frustratedpilot | Entries tagged with imagination

A very long time ago, I received a bunch of built-up 1/72 airplane models--including FIVE F4U Corsairs. (One Airfix, two Heller [now SMER] and two old-production Revell, to be specific.) They were all in bad shape and poorly built to begin with, so I stripped the paint off, carefully disassembled them and started looking for alternative parts.

My search is a little more serious now.

If High Planes did a detailling set for F4U-1(A), F4U-1D, F4U-1C and/or FG-1D, I'd be all over them. As it is, I may just get some F4U-5N sets from them, "impossible variant" be darned.

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of May 11, 2017

You can bake your shoes in the oven at 350 degrees for 40 minutes, but that won't turn them into loaves of bread. Know what I'm saying, Sagittarius? Just because a chicken has wings doesn't mean it can fly over the rainbow. Catch my drift? You'll never create a silk purse out of dental floss and dead leaves. That's why I offer you the following advice: In the next two weeks, do your best to avoid paper tigers, red herrings, fool's gold, fake news, Trojan horses, straw men, pink elephants, convincing pretenders, and invisible bridges. There'll be a reward if you do: close encounters with shockingly beautiful honesty and authenticity that will be among your most useful blessings of 2017.

I have a bunch of song lyrics to quote but I won't as a service to you.

(Linking to an NPR Post ABOUT THIS, I added:)

I remember when OMNI magazine had an article about a fiction-writing artificial intelligence named Racter.

Elsewhere today I on Facebook I linked to an article about a thesis-writing app that has suddenly become a tool for abuse among scientific scholarly “authors”.

Allow me to connect some more dots here. Upstairs, I have a lectern dictionary I snitched from my brother, who acquired it in a neighbor’s garage sale. One of the features of this dictionary is a bibliography of the World’s Great Books, as judged in the 1950s when the dictionary was compiled. Over 2500 books are included, all now public domain.

In theory, a battery of artificial intelligences can figure out all the story genres you like, and then mine the public domain for paradigms on which to construct new material especially for you, in manners that particularly appeal to you. They would make a whole new canon—just for you.

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of January 30, 2014

Can you imagine what it would be like to live without any hiding and pretending? How would you feel if you could relax into total honesty? What if you were free to say exactly what you mean, unburdened by the fear that telling the truth might lead to awkward complications? Such a pure and exalted condition is impossible for anyone to accomplish, of course. But you have a shot at accomplishing the next best thing in the coming week. For best results, don't try to be perfectly candid and utterly uninhibited. Aim for 75 percent.

When it comes the old saw about the truth hurting, I'm something of a masochist. I never could tell a pretty lie about myself.

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of July 18, 2013

The Sagittarian writer and artist William Blake (1757-1827) made drawings of many eminent people who had died before he was born. Julius Caesar was the subject of one of his portraits. Others included Dante, Shakespeare, and Moses. How did Blake manage to capture their likenesses in such great detail? He said their spirits visited him in the form of apparitions. Really? I suppose that's possible. But it's also important to note that he had a robust and exquisite imagination. I suspect that in the coming weeks you, too, will have an exceptional ability to visualize things in your mind's eye. Maybe not with the gaudy skill of Blake, but potent nevertheless. What would be the best use of this magic power?

Fat lot of good it does to have an imagination in times when nobody else wants you to get ideas.

March of The Machines.

There was a part that meshed directly with the "firmware" portion of POI's Machine. Law offices, prosecutor and defender divisions are now commonly using analytical computers to research cases and collect evidence in the "discovery" phase. How much you want to bet that The Machine already is looking in on every single one of these systems to tell who's being investigated...and who's doing the investigating? Maybe even to recruit potential future assets?

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of August 2, 2012

For a while, French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was very poor. He lived in a place that had no heat and almost no furniture. To enhance his environment, he resorted to the use of fantasy. On one of his bare walls, he wrote the words, "rosewood paneling with ornamental cabinet." On another, he wrote "Gobelin tapestry with Venetian mirror." Over the empty fireplace he declared, "Picture by Raphael." That's the level of imaginative power I encourage you to summon in the coming weeks, Sagittarius. So much of what you'll need will come from that simple magic.

Yes, there are times when exercizing a fantasy is more satisfying than outright making reality of it. That "old airplane movies show host" idea, for example.

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Where does FPilot end and Stephen R. Bierce begin? How about Stone Tepid? Dr. Scribbles (who's been absent for an ominously long time)? The Unknown Ramone?

