The Floor
This is a discussion thread for proposing new projects, batting ideas back and forth, and otherwise getting our public collaborations going. Please read the Floor section of the FAQ before posting here. Thank you!
Most recent posts are at the top. Scroll down into the past if you are hurtin' for context.
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Howdy steev… you’ve hit the Floor just in time for us to close it! Site discussion is gonna be centered over here just as soon as I fill out its weblog and such.
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yay! it’s cool to see Fiction Suit up and running. i kind of forgot about it and then went to check today and boom here it is.
I just added a show in 1-2-3 Hail TV…
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Awesome. Thanks, Tim. Maybe I will cook up something on this after we get our second a la carte project up (by mid-week?).
Meantime, hey everyone, assignments. I’ll post a joint news post that includes the news on these, when we have the new project up.
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It wasn’t until Ron took me out to see the ancient grotto under the streets of Santa Otilia that I fell in love with the city. He had me sit in the bow of his butt ugly rowboat as we set off from the harbor. I watched the water in the channel shimmer, mirroring the light gleaming from the glass and steel skyscrapers of the financial district a scant mile away, as we rowed alongside the levee next to the wildlife refuge, until we came to the tunnel entrance. An olive-green moss was growing up the sides of the archway. Across the top was an inscription in Latin, but the posters from the recent Festival defaced it, so that an intelligent person might, as I did, wonder aloud at what wonders lay across the threshold of the JAZZFEST BIERGARDEN FORMAE PVBLICAE. Inside, the dark swallowed the sounds of the street traffic, and we floated past the decayed brickwork that made up the old city, headlamps on, peering into dense and dank corners of this accidental cave. The echo of our voices over the water and through the maze of old canals created a mesmeric effect. And for the first time, I understood why the city was so beautiful. Each new generation had built on top of the previous city, having it grow up and over and through the old buildings, creating an urban palimpsest, where history and memory could seep up through the cracks, the pipes, the tubes, the wires to infiltrate the city as it was today. Here, beneath the streets, I could see the origins of Santa Otilia’s organic memory. And finally I understood the source of those unexpected noises and smells that haunted my living quarters each evening.
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As you can all see by now, I went ahead and created a project. Totally different from what we have on the table here, and a little more consumable a la carte. A la carte is also the focus of the new functionality and UI flow that I will, with luck, get up this weekend.
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If nobody else wants to jump in and cross things out in the next 48 hours or so, I think we shall begin the next phase, which shall be a variant on the Dictionary Story or “arbilexicon.” (More details on its traditional form here.)
Basically, the challenge will be to use all the words in the list, in a paragraph that introduces and names our city. The paragraph should be no longer than 300 words. (I’m flexible on that if it turns out to be really limiting)
Then, if we can get a few of those, let’s just work together on putting together a canonical one we can all stand, and get going!
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(I think I’m gonna go ahead and institute Textile over the next week)
I wasn’t thinking Exquisite Corpse for our paragraph… more like Iron Chef. Or is this all too adversarial for everyone?
(Also I need to fix the feed so I don’t miss like a week’s worth of posts again. And make login faster or less sucky aaagh)
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Game for introductory paragraph:
I wouldn’t choose Exquisite Corpse, because not seeing the other sentences would violate the “Yes, And” rule of collaboration. The whole point of an exquisite corpse is to find art in random juxtaposition. You might get an interesting opening paragraph, or you might get nonsensical crap, or just randomness. (Nothing wrong with randomness or nonsensical crap but it seems to me a collaborative fiction project with a basis in text would have more investment in product (whereas live improv’s ephemerality allows for “disposable theatre”).
Exquisite Corpse would generate an interesting list (of objects, persons, places) to start a collaboration, but not a paragraph.
Unless you could see the previous sentences, and build upon them, in which case it’s not an Exquisite Corpse it is something else.
I think a possible game would be a version of Mad Libs, perhaps a paragraph from a travel guide or a descriptive passage from an existing work of fiction (or Everything2, for that matter) with key nouns removed and participants could contribute words to fill out the paragraph.
Another exercise to create a paragraph would be a game of form, such as limiting the number of words in each sentence of that first paragraph: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Or a paragraph made up entirely of three word sentences. Or you could, like whatshisname, mandate that a particular letter of the alphabet be forbidden from each sentence.
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crap. again? (also: is there a reason not to do some reasonable amount of whitespace/line break interpretation, rather than forcing everyone to HTML-ize everything? and what about editing/deleting comments? maybe editing with edit history available?)
beautiful
brickwork
buttons – functioning or non-
cave
decayed
defaced
echo
float
gleam
haunted
intelligent
maze
mesmeric
moss
organic
overwritten
palimpsest
refuge
shimmer
smells
sounds
tubes
tunnel
ugly
water -
beautiful
brickwork
buttons – functioning or non-
cave
decayed
defaced
echo
float
gleam
haunted
intelligent
maze
mesmeric
moss
organic
overwritten
palimpsest
refuge
shimmer
smells
sounds
tubes
tunnel
ugly
water -
Misuba says: Also: when we’re done, we should try some kind of game process for writing our city’s introductory paragraph.
Exquisite corpse?I am Christia: bureaucrat by day, punkypants by night. Well, truth be told, I’m a bit of a punkypants by the day, too. And since I’m sort of into the whole urban planning thing, the city-building fictive sounds muy bueno. I’ve kind of been interested in doing some fictive-type writing involving my mis-reading of a new storefront in my ‘hood recently—I misread the “Psychic Reality” sign as “Psychic Realty.” I think mine’s way more interesting than Crystals and Aura Photos, Inc. Mebbe it could be part of one of the commercial districts, and create a fad that sweeps the City. Or something.
