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Category: Film / TV

Stop being confused and confounded by currency figures in old movies and books! This new “inflation adjustment” movie-and-book currency calculator will solve all of your narrative befuddlement.


In many movies and books, a financial amount is discussed at some point. For example, a character may remark that a heist “could be worth 100,000 florins” or “the estate had fallen on hard times, and now generated only 576 denarii annually.”

The issue:

Is the amount discussed above a lot of money? Or is it a paltry sum? Who knows!

This can be both narratively confusing: e.g. in a situation where an outlaw spends a week scheming to pull off a stagecoach robbery and then gets a $500 share in the ill-gotten goods. Are we, the readers, supposed to think that the outlaw has done well for himself, or is that amount equivalent to a week of work sweeping floors in the saloon?


Movies should have the option to pop up an inflation-adjusted and currency-adjusted figure (Figure 1) for any amounts of money mentioned by the characters.


Fig. 1: If a bunch of characters in the Old West are murdering each other over a treasure, it would be nice for the viewer to understand the value of the treasure: is it actually worth something, or are the characters murdering each other over something valueless? Narratively, it could work either way, but it would be useful to know what the intended interpretation is!

Similarly, e-books could easily have an option to display the current modern inflation-and-currency-adjusted value (Figure 2) of any mentioned quantities.



Fig. 2: Books that are set hundreds of years in the past often discuss currencies that no longer exist. This can be difficult for a modern reader: is a “ryō” a lot of money? What is a “ducat,” anyway? Here, the obsolete foreign currencies are converted to a modern equivalent.


This would also provide an excuse for book and movie publishers to periodically update their works. “Oh, you have the 2014 copy of Price & Prejudice? We’ve updated it with the new 2020 inflation figures—you should really re-order 100 new copies for the school library. Isn’t it important that students have access to quality educational materials?”

PROS: Helps the reader properly interpret a narrative with more complete information.

CONS: Actually performing the adjustment may be difficult. For example, if a high-quality Viking canoe is valued at “ten steel hammers and ten yards of cloth,” should we naively translate that to the modern cost of such things—e.g. approximately $140 in 2020 dollars?

Cure “distracted movie-watching” with a horrendous trick for directors who hate their audiences and want to punish them for insufficient cinematic dedication! Netflix must add this feature NOW.


People often don’t pay much attention to movies, preferring to play on their cell phones while the movie runs in the background.

(After all, if you miss an important scene, you’ll can always rewind and watch it again.)

The issue:

This lack of dedication to the cinematic arts is a phenomenon that movie directors surely despise!

What if directors could punish the insufficiently-dedicated movie fans by making their movies unwatchable (or at least incredibly confusing) to the cell-phone-game-playing-while-watching-a-movie audience?


In order to sabotage the enjoyment of those who don’t put enough dedication into the movie-watching experience, the following system is devised:

  1. The movie plays normally, at first.
  2. If you rewind the movie, it cuts to a different, specially-filmed scene that does not belong in the narrative. This scene is crafted by the director to make the rest of the movie as confusing as possible.

The director could film several of these intentionally-confusing “deleted scenes,” to be shown in various points of the movie. Below, and in Figure 1, are a few suggestions:

Movie Examples:

  • The Godfather: if you rewind, a scene is shown where Michael plots to kill his own father so that he can take over the family business.
  • The Empire Strikes Back: Darth Vader uses The Force to inform Luke that Obi-Wan Kenobi was actually his father.
  • Rocky: a scene shows Rocky putting heavy metal objects in his boxing gloves to allow him to cheat his way to victory.
  • The Matrix: Morpheus talks with Agent Smith, who is complimenting him for being a double-agent.
  • The Lion King: Mufasa falls into a canyon and hits a rock, splitting in the middle and revealing that he was actually not a lion after all, but instead a warthog and a meerkat operating a two-“person” lion costume.
  • Game of Thrones: a bizarre extended scene is added in which a king is sent on a commando raid and/or suicide mission.
  • Westworld Season 2: unaltered, as it is impossible to confuse the viewer any further.
  • Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi: unaltered, as it is impossible to punish the viewer any further.

A malicious director could also reveal a real plot twist early, or put in an incredibly annoying jump scare.



Fig. 1: Pulp Fiction (1994) involves a briefcase with valuable (but unseen) contents. A scene-rewind could reveal the contents as a Betamax tape of the infamous unreleased film “The Day the Clown Cried.” Whether this would actually undermine the stakes of the film (or improve it!) is up for debate.


Almost any movie can be made totally misleading with minimal effort by adding a scene in which a protagonist is (falsely) shown to be colluding with the enemy.

PROS: Directors will be able to torment any insufficiently-dedicated fans of cinema who dare to watch their films.

CONS: Sometimes, an intentionally-misleading twist might actually improve a movie.

