DGW, Marcus, and Toby try out the Storycastor cards.
-------Jam 1--------
2x Gold Cards: “A person who is new to the area” & “Cheapskate”
2x Copper Cards: “Motorcycle”
Alien. Aliens arriving and seeking to cut costs. The frugal alien. Invade and take over the world on the cheap (earth invasion). Deep pockets, short arms. Aliens have short arms and might not need them. The Blob. “Arrival” with Amy Adams.
A.I. that’s been brought in to make things more efficient. What would the computer immediately cut out without human weakness or manipulation? Human emotions are unimportant? Important to trigger the correct consumption. A very emotional AI that used Big Data and impulse, intuition. Marvin the depressed robot in Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Create a job that nobody else on earth has yet so that I won’t have any competition: AI psychotherapy. Giving it to robots and/or AI? Once these things are complex enough to develop emotional problems… What if you provide mental health support via AI? Teledoc. Telemedicine. Doing mental health on the cheap.Lag and lack of connectivity. A more efficient form of medicine.
Motorcycles. Aliens find the motorcycles cheaper to use than spaceships. Do they want motorcycles? We are the only place in the universe that makes them. They’ve been listening to our stuff and they just hit, “Easy Rider”, and it’s a craze. They want leather jackets, they’re using 60’s phrases. They show up as a motorcycle gang - Alien meets Easy Rider. Hell’s Angels with actual members from space.
Wig. Tabletop Improve. Does the Alien work in a wig store, does it wear one, does it find it sexual? Maybe they’re into dead hair? Gateways to the Bald.
--------Jam 2----------
2x Gold Cards: “Firefighter” & “Person in professional disgrace”
1x Copper Cards: “That song is on the radio again”
Defrocked priest who becomes a firefighter. Return to the place of arson to find the clues that clear his name. Professional arsonist and firefighter. Split personality - one is an arsonist, the other a firefighter. A retelling of Jekyll & Hyde.
Troubleshooter. Dumpster Fire douser. Releasing something they’ve been holding onto for awhile. Forgiveness, public apology. PR person who puts out dumpster fires. They’ve realized the error of their ways. Do something to help humanity. Dumpster Fire Management. Historical fiction - social media manager for the Nazi Party. A traitor to their party?
The Apologist!
We are all apologists. We have to be for our narrative selves to function. We do PR in our heads. Yuval Harari. The CIA and State Septs in our heads. David’s story about the stream of consciousness narrative experiment. How we connect ourselves to reality. Post-rationalization. How do I make sense of everything that is happening to me in real-time? For a human to feel mentally intact, everything has to make sense.
Feeling lost and disturbed when you cannot explain your own behavior. I don’t have an explanation. I believed there must have been a reason but couldn’t figure it out. Mentally destabilizing. Our Stream of Consciousness is a dictator. Donal Trump is in my brain.
Inside Donald Trump’s brain. There is a sub-sub-sub brain part trying to come up with explanations for his actions. A little ID - boy who is barked down and kept in the dark.
Monsters are Made. They don’t come out of nowhere. Abusive parents. Corrupt system. Tyrannical atmosphere. Systemically made. Culturally crafted. We can encourage narcissists and sociopaths. For example, we celebrate psychopaths in business - Bezos, Musk - and we laud them as the pinnacles of success that should be emulated. Yet, they aren’t people we’d want in our community because they are so transactional, always taking advantage of people, gaming the system. Society is complicit. Societie Complicite.
Apropos of Nothing - great show by complicate, “The Encounter”. This would be a great idea for a new business - virtual theater. We could beam performances into your head by using 3D audio and a simple one-man or small team visual performance. 3D Radio. 3D Podcasting.
“That song is on the radio again”. Reggae version of C+C and the Music Factory.
Will people ever be nostalgic for the times we find ourselves in now? Nostalgia today is not about politics but about culture.
“What if nostalgia is lost due to the Internet?” There’s no room for nostalgia when everything is ever-present. You can’t revisit, embellish, improve and aggrandize. If you have the thing infront of you it’s never as good as you remember it. Perhaps, nostalgia will never be a thing again. David’s story about false memory of scene from “Life of Brian”. You craft a narrative of the past that suits you, makes you feel good, you can do it with others, a version of the past that feels good without being confronted with the absolute reality of what happened… but no longer now that we have the Internet surveillance system.