This MAY be the start of a series...

BLACK SHEEP SQUADRON (Reimagined)

Anybody else think that Charlie Sheen, now that he's no longer on that sitcom with Jon Cryer and the 1/2 Man, would be perfect to portray Gregory "Pappy" Boyington? He even looks closer to the real man than Robert Conrad did in the 1970s series! Of course, we aren't going for a HOT SHOTS! prequel comedy...more like BAND OF BROTHERS. Closer to the actual history than the original TV series was.

The story, for those who never saw the original: Boyington was a fighter pilot who started when warplanes were still covered in canvas and open to the elements. (His original callsign was "Rats".) He left the Marine Corps months before Pearl Harbor to join the Flying Tigers in China, and had enough success with them to be given a squadron command. But then he blew the job just as the Regular Army was in the process of taking over the Tigers once America officially entered the war with Japan. Sent back Stateside, he suffered the dual shame of being dismissed from command for good cause, and for being in a unit the Regular soldiers called "chicken".

He re-entered the Marines, and with help from old buddies still in the Corps, he went back into action with the Cactus Air Force (the scratch multi-service task unit on Guadalcanal), mainly as a wingmate for other aces. After that tour ended, he arranged, with more abetting from his old friends, to steal command of a new squadron that was being formed and crew it with men in similar situations to his own--those the Regular Forces would have rather kept "safely out of trouble". With the latest fighter available--the F4U Corsair--the Black Sheep went into action and began re-writing the rules of air combat against the Japanese.

It was a meteoric tour of duty, only a few months in the fall and winter of 1943. The press loved the Black Sheep much more than the other American combat men in the area did, who loved them much more than the American commanders did, who loved them only slightly more than the enemy did. Pappy earned his redemption, becoming the top ace of the Marines--but paid for it. He was shot down while trying to save one of his own from getting killed, and was captured. He spent the rest of the War in a prison camp, while his men didn't know if he was alive.

The combination of his loss and the air action moving closer to Japan meant the Marines could rotate the Black Sheep out of theater. The squadron was disbanded, and then reformed with one of the original Black Sheep as the commander. They would be based on the carrier USS Franklin for the assault on Okinawa--their ship was hit by enemy bombers and half the men killed while they were being briefed for a mission. There has been a Black Sheep Squadron in the Marines ever since, and it has gone into action again and again, notably in the Korean War and Desert Storm.

I forget how Mom and I learned about Syd Field and plot structure formatting. I have a copy of his The Screenwriter's Workbook and it's been useful since the day we got it. As seen, it simplifies the process down to the level of a crossword or Sudoku puzzle.

More To Come.

Hey.

This season there are all sorts of ads on TV from IBM about how they're developing software systems that can so analyse written language to nail down meaning that they could possibly beat Jeopardy!'s double-entendre-laden game model.

I'm intrigued, but not so concerned yet.

The reason being that I wonder if anybody has found a way to analyse "tone of voice".

On DeviantArt, there is a worksheet created by Nancy Lorenz called "25 Essential Expressions Challenge", intended to train cartoonists and comic artists in designing characters that are consistant no matter what mood they are in, but still easy to read mood-wise.

The Expressions:
* Happy * Sad * Pleased * Angry * Confused * Tired * Surprised/Shocked * Irritated * WTF?! * Triumphant * Afraid * Bereft * Flirty * Serious/Interested * Silly * Hollow/Blank * Incredulous * Confident * Fierce * Despondent * Impaired * Raging * Ironic/Sarcastic * Disgusted * Ill/Nauseous

Now, in theory each and every one of those Expressions corresponds to a tone of voice, as spoken or as heard. If we can get artificial intelligences to both recognize just those 25, and respond correctly to those, we'll have come a very very long way toward fulfilling the technology's potential.

Besides, I wish Xtranormal could upgrade its dialogue system to include expressions as the above. Not only would it make the resulting videos more fun to watch, it would make it more attractive to use Xtranormal.

FP

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At this rate, another planet.

Not the kind you think.

Tonight, as I was downloading something I now need an unpacker program to open (that I will acquire when I have bandwidth/time), I went to the storage boxes and retrieved an old VHS tape of MTV's The Maxx and watched most of an episode. It was the one in which Maxx is stuck in a Dr. Seuss poem, and then must fight Mr. Gone's hired assassin Hammerhead once he re-emerges in the "real world", while Julie and Sara's mom engage in an R&R trip that is neither sufficiently relaxed nor restful.