Stop exercising! Instead: re-enact scenes from action movies! Burn off fat easily with this one weird tip that movie executives do want you to know! Fitness instructors hate it—the one totally untested secret to weight loss!


Exercise routines are often extremely dry and boring.

But they can be made more engaging by making a “themed” workout, with each part of a workout helping to accomplish an imaginary goal.

This is not a totally new idea. For example, the game “Zombies Run” motivates a person to jog faster by providing a virtual zombie horde to chase the player.


We can make a more general exercise program (i.e., not just running) by adapting scenes from major action movies.

Some movies actually already have a “workout routine” that could be used as-is, like the training montages in the Rocky series, or the rock-climbing sections of Cliffhanger (1993).

But almost any film can be adapted into a workout routine with sufficient creativity!

Examples below:

  1. Star Wars (1977), figure 1.
  2. The Empire Strikes Back (1980), figure 2.
  3. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), figure 3.
  4. Dances With Wolves (1990), figures 4 and 5.


Fig. 1: Star Wars: for the “Death Star trash compactor” exercise, you push against a large metal plate, while it tries to push back towards you. The plate could move back and forth several times. The exercise would be completed either when R2-D2 turns off the trash compactor or when you are pushed to the opposing wall by the plate.


Fig. 2: This Empire Strikes Back-themed exercise requires you to hang upside-down from a pull-up bar, so it’s a bit inconvenient to set up in most gyms. The menacing ice creature (left) is an optional component, but that role could easily be filled by any fellow gym-goer.



Fig. 3: Action movies contain plenty of scenes that could be adapted to an exercise program. The rolling boulder escape from Raiders of the Lost Ark makes a great high-stakes sprint.


Fig. 4: Dances With Wolves features a number of suitable inspirational scenes. Left: pull a bunch of heavy dead animals from the water supply (good for exercising a wide variety of muscle groups). For public health reasons, this workout would use sandbags instead of actual dead animals, even though this reduces the verisimilitude somewhat. Right: grind coffee.


Fig. 5: You can’t really have a Dances with Wolves-themed exercise program if you don’t dance around a bonfire with a wolf.


Movie studios should immediately seize this opportunity to release tie-in exercise programs (similar to the way tie-in novels / novelizations of major films are released).

PROS: Makes exercise more engaging and serves as an effective marketing / promotional tool to advertise a movie.

CONS: People might over-exert themselves when trying to escape a rolling boulder in a way that they wouldn’t in a normal exercise routine.

Dust off your 3D glasses (or excavate them from the geological strata that they are buried beneath) for this new multi-versions-of-a-movie plan that is definitely here to stay and not a gimmick!


3D glasses  provide the ability to put two totally separate images on a screen at once. Normally, the technology this is used to provide a stereo-3D effect (Figure 1).

But we could use this same technology to show subtly (or entirely!) different films to different groups of people in an audience.


Fig. 1: Each lens lets through a specific type of light. Here, the colored lenses separate out red and green light.


Instead of everyone’s glasses having both a left and a right lens, we can instead supply a LEFT/LEFT set of glasses and a RIGHT/RIGHT set of glasses, as seen in Figure 2. (We could also apply this idea to three groups—imagine another audience member with a BLUE/BLUE set of glasses.)


Fig. 2: One person would get a pair of glasses that was only the “left” lens, and the other would get only the “right” lens. Now we can display a different image to moviegoers (or game players) #1 and #2.

Possible applications in film:

  • In horror movies, one group of people could get the “ultra gory and horrifying” version of a film, while the other group gets a tastefully understated version with minimal blood and guts.
  • Additional horror movie option: for people who hate jump scares, the video footage accompanying the traditional “jump scare loud violin noise” could just be video of an actual violin, rather than of a cat and/or hockey-masked killer jumping out of a closet.
  • Two version of a film could be shown at the same time in a theater (for example, a PG-13-rated film and an R-rated film).
    • For example, if a film is rated R for brief nudity, the PG-13 version of the film could be generated by adding a bunch of computer-generated tumbleweeds. Ratings problem solved!
  • In a Sherlock-Holmes-style mystery, some people are annoyed by the fact that it’s usually impossible to “play along” with the mystery solving—instead, you wait until the detective reveals the obscure clues at the very end. With this “two movie” approach, the crucial evidence could be pointed out (e.g. with a red circle / arrow), so that the viewers would know which evidence Sherlock Holmes thought was important. But if you didn’t care about that, you could still watch the original cut!

* For the benefit of people with face blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia), a hovering name tag could be added above each actor’s head (like the floating name tag present in many multiplayer games). This would also help normal people in shows with a large cast of characters (like Game of Thrones or Arrested Development).

