So it looks like there's going to be a writers' strike in the United States. Among the demands brought forward by the Writer's Guild of America is the regulation of "generative AI" in screenwriting: the use of large language models like GPT, which produce text by calculating where certain words in the English language are statistically most likely to appear next to each other.

No matter what your job is, there's an AI booster out there who thinks GPT can do some part of it better than you can. Those guys are frequently wrong; for example, here's a post by Bret Devereaux examining in-depth the idea that ChatGPT can write your college essays for you. Short answer: it can produce an assemblage of text that looks like an essay, but submitting that text as your essay will not result in a good grade, because a truly successful essay requires a cognitive depth that is completely beyond large language models.

Where ChatGPT and other generative text models like it actually excel is in producing text that meets formulaic requirements in a confident, passable, vaguely novel and blandly inoffensive format.

It is, from a certain point of view, the perfect Hollywood screenwriter.

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So. Klingons.

In the original Star Trek series, Klingons were dudes in brownface makeup with a penchant for snakeskin pants and Fu Manchu moustaches. Starting in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and throughout the Star Trek series of the 80s and 90s, the Klingons suddenly had dramatic forehead ridges and dressed like they were headed to a Slipknot concert. In the early 00s, Star Trek: Enterprise started out with the forehead-ridge metalhead Klingons, then had an entire arc that transformed them into the original series’ brownface snakeskin-panted Klingons. Star Trek Into Darkness, which takes place in an alternate-reality version of the original series, kicked that whole thing in the shins with their slightly pointier take on the metalhead Klingons. And then Star Trek: Discovery, which takes place a few years earlier than the original series, slam-dunked Enterprise’s explanation into the trash with its incredibly dramatic take on the Klingons.


There are other, smaller incongruities throughout the timeline of the various Star Trek series; for example, Discovery’s holographic communication system is, by official canon, contemporaneous with the original series’ space fax.

The non-diegetic explanation for these things is obvious: Star Trek is a show about the future, and nothing dates faster than the future. On top of that, each successive production had a higher budget, access to improved effects tech, and artists who leveraged both to try out some Stuff.

There have been attempts to explain these incongruities diegetically; for example, Enterprise’s arc devoted to a gene-altering virus that made the Klingons look the way they did in the original series. Discovery also had some throwaway lines to explain why the holographic communication system disappeared in later shows. But Star Trek didn’t need that and I don’t care.

There are people who will tell you these explanations are vitally important, and every little timeline discrepancy needs to be explained. These people are annoying and you don’t have to listen to them.

Anyway, let’s talk about theater. In live theater, there’s a distinction between the reality the audience observes and the reality the characters experience.

Sometimes this distinction is slight. Julius Caesar probably didn’t speak in iambic pentameter and almost certainly didn’t speak English. Shakespeare doesn’t bother to explain why Caesar does both in the eponymous play; it’s implicitly understood that the characters of Julius Caesar are actually speaking Latin, and the use of English is an interpretive device.

Sometimes the distinction is more blatant. The Broadway production of Hamilton is performed on a bare-bones set featuring a walkway, a couple of staircases, an occasional table, and nothing else. The characters fight on battlefields and walk the streets of 18th century New York, but it’s all implied by their performances; what they see isn’t what we see.


This is how I watch Star Trek: with a wall of interpretation between me and the characters. To me, the technological standards and alien makeup change constantly; to the characters, it’s all perfectly consistent. The reality they experience is different than the one I observe. I don’t need anything explained, and whenever Star Trek tries to explain it anyway, all that does is raise even more questions.

The bit from “Trials and Tribble-ations” where Worf gets embarrassed about original series Klingons is good, though. That can stay.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but everything kind of sucks right now. Fascist governments are on the rise, a climate crisis looms, and those with the power to solve these problems are utterly uninterested in doing so. In times like these, people turn to utopian fiction to make sense of the world around them and find a way forward. But no piece of art produced in the past few years, no novel, no film, has emerged as the great utopian work of our cultural moment.

Because the great utopian work of our cultural moment already exists, and it came out 30 years ago.

In 1989, the Cold War was coming to a close. Throughout most of the 20th century, the world had teetered on the precipice of doom: the two most powerful nations in the world possessed, between them, enough firepower to destroy the Earth several times over--and they were at each other’s throats. Then it was over, and despite the fact that the world had failed to physically end, there was still a sense that a kind of apocalypse had occurred. Something had died. Something new was coming.

And on February 17, 1989, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was released in theatres.

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Sometimes I wonder if the reason Hollywood studios have embraced "NO SPOILERS" culture as much as they have is because they see it as a form of damage control.

Let's use Avengers: Infinity War as a case study. I, and many other people I've talked to, are absolutely disgusted by Gamora's death in that movie. Not in the Watsonian sense, where they're mad at Thanos for killing her, but in the Doylist sense, where they're mad at the filmmakers for deciding she needed to die and the subtext surrounding her death. Many found the scene's inherent abuse apologia triggering. It broke the movie.

If our culture at large didn't care about ZOMG SPOILERS, then I would have found out about Gamora's death and how she died very shortly after the movie came out. I, and the many people who feel the same way I do, could have saved our $15 and skipped the Infinity War, content to wait and read a recap later.

But of course, that means fewer ticket sales for the studio.

And because Marvel's marketing team berated fans so heavily not to reveal spoilers about the movie, all those people who would've otherwise avoided Infinity War ended up buying those tickets.

There's a good chance Marvel did that on purpose.

