There was nothing unusual about that script. That's how you do it. There was a "script guru" back in the early '00s who made the argument that every single first draft that had ever been written could improve simply by ditching the first 30 pages.

Beginning writers have this urgent need to explain all the cool shit they've thought of and hang up all the bangles and shine all the sparkles and backstory the ever loving fuck out of the poor dumb bastard making $15 to read this thing and write 1000 words on why it sucks and they don't realize that THE AUDIENCE OWES YOU FUCKALL. Then you get into novels and shit is even more brutal: The rule William Goldman, Blake Snyder and Syd Field all used is "you have ten pages to hook your audience." The rule Sol Stein uses is "they're going to pick your book off the shelf, open it, start reading the first page and if you don't have them hooked by the time they flip to page two you lose."

Star Wars - the whole fucking thing - is "He fought with your father in the Clone Wars."

Someone once wrote JRR Tolkien to ask what lay beyond the mountains of Mordor. He wrote her back to say "madam, if I told you, you would simply ask 'well what lays beyond that?' What is important is that I know what lies beyond the mountains of Mordor, not that you do."

There's a five page document that goes with that script. It lays out the next nine movies. It was created at the request of a collaborator. I fuckin' well know that world but nobody else needs to until there's a story happening in it.

I think you're correct. I had to read it a few times to get the gist of it, too, and I think they are just flat wrong in their conclusions based on their data. Their conclusion that long lasting antibodies don't form hinges on a big assumption in the Discussion, for which they provide no evidence:

In Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, 2.88% (118/4099) healthcare workers were diagnosed with COVID-19 before March 16, 2020. With a moderate estimation, the true infection rate would be ten times that had been confirmed, i.e., >25% of those healthcare providers without diagnosed COVID-19 had been infected. However, only 4% of those infected healthcare workers without confirmed COVID-19 still had IgG antibodies to SARS-CoV-2.

They are saying (without citation, mind you) that other people have calculated that there was a dramatic undercount of infections among healthcare workers, and therefore only ~15 or 20% of healthcare workers who were infected actually developed antibodies. They further assume, based on that, that only severely infected people develop IgG (which is responsible for long-term immunity) robustly.

If I were reviewing this paper I would print a copy just so I could throw it in the trash and piss on it. The only way we'll figure out whether long lasting immunity builds up is to query the people who have confirmed infections. And in this study, basically all the people with confirmed infections had IgG 3 months later (assuming there's some false negative rate, the "true" positive rate is surely well over 90%, although as far as I can tell they don't report what that rate is in their test). The proper control would be confirmed covid patients who were not hospitalized (or low symptoms if possible, but sample sizes could be tough to come by).

Anyway, I think this is a case of believing-is-seeing, and not objectively assessing data. The assumptions are economist-level bad, and the conclusions are therefore very hard to believe (even if they're right, this paper sure a shit doesn't say so). It is worth noting that the Discussion is 6 pages long, whereas the Results is 1.5 pages. This typically says the author has a point of view moreso than a valid data-driven conclusion. It is also an example of The Scientist trying to generate clicks. They know better than to link to non-peer reviewed garbage.

Abortion has to be illegal at some point, because otherwise you could abort a fetus up to the moment of delivery.

This is such a dude argument.

Abortion isn't new, nor are the laws around it, nor has there been any shortage of laws passed in order to figure out when men are allowed to be mad at women for taking charge of their bodies and futures. Historically these laws have taken the form of livestock value for induced miscarriage (example: Exodus 21 because show me a pregnant woman and I'll show you a dude who thinks its his right to tell her what the fuck to do.

Here's the thing. Take it from a guy who ended up owning and running a women's healthcare clinic, pregnancy is a pain in the ass and the longer you wait, the more of a pain in the ass it is. If you didn't want an abortion during the first trimester but you suddenly do during the third? Shit has gone horribly horribly wrong and you are living a tragedy. By the time you cross the third trimester you're better off taking the fetus to term anyway because babies fucking die. You don't take care of the kid and it's no longer a problem. Call it crib death, call it failure to thrive, call it whatever you want there are no shortage of ways you can take an unwanted baby and turn it into an unfortunate early passing even if you don't intend to, it's not like you need to put the kid in a basket and float it down to pharoah or some shit.

