Hola – Unblock censored sites with free VPN proxy & accelerate your Internet StoryCorps Hits 10th Birthday: A Mission Core to Humanity October 23, 2013; New York Times, “City Room” Ten years. 55,000 interviews. 90,000 participants. One mission: telling our stories. The storytelling started in a sparse booth in Grand Central Terminal, New York and grew to a nationwide initiative of ordinary people telling their personal stories. As StoryCorps turns 10 this year, it gives us an opportunity to reflect on the value of storytelling. For example, the New York Times reports, “There is the homeless woman who was so moved by her [StoryCorps] recording, calling it the most important thing she’d ever done in her life, that she tried to donate her food stamps to the staff members as her voluntary donation.” Donors and volunteers, too, have their stories. Nonprofit social service organizations spend a lot time and energy trying to solve problems.
Carrot Is A Productivity And Social Motivation App With A Sense Of Humor There are plenty of productivity and self-motivation apps on the market, but Hong Kong-based company Innopage wanted to create one that lets users indulge their whimsical side. iOS app Carrot‘s interface only allows you to fill-in a simple template and people have used the Mad Libs-like format to set goal and reward sets (called “carrots”) that are silly (“I am going to wake up at 6:30AM and reward myself with going back to sleep at 6:45AM”) and serious (“If I run 4.5km tonight then I will treat myself to a big breakfast tomorrow”). Encouragement is crowdsourced from Carrot’s other users and your Facebook friends. “Carrot” is a reference to “stick and carrot”–the phrase that distills the two ways that people can be motivated, either by force or by will–and Innopage is not the only one to have jumped on the idea that it might make for a catchy name for a motivational to-do app. There is another Carrot already in existence in the U.S. that barks reminders at users.
Infecting An Audience: Why Great Stories Spread In his 1897 book What is Art? the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy defined art as “an infection.” Good art, Tolstoy wrote, infects the audience with the storyteller’s emotion and ideas. The better the art, the stronger the infection--the more stealthily it works around whatever immunities we possess and plants the virus. Tolstoy reached this conclusion through artistic intuition, not science, but more than a century after Tolstoy’s death this is exactly what psychologists are finding in the lab. Note that this goes against our culture’s dominant idea about stories. For instance, if psychologists get a bunch of people in the lab and just tell them all the reasons it is wrong to discriminate against homosexuals, they don’t make much progress. So stories have a unique ability to infect minds with ideas and attitudes that spread contagiously. And how do we make an audience lose themselves? But stories are not usually about meaningless problem solving. This all raises another question.
The Tomorrow Girl: Dresden Codak Volume 1 by Aaron Diaz Aaron Diaz is an independent cartoonist, creator of Dresden Codak and purveyor of fine graphic novelties. Dresden Codak is a lavishly illustrated creator-owned online comic series about science, mystery and ghosts that began in 2005. The Tomorrow Girl: Dresden Codak Volume 1 is the long-awaited print collection of the first five years of Dresden Codak and includes brand-new art and content. It contains over 80 gigantic pages of comic goodness! HOB - Teenage girl versus the Future Advanced Dungeons & Discourse - The premiere philosophy roleplaying game Lantern Season - Living shadow theater 42 Essential 3rd Act Twists - As performed by the Ellis Island Community Players Caveman Science Fiction - Self-explanatory The Tomorrow Girl, Silver Hardcover Edition 10x13.3"Metallic ink on coverFabric spineIllustrated color endpapersWoven from a dragon's hide The Tomorrow Girl, Gold Edition Hardcover Other Goodies Kickstarter video work and effects by Harris Porter.
Video Games Represent the Most Powerful (and Potentially Dangerous) Era in Storytelling | Paul Runge Over the course of one weekend, I lost 12 hours, 42 minutes and 1 second. I don't know how it happened. It took me like a fever. I somehow slipped into watching a 56-part YouTube playthrough of The Last of Us, a video game recently released by Naughty Dog Inc. It is, I should say, a truly top-notch game. The characters, story, and aesthetic are complex and well-composed, and as a result, everything about the game feels literally (and figuratively) 3D. Increasingly, this seems to be the objective of the gaming industry. So, do you buy it? Maybe you should, but not as it's stated above. Video Games as Expressive and Formative In the 2006 documentary, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, celeb cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek expounded on the 1999 blockbuster, The Matrix. Here, I urge you to consider Zizek's proposition seriously; it's really not so esoteric. The dominant perspective regarding video games is that they enable players to embody their own fantasies. And I mean it. Violence is a choice.
Order of the Occult Hand The Order of the Occult Hand is a whimsical secret society of American journalists who have been able to slip the meaningless and telltale phrase "It was as if an occult hand had…" in print as a sort of a game and inside joke. History[edit] The phrase was introduced by Joseph Flanders, then a police reporter of The Charlotte News, in the fall of 1965, when he reported on a millworker who was shot by his own family when he came back home late at night. It was as if an occult hand had reached down from above and moved the players like pawns upon some giant chessboard.[1][2]— Joseph Flanders, The Charlotte News Amused by this purple passage, in a local bar, his colleagues decided to commemorate Flanders' achievement by forming the Order of the Occult Hand. In 2006, Greenberg announced that the Order had chosen a new secret phrase at an annual editorial writers' convention and resumed a stealth operation.[7] Members[edit] The New York Times in 1974 by Paul Hofmann and in 1998 by Tim Race
Damn Interesting Hamachi-Jalapeño Pizza This is a variation on the Tuna Pizza I made a while ago and it was inspired by my old favorite dish at Nobu, the Hamachi-Jalapeño sashimi. Your Italian grandma’ will strongly disagree with the “pizza” part and you might even get slapped for it but it’s worth the risk. It’s a disk of flour tortilla that’s toasted, brushed with eel sauce and caramelized in the oven or under a broiler. Thin slices of fatty yellowtail tuna are arranged on top and brushed with a mixture of yuzu and soy sauce which has the wonderful effect of slightly curing the fish. It’s then drizzled with a yuzu-kosho mayonnaise and topped with slivers of Jalapeno and tomatoes, red onion, cilantro leaves and micro greens. If you like sushi and pizza you will beg for more of this. If you plan on serving this at a dinner party you can toast and caramelize the tortilla disks ahead of time. Saturday, December 22nd, 2012Appetizer, Fish, Fusion, Japanese, Pizza, Sushi
Think ..."Some time ago I received a call from a colleague. He was about to give a student a zero for his answer to a physics question, while the student claimed a perfect score. The instructor and the student agreed to an impartial arbiter, and I was selected. I read the examination question: The student had answered, "Take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it, lower it to the street, and then bring the rope up, measuring the length of the rope. The student really had a strong case for full credit since he had really answered the question completely and correctly! I suggested that the student have another try. In the next minute, he dashed off his answer which read: "Take the barometer to the top of the building and lean over the edge of the roof. At this point, I asked my colleague if he would give up. "Well," said the student, "there are many ways of getting the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer. "Fine," I said, "and others?" "Of course.