John August

John

Duly Noted: Let’s Talk about Episode 259

Episode - DN 1

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Meta, Scriptnotes

Matt Selman (EP of The Simpsons) sits down with Scriptnotes favorites Aline Brosh McKenna and Rawson Marshall Thurber to discuss what went down in the season finale.

Links:

You can download the episode here.

Running the length of Malawi

Africa

Malawi MapIn 2007, Ryan Reynolds and I visited Malawi, a land-locked country in southern Africa, where we helped out with a group that runs day centers for thousands of orphans.

Since then, I’ve kept up with the organization, helping to build a secondary school and medical clinic.

Marathoner Brendan Rendall is currently running the length of the country to raise money to build a new wing for the secondary school, which is bursting at the seams. The block will include two science labs, an art room and a general classroom.

Brendan is running 650 miles. That’s 25 marathons back-to-back.

You can follow his progress on this map ((If you zoom in on the map, you can find Mulanje south-east of Blantyre.)) and see photos from the run on Facebook with the hashtag #runmalawi.

The school and related programs are run by Friends of Mulanje Orphans, which is one of the best charities I’ve ever enountered. Over the years, it has supported a generation of kids who are now helping run the program.

I’d urge you check out their great work and donate to Brendan’s campaign.

A Writer’s Guide to Allies

Follow Up, Genres, Story and Plot

On Scriptnotes, we often talk about heroes and villains. In episode 252, we discussed allies, and the different types of relationships between two characters.

What is the point of an ally in narrative?

  1. Characters advance their interests through allies.
  2. Characters learn about themselves through allies.
  3. Characters suffer pain for the wrong rewards.
  4. Allies define the incorrectness of a character’s starting point, and the correctness of their arrival point.
  5. Allies are more subtle and universal than enemies.

In real life, few people have villains that must be vanquished to save the day. But everyone has friends — and friends can be tricky, tricky things.

Allies should theoretically be capable of being heroes — except in feature films, they can’t. Rather —

  1. They need to illuminate the hero without pulling focus.
  2. They need to challenge the hero without becoming the villain.
  3. They serve as a proxy for the audience, asking our questions, sharing our fears.

There’s not much to learn from “we have to stop the evil genius before he blows up the world.” But drama, both in the real world and in fiction, comes from interaction with characters who are theoretically on our side.

Craig had a bunch of examples from Game of Thrones, some of which we didn’t have time to explore on the show. So here’s his complete list.

Marriage of convenience
We don’t like each other, but we need each other

Buddies
Jon Snow and Tormund

Unrequited love
Jorah Mormont and his Khaleesi

Misplaced faith
Cersei and the High Sparrow
Sansa and Joffrey

Parent/child
The Three-Eyed Raven and Bran
Tywin and Tyrion

Codependency
Jamie and Cersei Lannister

Disciple and prophet
The Faceless Man and Arya Stark

Manipulator and Manipulated
Littlefinger and Lysa Aryn

Sparring Partner
Tyrion and Varys

Animal loyalty
Hodor and Bran

Bad for each other
Jon Snow and Ygritte

Alpha and Beta
Jon Snow and Sam
Yara and Theon

Oedipal
Robb and Catelyn Stark

Master and slave
Ramsay Bolton and Reek

Bound by honor
Brienne and Sansa

You could argue with any of these categorizations. The point is that characters can be related in many ways other than the simple hero/villain paradigm.

Less IMDb needs a new home

Apps, Less IMDb

iconLess IMDb, our browser extension for making IMDb less cluttered and more useful, was the very first app we made. ((Is a browser extension an app? Debatable. There’s code and logic, and it has to be installed in an app-like way. But compared to Highland or Weekend Read, it’s not nearly as sophisticated. It falls into the murky area between web and app design, which is part of why it was a great first project for us.))

Here’s what I wrote back in 2010:

They’ve made it more difficult to do the one thing I come to IMDb to do: look at credits. New sections for photos, videos and trivia (star signs!) push credit lists below the fold, forcing you to scroll.

Rather than complain about it, Ryan and I decided to fix it.

And it worked!

In the early days of browser extensions, Less IMDb became very popular because it did exactly one thing well: rearrange layouts to get rid of the cruft, letting you focus on the stuff you’re more likely to actually want.

Six years later, the little yellow tab remains in the upper-right corner of my IMDb windows, silently re-jiggering things. Remarkably, despite all the changes of technology, the extension still works.

Mostly.

Except on Firefox and Chrome.

And even on Safari, layouts will occasionally break spectacularly. IMDb pages aren’t static; you never quite know what you’re going to get. When IMDb reskins entire sections to promote a big summer movie, our little extension gets confused.

Getting Less IMDb back into fighting shape across multiple browsers will take a savvy web person 10 to 30 hours, and it’s just not a priority for us. We’ll be launching Highland 2 soon enough, and that occupies every brain cell of design and coding talent.

But reworking Less IMDb might be a great project for someone else, which is why today we’re releasing all of the source code for it with an MIT license. You can download it here:

Less IMDb source code

Everyone is welcome to use this code to make their own version of the extension. And if one of those versions is great, we’ll even give you the name if you’d like it. (You can find us on Twitter: @qapps.)

I’m really happy we made Less IMDb. It set a great tone and mission for our company: making useful things we wished existed.

I hope someone takes up the charge and can give Less IMDb the love and attention it needs to go another six years.