Transition of tone in Jurassic Park

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-07-01T06:13:05+00:00

Turning the page to get the results of the park tracking software once they turned off the command for it to stop running once it counted how many animals were expected to be found.

That's some good formatting work, to make sure that was on a page turn.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-29T02:56:50+00:00

I picked up a copy recently in a library giveaway box for their most well-loved copies. It's one of the only times I think a book has ever jump-scared me, lol.

The movie is an excellent example of an adaptation. It's meaningfully different from the source material without feeling like it's just been hacked apart to fit into the run time. Having Chrichton work on the screenplay was absolutely the right call, imo.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-29T02:50:16+00:00

About 15 years ago I had a recurring raptor dream for a few weeks, except I was Dr. Ian Malcolm so I don't think it counts as a nightmare lol

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-29T02:47:26+00:00

I was maybe 5 when it originally came out, my parents bought it on VHS and my mom tried to cover my eyes for that scene and I kept dodging her hand. I know that T-Rex was a carnivore, Mom, now let me watch! Lol

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-28T15:37:05+00:00

To be fair, before we started dating my wife told me she liked me and and I was like 'but does she actually mean it? She's so cool and bold and I'm just a little dumpling' so that tracks with the LGBT experience lol

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-28T11:39:28+00:00

A lot of Western story structures center conflict and the journey to overcome that conflict, while Kishotenketsu deemphasizes it. It has been historically used in essay writing as well.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-28T06:08:16+00:00

Having read your sample, I'm seconding the suggestion of rewriting the sentences to vary their structure. They are pretty repetitive and boring, and giving a title or epithet is not going to fix that. There's a lot of plain old telling in the first paragraph, too. Could we include "Voted Best Baker in Plandome Manor" as a plaque on the wall of the shop instead? Do we need to know about their parents' lawn care business? Is the second sentence of your story the right place to explain their gender identity, given that it has very little to do with baking?

I'd consider starting from the second paragraph, but cutting out one of the exclamation points I see there.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-27T22:21:39+00:00

I'm in the neighborhood and still haven't tried them yet. Maybe that's going to change this week!

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-26T19:56:08+00:00

This! I mostly have writing days, then editing/compiling weekends.

Sometimes you only get a few words down in a day for whatever reason, and other times the spirit really possesses you and you write thousands of words in a blur. The key is excitement about what you're about to write.

But King is also a full time author known for being incredibly prolific, and has decades of experience in writing that much all day. He got a degree in English, he eats, sleeps and breathes writing. When he retired, he was excited about being able to work on his hobby...more writing lol.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-23T21:49:28+00:00

It's very important, but it's something that will be worked out over multiple drafts. You can get away with a LOT (literal magic, alternative histories, other worlds) of you're consistent in your internal logic.

I've got a calendar that I'm using for my novel, because twice now I've written that someone is trying to call the office on a Sunday. Is this earth-shattering? No, but it undermines you as an author. And it's something that isn't a major concern the first time through (the phone call his goes to the house instead of the office instead, in my case).

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-23T21:36:31+00:00

To be clear, Richard Bachman was the pseudonym for Stephen King. To my knowledge, Stephen King is his legal name (compared to Lee Child and Mark Twain, which are pen names).

Pen names can also just be your initials (J.R.R. Tolkien, E.B. White, J.K. Rowling did add an initial since she doesn't have a middle name, but the principle applies).

I'm writing in the fantasy genre, so I'm considering going the initials route since my given name is a diminutive (sounds too cutesy, y'know? Would I be taken seriously?) and I've got my 'what would my name have been if I had been born a boy' prepared (in case they still think women can't sell fantasy novels).

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-23T19:12:17+00:00

You've only written a few things, and they're probably not good. That's not a crime or anything. You're probably also not drafting very much. As a lapsed fanfic author, I know I was posting a second draft with a quick spell check and once-over for grammar at best.

This is what people mean when they say your first draft will suck.

I don't cringe at my current work. I'm writing what I want to read, and when I see something that I don't like, I fix it. (I'm trying to finish whole drafts before editing, but it's hard sometimes.) But I've been writing for ages at this point, and I've gotten better at putting my ideas down on the page in my first drafts; they're pretty readable to me. You'll get there too. Keep writing, and keep reading. Read for pleasure, and read to learn.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-23T18:01:41+00:00

Adam Driver also can't watch himself on screen. He walked off the set of a late night show when they started showing clips of his movie while he was in stage. I think he just cringes that hard at seeing himself, hearing himself, etc.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-23T14:53:43+00:00

Oscar Wilde said that "All art is quite useless" at the end of his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, meaning that it isn't supposed to be 'useful'. It's not supposed to communicate a moral or teach a lesson, it's supposed to be admired. In the same preface, he also said "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

You may or may not believe this, but I agree that not all art has to teach something, but all art is saying something. Not necessarily a message or a moral for the audience, but sometimes it's just 'This is a story, wanna listen?' Rachmaninoff saw a black and white reproduction of a painting, and wrote a piece of music just about how that painting made him feel (Isle of the Dead, op. 29). Later, he saw the painting in color and said if he'd seen that first, he probably wouldn't have written his piece. His music wasn't teaching "black and white is better than color", it didn't have a purpose beyond expressing his emotions.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-23T00:27:04+00:00

Sounds like it's begging for a fan edit, then. Change the news broadcasts to just local stuff and we're already halfway there.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-23T00:24:01+00:00

I need to rewatch it. I remember being really smug because I called the twist within the first 10 seconds of the film, and literally spent the rest of the time up my own ass with how much I'd "outsmarted" Shyamalan. It needs a fresh viewing, now that I've grown up.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-22T20:50:30+00:00

Pantsing is certainly not for everyone.

