Broken Mind

Sometimes I wonder what the people on Tumblr are like in real life. Or even people I pass by on the...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:09:05 -0400

Sometimes I wonder what the people on Tumblr are like in real life. Or even people I pass by on the street. I imagine myself being their friend, talking to them, hanging out with them and I’m always lead to a conclusion about that person and about meeting people.

I feel like it’s hard to make friends. I have distinct interests. I have a distinct way of talking to people. And people who seem “friendly” are friendly toward others like them, not toward everyone. This is most visible to me with my old friends and people i contact on facebook.

Why is that? My best friend, a guy I grew up with, used to spend hours hanging out with every day completely disappeared from my life. He’s the “friendliest” person I know out there yet we have nothing in common anymore. I try to talk to him but within a couple minutes he loses interest and so do I.

I’ve tried talking to other people as well and found that one of the only reasons I have some of the friends I do is because we connect on work. That’s it. We have no other shared interests. I wouldn’t have these people in my life if I didn’t work.

This thinking goes on and on.

Idk. It’s just interesting.

Shit, life loses meaning and focus,there used to be so much on my mind,but now it’s all gone,...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 23:38:19 -0400

Shit, life loses meaning and focus,
there used to be so much on my mind,
but now it’s all gone, just a haze of ideas.

Haze of ideas, haze of dreams,
unclear images of things wished.
What world am I in?
Haze of ideas, haze of reality.

evenings tolerated, days tiring,
A million outlets, I don’t fit one, or any.
even those disappear, and I can’t even wedge myself.

Haze of ideas, haze of dreams,
unclear images of things wished.

Tell me a story, tell me a rhyme,
it’s like a game of fulfillment.

There was a time in my life when I would get a phone call at 10pm, throw some shit on and get...

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:57:20 -0400

There was a time in my life when I would get a phone call at 10pm, throw some shit on and get out.

I’d pile up into the car with a bunch of other people and we’d drive around the city, picking up others, dropping people off, seeing all kinds of cool shit. I explored my entire town. I saw the prettiest lights during christmas, the best coffeeshops to hang out at during winter, the best parks for taking pictures, and abandoned playgrounds where I could climb to my heart’s pleasure.

I miss those times. Every single one of those people, those fleeting friends are now gone from my life. I’m moved back to that city, I still see the ghetto piercing shop where I almost got my nipples pierced, the tattoo parlor where my friends got their noserings, and the park where we climbed the roofs of pavilions.

I wonder why it’s so hard to find people like that again or do things like that again.

I used to get home 3 or 4 in the morning, sleep a few hours, hit the gym and go to class just to experience other adventures.

Whenever I browse Tumblr, I find that just about everything’s the same. Same jokes, same...

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 08:04:00 -0400

Whenever I browse Tumblr, I find that just about everything’s the same. Same jokes, same quotes, same replies. It’s a congregation of:

“THIS!”
“PICTURE REPLY!”
“I LITERALLY DID THIS WHEN I SAW THIS”
picture of a show + text on top quoting it
great movie reference! (no tag or description for you to know where the fuck it came from)

idk man.

Then it’s the same shit over and over and over.

Maybe I’m following the wrong people but I’m getting to a point where I’m LOGGING OUT of tumblr wtf, right?

Waste of Life

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 02:39:26 -0400

I just watched Perks of Being A Wallflower and I connected deeply with it. Every actor’s face resembled one of my friends’ which put me on an interesting train of thought. What HAPPENED to these people?

They’re gone from my life but that’s really okay, I just wondered. And then I wondered about all the people in our lives. They disappear so easily. Who was that one person so many years ago that I hung out with? No clue. Did they impact my life in a significant way?

Maybe, maybe not. I’ve met so many significant people that made significant changes to me and yet, I don’t talk to them. They’re gone. And future people? I can’t even see.

I feel like I am completely blind, and alone. And life is taking me for a strange and creepy life.

The people, though, within my life are very much appreciated.

Anyways, so I discovered that I am, indeed, disappointed with many things in my life. Thinking of those things lacking, namely people and experiences, put me in a bad mood and remind me so much of certain events and people. Those significant people whose face I can barely remember.

