tabletops are fun :)

Three Pillars of Writing: A Terrible Essay by Duhad

Since I ended up spending way too long writing this in response to a largely unrelated post about fan fiction, I’m going to post this overly long soap box rant about writing on its own in the vain hope the 3 or 4 people who follow me will read this if its not hidden under 3 feet of other peoples text.  -

I had a conversation with my friend Kit the other day, where I was trying to sort of argue/define an idea I had about stories fundamentally working on three central pillars. 1. Plot - The story of whats going on. The adventure/mystery/horror/romance/etc as an active and progressing narrative. 2. Characters - The central characters and their internal and interpersonal lives. 3. Setting - A mix of both world building and general attention to setting details, ranging from things as grand scoop as the history and cultures of fantasy and sci-fi worlds to as small and personal as the club scene in a big city or the neighborhood of a small town or the student body and facility of a school.

For comedies you can knock out one of these three to replace it with comedy without losing much, so long as the humor works.

In my original argument I more or less was saying that a story needs at least 2 of these to work in order to function, with one weak link not really unbalancing things, but two going out causing a collapse. But reading this I think I am coming to a more nuanced conclusion, that their are people for whom one or more of these are of much higher importance and who can over look flaws in the other one or two. That essentially each reader/viewer/player is, weather consciously or not looking for one or more of these things and the better or worse its handled, the more or less they like it. But since most people don’t really grasp this notion, they look for broader, more tangible things to explain WHY they enjoyed something or not. So for instance I have heard allot of people dismiss the works of Stephen King because he’s too long winded, to caught up on details and the daily lives of his characters and tends to meander, losing allot of steam in the middle of his books as the terrifying threats take a back seat to ‘pointless’ things like characters falling in love, falling out of love, dealing with substance abuse or stress or school or work or fascinations with silly hobbies. For people who are their for the plot, he’s a bore who needs an editor to cut out about 70% of any given new book. Especially when allot of his books end, not with a thrilling climax, but a chapter or two after that point, with the remaining characters moving forward with their lives. Yet his books sell like hotcakes because for people who pick up the books and fall in love with the characters and the worlds they live in. They get to just indulge in their stories for hundreds of pages before suddenly getting a thrill as these people they have spent the last ten to twenty hours with are suddenly thrust into terrible danger, with the fate of the lived in settings they inhabit, from whole world to tiny little communities, dangling in the balance! For another example “Rendezvous With Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke is a book I am sure about 90% of people here would HATE! Its slow, its uneventful, the characters are all consummate professionals who don’t have any drama with one another or really spent much time getting to know one another. The two most exciting things that happen are when someone we met one chapter ago almost gets seriously hurt while trying to fly a sort of winged bike and then does not and later when the Hermian colony fires a nuke at the Rama ship, but then it gets defused relatively easily with no lives lost. But I LOVE IT because it presents an utterly fascinating look at an empty alien spaceship that is unlike anything on Earth. Its strange and beautiful and endlessly fascinating to explore! And the people exploring it themselves are fascinating, not because their particularly deep characters, but because they represent a human culture that is at once recognizable and yet unlike our own. Its a setting first and for most book in other worlds. The Lord of the Rings is setting first, plot second and characters a pretty distant third, at least in the books. Fan fiction tends to be characters first, focusing on the lives and personalities of characters and their interactions with one another before anything else, though obviously their are lots of exceptions. Finally Sherlock Homes stories tend to be plot first, with the central mystery and how it gets solved being the center piece, with the characterization of Homes, Watson and a few of the central figures getting just enough attention to make us care about them and basically everything else being kept pretty out of focus unless necessary for the plot. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might go into the history of the Mormon Church in “A Study In Scarlet”, but mostly its just their to explain the motivations of Jefferson Hope and he only gets fleshed out to explain why he murdered Drebber and Stangerson, as soon as that’s done he basically just go’s to jail quietly and is never mentioned again. But that’s fine because its a story your reading for the plot, not the setting or the characters, so once the murder is resolved theres no need to keep and flesh out the characters and setting details unless their going to come up again. Which they will not. Hell Moriarty, Homes’s nemesis and biggest recurring enemy shows up in only two stories directly, the second of which he dies in and is only mentioned in a couple others as being basically just a guy who other criminals work for sometimes.

Now obviously these are only broad outlines of major elements that stories tend to work with in less tangible ways and their not the ONLY things readers/viewers/players respond to. Someone who loves plot focused stories might hate Sherlock Homes stories because they don’t like mysteries or prefer more modern characters. Someone who just wants a good character driven story might hate Bloom Into You because they don’t like the leads or just dislike anime as a medium. And someone who likes rich worlds might still hate Dune because its so dark and bloody and fatalistic. That’s fine. But I think knowing what key aspect/s of a way a story is told and where its focus is can tell you just as much about why you do or do not enjoy certain pieces of fiction as more tangible elements like it being a romantic comedy or a sci-fi horror.