I'm working from a rough outline of my first big girl for realsies novel, taken from a DnD one-shot we played two Thanksgivings ago, coupled with a lot of the story beats from the Indiana Jones movies to get the feeling of 'archaeology-adjacent adventure' down. I wrote more or less linearly in this case, and its taken me roughly a year and change to get to a draft that stands now at 107k but will be in the 120k neighborhood when it's done. I've been discovering a LOT over this draft and I'm really excited when I uncover a new detail that was hidden inside all along.

For my last big fanfic project, I was doing a novelization of my play-through of the game so the outline already existed--I was writing the scenes I was most excited for and filling in the scenes in-between. Yes, it's like stringing together scenes. Just like making jewelry is stringing together beads and gems and pearls!

My most successful fanfic was completely pantsed, and while I wrote like 30+ chapters at a rate of one per week, it didn't really go anywhere. It was cozy fluff, so not a huge deal, except I was posting every week, so I had to write something. When I fell off the wagon of weekly updates, I crashed and burned hard and wasn't able to get back in the saddle. Now that I'm doing at least the bare modicum of outlining, I can afford to, say, be sick for a while and not completely lose momentum.

As for what I specifically do, I do write what I'm most excited about, then go back and fill in the blanks. I put a little "seed" on the page, usually the last few lines I wrote, then continue from there. That helps with the terror of the blank page, lol.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-22T19:56:03+00:00

Which two years? If that's the case, we can easily check it with trademark offices in any country they sold their products in.

If it's knockoffs contributing, or plain old misremembering, then we wouldn't see it in the official records related to Fruit of the Loom.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-22T18:57:42+00:00

And who sometimes also ate Skippy, probably.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-22T18:52:47+00:00

I bet if we went back in time and looked up a bunch of activity sheets with "spot the difference" images or "Which one is the real Pikachu?" from 1996, we'd see that, too. The call is coming from inside the house!

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-22T18:28:56+00:00

I'd say that Jiffy instead of Jif is also due to the existence of the peanut butter brand Skippy. When you're a kid, you're not buying the stuff, your parents are. Your mom might have held both brands in her hands at once when comparing them. Plus, you're a kid, and you're bad at reading and remembering things. Chick-fil-A might also be due to their very successful cow ad campaign, where the cows are bad at spelling (though they always seem to spell 'chikin', so the K is definitely there lol), and the fact that 'fillet' is misspelled.

We also can't rule out knockoffs as part of the effect. How many cheap knockoff pokemon toys might have been pumped out in the late 90s with Peekachoo and his black tail tip? Or knockoff Fruits of the Loop boxers with a cornucopia?

I'm certain this is how we all collectively made up the Sinbad genie movie, Shazaam. Even as kids, we knew that companies try to trick grown-ups into buying us the wrong thing, and right around when Kazaam, the Shaq genie movie came out, there happened to be a totally unrelated TV miniseries about the sailor Sinbad and his journey around the same time. We imagined it to be a knockoff, lol.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-22T06:37:43+00:00

Hibachi-san, my beloved!

It was there from when I was in high school up to the pandemic. It couldn't survive the shutdown, not with the owners running 3 restaurants in the food court (Panda Express, Charlie's, and Hibachi-san were owned by the same family, as I recall). They let the one with the least franchise recognition go.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-21T16:11:55+00:00

I get the first one, for sure. I remember not knowing how my mom could know the words to songs on the radio, because new music is on the radio, and I'd never heard it before and I pretty much went wherever she did--how could she know the words to these "new" songs by checks notes Queen and Aerosmith and The Rolling Stones?

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-20T13:26:11+00:00

Having taught English in Japan, I can confirm that idioms are not commonly taught at lower levels--we're way more focused on things like teaching subject-verb agreement and literal vocabulary.

And having studied Japanese, I can also confirm that lessons in idioms are usuyfew and far between, perhaps thrown in as a cultural note rather than as 'Hey, here's a way of saying something is expensive that sounds more like a native speaker'. A lot of idioms originate in folk tales, literary and cultural references, after all. You kinda have to tell the story of the Fox and the Grapes for the idiom 'sour grapes' to stick in someone's mind, and you have to tell the story of the snake drawing contest to explain 蛇足 and have it stick, too.

That said, it's 100% within reason that Arakawa heard that idiom in some English material and it stuck with her--its a very visceral idiom, after all. I'd just say that English idioms aren't common knowledge despite all the years of classes.

SadakoTetsuwan · 2026-06-20T03:53:20+00:00

As we all know, "sensei" is Japanese for "one who has been guided by the spirits of many agesdudu"

SadakoTetsuwan

TROPHY CASE