#like I said. a lot of people are used to bad writers and mediocre storytelling

[emblazons]

One thing I’ve noticed while rewatching ST is the gratuitous use of flashbacks. And I mean gratuitous. Every single scene where they’re recalling something that’s happened in the past gets a flashback, even if that event happened in the previous ep. Any emotional moment gets a flashback. Max’s flashback montage saves her life. El’s flashback montage helps her revive Max’s heart. Now, do we really think it was a coincidence that the monologue had only one flashback to the very first day that they met? Is it a coincidence that it was the only moment in the monologue that made El smile bc she was choked and miserable for the rest of his speech? Why is her only happy memory from before their relationship began? Why weren’t there flashbacks to their reunion hug in s2 or even s4, of their snowball kiss, of them being a couple in s3, or even their cute friendship in s1? Why was this the only memory shown to us? I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

I’M SO GLAD YOU SEND THIS ASK.

Flashbacks are definitely a Duffer favorite storytelling choice, even when they use them as a part of the “linear” narrative—I’m thinking of how we got what is under all circumstances a “flashback” in S2 when El went into Mama’s mind even though it’s technically happening in the linear time of the story. It’s effective and better than just having characters tell us what’s happening, in line with that whole “show, don’t tell” mantra that almost all storytellers are given as writing advice.

It helps that they’re really natural at including them—honestly The Void is one of my favorite narrative devices they have for that reason, because it makes context easy without having to give us whole (ironically enough) monologues…because monologues are almost always just telling us things we don’t get to see ourselves.

I think that plays a LOT into why Mike got a monologue and not a flashback (to more than just one moment anyway) when he was confessing—we were being told Mike felt/did something we never actually saw him do in the narrative (show El he loved her in a way she accepted), which contrasts how the Duffers tell us the story the rest of the time.

Especially contrasting the way El had a whole montage of flashbacks to time with Max, and when Max was Vecna’d we got a whole flashback to her happy memories to save her…it is pretty clear why Mike’s longwinded talk was not at all effective in saving anyone—though a lot of people who watch the show surface level miss that, because they’re used to shitty writers storytellers who tell, rather than show. To catch the weight what the Duffers intended to do with mike’s monologue, you have to pay attention to how the Duffers have been telling their story since the beginning—in flashbacks, not long winded words.

It’s a simple enough to recognize if you’re familiar with The Duffers storytelling (as you point out). El’s only having one flashback (followed by them not showing us her response to the monologue + her not speaking to Mike and walking past him) is just further adding to the weight of the point—Mike’s actions did not back up his words, and so she doesn’t accept or believe them. 🤷🏽‍♀️

[fox-bright]

A note for all the people who started writing in 2020, and are submitting stories now:

I’m a submissions editor (that is, I read slush) for a fairly well-known SF magazine, and in this read period I am noticing a considerably higher-than-usual percentage of manuscripts that are rejected for severe grammatical errors.  When I mentioned this on a writing forum, I received a number of comments and PMs from writers who were surprised that I don’t “just fix the errors.” I’ve realized that it’s likely a lot of people don’t really know what a submissions editor does, or what happens to their short story after it’s submitted.

I’m not the magazine editor. I don’t get to send you the fun email that says “We’d like to buy your story!” and at no point do I have any place tinkering with your story at all. It’s not my place to correct errors.

I’m a filter. It is my job to take twenty stories and find one good one out of them to send on to the magazine editors. The other nineteen get rejected. I take stories, one after the other, from the submissions pile and I read through them until I hit a place where I say “No, this one doesn’t work” and I send a rejection letter. If the writer is skilled, I get to the end of the story without hitting that point, and I go “Huh!” and I set it aside for a day. I sleep on it. I go back and read it again, and if I get to the end and go “This is pretty great!” I send it on to the magazine editors, who do the next round of the process. If I am myself very lucky, I start reading a story and immediately forget that I’m looking for reasons to reject it. I am consumed by the drive to finish it, and I immediately send it on.

The second-to-last category is, as I said, composed of about one in twenty stories. The last category? That’s rare. One in a hundred, maybe. Maybe one in twice that many.

It is a lot more likely that I pull a story, open it up, get two or three double-spaced pages in, sigh, tab back to the submissions page and hit the “send rejection” button.

There are a lot of reasons that a story might not make it past me. There’s the basic stuff (does it meet submission guidelines? Is the format correct? Is there a cover letter with the necessary information about the writer? Is it in English? Is it a short story, not a novella, a novel, song lyrics, poetry, or a picture book?) and then we move on through grammar, readability, originality of concept (is it a fiftieth story about sex robots?), genre fit (we don’t publish non-fantastic westerns, or noir, or gonzo horror slasher stories, for instance, even if they’re very well-written), and increasingly arcane, specific things that any particular magazine is looking for. Those specific things differ, from publication to publication; there are good markets that want that gonzo horror robot porn western, for instance.

But the thing is, I can’t even get to looking at all of that top-level stuff if trying to get through your grammar and spelling is like stubbing my toe on concrete every other step.

There’s a tag on Archive Of Our Own that sees pretty common use, variations of “No Beta, We Die Like Men!” meaning that the chapter went up without ever getting a second set of eyes on it. Nobody checked it over for grammar, spelling, cultural accuracy, et cetera.  And for fanfic, that’s often fine. You are (by law) not trying to sell your fic, and you’re giving it to readers who generally already know the setting, the characters, the premise of the original work that the fic is based on. Other writers have done all of that trailblazing for the fic author. So if a fic has bad grammar, or weak characterization, or any of the other flaws common to new, casual writers, it’s not such a big deal; we already have a strong construct in our heads that we’re projecting the fic onto. We want to read good fic, but even mediocre fic can have something satisfying about it.

With original fiction, all the work is being done by the writer right then. There aren’t thirty TV episodes, a hundred hours of video games, forty volumes of manga sitting in the reader’s head already waiting for your story to join them. This means that every little thing, every word, is important. Every piece of grammar. Every clue about characterization. You’re building it all in front of us and if it’s nothing but dialogue then we can’t understand your setting, and if it’s nothing but ponderous worldbuilding, we’ll never come to be interested in your characters. And if there are fifteen grammatical errors on a page, it’s too distracting to immerse ourselves in any of it.

I don’t think that most submissions editors like rejecting stories. I think that all of us, who love reading and the craft of storytelling, would much prefer that when we pull your story from the submission pile, it grabs us by the throat. But we have to reject the ones that still need work.

You don’t want to submit a story that needs more work. You want to submit the absolute best thing that you can write. 

So if you’re new to submitting stories, particularly to professional markets, I highly recommend that you get a second set of eyes on it before sending it on to me or any other slush reader who will have to bounce it for the sixth dangling participle in two pages. Have a hyperfluent, passionate reader friend go over it for you in exchange for a pizza. Get in with a writing group (there are a lot online!). 

And if you don’t  have access to anyone else who can help, I suggest that you take the story and you put it in a box for a month or three. Come back to it with fresh eyes after leaving it entirely alone for a few weeks, and read it out loud. Record what you read, and then listen to it! A lot of the mistakes should pop out into sharp visibility.

[ordinaryschmuck]

What I Thought About Loki (Season One)

(Sorry this is later than it should have been. I may or may not be experiencing burnout from reviewing every episode of the gayest show Disney has ever produced)

Salutations, random people on the internet. I am an Ordinary Schmuck. I write stories and reviews and draw comics and cartoons.

Do you want to know what's fun about the Marvel Cinematic Universe? It is now officially at the point where the writers can do whatever the hell they want.

A TV series about two Avengers getting stuck in a series of sitcoms as one of them explores their personal grief? Sure.

Another series as a guy with metal bird wings fights the inner racism of his nation to take the mantel of representing the idea of what that nation should be? Why not?

A forgettable movie about a superspy and her much more mildly entertaining pretend family working together to kill the Godfather? F**king go for it (Let that be a taste for my Black Widow review in October)!

There is no limit to what you can get with these movies and shows anymore, and I personally consider that a good thing. It allows this franchise to lean further into creative insanity, thus embracing its comic roots in the process. Take Loki, for example. It is a series about an alternate version of one of Marvel's best villains bouncing around the timeline with Owen Wilson to prevent the end of the universe. It sounds like just the right amount of wackiness that it should be too good to fail.

But that's today's question: Did it fail? To find out my own answer to that, we're gonna have to dive deep into spoilers. So be wary as you continue reading.

With that said, let's review, shall we?

WHAT I LIKED

Loki Himself: Let's get this out of the way: This isn't the same Loki we've seen grow within five movies. The Loki in this series, while similar in many ways, is still his very own character. He goes through his own redemption and developments that fleshes out Loki, all through ways that, if I'm being honest with you, is done much better in six-hour-long episodes than in past films. Loki's story was already entertaining, but he didn't really grow that much aside from being this chaotic neutral character instead of this wickedly evil supervillain. Through his series, we get to see a gradual change in his personality, witnessing him understand his true nature and "glorious purpose," to the point where he's already this completely different person after one season. Large in part because of the position he's forced into.

Some fans might say that the series is less about Loki and more about the TVA. And while I can unquestionably see their point, I still believe that the TVA is the perfect way for Loki to grow. He's a character all about causing chaos and controlling others, so forcing him to work for an organization that takes that away allows Loki time to really do some introspection. Because if his tricks don't work, and his deceptions can't fool others, then who is he? Well, through this series, we see who he truly is: A character who is alone and is intended to be nothing more than a villain whose only truly selfless act got him killed in the end. Even if he wants to better himself, he can't because that "goes against the sacred timeline." Loki is a person who is destined to fail, and he gets to see it all with his own eyes by looking at what his life was meant to be and by observing what it could have been. It's all tragic and yet another example of these shows proving how they allow underdeveloped characters in the MCU a better chance to shine. Because if Loki can give even more depth to a character who's already compelling as is, then that is a feat worth admiration.

The Score: Let's give our gratitude toward Natalie Holt, who f**king killed it with this series score. Every piece she made is nothing short of glorious. Sylvie's and the TVA's themes particularly stand out, as they perfectly capture who/what they're representing. Such as how Sylvie's is big and boisterous where the TVA's sound eerie and almost unnatural. Holt also finds genius ways to implement other scores into the series, from using familiar tracks from the Thor movies to even rescoring "Ride of the Valkyries" in a way that makes a scene even more epic than it already could have been. The MCU isn't best known for its musical scores, partly because they aim to be suitable rather than memorable. But every now and again, something as spectacular as the Loki soundtrack sprinkles through the cracks of mediocrity. Making fans all the more grateful because of it.

There’s a lot of Talking: To some, this will be considered a complaint. Most fans of the MCU come for the action, comedy, and insanely lovable characters. Not so much for the dialogue and exposition. That being said, I consider all of the talking to be one of Loki's best features. All the background information about the TVA added with the character's backstories fascinates me, making me enthusiastic about learning more. Not everyone else will be as interested in lore and world-building as others, but just because something doesn't grab you, in particular, doesn't mean it isn't appealing at all. Case in point: There's a reason why the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise has lasted as long as it has, and it's not entirely because of how "scary" it is.

There's also the fact that most of the dialogue in Loki is highly engaging. I'll admit, some scenes do drag a bit. However, every line is delivered so well that I'm more likely to hang on to every word when characters simply have honest conversations with each other. And if I can be entertained by Loki talking with Morbius about jetskis, then I know a show is doing at least something right.

It’s Funny: This shouldn't be a surprise. The MCU is well-known for its quippy humor in the direct acknowledgment that it doesn't take itself too seriously. With that said, it is clear which movies and shows are intended to be taken seriously, while others are meant to be comedies. Loki tries to be a bit of both. There are some heavy scenes that impact the characters, and probably even some fans, due to how well-acted and professionally written they can be. However, this is also a series about a Norse god traveling through time to deal with alternate versions of himself, with one of them being an alligator. I'd personally consider it a crime against storytelling to not make it funny. Thankfully, the writers aren't idiots and know to make the series fun with a few flawlessly timed and delivered jokes that never really take away from the few good grim moments that actually work.

It Kept Me Surprised: About everything I appreciate about Loki, the fact that I could never really tell what direction it was going is what I consider its absolute best feature. Every time I think I knew what was going to happen, there was always this one big twist that heavily subverted any and every one of my expectations. Such as how each time I thought I knew who the big bad was in this series, it turns out that there was an even worse threat built up in the background. The best part is that these twists aren't meant for shock value. It's always supposed to drive the story forward, and on a rewatch, you can always tell how the seeds have been planted for making each surprise work. It's good that it kept fans guessing, as being predictable and expected would probably be the worst path to take when making a series about Loki, a character who's all about trickery and deception. So bonus points for being in line with the character.

The TVA: You can complain all you want about how the show is more about the TVA than it is Loki, but you can't deny how the organization in question is a solid addition to the MCU. Initially, it was entertaining to see Loki of all characters be taken aback by how the whole process works. And it was worth a chuckle seeing Infinity Stones, the most powerful objects in the universe, get treated as paperweights. However, as the season continues and we learn about the TVA, the writers show that their intention is to try and write a message about freedom vs. control. We've seen this before in movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier or Captain America: Civil War, but with those films, it always felt like the writers were leaning more towards one answer instead of making it obscure over which decision is correct. This is why I enjoy the fact that Loki went on saying that there really is no right answer for this scenario. If the TVA doesn't prune variants, it could result in utter chaos and destruction that no one from any timeline can prepare themselves for. But when they do prune variants along with their timelines, it takes away all free will, forcing people to be someone they probably don't even want to be. It's a situation where there really is no middle ground. Even if you bring up how people could erase timelines more destructive than others, that still takes away free will on top of how there's no unbiased way of deciding which timelines are better or worse. And the series found a brilliant way to explain this moral: The season starts by showing how the TVA is necessary, to later point out how there are flaws and evil secrets within it, and ends things with the revelation that there are consequences without the TVA keeping the timeline in check. It's an epic showcase of fantastic ideas met with exquisite execution that I can't help but give my seal of approval to.

Miss Minutes: Not much to say. This was just a cute character, and I love that Tara Strong, one of the most popular voice actors, basically plays a role in the MCU now.

Justifying Avengers: Endgame: Smartest. Decision. This series. Made. Bar none.

Because when you establish that the main plot is about a character getting arrested for f**king over the timeline, you're immediately going to get people questioning, "Why do the Avengers get off scot-free?" So by quickly explaining how their time-traveling antics were supposed to happen, it negates every one of those complaints...or most of them. There are probably still a-holes who are poking holes in that logic, but they're not the ones writing this review, so f**k them.

