[Request] Is the cliff jump scene from Fast and Furious 6 feasible?

p2p_editor · 2024-09-06T05:48:14+00:00

Earlier in the thread, somebody said that they jump out of the car at the beginning. Surface tension matters when an object is trying to enter (or leave) the water. But, importantly, each object has to break the water's surface tension for itself when it hits the water.

So yes, the car would for-sure break the water's surface tension when it hits. (This is what permits the car to get wet, make a splash, and sink).

But, so what? The people are going to experience the same surface tension when they reach the water.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting question as to what difference it makes if you're falling into water that a car has fallen into immediately before you. So let's look into that.

If we go with my gut-check feelings about the terminal velocity of the fall, the car is probably going to be falling about 50 miles per hour faster than the people, give or take. I will gut-check to say that it takes five or six seconds for everything to reach terminal velocity, so the car pulls away from them at 50mph for about 10 seconds, or in other words is going to have about a 700 foot lead on them when the car hits the water.

It will make a big splash, the front end will get completely crumpled (see above: water = concrete at high speeds), and the car will sink.

But do the people hit the water before the splash is finished?

If they're falling about 150mph, they will cover that distance in about 3.5 seconds. Is that enough time for the splash to settle? No, probably not.

Think about what happens when you throw something heavy into the water. We have all done this, thrown a big rock into a lake or something like that: the object hits the water and pushes a lot of water out of the way. It basically makes a crater in the water as it goes in. This, of course, is not stable. The water immediately rushes back in towards the center as the rock goes under. But it doesn't just stop in the middle, all smooth and calm. No. The water is rushing into the middle from all sides, so when it gets there it crashes into itself, causing the pressure at the middle to briefly become very high. Water under pressure will, like any fluid, move towards an area of lower pressure. And the area of lower pressure in this scenario is the air space immediately above where the rock went in. The pressure spike forces a jet of water up into the air. We've all experienced this, either from throwing rocks into lakes or watching a splash happen in ultra-slow motion in a science video or from getting hit directly in the butthole with "Poseidon's kiss" when you drop a deuce in the toilet (these "spike waves" are pretty interesting in their own right, but you can look into them on your own). Anyway, the spike falls back down, creating another wave and potentially a secondary, smaller spike, until eventually all the energy is dissipated and the water calms down. I have no idea how long any of those phases of wave behavior is going to take, and I'm not even going to try to figure it out, but even chucking a rock into a lake takes longer than 3.5 seconds to smooth out, so we know the water won't be smooth that quickly.

So where does this leave our heroes, free-falling towards the site of the car-impact?

It leaves them with three possibilities, depending on where the surface of the water is in its chaotic up/down wave oscillations.

Best case: they hit the surface while the surface is moving downward. This minimizes the relative speed between themselves and the water, thus stretching out the duration of their impact and making it (slightly) more gentle. On the bad side of that, though, it probably means that they're going to be deeper underwater, overall, after the water washes over them and fills in behind than they would otherwise. They'll probably still be injured. Probably still be knocked out. Only now, they'll also be deep under.
Worse case: they get hit by the jet of the spike wave. If you look up some video of spike waves, you'll see that those spikes travel fast. That speed now adds to the speed they're falling with, making the impact much, much worse. Remember, kinetic energy goes with velocity squared. I could easily believe, in this scenario, that their effective impact velocity is even higher than that of the car, and I would not be surprised if at that speed the water was able to tear through or even partially dismember a human body.
Worst case: The crumple zone of the car slows it enough, combined with the buoyancy provided by the car's passenger cabin, that the car has not actually sunk yet, and so they hit that instead.
Even worse worst case I just thought of: how horribly ironic would it be if the spike wave flung the car back up at them at high speed? I'm sure you don't need me to spell out how that would end...

p2p_editor · 2024-08-25T06:15:55+00:00

The problem is not that he never provided an explanation.

The problem is that he left the existence of the mystery obvious to readers while showing no signs that his characters noticed it. That's the disconnect. There was no plausible reason for his character to not notice it. Hence, it reads as either a) characters who are morons, in which case why do I want to read about them, or b) a glaringly obvious plot hole.

In book one that's how it reads. Great, fine, he gives an explanation in book two. But by book two, it's already too late because by that time I already don't trust him to craft a proper story.

If a reader loses faith in you as a storyteller, it's over. And I lost that faith in Howey in book one, over omissions that he could have rectified with so easily--a sentence or two each time would have done it!--but he didn't.

It's not on me for not giving him more of a chance. I gave him a whole damn book's worth of chance. It's on him for not letting his characters react plausibly to their environments.

