I’m pretty sure it’s a far right attempt at a meme.
My son’s Psychologist has repeated to us that our kid will do much better in a house with parents in a secure relationship than the one we have now. Which isn’t hard to believe, when your mom is belittling everything your dad does and your dad says things quietly to her that make mom explode.
Personally, I think he would have benefitted from a relationship where she didn’t send nudes to the guy she cheated on me with 3 years ago, but maybe I’m just that unattractive and distracted by work.
That leaves for an interesting question: why is most writing these days so god awful? There are great writers out there. Hollywood isn’t stupid (is it?) and wants money. Why do they put shit writers on so many projects that then flop like the shit that it is?
With streaming, it’s become about volume not quality. Before there were only so many movie screens and straight to video made next to nothing.
Now straight to streaming can make a LOT of money. Plus streaming services are trying to pump their selection and in-house productions cost nothing once produced. So even average or just good enough content can be profitable.
Because it’s targeting the lowest common denominator.
It’s generalizing the writing so that it generally appeals to generally everyone to increase engagement. This means that the show loses its specific attractions and it just becomes another generic TV show based in a different world.
Hollywood is stupid and they didn’t want to pay writers after the first draft is written. It may not be so much the writer is shit (they came up with some good ideas after all) it’s that they don’t have time to make additional drafts to fix plotholes, improve the dialog, etc.
Writing isn’t just banging out something on a typewriter and it’s pure genius the moment is written. It’s a process that usually involves multiple drafts.
You gotta admit a lot of things feel like a first draft, and it’s probably because it is. Hopefully these issues were sorted out with the writer’s strike.
it’s not a simple answer but due to technology and environment, it’s just the way things are. basically less care is taken to get each minute of output simply because it’s possible. so many things. you don’t have to log heavy reels around, you don’t have to use a typewriter. each step is so much easier. before, there was a lot more care taken per step.
Irony being that if they got together, the “child” would sink further towards the discord server. It’s about predisposition now, this kid was always doomed to end up in that pit
I liked the hazbin hotel pilot, but very much felt how you do about the helluva boss pilot. I thought hazbin was fun and quirky and I liked it a fair bit, helluva boss cranked up the edginess and immaturity but didn’t bring anything else that made up for it. Maybe the actual series is better Idk
Much less clever and subtle. I would call that a pretty low bar, honestly. Helluva Boss also has a lot of poorly-written content IMO, but in Hazbin it’s nonstop bad writing until there’s a small glimpse of something competent. I would recommend Helluva Boss to anyone who likes shitposts and sitcoms, but I wouldn’t recommend Hazbin to anyone right now.
If you like the concept of Upside Down, you might be interested in the anime movie Patema Inverted. It has the same premise and came out around the same time.
It’s a little different. The Upside Down in Stranger Things is a kind of alternate dimension, whereas in the movies Upside Down and Patema Inverted it’s that gravity is reversed for some people.
Bad writing for film and television really irks me because of how avoidable it is. I’m not talking about mediocre or lackluster writing, but the actual bad writing.
TV shows and movies are tremendously expensive to make. Every part of it costs a fortune except for one: the writing. Even if a studio or production company was paying for a whole team of writers to work full time it’s still only a fraction of the cost of paying film crews, actors, editors, and VFX artists.
Given the relatively lower expense, relative lack of time constraints, and enormous importance of the script to the overall quality of the product it absolutely boggles my mind that production companies consistently fuck up the writing process.
My pet theory is that this is because of the assembly line way of thinking of studios. Script -> Casting -> Shooting -> VFX -> Editing -> Profit.
It takes time to develop a good idea and script. If you force a writer to adhere to a strict schedule you’ll get a rush job and bad writing. As long as money keeps flowing in, their assembly line theory is validated.
It’s like reading a news article and seeing horribly constructed sentences and typos. Like, this is your main job! I know there are a lot of English majors out there who would love to find work.
At least for some of those there’s an excuse of needing to get the news out ASAP, but there’s no reason an in depth piece or an online article that’s been up for a few days should be butchered.
Really though writing should be the least important part of a journalists job, digging through stories and finding the truth or understanding the complex strands of the story should be and that often involves going back and editing, restructuring, reediting, reworking and adding to it over and over again.
