Writing Death

The consciousness of every human being thrives in death. Every thought you have ever had has regarded an event that has come and gone before you thought it. Our thoughts do not regard the present. There is an electro-chemical mediation that creates latency that separates thought from direct experience by a few milliseconds. Therefore all thought occurs in memory.

In writing death, I haven't seen any story that really portrays this time differential. For instance, we wouldn't experience the milliseconds prior to our death AT ALL. Because consciousness happens after the fact. So at the moment of death we have lost all of our experiences that happened immediately preceding it. Though it is interesting that the brain continues to function for a short period of time due to the accumulation of resources that exist in the brain already. So the brain can continue even a little while after certain vital functions finish. So it is possible to experience the cessation of your heartbeat, but not the cessation of thought, because the memory is formed in real time, the cortical processing of it is on a time lag.

Frontline Episode on Transmedia

This episode of Frontline that came out a couple of years ago talks about a lot of the trends in advertising and the usage of information. It's not specifically about Transmedia, but it is.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/view/

Transmedia and properties for young people

As I learn more about Twilight during the release of New Moon as my wife reads them for some market research so that she can learn what all the fuss is about, I have come to a question that I find to be interesting.

Twilight is essentially the story of a nihilistic young girl who wants nothing more than to die. She has an abusive vampire boyfriend who keeps her alive and tortures her throughout the course of the story. But he does it 'all for love' so it's ok.

A lot of Twihards are over 30 and lonely. Apparently the desire to have someone make all of your decisions and treat you like shit is sexy for a much larger segment of the population than may have been apparent to most of us.

The girl I lost my virginity to left me for someone who treated her like shit, whereas I was generally pretty nice to her. She wanted me back later, and wanted me more when I was cool, diffident and kind of a jerk to her, but I'd moved on and had an older woman I was dating by that time. Though, I think I internalized a lesson, "Girls wants to be treated like shit.", and so I treated some girls like shit before I learned that it's not really the right thing to do, and more importantly that I didn't need to act like that to get women. So I hope that today my wife agrees that I am doing a much better job at treating women properly. Having a daughter has definitely opened my mind to this.

What I have discovered in reading discussions of the inherent misogyny underlying the Twilight Saga is that this is actually common for adolescent girls. This says a lot about the thirty-something women who still want this in their lives. First it says I am glad I am not with that kind of woman, second it tells me something I always kind of knew about the vampire genre, but had difficulty articulating.

Twilight has both more literary merit than people give it credit for, and less literary merit than its fans give it credit for. In a way it's a very good portrayal of the poisonous nature of a vampiric relationship. It seems to show the essential nature of the separation between the ages of a vampire and a human. Essentially, Edward is a pedophile who has kidnapped and isolated a young child who is powerless to stop him. She embraces it, but who knows how much she actually wants it? Is it vampire Glamer? I don't know, I haven't read any of it, I am going from pure commentary. I will not spend my time reading something so universally reviled as one of the worst pieces of shit ever written just to make a pedantic point. So may the Twihards forgive me.

This may explain why young girls are so enamoured of older men. It may explain why they are enamoured of abusive men. It doesn't explain why older women are so enamoured.

Which brings me at long last to my question: To what degree is it essential that your property grow with your audience?

I ask this question as I have been reading (anecdotally of course) reports of kids who loved the first movie coming back with stark derision for the second movie. Of course it grossed a ridiculous amount of money on opening night and over the weekend, but what will it's staying power be? Are there enough women with stunted sexual and emotional development to continue to propel this franchise in the coming weeks? Are the adolescent girls who were 13 before and 15 now and growing out of their Twilight phase easily replaceable by girls who are 13 now?

I would argue that for a successful franchise to properly assert itself, it should grow with its audience. This is rarely done. Right now Gossip Girl and Heroes are the two shows that come to mind immediately where the shows are growing up with their audience. But the question as it regards Twilight is: Is it essential?

Does it even matter if a franchise matures? If it does mature, what are the benefits and drawbacks? If it doesn't mature, what are the benefits and drawbacks?

I would like to think it's important, but that could just be my aesthetic sensibilities asserting themselves. It seems to me that Twilight is a good case-study, because in the coming years we'll see how well it continues to do.

Futures of Entertainment

Hey,

I'm thinking about trying to do FOE4 on the cheap. Anyone in Boston have a sofa?

Thanks,

Erek

I was mentioned on Canarytrap.net's weekly round-up.

It's nice that something I had to say was meaningful to someone who herself has some interesting stuff to share.

I just discovered her when Jeff posted her to his blog.

http://canarytrap.net/2009/09/weekly-round-up-92509-wharton-on-the-long-tail-transmedia-and-the-future-of-tv-mittel-on-lostpedia/

Here is the discussion she refers to.

http://canarytrap.net/2009/09/transmedia-as-intertext-and-multiplicity-why-some-types-of-stories-lend-themselves-to-transmedia/comment-page-1/#comment-611

New study shows the narrow concentration of financial power

http://www.insidescience.org/research/study_says_world_s_stocks_controlled_by_select_few

Recently an article in Rolling Stone compared Goldman Sachs to a vampire draining the world. This article explicates how the world's financial power coalesces around a few key organizations.

WASHINGTON -- A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world's finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power, and point out the worldwide financial system's vulnerability as it stood on the brink of the current economic crisis.

A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the "backbone" of each country's financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country's market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.

New Avatar trailer is out

http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/avatar/hd/

This movie is being sold as a lot of things. One of the main things I have heard about it is how it will bridge the uncanny valley. It resoundingly fails to do that. It looks like World of Warcraft.

Don't get me wrong, it's pretty, but District 9 bridges the uncanny valley, this one does not.

It's all in the eyes and the corner of the lips. Basically, in high concept computer animation such as this facial movement looks very stiff and stilted like everyone has had their eyelids stretched and injects botox into their eyebrows and lips, in otherwords, they have sacrificed expressiveness for fullness. Meaning that the stills will look great, in terms of the animation it will be lacking.

I still look forward to it as I look forward to every sci fi epic, even though the last three major sci fi epic trilogies have pretty much straight up sucked: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix. I find the overwrought environmentalist paganism to be a little sketchy, but I'm willing to watch Fern Gully meets Halo. ;)