Sometimes, people stick. Sometimes they really do. You pass them off as people fleeing through the night but then you find yourself fleeing with them.

Shit.

Wake Me Up

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 23:17:43 -0500

Stirring of a beast, slamming of a drum,
welcome to my morning, welcome to my life.

Paper shredded thoughts, severed limbs
There is beauty within, no?

Missed buses, trains, and cars, falling asleep.
Leaving behind, leaving my life. Goodbye.

Drown me in money, drown me in lies.
Drown me in sorrows and cries.
Drown me, drown me, drown me.

I slam my fist, break metal, fluff pillows.
Break my mind, words slicing my heart.

Wishes and looks, the mirror always lies.
Ridicule my beliefs, strip me of my tries.

Darkness gone to replace searing bright light.
Wake up, wake up.

Wake me in the dessert, wake me to breathe soot.
wake me within a star, wake me within death.
Wake me into another dream.

***

“There is something romantic about killing your body,” I once said, wistfully, “There is something passionate and intriguing about the journey of a drug user.”

From flaming lips to vampire eyes, from blood sprays to closed eyes,
Who are you? Where am I? Sober gone, give me five seconds to breathe.

A child’s cry, I see myself, hurt pained. I see the dark brooding eyes,
the full lips of lies, the frail arms become hammers, the smile becomes madness.
The lenses reflect only my own torture.

Is this addiction? Is his violence his addiction? A vice never overcome.
Beat me, beat me, wake me into another dream. Kill me. Blame me.
Flay my flesh, cook my words, twist my fingers, rip my fingernails,
touch me softly, bleed me.

This is no place for me.

***

Chaos, droplets falling, gingerly resting on blades of grass,
stranger rides into town, all eyes on him, gone form me, from others.
I’m all gone, drift away, blown away.

Dust. Sand. Water.

A scream vanished in a hurricane.

***

Wake me up, wake me up, I’m throwing up.
Fuck.

Sometimes there are thoughts in my head, and they never leave.

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:19:18 -0500

Sometimes there are thoughts in my head, and they never leave.

One day, it was my birthday and I tried to have fun,sad and lonely, people started to actually...

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 21:27:43 -0400

One day, it was my birthday and I tried to have fun,
sad and lonely, people started to actually come!

In the middle of the night, I stood surprised,
my friend came sneakily as my birthday prize!

Thoughts on Looper

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:34:38 -0400

m-v-b:

I think it was clever that the writer chose to include a line about not over-thinking Time travel (which was clearly for the audience), but as I see it, the actual time travel ‘science’ was handled really well.

I mean, it wasn’t based on any legitimate scientific theories, but as I have said before, it didn’t need to be. They established their own rules and they stuck to them. The explanations given were satisfactory and clever, and consistent, which is rare in Time Travel movies (a sub-genre I’m a big fan of).

The core story and the dilemmas that it presented to the main character/s were absolutely compelling. The acting was great and both Gordon-Levitt and Willis brought their A-Game to it, giving the story a necessary emotional weight. As a viewer I was invested in the character of Joe and as the paths of the two Joes began to separate I found myself conflicted, not knowing which one to root for.

The only real problem (and I use the term ‘problem’ loosely) was the logic of how the act of Time Travel itself was employed in that world. The whole ‘Looping’ concept makes no sense in criminal business terms. I can think of at least a dozen different crimes I could commit with a working time machine at my disposal and every last one of them is better than ‘Looping’.

Actually, if you have access to a time machine and the only criminal use you can come up with for it is ditching people in the past so that they can be killed seconds later (even when the film clearly shows them shooting people to death in the future -anyway- as a major plot point)… then you’re pretty bad at being criminals.

Even if it is a great way to dispose of bodies, why the hell aren’t they sending people right over the top of active volcanoes? I guess maybe the machine only handles time and not space, but if so, why aren’t they doing it on a boat in the middle of shark-infested international waters and dropping them to their briny, toothy deaths, rather than sending good gold and silver back to people and making them responsible for the killing?

