Personal Status Updates! (Page 2 of 13)

Not had much sleep so pretty garbled writing on my part. Sorry.

Another reason I hated Torchwood is it obviated UNIT rather heavily. Not a Retcon persay but definately diminished and made it irrelevant.

That's interesting. A lot of what we get comes from the media (much like what most people know about American culture), so it is a very skewed perspective. Sadly, this results in a lot of Americans thinking that people in the UK are on the extreme left, and also more civilized and classy, and look at us as unwashed peasants, so the easily manipulated amongst us try to distance themselves from their American culture. Some even claim that America has no culture, which boggles the mind... Sorry. I'm drifting toward a rant here.

But yeah, it's media manipulation. They present a picture that isn't necessarily true in an effort to sway the way people think. It happens with news reports and political issues as well. I've been carefully watching the way that news reports skew stories over the past few years, since it plays into a novel series that I've been working on. The subtle word play and the things that they don't tell you about a story can cause all sorts of chaos. And then people refuse to accept the truth when you introduce it, because they didn't see it on the news.

I could get into some of those stories, but I'm sure it's far less interesting if you haven't been buried in it for years.

I imagine that a lot of what you see about us isn't the whole truth either. The media sucks.

Woo hoo!

Great to hear from you tex!

I thought I had my T100TA in perfect condition now that Google Chrome is working -- but then dust started getting inside the monitor. That's right. Dust. This 10.1-inch laptop is so badly designed that DUST GETS UNDER THE GLASS. And the warranty has expired.

So, I'm going to sell this laptop off and buy a new one. God damn it. I have to wonder if my mistake has always been to go for low-cost, low-weight laptops, and this T100TA clearly had a lot of corners cut to make its low price point.
I'm prepared to spend more money on an ultrabook, but I find myself wondering if that's necessary. I always picked out laptops with the thought of carrying them around all day. But the truth is that with a smartphone and a tablet, a laptop can stay at home and I've never gotten much work down away from home on a laptop anyway. What work I did get done could have been achieved with a Bluetooth keyboard and Google Docs on the tablet or phone.

It looks like 15.6-inch-screen machines are the way to go now that mobility is less of a concern. Gosh. I wonder if they still have DVD drives in them.

I'm kind of tempted by this $700 ultrabook, the ASUS UX305 -- but I am also tempted by the new version of the T100TAM -- a 10.1-inch 32GB netbook going for $200! Same specs as this much-loathed T100TA -- but the new one has much improved build quality! It's made of aluminium! And a 128GB microSD card can easily make up for the low-storage!

But I can't help but see what you mean when you say that buying cheap only sees you spending more money to replace the cheap and ultimately unsatisfying item you chose for its low cost.

Lifehacker says that when you are torn between two options, choose neither. Or maybe choose the cheap one and try it for 10 days and then return it if it's crap.

And now, for another installment of whiny first-world problems.

I thought I'd try to make a go of it with my current hardware before buying a new laptop. Maybe see if I even really need one. My desktop is actually a 2009 laptop plugged into a monitor, keyboard and speakers. I haven't used it much for the last couple years because I was splitting my work between the tablet and mini-laptop (an 11.6 inch laptop, later replaced by the 10.1-incher that I ended up selling off). Today, I found the desktop a bit isolating and wanted to move around the apartment a bit, so I pulled the laptop loose from its makeshift dock and made it my new work machine.

And, well -- it's kind of lousy. I remember the HP DM3 being an aluminium marvel back in 2009 with a delightfully bright screen and eight hours of battery life. I guess LCD technology has improved a lot since 2009, because my crappy little 10.1 laptop had solid black levels and rich colours while this 13.3 HP DM3 laptop has washed out colours and the colour black is represented as a vague gray. The viewing angles on this thing are extremely limited. Netflix looks weird. And all the text on the screen looks so jagged and pixelated and ugly. I guess you don't notice such things until you've had better.

But that's fine! It's a work machine! As long as black text on white backgrounds stays readable, it's not a problem. Except -- my God, this machine is *noisy*. I guess in 2009, fan noise was part of the laptop landscape and when converted to a desktop, the actual laptop was under the desk and the noise was distant. But here I am, trying to write and the grinding, buzzing, noisy fan is a huge distraction. And the heat! The palmrest of this thing feels like a mini-space heater! The base of the laptop, resting on my calves/ankles, is like an electric blanket. And the spinning hard drive is so noisy! The awful T100, for all its faults, was silent; the spinning hard drive in the keyboard dock made no noise and the rest of the T100 had no moving parts and it never got hot.