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And as an addendum for writers, I think knowing what you really love about stories can help you get thru allot of tricky spots. I love setting and character elements of stories, but have allot less patience for plot and so when writing I will breeze thru world building sections, people discussing culture or politics or the way things work in their sci-fi/fantasy/just plain weird setting and breezy banter dialogue. But then when it comes to moving the story forward its like, “Ahhhhhh... They uh... Do the thing and then... Uh... Hm... Time for a brake. I’ll get back to finishing this thing in a month or two.”

Before being able to crystallize by thoughts on this I would often get into trouble by setting out to write plot heavy epics, full of twists and turns and major events I knew would happen at X point in the future, but then never got anywhere in them because I found writing the quick and action heavy scenes that would get me to those big moments where just miserable and felt stilted as hell! Even now I write with my best friend and whenever she talks about these really cool ideas for things that will happen in the futures of the stories I get all excited thinking about how fun writing about how the settings and characters will change and how they will all interact with one another and how many fun scenes I can write in that new environment... And then I remember I need to actually push the story forward to that point and I suddenly get really stressed out because plotting out how that will all happen and then executing on that plot is my least favorite part of writing.

But when I wrote things for my friend’s game where it was like, “Write a history and mythology for this setting.” Or “Write two characters interacting and talking with one another in these short scenes.” Or “Come up with a type of fantasy creature or a culture or a tribe or a cult and then write about how they interact with a group of strangers.” And it was so easy and so much fun that I ended up writing so much stuff I actually got told several times to either stop or slow down because he thought I was pushing myself to hard to come up with this novels worth of setting details and short character interactions. But the truth of the matter was, I was just exhilarated to have a chance to just toss out all of these ideas I didn’t then have to tie together into a tightly constructed over arching plot!

Later I was writing a story for a comic with my best friend and though we had all of these cool ideas, it was not really coming together right. Everything was so detailed, so focused on notes about the setting and expository dialogue and aiming toward setting up for future events that it just didn’t feel right at all. So I took a brake and wrote a RPG based on the setting and spent about 100 pages just carefully building the setting and history for the universe it was set in. Then, months later, I came back to the comic and, now focusing just on the scene at hand and keeping in mind the setting I had built, I rewrote the opening chapter in a way which was SO MUCH BETTER then the first draft! Because I was no longer writing for the plot, but for the characters and the world and THAT was my jam!

Finally fairly recently, while dealing with a bout of writers block, I just for fun wrote something for my aforementioned best friend which was literally just a character looking around their weird room, commenting on some of the dumb stuff she saw and then having a conversation with her best friend. That ended up leading to a 23+ page story I am still writing with her that I find is so fun and relaxing to write I just pick it up and work on it when I am feeling stressed or down and it gets me feeling allot better! And though she is working on some long term plotting stuff for it, the thing I love about it is that, when I am writing it, its basically purely just setting details and characters.

And that’s what I want you writers out their to take away from my TED Talk today! If you find yourself getting caught up over and over again when writing, look at where you keep getting stuck and ask yourself, “Is their a pattern here? Am I getting stuck at random or is it when I try to focus too much on the world or on whats coming next in the story or when I need to write dialogue or back story that I am just grinding to a halt and not knowing what to write next?”  Because I think you might well find that their is a pattern and once you know where your just breezing along and where your getting stuck, you can work to either spice up the parts you have trouble with with the things you enjoy or rework your story to focus on your strengths and down play your weakness. It might seem odd at first, but if Michael Crichton can shove long expository monologs about science into a book about a dino theme park going to hell or a Congo safari filled with intelligent apes murdering people and if Andrew Hussie can hold up his story about cosmically apocalyptic happenings to have a couple of dumb kids talk to one another about nonsense for a few thousand words, you can indulge yourself a little. Its alright, it doesn’t make you a bad creator, just one who will appeal more strongly to a particular audience.

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Now that I have spent hours writing some dumb nonsense no one will ever read I will go to be- Oh wait its already morning, to get breakfast then work I guess.

As for the rest of you, go enjoy yourselves indulging in or creating whatever flavor of narrative you best enjoy!

@roxthefoxinsox @balile

A Totally Reasonable Explanation for Elon Musk Tanking Tesla’s Stock Price

It's Friday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is making a ton of reckless tweets, and the sun is out, so now seems like a good time to blog. I've got an argument for why Musk tweeting that Tesla's stock price is too high—theoretically an insane thing for a CEO to do, especially given that he's already been barred by the SEC from tweeting about Tesla stock without permission—is the least ludicrous thing he's tweeted today. It involves Bitcoin, because honestly we all died in 2012 and reality is now a Möbius strip of punishment.

After Musk's tweet, Tesla stock immediately fell by over 10 percent.

Two things first: One, Musk equating life-saving social distancing measures to fascism is ridiculous and irresponsible. Two, take for granted that Tesla investors, especially of the more casual Robinhood stock-picker variety, along with Tesla stans are losing it over Elon's tweet today. I would be too, if I'd overindexed on one stock that the CEO just tanked in the middle of an unhinged online fever dream. These are folks who believe in Musk not because of the original and beautiful Tesla dream of saving the planet, but because Tesla stock has a growth arc similar to Bitcoin.

