John August

General

Hey, why didn’t my comment get posted?

General

questionmarkAs a fairly-frequent commenter on other people’s blogs, I know how frustrating it can be when I’ve spent a few minutes working on the perfect riposte, only to have it disappear somewhere in the void. So I thought I’d explain a little bit about how comments on johnaugust.com work, and why they sometimes don’t show up right away.

In the beginning, there was spam. It cluttered your box. Then came blogs, and soon followed [comment spam](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog_spam). These are short, meaningless posts that generally link to some site involving gambling or prescription drugs. In most cases, the comments are not made by actual humans, but rather by automated programs (bots), who scurry around the web looking for open comment systems.

In order to keep this site from being overrun with comment spam, there are a few safeguards built-in:

1. In order to comment, you have to type the required word from the 16-word phrase. This is sort of a home-brewed solution, but it’s worked fairly well.
2. Comments that have certain words (or combinations of words) are flagged for review. These comments are logged in the system, but won’t show up until the administrator (me) approves them.
3. The same applies to comments with three or more links in them.
4. Comments from certain spammy IP addresses are automatically flagged for review.

The three-links rule is often what trips people up.

If you’ve posted something and it hasn’t shown up, be patient. The system will automatically kick me an email when a comment gets flagged for review. Unless I’m swamped, I’ll usually get around to approving it the same day.

Thanks for posting.

[Technorati spam blogs](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/annoying-trend-watch-technorati-spam-blogs)
[New comment spam blocker](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2004/new-comment-spam-blocker)
[Ingenious comment spam booster](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2004/ingenious-comment-spam-booster)

Formatting the one-sided phone conversation

Formatting, General, QandA

questionmarkI’m curious about your format for writing a one-sided phone conversation.

I’ve seen it done in so many different ways now, that I have no idea if there is a more uniform way of doing it, or a preferred way.

I’ve seen…

KEVIN

(on phone)

I know it’s your birthday…I can’t make it…Look, that’s not my problem.

or…

KEVIN

(on phone)

I know it’s your birthday…

(listens)

I can’t make it.

(listens)

Look, that’s not my problem.

Then, I’ve seen some similar to above, but filled with (beat) instead.

Is there one correct way to do it?

— Kris
New York City

There’s no one “right” way, but I tend to choose the first option, since space is always at a premium. The only time to break out the parentheticals is if something really is changing on Kevin’s side of the conversation: the tone, the intent or the direction of the conversation.

You’ll also need a parenthetical (or a separate action line) if Kevin is speaking to someone on-screen and on the phone at the same time.

For instance, here’s an exchange from Go:

GAINES

(on phone)

It’s called Mary Xmas. Mary like a chick…Like her name is Mary, not like you marry her. You fucking moron…I dunno, some warehouse shit.

(to Claire)

Is this gonna be cool?

CLAIRE

Yeah, I guess.

GAINES

(on phone)

My friend Claire here says it’s going to be a kick-ass-fucking-time…What, you know her?

(to Claire)

It’s your buddy Simon. He’s in Vegas.

CLAIRE

I know.

GAINES

She knows…Hell, I dunno…

(looks at Claire)

Maybe…Yeah, well save a load for me big boy…Whatever.

They still haven’t found what they’re looking for

General

Approximately five percent of visitors to johnaugust.com arrive from Google or one of the other search engines. Thanks to server statistics, I can see exactly what search phrase brought them here.

Some people were clearly ego-surfing: searching for their names as they might appear in comments sections, for instance. But other people, well, I have no idea why they thought this was a site for them. Keep in mind: these are things people actually typed in Google, which led them here.

Here’s a sampling of the best from the top 1000:

032. gay girls
041. the ride pimper
058. blow movie quotes
070. vlad girls
075. regaining confidence
082. things about daniel wallace
092. define:motivation
096. i expect you to die
099. what does i.e. mean?
101. teen girls first time
106. how much do screenwriters make
121. goddamn mongolian
167. tasha would
177. jodie foster movie deaf
214. i am forty times this many t shirt
225. what does story plot mean
251. bad dialogue, great movies
265. rollerblade dance
302. depiction of the english in braveheart
310. people who hate disgusting chewing gum
337. girls gay
384. low rider pimper
402. what is the different between the firefox and the internet explorer?
467. mongolian geisha
469. monuments and anthems
477. how to write good teen slasher screenplay
537. chinese male sex
538. this is the sort of english up with which i will not put.
548. english words with latin numbers in them
556. define:cutty
593. persians are not arabs
623. twips per page
694. do you have the lines to the movie willie wonka the chocolate factory
696. jimmy choos
800. why does css in internet explorer 5 for mac suck
863. willy wonker
901. gramatical ruls
910. men talking about girls
912. worst unsold screenplay
918. arabian sexy princes

Answer: You are an American male in his twenties

General

Thanks to the 470 of you who were gracious enough to fill out the not-especially-scientific [survey](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/who-are-you-where-do-you-come-from), I can now state with confidence that the typical reader of johnaugust.com is a North American college graduate in his 20’s who has a Y chromosome, but no WGA card.

Now, before anyone protests, I should point out that not all readers are typical. Some are women in their 30’s from South Africa with graduate degrees; others are older, younger, or more international. And one could easily fault the methodology: it relied completely on self-reporting, with no particular incentive for readers to click the link to take the survey.

Yet the trends in the data are so clear that there’s not a lot of point keeping the survey running any longer. If you don’t believe me, maybe some charts will prove the point:

chart: male/female

The vast majority of readers are men. That’s no surprise, but I wasn’t expecting almost 90%. I don’t know whether this reflects the reality of the male/female split among screenwriters or not. Regardless, I try to vary to my pronouns, so that I’m not always talking about “a screenwriter and his script.”

chart: age

Readers are a little older than I thought. Had I known that the under-20 categories would be so sparsely populated, I would have broken up the age groups differently. Given the average age, I may feel a little more liberty to swear.

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