The sad thing is that the most constructive post 9/11 change they made, is just to reinforce the cockpit doors and change some of the procedures for when a pilot comes out to use the restroom (a flight attendant will typically block the way as he does that, sometimes with a cart, to make it hard for people to run up at that moment.) That small set of changes was cheap and safe with basically no downsides. Everything else is an expensive mess.
I’ve been thinking a lot about fight scenes in media lately, and how to make them not suck.
While there are many amazing ones, the majority bore me. Basically, something like 10% of fight scenes are so good that I can remember their details a decade later, and the other 90% are borderline unwatchable and I forget them soon after watching. Sometimes it’s about choreography, but usually it’s deeper than that. But it’s not just emotions either.
It’s generally a blend of choreography with emotions. It’s the full creative spectrum. Many weak fight scenes hit one or the other, but the real great ones hit both and in a way that synergizes to make 1+1=3.
Here’s a fun thread, using Arcane fight scenes as examples. With some spoilers of course. Even if you don’t care about the show, I’ll give context and links for the examples even if you won’t get the same emotional impact as watching the full show itself.
Arcane, the highest-budget and one of the most well-rated animated shows ever, is 15 episodes in now, as it approaches its finale next week. It has a tremendous number of good fight scenes.
But despite a rather hard selection since so many are amazing, I can quickly list my top two as of this time. My two favorite fight scenes from among the many great ones. And they’re complete opposites of each other, because they nail different concepts well. And I’m about 80% confident that none of the fight scenes from the final act will surpass these in my view, but it’s possible. And that’s partially because simplicity goes a long way to making a fight scene amazing, and the final ones are likely to be more complex.
My first top fight scene is Ekko vs Jinx on the bridge in season 1. This is one of the most creative fight designs I’ve ever seen, and this view is very popular so I’m not alone on this in terms of how good it was. Ekko is the hero here, and Jinx is an anti-hero that has been rampaging over everyone else without being checked sufficiently this season, including killing multiple of Ekko’s gang members whenever they attacked her. So, in most viewers’ minds, even though many of us might appreciate Jinx, the Ekko win feels very right here and it’s his side, along with his good allies, that we’re supposed to be on.
Jinx and Ekko were childhood friends, but Ekko went on a lighter path and Jinx went on a darker path, and they’ve been enemies ever since despite both having reasonable path dependencies for how they came to their views. Jinx is trying to get back a very important crystal and already killed a ton of soldiers with a butterfly bomb attack on the bridge, while Ekko is trying to stop her from getting that important crystal back after almost everyone else is down due to that attack. They already had a mini-skirmish where Jinx broke Ekko’s hoverboard, and now they are about to fight for the final stakes directly.
https://youtu.be/OkscEokV238
The challenge from a writers’ perspective is that Jinx is a ranged fighter; she builds novel guns and bombs that are advanced for her world, and uses them in creative ways. Ekko is a melee fighter and very fast, including building hoverboards, but Jinx already broke his hoverboard in their earlier skirmish so he’s limited now. This *entire fight* is going to basically be done in 5 seconds from this point and is very binary; either Jinx shoots him before he can close the distance, or Ekko is badass enough to close the distance and win. So how do we make this interesting?
As the fight is about to occur, Ekko takes the initiative and signals to Jinx. She is stuck in the past, whereas he focuses on improvement. When they were little kids, they often had duels, her paintball gun vs his play sword, and Jinx would usually win vs Ekko. Ekko remembers those, and remembers how Jinx shot. But it’s been a very long time.
So, we get this animated flashback of them play-fighting as kid friends. This 1) reinforces the emotional aspect that these are two young adults are fighting to the death for high stakes despite being childhood friends and 2) that Ekko remembers their fights well, and improved on them whereas Jinx sticks to her patterns.
Ekko replays the animated scenario in his mind where he loses to Jinx’s paintballs, and then, in the present, he makes sure to avoid the same mistakes. She shoots very similarly to how she did back then, whereas he incorporates new moves that he didn’t have back then. He dodges her shots, gets close to her, and beats the ever living fuck out of her in those five seconds.