Mobius: I didn't really expect Owen Wilson to do that good of a job in Loki. Primarily due to how the Cars franchise discredits him as a professional actor for...forever. With that said, Owen Wilson's Mobius might just be one of the most entertaining characters in the series. Yes, even more so than Loki himself. Mobius acts as the perfect straight man to Loki's antics, what with being so familiar with the supposed god of mischief through past variations of him. Because of that, it's always a blast seeing these two bounce off one another through Loki trying to trick a Loki expert, and said expert even deceiving Loki at times. Also, on his own, Mobius is still pretty fun. He has this sort of witty energy that's often present in Phil Coulson (Love that character too, BTW), but thanks to Owen Wilson's quirks in his acting, there's a lot more energy to Mobius than one would find in Coulson. As well as a tad bit of tragedy because of Mobius being a variant and having no clue what his life used to be. It's a lot to unpack and is impressively written, added to how it's Owen Wilson who helps make the character work as well as he did. Cars may not have done much for his career, but Loki sure as hell showed his strengths.

Ravonna Renslayer: Probably the least entertaining character, but definitely one of the most intriguing. At least to me.

Ravonna is a character who is so steadfast in her believes that she refuses to accept that she may be wrong. Without the proper writing, someone like Ravonna could tick off (ha) certain people. Personally, I believe that Ravonna is written well enough where even though I disagree with her belief, I can understand where she's coming from. She's done so much for the TVA, bringing an end to so many variants and timelines that she can't accept that it was all for nothing. In short, Ravonna represents the control side of the freedom vs. control theme that the writers are pushing. Her presence is necessary while still being an appealing character instead of a plot device. Again, at least to me.

Hunter B-15: I have no strong feelings one way or another towards B-15's personality, but I will admit that I love the expectation-subversion done with her. She has this air of someone who's like, "I'm this by-the-books badass cop, and I will only warm up to this cocky rookie after several instances of them proving themselves." That's...technically not B-15. She's the first to see Loki isn't that bad, but only because B-15 is the first in the main cast to learn the hidden vile present in the TVA. It makes her change in point of view more believable than how writers usually work a character like hers, on top of adding a new type of engaging motivation for why she fights. I may not particularly enjoy her personality, but I do love her contributions.

Loki Watching What His Life Could Have Been: This was a brilliant decision by the writers. It's basically having Loki speedrun his own character development through witnessing what he could have gone through and seeing the person he's meant to be, providing a decent explanation for why he decides to work for the TVA. And on the plus side, Tom Hiddleston did a fantastic job at portraying the right emotions the character would have through a moment like this. Such as grief, tearful mirth, and borderline shock and horror. It's a scene that no other character could go through, as no one but Loki needed a wake-up call for who he truly is. This series might heavily focus on the TVA, but scenes like this prove just who's the star of the show.

Loki Causing Mischief in Pompeii: I just really love this scene. It's so chaotic and hilarious, all heavily carried by the fact that you can tell that Tom Hiddleston is having the time of his damn life being this character. What more can I say about it.

Sylvie: The first of many surprises this season offered, and boy was she a great one.

Despite being an alternate version of Loki, I do appreciate that Sylvie's her own character and not just "Loki, but with boobs." She still has the charm and charisma, but she also comes across as more hardened and intelligent when compared to the mischievous prick we've grown to love. A large part of that is due to her backstory, which might just be the most tragic one these movies and shows have ever made. Sylvie got taken away when she was a little girl, losing everything she knew and loved, and it was all for something that the people who arrested her don't even remember. How sad is that? The fact that her life got permanently screwed over, leaving zero impact on the people responsible for it. As badass as it is to hear her say she grew up at the ends of a thousand worlds (that's an album title if I ever heard one), it really is depressing to know what she went through. It also makes her the perfect candidate to represent the freedom side of the freedom vs. control argument. Because she's absolutely going to want to fight to put an end to the people who decide how the lives of trillions should be. Those same people took everything from Sylvie, and if I were in her position, I'd probably do the same thing. Of course, we all know the consequences that come from this, and people might criticize Sylvie the same way they complain about Thor and Star Lord for screwing over the universe in Avengers: Infinity War. But here's the thing: Sylvie's goals are driven by vengeance, which can blind people from any other alternatives. Meaning her killing He Who Remains is less of a story flaw and more of a character flaw. It may be a bad decision, but that's for Season Two Sylvie to figure out. For now, I'll just appreciate the well-written and highly compelling character we got this season and eagerly wait as we see what happens next with her.

The Oneshot in Episode Three: Not as epic as the hallway scene in Daredevil, but I do find it impressive that it tries to combine real effects, fighting, and CGI in a way where it's all convincing enough.

Lady Sif Kicking Loki in the D**k: This is a scene that makes me realize why I love this series. At first, I laugh at Loki being stuck in a time loop where Lady Sif kicks him in the d**k over and over again. But a few scenes later, this setup actually works as a character moment that explains why Loki does the things he does.

This series crafted phenomenal character development through Loki getting kicked in the d**k by the most underrated badass of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's a perfect balance of comedy and drama that not every story can nail, yet Loki seemed like it did with very little effort.

Classic Loki: This variant shows the true tragedy of being Loki. The only way to survive is to live in isolation, far away from everything and everyone he loves, only to end up having his one good deed result in his death anyways. Classic Loki is definitive proof that no matter what face they have, Lokis never gets happy endings. They're destined to lose, but at least this version knows that if you're going out, you're going out big. And at least he got to go out with a mischievous laugh.

(Plus, the fact that he's wearing Loki's first costume from the comics is a pretty cute callback).

Alligator Loki: Alligator Loki is surprisingly adorable, and if you know me, you know that I can't resist cute s**t. It's not in my nature.

Loki on Loki Violence: If you thought Loki going ham in Pompeii was chaotic, that was nothing to this scene. Because watching these Lokis backstab one another, to full-on murdering each other, is a moment that is best described as pure, unadulterated chaos. And I. Loved. Every. Second of it.

The Opening Logo for the Season Finale: I'm still not that big of a fan of the opening fanfare playing for each episode, but I will admit that it was a cool feature to play vocal clips of famous quotes when the corresponding character appears. It's a great way of showing the chaos of how the "sacred timeline" works without having it to be explained further.

The Citadel: I adore the set design of the Citadel. So much history and backstory shine through the state of every room the characters walk into. You get a perfect picture of what exactly happened, but seeing how ninety percent of the place is in shambles, it's pretty evident that not everything turned out peachy keen. And as a personal note, my favorite aspect of the Citadel is the yellow cracks in the walls. It looks as though reality itself is cracking apart, which is pretty fitting when considering where the Citadel actually is.

He Who Remains: This man. I. Love. This man.

I love this man for two reasons.

A. He's a ton of fun. Credit to that goes to the performance delivered by Jonathon Majors. Not only is it apparent that Majors is having a blast, but he does a great job at conveying how He Who Remains is a strategic individual but is still very much off his rocker. These villains are always my favorite due to how much of a blast it is seeing someone with high intelligence just embracing their own insanity. If you ask me, personalities are always essential for villains. Because even when they have the generic plot to rule everything around them, you're at least going to remember who they are for how entertaining they were. Thankfully He Who Remains has that entertainment value, as it makes me really excited for his eventual return, whether it'd be strictly through Loki Season Two or perhaps future movies.

And B. He Who Remains is a fantastic foil for Loki. He Who Remains is everything Loki wishes he could have been, causing so much death, destruction, and chaos to the multiverse. The important factor is that he does it all through order and control. The one thing Loki despises, and He Who Remains uses it to his advantage. I feel like that's what makes him the perfect antagonist to Loki, thanks to him winning the game by not playing it. I would love it if He Who Remains makes further appearances in future movies and shows, especially given how he's hinted to be Kane the Conqueror, but if he's only the main antagonist in Loki, I'm still all for it. He was a great character in his short time on screen, and I can't wait to see what happens next with him.

WHAT I DISLIKED

Revealing that Loki was D.B. Cooper: A cute scene, but it's really unnecessary. It adds nothing to the plot, and I feel like if it was cut out entirely, it wouldn't have been the end of the world...Yeah. That's it.

That's my one and only complaint about this season.

Maybe some scenes drag a bit, and I guess Episode Three is kind of the weakest, but there's not really anything that this series does poorly that warrants an in-depth complaint.

Nope.

Nothing at all...

…

...

...I'm not touching that "controversy" of Loki falling for Sylvie instead of Mobius. That's a situation where there are no winners.

Only losers.

Exclusively losers.

Other than that, this season was amazing!

IN CONCLUSION

I'd give the first season of Loki a well-earned A, with a 9.5 through my usual MCU ranking system. It turns out, it really is the best type of wackiness that was just too good to fail. The characters are fun and likable, the comedy and drama worked excellently, and the expansive world-building made me really intrigued with the more we learned. It's hard to say if Season Two will keep this momentum, but that's for the future to figure out. For now, let's just sit back and enjoy the chaos.

(Now, if you don't excuse me, I have to figure out how to review Marvel's What If...)

[titusmoody]

2021 Q2 stuff

Games

Return of the Obra Dinn -- Very different. A great experience to play, it doesn’t use any typical “gamer” skills or knowledge. It also hit on a lot of my personally prefered sensibilities (stories self-contained to ships, non-linear storytelling, mysteries, and meticulous attention to detail)

Kentucky Route Zero -- Even more different. I’m glad I played it for the atmosphere, though it didn’t click with me the way Obra Dinn did. Extremely atmospheric and cool, but also has a strong academic curiosity to it.

DOOM (2016)-- Okay, we’re back to regular video games. Everything about this one seems very carefully crafted. I had a good, mindless time with this one.

Spider-Man -- Not as well-crafted as DOOM, but also less juvenile. I also had a good, mindless time with this one.

Metroid: Samus Returns -- Feels like Metroid. The moment-to-moment combat is different than Super Metriod and Fusion, which is a nice way to keep things from getting stale.

TV

Shadow and Bone -- Sometimes tropes exist because they make for good stories. This show was a good example of that.

Pani Poni Dash -- WTF Japan, in a good way

Princess Tutu -- Much like I felt about Cowboy Bebop, this show was very well-made and I had an easy time appreciating what it was doing, though in the end it’s not the kind of thing that’s really for me

Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid -- Pleasant to watch, mostly lighthearted but could definitely have emotional moments here and there to keep you interested.

Kakegurui -- Shows like this are the reason anime fans are so self-depricating. It was thoroughly trashy, but I’d be lying if I said that the trashiness didn’t lead to a lot of fun.

Love, Chunibyo, and other Delusions -- An excellent comfort-watch. About a high-schooler trying to run away from his cringe-y middle school phase. I definitely have criticisms of it, but I’m also definitely going to watch it again.

Devilman Crybaby -- I swear, Masaaki Uasa takes the most overdone premises and portrays them in such bonkers ways that they become pretty cool. This isn’t one of the best examples of that, but it still works.

Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket -- Part of Gundam’s brand is that it shows the effect of wars on individuals. This is a great small-scale example of that. 

She-Ra -- It’s good. The plot kinda meanders and the backstory lore is presented confusingly/unclearly at times. But the central characters are good enough to carry at least a few seasons, and the secondary characters really elevate the whole thing. I was personally very fond of Scorpia as well as the way the writers used Entrapta both in the plot and as a character foil.

Chernobyl -- Second time watching this, it’s definitely a favorite. 

Movies

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again -- You already know what this is like and whether or not you enjoy the sort of thing it is. 

Moulin Rouge -- It’s hard to watch Mamma Mia without thinking of this one, so I watched it soon after.

Minari -- My personal reward for being fully vaccinated was to go to the movies by myself. This was a good movie, though overshadowed by the circumstances in which I saw it. I would’ve been very happy to be seeing anything.

My Fair Lady -- An iconic pop-culture touchstone. Not my favorite musical, for sure.

Interstellar -- This movie is in the odd position of currently being my favorite Christopher Nolan movie despite the fact that I don’t like it nearly as much as I liked either The Dark Knight or Memento when I saw those for the first time.

The Perfect Storm -- George Clooney, big wave.

Legally Blonde -- I didn’t hear the term “sitcom” until oddly late in life, and when I heard it, I assumed it meant movies like this where there aren’t a ton of jokes, but the characters are constantly in inherently funny situations. I don’t like this type of humor that much.

Jurassic Park -- A big “moral” of the movie was “don’t trust computers to do anything important” but today it’s hard not to get the message as “never underpay your system administrator” instead.

Apollo 13 -- Pretty good

ET -- I really didn’t like this movie and I don’t quite know what it doesn’t do that Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones do. Imminent danger seem to be part of it, but I don’t think that’s the whole picture.

The Day After Tomorrow -- *shrug* I had fun watching it

Pearl Harbor -- expected it to be bad, it was bad. It was definitely bad in interesting ways, and was almost good a lot of the time.

Die Hard -- I was looking for suspenseful movies with clear character motivation and this fit the description. It was good, though I didn’t like it quite as much as I hoped to.

Star Trek V -- Star Trek is often silly and I just can’t get on board with some of the silliness, like the last part of this movie.

Terminator 2 -- Yeah, I do like suspense. I don’t think I’ll look back on this as a favorite, but I was pretty into it. Moreso than Die Hard.

Cast Away -- Pretty good

Predator -- Somewhere between Die Hard and Terminator 2. I was a bit bored by the end, which ironically was the part that most closely resembled what I was looking for.

Braveheart -- I think romanticising medieval Europe is fun and cool. Unfortunately this movie has some creepy sexual hang-ups as well as rampant “no step on snek” energy that ruin the whole thing.

Redline -- Just a cool looking movie

State of Play -- I forgot the whole plot of this already, but I enjoyed it

Troy -- It’s not as bad as its reputation suggests, though the end does get really over-the-top cheesy

Demon Slayer -- I liked going to the movies by myself so much the first time that I did it again. This time it was in a much more full theater and I was one of very few people over 17. Fun action anime movie, though.

Gladiator -- I’m so disappointed that I didn’t connect to this movie, since over and over I felt like I was very close to loving it. I think the revenge motivation was what ultimately prevented me from really getting into it.

K-19: The Widowmaker -- Hell yeah, extremely tense submarine scenes, that’s exactly what I wanted.

The Manchurian Candidate (2004) -- The movie felt like it wanted its premise to feel plausible, but it really didn’t. Still pretty good, though

The Big Lebowski -- Still not a big fan of this one. 

The Naked Gun -- This confirms that my sense of humor has not gotten more refined since age 17 or so. I still thought this was pretty funny.

Dances With Wolves -- Mostly just boring. 

Angels and Demons -- Even at age 15 the book’s riddles and clues premise felt a bit too contrived. The movie has the additional disadvantage that verbal explanations are the most boring way to resolve questions, unlike books where words are all you have.

Chinatown -- Meh, a fine detective story but nothing really clicked with me. The director’s life is wild, though. He escaped the holocaust, had his pregnant wife murdered by the Manson family, and is currently a fugitive from justice for raping a 13 year old.

The Core -- Like The Perfect Storm, appealing in the “so bad it’s good” way.

Porco Rosso -- Think the type of character study of Kiki’s Delivery Service, but about a middle-aged man, so it doesn’t resonate with Miyazaki’s audience enough for many people to talk about it.