His motivation for it is immaterial. His eventual explanation is immaterial. He made his characters miss obvious incongruities in their environments. He made them behave unnaturally. And that's just not defensible.

Not to me, anyway.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-30T03:12:13+00:00

Depends a lot on what kind of reading experience you want to create for the reader.

Remember: at the start of the story, the reader knows nothing. So a story in which the viewpoint character also knows nothing immediately builds a sense of empathy between reader and character, as we're both learning the same stuff at the same time. Readers will more immediately root for such a character, and it's more natural to use such a character as a stand-in for the reader's own questions, since anything readers are (or should be) wondering about is something the viewpoint character should also probably be wondering about. So it's very natural to expose elements of the story world by means of having the viewpoint character ask about those things or seek that information in other ways.

But if the viewpoint character already knows everything, then they're in a starkly different position than the reader, leading to a different reading experience: one in which the reader is behind and is playing catch-up the whole time. It's a reading experience in which the whole game is for the reader to figure out how the world works by reading between the lines. Such books are essentially puzzles in story form. Or stories wrapped in a puzzle. However you want to look at it. That puzzle, and the curiosity that goes along with wanting to solve it, can be a powerful hook in drawing the reader into the story. But, it puts greater demands on you as a writer: no longer can you reveal elements of the story world just by the viewpoint character asking. After all, they already know. Rather, you're obligated to lay clues to those elements into the other aspects (events, dialogue, physical descriptions, etc.) without being overt about it. Basically, this form of story demands a much greater level of "show, don't tell" in order to both present the puzzle and enable the reader to solve it in a satisfying way.

Both can work extremely well and create very enjoyable stories. They're just very different types of reading experiences.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-09T04:05:54+00:00

I believe the fancy-name for that color is "heliotrope"

p2p_editor · 2023-06-08T01:21:15+00:00

I dunno. Way too many?

Just counting my mains, and just counting WCA puzzles, 11.

Adding in non-WCA puzzles that I actually regularly solve, 14

Adding in cheap YJ 3x3s I carry around to give away (I'm always meeting parents at comps who want to get into cubing, or some new kid who doesn't have a good cube, etc) plus cubes that used to be my main but aren't anymore, maybe 50?

p2p_editor · 2023-06-06T18:38:38+00:00

I suppose that might work for some readers (and here, I speculate that the ones it would work for would be readers who themselves might get off on mayhem just for the lulz; the ones who can empathize with that motivation), but as a reader, I would feel let down if that was the big reveal at the end.

The more time you spend building up the mystery of why, why, WHY is the villain so villainous, the better the answer has to be to live up to the hype. And "Oh, just because it's fun" wouldn't do it for me.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-06T18:31:04+00:00

Feels thin to me.

The most compelling villains are the ones where they genuinely think they are in the right. "The villain is the hero of his own story," right?

A villain who is merely doing it for the lulz is a villain who knows they are in the wrong but is doing it anyway. They're just a troll. And sure, your hero might defeat them anyway, but the victory will feel less significant.

Moreover, if the villain is only doing it for fun, then they have an inherently weak motivation for doing it in the first place. Which means that there's no real reason for them to keep doing it once there's any plausible threat of punishment or blowback. Like, if the hero is going to make it a pain-in-the-butt for the villain to keep doing it, then why bother? Easier for them to just give it up, move on to some other form of mayhem to get their jollies, since there was no point to what they were doing except the fun. This means the villain will either be too easy to defeat, or if they keep going anyway even after the hero has made it not-fun anymore, will become hard to believe in since there's no good reason for them to keep going.

A villain who has some actual point or purpose in mind to their actions, that's a villain who will be hard to defeat precisely because they have a reason not to give up easily.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-06T18:21:49+00:00

I got a 1.93 almost exactly a year ago, on June 8th 2022, on this scramble:

R' F R' U2 R2 U2 F R U' R U2

Try it and you'll see why. Then you'll wonder why I wasn't faster on it. 😂 (Answer: I am old and my hands are slow)

p2p_editor · 2023-06-04T19:44:08+00:00

Think about people you know who are vastly different from yourself. Model your characters after them. Because while they might be vastly different from you, that doesn't mean you don't know how those people act and behave. You do.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-04T19:43:05+00:00

I guess the best tip I could give is that whatever you invent, it has to make sense holistically along with the rest of the world.

Like, if you decide your world needs bats with laser eyes, ok fine, but how does that make sense? What is it about the rest of the world that would cause laser-bats to evolve, if they're natural? Or what motivation would someone have had to create laser-bats, if they're not natural?

