The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Conflict: a story needs one. It’s advice you hear in every creative-writing class, and a technique you see in every book, movie, and TV show. But what if a plot can move forward and keep the reader’s interest without inter-character discord?
...moreOne of the hardest parts of developing artificial intelligence, writes Frank Bures for Poets & Writers, is trying to teach computers causality: how and why one thing follows from another.
Humans don’t have to be taught:
...moreWe see causality constantly, incessantly, and effortlessly: when we read the news, when we gossip about neighbors, when we watch a movie or read a book….We are constantly cataloguing the story lines around us in an effort to sort out our own.
While browsing the web during a slow pre-holiday weekend day at work, I stumbled across a font family called Vialog, which is intended to be used primarily in signage. One of the fonts in the family, Vialog Signs Conduct, contains some of the most sinister glyphs I’ve ever seen.
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Narrative is charging $20 to submit to their online magazine. That’s for “unsolicited manuscripts.” In other words, if you’re already famous, they won’t charge you. Because really, Michael Chabon is not paying $20 to submit to a literary magazine. But seriously, there is something wrong here.