Travis Beacham

Yeah. Just so there’s no confusion about this— I don’t care what they’re called. Call them center-clockwise. Call them democraps. Call them lumpsuckers. I genuinely do not care.

Sure. You can call them ring-tailed lemurs for all I care. I dunno that the spectral labelling schema of US politics matters a ton to me personally.

Yeah. Brace yourself, but I don’t care what they’re called.

Oh yeah. I’ve seen it a lot. People just now discovering the movie are like, “Tons of people thought this was real.” Guys, nobody thought this was real. Maybe for like a minute way beforehand on certain very specific corners of the internet. But not when it was out.

I think it was a similar thing. The fact that it felt real was so groundbreaking and talked about so much that it eventually became “people thought it was real.”

And seeing this become the pop culture narrative is what convinced me Welles’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast was probably not widely mistaken for an alien invasion.

I was in high school when Blair Witcb dropped. A non-adult. I never thought it was real. I knew no one who thought it was real. Yes, the fact that it FELT real was huge and talked about. But I don’t recall that a lot of serious people believed a literal snuff film was showing in theatres.

The political class in general has a misunderstanding of what our relationship is. Like I go out and I eat at the restaurant that has something I want. It doesn’t occur to me to worry how restaurateurs feel about me wanting pizza. I’m not out here reading think-pieces about it.

I hate when the center-left political class talks about dropping the woke stuff. First of all, you lot were never carrying it. Secondly, YOU’RE asking for MY support. So it kinda feels like I can care about whatever I care about.

In a very real way I have never had to think about time more than when writing a comic book. How to slow a moment down with still images. Or speed it up with images. It’s a wild, quantum physics sort of writing.

Well— kinda. Movies are like music, but comics are not like paintings in that pacing is fundamental and not fixed. You do have to create a sense of moving time, making some moments pass quickly and others linger. You just can’t do that WITH time.

Well it would be very hard to picture a hero who’d have a harrowing time thinking of ways to defeat a villain I respected as little as that. Ideally you want your big bad to be sorta— I dunno… remotely competent.

It used to be in prehistory that the Mediterranean was mostly dry land and there was a moment when the Atlantic spilled over to fill it. Picture an ocean coming at you at 100m cubic meters a second... I dunno. Just sayin— there have been disasters that were harder to stop than an inept dictator.

And a comic book is probably much more dissimilar from the other three than they are to each other. Writing a comic book is firing up a completely different part of your writing brain.

Four core structural truths of every medium I’ve written in professionally. A film is a poem of motion and stillness. A season of prestige tv is a novel. Audio drama is telling as showing. And a comic book is time as space.

Don’t read this if you haven’t seen Weapons, but my god, there may be no single moment in modern cinema that’s scarier than just the sound of that fucking car door opening…

Because it feels a little like I personally am literally a hundred percent closer to replacing all art than AI is.

Or, you know, writing a movie. Like where is that on the scale of “existing” to “ending all human creativity?” Releasing a movie?

AI Is “Possibly The End Of Human Creativity,” Predicts CEO Of Amazon-Backed Firm Helping Rescue Lost ‘Magnificent Ambersons’ Footage Edward Saatchi, CEO of Amazon-backed startup Fable, sees AI as "possibly the end of human creativity" -- at least as an exclusive phenomenon.

“There is very possibly no limit to the miracle machine’s capabilities,” predicts salesman of miracle machines.

Was she patiently waiting for it or pacing? Watching the numbers change?

Well I’m sure there are multiple ways of getting around the building but I actually think the most solid evidence that she can use a lift is that we literally see her getting off a lift. It’s still a funny process to picture.

That said, the logistics are objectively funny.

Here, I’m gonna help some of you out. Arguing the logistics isn’t how you defend this moment. You wanna call out the effect of the creative choice. It works in situ b/c it’s that ominous thing of an elevator quietly arriving from hell. In art, if the vibe works, the logic doesn’t come up.

I think you'll find the Queen pressed the buttons for every floor and patiently waited until she finally reached the one with Ripley.

It’s not an attack. This is an A+ movie. And I will happily concede that it’s physically possible for her to use the lift. But no one can convince me that the process is not a vaguely funny thing to picture.

She’s this giant snarling thing. She presses the button. Waits. Gets in when it arrives. Turns around. Moves her talon over the buttons. Picks a floor. Waits there as it takes her up. This huge monster. Elevator music playing. C’mon that’s funny.

I see that many of you think I’m saying I don’t buy that the xenomorphs are clever. That’s silly. It’s a fully imaginary creature. Obviously whatever it’s doing is a thing it can do. I just think it’s sorta funny to picture the offscreen, implied steps of one of them using an elevator like a person.

No the door handle thing is a perfect beat. It’s well within reason and the characters comment on it. It’s a plot point. The queen thing is a little different. It’s way smarter than just opening a door, it’s a bit thrown away, and mostly it’s just funny to picture a xenomorph riding an elevator.

It’s very much like that— if instead of opening a kitchen door they used an elevator to go to the floor they’re prey was on and it wasn’t a plot point and no character ever pointed out that it was a strangely clever thing for an animal to do.

I love The Lost World (Jurassic Park 2). The film’s rex attack is easily a franchise high point. Easily. And the girl does use a gymnastics move to merc a raptor. Fair. I’d argue that this bit is quite grounded for a series that later spends several films on dinosaurs having military applications.