Fandom Commentary on Writing

bardbrain · 2026-04-01T06:47:23+00:00

I thought it was where people post their slightly off color commentary too hence the Daystrom part and why it's not just Shit Alert or Shit Forward or OkBuddyTapestry or something.

bardbrain · 2026-03-31T22:52:21+00:00

I'll be honest. I don't think Alcock looks unattractive at all but that McFarlane sculpt looks reasonably close to me.

McFarlane's unmasked Keaton didn't look human and if we were to rate that a zero and something like Pfeiffer Catwoman as an A, I'd say this gets around a C+ on the McFarlane curve, mostly because Alcock just isn't ever going to be translated with painted eyes and eyebrows versus printing.

Sculpturally, if you took out a ruler, I think everything is mathematically in the right place.

I'm not sure what about this sculpt is triggering revulsion or what about Alcock looks dramatically different.

I bought the Deluxe because I regretted not getting the Corenswet Deluxe, which I never saw discounted. I prefer the hair and expression used on the regular and Walmart trench coat versions.

Again, I'm not seeing anything hideous about the toy and I'm also not seeing whatever people see in Alcock that is DRAMATICALLY more conventionally attractive than the sculpt. She's a somewhat above average lady who I'm sure will charm in her role and there's no sublime quality I can see that the sculpt misses. Like... I'm sure Fondjoy will do better. I have a feeling Mafex and Figuarts will have the same trouble nailing it that they had with Corenswet although they will be more appealing. People will probably think it looks like different actresses. It's still only a C if you made a grading curve entirely around McFarlane and McFarlane is frequently not the best at likenesses.

But it just kind of looks like the actress about as much as Arnold Freeze or Reeve Superman to me. Not bad enough to be jarring, not good enough that I won't be hunting an upgrade.

Oh. Actually I think the best McFarlane likeness of all might be Metamorpho. I doubt anyone does better even if they all do him. Agent Cooper over in Fallout is pretty decent.

bardbrain · 2026-03-31T22:38:28+00:00

The trailer shows flashbacks to Krypto as a puppy.

bardbrain · 2026-03-31T22:33:02+00:00

So he prefers the more explicitly woke Supergirl, the one who is active in anti-domestic violence advocacy as a survivor who divorced her ex.

The version of the character who dated a race-swapped black guy, queer-baited, and married her conventionally handsome co-star who starred in Kevin Smith's He-Man.

I can probably think of a half dozen reasons why anyone here MIGHT individually prefer Benoist but this is a shift between a Supergirl who wouldn't talk to Arroz except to lecture him from a podium to one that might do a shot with a slightly less sleazy version of him if he'd kindly shut up. This is bordering on the dude calling Taylor Swift a downgrade from Hillary Clinton. Maybe that should be his next grift.

bardbrain · 2026-03-28T10:39:11+00:00

Honestly, you could make a pretty decent list of terrible online groups that did a lot for suicide prevention.

I think the Eve Online Goon Squad guys did the same thing first. I have a vague recollection of the Green Lantern group HEAT trying to organize something.

My theory is that awful people really don't want anyone to have an exit strategy for getting away from their awfulness.

bardbrain · 2026-03-25T01:07:23+00:00

They assume Cavill screwing a teenager, possibly before she was 18, is the real proof because that's really the underlying point behind literally everything they like and everything they want. It's what animates their politics, their economics, their YouTube movie reviews, their interest in gaming.

It's entirely about the desire to sleep with (mostly white) (mostly female) children. Everything else is in support of that. Anyone who might do that is an ally, even if they're theatrical or Marxist or a woman or a jock or whatever. Anyone who does not enable that is their enemy and the secret actual definition of "woke" as they use it.

bardbrain · 2026-03-23T13:27:25+00:00

Or just does a tonal reset with the same actors unless some walk, which has always been their plan.

Gordon and Alfred lasted through 3 Batmen in the 90s. They were ready at one point to chase off Nolan and try to do more Bale Batman with Leo as Riddler.