That series had been probably one of the most pervading influences on me and my creativity at that time of my life. Ethics & Toy Soldiers was, thematically, a fusion of The Maxx with Gulliver's Travels. The Maxx pretty much says that it's about who we want to be as people, versus who we're forced to be in this world; E.& T.S. was meant to be about the world we want to live in, versus the world that forces itself upon us.

But once again, the reality of the Internet Age has changed everything. Each of us, we inhabit roles we would have only had our imaginary friends to play, have become one another's imaginary friends. The Internet is Maxx's Outback, inhabited by monsters and Izzes and Leopards and really strange stuff...but it also has a comforting effect on us because it's part US.

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The art of the story. The tales my imagination tells me when I lay down to sleep every night.

Hey.

Just out of curiosity, I looked up a couple central sources on kit cars. Just to see if there was the possibility of eventually doing something with Moonshine if the opportunity came along.

Moonshine is better off in its current state. The kit car industry these days is more focussed on muscle now than it was when I thought it was in its boom era (the Seventies, when everybody and his brother had conversion kits to transform Volkswagens into Bugatti replicas and dune buggies and those faux Can-Am racers seen in the original Death Race 2000). Yes, you can convert a Corvette into something even hotter. Yes, you can build a Cobra just like the one from Gumball Rally, only with 21st Century suspension components and that modern Ford V8 I mentioned a couple weeks ago. Yes, you could convert a modern pickup truck hulk into a replica 1940 delivery van. You could even take the front and back ends off a ten-year-old T-Bird and replace them with new units that mimick the early Fifties Mercury that James Dean had in Rebel Without A Cause. But there's nothing on the market now that uses Toyota Corolla components and really appeals to me.

I guess what I want, I'd have to design myself.

Harley Earl never used a pencil. Hmm.

Take care of the velocity and the trajectory will take care of itself.

FP

PS: Producers Are Money-Grubbing Scum.

This is a postscript to my preceding idea about making the Hackett Continuum as a role-playing game...in the interest of making all ficlet dabblers aware of the paradigm involved, I looked into my copy of a screenwriting book written by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Stracynski.

Now whether you incorporate "commercial breaks" into your ficletage, that's entirely your thing. I was hoping to do so in my own series if only to put the "reality" of my world in perspective--what things cost, what was available technology-wise, what the culture was like, and so on. Plus it would have been nice comedy relief when needed. (And they can be repeated from one episode to the next.)

So this is the model:

* Episode Teaser/Opening Theme and Credits
* First Commercial
* Act I Scenes
- A - B - C - D - (E - F)
* Second Commercial
* Act II Scenes
- A - B - C - D - (E - F)
* Third Commercial/"News Brief"
* Act III Scenes
- A - B - C - D - (E - F)
* Fourth Commercial
* Act IV Scenes
- A - B - C - D - (E)
* Promo for Next Episode/Closing Theme and Credits

The reason for the Scenes in parathenses is because we could move Scene allotments around as needed. Each ficlet would represent perhaps two or three minutes of screen time. As an Act generally runs eleven minutes in practice, that means four to six ficlets.

The grand total is...twenty-two to twenty-nine ficlets. This is for the 'hour-long drama' show that I wanted to emulate; a half-hour sitcom would only have three Acts and fewer Scenes per Act.

More to come.

FP

Ever think of YOUR OWN on-line persona as SOMEBODY ELSE'S imaginary friend?

I mean, we can reap the benefits of being BOTH factual AND fictional. How about it?

FP

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Stephen R Bierce

Frustrated Pilot

March 2022

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Pilot's Log

Where Very Little Happens

Entries tagged with imagination

Scale Model Dilemma

FreeWill Ain't Fallin' Fo' No Banana In Da Tailpipe!

What I Said On Tumblr Today--And Maybe More Than That

FreeWill Takes The Stand

Thinking? Allowed? FreeWill Weighs In

From Last Night's 60 MINUTES

FreeWill Welcomes Our August Overlords

Writer's Block: Multiple Personalities

Placeholder

Adventures In Re-Imagination

Unexplained

Why Syd Field?

Expressing Some Impressions About Expressions

Writer's Block: Homeward bound

Necessary ReRun-Age

Writer's Block: My Endless Love

The Limits of a Whim

Nerdish Thought For the Day

Ficlet: The TV Series

Pair of Opposites: Reality/Imagination