PicoBlog

On February 9th, 2011, I took a general meeting with two producers and their executives. At the end of this professional meet-and-greet, one of the producers—call him MR. SMILEY—asked me, “What do you think about Dracula as a TV series?” This question set in motion the most protracted, creatively unfulfilling, and emotionally devastating experience of my career as a professional screenwriter. What follows is a blow-by-blow record of the conception and sale, outlining, writing, and straight-to-series green light of a television series called “DRACULA”, the first TV pilot I ever sold.

In Chicago, there are nights in winter when the sky glows an orangey-purplish-pink. It’s a composite of reflected luminescence, the light pollution trapped by low-hanging clouds produces a strange atmospheric alchemy. No stars, no moon, just an opaque swathe over the city. Under this sky, you will glow too. I can’t name this color, perhaps because it’s more of a feeling. My favorite word in Japanese is komorebi, translated as ‘the sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees.

The Unexpected Shape is a newsletter, podcast, & community for thoughtful softies. Every week, I send inspiration for ambitious people living with limitations, such as chronic illness, caretaking responsibilities, and/or disability. Over 9,000 subscribers No thanksncG1vNJzZmido6KyuMPAp55nq6WXwLWtwqRlnKedZA%3D%3D

Andrea Dworkin Who was Andrea Dworkin, and what did she stand for? Dworkin was a man-hater who thought all sex was rape. Dworkin was secretly a right-wing bigot. Dworkin pretended to be a lesbian to curry favour with hard-line feminists but was, in fact, irredeemably heterosexual. Dworkin was consumed by self-loathing, never had any fun, and was permanently filled with uncontrollable rage. These fictions about the feminist writer and campaigner are upheld not just by misogynists, pornographers, and others bound to detest what she stood for, but also by many women who consider themselves “sex positive.

Welcome to the first in a three part map series on the “American Nations” theory of cultural nationalities that exist within the United States. Today, I will dive into the theory at a high level. Over the next couple weeks I’ll analyze data on each of the nations and offer my own critiques and opinions on it. Links for each subsequent article will be added here as they are posted.

This is part of my “Art of Noticing” series, in which I learn, find, or discover the things around me that usually go unnoticed and turn them into an endless source of creative inspiration. Today I noticed how much LESS scary horror movies get in Act 3, when the hero finally finds and fights the monster. It made me think about the power of the unseen and unknown. I’m a white-knuckle horror film fan.

Growing up with a Buddhist Japanese mother we never celebrated Christmas in Japan, and at home in Australia it was a purely cultural but not a religious event — Santa photos at the shopping centres and presents under the tree, unwrapped in our pyjamas before breakfast, then a summery long lunch featuring fresh seafood and summer fruit under the wisteria outside. New Year’s Day is the more important Japanese celebration, a more sombre and quiet rather than celebratory event, but arguably the most important one of the year.

Over Easter I’ll be sharing some shorter posts rather than a longer read on Sunday. This first post looks at the readability of assembly language. Even in 2023, if we want to make the most of our hardware, then it’s still sometimes necessary to dip into assembly language. The most recent work on getting machine learning applications running on desktop PCs (for example the amazing port of OpenAI’s Whisper to C++ by Georgi Gerganov) have made extensive use of vector instructions and I’m sure debugging these has involved some reading of assembly language output.

It’s been a long time since the members of either major American party have paid attention to men who make things in the great factories of the world.  When I was born, Detroit was a muscular city, the fifth largest in the nation, turning out cars and trucks by millions.  Where would you look for tires and rubber, if not to Akron?  And Pittsburgh, the c… ncG1vNJzZmiZnqm1sLrYnqqopJWje7TBwayrmpubY7CwuY6pZq2glWLDorjLnrBmp5ZisaavyKygqKZdZoZ1gQ%3D%3D