DramatistDreamer

Thank you. Yes, I had read a little about the potential of AI and robotics, in addition to gene therapy. I hope there is some equity in any future trials and treatments as sadly, many people of color are often the last people to have access to clinical trials and new technologies when it comes to medical developments. That being said, I hope there is some breakthroughs soon too.

Your welcome. Not to get too personal in this forum but I lost a loved one to pancreatic cancer early this year. It was and remains a very painful loss. It is good that people can survive, hopefully Boone can continue to survive and thrive as sadly pancreatic cancer is a cancer that has a very high rate of recurrence. There just have to be some improvements in treatment and cure rates for cancer. I honestly can’t stand it anymore.

^Just spitballing ideas and I could come up with storylines for Reed, Ana and Ravi without much effort…isn’t that something? Speaking of Reed, his onscreen dad JT played by Thad Luckinbill is in a Paramount+ production called Special Ops: Lioness starring Nicole Kidman, Morgan Freeman and Zoe Saldana.

No, but just from observation in changes over a period of time. Television can be an awful grind with the hours especially. I remember one anchor who recently died of a heart ailment that she wasn’t even aware of and over the years, when I had seen her (I admit, wasn’t often since I hadn’t been a regular viewer since the 90s), she looked tired, despite her professional demeanor, it seemed imprinted on her face and body language. That was sometimes the feeling that I got when I saw Elise Finch. I just know that television, especially early morning news can be an absolute grind. Any job where you have to wake up at hours that are not normal for a human body to rest and repair itself can take a toll on health.

A poignant tribute to Elise Finch, done by her CBS New York colleagues.

Elise Finch was definitely a staple in the NYC news market and to hear about her death this morning was very sad, it just adds to the overwhelming number of lives lost, people dear to me and those who were a part of life throughout the decades. There were times when I tuned into the news and wondered about her health, if she was alright and now this.

The studios believed that they didn’t need the writers as long as they had their film libraries, movies in the can and actors to prance the red carpet. Well, things have certainly changed, haven’t they?

Because the match was interminable, I was only able to watch in parts but from what I saw, it seemed as though Carlos did to Novak what Novak usually does to other opponents. Carlos really played a composed match overall, again, from what I could see. On a separate note, we’re there any interesting Wimbledon fashions, at all? I didn’t see any but I didn’t see most matches. The current era might be a lost era in terms of fashion, the way the late 1980s was. Speaking of a bygone era, that hopefully will prove temporary, surface diversity…it seems like surfaces are vastly more alike than they are different at present. ‘Congratulations to Carlos ‘Carlitos’ Alcaraz. Hopefully some of these other young ATP players (and a few maybe not so young) will take note and get serious about staking their claim to big titles.

This makes me wonder if I should even post spitball story ideas on message boards. I might not do this anymore. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/15/technology/artificial-intelligence-models-chat-data.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

If viewers had seen Daniel as a teen, loving, practically being addicted to video games (which would have made sense since m uh, Phyllis), I think tptb could have gotten viewers to care. You would be surprised how you could get viewers/audience to care about something if you care enough to write something with detail and specificity and tie it to a character with a degree of popularity. It’s truly possible. Also, if you have at least one or two, or better yet a series of crisis (big and small) that raise the stakes. The added problem of having a product that doesn’t seem real is that there are no real stakes, any conflicts or crises will seem manufactured and artificial when the concepts that they are built on don’t seem real.

The commentators seem to believe that she had nothing left after having to beat five former GS winners. With her style of play, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the case. She also seemed to revert to the same problematic style of play from last year where her shots became entirely predictable. When it became obvious that Vondrousova had saw that she was telegraphing her shots and could then read where they were coming from and where they were going, it was as if Ons sank even further. You could see it in her body language. Most of it was her mentality.

She doesn’t need to be a sympathetic character, just so there are different sides to her, where we feel as if there is some impetus for her actions beyond the most basic motivations.

I also wonder whether Audra will turn out to be one-note, one-dimensional. It’s especially important for characters, particularly vixens to show vulnerability, even if only in private. It’s necessary that viewers see some vulnerability, so when/if the character goes out of her way to hide it, we still know that somewhere deep, it still exists.

The Academy responds with a letter after criticism over the exits of multiple Black executives. https://variety.com/2023/film/awards/academy-black-executives-exiting-addressed-1235671158/

The dialogue is so anemic.