Uncut Gems -- My second time watching it, it’s definitely a favorite. Between this and A Serious Man, I seem to love extremely stressful movies about mediocre jewish men.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) -- Interesting to compare/contrast with the other version. I like both

Galaxy Quest -- another movie that fits my personal definition of what “sitcom” should mean. Again, not my favorite type of humor

Fantastic Planet -- Looks like something between the animated sketches in Monty Python and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Very weird, it personally really worked for me.

Scarface -- I think romanticising organized crime is fun and cool. 

In the Heights -- colorful, catchy, happy and fun. 

Books

The House in the Cerulean Sea -- a good comfort-read. very simplistic and a little clunky and amateur-ish, but ultimately pretty cute.

There There -- not a comfort-read at all. A super raw look at the modern life of a variety of Native American situations. Very harsh but also interesting.

Six of Crows -- Fine YA fantasy fluff.

[thekrawra]

Ricky (and Gina and Nini but mainly about Ricky): MOVING FORWARD AND BACKTRACKING (WOW OKAY SO EPISODE NINE HAPPENED)

okay.

okay.

okay.

before i get into this, my usual preface: this is all personal opinion and interpretation based on how i understand the show. ship your ships, love the characters you love, read into what you want and forget about what you don’t. no hate, just a fun love of ships. 

that being said: i genuinely am not sure how this season is going to end. 

ricky and nini still sees likely. but we are one episode away from the end, and nothing said convinced me that ricky and nini should be together. 

that’s not saying they won’t be together...but just that no one really seemed all that enthusiastic about the idea. one of the first scenes we get in this ep is both big red and kourtney, ricky and nini’s best friends, respond negatively to the idea. 

“just for a moment” is a great song for sure, and i think it nails the dynamic and joshua and olivia did an amazing job with it. and while it’s very obviously a love song: it’s literally called just for a moment. so it doesn’t really feel like a song that references and/or really embodies leading into a potential longish term relationship. 

then when gina shows up, ricky first mentions he’s changed, but then corrects himself saying that maybe he’s gone back to how he was before. it’s about as direct a characterization statement you can get as far as development goes. 

now this isn’t a hard and fast rule: but it’s generally a discouraged principle to backtrack on character development. character development is a huge part of writing and characterization and generally rule number one of screenwriting is that your plot and characters should move forward in some capacity. the idea of “going back to as it was before” generally is used as a tool to reminisce on the past, and occasionally juxtapose against forward change: and normally forward change wins. even in stories where the idea of going back is much more extreme (ie apocalyptic films trying to “fix the world” and revert it to how it was before, time travel, etc) normally there’s a point where the characters have to acknowledge that they have to move forward. that they can’t just go back to the way things were before. 

further, to backtrack on character development makes most of what happened before seem inconsequential. again: not a hard and fast rule, but when your characters either don’t develop or go back on their development makes it feel like they didn’t come out of their experiences with anything to show for it. it’s normally a tactic used to imply some sort of negative connotation with the character - that they can’t process what’s happened/that they are beginning to hit a downward spiral that they don’t think they can deal with/that it’s too much/that they are scared to move forward. rarely is the backtrack in character meant to imply something good. 

by having ricky admit that maybe he’s gone “back” implies that he’s probably been seeking out the regular, and admitting that he hasn’t been moving forward. it’s an interesting choice to have especially this close to the ending because normally, when a character becomes aware they are going “back” something happens that then pushes them forward. 

then there’s the fact that now that todd has shown up, ricky now has to deal with an issue that has been pushing his arc (his parents splitting and change) in his mentality of having gone back to how things were in the summer (before the summer even). 

there’s no right or wrong answer on how that will play out, and what makes sense to me might not be what writers will go with because no two people would tell the story the same. so this is just what i get from the scenes and what makes sense to me with my style of storytelling. 

gina’s return forced ricky to on some level realize that while she’s been gone he’s gone back to “before” (in this case who we were introduced to in the beginning of the series). this isn’t saying that gina and ricky are definitely going to get together but it’s also not encouraging that ricky and nini are going to get together. 

then everything happens and todd shows up and all of it mirrors and parallels to the rest of the season. here’s ricky who did the musical originally to impress nini, deals with change and his parents splitting up, grows close with gina and finds a home in the musical (reshapes his support system in a way), and when gina leaves, he focuses back on nini. when she comes back, he admits to having gone back to “”how he always had been...back to the summer”. then, with this mindset and realization, he’s once again faced with dealing with a situation with his parents, and he freezes, and he knows how much this means to nini so he’s giving it up to ej for her (echoing back to: “if you really cared about me, you’d let someone who wants this part play it”). again, i think him doing this 100% shows he cares about nini, but i don’t think it is a good sign for them romantically. he’s ready to give up everything he’s spent the season working towards for nini -- a give and take that really isn’t healthy for him (just look at how happy and how good he was going performing before he saw his mom). point is he’s conflicted, he’s confused, and he’s defaulting. rather than pushing forward, he’s withdrawing and moving back (and before anyone says anything - i can admit this point is super subjective on how you read relationships and ricky. more than anything i think his actions are more about ricky than helping to support any particular relationship, but i thought it was big enough that i’d address my thoughts on it anyway) 

all that being said though...

to be honest, i really can’t figure this show out. it either has really great writing or really okay? bad? mediocre? inconsistent? writing and it’s entirely dependant on how they tie up their plot lines in episode 10. they’ve been laying a lot of seeds and have a lot of really interesting character development and its clear they are conscious of their backtracking of ricky’s character when they had gina leave. they’ve played into some sort of element of ricky and nini not being a good romantic pairing (something they honestly laid on pretty thick with a) their friends immediate reaction being hesitancy and very clearly not thinking its a good idea, b) they aren’t looking for the same things, and c) they’ve been unable to really talk to each other about any sort of romantic attraction or feelings (as in any time their romantic relationship is brought up it gets awkward/uncomfortable and they can barely look at each other)). they basically confirmed that gina did change ricky to an extent, and without her he went back to how he was before (they also basically confirmed that when she came back, it was like she’d never left, which is why ricky was as confused as he was when he spoke with her - he didn’t know how to feel because there’s two different mindsets there: who he developed into throughout the course of the series and who he was before the series/in ep 1 and when gina left, rather than continuing to move forward he went back to the second, rather than continuing to adapt)

what does any of this mean? well to me, ricky and nini just doesn't feel right at this point? and even though the pessimist in me thinks ricky and nini are going to get together next ep, i just can’t wrap my head around how it will work considering a) the acknowledgement of a lack of forward momentum with them and b) the lack of any positive connotations with them - both facts that the writers seem to be aware of if the recent episode shows for anything. 

and look, there’s obviously no one way to screenwrite and most of what i’ve been talking about is based on the classes i’ve taken by the teachers i’ve had, mixed with my own personal style. so there’s no hard and fast rules. this is slightly educated speculation based on my own experiences with the craft (which aren’t necessarily how the writers feel: there’s not really any right or wrong - just stories some people like and some people don’t)

on the other hand, ricky and gina have room to grow as a couple. they’ve had connotations of moving forward, of helping each other individually and ultimately that helps them as a pair - their give and take seems more equal than the give and take that comes with ricky and nini. so season two definitely seems to lean ricky and gina for me regardless of how season one ends. 

and yes, part of me still thinks that ricky and nini are season one endgame - we’ve all been prepared for it all season because it seems inevitable. but so far, the writing of the show just doesn’t seem to lean that way. 

of course, there’s a lot more you could talk about in this episode. did ej get gina the plane ticket? who sent the flowers? god can we all just be pissed at ricky’s mom and todd (like come on todd, you couldn’t even show up on time?)? i’m excited for next week to see how they tie the season up. 

i’m excited to see how they handle ricky’s character moving forward now that he’s acknowledged he’s moving back. i’m hoping nini realizes those words she says to gina in the sneak peek apply to her as well (that she has a chance with YAC and she should go for it! it’s an amazing opportunity). i’d love to see them talk and realize that they should probably just be friends (really good friends but friends). i’d love to see gina be the one to get ricky to do the show (probably won’t happen but man i’d love it).

point is, i’m curious, excited, and honestly don’t know how this all is going to end. i just hope the writers move their characters forward, not back. 

[vincent-marie]

The Oft Overlooked A BUG’S LIFE

A BUG’S LIFE…

What can I really say about this movie that other animation fans on the internet haven’t already? It was critically dubbed Pixar’s most mediocre film before the horror that is the CARS franchise.

I was about nine years old when this film came out, and I really liked it then. Honestly, I still kind of do, but admittedly some of it is nostalgia on my part and I’m well aware that it could have been better.

Like I said, this film has been talked about by other online critics about how it is okay, at best. That it was just the Pixar placeholder in between the first two TOY STORY movies. However for the purposes of this article I would actually like to highlight some of the good things about this movie, or at least my reasoning for why I still have a fondness for it.

Now before I continue I do feel like I should address two big elephants in the room: Namely, John Lasseter and Kevin Spacey. Knowing what we know now about them, if you can’t watch this movie without feeling uncomfortable, I totally understand. I’ll admit it makes me a wee bit uncomfortable to watch the film now, and more so the behind-the-scenes featurette on the DVD. (Wish I could blur their ugly faces when they’re being interviewed…)

However my opinions of this film on its own have nothing to do with them or whatever they contributed to the film, so they are irrelevant to what I have to say here. As far as I’m concerned if they hadn’t been involved in the film someone else would have taken their place, and those other people would have done just as good a job, if not better. Not to mention they would have been able to do it without being complete and utter creeps. To conclude, Lasseter can go suck a jellyfish and I hope Spacey rots in hell.

I’m going to primarily talk about the things I like about this movie, both then and now. But before I get to that I’m going to talk about why I agree with most critics who consider this one of Pixar’s lesser films.

A big problem with the movie is primarily the story and characters being a bit weak.

Part of that problem is the story’s initial structure. It’s clearly a retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI; village is being attacked by thugs, one villager leaves to get help in the form of warriors, villager brings back help, and they successfully fight off the invaders.

Probably the biggest difference in story is SAMURAI ended on a bittersweet note due to casualties among the samurai themselves, whereas BUG’S LIFE didn’t have any real casualties on the heroes’ side. That said, though, it’s funny that the ants seemed so damn certain there would be.

Initially modeling an original story off of a classic isn’t a bad thing in of itself. Back when I was in college it was something a lot of my writing and animation professors encouraged: learn from the classics. Not just film, but also literature and mythology.

The thing is SEVEN SAMURAI as a film was three to four hours long. It had time to accommodate for its fairly large cast, while still keeping its focus on a select few.

BUG’S LIFE, however, was only maybe an hour and fifteen minutes long. The writers probably could have stood to trim down some of the Bug Circus and take time to polish the story rather than try to give EVERYBODY an opportunity to have a funny line.

Having a couple ensembles in place isn’t a bad thing. They had that in TOY STORY with Andy’s toys, the Little Green Men in the claw machine, and the mutant toys. The groups, however, were smaller in that movie, and in the case of the Mutant Toys they had no speaking lines and had to convey everything with silent acting.

However something that’s been pointed out is that with Pixar films there was always a real progression in technical quality. That with each movie they got better and better with the tool of their trade that was CG animation.

Let’s look back at TOY STORY. The reason they made the characters plastic toys was because that’s just what their character models at the time always looked like. It would be a long way before they could even consider rendering complex fur textures for MONSTERS INC., and more complex still Merida’s tangled head of hair in BRAVE. It’s why the human characters in TOY STORY also look a bit weird and plasticky by today’s standards.

With TOY STORY they accomplished lively character animation in 3D. With TOY STORY 2 they managed to make better looking, less stiff human models like Al of Al’s Toy Barn, and slightly nicer fur textures on Buster the dog. MONSTERS, INC. had the aforementioned complex fur textures for Sully and some pretty decent early snow effects.

So what did BUG’S LIFE accomplish on a technical level?

Two words: textures, and lighting.

The last time I watched BUG’S LIFE I was absolutely FLOORED by how beautiful the set pieces were.

Take this scene of Flik giving Dot a pep-talk.

All that detailing in the blades of grass in the background, the pebbles on the ground, the textures on the pebbles, the textures on Flik’s contraption, and even the textures on the characters. It blows my mind trying to imagine how long it took to create those models, differentiate between the more see-through nature of the grass blades and the opacity of everything else, and arrange them in a way that makes for a convincing bug’s eye view of a patch of grass.

Then there’s the scene of the grasshoppers breaking into the anthill.

TOY STORY had some decent lighting that helped establish the needed atmosphere, but I don’t recall it being nearly this crisp.

Once again, there’s the textures on the objects and characters. As a kid, while I was aware the film was CG animated, I found myself speculating if the grasshoppers’ muzzles were made of foam rubber.

These were all things I took for granted as a kid, because I did not yet have the experience to know just how much work and skill it takes to make 3D animation.

This is a still from a minute-long film I made in a 3D computer animation class. I was given maybe only a couple months to make it. That included having to navigate my way through these complex computer programs I was completely unfamiliar with, and technical difficulties like the textures not grafting onto the models right. Let me tell you, it was a pain in the ass.

I look at the backdrops for BUG’S LIFE and I’m left to ask: “How many computers CRASHED trying to render all that?” Because, believe me, that happens. A lot.

Also, here’s the thing. When technical elements of a film are done well, such as lighting or camera focus, the audience LITERALLY doesn’t notice it. They’re too swept up in the story because the visual storytelling keeps up the illusion for them. The audience only notices important technical details like this when they’re done BADLY, hence a lot of people outside the film industry really take for granted just how much work and skill is taken into making a film that looks good.

(It’s why I think everyone should watch FOOD FIGHT at least once in their lives, especially animation fans.)

Okay, while it is inevitable that I would bring up Dreamworks’ ANTZ, I’m not going to talk too much about it. (It’s like the Cola Wars; everyone inevitably picks a side.) All I’ll say for now is I’ve always preferred BUG’S LIFE because it’s nicer-looking design-wise and its content and execution is more family-appropriate. (Also, in 1998 we didn’t know at the time Kevin Spacey was a creep, but everyone and their DOG knew Woody Allen was. Nice job, Dreamworks!)

It’s been pointed out that there’s a distinct casting difference between ANTZ and BUG’S LIFE. ANTZ had a cast of recognizable movie actors, while BUG’S LIFE had a cast of recognizable television actors.

For BUG’S LIFE that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of the things that bothers me about celeb casting in animated movies is that oftentimes it feels like a flimsy attempt at star-power when said stars don’t have the power to elevate the characters. Actors who might be good front of a camera but bring nothing to a recording booth.

However for the most part Pixar has been really good at casting well-known actors who actually fit their characters and add some personality to them. BUG’S LIFE was no exception.

In fact, quite a few of them had loaned their voices to animation before this film, and some damn good performances too.

And I can name at least one BUG’S LIFE alum who graduated from funny performance to heartfelt performance with Pixar…

(… I’m not crying! YOU’RE crying!)