The battery seems to last about 40 minutes.

I dunno. It's not great, but I am honestly asking myself if I really need better. I mean, the iPad mini screen looks great and I can use that for web browsing. I have a proper HDTV for movies and TV. I only need a laptop for typing long documents; this thing doesn't need to be a mobile multimedia machine. The T100 got on my last nerve after dust started getting under the glass and I sold it off in a fit of pique yesterday. The HP DM3 has yet to aggravate me to that degree. With a tablet and a home theatre PC in the living room, does a work machine need to any more than adequate? Dunno.

Met a Girl Yesterday who literally took my breath away and made my heart jump.
Never been "In Love" before... Is this what it is like?

I met her again tonight and I'm ridiculously happy and can't seem to stop thinking about her.
I don't even usually find Blondes attractive. So weird!

Very cool. Congrats!

Gosh. I think this is the first time we've had a romance post. Tell us how it's going!

Well, I mean there have been examples of movies that are clearly not what the trailer said they were.  Click looked like a dumb Adam Sandler movie about a guy who gets a magic remote and does a bunch of sophomoric stuff.  What it actually ended up being was a Capra-esque film about a guy dealing with his own mortality.

American Ultra was painted as a stoner who is a CIA asset.  It's got action and comedy.  And that's basically what it was.  But it was also fun in a way that only Jurassic World was really able to capture.  It wasn't crazy original, but it was apparently based on a real-life CIA abandoned project so that was kinda cool.  Something like Bourne meets Half Baked.

Landis wrote a Frankenstein movie that's coming out soon.  He's doing a remake for television.  He's writing a Superman comic and pitched for a Fantastic Four movie.  I don't necessarily think his comments were hypocritical, but he's had criticisms about the way movies are sold in general.  And I think his concern is that it'll be harder for original ideas to get created if original ideas aren't profitable. I don't think he wants sequels/remakes to go away - just that he doesn't want original ideas to go away.

Well that's the other thing that might've hurt it.  The main character is a stoner, but it's not really the point of the movie.  It's more of a "this guy is a stoner who works at a convenience store - how can he be Jason Bourne" more than anything.  He's high a lot and talks about getting high when he's trying to understand what's going on, but the movie moves beyond it at some point.  It isn't played for laughs like in Harold and Kumar, and after the movie gets going, you see that it's more medication than anything else.

Because I'm the same way.  I don't do drugs and don't really think they're all that funny.

And I guess that's an issue with marketing it - the stoner aspect is there, but it's not the whole story.

Yeah, I mean I don't really remember any Harold/Kumar-type jokes.  That definitely couldn't contributed to the downfall if people were expecting that.

Yeah, I just like Landis and wanted to support his movie.  He had this ramble the other day about Nightwing that I really liked.  Not so much about the rambling itself but just the happiness in his face as he talks about it.  He LOVES this stuff.  LOVES story.  LOVES these characters.  They're real to him, and he's fascinated.  Something about that is really cool in a childlike innocence way.

(Also I love Nightwing.  In my opinion, he's the only comic book character who's ever been allowed to grow for some reason, and that's awesome to me).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCBMGKc78qI

Just an update on SLIDERS REBORN -- I got stuck when I hit some problems with the ending. Very simply -- I neglected to write a full beat sheet with a brief summary of each scene. Instead, I just wrote a general overview without too much detail.

Converting the general outline was pretty effective for writing Part 1. With Part 2, I hit some serious plot issues that only became apparent when writing the individual scenes. And I got lost.

A couple weeks ago, I was angsting about the situation with Matt and from our discussions emerged a solution. I proceeded to rewrite the ending in the form of a scene-by-scene outline and the solution proved effective, but it took the whole weekend. I set aside time this past weekend, intending to finish the script. What I found was that I couldn't finish it yet -- the ending works, but the preceding scenes no longer match the ending. So I had to go back and convert the written-script into a scene-by-scene outline, this time with the correct clues and exposition that set up the ending.

In retrospect, this is the sort of thing that happens when someone who has not written many screenplays and never taken a screenwriting class attempts something complicated involving a mystery with a revelation. I neglected to convert my general overview to a scene-by-scene outline. This wasn't a problem for Part 1, which was mostly conversations, but it was a problem with Part 2, where the clues and setup were not sufficiently seeded and the payoff didn't make sense -- which I would have spotted if I'd written a proper beat sheet.

