Self imposed rules

[Kumquatqueen]

Scientists in a lab? Oppenheimer, maybe? I haven't seen it yet. How about The Imitation Game (Alan Turing)? There's little or no eroticism in those, but you did say any movie.

Turing mostly did maths. His offices at Bletchley are hardly a lab - tbh, the place is more like Scrapheap Challenge in army huts!

Scientists when they do get portrayed tend to be mathematicians with amazing doodles on a blackboard (Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind). The only labs tend to be SF plot devices (Gattaca, Jurassic Park) of implausibility, rather than just being a workplace. The Martian is one exception - he was a scientist, and Mars became his lab.

I haven't seen Oppenheimer (it's on the list), but it seems to be mostly about the politics of the time? I was just musing how generic characters work in offices (often in 'advertising') and generic students are always shown in a lecture theatre or tutor's office - you pretty much never see a lab as a workplace except a crime one, where it isn't, it's just a place for miracles to happen (see CSI/NCIS/Lucifer). A lead character doing some realistic science - you pretty much have to go back to Quincy!

Given how labs I've known have been total hotbeds of lust and affairs, I've tried to redress the balance a bit. On the film side, a film or miniseries about the race to deduce the structure of DNA might work well - use Jim Watson's The Double Helix and show him crashing and burning with every female he could find (particularly Rosalind Franklin). Perhaps, soon, there will be one about the Health Protection Agency (or equivalents round the world) and their realisation that Covid is going to be a big one, and efforts to persuade their governments to take it seriously. But we may need more lead characters to die off, first.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Turing mostly did maths. His offices at Bletchley are hardly a lab - tbh, the place is more like Scrapheap Challenge in army huts!

Scientists when they do get portrayed tend to be mathematicians with amazing doodles on a blackboard (Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind). The only labs tend to be SF plot devices (Gattaca, Jurassic Park) of implausibility, rather than just being a workplace. The Martian is one exception - he was a scientist, and Mars became his lab.

I haven't seen Oppenheimer (it's on the list), but it seems to be mostly about the politics of the time? I was just musing how generic characters work in offices (often in 'advertising') and generic students are always shown in a lecture theatre or tutor's office - you pretty much never see a lab as a workplace except a crime one, where it isn't, it's just a place for miracles to happen (see CSI/NCIS/Lucifer). A lead character doing some realistic science - you pretty much have to go back to Quincy!

Given how labs I've known have been total hotbeds of lust and affairs, I've tried to redress the balance a bit. On the film side, a film or miniseries about the race to deduce the structure of DNA might work well - use Jim Watson's The Double Helix and show him crashing and burning with every female he could find (particularly Rosalind Franklin). Perhaps, soon, there will be one about the Health Protection Agency (or equivalents round the world) and their realisation that Covid is going to be a big one, and efforts to persuade their governments to take it seriously. But we may need more lead characters to die off, first.

Popular culture, by which I mean movies and television, have always been hit or miss when it comes to describing how the world works. It has to be entertaining first, and a lot of activities aren't going to be shown or shown inaccurately. Some documentaries are pretty good.

So if you want to describe the real world of scientists, you're going to have to do it yourself, on this site. You're already doing that, so your readers at least will get the scene.

 

[8letters]

... and what to do about them.
to write my last story because I made myself an arbitrary rule that I don't post two incest stories in a row, and my prior entry had been A Perfect Thunderstorm ch. 3, which generated lots of demand for Ch. 4.
I thought I would have trouble with ch.4, but ended up stalled for quite a while before turning out The Old Lady Next Door. I feared the anti-depressants had stolen my creativity.
Oddly, the morning I saw The Old Lady posted, the beginning of ch. 4 just flowed.

Do you have arbitrary rules? Do you follow them always, or are they flexible?
Do you find that sometimes the next story just flows once you have struggled on the prior one?
Is my arbitrary rule silly? I created it to avoid being typecast as just an incest writer.

I don't post two throuple stories in a row. And no sequels (which someday I might possibly break).