But after he does that, and she’s utterly defeated, he sees her bloody face while on top of her and hesitates. He sees the childhood friend that he used to have. Vulnerable. Bloody. A girl. So, he pauses. He’s a good person. It’s not easy to beat a woman to death that he knew as a child.
But she uses that moment to unpin one of her grenades to kamikaze with him. Because in reality, she’s *not* the girl he used to know; she’s a violent woman that is willing to open a grenade right next to herself to kamikaze rather than lose. Ekko tries to run at the last second.
The explosion goes off, and at the end of the episode we don’t see the immediate result. The spoiler result in the next episode is that Jinx is mortally wounded by her own grenade while Ekko is less wounded due to jumping out of the way, but Jinx got the crystal back, holding it in her hand as she is dying on the bridge while her father’s forces come to intervene, and that’s very relevant for the season climax.
The overall result is less important than the fight itself. The writers went with the creative path here; how to prolong a ranger vs melee fight, and how to make it interesting. Their Ekko mental replay animation did that amazingly well.
And as a third point, it foreshadows that Ekko will eventually get time-altering powers based on the game lore. In that fight he just mentally used those powers by remembering the past well and doing better than he would have done in the past, but in the future his character will literally get the ability to briefly go back and time and fix things, which is what he did here already. And by extension, it kind of shows why he deserves those powers.
The second top-tier fight scene is Jinx vs the Beast in season 2, which unlike the first one, most people probably wouldn't list as a top fight scene. But I think it is.
By this point, Jinx is quite different. After to her mortal wound in the Ekko fight, her father had his mad scientist pump her full of chemicals to save her life, so she has limited super speed and durability in addition to her pre-existing gun/bomb making skills and overall scheming. She got a buff, in other words. And then she basically won season 1 since she ultimately kept the crystal vs Ekko and used it to deadly effect, but didn’t know what to do after that win since it’s a dark win, went through a major character arc, and is now doing something that the viewer would likely agree with.
She’s trying to bust her adopted child out of prison, along with a bunch of other oppressed people out of prison. She succeeds. But then for details that I won’t go too far into, a giant beast attacks the prison, coming after one of the prisoners that summoned it.
This beast has been built up for like five episodes at this point, and has insane regenerative powers. As every episode ends, we see that this scientist is building some beast. And in this episode, he *finally* unleashes it to come and bust him out of prison, not knowing that Jinx is already coming to bust him and others out of prison.
Season 2 has a “Big Bad”, and she happens to be inspecting the prison at this time, and this beast literally knocks her to the side like a joke. She’s an utter badass but this beast is like “gtfo here”. So we get the setup that this thing is unstoppable even comparable to other badasses.
So Jinx, her right-hand woman Sevika, her adopted child Isha, and this prisoner that summoned the beast to him, are all at the bottom of this prison dealing with guards after everyone else escaped thanks to Jinx, and this unstoppable hyper-beast comes down ready to kill everyone.
https://youtu.be/YHrF7gbBB6w
The guards turn their attention from Jinx to the beast as he breaks through literally everything. Jinx herself focuses on the beast too. As he breaks down to that bottom floor, his first strike killing guards initiates heavy metal music. So, we get a well-synced audio change that fully amplifies the sheer magnitude of this problem relative to prior threats in the show. He busts through all the guards like a joke.
Jinx shoots the beast with her magical weapon that would insta-kill most things, but he heals from it instantly. She gets that “oh shit” look on her face, and immediately tells her right-hand Sevika to get her adopted kid Isha out of here, while she hangs back to deal with this insane beast to distract him.
Jinx at this point has been actively declining to be any sort of hero, saying she’s not fit for it. She’s instead been trying to be an adopted mother to this orphan kid Isha that she saved, which directly conflicted with her other path of being a violent hero, since being that violent hero would make it harder to raise her adopted kid.
But in this moment, both paths converge. She came here to save her adopted kid Isha, but to be a mother for her and keep her safe she needs to be a violent hero in this moment, so she focuses everything on holding the line and basically sacrificing herself against this hyper-beast.
