House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, is an unconventional novel that makes use of typeset, page layout and style to tell a story. It’s classified under a bunch of genres including horror, postmodernism and romance. The book took ten years to plan and write.
On the surface, it seems to be about a family who finds their house is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. But it has three converging stories presented in the format of an academic research paper.
It started from Danielewski’s theoretical essays and philosophical ideas. The book was released on the Internet, page by page, for over a year leading up to its publishing date. The planning involved in writing such a complex book and also to market such an odd concept was extensive.
Today, House of Leaves is studied in universities as a satire of academia and a form of ergodic literature. It is a cult classic.
Hacknet is a terminal-based hacking game released in 2015. It’s created by a single game developer, Matt Trobiani. He encountered many problems while planning the game, as hacking was not something all gamers knew. But he overcame it and made a game that has received rave reviews.
Read the interview here.
The one project I was fairly satisfied with was a series of digital images back in my foundation year. Having the threat of failing a core module helped in getting me off my lazy ass and whipping me into action.
I have countless ideas, but without a slave master, these ideas never make it past conceptualization. I’m just too lazy to do things. Or critique things, for that matter. Too much work.
Is there a reward for completing a project? Sure, I guess it’s satisfying. But that’s it, really. If I complete something, it’s because someone – or fear – forced me to.
… is a construct of the human imagination. Time enslaves us. We are the only creatures to live and die by this idea of a 24-hour clock.
Time passes. Time slips through our fingers like sand, and we can never get it back.
Time is useful, I suppose, in the grand narrative of a story. Even then we do not allude to time as often as we do in real life. It is, however, often necessary to have some kind of timeline with which to organize our series of unfortunate events, so they can play out nicely like frames in a film.
Same goes for projects, really. Time has consumed us. We are nothing without time.
Pity.
Just another Open Source Studio site