Alex Coppen

los angeles

The Sane Person's Guide To Los Angeles

So you did it. You transplanted from somewhere else far away to the glittering City of Angels on the sunny west coast; full of wonder, bluster, and hopey-changey stuff. You read three hundred Reddit threads and fetishistic digital blog articles about the 10 things you need to know, only to

screenwriting

Why Can't Screenwriting Work Like Stage & Music Publishing?

Composers who write sheet music publish it as an original literary work to a library catalogue, and record labels purchase the rights to make a sound recording of it in the form of up-front payment and/or royalties. Is there any reason producers shouldn't operate as record labels, and license

women

Something Has Gone Very, Very Wrong With Young Women's Mental Health

"Do today's global protests have anything in common?", asks the BBC in a November 2019 article. The answers they suggest are inequality, corruption, political freedom, and, in the last image, climate change. They seem to "miss" one wildly obvious observation: young women exhibiting deranged religious cult behaviour. Mental health can

academia

The Need For New Laws Dealing with Frivolous And/Or Malignant Scholarship

Outlawing Critical Race Theory and other "divisive concepts" in the education system is a welcome step, but it doesn't address the much bigger problem underneath. "Divisive" doesn't necessarily mean "bad", intellectually-speaking: Galileo and Darwin were divisive; debates divide at the end to discover the result. For sixty years, academics have

religion

Liberationism: The Counterfeit Gnostic Pagan Gospel of the Critical Social Justice Religion

Liberationism, n: A gnostic pagan Millenarian religion centred on the worship of the self, and its place in a hypothetical transhuman utopia achieved through collective abandonment of social conventions. The 60s and 80s were an orgy of self-congratulatory "liberation" back to primitive existence in the pursuit of escapist mysticism. Humans

film

Fumigating The Radiation Poisoning Of Critical Theory From Screenwriting

Art is not about activism; drama is not about deconstruction; stories are not sociology; plots are not about propaganda or "power dynamics"; arcs are not "analysis"; ideas are not ideology; teleology is not "theory"; juxtaposition is not about "justice"; characters are not low-resolution caricatures; nature is not about "narratives"; writing

USSR

Reanimating the Corpse of the Alternative Society

What do you do when you don't have any ideas? You reanimate the old ones other people had, and give them a new name. Internationalists and activist political groups are relying on nobody noticing their source book is the old USSR. Journalist and author David Satter,  Senior Fellow at the

screenwriting

Story Plot Structures: How Plays, Games, And Movies (Don't) Work

A good story tells itself. If you are finding yourself stuck and attempting to force the events of a story, your story sucks. Or, you suck at telling stories. Stories with true narrative force are unstoppable. 99.9% of stories created today - even through the 36 situations - are

screenwriting

Story Catalysts: Accelerators, Instigators, Initiators, Inciters

You've got that dramatic arc you want to play out in the scene, but how do you start it? What kicks off or provokes the action? You need a catalyst or provocation which jumps starts a context for your plot point to exist within. In chemistry, catalysis is the process

foucault

Michel Foucault: prolific, serial paedophile rapist of children

Foucault is the most cited scholar in the humanities. His homosexual proclivities, and subsequent death from AIDS in 1984, are well-known. It turns out his nature was much worse than San Franscisco BDSM bathhouses: whilst working at the University of Tunis, he paid 8 year-old Tunisian Arab boys to sodomise

science

A Better Mind: The Great Unknowns & The Great Values

Our generation's most brilliant minds are burning CPU time explaining, to our least functional minds, the basic concept of the link between sex and gender; despite having more knowledge than ever before, we have less wisdom. It begs the simple question: what should we spending our time on? Well, there

technology

Getting The Soviet Republic Of Big Tech Out Of Your Life

If Big Tech platforms are now countries, they seem to resemble communist dictatorships like the USSR or the People's Republic of China. Silicon Valley's big Utopian, transhumanist ideas are looking more like Dante's Hell than Elysium. A small council control the flow of information and decide what is good for