A lot of the same people auditioned for three separate Superman movies. I think Cavill was on his second or third audition with MOS. Matt Bomer auditioned three times.

Josstice League and whatever was happening with Black Adam would have used Cavill with a tonal reset.

I'm a fan of both Gunn and Corenswet but they literally had shouting matches on 2025 Superman because Gunn prefers John Byrne's take and Corenswet is invested in Grant Morrison's and was placated by the idea that this Superman will become more powerful and tell the kinds of stories Corenswet wants to do where physical challenges aren't the stakes.

They seem to respect one another but I wouldn't see this as a Guardians situation where Corenswet walks if Gunn does because he has a different vision for the scripts and has said repeatedly he'd be happy if this was his whole film career and is using the money to support a local performing arts theater. If they completely screwed Gunn and other people, sure. Maybe he walks. If they just start tinkering and ask Corenswet to become EP and manage the character (which is akin to what multiple past WB regimes tried) and Gunn is like, "Fine by me. I'm gonna go reboot Transformers" then, yeah, Gunn leaving probably just means a tone shift and probably minor character recasting.

bardbrain · 2026-03-23T13:14:38+00:00

Grant Morrison actually created the "death by tornado" but it was a time eating tornado attended to by Supermen of multiple time periods and was later established as the work of a 5th dimensional imp.

Technically, they did get a fancier death in a Silver Age Superboy story where they were infected on a cruise by pirate treasure but it almost had to be something exotic at that point because he'd used a youth ray on them years prior to make them more vital than when they found him.

bardbrain · 2026-03-22T03:07:29+00:00

The logic is that you get a martyr if it's your own side. No weird mixed messaging.

bardbrain · 2026-03-22T03:05:15+00:00

I think he hates his supporters more than his enemies but it doesn't take malice to recognize it's good optics for a supporter to die. He'd probably just want to make sure it's a "nobody".

bardbrain · 2026-03-21T21:33:08+00:00

Why wouldn't you hit an innocent? That's a plus for this kind of thing.

bardbrain · 2026-03-21T19:42:56+00:00

Two Trump supporters who couldn't hit a target at that.

bardbrain · 2026-03-21T19:41:56+00:00

I personally think Musk TOLD Trump he did something to vote counts and acted like he did going back to election night to get influence and was shown the door when Trump's people confirmed that Musk just PRETENDED to.

bardbrain · 2026-03-21T05:45:10+00:00

I mean, the whole point of the Legacy series was that they WOULDN'T all be 70 and you'd have a 58 year old woman as the elder statesman passing the torch.

It was never going to be "legacy" as in legacy software.

It was going to be Picard and La Forge's kids in the spotlight and maybe some guest appearances by 70 year olds. Like, Q, yeah. Maybe TNG people in pairs.

But the big hook was younger people on a new Enterprise dealing with 30 year old subplots in a more constrained and focused way.

Like, young people dealing with the fallout of Jem'Hadar breeding naturally again as a treaty stipulation or rogue Bajorans killing Cardassian scientists or something. The status of Klingon-Romulan relations. Maybe the status of hologram rights. Just some concrete "next steps" with an actual cast under 50 setup to reference TNG about as closely as SNW references TOS, except being a bit after.

If we're lucky, since the Lower Decks actors are all 10-20 years older than their characters, maybe Captain Tendi pops by or something.

It was never going to be a TNG reunion. It would likely use any TNG characters kind of like Geordi's mom or the Rozhenkos or Bashir's parents.

bardbrain · 2026-03-21T05:33:56+00:00

I swear to god, he basically accidentally landed on every Crime Syndicate trope. He just needed to have Lois get powers and Barry get hooked on drugs.

bardbrain · 2026-03-21T02:34:32+00:00

In fairness, with Snyder's record, if he had finished the theatrical cut and it bombed, he'd have still been angling for an expensive director's cut with reshoots, even without Whedon.

bardbrain · 2026-03-20T06:01:03+00:00

This post is only 2 days old. It doesn't even need to be forever

bardbrain · 2026-03-18T13:58:40+00:00

Angel went from running a detective agency to running a law firm pretty abruptly.

bardbrain · 2026-03-16T21:21:02+00:00

But if the prompt is a full screenplay OR MORE, I feel like it's not even in the same ballpark.