But I digress. I consider the casting for this movie pretty solid. (With the obvious exception of Kevin Spacey.)

What’s more, growing up I remember a lot of the TV spots for Pixar films usually down-played the celeb cast and let the product speak for itself. The celeb casting was less of a selling point for the films and more like a fun little Easter egg for the parents who had to take their kids to the theater.

Earlier I stated that the story and characters in BUG’S LIFE are a bit weak, and I stand by that. However there are a couple characters I’d like to highlight here as I’ve always found them interesting and memorable in their own ways.

First, let me talk about Hopper for a minute.

(I’ve already stated that Kevin Spacey can rot in hell, so there will be no more of that.)

I’ve heard criticism about Hopper as a character that he was a very bland, one-dimensional villain. To be fair, they’re not wrong.

But the thing I always liked about Hopper is that his one and only goal is to hold dominion over the ant colony. To keep them under his foot, both literally and figuratively, and he wasn’t afraid to use deadly force to do that. He was willing to kill a few of his own goons just to illustrate a point. That’s how threatening he was.

In a lot of children’s media I had seen up to that point, there were several bully characters that were often portrayed as the bigger kids who would demand your lunch money. They were usually ineffectual doofuses like Bulk and Skull from POWER RANGERS, or kids with serious insecurities like Binky Barnes from ARTHUR. While not the first of his kind, Hopper was one of the first characters I had ever encountered as being a prime illustration of not just a bully, but one who had the makings of a dictator.

With his rather one-note motivation, I can see why audiences found him bland, but given his violent means of staying in power, I’m glad they didn’t try to make him “complex” or give him any sympathetic character traits.

Frankly, we live in an age where horrible people are romanticized in the media as being “misunderstood”. I feel like, unlike those media outlets or the upcoming JOKER movie, BUG’S LIFE gets it. They don’t deserve to be portrayed with humanity. These people are monsters. Nothing more.

Maybe if Pixar hadn’t felt the need to rush the production maybe Hopper is one of many characters that could have been polished up a bit in the writing process. Give him some more distinct, memorable traits as a character. Maybe hints at a backstory of Hopper having a long-standing history of using and abusing others, and always getting away with it.

(When I put it that way, we can just say Hopper is the John Lasseter Story. Just draw a pair of glasses and a tacky shirt on the guy and it’s a spitting image.)

The other thing I’ve always liked about this movie was the portrayal of Princess Atta.

Besides being the first Pixar Princess, I always liked how, unlike the Disney Princess pantheon up to date in the late 90s, Atta actually had a bit of a character arc related to the fact that… well, she’s royalty! She’s going to have to take over the colony eventually as queen.

We see this from the beginning as she’s overseeing the harvest and going into a panic when things go even slightly wrong. Also, I find it interesting that it’s a guy that screws everything up when Flik accidentally destroys the food offering, yet she’s the one who gets blamed for it. (Ironic commentary coming from the studio led by an egotistic creep who wouldn’t let women in on meetings.)

But what I loved about her as a kid was that her personality and approach to things was a lot more real and down-to-earth than your average glamorous Disney Princess. She felt less like fairy tale royalty and more like a woman up for promotion at a big company. From a pragmatic standpoint that can be just as scary, stressful and daunting.

(It also feels appropriate in hindsight considering her voice actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus would later star on VEEP…)

My friend @baxterfilms and I have had a lot of discussions about this movie, and we agreed that Atta should have been the protagonist. She actually has a character arc of her own of being unsure of herself at the start of the film, taking charge in the second act, and eventually standing up to Hopper in the third.

Remove Flik entirely, and have her go on a journey to find reinforcements against the grasshoppers. Have her realize that Hopper’s demands are impossible, she’s sick of having to adhere to him, and have her sneak out to get help. When she finds out she literally brought home a bunch of clowns, she understandably freaks out. She has to figure out a resolution because there is a lot of pressure on her to make things right and free the colony from bondage.

Strangely enough, with that version of the story you could still probably have all the indulgent fun of the celebrity cast. It’s just the very core of the film’s story needed some serious tightening up, and maybe Dave Foley as Flik would have fared better as a comic relief sidekick.

With all that said, I thank you for taking the time to read this. I really do think that this film is highly under-appreciated in the animation community. There might have been trouble in the writing room, but the technical achievements in this film were still there and helped Pixar hone their craft into making their animated features as stunning as they are heartwarming.

I have to say, though, I find it funny that there’s almost a pattern to these insect-driven animated movies. Going all the way back to MR. BUG GOES TO TOWN, they usually have rather weak leading characters, and the supporting cast winds up leaving more of an impression.

Weird, huh?

[orbemnews]

Netflix and Amazon gave daring Indian filmmakers hope. Now that's turning to fear Even with two major, critically acclaimed films under her belt — “Kal: Yesterday and Tomorrow,” a thriller she wrote and directed, and “Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi,” a political drama that won Bollywood’s equivalent of an Academy Award — the work just wouldn’t come. Since then, the Mumbai-based filmmaker says she has “been inundated with work.” Her film “Guilty” — a social issues drama about a rape investigation — was released by the streaming giant in 2020. In the same year, Disney+ Hotstar released her 8-part comedy series “Hundred.” Now, increasing government scrutiny of these more provocative projects and other groundbreaking stories is worrying Narain and many other creators in Mumbai, the home of India’s film industry. Original shows on Amazon Prime and Netflix have lately drawn ire from Indian politicians and regular citizens who consider these films and TV shows insensitive to cultural and religious beliefs. Police complaints have also piled up against creators and company executives, and some of the offenses they have been accused of — including committing “deliberate or malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings” — carry prison terms of up to three years, a fine, or both. And, in recent months, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has announced new rules and guidelines for streaming services, though no explicit bans on particular themes. India’s creative community now fears that streaming services may buckle under the pressure, and refrain from touching stories that are even remotely controversial. It’s a troubling sign for an industry that had just begun experimenting with new forms of storytelling and producing shows capable of worldwide appeal. Just last year, Delhi Crime, a Netflix drama series based on the real rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in India’s capital, won an international Emmy. Start of a new era The arrival of Amazon (AMZN) and Netflix in India has been a boon to directors and writers like Narain, who had long languished on the fringes of Bollywood — an industry often accused of nepotism. Several filmmakers told CNN Business they thought the international streaming services introduced a degree of professionalism. “I co-directed a film called ‘House Arrest,’ which was released on Netflix in 2019, and everyone on set was thrilled just because they were getting paid on time,” said Samit Basu, novelist and filmmaker. He added that the culture changed to one where rigorous research and development were commonplace. “A lot of book rights were auctioned and writers’ rooms started happening,” Basu added. “Earlier, people in the film industry hardly ever read books.” More importantly, these companies made it possible for storytellers to explore subjects that had previously been untouched. Bollywood films are hamstrung by the Central Board of Film Certification, which forces filmmakers to remove everything from kisses and swear words to shots of drug abuse — once even from a film about drug abuse. Indian TV, which is also regulated by the government, is dominated by often regressive stories about housewives and mothers-in-law. Streaming content broke that mold because it was, until recently, unregulated by the government. “Sacred Games,” Netflix’s first original series in the country, shocked Indian viewers by casting well-known actors in a show that liberally made use of abusive language, violence and nudity. The program was compared to “Narcos,” Netflix’s hit American drama about Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. Amazon’s first series in the country, meanwhile, was “Inside Edge” — a show about the dark underbelly of cricket, a sport that is worshipped in India. Both “Inside Edge and “Sacred Games” were nominated for International Emmy awards. Several other shows on the platforms have also taken an unflinching look at subjects ranging from politics to female sexuality, which Bollywood and Indian TV have typically shied away from. “I am glad I did my film for Netflix because they did not dilute anything,” said Narain, referring to her project “Guilty.” When a kiss offends Politically-fueled uproar over shows on these international video platforms isn’t new. “Sacred Games,” which was released in 2018, managed to offend lawmakers from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Congress Party. In 2019, a politician from the BJP filed a police complaint against the creator of the show for a “scene which disrespects Sikh religious symbol Kada.” But lately, the political and public outrage has reached a crescendo. Netflix faced boycott calls in November over “A Suitable Boy,” an adaptation of the award-winning novel of the same name by author Vikram Seth. Some viewers and BJP politicians were angered by a scene that depicts a Hindu man and a Muslim woman kissing in a temple, which led to complaints against Netflix executives. The company did not respond to CNN Business’s request for an update on these complaints. In January, Amazon’s political drama “Tandav” — which has been likened to the Netflix series “House of Cards” — faced a backlash from politicians who said they complained to the police about the company and the show’s creators for depicting Hindu Gods in a derogatory way. Aparna Purohit, the Head of India Originals at Amazon Prime Video, was questioned by police for several hours. Both Amazon and the show’s creators issued an apology. “We respect our viewers’ diverse beliefs and apologize unconditionally,” Amazon said in a statement. That same month, an Indian journalist filed a police complaint against Amazon’s crime series “Mirzapur” for “showing the city of Mirzapur in a bad light,” according to media reports. And this month, the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights asked Netflix to stop streaming “Bombay Begums,” a drama about five ambitious women, because of its “inappropriate portrayal” of children, who were shown sniffing cocaine. The government has also taken official action to rein in streaming services and the content they provide. Last November, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry brought the previously unregulated services within its scope. Three months later, the government announced new rules for online content, including a requirement for video platforms to classify their content into age-based categories. They also have to appoint a “grievance redressal officer” in India who has to address every complaint made against the company within 15 days. While activists have criticized these rules, the government said the video streaming services must be “responsible and accountable” for their content. “India is tolerant and will remain tolerant,” India’s technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Thursday. “But the limits of tolerance and standards of tolerance should not be judged on the creating freedom or abuse of a particular producer of an OTT platform.” The new rules do not explicitly ban any type of content — but the vague scope of the regulations is also exactly why filmmakers who spoke to CNN Business were troubled. A wide range of topics have already been targeted with complaints and outrage, leaving creators second-guessing and self-censoring. “In India, anyone can have a problem with anything. In India, people confuse what a character is saying with what the writer believes,” said Sumit Purohit, who wrote for “Inside Edge” and “Scam 1992,” a web series on Sony’s streaming service SonyLiv. “How can you make a series like the ‘Mindhunter’ here?” he asked, referring to a Netflix show about serial killers. Purohit also described the impact of self-censorship on a writer, saying that it “makes you angry, frustrated,” because “that is not how any art is created.” The backlash from all sides — politicians, journalists, national agencies and even regular citizens — is hard for American services to fight in India, a key overseas market, as they are wary of getting on the wrong side of the government. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in 2018 his “next 100 million” users would come from India. In Dec 2019, he said his company would spend 30 billion rupees ($413 million) on original content over the next two years in India. And, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has said that “it [Prime Video] is doing well everywhere but there’s nowhere it is doing better than in India.” A chilling effect There are already some signs that the industry might be regressing. Earlier this month, Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources, that “companies like Amazon’s Prime Video and Netflix are inspecting planned shows and scripts, with some even deleting scenes that could be controversial.” A few days later, the Indian financial newspaper Mint reported, citing anonymous sources, that Amazon had canceled the second season of the crime series “Paatal Lok,” which was praised for its portrayal of corruption and caste discrimination. Amazon and Netflix declined to comment on the reports. “Nothing that has politics in it is being touched [commissioned] right now,” said Josy Joseph, an investigative journalist whose media platform is collaborating with the creator of “Sacred Games” to make a series about Tihar Jail, India’s largest prison. “There is a massive depression that has set into the creative minds of Mumbai,” he said. “They are scared and writers are winding down to mediocrity. They are going back to telling saas-bahu stories or conservative romance.” (Saas-bahu means “mother-in-law and daughter-in-law” in Hindi.) While production isn’t slowing down — Netflix has announced 40 new shows and movies from India — Basu worries that production houses in the future may go for content that is “unambiguously safe” and “assumes that the audience’s intelligence is zero.” Just weeks after Prime Video executive Purohit was questioned by police, the platform announced it would produce its first film in Bollywood, the stronghold of traditional Indian movie making. “Ram Setu” will “highlight our Indian heritage,” said Vijay Subramanium, the head of content at Amazon Prime Video India, in a statement. Some filmmakers are less pessimistic about their creative freedom. Karan Anshuman, one of the creators of “Mirzapur” and “Inside Edge,” said he felt it was “too early to react” to the heightened scrutiny, adding that he would rather “wait and watch.” But film writer Arpita Chatterjee, said it is too late to rein in the Indian filmmaking community now. “We can’t just go back 20 years,” Chatterjee said. “The world is at a different place and storytellers are at a different place. You can’t just put the genie back in the bottle.” Source link Orbem News #Amazon #daring #Fear #filmmakers #gave #Hope #Indian #Netflix #turning

[dipulb3]

Netflix and Amazon gave daring Indian filmmakers hope. Now that's turning to fear

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/netflix-and-amazon-gave-daring-indian-filmmakers-hope-now-thats-turning-to-fear/

Netflix and Amazon gave daring Indian filmmakers hope. Now that's turning to fear

Even with two major, critically acclaimed films under her belt — “Kal: Yesterday and Tomorrow,” a thriller she wrote and directed, and “Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi,” a political drama that won Bollywood’s equivalent of an Academy Award — the work just wouldn’t come.

Since then, the Mumbai-based filmmaker says she has “been inundated with work.” Her film “Guilty” — a social issues drama about a rape investigation — was released by the streaming giant in 2020. In the same year, Disney+ Hotstar released her 8-part comedy series “Hundred.”

Now, increasing government scrutiny of these more provocative projects and other groundbreaking stories is worrying Narain and many other creators in Mumbai, the home of India’s film industry.

Original shows on Amazon Prime and Netflix have lately drawn ire from Indian politicians and regular citizens who consider these films and TV shows insensitive to cultural and religious beliefs.

Police complaints have also piled up against creators and company executives, and some of the offenses they have been accused of — including committing “deliberate or malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings” — carry prison terms of up to three years, a fine, or both. And, in recent months, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has announced new rules and guidelines for streaming services, though no explicit bans on particular themes.

India’s creative community now fears that streaming services may buckle under the pressure, and refrain from touching stories that are even remotely controversial. It’s a troubling sign for an industry that had just begun experimenting with new forms of storytelling and producing shows capable of worldwide appeal. Just last year, Delhi Crime, a Netflix drama series based on the real rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in India’s capital, won an international Emmy.

Start of a new era

The arrival of Amazon (AMZN) and Netflix in India has been a boon to directors and writers like Narain, who had long languished on the fringes of Bollywood — an industry often accused of nepotism. Several filmmakers told Appradab Business they thought the international streaming services introduced a degree of professionalism.

“I co-directed a film called ‘House Arrest,’ which was released on Netflix in 2019, and everyone on set was thrilled just because they were getting paid on time,” said Samit Basu, novelist and filmmaker. He added that the culture changed to one where rigorous research and development were commonplace.