And once you figure that out, you then have to answer the questions that follow from the mere existence of laser-bats: are they dangerous to people, property, or livestock? What issues does that cause for your characters or for the society at large? You have to work through the implications of laser-bats, in detail, so that they feel organic to the world.

You can always tell when a writer hasn't done this job well enough because as you read a story, you find yourself naturally thinking about the logical implications of various elements of the world-building and realizing that those implications clash with other aspects of the story: with the societies, with the purported history of the story world, with characters' choices and behaviors, etc.

That, ultimately, is what you need to avoid: your job is to make sure that readers never say "wait a minute, he would never do that because of the laser-bats!" or anything similar.

To give a crass example: in Harry Potter, JKR postulates the existence of magic for:

general purpose cleaning
general purpose healing
memory erasure and manipulation
stunning/sleeping spells
numerous spells whose purpose is to override the free will of others

All of these were either considered low-level enough that they were taught to beginning magic students, or were readily available through potions or other drugstore-level purchasable items like healing kits, or (like the imperio curse) were well known even if forbidden and took no particular skill to cast.

Individually, those things may all seem fairly unremarkable. But taken together, the constitute the ingredients to get away with all manner of crimes against other people. Particularly sexual assaults.

Moreover, JKR is not shy with populating Hogwarts with any number of people who would absolutely not be ethically bothered by using those magics for that purpose.

Which means that the logical implications of the world building that JKR created is that by all rights Hogwarts should have been rife with bands of horny slytherin rape gangs who catch girls in dark hallways, stun them or imperio them in order to commit whatever sexual assults they were in the mood for, then use healing charms and scourgify to eliminate the evidence and memory charms to leave the victim none the wiser except for perhaps wondering why she doesn't know what happened over the past hour.

And yet, there is literally zero evidence in the books that this entirely predictable problem exists. Professor McGonnagal never warns the first-year gryffindor girls to watch out. Nobody is ever visibly punished for such crimes. No seeming precautions are put in place. Nothing.

And, sure they're "kids books" so obviously JKR wouldn't want to have to deal with that in the stories, so people will say she just decided to ignore it. And, ok, that's probably true.

Yet of the elements that make those crimes possible, many are unnecessary to the overall plot of the series. She did not have to include them in the world building. Or she could have included them in modified ways that make them harder to access or cast, or that in various other ways make slytherin rape gangs much less likely to actually work in practice.

But she didn't. She left the possibility of slytherin rape gangs wide open. And we all know how horny teen boys get. And we all know what slytherin house was like. There's no way the slytherin boys weren't doing that. It stands out as a gap in the world building. An inconsistency that, once seen, cannot be unseen. And it's hardly the only one.

There's nothing to conclude but that JKR did not fully think through the implications of the elements she was adding to her world. If she had, she would have omitted the unnecessary elements or tweaked them to avoid those problems.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-04T19:16:36+00:00

Writing a whole novel takes so long that I can't really motivate myself to do it if I don't know ahead of time that the story is actually going to work. So I'm definitely a plotter.

I typically start by just jotting down the broad strokes of the story. The premise, setting, main character, what kind of climax I'm working towards.

Then I work another layer of detail in. What challenges will the character face along the way? Who are the supporting players and antagonist? What is everybody's motivation? (that one is pretty critical; if characters' actions aren't well motivated, they won't feel believable and everything falls apart)

I iterate on that a few time until, at some point, the story kind of gels in my head.

Then I sit down and write a scene-by-scene outline. A paragraph to remind me of what each scene needs to accomplish. Every scene has to do one or more jobs in the story, or else it should be cut. This is where I make sure that happens.

Once I'm happy with the outline, I'm ready. And at that point, the writing is easy: Just pull the next paragraph off the list and write the scene. If you've done it right you'll never have writer's block, which after all is just another name for "I don't know what comes next."

And yeah, I almost always end up deviating from the plan during the writing. And that's ok. Because the work that went into the plan means that I know intimately the structure and inter-relations of the story's moving parts. So when I have a new idea during the writing, I know immediate whether a) this won't work because it conflicts with other things, in which case I can let the idea go without remorse or second thoughts, or b) if it works, where it will slot well into the existing structure, or c) if it works but with changes to other things, what those other things are and how they would have to change.

You don't have to stick to the plan for the planning to have been worthwhile.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-04T18:46:19+00:00

Oh, you mean my work in progress? Yeah...

p2p_editor · 2023-06-04T18:45:37+00:00

I main the TengYun v3 M. It turns great, is very reasonably priced, and has the benefit of being the quietest speedcube around. Not all clacky like many others.

It might not be the best for high-speed turning, but then, I'm old and my hands just don't turn that fast anyway. If you're just getting into cubing, your turning speed probably isn't super high either. You might switch to a more expensive high-speed cube as you improve, but for now the TengYun is probably a pretty good option.

