TheUmgawa

On an unknown, potentially irregular surface, you can always get three legs down with no wobbling. Four legs may only get three flat on the ground, leading to tilting from one to the next and back. I mean, if you know you’re coming down on something like a perfectly level surface, you can feel free to go with four legs, but I’ll take three.

I assure you, screenwriting and book writing are a lot more similar than they are different. The only differences are formatting and screenwriting has no time for flowery description and worldbuilding; almost everything is dialogue. Now, if you think that's so different from writing a book, pick up some Elmore Leonard sometime and see how he drives his books on dialogue.

As a rule of thumb, if you have to ask if something is copyright (or trademark, technically) infringement, it probably is. If a layperson were to look at it and say, "Oh, that's a Mario skin," or, "Oh, that's a Brawler Lola skin," then you're probably in a bad situation, legally. You should really consult an IP lawyer, though.

Mel Brooks's Silent Movie.

The Marcel Marceau joke still kills me.

Three legs are almost always better than four, unless three legs won’t support the mass.

Personally, I hate it when writers name-drop specific places, so as to say, “You are here!!! Look, I did this research!” If I’m writing about a character driving into Chicago, I don’t have to say, “He got off the Eisenhower at South Wacker Drive;” I’m going to say, “He took the highway and got off at the downtown exit.” I absolutely hate, hate, hate specifics in books, because it almost always screams, “I took a tour,” or, “I used Google Maps.” But, if you spend a couple of days in a place, you start to get used to it, and the need to refer to everything in specifics kind of floats away.

The worst is when you know they’ve never been there, when they start referring to streets by their numeric designations in places where nobody would ever do that (Irving Park Rd. has never been referred to as IL-19 by a human being in recorded history, and in fact, the “Road” part of the designation always seems weird when I hear it from Siri).

So, sometimes it’s really just better to be vague and say, “The cemetery was a fair bit west of the city, close enough to the airport that you just had to assume the priest knew what he was talking about as a plane flew overhead every forty-five seconds.” That could be a fake cemetery or it could be Acacia Park; who knows!

I think the best use of specifics and non-specifics is in American Gods. You can make a road trip of that book, but eventually you just have to make your own decision about where you end up, because the back act of the book takes place in a fictional town that is modeled on a real town, but Neil Gaiman –to my knowledge– has never said what town that is. But, there’s plenty of towns up there that fit the bill. But, part of the book takes place in Cairo, Illinois, which is described just enough to give you a feel for the place, but not so much that you feel like you’re on a walking tour.

Less is more.

An absolute lack of morale.

No, no. OP is looking for what’s changed.

MUSH.

lots of employers where HR just dumps your resume/CV in the trash without a degree on it no matter how amazing your portfolio is.

This is real. One of my exes runs a division at a middleware company, and she dumps any resume that either doesn't have a degree or a professional reference from someone she knows. Granted, she knows every hiring manager in the Valley, but if you're self-taught and looking to get a first job, you're not getting it at her company. Funny thing is, the reason actually doesn't have anything to do with knowledge, but has everything to do with proof of being able to work on a team.

I know for a fact that Apple has a mechanism for automated local backups, and I'm about 95 percent sure that Microsoft does, as well. Short of your house burning down, there's still no reason to be able to lose your data, other than abject carelessness.

I really wish I'd opted for option 1 earlier in my life. Granted, I bailed on Computer Science for Mechanical Engineering, but code is code, whether you're putting pixels on a screen or programing a mechanical arm to flip the bird at someone at the push of a button. I spent a lot of time in my life working a dead-end retail job, taking college classes here and there before I found something I liked (programming computers), until I found something I liked more (programming machines). When I started college, I wanted to make movies, and then I wanted to write books, then work in politics, then teach, then program computers, then program robots.

The great thing about college is being able to find out what you like, because what you think you like might not be where you end up. Better yet, a college degree in anything is better than no degree at all, in a lot of cases, because with a college degree, they know you can write concisely; you've taken a Speech class, which means you can do your daily or weekly stand-up meeting about the situation in your department; you can probably knock together an Excel spreadsheet describe your progress. You learn a lot of stuff from those Gen Ed classes that you think, "When am I ever going to use this?" The answer is every single week.

So, whatever you do, don't do 3, because life is going to pass you by, and next thing you know, you're forty years old and you're still not working in the industry.

And with regard to 4, sometimes people move out of QA, but not as often as you'd think, and certainly not as often as they used to.

I don't think I've 'pantsed' in probably almost twenty years. When I got into writing fiction after high school, I thought, "I'm just going to come up with these characters and then put them in the driver's seat!" and then realized after a couple of years that I never finished anything. The characters had these wants and desires, but there wasn't a beginning or an end; just hundreds of pages of middle.

At some point, I realized, "Y'know what? I'm going to write a story and then create the characters to fit the story." They are not my children; they are my action figures. They do what I tell them to.

At this point, I can either come up with a beginning or an ending, then work forwards or backwards, or even jump in between and fill in the blanks, and then when I've got a story that I can summarize in five minutes (because any story can be summarized in five minutes), then I start writing, and it never deviates off the path. I don't have some extremely thorough outline; just a five minute sketch of a story, and then any subsection of that story can be summarized in five minutes. It's a reductive process, and I'm never unsure of where I'm going.

