Hollywood Studios and Writers Guild Reach Tentative Deal to End Writer's Strike (yahoo.com) 154
"After several long consecutive days of negotiations, the Writers Guild of America and the labor group representing studios and streamers have reached a tentative deal on a new contract," according to the Hollywood Reporter.
"We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional," the Guild's negotiating committee told its members in an email, "with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership." The Hollywood Reporter calls the news "a major development that could precipitate the end of a historic, 146-day writers' strike."
Details from the Los Angeles Times: The proposed three-year contract, which would still have to be ratified by the union's 11,500 members, would boost pay rates and residual payments for streaming shows and impose new rules surrounding the use of artificial intelligence...
With the tentative pact with the WGA done, entertainment company leaders are expected to turn their attention to the 160,000-member performers union, SAG-AFTRA, to accelerate those stalled talks in an effort to get the industry back to work. Actors have been on strike since mid-July...
The writers' strike was, in many ways, a response to the tectonic changes wrought by streaming. Shorter seasons for streaming shows and fewer writers being hired have cut into guild members' pay and job stability, making it harder to earn a sustainable living in the expensive media hubs of Los Angeles and New York, guild members have said.
The studios came into negotiations with their own set of challenges. The pay-TV business is in decline because of cable cord-cutting and falling TV ratings, which have eroded vital sources of revenue. At the same time, the traditional companies have spent massively to launch robust streaming services to compete with Netflix, losing billions of dollars in the process.
"We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional," the Guild's negotiating committee told its members in an email, "with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership." The Hollywood Reporter calls the news "a major development that could precipitate the end of a historic, 146-day writers' strike."
Details from the Los Angeles Times: The proposed three-year contract, which would still have to be ratified by the union's 11,500 members, would boost pay rates and residual payments for streaming shows and impose new rules surrounding the use of artificial intelligence...
With the tentative pact with the WGA done, entertainment company leaders are expected to turn their attention to the 160,000-member performers union, SAG-AFTRA, to accelerate those stalled talks in an effort to get the industry back to work. Actors have been on strike since mid-July...
The writers' strike was, in many ways, a response to the tectonic changes wrought by streaming. Shorter seasons for streaming shows and fewer writers being hired have cut into guild members' pay and job stability, making it harder to earn a sustainable living in the expensive media hubs of Los Angeles and New York, guild members have said.
The studios came into negotiations with their own set of challenges. The pay-TV business is in decline because of cable cord-cutting and falling TV ratings, which have eroded vital sources of revenue. At the same time, the traditional companies have spent massively to launch robust streaming services to compete with Netflix, losing billions of dollars in the process.
Darn it (Score:5, Informative)
I've been really enjoying the Strike Force Five podcast [wikipedia.org]... and now it's probably gonna end.
Good for the writers, though (seriously).
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Indeed, it's been a rare glimpse into just how unfunny and generally boring these people are without their writers and a laugh track.
In many ways, it's as eye opening as trying to watch Friends without the laugh track and recognizing that it's nowhere near as funny or representative of life in a US city at the time of its filming. And recognizing that much of it is just selling of a specific lifestyle to you.
Re: Darn it (Score:3)
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They must be revendicating to work from home.
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I quite enjoy the late-night talk show monologues. They have just about the only political satire left in the TV wasteland, so I'm glad they'll be back sticking pins in the pols.
Re: Darn it (Score:4, Insightful)
Totally agree! Plus, they do a great job of capturing news clips of politicians sticking their foot in their mouth and presenting 'the news' as it happened, in a meaningful and entertaining way.
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Your linked video does not include the monologues.
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Your linked video does not include the monologues.
His linked video is also just a collection of bumpers, which he's presenting as if it were an episode because he is disingenuous.
Re: Darn it (Score:3)
The video you presented was a collection of segment bumpers. You are presenting it as if it were an episode. That is either spectacular though not surprising incompetence, or a willful attempt to mislead. Either way no one should be concerned about giving it a rational response, since this comment is the only rational response to what you wrote.
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Re: Darn it (Score:2)
Well for one thing they aren't the monologues.
For another thing, they aren't even the bumpers for the monologues.
Maybe you should try looking up words before you try to use them.
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Maybe you should try looking up words before you try to use them.
Yes, lets do that. [merriam-webster.com]
monologue: noun : a dramatic sketch performed by one actor : the routine of a stand-up comic
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Those are hilarious! Thanks for sharing. A shame this isn't more common. Perhaps fewer people would have died.
