I love movie clichés...sometimes. I say sometimes because most of them are not lovable. The gun that never runs out of bullets, the villain eating steak, the antagonist who tells the protagonist with “We are not so different, you and I.” But some are fun to notice, appreciate, and analyze. One of my favorites comes by way of films set in the pre-gunpowder age: it’s the two armies facing off across a field then charging at each other full bore and slamming into each other at speed. Directors love this shot. You know the one: It’s a static side-angle camera shot of the battle right where … [Read more...]
The Roundup: Sound Tattoos and Buddhist Whales
I’m back with another roundup of my favorite mini-future developments. No robots, no immortality, no space travel, and no VR nightmares. I’m talking about the little tech innovations and weird trends that seem to pop up at a crazy pace. Edible rocks and designer cats and glow in the dark hair, that kind of thing… Let’s go. 1) The First Cryogenically Frozen Human Being No, the story about Walt Disney’s head is not true (much as I would like it to be). And yes, it’s possible someone has had their own head placed in a freezer before, but this is the first time everything is on the up … [Read more...]
Nostalgia for Worlds That Never Existed
It’s easy to have nostalgia for real places. Off the top of my head, I can probably think of a dozen that I would visit again if I could somehow go back in time—and get back into the headspace of the time. Summer camp, my old soccer practice field, various portions of forest around my hometown. There are adult ones too. Parts of college campuses, or the route I used to walk to work when I lived in Washington DC. Old town Geneva is a big one, my home during an internship back when the Internet was young… But I often wonder if anyone else gets nostalgic for imaginary places—because I can miss … [Read more...]
The Best Ideas I Ever Had
After years of unedited additions, I recently decided to clean up my chaotic “story ideas” document. Most writers have one. Mine had gotten a bit unruly, and I thought scraping some mold off the bread would do it—and my brain—some good. The document has three general tiers. The top tier is a list of well-developed ideas, each with several paragraphs of notes. The second tier details less-developed but fairly complete story ideas usually boiled down to a few sentences. The final tier is a list of random scenes, images, or ideas often scribbled or typed in incomplete phrases. They … [Read more...]
Choose My Own Adventure For Me
Somewhere between the ages of five and ten, deep in the analog darkness of the 1980s, I fell under the spell of the Choose Your Own Adventure books. This was a magical time for me. I knew that I had discovered the most divine form of storytelling ever conceived. The stories almost always dealt with fantasy, sci-fi, or horror, which was/is my thing. The authors wrote in a surprising (to a 9-year-old) second-person singular point of view—addressing the reader as “you.” It was a revelation. It also put pressure on me to take part in the storytelling. The fate of the protagonist (me) was … [Read more...]
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