The idea of using liposuctioned fat is back again, but now as a means to solve world hunger.
And, OK, sure, it’s a spoof, or hoax, or whatever you want to call it. But maybe it’s time we started thinking about ways to use this great national resource we possess–our red, white, and blue fat.
We are already considered the Saudi Arabia of Coal. Let’s utilize this new sustainable, natural resource. We can be the Saudi Arabia of human body fat too.
Our short film, “Tag, You’re It!” written by me (and including a guest appearance by yours truly featuring me playing the guitar), just made the final 14 in the F*CK Valentines Day Film Competition.
This short is a combination of 2 parts of an experimental film Small Media XL produced for a panel at South By Southwest. The film was inspired by the exquisite corpse games of the surrealists.
Watch the film. And if you like what you see, head over to the F*CK VAlentines Day page, and vote for us.
I was staring down at a stack of Milton Bradley boardgames still wrapped in plastic, price tags intact. Monopoly. Scrabble.
“Rebecca. Seriously. You have to see this.”
I gently lowered the games into a cardboard box, closed the lid, and joined her in the hall. She unscrewed the bottle of Makers and handed it to me.
“Drink. I got the mother load.”
We drank every time we found one. We called them, “our little souvenirs.” We’d already finished half the bottle. I found the last one, a faded Siouxsie and the Banshees t-shirt, black gone to gray, Souixsie’s cracked white eyes that reminded me so much of Patricia’s.
She was Patricia now that she was dead.
“Drink.”
I looked down at the bottle. The circle of light reflected in the glass was the morning sun. It had forced its way into the apartment. We had been packing since 11. I brought the Makers to my lips, took a pull, and didn’t notice the burn of the alcohol.
She handed me the box. It had an Amazon logo and remnants of torn packing tape on the sides.
“It was in the hall closet. Top shelf. Behind a crate of cleaning supplies. Under a stack of paper bags. She went to a lot of trouble.” She hiccuped a quick laugh. It sounded like a foreign language to me. One that I didn’t know, but could almost place.
“Open it.”
I folded back the lid. At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. A riot of shiny colors and shapes. Pinks, and blues. Rounded. Globular. A box of exotic life. Sea cucumbers. Tube worms. Translucent creatures dredged up from the deepest parts of the ocean. The parts that sunlight isn’t supposed to reach.
I opened my mouth, intent on saying something, but I couldn’t think of what.
Sex toys. The box was full of Patricia’s vibrators. Her dildos. Strap-ons.
“This is probably one of those things that we should get out of here. Before Mr. and Mrs. A. show up, right?”
Patricia’s parents were Orthodox. Not that the cancer had cared about that.
She laughed again. A quick bark.
“I’m sorry. I just keep hearing Patty’s voice.”
She imitated Patricia then, not the sickly little girl whisper her voice had become, but the full-throated Long Island squawk that had always made me tense my jaw.
“If I could come that way, I wouldn’t need the batteries.”
We both laughed then, hard, and loud. The sound of it ricochetting off the walls, dislodging the dust, freeing it to dance in the encroaching sunbeams. Laughed until our voices caught, and we had to wipe the tears from our eyes. Laughed until our bodies shuddered. We clung to each other, and rode out the convulsions, unsure where the laughs began, and the sobs ended.
We finished the bottle in the basement. The super had shown us the hole. The deepest, darkest place in the building. He said he didn’t know where it led.
We held them up, dangling them between our fingers, Patricia’s toys. We toasted them. A shot of whiskey for each one. And then we sent them off with a little salute. Opened our fingers, and let them go, to sink back into the blackness.
For a long time we’ve had this preconception that what sets us apart from other primates is our ability to make tools. As a kid, I always imagined an individual genius caveman chipping a wheel out of a rock, the act of which marked the begining of our species dominance over the planet.
And that image is somewhat correct. For hundreds of thousands of years human ancestors made hand axes (or bifaces)… and not much else. Man, the tool-maker, spent literally thousands of generations making one tool. Over and over and over. (There is even a theory that these “axes” weren’t actually tools per se, but rather artworks used to attract mates, but that’s a concept for another post.)
Not only isn’t tool-making a human-only activity, but for hundreds of millennia it’s also didn’t do much to make us the dominant species on the planet.
So what did?
