A Speculative Journey

[mawka01]

Honestly, I love Erin so much.

[flannelboundboi]

Goodnight Moon ASMR

[flammedoudoune]

Goodnight Moon is such a good ASMR channel. She puts so much love and hard work in her videos and they’re all so pretty to watch. Also she looks super cute and has the most relaxing voice ever. I kinda want to draw fanarts of her characters, tbh. I don’t know a lot of people who watch these kinds of videos so I can’t really talk about my love for her with anyone, but I think she’s super creative and talented.

[piecesoffate-blog1]

Storytelling in Visual Media: ASMR

ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response), is a fascinating popular video genre that seems to have transpired because of modern Internet culture. ASMR is described as a pleasant tingling sensation that begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine that is triggered by sounds. (Link). Triggers are different from person to person and some don’t even experience ASMR, but many use the sounds as a way to relax.

The creatives of this community, called ASMRtists, make videos with sound triggers such as doing makeup, giving scalp massages, reading stories, and talking softly. Many ASMRtists do roleplays, wherein they portray a character, either already existing or of their own creation, and act out a short scenario that weaves in different triggers. This short sketch-like style has brought forth a new form of ASMR that incorporates a narrative.

The ASMRtist Goodnight Moon, in her fantasy Babblebrook Series of roleplays, has created her own world and characters that she continues to develop in each new video. Her characters range in personality; in some videos she portrays a haughty witch, in others, a chipper shopkeeper. In many of these, sounds are layered together to create a believable universe: squeaks of different animals, beads clinking together, and drums in the distance. Goodnight Moon even brings 8 of her characters together in a two-hour long video, all a part of a festival roleplay (Link). The videos in the Babblebrook Series have millions of views, with the most popular, “ASMR Maybell’s Menagerie: Dragon Egg Shopping,” currently at 2 million.

Much like music, radio and television, Goodnight Moon and other ASMRtists are able to create characters and worlds using sound. Their use of ASMR as a relaxing sound component gives a new perspective to worldbuilding in visual media.

[hapalopus]

an impostor

[piecesoffate-blog1]

“Augmenting Reality”: How Pokémon Go Shows the Consequences of AR in the Real World

It has been more than a month now that the Pokémon Go app has been released. Since then, millions of people have been downloading and playing the augmented reality (AR) game. It seems to be a phenomenon, and a victory for sending AR further into the spotlight when VR technology has been receiving more recent attention. While new AR technology is certainly being developed and implemented, Pokémon Go has two advantages that go hand in hand—the name of “Pokémon” and nostalgia—that have contributed to its popularity. 

The AR in Pokémon Go has taken it a step further to, in effect, create the world envisioned by the original Pokémon games. The users, acting as Pokémon trainers in the game, walk around in order to catch Pokémon, where their images can be seen through the camera. In addition, the three teams a trainer can choose from—Team Valor, Team Mystic, and Team Instinct—mimic the original Pokémon games, and have created a sense of team loyalty. 

The app’s burst of popularity brought it and the application of AR to the attention of multiple news outlets. This is different from tech such as AR glasses and headsets. The Pokémon Go app, free to download and play, is accessible to anyone with a compatible smartphone, and needs no extra peripheral to use. While this limits the quality of the app, as many thought it would when the initial trailer was released, it has not diminished its popularity. A range of positives have come about because of Pokémon Go—from people exercising, socializing, and taking their dogs out for walks more, saving businesses and having meet-ups around the globe, to discovering places few knew about. That’s not to say there are not negatives: the system was initially unprepared for the number of people accessing it at launch, it was said to be the cause of accidents as a distraction to walking and driving users, and the app was blamed as being a waste of one’s time. 

While Google Glass showed us what day-to-day life would look like with an AR overlay, Pokémon Go has shown how AR entertainment can effect the way people live, altering behaviors for better or worse. But most important is its blending of game and reality—how it shows AR can bring people together in real life through technology.

[transvibe-deactivated20210808]

This was outside of a pet store

[cmxpunk]

A Short Story by Shinsuke Nakamura

[piecesoffate-blog1]

Story through Character

While it was once common to tell a story through speech or in a physical book, our choices and ways of telling stories are multiplying as technology changes. 1st-person accounts of a story in a character’s voice are still very popular, and by using multimedia a story can be built over a number of posts, rather than a book or a journal. 

A recent example of this would be a reddit user who began to spell out a very different kind of world from ours:

“In the MKULTRA experiments, the CIA dosed unwitting subjects with LSD to see how they would react. What has not yet come to light is that MKULTRA was an intra-agency project. The CIA created new departments within the CIA and fed them steady doses of LSD and other psychoactives to see how the departments would diverge and mutate away from normal departments. Whole projects and hierarchies were created with everybody involve being more or less unwittingly under the influence of LSD. This is how the "restraint bed portals" and "flesh interfaces" were first created i.e. from a heavily psycho-mutated hierarchy. The entire thing had to be eliminated, but the technology it created has been revolutionary.” (Link)

While the user’s posts could be easily dismissed, it is the urgency and voice with which they are written that they convince us that this “character” believes and has witnessed these events in some way. This piece could easily be part of a short story or novel as a character’s account or as their world’s history.

Media can also be used to roleplay or step into the mind of a character. A Twitter user William Shakespeare @Shakespeare tweets on different topics in the voice of a living-dead Shakespeare that speaks partly modern and Elizabethan. These tweets, a bit like entries in a journal, address current events and also call back to different quotes from plays. The short, 140-character limit of tweets even creates the situation where a frequent user keeps a narrative of their life through each post. If one looks at a user’s page, there is a progression to the posts on the page, like a modern diary. 

