{"id":135,"date":"2011-10-10T13:34:58","date_gmt":"2011-10-10T17:34:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/?p=135"},"modified":"2011-10-12T10:51:45","modified_gmt":"2011-10-12T14:51:45","slug":"the-thing-and-wordcraft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/?p=135","title":{"rendered":"The Thing and Wordcraft"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Forgive me as a geek the hell out about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0084787\/\"><em>The Thing<\/em><\/a> for a while.<\/p>\n<p>I watched the flick for the first time in years last night, and was struck by three things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How remarkably blue Kurt russell&#8217;s eyes are.<\/li>\n<li>The subtle placement of an old anti-vd poster behind Mac as he performs the blood test. \u201cThey aren\u2019t labeled, chum\u201d<\/li>\n<li>One particular aspect of craft &#8212; names.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>12 characters are involved in the strange events at Outpost #31, any of whom could be an alien. People whisper paranoid fears about each other in dark corners.&#8221;What\u2019s wrong with Blair?&#8221; &#8220;Go get the keys from Garry.&#8221; &#8220;I won\u2019t go with Windows.&#8221;\u00a0 And yet I had no issue keeping the names straight.<\/p>\n<p>How was this done?\u00a0 A few keys &#8211;<\/p>\n<p><strong>It\u2019s ok for people to call each other by name<\/strong>. Writer advice columns everywhere tell us not to do that. \u201cGee, Bob, I don\u2019t get it.\u201d \u201cMe either, Shan.\u201d They say people don\u2019t really talk like that, and to an extent they are correct. But in a group conversation, it happens much more frequently &#8212; and this can be used to our advantage.<\/p>\n<p><strong>One at a time<\/strong>. The witchcraft whisperings addressed one guy at a time. Even if the audience isn\u2019t sure who they mean at first, it\u2019s made clear pretty quickly by referring to other scenes.<\/p>\n<p><strong>No nicknames<\/strong>. Aside from the shortening of MacReady to Mac, the rest of the characters stick to one name. I\u2019m a fan of using the various ways people refer to each other as a device to reveal the character of the speaker, but when faced withe the sheer ice cliff of names in this story, they were right to leave it simple.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Forgive me as a geek the hell out about The Thing for a while. I watched the flick for the first time in years last night, and was struck by three things: How remarkably blue Kurt russell&#8217;s eyes are. The subtle placement of an old anti-vd poster behind Mac as he performs the blood test. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,1],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-thing-2","category-uncategorized","tag-the-thing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":141,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions\/141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}