It gets really hard to see your writing with fresh eyes once you’ve got it so perfectly constructed in your head, it’s super easy to miss awkward mistakes that have crept in - this is why editors were a thing but newspapers rarely bother anymore or the editor is too focused on political and social acceptable to notice grammar or word choice errors
I’m sure there’s plenty of those making a mess of things, but taking time in the writing process, getting input from relevant parties, and doing as much preparation as possible cuts out a myriad of problems.
Studio got a product placement deal? Great, let’s integrate that into the story long before filming even begins so it feels natural.
Director doesn’t know if he wants plot point A to happen or not? Good thing he heard about that while the movie was just a script instead of having him decide with dozens of people on set.
I’m sure there are uncontrollable, unforeseeable problems that will come up in any production. There is no reason to exacerbate those by being willfully unprepared. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure but it seems like film studios reliably hamper the “prevention” part to shave a few weeks off on prep time and end up losing more time or huge piles of money because of it.
i wouldn’t be surprised if a big part of it is that the higher ups don’t know much about what good writing actually is, or they’re too focused on ratings and they don’t dare deviate from “what works”. it also wouldn’t surprise me if writers weren’t allowed to make “major” changes to scripts after seeing how the writing looks after scenes have been recorded, because it might be “too expensive to change”.
It’s crazy cause if you hear writers in tv talk about it, they’ll get contracted like a month or two before they have to finish the first batch of scripts. Writing in Hollywood is as much about learning quick writing shortcuts/tropes to move the plot along to get the product out on time as it is being able to develop a plot.
That’s what sticks in my craw. If I’m a studio exec who’s going to invest potentially hundreds of millions of dollars it’s beyond stupid to jeopardize that to get a payout a little faster.
It just seems stupid to put a time crunch on the most important phase of your investment. I don’t see how taking a greater risk of a project being a flop is worth getting the script a few weeks sooner.
I think a lot is because Hollywood became a Henry Ford production process, one part feeds into the next so they’d have empty studios and workers idle if the next idea isn’t ready to go.
Also it literally doesn’t matter, this marvel film has literally the same plot and jokes as the last one? That’s ok we cooked up a drama where we pretend villainous gamers are against it to get people talking about it, we seeded stories into the media we own about it and forced our celebrities to pretend to love it…
They can make the absolute worst shit and as long as they link it to something vaguely related to some culturally significant thing it’ll be huge, even more so if they can link it to a social divide or political division they have no intention of ever actually caring about.
Childhood toy + social flag = money, it works for comic books ‘i had a the flash t-shirt when I was six I have to like these new films’, it worked with Barbie ‘this proconsumerism corporate tat which was heavily criticised by notable feminists has made a film attempting to shoehorn social progress back into a corporate friendly sales generating mush, they say the baddies don’t like it so I have to go see it!’, and it works with endless sequels ‘this franchise now makes zero sense, has the most painfully predictable plots, has gone so far off the rails jumping sharks that literally nothing makes sense and there are zero stakes to any of it which totally ruins everything that made the first one good…’ and you can’t even tell what I’m talking about with that because it’s everything (i was thinking john wick btw)
Make something actually good and no one will care unless the media circus tells them to, that’s how you get s flop. Make something even slightly changing intellectually or from a certain point of view and instantly most your audience is gone or angry, but be like Barbie and put sparkle on social concepts 90% of the world has agreed on for decades while actively avoiding anything more contentious then you don’t need to worry about alienating the audience or going over their heads.
And for some reason people just won’t stop watching it, they won’t watch indy stuff made with passion or small budget things no matter how good they are because they HAVE to see the big releases, like you’ll lose touch with society and be unable to make friends if you don’t force yourself to endure at least a dozen painfully dull industry movies a year.
Basically movies that cost almost nothing to make and use great writing to build up the world. Our minds are really good and fleshing out the rest as long as their given good writing as a foundation. Productions could save a lot of money with good writing. It blows my mind you could sink $200 million dollars into a project and not have an absolutely flawless script.
I never said they’re mutually exclusive. There’s tons of big budget explosion movies that have great scripts. Dark Knight, Casino Royale, Matrix, The Bourne movies, Heat. The best movies have legs and continue to sell for years after release, exploding sun only gets you a good opening weekend.
It’s completely beyond me why scripts get rushed out the door before they’re at the very least solid. Sure, a production company might make their money just a little bit sooner but they run a massive risk of losing all of their money making a movie that completely bombs.
It’s impossible for every script to be a masterwork, but holy crap it seems like an audience wanting a competent script is too much to ask. It’s not like there’s a shortage of aspiring writers that can take a crack at a script until it’s at least passable.