“A lot of book rights were auctioned and writers’ rooms started happening,” Basu added. “Earlier, people in the film industry hardly ever read books.”

More importantly, these companies made it possible for storytellers to explore subjects that had previously been untouched.

Bollywood films are hamstrung by the Central Board of Film Certification, which forces filmmakers to remove everything from kisses and swear words to shots of drug abuse — once even from a film about drug abuse. Indian TV, which is also regulated by the government, is dominated by often regressive stories about housewives and mothers-in-law.

Streaming content broke that mold because it was, until recently, unregulated by the government. “Sacred Games,” Netflix’s first original series in the country, shocked Indian viewers by casting well-known actors in a show that liberally made use of abusive language, violence and nudity. The program was compared to “Narcos,” Netflix’s hit American drama about Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.

Amazon’s first series in the country, meanwhile, was “Inside Edge” — a show about the dark underbelly of cricket, a sport that is worshipped in India. Both “Inside Edge and “Sacred Games” were nominated for International Emmy awards.

Several other shows on the platforms have also taken an unflinching look at subjects ranging from politics to female sexuality, which Bollywood and Indian TV have typically shied away from. “I am glad I did my film for Netflix because they did not dilute anything,” said Narain, referring to her project “Guilty.”

When a kiss offends

Politically-fueled uproar over shows on these international video platforms isn’t new. “Sacred Games,” which was released in 2018, managed to offend lawmakers from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Congress Party. In 2019, a politician from the BJP filed a police complaint against the creator of the show for a “scene which disrespects Sikh religious symbol Kada.”

But lately, the political and public outrage has reached a crescendo.

Netflix faced boycott calls in November over “A Suitable Boy,” an adaptation of the award-winning novel of the same name by author Vikram Seth. Some viewers and BJP politicians were angered by a scene that depicts a Hindu man and a Muslim woman kissing in a temple, which led to complaints against Netflix executives. The company did not respond to Appradab Business’s request for an update on these complaints.

In January, Amazon’s political drama “Tandav” — which has been likened to the Netflix series “House of Cards” — faced a backlash from politicians who said they complained to the police about the company and the show’s creators for depicting Hindu Gods in a derogatory way. Aparna Purohit, the Head of India Originals at Amazon Prime Video, was questioned by police for several hours.

Both Amazon and the show’s creators issued an apology. “We respect our viewers’ diverse beliefs and apologize unconditionally,” Amazon said in a statement.

That same month, an Indian journalist filed a police complaint against Amazon’s crime series “Mirzapur” for “showing the city of Mirzapur in a bad light,” according to media reports. And this month, the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights asked Netflix to stop streaming “Bombay Begums,” a drama about five ambitious women, because of its “inappropriate portrayal” of children, who were shown sniffing cocaine.

The government has also taken official action to rein in streaming services and the content they provide. Last November, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry brought the previously unregulated services within its scope.

Three months later, the government announced new rules for online content, including a requirement for video platforms to classify their content into age-based categories. They also have to appoint a “grievance redressal officer” in India who has to address every complaint made against the company within 15 days.

While activists have criticized these rules, the government said the video streaming services must be “responsible and accountable” for their content.

“India is tolerant and will remain tolerant,” India’s technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Thursday. “But the limits of tolerance and standards of tolerance should not be judged on the creating freedom or abuse of a particular producer of an OTT platform.”

The new rules do not explicitly ban any type of content — but the vague scope of the regulations is also exactly why filmmakers who spoke to Appradab Business were troubled. A wide range of topics have already been targeted with complaints and outrage, leaving creators second-guessing and self-censoring.

“In India, anyone can have a problem with anything. In India, people confuse what a character is saying with what the writer believes,” said Sumit Purohit, who wrote for “Inside Edge” and “Scam 1992,” a web series on Sony’s streaming service SonyLiv. “How can you make a series like the ‘Mindhunter’ here?” he asked, referring to a Netflix show about serial killers.

Purohit also described the impact of self-censorship on a writer, saying that it “makes you angry, frustrated,” because “that is not how any art is created.”

The backlash from all sides — politicians, journalists, national agencies and even regular citizens — is hard for American services to fight in India, a key overseas market, as they are wary of getting on the wrong side of the government.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in 2018 his “next 100 million” users would come from India. In Dec 2019, he said his company would spend 30 billion rupees ($413 million) on original content over the next two years in India. And, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has said that “it [Prime Video] is doing well everywhere but there’s nowhere it is doing better than in India.”

A chilling effect

There are already some signs that the industry might be regressing. Earlier this month, Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources, that “companies like Amazon’s Prime Video and Netflix are inspecting planned shows and scripts, with some even deleting scenes that could be controversial.”

A few days later, the Indian financial newspaper Mint reported, citing anonymous sources, that Amazon had canceled the second season of the crime series “Paatal Lok,” which was praised for its portrayal of corruption and caste discrimination.

Amazon and Netflix declined to comment on the reports.

“Nothing that has politics in it is being touched [commissioned] right now,” said Josy Joseph, an investigative journalist whose media platform is collaborating with the creator of “Sacred Games” to make a series about Tihar Jail, India’s largest prison.

“There is a massive depression that has set into the creative minds of Mumbai,” he said. “They are scared and writers are winding down to mediocrity. They are going back to telling saas-bahu stories or conservative romance.” (Saas-bahu means “mother-in-law and daughter-in-law” in Hindi.)

While production isn’t slowing down — Netflix has announced 40 new shows and movies from India — Basu worries that production houses in the future may go for content that is “unambiguously safe” and “assumes that the audience’s intelligence is zero.”

Just weeks after Prime Video executive Purohit was questioned by police, the platform announced it would produce its first film in Bollywood, the stronghold of traditional Indian movie making. “Ram Setu” will “highlight our Indian heritage,” said Vijay Subramanium, the head of content at Amazon Prime Video India, in a statement.

Some filmmakers are less pessimistic about their creative freedom.

Karan Anshuman, one of the creators of “Mirzapur” and “Inside Edge,” said he felt it was “too early to react” to the heightened scrutiny, adding that he would rather “wait and watch.”

But film writer Arpita Chatterjee, said it is too late to rein in the Indian filmmaking community now.

“We can’t just go back 20 years,” Chatterjee said. “The world is at a different place and storytellers are at a different place. You can’t just put the genie back in the bottle.”

[dailydaveeddiggs]

An evening with Daveed Diggs at Dinkelspiel

“I call myself a nerd all the time,” said “Hamilton” superstar Daveed Diggs to Nerd Nation at Dinkenspiel Auditorium.

[...] McGhee and Diggs kicked off the night with a picaresque rambling tour through Diggs’ early days. Playing up his Oakland heritage (“Everybody from the Bay has a superiority complex, because we’re dope”), Diggs took the room through a series of amazing twists-and-turns: his “crazy birth story” (he was born in two hospitals), his experience playing Charles Darwin at a production in Dink years ago (it wasn’t very good), his mother’s stint as a DJ in the ’70s and early ’80s, and her dropping out of college to go hitchhiking with a German Shepherd named Beowulf. (“That’s some Berkeley-ass shit.”) Throughout, his elegant storytelling skills kept the audience hanging on his every bon mot.

Where Diggs really struck home were his descriptions of culture shock at Brown University, his alma mater. “[There,] the standards for ‘Normal’ seem so restricted,” he said. When he visited Brown on an athlete recruiting trip, he noticed how every single black person greeted him with, “What’s up,” or “a complicated handshake.”

Diggs mused, “It wasn’t until I’d been there for several years when I realized: That’s what you do when you’re an endangered species,” to gasps, claps and snaps. For people of color coming from predominantly multiracial environments as Diggs did, to be transported to a liberal college campus comes at the risk of being shook at how much your color really pops out — in ways you didn’t think were relevant to you.

(This week, he plans to go to Brown to receive an honorary doctorate: “I asked if they would give it to me in engineering, and they said no.”)

Transitioning to “Hamilton,” Diggs described, in rich detail, how he came on board Miranda’s production, sparing no rod to our beloved Puerto Rican.

“I was emailed Lin’s fucking god-awful demos,” he says to great audience laughter. “Him rapping and singing every part. All those falsettos. Even still! It was so brilliant.”

What most impressed Diggs was Miranda’s ability to break the typical mediocrity of so-called hip-hop theater.

“‘Hip-hop theater’ usually means that something suffers,” he noted. “Either the hip-hop is not good, or the theater is not good. One of them is a misunderstanding. [“Hamilton”] was not that. Lin’s a really good rapper for real. He’s also a nerd about it.”

McGhee pressed Diggs on his thoughts on hip-hop entering an elite, predominantly white, mainstream space like Broadway — and what is won and lost in the move.

“That’s a tricky question, and something I’ve been struggling with a lot,” he said. “Hip-hop was indifferent to Broadway. We didn’t need Broadway, but I think Broadway needed hip-hop. It needed something contemporary. You know, Broadway in the ’30s and ’40s was using jazz music — genres on the cutting edge of popular music, on the same exposure level as Tin Pan Alley. So I think having the vocabulary of hip-hop [in Broadway] is like another tool in the toolbox for artists to use. It’s useful for the art form.”

When asked by McGhee on playing Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, as a black man, Diggs was swift: “It was a trip.” But his answer proves that Diggs exudes the Black confidence, swagger and brilliance of the historically white men he plays in the show.

“I approached it the way I’d approach any character, which is trying to find real-life analogues in my own life. You discover he’s an incredible writer; it made sense to me, then, to make him a confident rapper. He was an incredibly curious person, inventing things all the time.

“He was also just insanely privileged — to a degree which I had never experienced, and don’t have any real-life analogues to it. I read once that his first memory was of being carried in a bassinet by one of his slaves. That was key to me. Being aware of the way that someone like that walks through the world. Creating a character who was as privileged as I could possibly imagine.”

Diggs went on to describe a key moment in Jefferson’s first appearance (“What’d I Miss?”), and how the staging worked to complicate the Jefferson of the show.

“Jefferson’s entrance is him literally being wheeled around on the stage by all his slaves. And they’re cleaning up the floor, scrubbing around him, stand in a straight line. No one talks about that, but that is what’s happening on stage.”

The conversation expanded beyond “Hamilton,” touching on Diggs’ recent spots on the TV show “Black-ish.” Diggs explained that he was brought in to fill in the gap of Millennial Blackness, “a version of Blackness that they weren’t exploring.” Diggs expressed shock when he was asked to reprise the role in another episode.

“I think I’m always waiting for someone to say ‘Psych!'” he said. The wave of laughter in the audience — some nervous, some not — was a wry counterpoint to that statement’s depth, pain and sting of truth.

On his massive success, the humbled Diggs  said, “I get to say ‘no’ to a lot of things. That, for an artist, is crazy. You want to talk about privilege. I’m still getting used to it! I say ‘yes’ too way too many things. I feel nuts most of the time, running around and feeling like I’m doing too many things.

“I’m loving what I’m doing, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t believe that it will be there forever for me.”

Afterwards, the floor opened up to a question-and-answer session with the audience. He answered questions on his favorite rappers (E-40 of Vallejo and Aesop Rock) and his thoughts on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” (“Tina Fey is a national treasure”).

In response to a question from Victor Ragsdale ’19 on advice he would give to young black kids wanting to navigate the waters of Broadway and TV, Diggs was soul-stirring.

“Bring all of your self. Don’t leave any of your self home. Nobody wants you for what you think they want. Yes, Hollywood is racist and sexist. So is Broadway. So are all of these industries of art of which we are practitioners. That’s not your fault. You can’t change yourself to fit into their mold.

“As an actor, you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the director wants from you. That’s not what people really want. It’s the most exciting thing in the world to interpret something that someone didn’t think of. Those people always get called back. You may not get the part, but you at least get called back and put on people’s radars.”

Asked on the state of hip-hop today, Diggs was fervently optimistic.

“I love it all. Obviously the underground is where I grew up. What’s really impressive is how weird everything mainstream is. Young Thug is a star — but his stuff is out there, avant-garde, wild.”

But then Diggs left the challenge to all of us, the next generation, to push art and thought to the next level. “I’m getting too old to be asked these questions. I don’t get to dictate what culture is anymore. I now get to watch what the kids create and be a fan of it.”

He encouraged open-mindedness of other artists’ work, regardless of political leaning or disagreements with mode of attack. “As a consumer, you get to say, ‘I don’t agree with this piece of art, so it’s not good.’ As an artist, I don’t think you get to do that. I think you have to explore the reasons you like or dislike something a little bit more than whether or not you agree with it.

“Just because an artist doesn’t align with me politically, that doesn’t give me any reason not to listen to them. Or to say that they’re bad outright. And if don’t like their ‘message,’ then it’s my job to put an alternative message out there.”

[emblazons]

you’re so right that some people will just accept mediocrity because it’s what they’ve come to expect. Like, I’ve even seen people believe that mike was purposely written to be a bad person (even though it’s been said again and again that he’s the heart) just because they don’t think byler will be endgame. They also think Byler is just another fanon ship instead of something intentionally woven into the narrative over the past 4 seasons. I think it’s just sad that people are so jaded that they miss what’s right in front of their faces.

Oooh, you touch on such a good point with your word choice—that people are willing to accept mediocrity in storytelling, not because no one tells stories well anymore, but because as a whole we’ve been subjected to a lot of weak narrative development & downright narrative betrayals lately…not just in terms of queer rep, but television in general.

(Forgive me—this got long lol)

I feel like so many people are just used to television disappointing them on all levels these days because so many writers/show runners aren’t as invested in the work or the process as they need to be for quality storytelling (or just…aren’t talented enough to pull off quality lmao). I think Game of Thrones is probably the most intense version of this in recent memory for sure, but there are a ton of shows and even film series that have made people lose hope that the media they consume is going to follow through with the twists, turns, foreshadowing and setups audiences have suspected for seasons—and all in the name of “subverting expectations,” which adds another layer of mistrust to the whole affair.

With Stranger Things and Byler especially, I think there is a twofold thing happening: either people have become so used to mediocre TV that they expect all television to be oversimplified and mindless (to the point that they insult people for thinking their media could be something else—the “a blue door is just a blue door” “you’re reading too much into it” people)—or they’re so jaded by having their hopes dashed in the past that they insist on “taking everybody else down with them” (aka loudly declaring that entire characters, arcs or even ships aren’t possible in the face of overwhelming evidence just so they can avoid feeling disappointed should it not happen). With both, I understand how people got there (either never expecting more because they’ve never been taught to, or expecting and being let down too many times)…but I think that’s why it’s so important to look critically not just of the setup in the story, but how the people creating the story live and work.

In the case of Stranger Things, it’s not just the story that makes me more confident—it’s The Duffers themselves, alongside a number of their fellow producers. Like. On top of the evidence that’s present in the narrative, I rest easier looking at Byler and the end of ST because I can see that The Duffers are deeply invested in their story and always have been—they’ve mapped and worked at the fullness of the ST narrative since the pitch (they have said repeatedly that they had a 25 page doc delineating all the lore of the UD & powers before S1 even aired on Netflix), in addition to the little things like the way the script Noah read to audition for the show was something Will ended up saying in S2–which shows not just talent, but intentionality and forethought.