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Agree. These strikes have not affected me in the slightest.
Just a thought ... (Score:2)
At the same time, the traditional companies have spent massively to launch robust streaming services to compete with Netflix, losing billions of dollars in the process.
Maybe, just maybe, they should have gotten behind one central platform for all streaming needs instead of fracturing into Broadcast TV 2.0.
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Maybe, just maybe, they should have gotten behind one central platform for all streaming needs instead of fracturing into Broadcast TV 2.0.
Everything new will have a kind of battle over standards. People that looked into the history of electrical standards should be familiar with the standards wars from the early days of utility electrical service, a fight that in some ways is still going on. Then there's various "format wars" for audio and video media. The Internet Protocol wasn't always the only game in town for getting computers to talk to each other. How many different kinds of serial ports are there? How many different kinds of USB p
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You mean like Cable TV? Because that's all that was going to happen with one central platform - it would literally be Cable TV all over again. At this point, why even bother?
Cable TV delivered over the Internet - all the cost, none of the infrastructure. You'll be paying $200/month for TV plus another $100/month for internet.
And the movie industry went with the separate
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Counterpoint to iTunes: Steam. iTunes' biggest flaw was that it strongly restricted what hardware you were allowed to use. Steam, while obviously focusing on Windows, does not. If you have a PC, regardless of manufacturer or home-build, you can get games from Steam.
By the time iTunes opened up other avenues it was too late; other players had entered the field in the form of eg. Spotify. Which, again, has/had pretty much everything available to everyone.
For the vast majority of the population, a one-stop-sho
Re: Just a thought ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, streaming is a bust for practically everybody bar Netflix. Although nobody is doing well, Disney has the most extreme example.
Services that went exclusive fare the worst. Back in the day Disney would see nice licensing fees from third parties wanting to broadcast their content. Physical media anbd digital sales also. Now their content goes to Disney+ where they effectively earn nothing.
If streaming will work it will be as a repository of older and non-exclusive content, placed there after other channels have run their course. It'd be great for general entertainment, yet cheaper to run, also not cannibalising revenues from more established channels.
Netflix is profitable. Prime and Apple TV+ are essentially side gigs for their owners. It's Warner, Paramount, and Disney who will lose out if they believe they can continue along this road.
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One problem with streaming in it's current form: nothing pisses me off more about it than seeing a shitty Z grade movie I watched for free as a kid on tv, going for rent/buy only on a stream. We're talking real bottom of the barrel shit they want $5 rentals on.
Oh the huge manatees! (Score:3)
South Park's joke about how Family Guy episodes are made has only become more and more appropriate with time, so it has to be mentioned here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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South Park's joke about how Family Guy episodes are made has only become more and more appropriate with time, so it has to be mentioned here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
s/manatee/LLM/ig
I was just getting into Strike Force 5 (Score:2)
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writers need to eat
Do we get to vote on that?
So don't live there (Score:2)
Jeez, you're writers. You can do that anywhere. Take advantage of the same underlying technology that streaming media companies are using to supposedly reduce your income and, I don't know, write something people actually want to watch. And who the hell wants to live in L.A. or New York these days? Feh.
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And who the hell wants to live in L.A. or New York these days?
Going by the property values, one hell of a lot of people.
Thank God they are back (Score:2)
Thank God they are back. I can't wait for the next seasons of brilliant shows like "She-hulk" and "Velma".
A moment of silence, please... (Score:2)
Now do the rest of the crew! (Score:2)
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Re: And nothing of value was gained (Score:2)
I don't think there was ever the expectation AI would churn out finished scripts. So long as a human contributes significant work then there'd be copyright protection.
Robot, make me an adaptation of The Witcher for the 'modern audience'.
Robot, make me a remake A New Hope for the 'modern audience'.
Add a few parameters and you're good to go. Whatever AI produces will in time be of an equally low standard to late drafts from these writers.
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Oh don't worry. It's not AI generated, I wrote it. Really. Pinky swear.
Re:And nothing of value was gained (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly nonsense. Just because you don't like good movies and TV shows, doesn't make them worthless. Many millions of people get a lot of enjoyment from them.
Hopefully Star Trek Strange New Worlds season 3 can get into production ASAP now.
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Hopefully Star Trek Strange New Worlds season 3 can get into production ASAP now.
I'm afraid they lost me after their "musical" episode.
