Talking as Fast as I Can

Deliciously Twisted. Dangerously Cheesy.

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How to Avoid a Sex Scene pII

Luckily, even though I have been swamped with work in my screenwriting course, the app I am developing relates to my film course, so I have been able to think more about the app while working on the massive pile of movies, scripts, etc. I have in front of me. 

I have yet to think of a clever name for my personal app, but I think it will have a similar format to the App RunPee. RunPee is an app that tells you when the best time to pee during a movie is so that you don’t miss any pivotal plot points.  

I explored the app a bit and it basically runs as you’d expect, but charges users “peecoins” to find out the times for any movie. 1 movie = 1 peecoins. To earn peecoins you can either make an inApp purchase ($1 = 10 peecoins) or watch an advertisement (1-to1). Once you’ve unlocked the movie, you can view it anytime without using an additional coin. 

Feels pretty fair. 

For my app, the idea would be similar but a bit more detailed. After downloading the app, you can type in a movie of choice, and you will be directed to a page for that particular film. On the homepage of each film there will be a synopsis, plus a description of anything that might be awkward to watch in a film with your parents.

I think forgoing a rating system on an awkward scale is necessary because different people have different relationships with what is/isn’t awkward so it might be better off to describe what happens and let the viewer decide for themselves.

From there, you can go to a side screen that will tell you the scene before an awkward scene happens, how long the scene itself is, and when to leave/come back. 

I haven’t decided about monetization yet, but RunPee’s method seems pretty good and noninvasive or aggressive for users. Stay tuned!

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Elementary, dear Watson

This week we participated in an interactive storytelling event during class.  I was having a very stressful week, so solving a murder during class was a nice calm distraction from the day-to-day stresses I have been dealing with!

I really enjoyed this activity because it required problem solving, creativity, teamwork, and ingenuity.  It was a fun way to get out and about during class and to think outside the box for a little bit.  As adults, I feel like we often forget to do activities that are fun and creative, and this was just that sort of activity that reminded me how fun it can be to get a little silly. 

During the activity, and in my research after the class, I also realized how interesting a virtual reality “mystery game” could be.  I grew up playing HerInteractive’s “Nancy Drew” computer game series, and I love the new trend of escape rooms, so VR mystery is right up my alley.  

VR mystery is particularly interesting to me because it deals with an extra level of creativity, in my opinion.  How do you make a meaningless object meaningful? How do you convince someone a toothbrush holds the keys to the story? We’ll have to find out!

I had fun during this class and I’m interested in following the progress of Sher IOT. 

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This Post May Contain Cookies

I fiddled around with “Do Not Track” this week and found it much more enjoyable than the interactive games we’ve been exploring the past few weeks. I like watching videos and learning about how much technology is controlling our everyday lives, so “Do Not Track” was pretty much the perfect site for me to explore this week.

As I’ve mentioned a few times in class, before I came to Scotland I worked as a Digital Market Analyst for a big company in NYC.  We helped our client put out ads all over the interweb and let me tell you - it was massively boring!

I’m not much of an analyst, so the job just wasn’t for me.  However, I did find the logistics of how we are tracked online really interesting.  We often had vendors come in trying to get us to buy ad space on their apps. During these meetings, the sales rep would try and hook us by showing us how much data they had on their customers and how accurately they were able to pinpoint who was looking to buy what, just based on the information they collected through the smartphone.

It was crazy to me to see how much information your phone gives away without your consent. I remember one company (a weather app) telling us that they could send targeted food ads to customers around lunchtime based on when they left the office and what route they took to get around town, it’s a scary world!

To a certain degree, I find this information useful and a bit frightening, but it’s not frightening enough for me to chuck my smartphone in a river and live life off the grid. Sure, the idea that my phone is tracking my moves, wants, and needs can be a bit uncomfortable, but there’s strength in numbers, in my opinion.  If everyone is being tracked, I’m not going to stand out from the crowd.  The chances of something sinister happening to me as a result of my trackable existence seem pretty benign.

Knock on wood.

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Ingress and walking into things

I tried out the Ingress App on my phone in order to explore the digital gaming world a bit deeper.  I signed away all my personal information by connecting the app to the data mine that is my facebook, and then I allowed it to use my location because big brother needs to know where I am at all times.  Nothing I haven’t done a million other times across the world of digital media. 

If I had to go to the grocery store or walk into town, I made sure to open the app in order to “explore” the Ingress world a bit.  Back in 2016, I jumped on the Pokemon Go! bandwagon (also created by Niantic), so the format of the game was something I was used to playing with.  I did find the narrative kind of hard to follow, and the instructions for “portals” felt a bit repetitive. I’m stubborn and easily bored, so I lost interest in the app after three or four outside excursions.

I don’t believe Ingress works as well as Pokemon Go! did.  For one, there’s a lot more narrative involved in Ingress, which means you need to pay attention to the dialogue on your phone screen frequently.  This would be all fine and good if the game didn’t also require that you be out and about in the world playing it.  I felt like every time I found a portal I would have to pause for 5 minutes on my walk just so I could listen to ADA and JARVIS fight over my loyalty. In freezing temperatures, this was not ideal. 

Pokemon Go! was slightly less narrative and more action. If you found a Pokemon, you had to stop to catch it, but otherwise, there wasn’t much expository dialogue for you to wade through.  It was much easier to play while walking places, in my opinion. 

