Bots - talking amongst themselves - via
A twitter conversation between two bots (@oliviataters and @notkeithcalder) was picked up and intercepted by the Bank of America bot account. This is twitter bot culture sans humans.
how beauteous mankind is! o brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!
Back when I was back in LA trying to be a screenwriter I did, as a lot of people in that situation do, a bunch of script coverage. Script coverage is basically reading a script (as a rule of thumb, scripts run one page per minute of runtime, with a lot less text per page than prose) and generating a 2-4 page summary and evaluation.
There are a few reasons you might have coverage commissioned: to evaluate a script for purchase and development; to judge its writer’s skills for employment on other projects; to judge its suitability for a particular actor or director; or just so you can pretend to have cared enough about it in Hollywood’s back-scratching favor economy.
The one constant is that it’s done by assistants or freelancers on behalf of executives, agents, or other “suit” variants who can then pretend they’ve actually read and judged the script themselves. Suits who make decisions relating to scripts are, as a rule, actively proud of the fact they don’t read scripts (or anything else).
On the one hand this makes sense; to them the script is a means to the end of making a deal and by treating it as a vestigal irrelevance they can attribute all glory of a successful deal to themselves. On the other hand, the hand that cares about human culture, this is worse than genocide, and would still be so even if I were particularly bothered by genocide.
Movies basically only have intelligible plots because movie stars have enough self-respect and pull to insist on only working on projects that do, which is why so often when you see a movie starring some interchangeable young models fresh off a fandombait CW series they don’t.
So that said, let me tell you about three scripts I remember doing coverage on (this was mostly 2005-07ish): the one that “got around”, in that I ran into the most people that also remembered having read it; the one I considered the best (but never got made as a movie); and the only one that actually got produced.
The one that got around: The Short Season
This was a script about a small-market but locally beloved baseball team and its general manager who, resigned to the fact that he didn’t have the resources to field a winning team, resorted to clever publicity stunts to keep up attendance and entertain the fans. At one point he fields an all-little people lineup only to discover that thanks to their tiny strike zones they’re quite competitive. Meanwhile the owner (and/or league, I forget) are plotting to abandon the team’s home city in favor of a more lucrative market.
This script was actually pretty decent and I could see it as a viable movie, but “mid-list sports dramedy” isn’t really something studios make very much anymore. Part of it is that the then-current* business model for movies was to finance films on foreign presales which were largely based on the brand recognition of star actors, and there weren’t really any A-list star roles here - I could see the manager/lead going to a Pierce Brosnan or Val Kilmer type, the love interest to a Cameron Diaz/Kirsten Dunst, but honestly I doubt there was a single player role strong enough to draw Peter Dinklage’s interest.
The best: Chasing the Whale
This was about a young man rising to prominence as the hospitality manager of a Las Vegas casino, and the mega-rich “Whale” super-gamblers he courted. I later read, and recognized as the source text, Whale Hunt in the Desert, the best pimp memoir since Iceberg Slim. The plot was an excuse to show off all sorts of colorful fun shit but for all that wasn’t bad, and I could see this as a great comeback vehicle for a Tobey Maguire or Daniel Radcliffe. I have no idea why this wasn’t made, particularly after The Hangover made bank and everyone in town must’ve been looking for a Vegas movie. Dumb industry politics is my guess, maybe whoever owned the rights was asking for too much money, who knows.
The one that got made: August Rush
I read this one with an eye towards a possible role for Aaron Carter (the managers I was working for seemed to specialize in child stars, former boy band members, and ex-SNL token brown girls. When the Family Guy movie came out and Stewie asked future-Stewie whether they ever found a role for Ellen Cleghorne I bust a gut because finding that role was literally my job at the time. Well, future-SNL token brown girls too, we also had Nasim Pedrad). My summary was “well a lot of this seems to be resting on the strength of the music, I hope it’s good because the rest is fucking terrible”, and though I didn’t see it that seems to be the critical consensus.
* well, for a while there before the ’08 crash they were also funded on German and Eastern European tax credits. That explains the career of Uwe Boll - his movies were absolutely terrible but he could keep to a schedule and a budget, and with all the tax credits they didn’t actually need any sales to be profitable - whatever they got was just gravy, and acquiring recognizable video game licenses was a cost-efficient way of starting off with a built-in opening weekend audience. Also some stuff with Gulf sovereign wealth funds and Asian box office, which is why even stuff like 2008’s Dark Knight will have semi-extraneous segments with Chinese locations and stars.
I don’t understand. You can go to championships for frisbee? Won’t the dog team win just like they do every year?
There is nothing in the rulebook that says a dog can’t play frisbee.
