It's like my head

“A useful starting place might be something the actor and comics writer Nick Vince said, back in the early 90s. It comes from cinema, as did Nick, and it goes like this: imagine the panel as your “print moment.” The frame that captures the essence of the moment. Imagine, say, thirty seconds’ worth of film, and that your job is to overlay those thirty seconds of dialogue over a single frame pulled from that ribbon of film that best encapsulates what’s going on.”

“

Google doubtless gathers enough data about me in other ways that my non-use of G+ won’t matter a whit.  They felt that they had to have a social network, but they are not a social network company, and don’t need to run a social network in order to do their business.

Perhaps you could add “the death of the social network” to “the death of blogging” in the media-headline scare list.  Replace it with pervasive digital loyalty, maybe.

Whatever it is, it’s no bloody use for hearing from people, or talking to a crowd.

”

“

In the new science-fiction film I saw a couple of weeks ago, there’s a funny scene where a woman is trying to make her car work. The car comes with handprint recognition instead of a regular lock, and so she has to spend half a minute awkwardly splaying her hand on the driver’s-side window, trying to get the goddamn thing to find her print and open the car. Eventually, the car relents and lets her in.

For her second trick, she has to get the car to start. No key, see? The driving system uses facial recognition to start the car, just as some Android phones today will unlock themselves on “seeing” their owner’s faces. However, it would appear that, on the day she set up the facial recognition system, she was wearing a little eyeshadow and a little lipgloss. Because the car doesn’t recognise the fresh-faced girl sitting there on this summer’s day, she has to reach under the armrest to fish out a little lipgloss and a little eyeshadow and try again. Just to get the car to start.

Because the future tends to arrive a little bit broken. We have workarounds for everything, because very few things turn up perfectly functional.

Which isn’t something you tend to see science fiction focusing on much. But then this wasn’t a traditional SF film. The film, A Digital Tomorrow, produced by Nicolas Nova of the Near Future Laboratory and colleagues at the Media Design Program in Pasadena, was a design fiction.

”

“

THREE PANELS OPEN is an open invitation.  Perhaps you’d like to do one.  A comic that is three panels in duration and 640px wide.  I’m only going to run the ones I like best, I’m afraid. However, there’s no time limit on submissions.  You can email the image to warrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.

It would be really nice if more women were sending comics.  Or, indeed, if any women were sending comics.

”