Possible applications in games:

  • You could have a game in which player #1 has the controller, but can only see a limited view of the world, while player #2 has no controller, but can view critical on-screen information that is not visible to player #1. For example, player #2 could have a map, or perhaps be able to see certain invisible walkways / invisible enemies / secret passages, etc.


Fig. 3a: In the haunted house movie above, we want to only show the full Grim Reaper to one portion of the audience members (the other viewers should see the glowing eyes but not the specter itself). See figure 3b for a description of how this is done with a traditional set of red/green glasses.


Fig. 3b: A colorized version of 3a, ready for 3D-glasses viewing. Yellow = shown to all viewers. Green = only shown to the “right lens glasses” viewers. In this case, the flying Grim Reaper thing will only be visible to a green lens-wearer. See figure 3c for specific images.



Fig. 3b: Top: “red lens” view where only the eyes of the haunting specter are visible. Bottom: “green lens” view where the entire Grim Reaper is visible.

PROS: Creates additional jobs in post-production. Allows multiple versions of a film to coexist without compromising a director’s original vision.

CONS: Prevents the use of 3D. May increase production costs.

Footnote: Existing applications for console games:

This “show two totally different images” technology has been commercially available for split-screen video games as a semi-standard feature of 2012-era 3D televisions.

The screen could be split (either vertically or horizontally), and one half of the screen would go to the “left” 3D channel while the other would go to the “right” 3D channel. In this fashion, players with left/left and right/right glasses (as seen in Figure 2) would get an entire full screen all to their own. (This also greatly reduced opportunities for screen-looking, although some light still leaks through.)

Unfortunately for this technology, both split-screen games and 3D televisions appear to be a thing of the past.

Become a sophisticated cinephile AND appreciate the finest movies that cinema has to offer in only ONE-NINTH the expected time, thanks to this bizarre invention! You will be the envy of your friends and countrymen.


There are hundreds of famous and excellent movies, but almost no one has seen them all!

It’s possible to laboriously go through the extensive backlog of classic movies, but with the current volume of media, this would be a major endeavor.


By splitting a screen into N segments (for this example, let’s say 9 segments), different sections of a single movie can be played simultaneously.

Audio would probably need to either be turned off or limited to a single screen at a time. Subtitles would be a requirement.


Fig 1: All nine sections of the movie will play at once, allowing the dedicated viewer to see every scene from a movie in a fraction of the expected time. Depicted: the 1977 Woody Allen movie “Annie Hall.”

So if a movie is 100 minutes long, the top-left screen (#1) would start at time 0:00, the next screen would start at 10:00, …, and the bottom-right screen (#9) would start at 80:00. Then the 90 minute movie could be viewed in its entirety in only 10 minutes!


Fig 2: Look how much time you’ll save! You’ll be able to watch the entire director’s cut of Das Boot (3 hours and 29 minutes) in just over 23 minutes! That frees up 3 hours and 6 minutes in your day, which you can use to post arguments about the film online.

VERTIGO 1_modified_2_small_numbered.jpeg

Fig 3: This proof of concept shows what the simultaneous-watching system would look like for the famous 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film “Vertigo.”

Additional option:

Since movies invariably have scenes of both high and low intensity, it might be possible to adaptively set the screen timing so that only one dialog-heavy section was on screen at once. For example, one screen would show a complicated and plot-crucial scene that required viewer attention, while another showed a long establishing shot that could be mostly ignored in comparison.

PROS: Cinephiles will love it. You will appreciate movies in RECORD time now.

CONS: Probably would not work for certain types of movies with intricate or non-straightforward plots; for example, The Departed (2006) or Memento (2000).

Nine (9) insane books that you read in high school with TWIST ENDINGS that leave you speechless! Or, a way of bringing excitement back to classic literature.


When reading any book, there’s an unavoidable spoiler: the number of pages left in the book!

Specifically, the number of remaining pages gives you a strong clue as to how the narrative is going to go. If you are only 25% of the way through a book, but the main character is dangling from a sheer cliff, odds are that the character is going to survive. This substantially reduces the tension. (Note: exceptions exist, such as Game of Thrones.)

This also applies to movies—if there’s still 90 minutes left in a film, you can be pretty sure that whatever plan the protagonists are up to is not going to resolve without any complications.


Here are two proposals to fix this “length spoiler” issue:

First Proposal: Add blank pages to a book to hide the location of the ending

Fortunately, we can easily maintain the narrative excitement and tension with just one weird trick! All that is necessary is:

1. For a book, pad out the book with a substantial number of blank or plot-irrelevant pages, so the reader won’t know where the plot ends. (This approach was inadvertently done in the third Lord of the Rings book (Return of the King) by J.R.R. Tolkien: the book’s plot ends at the 75% mark. It is then followed by an extensive set of appendices such as “Appendix D: Calendars: Shire Calendar for use in all years”).

