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shadowkat1. Oh this too good not to share -- I snagged it from yourlibrarian.
Fanfic in Television Writing
Beat seven, spring 2019. Los Angeles. It has been a long time since I dared reread any of the wish-fulfillment stories I scribbled in my lonely teenage notebooks, but I suspect if I did, they'd contain something a little like this: You're a freewheeling political reporter on assignment on a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean, covering a tech conference full of Ukrainian models, when Joss Whedon calls and asks if you've ever thought of writing for television. Of course you have, but only in the way that you've thought of being an astronaut. Six weeks later you're in California, sitting in your first writers' room, on Whedon's new sci-fi show for HBO, The Nevers, and it turns out that the evenings you spent at college arguing about Buffy with your best friends were a better use of your time than you realized.
I always suspected that Los Angeles was largely fictional, but I knew it for sure once I arrived. It's a spread-out, traffic-stinking daydream baking in the endless sun, as if a normal metropolis melted into a puddle in the heat of its own hype. There are palm trees everywhere. At least twice a week I wonder if I have walked through a magic screen into the television and my body is somewhere back in England, slowly stiffening.
Writers' rooms are intense. You take six to 10 clever, sensitive, ambitious people who spent their adolescence largely in their own heads, lure them with cash and sugary snacks, trap them in a room with whiteboards all around, and tell them to come out when they've scripted 10 or 20 episodes or killed each other, whichever comes first. Ideas bob to the surface and are batted away, friendships form, entire character arcs shift and change in a day; egos are stretched to snapping point and darlings are dashed against the rocks of studio notes and production budgets. And then you let the actors loose. Dropped in at the deep end of a whole new industry, I find it all fascinating. But then, watching the sausage get made actually enhances my breakfast experience.
On the second day on The Nevers, surrounded by still-blank whiteboards where the narrative DNA of the show had yet to be sequenced, two of us admitted shyly that we used to write Buffy fan fiction. Whedon looked at Jane Espenson, who wrote for Buffy and so many other shows we watched and who all of us were still too intimidated to talk to. “So did we,” she said. “We called it season 6.”
Hee. Yeah, I sort of figured that one out on my own -- that's why I got obsessed, the writers were having a lot of fun and experimenting. I couldn't believe they were doing it.
2. Creepy Puppet Dance Routine That Has a lot of interesting stuff going on.
3. Apparently Trump Actually Did Try to Buy Greenland from Denmark
I want to buy Greenland, said President Trump. No way, said the Danes and Greenlanders, who share control over the giant frozen island and its rich mineral treasures. Then I’m not going to visit your queen, shot back the self-proclaimed master of the real estate deal, who can’t stand being rebuffed. “Is this some sort of joke?” tweeted Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a former Danish prime minister, speaking for everyone.
That’s the gist of it, one of the more astounding plays by a president who finds new ways to amaze, alienate and infuriate almost daily.
To be fair to the president, acquiring Greenland would be nice for the United States. The island sits atop a trove of rare-earth metals, a category whose mining and export is increasingly dominated by China. It also has national security importance to the United States, which maintains its northernmost missile-warning, space surveillance and deepwater seaport at the Thule Air Base on Greenland’s northwestern coast. China has tried repeatedly to get a foothold on the island, but has been blocked so far by Denmark.
Mr. Trump is not the first American president to seek to buy Greenland; Harry Truman tried and failed in 1946. And earlier presidents did acquire quite a bit of territory through purchases: Thomas Jefferson concluded the Louisiana Purchase with France in 1803; Andrew Johnson bought Alaska in 1867; and Woodrow Wilson picked up the Danish West Indies, now the United States Virgin Islands, from Denmark in 1917.
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David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news — and offers reading suggestions from around the web — with commentary every weekday morning.
So Mr. Trump would have chalked up quite a historic feat had he closed on the acquisition of Greenland. But the United States doesn’t need to own Greenland to maintain a major military base there. More to the point, the world in which major powers deemed it their civilizing mission to conquer or buy territories and colonies is long over — witness the furor over Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.
“Greenland is not for sale,” declared the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, calling the idea “absurd.”
”Greenland is not Danish. Greenland belongs to Greenland,” she said. “I strongly hope that this is not meant seriously.”
She added, pointedly: “Thankfully, the time where you buy and sell other countries and populations is over. Let’s leave it there.”
Mr. Trump, responding on Wednesday, called Ms. Frederiksen’s response to his overture “nasty,” and said: “You don’t talk to the United States that way. At least under me.”
What came through in Mr. Trump’s approach was not realpolitik, but a crude and insulting transactional vision of a world in which buying a self-ruled territory and its more than 56,000 people was just another “large real estate deal” — in his view, one that Denmark should welcome because Greenland was purportedly draining $700 million a year in Danish subsidies.
When first reported in The Wall Street Journal last Friday, the idea drew howls of hilarity. But when Mr. Trump made clear he was serious, amusement turned to astonishment and, in Denmark and Greenland, to indignation. Mr. Trump’s claim that “Denmark essentially owns it” overlooked the fact that Greenland effectively runs its own affairs while Denmark, its sovereign owner, takes care of defense and foreign policy.
Greenland was not amused. So now, we've pissed off Greenland and Denmark? Really?
I was however amused. Because honestly, at this point...what can one do? The world has gone mad and I'm just living in it.