As Sevika brings Isha out, Jinx fights the hyper-beast all-out. And at this point, she has super speed and durability vs when she fought Ekko, along with her better weapons, so she’s going all-out against this thing physically and technically in a way that most others could not. But she’s constantly on the defensive since he’s so damn unstoppable even against her magic weapons and chemical durability/speed.
We get scenes back and forth between Jinx fighting the beast, and Sevika bringing Jinx’s kid Isha out (Isha’s perspective is desperately worried for her adopted mother Jinx). And then importantly, one of the later scenes is that Sevika brings Isha out of the prison, and we see the front gates. It’s an utter bloodbath; this beast just sheer broke through the main front gate uncontested against their forces. It re-affirms the sheer magnitude of what Jinx is dealing with down there even more than we saw prior, even as she’s already losing gradually.
And then as it ends, the beast beats Jinx, and she pulls herself against the wall. She accepts the defeat, saying “you got me hairball”, and she tries to kamikaze with a grenade toward him like she did with Ekko. But the beast even stops that (and probably would have survived it anyway). So, Jinx is defeated even in her kamikaze attempt, is frightened, and readies herself for a painful death, but was successful at getting her right-hand and adopted kid out.
There are spoilers beyond that which I won’t go into. What’s notable about this fight is that it’s not particularly creative like the other one was. Some unstoppable hyper-beast vs an agile, badass, ranged, underdog character we want to survive. As the plot later reveals, this beast has a ton of plot implications, but we don’t even know those at the time, and yet it’s *still* an amazing fight for a few reasons.
The first reason is that’s well-telegraphed. The show didn’t fuck around with telling us ahead of time how unstoppable this thing would be. They built him up from late season 1 into season 2 in various end-credit scenes, for like 5+ episodes. So even for those that didn’t know the video game lore, when he was finally released, we knew this thing wouldn’t fuck around.
The second reason is that it was well-choreographed within the episode. The beast literally flings the season’s later Big Bad away like a joke. The Big Bad might be more impactful overall since she has armies and all sorts of political machinations in addition to her physical badassary, but in a direct fight nothing stops this thing, nor is it close. And then he busts through down to the prison, through every single defense. And we get escalating scenes of just how bad this is, like toward the end we see that he literally just bloodily massacred the entire front defense and pushed in. And his attacks are timed with heavy metal music to boost the impact. He was amplified perfectly to the viewer. Those details matter in terms of execution.
And then the third reason is we have a character development, narrow win condition, and emotional stakes. Jinx, deciding to stay here and distract this unstoppable thing to get her right-hand and kid out, is a hero move, which she has been rejecting. Previously, she rejected being a hero because 1) she literally thought she’s a jinx, bad luck, that nothing good comes from what she does and nobody should follow her and 2) after moving beyond that view, she felt that protecting her new adopted child meant forgoing her previously violent self that she has slowly accepted herself as being.
This moment, however, required embracing her violence to protect her child, and she gladly did so. So she made the choice to embrace her violent self and likely die fighting this thing so her right hand and adopted child could get out. She decided to be a hero, for her child.
There was nothing uniquely creative about it. Instead, it was just perfectly executed. We are signaled ahead of time how unstoppable this thing will be, when it’s unleashed we are increasingly shown that it’s as unstoppable as we suspected it was in terms of narrative and well-synced music, and then when it impacts the people we care about, we see character decisions to try to interact with it to save others, which gives us emotional stakes amid a well-choreographed fight.
So, while I’d say the Ekko vs Jinx fight maximizes the combo of creativity and emotion, the Jinx vs Beast fight emphasizes amplification and character. Very different. But both amazing. Both perfectly executed.
There were many other amazing fights in Arcane, but I think those two were the best.
The show presents some fights that are *supposed* to impact me more than some of these, but for me they don't fully capture it. Since Violet and Jinx are the two main characters, when they fight in early season 2 that should be the best fight ever. And while it's decent, I don't think it's the best. It feels too much like the writers wrote it. Like it's structured as a scene, that we've been expecting. When I watch it, I am thinking, "what are the writers going to do here?"
When writers do their best, we don't see their handiwork. We just feel like it was character decisions. When writers err, we can more easily see their hand at play. The Jinx vs Violet fight, as epic as it was, had too much of the writers' hand at play for me to call it a top fight of the show.
