Steven Moffat’s Plot Twist Problem

Poor plot twists are everywhere, and they come in two types: either the plot twist was so cliché and obvious that everyone knew it was happening miles before the book, show, or film decided it was time to reveal it, or else the twist caught everyone so far off guard that it didn’t even seem to be real after it had happened. Authors and screenwriters are always walking a tightrope balance: they must both create a twist that is foreshadowed and explainable, and they must make sure that no one sees it coming. That’s a tough task, and that’s why plot twists are so hard to write.

Let’s take the last few series of Doctor Who as an example. Stephan Moffat is a reigning king of twisty plots. The episodes that he’s personally penned for the earlier series of Nu Who – The “Empty Child” two-parter, “The Girl in the Fireplace,” “Blink,” and “Silence in the Library” – are all stand-out plotty-wotty stories, and his “Scandal in Belgravia episode” of Sherlock is my favorite of that series. Moffat became the Doctor Who show runner in 2009, and, although the show definitely retained its awesomeness under his hand, he finally showed which side of the plot twist problem he stumbles over. His recent Who episodes have all held underdeveloped plot twists.

Spoilers to follow. … Sweetie. Sorry; it’s a dumb joke, but then again, so am I.

Why Caffeine is The Best Drug Ever

This isn’t the best way to consume coffee, but a handful of scalding liquid wouldn’t make a heart, so it’s a tradeoff.

It’s the morning of your final exam. You studied for the past 24 hours, and are now too tired to recall anything or even accomplish anything except drinking a cup of something. What single substance will energize you, improving your reaction time and just generally save the day?

Yeah, that’s right. You read the title. Caffeine. Caffeine has many benefits, few disadvantages, is legal, and can be managed easily. It is quite literally the best performance-enhancing drug available to you today. Here’s why.

 Caffeine has many health benefits.

It’s a performance enhancer. It makes you more alert and shortens reaction time. It also prevents headaches, in small doses. If you drink a lot, I admit that the headaches won’t be helped. But caffeine has been proven to reduce depression. This one makes sense if you think about it. Energy is good. It peps us up and makes us happy. One sign of depression, on the other hand, is feeling helpless and immoveable; apathetic. To top it all off, caffeine also helps your liver and has been known to decrease risk of Parkinson’s.

Caffeine has just a few health disadvantages.

It’s addictive. That’s part of the definition of a drug, though. It’s barely addictive, and a lot better than most drugs you could be on. With the exception of pot, but that’s another argument. My point is, just being addictive alone isn’t a terrible problem. I’m addicted to writing, but that hasn’t hurt my life. It all depends on what other disadvantages pop up to anything when you’re addicted to it.

It’s harmful if you have too much. Ironically, it gives headaches when overused. And usually gives jitters and/or digestive problems, depending on the person. But again, that’s the definition of “too much” – too much of anything is harmful. Water is great for you too, but if you keep drinking it all day, you will eventually die.

Caffeine is legal.

This is always a big plus when dealing with drugs. You don’t want to turn into a criminal! Stick to the straight and narrow. It’s funny when you think about it: athletes are banned from using steroids, but are free to dose up on caffeine before playing, even though it’s been proven to positively affect their performances! If you need a drug to give you that sweet legal energy, caffeine is one of your best options. It’s not like you’re living in the 1800′s, when cocaine was available.

That’s not tobacco he’s smoking.

Caffeine can be managed easily.

The stuff loses its power when consumed too often, but it’s possible to reap all the benefits with none of the problems. Try staying under the equivalent of three cups of coffee a day. Admittedly, this is the toughest part. But don’t let the caffeine get the best of you! If you ever stop getting your sweet sweet hit of energy out of your morning cup, try quitting for a week. That’s what I forced myself to do last month. I’ve kept to one or two cups a day since, occasionally skipping an entire day. As a result, the coffee is useful once again. If you’ve already realized the charms of caffeine years or decades ago, you should consider this (drastic) move. Absence makes the

Summary: Caffeine is far more useful and far less harmful than any other performance enhancement out there. Use this to your advantage. Drink up.

The facts on US book readers

Taken from the Atlantic article “The Simple Reason Why Goodreads Is So Valuable to Amazon,” and using data provided by the Codex Group, these graphs explain why book lovers are so necessary for US book sellers to reach.