Or, shit, if you don’t want them floating up on some shore, or cluttering up the trash vortex, why not shoot them BEFORE putting them in the time machine? At least give them a little gut-shot so that they don’t have the strength to get up and run away.

Also, why bother sending the Loopers their own older selves to kill? Seems like you could save a lot of trouble by palming one future Looper off onto another past Looper and no one would be any the wiser. There are real holes in this operation, is what I’m saying.

Yes, ‘Looping’ is silly, and yes it really wouldn’t make any sense in the real world, but science fiction is always just heavily concealed fantasy. The whole point of fantasy is that it couldn’t exist in the real world.

Looper was great old fashioned sci-fi. It reminded me of the works of John Wyndham, Richard Matheson, or Frederick Pohl (some of my favourite classic sci-fi writers). The ‘Looping’ premise is more about creating a situation than it is building a logical world.

Like many great works of Science Fiction, Looper presents a scenario that could not exist, and exploits our suspension of disbelief to explore the human condition in ways that other genres can’t. I believe the movie pulled this off masterfully. It was an excellent story, and the only way it can be told to us is if we as audience choose to ignore these obvious logical oversights.

I’m not saying you turn your brain off to watch it - you shouldn’t have to feel that way when you’re watching a movie. By all means, figure out what doesn’t make sense about the movie, but don’t let that ruin it for you.

Hell, it’s nowhere near as flawed as Back to the Future, and everyone knows how much I love THAT franchise*.

-MVB

*To an uncomfortable degree…

Didn’t read the whole post but here are some of my own thoughts:

by sending the people to a specific point in the past where they need to be killed, you ENSURE they die. How can you know that you looped back to a volcano? You can’t. You can’t know that they died or that they won’t pursue you. This way you know
by sending back the silver&gold (probably much cheaper in the future), you can start building an empire in the past with the knowledge of the future. This ensures more profits in the future. You also do this without expressly manipulating the stock market or anything else which might adversely affect you.
by using loopers, you also get more people into the business. The pay off is large enough that you can get A LOT of people in the business on this. The loopers in turn spend their money in your establishment, on your whores, on your drugs. You’ve just created extra cog wheels in your big badass machine. And you’re circulating more money. Not only that, you have extra people you can use.
By sending a looper to a looper, it’s a last act of breaking someone. It’s like a message “You’re broken” but instead of instilling anger in the looper, it’s treated not only as a good thing but as a “retirement”, you get a ton of gold, you party like it’s 1999, and everyone congratulates you. What’s so good about this? You effectively retire a looper at a good time, you give them their last money (enough to make everything “worth it”), and you ensure good relations. This means that in the future when they run out of cash (which will happen), they’re likely to come back in some form or fashion. Or if not, to live out and die without interfering.

Idk. It seems like they’ve got a good plan :0

camdamage: my [5 year old] tongue piercings - per...

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 11:08:00 -0400

camdamage:

my [5 year old] tongue piercings - per brokenmindthoughts curiosity

courtesy crooked teeth and complimentary looks up my nostrils

w00t! I was looking through her tumblr trying to find a good close up picture. Been telling my friends for a while about this hot girl with the double tongue piercing.

So yeah, this is what i want to get done :)

Craving Inside

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 23:08:54 -0400

Innocence, riddling my mind,
craving inside.

Life thoughts, ruling my mind, leaving me behind, followed by a sigh.
A right to keep going, when life isn’t right, when feelings combine.
Paper aligned to keep me insane, locked up in vain,
a feeling of shame.

Who am I? Riddling my mind. Straying beside what was me at one point.
Clandestine rituals, secret shrines, build up in my mind.
Flying toward the sun, burning my eyes.

Persistence. My arms confined.

If you had hoped for such a drastic difference, away from your routine life. If you had hoped,
For a change in those small things and persist from benign.

Persistence. My love divined.

Strength sapped, smoke blowing without a light. A virtuous find.
Return my love in kind. A darkness reliant on a back without a spine,
A sigh without a plight.

