Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Kircher's Dragons
" There is a great deal of debate among writers with regards to dragons: do animals of this sort actually exist in nature, or, as...
Crafting Interpreters
Ever wanted to make your own programming language or wondered how they are designed and built?
Weaving Narratives into Procedural Worlds
Examining the value, characteristics, and methods of integrating static narratives into otherwise procedurally generated environments.
Twig + Tale | Sewing & Craft Patterns
Discover sewing patterns for timeless clothing & crafts. Thoughtfully designed for makers of all skill levels. Create with Twig + Tale today.
Food, foragers, and folklore: the role of narrative in human subsistence
Narrative is a species-typical, reliably developing, complex cognitive process whose design is unlikely to have emerged by chance. Moreover, the folklore record indicates that narrative content is consistent across widely divergent cultures. I have argued elsewhere that a storyteller may use narrative to manipulate an audience's representations of the social and/or physical environment to serve his or her own fitness ends. However, my subsequent research suggests that such manipulation results from a broader selection pressure which narrative effectively alleviates: information acquisition. By substituting verbal representations for potentially costly first-hand experience, narrative enables an individual to safely and efficiently acquire information pertinent to the pursuit of fitness in local habitats. If this hypothesis is true, narrative should be rich with information useful to the pursuit of fitness. One class of information integral to the accomplishment of this task is foraging knowledge. In this paper, then, I present evidence that foraging peoples use narrative to transmit subsistence information: specifically, I demonstrate how various narrative devices (e.g., setting, description, mimicry, anthropomorphism) are used to communicate foraging knowledge.
EsDictionary - The EsDeeKid Translator
If You’ve Only Ever Played D&D, You’re Missing Out - Aaron Ross Powell
Tabletop RPGs are story engines. Why would you want to tell only one kind of story?
Creatures of Story and Song | Reaktion Books
Discover why a beaver was said to bite off its own testicles, why the baleen of a right whale was prized by medieval knights or why you should give your crush the gift of a great auk.Creatures of Story and Song pieces together evocative legends, poems and historical accounts from a thousand years of history […]
Koans Are No Longer Paradoxical
Illuminating how they instantiate a rigorous form of logic
God Help Us, Let’s Try To Learn About Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques
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Master 4 Layers of Storytelling to Make Your Art Unforgettable
You think storytelling is just for writers? Wrong. The story you craft—not just on canvas, but in your journey, your impact, and in your own mind—could make your art impossible to ignore.
You’ve Been Played
How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation—and what we can do about it Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across...
The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth
People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is f...
Cory Doctorow: Stories Are a Fuggly Hack - Locus
I've mentioned before, stories are weird. I mean, really, really weird. Nothing that happens in a piece of fiction has any consequence in the real world. Romeo and Juliet did not live, did not die, and the ''tragedy'' they represent is objectively less important than the tragedy of the live yogurt culture I digested at the breakfast table this morning. My theory is that the parts of our brains that …Read More
