One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is non-traditional story structures.

(Spoilers for The Matrix, Sicario, and John Wick if you haven’t seen them by now…)

A good example of a traditional story structure is The Matrix. It’s a typical three-act structure with an underdog protagonist who explores a whole new world, powers up via his mentor, and then takes down the stronger villain and gets the girl. But it’s more creative and better executed than most. Top shelf stuff.

In contrast, a movie like Sicario is less traditional. We mostly follow the story from the protagonist’s perspective. But then toward the end, she basically gets defeated and her worldview is invalidated. And then a supporting character, like a dark anti-hero type, kind of takes over as the main character for the final 20 minutes of the film. It’s quite highly rated and very good, but that kind of structure can be risky because the protagonist that we've come to care for goes through an anti-climactic and unhappy ending, with the dark/cynical side winning over the light/optimistic side. And it’s not even as simple as “villains win”, but rather, the anti-hero kind of takes over as the main character and defeats villains in the original protagonist's place, so we have partial "protagonist rotation", where a supporting character kind of ends as the main character. It’s a higher difficulty level to land that type of ending because the viewer is like, “Damn. I mean amazing too, but damn.”

A less complex example of a non-traditional structure is John Wick. It’s an action movie, one of the better ones for its genre, but the non-traditional element is that we know from the start that the protagonist John Wick is the biggest badass around. None of the villains are as strong as him individually, or even close really. The villains are the underdogs. And so to make that non-boring (“John Wick just kills everyone and wins easily”), it requires things like greater numbers of villains, and/or various schemes to surprise or outsmart the protagonist. It’s also a little harder to stick the landing because the climax can be less satisfying if you know from the start that the protagonist is stronger than the antagonist, and so it either needs emotional depth, complex situations, or other ways to make that ending satisfying.

I’ve been exploring some of these and thinking about it a lot because my novel has a number of these types of non-traditional elements, which elevates the difficulty in terms of making them satisfying despite going against the basic structure that people expect as a baseline.

Are there books, shows, or movies you like that go through rather non-traditional story structures?

Man I love yubi keys. Feels great being able to lock things down with a physical device.

But now I need to update to USB-C.

Anyone else a fan?

I wish I could use them to sign into nostr clients 🤔

Who do you think will win the election?

One group of devs (daniel, fiatjaf) are putting spyware all over nostr, and other group (Vitor etc.) are adding Tor. End result is that users lose both privacy and speed. Strange to observe. I hope we can get back to serving our users well.

Instead of digging through personal diaries, future historians will dig through hours and hours and hours of personal video and voice recordings.

Imagine Anne Frank vlogging.

Consider our past: 6,000 years filled with wars, famines, epidemics, and relentless emotional suffering. Isn’t it time we reevaluate the principles that have guided our lives?

Why is 2% the right amount of inflation?

It’s the amount they can get away with in order to debase the underlying currency, much like a hidden tax, without upsetting people to the point of rebellion.

(from today’s Informationist Newsletter)

I need to stop procrastinating and work on my Nostriga and Honeybadger presentations. They're a week away and I have zero slides complete 🥹

Ugh. Talking is the easy part 🤣

Can I just use one slide with a bunch of memes and gifs and call it done?

Out of a million possibilities, I found one that won. That’s what innovation is like.

Both Biden and Trump are kind of retarded. We have known this for a long time.

During the debate, Biden’s age issues became unmasked. And then during the tragic shooting on Trump, he had the courage and presence of mind to fist bump and come out very strong. And in their emotion, people of course rally behind strength.

But then when we go back to hearing Trump speak for an extended period of time, we are reminded that he is kind of retarded, like where we were before, prior to the emotion of the crisis.

Nothing stops this train. All our heroes are retarded. Stay humble and stack sats.