i can be the future, too!

[jlh]

I'm hoping my friends who are also older than 35 will chime in on this post! Because this is the thing: when you're young, and you aren't up on the latest hippest new thing, it can be sort of charming. You can choose to be a luddite and people might find it either tiresome or cute. But once you're over a certain age, you just look like you're

Comments

[jlh]

Yeah, I thought that Inception thing was ridic, but it was very sticky and showed up all over the place

[jlh]

As I've been answering these comments, particularly the ones over on DW, I'm realizing that I think I'm just revisiting my usual weird reactions to hyperbolic speech that I get more than occasionally when people are like THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER AND IF YOU DON'T THINK SO YOU'RE AN IDIOT that people go off on and I think, "golly, does my friend think I'm an idiot?" when I guess that's just sort of a thing that people say? I don't know

[amyamy]

Yeah, I dunno, I have trouble believing any one thing is going to revolutionize narrative structures. We've been telling stories for millennia and nobody's gotten tired of Once Upon a Time a Person Met Another Person and They Did a Thing. Every so often a new narrative idea comes around and people herald it as the Future of Narrative, and sometimes they do actually get incorporated into the way we tell stories but mostly they just seem to be interesting and novel gimmicks that get a bit of play every now and then as the traditional narrative goes on strong.

[jlh]

Well, that's certainly true in broad strokes? I guess it's more the form. I mean, if you've never seen a movie they can be a little mystifying; that happened a lot when movies were first figuring out how to show passage of time and all that stuff. And while those conventions got sorted out fairly early, audiences still had to learn how to read them. We don't think about it because we learn so damn early how to read filmed narrative. Mahoni above notes the whole many threads narratives that float around these days, which I adore, but which I think for some people are just confusing

[amyamy]

Oh, gotcha. I was thinking more on the level of tricks that are neat once or twice but don't get used often after the novelty goes away - Sixth Sense, as you mentioned, or Memento, or in lit stuff like Calvino's if on a winter's night a traveler. And I do think Inception fits into that niche - it's just such a specific storytelling device I have trouble seeing it being used much

[jlh]

Yeah, my parents are old and never got a DVD but they always multi-tasked and read in front of the TV.

I guess, I get worried sometimes that the reason I don't care for things is less because I don't care for them and more that I'm being inflexible, which I'd rather not be? So then I have to relentlessly question myself, which I pretty much do anyway, haha.

[sail_aweigh]

I think it's a bunch of hooey. It's just like 3D TV. My daughter (who is 30) and I have been arguing over whether it's a passing fad or the wave of the future. She thinks it's the wave of the future. I told her they thought it was the wave of the future in the 50s and look what happened to it back then, nowhere, nada, zip. It's fun, it's suitable to some forms of narrative, but not all. And if all movies were made in 3D in a video game format, 70-80% of the movie going audience would bail, is my opinion. People want variety. It's not about one size fits all

[jlh]

omg did you see all the warnings for the 3D TVs that were available for sale this Xmas? They were like, you really shouldn't sit too close, and you shoudln't watch it for more than a couple of hours a day, or something, and I was like, oh, it's TV as Happy Fun Ball, awesome. I mean, right now 3D seems like a money making scheme, but I think that's because so much of it is shitty conversion rather than well done original film. Like, I'm sure that James Cameron will do great things with 3D because he's such a good technician

[ali_wildgoose]

With regards to "Homestuck" specifically -- I wouldn't describe it as the future of narrative, so much as a narrative that's taking advantage of the web browser format to a much greater degree than most of its peers. Most popular webcomics are serialized graphic novels or digital newspaper strips, which use the internet as a promotional tool and content delivery system, but which could be read in print just as easily as online. Other comics have used flash and HTML and to create interconnected hypertext narratives, so Homestuck isn't exactly breaking virgin ground -- it's just a more approachable, appealing, compelling and effective* version of what people have been trying to do for years, which has managed to grab a very large audience

[jlh]

So re Blankets, I guess I read it in 2004 or so because I remember borrowing it from you and maybe it was Sgt Pepper in this way but what was so new about it other than its content? Because it wasn't incomprehensible to me, really. It wasn't like, a thing I had to figure out; it seemed pretty straight forward

[ali_wildgoose]

I don't really think that the basic story of Homestuck is any more difficult to follow than a Tarantino film, honestly. The format takes a while to get used to mostly for stylistic reasons, and because it isn't immediately obvious which details you should be paying attention to -- for instance, I laboriously read several fake magazine articles and skimmed the chat logs, which was the opposite of what I should have been doing. The parts that are a little difficult to follow are the world building and magic system, and I think it's a fault of Hussie's writing that they aren't easier to keep track of, not really an inherent aspect of the medium

[jlh]

I absolutely understood that you were warning me away for content reasons, not because you thought I wouldn't be able to follow it. I'm sorry if I implied otherwise! Though I'll admit that Paul's tumblr post, which I found entirely incomprehensible despite reading it several times, got me a little panicky in the "well, if this is how we're going to be talking then maybe I should read the comic?" kind of way

[jlh]

Omg I hate the digital natives thing. We know milennials and I don't see them to be that different. Isn't it more people who spend time online and with social media and web devices, and then people who don't? Many of whom seem to be older reporters who 20 years ago probably couldn't program a VCR?

My parents were huge multitaskers, btw. They were always reading books and magazines in front of the TV; that's why I always did, and I was known in college for doing that and confusing my roommates who couldn't do anything while the TV was on. And Dad would have been 82 yesterday.

[slytherincesss]

I'm a huge multitasker too. Nothing is more enjoyable to me than having a queue of my favorite programs on the computer or in the DVR and watching them with one eye, while reading or housecleaning or cooking (last weekend when I was batch cooking, I brought my computer into the kitchen and knocked out S1 of Castle) or doing other stuff online. It drives DH crazy -- it truly bothers him that I cannot -- or will not -- sit down for two hours and just watch a movie or whatever. It, like, makes my innards crawl to not be able to multitask in this way. There are exceptions to this, of course, such as classes or seeing a movie in the theater. Of course it bothers me that whenever DH wants to sit down and watch TV, he wants to watch Family Guy, which is offensive to me in a non-funny way. It's such elementary, shallow humor. Anyway, my parents were multitaskers in front of the TV and I inherited that proclivity.