The Creativity of College Cheating

Academic honesty has faced plenty of problems over the years. They have all been people. People are the biggest problems because they can always think up new ways to go about getting what they want. If a college course is too tough in their eyes, hundreds of options open up, and only one of them is honest. There’s a reason cheating has never been stopped, and that’s human ingenuity.

Cheating hasn’t really been studied in depth, since it’s in so many forms, but the fact that cheating depends on creativity has been addressed. One paper, published by the University of Michigan in 2006 and titled How College Students Cheat On In-Class Examinations: Creativity, Strain, and Techniques of Innovation, “examines the variety of creative tactics that students use to cheat during in-class examinations.” I’ve culled the most fascinating examples given, all of which prove that cheaters are a lot more cunning than you might think.

Disclaimer: Cheating is of course not a good idea, and often has drastic penalties. Don’t consider this a suggestion, but a cautionary exploration.

1. Learn the teacher’s interests.

Says one student interviewed:

What I mean by that is notice if he brings a magazine or newspaper and if he does this everyday. If you see him reading something on campus, notice what it is and how long he’ll read than look up. Bring a watch. Most people begin reading something they like and forget what they are supposed to be doing and in about 5 minutes they’ll look up to see where they are or look at their watch to remember what they have to do. After you notice these things a few times your set. If you are going to a test and he comes in with a magazine or paper he read daily or every other day you got him. You’ve already studied his reading habits and you know about how often he’ll look up at the class. Say he looks up about every 3 minutes. You know you have at least 2 minutes to cheat so now you got him. He is unaware of his thought less routines or habits so the chance of getting caught in virtually gone.

2.  The Flying Ducks method

Another student shares one of my favorites:

I found [one] method relying on several parties in an auditorium setting. I call this method the flying ducks formation of test taking. You need a few people in order to make this procedure work. A person who studies or is a scholar is needed for this procedure. What happens is the scholar sits in front of the pack of students and takes the test as though nothing is happening. Two people sit in front of the pack of students and takes the test as though nothing is happening. Two people sit in the next row over his shoulder in a formation and compare or copy the test from him. Then in the next row, two people sit to the left over and the right over and copy the test. When looked from above the students sit in a V-formation as though they are a flock of ducks migrating to the south. This procedure works best in auditorium classes that has a slope in it, because it is easier to look at someone else’s paper.

3. Signs

Two students share similar stories:

Another method of cheating that was successful on multiple choice tests for a while was using signs. This would work in the classes that had students facing each other. For example, I would watch a student and he or she would signal me the answer by touch the nose for A, touch the chin for B, the ear for C, and finally touch the top of the head for answer D. This method was harder so we had to pay attention and stay on the same question.

I had a huge exam in physics coming up and had no time to study. So I devised a plan with a friend in that class. The plan was to cheat on the exam through silent communication. The way we decided to do this was to give each object on our desk a certain letter meaning. A would be a pencil, B would be a pen, C would be a calculator, and D would be the actual test. When either one of us didn’t know the answer to one of the questions we would knock the number of the question out lightly on the desk and wait for the other to pick up the object with the letter of the right answer assigned to it. It worked beautifully and the teacher never knew what happened. We both passed the test and were never caught.

Things That the Next Indiana Jones’ Paramount logo Can Fade Into

I found an online discussion that I enjoyed enough to pull this list from. It spoke to me deeply, and I’d like to break down my favorite options.

For Indiana Jones fans, the logo fade at the start of each film, in which the Paramount logo fades into something — anything — with a similar silouette, is essential. I know it entranced me as a kid, and I was unreasonably happy when the Crystal Skull came out with a good one: a fade into a gopher hill. Now, the fifth Indy movie is inevitable, and after the Disney buyout of Lucasfilms, I’m looking forward to it. But there’s one touch they simply can’t fail on. I mean, look at the options.

1. The pyramids.

As you can see above, the three pyramids pictured almost mesh with the three mountain peaks of the logo, making for an even better transition than usual. The pyramids would have to be shot from a different angle than this one for it to work perfectly, though, and if that doesn’t work, a camera shot moving to the right might do it. But these fades haven’t been completely perfect in the past, so a little fudging is okay.

2. A mountain of books that Indy is studying behind.

Reasonable and different. Indy probably isn’t adventuring all over the globe a lot in his old age, so the action would have to start at home, before, naturally, shoving the poor guy all over the globe anyway.

3. The 60s-era Paramount logo playing in a drive-in theater.

Suitably meta.