I know everyone else has been seeing the Spider-verse movie, but my mom isn't super thirsty for Jake Johnson. So.

I think the wrong approach to an Aquaman movie would've been to conclude that the entire character is a joke and redesign him from the ground up. And this movie didn't do that, so thank god. Instead, the filmmakers decided to take all the goofy comic book shit at face value and extract as much fun and joy out of it as possible, up to and including an army of crab men rendered in loving CGI detail.

The result is not quite as personally affecting for me as Wonder Woman, but definitely better than basically every other DCEU movie so far. I never saw Justice League, so I can't say whether Jason Momoa's performance is better or worse than in that movie. But I can say that if you hold The Little Mermaid responsible for your sexual awakening, this movie has a lot to offer you.

I love how ( SPOILERS )

It's also notable that ( MORE SPOILERS )

As a final note, this movie is 142 minutes long and my showing included 10 minutes of pre-roll ads. Not trailers. Ads. The trailers were an additional 10 minutes. I think I've figured out why nobody goes to see movies in the theatre anymore.

Anyway, if you plan to do literally anything else after you see Aquaman, make sure you catch an early showtime.

Like most human beings, I enjoy movies. I’m also heard of hearing, which means that I need subtitles. At home, this isn’t such a huge issue, and I’m lucky enough to have people in my life who don’t get all huffy when I turn the subtitles on while we’re watching a movie together.

In anticipation of there suddenly being way more Superman fic out there, I figured I’d put together a tip sheet for people who want to write about Clark doing journalism for a living. This is nowhere near an exhaustive guide, just a quick rundown of where I keep seeing writers slip up.

Source: two generations of my family worked in newspapers and I considered journalism as a career before Postmedia made it way less appealing. If anyone has any corrections or stuff they’d like to add, please do.

general stuff:

• I fell down a research hole on the DC wiki and still can’t figure out what Clark’s major is. It’s not necessarily journalism. There’s no one degree that qualifies you to be a journalist.
  • when my dad was hiring for his papers, he usually preferred English majors over journalism majors, because “the English majors were better writers.” This is probably not empirically true.
• Comics and movies usually portray Perry White as the autocratic overlord of The Daily Planet, making all the editorial decisions, responsible for hundreds of employees, yet only interacting with the same three or four all the time. In reality, a lot of what Perry White does in the comics gets delegated out to a small army of section editors and assignment editors and managing editors and look there’s a lot of editors, okay? The EIC is the boss of the whole operation, but he doesn’t spend the whole day bellowing orders from his office because if he did, he wouldn’t get anything else done.
• Print newspapers get most of their revenue from ads. There can be significant pressure not to piss off the advertisers, especially these days.
• Some newspapers have embraced the digital age. Some haven’t. Some use paywalls on their websites. Some don’t.
• The most unbelievable thing in Man of Steel was that a newspaper in the year of our lord 2013 had that many employees and was hiring.

writing about writing

• Some journalists are better at reporting than writing. Some are better at writing than reporting.
• Your average news article is structured so that all the most important details are at the beginning of the story, with the least important details at the end. If fiction stories start with “it was a dark and stormy night” and end with “the butler did it,” then news stories start with “the butler did it” and end with “it was a dark and stormy night.”
• News articles are supposed to be objective. Personal opinions are usually confined to editorials or columns.
• Because news articles are supposed to be objective, they will usually strive for “balance.” If a story involves a controversial issue, the writer will often seek out contrasting opinions so the reader can see both sides of the issue and make up their own mind.
  • This can sometimes lead to “balance bias,” where the most seemingly benign statement in an article is contrasted with the ramblings of some yahoo for the sake of fairness.
• Articles are usually quite short–less than 1000 words. Longer, more in-depth features happen either because the issue in question requires it, or because the feature is on a topic considered “timeless” and isn’t subject to the same kind of deadline pressure.

hip newspaper lingo

• Art is a photo or diagram or whatever used to accompany a story. Pretty pictures used to catch the eye and illustrate the article.
• A reporter’s beat is the subject that they usually cover, such as crime or politics. A reporter who’s an expert on a particular subject is a correspondent.
• The big unwieldy newspapers are broadsheets. Small commuter papers are tabloids. Broadsheets are usually considered more prestigious and reliable than tabloids.
• Copy is any written material. Copy editors edit copy, make sure there are no legal issues, write headlines, and figure out where to place a story in the newspaper’s layout.
• Stories will sometimes be under embargo, where they can’t be published until after a certain date or time.
• If an editor decides not to run a story, that story’s been killed or spiked.
• The first paragraph of a news article, with all the important details, is called the lede. Deliberately or accidentally placing important details later in the story is called burying the lede.
• Wire services (commonly shortened to “wire” or “the wire”) are syndication services that provide stories and art to various newspapers (and TV and radio stations) for a fee. Reuters, Associated Press, etc. If you’re a copy editor and you need filler or art or whatever, you grab it off the wire.

movies to watch:

• All the President’s Men - pretty good look at the realities of investigative reporting (hint: there are a lot of tedious phone calls involved). The filmmakers were so dedicated to accuracy that they had the Washington Post’s garbage shipped in so they could put it in the movie set’s trash cans.
• The Paper - 24 hours in the life of a New York tabloid. Michael Keaton’s in it. Great look at the day-to-day operation of a newsroom and the relationship between reporters, editors, and the editor-in-chief. Also it’s really goddamn funny.

UM OKAY THIS POST IS WAY LONGER THAN I INTENDED IT TO BE

BYE