Seriously, take a look:

Price of Bitcoin. Image: Coindesk

Tesla's stock price

I got the Bitcoin tracker from Coindesk, which does not go far enough back to track Bitcoin's price when it was under $100 in the early days, but these graphs have four notable, similar features: an early peak (for Bitcoin, this unfortunately starts where the graph shown starts, as Bitcoin hit its first major price peak as it got lots of attention in 2013 and 2014), a long trough, and later two peaks roughly 5-10x in size, followed by a shorter trough.

(This is where I'll just make the blanket note that Tesla is obviously a real company that makes real products that real people buy, and has done so for a long time; this fact, combined with the fact that its production numbers and earnings reports more directly affect its viability as a company than Bitcoin is seemingly affected by anything it itself does, has meant both that its stock price is more rooted in reality than Bitcoin's, and that its current boom cycle has been compressed into a very weird year of good corporate news, a global economic disaster, and erratic tweets. So while they're very disparate topics in a strictly economic sense, I'm not here to talk about The Economy, but instead trying to suss out Musk's need to post something seemingly so counterproductive.)

Tesla and Bitcoin aren't comparable in really any way other than one crucial thing related to their price: Tesla's stock value and Bitcoin's own value have both been dramatically influenced, not merely by the "market price" of the value they create, but by the psychology of both being assets that are highly recognizable, easily acquired, and (crucially) seemingly "obscure" enough that if you are in the know, you can get rich. More on that in a second. But to support this argument, take the fact that car company CEOs have perennially confused why Tesla is worth so much when it makes comparatively so few cars (isn't the market rational), and for Bitcoin, just take the fact that its price has never been rationally pegged to its utility as a currency alternative.

Instead, the prices of both are susceptible to the same hype cycle, based around four events in the lifecycle of a much-hyped, obscure tech investment that appeals to a certain type of investor looking for 10x gains.

First, the most important part is that each has clear “early adopter bubbles” that built fervent, rabid fanbases focused on the fact that they made a ton of money extremely quickly. Both of these bubbles then popped because there wasn’t actually enough fundamental utility/market success for either entity to sustain that initial bubble. Things settled down, but this initial bubble does two crucial things: First, it gives a proven narrative of an asset's ability to grow in value quickly, regardless of if that's rational or repeatable. Second, it creates a large fanbase of investors who have the stories to tell of their huge gains and every incentive to keep that narrative alive. Crucially, in the long term, these first bubbles look tiny now but they were huge growth at the time. That fact is all one needs to keep proselytizing.

That initial bubble is driven by people who genuinely are savvy investors in one way or another. They knew about something hot before other people did, and were enough in the scene to understand what they were buying. They're not going to be hurting too bad when the stock/Bitcoin prices correct themselves, which is why we have a long trough to follow.

Sure, everyone got excited there for a minute, but let's be real: both Bitcoin and Tesla weren't ready to sustain that level of expectation. So you've got a few years of growth for the company/cryptocurrency that irons out a ton of fundamentals; Bitcoin got easier to use, Tesla started making and selling a whole lot of nice cars. They were, for sake of me being concise here, succeeding at their functional goal in ways they weren't during their first bubble.

This is a good thing, so why wouldn't this success drive their prices higher? Well, lack of attention is one thing; negative attention and skepticism following a burst bubble is another. But most likely this is actually when both were priced correctly. You see some slow, steady growth commensurate with the successes of both entities, which is what you'd expect since the fundamental output of each requires them to grow more linearly than the pure exponential-growth tech entities they were viewed as by investors in their first bubble.

As both Tesla and Bitcoin improved their fundamentals, they both had savvy, highly-vocal fanbases of investors who a) had prior wins in the first bubble to prove their bonafides and b) every reason to point at each success and say "see, trust us, this thing is gonna go to the moon again."

(It's notable that both Bitcoin and Tesla have huge, very vocal fanbases built around subreddits, forums, and blogs focused largely on their investments' success. Every company has a fanbase somewhere, but Ford forum posters aren't talking over and over about when their investments are going to pay off. They're talking about Mustangs.)

I would not be surprised that in a moment of clarity, he decided to tank the stock because high prices and high expectations from stans were setting him up for more long term scrutiny than him being in trouble with the SEC short term

Eventually, all of that success-as-a-useful-product growth and here-comes-another-boom talk sustains a significantly bigger growth, driven by the fact that a) there is the fervent fanbase from the first explosion, b) years of those people pointing to “just trust us, it’s ready to blow!“, and c) the price-accelerating psychological effect of hitting new price peaks after years of dormant growth. No one wants to miss out on a sure bet, especially in the hallowed 10x world of highly-publicized tech investments, so this next peak is HUGE, helping sustain the myth.

This peak is unsustainable too, but unlike that very first bubble long ago, this peak is built on a foundation of stress. It's not propped up by a bunch of investors who understand a good roughly well enough to take a flyer on it, like every early Bitcoin person did, but on the mere idea that a stock has to go up, because everyone is talking about it! I mean, really, I have absolutely no idea what's actually going on in Tesla factories. Are they doing a good job or not? Who knows! Big-time institutional investors would, but I have no idea. Ultimately though, that's irrelevant, because I'm not buying a potential fast-growth stock like Tesla based on whether the price is based in reality, I'm buying it based on whether I think I can get rich as shit really quickly! And for that, investors only need the IDEA that it can go up, and buy-in from other bandwagon investors who are also buying in.