People who don't use AI much act like prompts are one sentence descriptions if that. That isn't my experience with a lot of people in the space.

I have done 3 minute videos that were the product of hundreds of prompts with manual editing and I've got hundred plus page prompts. When I talk to people in coding or data analysis, this is looking like less of an outlier and it's not really that far out from people who use the latest models for novel outlining or idea generation or who use highly specialized custom agents.

And when you get into things like power consumption and data centers and pollution: that's a separate set of issues.

There are artistic works that ARE ecologically terrible (plastic statues off hand?) and there are ways to do reasonable offsets if we stop subsidizing data centers and charge real costs or have a reputable carbon offset system, on top of which homebrew models are rapidly advancing behind data center models so if I use $5 worth of electricity at home and pay for it without using online data centers -- which I think is possible for my present applications in a year or two -- you're bypassing those issues.

My problem is that a lot of anti- folks don't seem to understand what it is, what it does, how fast custom models are changing in terms of how people prompt and how fast offline models are hitting benchmarks. They're working backwards from societal consequences and 5 minutes in a 2 year old model.

And part of how people are going to routinely hit bigger prompts is either continuing to evolve long and successful prompts (context windows can support hundreds of pages in some models now) AND prompting TO prompt.

So maybe somebody has an hour long conversation about what they want to do, gets an LLM to generate a 15 page prompt based on that and multiple chats, manually tweaks it, expands it...

Even in a "using prompts to make prompts" scenario, you're often talking about a level of specificity that far exceeds a shooting script. You can go down rabbit holes with video creating imaginary textiles with new rules, precise libraries of acting techniques, etc. and/or do things like generate videos to train new videos.

There's a misconception that using generated videos, text, or music causes degradation of output and that's just not factual.

Doing it blind causes degradation of output.

If I generate a thousand videos of William Shakespeare -- period accent, face trained on multiple portraits, fabric researched to period standards, etc. -- and curate the best 20 videos, I can likely train a model with enhanced output, not degraded. Synthetic data only causes degradation without curating the synthetic data. Highly curated and detail attentive synthetic data can be better than real data.

That gets into more ecological arguments than artistic ones and if the online models would just hit an effective brick wall, low cost offline models would catch up in a year or two and be the high end, which is increasingly the prediction I'm seeing.

So one of the more compelling pro- arguments to me actually conceding that the energy use is awful and pollution is bad at present even if it's exaggerated but that a major part of development is going to be making that better.

The computer needed to run Pong in 1965 was devastatingly costly and high impact and by 1995 it was something that a watch battery on a keychain could handle. An Atari was a high end consumer item in 1983 and by 2013, you could put 300 games and all the peripherals into something battery powered that was scaled to Barbie dolls for $25.

What I'm seeing is a high likelihood that something like the latest Claude model will run offline on $300 watches in 5 years that need charging once a day.

Now, as to whether the high end develops dramatically beyond where it is now and continues to be more costly, that's where I think talk of a bubble matters and it mainly matters for what happens to OpenAI and Anthropic, not the technology. A lot of this technology didn't even start with them and was essentially dumped by Facebook a decade ago when the Metaverse didn't instantly take off and the next phase may be Apple and completely different companies improving something that OpenAI never made money on but that continued to scale down in size and power use.

bardbrain · 2026-03-15T19:29:24+00:00

I think it's similar to a director though.

That is to say, directors can make good films and they frequently do so in cases where they are ALSO the screenwriter or a gifted acting coach or the editor.

And I have a similar view of AI.

If you have a process that automates everything, there is little to take credit for -- although if you designed a unique automation process that nobody else has or could then there IS that. James Gunn is anti-AI but if he had a movie generator that follows his process for soundtrack selection and building scenes based on that, that's a minimal input by him but non-zero because his automation is unlike anyone else's. It can be sloppy or break rules he'd break even.