That's part of why I'm pretty specific about these other fights. Ekko vs Jinx. Jinx vs the Beast. They feel organic from the characters' own decisions, the writers hands' were hidden, and there was amazing creativity, amplification, emotion, character, and/or execution.
Is there anyone who is *strongly* interested in being an early round beta reader for my sci fi manuscript?
Near-future sci-fi, crime/thriller/cyberpunk. A blend of action and multi-character depth, and moral analysis. The action is key and all, but alpha readers thus far cried at the character aspects; that's what hit them hard enough to care how they would engage with the action.
Strict Requirements for first-stage beta readers:
-I need to know/trust you personally, either in person or very well online with high reputation, to the point that I'd send an unfinished manuscript to you. There's no strict requirements, but if you know, you know.
-You like sci fi and/or fantasy books, and would be happy to read and offer objective (even brutal) feedback on a sci-fi action/crime thriller novel within the next month or two.
-You can comment or DM, for privacy sake.
That's a small group, but I'm putting it here on Nostr first for what I consider my pre-beta or readers. I will then expand 10x on Twitter and elsewhere for my full beta readers.
Meanwhile, I'm in the early revision stage. Manuscripts won't be sent out immediately. I'm still doing revisions and working with alpha readers, but I'm at the stage where I can start *planning* for the next step to see who might be interested to be early beta readers. Nostr folks get the exclusive early notice here.
I do tend to move pretty fast, though.
All pre-beta readers that provide meaningful input would be mentioned in the acknowledgement section, if the book were to be published, which of course I cannot guarantee will happen. I will only publish good books, one way or another.
But like, the alpha readers do like it. ;)
Price breakouts are really important and it’s great to finally see one, but I’m also kind of in the camp that anything under $100K is boring by this point.
I specified the clothes color for the two in the left, but not the two on the right, and they came out black anyway. I picture the guy on the bottom right wearing like a white lab coat more often than black.
Since it’s focusing more on headshots and it’s the near future, I didn’t give it fun details. The top left guy is zoomed out enough that he could have a gun but it can be hard to get midjourney to listen sometimes.
And Midjourney literally struggles making non-supermodel characters.
Like, certain faces I want to be tougher/plainer and it wouldn't do it, so I literally said ugly in the prompt and this popped out:
https://m.primal.net/Lytl.png
I messed around with Midjourney to create initial renderings of some of the main characters of my hobby sci-fi manuscript.
Would that movie poster interest you or nah?
https://m.primal.net/LyMn.png
I don't mean in terms of art quality itself per se since it's all AI, but rather, do those characters look interesting or not? Does a story involving those four provoke interest or not really?
Good feedback.
The content is actually really substance-based first and foremost. Character-driven, and very introspective.
AI pictures often have a slightly artificial aspect which gives us flash/bang/surface vibes. But believe it or not, the story is about the inner lives of these people as much as the outer lives. And two other people but they're more spoilers, so these are the four that are easier to show.
This was my alternate quadrant, if one is interested in hero/villain reads. Probably that slight top left change affects a lot.
https://m.primal.net/LyNf.png
"When a terrorist with strange powers begins wreaking havoc in an increasingly deadly series of attacks, federal investigator Asim Rahal must race against the clock to determine her whereabouts and find a way to stop her. In doing so, he realizes that the rabbit hole goes deeper than he thought."
Fair.
Part of the OP is a joke. It’s just four of the main character portrait drafts in AI in a quadrant, not an *actual* trailer of any substance. It’s just that when you put four characters together it looks a bit like a trailer, was kind of my joke.
Mainly interested to see vibes of how people feel about each one visually, ignoring the fact that they’re obvious AI for the most part.
Yeah, these are initial renderings, not intended as a legit movie poster. The movie poster point was kind of a joke.
Before having an artist work on them, I’d figure them out in AI like this and get feedback as something to give to the artist.
Top left has a big sarcastic/comedic aspect. He went through dark-brooding like 15 years ago and graduated from that.
Top right is kind of bubbly. ^-^
Bottom left is dark and brooding. :(
Bottom right is too obsessed with his work to brood.
gm
In fiction, the point of view from how we see the story can often color how we perceive the ethics of characters. And of course, that lesson can apply in real life as well.