2. For a movie, include many minutes (or hours!) of still frames at the end of the film, so that the the remaining length is not immediately obvious if you pause the video. (Or you could watch the movie on VHS.)

Second Proposal: Publish multiple variants of each book, with hasty resolutions

So the problem with the first proposal is that if a book is to follow certain narrative structures, we still know that certain things will happen—the hero won’t just stay home in the first act.

But with modern technology, we can now provide variants of books (and movies) where different events occur, prematurely ending the plot.

Then, the reader can’t use their meta-knowledge of how narratives are normally constructed—the book could end unpredictably at any time! (See the Conan-the-Barbarian-inspired example in Fig. 1).

failurebookFig. 1: The blank pages hide the fact that the narrative actually ends on page 206. The savvy reader, seeing hundreds of remaining pages, probably assumes that the story is going to continue, but it is not so!

Additional Examples of “early book endings”:

The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien), alternative early ending:

There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber, until they roared up in an instant, incinerating the burgling hobbit before he could even recognize the danger.


(124 blank pages follow)

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J.K. Rowling), alternative early ending

They inched toward the message, eyes fixed on a dark shadow beneath it. All three of them realized what it was at once, and leapt backward with a splash. Mrs. Norris, the caretaker’s cat, was hanging by her tail from the torch bracket. She was stiff as a board, her eyes wide and staring. 


Later, the trio transferred to a much less dangerous boarding school in New Hampshire.


(144 blank pages follow)

Solution to the main problem with this approach:

Since there will be dozens of variants of the book (with premature endings at different spots), different readers may actually get different versions of the book.

In order to prevent readers who got one of the “early ending” copies of the book from being unsatisfied with the book due to the poor conclusion, the publisher would make the second half of the book available online for free, so that even the unlucky readers can still experience the full narrative.

booktreeFig 2: An example of how the narrative could be constructed. Perhaps point “F” is the book’s original ending: now we just need to hire a few fan fiction authors to fill out endings A, B, C, D, E, J, G, H, and I, and we’ll have all the benefits of a Choose Your Own Adventure (™) book with the literary merits of the finest fiction.

Note that this specific example may be overly expensive due to the extremely early divergence in plot between the (A, B, C, D, E) branch and the (F, G, J, I, J) branch. For economic reasons, probably only one of those branches should be included—otherwise there are essentially two totally different books being written here.

Current state of the art:

The application of divergent and/or user-selected narratives has been long neglected, with the only recent noteworthy examples being the Shakespeare-inspired “Romeo And/Or Juliet” (http://romeoandorjuliet.com/) and “To Be or Not To Be” (Hamlet) (https://www.amazon.com/Be-Not-Ryan-North/dp/0982853742), both by Ryan North of “Dinosaur Comics” fame.

PROS: Adds much-needed dramatic tension to formulaic plots!

CONS: Does not work with non-fiction.

Cinephiles: You can now get the rich analog experience of VHS via streaming video! Liberate yourself from the harsh pixelation of compressed digital video.


In olden times, recordings could only be viewed at home by either personal movie projector (extremely rare) or VHS player.

Nowadays, digital video makes it possible for anyone to get on-demand video without the hassle of low-quality video and rewinding tapes.

But perhaps the “VHS experience” is integral to getting the full effect from certain films? Certainly no one would dispute VHS’s superiority in providing a “warmer” analog film experience without compression artifacts—not the harsh pixelated video of so-called “high definition” Blu-ray or streaming video.


An Internet streaming video site could easily emulate an old VHS tape by remembering the position where the viewer was in a video and forcing the user to use archaic VHS-style controls to move around in the video.

(This would also be possible with Blu-Ray discs, since they have the ability to connect to the Internet and could theoretically use this connection to save the user’s position in the video.)

Changes that could be implemented to give the full VHS experience are listed in the following figures below:


Fig 1: PAUSE no longer just freeze-frames a scene; instead, the frame becomes static-y and annoying lines appear on it.


Fig 2: FAST FORWARD and REWIND no longer allow jumps to arbitrary points in the video. Instead, a long rewind operation would require stopping the video and then clicking “rewind.” While rewinding at high speed, the video is not visible, so the user just has to guess as to their position in the film.


Fig 3: Starting a video: if the video has not been previously rewound, the viewer will only see the blank VHS screen. The user will have to spend a few minutes waiting for the “tape” to rewind.


Fig 4: The MENU is replaced with an image of the VHS videocassette, showing the current status of the tape through the transparent panels on the sides..


This is a great way to increase immersion and brings the 1980s-videocassette experience into the modern era.

PROS: Allows cinephiles to get that warmer, richer analogue video experience of VHS, not the cold and harshly-compressed “digital” video that we are subjected to today.

CONS: May require sitting at least 30 feet back from your 50+ inch television in order to properly approximate the size of a 1980s television.