You know the story by now: everything comes crashing back to Earth, but rather than the initial small, fervent, obsessive fanbase, now you have a whole bunch of NEW folks who saw the potential to get 10x as rich in half the time in a significantly more mature market (which is impossible), and so they all lose their goddamn shit through the next trough, and all this attention (and smart narrative building by Tesla) accelerates into a second peak.

In the case of Bitcoin, the price stabilized somewhere around half its peaks as a bunch of people lost their money and exited, and others held on figuring they could afford to wait for more growth. And all along the original grifters got paid, but the folks who lost by buying too late on the first and second peaks lost their minds (and wallets). In the end, the Bitcoin system has been so perennially bogged down by boom and bust cycles, with many power players moving in and out over the years, that it's moved into a world a whole lot different than its original promise.

Musk is fully steeped in the VC-to-forum-poster hype cycle outlined above, so I have to believe he knows that eventually valuations can get so high—not based on actual product success but on the psychology of wannabe exponential growth investors—that shareholder demands end up steering the company more than he’d like, especially since he takes obsessive control over the company's image, operations, and stock price.

So I would not be surprised that in a moment of clarity, he decided to tank the stock because high prices and high expectations from stans were setting him up for more long term scrutiny than him being in trouble with the SEC short term. And maybe then the Tesla price stabilizes again with lower expectations as he continues to try to build a profitable car company in the midst of a global economic collapse, which is hard enough without a bunch of Bless You Stonks God reply guys and r/WallStreetBets bros battering your mentions for months by begging you to save them from economic ruin by doubling their Tesla investment in the next three weeks.

Hey, it worked for Bitcoin, more or less, but instead of a master plan by one guy it collapsed because Bitcoin people are insufferable con artists.

A Totally Reasonable Explanation for Elon Musk Tanking Tesla’s Stock Price syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

Sensor Sweep: E. C. Tubb, Bernie Wrightson, The Professionals

Horror (Skulls in the Stars): I would draw some attention to my friends at Valancourt Books, who have been doing such an amazing job reprinting classic works of horror. In particular, I thought I would mention the great job they’ve done in bringing some of the best haunted house books back into circulation!  When I first started blogging about horror, I wondered why there seemed to be so few “classic” haunted house books around.

  RPG (Walker’s Retreat): Wizards of the Coast wants to turn D&D���and, by extension, all tabletop RPGs–into lifestyle brand extensions. To that end, they have to change how D&D is perceived, and that’s what all the changes with 5th Edition is about. The rule changes correspond to changes in the game’s brand narrative; Critical Role and other well-publicized Let’s Play series such as every single one on the Official D&D Channel are as much a part of this scheme as the rules changes themselves.

  RPG (Empire Must Fall): This small corporation has had an outsized influence on both gaming and fantasy fiction since it acquired TSR Inc. in the late 1990s. Because its fiction publishing and its games publishing, Wizards of the Coast has had a massive influence on what is considered “fantasy” in most of the world- and especially so in gaming. Tropes that it, or TSR, originated are memes that both employees and customers spread globally and are now prominent in properties such as World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy.

  Fiction (Pulp Rev): There was nothing routine about Goshawks over Babylon. Fast, stealthy, armored, each dropship could ferry a platoon of troops. It was the military’s heavy-lift aircraft of choice. The STS used them for long-range deployments, or to transport vehicles and armor. BPD most assuredly did not have any in their inventory. These specimens had to be here for the Black Watch. The only question was which organization they belonged to: the military, the STS, or the New Gods. Regardless of the answer, Fox did not want to fight them.

    Games (Niche Gamer): Following the pro-Hong Kong protest statements from professional Hearthstone player Chung “blitzchung” Ng Wai and Blizzard Entertainment’s suspension of the player, many have wondered how much influence Chinese investors or profits from the region have influenced such a decision. The truth is, very little. According to both The Daily Beast and PC Gamer cite that Chinese tech giant Tencent own a mere 5% of shares. As stated on PC Gamer.

Games (Jon Mollison): The game so nice, it’s already been banned by OrcaCon despite not being funded, printed, or on the market.  Thus proving the point of the game in the first place. What can I say?  As I type this, the campaign is just over $30K at the post.  The world is hangry for this kind of satirical take at the scolds and schoolmarms who patrol our thought places for badthink.  My guess is that the “Alt Right” expansion set will be received by its targets with the opposite reaction as the core game.

Pulp (DMR Books): Such tales are characterized by sword-swinging action focused on personal battles rather than world-shaking events, with an element of magic or the supernatural and sometimes one of romance as well.  Tros of Samothrace has all those ingredients and was serialized a number of years before REH’s work; doesn’t that mean that it is Sword & Sorcery too? Well, not quite but the distance that separates the two is much shorter that you might think.