Good points made, one and all. Jack surely had the right idea to let Kyle go, if he couldn’t accept a demotion. Now he should make the same decision with Summer. The mistake is having Audra immediately extend a job offer to Kyle, we should have seen Kyle try to send in his CV to other corporations and get rejected , usually because of his reputation in NYC getting around and/or the executive recruiters at these corporations making the assumptions that Kyle is only temporarily on the outs with his dad and will eventually reconcile and return to Jabot. We should see Audra plotting whether to scoop up Kyle to work for her, weighing the pros and cons, and what could be in it for her before extending an offer to him and Kyle, desperate and dejected, would have been primed to take whatever Audra has to offer. Kyle tries to plant the seed for Mariah to leave Jabot. Is that supposed to hasten some sort of conflict within Mariah? At the exact same time that her mother Sharon is embarking on starting and/or merging her newly acquired company? Regardless of what happens, Mariah and her brood will never be in danger of going hungry or being homeless, that’s for certain. The main problems having to do with sets, is really about not having enough sets but of not having the expensive looking sets suitable for wealthy people who live in mansions and work in C-Suites of billion dollar corporations and conglomerates. If the majority of these characters worked as customer service representatives or traveling salespeople, sets wouldn’t mean much to whether the storylines succeeded or failed. Now sets take on an outsized importance because everyone has to be wealthy. The last times the show had working class/blue collar characters, they didn’t even know how to write for them.

The constant drone of relentless baseline tennis on grass courts is why I watched less than a handful of matches in their entirety. If Ons is ever going to be more than a finalist, she needs to makes some tweaks to her approach on grass. Being aggressive is necessary on grass but playing an aggressive baseline game could only work if you can overpower your opponent, otherwise, you will do what Ons obviously did and exhaust yourself by the time you get to the championship match. If she knew that she was having trouble summoning enough reserves in energy, why didn’t she come into net more often? Adapt a more offensive strategy? Instead she hit so many drop shots, Vondrousova knew where the ball would land, even before the ball left the strings of Ons’ racquet. People swoon over Ons’ “variety” in her game but if she’s so mentally and physically fatigued that she can’t summon the mental strength to mix up her shots to create the variety that is integral to her style of play, her game is in immediate jeopardy. And today she couldn’t summon anything unique to save her tennis life out there. From what I have observed over the years, grass court tennis rewards athleticism and the type of aggressive game that takes risks…it doesn’t pay to be safe out there, that’s clay court tennis. For a similar reason, Svitolina couldn’t reach the final but since she had a baby less than a year ago, and is dealing with a lot of geopolitical stressors, I will show her some grace, it was a very good result for Elina, especially considering her game is not meant to win on grass. For me personally, this relentless churn of baseline tennis (aggressive or not) is just not the most interesting to watch. I have no interest in seeing players trade dozens of shots from behind the baseline with no apparent focus on how to create a winning shot, just endless hitting until one player drops out of frame from exhaustion. Not very interesting.

I’m glad these issues are finally seeing the light of day, as they’ve been the topics of industry blogs and discussions for some time now. Here’s a NYTimes article about SAG president Fran Drescher that contains a quote/tweet from soap vet Nancy Lee Grahn. https://news.yahoo.com/once-nanny-now-center-stage-113635415.html

Lol, that sounds like collective amnesia on the part of the creative and production staff. Or total lack of research. They are just allergic to looking back in any meaningful way and taking stock.

This is why I just cannot get into the narrative that Iger and those of his ilk are trying to spin, whining about entitled writers and actors while they ride around in their chauffeured driven Bentleys. It’s unfortunate that our celebrity-obsessed culture tends to focus on the celebrities who are the exceptions to the rules. The majority of actors, the majority of writers are journeymen/women. Anyone who has ever gone on an audition (big cities like NYC and L.A. included) or submitted work for consideration knows that it is usually a tough grind, which is the reality for the majority of this craft. I realize that celebrity often draws attention to the cause but I can’t help but think it’s a mistake for these unions not to highlight the everyday members who draw average and below average wages. If the perception is that every WGA/WGAE member is Aaron Sorkin and ever SAG/AFTRA member is Jennifer Lawrence, that is a problem that colors the focus of what these unions are trying to achieve. And frankly these union heads need to fix it.

Melanie has such a delightful hearty laugh and it rings out as genuine. As someone who has had a tough year, I can appreciate her words about what it takes to come back from grief and loss and heartbreak. Hopefully she can talk about her book on bigger platforms to promote her book to a larger audience.

👀 https://apnews.com/article/larry-nassar-gymnastics-coach-stabbing-4ab34526e30c09194e33ee2bd59eb652

Eubanks was noticeably crestfallen at not being able to pull off the victory but when he’s had a few moments to recover and really think about what he’s accomplished this Wimbledon fortnight, I mean his first main draw tournament at Wimbledon to the Quarterfinals, that is quite an achievement, hopefully this spurs him onward.

I just read that the Wednesday deadline will not be extended again. It’s definitely going to be tough but I hope the writers don’t give in and not just as a matter of principle. They should also be engaging those in media who have expansive platforms and who are sympathetic to their cause, or at least those who claim to be.

I mean, even I got an invite in my mailbox to join the picket line for WGAE and I have only ever had an associate membership years ago, lol. Fran needs to hustle herself back to L.A. before Melissa Gilbert grabs the presidency back, lol.