MetaFilter posts tagged with story

Demolition

Pater Aletheias — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:49:12 -0800

Kajima's floor-by-floor slow demolition is one of those rare things in life that leaves you truly speechless....After all, seeing the video of a 20-floor building submerging into the asphalt as if it was liquid is something that belongs to a sci-fi movie. Kajima informally calls this the daruma-otoshi method, after the old Japanese game consisting of a daruma doll made of stacked pieces that players knock out one by one without toppling the doll.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

puke & cry — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 17:51:17 -0800

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Also, 2 and 3. NSFW due to a tasteless header image. You'll have to arrange by date and ascending to view them in proper order.

The blah story.

LSK — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:02:59 -0800

Blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah.

Tales of the City

loquacious — Sun, 04 May 2008 01:20:49 -0800

In 1974 - or 1976, depending who you ask - Armistead Maupin began writing "an extended love letter to a magical San Francisco” in the form of a serialized, fictional drama published originally in the Pacific Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, originally called "The Serial" which then became collectively known as Tales of The City. It is a suprisingly beautiful, deep, emotional, cosmopolitan and lasting tale about life in San Francisco in the turbulent, heady days of the 1970s and 1980s. Widely credited with and cherished for helping spread a little of the openess, tolerance and acceptance that San Francisco is now famous for. It then became a series of books - Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You - and lastly, the spin-off tale of Michael Tolliver Lives. Almost exactly twenty years after first publishing, it then became an excellent miniseries from the United Kingdom's Channel 4, which aired in the United States on PBS, but not without protest or limitations. San Francisco... this post is for you. All of you. More than the Mission burritos, more than the diverse weather, more than the beautiful, breathtaking views and the odd experience of falling deeply in love with a place - and only slightly less than the many real people I've met - this has touched me the most. Thank you. (Get your YouTube samples here.)

Write Me Stories

goodnewsfortheinsane — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:39:55 -0800

Paulo in London asks musicians to write him a story on an index card. For example, the Polyphonic Spree's Michael Musick and Bryan Wakeland, Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry, Jens Lekman, Sufjan Stevens, and the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne.

Classic Tales and Fables

Kattullus — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:41:39 -0800

Over 2000 classic tales and fables including Aesop's Fables, Bulfinch's Mythology, Indian "Why" Stories, tales by Oscar Wilde, Beatrix Potter, Rudyard Kipling, Louisa May Alcott, L. Frank Baum and Harriet Beecher Stowe and stories about Abraham Lincoln, Robin Hood and Baron Munchausen. And more! The folk and fairytale collection is particularly rich, with hundreds of stories from all over the world.

Best Story Ever

cog_nate — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 07:58:21 -0800

Best Story Ever is a series of clips featuring various celebrities -- Henry Rollins, Lewis Black, Dee Snider, Chuck D, Ron Jeremy, Bret "The Hitman" Hart, and many more -- telling their best stories. Some are lame, some are funny. But hey, what's your best story ever? (It can't be lamer than Alan Thicke's, can it?)

Storytelling with Google Maps

brain_drain — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:34:53 -0800

The 21 Steps is a spy thriller short story that is told using Google Maps. [via mefi projects]

Preserving the Heritage of Zonians

tellurian — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:02:31 -0800

Canal Zone Images is a collection of stories and images about the Panama Canal Zone. Did you know that the construction workers were paid in gold and silver ('spiggoty' dollars)? "Paper money was not used on the pay car at all. In the first place, there was always a danger of its blowing away, and in the second place paper money in the hands of negro workmen soon assumed a most unsanitary condition." A couple more: The story of Submarine 0-5 [4 times! What do you have to do to get gold?]. A train wreck at Miraflores (here is the other postcard [different site] that he mentions).

Every scene must turn...

Pastabagel — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:46:05 -0800

The Wager: "I'll bet you that video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have. I'll bet you that fifty years from now they'll be just as mature and well-respected as comic books are today," posits game designer Steve Gaynor. Responses and rebuttals. Aristotle wrote, "most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse." Literature and cinema have attempted to follow these ancient rules of story since their inception, and in the industry's infancy, some games embraced a form of second person narrative in which the player was acknowledged as the central character. But as the industry has matured, the focus has shifted to storyless worlds or tournament games whose open-endedness was precisely their selling point. (However, see also Portal (spoiler!)and System Shock 2) Does the interactive medium of video games inhibit the "structuring of incidents" requisite to form a cohesive narrative? Is the open-endedness in games precisely that which prevents their evolution into a culturally relevant artform? Or is the art-form "too new", the application of those time-honored rules to video games still being worked out?