4. A map of the Bermuda triangle.

One of my favorite possibilities: the camera shot could then pull up from the map as the wind pulls it away. We’re in a helicopter! It’s going down! Indy’s hat flies around, almost escaping the helicopter! A hand grabs it! We see the hat on the head, which raises to reveal — Sorry. Got carried away.

5.  A bird’s eye shot of a similarly-shaped island.

If they use the Bermuda idea as the meat of the film, neither this or the map idea would work… At the least, Indy needs thirty minutes of scene-setting before he can get to the main adventure. But as a one-off, ten-minute mini-adventure, the Burmuda triangle would be amazing.

6. Dorsal fins.

I’ll let you guess what they would be attached to.

7. The actual mountain used in the logo. Just zoom in.

Might as well get back to basics.

8. A graded paper.

The most specific and, quite possibly, the best option:

“Could be neat if the movie opens on an A-grade on some paper. Camera pulls out further to show it flapping gently in the wind, caught on a cliff ledge cause Indy’s trying to juggle his workload with the part of the job he actually enjoys.” ~Lao_Che

Based on my experience, this is pretty accurate to a college professor’s life.

Writing a descriptive list

Writing descriptive lists, even of just two items, is a nice trick writers have up their collective sleeve: two or three seperate items can easily add up to be more than the whole, making for an opportunity to ply the ol’ writing skill. Let’s check out an example of what I’m talking about. Elmore Leonard is very fond of one of his characters’ description of the romance novels that she used to write: they were “full of rape and adverbs.” Here, Elmore uses two items to aptly sum up romance novels. The first item, rape, is a shocking one.

1. Shock value is appreciated.

The second item, however, is far less interesting:

2. Vary the items as wildly as possible.

This ties in with the Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking rule: end the list with a weaker item. The shocking ones are shocking in their own right, and will therefore be fine alone, but when the final, impactful ending item isn’t as shocking as expected, it becomes shocking in its mundanity.

3. Signify issues larger than the item itself.

This is by far the toughest lesson to apply. Elmore’s example serves to highlight adverbs in relation to romance writing. Why? Because Elmore considers adverbs a sign of crass writing, and is heavily implying that romance novels on the whole are poorly written. He explains here:

Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” … he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange.

Just by mentioning adverbs, Elmore has turned his quick, two-item list into a critique of a genre. It’s a clever use of itemized lists in literature, and an example we can all learn from.

SCIENCE 1; ZOMBIE CAT 0

Science, circa 2012

Well, this is a pretty sweet year for solving epic scientific problems.

Not only was the Higgs Boson finally discovered for realsies, but the classic thought experiment Schodinger’s Cat, which postulated the creation of an undead zombie cat as a result of the magic of quantum objects, has also bitten the dust as of yesterday. That’s right, the onslaught of modern science has slain two long-hold mysteries of the scientific realm.

As the article explains,

Schrödinger’s cat, the enduring icon of quantum mechanics, has been defied. By making constant but weak measurements of a quantum system, physicists have managed to probe a delicate quantum state without destroying it – the equivalent of taking a peek at Schrodinger’s metaphorical cat without killing it. The result should make it easier to handle systems such as quantum computers that exploit the exotic properties of the quantum world.

Quantum objects have the bizarre but useful property of being able to exist in multiple states at once, a phenomenon called superposition. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger illustrated the strange implications of superposition by imagining a cat in a box whose fate depends on a radioactive atom. Because the atom’s decay is governed by quantum mechanics – and so only takes a definite value when it is measured – the cat is, somehow, both dead and alive until the box is opened.

This is practically Dr-Strange-level stuff right here. We truly live in interesting times.

 

 

 

How the economy is ruining Hollywood creativity (such as it is)

   “To be fair, economics is to blame for some of the decrease in creativity. A movie studio can make more money with a sequel than a gamble on something creative.” ~Scott Adams, The Heady Thrill of Having Nothing to Do, August 6, 2011

The solution: pick an old topic, freshen it up, and pitch it. Turn a dumb board game into a good movie, and you’ll be able to create a solid work in today’s economy.

21 Jumpstreet is a great example: it’s ostensibly based on an 80s shows, but only shares the very basic premise and a few (hilarious) homages which only serve to make the rest of the original story even more fun.

Hollywood’s already covered remakes, prequels, superheroes, kid’s cartoons, Dr. Seuss books, toys, even board games – the next cash cow, judging from The Great Gatsby and Les Mis, is classical literature. And, as we transition to the inevitable ‘movies based on cereal mascots’ phase of Hollywood’s game plan, the only successes will be those who can embrace reality and craft a stellar story around a terrible terrible concept.

