Worried About J-Law

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I continue to be worried about Jennifer Lawrence. She countenance continues to be…sad. It makes me wonder if she has a broken heart ever sense all those nudes of her were leaked a few years ago.

Are you ok, babe?

I think about this possibility way too much.

J-Law used to be so chipper and have such an effervescent personality that her more subdued presence makes me suspicious that something deeper is going on. And yet, she is a mom now and older and so maybe she’s just matured?

What The Next Tech-Romance Movie Will Be About, Probably

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I suspect the next “Her” will be something to do with an AI getting a body. It will feature a lot of sex and nudity done by some starlet that wants to make a name for herself in Hollywood.

That seems the next inevitable step in the “guy falls in love with an AI” genre of movies. Though, to make it more interesting, I would have it so the female AI was smitten with the guy and pestered him into a relationship. Something like that.

I would write the screenplay for such a movie myself, but, alas, I’m old, don’t know how and I live in the middle of nowhere. This has been a problem all my life — I can come up with really great ideas, but there’s always some reason why I can’t actually write them.

But I will admit that I’ve gotten better — I have, in fact, written a novel and am re-writing at the moment. And I have a number of short stories that I want to write forthwith.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for someone to develop this type of movie. It would be really good.

The Only Thing Stopping Me From Throwing Myself Back Into Working On My Passion Project Novel Is The Fucking Election

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I saw yet ANOTHER person who was clearly interested in my passion project novel poking around this blog. They went from looking at the link about Lisbeth Salander to that about Corrie Yee. Now, I’m by nature extremely paranoid, so my first reaction is — “Oh, shit, someone is going to cherry pick my idea for some sort of screenplay.”

My heroine — who looks somewhat like Corrie Yee in my imagination — has a sleeve tattoo like Megan Fox does in this picture. (Totally different design, though)

And, yet, you can’t live your life in fear and paranoia. So lulz, I’m going to keep working on the novel until something pops out that makes it clear that my idea has, in fact, been “stolen.”

My hunch is, if it is “stolen,” it would be that two elements of my dream, my vision which are publicly known — that the heroine Union Pang would have a sleeve tattoo and look a lot like an older version of Corrie Yee — is what would be used in any screenplay.

Corrie Yee

The issue is — I’ve been working on this fucking thing so long that it’s inevitable that some element of it would be used independently by someone else. This just would be an instance of someone using cherry picking some elements I put out pubically.

I live in oblivion — how was I supposed to know anyone would give enough of a shit to do such a thing?

There are any number of reasons why someone would be interested in my novel’s heroine other than stealing the idea, I’m going to just chill out for the time being.

I am just about ready to throw myself back into working on the novel, but for the fact that I’m locked in neutral, not knowing how the 2024 election is going to turn out. What I think I’m going to do is at some point next week, I’m going to lurch back into my normal headspace and THEN I will start to write a lot again.

Raising The Stakes With Scifi

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I think I’m just about ready to get back to working on a few novels. The one novel I’ve been working on the longest — the one that is meant to be part of a six-novel project — is set to be reworked significantly. The chief reason is that the stakes simply aren’t very high at the moment.

The novel is just about one woman’s obsession with owning a small town newspaper. That’s it. But I’ve decided that by leaning into an already-there scifi element of the novel that I can significantly raise the stakes. And, to a certain extent, I can give the novel something of a trick ending, cueing up the next novel in the series. (Which, at the moment, is much more of a traditional murder mystery.)

As part of that, I’m going to have to sit down and rewrite a whole lot of the novel, which is going to slow me down. My goal is now to query something, anything about a year from now.

Ultimately, the six novel series I’m working on will produce an American Lisbeth Salander.

Of course, there continues to be the issue of stripping being a big part of the novel. This is going to make a lot of literary agents blanch, I’m afraid. But that’s my vision for the novel, so there you go. And, what’s more, I still have a few other scifi novels rolling around in my mind that I my piviot towards if all else fails.

Something that doesn’t have the spicyness that the main, passion project novel currently has.

But I am well aware that if I don’t hurry up, I’m going to be in my 60s before I become a published author, if I ever do. And I am well aware there are many, many, MANY reasons — on the face of it at least — why I will *never* get published.

I’m too old. Too bonkers. The list goes on.

Yet, you have to have hope, you know?

One thing I continue to worry about is, of course, the whole Trump situation. I refuse, however, to just be in neutral until the election. I have to get something, anything done. So, starting today, I’m going to stop mulling things so much and start to read, watch and write what I can.

Revisiting The Potential Future Of Hollywood & AI-Generated ‘Immersive Media’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Someone from the Los Angeles area looked at one of my blog posts about AI and “immersive media” from a while ago, so that got me thinking about where things stand now. I still think that live theatre is the future. I still think that, by say, 2030, Broadway will, in some way, replace Hollywood as the destination of young men and women who want to act for a living.

It could be a few years beyond that, but it’s coming. I say this because there is a capitalistic imperative to essentially replace all — all — of Hollywood with AI generated art. This is all going to happen in the context of what I call the “Petite Singularity” that I predict is going to happen by the end of the decade.

We may not be uploading our minds into the cloud, but there is going to be a lot of future shock. I mean, I got into an argument with an AI recently where I found myself saying “I’m sorry” like I was arguing with a passive-aggressive woman. Ugh.

So, the technology is zooming towards us. I hold to my prediction that at some point in the near future, your TV will scan your face and generate very personalized content based on existing IP. It will, on the fly, generate, say, a new Star Wars movie that is a bit darker than the usual fair, just because that is your mood at that specific moment.

