Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Throughout the ‘Fake News’ uproar of the post-election cycle I kept thinking back to this line that I wrote in The Boy Kings about the launch of News Feed in 2006. The story concerns a moment when a Facebook coworker tested a News Feed story by putting the two of us ‘in a relationship’ on…
The economics of a web-based book: year oneAt the end of July 2014, this book completed its first year online. When it launched, I described it as “partly an experiment in taking the web seriously as a book-publishing medium.” In the interests of science, a few words about how that experiment is going. Nothing here…
Last time we checked on The Binding of Isaac community, a glitch caused people to believe the game’s missing content was part of a giant conspiracy. Instead, it was just a glitch. But in the last few days, culminating in a real-life search of Santa Cruz, California, fans did band together to solve a grand…
I was listening to a filmmaker, Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers, Kids) talk about coming up with original stories, and he made one interesting point about why it seems more and more difficult: technology is taking away the opportunity for drama. That’s a biggie for opera, where every emotional state and difficult decision is heightened by…
Some time in the middle of Avengers: Age of Ultron, I came to terms with the fact that there will never be any more decent Marvel movies. In fact, there can’t be. Some of what I have to say is going to read as genre snobbery. So let me get this out of the way:…
“While the producers and programmers work to find a way for us to play with their creations, we are busy building our own. The StarStruct Employee Forum is interactive fiction. We didn’t sit around and discuss what the game will be like or how we liked the book. We created characters, we put them on the ship, we invented storylines and conflicts, and we wrote a kind of story. It was often chaotic and frustrating, but it was (is) great.”
Begin: WordPress Article Content Virtual reality promises a lot of potential changes to the way we experience the world, but the ramifications it has for how we tell stories might be among the most interesting. Vice News is offering a glimpse into what news broadcasting might look like when VR is omnipresent with a report…
Endgame is going to be a fascinating project in collective storytelling. The project started as Endgame: The Calling, a novel published in October from best-selling (and controversial) author James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton. It is the first of three books. Before the second novel comes out, Google’s Niantic Labs division will launch its Endgame mobile game. Much…
Louis XIV has been enthroned on a horse on the Place des Victoire in Paris since 1828. However, the Sun King had to reconquer his place on the streets of the French capital, after his statue was melted into cannons by revolutionaries and was briefly replaced by a naked general. Today, Place des Victoire…
Something Short and Weird By Roxie Pell January 6th, 2015 end article header Electric Literature has announced the upcoming debut of its weekly online magazine Okey-Panky, a cocktail of short, experimental writing brewed to cure the Monday blues: Okey-Panky would be dedicated to brevity, eccentricity, and dark humor. It would publish every Monday morning, which…