Anyway. I've got a proper beat sheet now and I think I will have it done within this week. I just don't know if Nigel will have time to review the script in time for the deadline. I've learned my lesson -- I'm going to do a proper beat sheet for Part 3 as well.

What you went through is part of the reason why I wanted to write my entire six book series in its entirety before releasing the first book. I would hate to have three books published before realizing that I forgot to set up a crucial plot point. It's an editing nightmare, but still the best way to go about it, I think.

The moments of crisis happen to all writers. At least you found a way out of it. Congrats on that.

I'm not a big fan of anything Mozilla related these days. I'm not sure that I could bring myself to use any variant of their browser.

The new TV season starts tonight! Gotham and Minority Report. Should be interesting. I've been surviving on a diet of Sons of Anarchy and Longmire on Netflix, and neither one of them is particularly great. It'll be nice to get some normal TV back.

Life is finally starting to settle down a bit. I haven't been posting much because things have been so crazy, but aside from some filming days coming up, I should be planted at the computer for a while. I'm sure that I'll be trying to avoid work most of the time, so I might be posting more.

It's a method that works better sometimes than others. I think that the scenes that we have playing over and over again in our heads are the landmarks (usually, it's the intro, some fun middle stuff and then the end) so we just have to fill out the stuff that links all of those moments together and makes sense of the mess. Writing them first can help lock things in place, but for me it's difficult to work that way a lot of the time. If I write all of the scenes that my brain is going nuts over, I'm not sure how motivated I will be to write the rest. So writing scenes in order for me makes those big scenes like a reward for my work.

It's nuts. Writing is nuts. Nothing works the same way twice. It can be maddening. Good luck!

My thing with Firefox is purely political. I don't like how they do business, so I won't do business with them. Probably nothing that most people would care about.

I do.  Could you tell me more?

Okay. At the rate I'm going with the second SLIDERS REBORN script -- writing a scene or two on weekdays, writing large chunks on weekends -- it will be done by next week Sunday.

I was going to send Nigel Mitchell the script -- but I think that might be waiting too long. Part 2 was supposed to come out in June and I think I've integrated Nigel's input regarding the outline as best I can. One of his remarks was that while he could provide me with bits and pieces to add to the story, he was reluctant to suggest specific changes as the story was intricate and he found that pulling on one thread would unravel the whole thing.

I think, for September 30, I will post the first 15 pages of the script just to indicate that it's well on its way to completion despite the laboured development process. I'll have the first draft done by October 3 and I'll give myself a week to go through each page and punch it up, and then post the Part 2 script and the Part 2B novella (already written) on October 10.

Part 3 -- I think I'll reschedule that for a January 2016 release date, in light of all the issues I had writing Part 2.

Yes, this I understand.

I'm not sorry for releasing Part 1 when I did. March 22, 2015 was too important a date to miss. However, completing the script for Part 1 a mere three weeks after the outline gave me a false sense of confidence. Part 1 was not terribly plot-driven and there were far fewer clues and setups than were needed for the payoff of Part 2. With Part 2, seemed fine in a general outline (or possible to rationalize) became illogical, nonsensical and incomprehensible when typing out actual scenes with events and dialogue. But it has gotten a bit ridiculous that a June 2015 script is coming out in October.

I wrote a scene today where Rembrandt encounters a double of Maggie who is a secret-agent-action-girl. Well. I think at 48, I have to call Maggie an action-woman. The plot and pacing required that Rembrandt convince this stranger that he is her ally and can be trusted. The means by which I had him do so is questionable in the extreme, but damn it, this had to move along.

I genuinely do not know if it's true to Rembrandt to have him declare that of all the sliders, Maggie is the one he knew best. Or if it's true to say that he knows her so well he can convince any Maggie-double that he's a friend. And also to say that Maggie gave him (off-camera) combat lessons during their two and a half years together. (But surely she would have?) But I think when writing tie-in fiction, you have to take some chances like these in extrapolating this way.

Something I really enjoy about fanfic -- many people have told me about the importance of not being self-indulgent in your fiction. Killing your darlings. Doing what serves the story as opposed to your personal fetishes and obsessions. But fanfic is a place where you can do all that. I was listening to the SLIDERS Rewatch podcast where Tom and Cory were joking about the Elston Diggs character of Season 3, laughing about how this silly character pops up in scripts and spouts expository dialogue to the sliders without any provocation, inexplicably telling strangers about his world and society like he assumes they're interdimensional visitors and need to be informed of what for Diggs would be common knowledge.

