You want National Geographic, back when it still had text? It exists, in cardboard boxes in people's attics.
A way of seamlessly combining visuals and text would be great for telling non fiction stories as well. I don't want to watch a two hour documentary about steelmaking, I want to read a book about it, but there are definitely bits that I want explained in an animation, or bits where I want to hear someone speaking
It's true that what I'm picturing has qualities of a magazine. A graphic novel that felt like it had the flexibility of a magazine article would also accomplish this, but it's leaving a lot on the table not to pull in technology.
3: Some math textbooks have gotten really great about this! Like, "Here's an interactive applet where you can actually play with the phenomenon that we're describing yourself." Like, look how the arc of the ball changes when you pick different coefficients, or look how the graph changes when you pick different numbers, or whatever. Or press play, and watch this little animation that illustrates the point. It's really nice.
You know when there's a really beautiful article that does a great job pairing some visuals with the article, in a way that feels a little like a new genre?
I don't. My experience of "interactive" stories is of stories loaded with (often janky) crap that interferes with my reading of the text; text littered with copy errors, because the papers spent their money on interactive developers.
Yes, yes! I find it beautiful when you're triggered.
Said the Hungarian to the instant messenger.
which was seamlessly integrated into text, laid upon a captivating background of Mount Fuji shimmering amidst clouds.
6 I'm sure AI generated interactive stories will solve all these problems
Heebie's here trying to invent the eighth art
Art Garfunkel, King Arthur, Arthur that cartoon anteater, and I can't come up with seven more.
Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Miller, Arthur Ashe, and Arthur C. Clarke with a google assist. There.
This sounds kind of like the thing that the Washington Post does sometimes, where I'll be reading an article and it'll interrupt me with a multimedia slideshow or an interactive graphic. Usually this will be a reminder for me to get back to work.
But also this reminds me of how I tried to watch one of the Harry Potter movies once, and it wasn't like a movie at all, but rather a filmic illustration of the book. Like, there didn't seem to be any effort put into making the movie a coherent piece of art on its own terms -- it was just a series of visual representations of the key scenes in the novel. I know that's not really what heebie is talking about, but there does seem to be a market for video-illustrated versions of popular books.
Speaking of British things, how can you fund national service in the middle of austerity?
Then pay welfare for the people who mined coal before.
You can have the draftees do one day of service, then send them home because you don't have any equipment for them to war with.
Maybe every boomer could be assigned their own draftee to personally run errands for them.
Speaking of British things, how can you fund national service in the middle of austerity?
They can't, they are blatantly lying about it. Mark Pritchard MP asked the MOD in parliament TWO WEEKS AGO whether there were any plans to reintroduce national service and the MOD reply (via the PUS, Andrew Murrison) was:
"The Government has no current plans to reintroduce National Service. Since 1963, when the last national servicemen were discharged, it has been the policy of successive Governments that the best way of providing for the defence of our country is by maintaining professional Armed Forces staffed by volunteers. The demanding, increasingly technical, nature of defence today is such that we require highly trained, professional men and women in our Regular and Reserve Armed Forces, fully committed to giving their best in defending our country and its allies.
If potentially unwilling National Service recruits were to be obliged to serve alongside the professional men and women of our Armed Forces, it could damage morale, recruitment and retention and would consume professional military and naval resources. If, on the other hand, National Service recruits were kept in separate units, it would be difficult to find a proper and meaningful role for them, potentially harming motivation and discipline. For all these reasons, there are no current plans for the restoration of any form of National Service."
https://members.parliament.uk/member/1576/writtenquestions?page=1#expand-1718237
Everything there is true! I mean, Sunak knows he's going to lose so he's just spraying shit in various directions, but this is a particularly obvious lie.
You could have the draftees mine coal.
You may already know this, but this actually happened during the Second World War. And even after it was over! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevin_Boys
Context: in 1939 Britain was the Saudi Arabia of its day, the biggest energy exporter in the world. This energy was in the form of coal. Over a million men worked in the mines. The industry of Britain also ran almost entirely on coal, or on electricity generated by burning coal. One of the most vital war imports - neglected because of weirdnesses in data formatting, specifically everything else gets measured in tons or gallons or barrels or cubic feet, and timber gets measured in its own peculiar unit called the standard that no one really understands - was timber from Scandinavia, which was used overwhelmingly as pit props; a coal mine is not just a hole in the ground that you take coal out of, but also a hole in the ground that you put wood into. After the invasion of Norway and Denmark sealed off the Scandinavian supply, timber had to come from Canada instead, or from home forestry.
For much more on this, see Edgerton (2011).
GMF has a good bit in one of his McAuslan stories where he's trying as a very new and green platoon commander to get to know his Jocks, and he asks one whether he volunteered for the Gordons, and "he gave a sort of controlled shudder, like a galvanised frog, and muttered 'No, sir, ah wanted tae go intae the coal mines'."
Heebie, you're just describing comics, and comics are already as varied and diverse as any artform. You can zoom through comics, you can also watch a masterpiece of cinema and look at your phone half the time.
