🌅 Run Away With Me for the Summer... I've written before about how much I didn't enjoy The Dinosaur Lords by Victor Milà n. Its faults are legion, but the issue that had the most lasting impact on me was Milà n's use of POV. The perspective character would shift sometimes every few paragraphs and the result was... well, in the linked write-up I described it as being "like trying to read a tennis match." It was incredibly taxing to have to deal with the constant shifts back and forth, and from that point on I decided to... Stop Using Scene Breaks Let me start out with a brief overview of what POV means for the newbies. If you don't need the refresher, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. Point of View (POV) or perspective refers to whose eyes the story is being seen through. In the broadest sense, these are delineated by which pronouns the narrator uses vis-à -vis the perspective character. 1st person uses "I," i.e., the narrator is a character in
📎And I'm Still in the Murda Bizness... Content Note: suicide Full Disclosure: a member of my immediate family worked at Boeing for over a decade and has not been consulted on this in any way. I have no inside knowledge of the individual or company in question. About a week ago there was a BBC News article making the rounds about a 62-year-old named John Barnett who was found dead in his car of an apparent self-inflicted wound. Barnett was a former employee of Boeing who had filed a whistleblower complaint in 2019 over lax safety standards. At the time of his death he'd given one deposition on the matter and was scheduled for another. The internet promptly jumped down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and assumed that Boeing must have had the man murdered. And my hackles got raised . This is me going on the record that I find the idea ridiculous, for reasons I'm going to detail below. I was very irritated with friends and coworkers for hopping on this stupid bandwagon. Of