I said good day sir!

I have to assume that in the fullness of time, at least once, a mouse has used a mushroom as an umbrella.

Also! Bonus frog!

We don’t see a lot of bald expressions of emotion in film and television, especially if that emotion is fear or sadness or vulnerability. Dramas will give us some tears, but they always cut a way after a few seconds because a closeup of someone crying is deeply uncomfortable and most movies and TV shows aren’t in the business of making their audiences uncomfortable. It just doesn’t sell well.

But in this scene the camera never looks away. It follows Spock as he sits down at the table, and it circles him as he cries. But there are no cuts. We don’t even get music to create some distance, make it all a little more palatable; we just hear sobs and mumbled math equations.

It’s absolutely excrutiating. It would be excruciating no matter who we were watching, because we are so unaccustomed to seeing unadulterated emotion. And then there’s the fact that it’s a man. And that it’s Spock.

As originally scripted, the scene would have begun with Spock walking down a corridor openly sobbing. At that point, we’d cut away and find that another infected crewman has begun frantically running around the ship, slapping graffiti paint jobs all over the walls of the Enterprise. In subsequent shots, we’d find several more crewmen beginning to lose their inhibitions, and just when the pandemonium is beginning to overwhelm the ship, we’d come back to Spock.

Spock is now riding in an elevator, crying. He gets to his floor, and when the doors open, the graffiti guy runs up and paints a big black mustache on Spock’s face. At that point, Spock cries even louder. Leonard continues:

Now, that’s very imaginative, very inventive, very theatrical and very funny, but I felt that it was not really significant or appropriate for Spock. I mean, Spock was crying… but so what? There was no context for it, no discernible root force, no underlying cause for what’s going on. You know, in a strange way, this one-shot extra who’s walking around doing the paint jobs all over the place is a lot more interesting than Spock, who’s weeping. It seemed to me like we were wasting some really strong dramatic possibilities, all for the sake of an easy sight gag.

So I said all of this to John Black, and I also said that what I felt we really need to do her was a scene in which Spock’s basic inner conflict, the human versus the Vulcan, rises to the surface and motivates his tears. I mean this draft of the script found Spock fighting through all this emotion in public, and I felt that would be a terrible thing for Spock, because he’s a very private person.

So I said to John, “I think Spock would look for privacy when he feels the urge to cry. When he can no longer resist his tears, he would probably look for a private place in which to battle it out within himself.”

And John’s reaction was very negative. It was typical producer/writer-under-pressure kind of stuff. “C’mon, leave it alone because I’m working on next week’s script. Shoot it, just shoot it.” This kind of thing. And he complained about hurting the rhythm of the script.”

I’ve got to break into Leonard’s story here to explain that “it hurts the rhythm of the script” is a sort of basic, all-purpose producer’s excuse that’s fed all too often to actors seeking script changes. Good, bad, legitimate, frivolous, it doesn’t matter. If a producer doesn’t want to deal with your suggestions, he’ll probably just tell you that what you’re suggesting “hurts the rhythm of the script.” It’s the TV producer’s equivalent of “the dog ate my homework,” or “the check is in the mail.” It’s just an easy, somewhat plausible excuse that generally has no basis in reality. With that in mind, Leonard’s determination and fiercely protective nature in regard to Spock drove him over Black’s head to Roddenberry.

I called Gene about it, and I told him just what I’d told John. In talking to Gene, I was very careful to be politically supportive of his producer but about an hour and a half later, here comes John Black out to the set. So now I’m feeling, “Ahh, this great!” I’m feeling that someone’s actually listening to me.

And Black was funny, he cam onto the set and said, “Let’s go talk someplace.” We went to my dressing room, and he said, “Okay, tell me your idea again. Daddy says I have to listen to you.” And I had already formulated a basic concept of the scene, so I said, “Look, John, just get me into a room, and write me a half-page, a quarter-page, where you see Spock walk down a corridor and slip inside a door. As the doors close behind him, he’ll burst into this emotional struggle.” And John asked, “Well, what’s this struggle all about?” And I said, “It’s about love and vulnerability and caring and loss and regret, versus C=pi-r-squared and E=m-C-squared. Spock is a scientist, he is logical, and he feels this can’t be happening to him. It’s that kind of struggle. It’s logic versus emotion. It’s rational control versus uncontrollable urge. With that in mind, going behind closed doors will speak to the basic privacy of the character.”

