Kerry, 26. You'll probably learn more than you want to know about me. I like dance, and science, and Peter Pan and Harry Potter and poetry, and sometimes I get stuck in my mind. I am in recovery and there is a chance that some posts may be triggering. "Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world." --Voltaire
I am that merry wanderer of the night.
I jest to Oberon and make him smile
When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,
Neighing in likeness of a filly foal:
And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,
In very likeness of a roasted crab,
And when she drinks, against her lips I bob
And on her wither’d dewlap pour the ale.
“The oldest olive tree in the world located on the island of Crete. It is estimated to be as over 3,000 years old and still produces olives.”
—
gotta share @telesilla’s tags -
#that was (give or take) around the time of the bronze age collapse #crete was no longer a major player #and the known world was kinda in turmoil #and yet someone planted an olive tree #i’m not saying there’s a direct parallel #but you know…systemic collapse thanks to many things including climate change #and it sucked for a lot of people #but they still needed olive oil #and idk man…maybe plant a tree #because the world has ended so many times #but the tree is still here #and so are we
Anonymous asked:
Nobody is making anyone go into scriptwriting. No one is born in a Netflix company town where their dad takes them into the script mines at age 12. Fuck writers who want to get paid more than once for the same job. They should only get residuals AFTER all the people who do REAL WORK, like construction, grips, costume, makeup & animators etc. Most of them are much better at their jobs than writers especially for streaming services, and they are what screenwriters can lean on & novelists can't.
racefortheironthrone answered:
People need to realize that the unions for white collar people like WGA or SIEU or NEA (public sector unions are why cops who kill the people they were supposed to serve & protect remain employed get pensions) is not the AFL-CIO or any other historical union fighting for the lives of the people who built the country’s industry and made it run, any more than the NRA are the Minutemen of 1775 New England.
First, go fuck yourself, you fucking scab. No, seriously - you don’t come to my blog and spout off about what workers deserve unions and decent pay and what ones don’t, like it’s your fucking decision. The intellectual labor that writers perform is just as real as any other work done on a film set - “all who labor by hand or brain” is the inherent logic of industrial unionism for a reason.
Second, writers aren’t asking to get paid more than once: residuals are deferred pay, you absolute moron. In Hollywood, whether it’s writers or actors or voice talent or whatever, you get a small fraction up front - it’s usually an ok check, depending on the union’s day rates and so forth, but you can’t make a living off stitching these together - and then most of your pay comes from monthly royalty checks that provide you with the income you need to live off when you’re between jobs.
The problem is that, historically in Hollywood, residuals have been structured with a very long “tail” - the payments start out relatively low and then get more generous over time as the show has more seasons and (presumably) goes into syndication. This doesn’t work with streaming’s new business model, where increasingly shows are getting 2-3 seasons max and streaming services have become increasingly quick to not just cancel shows but yank them off their servers in order to avoid paying residuals.
So what WGA writers are fighting for is a system that ensures writers (but also actors and other creative workers, because the unions pattern bargain) get a fair share of the show’s revenue, even if the show is only given 2-3 seasons.
Third, the U.S labor movement would not exist today if it wasn’t for white collar workers and public sector workers. About half of the U.S labor movement - 7 million workers - is public sector, and those workers are overwhelmingly women of color, mostly working as either teachers or postal workers. Likewise, about half the U.S labor movement is made up of white collar workers, and we’re graduate students and adjuncts and lab researchers, teachers and social workers, administrators and IT departments.
I’m both public sector and white collar, and I’m a member of an NEA union. I’m an adjunct professor who earns $6,000 a course and it’s my job to get working adults with jobs and families who’ve never gone to college or who’ve been out of higher ed for a decade to graduate with a bachelor’s or a master’s. If you don’t think that’s real work, you’re free to research and write all the lectures and powerpoints, deliver those in an entertaining and educational fashion, answer a flood of questions from students who need help navigating academia, and then grade all the midterms and finals and research papers.
