Kurt Vonnegut: the Shapes of Stories
The famed writer walks us through three dramatic prototypes and believes that a computer should be able to hack a storytelling algorithm.
Consider before you embark on your next feature.
Run Time: 4:37.
If you’re involved w/ storytelling in any capacity, watch this video.
I was never his biggest fan, but I like Vonnegut a lot more after watching this.
Here it is: Colbert singing Rebecca Black’s Friday on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Oh man, this is hilarious.
Certainly puts a nice shine on the turd.
(via brooklynmutt)
Faint Praise triptych. 20”x30”/panel. Works in progress.
Resurrected the final triptych I’d started a couple of years ago and put a new coat of paint on it. Anyway, trying to figure out what to do with them.
I like to think of myself as a Yay!-theist™.
David Foster Wallace:
What she did with me - I must have been eight, or twelve, who remembers - was to sit me down in the kitchen and take a straw broom and start furiously sweeping the floor, and she asked me which part of the broom was more elemental, more fundamental, in my opinion, the bristles or the handle. The bristles or the handle. And I hemmed and hawed, and she swept more and more violently, and I got nervous, and finally when I said I supposed the bristles, because you could after a fashion sweep without the handle, by just holding on to the bristles, but couldn’t sweep with just the handle, she tackled me, and knocked me out of my chair, and yelled into my ear something like, ’Aha, that’s because you want to sweep with the broom, isn’t it? It’s because of what you want the broom for, isn’t it?’ Et cetera. And that if what we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the fundamental essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the kitchen window, and a crowd of the domestics gathered; but that if we wanted the broom to sweep with, see for example the broken glass, sweep sweep, the bristles were the thing’s essence. No? What now, then? With pencils? No matter. Meaning as fundamentalness. Fundamentalness as use. Meaning as use. Meaning as fundamentalness.
This finding told us that the explicit concept of a specific supernatural agent—likely acquired from and reinforced by cultural sources—is needed for people to see communicative messages in natural events. In other words, children, at least, don’t automatically infer meaning in natural events without first being primed somehow with the idea of an identifiable supernatural agent such as Princess Alice (or God, one’s dead mother, angels, etc.).
Interesting post from Scientific American.
(via babygrrllabs)
This one hit me hard.
If you’re so inclined: Red Cross Donations
CREDIT: AP Photo/Kyodo News
© 2011 Wrath66
