Mapping the Future
via Fast Company
read the full article here.
Envisioning Technology, the firm behind the massive infographic explorations of the future of emerging technology and the future of education technology, is, as you might guess, run by a futurist: Michell Zappa. His most recent visualization maps the next three decades of health technology, charting how regeneration, augmentation, diagnostics, treatments, biogerontology, and telemedicine will change over time. According to ET, the stuff of science fiction–from cryogenics to all-out life extension, from robot health care to 3-D-printed synthetic organs–will be very real before too long.
Prometheus Writer Jon Spaihts
Awesome interview with Jon Spaihts. Please read the whole thing over at io9.
Story flourishes under constraint. The more scientific limits you keep in place, forcing yourself to work within real rules, the more authentic your story will feel. I always fight for scientific rigor.
Scrivener
The Gatecrashers development team (ok me) are big fans of Scrivener. I can’t say enough good things. As a tool for building a storyworld I haven’t found anything better (though we are building a pretty dope Filemaker Pro database – more on that later).
In the meantime, check out Scrivener over at Literature and Latte.
This is a blind recommendation, but here’s a blog I was just pointed to that claims to be “Everything Scrivener.” Give it a whirl. EverythingScrivener
Daily Experiments in How To Make Life Better
Deep Thoughts This Week
1. The world is becoming overwhelmingly urban.
2. Multinationals rarely invest in unstable nations.
3. There must be a better way for rich countries to help poorer ones.
Very interesting idea. If nothing is working, why not try something drastic?
Paul Romer “It’s easy to criticize experimenting with the livelihoods of the poor, but having spent time in the chaotic slums of Honduras, Haiti, Jordan and Indonesia, I’ve found that the poor are already conducting daily experiments in how to make life better outside the formal economy. By and large, it isn’t working. We have to try some new things, probably many new things. And we have to accept that some of them won’t work. ”
Read the full article at the NYTIMES >
Game of Thrones
Decided to read A Game of Thrones. I didn’t realize that the first season of the TV show was the entire first novel. I keep turning pages hoping that something will be different. I suppose that’s compliment to HBO and the series, but damn, I’ve invested a lot of time looking for something more than was in the show.
I’ll probably read the next one.
Sci-Fi That Foretold the Future
Fun little article in Google’s design mag about sci-fi catching up with reality.
The lightbulb moment came during the movie I, Robot. In it, the robot says – thoughtfully – to an angry Bridget Moynahan: “Is everything all right, Ma’am? I detected elevated stress patterns in your voice.” Watching that, two Portland teens asked themselves a simple, profound question: is it really possible for machines to detect feelings? I mean, could that really happen? A year later, their emotion-detecting algorithm won the team grand prize in the Siemens Competition. Read More at the site…
LA Noir & Open World Games
This is a great article from Grantland about the complex challenges of immersive storyworlds and narrative video games. It is primarily a review of LA Noire by Tom Bissell.
Press X for Beer Bottle: On L.A. Noire
Can Rockstar’s latest release change the face of gaming, or is it just Red Dead Detective?
Those who are immune to the pleasures of video-game storytelling argue that games have far more in common with music and visual art than film and literature. According to this view, games are primarily rule sets or interactive systems, and it is in these arenas where the true art of video games resides. This is undoubtedly true, but must it be an excluding truth? No one, after all, ever gathered around a campfire to hear a rule set. It may be that our existing storytelling models are, in many ways, ill-suited to video games. Perhaps the video game medium is not a storytelling medium at all but an experiential medium in which storytelling possibilities are allowed to occur.
I haven’t read Tom’s book Extra Lives, but I do like to share a little link love, when praise is due.
Sneakheads in Chinatown
I read this article years ago and it has really stuck with me. Especially considering I now live blocks from East Broadway. This article is the inspiration for Rivertown. Read it. I was just mining it for some numbers and came across this:
East Broadway became known as “Fuzhou Street,” and the Chinatown shorthand for new arrivals was “eighteen-thousand-dollar men,” after the snakehead rate in the eighties.
The New Yorker
A Reporter at Large
The Snakehead
The criminal odyssey of Chinatown’s Sister Ping.
by Patrick Radden Keefe
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/24/060424fa_fact6#ixzz1RKEyUZQv
Share Story Worlds
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.
Visit:
