ITT: Original Story Ideas

[MMMW]

Psychonauts of NASA's inner-space program plant an American flag in an alternate dimension already inhabited by aliens.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

A young Iranian nuclear physicist helps to build an unstable particle accelerator, which goes haywire and generates a wormhole that sucks him in. The story alternates between his pulp sci-fi style romp through an alternate universe and the increasingly desperate situation for his wife back home. As he's dying of apparent old age, the trappings of his story fall apart and he's left completely alone in the void. He recalls a discussion he had with his wife on information loss, and how the narrative of his experience will vanish with him.

[Jasper]

Psychonauts of NASA's inner-space program plant an American flag in an alternate dimension already inhabited by aliens.

That's pretty cool!

[Placid Dingo]

A young Iranian nuclear physicist helps to build an unstable particle accelerator, which goes haywire and generates a wormhole that sucks him in. The story alternates between his pulp sci-fi style romp through an alternate universe and the increasingly desperate situation for his wife back home. As he's dying of apparent old age, the trappings of his story fall apart and he's left completely alone in the void. He recalls a discussion he had with his wife on information loss, and how the narrative of his experience will vanish with him.

Write that thing!

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

A young Iranian nuclear physicist helps to build an unstable particle accelerator, which goes haywire and generates a wormhole that sucks him in. The story alternates between his pulp sci-fi style romp through an alternate universe and the increasingly desperate situation for his wife back home. As he's dying of apparent old age, the trappings of his story fall apart and he's left completely alone in the void. He recalls a discussion he had with his wife on information loss, and how the narrative of his experience will vanish with him.

Write that thing!

I started it, but it kind of petered out. It's hard to find folks from Iran that are willing to act as cultural consultants for these kind of things.

[EK WAFFLR]

An out-of-work Private Detective decides to go sleuthing in his own whisky-marinated mind.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

A freak electrical storm wreaks havoc and destroys the internet. Millions of Americans are left to be faced with a world without singing cat videos and butt porn.  Tensions mount as withdrawal kicks in.  And then, one little boy discovers a treasure from the ancient world when people used to play outside and communicate with each other face-to-face with vocalized words.  It's a frisbee.

Replace internet with calculators and my dad wrote this story in fifth grade.

[Oysters Rockefeller]

A couple days in the life of a guy whose job it is to clean up suicides as quickly as possible, in a world where it's considered standard to take ridiculous amounts of anti-depressants. I imagine he'd not be taking them, just to create a character the reader can put themselves in the shoes of. I like to think it'd be a dark comedy/ satire about how people tend to look at life through a social lens, instead of accepting life as it is.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Some large (double-digit) percentage of people who experience free fall outside of the ionosphere later have an intense revelatory experience. Commercial space tourism companies pop up and produce a steady stream of exceedingly wealthy cult leaders. Governments later begin using this to discredit people they don't like, sending them free tickets to space knowing that they are likely to come down acting entirely nuts (the way the CIA occasionally doped people with LSD to discredit them during the good old days of MK-ULTRA). Some of the cult leaders get their act together enough to organize and oppose space travel.

[Oysters Rockefeller]

Some large (double-digit) percentage of people who experience free fall outside of the ionosphere later have an intense revelatory experience. Commercial space tourism companies pop up and produce a steady stream of exceedingly wealthy cult leaders. Governments later begin using this to discredit people they don't like, sending them free tickets to space knowing that they are likely to come down acting entirely nuts (the way the CIA occasionally doped people with LSD to discredit them during the good old days of MK-ULTRA). Some of the cult leaders get their act together enough to organize and oppose space travel.

I kind of love that idea.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Some large (double-digit) percentage of people who experience free fall outside of the ionosphere later have an intense revelatory experience. Commercial space tourism companies pop up and produce a steady stream of exceedingly wealthy cult leaders. Governments later begin using this to discredit people they don't like, sending them free tickets to space knowing that they are likely to come down acting entirely nuts (the way the CIA occasionally doped people with LSD to discredit them during the good old days of MK-ULTRA). Some of the cult leaders get their act together enough to organize and oppose space travel.

I kind of love that idea.

It's yours.

Here are a few more:

1) McLuhan had a theory of hot and cool media. The distinction is that hot media tells you what to think (and is therefore non-interactive) whereas cool media means nothing until you think about it (and therefore requires effort on the part of the consumer). McLuhan believed that cool media cools down political unrest by giving a built-in release valve for the need to engage in action, whereas he thought hot media countered apathy. Story: The BBC (who broadcasts in a wide variety of places) has a computerized system using this model of the interaction between political activism and media coolness to regulate the global political situation through the mechanism of changing the vagueness of scripts in BBC newscasts (the news in a place with riots in the streets resembles Finnegan's Wake, being incomprehensible enough that some effort otherwise directed toward activism is directed instead toward figuring out what the news means, while a place where the economy needs stimulation the news will be limited to precise and low-information newscasts). This works wonders for a while, until riots start in London and it is discovered that the system does not take into account the feedback loop between the writers of the original scripts and the newscasters.