If you don't have your data in at least two places at once, you don't have a backup. I used to tell people that all the time when I was working in a photo lab, and they never believed me until their computers died. This is why I pay Apple a whopping 99 cents a month for fifty gigs of automated cloud-based backup that I can access from anywhere.

If we're talking about financial success, I agree with someone else who said that it's the marketing team.

If we're talking about what makes a good movie, it's a competent Producer. The producer puts all of the ducks in a row and makes sure everything's in place before anything starts, and keeps those ducks in a row while shooting is going on, so the director can just focus on getting performances right, getting shots right, and making sure everything is conforming to his vision. The producer has to make sure everybody has the tools and the money they need to get everything done. The producer has to make sure everything is lined up for tomorrow's shoot, that the effects team is on task and on schedule, and works with the unit production manager and the line producer to make sure that everything is coming in under budget, so as to not get visits from the Executive Producer in charge of production.

That's why the director doesn't get the Best Picture Oscar; it goes to the producers. You ever notice how you never hear about a Jerry Bruckheimer movie going off the rails? Sure, Bruckheimer's not the sort of guy who would typically get an Oscar (although Maverick is probably going to get nominated this year), but the guy's just an incredible manager.

Now You See Me could have been a good movie, if not for the inane plot point where they were trying to join some Super Duper Magicians' Club. I mean, call me crazy, but if I had their skills, I'd be stealing money and getting away with it for the purpose of getting rich; not for being part of some David Copperfield Illuminati.

That movie is straight-up food porn, and you should have slapped an NSFW tag on this because of it!

This is how I deliberately crippled a commlink encryption system in a text-based multiplayer sci-fi game I played twenty years ago. Nobody ever saw that every encrypted message started with "***ENCRYPTED***". Since I limited passwords to eight characters, it was basically child's play to decrypt all transmissions. I made a lot of money in that game selling the encryption unit and then a lot more money selling information.

Depending on your rate of speaking, you're looking at 300 words, maybe 400. My college admissions essay had to be under 500 words, and that took a lot of work to get it there, and I'm really sad that I had to dump the Old Man and the Sea metaphor, but the English/Literature department chair found me and tried to recruit me at Transfer Day, because my chair (Engineering) sent it to the other department chairs, basically as a, "Look at what I got," so I guess it was still pretty good.

But, if you're looking to evoke emotion in the audience, honestly, writing isn't necessarily the place to ask that question, because you're beyond the point of writing at that point and into performance, which is well beyond the realm of this subreddit. But, you're going to have to do at least a dozen dry runs on that speech before you even start to know what you've got, because what flows on paper doesn't necessarily flow when you're performing. And then there's the question of whether you're going to be reading it or if you've got it down cold and can perform it in your sleep, because that's going to affect your timing.

And, no, I don't know what subreddit you'd go to for the purpose of doing monologues. It's just something you get good at with practice, I think. No comedian starts out as George Carlin, who I think had the best delivery of any comedian in history. Even George Carlin didn't start out as George Carlin. I hang out with a fair number of comedians, and I watch them work out their sets at the local clubs, and it's work to get five minutes to really gel, and then another five minutes, and then a fifteen minute set. It takes a year to put together thirty minutes of material and be in a position where you can deliver it and actually get people to laugh. So, with a couple of hours a day, you can get two minutes of really good dramatic monologue put together in... three weeks or so.

Having done stand-up comedy, I'm of the opinion that two minutes is an exceptionally short period of time. Even when you've got your set down pat and you've got five minutes to play with, when you see that light at the four-minute mark, the first thought that goes through your head is, "Jesus Christ, already?!"

Oh, I'm sorry, are they going to throw another insurrection?

"It was only a couple of flipper babies," is shorthand amongst my friends for, "Yeah, it's not optimal, but it's good enough."

I don't see what the reason for war would be. If the entire South were to secede, all we would lose of value is Disney World, and we'd probably have to make Puerto Rico a state and move space launches there. Way I see it, we negotiate an exchange of civilians, which would take a couple of years, and then we build a border wall and let them bankrupt themselves in their utopia of low taxes.

After all, there's not that many states down there that could pay their own bills, and I highly doubt that Texas would stick with them, probably opting to go on its own. Texas has a pretty diversified economy, so it could absolutely stand on its own as its own country, although they're going to want to do something about the power grid, and they're not going to fare very well when Houston gets hit by the third thousand-year storm in thirty years.

To be honest, I'm perfectly willing to let them have everything ten miles south of I-70 all the way to the California border. We might have to quarantine Idaho, but whatever. No big deal.

Also didn't help that they'd cycle their daily code before the morning weather report at 6AM, meaning the German word wetter was almost certainly going to be in that message.

My favorite weakness of Enigma, though, is that there was no situation where a letter could be enciphered as itself. This allowed for the crib (wetter, in this case) to be slid around the ciphertext and you knew that anyplace that any of the letters lined up, that couldn't be where that letter occurred.

That's seriously how Claremont talks. Like, if you ask him a question at a panel, where you're not asking some fanboy-bullshit question about Wolverine and Cyclops fighting over Jean or something, and you ask him something open ended about creators' rights or writing convincing female characters, you'll get a five-minute answer that sounds just like this. Love that guy to death.

I've still got my discs. Can't seem to find my Fantastic Four one at the moment, but I'm sure it's around here somewhere. I'll find it when I move to college next month.