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I appreciate that musicals are not everyone's thing, but you couldn't have been much of a fan if that was enough to put you off. The season finale is great, shame you missed it.
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I've never found the argument of "X number of people like something so it must be a good thing" to be well founded. Many people also get a lot of enjoyment from getting high on Fentanyl. That doesn't make it a good thing.
Good is subjective, and what you find palatable in the latest Hollywood offerings are equally unpalatable by many millions of people as well. Disney alone has lost nearly a billion dollars so far this year on its box office flops (source [forbes.com]).
So it really isn't nonsense. I'd even go so far as t
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So you haven't watched any movies or television in the past few years? I'm calling bullshit.
Re:why such big news? (Score:5, Insightful)
aren't there more important issues in the world than not having new episodes of some show?
That's not what this story is about.
It's about how companies and workers are adapting to AI.
Just like the UAW strike is not just about higher pay. It's about workforce contraction caused by robotic assembly lines and the move to EVs, which need far fewer workers to assemble.
The world is changing, and there will be more conflicts like these.
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Then I guess if the writers actually wrote scripts that are not formulaic, predictable and ultimately boring, they wouldn't have anything to fear. AI is generative, but not creative.
The reason they're afraid for their job is simply that, well, neither are they.
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No. The writers are producing formulaic, predictable scripts because that's what the studios want. And the studios want that because that's what the public wants, and they, (the studios,) know that's the quickest and safest way to make a buck.
Why do you think the last season of Picard was complete fan-wank from start to finish? Paramount wanted to save a flagging property... and it worked! The fanbase lapped that crap right up.
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The prima facie evidence simply doesn't support that. Of the top ten grossing movies of the year [wikipedia.org], only two aren't derivative and formulaic.
Oppenheimer is a biography by a well known and well liked director. While I personally can't wait to see it, the only reason I can figure that it came in #5 is because people like Christopher Nolan films.
The people who went to see Sound of Freedom, I'm guessing, did so for political reasons. I can't speak to that for sure though, nor can I speak to it's quality.
The remai
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No, it's not about AI, workforce contraction or other things. It's the sudden rise in workers realizing they've been screwed. Because if it's one thing the pandemic has revealed, it was that some people did
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Ah, the good ol' horse buggy whip maker strikes.
Re:why such big news? (Score:5, Insightful)
The unions know they are fighting a rearguard action.
In 1979, the UAW had 1.5M members. Today it has 146,000. So 90% are already gone, mostly lost to automation, but also offshoring and moving to RTW states.
The writers also know they will lose many jobs to AI.
AI and robots are coming and more compliant workers aren't gonna stop technology or even slow it down.
So the unions are trying to get what they can while they can.
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The writers also know they will lose many jobs to AI.
If that's what they "know" then they must not understand AI very well.
If the writers want to preserve their jobs then it might help to write well, better than any AI and better than most other writers.
This taking the industry hostage only works so long as they don't make too much trouble, if they demand too much then someone will break the strike and that could be the camel's nose under the tent that brings everything down.
Re:why such big news? (Score:4, Interesting)
If the writers want to preserve their jobs then it might help to write well
The studios want profits, not originality. The most profitable shows are derivatives and franchises, just recycling the same plots and jokes over and over.
The most profitable movie this year will either be yet another Marvel Universe film or Fast and Furious #743.
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It's all hopeless. Strange New Worlds was fantastic this year, and all original stories. Already renewed for season 3.
Foundation is an improvement over the original work. For All Mankind is a bit more mixed, but looking forward to this year's season. Is there a second season of Severance this year?
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I need to check out SNW but the writing in Discovery has made me very hesitant.
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Discovery had its ups and downs for sure, but overall there were some great stories and characters there. I think it's a bit like DS9, different enough that a lot of TNG fans were put off, but in time it came to be well regarded. Let's not forget that DS9 had episodes like Move Along Home and Babel.
What I can't understand is Voyager. It used to like it in the 90s, probably more so because I was just wanting to see new Star Trek and that was all there was. But now... Most of it is unwatchable bad. The writin
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You have to admit "The Thaw" and "Year in Hell" are really good VOY episodes. I'm one of the few who are ENT fans (ducks), I think the theme song went a long ways toward generating the hate that show receives. I liked the second half of the first season and the second season of DIS, but I couldn't get back into it for the third season. I think Sonequa Martin-Green is a terrible actor, I didn't like her in The Walking Dead.