Because writing doesn’t really work like that, the reason we get bland writing is because they keep adding extra chefs.
Thay get these professional writers that learned formula in school and apply it to sections of someone else’s work and wonder why the result is an ugly tapestry of formulaic rubbish.
All the things people love are written by people with passion for the project, then they get a budget increase and professional industry writers get brought in and it’s all shitty generic snappy dialog and dramatic posing that feels uncomfortable and awkward in the scene.
No matter how expensive a home sim you make, it won’t ever get be even a quarter of what an actual entry amateur plane costs to buy and maintain. It’s not even the plane itself either, it’s all the recurring costs like storage, maintenance, spare parts, fuel, certification fees, taxes, etc. The only cheap flight option for a recreational pilot is bushcraft light planes. And they will still cost more than the sim setup, while you’ll only be able to fly it on certain places, during certain weather, at certain times of the year. The rest of the time you’ll still have to pay all the storage and maintenance fees. Planes are incredibly expensive.
Back when I was making extra good money I got some flying lessons and started dreaming about it and eventually figured out the costs (bad enough the upfront ones, way worse the running costs) for a shitty-shit plane that wasn’t even exciting to fly.
Also the physical setup in the picture looks like it’s emulating large commercial passenger planes (don’t really know enough to guess which, though) and those planes cost millions of dollars.
Wet lease? Yeah, clubs and leasing are an accessible option but depends on what you want to do. Flying a tiny 182 Cessna, sure will be as much as a nice Sim setup. For one flight, at $200 an hour, roughly 25 hours of flight or thereabouts and you’re already over the price of the simulator.
Fly commercial jets, like the one this picture is simulating? No way. A small Citation jet starts at $50k a month. That’s probably already 5 times the cost of equipment in that photo. And you can fly the big birds and do crazy stuff with them in the sim.
There’s heights and there heights. The common fear is of heights that are large enough for a fall to cause serious injury, and not too large to be out of range for biological fall protection
I used to be afraid of heights, but trained myself out of it as an adult. I had trouble abseiling, walking on elevated walkways, standing near windows in tall buildings
Three things I never had a height problem with:
Front seat of a plane (or any other seat, for that matter)
I fucking love the dedication people put into their sin rigs. Their joy makes me so happy, even more so when it’s related to their real work. This guy is a trucker and recreated his entire cabin for his American Trucker sim. He’s my fucking hero: youtube.com/shorts/EmpAJR5lNuQ?si=Z324Z-M_pGG_9Bp…
Yes and no. I bought a property with a double wide and a 5000 square foot hangar on it located on a private strip. The rent from the double wide and the other hangar spots I rent pays the mortgage and all the expenses related to the property. I own a j3 cub that I have about 30k into that I fly daily in Florida and maintain it myself for practically nothing. Affordable aviation is possible but you have to be very smart about how you go about doing it, and a good bit of luck is involved to get the right deals by being in the right place at the right time.
Yes, but I bet that if you break down the accounting it would still be several times the cost of the setup on the photo. Home sims typically don’t carry an additional mortgage payment or a lifestyle commitment.
That setup is not 30k, I know because I’m a sim hobbyist. Maybe if it had a surround canopy or a motion chair, maybe, and it’s just maybe, it will start approaching 10k. Most people consider motion to be secondary and unnecessary for commercial flight simulation, and people are increasingly preferring VR over modular panels. Sim still doesn’t require uprooting your life to live in the middle of nowhere, switching careers, and going into debt to buy property and risk financial ruin with a fickle investment. It’s ok, some people are fine flying sim because they never would get to fly an Airbus IRL and wouldn’t want a job as a airline pilot to get to do it, they just want to play pretend, and that’s fine.
That’s not even counting the not small chunk of people who are actually commercial pilots who also build sim rigs in their homes.
None of the stuff applies to owning an aircraft in my case either. I’m still where I grew up. I never switched careers, and how is it a fickle investment where I’m literally cash positive on the whole thing, building equity in something that will be worth a ton in the future… you think investments are risk free or something?
Never said it was easy, but I have less than 60k of my cash into everything, including a property that generates me money back. You gotta work for what you want. It’s not like I just inherited the capital to do this. I worked for it. And now I have something that will not only pay for itself but pay me as well. But go ahead and just try to hold yourself down with that thought process if you want.