23: I guess so, but I didn't think they generally had enough text and technology to count. But give me an example!
re: 21
They can't, they are blatantly lying about it.
Yeah, it's all about weaponising the extraordinary amount of hatred that a lot of older people seem to feel for the young. Stoke a bit more pensioner anger and get the fuckers out to vote. Political journalism rarely presses them on the lies, though. Sure, they get a little push back on the internal incoherence of their plans, but the basic premise that there's even any policy intent there at all--like "levelling up", which was also a load of shite from the start--never gets questioned.
It's too bad that even Trump isn't stupid enough to suggest national service. It might get the youngs off the fence and voting D again.
If Trump suggested bringing back national service I think it would be largely ignored. He says a lot of insane stuff and it gets largely ignored.
27 is a very cynical view of the younger generation. They're supposed to be utterly disgusted by Biden's active support for genocide, but that would all go away as soon as Trump suggests that they spend eleven months peeling potatoes and degreasing engine blocks in Fort Sill?
I think what Heebie is specifying in the OP is a profusely illustrated narrative like you often get in story books for under 10s (or you did when I was a kid- maybe they've gone out of fashion)..You had text on the left hand page, and a picture of the action described in the text on the right. Or top and bottom of the same page. What you want is that, but for grownups. Should be possible; I don't know why it isn't done.
This might be a comparatively harmless application for AI. You write your narrative and pick the bits you want to illustrate, copy and paste them into the AI and tell it: " draw that". Then you arrange the text and pictures how you want them and, Bingo!
27 is a very cynical view of the younger generation. They're supposed to be utterly disgusted by Biden's active support for genocide, but that would all go away as soon as Trump suggests that they spend eleven months peeling potatoes and degreasing engine blocks in Fort Sill?
It's hard not to be cynical of the younger generation when they're so disgusted by Biden's active support for genocide that they'll risk a presidency where you audition for VP by writing "Finish Them" on Israeli bombs.
I thought that was a sex thing, but when you put it that way, it sounds awful.
It's probably not funny. Anyway, in a few years either Trump is going to have ended democracy in the U.S. or Israel is going to be trying to get military aid from a Democratic Party whose leaders are not just too young to remember the Holocaust, but too young to remember when Israel wasn't so overwhelmingly strong that it could beat Palestinians at will. And, presumably, they'll also remember Israeli leaders trying to help Trump win.
34 you'd think they'd be thinking how that's going to play out for them in the long term but you'd be wrong
you audition for VP by writing "Finish Them" on Israeli bombs
Do you really think Nikki Haley is still auditioning? I don't see it, that ship has sailed. I think the bomb stunt was just recreational hate mongering.
There are graphic novels that are relatively dense with text, or where the illustrations really complement text-- Will Eisner's "Contract With God", Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Bechdel's Fun Home.... Probably at least a few people here have favorites also.
37: this is your stereotype underground comic, too? Robert Crumb, Freak Brothers, etc. That tends to be dense with dialogue, though; Persepolis is mainly narrated.
Contract with God is doing its own weird thing - almost more like a very heavily illustrated picture book, with the story told entirely through text. You could read Contract with God without the pictures and not miss much.
Alan Moore's quite fond of putting in big wedges of text - in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Watchmen, for example - but they're skippable. They don't contain any part of the core story.
a Democratic Party whose leaders are not just too young to remember the Holocaust, but too young to remember when Israel wasn't so overwhelmingly strong that it could beat Palestinians at will. And, presumably, they'll also remember Israeli leaders trying to help Trump win.
Unfortunately for Gaza, the current Democratic Party leaders are not too young to remember that when 3,000 people got murdered one morning in New York, the reaction of the citizens of every city in the world was "spontaneous expression of shock, sorrow and sympathy", except for the citizens of Gaza whose reaction was "zoom about in their shitty little cars honking and cheering madly, like their football team had just made it through into the semi finals".
You could read Contract with God without the pictures and not miss much.
Possibly there are people who say you could read Raymond Chandler without the adjectives and not miss much also. This is so wrong that I don't know where to start. The physical settings, the framing and pacing of panels, appearance and expressions of the characters-- just no. Eisner was an incredible talent, fantastic that he got a chance to do this.
Actually one more, Shigeru Mizuki has done a multi-volume history of Japan in the years before WW2 intertwined with his autobiography in the same years, I liked the first one a lot. Transitions are abrupt and I'm not that familiar with Manga, but it's an ambitious piece of work. Reprinting into English seemed careful too-- the book has the spine on the left.
Possibly there are people who say you could read Raymond Chandler without the adjectives and not miss much also.
Sorry, not miss much of the plot. I thought that was clear from context.
In an actual graphic novel the plot is conveyed through images, as well as through the narration, caption and dialogue. You couldn't follow the story of a graphic novel just from reading the text. In "Contract with God" IIRC (it's been a few years since I read it) the plot is conveyed through text almost entirely. You could get the entire story just from the text - it would be an extremely impoverished experience, but you could get the story.