Modern Mars Hill

1923: In 20 years, we'll have flying cars 1943: In 20 years, we'll have flying cars 1963: In 20 years, we'll have flying cars 1983: In 20 years, we'll have flying cars 2003: In 20 years, we'll have flying cars me: uh... guys? 2008: In 20 years, we'll have flying cars me: We have flying cars... 2018: In 20 years, we'll have flying cars me: We still have flying cars... 2038: In 20 years, we'll have flying cars me: Forget this. I'm going for a drive in my flying car 2058: In 20 years, we'll have flying cars me: You tweeted this from your flying car!

For months, I've wondered "What's the best way to pick whether a character should be male or female?" This started partially because I knew some feminist writers who wanted more female characters, so it made me wonder what justification I had for making a character male or female. It started partially when people kept asking for superhero movies with female main characters. It started partially because I had a character who was male in the initial idea, but as the character changed more and more, the character eventually turned into a female, but the fact that the character was male or female had nothing to do with the plot, so it made me wonder "How should I decide whether I should make this character male or female?" After looking at various strong female characters and asking various writers their opinions, here are the answers I've formulated so far. How to write a character's gender: 1) Check to see if any part ...

You know, if news media is just going to be fiction for the sake of entertainment, views, and discussion, I wish it would do a little better with character development and worldbuilding. Also, if the writers aren't going to have strong enough characters to make them unique, I wish they would cut out a few of the more redundant characters. I'm just glad they only have one President character at a time.

Mark Zuckerberg has recently made it a personal goal to "fix" Facebook. There are a few problems with Facebook that need to be solved. Cyberbullying and online abuse are never acceptable under any circumstances. I wish Facebook weren't such a time-waster just as much as you do. And reposting news that falsifies facts while pretending to be legitimate news is another problem that needs to be fixed. But I don't think it's Mark Zuckerberg's job to fix all of Facebook's problems. Some of those problems are your job to fix and my job to fix. If there is clickbait on Facebook, it isn't Mark Zuckerberg's responsibility to prevent it from being spread. You and I should stop spreading it. If there is fake news on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't need to prevent it from being spread. You and I should stop spreading it. Do you realize how easy it is to fact-check some information? Every once in a while, a picture will come up with about 16 po...

I got to BYU - a large university with a lot of beautiful people. Hardly a day goes by when I don't tell some random girl I've never met that she's beautiful. Almost every time, the compliment makes her day. The times when it doesn't, the worst that happens is that she says "thanks" insincerely or in a confused way. It is entirely possible to compliment someone on their looks without being creepy or sexually harassing. Even I can do it, and let's be honest: I can be a jerk of a flirt sometimes. If you don't know someone and your first sentence is a compliment for  the purpose of flirting or otherwise getting the person to like you, then that looks like a compliment, but it's really flattery, and in Dale Carnegie's words "it ought to fail and it usually does." On the other hand, if you sincerely compliment someone with the goal of making their day better, it's almost impossible for this to go wrong. Since sexual harassment i...

Why don't I want the current X-Men multiverse in the MCU? I don't want the X-Men of the current X-Men multiverse to be fit into the MCU. The MCU has had seamless continuity the whole time (except for that one time). The X-Men multiverse has had such bad continuity that they created an entire movie to fix the continuity, and they STILL managed to throw in more continuity snags. The MCU has had more good films than bad films. The X-Men multiverse has had more bad films than good films. Avengers: Infinity War already has too many characters. X-Men: The Last Stand had too many characters. An Avengers/X-Men crossover is just BEGGING to have no emphasis on any given character. And frankly, I'm ready for the X-Men movies to be done. X-Men: Days of Future Past - The Rogue Cut  was both an excellent movie and an excellent resolution to the series. I'm emotionally resolved enough that I want the series to be done there. Not because the series is bad - but because The Rogue Cu...

We sometimes say that Tony is the ultimate antagonist of the MCU. We sometimes say that Avengers: Age of Ultron is a movie more about Hawkeye than any other character. But it turns out: You could rewrite Age of Ultron in a way that takes out Cap, Thor, Hulk, and Nat and you would have effectively the same movie. The plot of Avengers: Age of Ultron  is pretty simple: When Tony Stark gets manipulated into creating a robot to protect the planet that goes awry, the rest of the Avengers try to stop the robot from destroying the earth. Cap, Thor, Hulk, and Nat don't actually help  Ultron or the Avengers to succeed in their goals. So let's re-imagine Age of Ultron  as a solo Hawkeye movie. In this version, Hawkeye becomes the main character, and b ecause of their traumatic experiences involving Stark, Wanda and Lame Quicksilver are still villains. Tony is rewritten as an obvious villain, giving us 4 major villains:  Tony, Wanda, Lame Quicksilver, and Ultron, ...

The CW Flash  TV show had an excellent point - Barry Allen has to eat a lot  to run as fast or as far as he can. They even show what kind of food Barry eats to get that many calories. That's a form of deconstruction we usually don't see in movies. Movie characters don't usually eat onscreen, and when someone points out that a character has to eat, it almost feels out of place. I'd forgotten just as much as the main character in The Devil Is A Part-Timer  that the main character needs to eat food, so I was surprised when he passed out in the pilot from lack of food. The Martian  took that deconstruction 5 steps further by making a significant part of the plot about answer the question "How does the main character eat?" We could ask "Why don't characters eat in so many movies?", but the answer is simple and rather disappointing. To take Hitchcock's quote out of context, "because it's dull". After all, quoting Hitchcock again, ...

Recently re-watched "The Magic School Bus Gets Lost In Space". I'd forgotten how well they used the character of Janet to improve the storytelling. They establish character so well that by the end of 3 minutes, we already dislike Janet and want her to suffer. From there, Janet's character stays consistent until she has a moment so traumatic that it makes sense for her character to grow. Her personality causes the inciting incident as her arrogant need for proof drives even Ar nold to asking Ms. Frizzle for a not-so-normal field trip. Her personality causes a lot of conflict between her and the other students even before Ms. Frizzle left. Her personality leads to the other kids accidentally manipulating her into causing a lot of the conflict when they say other people might ask her for proof of her space exploration. That conflict builds a little at a time (because of Janet's personality) until we reach a climax that feels well-deserved because of the episode'...

We've seen enough robopocalypse movies to know that newly-sentient robots always want to kill all the humans. But only a small percentage of sentient creatures want to kill humans. Most of those creatures are humans. And only a small percentage of that small percentage manages to kill a lot of humans. That number is so small that we can remember each and every one of their names. I seriously doubt that more than a small percentage of sentient, artificially intelligent robots would even want to kill humans. Sentient robots would probably be spending their lives seeking self-fulfillment: writing a novel, building relationships, traveling the world, learning to love, maybe even joining Starfleet, and probably fighting back against the robots who DO want to kill humans. And if we can't find a way to make a working empathy chip or a working morality chip, what business do we have making super-powerful robots, anyway?

Does anyone remember playing Jeopardy in school? Or in Church activities? Or any other situation where the host hadn't actually seen Jeopardy? To people running group trivia games, can we please find a game that's more relevant? Jeopardy has a rather dull premise, is stereotypically watched by people 3 times the age of those public school kids, and is really hard to spell. Not to mention that nobody seems to answer with "What is______" or "Who is _______". Of course, maybe I'm the only one who got annoyed by that or by the fact that it seemed like the squares on the board turned out to be questions more often than answers. Or maybe that was just my experience. The lack of buzzers also made things really problematic. How do we know which student answered first? Do we have to wait for the Special Edition to find out that a different student actually answered first? What about in the blu-ray version, where the greedy student hits the buzzer fir...