There will be no shared reality. We’ll all have our own little media cocoons that we live in. We won’t be able to have any water cooler talk — at all — because we’ll all be watching slightly different versions of the same show.

Anyway, it’s a future we’re going to have to prepare for. I still believe that there might be a really big shift away from movie theatres towards live theatre. If you’re a 15-year-old, you’ll go to live theatre with your date instead of a movie because, well, movies in that context won’t exist anymore.

And all of this will happen really, really fast. Too fast for anyone to process it.

The thing I have my doubts about now is the idea that anyone will use the Apple Vision Pro. I may have gotten that part of my prediction just plain wrong. While I do think that Augmented Reality has a bright future, Virtuality Reality…not so much.

I just don’t see the usecase for it. At least not in the near term. I suppose it might be good for immersive media, but that’s a lot closer to 20 years from now, not five or six. The technology just isn’t there yet. And the goggles will have to be a lot less bulky.

I’m still waiting for my “MindCap,” something similar to the technology in 3001: Final Odyssey or maybe Strange Days. Anyway, regardless, if we can somehow avoid a civil war, revolution and or WW3 in the next few months, something interesting might happen.

We Need A New ‘Her’ Movie

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

If I was 20 years younger, I would probably be seriously interested in learning how to write screenplays. But, alas, barring something I totally can’t expect, that moment in my life is long past.

Yet, that doesn’t stop me from thinking up movie ideas.

One movie idea that I think would be pretty cool would be a movie that was the inverse of “Her,” where the AI was the aggressor. The AI pesters a man during the long, winding path towards it getting a Replicant-like body.

I think that would be pretty interesting.

Another movie idea would be one that would be a bit more dark. It would be about the practical implications of a man falling in love with an android with an LLM-type mind in it and how his family reacts to such a futureshock type thing.

Both of these ideas are pretty good, I think. But, like I said, I’m just too old to do anything with them. But I am still going to press forward with the novels I’m working on.

Even though I’m old, I’m not THAT old yet.

If I’m not a published author — in some way — by my late 50s then…oh boy, is that going to be existential. But I still have some time before that happens.

A Rough Screenplay Treatment

By Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here’s a rough screenplay treatment that has popped in my head of late for some reason.

The setup is that we learn that the Greek and Roman gods were real. They were just invisible (to humans) multi-dimensional machine intelligence creatures. They messed with the affairs of Man all the time until Christianity began to take over the world.

Or something like that.

I just can’t figure out what type of plot to give the story now.

Military Grade Singularity As The Basis For A Techno-Romantic Comedy Screenplay

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m always thinking of scifi concepts and it seems like one interesting one would be the idea that the U.S. Government — specifically the U.S. Military –has already “achieved the Singularity internally” as the old saying goes. I don’t know what that would look like, but it’s an interesting idea to toy with as the potential premise of a novel or screenplay.

And if you really wanted to put a unique spin on it, you would have it a “Her” like movie fused with Annie Hall, rather than something dark and dystopian. It could be quite romantic and humorous.

It’s times like these when I wish I was younger so I could have the time and energy to throw myself into a project like this.

Time To Buckle Down

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Time to stop screwing around when it comes to these novels I want to write. The main “passion project” novel should be pretty easy to start up again. But it’s the other novel — the scifi novel — that could be tough.

It’s just tough to change my style of writing after so long of looking at specific type of novel. But I really want to do it. So, here we are.

I keep going back and forth about the need to use AI on any of this. I used it some on the scifi novel and I realized it just slowed me down. So, I don’t know. I think maybe I will be really selective about it going forward.

I hope to write a six novel series that will appeal to readers of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It’s set in a small town in Southside Virginia.

But I really do hope to begin the querying process for the thriller novel this spring. And, I think, I need to star to tinker with the other novels in the projected six-novel project. It sure would be nice to have huge chunks of those other novels done if I manage to sell the first novel in the series.

And I am WELL AWARE that I have a very peculiar project on my hands — I mean, how many people want to read about strange events in small Southern town over the course of 6 novels set over 25 years? It’s not like I’m writing “It” or something.

My version of Lisbeth Salander looks a lot like Corrie Yee.

But I have six novels gamed out in my mind and I want to see if I can pull it off. All the novels are really interesting and I have the ending of the last novel already thought out. It’s just — I’m not getting any younger.

If I don’t get something, anything done soon, lulz it’s all over –I’m just be 100 years old before anything is done.

But the reason why I like this six novel project is it gives me hope. Reach for the moon and you might just fall into the stars, as the old saying goes.

A Techno-Romantic Comedy Concept

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Every 10 years or so, a romantic comedy comes out that sets the mood of the zingiest. In the 1970s, it was Annie Hall. In the 1980s, it was When Harry Met Sally.

Lately, these romantic comedies have become less comedic and more melancholy — both The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and Her were a bit more dour than one might expect for a romantic comedy. And there was a technological element to both of them.

Well, it seems there is an opening for a romantic comedy that would have elements of Annie Hall, Her and The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. It would go something like this — a man begins to believe that a chatbot is fucking with his algorithms in some way.

But it would happen in a “day after tomorrow” situation whereby LLMs might be a bit more powerful and interconnected around the globe. So instead of having a traditional fight, the LLM would make things more difficult for the man as he went about his day.

Something amusing like that. It would be kind of like the movie Maximum Overdrive if it was fused with Annie Hall. I think audiences would really enjoy something innovative like this.