If you’re ok with living in the middle of nowhere, then it’s entirely doable. Some folks just have different priorities.
For instance, here is a property in Yucca Valley, CA that has a hanger in the backyard, where you can head out right on the runway from your yard. Just under $300k. There’s an entire street of houses that are adjacent to the runway of a small municipal airstrip, I think they call them fly in/fly out communities. They’re often well off the beaten path, but you don’t have to pay for storage when you have a hanger out back.
Dude I have a mortgage. I put 25k down on the property. I rent out the house and 3 spots in the hangar. I get enough income from rent on the property to pay the mortgage and have profit on top every month. I’m not a rich by any means. But I live comfortably enough.
I mean, I hope you get rich mate! Yeah I understand your point, and I am also definitely happy that affordable aviation is not a multimillionaire only dream. Though still those simulations are maybe 5 percent of the costs we are talking, yet :(
You have to have the kind of life and professional occupation which is compatible with living in such a place.
Not many people have or are willing to change their lives in order to be able to fly regularly on a real plane like that. It’s like people who chose to live on a boat and sail around the World (doable, if you adjust your whole life to it and have the skill to work in the kind of occupation compatible with it).
Meanwhile a setup like the one on the picture is a lot easier to work into one’s life, even living in appartment in the middle of a city and with a 9-to-5 regular Joe job.
If you’re truly passionate about flying and owning aircraft then you do what you have to do to make it happen, that’s what I did anyways. Exactly that. And I have less than 60k of investment in everything. The property generates profit now.
Fair enough, and I respect the commitment and that you share how you made it work. Without going ‘all-in’, having our own plane is a dream that’ll never go through…
(But I can imagine that even with the same commitment a lot of people wouldn’t have the opportunity to copy it - money is one thing but available property is another)
I looked into getting a pilots license and a plane once thinking maybe it would be more fun than flying commercial.
The license to fly just a dinky Cessna would be expensive af and I would only be able to afford a Cessna from 1982 or some shit anyway AND they only have a range of like 300 miles or some shit.
To actually go anywhere beyond my state I’d need a private jet license which is even more expensive takes a while and WAY outside of affordability.
Ah well guess I’m stuck driving or flying commercial
‘Fables’ was a comic book that was the first to use the idea of characters from fairy tales living in the modern era. When people realized that everything was already public domaine we got two shows, neither as good as the comic.
It was created by some of the same people who made Lost. Both shows relied heavily on flashbacks to make the shows seem more planned out. Both relied on inconsistent mythologies to fake worldbuilding.
How many times can you use amnesia in a show with seven seasons? How many times can you reveal that Character A is secretly related to Character B? How many times can someone get killed but then miraculously get better? How many times can you introduce absolutely world-breaking plot devices, only to forget about them immediately?
The answer for all of the above, for Once Upon a Time, is THERE’S NO FUCKING UPPER LIMIT.
It did have this absolutely fantastic exchange though…
Grumpy: We’re all going to go hang out with Happy.
Snow White: Didn’t he get turned into a tree?
Grumpy: Yeah, but we fixed that months ago! We do things when you’re not around!
The cheapest Cessna (say a half-a-century old Cessna-150 with only a thousand or hours left on the engine before mandatory refurbishment) will set you back maybe $20k.
Then there’s the maintenance costs (one every 50 flight hours, a bigger one every 100 flight hour and so on as well as the yearly one), plus insurance and fuel.
Oh, and flying one of those planes is not really excitting (except for landings, those are cool) mainly because it cruises at 90 knots airspeed (about 160 Km/h) which at the minimum flying height per flight regulations (except during takeoff and landing) which is 1000 feet (around 300m) does not feel at all fast.
Absolutelly, spend $30k (if you get it as a kit and assemble it yourself) and you can get something a little more excitting … or spend $2k in that setup (I’m guessing, assuming you assemble it yourself) and let the Suspension Of Disbelief save you the rest of the money and you can even fligh planes that cost many millions of dollars (which, judging by the controls, is what that setup is simulating).
Mind you a Commercial Pilot License is “only” 1000 flight hours so you might get it for less than $100k depending on which country you do your training in and hence the cost per hour in the air (or, if you do like my Amateur Pilot Trainers in the UK and give lessons for the flight hours, which can be done with only an Amateur Pilot License) though you’ll get a lot of “special moments” with trainees at the controls (did I mention landings are exciting ;)).
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