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Sunday, October 19, 2008
Fictions and Truths
A friend from high school sent me this story about how a student was arrested for writing a zombie story about his high school. The reason he sent this to me is because he and I wrote a zombie story when we were in high school. We wrote Adventures of Joe Flamehead, which took place in our high school. In the story the school had a nuclear reactor that melted down and made the school a wasteland. I am sure if it was 2008 and not 1988 we would have been arrested and sent to jail for the story. There are a lot of problems here. When I was in high school, I was one of the misfits. We did a lot of story notebooks where two or three people would pass a story between them. Lots of those stories had characters who were students in the schools. The students were both the heroes and villains in these stories. It was a way for us to relate who we were and who everyone else was. It was a way for us not to be the popular kids and still have a good time. Feel sure of ourselves. It you were a real fan of zombie fiction, writing a story that took place in your school and turn people you knew into zombies. That is a good way to learn how to write one of these stories. It is good to start with people you know so you can tweek the characters. Of course most current zombie fiction is violent. If you look at video games it can be seen that shotgunning zombies is seen as acceptability violence. I would not think a story like this is a threat. It is sad that we cannot look at things like this in a case by case basis. Labels: boing boing, high school, joe flame head, law, self, story, zombie
- Rich,
4:09 PM
Monday, August 18, 2008
Story and Truth
Fling93 posted this article about WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity. The day after reading the article I heard
Andrew Stanton on Fresh Air. The Mises Institute article has two main points as I see it. The first is the Buy N Large Corporation would never exist. If there was a single company that did everything, it would become the government. The second point is about the end of the movie. The credit show the world starting over again from the beginning, including going back to farming. The ship has an food system that has not failed in 700 years. It would be more dangerous go back to farming and not use the food system on the ship. Here is the text of the article. The humans' return to Earth and attempt to "rebuild" their lives is ludicrous from any sound economic perspective. After having had a sustainable automatic food production system aboard the Axiom — which had apparently worked without fail for seven centuries — humans all of a sudden decide to resort to traditional agriculture. The one thing they have machine capital to do for them, they decide to do manually instead. Rather than devoting the precious time bought by the ready availability of food to, say, create art, repair all those broken skyscrapers, or design even better robots, the humans decide to manually dig holes in the ground and grow their food through backbreaking toil that led millions throughout history to die premature deaths. Oh, by the way, the film left that part out. Virtually no one today who romanticizes the "good old days" of traditional agriculture recognizes how nasty, brutish, and short life under such conditions had been for millennia. Once the first industrial factories opened — with their long hours, dangerous equipment, and meager pay — people flocked to them in droves, because the factory conditions (including the sanitation provided and wages paid) were greatly preferable to those of toiling virtually all day on the traditional farm. Two days after reading this article I hear Andrew Stanton on Fresh Air. He started with the idea of telling the story of the last robot on earth. He wanted this robot to be trash compactor and the world to be a dump. He took these ideas and created a story that serve them. He created Buy N Large as a way to quickly tell the story of how the world came to be this way. He comes up with this by stretching his own life out to the extremes. He basically thought about the world he saw around him. Thinking about this idea, how important is the truth when it comes to fiction. Is it important that Wall*e got the economics wrong building the world? Writers will tell you that their only duty is the story. They need to make a story work even if breaks the rules of the real world. The average person believes that this world would work. That is only thing that is needed for a good story. The problem is that stories do have an affect on the real world. Seeing this movie might effect how people see corporations, the environment, and the future. Fiction often changes the way the way people see the world. Everything from To Kill A Mockingbird to 1984, Atlas Shrugged to The Jungle are works of Fiction that changed the way people saw the world. Science Fiction is often about exaggeration. Often Science Fiction goes past what is possible to tell stories. No one worries if the Road Warrior is truly possible or not. Soylent Green is a good movie, if the world could get to that point or not. I am not sure you can fault these movies for not getting the science or economics wrong. In his twitter fling93 said: WALL*E was great, and spoke to me in more ways than I could have imagined. But it got the econ all wrong: http://mises.org/story/3037. My guess is that Andrew Stanton did not take a moment to worry if the economics in this movie would really work. He just built a company that would serve his purposes for the story. In the end I am not sure what Wall*e is trying to tell the world. There are messages about environmentalism, consumerism, connection to the land, taking time to look at the stars, and love. There is a very good chance that kids that see this movie will have their view of the world shaped. I just hope when they go to take action they have more facts than just the movie. If people act only knowing this movie, that is a problem. Don't worry, People on the left are giving Wall*e a hard time for its message also. Labels: economy, story, writing
- Rich,
6:20 PM
Sunday, February 10, 2008
I feel like a bull, mostly.