I have been repeating “there is nothing in the rulebook that says a dog can’t play frisbee” to myself and cracking up for a good 10 minutes now.
I have been repeating “there is nothing in the rulebook that says a dog can’t play frisbee” to myself and cracking up for a good 10 minutes now.
Okay, now I’m only doing it every few minutes.
there’s a new version of dwarf fortress out and that means new bug reports:
Humans die of old age only after the end of world generation; corpses lie around town
If an adventurer shouts and nobody is around to hear it, the game crashes
Minotaur strangles dwarf under water for three months and counting with no end in sight
War Dogs appear to run from themselves in terror
All clothes in cabinets of Dwarven Fortress are too large for dwarves
Creatures spawn covered in tears
Zombies start conversation with necromancer adventurer who tries to sleep in their house
Adventurer yelled “Yield!” at boss, was presented with option to yield to himself
- New tree generation frequently causes birds to explode
Chalk graffiti in the men’s bathroom of Over & Out, the discordantly fancy bar at 82nd & Stark:
How much $ is enough, and what will you do with it when you get it?
Free thought defined this country. Why aren’t you thinking?
#Stoplivingonacomputer
#getyourhandsdirty
#socialmediaistheoppositeofsocial
Before I die I want to: LIVE
Describe your poop with a song name
Graffiti carved into the wood table outside:
WHITE POWER
I hope Dov gets American Apparel back, thing’s his baby by any rights. Never met the guy but in LA I lived down the street from the original store and there were always a bunch of Echo Park fucks who worked with him down at the factory.
If not, hell, hope he comes up here and starts Cascadian Apparel, between the “locally made with skilled labor at good wages”, “hipster as fuck”, “chill casual work culture where everyone has sex with each other”, and “vaguely Canadianish” tones that place was more Portland than LA all along.
Keep in mind that his management style was always to circumvent the Peter Principle by taking people he found interesting, promoting them and putting them in charge of things but then busting them back down or out the door if they didn’t prove competent at it, so the real underlying beef you hear from all these girls filing complaints was that they thought they were sleeping their way to the top only to discover the boss was still judging them on actual job performance.
If you’re young like Tumblr young you might not realize that the t-shirt as everyday clothing staple didn’t exist until the 1990s and was before that more a novelty souvenir item. Some of the credit goes to the beachwear upscaling of ‘80s Miami fashion, but the two big forces behind that development were American Apparel on the wholesale/manufacturing side and Hot Topic on the retail side.
Like, Hot Topic is legitimately more important to the development of American fashion than any and all New York designers, grok that.
Their original angle was being the place you could buy band t-shirts. Like back in maybe ’96 when I was getting the classic Garbage “Hollywood Star” shirt (which I can’t even find a picture of on Google, fuck I’m getting old), our mall didn’t have a Hot Topic yet so since I hadn’t been to an actual concert on that tour to hit up the merch table I had to order from one of the cheap newsprint resellers’ catalogs I picked up at the local record store.
Every so often there’s some post going around Tumblr where some artist is breathlessly reporting that Hot Topic (or Urban Outfitters, sometimes) is selling some product with their art on it, like, without paying or even asking, like ha ha ha Hot Topic has always sold bootleg shit, bands were complaining about this from day one. (The t-shirt industry has never been all that picky about IP, check out the “bootleg Bart” tag.)
If someone makes enough fuss they might pull the product but hey, cost of doing business, it’s basically not worth it to pursue legal action because in any case you wouldn’t be suing the deep-pocketed Hot Topic, Inc. but the fly-by-night company they ordered from. (Just like if someone did a bootleg run of your book you’d be going after the printer, not the bookstores it appeared in.)
Honestly that distinction wouldn’t be an insuperable problem with enough political capital to throw at the issue, but while Hollywood studios contribute enough to trade balance, jobs numbers, and most importantly lobbyist salaries to get pampered on this shit, Deviantart users don’t really have the pull to get the OC Do Not Trace Act of 2014 out of committee.
Ironic that I used to play a Druid in WoW (Allyna, on whatever server the Very Hairy Man Guild rocked) ‘cause I can’t figure how to play one in Hearthstone to save my life.
Or not ironic, ‘cause Druid’s in the same state I remember of “being able to do a lot of things less efficiently but nothing particularly well” (started back before the triple-stacking ticking heal and Innervate was still a spec peak, it got better before I quit at 70).
Hearthstone’s good tho, it’s like if Garfield made Magic having learned the lessons of Magic. Right at the intersection of Blizzard’s strengths in matchmaking, asymmetrical balance, and profitable-but-not-offensive cash economy.