Obviously technology plays a huge role, from domestication of plants and animals to the creation of clothing and pottery, from long bows and atom bombs to penicillin and anesthetics. Our technology, our tools, have helped us colonize every square inch of planet Earth. So if not man, the tool-maker, then man, the tool-user? How unsatisfying is that?
I think it’s something else. I think it’s something to do with the fact that we are social. That we can “stand on the shoulders of giants.” That we can outsource.
I think we are man (and woman), the collaborator. I believe that we are social inventors/builders/crafters. That’s the power of the human race. That we can share the burden. That we can bounce ideas off each other. That we can specialize. That we don’t have to invent or make everything ourselves.
This TED talk got me thinking about this… it’s awesome.
Writers get this question a lot. In many different forms. Everyone wants to know what inspires the stories that we write. There isn’t one answer. Sometimes a story comes from stumbling on a fascinating program on NPR about The Last Freelance Embalmer. This is where Resurrection Men came from. If you keep your eyes open, inspiration is everywhere. Story can start with character, plot, and theme.
And how can it be applied to make for more effective and powerful user experiences?
San Francisco startup Gamify has launched an in-depth Gamification Encyclopedia. This wiki-based site covers “gamification”–the process of adding game mechanics and rewards to non-game experiences–of all kinds, from websites to the ways it’s been applied by governments and industries like healthcare and transport.
Gamification is emerging as a powerful meme in the interactive world. No wonder, especially when you consider that CityVille, the latest game from Zynga, (the company that created of Farmville), just barely a month old, is the most popular application on Facebook, and is closing in on 100 million monthly active users.
Play is a powerful thing.
How will you apply the tenets of game design–make it fun, offer rewards, foster social connections–to make more compelling customer experiences in 2011?
Or is it just me? Here’s a shot of Phillip K. Dick (one of my favorite authors) from the early 60s:
Phillip K. Dick with his new beard (taken by Anne Dick)
And here are a couple of photos of my old man from a similar time period… give or take:
Dick definitely had a fuller beard, but I still feel like there’s a strong resemblance. What do you think? Wishful thinking? Or just that the beards and glasses meant that a whole generation of men ended up looking kinda like this in the 60s?
Addendum: My father does not look like the Android of Phillip K. Dick’s head.
I am a writer, designer, interactive strategist, user experience guru, branding expert, and actor who uses story as a tool to design interactive experiences and create engaging entertainment.
For more than 15 years I’ve worked in diverse creative and leadership roles on cutting edge projects for companies such as ABC News, The BBC, Coca-Cola, ESPN, Reuters, Viacom and Vogue, helping them to define narratives for compelling customer experiences.
My success in helping companies achieve their unique goals comes from my underlying passion for creating wicked cool entertainment, from some of the best direct-to-video horror films to come out of the 1990s to award-winning commercial campaigns for ILM commercial productions and EIDOS, from webisodes such as Teen Nick’s “Exit Strategy“ to the recent feature films “Ghost Club“, “Blood Junkies” and “Resurrection Men”.
I’ve recently co-founded Small Media Extra Large, a hybrid agency with interactive, social media, and video production capabilities that creates captivating websites, mobile apps, games, web series and advertising.
And it’s really starting to annoy the hell out of me. It’s been showing up in Yahoo mail, and in blog entries on Google reader. It’s definitely effective in combating banner blindness. Normally I don’t notice ads. Even the flashy dancing santa ads. In fact, especially not those. I’ve trained myself. But something about this one makes it impossible to ignore. Could be the freakish quality of the obviously photoshopped dude in the photos, or the fact that he shows up everywhere I look. I don’t know what I’ve done to be targeted by this campaign. I haven’t searched for or written about any health related stuff, except trying to find a good dentist in NYC. Could be that it’s January, and this company has made a huge ad buy trying to get as much of that juicy New Years resolution green as they possibly can before we’re all ready to go back to our bacon and TV watching. Whatever. I don’t care. I’ve had enough of this guy. I don’t have any interest in the product. If anything this campaign is having the exact opposite effect. I am starting to hate this product. Starting? No. I HATE it. And I’m starting to hate Google, and Yahoo too.
Uncle. Please stop showing me these ads. Please. I’m begging you.
Or perhaps this is a clever ploy to break me of my internet addiction?
Where am I?
You are currently viewing the archives for January, 2011 at Jason Nunes.