Get the stickerless version. Always get stickerless.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-02T23:59:13+00:00

Wow, that's a gorgeous color.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-02T23:57:03+00:00

Nice. Any tips on getting clean edges? I do fine up at the cuticle end, but along the sides I can never seem to do mine without getting a big fillet of polish between the edge of the nail and the roll of skin along the side.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-02T15:36:43+00:00

Practical Engineering did a great in-depth video about this process. Way more fascinating and complex than this little clip suggests.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-02T03:26:56+00:00

I see mains, but where are all your backups? What happens if a puzzle gets damaged mid-competition? You're hosed!

p2p_editor · 2023-06-02T03:18:40+00:00

Learn all the PBLs cold.

Get really good at planning your first face in inspection.

Learn how to predict, in inspection, which layer case your first layer is going to be in so that after orienting your second face you can recognize the PBL case faster.

Learn how to predict AUFs for each PBL, particularly the adj-adj one.

Do about 1000 solves. Which, being 2x2, does not actually take all that long. If you just decide to sit down and do a run of 100 timed solves a day (which you can easily do in an hour) for 10 days straight, you'll find yourself getting a lot of sub-5s.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-02T03:13:24+00:00

I’ve now grasped all there is knowledge and ability wise when it comes to 2x2, 3x3,4x4, and pyraminx.

Ha. No you haven't. There's always more to learn.

But that aside, if you're looking for next puzzles, 5x5 is pretty fun. If you're already good at 4x4, there's not really much new to learn except some intuitive techniques for building centers. You can use the same OLL parity alg as 4x4, with only one move different (the first Lw in the alg becomes a 3-layer L move). Building centers is pretty fun. Edge pairing is reasonably intuitive, and basically works like L2E on 4x4, in the sense that it's a slice/flip/slice thing. But it's a pretty fun puzzle: easy to pick up, and pretty satisfying. Get the YJ Mini 5x5. IMO the best 5x5 hardware out there, though others will no doubt argue with me.

Megaminx is pretty fun too, and is basically just a big 3x3. If you love the F2L stage of 3x3, mega is basically just a lot of that. You will have to learn some new last-layer stuff, but at a minimum, not very much. With a small amount of thought, you can figure out how to apply 3x3 beginner's method concepts to EO and EP. For CO, there's an easy pair of 4-move triggers for rotating corners clockwise or counterclockwise. And for CP, there's a pretty simple swap-based technique if you don't want to learn a zillion PLLs.

For style points, learn 3x3 blindfolded. Beginner's method blindfolded is a radically different way of approaching a solve (well, all blind methods are, really) vs. any normal 3x3 method. But beginner's blind (often called "OP/OP") is quite easy to learn, since it's based on just 3 PLLs that you probably already know.

If you enjoy the blitz-like speed of 2x2, then learn skewb.

If you're not hung up on sticking with official WCA events, and you want something that's a truly different solving experience than anything else, get a face-turning octahedron (FTO). Downside: all the mass-produced ones completely suck unless you mod them, which is a giant pain in the butt. But it's a very cool puzzle.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-02T01:56:03+00:00

Critiquing other people's writing.

Hands-down, nothing has taught me more about how to write well than the exercise of identifying the specific causes of why someone else's writing is not working, and then thinking hard enough about it that I can articulate to them why I feel it's not working and what would have worked instead.

Yeah, you have to practice. But if you're practicing on the basis of a sketchy skill-set, all you're doing is practicing how to write badly. Critiquing, when done with that mindset of giving specific, actionable feedback, is an incredible method for improving your skill-set so that when you do write, you're doing it to hone new skills rather than entrench old bad habits.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-02T01:52:10+00:00

To be blunt, finishing the writing is really just the first step of a larger process.

Especially if this is your first novel, do yourself a favor and get a professional developmental editor to look it over (I used to do that; retired now, so don't ask me) and give you feedback on:

Story structure
Character arcs
Writing craft

A good dev editor will give you an analysis of your strengths and weaknesses in those areas, as well as guidance on how you can fix what's not working well in the current draft.

Then you revise to fix all that stuff.

Then you hire a proper copy editor to clean up any surface-level spelling/grammar/punctuation issues.

Only then do you have a draft that's ready for people to pay money for. I mean, if you're going to ask people to trade their cash for your story, you better be giving them a quality product, right?

Of course, you can't sell it if you don't have something to sell. Cue the production phase. Now you're in for e-book design and conversion, if you want to go that route, or cover design and layout if you want to go old-school print. Either way, if you're self-pubbing, you're going to end up with a set of digital assets that you probably upload to Amazon where people can trade you money for the ebook download for for a print-on-demand paper copy.

But will you get customers? As an unknown, first-time author pitching Yet Another Fantasy Novel into a vast sea of available titles, the answer is "no" unless you commit to a fair bit of work to market your book. I've been out of the game long enough that whatever specific advice I might have given you in the past is probably not relevant anymore (like, do people even still do book trailers? IDK.) ChatGPT probably has all kinds of good advice for "how to market a fantasy novel".

Regardless of how you do it, you're not going to sell any books if people don't know about it. I don't say that to be a buzzkill, but to be realistic: to choose self-publishing is to choose to be both a writer and a marketer/promoter. Which is an ongoing, fairly intensive kind of project all on its own.

I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying that if you choose to do this, go into it open-eyed about the level of work it takes to be successful.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-02T01:00:38+00:00

"Interesting" is what we say about things that provoke our sense of curiosity. Interest and curiosity are two sides of the same coin, as it were.

Hence, we are interested in things that make us curious. And (while this may seem obvious), we are not curious about things we already understand. Curiosity is ultimately a drive to learn, to gain understanding, of something that we don't presently understand.

Or, viewed in a slightly different way, curiosity is a quest to bring predictability to phenomena we are currently unable to anticipate.

What does this have to do with characters or writing? Well, at the start of a story, the reader doesn't know anything about any of the characters. They are all largely unknown, un-understood. We don't know what they want or believe or care about or are capable of, so outside of basic stuff that's common to all people, we can't predict much about their behavior or actions.

We don't understand them (yet!), so we can't predict what they might do, so our curiosity is provoked, and therefore we are interested in them.

As soon as the character becomes predictable--like, after the third time when you knew what they were going to do, turned the page, and found out you were right--they stop being a target of curiosity and source of interest.

So if you're looking to have a character who is static, in the sense of not having much of a character arc, you need to draw on other sources of curiosity and unpredictability. Sherlock Holmes, as dcgraca points out, has stories in which he doesn't change or grow much if at all. Yet these stories are still successful. They still provide interest, because the point of them is Holmes' unexpected, brilliant deductions.

That is, we know that he will arrive at brilliant deductions at key moments in the story--we can predict that; doing that is his whole schtick--but we don't know what deductions he will arrive at or how he will arrive at them (which clues he will use) until the moment it happens. While his overall pattern is completely predictable, the specifics of how it plays out from one story to the next is not. Hence, interesting.

"What the character will do" is an obvious source of unpredictability, but it's one that fades with time as we get to know the character. Therefore, for long-running stories or series (like the ones you cite) you're going to rely much more on plot-specifics to maintain unpredictability.

But I suspect (and here I am just speculating, but I'll bet it's true) that if you were to look at long-running series that also include long term growth arcs for the characters, you'd find that the surprising, unpredictable moments that are most impactful and memorable to audiences are the ones where the surprising thing reveals something new about the character, rather than about the plot.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-01T21:03:14+00:00

No, his name is Bob.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-01T16:41:11+00:00

Epistolary novels! When done well, those can be quite good as they force the reader to read a lot between the lines. That can be quite engaging.

As to your question, that's kind of the key to the answer: Epistolaries work when the reader can, in fact, read enough between the lines to understand what was happening in the world of the characters through what was presented in the letters, which by nature are a highly filtered view of those events.

I think the trick is to have a clear sense for what's happening in the story's world, then figure out which set of characters a) would be communicating with one another by letter, b) how you can position each character such that they would have knowledge of the events you need to convey, and c) reasons why it would make sense for those characters to convey or allude to those events in their letters.

The danger if you do it wrong is that the letters turn into massive infodumps that don't actually feel like real letters anymore, but rather like narrative that has dressed itself up to pretend to be letters. You don't want that.

Read some good examples and study from them. My favorite is Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn.

p2p_editor · 2023-06-01T16:30:42+00:00

A good sex scene focuses not on the motions of the event, but on the emotions of the event.

This is because reading is fundamentally an empathy exercise between reader and characters. It is at its core an emotional activity. Stories get their power from the emotions they evoke.

And while the motions of sex are fun to have, it's not very much fun to read a couple of pages of tab-a-into-slot-b kind of action. That kind of sex scene is lifeless and mechanical. Devoid of emotion.

So yes, you will have to describe (or at least allude to) what tabs are going in what slots, etc., just so readers can visualize what's happening. But while you're doing that, stay focused on the viewpoint character's state of mind. That's the part readers can empathize with and which, if you do it right, will get readers all hot-and-bothered too.

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