I’ve got to share something I learned from our show runner on The Chi - Jewel Coronel. When she was working for Terry Rossio (yes, THE Terry Rossio), he gave her a fantastic exercise to test any character she was writing 1/

Finally getting this bad boy framed but I don't know what side to display. It's 2 feet by 3 feet. Leaning toward the map

Using my own workbook to get a jump on my rewrite. Feeling better about this draft already

1/3 of my phone’s storage is taken up by operating systems and system data. 1/2 is taken up by app data. I needed an app for two factor authentication to approve my time cards. There is little room here, on this black rectangle, for joy.

Just over two weeks before your sci-fi short stories are due!

Any suggestions for which edition of Plutarch’s Lives I should purchase for a first time read?

Speaking of indies, have you guys seen our movie YOUR LUCKY DAY? Shot in 16 days on 1 lens. Mainly one location. A powerhouse performance by the late Angus Cloud. Written and directed by Dan Brown. Premiered at Fantastic Fest. On Netflix. (I also started a YouTube and am going to start actively posting some things there if ya wanna follow along). youtu.be/Ruw3b_iOnMA?si=RBiH…

Are you creative enough to spin a happy ending from here? Reminder that your scifi short story submissions to Panopticon Volume 3 are due July 1st.

🦔Leonardo is a $17 billion defense contractor. It built a system called SignalTrace that clips sensors onto the license plate readers already mounted on street poles, overpasses, and police cars across the US. Every time you drive past one, the sensor grabs the Bluetooth and WiFi signals from every device in your car, ties them to your plate, and logs the time and location. Your phone, your AirPods, your kid's tablet. All of it goes into the same file. A friend rides with you once and their devices are linked to your plate. Leonardo has sold this to police departments since at least 2023. There is no federal law covering it, no opt-out, and no warrant requirement. My Take None of the pieces here are new. Your phone has always broadcast a signal. The license plate cameras were already there. Leonardo just connected them and found a buyer. Nobody had to break a law or build anything from scratch. They assembled a surveillance system from parts already in place and sold it before anyone noticed. Most people found out this week from a 404 Media investigation. Leonardo received the patent in 2024. By the time you hear about something like this, the deals are done and the sensors are on the poles. That's how it works now. Hedgie🤗 404media.co/this-company-wil…

VFX people - I’ve got a recently graduated student looking to make their first short film and need some VFX done. Who can help me figure out a budget? I don’t even know how to give them a ball park number for their project.

I'm going to say this and then log off for a bit because I have a pickup shoot to prep. On my current feature that I am producing (wrote it as well) our crew was paid fairly, above minimum wage requirements and in keeping with labor laws. Would I have liked to pay more up front? Yes. But we just didn't have that ability with our financing. My fellow producers and I structured in bonuses for our crew should the film hit certain benchmarks. Should the film do well, they'll make way more money than they would making a standard union level salary for the same amount of time. Every film is different, every financing deal is different, and so I don't think it is or should be mandatory for producers to set up deals like this. What we paid people was fair, and if that's all they ever get paid, it won't be something I have on my conscience. There's a very good chance I never see a dime, since I deferred my writing and producing fee to make the project happen. This is something I would never ask my crew, unless they begged to defer some of their pay in exchange for backend. I will always be open to that arrangement. Indie producers especially are probably way more open-minded about structuring deals to allow more profit-participation. You aren't going to get that within the studio system, at least not any time soon. So, BTL crew, please, advocate for yourself. Ask for a deal structure that will benefit you if the film does well. You'd be surprised what people will be willing to do! If you fear your producer so much for asking for that, then maybe they're not a great person to work for. If you fear speaking up about onset work conditions that violate the law, then you definitely don't want to work for that producer again, and you should seek legal counsel to see how you can protect yourself and your fellow crew members, because if the producer is abusing or exploiting people they've likely done it before and will continue to do it unless someone steps up. Be the change you want to see in the world. I'm not some heartless, bootlicking producer without a soul. I'm a writer. I'm a first AD. I'm a PA on my own film. I've worked harder than anyone else on my film (which is as it should be), and without compensation (also as it should be). But to act like we, on the producing side, are stealing from crew by not giving out bonuses when not contractually obligated to do so really misses so much of the reality of paying for a movie to exist. Until you're in the driver seat, you don't really know.

The Obsession art director post. Man, what a choice. One year total experience. Only credit pre-Obsession is a single short film. Sign on to a low budget indie. Agree to rate. Movie explodes. You're suddenly the Art Director fo the most talked about film of the year. If this ever happens to you, let me give one piece of advice. Embrace it. Use the credit to fight off offers, get a BTL agent, turn those difficult three weeks into an incredible career. Do NOT cut every connection you have to the filmmakers, put out tweets about how you wish you'd shut down their production, and complain about the rate you agreed to (which isn't even like $100 or some student film sketchiness). Do you know how many indies I have done as an actor for $240/day? A fucking lot. Every single time I know what I'm getting into and I hope to god it turns out well and leads to another opportunity. I cannot even imagine getting cast in Obsession and then putting out a career ruining post about it instead of trying to leverage it into more work.

Just received a new entry for Panopticon Volume 3 and wow - the quality of the entrants this year is impressive.

Grim and dark sci-fi is easy. Grim and dark sci-fi with a ray of hope is a brutal challenge. Are you up to it?

How a 10-Minute Short Film Landed Luke Barnett a Role in 'Dark Winds,' a Feature in Development and More: 'It's Had a Far Greater Impact Than Anything Else I've Done' variety.com/2026/film/news/l…

Not enough people know about The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati

Katherine Argent wrote a masterpiece of a tweet. We turned it into a dramatic one-take short film. This is “Everything is Fine.”

Best Filmmaker Advice from John Patton Ford (Emily The Criminal, How To Make A Killing)

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts. So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world. What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable. Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations. The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead. Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described. The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding. The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months. Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight. Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now. She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

I keep trying to explain to people, but America doesn’t have a viable 3D printer company because we don’t have any of the underlying architecture. Shocking how many people think a complex product is some singular thing you build at a “factory.” A 3D printer is really just a featherweight CNC mill, so much so that they speak yeh same language (G-Code). You need: - micron accurate linear rails - Sub micron bearings for those linear rails. - High resolution servo/stepper motors. - Motion control chips and boards and stuff. - Sheet metal, injection molding, various coatings. America has *no* industrial base for *any* of this at consumer product scale. We invented or definitively innovated everything above, then the McKinsey set came in and convinced us to ship it all to China for the last 40 years. So yea, sure… you can screw a 3D printer together in America, at great expense… but you are doing so with primarily Chinese components. What we need is a bunch of uninvestible (by venture funds) businesses that are boring and competently supply a bunch of even more boring, medium margin, no-moat components.

Anybody want some TV/movie crew shirts? Large and XL Getting rid of some extra shirts from “Monster” and “Utopia” to start.