The Wit of The Newsroom: Analyzing the secrets of Sorkin’s banter

So I’m a big fan of the Newsroom. I have to admit, though, that’s it’s not because of the politics or the characters, because both fall a tad flat. It’s because the witty, fast-paced banter is constant and all-consuming. The hour speeds past way faster than with most shows, and virtually the entire draw, at least for me, is in the dialogue. There’s a reason it’s Sorkin’s highest-praised talent.

“Don’t make me use banter.”

“Dern merrk meh urse berrrrntrrrr.”

But I’m not content to just watch it. I’m interested in just what makes his dialogue is fascinatingly punchy, so I’ve taken to watching each episode with a laptop open, noting various linguistic techniques that the show uses to stay entertaining.

Overall, Sorkin’s typical approach is to get two people talking to each other, and then make sure that both people use misdirection often and clearly. Misdirection is seldom allowed to exist for more than a single line of dialogue before the lie or syntactic ambiguity is confessed or clarified. This way, the audience can follow along easily — a necessity of commercial screenwriting — but can also feel as if the narrative is not easy to follow along with — a luxury of commercial screenwriting, and the reason Sorkin dialogue is so fun to listen to.

There’s plenty of ways to slip misdirection into the conversation. Clarify a small point, and then drop a big point that renders the small one useless. Deny one point, then reveal that you only denied one aspect of it, and not the aspect that the requester wanted to hear denied. Correcting a mistake, but only if it’s a small one: “You said ‘why’ twice.” And there’s always blatant hypocrisy, like the conversation between Will and episode six’s new bodyguard: “What other people have you guarded?” “We don’t talk about that.” “Okay.” “Kanye. It was awesome.” Or again, at the beginning of episode eight, in which Will harps on his newsroom’s “entire philosophy,” then explains that he’s off for a meeting to discuss “suspending our entire philosophy.”

Watch an episode with an eye out for the different types of obvious misdirection. On top of that foundation, a handful of tougher-to-categorize staples of the dialogue-writing trade suffice to boost the entire show into a stunningly entertaining wit-fest. Repetition and contradiction is rampant, for instance. From episode six: “We can do it if you want.” “I want.” and “Do you see a lot of action in New Jersey?” “Do you see a lot of action in the studio?” From episode eight:  “But they don’t work for Leona Lancing.” “I don’t know, I think everyone works for Leona Lancing.” Also making appearances are snark, hyperbole, analogies — all the good stuff. Wordplay is a fun one: “He said ‘in pain,’ not ‘a pain.’”

Episode seven has a few examples of classic tactics, with a little understatement, people being wrong about commonplace info, and the ubiquitous snark. There’s more repetition: “Way outside the box”/“bring it back in the box,” and a nice running gag: Everyone on the airplane knows Don is having dating problems with Maggie.

Running themes are a fun part of The Newsroom: on top of running gags like airplane gossip or Neal’s Bigfoot theory, all the characters tend to gravitate towards a certain linguistic trait in each episode, despite seldomly using it elsewhere: In episode six, irrelevant assumptions or data are may times given to rhetorical questions like “how are you” and “guess what.” In episode eight, emotional plot revelations often come in tandem with jokes, a la “Oh my god, Sloan, it’s like the Land Where Time Stood Still! Brian Brenner’s the guy I cheated on Will with!” and the episode’s final line, “I didn’t know He had that kind of comedic timing.”

Those aren’t all of the secrets behind the punch of The Newsroom’s wit, the entirety of which is genuinely difficult to compose. Once it’s all broken into parts, though, the dialogue doesn’t seem quite as superhuman. Sherlock Holmes similarly fails to amaze his clients once he has taken the time to explain the many steps to his reasoning. Neither Holmes nor Sorkin should be considered hacks for using myriad tiny steps to create their masterpieces.

There’s one element to Sorkin’s dialogue that is the easiest to create by far, too: the ‘fast-paced’ part. The trick is merely talking all the time. I was watching the latest episode, and was surprised to hear the Newsroom-y theme music playing while Charlie Skinner walked through the library. Normally, we don’t get a full ten seconds for such luxuries. It’s just as well. I don’t like the theme music. Like virtually every other element on the show, it just gets in the way of Sorkin’s dialogue.