2) Some popular children's film from the 70s was actually intended as part of an experimental 'manchurian candidate' program for MK-Ultra. The MK-Ultra trials began and everyone from the CIA was pulled off the project, documentation destroyed. The original intent was to pull distribution of the film at the last minute, and to have the description of the intended target be something no human could be mistaken for (so that this would not lead to accidental killings). Instead, the film was released and was a runaway hit, several generations of children watching it quite often. A peaceful alien race makes first contact with humanity, but by chance corresponds to the description of the 'target'. The visitors must be protected from the trained killers of all ages.

[Cramulus]

1) McLuhan had a theory of hot and cool media. The distinction is that hot media tells you what to think (and is therefore non-interactive) whereas cool media means nothing until you think about it (and therefore requires effort on the part of the consumer). McLuhan believed that cool media cools down political unrest by giving a built-in release valve for the need to engage in action, whereas he thought hot media countered apathy.

Ahhh! I was JUST trying to explain the concept of hot vs cool media, and I got totally confused trying to explain why radio is hot while TV is cool. (still a little fuzzy, but it's coming into focus) That was a far more lucid and concise description than any of the McLuhan I've read! Thanks!

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

McLuhan isn't very good at being clear. If I'm charitable, I'll chalk it up to trying to cool down his books (which are in the typically very hot medium of print -- hot because of uniformly spaced rows of uniform type whose characters are uniform and fairly uniformly correspond to fairly uniform groups of sounds)

[Triple Zero]

1) McLuhan had a theory of hot and cool media. The distinction is that hot media tells you what to think (and is therefore non-interactive) whereas cool media means nothing until you think about it (and therefore requires effort on the part of the consumer). McLuhan believed that cool media cools down political unrest by giving a built-in release valve for the need to engage in action, whereas he thought hot media countered apathy.

Ahhh! I was JUST trying to explain the concept of hot vs cool media, and I got totally confused trying to explain why radio is hot while TV is cool. (still a little fuzzy, but it's coming into focus) That was a far more lucid and concise description than any of the McLuhan I've read! Thanks!

This is VERY interesting! Where can I read more about this?

And I don't get how a TV is cold but a radio is hot? I'd say they're both hot because of non interactive? But the Internet is cool, sometimes, and a study book is cool, and maybe non-fiction is too. Or am I missing the point here?

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

And I don't get how a TV is cold but a radio is hot?

I think when McLuhan talked about TV he visualized a fuzzy black and white screen the size of a pop tart in a piece of wooden furniture the size of a fridge. After all, he said (in Understanding Media) that TV killed the comic book because of how much less detailed the image was! (Fun fact: McLuhan also may have invented the first remote control, because he took the line to the speaker assembly in his television and extended it out to a lightswitch in his arm chair, which he used to mute commercials in the 50s and 60s.)

I'd say they're both hot because of non interactive? But the Internet is cool, sometimes, and a study book is cool, and maybe non-fiction is too. Or am I missing the point here?

When McLuhan says interactive he doesn't necessarily mean it as strongly as we do. We think of something with one volley (someone says something to me and I respond) as un-interactive, but he uses it to distinguish it from passive (a half volley: someone says something to me and I accept it). Something that you can interact with for many volleys (like a video game) is much cooler regardless of its information level, which may be related to why he associates 'coolness' with 'tactility' (touching is manipulation, and manipulation is immediate simultaneous bidirectional interactivity). He tries to contrast all of this with print, because the capital-L Literate man (who I think of as the stereotype Pompous Brit, but may also be visualized as the stereotype Bureaucratic Frenchman or any other figure who blindly colors in the lines -- grayface march-in-lines obey-the-natural-order cut-france-into-equal-squares type) can read something without being affected by it in the least.

Where can I read more about this?

Pretty much anything McLuhan has written after The Mechanical Bride is about this at least in part. He's incredibly vague, though, and borderline incomprehensible much of the time. Probably the best way to get more information about it is by reading The Gutenberg Galaxy and then reading Understanding Media. If you are inclined to, please do -- it's kind of awkward to feel like resident McLuhan expert. I feel like he's going to come out from under a desk and accuse me of negating his whole fallacy!