A world through the eyes of one character or person can allow us to think about what else there is to the world. If we seriously consider these stories, they provide insight on creating character: Is the reddit user’s character an unreliable narrator? Do people from their world have different opinions? How has modernity changed this Shakespeare that now uses Twitter? And how has he adapted to modern society? These storytelling elements are excellent for creating, developing, and getting into the mind of a character or universe.

[piecesoffate-blog1]

The latest Tweets from William Shakespeare (@Shakespeare). An upstart crow! A tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide! Able to bombast out a blank verse! Goats and monkeys! -Robert Greene, E! News Daily. Bankside

[piecesoffate-blog1]

Someone is creating a horrifying sci-fi world in Reddit comments

A lot of weird things happen on Reddit, so it normally wouldn't be all that interesting to hear that someone is posting strange comments. But listen, someone is posting some really strange comments....

[edgertttechnology]

Steampunk World: Station 45 Gleb Alexandrov

[cinemagorgeous]

By artist Inno Choi.

[piecesoffate-blog1]

Invention and the Course of Technology

There is much of our present world within our speculative ones. You could say in confidence that a speculative world can only be present within the bounds of what we know. A prominent component of this is the technology of a speculative world. In medieval settings, this usually involves items such as swords, catapults, castles, and the occasional glimpse of gunpowder. Modern or futuristic settings include objects such as computers, cars, and nuclear power, among other things. If a piece of technology is out of place, these worlds suddenly become strange, fictional, and anachronistic. They are our world, but not, somehow alien in their difference.

The Steampunk genre is famously known for its anachronistic placement of technology. It presents tech such as microphones, computers, airships as a part of culture in an approximate time period between the late 1800s and early 1900s: this could mean there are cowboys with flying trains and Victorians with robots. 

The questions for a worldbuilder to answer is: why? Why would technology develop this way? Even if this combination of time period and tech doesn’t make sense, it’s important for world-building to have either a hint or an explanation reasoning why. Maybe someone found out how to create a computer earlier in history or tuberculosis was cured or World War I started early and created a post-war boom, or World War I never happened at all. 

We can look at some real-life examples to think about this: computers once spanned several rooms, but now have been shrunken down to a size smaller than a penny. On the other hand, the oil industry, while it has changed, has not seen nearly as radical changes. The above-ground oil rigs are relatively the same size and require a large radius to operate in. They have not shrunken to centimeters as computers have.

Why is this? Because we have not discovered the tech that would allow it, it would not be cost-efficient, or it would be too dangerous? These are just a few of the questions that could be thought of before research. Now, suppose that it was the oil rigs that had been shrunken instead of computers. Perhaps the idea of oil rigs being replaced by small machines is not plausible in our world. But it can be in another one. What would the world be like? And another question that is sometimes avoided with speculative fiction: how might other technology change according to this (think the development of smartphones in our world)?

Questions about technology are some of the most important to think about before you begin building your world.

[westdesertsage]

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery (via Frank Elwell)

[neurosciencenews]

Too Much ‘Noise’ Can Affect Brain Development

Using cutting-edge imaging technology, University of California, Irvine biologists have determined that uncontrolled fluctuations (known at “noise) in the concentration of the vitamin A derivative Retinoic acid (RA) can lead to disruptions in brain organization during development.

The research is in eLife. (full open access)

[dpolaristar]

“If your image of a computer programmer is a young man, there’s a good reason: It’s true. Recently, many big tech companies revealed how few of their female employees worked in programming and technical jobs. Google had some of the highest rates: 17 percent of its technical staff is female. It wasn’t always this way. Decades ago, it was women who pioneered computer programming — but too often, that’s a part of history that even the smartest people don’t know,” explains NPR’s Laura Sydell.

In an interview on All Tech Considered, Walter Isaacson, the author of “The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution,” describes how the women who pioneered the computer revolution have often been left out of the story. In his book, he shares many of their stories, including that of Ada Lovelace, who is widely considered the world’s first computer programmer; Grace Hopper, the inventor of the first compiler and the COBOL programming language; and the female mathematicians who developed programs for the world’s first general-purpose computer, the ENIAC.

“When they have been written out of the history, you don’t have great role models,” says Isaacson. “But when you learn about the women who programmed ENIAC or Grace Hopper or Ada Lovelace … it happened to my daughter. She read about all these people when she was in high school, and she became a math and computer science geek.”

To listen to Sydell’s interview on NPR, visit http://n.pr/1dK3ZfB – you can also learn more about Isaacson’s book “The Innovators” at http://amzn.to/1NLLGAO

To introduce young children to the trailblazing Ada Lovelace, there is an excellent new picture book “Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine” for ages 5 to 9 at http://www.amightygirl.com/ada-lovelace-thinking-machine

For older readers, we highly recommend the biography “Ada’s Algorithm” (http://amzn.to/1TaxIgs) and the new historical fiction graphic novel for teens and adults, “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer” (http://amzn.to/1OUChKo)

For a fun way to introduce young children to programming concepts, check out the board game “Robot Turtles” for ages 4 to 7 at http://www.amightygirl.com/robot-turtles

Another great way to introduce kids, ages 9 and up, to programming is via new DIY systems that allow you to build real programmable computers on your own such as the “Raspberry Pi Ultimate Set” (http://www.amightygirl.com/raspberry-pi-ultimate-set) and “Sparki: The Easy Arduino DIY Robot” (http://www.amightygirl.com/sparki).

And, for more toys and kits designed to encourage your Mighty Girl’s interest in programming, check out the recommendations in our blog post: “Top 40 Science, Math, & Programming Toys for Mighty Girls” at http://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=10528