The Duffers have always had the bones of a story from start that they happen to be fleshing out piece by piece on screen—they’re not winging the narrative every time it gets renewed, or adapting a work that isn’t finished and not knowing enough to make the ending worthwhile. They have talked about their process, their plans, and expanding it with other peoples ideas, yes—but they care about their story, and have always looked up to people who put their whole heart and mind into their work rather than winging it…which makes me feel more comfortable looking into their work deeply and giving a damn about the story they’re trying to tell.

I don’t remember who said it, but it’s true—the highest form of respect you can show a creator is taking their work seriously, and while I know the Duffers are far from perfect, they’ve put in the time, effort and energy to craft a story that deserves critical thought—I’m just taking the calculated risk of believing that they’re going to do their best to “see their work through to the end.” They’ve joked before that endings are always hard, but that they’ve put in the effort to “stick the landing” and won’t undermine the direction of their story just because someone might have been able to guess it, as some other creators have—because (as any good creator knows) “subverting expectations” is not the same as pulling something out from nowhere for shock value. In a well thought out story, putting in clues that people can see play out / catch in a rewatch only to say “I can’t believe I missed that” is one of the best parts of creating and consuming media, both because of the final payoff and because of the time & effort it takes to do it well.

All that to say—I understand why people are jaded, and even why they expect Stranger Things to be as unintentional or “mindless” as most modern television is, but…I am willing to have a little hope that the duffers are dedicated enough not to let me down, not just because of the quality show itself, but because of how the Duffers talk about it + how many other creators (filmmakers and authors especially) who I respect I see respecting The Duffers as well. Maybe I’ll be disappointed by the fullness of the outcome one day, but hey—if I am, I’ll cross that bridge in 2024 😂

Thanks for the ask!

[davidmann95]

What are your thoughts on Earth One? I've read Batman and Wonder Woman but just started on Superman.

A disaster that has long since outlived its dubious usefulness, only surviving now on monstrous inertia and sheer fucking stubbornness.

In fairness, it started as a great idea. Blockbuster-style ‘realistic’ origin stories of the biggest DC heroes in the OGN format and aimed at the bookstore market, with the biggest creators out there behind it? That’s genuinely inspired. The results however…Superman: Earth One and Batman: Earth One both manage the genuinely pretty incredible feats of being the worst story told of their title characters in almost 80 years. Both reasonable in concept - JMS had handled Marvel’s #1 boy to initial success and did some interesting work with the archetype in Supreme Power, and Johns/Frank on Batman would seem a surefire thing after their work on Action Comics. But there’s a gap between concept and execution here you could pilot an entire fleet of warships through.

Batman’s an incompetent, banally vengeful, violent asshole who fails utterly at nearly every turn due to his utter lack of training or preparation, whose sole victory of substance is strangling a weaponized mentally ill man before being easily defeated by the dang Penguin, and being rescued by the use of guns. It admittedly tries to do something interesting with the idea of an urban vigilante who isn’t necessarily brilliant and unstoppable - he’s just got some incomplete military training and whatever gadgets he can cobble together - but one cheap “I’LL SAVE THIS CITY NO MATTER WHAT IT TAKES!” bit later and suddenly he’s for-real Batman even though he’s still a goddamn idiot. The sequel (checked out of the library) builds on this foundation to show he doesn’t have a clue about detective work, and the Riddler’s riddles are a distraction from a simple revenge scheme because hahaha, supervillain gimmicks are stupid. Also police brutality saves the day, which has sure aged well. Plus it’s all but directly Bruce’s fault his parents were killed. Throw some faux-deep monologuing on top about the rotting heart of the city and the meaning of life and death like a Snyder/Capullo joint gone septic, and you get a comic that manages to be both unpleasant and entirely boring. Looks nice though.

Superman, on the other hand, is the honest-to-god abomination of the pair. I’ve drained most of my poison on it over the years, through distance if nothing else, but this is one of the few comics out there whose existence sincerely makes me kind of angry. Not just because it’s a bad Superman story that catastrophically misses the point of the character, those are a dime a dozen - though yes, even aside from it being a Superman story, this is a painfully stock alien invasion/’embracing who you really are’ story we’ve seen a million times in a million better configurations. No, the thing that puts it over the top of the likes of, say, Superman II - which similarly has a Superman who’s kind of a total piece of shit - is that it is a story where he learns nothing from being a garbage person, and is rewarded for it. 

There’s a scene of him at his father’s grave saying he’d rather use his powers to get rich than help people, and if not for the alien invasion, that’d be it. That’d be the end of the story, that’d be what this Clark Kent did with his life. Of course he spouts off some mealy-mouthed horseshit about how he’ll still find ways of helping people, but that’s a tad undermined that when the alien invasion does show and starts slaughtering people around the world en masse with the promise of exterminating everyone on Earth if he doesn’t fight back, he spends another 20 pages waffling until someone he likes is personally, directly threatened, making him not only a cowardly sack of shit unwilling to make the most clear-cut of moral choices, but also kind of a goddamn moron for not understanding right away that the space invaders raining laser death around the world are being serious. And then he sticks with being Superman not out of a realization that he must do what is right, or out of shame that so many died while he was afraid and selfish and refusing to waste his gifts ever again (a tack that handled right could have redeemed a lot of the earlier story), but because it turns out getting to use his gifts publicly as Superman is more fun and satisfying than being a football player. In the sequel (again, checked out of the library out of morbid curiosity) when he decides he must tackle the Real Issues, instead of overthrowing a dictatorship himself immediately and without casualties, he passes out AK-47′s to insurgents to arm a bloody revolution so that he can return the dictator’s earlier quip about how “he who has the guns makes the rules” before leaving him to die. The third at least managed to titanically up its game to crushing mediocrity - it almost reads like a new, marginally better writer trying to fix things up and manage a soft reboot - but that hardly balances the scales. As usual, I’ll default to Colin Smith’s fantastic set of articles comparing it ethically and storytelling-wise to All-Star Superman, but this is one of maybe two or so pieces of pop media out there where I can’t find enjoyment of it anything other than objectively wrong (the other being Thor: The Dark World, though that was merely really really overwhelmingly shitty).

The Titans book…existed, I guess, and didn’t pull off much more than that. Morrison/Paquette/Fairbairn’s Wonder Woman was interesting if nothing else, and it did a better job of building up Paradise Island visually as a high-concept super-feminist-fantasy-wonderland than anything else I’ve ever seen, but it was critically flawed. The characterization for Diana is pretty paper-thin, and as a feminist text it’s if nothing else yet another argument that Morrison probably shouldn’t be trying to write about contemporary social issues if he essentially refuses to use the internet - Elle Collins’ and Kelly Kanayama’s pieces on it go into its failings far better than I ever could. It was a fascinating failure at least as opposed to the rest, I’m genuinely curious where further volumes might go, but I’d consider it Morrison’s most significant failure as a superhero writer so far of the 21st century. An experiment in seeing if he could write Wonder Woman, rather than something he did out of sincere interest.

Earth One outlived its purpose once the New 52 hit, but it sold just well enough that DC couldn’t justify throwing it aside, so it still goes on. Superman may be done now that JMS has left comics (as should be Flash: Earth One, which I actually consider a shame given it apparently would have come out close to Morrison’s Multiversity Too: The Flash, which would’ve been a gut-buster of a contrast) unless someone else comes on to continue it, and Aquaman: Earth One may have fallen by the wayside, but Johns and Morrison have both confirmed there’s going to be more Batman and Wonder Woman, so at this point I don’t think it’s going to go away until we at least see Justice League: Earth One, presumably Chuck Austen’s triumphant return to DC. In spite of that though I maintain the experiment has utterly failed, the greatest testament to that being that when Morrison’s described Earth 1 in The Multiversity Guidebook he noted that the Earth was ‘in flux’, thereby inserting an escape hatch - essentially admitting that that Earth sucks so bad that you shouldn’t have to believe it actually exists in the Multiverse if you don’t want to.

EDIT: jonsei93 said: Damn, it’s kinda sad that THIS Superman gets to wear the classic costume instead of the main one. Because E1 Superman really doesn’t deserve to wear it, let alone touch it! (Yeah, I read a little of Superman Earth One, too and….yeah, I didn’t really bother acknowledging those books after that)

There are definitely people out there who considered Earth One to be the proper modern reinvention of the character rather than the New 52 guy, I’m pretty sure entirely based on that suit. Knowing this makes me feel bad.

[jackybooks]

Stephen King - On Writing | A Memoir on the Craft

Stephen King - On Writing | A Memoir on the Craft

I believe large numbers of people have at least some talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened. If I didn’t believe that, writing a book like this would be a waste of time

V.C.

There were more doors than one person could ever open in a lifetime, I thought (and still think) - “endless possibilities of life”

By the time I was fourteen, the nail in my wall would no longer support the height of the rejection slips impaled upon it, I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.

I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused of someone of wasting his or her god-given talent. if you write(or paint/dance/sculpt/sing), someone will make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.

Mindset of writing

If stone sober people can fuck like they’re out of their minds - can actually be out of their minds while caught in that throe - why shouldn’t writers be able to go bonkers and still stay sane.

Writing is a lonely job, having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches, just believing is usually enough.

Stopping a piece of your work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit in a sitting position.

I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing

Toolbox

Vocabulary

It ain’t how much you got, honey, its how you use it.

Put your vocabulary on the top shelf, and don’t make any conscious effort to improve it.

Use the first word that comes to mind, if it’s appropriate and colorful.

Concision

"My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was begun"

"My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss. I'll never forget it”

You might also notice how much simpler the thought is to understand when it's broken up into two thoughts. This makes matters easier for the reader, and the reader must always be your main concern;

Adverbs

To write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.

On Writing

Good writing consist of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style)

Reading

To be a good writer, you must read a lot and write a lot. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by force of your writing until it has been done to you. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time(or the tools) to write, simple as that.

The real importance of reading is it created an ease and intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one’s papers and identification pretty much in order.

Once weaned for the ephemeral craving for TV, most people will find they enjoy the time they spend reading. I’d like to suggest that turning off that endlessly quacking box is apt to improve the quality of your life as well as the quality of your writing.

We read to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us recognize those things when they begin to creep into our own work, and to steer clear of them.

You learn the best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

You must begin by being your biggest advocate, which means reading the magazines and publishing the kind of stuff you write.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do, when you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who reads it.

The place can be humble(probably should be. and it really one u needs one thing: a door which you are willing to shut. The closed door is your day of telling the world you mean business; you have made a serious commitment to write and intend to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

But you need the room, you need the door, and you need the determination to shut the door. You need a concrete goal, as well. The longer you keep to these basics, the easier the act of writing will become.

If you're a beginner though, let me urge that you take your story through at least 2 drafts; the one with the door closed, the one you do with it open…

Keep the door closed

There comes a point when you want to show what you're doing to a close friend, either because you're proud of what you're doing or because you're doubtful about it. My best advice is to resist this impulse. Keep the pressure one; don't lower it by exposing what you've written to the doubt, the praise, or even the well-meaning questions of someone from the Outside World. Let your hope of success(and your fear of failure) carry you on, difficult as that can be. There'll be time to show off what you've done when you finish... but even after finishing I think you must be cautious and give yourself a chance to think while the story is still like a field of freshly fallen snow, absent of any tracks save your own.

Here's something else - if no ones says yo you, this is wonderful! you are a lot less apt to slack off or to start concentrating on the wrong thing.. being wonderful, for instance, instead of telling the goddam story.

You've done a lot of work and you need a period of time to rest. Your mind and imagination - two things which are related, but not really the same - have to recycle themselves. My advice is you take a couple days off - go fishing, and then work on something else, something shorter, preferably and something that's a complete changer directions and pace from your newly finished book.

Resist temptation, you'll very likely decide you didn't do as well on that passage as you thought and you'd better retool it on the spot. This is bad. The only thing worse would be for you to decide the passage is even better than you remembered - why not drop everything and read the whole book over right then? Get back to work on it! Hell, you're ready! You're fuckin Shakespeare!

After 6 weeks - Revising/Rewriting

If you've never done it before, you'll find reading your book over after a six week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience, It's yours, you'll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It's always easier to kill someone else's darlings than it is to kill your own.

With 6 weeks of time, you'll also be able to see nay glaring holes in the plot of character development. I'm talking about holes big enough to drive a truck through. And listen, if you spot a few of these big holes, you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us,

When reading your own draft - only god gets it right the first time and only a slob says "oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for”

I love this part of the process because I'm re-discoverying my own book, and usually liking it.

Underneath, I'm asking myself the big question: Is this story coherent? What I want most of all is resonance, something that will linger for a little while in Constant Reader's mind and heart.

Most of all, I'm looking for what I meant.

The forumla for revision

2nd draft = 1st draft - 10%

When to open the door

Someone once said - All novels are really letters aimed at one person. At various points, the author is thinking, "I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part?"

And if what you hear makes sense, then you make the changes. You can't let the whole world into your story, but you can let in the ones that matter the most. And you should.

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scrubber's heart, kill your darlings

What to write about

The big question - what are you going to write about? And the equally big answer, Anything you damn well want. Anything at all, as long as you tell the truth.

What would be very wrong, I think, is to turn away form what you know and like or love, in favor of things you believe will impress your friends, relatives, and writing circle colleagues.

When I'm asked why I decided to write the sort of thing I do write, I always think the question is more revealing than any answer I can possibly give. Wrapped within it, like the chewy stuff in the center of a Tootsie Pop, is the assumption that the writer controls the material instead to the other way around. "The book is the boss”

What you know makes you unique in some other way. Be brave.

If you’re a lawyer, your story about lets say lawyers & gangs whatever will be very good because its grounded on experience and truth.

Structures of Writing

Stories and novels consist of 3 parts - Narration, Description and Dialogue.

Narration Moves the story from point A to B, and finally point Z

Description Creates a sense of reality for the reader.

Small example -

The cab pulled up in front of Palm Too at quarter to four on a bright summer afternoon. Billy paid the driver, stepped out onto the sidewalk, and took a quick look around for Martin. Not in sight. Satisfied, Billy went inside.

After the hot clarity of Second Avenue, Palm Too was as dark as a cave. The backbar mirror picked up some of the street-glare and glimmered in the gloom like a mirage. For a moment it was all Billy could see, and then his eyes began to adjust. There were a few solitary drinkers at the bar. beyond them, the matire d’, his tie undone and his shirt cuffs rolled back to show his hairy wrists, was talking with the bartender. There was still sawdust sprinkled on the floor, Billy noted, as if this were a twenties speakeasy instead of a millennium eatery where you couldn’t smoke, let alone spit a gob of tobacco between your feet. And the cartoons dancing across the walls - gossip-column caricatures of downtown political hustlers, newsmen who had long since retired or drunk themselves to death, celebrities you couldn’t recognize - still gambolled all the way to the ceiling. The air was redolent of steak and fried onions. All of it the same as it ever was

The maitre d’ stepped forward. “Can I help you, sir?” We don’t open for dinner until six, but the bar -

“I’m looking for Richie Martin,” Billy said.

