I hate when the center-left political class talks about dropping the woke stuff. First of all, you lot were never carrying it. Secondly, YOU’RE asking for MY support. So it kinda feels like I can care about whatever I care about.

It used to be in prehistory that the Mediterranean was mostly dry land and there was a moment when the Atlantic spilled over to fill it. Picture an ocean coming at you at 100m cubic meters a second... I dunno. Just sayin— there have been disasters that were harder to stop than an inept dictator.

Four core structural truths of every medium I’ve written in professionally. A film is a poem of motion and stillness. A season of prestige tv is a novel. Audio drama is telling as showing. And a comic book is time as space.

Don’t read this if you haven’t seen Weapons, but my god, there may be no single moment in modern cinema that’s scarier than just the sound of that fucking car door opening…

“There is very possibly no limit to the miracle machine’s capabilities,” predicts salesman of miracle machines.

Was she patiently waiting for it or pacing? Watching the numbers change?

Here, I’m gonna help some of you out. Arguing the logistics isn’t how you defend this moment. You wanna call out the effect of the creative choice. It works in situ b/c it’s that ominous thing of an elevator quietly arriving from hell. In art, if the vibe works, the logic doesn’t come up.

I think you'll find the Queen pressed the buttons for every floor and patiently waited until she finally reached the one with Ripley.

I see that many of you think I’m saying I don’t buy that the xenomorphs are clever. That’s silly. It’s a fully imaginary creature. Obviously whatever it’s doing is a thing it can do. I just think it’s sorta funny to picture the offscreen, implied steps of one of them using an elevator like a person.

It’s very much like that— if instead of opening a kitchen door they used an elevator to go to the floor they’re prey was on and it wasn’t a plot point and no character ever pointed out that it was a strangely clever thing for an animal to do.

I love The Lost World (Jurassic Park 2). The film’s rex attack is easily a franchise high point. Easily. And the girl does use a gymnastics move to merc a raptor. Fair. I’d argue that this bit is quite grounded for a series that later spends several films on dinosaurs having military applications.

Remember in Aliens when the queen USES THE ELEVATOR? She doesn’t scrabble up the empty elevator shaft. No. The elevator dings. Doors open. And she steps out. Meaning— at the bottom she pressed the call button, waited, got in, pressed the button for Ripley’s floor, and rode the lift car up to it.

I was always a creative kid. But oddly, I initially wanted to be a paleontologist. And I’m not saying that I “liked dinosaurs.” Lots of kids like dinosaurs. I had a full-on ADHD hyper-fixation. My favourites were like Carnotaurus and Oviraptor. Deep cuts. Like I KNEW about dinosaurs. And still do.

Does Star Wars take place before or after Lord of the Rings? Here’s what we know. Both stories are set in this universe. With Tolkien’s letters suggesting LOTR is set on Earth about 6,000 years ago and Star Wars being far more vague. All we know there is that it’s long ago and far from Earth.

Had to go one per show because otherwise it would just be all DS9… Cap - Sisko 1st - Saru Sci - T’Pol Doc - Bones Sec - Le’an Eng - Geordie Helm - Boimler

Hot take. But Doctor Who needs to feel like I Saw the TV Glow. It needs to be eerie and lo-fi and experimental, with almost deliberately janky vfx. To my point, the Mondasian Cybermen… The cloth-masked version is hands-down the creepiest Cybermen design.

“We changed the name of the USNS Harvey Milk to something non-political.” Taking the name of a gay civil rights activist off your boat IS political, you mop bucket.

I dunno if you saw that my buddy Eric Heisserer is doing a Pacific Rim series but it is in very capable hands. Dude wrote an all time top ten sf film in Arrival, has a deep-cut expertise of PacRim lore and a crystal clear eye on its heart. Fans, if you’d heard the things I’ve heard about this…

Something a lot of sf doesn’t think about. Space is completely dark. Like the ocean at night. So unless you’re in proximity to a star, a vessel’s hull would only be illuminated by its own exterior lights.

Well it never counts. Not really. Maybe for the people whose money it is. But I don’t care what they spent or made on a movie. If I like it, I say it’s good. If I don’t, I say it’s bad. And every reason I have is something that happened between the lights going down and coming back up.

I put it to you that you don’t actually give a fuck how much money a movie earned or cost to make. How do I know this? Well do you like Groundhog Day? Okay, without looking, in what spot did it open? … See, you don’t care.

Grammatically speaking, what the fuck is going on with the name of Ruth’s Chris Steak House?

Impact Winter was my competition for the 2023 Ambie Award. Very cool news for a very cool podcast. Congrats, @travisbeacham.bsky.social ! deadline.com/2025/02/impa...

