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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Jan 25. Do you have a worked-out magical system (or advanced technology in sci-fi)? Or do you make it up as you go?
Oh, I love rules. Rules are toys to play with.
The story of BAGZ is very much built with the sci fi MacGuffin's rules. It starts with Terminator's "We can't bring guns through time," rule so future people genetically engineer organic weapons for time trave - giant brains, and "burden and danger of a big brain" is a core metaphor of the story.
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[#]WordWeavers 26
Does your character value academics?
Jaq has extensively studied Welsh history, enough to mix up Darth Vader with Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, the first king of Wales, at a Star Wars pub trivia night. But her interest in esoteric things is mostly utilitarian. When struggling to understand peoples' irrational reactions to living in a world with zombies she notes, "Just stay human and don't eat brains. Boom, a complete epistemology."
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[#]wordweavers Jan 25th When shopping, what do your MCs look for? (Prices, brands, ethical sourcing, quality?)
The main thing my main character expresses interest in buying is a Metro Monthly Transit Pass. This is a rough cut of what happens when Jaq gets her first paycheck after being trapped in the 21st century for two weeks. It sums up her priorities pretty well. 1) Get a bus pass. 2) Save the world. In that order.
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[#]WordWeavers for 23rd January, 2025
In their world, is your MC more traditional or more interested in change?
That's a really interesting question. She wants to go back in time to change history, but she sees the social order in the future as eminently reasonable given the apocalyptic situation. When she arrives in the present, she basically hates it but also it was essentially the world she wanted to create if she had been able.
I don't think that answers the question.
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Here's an interesting historical fossil. 1970's East German propaganda film where they explain that when the West was going to invade, the workers rose up and said "Stop" and built the Berlin Wall to protect themselves and preserve the peace from NATO aggression.
Cuz apparently the wall would keep out strategic bombers, and it was nothing to do with DDR citizens escaping and defecting. I dunno, just rings a certain bell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgzCB--p5PQ
[#]History #Propaganda #TrainingFilm
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Whoever wrote the trivia for "Past Tense" seems like they got the message of the episode.
"Dr. Bashir gives the hypoglycemic Lee a shot of GlucaGen. That medication is used to force the liver to release its stored glucose (glycogen) when a patient is unconscious or otherwise unable to eat carbohydrates. For what it's worth, in most countries a dose of GlucaGen costs about $25., in the USA it costs over $250."
[#]startrek #ds9 #medicine
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[#]WordWeavers Jan 22: Does the thought of one day dying scare your characters?
"If anything goes wrong, this might
not be a suicide mission." is a line in the film. The idea of living in the 21st century and having to work a retail day job during late stage capitalism is treated as a fate worse than death. Having failed to make it to the apocalyptic battle is a great distress and even shame for the main character, and being alive just evidence of being a fuckup.
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Probably the single most obscure joke/reference in the whole script involves a brain talking (roughly) about the genetics involved in making the covid vaccine more efficient, just saying it's talking about the fictional "Z-34" Zombie protein instead of SARS Cov 2 spike protein. For the possibly one viewer who gets it, this sets up the story as a Covid-y parable.
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/
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[#]WordWeavers 1/20. Do you feel the Covid pandemic has affected your writing or stories? If so, how?
I didn't set out to write about Covid, but it wound up inevitable. Me getting burned out and needing to do something creative had a lot to do with those days. And once I was writing a post-zombie apocalypse story it became impossible not to have some parallels.
Eventually, there was a zombie vaccine, zombie protein shedding, pepe the frog meme disinformation, zombie stigma, etc.
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[#]writerscoffeeclub 01/19—Did you find a way through the maze of traditional publishing to get your book published? What’s your secret?
YOLO. I wrote a screenplay and decided to self produce. Called in every favor I could wrangle, but we shot it. It's in post production now and I don't know exactly where it'll wind up. But there was no need to wait for permission from a publisher/distributor/studio/anybody. It'll make it out regardless.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub January 16: How would you describe the way you create your stories to a non-writer?
Most everybody responding to these prompts seems to be writing stuff like novels, rather than film.
The unique thing about writing for film is hacking away at stuff that costs money, finding ways to simplify to where you can do something in real life and still be interesting. You trim and cut til only the movie is left, rather than adding and adding.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub 1/15: Would you ever hide your politics to avoid alienating some readers?
Lol, no. BAGZ is blatantly socialist and urbanist. It complains about the LA Metro system being inadequate and the importance of mass transit, pokes fun at far right conspiracy theorists, and when characters discuss the possibility of a person stealing food one character has the line, "If you care about humanity, eating is not a worse crime than hunger."
I am quite happy to alienate some people.
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Google stuck so many "helpful" labels on the subject line of this email in GMail that there is only one complete word from the subject left, and that word is just "New"
When you've taken all of the information away, it's not actually helpful to clarify or emphasize it. There's nothing to clarify. This is a textbook example of a feature that sounded like a good idea, but the company would be better off never having released.
[#]Google #Enshittification #BadUI #Software
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[#]wordweavers Jan 11 - Fight, flight, freeze or fawn? How does your MC react to danger?
Jaq is great in a crisis. Level headed, ready to fight, do what's necessary.
She absolutely falls apart without danger. Some quiet and a chance to catch up with friends just results in a lonely spiral of hostile depression. Which puts her at risk of leaping to conclusions and recklessly believing anything that plausibly leads to some excitement.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Jan 11: secondary characters: backstory or created as needed?
I thought it would be funny to play with this, so BAGZ has a character who is introduced by loudly insisting "I was just standing here!" as if he's covering up whatever weird stuff he was actually doing and he's lying about having no back story.
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Remember when Slack used to be... a pretty straightforward chat app? Channels were on the left, chats were on the right. Logged into Slack today for the first time in a while, and it's kind of stunning how much of the UI is just not about the content of the core use case. Pop ups and "improvements" and additions obscure everything. It's a busy mess.
[#]UI #Slack #Enshittification #BadUI #SoftwareDesign #Software
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Apparently EdgeCast might finally be dead. So I think when I was tossed, I was only one major layoff cycle from the end.
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I continue to wish I could turn off the AI Overview bullshit from Google search results. Sometimes I look at it by accident, and there's a risk I'll believe it.
Apparently: A) South Korea is the same length as the entire Korean Peninsula. And also, B) South Korea starts in the middle of the Korean Peninsula. And according to Gemini, both of those things are true at the same time.
[#]AI #Google #Gemini #Enshittification
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Tried putting my phone on Airplane mode to avoid doomscrolling.
How did people poop before smartphones? Did everybody just hold it for a hundred millennia?
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