Me and the Scotsman are getting along pretty well, actually. We bonded about gardening (he’s a farmer) motorcycles (he’s raced in the Isle of Man TT) and then he insisted on giving me a vintage Burzum t-shirt from when he was crashing on Varg’s couch, because of course he did, because Portland.
I am a little weirded out wearing this around. Not ‘cause I’m worried about antifa, well not too much - wouldn’t take this shit to Slabtown, but like I say I know how to fight and I’ve seen those guys in their own shirts and not too intimidating I tell you what.
More cause I’m worried about getting called out by metalheads - I don’t actually like or really know that much about Burzum. I didn’t notice or care that I had a metal-shaped hole in my musical knowledge until I came to Portland but boy howdy.
I play pinball with people who grew up with Red Fang, with their merch guy. Played a game or two with the guys themselves, nice boys. Went to a show once, good crowd energy for the hometown heroes but for the life of me they sounded like mid-90s Metallica and that’s not an itch I was trying to scratch.
I mean if you look at my happy hardcore tag you can tell I’m not opposed to ridiculous power music from Northern Europe. I love Dragonforce, cause I’m an entry-level pleb. Ensiferum, too. If some of you scrubs I picked up through 'dwracu’s reblogs can give me some suggestions off that I’ll consider.
the thing i like about cyberpunk is that it was completely correct about universal malevolent corporate oversight, the total destruction of the middle class, and the profound desperation and hunger that drives young people to learn hacking and internet fluency. you can sort of mentally prepare yourself for how incredbly bad things are by reading, for example, any Shadowrun campaign or World of Darkness flavor book from the late 80s early 90s and saying to yourself, softly like a cantrip, “this but unironically”
‘As the website of the current Laurel Canyon Association notes, “restrictive covenants were attached to the new parcel deeds. These were thinly veiled attempts to limit ownership to white males of a certain class. While there are many references to the bigotry of the developers in our area, it would appear that some residents were also prone to bias and lawlessness. This article was published in a local paper in 1925:
Frank Sanceri, the man who was flogged by self-styled ‘white knights’ on Lookout Mountain in Hollywood several months ago, was found not guilty by a jury in Superior Judge Shea’s courtroom of having unlawfully attacked Astrea Jolley, aged 11.
“Wealthier residents were also attracted to Laurel Canyon. With the creation of the Hollywood film industry in 1910, the canyon attracted a host of ‘photoplayers,’ including Wally Reid, Tom Mix, Clara Bow, Richard Dix, Norman Kerry, Ramon Navarro, Harry Houdini and Bessie Love.”The author of this little slice of Laurel Canyon history would clearly like us to believe that the “wealthier residents” were a group quite separate from the violent hooligans roaming the canyon. The history of such groups in Los Angeles, however, clearly suggests otherwise. Paul Young, for example, has written in L.A. Exposed of Los Angeles’ early “vigilance committees, which stepped in to take care of outlaws on their own, often with the complete absolution of the mayor himself. Judge Lynch, for example, formed the Los Angeles Rangers in 1854 with some of the city’s top judges, lawyers, and businessmen including tycoon Phineas Banning of the Banning Railroad. And there was the Los Angeles Home Guard, another bloodthirsty paramilitary organization, made up of notable citizens, and the much-feared El Monte Rangers, a group of Texas wranglers that specialized in killing Mexicans. As one would expect, there was no regard for the victim’s rights in such kangaroo courts. Victims were often dragged from their homes, jail cells, even churches, and beaten, horse-whipped, tortured, mutilated, or castrated before being strung up on the nearest tree.”
And that, dear readers, is how we do things out here on the ‘Left’ Coast.’
Had a college girlfriend who passed on that when her mom was a girl at a sleepover in the foothills at the Valley mouth of the canyon, in one of those hillside houses where the basement has a sliding glass door, Captain Beefheart and his band showed up drunk and uninvited and had to be shooed away.
Only Canyon story of my own is that when I was riding Blue Bitch up around there the timing chain snapped and I had to glide/push her down, not only was that the only time I’ve ever had motorcycle problems that someone else didn’t stop to offer help, but the other drivers on the road were downright obnoxious about me being in their way.
No overnight weekend parking in that part of Weho so I just pushed it east down the sidewalk on Hollywood. Stopped in a liquor store and got a flask, pushed it 200 steps on one side, took a drink, switched. By the time I was clear of the nightlife district I was kind of drunk and figured I was close enough to Vermont where it starts to go downhill, so I kept going and managed to mostly glide back to my mechanic’s place behind the Mexican Mafia nightclub at Sunset and Silverlake.
I wonder how many generations it would take to breed dandelions into a useful fiber-bearing crop like cotton? Or like this weird low plant I saw once with incredibly soft fibers native to Maui.