As the years go, I’ve grown to increasingly fear that I may never fully shake my frustration that the only version of Moby’s “South Side” available on streaming is the one without Gwen Stefani.

The assumption about “DEI hiring” is that diverse hires are less qualified. The complete opposite is true. If left to their guts, bosses will tend to just hire from their own social circle. Their buddies. Their buddies’ buddies. Etc.

Anytime I’m feeling overwhelmed I remember that we’re the generation who had to defrag our own hard drives and I realise that probably we can deal with anything.

Yeah, the addiction thing is odd to me. Like is dialysis addictive? These medications are mitigating actual neurological symptoms that modern life has zero willingness to accommodate. I wish people would stop talking about the most reliable treatments like they’re recreational.

I am neurodivergent and have been medicated for ADHD for about 24 years. This was a life-altering intervention. When I was diagnosed, I’d just flunked out of college. After, I got into film school, earned a 4.0 GPA, wrote A Killing on Carnival Row, and began my professional career. So… assess that.

Asked how this feels. Bittersweet. Often you go into these things with a story you want to tell. But you might get noted to death. Or pushed aside. Or the show gets cancelled. And it’s rare that you get to end the story on your terms, in the way that you saw it ending. And that’s an amazing feeling.

First time I’ve typed these words in a script… 🥹

The “Gulf of America” thing is so childish and petty. Fortunately, I am too, and will carry a sharpie dedicated to correcting every occurrence of it that I encounter.

Can’t find the link but the NYT has a helpful piece breaking down the constitutional implications of Trump’s latest executive order that the Green M&M must be anatomically fuckable.

“The man made the Nazi salute and to offer any plausible deniability means he and his followers can use that doubt and turn it against us, accusing us of overreacting or reading into things that aren’t there.”

Holy shit, he just signed an executive order that the Snyderverse is canon…

Yeah I’m sure white supremacists are thinking, “Such a shame Elon only did a Roman salute. How disappointing. Guess we’re still waiting to hear where he stands on our issues.”

Yall better not get all weird about me blowing a vuvuzela in The Hague when their sentences are announced.

It’s a drought. You want us to pipe water from Northern California to— what? Water our woods?

The TikTok ban. My gut is that either nothing or almost nothing will happen. In a month, I feel like everyone will still be on TikTok. Dunno how the gov’t will spin the backing down part. I just sorta feel like they’ll have to. Bread and circus, right?

The world doesn’t end. Every generation comes in so sure that it does and are shocked when they live long enough to get blamed by the next for dropping the ball. Because there’s no ending. Just two opposing directions of travel. Entropy and progress.

Casting is such a mixed bag of fun and ugliness. There is nothing more magical than feeling like you’ve met the character you wrote. Getting them hired is not entirely unlike a 19th century street gang turf war.

And Christmas Carol isn’t even the only Christmas ghost story he wrote.

Yeah and lots of Pre-Christian stuff too. “What, the horned guy? No, he’s not our old god. This is a different guy with horns. He’s— uh— Santa’s friend… Krampus…”

Iceland’s got this story. The Yule Cat. It’s a bloodthirsty cat the size of a two-story house that prowls the frozen volcanic countryside in December looking for people to eat… One of the many ways in which European Christmas lore beats the shit out of Elf-on-a-Shelf.

#ImpactWinter (for those who got here some other way) is my episodic, full cast, immersive audio story from Audible. Set in a world where a comet impact has blotted the sun and vampires have taken over. It starts in the English countryside and follows two sisters, but grows from there.

Writing the final season of #ImpactWinter it occurs to me I’ve never been given the chance to actually wrap up any long-form story I’ve tried to tell. It’s kind of a blast. Paying stuff off, etc. I think you’ll love it. Like no kidding five or six of the top ten BEST moments are in the home stretch.

There are two ways to shoot a scene scripted to take place in “a foggy forest.” The easiest way is to shoot whatever weather you’ve got on the day. The other way is best illustrated in this old pic from my camera roll…

Ideally you create just enough of an imagined world to make the blank spaces feel full of stuff you haven’t covered. Leave nothing blank and the world starts to feel bounded by the terms of the story, less a world than a richly detailed device. Harry Potter sometimes plays this way to me.

The real art of world-building is not in the parts you build. It’s in the parts you leave forever unbuilt.

My thing about the Alien franchise is that there will never be an explanation of where the monster comes from that’s better than not knowing. So I kinda watch the Prometheus movies as the android David’s sidebar attempt to recreate the existing creature that appears in the rest of the series.

Hey. Birds are reptiles. In fact, crocodiles and birds are more closely related than crocodiles and lizards. (And I’m not gonna argue about this. Just go Google it.)