The Arcane Season 2 soundtrack is just as good as the first season. This was my favorite track so far:

Price breakouts are really important and it’s great to finally see one, but I’m also kind of in the camp that anything under $100K is boring by this point.

This is wild actually. View quoted note →

Now in meme form. Pretty accurate to character actually. View quoted note →

I messed around with Midjourney to create initial renderings of some of the main characters of my hobby sci-fi manuscript. Would that movie poster interest you or nah?

gm In fiction, the point of view from how we see the story can often color how we perceive the ethics of characters. And of course, that lesson can apply in real life as well. If you ask most people if Neo and Trinity in the Matrix are heroes or anti-heroes, for example, they’ll probably say heroes. There is nothing particularly dark or edgy about them other than kind of a general “cool” factor. They’re pretty chill and well-meaning people in their downtime, we care about their relationship, they help their friends, they have rather pure motivations, etc. But in the Matrix, agents can teleport themselves into any unplugged person. Which means that when Neo or Trinity attack a place, they pretty much have to slaughter everyone. Leaving survivors means that agents can teleport in. Innocent guards and stuff just get wiped out by the dozens. The stakes of humanity being enslaved by the machines are so high, that the characters don’t even really debate the ethics of this; they just accept it. Like literally the opening scene is Trinity killing police, and the audience is like “wow cool” instead of “so, is that the antagonist?” The famous lobby scene consists of Neo and Trinity wiping out tons of guards that are just doing their job of guarding a skyscraper. In the sequel, Trinity sends a motorcycle bomb into a power station, and then murders the remaining guards as they attack her. We all basically like Trinity, and yet there are platoons of widows and orphans out there from all the guards she killed. There aren’t really even any scenes of her reflecting on that, like finding it emotionally difficult in any way to do those things or feeling in any way haunted by it. If the Matrix story was shown from like, a detective’s point of view, these characters are terrorists and would either seem like outright villains (if you don’t know their motivation) or anti-heroes if you do (ends justify the means; mass-murder is okay and not even worth feeling bad about if it saves billions). So, how the movie *frames* things for us makes a big difference. We closely follow Neo and Trinity so much that we’re like, “of course they’re the heroes”. The same thing happens in real life with political commentators and things like that; a cultural narrative can frame something as wholly good or wholly bad when often it’s actually kind of complex. Therefore, it’s a useful practice whether in analyzing fiction or real life, to always ask how you could invert the framing for something.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is non-traditional story structures. (Spoilers for The Matrix, Sicario, and John Wick if you haven’t seen them by now…) A good example of a traditional story structure is The Matrix. It’s a typical three-act structure with an underdog protagonist who explores a whole new world, powers up via his mentor, and then takes down the stronger villain and gets the girl. But it’s more creative and better executed than most. Top shelf stuff. In contrast, a movie like Sicario is less traditional. We mostly follow the story from the protagonist’s perspective. But then toward the end, she basically gets defeated and her worldview is invalidated. And then a supporting character, like a dark anti-hero type, kind of takes over as the main character for the final 20 minutes of the film. It’s quite highly rated and very good, but that kind of structure can be risky because the protagonist that we've come to care for goes through an anti-climactic and unhappy ending, with the dark/cynical side winning over the light/optimistic side. And it’s not even as simple as “villains win”, but rather, the anti-hero kind of takes over as the main character and defeats villains in the original protagonist's place, so we have partial "protagonist rotation", where a supporting character kind of ends as the main character. It’s a higher difficulty level to land that type of ending because the viewer is like, “Damn. I mean amazing too, but damn.” A less complex example of a non-traditional structure is John Wick. It’s an action movie, one of the better ones for its genre, but the non-traditional element is that we know from the start that the protagonist John Wick is the biggest badass around. None of the villains are as strong as him individually, or even close really. The villains are the underdogs. And so to make that non-boring (“John Wick just kills everyone and wins easily”), it requires things like greater numbers of villains, and/or various schemes to surprise or outsmart the protagonist. It’s also a little harder to stick the landing because the climax can be less satisfying if you know from the start that the protagonist is stronger than the antagonist, and so it either needs emotional depth, complex situations, or other ways to make that ending satisfying. I’ve been exploring some of these and thinking about it a lot because my novel has a number of these types of non-traditional elements, which elevates the difficulty in terms of making them satisfying despite going against the basic structure that people expect as a baseline. Are there books, shows, or movies you like that go through rather non-traditional story structures?

My husband read 34 of 45 chapters of my hobby sci fi manuscript so far, and the funniest conclusion he's had is that it's less autistic than he thought. He said he knew I would do action and fight scenes well, but for the downtime scenes with friends and partners and stuff he was like, "not that I'm saying I didn't expect you to write them decently, but like, you know... and yet holy shit." Act 2 really hit him hard. He's currently traveling, so for Act 1 he sent me all sorts of audio recordings of his thoughts and gave some good suggestions, like very interested but kind of intellectual about it. But then for Act 2 instead of sending audio recordings he's was like, "We... need to video chat right now, omg." He ended up reading that second act in one sitting and messing up his schedule because of it.

Feels like memes won the election. Candidates unironically have to be positively meme-able to be successful going forward. And in particular, candidates can’t have the vibe of an HR manager that would call you into the office to talk about your inappropriate memes. Trump is meme-able. Obama was meme-able. Even Biden had his Dark Brandon meme but otherwise was not great on that front. Kamala is totally not meme-able.

I hope they actually free Ross though.

The good news is I finished the manuscript. The bad news is it required being mostly offline and so I missed the whole Peanut the Squirrel story arc. Trade-offs, man. View quoted note →