Thinking about characters.

Greg doesn’t like Shawn and Dusty because they are his opposites, but Shawn and Dusty are distinguishable. Shawn is the slacker, easy-going type; Dusty is neurotic, possibly a little obsessive-compulsive.

Seth and Dusty are both neurotic, but Dusty is more anxious and obsessive-compulsive, while Seth is more of an introvert.

However, Seth is not as introverted as Bart. Bart is a network nerd. He, also, is wealthy, because he worked for Netscape and then for Google. But he does not have an ostentatiously wealthy lifestyle like Don.

Don is more a scientist than a business success -- he is a Silicon Valley millionaire, not the (acquantance 1) type but the sort-of smooth type. He's a CTO but has managed to smooth himself out -- a little like Ford or that guy who was the head of inet.

Greg is more the classic type-A business type, but he’s not as successful as Don or even as wealthy as Bart. He is a very minor real estate developer -- he redevelops strip malls and old shopping centers. Keep in mind that guy you sat next to at the sushi bar in Las Vegas as the prototype for Greg.

Popular posts from this blog

Datamining your Twitter feed

Just as I predicted in How They Scored: Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines. -- Kara Swisher, All Things D
Read more
Yesterday I wrote about 2500 words as a backstory to Shaun... this morning I wrote another 2000, and I only now have just picked up Shaun. Most of that was a story about a girlfriend they shared, Robin. I modeled her on the real Robin I slept with only once or twice back in 1980 -- a cheerful blond girl who had not lost all her babyfat, whom I met doing contact improv. There was one memorable moment in my affair with her -- the moment I came inside her. Other than that, I remember walking her to her place over on Parnassus afterward, and running into her and her mother on a Muni bus some time later after we had mostly lost touch with each other, and trying to keep up a correspondence with her when she moved back to Washington, DC. She was someone I never really knew much about -- I don't know whether that was because she was rather young and unformed, or because I was too self-centered to pay attention. Probably a little of both. Anyway, I kept the blond cheerfulness, the blandness...
Read more

Why do people report on themselves?

Image
Not long after I started using Twitter, I started to wonder: Why? Imagine the familiar movie scenario where a detective is desperate to track and find a suspect, or where a detective is hired by a suspicious spouse to trail their errant husband or wife. Or an alternate scenario from the Cold War, where the secret police manipulate ordinary citizens to inform on one another (cf. the film The Lives of Others , pictured at left). Or the horrible situation of a controlling husband who wants to know where his wife is at every minute of the day. In those situations, one person wants to track another; the person who is tracked would rather not be tracked and sometimes would do anything to avoid it. Now consider yourself, or any ordinary bourgeois, and how much you are tracked on a daily (and sometimes minute-to-minute) basis. Credit card companies and credit reporting firms register every purchase you make with something other than cash. Airlines, grocery stores and other businesses with rew...
Read more