But when I see those eyes, black pools of fury. A mirror shattered, broken pieces of my personality.

What a craving inside.

Getting Ready For NaNoWriMo

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 09:34:48 -0400

Anyone else scrambling for National Novel Writing Month?

I totally messed up last year because I had no plot and just started writing out of nowhere. The shit pretty much sucked because by day 5 I realized I had no idea where I was going with it. Bleh.

This year, I’m hoping to develop a thorough plot so I can focus on writing what I want to write. I used the Snowflake Method before and it served me well..

I’m not sure if I want to write an actual novel though. I’ve started a short story collection in PREPARATION for my novel. It’s helping me define the world the book is set in better.

How are you preparing for NaNoWriMo?

A DreamLess Night

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 02:00:16 -0400

I remember the night where I spent the whole night playing with a cat that would not let me sleep. It mowed and cuddled against me, pawing at me when I tried to fall asleep yet my tries always failed for different reasons than the playful pet.

“Oh kitty,” I whispered, wishing not to wake up the occupants of the house, “I wish, oh I wish that I had the strength.”

And the kitty just mowed, urging me on. It was not long before my conscious and the sleepy cute kitty convinced me to stand up and walk through the dark house, looking up at the tall ceilings (idly wondering why the house was one story instead of two), to walking through the hallway.

I tentatively stood by the front door, “Should I knock? Should I say something? Is she sleeping?”

I knocked and was welcomed inside but denied for my request, however innocent it may have been. I overstepped.

The kitty cuddled with me that night, and so did the other cats. What lovely creatures they were.

***

Tonight I wonder again, should I walk through the darkness? Should I appease my little chihuahua that keeps staring at me wondering when I will retire to the bedroom so she can sleep soundly where she is used to it.

I reluctantly stay, on edge, wondering about the next few hours, the next few days.

Nemo Is A Name

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 22:36:38 -0400

I’m gone in a world of haze, worthy of Master Neutral, worthy of no right nor wrong,
It’s a standstill of waters that approach a fork in their flows. Left or right? Neither just stay.
I’m no one, Nemo sailing the oceans but never quite satisfied with my direction.

Thinking through the weave of choices, color blind to the colored threads,
Without a clue as to what they mean. Grey versus another grey, clashing stuffy heads,
clashing without a vision, without a purpose, without any enthusiasm,
Even when passion takes over my body, I finish without an orgasm.

I rot and hate for rotting but don’t bother to bloom nor grow with hours passing,
I slice my soul into pieces unknown, I dice my tongue to speak no words,
I break my arm as to not write, and take away my want or need to express what I feel.

Stuck, tired, dead to me. A life of a Shroedinger’s cat awaits, neither but both true.
A superposition without a distinction, Nemo again, sailing the waters in circles.
Wishing to live all wretched lives but in the end deciding neither fork in the road,
neither split in the river’s way,
neither black nor white,
neither wire, no color, no thread, no weave present, no direction, no dimension,
no decision ever made, no footprints stepped through, no story told, no life lived,
no strife survived, no life taken, no nothing done.

And at such point Nemo became a name and not a symbol nor label for no one,
At such point, Nemo was the captain and ruler of the seas, a destination in itself,
at such point a nation arose not on land but on water,
at such point the hollow of a weave became a pattern,
at such point a striped pattern emerged between the black and white,
at such point the wires entangled in a switch,
at such point a circle became a new direction, a fifth dimension made its way here,
a decision of indecision never existed, the jungle opened itself with no footprints made,
a story was written instead of told, a life was enjoyed not just lived, a strife faded away for joy,
and death taken from the suicidal man, and “nothing” became the religion of zen.

redpoppy-fields: When in doubt, always reach for your...

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 22:04:38 -0400

redpoppy-fields:

When in doubt, always reach for your smartphone/ipod. Even Harry Potter needs to, and he already has a magic wand ;)

Quick fact, the book was set in the late 80’s, early 90’s.

