who knew?
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Types
I am always amused at how disparate preferences can be.
And also how different someone can look in real life and on camera.
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Easy there, guys.
I would like to invite people on the internet to drop the alarmist ‘we live in a fascist police state’ complaints. Yes, the police can be dicks and mistreat protestors, and that is not cool. Yes, stuff is messy, but we are a long way from the very real and frightening place that your words describe. So far, in fact, that you are undermining your position by saying so.
To the best of my knowledge houses have not been burned at random to make a point. No one has been sent to labor camps. Thousands of seventeen-year-olds haven’t been rounded up and shot at dawn on flimsy suspicions of crimes against the state.
Your life of sheltered privilege is causing you to say stupid things. The simple fact that you are not terrified into silence by videos of the mistreatment is proof that things are not as sick-nasty as your Young Adult genre fiction has made you believe.
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The worst thing you can do as a creator…
…aside from wasting your reader’s/watcher’s time is to be totally cheap and flimsy with your fictional worldbuilding.
That stuff drives me crazy, even though I completely understand why it happens.
Fake video game names are the most egregious examples of how obvious it is that writers are not paying attention to naming conventions.
Of course the only example I can think of right now is ‘Slayer’ from the movie ‘Gamer’*. ’Slayer’ is a decent enough fit and someone on the movie obviously played some Halo, because that is the name of your standard deathmatch in the game. But it doesn’t take into account two very important things that would happen in the real world:
1) A real-life marketing team would fight tooth and nail against a game named ‘Slayer’ that is a straight up paramilitary shooter. The name Slayer connotes the old school somewhat occult violence found in games like Doom and Quake, not the gritty modern combat violence you see in the movie. More appropriate names: ‘Ironsights’ ‘Warzone’ and any number of potentially better names.
2) There is no implied information to that name. There would be an element of seeming-randomness to the naming because the game itself is going to have some element that we are not familiar with until we know more about the game that ties it together thematically. Halo (where there is a round planet thing called a halo, but no angels or parachuting), Bioshock (tonally resonant name also hinting at the modifications the player undergoes in the game to get gnarly powers), Call of Duty (wherin the player is always a soldier and is totally like, pushed down a very linier but cinematic experience)…
Again, it’s a fair effort, but if it’s too uncomplicated a name it just starts to feel written. We don’t have the luxury of having lived in this fictional world and become accustomed to whatever generic names are there (Battlefield, Rage), so we need all the help we can get.
*when you look at the name of the movie and the name of the fake game side by side…it all seems to make more sense, doesn’t it?
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Workout!
Finished a 4-week really simple convict workout.
Headstands - 45s/45s -> 2m/1m
Angled Bridges - 5/5 -> 15/15
Jackknife Pullups - 5/10 -> 15/10
1/2 1-leg squats - 5/10 -> 12/12
Pushups - 20/10/10 -> 20/17/12
Leg Raises (flat) - 15/10/10 -> 20/15/12
These aren’t huge gains but I’m leavin’ em up.
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You know…
…if I were that guy, I’d probably hate me too.
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Good Brother
Thank goodness.
This take on the beginning of the story feels complete. Holy shit there aren’t loose ends now.
Short break, then I continue!
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Scrivener
I tried this program once before but (you know me) I didn’t do the tutorial and found it to be unnecessarily complex. Now that I’ve run through the basic tutorial, I’m left with the impression that I never should write without it ever again.
I’ve written five feature scripts* and every single one of them is a bewilderingly complex jaunt with a degree of bizarreness that threatens to completely alienate the reader.
Frankly, iterating on these scripts the way that I do is exhausting - they’re so complex and unusual that balancing accessibility with good storytelling leads to plenty of failures of both. I need all the help I can get, and a comprehensive program that allows me to instantly jump from broad strokes to minutia and back, turning on and off scenes as I go, evaluating them, trying out new ones, and so on…well, it all sound really nice. Maybe I’ll get one to a place where I’ll look at it and say ‘okay, I’m happy with that.’
*more for me than you, but those scripts are: Wicked City, Galactic Tollbooth 2199, Anticipate, Dead Reckoning, and Good Brother.
