been embracing my natural mane #curlystr

That giant sucking sound you hear is the world’s purchasing power flowing into the #Bitcoin network.

I love seeing entrepreneurs and creatives on Nostr.

Just authentic hustlers.

Comment on what you do, I'm interested to see what we have here in this Nostrsphere.

For us slow ones at the back, WTF does web based actually mean? nostr:note1txlq6ruy8288scg6e005kxkpltkq73ckgfczagat5jz2dhlnskgq6keyau

Anyone else having a difficult time staying caught up on relevant world events and macroeconomic data outside of X?

I am.

Few folks are aware of one of my behind the scenes janitorial jobs. I'm somewhat responsible for ensuring that a lot of amatuer-run Bitcoin web sites remain online.

How so? I have scripts that check the liveness of every one of the thousands of links on my Bitcoin Resources site.

When a site goes down, it alerts me, then I reach out to the site's operator.

It's amazing how few people monitor their own sites given that there are plenty of services that will do it for free.

“So was it a good fight?”

Welcome! Followed.

Yes. Jack brought a humanity, and a thoughtful, curative presence to his tenure, which Eel lacks, and even repels. I left in 2017, when Jack was attempting to disentangle his creative powers from the burdensome, boring boardroom expectations of what Twitter was inevitably growing into. His spirit needed to soar and the business culture was grounding him, IMHO. nostr:note15u0vhw6s972ua67xq9hz3dhdmhw4kf35fxct5hkurjhjxgvskw9swt89zt

Bulleit rye and a prime NY. Be a man.

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?

Vintage 70s Virginia Slims Cigarette address book.

You’ve come a long way, baby.