What Civilization V taught me about world building

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 22:03:22 -0400

I’ve taken into world building and recently purchased Civilization V which tries to mimic the progress of empire expansion from thousands and thousands of years ago. The game taught me a lot about how people think and how rulers think when guiding their people and bettering their world.

Here are a few important things:

You try to advance as fast as possible

Time is of the essence and advancing your world is essential. You can’t fall back and make the wrong moves. That may cost you 9-10 moves easy and then you’re pretty screwed.

You have to decide whether to expand, conquer, or build up your current empire

That’s a huge one. Every time your city asks you what you want to produce, you have to decide one of those. You can decide to expand (settlers + guard), conquer (guard + guard), or build your empire (buildings + workers).

If you think about it, we face this every day in our current world. Do we decide to enhance our lives? Build our defences? Expand our frontiers? It’s a hard decision but these decision will shape your world. Here are the extremes of what will happen:

* vast rural empire (akin to russia (expansion))
* strong central empire with conquered nations it controls (akin to Britain)
* strong and powerful central empire (japan)

When someone tries to enter a territory you had your eye out on, you’re willing to kill them

Really. I had a few islands, expanding over it slowly. Had a guy, out of nowhere, throw his settlers there. Initial reaction? My damn island. So I moved all of my army people to surround the settlers.

Even if it doesn’t seem like a competition it is.

A realization

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 02:42:50 -0400

After years of writing my first novel, editing it, and being happy with it, I’ve reached a point where I started writing my second novel.

After several (failed) attempts to start again, I realized that I can no longer write it. The entire universe I created for these books, I realized, was extremely unrealistic and so as I started writing the second novel, it fell apart completely. The technology worked as an asynchronous glue that held the way we see things and the way people in my world saw things.

So, I think I’ll abandon the project or at least, leave it behind for some time. Some people on Reddit and Quora gave me advice akin to:

keep going and edit as I go back
get more details in place
try to use a different angle.

When I looked at going through with the book, I realized I wasn’t sure where I wanted it to go. When I looked into creating more details, worldbuilding, and so on. I kept hitting walls. According to the premise of the book, a civilization 200,000 years old was at war with another…errr… 200,000 year old civilization. And one dude, who’s millions years old but doesn’t know it, searches…

fuck it, this sounds like too cool of a story :) haha, I’ll keep going.

Ideabird 8/3/12 - My story

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 23:20:13 -0400

theideabird:

The vomeronasal organ (VNO) is a secondary chemical reception organ (like smell) in many mammals, and possibly in humans. Unlike smell, it only registers chemical messages, pheremones, from your own species. There is much debate over whether adults still have them, or if they’re reabsorbed into the body as we age. In any case, the genes appear to be there, even if not expressed. The gene gets expressed, and we all suddenly have six senses. We learn not just to receive these pheremonic messages, but that we can communicate with them, creating something as beautiful and primal as music, but in a new sense.

The ability to sense someone else’s feelings or chemical became a problem quickly. It was a known fact that people lie. Our lives are based on lies. We lie to ourselves, we lie to others, others lie to us and we are okay with it. We endorse it, we enjoy it because it makes our lives simpler. When we speak to the bank teller and they tell us “We can’t do anything about this, sorry”, we believe them and reach some form of acceptance upon leaving. When we ask our supervisor at work about a certain activity and they explain it to us, we trust them to know what they are talking about. When we ask our friends for advice, we trust they tell us the truth.

The VNO changed all that, or at least started to. A push of extremist neo-moralist surged with the changes. They called the sensing organ an inhuman thing, an intrusion on privacy and freedom. People were meant to be secretive, to have a peace of mind when talking to someone that they could hide behind a wall of smiles and speeches. We had our excuses but no more.

Jack was a Neo-Moralist and he joined the movement proudly. He was one of the first adults to develop the VNO. He could not stand having to experience and feel everyone’s feelings, everyone’s desires, and hidden perceptions. He found it repulsive. He found it repulsive to the point where he sought to have the organ removed. Alas, it was joined too closely with the brain to be removed safely.

