The Death of Drafts

Something I need to get in the habit of is using Evernote to write my rough drafts before bringing them into Blogger, rather than my usual method of writing into Blogger directly. The interface is fine when I need to insert things like links or videos, but as far as the core activity of writing the entry, it's not always as smooth and pleasant a user experience as it should be. I feel the same way about WordPress, though to a lesser degree because the block system it uses is relatively intuitive. Blogger is too much like a word processor; it's very much about the WYSIWYG philosophy.

To better illustrate what I mean, we have to talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey. A lot of people don't understand the relationship between the movie and the book, specifically which came first. Technically, the book was written first, but it was meant to serve as something of a wiki for the screenplay. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, "Before you can make a movie, you need a script. Before you write a script, you need a story." Screenplays, by their very nature, aren't really meant for embellishing details or offering backstory to a spotlighted item. There's an unwritten rule in screenwriting of no paragraph of more than 3 lines. They're designed to be concise and quick to read, each page amounting to roughly one minute of screen time. Novels can play with time and structure in ways screenplays can't, hence why some novels are deemed "unfilmable."

There's another rule about screenplays, that the first version of your screenplay submitted is always your first draft, no matter how many rewrites it went through up until that point. When I was in school, we made these things called rough drafts. They were handwritten on paper, and your teacher would eventually hand it back to you with red marks all over it, pointing out every little mistake you made (sometimes with helpful suggestions on what to do next). You would then completely start over and write out another paper taking the edits to heart. I'm sure this is still technically done, only with digital files instead of sheets of notebook paper. My point is that word processing created a convenience in terms of editing your written work. Some writers forgo "drafts" altogether and edit as they go along, never even bothering with the "version history" feature some word processors and notetaking applications provide. There's no more starting over, barring any serious fundamental hiccup like finding out a source is inaccurate or an entire premise is off the mark. It's overall a more nebulous process. You can still number your drafts, but those can be reserved for page one rewrites rather than little typos or moving a sentence from the end of a paragraph to the start of one. 

This concludes the experiment. Draft was successfully transferred from Evernote to Blogger. 

Half a Mind to Have and Have Not

Let's talk about grammar, spelling, and an overall command of punctuation for a moment. There's a possibility I've gone over most of this before, so if you think you already know where this is going, you won't be missing anything.

The Gadget Guy asked why I don't ridicule the grammar of people who agree with my views meanwhile it's somewhat the focus of my caricatures of him.

Short version: I don't honestly believe there is any such thing as perfect grammar, not in English, anyway. The language is too big a mashup for anything to mesh properly. Still, while I let out the odd "teh" or "lead" when I mean "led", some people have a batting average so much lower than mine, so much than the rest of the team in fact, the other team throws the game out of sympathy.

ShortER version: You're just that bad.

Now, as for why I seem to play favorites:

The reason has to do with the definition of pretentious.

"attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed."

To that end, if you're going to claim to be intelligent, observant, and articulate, or otherwise having an inside track on some unknown truth, it's not unreasonable to expect you to demonstrate the skills necessary to understand this information in the first place.

If you've ever seen Apocalypse Now, you might remember that journalist who basically thought Marlon Brando was the second coming. One of his lines about "reality" goes something like this: You can't go into space with fractions.

This line sums up exactly how The Gadget Guy "thinks". While it's true mathematics in and of itself can't help anyone achieve anything, it's application does. When Galileo said, "Math is the language in which God has written the universe." he wasn't being literal. He was saying that merely using philosophy and direct observation was not enough to understand the world around us. There wasn't anything inherently wrong with it, simply that it was misapplied. Mathematics and the scientific method provided a mechanism to prove hypotheses and spot any falsifiable aspects. Consider the moon, how eclipses were seen as ill omens by primitive folk, while those who knew better not only knew there was nothing to fear, but could even predict their occurrences. In fact, it can be used to one's advantage, such as Christopher Columbus using it to convince the Native Americans he was god-like. Arthur C. Clarke illustrates this in his Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This all finally brings us to Friedrich Nietzsche's master-slave morality, wherein the values of "haves" are judged by "have-nots" as having evil intentions by default, a resentment of other's sentiments. In a roundabout way, it's envy. Worse, rather than the type of envy that may motivate people to transcend their betters (inspiration), it's the type that takes its bat and ball and goes home... after setting fire to the field and bludgeoning the other players unconscious.

Qomics Quintology Part IIIb: Nadesico

I make a startling discovery about one of my favorite writers... and I'm driven to drink because of it.

vii Favorite Movies With Numbers in the Titles That Are Not Sequels

2001: A Space Odyssey
32 Short Films About Glenn Gould
THX-1138
7 Samurai
District 9
The 10 Commandments
Plan 9 from Outer Space

Honorable Mention:
Godzilla 2000 , technically speaking, none of the Godzilla films are exactly sequels, more like episodes, akin to James Bond films or the works of Kevin Smith. There may be ties (especially if it involves Mechagodzilla), but each film, by its very nature, stands alone. If nothing else, Godzilla 2000 has the weakest ties to the other films in the series.