If you ask most people if Neo and Trinity in the Matrix are heroes or anti-heroes, for example, they’ll probably say heroes. There is nothing particularly dark or edgy about them other than kind of a general “cool” factor. They’re pretty chill and well-meaning people in their downtime, we care about their relationship, they help their friends, they have rather pure motivations, etc.
But in the Matrix, agents can teleport themselves into any unplugged person. Which means that when Neo or Trinity attack a place, they pretty much have to slaughter everyone. Leaving survivors means that agents can teleport in. Innocent guards and stuff just get wiped out by the dozens. The stakes of humanity being enslaved by the machines are so high, that the characters don’t even really debate the ethics of this; they just accept it.
Like literally the opening scene is Trinity killing police, and the audience is like “wow cool” instead of “so, is that the antagonist?” The famous lobby scene consists of Neo and Trinity wiping out tons of guards that are just doing their job of guarding a skyscraper. In the sequel, Trinity sends a motorcycle bomb into a power station, and then murders the remaining guards as they attack her. We all basically like Trinity, and yet there are platoons of widows and orphans out there from all the guards she killed. There aren’t really even any scenes of her reflecting on that, like finding it emotionally difficult in any way to do those things or feeling in any way haunted by it.
If the Matrix story was shown from like, a detective’s point of view, these characters are terrorists and would either seem like outright villains (if you don’t know their motivation) or anti-heroes if you do (ends justify the means; mass-murder is okay and not even worth feeling bad about if it saves billions).
So, how the movie *frames* things for us makes a big difference. We closely follow Neo and Trinity so much that we’re like, “of course they’re the heroes”. The same thing happens in real life with political commentators and things like that; a cultural narrative can frame something as wholly good or wholly bad when often it’s actually kind of complex.
Therefore, it’s a useful practice whether in analyzing fiction or real life, to always ask how you could invert the framing for something.
The framing de-humanizes them but not necessarily for logical reasons. They are all real biological people that are plugged into the Matrix and die in real life if they are killed in the Matrix, and experience pain and so forth.
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?
Along with Steve Lee of Spiral and Ren of Electrical Capital, I co-authored a paper on Bitcoin consensus and the analysis of risks around protocol upgrades from a technical & economic perspective:
https://github.com/bitcoin-cap/bcap
Here's the v1.0 PDF version:
https://github.com/bitcoin-cap/bcap/blob/main/bcap_v1.0.pdf
It explores what consensus is, how Bitcoin has historically upgraded its consensus over time including through contentious periods, and what some of the future paths and associated risks there are for potential changes in the future.
The paper doesn't take a stance for or against any given consensus change, but rather analyzes the field for how changes are made (which partially evolves over time as the network grows, i.e. 2024 is different than 2017 is different than 2009), and what some of the specific risks are for contentious changes from a blended economic and technical perspective.
For example, we analyze scenarios around bounty claims, which is a risk that can manifest when the majority of miners adopt a change but only a minority of economic nodes have:
https://github.com/bitcoin-cap/bcap?tab=readme-ov-file#how-might-this-occur-with-a-soft-fork
And in a world of sovereign holders, corporate treasurer holders, ETF holders, and so forth, some of that could play out differently today or in the future compared to how it might have played out in the past. And so we provide a framework to help analyze those scenarios and risks.
For the v1.0 version, we had the paper reviewed by major exchanges, ETFs, corporate treasurers, developers, miners, legal experts, philosophy professors, etc to make it as accurate and helpful as an educational resource across domains.
However, we consider our initial version to only be the start. We're releasing the paper to the public domain, and inviting people to contribute to it or even help maintain it on Github.
It's a living document, in other words. We're not the authorities on this; we just did a lot of research and review on the topic as a starting point. If there's something you think could be clarified, or something you disagree with, then we invite your contribution! And a big thank you to the initial people that reviewed it and provided feedback for the initial v1.0 version!
My husband read 34 of 45 chapters of my hobby sci fi manuscript so far, and the funniest conclusion he's had is that it's less autistic than he thought.