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Voyager also forgot about rules that had been in various drafts of the TNG writers guide and stuck around. The crew
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The Thaw and Year of Hell were the better ones, but still let down by poor execution. I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying they were good.
I quite liked Enterprise, especially season 3 which seems to be the one that everyone else hates. It was far from perfect, but I liked the longer story arc.
I think it took Martin-Green a while to really nail her character, but that tends to be true of all Star Trek shows. It would have been for SNW, if not for the fact that season 2 of Discovery gave them a chance to sett
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VOY's problem was they wrote themselves into a corner with the very first episode.
Everything they did had to at some level be either about getting home, of placed in some context of why it was even more morally critical etc, and should be an permissible distraction. They actually compounded this problem with the heterogeneous crew in that it made mutiny both more likely and more practical and outcome if 'getting home ever fell to far down the objectives list'
Therefore all those first contacts were at some l
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I think some people were so offended by the fact that there were gay and non-white people on the screen that they just can't see past it.
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Technology failing can't drive the episode... I'm thinking of all the times that the holodeck going wrong was the entire plot in TNG episodes.
Voyager suffered from some really bad writing. Everything from the dialogue to the way they made the Borg suck.
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Whether it makes a difference or not, my 2 cents. To me the writing of: 'Strange New Worlds' is so much better. The production values from 'Discovery' were not bad. At least not in what I have seen, which is only the first season. Even though I love the 'Star Trek'-franchise as a whole, I didn't want to see the following series from 'Discovery' anymore.
While 'SNW' has an odd episode once in a while, the writing feels so much more like the writing happening during 'TNG'/'VOY'/'DS9', accompanied by great prod
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The issue with discovery has nothing to do with 'diversity' this issue is that every single character on the show has some kind of severe mental health issues save for perhaps Saru (who 'got over his' to a degree).
Michael is also a bit different but also really quite deranged.
Every other character is some version of "Reginald Barclay." There is exactly no way these people would have been promoted to any kind of significant rank in a 'military' ordered organization. The whole things just feels wrong.
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Discovery is generally pretty bad, in fact to terribly to keep watching IMHO.
SNW is actually pretty faithful to TOS and it is worth watching.
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THIS - the studios don't want writers they want generative AI and LLMs.
At least mostly that is what they want. Its pretty clear the movie 'business' is mostly about delivering the latest polished revision to the 'epic of Gilgamesh' over and over again for each new generation of 14-17 year olds.
That is the bulk of the $$$ is there. Some part of keeping relevant does involve doing 'art' but most of these writers seem to think they are Gauguin when what they are doing is 'just commercial art'.
Its not special
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Go ahead and tell me any of the latest Marvel movies have made money. Box office results have made it clear people are sick of them.
The problem is that Hollywood isn't listening.
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The writers also know they will lose many jobs to AI.
If the writers want to preserve their jobs then it might help to write well, better than any AI and better than most other writers.
In context of LLM, I disagree. Imagine if in a boxing ring you had to compete against a robot that performed at about the peak of historical level. Essentially, to compete in boxing you'd need to defeat approximation of Ali [wikipedia.org]. In such circumstances, would anyone be able to compete? Sure, exceptional boxers would, but majority of rank-and-file boxers would be out of a job. It is like that.
Re: why such big news? (Score:2)
The main benefit of automation is higher quality outputs. Even the best human workers deliver highly inconsistent outputs. For example, even with a torque wrench, the actual torque applied to a bolt will vary more than if a machine had done it. This is what leads to quality issues.
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As much as I hate current cultural ethos of Hollywood, these writers represent significant portion of our culture and I am not convinced that burning the whole profession down and salting the earth would be a net benefit for humanity. The use of LLM guaranteed to produce high-qu
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Perfect boxing (or any other sport) would be boring af. Who would pay to watch an event knowing there was essentially zero chance of an unexpected outcome?
Sporting events are all about the revenue stream and big pay days not about being the best or determining winners and losers.
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That's only because Reagan broke the Unions (Score:2)
This isn't "what they can while they can" this is the start of a fundamental shift in American politics. The baby boomers, who are still fat & happy from the benefits of Unions
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Any company that gets a union deserves a union. Treat your employees fairly and they won't feel the need to organize.
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Any union that demands a 40%-50% pay increase is CERTAINLY in it for the money.
Of course they're in it for the money. Duh. But that means more than just a raise. It also means not having their jobs eliminated.