He was approached by a police officer once, he mused, the stink of a bad day on him. The officer asked him about his driving skills and the speed he was going but he knew all too well the cop did not care for any of it. He wanted to finish the bad day, get a ticket into his quota, and the cop did not particularly like the way Jack looked either.

There was a whiff of a broken heart. Sounds like his girlfriend cheated on him with a guy that looked like me, great. Already disappointed and angry, Jack gave the cop a bad time. And this is why I’m a Neo-Moralist. This is not worth it.

When he returned home, he got on the internet and talked to his friends on a forum, discussing his negative experience. How nice it is, he thought, not to have to feel what they feel, not to have to know if they’re lying or not, not to have to watch one’s feelings and chemical outputs.

He slumped down and relaxed, sighing. The Neo-Moralists were sure to win this one. No one should have to be subjected to this. The propagandists call it beauty, but it’s horror. They call it a path to empathy, Jack calls it a path to perpetual hate.

In response to brokenmindthoughts

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 02:58:34 -0400

theideabird:

Since the TheIdeaBird’s Tumblr mirror was mentioned on io9.com (http://io9.com/the-idea-bird/) that site has gained a lot of followers. More so, I think, than my home site, http://TheIdeaBird.net. Consequently some of the founding ideas aren’t on the Tumblr front page. I was originally inspired to come up with a story idea blog from the book The Mystery of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg: A wonderful kids book consisting of a single piece of artwork and a couple of lines of text on each page. Teachers have been using this lovely book for ages to get kids thinking and writing.

My goal for this site, part exercise, part exorcise, is to pass out free story ideas. Just enough for you to lift your nose to the sky and sniff possibility in the wind. I try very hard not to come up with a conclusion or definite characters. I’m not always successful, and often have my own ending in there. On days when that happens, I consider that a fault on my part. I want you to take it out for a flight and see where you end up.

I’m honored that you tried that with one of my pieces.

Taking apart the idea you worked with:

Explorers come across savages living in the remains of an automated civilization. They determine that the people were all enslaved by their leaders using nanobots. Over time, due to cosmic rays, etc., the nanobots instructions, mutated and they couldn’t reproduce properly. The explorers find the original nanobot programming, and there is great temptation to rebuild a slave society.

I’d read a couple of stories about nanobots gone wrong. One in particular was a nice little slice of mystery story where humans are all acting strangely and in the end we find out nanobots accidently enslaved everyone. Fun. Of more interest to me was the scientific idea of any self-replicating unit becoming subject to error and mutation, whether the unit was biological or technological. But a self-replicating tech unit might not have the guide rails of natural competition that biology provides in spades, red in tooth and claw as they say.

That’s an idea—how do I make it a possible story? Human nature. You come across a savage society, you find the keys to ruling them. Are you a savage who enslaves them, or a liberator who nurtures them? A great many explorers found guns gave them great power over lower-tech societies, and things didn’t go well. Who are you, given that power? That’s the conflict. As god of your story, with ulitmate power over your slave-characters how do you have it come out.

So, a variant on a scientific idea, a possible conflict. The only thing missing is the elegant presentation of the idea. I can claim that I am trying to use the barest economy of well-chosen words, painting a picture in the least brush strokes. I can speak of Basho and the parallels of haiku to create something timeless in a miniature space. But hey, I’m trying to find something new every three days. Some days are better than others. The Ideabirds with word choices that delight me fall with a thud, and the clunkiest (to me) birds lift up a chorus of delight. >shrug< I dunno.

I love doing this, I really do. It gives me an excuse to dive into fascinating technical stories and follow the paths of wonder. I’m a happier man. But what would really make me happy is if there was a way I could monetize this. Like Mark Twain & William Shakespeare and all the rest of us chicken-scratchers I gots kids to raise and bills to pay. And sadly, there seems to be an inverse proportion to how much fun something is and how well it’s compensated. Don’t mean to sound whiny, just pragmatic.

I will try to post one of my shorts soon. I want to read it, though. Make it available as an MP3 to enjoy when you want.

Thanks for your interest, and thanks everyone for reading!