Horror (Thomas McNulty): Joseph Payne Brennan fans will be pleased to learn that Dover Publications have reprinted Brennan’s quintessential anthology, The Shapes of Midnight, originally published by Berkley in October 1980. That Berkley paperback, with Stephen King’s introduction, is a now a highly sought-after collector’s item. However, there is a caveat to this Dover edition. This edition does not faithfully reproduce all of the stories from the Berkley edition.

Fiction (Karavansara): In the recent evenings, I’ve had a lot of fun with Heroes of Atlantis & Lemuria, recently published by DMR Books. The volume collects the five stories of Kardios of Atlantis, originally written by Manly Wade Wellman in the 1970s, and that we meet at the opening of the book as he’s washed ashore after Atlantis sank. Kardios, lone (maybe) survivor of the lost continent, is actually the one that caused the sinking of Atlantis (or so he says), and he takes it from there, exploring the world beyond and generally getting into a whole lot of trouble.

Science Fiction (DMR Books): Earl Dumarest is one, grim, deadly space-traveller. He’s seen a lot of hard light-years as he’s followed the star-roads and he’s been burned by many an outworld sun. According to Michael Moorcock—who knew Tubb and described the Dumarest series as “excellent”—Earl Dumarest was a “conscious and acknowledged imitation” of Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark.

Sword & Sorcery (Adventures Fantastic): Wagner considered himself more of a horror writer than a writer of fantasy or sword-and-sorcery (a term he hated).  As a fiction writer, he was all of that and more. His work, if you can find it, and if you can afford it, is worth reading.  He’s out of print and getting harder to find (and more expensive) all the time. He was also an editor to the top rank.  He edited DAW’s Year’s Best Horror anthologies for years.  They are worth seeking out for the introductions and essays alone, never mind the great stories.

Comic Books (Tentaclii): I’m pleased to see that Marvel are producing beautiful crisp reprint print-books of their black-and-white Savage Sword of Conan magazines and its precursors. The first 1000-page volume is out now, with Vol. 2 due in mid November, and Vol. 3 in January 2020. According to the reviews Marvel have done an excellent job here, apparently marred only by some copyright trolls who are preventing the reprinting of stories featuring certain of R.E. Howard’s supporting characters.

H. P. Lovecraft (The Westerly Sun): The life and work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Providence’s best-known fantasy and horror author, will again be at the center of a popular walking tour and film series conducted by the Rhode Island Historical Society and presented as part of the Flickers’ Vortex Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror Film Festival known as “Vortex.” The festival continues this year from October 19-27, with the Lovecraft Tour returning for four very special days.

Arthur Machen (Wormwoodiana): In Arthur Machen’s 1915 wonder-tale “The Great Return” we hear of marvelous lights, odors, bell-sounds, Welsh saints, the Rich Fisherman, and healings, as the Holy Graal is manifest, briefly, in Wales in the 20th century. The story needs no detection of “sources” to be reasonably well understood and enjoyed. However, our enjoyment of it may be enhanced if we see it – or recognize it – as a “sequel” to one of the great medieval Arthurian works.

Comic Books (Broadswords and Blasters): I first encountered the works of Bernie Wrightson as a kid decades ago in the 1980’s. Back in those days, before I had access to a proper comic shop, my local supermarket carried shrink wrapped bundles of comics, usually (if I remember correctly) four to a pack. There was no rhyme or reason to the packaging of these bundles, it was purely luck of the draw; you could just as easily land an issue of Simonson’s Thor as you could Moench’s Aztec Ace.

History (The Lost Fort): Archbishopric, seat of the Teutonic Knighs, and member of the Hanseatic League – Riga’s Old Town has plenty of churches, a castle, and lanes and squares with pretty old houses. I spent a day there and managed to snatch a nice collection of photos to go with a post about Riga’s Mediaeval history. Settlement at a natural harbour 15 kilometres upriver from the mouth of the Daugava river (also known as Dvina; in Old Norse as Dúna ) dates back to the 2nd century AD.

Science Fiction (M. Porcius): In his essay in praise of Leigh Brackett, “Queen of the Martian Mysteries,” Michael Moorcock tells us that E.C. Tubb’s Dumarest books are “excellent,” and were inspired by Brackett’s own planetary romances about Eric John Stark.  So when I saw Tubb’s Derai at a used bookstore (the 1968 Ace Double, combined with Juanita Coulson’s The Singing Stones) I picked it up.

Science Fiction (Matthew Constantine): Way, way, way back when I was first scoping out tabletop role-playing games at a local shop, I remember flipping through some Tekumel book or another.  Along with Skyrealms of Jorune and a few others, it really stuck in the back of my brain.  As I went on to create my Conquest of the Sphere setting, elements of those games (mixed with countless other things) informed me.

Westerns (Paul Bishop): The Professionals is second only to The Magnificent Seven as my favorite Western film. Watching Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster relish chewing the scenery together while trying to out macho each other in The Professionals is sheer late night viewing entertainment. The movie led me to the book, and to the discovery of the sheer Western storytelling power of Frank O’Rourke.

Sensor Sweep: E. C. Tubb, Bernie Wrightson, The Professionals published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

Hedge-fund managers @mcelarier spoke to “leaned toward the theory that Epstein was running a blackmail scheme under the cover of a hedge fund.”

