Skip to main content

Thought 3 - Fractured Fairy Tales, A Modern Approach

I have been reading "The Brothers Grimm" lately. Whilst reading it, I noticed that many tales are compilations of other tales or borrow things from another tale. This can of course be attributed to oral tradition of passing a story down from generation to generation, remembering parts, forgetting others, adding in new parts, mistranslation, etc. It is almost as if the stories themselves are/were living beings that evolved into elaborate tales, pollinating from tales that survived the last generation. Either being adventurous enough, or full of the right lesson to be learned. Eventually the tales are written down and preserved like a specimen in a museum. Yet, they have continued to evolve even within a modern society where the oral tradition is no longer a method of propagation for the stories. Instead of a retelling of a story, it is called an adaptation, retelling, revisioning, or even an edit. Take for example "Snow White" as the common motifs of princess, witch, good and evil, all show. Yet, a story which takes less than 5 minutes to read, has been translated into a modern movie of 83 minutes. Even more, people will recast the players, make a more modern version. But why? The story is written, yet not immune the the effects of transmission. Could knowledge itself be a living being that grows and breeds through us? Even today as a new formats are created in movies, television, and even comics, each modern format can been seen to cross-pollinate into another form, a good TV show dies and becomes a comic, a comic grows in length to the graphic novel, then graphic novel turned into a movie, a good movie is adapted into a television series. And in each case no conversion maintains perfect consistency with original. One merely has to look a the various incarnations of Batman, Superman, and Spider man to see the evolution of the characters, the stories are similar and the players the same, yet everything is different with time, despite that we as humans no longer need to rely on the inaccuracies of oral transmission.

Just a curious observation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thought 16 - Kid Power

In response "Thought 14 - Perpetual Cat" sugarbumkin said, "The same theory could be applied to balloons tied to kindergarteners at recess. I like it." Well this got me thinking... Clothes with that are laced with MEMS generators. A MEMS generator is a solid state electronic circuit that generates low level of current though passive motion of the environment. Things like temperature change, acceleration, and even Brownian motion are converted to power using a MEMS generator. So, now we have attached them to small free moving bipeds of pure energy. How do we get the energy back. I figure that we isolate the playground into a large battery configuration where the children are running around on a conductive plate that makes contact with the heels of their shoes. They will run around with a super capacitor in addition to the MEMS, when their feet touch the ground the super-cap is discharged into the conductive plate underneath them. I do not think that the childr...
2 comments
Read more

Thought 44: Phone Home

This is actually two thoughts in one, but they are both phone related. Thought 44.1: The backside keyboard. We created the typewriters since 1829 and they've use all of our fingers in an effort to create efficiency. We have even created varieties of key layouts such as qwerty and Dvorak to improve the typing speed. Then we took a huge step backwards and created the cell phone with only the 12 buttons for typing, reducing not only the number of keys by the number of fingers usable on those keys. Then we made the thought that if we just replicate the full qwerty things would be better. And to some extend they are, but we still are reduced to just 2 fingers, or rather thumbs to type with. Then it struck me, the full key set could go on the back of the phone. Well at first it seems rather stupid how do you see the keys to type on them, but does/should a touch typist ever look at the typewriter or keyboard? No. The buttons on the back could be a full qwerty keyboard split and r...
1 comment
Read more

Thought 52: Coaster-less Beer Glass

It occurred to me last night while drinking beer that the coast was both irritating and waste of resources. Irritating that almost no glass actually lives on the coaster, preventing them from performing their original task of preventing damage to the table. And a waste that they get thrown away every night and in some cases every drink. So I dreamed up this: The glass has ridges to direct the condensation down to a reservoir at the bottom of the glass. The reservoir size will be base on the humidity and temperature difference of the beverage and the surrounding air. The reservoir can be drained by a couple of rubber plugs along the sides. The vary bottom of the glass is covered in a bit of rubber to prevent damaging the table from the hard glass. The interesting part is that the water will make the glass more stable as it is drunk by increasing the base weight. Cheers for your thoughts!
2 comments
Read more