Let's try our hand at this. I know there are a lot of wizards here filled with imagination and creative impulses but it can be quite hard to start a thing on your own, to carry all the process by yourself. Having no direction or initial spark to work with can be a huge impediment as most of us here know. This thread is an attempt to fix that, giving you an initial buildup to start with. There will be a few rules in order to keep things from getting too wild and out of hand but other than that you can do whatever your heart desires. I'm planning this thread to have several projects, the first one will be a test run to see what works and what doesn't. It's actually quite simple. I'll write down the beginning of a story. Some characters, some events, a place where things are going to happen. From that you can pick whatever you want and add to it. We'll try to write a story together here, plain and simple.
First thing is, don't be shy. If you have any idea you want to add, post it. If you want to post a finished paragraph or several, you're most welcome. If your idea is not polished or put into narrative format and you just want to brainstorm a bunch of events, characters or whatever, you can do that too. No idea is too big or small. If you're feeling insecure about the tone you should take or if it should be in dialogue or plain narrative, just take a deep breath and write like you would be telling your idea to an acquaintance. Keep it simple if you like and try to get your idea across. Other wizzies will come and eventually work things up. Second thing is, don't get too attached to the stuff your adding here. People will come and change it and some times you may not like it. But here's the cool thing. Now you have a direction to what you want to do, and you can keep writing, on your own or in here. The important thing is that the story keeps going and we all can have some fun and distract ourselves from life a bit.
I like David Foster Wallace a lot, but man, his essay "E Unibus Pluram" is shockingly bad.
>For Gilder, the new piece of furniture that will free Joe Briefcase from passive dependence on his furniture will be "the telecomputer, a personal computer adapted for video processing and connected by fiberoptic threads to other trlecomputers around the world." The fibrous TC "will forever break the broadcast bottleneck" of television's One Over Many structure of image-dissemination.
>It's wildly unrealistic to think that expanded choices alone will resolve our televisual bind. The advent of cable upped choices from 4 or 5 to 40+ synchronic alternatives, with little apparent loosening of television's grip on mass attitudes. It seems, rather, that Gilder sees the '90s' impending breakthrough as U.S. viewers' graduation from passive reception of fascimilies of experience to active manipulation of fascimilies of e,experience. It's worth questioning Gilder's definition of televisual "passivity." His new tech would indeed end "the passivity of mere reception." But the passivity of Audience, the acquiescence inherent in a whole culture of and about watching, looks unaffected by TCs.
So this guy Gilder essentially describes the future of the internet, and Wallace's response is "nah, that won't change anything." And this was written in 1990. The internet wasn't some far-off sci-fi concept, it already existed in embryonic form. And his depiction of telecommuters in Infinite Jest shows that the significance of the internet eluded him even in 1996. Great author, but his inability to understand the difference between television and the internet is a serious mark against him.
Anybody else enjoy reading literary and cultural theory? I've taken a couple classes on the subject as an undergrad and loved it.
Also holy shit Althusser fucking murdered his wife and got away with it
Today I finally finished The Three Musketeers after ~5 months of reading it during my breaks at work. Does anyone take a book and only read it during their down time? such as on the bus or other regular but short intervals.
I've also completed:
Lord Of Light
A collection of Ray Bradbury's short stories
Maybe some others that I've forgotten where I've finished them
A few months ago I read Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke. It was incredibly interesting, albeit not totally science fiction, but mostly fiction about ``what if the world behaved this way?''
It's about what happens when aliens do decide to show up on Earth.
It was also very different from Arthur's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Read any scifi lately?
Anybody watching Bernard-Jou Iwaku? It's a three-minute anime from this season.
>The short gag manga is about the love of famous works of literature. It follows Sawako "Miss Bernard" Machida, a lazy girl who wants to be a well-read person — but does not actually read much. The manga recounts the conversations between "Miss Bernard" and her bookworm friends about the Bible, The Tale of the Heike, Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Door into Summer, The Great Passage, Fermat's Last Theorem, and more masterpieces that she has not necessarily read.
Let's get a sharethread going, shall we? Shitaba supports any file type, so epub, mobi, pdf and whatever else you have are fair game.
I'll start off with what I posted in the other thread: Welcome to the NHK! by Tatsuhiko Takimoto. It's a black comedy novel about a 22-year-old NEET named Satou. After four years of living alone in his apartment with limited social contact, he meets a young girl and an old high school classmate who try with mixed results to free him from his hikikomori ways. It satirizes wish fulfillment fiction, the otaku lifestyle, and the hikikomori phenomenon.
What is the deal with women and Jane Austen? I swear that every goddamn woman in my English department has some sort of transtemporal crush on her. It's not that I don't see the appeal of Austen; I'm no rabid fan of hers, but I can admire the wit of her dialogue and the astuteness of her social observations. But why is there near-universal admiration of her from women who read?