That post about fibers got some attention - well, 2 likes and 2 reblogs, which is 2/2 more than I expected, so not being one to pass up an opportunity to draw structural connections between things in the format of a story that makes my life sound more interesting than spending so much time on the internet would imply, let’s expand on it.
I went to Maui a few years back to celebrate my mom’s not, after years of treatment, having cancer anymore. She was born on the Big Island as a Navy brat, went back after college as a secretary in a TV station for a few years, so she’s got some history in the area. She was even given a Hawaiian name, which was kind of funny because then she couldn’t find any of those “if this is your real name, this would be your Hawaiian name” keychains at the souvenier stores.
Maui was kind of the boring island; my dad booked the trip (through an honest to god travel agent) and only seems to know how to book golf vacations. I hear it’s a nice golf island.
Things about Hawaii I noticed: even the Haole use native Hawaiian words a lot - not just “aloha” but the top 40 radio in talking about some community event would mention “…and plenty of games and rides for the keiki”, men’s/women’s bathroom signs would be “kane/wahine”. For a while I wondered if this was actual culture or just a schtick everyone agreed to pull, but on thinking of it I guess actual culture is a schtick everyone agrees to pull.
There was plenty of constant road repair and resurfacing, with larger work crews than I’ve ever seen, even though the roads were by any standard perfectly fine to begin with - I guess that’s what happens when you hardly have any roads but still have two senators to claim your share of highway appropriations.
Bunch of Samoans on the island. I’d heard those guys were built big and solid, but holy shit.
Lot of hitchhikers. Apparently land prices and rents are insane anywhere near the centers of the tourist trade, so people commute from hella far out, and car/gas prices are absurd too. Not many bikes though, which is maybe because “hella far out” tends to mean “halfway up a mountain”.
A lot of native/secessionary flags, handpainted signs, etc. in front yards.
A lot of rocks - like, maybe half a car-sized rocks but not otherwise very distinguished - roped off in the middle of, like, someone’s yard with a plaque being all “this is a sacred rock with a proper name, people might come around to hold cultural events here every now and then, but otherwise don’t mess with the rock”.
OK, so this tour. It was an ecotourism/ziplining thing, because why not, because I was getting kind of tired of sitting around on the beach with my parents. We went up a hill and the guides, natives all, pointed out things about the region. Saw a pineapple farm, they talked about how you’d have to harvest them in like, multiple layers of heavy clothing in the hot as fuck sun, because a pineapple farm is basically a field of goddamn razors with fruit in the middle.
I could see why people would grow marijuana on Hawaii, because the whole place was verdant as fuck, full of ridges and hollows, full of native plants that didn’t really look that far off from cannabis from the air, or even up close, to begin with.
Oh and also the plant I mentioned, which grew near the base of these trees near the top of the mountain, had these brown, downy fibers, softest thing I’ve ever felt, the guides said that the locals used to use them to stuff pillows with, but that the government protected them and kept people from exporting or farming them. Which, on the way out of the airport, yeah you passed through 3 different inspections checking your stuff for native plants.
Now that’s nominally about environmental contamination and invasive species, but I was sure there was an economic protection angle and on looking it up, apparently yes, there’s a big thing of industrial espionage agents sneaking into forests and smuggling plants out. But that’s how it’s always been in the tropics - spices, rubber, tea in China, whatever. You want to keep a monopoly on that shit.
I mean it’s not like the Americans are developing that industry, but I guess the idea is to prevent anyone else from developing it instead. Like, we don’t think about it much now but economically speaking fiber is fucking critical. Making clothing is the most fundamental thing distinguishing humans from other animals, textile production has always been the first step of industrialization, and development of a new and better fiber source will FUCK SHIT UP.
Like, China figured out silk production, and it was like “oh, great, now we get to dominate half the fucking world for a millennia or two”, just the act of moving it from place to place completely dominates the history of western Asia.
Like the British developed a wool industry and it was like “oh great, now we get to dominate half the fucking world for a few centuries, first we just need to take all these people in Scotland and northern England, kick them off their farmholds, and turn them into a pathetic wreck of a population working in hellish conditions 14 hours a day, wracked by disease, homelesness, addiction, and violence”.
Like, the Americans figured out the cotton gin and were like “oh great, now we can establish a massive feudal slave empire, and kickstart a development process that will end up with us dominating half the fucking world for a century at least”.
And then the British, in order to hold on to their existing half-the-world empire were like “oh fuck, better conquer Egypt and India and place a few hundred million people under the lash to compete”.
Fiber will FUCK SHIT UP, don’t you forget that.