So John wrote that and some other stuff, six or eight lines maybe, and it was exactly what I needed. Spock was now able to slip inside a door, close it behind him, struggle for a moment, then cry. At this point, he would start babbling, and the cause of the internal struggling would become obvious. Problem was, when it came time to shoot this stuff, a whole new set of obstacles had to be overcome. 

Marc Daniels, who was directing this particular episode, came up and asked, “What do you have in mind for this scene?” So, playing director, I said, “Just put the camera here, behind the desk. I’ll come in the door, I’ll walk toward you, I’ll come around, I’ll sit in the chair, and I’ll start this babbling conversation with myself, and I’ll cry. Now, if you’ll dolly around getting closer and closer we can meet at the end of the scene. We can see Spock’s entire breakdown in one long dramatic shot.”

Okay, now it’s five-thirty, I got out to get my ears and makeup touched up, and the time is important because we’re on a very rigid schedule. With overtime being so ridiculously and prohibitively expensive, we’d have to wrap each evening at exactly six-eighteen. Didn’t matter if you were in the middle of a sentence, come six-eighteen, we wrapped.

So now Jerry Finnerman starts to light the scene and it’s obvious that this will be our last shot of the day. I’m in the makeup chair, getting touched up, and now in comes Cliff Ralke, our dolly grip, who was always a very supportive person, and he says, “Excuse me, Leonard, but you’d better get out there, because they’re changing the shot you guys just talked about.”

So now Leonard comes out to the set, and the director has indeed changed the shot they’d just agreed upon. It’s important to note, however, that the reasoning behind this change, though not particularly sensitive to Leonard’s needs, was rational and perfectly valid. You see, as previously discussed, this shot would have entailed a one-hundred-and-eighty degree camera move starting from one side of the set, then slowly dollying completely around to the opposite end. This caused problems because the long, involved shot required a lot of lights and a time-consuming, involved setup that Jerry Finnerman didn’t think could be accomplished without going into overtime. Finnerman discussed this situation with Daniels, and together they decided that the most efficient way to shoot this scene would be in a series of brief cuts, each of which could be lit quickly and with relative ease.

They were going to have Leonard enter in a wide shot, then cut. Next, in a slightly tighter framing, they’d follow him as he crossed the set and sat down. Cut. An even tighter frame would catch the beginning of the speech, and they planned to cut once more, zooming to a close-up as Spock began weeping. This made sense in terms of production efficiency, but Leonard felt this shooting sequence would really damage the dramatic impact of the scene. He continues:

I said, “You’re going to lose the continuity and fluidity of the scene if you shoot it this way. I will not be able to do it as well, and I think the end result will just seem choppy and phony.”

By now it’s five forty-five, and with no time to debate the situation, they got hold Gregg Peters, our first A.D., who was the equivalent of the hatchet man. He was the guy who’d always call the six-eighteen wrap, and we all discussed the situation. Finally Marc Daniels said, “Let’s go for it. Let’s try to get it done.”

Now the lighting crew ran around setting up the shot, and I think it was about six-fifteen when they finally said, “We’re ready.” Marc had me walk through it once, and by now production types were standing around behind the camera, looking at their watches and saying, “He won’t make it. He’ll never do it.” So the tension was really mounting.

So basically I know this has got to be a flawless, one-take thing. Y’know, I’ve got one crack at it before they shut us down for the night. If I were to screw up, we’d almost certainly have gone right back to the cut-and-chop scenario come morning. Anyway, this was the scene that I’d asked for and fought for, and now the logistics of the situation were such that there was absolutely no room for error. There was a lot riding on this, and I wouldn’t have been so adamant in my battling if I hadn’t felt that this scene was extremely important. I felt like it merited my efforts, in that it truly defined, for the very first time, what the Spock character was all about.