Tony Jonick, Oakland CA

So, I definitely wasn’t aware of the history of the project so that’s great to hear! I like the idea of writing that ubiquitous setting and painting something over it! That’s very inspiring especially for a children’s book :) It reminds me of Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov. No, not the book but actually the cover and just the title itself. I remember having that book for years before I started reading it (and realized it was just I, Robot updated ;) ). It made me think and just the image and the title inspired me to write stories of my own. What DID robots dream about? Was it love? Was it upgrades? Was it escaping their slavery? idk. But I get the point now.

My response was actually triggered by a redditor that mentioned how he has a million stories that he cannot all write out because when he starts writing one, he has an idea for 10 more and when he starts one of those, he has an idea for 10 others and so on. So a response was that it wasn’t a story that he had just an idea, and an idea takes a lot of work to be converted into a full story, a story that can take on a full shape, that can become a novel. It’s not just “oh, this stuff happens”. It’s a continuous line of questions like “Then what?”, and “why?”, “how did that become relevant?” and so on.

Anyways, I wouldn’t mind transforming those ideas on TheIdeaBird into short stories (flash fiction) just for exercise. I feel like it helps me be creative. I have a million things to do (from web development projects, to hobby stuff, to taking care of my family, to work, and to trying to figure how not to stress) but I can commit to something like a story a week haha.

It doesn’t really pay bills unless you can self-publish it ;) if it gets on io9 after that, you can make quite a good chunk of money. ;)

And reading your own stories, that’s pretty cool. I’ve always wanted to read my poetry since I feel like only I know where to put the stress, where to make pauses and so on.

:) Anyways, good night!

So last night, I was tired as hell writing that article and omitted several key points that I...

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 10:10:54 -0400

So last night, I was tired as hell writing that article and omitted several key points that I actually wanted to mention. And some key examples that I wanted to point out.

First, I wanted to mention that the ideas that TheIdeaBird puts forth aren’t stories, they’re just settings. They’re hypothetical situations without a real plot, without characters. It’s basically just a cool setting.

Second, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Third, what I think would be cooler is writing a one-page flash fiction story with that “idea” and throw a plot in it, throw some characters in it, and breathe some momentary life.

Fourth, submit that shit to 365tomorrows ;)

Fifth, I think I’ll do that.

So, here’s what’s on my mind. The specific idea that I saw that intrigued me was this:

Explorers come across savages living in the remains of an automated civilization. They determine that the people were all enslaved by their leaders using nanobots. Over time, due to cosmic rays, etc., the nanobots instructions, mutated and they couldn’t reproduce properly. The explorers find the original nanobot programming, and there is great temptation to rebuild a slave society.

That’s a great idea. But where’s the plot? You could discuss the temptation but from whose point of view? Who are the people involved? The idea could easily be expanded and have more meaning with this:

The group of explorers is torn into several sides. Some wishing to recreate the former glorious civilization and learn from them. The split group headed by Jones wanted nothing to do with this evil creation. They loudly oppose the others and become violent in their endeavor to keep Erickson and his split group from activating the nanobots despite the protests, and despite the fact that their country’s response team is on their way. Jones’s group completely separates itself, falls into the city and a young man by the name of Erick finds that his ideology and beliefs are being skewed. As the days of treachery and fights go on between the explorers (something very unusual), Erick recognizes that the nanobots have entered their bloodstream and are converting the group into said mindless slaves. Erick fights it, fighting his friends and co-workers in the process. He struggles to get to the ancient city’s spire to deactivate the process.

By the time the response team gets there. There are thousands of former savages rebuilding and creating infrastructure in the city. The team is nowhere to be found. Over the years, a myth arose in the savage population about a group of aliens that worked alongside them instead of above them. A group that restored their race back to its former glory

Maybe I got a bit carried away there but instead of having one paragraph, you have an entire story including some characters, a basic story, the climax, and the aftermath. It’s more of an outline here, maybe a pitch instead of a setting. I realize the setting has A LOT of potential but it’s really not much without a story that inherently requires the setting.

I’d love to see this writer expand that one paragraph into three, or four, with a real story behind it ;)