I'm part of an award-winning writer's group, and several of the members swear by this book.
Of course they do, because they win awards from other writers who also believe in it.
And the reason 90% of the entire fiction market follows the formula is because there are authoring tools (not talking about word processors) out there to help you take a simple plot and cut it up and mold (sic) it into the formula. (Even some free ones http://www.novelist.ch/joomla/ ).
To your list of such authors, you can add just about any author who's name appears in bigger print than the title on the jacket. If they have more then 10 titles in print, its a virtual certainty that they use authoring tools, and plot obfuscation tools (things that help them plant early hints to later events).
The series of summer bombs is promising to shake up the American movie industry. Whether that means they'll spend more on multiple smaller movies or just spend more on sequels....
Except many weren't bombs. A couple, yes, but by and large the summer movies made money. From this page, you can click the title of recent movies and see their production budget, and compare it to their gross. Anything that has been out for at least a month has pretty much made back its production budget at a minimum..
And this is no different than prior summer movies dating back decades.
If you think about it, it is inevitable that it can't just be this book. Because if it were, then it would mean that this author was someone of striking originality, almost a contradiction in terms. Instead this must be a careful codification of formulas already commonly known.
Exactly. More than likely, the book just documented what was ALREADY being done, which served to further entrench the formula.
Pretty much spot on, except the Commercial Bit actually looks more like this:
Ask bunch of suggestive questions to hook audience, show preview snippets of what's after the commercial show 5 commercials 3 minutes of review of what happened in the last 5 minute segment 5 more minutes of new material
Wait, I think you've been watching old movies for too long....
These days the protagonist has to be rescued by the leading lady with arms the size of pipe-cleaners and melons on her chest, who somehow kicks the shit out the the Third Reich and saves the day for their bumbling male partners.
And every one of those is characterized as a huge risk, and daring by the entrenched. And the audience can't get enough of them because they are desperate for something new. It still ends up being niche television, because soon after its first two seasons, it gains imitators AND it runs out of ideas and ends up copying itself.
The problem is, that niche television has soaked up just about all of the decent writers and screenwriters to the point that the bulk of movies and TV drama is tripe. Its likely to be a waste land for decades, because everyone is reading the same guide books and taking the same writing courses.
the writing schools have been teaching this same classic shit for decades. if you draw storylines(up's and downs of "mood" plotted on a x/y axis where x is time) you'll see patterns with classic movies, plays and books.
Exactly. There are book authoring tools that do exactly the same mood manipulation. Any book in the bookstore which has the author's name printed larger than the title of the book is guaranteed to be written via one of these engines. Any author that has written more than 5 books is guaranteed to use one.
(Its gotten so bad that I just don't read anything where the author's name gets top billing on the jacket any more).
Same with TV Cop show. Strong confident woman cob with arms the size of soda straws, kicks the shit out of bad guys twice her size, while whimpy bumbling male partner (also twice her size) lies battered on the ground. Same formula every episode. Same female writers buried in the credits with only first initial and last name.
The technology requires multiple images to capture the scene from a variety of vantage points.
So simply the big difference here seems to be synthesis of properly spaced stereo cameras by using cameras positioned anywhere.
But it sounds less impressive than some of the stereo movies released from older 2D movies where there wasn't any additional cameras, and someone simply assigned depths to parts of the image and put CGI to work on it.
There is no law authorizing a gag order that courts routinely hand out. They usurped the authority. They weren't prohibited. Only Congress was. They just took it upon themselves to invent that and declare it legal, and wont allow it to be found otherwise.
However with FISA laws, CONGRESS made a law authorizing the gag, and that makes it illegal. "Congress shall make no law".
The founders went further than simply creating a supreme court to decide what the law is. That route was surely open to them. But they chose a different route. Why: Because the people would not accept the Constitution with out it:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
No possible subsequent law can get around that, and any judge who rules otherwise has violated his oath of office.
Since the gag order is unconstitutional in the first place the feds would just let it go rather than risk a loss in court.
There are already companies that offer cloud storage that has customer side encryption that prevents them from honoring a nsa letter or a search warrant. So writing such a contract is not illegal. See SpiderOak.
How would terminating a customer account violate a lawful order.
Fisa order for customer Joe arrives. Joe's account immediately terminated. Fisa replied to with no such account exists. Joe calls up pissed. Receives Reply: read clause 24.65 of your contract.
If there were only two people involved it's not worth any effort to stop it. You want to prevent it being put on the Web for free.
Plus, you can refuse to sell single copy subscriptions, and make the pirate purchase at least a half subscription, giving you time to kill of the remaining copies when your google search finds the fingerprint on the web.
The concept of a magazine was born with print, and should die when print dies. Why fight deadlines when you can simply post them as you finish them, and have people returning to your site every day?
Paying 1.5 times the subscription price just so you can distribute something for free suggests a higher level of altruism than your average pirate usually exhibits.
For most companies, a secret serial number, and a monthly web search is all they can afford. Even this poses a bit of a problem, because you have to serialize each copy, and that complicates the delivery mechanism. Its not foolproof because comparing two different copies sent to two different users would reveal the location of the serialization. But there is little incentive for a sharer to go to the trouble of doing that.