He said he knew I would do action and fight scenes well, but for the downtime scenes with friends and partners and stuff he was like, "not that I'm saying I didn't expect you to write them decently, but like, you know... and yet holy shit."
Act 2 really hit him hard. He's currently traveling, so for Act 1 he sent me all sorts of audio recordings of his thoughts and gave some good suggestions, like very interested but kind of intellectual about it. But then for Act 2 instead of sending audio recordings he's was like, "We... need to video chat right now, omg." He ended up reading that second act in one sitting and messing up his schedule because of it.
Feels like memes won the election.
Candidates unironically have to be positively meme-able to be successful going forward.
And in particular, candidates can’t have the vibe of an HR manager that would call you into the office to talk about your inappropriate memes.
Trump is meme-able. Obama was meme-able. Even Biden had his Dark Brandon meme but otherwise was not great on that front. Kamala is totally not meme-able.
https://m.primal.net/LuYw.jpg
Memes actually condense a lot of information into a tiny bite. But yeah, ideally a politician would then also have detailed positions that they can articulate well in debates.
gm
This weekend I finished the (very) rough draft of my hobby sci-fi novel manuscript.
115k words, 45 chapters, front to back readable.
Written in two months, but thought about for years which made the writing come out faster. It needs a ton of revision work, especially since fiction writing isn't my expertise.
Most people have to edit/revise down their manuscript, but I envision this being filled a bit more to 120k+ words.
For reasons I can't say due to spoilers, the third act was the hardest for me. For most writers, the second act is the hardest, kind of that "meh" middle. My middle was tight and fun and easy to write. But due to a couple nontraditional story structure elements, as well as the most technical action sequence in the story, the third act was *really* hard. But I managed to figure it out and am quite satisfied with it.
Now I have to revise and optimize it all.
I told my mother about bitcoin for years and she was like “yeah, cool, nah.” She’s in her 70s.
And then I was like “The HRF eg @gladstein is doing cool shit for human rights with bitcoin.”
And once I showed her some examples, she was like “holy shit” and joined their newsletter and is like 110% onboard with their mission. She reads their newsletters more than me now, and asks me questions about them, so I have to catch up on them to answer her stuff.
She still doesn’t own Bitcoin but is like, reading every HRF email and asking me about them and totally onboard.
I appreciate people across the political spectrum, and have friends in multiple worldview camps. Especially since they are often from different countries with different contexts. My friends do tend to cluster in certain areas due to our shared interests (i.e. I am freedom-oriented in general), but there are people who consider themselves to be anarcho-capitalists and others that consider themselves to be aware progressives, for whom I would invite them to my home and stay in our guest area.
But I have a visceral disgust toward people who I perceive to be playing a role or being consciously fake. I'm not against people playing an actual obvious caricature for satire of course. But in the modern era, there is a tremendous amount of audience capture, gaslighting, fake social media influence that is meant to come off as genuine, and influencers and politicians treating their audience as though they are literally retarded.
Once I perceive someone as fundamentally fake and consciously playing a false role that they pretend is real to their audience, they're done to me. This behavior has been on an enormous uptrend in the past few years, much to my provocation. It's an acceleration of cynicism. Those that do this are intelligent but cynical toward their audience, manipulating them either for personal gain or for their political purpose.
Be aware of this trend.
When I ate a lot of carbohydrates, no matter how thoroughly I brushed and floshed my teeth every day, my dentist would be like, “eh you could do better.”
When I sharply reduced my carbohydrates, even when I was a bit less thorough in brushing, my dentist would be like, “it all looks great, good job.”
Just my multi-year experience. I don’t claim to say it’s universal.
In case you want random dental advice from Lyn.
It’s been a big issue of mine for decades, and so far the solution has been to eat fewer carbs but also eat a decent amount of calcium. And vitamin A and K2.
All my solutions have been dietary. My brushing and flossing was pretty consistent but as I changed diet, cavities or lack thereof would change radically.
I've got an out-of-date article from like 2017 that captures 80% of it.
https://www.lynalden.com/increase-energy/
I recently did a podcast with Max Webster that updated it. I'll repost it here when it's out.
Oddbean new post about login | logout
Notes by LynAlden | export