I love Japanese literature. Its themes are often focused, intelligent, quirky. I also love cats – indeed, for similar reasons, one may add! Combining the two, we get this review of If Cats Disappeared from the World, by Genki Kawamura.
You might also recall my review of The Travelling Cat Chronicles, by Hiro Arikawa, featuring a very similar theme. There are many similarities between the two novels, and if they weren’t both published in the same year, I’d be willing to ascribe the coincidence to an act of imitation instead.
So, what does a story like If Cats Disappeared from the World tell us?
What if Cats Disappeared? We don’t even want to think about it(more…)
It’s impossible to experience without memory. Think about it: If you had no memory beyond the immediate, ever-ghostly “now”, how could you remember how a sunset looked like? How could you remember your first kiss, or some important achievement?
Moreover, it’s not only experiencing that, without memory, would suffer. Learning would be difficult if not impossible. Much of what constitutes our humanity would be absent.
And yet, there’s something problematic about the coexistence of experience and memory. I’m of course referring to the fact that memory taints the experience it’s supposed to help us remember.
We often think we remember things very well, very accurately, maintaining an objective view to their real essence. As the perceptive, thinking reader that you are, I’m sure you’ve discovered many problems in the sentence above.
The truth is, we don’t remember things all that well, not very accurately, and it’s quite by definition that we can’t hold an objective view, let alone to the “real essence” of things – good luck defining that, especially for emotions, thoughts, and states of mind.
This image from the 80s helps me remember some scenes of my early childhood. But the memories area poor guide for creating a factual foundation. Still, it helps me (re)create a non-fact based reality which is still useful(more…)
From Narrative Nods to Word Journey, I’ve made a lot of programs that one way or another revolve around words, writing, and fictional worlds. Character Concept Picker is such an app. It’s open-source, free for all, and it can help you come up with ideas for building characters for your next novel or video game.
It all started when, browsing LinkedIn, I discovered an Excel table with some character traits and other characteristics, meant as a guide for creating characters. It was the work of Jacob Conner Harris, a narrative designer.
I messaged him and asked whether he’d be interested in teaming up and creating a little app using the data he’d come up with. He said yes, and Character Concept Picker is the result.
The results generated by Character Concept Picker(more…)