software

Quick Delivery Of A Web App For Android & Desktop

Increasingly there's a growing need to develop and publish across technological platforms, for many different reasons. One of them is vendor lock-in, where you want clients to depend on an installation of your product rather than visit a shared page. Another might be access to the underlying operating system. Or

marcuse

The Toxic Disciples of Marcuse

"...the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements” on the Right, and the aggressively partisan promotion of speech, groups, and progressive movements on the Left" is the central thesis of the 60s' generation's prophet, Herbert Marcuse, in his satanic diatribe, "Repressive Tolerance". He ironically called it

politics

A Generation's Time To Legislate A 21st Century Magna Carta

On June 19 1215, a new era dawned which would end up transforming the world. Archbishop Langton finalised a document of 63 clauses written in Latin to make peace between the King and a cartel of rebel English barons. It eventually grandfathered the English Bill of Rights, the modern justice

politics

The Hopelessly Partisan Impartiality of Fact Checkers

Whenever anyone claims they are offering the "correct" perspective of the facts in a political context, you should be highly suspicious. Cynical, even. Aspiring to the "correct" version or opinion is something the Communist Party of China and their fans in Academia require and mandate you to do. "Fact checking"

laravel

The A-Z of Laravel & A Maze of Development Shortcuts

Engineering is a discipline which can be a harsh teacher; repetition can be porous or opaque in how it educates you to optimize, and not simply through immiseration. We have few exams, but many unspoken qualifications. At some point, a lot of technical people either resign themselves to doing it

politics

Reform & Reclaim: The Lion Takes a Stroll

Laurence Fox is on his way to becoming a man of history, if he can build an alliance with numbers and a structured ideology. The UK may be led by Prime Minister, but it follows Nigel Farage. Both men have realised there is a huge population of classical British liberals

politics

Say What You Like About Trump, But Something Isn't Right Here

How did one of the least popular candidates in a primary gather the most votes in American history without campaigning? Democrats only win when they show up in large numbers and carry minority demographics. When People Are Selling You A Story, Watch OutTrump's been quite useful for other politicians. All

communism

A Compendium of Communist Dirty Tactics

Amongst communism's many, many problems is the one searing elephant in the giant empty room: why the proletariat never show up and come along. From Lenin, to Gramsci, to Mao, the same issue has dogged generations of activists; how to carry out the revolution if the incitement doesn't work. The

screenwriting

Deadly Sins of Screenwriting

Art has month purposes, but its sacred one is to reveal truth. Greek mythology and the Bible all speak in stories. Aristotle uses the same word as St Paul to describe a crucial thing which underpins everything that makes us human and drives art: Hamartia. In The Poetics, Hamartia is

christianity

The Increasingly Strange Case of Ravi Zacharias

Why would the most famous Christian apologist since C.S Lewis own spas, threaten suicide in an email to a married woman, have a secret corporate board, settle lawsuits with secrecy agreements, or use encrypted messaging apps? It's wrong to speak ill of the dead. It's wrong to hurl accusations

china

Fourth Generation Culture Warfare and the Trojan Tiger

Despite obvious comparisons to Orwell's literary observations of Stalin's regime, it's impossible not to notice how the Chilling Effect from the recent social media mania in liberal Western democracies is so reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Party's social suppression techniques. The US Attorney General's extraordinary denouncement of American companies "collaborating"

screenwriting

Understanding How The Other Species Communicates: A Study For Life

Tucked away in Leigh Michaels' (LeAnn Lemberger's) excellent writers' guide, "On Writing Romance" (2007), is a fascinating snippet about male/female relations which wouldn't be amiss in the self-help section of your local bookstore. The concept of us being two different "species" is now so overplayed it's become a trope,

academia

The Academic Virus Deliberately Designed for the Corruption of Everything

"We're trained Marxists", says Patrisse Khan-Cullors into a webcam recently. "We spent the year reading, anything from Marx, to Lenin, to Mao, learning all types of global critical theory and about different campaigns across the world", she responded two years ago, when asked "How did you build the BLM movement?