Linking off a tweet by Lance Weiler, I came across sharedstoryworlds.com.  I love the idea of fan fiction and hope to make it a part of The Gatecrashers in the not so distant future. (of course I’ll have to get my shit together to have a world defined enough to share…but back to the story)

What is a Shared Story World?

The short answer: an entertainment property designed for collaboration with unknown individuals.

The medium answer: an entertainment property designed to allow audiences/fans/consumers to collaborate and participate in the creation of content in the entertainment property.

For the long answer go to their website and find out.

Read the full article on regenerative tissue growth from stem cell injections @ wired. Here are a couple excerpts:

Restore 1 showed that Cytori’s cells could rebuild breasts lost to cancer. The next logical step was trying it out for breast augmentation. Perhaps not surprisingly, once again this happened in Japan. The country has a strong and entrenched cultural prejudice against putting anything foreign into one’s body; organ transplants were slow to be adopted in Japan and still remain rare. But if that ick factor is the immovable object, the Western-inspired desire for bigger breasts is the irresistible force.

 

This is what it’s all about. When there is no real home for people, they will improvise and new urban worlds will be created.  I’m only half way through this book (regrettably usually where I put them down and start something new, for no reason in particular, just because – perhaps I need an iPad 🙂

In Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World, Author Robert Neuwirth travels the world to explore the largest squatter communities out there, and find how how they came to be, and how they continue to survive and thrive. These modern cities are not filled with tents, they’re filled with community boards, restaurants, home-grown social services and a new way of life; often ignored by the cities governments that surround them.

‘Neuwirth gets the lowdown on the low life by becoming a resident of four of the most happening squatopolises: the thriving extralegal pockets of Istanbul, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Rio. His ghetto epiphanies include impeccable civility, self-organizing local governments, bustling economies, modest crime rates, and squatter millionaires.’ – Josh McHugh,Wired

Cinematographer Doug Emmett suggested Maximum City to me when I gave him a quick pitch about the Gatecrashers. It was right on. Thanks Doug.  I can highly recommend this book.

This is what the  The New Yorker had to say:

Modern Bombay is home to fourteen million people, two-thirds of them packed into neighborhoods where the population density reaches one million per square mile. Its official name is now Mumbai, but, as the author points out, the city has always had “multiple aliases, as do gangsters and whores.” Mehta, who lived there as a child, has a penchant for the city’s most “morally compromised” inhabitants: the young Hindu mafiosi who calmly recollect burning Muslims alive during riots twelve years ago; the crooked policeman who stages “encounter killings” of hoods whose usefulness has expired; the bar girl, adorned with garlands of rupees, whose arms are scarred from suicide attempts. Mehta’s brutal portrait of urban life derives its power from intimacy with his subjects. After clandestine meetings with some of Bombay’s most wanted assassins, he notes, “I know their real names, what they like to eat, how they love, what their precise relationship is with God.”
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

I’m starting a Glossary here in the Garage. I’ve decided to break it up into real world; where I’m going to pull words from all the reference reading I’m doing, and Palomar City, where I’m going to plug in some definitions for in-world items you might come across on the blog. This will hopefully find it’s way into a wiki in the near future.

In conjunction with the Glossary, I’m going to start a Reading List. I read about one book a year, and usually only half of it. So don’t worry, that list is not going to be too intense.

Here are the first two entries in the Reading List.

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World

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Currently Listening To: Algodón Egipicio “El Ingenio Humano”

Social Media Counter Measures. Not even lurkers, these digital mole misdirects and propagandists are govt funded comment spammers.

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as “sock puppets” – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

As if private companies haven’t been doing this for many many years.

Read the full article at the Guardian.

Ok, I’ve been talking to the void for too long. I just made a few little stylistic tweaks, and now the Garage door has been opened. This is what it looked like the day it went live.

This is my dream come true. The dopest intersection of technologies. Put on a good set of headphones and go directly here: youarelistening.to/newyork

Okay, this post is for a different project all together. But it’s dope and relevant – when you start reading The Shipbreakers you’ll get it.  But peep this article.

Japanese Space Junk Net

Taking a minute to share some Classic SciFi love. Peep Hardware by Richard Stanley. I came back across this while looking for an audio clip of Iggy Pop as the mad radio voice. This is even better, thank Jo Blo. Iggy Pop Video Clip as Angry Bob.

Man it looks like I’m writing this from prison, but my studio is actually pretty dope, don’t let the painted cinderblocks and falling apart windows fool you.