Have an idea you know you'll never use but hate to see go to waste? Post it here. Maybe someone else can use it.
Here's one from the BBC: "The slow death of handwriting"
A century from now, our handwriting may only be legible to experts. For some, that is already the case. But writer Kitty Burns Florey says the art of handwriting is declining so fast that ordinary, joined-up script may become as hard to read as a medieval manuscript.
"When your great-great-grandchildren find that letter of yours in the attic, they'll have to take it to a specialist, an old guy at the library who would decipher the strange symbols for them," says Ms Florey, author of the newly-published Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting. She argues that children - if not this generation then one soon to come - may grow up using only a crude form of printing for the rare occasions in life they need to communicate by pen...
The BBC "In Pictures" sites is one of my favorites. The basic site is here. Sometimes just seeing an unusual image will spark an idea. Who are those people? How did they get into that situation? What happens two minutes after this picture was taken? Or sometimes it's as simple as, What the Hell is that?
If it's a media presentation, I generally mute the speakers. I don't want the narrator's words polluting my imagination.
The BBC's Science page is also always fun and full of things you don't see in the American news. For example, this.
Then there's always Agence France-Presse, especially their Portfolios section.
Another of my favorite sites is The Register. If you're looking for bleeding edge tech news mixed with the downright weird, this is the place. For example, this is where I learned that Lockheed has developed a powered exoskeleton for the U.S. Army. Fittingly enough, the acronym works out to be HULC, and it can run for up to three days on a tankful of JP8.
The folks at The Register also keep an eye on DARPA, dishing up such delights as this article on the latest fruits of the Nano Air Vehicle program. (Your tax dollars at very tiny and expensive work.) Sadly, this is also the site where I learned that Columbia Pictures is planning a remake of Total Recall. Oh God, no, please, say it ain't so.
Sometimes a story idea just starts with a name or a single word. For example the other morning Karen was reading something in Biblical Greek at me over breakfast, but I mis-heard her and thought she'd said the name, "Arsenio Kotai." That got me thinking: who is he? What's his story?
Or what about Joy DeVive? Or K'Pok, the Buoyant Vulcan? A stand-up comedian now playing at a Ferengi casino? Can there even be such a thing as a Vulcan comedian?
Chains of creative causality often make no sense in retrospect and are impossible to explain. Suffice to say I was thinking about something else and trying to come up with a word to describe it, and ended up with, "The Oneirovore." It's a title. What's the story behind it? I don't know. But to decode it for you, "oneiros" is Greek for "dreams," and a "vore" is of course something that eats or devours. "The Dream-Devourer:" is it a character, a parasite, an illness, or a metaphor for my job? I don't know. You tell me.
Posts