Fanfic in Television Writing
Beat seven, spring 2019. Los Angeles. It has been a long time since I dared reread any of the wish-fulfillment stories I scribbled in my lonely teenage notebooks, but I suspect if I did, they'd contain something a little like this: You're a freewheeling political reporter on assignment on a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean, covering a tech conference full of Ukrainian models, when Joss Whedon calls and asks if you've ever thought of writing for television. Of course you have, but only in the way that you've thought of being an astronaut. Six weeks later you're in California, sitting in your first writers' room, on Whedon's new sci-fi show for HBO, The Nevers, and it turns out that the evenings you spent at college arguing about Buffy with your best friends were a better use of your time than you realized.
I always suspected that Los Angeles was largely fictional, but I knew it for sure once I arrived. It's a spread-out, traffic-stinking daydream baking in the endless sun, as if a normal metropolis melted into a puddle in the heat of its own hype. There are palm trees everywhere. At least twice a week I wonder if I have walked through a magic screen into the television and my body is somewhere back in England, slowly stiffening.
Writers' rooms are intense. You take six to 10 clever, sensitive, ambitious people who spent their adolescence largely in their own heads, lure them with cash and sugary snacks, trap them in a room with whiteboards all around, and tell them to come out when they've scripted 10 or 20 episodes or killed each other, whichever comes first. Ideas bob to the surface and are batted away, friendships form, entire character arcs shift and change in a day; egos are stretched to snapping point and darlings are dashed against the rocks of studio notes and production budgets. And then you let the actors loose. Dropped in at the deep end of a whole new industry, I find it all fascinating. But then, watching the sausage get made actually enhances my breakfast experience.
On the second day on The Nevers, surrounded by still-blank whiteboards where the narrative DNA of the show had yet to be sequenced, two of us admitted shyly that we used to write Buffy fan fiction. Whedon looked at Jane Espenson, who wrote for Buffy and so many other shows we watched and who all of us were still too intimidated to talk to. “So did we,” she said. “We called it season 6.”
Hee. Yeah, I sort of figured that one out on my own -- that's why I got obsessed, the writers were having a lot of fun and experimenting. I couldn't believe they were doing it.
2. Creepy Puppet Dance Routine That Has a lot of interesting stuff going on.
3. Apparently Trump Actually Did Try to Buy Greenland from Denmark
I want to buy Greenland, said President Trump. No way, said the Danes and Greenlanders, who share control over the giant frozen island and its rich mineral treasures. Then I’m not going to visit your queen, shot back the self-proclaimed master of the real estate deal, who can’t stand being rebuffed. “Is this some sort of joke?” tweeted Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a former Danish prime minister, speaking for everyone.
That’s the gist of it, one of the more astounding plays by a president who finds new ways to amaze, alienate and infuriate almost daily.
To be fair to the president, acquiring Greenland would be nice for the United States. The island sits atop a trove of rare-earth metals, a category whose mining and export is increasingly dominated by China. It also has national security importance to the United States, which maintains its northernmost missile-warning, space surveillance and deepwater seaport at the Thule Air Base on Greenland’s northwestern coast. China has tried repeatedly to get a foothold on the island, but has been blocked so far by Denmark.
Mr. Trump is not the first American president to seek to buy Greenland; Harry Truman tried and failed in 1946. And earlier presidents did acquire quite a bit of territory through purchases: Thomas Jefferson concluded the Louisiana Purchase with France in 1803; Andrew Johnson bought Alaska in 1867; and Woodrow Wilson picked up the Danish West Indies, now the United States Virgin Islands, from Denmark in 1917.
Sign up for David Leonhardt's newsletter
David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news — and offers reading suggestions from around the web — with commentary every weekday morning.
So Mr. Trump would have chalked up quite a historic feat had he closed on the acquisition of Greenland. But the United States doesn’t need to own Greenland to maintain a major military base there. More to the point, the world in which major powers deemed it their civilizing mission to conquer or buy territories and colonies is long over — witness the furor over Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.
“Greenland is not for sale,” declared the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, calling the idea “absurd.”
”Greenland is not Danish. Greenland belongs to Greenland,” she said. “I strongly hope that this is not meant seriously.”
She added, pointedly: “Thankfully, the time where you buy and sell other countries and populations is over. Let’s leave it there.”
Mr. Trump, responding on Wednesday, called Ms. Frederiksen’s response to his overture “nasty,” and said: “You don’t talk to the United States that way. At least under me.”
What came through in Mr. Trump’s approach was not realpolitik, but a crude and insulting transactional vision of a world in which buying a self-ruled territory and its more than 56,000 people was just another “large real estate deal” — in his view, one that Denmark should welcome because Greenland was purportedly draining $700 million a year in Danish subsidies.
When first reported in The Wall Street Journal last Friday, the idea drew howls of hilarity. But when Mr. Trump made clear he was serious, amusement turned to astonishment and, in Denmark and Greenland, to indignation. Mr. Trump’s claim that “Denmark essentially owns it” overlooked the fact that Greenland effectively runs its own affairs while Denmark, its sovereign owner, takes care of defense and foreign policy.
Greenland was not amused. So now, we've pissed off Greenland and Denmark? Really?
I was however amused. Because honestly, at this point...what can one do? The world has gone mad and I'm just living in it.