Hi!
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Okay, so, nobody wants to be the one to Commence The Winnowing. So I will.
beautiful
brickwork
buttons – functioning or non-
cave
decayed
defaced
echo
float
fruit
gleam
haunted
intelligent
maze
mesmeric
moss
organic
overwritten
palimpsest
refuge
shimmer
smells
sounds
transparent
tubes
tunnel
ugly
water
wheatAlso: when we’re done, we should try some kind of game process for writing our city’s introductory paragraph.
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Okay. Here are all our words in alphabetical order:
beautiful
brickwork
buttons – functioning or non-
cave
decayed
defaced
distressed
echo
filter
float
fruit
gleam
haunted
intelligent
maze
mesmeric
moss
organic
overwritten
palimpsest
refuge
shimmer
smells
sounds
thriving
transparent
tubes
tunnel
ugly
water
wheatNext step: everyone who contributed words may cross up to three words out.
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reverse order would work nice, but only if an easy way to jump to the bottom existed
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Hey. No worries. You just sounded very… complete.
(straw poll: should the posts on the floor go in the reverse direction, that is, newest at the bottom? I think it’d make for smoother flow but it might also confuse.)
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Misuba! I know that my proposal is vague, I kept it that way so that
people could suggest their ideas. I tried to keep things as open as
possible and uphold the “yes, and” rule. You say that it would be a
gargantuan project, but it doesn’t have to be. If one person writes an
article on an 18th century maire who dressed only in pink it doesn’t
mean an article on every maire of the city’s history has to be written.
(Does it?) So I stand by my idea that it’s a good starting point, but
it’s just an idea I’m throwing, we’ll see if it sticks to the wall.As for the words you requested:
Thriving.
Beautiful.
Ugly.
Smells.
Sounds.(I suck at this stuff)
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water
shimmer
cave
moss
filter
transparent
organic
intelligent
-
echo
float
tunnel
maze
fruit
refuge -
haunted
decayed
distressed
overwritten
palimpsest
defaced
buttons – functioning or non- -
Howdy Leo… right after I post this I’m gonna try and fix your links.
But
first! A city is a good start and a rich vein to mine, but we’re gonna
need to get more specific than that if we want to get far. A city
actually is a pretty behemoth project at the level of detail that you
suggest. But that isn’t the problem; the problem is that we need some
way to keep different entries (pages, that is… maybe I should revisit
that terminology) intertwined. We can come up with some meta-rule that
intertwines them, like you must use a character name from someone
else’s entry or somesuch, but I’d prefer a less coercive solution…
something that naturally tends to bring things together thematically.There
are a few possibilities, like suggesting an event that happens to a
city, and what things are like before and after. Or we could just go
for a theme with some kind of charge to it.For themes, I propose
a game. Everyone who posts here, throw us five to ten words that you
might use to describe a place that would fascinate you. Just words, be
suggestive and vague, don’t get into specifics too much (or at least
don’t give them context). Then… we’ll… think of something to do
with them.Here’s mine:
wheat
tubes
mesmeric
gleam
brickwork -
Hi!
I’m not sure how to introduce myself. Like many people here, I’m a
<a
href=“http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1490386”>noder</a>.
I’m a
Frenchman, I live in Paris where <a
href=“http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1688095”>I study law</a>
and philosophy. Obviously,
I enjoy reading and writing immensely, whether it be fiction or
non-fiction.
Anyway, here’s my idea for a first fictionsuit: a city.
That’s it.The
story, history and life of a city (maybe a
city-state) that we invent to sound like a world-class city that has
unique flavour, but could exist in the real world. The working-class
boroughs, the hip business districts, biographies of notable figures,
etc. I think
a city is big and diverse enough for each of us to come up with ideas
and stuff that we like and is our own. At the same time it is enough
constraint to give our creations common themes and a common backdrop.
There’s plenty of stuff to write about but at the same
time it’s not a behemoth project like a country or a universe. We’ve
all lived or been in big cities, so we know what they’re like, but
there’s also so much diversity between the great cities of the world
that we can invent one that has its own flavour and wouldn’t look out
of place alongside Paris, London, New York, LA, Hong Kong or Tokyo in
Wikipedia. -
Thanks for the reminder. All better now.
Now to forcibly reeducate the signup action…
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FAQ is not currently available without logging in, BTW.
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Hi anat-! Good to see you’ve got some interest.
You know, now when things are still quiet might be a good time to tell
us more about Peters and Schuyten and how they’re relevant to the
mission… I confess I don’t know much about their work. I probably
read something now buried deeply in my box of old Comics Journals. -
Hi, here’s me!
I’m trying to think of things that might be missing in the FAQ for now,
and coming up with little because it’s past my bedtime. But I wanted to
say hello…
I don’t really know what to say to introduce myself. I’ve never yet
tried to write a fictive, and I’m sure I’ve read little of those
available in the world of literature at large… But I’ve always loved
the concept, ever since reading Borgesian. There’s also a great series
I love of, I guess you’d call them comic books, Belgian comic books
from authors/artists Peters and Schuyten (hope I am not mispelling that
too much), of which a good part of is in the form of fictives. Not sure
it’s good to mention them here, but anyway, that’s pretty much my
references right there to fuel the interest I have in seeing
Fictionsuit happen, become and bloom.Here’s to hope!
And I’ll come back when I’ve slept a bit. :)
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