...FYI.
One other data point to add: at any given point in time, 95% of the WGA is unemployed.* So what money you do manage to make needs to be enough to last you a while. (A five-figure script minimum may look like a lot, viewed from the outside... until state and Federal taxes have had their bite of it, and you realize that whatever's left may be the only writing money that person makes for a year. Or two. Or five.) This is where residuals become vital.
*I refuse to use the anodyne old theatrical-arts euphemism for not being engaged in paid work, "resting". If you're about to be broke (again!), trust me, rest is the last thing on your mind.
Real effective union if they can’t keep ninety five percent of their members gainfully employed.
That’s one reason why we’re on strike. Because we want to keep more writers in work longer.
But missing from your snark is the understanding that different kinds of jobs exist. Some jobs exist to allow the workers to work every day, or every weekday. Some jobs the workers work intensively for days or weeks or months and then may not work for a long time.
That’s where the concept of residuals comes from.
Actors on film or TV will only work for short periods, most of them. But you will enjoy their work for decades. Their unions have worked hard to make sure they got paid when films or shows they were in get repeated. That’s a feature, not a bug. There are only so many shows being shot, only so many movies being made.
The problem with a streaming world is actors and writers aren't being properly paid when things are available streaming all the time, because in the beginning these services were starting out and the producers asked us to cut them some slack as they weren't even profitable yet.
I’ve got friends who are members. I don’t broadly disagree with the stated goals of the union. I agree that residuals as they are are pathetic and they should definitely take streaming into account (if for no other reason than that those industries would be forced to publicize streaming statistics).
My point, such as it was, was more that they don’t seem very good at achieving those goals.
But they do.
Here. Perhaps this will help:
We need to go back to using sailing ships full time like immediately. Yes it would take longer to get places but the Aesthetic is unmatched
Like there is nothing sexier hthan this
Can’t wait for OP to get scurvy
Are you under the impression that the ships themselves are what caused scurvy
Once again. Do you think this is the fault of the ships themselves
The full rotation of the Moon as seen by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
When I was a kid my mum had one of those great big oversized Reader’s Digest World Atlases you still see pop up in thrift stores from time to time, and, fun fact, at the time our edition had been published, a few years before my birth, we had not yet orbited the back of the moon, and so while the front of the moon was shown in great detail (humanity having studied it for tens of thousands of years), the far side, the dark side of the moon, the side that is permanently facing away from us, that side was mostly just blank, with a very few details around the edges that we are able to see from here due to the slight wobble.
Seeing the dark side of the moon is that recent to us, as a species. And here it is, just another thing to pause on for a moment, and smile at, and go, “Neat!” before we scroll on to something else.
The present blows my mind, sometimes. I kind of love it.
This is marvelous!
I freaking hate LED headlights. I should not be BLINDED by the fucking SUN at nighttime and then end up into the opposite fucking lane because douchebag Mc shit nozzle needs to be the biggest and brightest Ford Super Sucker 2045 Big Boy Truck at the Bald White Man Sunglasses Ball
"I'm not making fun of the Great Depression!
...I am making fun of the Great Depression."
Small things that make me sad about America #1: they have no Bramley Apples here. Big knobbly ugly sour cooking apples. They do not exist in this place.
Hol up
COMPUTER, ENHANCE IMAGE
MISTER NEIL GAIMAN OF WRITING FAME HAS MADE A SPELLING ERROR
HE IS HUMAN AFTER ALL, REJOICE!!!!
You ever been sitting there and suddenly realise that you can just... do things? Like not even in a "be gay, do crime" sort of way, but you're just sitting there bored out of your mind because there's no work or laundry you should be doing and you're tired of browsing tumblr and reading through strangers' arguments on reddit, and you're suddenly hit with a "hold on, I have free will and a pair of hands, I can just do whatever I want", because whatever you're doing is optional and you can do some other voluntary activity.
Anyway, today I am going to see if I can weave a basket out of shredded newspaper.