That said, I can’t help but feel these Niantic games are a bit of a contradiction.  Pokemon Go (and Ingress works similarly) was initially praised because it forced “gamers” out into the real world in order to interact with the app.  People were experiencing nature again! Isn’t that swell? Sure, people might’ve been playing games out in the real world, but they are still solidly stuck to their screens.  In order to not miss portals (or pokemon), the user must be tracking the map on the screen the whole time they are walking.  In my experience, this led to trips, collisions, and haphazardly walking into intersections - not quite what I’d classify as “experiencing gaming in the real world”.

 Ingress was interesting for a bit, but ultimately not something that was able to capture my attention.  I don’t really love a game at using my location to play it (at least in such an obvious manner), and I don’t think I’ll miss running into people on the street because I was trying to figure out what ADA was telling me about XM.  Thanks, but no thanks Ingress. 

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I Don’t Understand

This week I decided to experience Exiorare. I read the graphic novel first and then did the computer experience several times. 

Maybe I’m a dummy but I had a lot of trouble understanding what was going on during either experience.  The graphic novel seemed really disjointed to me (but maybe that’s because they want you to buy the whole package), and I couldn’t understand the plot or what the characters were striving towards.  Then again, I’m not really someone who reads graphic fiction so maybe I’m just not used to this format. 

As for the interactive experience, we touched on it briefly in class. I explored the scenario as much as I could, starting over several times to try and have a new set of options. I thought this particular exercise was pretty cool, as I’ve always been a fan of “choose your own “adventure” games, and it reminded me of some of the mystery/detective computer games I played when I was younger.

Where I got stuck was every time I pressed the red button (any of the red buttons, and I pressed quite a few), the site would redirect me to a loading screen that would never load.  I was torn between thinking this was a glitch and thinking that maybe this was all a part of the game, so I didn’t know what to do.

I actually googled it and from what I found, it seems like another page should open up after I press the button, and the loading screen shouldn’t be the end of my experience.  As I type this, the loading screen is still playing on on a separate tab. I’ve enabled adobe and opened it on several different systems, so what gives man!

Despite this barrier, I think I did enough exploring of white.house to understand the basic format and goal of the website.  I thought it was very clever to have it incorporated in a scene during the graphic novel, and otherwise, enjoy this type of interactive web space.  My main grievance is that I know there is more to explore but I can’t figure out how to explore it. 

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Basic Project Idea

It might be obvious since I’m pursuing a degree in Screenwriting, but I really like movies. I’ve grown up watching movies with my family, and in the days of Pixar, Disney, and animated toaster’s saving the day, everything was fine and breezy.  We could all enjoy the movie, laugh, and feel comfortable watching it together. 

Fast forward to adulthood, when our family movie night tastes have changed ever so slightly to feature more adult content than a fish for looking for its dad. Now, when my dad suggests a movie for us all to watch on a Saturday night, I can see everyone racking their brains and trying to think “what are the possibilities that there is a really awkward sex scene in this film”?

I know I’m not alone because The Onion wrote an article about just such an experience  https://local.theonion.com/family-watching-movie-white-knuckles-it-through-unexpec-1819574925 (the fact that I share the same last name as the family in the article is a mere coincidence, but really hit home). If everyone is feeling similarly, why is no one doing anything about it?

There is an app currently available that tells you the best times to run to the bathroom during a movie to ensure that you miss as little as possible while you’re on the toilet. I am proposing an app that does the same thing, but with sex scenes in a movie.

Drawing from users of the app, movies will be added into the database and timestamped (with a description of the scene prior to the sexy time scene) so that viewers can know a good time to casually excuse themselves to get more popcorn.  The app could also feature a basic rating system (on a scale of 1-10), on how awkward of a movie it is to watch with your parents. 

It’s an idea still in the works, but my god, I would use it if I could.

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7 Deadly Digital Sins

I read/watched/fretted over the “7 Deadly Digital Sins” for this weeks class and suddenly started noticing how everyone around me was absolutely glued to their phones. I was sitting in a cafe, and many people were sitting with friends or in groups, completely immersed in their phones.  The only time they looked up was to show someone something they were looking at on their phone.

Yeesh. But I do this all the time. 

I watched all seven of the videos on the website, partly out of curiosity and partly because I didn’t want to go outside into the cold any sooner than was expressly necessary. I skimmed a few of the articles and took a couple of the polls as well. 

I found much of what I watched and read really interesting, though nothing was really surprising.  Social media, phones, and technology are so ingratiated in our daily lives, it’s not a shock that people feel so desperately connected to their Instagrams, iPhones, and twitters.  Similar to the accounts I read on the site, I too get a spark of validation when I post a photo on Instagram and it receives X amount of likes. I also feel a pang of sadness when I see someone doing something cooler than me on my feed. 

I recently listened to a podcast on Social Media and Schadenfreude which I feel is very applicable to a lot of the experiences I read about on the site.  Social media and technology tend to make people feel like they not only need to present the best versions of themselves online, but that best version must be better than anyone else's.  The read caused a little bit of self-reflection and a lot of vigorous head-nodding in agreement. 

The internet and social media are still relatively new, and I think society needs to learn how to use it better.  Just because it feels like a highway with no speed limit, doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be rules of the road.  This experience helped to highlight to me that we are still in a very transitional phase when it comes to our relationship with technology, and I believe it will be interesting to see where we go next.