Its fairly cheap and it puts the risk directly on the sharer.
You've been here long enough to know that the submitter submits both the headlines and the story, and that the editors do little except make sure the links are diverted through as many ad supported sites as possible instead of going directly to the source.
Nothing new here. Had the same experience in mexico a dozen years ago. Red light or green light. But back then, there was a guy standing on a switch could just flex his knee to make additional selections if you looks particularly shady.
You're assuming best case scenario: you stop the car, someone runs up to take your keys and help with bags, and immediately drives away. I'm assuming normal situations, like nobody is there to take the car away, and you may not have bags to start with, or they're in the back seat.
Clearly you've never used valet services. They don't have room for many cars, so they had dozens of drivers. Typically they drive the car away before you even get your bags into the terminal. Your car never sits there longer than it would if you unloaded and parked it yourself. So there is ZERO additional risk, and there has NEVER been a case of a bomb in a car delivered to a valet.
And the search isn't done right there at the departure curb, its done in the valet parking area, long after the car has left the danger zone, after the woman had left for her flight in the store above.
There are closed loop systems, but you still need to cool and condense the steam back to water just to pipe it around, and re-heat it. Pushing spent (low pressure) steam back into your heating plant is no where near as efficient as sending water in. Condensing to water and pumping that is actually more efficient.
Most electrical generation plants have two or three stages of generation, where the steam exiting the high pressure turbines is re-heated with with flue gases and sent through the medium and low pressure turbines. At the end of the line they have extracted just about all the heat they can from it.
The problem is we have no really good use for the remaining heat of spent steam. And no way to extract the remaining heat into a useful form, or recycle it back into the plant or any other economical use.
So we essentially heat the atmosphere, by venting it into cooling towers.
But the water? It all gets returned to the cooling pond, except that bit that you see rising as vapor (its not steam) above the cooling towers. .
The fact that powerplants borrow water to cool themselves is no big deal. They give it all back.
No, no, the article says "withdrawn" which means its not in the water bank anymore. So at 40% per year, in two and a half years there will be no water left in the bank. We are Doomed.
To protect your future, you should run down and withdraw all your water from the bank today. Horde it in your bed. (That's why water beds were invented).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm part of an award-winning writer's group, and several of the members swear by this book.
Of course they do, because they win awards from other writers who also believe in it.
And the reason 90% of the entire fiction market follows the formula is because there are authoring tools (not talking about word processors)
out there to help you take a simple plot and cut it up and mold (sic) it into the formula. (Even some free ones http://www.novelist.ch/joomla/ ).
To your list of such authors, you can add just about any author who's name appears in bigger print than the title on the jacket.
If they have more then 10 titles in print, its a virtual certainty that they use authoring tools, and plot obfuscation tools
(things that help them plant early hints to later events).
The series of summer bombs is promising to shake up the American movie industry.
Whether that means they'll spend more on multiple smaller movies or just spend more on sequels....
Except many weren't bombs. A couple, yes, but by and large the summer movies made money.
From this page, you can click the title of recent movies and see their production budget, and compare it to their gross.
Anything that has been out for at least a month has pretty much made back its production budget at a minimum..
And this is no different than prior summer movies dating back decades.
If you think about it, it is inevitable that it can't just be this book. Because if it were, then it would mean that this author was someone of striking originality, almost a contradiction in terms. Instead this must be a careful codification of formulas already commonly known.
Exactly.
More than likely, the book just documented what was ALREADY being done, which served to further entrench the formula.
Pretty much spot on, except the Commercial Bit actually looks more like this:
Ask bunch of suggestive questions to hook audience,
show preview snippets of what's after the commercial
show 5 commercials
3 minutes of review of what happened in the last 5 minute segment
5 more minutes of new material
Rinse, repeat.
This follows the same music formula for the I V vi IV chord progression in most popular music.
Well, what do you expect when every musical instrument on the entire planet is a guitar?
The last mainstream song I can remember hearing where something other than guitar was featured was Call Me Maybe.
Wait, I think you've been watching old movies for too long....
These days the protagonist has to be rescued by the leading lady with arms the size of pipe-cleaners and melons on her chest, who somehow kicks the shit out the the Third Reich and saves the day for their bumbling male partners.
True.
And every one of those is characterized as a huge risk, and daring by the entrenched. And the audience can't get enough of them because they are desperate for something new. It still ends up being niche television, because soon after its first two seasons, it gains imitators AND it runs out of ideas and ends up copying itself.
The problem is, that niche television has soaked up just about all of the decent writers and screenwriters to the point that the bulk of movies and TV drama is tripe.
Its likely to be a waste land for decades, because everyone is reading the same guide books and taking the same writing courses.
the writing schools have been teaching this same classic shit for decades. if you draw storylines(up's and downs of "mood" plotted on a x/y axis where x is time) you'll see patterns with classic movies, plays and books.
Exactly. There are book authoring tools that do exactly the same mood manipulation. Any book in the bookstore which has the author's name printed larger than the title of the book is guaranteed to be written via one of these engines. Any author that has written more than 5 books is guaranteed to use one.
