For when you’re tired of platitudes and want a little attitude.
Monthly Archives: April 2016
Walk Hand and Hand Into Extinction: Stories Inspired By True Detective
My short story Grieving in Reverse is featured in the new book Walk Hand and Hand Into Extinction: Stories Inspired By True Detective.
This paperback is filled with macabre mysteries inspired by the existential themes of the first season of True Detective and the work of gothic literature that inspired it: Robert W. Chambers The King in Yellow.
My contribution to this collection is a modern noir with a dash of cosmic horror. It’s about a private eye who’s hired to look into the apparent suicide of a script reader. He learns the terrifying truth about a screenplay that drives anyone who reads it to madness. I dare you to read it. Continue reading Walk Hand and Hand Into Extinction: Stories Inspired By True Detective
How to Save Your Twitter Profile from the Algorithm
On February 5, Buzzfeed reported that Twitter was doing away with their chronological timeline in favor of an algorithmic one. Users would no longer see tweets as they were posted in real time, but rather in an order the algorithm thought users wanted to see them. Buzzfeed theorized that this would help manage spam links and adjust Twitter’s signal to noise ratio, but users remained skeptical.
Many users feared, myself included, that Twitter was downgrading everyone in order to sell priority placement tweets to power users, just as Facebook had done with status updates on its Fan Pages. Social media services were shifting stanchions onto their free dance floors, relabeling the spaces as their VIP sections. Twitter appeared to be doing the same; gutting the democracy of the service to benefit a monopoly held by power users, celebrities, and advertisers.
We feared that the algorithm would put an end to Hashtag Revolutions like the Arab Spring or Ferguson Protests, and that breaking news would get buried by Kardashian selfies. Twitter has been championed as the voice of the people. An algorithm would elevate posts based on predictions. It wouldn’t know the value of movements without a point a reference. Continue reading How to Save Your Twitter Profile from the Algorithm
Words Of Discouragement: 1
For when you’re tired of platitudes and want a little attitude.
How to Keep Your Writing from Reading like a Bogus Essay Answer
In his book On Bullshit Harry G. Frankfurt wrote, “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.”
Something magical happens when people are called upon to give information they don’t have: rather than admit the limits of their knowledge they give it the old college try. We all know what decisive conclusions sound like. We need not know what we’re talking about to draw them. So we riff to buy ourselves time until we stumble upon a point.
This article is going to explore this phenomenon, identify how it shows up in fiction writing, and what can be done to fix it so that would-be authors can seem like they actually know what they’re doing. Continue reading How to Keep Your Writing from Reading like a Bogus Essay Answer
A Different Kind of Bathroom Bill
DISCLAIMER: Discrimination is ridiculous. Especially when the ability to discriminate hides behind the veil of victimization, like the religious liberty bills that have been proposed throughout the US this year. These bills would give devout shop owners the right to deny service to members of the LGBT community.
The following isn’t simply a parody of this ironic situation, it’s a callback to a prejudice against another segment of the population. They too were discriminated against for religious reasons. They too have a trait that can be found in 1 in 10 members of the population, and they too cannot change the way they are despite efforts to convert them.
The following is written from the perspective of someone with a strong prejudice against them. Continue reading A Different Kind of Bathroom Bill
When Symbolism Goes Wrong
There’s a scene in 2013’s Man of Steel where Clark Kent goes to church seeking guidance from a priest. Aliens combatants, from Kent’s home planet Krypton, are broadcasting a message to draw him out of hiding. He’s torn between stepping forward or remaining in the shadows. The priest stands over Kent, from the aisle, as the Kyrptonian confesses from the pew.
Normally in a scene with two characters speaking the cameras are positioned over the shoulders of the characters to show their point of view. First we see a camera tilted upward to show Kent’s view of the priest (who eventually sits on a railing, but is still looking downward). We should then see a reverse shot from the priest’s perspective looking down on Kent. Instead we see a shot that’s tilted upward, as if the priest was looking at Kent from the floor.
Why did director Zack Snyder choose to frame the shot this way? My theory is that he meant to emphasize the stained glass depiction of Christ over Kent’s shoulder, kneeling in prayer, just as Kent is. As far as symbolic references go this one isn’t that subtle.
This weeks article is all about when it’s a good idea to link your story to icons with deeper meanings, and when they can hurt your story by feeling unearned. I’m going to focus on Man of Steel and Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice because they’re filled with examples of heavy handed symbolism.
(Spoilers for Man of Steel and Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice follow).
Full Disclosure: I don’t hate either film. There’s a lot to like in both, but this isn’t a review of either movie. It’s an examination of visual shorthand. Continue reading When Symbolism Goes Wrong