Steve Alloway

@Caol_MacCormaic Honestly, in the current culture, "plot hole" has just become a sort of catchall term for "anything outside the purview of my experience." Anytime a character doesn't act exactly the way I would in my current, 21st century life, it's a plot hole.

how is a 12 year old sitting in the front seat a plot hole

@LucyLickerish I've just made a banoffee pie for the occasion...

@bunnnies24 @_BEPS1

@_BEPS1 Clearly the solution is $100 of tacos

@LucyLickerish Hell yes.

Anyone want to skip work with me and go do something more fun?

‘Benjamin’ (@OniPress): Hardcover Review by @Fanbase_Press Contributor @ingrediments fanbasepress.com/press/reviews/…

@EveyJacob I feel that...

@ingrediments Just in general lol

No matter how much I do there is still more that needs to be done

‘A Star Called the Sun’ (@ImageComics @simonroyart): Trade Paperback Review by @Fanbase_Press Contributor @ingrediments fanbasepress.com/press/reviews/…

@KerryCallen I love the Inferior Five. For a while, I was collecting all of their old comics, but then there was some spring cleaning gone awry, and now I only have one or two issues anymore.

I've been a fan of the Inferior Five since I was a kid. Sadly, they've had very few appearances since the 60's. I recently had the itch to draw them, so I scratched it! I put them in an "Avengers Circle"!

I've been saying this for ages. I feel like our entire society has forgotten what "suspension of disbelief" is, and media as a whole has suffered for it.

@SketchesbyBoze My dad read The Hobbit aloud to my brother and me when we were kids. I forget how old we were, but definitely younger than 12.

Someone once told me that The Hobbit is too difficult a book for a child of twelve to read. The Hobbit, famously a children’s book. Fewer and fewer people are able to read in part because we continue to lower expectations. Kids in the 1940s were reading Defoe & Dickens.

@BadFilmTakes1 Same people who use Alec Baldwin's scene in Glengarry Glen Ross as an aspirational mantra even though the point of the movie is exactly the opposite of everything he's saying.

I kind of hate Mad Men sigma male posters who willfully misrepresent what a scene is conveying. The context of this scene is Don Draper justifying why he took all the credit for Peggy's work, all while he's crashing out over a divorce. It's not some aspirational grindset playbook

Joke's on you. I'm in marketing. I've never done meaningful work.

@ItsMattsLaw The Massey Prenup. It's never been penetrated. youtu.be/p-rRbXNrFBU?si…

what the fuck is a perfect contract

@LucyLickerish Good morning!

Good morning, beautiful people. ♥️

@mariasrainer When I first saw the movie, I was 17. When I came back to it in adulthood, I thought, "Oh, I was just a silly, overwrought teenager. There's no way it holds up." But it still blows me away, every time.

@ingrediments oh, i adore this scene that’s such a good pick

when i say the best scene in a film musical you say…

@SimpGanassi I was just saying this to a friend the other day about the Ray Bradbury story A Sound of Thunder.

I’ve never read Little Women, watched Rashomon or seen Guys and Dolls BUT I have seen the Simpsons bits about all of them so I effectively have a deep scholarly understanding of all of them

@RVAwonk Quick, somebody have the AI engines play several hundred games of Tic Tac Toe against themselves!

“Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases.” These are the models that are going to be given autonomous control over weapons systems.

@akernis Oh, wow, that was fascinating! Thanks!

@ingrediments If you have nine minuttes this gives the most context I have seen. youtube.com/watch?v=9LMr5X…

It's not a rule. It's a Problem: the Tiffany Problem. You put a character named Tiffany in your medieval Earth, readers balk because they think she's a Valley Girl. YOU and enlightened medievalists know that Tiffany was a common nickname for Theophania. The reader is WRONG! (Let's pause a moment until the blasting of kazoos fades.) Congrats, you're right, but at a cost: reader immersion. You've put a moment of WTF into the head of every reader who doesn't know this thing you know, and even into many of those who do (they'll stop to marvel at how you knew that weird detail, too). You pay the price one of three ways: add enough context for the unenlightened readers to understand, change the name, or break immersion. Choosing to break immersion isn't the brave choice. Not because you're not a brave person, but because it's not a moral choice: it's a craft choice. So is how you choose vocabulary (simple/esoteric/flowery), description style (plain/poetic), setting (every day/historical/ultra-weird), or blending genres. Breaking immersion often will winnow/refine your readership to those who like how YOU break their immersion, who like being pulled out of their reading world to marvel at tiny details you got right. Readers who prize maintaining their immersion will likely choose authors who prioritize maintaining readers' immersion in the future. "Aha! See? I'm being brave because I won't water down my creative vision for the sake of reader immersion!" Eh... maybe. There's a lot of competition in that space, and those who do it well enough to make careers are doing a lot of things well. (Maybe some do it intuitively, but the perpetual heavyweights are highly aware masters of craft.) Those who love a niche aren't necessarily anti-commercial; they're just placing their bet on an uncluttered field with fewer competitors: Tom Clancy filled his books with (boring/fascinating) technical details of military hardware/doctrine/oh-god-everything that one might think only a hardcore mil-geek could love. He relayed the story that when he finally managed to sell The Hunt for Red October to a small publisher, he said, "I think it might sell five thousand copies!" His wife said, "I bet it'll sell fifty thousand copies!" Surely only a language geek could love Tolkien, amirite? Surely only the staunchest navel-gazer could love Proust? So make your choice, pay your price. If you do your niche well enough, you can make a career either way. (Wow, this turned long. I think it would've made a better substack. Let me know. I'm thinking of starting one.)