Learn how people expect you to behave in various situations.
Whether you’re getting a massage or gambling in an illegal poker room, now you can learn the protocol on the internet instead of plunging blindly into an unfamiliar social situation.
Also of interest are the protocols for familiar situations (getting the check at a restaurant, etc.) but in different places all over the world.
Metro stops can be quite long, sometimes taking several minutes to walk end to end. Experienced riders, while waiting for their train, will walk to a specific place, so that they can exit or transfer out of the station as soon as they step off the train.
But if you’re new to a line, you don’t know where the exits are. The proposal is to put “ghost” exits at every metro stop, so that you know where all the exits and transfer points are for all the stops on the line. Some sort of indicator saying “if you were at the Morgan Av stop, this would be the exit to Bogart St”. This could be a subtle sign or a drawn doorway like in Beetlejuice.
Oh, I’ve started a Tumblelog, here.
Domain names are cheap. So cheap that squatters will put together any words that make sense (or don’t) and sit on the dot-com.
Creative people are getting the picture. Many people I know have started buying fun domain names without any specific intentions, just to reserve the name in case a project comes up that needs it.
So I propose a domain trading website where people can post their “haves”. If you see something you like, propose a trade. Tell the current owner about the project you have in mind. Offer up some domains of your own, or recognition on the website-to-be. To protect the spirit of the site, monetary transactions are banned.
Paradoxically, I need to find someone with the perfect domain to bake this.
Visited Newbury St galleries with AB today. My favorite work was Philippe Bertho.
It reminds me of SNES/Genesis-generation video games. Depth is shown by parallel projection flat planes and drop shadows. Falling infinitely. Even the gold rings look like Sonic coins.
This one has a nice fold.
The portrait the girl is painting is twice as ridiculous as the situation that she and her model are in.
Flex your virtual muscles
To the best of my knowledge, the best selling computer game of all time is the Deer Hunter series. There are certain activities in real life that people just crave to simulate on the computer. Shooting guns is clearly one such activity, and my theory is that other activities that little boys have a fascination with would also make great computer simulations.
This is why it surprises me that there is no realistic construction site simulation. I want to operate a giant crane. Move large mounds of dirt. Erect a skyscraper. Let’s put those physics engines to work.
There might be two modes. In the first mode, you operate individual machines. Caterpillar could license their entire catalogue of current and past equipment; I’m sure the 3D files already exist. In the second mode, you take a more god-like perspective as in the other Sim- games. You’re assigned a project and have to complete it on schedule and within budget.
[This idea was already on Halfbakery]
At work we often think about stories inheriting from other stories. Usually this is with prototype stories, like genres. For example, in the date movie genre, there is a boy and a girl. They meet, break up over a misunderstanding (usually one character is pretending to be something they’re not), and then get back together at the end with a public declaration of love. Any specific date movie will inherit from that prototype story. That is, take it as a skeleton and elaborate on it or perhaps give a variation or twist on it.
Some movies’ stories inherit from real life, so-called “based on a true story” movies. But a really interesting thing is when a real life story inherits from a movie’s story. This falls under the general category of “life imitating art”, but I’m specifically thinking of a more direct inheritance, when the situation surrounding the making of a movie inherits from the movie’s story.
Werner Herzog plays with this in almost every movie he makes, and it is absolutely essential to the effects he achieves. For example, in Fitzcarraldo, the main character in the story convinces a tribe of South American natives to help him move a steamboat over a mountain using a system of pulleys (to gain access to a river on the other side). He does this by showing off Western art and technology (opera played on a phonograph), convincing the natives he is a god of sorts.
Herzog uses shots that show that this feat was not done with special effects (like miniature replicas) and that the natives are not played by actors. So you know that in real life, Herzog actually convinced a tribe of South American natives to actually move the steamboat over the mountain, which is really what makes the movie so incredible.
Rescue Dawn has a great chain of inheritance. Dieter Dengler was a person in real life who was captured as a POW in the Vietnam War. In 1997, Herzog made a documentary about Dieter’s experiences called Little Dieter Needs to Fly. This movie inherits from a real life story (and if you’ve seen a Herzog documentary, you know that “inherits” is a good word here). Herzog then remade this story into a hollywood war movie, Rescue Dawn. So Rescue Dawn’s story inherits from Little Dieter Needs to Fly’s story which inherits from a real life story.
But in a recent special on Herzog, it was mentioned that Rescue Dawn is perhaps closer to reality than Little Dieter Needs to Fly, because it documents the real experiences of Christian Bale (who plays the role of Dieter in Rescue Dawn). We see Bale actually walking through the Vietnam jungle barefoot, actually getting really skinny, actually picking up a live snake out of a river, actually biting the snake and tearing its skin off (well, there’s a cut here, so it’s probably a fake/dead snake, but the snake in the river is definitely real).
Real life inheriting from Rescue Dawn inheriting from Little Dieter Needs to Fly inheriting from Real Life.