I Was A Teenage Book Sniffer

I used to work at an online bookstore. I didn’t work online, sadly, but I instead spent the majority of my hours logging time at a big warehouse full of bookselves. I would collect huge stacks of used books and run each book’s ISBN through a computer program that would determine if the book was worth listing on the site. It was repetative, meanial work, but I didn’t mind it, both because I was paid well and because books were involved.

Still, data entry is boring. To pass the time, I settled on a few entertaining diversions. The most interesting of them: book sniffing.

Booksniffer without a cause

I didn’t have a lot of time to read the books that I scanned: processing information from the book took me more time than it took a computer program, and the size of my bonus depended on my need for book-scanning speed. But a quick whiff of each book’s unique paper-and-glue-combo was a rewarding and suitably speedy pastime. I could crack up a book, sniff it, and toss it aside in the two seconds it took the program to locate all the online info about the book – it’s name, author, publisher, and date of printing.

Since I also checked all the information about the book to verify the program’s opinion, I was able to assign information to each book smell that my nose registered. And since I did this quickly, at speeds of about a book every ten seconds, I inventoried each book’s info/smell relationship on a subconscious level.

The subconcious, for the unaware, has amazing and bizarre powers of indentification bordering on the supernatural. Case in point: Chicken sexing, a job in which one must indentify the sex of a chick with a quick glance at it’s rear. The male and female chicken are nearly indistinguishable at birth, appearently, and many of the top chicken sexers in the business will, according to the academically-titled paper The Art of Chicken Sexing, admit that “in many cases they have no idea how they make their decisions.” There’s a process, sure, but it’s so deeply internalized that it can’t be imperically explained. Chicken sexers must subconsciously learn the trick , often with a two-year stay at the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School of central Japan.

The Chicken Sexing paper goes into much more detail, and explains a similar situation among British aircraft spotters during WWII: the spotters could tell enemy aircraft from their own, but didn’t know how they were able to. New spotters were trained though trial and error, with the experts passing their knowledge on to the new, equally-clueless recruits.

My nose for old books was gained, I argue, through a similar process. I would smell a book, then check the information. The date of printing was most important: if the costumers cared what version they got, it was because they were either  consumers who wanted the latest copy or collectors who wanted the oldest copy. (Each group grew shocked and upset when mistaken for the other.) As a result, my subconcious grew to learn what smell meant which date.

I spent about a year at the bookstore. Today, if I smell a book, I can name the decade it was printed it based off the paper, ink, and glue. It’s a great party trick, although, surprisingly, book sniffing has yet to come up in my party conversations.

I am wrong often, to be honest, but I can beat pure guesswork even if by a narrow margin. The fact that there are few books currently circulating which are older than the 1920s or ’30s helps quite a bit, since it leaves me only eight or nine possible decades to choose from. And when I’m off, it’s often just by five or ten years.  The late forties are very similar to the entirity of the fifties, for instance. I can only assume that the fifties were not a time of great evolution in book printing.

With only a year to practice, it’s no wonder I’m not a genius at it. If I had a few more years, I might be able to pick out the book publisher or location of the papermill that produced it. I could be a Sherlock Holmes of the book world, solving all cases that hinge on being able to smell a book, but not being able to flip to it’s copyright page. As it is, I can’t really help anyone, as I can’t even explain my powers very well.

There are a few general, common-sensical words of wisdom, though, and I’ll leave any up-and-coming book sniffers with them:

~Older books smell more deteriated, while newer ones smell crisper.

~Academically published books and commerically published ones smell differently. I assume the academic world can afford higher quality paper due to the smaller audience.

~Each decade of the twentith century smells slightly different. There aren’t any sharp distinctions, just a spectrum, but it you smell a commercially-published book from the middle of each decade, you should have a good yardstick.

~The cheap book serieses—Choose Your Own Adventure, Goosebumps—all tend to have their own smell, separate from the smell of other books from that decade. CYOA books from the eighties tend to smell like normal books from the sixties, but more acrid, while the ninties’ CYOA and Goosebumps books have a unique cheap ninties smell. (As an aside, cheap books in the earlier decades of the 1900’s were either non-existent, have all disappeared, or, most likely, composed all books back then. They all smell  the same.)

~The best book smell is the sixties. I may be biased on this one, as I loved reading cheap Tarzan and Zorro books from the sixties as a kid, but in my opinion, it’s the decade with the quinessential ‘old-book’ smell.