 Because of past projects like the Mayfly project, Lisa told me about the Six Word Memoir project. It is an interesting question. Can you tell your story in Six words? Memoir literally means "My Story". My six word memoir is: I feel like a bull, mostly. What would your Six Word Memoir be? Labels: mayfly project, memoir, self, six word Memoir, story
- Rich,
4:50 PM
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Wonder Woman
I was thinking about Wonder Woman. She has never been an interesting character to me. Her most interesting stories are all the way back in World War 2. In my life time the most interesting stories have been about her and the Gods of Olympus. I like the stories where the Gods are worried about losing their power because no one worships them. I am not sure what would make an interesting Woman Woman story now. I like her in the Justice League. I thought she was a great character in the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited cartoons. That might be because she was being played off Superman and Batman. I wonder if the hard part of Wonder Woman is that she is so Iconic, but what she stands for has changed a lot over the years. To be honest, Batman and Superman have not changed all that much in the past 75 years. They have had a lot of character development, but they are still icons of something easy to understand. I think the Icon of Wonder Woman is harder to understand. In part is it harder to think about what a woman should be. I think there are lots of different images of what a Wonder Woman could be. If I wrote Wonder Woman I would make this a conflict for her. I would make it clear to her that she thought about how the world saw her. On Yahoo Answers someone asks if DC should change how Wonder Woman dresses. I think the answers are pretty interesting. It says a lot about how people see women and Wonder Woman. I think these questions should exist inside of the the comic book also I have some ideas what I would do with a Wonder Woman story. Some ideas that I do not want to share here. I should try writing a Wonder Woman story. If there are any Wonder Woman fans out there you should let me know what Wonder Woman stories I should read Labels: comic book, DC Comics, Feminism, flickrpost, story, Wonder Woman
- Rich,
1:20 PM
Friday, October 26, 2001
They Call Me Mr. Pathos
Taken from the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate DictionaryPathos- Function: noun Etymology: Greek, suffering, experience, emotion, from paschein (aorist pathein) to experience, suffer; perhaps akin to Lithuanian kesti to suffer Date: 1591 1 : an element in experience or in artistic representation evoking pity or compassion 2 : an emotion of sympathetic pity When I was in college a guy gave me the nickname Mr. Pathos. The nickname says something about the way I view art and how I feel about creating art. It was my sophomore year in college. Most of the people in the broadcasting department knew me by this time. They had seen most of the broadcasting projects that I had done. I was starting to build a reputation as a reliable person to have on a video shoot. I had technical skills and I knew how to solve problems. These were important skills at a University where the equipment was out of date and never seemed to work. I was also starting to build a different reputation also. I was taking Advanced Television production. My first two projects were very emotional. They were not like the projects being made by the rest of the class. the first project was one minutes about having an ear infection. The second was a poem that I had written. Most of the people in my class where playing with comedy. I was making one minute art films. At the time I did not feel that I was good at being funny. I did not feel that I could make a good project that was light-hearted. I felt the best project I could make was too turn the emotion way up. I felt that I could make a really good project if I tried to get to peoples' hearts. It applied to my artist sensibility. I received the nickname Mr. Pathos for an editing project. Everyone in the class was given the same footage of our professor kicking a 50 yard field goal. I took the score from Born On The Forth of July. I read a script of the kicker reliving past glory. It was best described as sappy. This guy Chris called me Mr. Pathos after that. I found that nickname both to be a but of an insult and a badge of honor at the same time. I tell this story because I feel that I still have many of those same artist sensibilities It might be a little worse now because I am mostly writing about myself. I am not hiding the way I feel about things behind the veils or fiction. Everyone who reads Sad Salvation knows it is about me. There is no other persona for me to hide behind. I feel good when I write something really emotional. It excites me to spill my worst emotions out on a page. Maybe I am using this web log when I should be going to therapy. It still feels good to get all these things out. I am not going to write about the times I feel happy. I do not understand those moments as well as I understand the things that make me upset. With a title like Sad Salvation, how can I be anything but Mr. Pathos. I am going to keep writing things where my emotions spill out all over the page. Labels: art, college, pathos, self, story
- Rich,
9:50 PM
Thursday, October 04, 2001
Welcome to Sad Salvation
I looked at my life a few years ago and thought about something. I was sitting at a coffee house thinking about starting a new zine. I was trying to rack my brain trying to figure out what I could personally publish that would be interesting for people to read. I was thinking of the zines that I had read recently. There was nothing that I was reading at the time that really excited me. Most of it was pretty meaning less. I had read a decent number of zines. I have even published about a half dozen issues. I looked at what other people were writing. I found something incredibly personal in zines. They were a place where people could try to construct some kind of story about their lives. The zines I was reading at the time where unlike any of the other stories I was finding in the rest of the world. Being 23 years old there was something really empowering about zines. I was right out of college and I seemed to be going nowhere in the world. All of my friends were facing the same situations. We were working at bookstores and restaurants. We were clerks and temps. We spent our time watching clocks and find ways to slack off. Zines seemed to be the best way to work out our artistic frustrations. Using the office copy machine to cut the cost of a zine was a natural thing to do. I was sitting at this coffee shop and I was not 23 years any more. I was 27 years old and my friends were starting to find their way into careers. They were becoming teachers, designers, and engineers. It was my day off from a dot.com start up. The way my life was happening was slowly sinking in for me. For most of my life, my friends have been the artist type. Growing up we would tell stories, dream up comic books, and talk about the kinds of movies we wanted to make. We were all writers at heart. As I went through my life, these were always the kinds of people that I became friends with. We were people who dreamt about making our impression on the world. We thought about big ideas and big ways to express them. The problem was that we were becoming regular people. There is a whole generation of people that are just like me. People that in their heart see themselves as writers and artists, but their job does not reflect that. We are sitting around playing in bands for recreation. We write zines and web sites as an artist outlet. We keep on thinking that someday we will be able to break out and become a true artist. In this light, writing a zine is Sad Salvation. It is not only our artistic salvation, but it is also salvation because it is what we value most in this world. I am not speaking about everyone. I am just talking about a type of person I seem to be close with. We are not starting families, we are not growing roots in a community, we are not working toward building specific lives for ourselves. I wonder if we will ever find that Salvation we are looking for. (I have the feeling this needs a re-write).... Labels: age, comic, sadsalvation, self, story, zine
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