We did this whole roundyround with "partial birth abortions" back in the '90s AND NO ONE EVER FUCKING HAD ONE. Not a single person on either side of the argument could come up with more than one or two case studies where partial birth abortions were even performed. It's just not the way you handle obstetrical emergencies, nor is it how anyone - ANYONE - wants to handle an unwanted pregnancy. It's like "well, I figured I could have just poisoned my husband but instead I forged a terabyte of documents to convince the CIA he was the head of ISIS so they would call a drone strike on my house while I was in Vegas with the girls." It's the most ornate, involved, expensive possible way to terminate a pregnancy and the only reason anybody even talks about it is so that a bunch of men can jump around angry at each other over some hypothetical woman somewhere in the background of the argument that nobody really cares about.

Every law you make? Is going to be used to hit someone over the head. In the case of abortion laws, they will be used to punish the poor, the minorities and the disadvantaged. Nobody - NOBODY - needs to sit around legislating "well this is a fetus and that's a baby because POP at the magic 34 week 2 day 9 hour 7 minute 32 second mark WE GET TO REGISTER THEM TO VOTE!" because fucking hell, abortion rates have been plummeting anyway ever since a couple-three pills can be popped and all this posturing accomplishes is making it harder for my employees to help postpartum women with boggy uteruses and partially retained placental fragments.

Fuckin' let it go. If someone floated a constitutional amendment requiring the possession of a uterus in order to vote on issues pertaining to uteruses? I'd fuckin' LOBBY for that shit.

There are a lot of authors out there who publicly talk about what they want writing to be, not what writing is. Mr. "sit at the typewriter and bleed" tried out 26 different titles for A Farewell to Arms, finally settling on number 12.

There is science to it, and there are methods that make you more successful, but they tend to be unfun. I've beta-tested for Final Draft for like fifteen years now and there was a time when they'd tell you that the "want to be a screenwriter" market is substantially more lucrative than the "screenwriter" market but since that's bad for business, they keep it on the downlow.

Multiply by every other creative profession.

LOL

The best argument I've ever heard, pro or con, about abortion is that nobody got to legislate it. it went to the supreme court and pop it couldn't be legislated anymore, for or against. That was maybe thirty years ago, well before Turdblossom decided to put family values bills on everyone's ballot in 2004, before Gavin Newsom decided to say "double eagles bitchez we're marrying gays" and before pretty much the entire country went "you know, I'm not enough of a bigot to give my support to a law denying gay people human rights."

This article has a fuckin' coloring book in the margin to illustrate the vigor and vim with which legislatures will approach the problem even when they aren't allowed to make it illegal. It is my firmly considered opinion that a house'n'senate passed, presidentially-signed sentence that said "healthcare decisions related to pregnancy are the purvey of women and the physicians supervising their care" would club this entire fucking issue in the head never to rise again.

mk and I used to talk a lot about how journals should discourage discussion sections to the greatest extent possible. Restate your results, put them in context, and tell us the limitations of the study. Don't pontificate or just make shit up. Speculating wildly for the sake of drumming up interest is an unfortunate side effect of the self-promotion that scientists have to engage in to get noticed, and duping journalists into covering it is too easy sometimes, because they need content, too.

I don't know off hand how that 90% number compares to other diseases (or again how reliable their test is), so even that is difficult to judge. That's the kind of thing they should be telling us in their discussion.

After their study was published in 1998, tourists located the stone circle by plucking the latitude and longitude from the research paper. Soon, visitors were defacing the megaliths and standing up nearby stones that changed the site’s alignment.

“They ended up messing up the area, which had been pristine for 5,000 years,” Malville says.

Fuck people! But great article - it's funny how reading it reminded me of the one I posted about the Polynesians recently, and then they mention them a few paragraphs later.

There was no north star at the time, so the people navigated using bright stars and the circular motion of the heavens.

This was news to me, I had to google that because the thought of "important" stars changing significantly seemed so unlikely to me, in the small scale we have experienced humanity. Looks like something changed in earth's alignment so that the North Star now appears brighter?

Looks like something changed in earth's alignment so that the North Star now appears brighter?

It's axial precession. Currently we're on Polaris, 5000 years ago it was Thuban.

The time to make a 'full circle' is 25772 years, or 1 degree every 72 years.

Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!

I mean... he's not incorrect... it's an asinine thing to say... but it's accurate. I mean... If I don't open my eyes, I can't see the train coming.

It's as if he's writing Biden's commercials for him.

He's not a whiny bitch