"Oddly, Epstein also claimed to do all the investing by himself while his 150 employees all worked in the back office — which [one hedge fund manager] says reminds him of Madoff’s cover story."

Real Hedge-Fund Managers Have Some Thoughts on What Epstein Was Actually Doing

By Michelle Celarier | Published July 11, 2019 | Intelligencer New York Magazine| Posted July 12, 2019 |

Long before Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to prostitution charges in Florida more than a decade ago, his fellow Palm Beach resident and hedge-fund manager Douglas Kass was intrigued by the local gossip about his neighbor.

“I’m hearing about the parties, hearing about a guy who’s throwing money around,” says Kass, president of Seabreeze Partners Management. While stories about young girls swarming Epstein’s waterfront mansion and the sex parties he hosted for the rich and powerful were the talk of the town, Kass was more focused on how this obscure person, rumored to be managing billions of dollars, had become so wealthy without much of a track record.

Kass was well-connected on Wall Street, where he’d worked for decades, so he began to ask around. “I went to my institutional brokers, to their trading desks and asked if they ever traded with him. I did it a few times until the date when he was arrested,” he recalls. “Not one institutional trading desk, primary or secondary, had ever traded with Epstein’s firm.”

When a reporter came to interview Kass about Bernie Madoff shortly before that firm blew up in the biggest Ponzi scheme ever, Kass told her, “There’s another guy who reminds me of Madoff that no one trades with.” That man was Jeffrey Epstein.

“How did he get the money?” Kass kept asking.

For decades, Epstein has been credulously described as a big-time hedge-fund manager and a billionaire, even though there’s not a lot of evidence that he is either. There appears little chance the public is going to get definitive answers anytime soon. In a July 11 letter to the New York federal judge overseeing Epstein’s sex-trafficking case, Epstein’s attorney offered to provide “sealed disclosures” about Epstein’s finances to determine the size of the bond he would need to post to secure his release from jail pending trial. His brother, Mark, and a friend even offered to chip in if necessary.

Naturally, this air of mystery has especially piqued the interest of real-life, non-pretend hedge-funders. If this guy wasn’t playing their game — and they seem pretty sure he was not — what game was he playing? Intelligencer spoke to several prominent hedge-fund managers to get a read on what their practiced eyes are detecting in all the new information that is coming to light about Epstein in the wake of his indictment by federal prosecutors in New York. Most saw signs of something unsavory at the heart of his business model.

To begin with, there is much skepticism among the hedgies Intelligencer spoke with that Epstein made the money he has — and he appears to have a lot, given a lavish portfolio of homes and private aircraft — as a traditional money manager. A fund manager who knows well how that kind of fortune is acquired notes, “It’s hard to make a billion dollars quietly.” Epstein never made a peep in the financial world.

Epstein was also missing another key element of a typical thriving hedge fund: investors. Kass couldn’t find any beyond Epstein’s one well-publicized client, retail magnate Les Wexner — nor could other players in the hedge-fund world who undertook similar snooping. “I don’t know anyone who’s ever invested in him; he’s never talked about by any of the allocators,” says one billionaire hedge-fund manager, referring to firms that distribute large pools of money among various funds.

Epstein’s spotty professional history has also drawn a lot of attention in recent days, and Kass says it was one of the first things that raised his suspicions years ago. Now 66, Epstein didn’t come from money and never graduated from college, yet he landed a teaching job at a fancy private school (“unheard of,” says Kass) and rose through the ranks in the early 1980s at investment bank Bear Stearns. Within no time, Kass notes, Epstein was made a partner of the firm — and then was promptly and unceremoniously ousted. (Epstein reportedly left the firm following a minor securities violation.) Despite this “squishy work experience,” as Kass puts it, at some point after his quick exit, Epstein launched his own hedge fund, J. Epstein & Co., later renamed Financial Trust Co. Along the way, he began peddling the improbable narrative that he was so selective he would only work with billionaires.

Oddly, Epstein also claimed to do all the investing by himself while his 150 employees all worked in the back office — which Kass says reminds him of Madoff’s cover story. Though it now appears that Epstein had many fewer employees than he claimed, according to the New York Times:

Thomas Volscho, a sociology professor at the College of Staten Island who has been researching for a book on Mr. Epstein, recently obtained [a 2002 disclosure] form, which shows [Epstein’s] Financial Trust had $88 million in contributions from shareholders. In a court filing that year, Mr. Epstein said his firm had about 20 employees, far fewer than the 150 reported at the time by New York magazine.

Given this puzzling set of data points, the hedge-fund managers we spoke to leaned toward the theory that Epstein was running a blackmail scheme under the cover of a hedge fund.

How such a scheme could hypothetically  work has been laid out in detail in a thread on the anonymous Twitter feed of @quantian1. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but in summary it is a rough blueprint for how a devious aspiring hedge-fund manager could blackmail rich people into investing with him without raising too many flags.

Kass and former hedge-fund manager Whitney Tilson both emailed the thread around in investing circles and both quickly discovered that their colleagues found it quite convincing. “This actually sounds very plausible,” Tilson wrote in an email forwarding the thread to others.

