Gel Videos - Ira Glass
http://gelconference.com/videos/2007/ira_glass/

"A master class in storytelling. Ira Glass, host of "This American Life" on radio and TV, has spent years telling stories, and getting stories told. In one of the most popular Gel talks ever, Ira describes the elements of a good story."

I heart this american life

Ira Glass

I was at a Kurt Vonnegut talk in New York a few years ago. Talking about writing, life, and everything. He explained why people have such a need for drama in their life. He said, “People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be like the stories. Let's look at a few examples.”

I was at a Kurt Vonnegut talk in New York a few years ago. Talking about writing, life, and everything. He explained why people have such a need for drama in their life. .He said, “People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be like the stories. Let's look at a few examples.”

choose your own adventure stories thoroughly visualized and diagrammed

choose your own adventure visualizations

Slick visualizations of choose your own adventure stories.

"When a world of new possibilities has just opened, it’s hard to find the will for restraint. But, in time, people scale back the more gratuitous uses of this sort of glitz, moving from what’s possible to what best suits the material." - analyzing the structure of "choose your own adventure" books

"13 months and 11k lines of code later, i’ve finished up the choose your own adventure project. all told i ended up cataloging a dozen books from the early-to-mid 80s, looking for patterns in their construction and in the paths made by different readers through them. these short, simple books had a surprisingly complicated structure with their interlocking pages & choices. as a kid the idea of writing one and keeping all those pages straight boggled my mind. what was lost on me at the time was that even a list of hundreds of page numbers can be comprehensible if it’s redrawn as a diagram. these days i feel like i approach everything that way. so here is my look back at an obsession from my past, using graphical obsessions of the present to guide the way." via http://etc.samizdat.cc/2009/11/the-rules-of-the-game

Visualizations of flow through Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Lots of Galactica goodness...

Sometimes a Great Notion is to read what the Trib is saying about BSG - yet another post, love it!

RDM talks about the final cylon

OMG, how cute is the picture here?

Julian Bleecker : Extending this idea that science fiction is implicated in the production of things like science fact, I wanted to think about how this happens, so that I could figure out the principles and pragmatics of doing design, making things that create different sorts of near future worlds.

Extending this idea that science fiction is implicated in the production of things like science fact, I wanted to think about how this happens, so that I could figure out the principles and pragmatics of doing design, making things that create different sorts of near future worlds. So, this is a bit of a think-piece, with examples and some insights that provide a few conclusions about why this is important as well as how it gets done. How do you entangle design, science, fact and fiction in order to create this practice called “design fiction” that, hopefully, provides different, undisciplined ways of envisioning new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices.

"Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It’s like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures ... It’s meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination."

design essay

hasticity, which is the science of random chance, and they talked to someone who

There's whatever the story appears to be about—the financial crisis, evangelical Christianity, cryogenics—and then there's what it's actually about. And what it's actually about is, as often as not, wrongness.

Ira Glass on the narrative power of being wrong