And when a scene required a receptionist, I could not resist making that receptionist Elston Diggs while presenting his bizarre expository dialogue as an indication of a compulsive mental disorder.

I'll try and read it later this week ireactions.

New TV Show on Saturday called Ringer. Have any of you seen it?

Been reading a really good Original Story on Fictionpress.
It is called Mother of Learning. It's really good.
Here is a Link:

https://m.fictionpress.com/s/2961893/1/

Okay. Part 2's script is complete. But pretty rough. There were lots of sections where I just wrote __________ and focused entirely on writing dialogue. But it's now a process of reviewing and refining what's been written over the next few days. The actual writing is done, so I'd say we're on track. :-)

I just fed the raw text file into Final Draft and with the formatting, it comes out to 130 pages. I'm astonished. I thought this was going to be a much longer and crazier length.

I read that RINGER ended on a totally unsatisfying note -- I'm hesitant to get involved in shows that ended on cliffhangers.

**

I honestly had no idea how long "Revelation" (2) was going to be. I wrote chunks of it on my laptop, but then my laptop became so unacceptably awful that I was compelled to sell it. I then wrote long chunks of it on my iPad. I wrote a bunch of scenes in Google Docs which inserted unnecessary line breaks between every paragraph. I switched to writing in the iOS Pages app which produced corrupted Microsoft Word files. I finally shifted to using Microsoft Word in iOS. But it became clear that I was going to need to do this on a Windows machine because I needed the plot outline next to the script. (Yes, I bought a new laptop after all. Damn.)

Nigel was actually of the opinion that the outline was WAY TOO LONG for one installment. But. I think Nigel was thinking as a novelist (which he is) instead of as a screenwriter. Screenwriting is about the edited highlights.

I also had to really up the font size to size 30 or so so that I wouldn't be squinting at my tablet. And sometimes, I wrote on my home theatre PC with the screen at a healthy distance on the other side of the room, meaning the font must also be large. So I was looking at a 340-page document in the end with no sense of what Final Draft would do with the format and the word-wrapping.

I think it might end up being 150 pages or so because there's a lot of description to add.

Ringer was a fun show. It was over the top in a lot of ways, but it was interesting to watch.

Honestly though, I don't really remember the ending.

Flu Jabs from Dr seem on the Cards for me but we all know the new strains outpace the Vaccines.

Oh the "Fun" of a for Profit Medical System and Pharmaceutical Industry eh?

Phage Therapy is the Answer to Antibiotic Resistance and Obsolescence but it is only an effective System of Treatment on a Large Scale.

Lots and Lots and Lots of Fluids.

That helps.... A bit.

That sounds like a lot of fun! How was the food?

**

I keep underestimating how long it takes to write something. I finished the first draft of SLIDERS REBORN: "Revelation" last week. But it was a draft where at times, just to get to the next scene, I would write in ______________. Any place where I struggled to describe something, or needed to do research, or required photo reference, I would write in ____________ just to keep moving. I didn't think it would take more than a day to fill in the blanks -- it ended up taking three.

There were also issues that I spotted in the course of writing. In one scene, someone gets tied to a chair. But then I realized this raised a question: where had the rope come from? It became necessary to go back and find somewhere to introduce the rope and then come up with a line of dialogue to explain what it was doing in the scene.

Another difficulty I had was locations. In another thread, Temporal Flux and Matt commented on the location shooting in San Francisco for the Pilot episode, and another poster remarked that no other city has roads like San Francisco's. And as a result, I found myself peering through street-level photos of San Francisco and reviewing a real estate map in an effort to add some sense of the city to the story or at least start with something real and then adapt it into a fictional approximation.

This experience has really been an education in project management for fiction.

I would say my biggest mistake with REBORN was not talking about the plot issues I was having, instead trying to find some technobabble to resolve the issue and only digging myself into a deeper and deeper hole until Matt took away my shovel and threw me a rope ladder.

I would say the most ridiculous and stupid part of REBORN is, well -- the graphics. I mean, creating images of four actors standing next to each other would just be a half-day photoshoot for a real TV production. For SLIDERS, we have to cheat with putting Jerry's 2015 face on his 1995 costume and compositing photos of Jerry, John, Sabrina and Cleavant next to each other. And I did a pretty decent job at first with 100x100 pixel images, but then Matt upped the 'featured image' resolution to 800x300 pixels for the Earth Prime redesign. I actually found some pretty recent photos of Jerry, Cleavant, John and Sabrina, but so far, my efforts to put them in the same image together have been pretty hideous. I'm hoping to get it right for the final chapter.