Digitizing Reality

Now this is interesting:

earthmine:

Founded in 2006, Berkeley-based earthmine inc is a street-level, 3D mapping company that provides software and data as a service to those that need to relate information to places. The company is focused on indexing reality, creating a robust geospatial data mine of our urban environments that is accessed from the human perspective, and an order of magnitude more detailed and accurate than anything before.

For those who gather, analyze and communicate location-based information from a street-level perspective, earthmine solutions enable better informed and more effective geospatial decision making by delivering a highly accurate and realistic user experience that can be easily viewed, annotated, analyzed, measured and shared.

Why: examining street-level design and comparison.

Downtime

So the website went down yesterday during an upgrade of the photo weblog. Of course, this sort of strangles certain work. I have Alex King’s Twitter Tools widget working in the sidebar as well as the Twitter app running in Facebook. So, if the weblog breaks again, or, if the Course weblog breaks, which is perhaps more important, people can get in touch in Facebook or do the Twitter follow.

But I want to know why the thing crashed!

Brimmer and Death: Anchors

Brimmer and Death is growing close to completion. I’ve been through the narrative several times and in doing so have found several elements that continue to develop from connections aided by the editing medium, Storyspace.

Basically, Brimmer and Death is framed by common images and common places, but the premise of the story, fixed in the world where supernatural forces weave in and out of human space, provides lots of play for shaping those spaces. One of the elements that kept popping up is the notion of shelter. I wouldn’t call this a theme, but the “shelter” in the story, which is a real shelter–call it a bomb or fallout shelter–served to anchor narrative, gave a place to come back to when things went awry. And they went awry a lot.

In the beginning, I had no idea that Death would play a role in the story. The story began with Brimmer having a conversation. This conversation was abstract and meant nothing upon first writing. Here’s a guy named Brimmer and he’s having a conversation with some other and unknown voice. The voice asks Brimmer where he’s from. I remember clearly Brimmer responding with a snide answer: “You writing a book?” The conversation proceeded from there. But the snide answer was not the Brimmer who evolved.

Later, as the story developed, this conversation turned–luckily–into an interluding message. Brimmer has long life. On his journey and at some time in the future (it doesn’t matter when, which became another anchoring solution) he has a conversation with a random person. They trade small talk. Brimmer has been thinking about something. He’s asked the question, “Where are you from?” Now, let’s say Brimmer has been alive three hundred years, four hundred years. Suddenly this question will take on all kinds of importance to Brimmer as a fictional being to think about.

I have a pretty good idea what I would say. But what would Brimmer say?

Every writing medium has its own aesthetic problems and technical requirements that can be studied from their instances: film, comic, short story, poem. Brimmer and Death still needs sculpting, lexia to lexia, line by line. Every lexia has to punch. Every lexia should have the force of any good poem, but, unlike an individual poem, every lexia must fit within a larger structure.

Worlds

This is a nice set up for a world:

One by one or in couples they left, filled with ham and chicken sandwiches and coffee or whatever they’d drained from his bar.

From Susan Gibb’s next hypertext project.

Mobius and Hypertext

Susan Gibb has a bit up on Brimmer and Death that covers stuff written into a space called “Rooms.”

Here’s the revision:

Hand in hand, they walked through rooms, some cluttered with books and furniture, others punched through with holes that opened onto instances of existence.

“I opened these for you,” she said. “I’m about scope. I thought you’d like some.”

He watched stars burst. He observed a multitude of births. He saw mountains crumble on worlds other than Earth, masses wander alien streets gasping for disease-less air, small forms fall from windows, avalanches smoking toward the wide-eyed, until he had to turn away. He follow her onto a checkerboard floor that coiled out into blackness like the strand of a gene.

“Everywhere,” she said.

She led him over the edge and onto the opposite side where they found themselves hemmed by a crowd of blue sheep. He followed her over a hill and she offered him coffee from a black cup in a kitchen with an avocado green stove.

“Have you decided where you’ll, what did you say, bunk up?”

She notes something I hadn’t thought of, too.

Pacing in Hypertext

Brimmer and Death is being edited via its paths or two major narratives. I read and write following one narrative path, finish it, then go back and read/rewrite through the next, then I do it all over again (and over again). This means that at some point the editing pen is going to meet ground already covered but from a different frame of reference repeatedly. The map image below of a few text spaces represents how this editing technique can change the plot and the pace.

Picture 1.png

Define plot? I mean plot in its most general sense: causality as it matters to decisions. In a later section of the story, Brimmer has shacked up with Death and is going through an acclimation period in her “realm.” I felt that I had rushed through this section and really hadn’t set up the push toward the end, and thus had to add some scenes to slow things down, establish some grounding in the new digs, and ease Brimmer into some cause: how to get him out of a place he’s wanted to enter for quite some time.

Above, “Observation” used to link to “Windows.” The box titled “Plot” simply identifies for me where the new sub arc needed to begin. It ends with “Aches.” The pacing here matters to both narrative instances of the story.

To Universe or not to Universe

Brimmer and Death began with these few sentences.

On the first evening of a two-day hike through the desert, Brimmer met Death seated on a flat-topped stone. On her head she wore a black bandanna. Silver rivets studded her belt, and she cooled herself with a paper fan imprinted with the shape of the universe.

This little bit is supposed to do a couple of simple things: set the scene, establish POV, provide some information about who’s around to do something, and provide context.

After all, the two requirements of fiction are easy: tell a story and make it interesting. In that first round above, something is suggested, there’s a start to context, place, and character, but yuck what’s with that fan?

Right. Here’s the revision:

On the first evening of a two-day hike through the desert, Brimmer met Death seated on a flat-topped stone. She wore a plain black bandanna on her head. Silver rivets studded her belt, and she waved the heat away with a bone-handled fan.

Let’s say that Death indeed has a picture of the universe on her fan. I like that idea. Brimmer and Death, after all, is a story that deals with the fantastic. If Neil Gaiman could invent a pleasant character named Death, who’s to say that a hand fan she may be carrying couldn’t have a painting of the universe on it. But it just doesn’t work. The syntax is tortured to force the image into place, and it doesn’t sound right either. Another issue has to do with the relationship between sentence lengths, which has a lot to do with noun verb structure. “with a paper fan imprinted” makes for a dull, over-technical sentence. So, why not just lose the problematic image (it could come back in somewhere else, maybe, or not all) and just give the fan a bone handle. It makes the encounter more concrete and doesn’t turn Brimmer or the narrator into these incredibly observant people who, when confronted with an image, immediately recognize it as the universe.

In addition, “cooled herself” is abstract, so “waved” was added to provide a little movement and the suggestion of humor. There are a lot of “a” sounds to exploit just for kicks.

To finish, I don’t like the word fan in relation to “rivets studded.” Fan is just not a very good word.

. . . and she waved at the heat with a bone-webbed flyswatter/paper airplane/running shoe.