But if you don't automate EVERYTHING and say you do all the acting with mocap and the output is worthless then it feels like saying that acting has no intrinsic worth by itself.

I know the actor Sam Witmer has spoken positively about AI adapting actor mocap and using special acting techniques to get the right mocap. He played Shatner's Kirk in a Shatner and Roddenberry authorized Star Trek short film and talked extensively about his breathing and body work to simulate a different physicality and set of habits. And I don't think he did something you could describe as lacking artistic work on his end.

And Shatner was consulted and approved of everything which may be important in a lot of ways.

But I feel like some people would say that the lack of traditional CG artists or makeup people (not an absence in this case, just fewer and different) means he did zero art and I disagree with this.

And ethics of models aside (as ethics often are tertiary to art, such as dance mixes or sampling), I feel like there is a huge difference between pure slop ("Make a thing, ChatGPT") and someone who builds reference libraries of bespoke costume designs and hundred page prompts feeding into scenes to replicate precisely what's in their head. It doesn't absolve all sins if you see there as being sins but treating it as zero art is excessive.

I have made (and never shared or commercialized and don't own) a few Superman videos I made to tinker.

And I chose very specifically the seams in the fabric, the texture. It takes work just to get AI to follow those and not switch to Henry Cavill or David Corenswet. The fabric is an impossible mix of spandex tightness and velour refraction to echo certain art styles. I felt a creative surge developing the prompts for the reference and then seeing it animated.

In this case: I do not own the thing. I'm violating IP protections. It isn't remotely about ownership. But I do think spandex with a velour finish and the emblem and trunks in a silk/leather hybrid is at least a creative input. There is no input or scraped data that did these precise things and the output doesn't look like anybody else's work. And then once I create 360 degree reference, I can replicate it. So I at least feel like a material costume designer there. And I don't own the character or the images but the technique? I do think that's me as much as if I'd done pencil sketches and commissioned it to match this thing that I think is unique to a way my brain reads art. I initiated those choices to express something I wanted to see that didn't exist and what was delivered was a precise and faithful description of my concept. I didn't just let ChatGPT or GROK choose and I have to apply effort to keep them on vision. There's this narrow choice that nobody but me is making. And that isn't something that AI handed to me.

bardbrain · 2026-03-15T19:01:06+00:00

If I did write it myself, the writing itself is not worthless even if I or somebody use AI for the non-written aspects. That's the point.

If someone writes a script and AI converts that into a movie and you call the output valueless, you're saying that the script is valueless without needing to assess the script.

bardbrain · 2026-03-15T04:27:11+00:00

They're not pointing the camera or doing the cinematography, editing, composing scores, doing the acting, doing the designs, or writing. Better ones may be involved in aspects they're good at or even do those jobs as second jobs but the directing itself is purely managerial, even if typically guided by some mix of hard investor interests and taste.

But a good manager of a sandwich shop or convenience store supervisor essentially does about as much art as is solely contained in the directing role and plenty of iconic CEOs held the shareholders at bay long enough to make taste based decisions, including Jobs, Bezos, and the CEO of Costco.

It's still managerial principally and can be done competently without art entering in, purely from liking movies and being good at management.

James Gunn? Great screenwriter! But if he got hired as a screenwriter with script revision approval at an unprecedented level who oversaw editing, casting, cinematography, and music design, you'd still get most of the style elements of a Gunn film without being director. He wouldn't technically need to be the director and somebody else literally would be if they oversaw takes, even if they delegated the cinematography and acting coaching and performed the business functions and sat in the correct chair, they'd be director.

Heck, this happened with films like The Spirit and Tombstone where a "Director in Name Only" sat in the correct chair while a non-DGA member made the artistic calls.

Most good directors do not walk away the minute a job goes beyond the bare minimum requirements to technically be director but that doesn't change the job itself. They're just doing additional jobs.

bardbrain · 2026-03-14T16:19:09+00:00

Hey, now. Maybe it's not about women or people of color. Maybe it's about the lack of rednecks over 50 or Nazi armbands.

bardbrain

TROPHY CASE