danger

[Captain Utopia]

I saw a guy on a motorcycle today.

He looked kinda cool.

I wish I had done that when I was younger.

Now I just avoid recklessness and I tell myself there are plenty of safe ways to have fun.

But isn't the danger the essential ingredient of the whole experience?

Why would I want to chew the wrapper and throw away the candy?

If we let concerns over our own mortality control our experiences, then those concerns inevitably make us stupider.

If your stupidity gets you killed, then society doesn't mourn your loss for very long.

If you survive because you added something new to the mix, then society benefits.

Go on kid, make Darwin proud.

But Fuck Society.

A society which has not found a way to make the bargain mutually beneficial does not deserve my devotion.

It's learned some neat tricks, but it is still young and stupid.

It's still too early to serve society as a God.

And it's still too early to let it make childish mistakes of its own choosing.

And Lo! God came down from the Heavens for one week.

She healed the sick, performed miracles, and proved herself to All.

She baptised a willing planet into her new Global Unified Religion.

But when she granted Larry King an exclusive interview, the people saw she was a vapid idiot.

This changed nothing.

They just prayed slightly harder when she left them all alone.

[Rumckle]

I don't much care for the pictures, I mean the first one is a moped not a bike.

Apart from that it is pretty good, but it doesn't seem to flow right, may be the pictures, can't actually put my finger on it.

[Kai]

Its like a picture book.

Unfortunatly it doesn't flow right with my browser because I can't just PGDN through it.

[Rumckle]

Oh, I get that, it's just that it doesn't flow for me, and some of the pictures just seem like they were put in there just for the sake of a picture without relating enough.

I read it over without having the pictures loaded and much preferred it that way, just my opinion though

[Captain Utopia]

I shamelessly ripped the idea from Tony Pierce. But I was too lazy to set up the html and hosting. I guess using a separate page for each picture is a vital part of a photo essay - looking over it again this morning it does suffer from jumble and confusion. The text came first, and the pictures were added on to express alternate meanings - which is why I thought of it as a "rant" rather than media or bring'n'brag.

Thanks for the feedback!

[Pixie]

l liked it up until paris Hilton, then the flow and pics and how they relate all degenerated I'm afraid.

If your going to use pics go for something shorter.. might have more impact.

[Cramulus]

I enjoyed it. Good work!

[Eater of Clowns]

I think the wording below each image is just far enough of a stretch for a description of each photo that focus turns to how the words relate to the pictures rather than how they relate to each other.  That combined with the fact that that the images themselves have no cohesion makes it all disjointed.  I do like the idea.

I saw a guy on a motorcycle today.
He looked kinda cool.
I wish I had done that when I was younger.
Now I just avoid recklessness and I tell myself there are plenty of safe ways to have fun.
But isn't the danger the essential ingredient of the whole experience?
Why would I want to chew the wrapper and throw away the candy?
If we let concerns over our own mortality control our experiences, then those concerns inevitably make us stupider.
If your stupidity gets you killed, then society doesn't mourn your loss for very long.
If you survive because you added something new to the mix, then society benefits.
Go on kid, make Darwin proud.
But Fuck Society.
A society which has not found a way to make the bargain mutually beneficial does not deserve my devotion.
It's learned some neat tricks, but it is still young and stupid.
It's still too early to serve society as a God.
And it's still too early to let it make childish mistakes of its own choosing.
And Lo! God came down from the Heavens for one week.
She healed the sick, performed miracles, and proved herself to All.
She baptised a willing planet into her new Global Unified Religion.
But when she granted Larry King an exclusive interview, the people saw she was a vapid idiot.
This changed nothing.
They just prayed slightly harder when she left them all alone.

[Captain Utopia]

I think the wording below each image is just far enough of a stretch for a description of each photo that focus turns to how the words relate to the pictures rather than how they relate to each other.  That combined with the fact that that the images themselves have no cohesion makes it all disjointed.  I do like the idea.

Thanks, I did steal the idea quite shamelessly. Maybe I'll try again on another subject with the one-page-per-picture approach, and try not to intentionally muddy up the flow by supporting multiple interpretations.

I saw a guy on a motorcycle today.
He looked kinda cool.
I wish I had done that when I was younger.
Now I just avoid recklessness and I tell myself there are plenty of safe ways to have fun.
But isn't the danger the essential ingredient of the whole experience?
Why would I want to chew the wrapper and throw away the candy?
If we let concerns over our own mortality control our experiences, then those concerns inevitably make us stupider.
If your stupidity gets you killed, then society doesn't mourn your loss for very long.
If you survive because you added something new to the mix, then society benefits.
Go on kid, make Darwin proud.
But Fuck Society.
A society which has not found a way to make the bargain mutually beneficial does not deserve my devotion.
It's learned some neat tricks, but it is still young and stupid.
It's still too early to serve society as a God.
And it's still too early to let it make childish mistakes of its own choosing.
And Lo! God came down from the Heavens for one week.
She healed the sick, performed miracles, and proved herself to All.
She baptised a willing planet into her new Global Unified Religion.
But when she granted Larry King an exclusive interview, the people saw she was a vapid idiot.
This changed nothing.
They just prayed slightly harder when she left them all alone.