(Its gotten so bad that I just don't read anything where the author's name gets top billing on the jacket any more).
Same with TV Cop show. Strong confident woman cob with arms the size of soda straws, kicks the shit out of bad guys twice her size, while whimpy bumbling male partner (also twice her size) lies battered on the ground. Same formula every episode. Same female writers buried in the credits with only first initial and last name.
It is modded down for being a "subtle brag".
"(not so) subtle EURO brag"
The technology requires multiple images to capture the scene from a variety of vantage points.
So simply the big difference here seems to be synthesis of properly spaced stereo cameras by using cameras positioned anywhere.
But it sounds less impressive than some of the stereo movies released from older 2D movies where there wasn't any additional
cameras, and someone simply assigned depths to parts of the image and put CGI to work on it.
There is no law authorizing a gag order that courts routinely hand out. They usurped the authority. They weren't prohibited. Only Congress was. They just took it upon themselves to invent that and declare it legal, and wont allow it to be found otherwise.
However with FISA laws, CONGRESS made a law authorizing the gag, and that makes it illegal. "Congress shall make no law".
Its a whole different ball game.
Microsoft. Snort. Done.
More likely the NSA installing more spyware backdoors.
The founders went further than simply creating a supreme court to decide what the law is. That route was surely open to them. But they chose a different route. Why: Because the people would not accept the Constitution with out it:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
No possible subsequent law can get around that, and any judge who rules otherwise has violated his oath of office.
Since the gag order is unconstitutional in the first place the feds would just let it go rather than risk a loss in court.
There are already companies that offer cloud storage that has customer side encryption that prevents them from honoring a nsa letter or a search warrant. So writing such a contract is not illegal. See SpiderOak.
How would terminating a customer account violate a lawful order.
Fisa order for customer Joe arrives.
Joe's account immediately terminated.
Fisa replied to with no such account exists.
Joe calls up pissed. Receives Reply: read clause 24.65 of your contract.
If there were only two people involved it's not worth any effort to stop it.
You want to prevent it being put on the Web for free.
Plus, you can refuse to sell single copy subscriptions, and make the pirate purchase at least a half subscription, giving you time to kill of the remaining copies when your google search finds the fingerprint on the web.
This!
The concept of a magazine was born with print, and should die when print dies.
Why fight deadlines when you can simply post them as you finish them, and have people returning to your site every day?
Paying 1.5 times the subscription price just so you can distribute something for free suggests a higher level of altruism than your average pirate usually exhibits.
Mod parent up.
For most companies, a secret serial number, and a monthly web search is all they can afford.
Even this poses a bit of a problem, because you have to serialize each copy, and that complicates the delivery mechanism.
Its not foolproof because comparing two different copies sent to two different users would reveal the location of the serialization. But there is little incentive for a sharer to go to the trouble of doing that.
Its fairly cheap and it puts the risk directly on the sharer.
You've been here long enough to know that the submitter submits both the headlines and the story,
and that the editors do little except make sure the links are diverted through as many ad supported
sites as possible instead of going directly to the source.
Nothing new here.
Had the same experience in mexico a dozen years ago.
Red light or green light.
But back then, there was a guy standing on a switch could just flex his knee to make additional selections if you looks particularly shady.
You're assuming best case scenario: you stop the car, someone runs up to take your keys and help with bags, and immediately drives away. I'm assuming normal situations, like nobody is there to take the car away, and you may not have bags to start with, or they're in the back seat.
Clearly you've never used valet services. They don't have room for many cars, so they had dozens of drivers. Typically they drive the car away before you even get your bags into the terminal. Your car never sits there longer than it would if you unloaded and parked it yourself. So there is ZERO additional risk, and there has NEVER been a case of a bomb in a car delivered to a valet.
And the search isn't done right there at the departure curb, its done in the valet parking area, long after the car has left the danger zone, after the woman had left for her flight in the store above.
There are closed loop systems, but you still need to cool and condense the steam back to water just to pipe it around, and re-heat it. Pushing spent (low pressure) steam back into your heating plant is no where near as efficient as sending water in. Condensing to water and pumping that is actually more efficient.
Most electrical generation plants have two or three stages of generation, where the steam exiting the high pressure turbines is re-heated with with flue gases and
sent through the medium and low pressure turbines. At the end of the line they have extracted just about all the heat they can from it.
The problem is we have no really good use for the remaining heat of spent steam. And no way to extract the remaining heat into a useful form, or
recycle it back into the plant or any other economical use.
So we essentially heat the atmosphere, by venting it into cooling towers.
But the water? It all gets returned to the cooling pond, except that bit that you see rising as vapor (its not steam) above the cooling towers.
.
Yup, because as soon as that water for cooling is all gone, there will be no more water.
40%!!! The greedy bastards. !!
The fact that powerplants borrow water to cool themselves is no big deal. They give it all back.
No, no, the article says "withdrawn" which means its not in the water bank anymore.
So at 40% per year, in two and a half years there will be no water left in the bank. We are Doomed.
To protect your future, you should run down and withdraw all your water from the bank today.
Horde it in your bed. (That's why water beds were invented).