“He somehow cajoled these guys to invest,” says Kass, speaking of hypothetical blackmailed investors who gave Epstein their money to invest, but managed to keep their names private.

The fact that Epstein’s fund is offshore in a tax haven — it is based in the U.S. Virgin Islands — and has a secret client list both add credence to the blackmail theory.

So what did Epstein do with the money he did have under his management, setting aside the questions of how he got it and how much he had? One hedge-fund manager speculates that Epstein could have just put the client money in an S&P 500 index fund, perhaps with a tax dodge thrown in. “I put in $100 million, I get the S&P 500 minus some fees,” he says, speaking of a theoretical client’s experience. Over the past few decades, the client would have “made a shitload” — as would Epstein. A structure like that wouldn’t have required trading desks or analysts or complex regulatory disclosures.

Kass has kicked around a similar idea: Maybe Epstein just put all the client money in U.S. treasuries — the simplest and safest investment there is, and the kind of thing one guy actually can do by himself.

If the blackmail theory sounds far-fetched, it’s worth keeping in mind that it was also floated by one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre. “Epstein … also got girls for Epstein’s friends and acquaintances. Epstein specifically told me that the reason for him doing this was so that they would ‘owe him,’ they would ‘be in his pocket,’ and he would ‘have something on them,’” she said in a court affidavit, according to the investigative series in the MiamiHerald that brought the case back to the public’s attention late last year.

In the 2015 filing, Giuffre claimed that Epstein “debriefed her” after she was forced into sexual encounters so that he could possess “intimate and potentially embarrassing information” to blackmail friends into parking their money with him. She also said photographic and video evidence existed — an assertion that looms especially large now that federal investigators have found a trove of images in Epstein’s home safe.

MEET THE PROFESSIONALS - Amit Sen (Film Music Consultant)

Having focused on directors and producers, our MEET THE PROFESSIONALS series moved into an area which is often new territory for the up-and-coming filmmaker; Music Composition. The course tutor tasked with teaching LFS students the musical language with which to converse with prospective composers is Amit Sen, who studied film scoring under Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams and David Raksin in the USA. 

Sen came to London at a young age with his musical family; his grandmother was a singer, his uncle a sitar player and his mother was a singer. It was no surprise that the young Sen then took up the violin at the age of 11 and started composing almost at the same time. After a performance at the Camden festival for a string quartet in 1963, Sen moved on to the guitar and eventually the viola after his music degree. When he moved to the States, Sen's day job was as a straight musician, while his night job included hanging out in clubs and playing Rock ‘n’ Roll and Jazz.   

When MA Screenwriter Sophie McVeigh caught up with Sen, she discovered the true extent to his musical background, how his time in the USA informs his teaching ideology and that getting a film scored doesn’t have to be the minefield that many budding filmmakers seem to treat it as. 

Sophie McVeigh (S.M): How long have you been at The London Film School (LFS) and what's your role here? Amit Sen (A.S): I did my first workshop in 1992, 24 years ago. A long time. [I was] brought in to do one lecture a term and then it grew and grew. My immediate predecessor was a man called Vasco Hexel. When Vasco left I took over. That was three years ago. The post is actually called ‘Music Consultant’ and there are a number of roles I perform. I do a regular group of four lectures to Term 2's which culminates with a visit to the Royal College of Music. In addition they also have an individual music consultation with me and that’s a great opportunity to discuss the needs of their own films. They run a MA in Composing for Screen and this collaboration allows our students to work with their composition students. We find that this often leads to long-term composer/filmmaker partnerships which sometimes last beyond their student careers. It's a great learning experience for everyone, learning to communicate, briefing for music, overseeing and managing the scoring process and so on. Of course it's the experience of working with somebody who is not part of the film tradition. This can be quite a steep learning curve for many. 

I also do consultations with term 4 and 5 units. We deconstruct the story and narrative and talk about music – what is appropriate, what isn't, how to brief, what an appropriate score might be, style, genre of music etc. It’s essentially about the structure of the score. There are detailed discussions on why there should be music in a scene, entries, exits, what are their ideas and so on. So that by the time they go to a composer they're going with a formed picture of what they want and how to ask for it. This is the prep to find an appropriate framework for music. Then the composer comes on board and the picture changes because the composer has his/her own views and ideas and the creative process truly begins. So my role's more like a kind of agent provocateur in many ways, but also I have a teaching role. I'm a tutor and I interview, so I wear three different hats. 

S.M: You studied in America, at Berkeley under John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. What was that experience like?

A.S: Scary and unexpected! John Williams turned out to be quite unlike anything that I was expecting. He was the most mild mannered quietly spoken person. His approach is very understated. He writes two to three minutes of orchestral music a day most of the time, which is a huge, huge amount of output. Jerry Goldsmith, almost the exact opposite. Irascible, but brilliant nevertheless, very highly strung. The absolute traditional picture of the composer/artist. We used to say that he was 20% Tchaikovsky, 20% pure adrenaline and 60% genius! And there were others. Elmer Bernstein came through, David Raksin. 

