Sources of inspiration thread

[Nuprahtor]

mcc
If there is a heavier film than "The Eraserhead", it must be "The Begotten".
I do not recommend it to anyone to view, just look footage from the film to be inspired

[NiallM]

The Door to Hell; a gas-filled crater in Turkmenistan that has been burning for 40 years:

[Lance Burkett]

The Company of Myself:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/2DArray ... -of-myself

It's a short game about reclusion, isolation etc.

[Ian Snyder]

The Door to Hell; a gas-filled crater in Turkmenistan that has been burning for 40 years:

This is absolutely beautiful! Wow!

[Epoché]

That door to hell reminds me:

There is a mud geyser in Indonesia which has been spewing out poisonous hot mud for years, it started when one of the mining companies owned by corrupt government officials fucked up spectacularly while drilling for oil in the middle of a crowded city. At first they built a giant wall around it, several stories high, when it burst the banks they forcefully evacuated the surrounding suburbs and built an even bigger wall. When that wall broke, they built a channel which funnels the toxic sludge into the nearby river, which flows straight into a huge fishing zone in the pacific. Thanks to censorship by the Indonesian government I have not been able to find good images or English stories about it. For the same reasons the public was not compensated or warned of the health effects at all. Still, inspiring/dystopian stuff, its really creepy seeing a wall the size of a skyscraper, right next to schools and houses, barely holding back a volcano of scalding sludge.

[dlan]

@Epoché

Do you refer to the Sidoarjo mud flow ?

The satellite images are really impressive, especially when compared with images before the disaster.
http://www.crisp.nus.edu.sg/coverages/EJmudflow/index20110614.html

[mcc]

[Ed K]

Beautiful film of a derelict village in Scotland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_3dO0vS ... e=youtu.be

[mcc]

Photograph taken on Mars

[Jonathan Whiting]

Reading Borges' Ficciones, only half way in, but I'm utterly captivated. He packs more compelling ideas in mere handfuls of pages than are found in great swathes of more recent scifi/fantasy. If you have the stomache for capital L Literature I'd highly recommend checking some out.

Of those I've read so far, the following particularly stood out:
* Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
* The Babylon Lottery
* The Library of Babel

You can probably find the texts online with a little light searching.

[Ed K]

Ho yes, Borges is amazing. It's a treat to be reading that collection for the first time!

Even if they can be quite tough reading (including the mad little games he plays with footnotes etc), the shortness of the stories make them easy to get through.
Would be be presumptious to say that this is applicable to games?

Apart from those you mentioned, some other favorites of mine are The Aleph, The Zahir, The Immortal, and Funes the Memorious.

Some stories are only a page long and pack in some great stuff, like On Exactitude In Science (not in that collection IIRC)

[Terry]

This left me satisfied (and itching to do more stuff with proper 3D models): http://vimeo.com/10281433

[Stephen L (inactive)]

Reading Borges' Ficciones, only half way in, but I'm utterly captivated. He packs more compelling ideas in mere handfuls of pages than are found in great swathes of more recent scifi/fantasy. If you have the stomache for capital L Literature I'd highly recommend checking some out.

Of those I've read so far, the following particularly stood out:
* Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
* The Babylon Lottery
* The Library of Babel

You can probably find the texts online with a little light searching.

If you like Borges, you might also get something out of Calvino's short stories as well. I love both.

[Ian Snyder]

Ran across this today, I find it pretty fascinating.

[mcc]

Ian: Oh wow.

Reading Borges' Ficciones, only half way in, but I'm utterly captivated. He packs more compelling ideas in mere handfuls of pages than are found in great swathes of more recent scifi/fantasy. If you have the stomache for capital L Literature I'd highly recommend checking some out.

Of those I've read so far, the following particularly stood out:
* Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
* The Babylon Lottery
* The Library of Babel

You can probably find the texts online with a little light searching.

If you like Borges, you might also get something out of Calvino's short stories as well. I love both.

I'll have to look up Calvino! What I recommend to people who like Borges is Julio Cortázar, who was working at about the same time also in South America and worked mostly in hallucinatory short stories. Aside from a couple short stories that got made into movies, his one big claim to fame is an experimental novel named Rayuela ("Hopscotch") designed with the property that you can read the chapters out of order and still get a comprehensible (though potentially very different) novel.