They're likely to get much less than 40% and many of the jobs will go away no matter what the unions do.
Re:why such big news? (Score:4, Insightful)
The unions want a 40% pay increase because that’s what the CEO received. I’ve always said you could replace most CEOs with a magic 8 ball and get similar results.
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The unions want a 40% pay increase because that’s what the CEO received. I’ve always said you could replace most CEOs with a magic 8 ball and get similar results.
Which CEO and what calendar years are you comparing?
CEO pay is so heavily weighted to irregular bonuses of stock options and RSUs that percentage increase/decrease 'what about their pay' are pointless. Find a big increase, and I will show you a CEO who took an equally large decrease.
(although I do fundamentally agree with the 8 ball claim)
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Egg prices haven't been under a dollar since about 2001 you lying liar.
https://www.usinflationcalcula... [usinflatio...ulator.com]
Re: why such big news? (Score:2)
Literally matched exactly what your link shows, right to the penny.
Re: why such big news? (Score:2)
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Why is this strike information all over the place, aren't there more important issues in the world than not having new episodes of some show? Isn't this just a small, tiny, insignificant non problem?
It's the machine celebrating its own rot. Hollywood loves nothing more than real Hollywood drama, and the media that gives us "news" is all wrapped up in Hollywood. Of COURSE it's the biggest news in the world to them. It's their very essence being drug out and publicly flogged for the entertainment of the plebes. We should be playing Taps for their dignity, but that died decades ago.
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If anything, I'm happy there's nothing new being produced. What little good there is was still more than I could catch up on so I'm happy to have a chance to watch my backlog. This is about writers and actors getting better terms, especially in light of technology that is not only taking work away from them but doing it in a way that uses AI clones to mimic what work they would have done - both on the writing and acting sides.
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Someone has to coordinate to send the messages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I used to think unions exist to protect interchangeable, easily-replaced workers doing dull, soul-crushing, and repetitive jobs from being replaced by cheap labor or automation. You know, like writing screenplays, or acting...
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How is this writer's strike supposed to affect me? I forgot it was a thing because I didn't notice anything different.
Obviously, you're not a golfer. [youtu.be]
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It is far less visible than it used to be. Remember when the writers went on strike in 2007? It delayed a few shows I was watching at the time. It was a minor annoyance! Now, when everything is streaming and doesn't have a regular timeslot on a major network, it's much more difficult to notice.
Re:There's a writer's strike? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well when most of your time is spent masturbating about nuclear power these things can easily go unnoticed.
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Now you suddenly care about recycling when it comes to wind turbine blades.
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Re:There's a writer's strike? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah. It's perfectly okay to call out a fantasy non-solution while supporting an actual solution that is making a meaningful difference which may have only a minor recycling problem.
Seriously we've gone from "not green enough" to "kills the birds" to "what do we do about the blades!" You're not making a case against wind here, you're showing how absolutely awesome of a solution it is when you need to dig soooo deep to find the problems with it.
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We had a total shutdown during Covid for a lot longer. The only impact I noticed was a few of the anime series I watch had a long delay before getting back to it. Everything else seemed to continue on afaict.
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This right there. Who the fuck cares that talentless hacks don't want to work?
I haven't seen anything come out of Hollywood lately where the script was not predictable drivel. The only thing I wonder is, are the writers to blame or the studios? Do we simply not have any talented writers anymore or are they being forced into a straightjacket of checkbox-writing where they have to cover every single checkbox marketing has put down for them, what characters to include, what tropes to include, what they must not write about and so on, so there is no room left for a sensible plot?
I've spoken with a few folks that write for television and movies about this. They're responses, universally, are that they are encouraged to stay inside the lines at every turn. And if you do manage to slip a script through that has some genuine creativity in it, they'll committee it, workshop it, bring in more and more people to help you "understand" how flawed and broken it is until it's nothing more than a cookie-cutter knock-off of what sold the previous year. Frankly, I'm shocked any of them want to k
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The studios are totally to blame. But those studios end up influencing what writers are actually getting work. Better terms will attract better talent, but Hollywood sees the strike as a big cut to their yearly profits, so they're going to shovel out loads of reboots and sequels as soon as the actors are back.
Everyone agrees that this is lazy but the problem is that people keep buying it. I wanted a much longer blackout of new content just so I can catch up on the good stuff I haven't fully caught up on
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All of the new Star Trek writing is garbage. Too much Marvel movie influence.
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Why don't you try writing something different?