It wasn't like you had the greats and then nothing happened for six months. It was actually a highly professional set-up and it prepared you for the world that you were entering similar to what happens here at the LFS. The requirements were absolutely stringent, we were producing scores, actually working with local filmmakers and we had full 15 hours a week classes on top of all that. Tough training.

S.M: What did you learn from that time that you still pass onto your students now?

A.M: The methodology, what makes effective training, the work ethic, the structure of scores… all that comes directly from that period. Talking about Goldsmith and Williams and others, they have a way of doing things, a pragmatic perspective on the profession distilled from their personal experience. So you get that view and it stays with you.

S.M: As a consultant on student film scores, do you find that there are any common difficulties that students have when they're starting out?

A.S: For most, music is completely unfamiliar territory. What often goes wrong is communicating what you want from the composer. It takes a while to develop the language to form ideas about what music can bring to a film. So that's what we begin with in Term 2. ‘How do I brief a composer? What do I say? And will they think I'm stupid if I don't know the language?’ Those can be the main concerns. Each film maker has to develop their own way of thinking and working. It's about evolving ways of working that work for you, and that's a trial and error process. 

S.M: Is there anything that you wish students knew when they arrived, or something that they could do prior to applying to prepare themselves in that respect?

A.S: If you live in the modern world and you're into films, you would have imbibed so much, you would have a very full memory bank. You would have seen a good 250 to 300 films. You may have ignored the music but it's in there somewhere. The question is not so much what you know but what you’re prepared to take on board and whether you're ready to re-assess and re-examine what you already know and take on fresh perspectives, new ways of looking at things. So the only thing I expect from them when they arrive is a massive amount of curiosity and a desire to experiment.

S.M: Are you still composing?

A.S: Yes I am working on a vocal piece at the moment. I worked with Nitin Sawhney on a silent film recently which was screened live at the Barbican with the London Symphony Orchestra and I also play. I sing in a jazz choir. I'm just another tenor in the ranks. It's good fun, doing the stuff that I started out on.

S.M: Which film scores would you say offer a masterclass to students?

A.S: Hard to pin it down to a few and bearing in mind is that this is only my opnion, I would recommend PARIS TEXAS, PSYCHO, OLIVER TWIST (David Lean), MEPHISTO WALTZ, E.T., THE CONVERSATION, KING’S ROW, NIGHT MAIL, etc. Elmer Bernstein’s score for TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is deceptively simple but if you listen to it carefully the composition craft and invention becomes immediately apparent and it just fits in the film so well. Each little motif and theme is almost invisibly and organically developed and tailored into the narrative. It’s important for film students to be aware of the process also rather than just the end product, the score. 

I would refer you to a series of six articles I did recently for Classical Music magazine interviewing film composers. This included Patrick Doyle, Dario Marianelli and Howard Shore. Howard Shore said that he'd read The Ring Cycle cover to cover before he wrote the first note. There is almost 23 hours of music in that series (including The Hobbit). That is almost twice the length of all the Beethoven symphonies run end to end. That’s an awful lot of music. Shore's film composing career started with a very bold move. He mustered up the courage to approach someone who'd impressed him, someone a bit older who'd ride his Ducati through the neighbourhood. This was David Cronenberg. He went up to David Cronenberg and said: “I saw your film , you know the one that was playing at the Toronto Festival. I’m a composer and I’d like to work with you?” and a 35 year, 15 film partnership was born. If you look at his entire body of work, Shore has two completely different musical personalities. SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, PANIC ROOM, GANGS OF NEW YORK, SPOTLIGHT shows one personality. Lyrical, commercial, occasionally edging towards easy-listening. But you listen to those early Cronenberg films – THE BROOD, SCANNERS, DEAD RINGERS, etc., a raucous, experimental, edgy, Jekyll and Hyde personality emerges. The Howard Shore that you hear in a Cronenberg film is more along the lines of Stravinsky and the post impressionists. The others come from the mainstream. Masterscores come in a variety of colours and shapes.

S.M: Have you experienced that yourself, where the film has brought something out of you that was unexpected?

A.S: It's not so much the film you’re working on but the person you're working with that effectively gives you the permission to do that. Chemistry is at play. Most of the time people play it safe. I think that's what happened with Shore and Cronenberg. He took a risk, and that risk set the character and the colour of that relationship from that point on. I was on a project, a series for C4. In one sequence the director wanted a pastiche of a relatively unknown 20th century composer. I didn’t think it would work mostly because it was just beyond my skill level and I advised against it. He insisted. Eventually I just got down to it and produced something and it worked very well.

S.M: Do you encourage your student to take risks?

A.S: All the time. Because the creative dynamic is a risk. You are making something that didn't exist before and no one knows what will result. You have to suck it and see.

S.M: What do you think is special about the programme at LFS? Why would you advise a student to come here?

A.S: A student once described it as a production house with some teaching thrown in! And that's not a bad description of how it is, it’s a good ethos. One of the things here that's unique is that students have a such great choice of options and the school has both its feet very firmly planted in professional practice.

To read more interviews with the working professionals that make up the tutors and staff at The London Film School, visit our MEET THE PROFESSIONALS series on the LFS Tumblr website.