Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Bush bad, Feingold smash!
Saw this on Katie's blog, passing it on. Not much to say about this, just looking forward to quantum cryptography, when it might be possible to communicate and know that it's physically impossible to intercept the message.
Creative writing
I'm going to get started fairly soon on a website idea I've had for a while now, and would appreciate any input from anybody who would be interested in using it. The purpose of the website will be to allow people to compose, share, and critique works of fiction. The writing will be done one page at a time (this is all electronic, so there will probably just be a word or letter limit), but you will be free to use as many pages as you like. I know, this idea is groundbreaking... I'm getting there.
It will be possible to take a partial story (say, pages 1-3 of a 5 page story) and pick up on page 4, following whatever plot line you like. The original story doesn't need to be yours, and anybody can pick up on any page of your new plot line and proceed as they like. The original 5-page story will remain, but at the bottom of page 3, rather than a single link like "go to next page" there will be the option to go to any of the tangential plot lines. You may think of this as just a web-based choose-your-own-adventure authoring tool, but that's not entirely accurate. For starters, there won't be options like "Does Jim open the box? Click here for yes, click here for no." Since this site is meant partially to provide feedback to the authors, pages will be critiqued with both written comments from other authors (assuming people actually do this) as well as numeric scores in a variety of fields (like plot consistency, writing style, etc.) and the links at the bottom of any page will have this information. All the critiques and scores will be provided by the community of writers using the page and the readers. Think of it as peer review. So, to use the above example, someone reading the story, upon finishing page 3, will be given two links, one for page 4a (the first written), and another for page 4b (the new plot line). The links will have the numeric scores displayed, to facilitate the decision of which page to move on to.
Did any of this make sense? If I wrote this would anybody be interested in using it? Any ideas that you think would make it better? Please comment; I'm going to try to get started early next week.
It will be possible to take a partial story (say, pages 1-3 of a 5 page story) and pick up on page 4, following whatever plot line you like. The original story doesn't need to be yours, and anybody can pick up on any page of your new plot line and proceed as they like. The original 5-page story will remain, but at the bottom of page 3, rather than a single link like "go to next page" there will be the option to go to any of the tangential plot lines. You may think of this as just a web-based choose-your-own-adventure authoring tool, but that's not entirely accurate. For starters, there won't be options like "Does Jim open the box? Click here for yes, click here for no." Since this site is meant partially to provide feedback to the authors, pages will be critiqued with both written comments from other authors (assuming people actually do this) as well as numeric scores in a variety of fields (like plot consistency, writing style, etc.) and the links at the bottom of any page will have this information. All the critiques and scores will be provided by the community of writers using the page and the readers. Think of it as peer review. So, to use the above example, someone reading the story, upon finishing page 3, will be given two links, one for page 4a (the first written), and another for page 4b (the new plot line). The links will have the numeric scores displayed, to facilitate the decision of which page to move on to.
Did any of this make sense? If I wrote this would anybody be interested in using it? Any ideas that you think would make it better? Please comment; I'm going to try to get started early next week.
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