On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

Think about Unity President Marc Whitten's nonpology for his company's disastrous rug-pull, in which they declared that everyone who had paid good money to use their tool to make a game would have to keep paying, every time someone downloaded that game:

The most fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is we’re building a sustainable business for Unity. And for us, that means that we do need to have a model that includes some sort of balancing change, including shared success.

https://www.wired.com/story/unity-walks-back-policies-lost-trust/

"Shared success" is code for, "If you use our tool to make money, we should make money too." This is bullshit. It's like saying, "We just want to find a way to share the success of the painters who use our brushes, so every time you sell a painting, we want to tax that sale." Or "Every time you sell a house, the company that made the hammer gets to wet its beak."

And note that they're not talking about shared risk here – no one at Unity is saying, "If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we're on the hook for ten percent of your losses." This isn't partnership, it's extortion.

How did a company like Unity – which became a market leader by making a tool that understood the needs of game developers and filled them – turn into a protection racket? One bad decision at a time. One rationalization and then another. Slowly, and then all at once.

When I think about this enshittification curve, I often think of Google, a company that had its users' backs for years, which created a genuinely innovative search engine that worked so well it seemed like *magic, a company whose employees often had their pick of jobs, but chose the "don't be evil" gig because that mattered to them.

People make fun of that "don't be evil" motto, but if your key employees took the gig because they didn't want to be evil, and then you ask them to be evil, they might just quit. Hell, they might make a stink on the way out the door, too:

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/

Google is a company whose founders started out by publishing a scientific paper describing their search methodology, in which they said, "Oh, and by the way, ads will inevitably turn your search engine into a pile of shit, so we're gonna stay the fuck away from them":

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

One Weird Al fan who was massively surprised by all this was Stefani Germanotta, better known as Lady Gaga. It turns out that her manager had been the one handling the situation and never actually played the song for her. She quickly OK’ed it, and the song was still the lead-off single for the Alpocalypse.

TLDR version: The Jane Goodall Institute was not amused, and bugged Larson to pull it from publication… But Goodall herself saw it when she got back from the research trip she’d been on, thought it was HILARIOUS, and let the PR people who made the decision HAVE IT for giving him grief about it without consulting her first, before giving Larson the go-ahead herself; as a result, it got to go back into print. She even signed a copy of it for him!

A guy like that walks into your tower with a toothpick in his mouth, takes one look at your summoning circle and goes

“I see yer problem. You used chalk B12 instead of S3. B12 is only for transmutation circles. Gimme a sec I think I have a piece somewhere here.”

He fixes your circle, test summons an imp and goes.

“The chalk? I always use that chalk, it’s never been a problem.”

“Ah - yes. This stuff will work just fine for most circles, but, uh - here, take a look with my loupe. You see the off-color flecks? Can’t hardly see them with the naked eye, but those are impurities. Silicates, might even be some iron in here, to be honest. Usually won’t cause a problem, but - you said you hadn’t tried this particular summons before?”

“First time trying a 5th level, yeah.”

“Those silicates will make your scribing a little fuzzy when viewed from the astral plane. You see, for example, these three fine lines here? With this chalk, on the astral that looks like one thick line with fuzzy edges. They can’t tell exactly what you want, and they’re picky lil’ critters so they just won’t do anything in response.”

“Really? Oh. I always thought the expensive chalk was just fancy to be fancy.”

“Making pure chalk is difficult, you need a dedicated production line or dust gets in the finished product. To be honest, you don’t need to bother with it for most things, but 5th and up, 5th level and up, it actually is necessary. Anything with lines within about two millimeters of each other.”

“So I need to start over?”

“Unfortunately yes. You’ll have to erase all this, but with some good chalk it should work just fine. Next new moon your summons should go off without a hitch.”

“Dang. At least it’s not my sigils, I was worried it was my sigils.”

“Nah Your sigils look good. Even and balanced. You know what you’re doing, it’s just an equipment problem.”

“Thanks for the help, sorry to make you come all the way out here.”