“If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way; if you don’t, you’ll find an excuse”
Puzzle
Imagine (or remember) standing somewhere in the UK at midday on January 1st .
12 hours ago the year 2010 had just begun in the UK. However, due to timezone differences, some places saw January 1st a further 12 hours ago – 24 hours ago from your current vantage point of midday in the UK.
Conversely, there’s still 12 more hours of January 1st to go. but due to timezone differences, some places won’t reach the end of the day for a further 12 hours – 24 hours from your current vantage point of midday in the UK.
Of course, this means January 1st is actually 48 hours long – or in other words, two days.
Recently I’ve come across a whole bunch of things that could be termed ‘story analysis’ – the appliance of science (or at least pattern-spotting) to the art of the story.
Links
It started when I recently read Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, in which he details the stages of the ‘Hero’s journey’ (or ‘monomyth’), an outline that he argues all great myths, legends, fairy tales and religious stories adhere to in one form or another. In terms of telling me a lot of smart stuff about a thing I don’t know much about, it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, as it’s given me a fantastically clear lens through which to understand and analyse stories.
Wikipedia link (which is a great way to get most of the idea without reading the book):
Quote
As quoted in the Wikipedia article, a criticism of Campbell’s thesis by Donald J. Consentino:
“It is just as important to stress differences as similarities, to avoid creating a (Joseph) Campbell soup of myths that loses all local flavor.”
(Actually it’s clear from reading the book that Campbell positively delights in the local flavour, not to mention the fact that this criticism essentially misses the entire point, but it’s a nice quote anyway).
Pictures
King of geekery monetisation Randal Monroe of XKCD has created nice diagrams showing character movement in films:
(As with many things he’s done before, it’s something I’ve done at one point myself in a half-interested pencil and paper way, but he takes the idea to its logical conclusion and I fully expect it to appear shortly in his store as a poster, where similar things can be obtained http://store.xkcd.com ) [Yep, there it is. – T.M. 11/9/2011]
In the world of gaming there are additional constraints to storytelling, leading to some amazing homogeneity of story as recently brought to my attention by Simon in the following chart of BioWare game clichés.
Another Link
No coverage of pattern-spotting in stories would be complete without mentioning TV Tropes, a wiki for pretty much exactly that. Some examples:
This Week’s Puzzle – Exceptions that prove the rule
Any attempt to find patterns in stories will encounter exceptions. A frequent response to this is to say “that’s the exception that proves the rule!”, which is a clever way of saying “the thing that proves me wrong actually proves me right, because I say so”. Of course, that’s a wilful misreading of the phrase, but the question naturally arises: how is that phrase supposed to be interpreted and used?
Last week’s puzzle – Showers
Showers are amazingly complicated, with feedback delays, mixing issues and subtle interactions of water pressure all conspiring to make the simple task of achieving a reasonable temperature surprisingly difficult, and I intend to write a blog post with more detail on these different factors at a later date.
Meanwhile, my own solution has been to set the hot water temperature on the boiler and not use the cold tap in the shower at all, thus sidestepping all of these issues.
Films
I saw Triangle, and although it may need a second viewing to clarify, I think it might be the best constructed time-bender I’ve seen yet.
I also saw The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and as expected it was very nice to see what Terry Gilliam can do with modern CG and a decent budget, but it did suffer from the apparent absence of a clear narrative arc, hampered further by the marketing’s misleading emphasis on the character played by Ledger ( / Depp / Farrell / Law).
Video
Richard “Donnie Darko” Kelly’s latest film, The Box, looks like a hilariously insane extrapolation of a very simple temptation story.
Here is a decently executed, 7-minute version of the basic idea called “Black Button”:
Even that felt fairly stretched, so who knows what they do to drag it out to 115 minutes in The Box. You can get some idea of how silly they go from the trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFHa-ygkF_M
[Video removed, try this search – metatim 03/08/15]
Quote
Tycho (from Penny Arcade) on Twilight cash-in TV series The Vampire Diaries:
“Imagine a Buffy the Vampire Slayer where there was no Buffy, and vampires are rarely slain. All you’ve got left is “The,” and Sally, that ain’t no kinda show.”
Last Week’s Puzzle: The Return Ticket
Just in case you forgot, last week’s puzzle was this:
“Trains leaving station A only go to station B. A single from A to B costs £3. A return from A to B and back again costs £5. A woman walks into train station A for the first time in her life. She goes up to the counter and hands the cashier £5. Without either of them saying a word she is given a return ticket and leaves happy. How did the cashier know what she wanted?”
Since it took me 5 years to work out, I’m hardly about to reveal the answer here. However, I will say the following:
a) I now know a few people that have solved it in under a minute
b) While there are naturally many possible answers, there is one answer that is clearly better than the others
This Week’s Puzzle: Showers
While some are lucky enough to have a shower sufficiently advanced to have solved this problem with the magic of modern technology, for those of us less fortunate, the problem remains:
a) Why is it so hard to get a shower to run at a comfortable temperature?
b) What can be done about it?
Eddie Izzard explains the problem more dramatically here:
Films
I saw Surrogates, which was a strong enough concept (with relevance to the kind of changes we will see in the coming decades, even if we don’t quite achieve fully robotic avatars affordable by 98% of the population) that it maintained interest despite the weak writing and characters.
Video
Technology unlocks surprising things. Witness the kind of trompe l’oeil magic that can now be achieved by virtue of having a powerful enough digital projector:
Link
Highlighted in the final part of last week’s issue of The Week, this article from pseudonymous postman Roy Mayall casts an interesting light on the current wrangling with Royal Mail.
Key quote from towards the end:
“There is a tension between the Royal Mail as a profit-making business and the Royal Mail as a public service. For most of the Royal Mail management … it is the first. To the delivery officer … it is more than likely the second.”
The current ongoing (in)action would seem to stem directly from this tension.
I suspect this would seem less benign if the same modificiations to a natural form could be carried out within minutes instead of over the course of years.
Puzzle
I mentioned this puzzle in a recent discussion stemming from Things and it sparked a lot of interest. Here is a version only slightly modified from the way I originally heard it from Laurence:
Trains leaving station A only go to station B. A single from A to B costs £3. A return from A to B and back again costs £5. A woman walks into train station A for the first time in her life. She goes up to the counter and hands the cashier £5. Without either of them saying a word she is given a return ticket and leaves happy. How did the cashier know what she wanted?
The original version, along with many other puzzles, can be found here:
