Hello Kitty Drunk Driver

Happy All Hallows’ Eve. 

This woman should be Darth Vader’s running mate from my previous post. She was pulled over for drunk driving in a Hello Kitty outfit.

mugshots are public domain

Cosplayer hint: Nothing screams sober to the police like driving down the wrong side of the road while wearing a Hello Kitty costume. 

Darth Denied

Darth Vader was turned away from the polls in Ukraine because he wouldn’t remove his mask.

The only person in this whole thing who smiles is a young woman in a knit cap when Darth brushes past her. Everyone else takes it so seriously.  

Marissa Meyer’s Writing Process

Marissa Meyer, author of Cinder, has posted her writing process from idea to finished book. 

She describes in detail such things as outlining, using Scrivener (I still use Word), how to take criticism from beta readers, and the publisher’s editorial process. Her first installment is here. Her overall blog is here.

I met Marissa Meyer last year when she spoke at the Bothell Library. Instead of simply reading from a manuscript, she regaled us with older versions of fairy stories, as I described in my blog post.

personal photo 

So if you hear that Marissa Meyer is speaking in your area, be sure to go see her! 

Ripping the Mask off of Movie Composers

Who really composed the score for Frozen?

If you go to the site for The Score and page down to the recording of “The Orchestrator” episode, listen to the first eleven minutes (or click to the third segment and listen to the first five minutes). It will change your view of movie scores forever. Some of these great movie composers send a file with the most bare bones of a score to an orchestrator, and the orchestrator actually fills it out or cuts it back, then he writes the actual written score composed of notes for all the different instruments in the orchestra.

image by August Hogn

That demo the orchestrator was given for “For the First Time” was a joke.

This rips the mask off of some the supposedly great composers in the business. The closest comparison is when a movie script is handed to a novelist who works closely with the movie business, and he proceeds to take a 90 page script and turn it into a novel of 300+ pages.

I remember one particular scene where a woman rolled a bicycle out of her room. The novelist added in the feel of the bicycle, the crumpling sound from some objects on the floor, and how all this reminded her of her father. At most, I imagine the movie script would just say she wheeled the bicycle out.

But this novelization process is open and above board—the writer’s name appears on the cover of the novelization. But the orchestrators’ names do not appear on the film scores. In the future, we will look back and see the orchestrators were the real geniuses.

Stephen Hawking: There are no black holes

Stephen Hawking is one of the creators of black hole theory using relativistic physics. (Actually, it would have been possible to come up with a black hole theory using the old Newtonian physics, but nobody ever bothered to.) Hawking has actually become quite the celebrity from his work, and he even appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He’s one of the most easily recognized scientists in the world.

A black hole during a total eclipse 

Now Hawking has rethought it and declared black holes do not exist. A standard feature of science fiction has vanished, as if it had fallen into . . . well, we’ll think of something. Easy for Hawking to say—sorry I was wrong about what’s made me famous over the past few decades, next I’ll invent some other impossible things for you yokels to believe in.