wonderful wonderful deepmemething from Kincaid
OK. An alien lands and gives you a six-chambered gun. Each chamber can hold one full-length media item: 1,500 pages of text, 90 minutes of music, 3 hours of film, one entire video game, a full speech, several dozen images from a single artist, a single season or plot arc of a TV series, one full live performance, detailed architectural plans and photographs for one building, even a full meal -- any discrete cultural work. The means of data storage is not important; for all intents and purposes, each gunbarrel holds one fully realized artistic or academic concept.
If you spin the barrel and fire the gun at a sentient being, the entire artistic contents of that barrel will be instantly uploaded into the target's memory and cognition. It will be as if they have not only experienced the work, they understand it at the same level you do, with all prerequisite knowledge also uploaded.
The target will not necessarily believe or enjoy the work as you did. They will experience whatever emotions and opinions they would've had if they'd sat through the work normally, though several times more intensely, and any opinions based on mere denial or ignorance will be transmuted into their truest, deepest opinions, the sort they would've otherwise reached only after years of contemplation, compressed into an instant.
The target will HAVE to confront the experience, and during the next several days they will uncontrollably commence to think about what they saw or heard. Love or hate it, believe it or reject it, it will remain a lasting and prominent part of their mental world. You have essentially forced them to know and comprehend your art-bullet, and they will never forget it.
The gun has infinite ammunition and the alien lets you have it for a full year before you have to return it. What six things would you load the barrels with? [Variants of 無 are perfectly fair answers. Answer the question any way you wish, but please refrain from being pointlessly wacky. :) ]
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So my initial first reactions were: Suikoden I, Suikoden V, as much of Super Play magazine as one can compress into a chamber (starting at the end and working back if space is an issue, as the later issues were better, in my humble opinion), and the first world of Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog (as I think the experience is, quite honestly, a purer one if that's as far as you get; the rest of the game is just less aweing by comparison); and the last two slots I still have to think about. I'm sort of deliberating over "a world from a platform game" because impressing people with deep understanding is the most important aspect of this for me, but it's something I feel is a sublime experience even if it doesn't really teach one anything, and I don't think I can pass that up.
If you spin the barrel and fire the gun at a sentient being, the entire artistic contents of that barrel will be instantly uploaded into the target's memory and cognition. It will be as if they have not only experienced the work, they understand it at the same level you do, with all prerequisite knowledge also uploaded.
The target will not necessarily believe or enjoy the work as you did. They will experience whatever emotions and opinions they would've had if they'd sat through the work normally, though several times more intensely, and any opinions based on mere denial or ignorance will be transmuted into their truest, deepest opinions, the sort they would've otherwise reached only after years of contemplation, compressed into an instant.
The target will HAVE to confront the experience, and during the next several days they will uncontrollably commence to think about what they saw or heard. Love or hate it, believe it or reject it, it will remain a lasting and prominent part of their mental world. You have essentially forced them to know and comprehend your art-bullet, and they will never forget it.
The gun has infinite ammunition and the alien lets you have it for a full year before you have to return it. What six things would you load the barrels with? [Variants of 無 are perfectly fair answers. Answer the question any way you wish, but please refrain from being pointlessly wacky. :) ]
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So my initial first reactions were: Suikoden I, Suikoden V, as much of Super Play magazine as one can compress into a chamber (starting at the end and working back if space is an issue, as the later issues were better, in my humble opinion), and the first world of Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog (as I think the experience is, quite honestly, a purer one if that's as far as you get; the rest of the game is just less aweing by comparison); and the last two slots I still have to think about. I'm sort of deliberating over "a world from a platform game" because impressing people with deep understanding is the most important aspect of this for me, but it's something I feel is a sublime experience even if it doesn't really teach one anything, and I don't think I can pass that up.