Saturday, March 20, 2010

A Mac is in my future

I've wanted a Mac computer ever since the first one came out in 1984. What style! What panache! What an inflated price tag! Imagine clicking on icons, instead of typing in command lines on a Windows DOS black screen. And no OS to load with floppy disks. It was already burned into the hardware. A science fiction utopia!

The first MacIntosh only had a tiny black and white screen and rather prmitive by 21st century standards. But primitve as it was, it was nonetheless light years ahead of the fledgling Windows environment. And outrageously expensive. Not that the Mac is dirt cheap nowadays. It was never meant to be.

It was meant to be a super user-friendly machine that just works. And that's exactly what it does. No PC viruses, no blue screen, no crashes, no BS. It is more expensive than a PC but the difference is worth it. But when you consider what you'd have to pay for a PC to get the equivalent power, software and security (maybe), there's hardly any price difference at all.

But price wasn't the only consideration for me. It was the OS itself, the apps and the sheer beauty of design. I've been studying the software offerings for the Mac and I'm more than impressed. Especially software for writers. Scrivener stands head and shoulders above any Windows writing app I've ever seen. The NeoOffice productivity suite looks great, too. In addition, it's open source and free.

My reasons for making the switch from PC Hell to Mac Haven are legion. So it's goodbye Billy, hello Stevie before the end of this year, either for a birthday present or a Christmas present to myself. Either way, the Mac will be mine.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Script Frenzy 2010 : Avatar 2, The Renegade

April is right around the corner and  Script Frenzy is about to begin, which means writing a hundred page movie script in 30 days. I'm up for it. In the few years I've signed up for SF, I've have yet to finish a script. This year will be different, I hope.

Been in fanboy mode since seeing Avatar 3 times. Bought an 'Ivong Na'vi ** t-shirt from Learn Na'vi and am even learning the Na'vi language. Call me a geek if you will, I can live with it.

Without further doo-doo, here's the bare bones synopsis of this year's opus.

Title: Avatar 2: The Renegade
Tagline: Old soldiers never die...
Logline: Col. Quaritch launches a one-man war to destroy the Tree of Souls and the Na'vi.

Plot:
It's 6 years later and Col. Quaritch is back...in an avatar body! He wants to finish the job of neutralizing the Na'vi, plus taking revenge on Neytiri for those 2 arrows in the chest. He also wants to Jake dead on general principles. This may prove to be difficult, since Jake has since become jakesully, leader of the Omaticaya clan and has his own royal guard.

Jake naturally opposes Quaritch, but also has other problems. Several disgruntled followers of Tsu'tey blame Jake for his death, plus the fact that he is "uniltìranyu" (avatar) and has no right to be "eyktan" (tribe leader). Jake and Neytiri now have 2 kids, a boy and a girl : Fromìk, 4 and Tawyane, 5 (anthropological trivia: Fromìk has 4 fingers and Tawyane, 5 ). Because Neytiri is the wife of  a "five-finger", she also encounters problems with racism/jealousy from some  within the tribe which will ultimately endanger her life. Both kids also get into trouble, like all 6-foot tall children . Grace will be reunited with her avatar body. Jake couldn't bear her loss and has kept her avatar in stasis, just in case. And it just so happens the time is ripe to wake Grace up.

There will be plenty of action, drama, love, pathos, bathos and the inevitable Final Confrontation, as well as the inevitable Predictable Ending. Unfortunately (or fortunately) once I finish the script, I can't do anything with it or I risk my skin with a legion of studio lawyers. So I'll print out and bind a nice copy before lovingly sticking the thing in a closet for my future biographers to find in 50 years or so. 

** Let Na'vi Bloom!
 

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