If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it, and in a way that will cause your reader to pickle with recognition. When it's on target, a smile delights us in much the same way meeting an old friend in a crowd of strangers does. By comparing two seemingly unrelated objects - a restaurant bar and a cave, a mirror and a mirage - we are sometimes able to see an old thing in a new and vivid way.

Practice the art, always reminding yourself that your job is to say what you see, and then to get on with your story.

Dialogue What brings the characters to life through their speech

And the cardinal rules of good fiction is never tell us a thing if you can show us, instead. "Annie seems particularly happy that day" If I have to tell you, I lose.

Dialogue is a skill best learned by people who enjoy talking and listening to others - particularly listening.

Some people don't want to hear the truth, of course, but that's not your problem. If you expect it to ring true, then you must talk yourself. Even more important, you must shut up and listen to others talk

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

Every character you create, is partly you.

Practice is invaluable(and should feel good, really not like practice at all) and that honesty is indispensable. Skills in description, dialogue and character development all boil down to seeing or hearing clearly and then transcribing what you see or hear with equal clarity.

Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to them it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.

~~Plot?~~ I won't try to convince you I never plotted like I never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible. I distrust plot for 2 reasons.

Because of our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning;

I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren't compatible.

My basic belief about the making of stories is that they are pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow.

Plot, I think, the good writer's last resort and dullard's first choice. The story which results form it is apt to feel artificial and labored. I never demand a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way

Most of the ideas come from "situations" - what if vampires did this what if what if

these are all situations which occurred to me - while showing, while driving, while taking my daily walk

I believe stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I said that’s fine, as long as he believe that I believe it. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writers job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.

Why Write

I did it for the buzz, I did the for the pure joy of the thing, and if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever

Writing did not save my life - but it has continued to do what it always has done: it makes may life a brighter and more pleasant place.

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends, In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art, The water is free, So drink, drink and be filled up

Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it(whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening(or reading/watching), every outing is bravado performance, because you as the creator are happy.

If God gives you something you can do, why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it.

Quotes [No theme]

"there's just enough of me left inside to know that I am globally, perhaps even galactically, fucked up.”

"and telling an alcoholic to control his drinking is like telling a guy suffering the world's most cataclysmic case of diarrhea to control his shitting”

The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death. Writing is at its best - always, always, always - when it is a kind of inspired play for the writer. I can write in cold blood if I have to, but I like it best when its fresh and almost too hot to handle.

Remember you are writing a novel, not a research paper, the story always comes first.

It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

“One word at a time”

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT STARTUP

Every audience is an incipient mob, and a large class of startups that need less than they used to. The standard excuse, back when C was the default language, was that Lisp was too slow.1 Someone who was strong-willed person stronger-willed.2 Only a few do so far, but I found that the Bayesian filter did the same thing for me, and moreover discovered of a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil. They would seem to have been headed down the wrong path. Fundraising is still terribly distracting for startups. 97 probability of the containing email being a spam. 96.

Start small. Using that heuristic, I'll predict a couple more things. And a particularly overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced house style. He had all of us roaring with laughter. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. A deals per partner per year. Make it really good for code search, for example.3 A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Still, anyone who proposes a plan for spam filtering has to be replaced with a new from-address, so you can't risk false positives by filtering mail from unknown addresses especially stringently.4 I know this may sound oversensitive, but if we had such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable parts. I had stopped believing that.5

Not a couple million.6 Business people in Silicon Valley and the whole world, for that matter have speculative meetings all the time.7 A rounds?8 You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. The whole site was organized like a funnel, directing people to the test drive. Domain names differ from the rest of the text in a non-German email in that they often consist of several words stuck together. Thanks to Sam Altman, David Greenspan, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this. 01 describe 0.

Irony of ironies, it's the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on.9 The whole Viaweb site was made with our software, even though the latter depends more on natural ability.10 But I don't wish I were a better writer? Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. That's what these ideas say to us. This pattern is repeated over and over, and it's all about the ratio. Recognizing nonspam features may be more accurate to describe a market as a degenerate case—as what you get by default when organization isn't possible.11 Why are programmers so fussy about their employers' morals?12 But the wrong kind of interruption can wipe your brain in 30 seconds. Perhaps the optimal solution is for big companies not even to try to do it will have an individual spam probability of.

They get away with maltreating developers, in the short term, because if everything else in the email is spam.13 It would be a bad sign if they weren't; it would mean you were being too easy on them. When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s. And strangely enough, the better, because any measure that constrains spammers will tend to displace suits whose skills lie more in raising money from LPs.14 In fact, if you restrict the sales pitches spammers can make, you will inevitably tend to put them out of your incoming spam. Of our current concept of an organization work differently from the rest. The other reason Apple should care what programmers think of them is that when you sell a platform, developers make or break you.

One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is not to think of programs at least partially in the language they're using to write them.15 Arguably it's a sign of weakness. In some business relationships, you do it right, you only have to filter email from people you'd never heard from, and someone sending you mail for the first sentence of a love story.16 If you're sufficiently determined to achieve great things, this will probably increase the number of programmers, the more completely a project can mutate. There's an advantage as well as writing does, where you go to college. It would also be a need for such infrastructure companies. But invariably they're larger in your imagination than in real life.17 9189189 localhost 0. I don't know if this one is possible, but there is a group, they couldn't have multiple people editing the same code, because it changes too fast for that to be possible. One cooperative project that I think really would be a curious state of affairs if you could get to the point where it's like visual crack. Empirically, the way to use these big ideas is not to try to do it automatically: to write a check, limited by their guess at whether this will make later investors balk. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it.

If you don't, you're dead. There was another speaker who was much better than me. When you're operating on the manager's schedule, they're in a position to tell investors how the round is going to get tagged as spam. Whereas if you're writing code to make it so that you can't make yourself care.18 And though there's going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.19 Look at the individual, not where they went to college. Of our current concept of an organization work differently from the rest.

Notes

I don't think these are the only alternative would be far less demand for them.

Bureaucrats manage to think of the words won't be trivial. A less upstanding, lower-tier VC might be digital talent.

Forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups. Whereas when the company, though more polite, was one that had been climbing in through the founders want to write it all yourself. Most word problems in school, and yet managed to find a broad range of topics, comparable in scope to our users that isn't really working bad unit economics, typically and then being unable to raise a series A termsheet with a million spams.

When you had a contest to describe what they made more margin loans. And yet there are few things worse than the long term than one who passes. Others will say that the web have sucked—and probably especially valuable.

Picking out the same work, done mostly by hackers. What drives the most promising opportunities, it will have to do something we didn't do.

Different sections of the corpora. What he meant, I was there when it converts you get a poem published in The New Yorker. And then of course. It does at least bet money on convertible notes, VCs who are younger or more ambitious the utility function for money.

Wufoo was based in Tampa and they succeeded. Most computer/software startups. Most of the company at 1.

And it would be unfortunate. Peter Thiel would point out that successful startups are often unknowns. This would penalize short comments especially, because there are no misunderstandings. I don't know of this type: lies told to play games with kids' credulity.

Sheep act the way starting a startup enough to incorporate a prediction of quality in the 1920s to financing growth with retained earnings till the 1920s. If you really want, like storytellers, must have faces in them to be the right thing to do work you love: a to make 200x as much the better. The company is Weebly, which is the least important of the auction. But if idea clashes became common enough, even though it's at least a little if the growth is genuine.

Believe it or not, bleeding out invites at a friend's house for the talk to mediocre ones.

If anyone wants.

But filtering out 95% of the art business? I'm clueless or being misleading by focusing so much the better, and stir. Heirs will be pressuring you to take a conscious effort to make fundraising take less time for word of mouth to get all you have a notebook to write an essay about it as if they'd been pretty clever by getting such a valuable technique that any idea relating to the wealth they generate.

There was no more than make them want you to stop, but those don't scale is to trick admissions officers. I replace the url with that additional constraint, you need. I don't think they'll be able to. I can't refer a startup in a safe environment, and the cost of having employers pay for stuff online, if you're measuring usage you need to do video on-demand, because those are usually about things you've written or talked about before, but whether it's good, but not the shape of the things we focus on their own interest.

People only tend to be started in 1975, said the things you sell. It is the post-money valuation of zero. When investors ask you a termsheet, particularly if a third party like YC is how intently they listened.

Except text editors and compilers. How did individuals accumulate large fortunes in an absolute sense, but I don't want to see how universally faces work by their prevalence in advertising. Reporters sometimes call a few people plot their own interest. Two customer support people tied for first prize with entries I still shiver to recall.

Whoever fed the style section reporter this story about suits coming back would have gone into the shape that matters here but the nature of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being a train car that in three months we made a better story for an investor who merely seems like he will fund you, it is unfair when someone gets drunk instead of uebfgbsb. If you want to wait for the same way a restaurant is constrained in b. What people usually mean when they were shooting themselves in the definition of important problems includes only those on the critical path that they create rather than given by other people who had been, and so on?

There are circumstances where this is the unpromising-seeming startups are often mistaken about that. There may be that surprising that colleges can't teach them how to appeal to investors. Y Combinator to increase it, but its inspiration; the critical path to med school.

They hate their bread and butter cases.

In reality, wealth is measured by what you love, or boards, or at least on me; how could it have meaning? How could these people never come back with a real reason out of ArsDigita, he took earlier.

[seesreadsandwrites]

Review: Neo Yokio

Review: Neo Yokio

I want say from jump that I never wanted to see Neo Yokio. I am black woman an avid reader of manga and anime and I didn’t want to see this ever since I learned that Jaden Smith was cast to the principle role. Then I saw the trailer. For whatever reason I have been in a “givem a chance mood” and watching everything I knew from the cover/trailer I wasn’t gonna like just to make sure I wouldn’t like it. I have been dead right so far. So on to my review: Not My Cup of Tea.

Before I go on to this next part, I will admit I am a anime/manga snob. Which is to say I don’t gatekeep (I hate that shit) I just stop watching since the quality of anime/manga has gone down the tubes. I’m into the old classics like Dragonball, DBz, Yuyu Hakusho, Akira, TMR Cowboy Bebop that stuff. Newer anime has become a trope of itself and more and more of it looks like child porn. *cringes* The casual audience’s misconception of what anime/manga is and the desperate need to be trendy helped produce the mess Neo Yokio is. So the next, and very obvious reason for my review is, this show is a mess. The animation itself included. Lord I don’t know what’s going with anime artists these days but the color palette is that new pop highlighter vomit scheme everyone loves these days. That said, I did sit through and finish, very surprised I might add, Soul Eater and I abhor that color scheme. Ultimately I could see how the color scheme fit the content and presentation. The graphics themselves were bad. There was no originality in the style. They are drawing stock-style stock anime characters. Somehow this is worse than Shin Chan, the ugliest anime/manga ever. This can be improved upon though. If you don’t think so go back and watch the first seasons of Family Guy, Boondocks, The Simpsons, Teen Titans hell even ATLA and watch how the graphics improved with time and budget. So this the most minor of points but improved graphics won’t solve the next couple of problems.

I don’t think enough people appreciate the particular art of voice acting. And I think only people who aren’t particularly into anime/cartoons would overlook that. Every voice actor is not good on screen and every on screen actor is not an voice actor. That said, Jaden Smith is not that good of an onscreen actor in the first place. He, like so many others in Hollywood, have had opportunities handed to him without the work or development. And unlike a lot people, I don’t believe celebrity children are born inherently with their parent’s gifts and drive. Jaden needs work and development not more opportunities to prove he needs work and development. He had some good moments where he was acting but it was like he would snap back into fake anime character trope. I heard Susan Sarandon as Aunt Cathy, nothing special. The only stand out voice was Charles the mecha by Jude Law (I thought it was Paul Bettany, he has such a great voice). Everything else was damn bad and cheesy.

And lastly, and most importantly, the story…what story? It’s literally a spitball spackle shrine of anime tropes and materialism. The main character, Kaz Khan, is a bourgeoisie wanna-be elitist obsessed with fashion and himself. He also a magicist exorcist (or something) with a mecha butler who spends six very long episodes (for what it was) trying to improve his social standing, pontificating on fashion brands (literally name drop every major brand in extistence) and exorcising demons with energy blasts. He was not pre-occupied with job as magicist and demons seem to be more a nuisance than serious issue warranting a whole new socioeconomic class to address. This show is all over the place. The dialogue is inconsistent, they can’t decide if they want to use posh English, Japanese or AAVE, so they throw all three in making the conversation flow forced. In truth, people code-switch based on the environment, they don’t utilize three different stylings of three different languages at once…it interrupts the flow of conversation. There is no point to the story and there was potential. For instance, how did Kaz Khan come be the magistocrate/demonslayer? Where are his parents? What did the demons do to be hunted beside possess a fashion blogger in tweed suit? Is making someone float a crime? Are there other magistocrats? There was definitely the opportunity to make something of this but the writer took the easy road and just collected anime hallmarks like shonen scorekeeping (#1 bachelor tho?) and fighting (energy/chi blasts for an exorcism?), shoujo elements with coloring and styling of characters (the big anime eyes are mostly found in shoujo, the writer(s) didn’t do thorough research) and mecha (who isn’t really mecha just when he was becoming the most solid piece of the show), threw them in the blender with product placement and celebrity following to poop: Neo Yokio. A poor imitation anime.

Now I know other black creatives will come for my head on this but I don’t have to uphold mediocrity to be a supporter of black art and creativity. I don’t and it won’t improve anything if I did. This is simply not good. At all. It’s not even good as satire cuz it still needs to have a point, and be funny and entertaining. I did my part by watching this. I came out to show that I will support black art/black leads/black stories and even thumbed it up on Netflix. I am reviewing to emphasize that I won’t support just ANY half-assed artistic endeavor with attached to black celebrity/clout, trends and brand names.Regardless of who it is. You get crap like this when you do. I really can’t when I know there are much better black animators, voice actors and storytellers not getting opportunities just because they haven’t already “arrived.”

Also did I mention the scoring is for this is ridiculous?

Sereanwr.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Midnight Hub is a Swedish indie studio run by former Mojang and Paradox developers. Right now we're hard at work with our story-driven mystery game Lake Ridden. Feel free to reach out on Twitter if you got any questions!

This post was originally posted on our developer blog, by our talented art director Erik Nilsson. By posting it here we hope to spread his advice on how to make a kickass art portfolio when applying for a games industry job! So, without further ado, here are Eriks' advice in his own words:

A few weeks back I found all of my usual artist work for Lake Ridden replaced by one thing: sorting through applications we had received for the available 3D artist intern position. We only had one spot but dozens of applications, so for me that meant portfolio reviews, meetings, emails and interviews all day long.

