Tale

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Probably my favorite Superhero movie. I'm going to need some time to digest it to be certain.

Have you tried taking the character, coming up with a few ordinary, mundane scenarios that don't make for a good story but make up important pillars of this guy's life and writing a scene a few pages long for each of those as an exercise? Then write a couple of scenes where something less ordinary happens, the guy is robbed or he won the lottery and he's now having his first amazing holiday and try to imagine the guy being stressed and excited and in every scene where applicable work out a past, and the guy's plans for the future, his pattern of thinking and who the people in his life are ect. Another way to go may be to imagine a character from a show/movie/book and writing him into the role and letting him evolve into your own creation as the story progresses. Or to imagine an actor/friend/acquaintance and write the role as if for them as a kind of guideline to get you started (not that the character has to be like them, but you can imagine them playing the character in your head). I think I'm satisfied writing a brief biography that includes events relevant to the themes of the book for the moment. But I do like your ideas and would be glad to add them to the toolbox for future use.

You should have tried harder! Quitter.

I swear, people just throw themselves intentionally off of every cliff they come across.

That was the main character of my last project. He didn't really have an understanding of anything he did. I, on the other hand, had an understanding of it. Generally a bad idea. You want to do your researcher on that kind of thing or avoid it. Did you miss the part where I was two chapters in and then I realized this was precise thing was causing me a problem? The characters were boring and shallow. They lacked any ability to contextualize and were struggling with consistency. They were mostly things that events happened to. So Max sees people he works with start killing each other. And he's scared. So he... does nothing. Because he's scared and there's no context for this interaction. And that was a scene I actually wrote. It was dull. Max had a chance to define himself there and the only thing he defined himself as was "scared." I can't expect someone else care about a guy whose only characteristic is that he's scared of scary things.

Because if I don't understand them, they don't have a themself to do anything by. They're just a blank item reacting predictably to things around them. They're actually far easier to control in that situation. But they are far more boring. Kind of like me at a party. Just standing in the corner waiting for it to be over because none of it interests me. Only finally interacting when someone else approaches me or I decide to leave. Understanding the character is how I know whether they're to be brave or frightened in a situation. Where I know if they'll be curious, what they might be focused on, when they'll be defiant. Without that they're just simple reactions. They can only answer questions and occasionally tilt their heads.

Only with a permit. Some people don't like to deal with it, because it puts extra restrictions on your license as a result.

That's part of what my expanded outlining is doing. I've been told to write it up like a miniature wiki page for each character/faction and that's doing wonders for me. My old outline on this project basically consisted of "they don't like ___, but they like ___. I want them to ___." This was not very helpful. This is a lesson I probably should have learned from three of the past four projects where I did have better histories. I guess I'm just not very good at discovery writing.

In today's installment of "Tale is learning some probably pretty basic stuff about writing" I spent time revising my outline. I noticed a big problem in trying to write around chapter 2, I don't know my characters very well. It's like the theatrical cliche of "what's my motivation." Can't inject any emotion and don't really understand why my own characters are doing anything. Expanding my outline with details should help with the problem.

I spent much of my day watching a guy try to disprove relativity through thought experiment.

Maybe I am reading too much into it. But the problems with those movies isn't that they're not timeless classics. It's that they're bad. If you look away from the fact that the originals are timeless classics, they're pretty bad too. Well, New Hope and Return anyway. Empire still holds up pretty well. I've seen that claim before. They're not bad the way the prequels are, not in the same way or the same degree. Last time I saw that someone was complaining about the camp. But at least camp has emotion in the characters and it's not a bunch of wooden people talking. The fights aren't completely self-indulgent, they carry the emotion and relationships with them. Every fight with Dooku is completely void of character. The fights with Grevious have nothing. The fight with Maul has nothing until the second half. The one fight in the prequels that really does have character to it is dragged out way too freaking long and with some truly dreadful choreography. It needed to be cut to a third of what it was. The originals weren't that bad. The fights existed to show the character relationships, not just flash lights around. And they kept themselves short, which helped focus on the emotion.

It is fairly easy to be popular among young audiences. They share the direct-to-DVD market with b-movies, you might have noticed. What is a noteworthy achievement is being popular with the entire family. Getting it to be something that the parents enjoy sitting down watching with their children.

I'm not surprised. Season 3 wasn't even an entire book. It felt like so little happened compared to the first two seasons.

Maybe I am reading too much into it. But the problems with those movies isn't that they're not timeless classics. It's that they're bad. That's kind of my point. The criticism isn't because they're not as good as the originals. The criticism is because they're bad movies. Expectations aren't a factor. They're not Sharknado bad, which is also a movie some people enjoyed, but that's not ultimately a valuable standard. If they hadn't been part of an already successful franchise, two thirds of them wouldn't have been made at all. John Carter was better and it's not getting any sequels.

Dismissing criticism by blaming expectations doesn't sit well with me. There's been plenty of good work out there that was met with high expectations and still pleased the audience. Peacekeeper Wars and Serenity to point to two examples that are dear to me. But there exists numerous other sequels, reboots, and TV seasons that are all well received despite following a high bar, standard, or simply an insular and rabid fanbase. Broadly dismissing criticism like that only strikes me as an unwillingness to understand the criticism. The problems with the Star Wars prequels are probably the most broadly discussed. So not at least acknowledging its failings and saying that you prefer the parts it did well, such as special effects, strikes me as perhaps intellectually dishonest. If not purposefully blind.

I can't agree. Even the things I worry about only lend to being less than their potential, not inherently bad. The movie is going to have an uphill battle, particularly with having to deal with the 30 year time skip and passing the torch. But uphill battles can be won, they're just hard.

I'm not worried about Abrams. I liked the first new Trek. It's the second that I really dislike. And given Damon Lindeloff's involvement with Prometheus, I'm tempted to blame him for the both. Kasdan worries me in a different way. Yay, he wrote Empire. But he's not really had any work in the public eye for a decade. So whatever skill he had might not be skill he still has. And even then, whatever he liked to write might not be what he still likes to write. Am I just a bitter pessimist?

I'd disagree on BSG being solid. And Serenity was 9 years ago. Star Trek and Star Wars are literally the only ones ongoing that aren't just hypothetical. I absolutely hated Into Darkness for the exact reasons I dislike franchises. And there's currently more bad in Star Wars than good. We need something new that can create its own principles and themes. That only burdens itself when it's a failure. That's not occupied with trying to raise the stakes of the ones it's following or betray their themes.

All the talk about Yuuzhan Vong is making me bitter at franchising again. It would be so nice if we could have a broad set of Space Opera on film to enjoy.

I'm not exactly sure that random Chilean retailers have the inside scoop.

I just finished watching all things Evangelion. The Rebuild movies, the series, End of Evangelion. All to help get in the mood for science fiction. Next I think I'm moving to Martian Successor Nadesico. Which I don't believe I've watched in nearly a decade.

Played Blackwell Epiphany over the weekend. It's as good as any of the other installments, perhaps better because of its puzzle design. I only got "stuck" twice over the game.

It could also be the same "I didn't really pay attention and don't care" that caused Liam Neeson to pronounce Coruscant as Gorazat in The Phantom Menace.

In other words, nothing changed. The EU canon was never treated the same as the film canon. EU canon started with the clone wars being about cloned Jedi going mad. Han Solo used to work for the Empire. And when you kill a Dark Side user, they explode.

I think I want to play Morrowind. But magic is so boring and I've done stealth/combat a hundred times.