Science Fiction Part 8 – The Failures
The final tier of the science fiction ranking, including the negatives. Scott, Nolan, Zemeckis and Cameron, plus the most expensive failures the genre has produced.
Tag: Research (Page 6)
Fiction WritingHorror for People Who Do Not Like Horror
Twenty horror films for people who believe they do not like horror. Almost none are gore, most contain no monster worth the name, and several are among the best films ever made in any genre. Ranked gentlest to hardest so…
Critical ThinkingHow Warner Bros. Dismantled a $17 Billion Cartoon Empire
In the early 1990s a Bugs Bunny cartoon drew 37.7 million viewers a week and the franchise was valued near $17 billion. Sixty years of owners treated it as a revenue stream instead of an asset. Here is the full…
Book ReviewsThe Fear Thesaurus
A reference for writers on how fear shows up in a character: the physical signals, the behavior, the internal experience, and the ways people hide it. Useful when a scene needs a reaction that is not the obvious one.
Book ReviewsReincarnation and Biology
Stevenson's most rigorous work documents 225 cases where children's birthmarks matched wounds on the dead people whose lives they described. Forty-nine of those cases had medical records to verify the correlation, which makes them harder to dismiss than memory alone.
Character DevelopmentThe Disasters That Happen to Ordinary People
The disasters that happen to ordinary people are boring: a power cut in a heatwave, a burst pipe, a job ending. Almost nothing in the preparedness market addresses any of it, because fear sells better than usefulness.
Critical ThinkingToba: The Winter That Almost Ended Us
Seventy-four thousand years ago a mountain in Sumatra came apart and took the sky with it. Sunlight fell, the cold held for years, and the human population may have dropped to fewer than ten thousand. This is what that winter…
AmericaWhat I Wrote on September 11, 2001
On the evening of 11 September 2001 I wrote about what I had watched that day, and never revised it. Twenty-five years later, some of it holds up and some of it is wrong in ways that took years to…
AI WritingAI Detection Cannot Be Evidence, and Publishing Is Using It That Way
An author can now lose a publishing contract because a stranger uploaded their manuscript to a website and got a number back. Here is why those numbers cannot bear the weight being put on them, and what a writer should…
AI WritingAI Consciousness Left Philosophy and Entered the Laboratory
Researchers trained a model on a meaningless maze and found a positive and negative axis that already existed in the base model. Steering it changes behavior far outside the maze. Here is what that evidence shows, what it does not,…
FictionThe Office Block Where the Bedrooms Are
Bucharest is the centre of the global adult webcam industry and almost none of the work happens in bedrooms. It happens in studios in ordinary office blocks, in an industry the state declines to classify.
Character DevelopmentBehind the Book: Real World Survival
I asked a member of my own team what he would do in an earthquake. He said he would get under the window, without hesitating. He was not stupid. Nobody had ever told him.