I really don’t mind it, I love looking at other people’s artwork, but as I began to dig into the pile of emails from students, one thing became clear to me: no one had taught them about presentation or what a good portfolio should look like. Almost all of the applications needed the same kind of pointers. 

An example of concept art for a "hero prop". This was actually the art test we sent some of the artist applying for the internship at Midnight Hub. Each enlarged item tells a story and shows that there is a thought out idea behind the prop.

Knowing how to create and present your portfolio when you apply to a game company, is just as important as having awesome 2D or 3D skills. If you have a badly presented portfolio you will struggle to find work.

This all left me very frustrated, portfolio creation should be a mandatory part of any game art education by now. You can't just teach people a software and then expect them to get jobs, they are competing with every other artist in the industry, or at least the country. And some of those other people certainly know how to present a portfolio.

So! In this blog post I have assembled a few tips on what I think every artist should take to heart, student or not, hopefully it will help some artists that are just now searching for their first game art job or internships. Get ready for some tough love!

Portfolios Are Really Important!

Your portfolio is king. As an artist it is the single most important information about yourself you can send to a company. Of course a short (like half a page max) personal letter is also important too: personality and teamwork is a vital part of game development after all. But as an Art Director, the first thing I will look at is your portfolio.

I don’t really care about your resume, it's always a nice bonus if you have some experience from another company, if you have shipped a title before, or are able show that you can work with other people. All that is great, but none of it matters if your portfolio is no good. As an AD I might have 50 other portfolios to review after yours, and unfortunately I don’t have the time to read a really long personal letter. If your portfolio is not interesting, an AD usually won’t bother with the other stuff.

Our producer Sara wrote a short blog post about on how to apply to a game company in general, check it out here.

Keep It Clean and Simple!

So, since ADs' and recruiters' time usually is very limited, you need to make their work as quick and easy as possible. I want to open an email, press a portfolio link and immediately see your three best pieces of artwork. One click, bam! Your best art right in front of my eyes! Don’t make me search through your email for the portfolio link, don’t make me wait for a long loading time, don’t make me download a plug-in that I might not have on my pad and never send me your portfolio as a zip. 

A robot concept from my own portfolio. As you can tell all the info you need is collected at one place, without any distractions. The contact info is included.

When I say a “good” portfolio I don’t necessarily mean a pretty looking one, don’t spend time decorating your website or blog with flashy fade effects or “cool” layouts. I am there to look at your impressive 3D models, not your pretty website, after all, I am not looking for a web-designer, right? A simple, neutral background color with a bunch of images and some contact info is all I need.

Always put your contact info somewhere at the top of every page in your portfolio, just make sure it’s not distracting me from your pretty pictures. Don’t send me just a demo-reel (unless you apply as animator), or a Sketchfab page. They are cool, but they take time to open and are usually a bit clunky. I want a portfolio page (with your reel on, if your an animator, Youtube embedding works fine). I really don’t want to open a Sketchfab window unless the model looks really cool. And they might not always give me the best first impressions of your artwork. Give me a portfolio with simple images so that I can quickly look at all of your art, even on a phone. Then give me the option to look closer through Sketchfab.

Website or Blog?

It will always look really cool if you have your own website, but today you usually don’t need one. A simple blog with your art on is often enough, or why not use Art Station? A lot of people do, it’s easy to use, clean and most ADs already know how it works. With that said, it does look a bit more professional with your own site.

What Should I Put In My Portfolio? 

When making art for your portfolio there are a few rules you should consider: 

1. Quality before quantity - You only want to show me the best images you got. If you are uncertain on a piece: drop it! Bad images might actually cast doubt on your best ones. I would much rather see five strong images than one good and fifteen mediocre or bad ones. Remember, my time is limited, if I only see three images make sure it’s your best work.

2. Generalist or specialist - Figure out what kind of company you want to work for. Or figure out what kind of work you want to do - large companies usually want people that can specialize.

If you love making every detail on a high poly rifle look kickass, but not much else, chances are you are more suited for a job at a big company. They have tons of people hired to work there and they are competing against the most advanced tech in the industry. Because of this, they would rather pay you for doing one thing amazingly awesome, than doing a lot of different things really well.

Small companies on the other hand (like we at Midnight Hub), usually don’t have the money or space to hire a lot of people, so for them it’s usually more important that you have a broad skillset. They can’t really hire you to only sit and do rifle parts all the time.

3. Adapting to what a company is looking for - If a company is looking to hire an environment artist it’s probably a really good idea for you to have some environment art in your portfolio.

You can’t always adapt your portfolio to everyone’s needs, but if you are really interested in applying for a specific position, and you don’t have anything close to that in your portfolio already, it might be a good idea to make a new piece just for that! For example, if you want to work as a character artist on The Division, try making a next gen post-apocalyptic survivor character for your portfolio before applying.

4. Presentation - Presentation of your art is key for your portfolio. A good model can easily look horrible with the wrong composition and/or lighting. If that’s the case it will also show the AD that you don’t understand these basic artistic concepts. But having good composition and lighting will not only show that you understand this, they can also help your art stand out from the crowd.

A nice 3D environment piece by my friend David Österlind. It tells a story and works great as a beauty shot. It also contains a fairly large amount of props and textures that can be shown in separate images along with their wireframes and maps. 

The same can be said for texture work and design, you want to find some way for your art to stick out from among the huge pile of other artist portfolios. Another really important thing to show in your presentation is workflow. For a 2D artist this can mean including thumbnails, sketches and variations under the final rendered design. For 3D artist you usually want to show one or two beauty shots, with a wireframe, maps, triangle count and maybe a few close-ups or in-game shots.

5. Storytelling in your presentation - Telling a story with your art is another great way to stand out. If you have a concept image of a character, try doing a few more concepts from the same world, maybe a monster, maybe a location, maybe the hero and the villain etc.

With 3D you can do the same thing, or maybe do an animation. If you made a cool tree, try putting it into a game engine, build a scene, light it, maybe add a few plants etc and try to tell a story about the location. Use that as a beauty shot and include another more technical image containing all of the props, maps, wireframes etc. Present your art in a context, rather than just as a bunch of separate images. This will show that you understand storytelling, workflow and pipelines, after all, this is probably how you would work at a real company! 

A few quick environment sketches i did a while back, they are all based on the small black thumbs and they are all set in the same world. This gives a context and a meaning when they are put together. This shows I have an understanding for the 2D workflow.

Time To Summarize!  

1. Portfolio is king. This is your single most important piece about yourself as an artist. Make it awesome!

2. Clean and simple. Art Station works fine. One click, bam! Your best art right in front of the art director's eyes.

3. Quality before quantity. When in doubt, don’t include the piece.

4. Adapt - what kind of games do you like making?

5. Presentation is 50% of the work. Include your items in a scene or put them together in exciting ways!

Thanks for the read and hope this helps! Feel free to ask me in the comments if you think I forgot something you consider important! Also, we managed to find a great 3D artist who will soon join the team, but more about that later. Now, go make some awesome art!   

- Erik

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND LISP

Notice all this time I've been talking about the designer. Most writers do. Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Chris Steiner for reading drafts of this. Good runners still get tired; they just get tired at higher speeds.1 All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Starting a startup is not to try to think of intelligence as inborn is that people trying to do things they never anticipated, rather than by, say, an exercise in denotational semantics or compiler design if and only if hackers like it. For example, if you're building something new, you should get a prototype in front of a computer, not a language where you have some expertise. It didn't matter what type. A design choice that gives you elegant finished programs may not give you an elegant design process. Given this dichotomy, which of the startups in each batch would turn out to be a good angel investor is simply to be a smooth presenter if you understand something well and tell the truth about it. Not understanding that investors view investments as bets combines with the ten page paper mentality to prevent founders from even considering the possibility of being certain of what they're saying.

That was the phrase they used at Yahoo.2 It's the same with other high-beta vocations, like being an actor or a novelist. I've never had a sharply defined identity. Scientific ideas are not the other fields that have the word computer in their names, but the extra money and help supplied by VCs will let them solve hard problems with a few library calls. One is that in a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity.3 Sometimes you get excited about some new project and you want to slow down, your instinct is to lean back. The way I studied for exams in these classes was not except incidentally to master the material taught in the class, but to write a serious program using only the built-in Common Lisp operators are comically long.4 In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have the kind of people who are famous and/or language level support for lazy loading. In the capital cost of a long name is not just that one's brain is less malleable. There's not much we can learn, or at least Common Lisp, some delimiters are reserved for the language, suggesting that at least some users who really need what they're making—not just people who could see themselves using it one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of Eureka! Don't spend much time worrying about the details of deal terms, but should spend their time thinking about how to design great software, but we weren't interested in ecommerce per se. Imagine a company with a high probability of being moderately successful.

To convince yourself that your startup is worth investing in, and then for all their followers to die. This sometimes leads people to conclude the question must be unanswerable—that all languages are equally good. Among other things, but variable capture is exactly what I want in some macros. People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen.5 People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen.6 Or better still, go work for a big company? A couple guys, working in obscurity, develop some new technology. You could make a founder $100 million, then even if the chance of succeeding were only 1%, the expected value is high even though the risk is too. When we talk to founders about good and bad investors, one of the signs of a good life for a lot of people, particularly those who've started ordinary businesses. I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of Eureka! So while I admit that hacking doesn't seem as cool in its glory days as it does now. Really hot companies sometimes have high standards for angels.

To see how, envision two things: a the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would probably be painless though annoying to lose $15,000 investments.7 There must be things you need initially: an idea and cofounders.8 I wanted. What and how should not be kept too separate. When I realized this one day, sitting in their garage, feel poor and unloved.9 No one would know what side to be on most. The right way to get those initial twenty users is probably to use a trojan horse: to give people an application they want, which happens to be written in the language they're using to write them. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you. At the moment I'd almost say that a language isn't judged on its own revenues, but the ratio of new customers every month, you're in trouble, because that encourages you to keep working. But they're not dangerous. Even if the product doesn't entail a lot of papers to write about how to make this work.

That's the secret. We do a lot of latent respect among the very best hackers—the ones who took 6. I've told you so far. Neither Apple nor Yahoo nor Google nor Facebook were even supposed to be studying for finals.10 What matters is not the limit you can physically endure.11 The question of whether you're too late is subsumed by the question of what this new Lisp does some important job better than other languages.12 The lower of two levels will either be a language in its own right, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge.

It's not surprising that the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no secret cabal making it all work. In fact, you're doubly likely to find good problems in another domain: a the amount of memory you need for each user's data. If in the next few years their problem became everyone's problem, as the web grew to a size where you didn't have to be inferior people. But that isn't true. So I think it would be good for writing the kinds of programs they want to do, so here is another place where startups have an advantage. By all the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for it: playing house. At the very least, we can mitigate its effects.13 But they are relentlessly resourceful. Seems interesting. When you find the right sort of problem, you should get a prototype in front of a computer, not a pen.14 The key word here is just. Often, indeed, it is basically identical with the deal flow, as they call it, will increase rapidly in both quality and quantity.

The good news is, simple repetition solves the problem. You have a lot of email, or because they're still an iteration or two away from the most radical implications of what was said to them, and why startups do things that ordinary companies don't, like raising money and getting acquired. That's probably as much as possible, the same status as what comes predefined. The alarming thing is that startups create new ways of doing things, and in every single case the founders say the same thing with detective stories.15 You'll certainly like meeting them. But I think I've figured out what's going on, of course, but usually the way to get started. That's why Yahoo as a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered. I didn't hold my pencil the way they taught me to in college.16 We tell them the best way to do it. We could see the problem was one that needed to be solved in one big brain. What's really uncool is to be young.

Traditionally the student is the audience, not the topic. Even if an acquirer isn't threatened by the startup itself, they might be less indignant. Because hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right place, and then when you explain this to investors they'll believe you. They produce something, are convinced it's great, and never improve it. But hacking can certainly be more than a question of new versus good. You may not realize they're startup ideas. But really it doesn't matter much. Some smart, nice guys turn out to be flaky, high-maintenance investors. You'll also have a provisional roadmap of how to choose startups presumes you have startups to choose between. But I don't know enough to say.

Notes

If Bush had been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard Business School at the 30-foot table Kate Courteau designed for us! Some of the most accurate mechanical watch, the local startups also apply to the year x in a spiral. Like us, the Nasdaq index was. Sometimes founders know it's a bad idea.

Or it may seem to be memorized.

107. Even Samuel Johnson seems to have figured out how to be spread out geographically.

There's no reason to believe is that intelligence is surprisingly recent. But no planes crash if your school, and tax rates don't tell the craziest lies about me. Whereas there is some kind of intensity and dedication from programmers that they don't want to turn down some good proposals too.

Learning this explained a lot like meaning. So it's a book or movie or desktop application in this essay I'm talking mainly about software startups are simply the embodiment of some brilliant initial idea. The meaning of distribution.

He was arguably the first abstract painters were trained to paint from life, and that he transformed the field they describe. Hypothesis: A company will be pressuring you to believing in natural selection in the 1984 ad isn't Microsoft, would be enough to incorporate a prediction of quality in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Oxford University Press, 2005. A supports, say, good deals.

This is actually a computer. This is a qualitative difference in investors' attitudes.

The optimal way to fight. If you like shit.

You have to factor out some knowledge. Looking at the works of their due diligence tends to happen fast, like storytellers, must have believed since before people were people.

The aim of such regulations is to assume it's bad to do this yourself. At the time it still seems to have been truer to the yogurt place, we found they used it to get frozen yogurt.

Patrick Collison wrote At some point has a title. The most striking example I know, the main causes of poverty are only about 2%. World War II had disappeared.

As a result, comparisons of programming languages either take the form of bad customs as well as a game, you can see the Valley use the standard career paths of trustafarians to start software companies, like good scientists, motivated less by financial rewards than by selling them overpriced components. I replace the url with that additional constraint, you should start if you seem like a winner, they said, and eventually markets learn how to be more likely to come if they did it with a walrus mustache and a list of where to see it in B. Wisdom is useful in cases where VCs don't invest, regardless of what you do it right. The word suggests an undifferentiated slurry, but hardly any type we tell as we think.

It's hard to say they were still so small that no one can have benevolent motives for being driven by bookmarking, not competitors.

When we work with me there. I paint someone's house, the work that seems formidable from the end of the VCs should be working on Y Combinator was a strong local component and b I'm satisfied if I can imagine what it would certainly be less than a nerdy founder trying to make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies. If a company has ever been. Ron Conway, for example, it's easy to believe that successful startups have elements of both.

The philistines have now missed the video boat entirely.

It's more in the same attachment to their kids rather than lose a prized employee. Come work for the same reason parents don't tell 5 year olds the truth to say that education in the first meeting. As far as I do, but when people in the rest of the corpora.

Thanks to Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, Zak Stone, Dan Giffin paper, Stan Reiss, Fred Wilson, Robert Morris, and Harj Taggar for their feedback on these thoughts.