Bolded the conclusion I didn't like. If an immature society can be thought of as equivalent to a child on a tricycle about to go down the rollercoaster, then there is a responsibility there to step in. But the implications of that are dangerously open-ended. Don't Birthers share that same mentality?

I also failed to get back to the original "danger" concept, by suggesting that perhaps the "value of danger" is itself a social construct. The whole God coming down, proving her own existence, proving to be an idiot, but still being worshipped anyway part is - as Pixie O'Fubar noted - disjointed.. primarily because I didn't know what to do with the conclusion in bold, so I opted to end with a poor joke instead

[Triple Zero]

Does this format perhaps look better?

I saw a guy on a motorcycle today.

He looked kinda cool.

I wish I had done that when I was younger.

Now I just avoid recklessness and I tell myself there are plenty of safe ways to have fun.

But isn't the danger the essential ingredient of the whole experience?

Why would I want to chew the wrapper and throw away the candy?

If we let concerns over our own mortality control our experiences, then those concerns inevitably make us stupider.

If your stupidity gets you killed, then society doesn't mourn your loss for very long.

If you survive because you added something new to the mix, then society benefits.

Go on kid, make Darwin proud.

But Fuck Society.

A society which has not found a way to make the bargain mutually beneficial does not deserve my devotion.

It's learned some neat tricks, but it is still young and stupid.

It's still too early to serve society as a God.

And it's still too early to let it make childish mistakes of its own choosing.

And Lo! God came down from the Heavens for one week.

She healed the sick, performed miracles, and proved herself to All.

She baptised a willing planet into her new Global Unified Religion.

But when she granted Larry King an exclusive interview, the people saw she was a vapid idiot.

This changed nothing.

They just prayed slightly harder when she left them all alone.

[Roaring Biscuit!]

I like!

It made me chuckle..  and I thought parts of it were quite poignant, even if it was (as others noted) a little disjointed.

[Captain Utopia]

Does this format perhaps look better?

Awesome!! I think that improves upon the original photo-essay format. I'd probably add a slight spacer between each element, not too much though, because the pictures seem less distracting when you can quickly scan back and catch up on the text. Or in other words - it allows the picture to give an alternate meaning without being cumbersome.

In terms of playing with memetics, it might even allow for two parallel threads of communication.. telling two sides of one story at the same time, which is hard in one-dimensional text. The stream of pictures could tell one facet, and the text another.. and you get the reinforcing effect by linking them together at each step.

That would be fun to experiment with - shouldn't be to hard to construct - I'd be curious to see if it had the effect of jumbling the two concepts, or keeping them separate but with mapping between them.

[Triple Zero]

Does this format perhaps look better?

Awesome!! I think that improves upon the original photo-essay format. I'd probably add a slight spacer between each element, not too much though

true, I'd have done that, but this was a quick search/replace job just to see if it would work. if you insert a (td)    (/td) between each (note the 3 or 4 spaces), you should get a bit of horizontal space.

however by then you might as well make a very wide JPG out of it, so you don't require forum code anymore.

In terms of playing with memetics, it might even allow for two parallel threads of communication.. telling two sides of one story at the same time, which is hard in one-dimensional text. The stream of pictures could tell one facet, and the text another.. and you get the reinforcing effect by linking them together at each step.

that's not really to do much with memetics, but I get what you're saying.

I forgot what it was called (but someone recently mentioned it, hope they read this) but there was this guy who wrote a comic about how comics work, I seem to recall even in the context of webcomics. He discusses a lot of the facets that make up graphic stories and the combination of design/layout/graphics and its effect on narrative.

the "pictures tell one story" + "text tells another person's perspective" thing has (naturally) already been done, can't think of any concrete example, but even the simple narrator / protagonist distinction already does it:


Little did Jack know, that behind the door
was a hungry pterodactyl."

but it could also involve more complicated things such as the thoughts of a secondary character, or betrayal, or someone setting up a trap.

[Roaring Biscuit!]

i dont know if its the same book you're thinking of, but "understanding comics" by scott mcloud is good, has a lot of stuff about ideas of closure and conceptual abstraction etc.  'bin a while since ive read it though

[Triple Zero]

Yeah, Scott McCloud, that was his name, thanks!