#story of your life

[dainpo]

[savethegrishaverse]

For our next twitter party, we want to talk all about the strong bonds between the siblings of the Grishaverse using the tag #StoryOfYourLife! Come prepared with your best tweets, questions, comments, gifs, memes, and more. Let's make some noise! 🗣️

#SaveShadowAndBone and #SixOfCrowsSpinoff TWEETING PARTY 9/5 at 12PM! Come check it out here!

Remember to:

Only use three hashtags.

Enjoy and be engaging with your tweets! Keep sharing! Timezones under read more.

If you cannot attend, you can always schedule tweets ahead of time on desktop in order to help out still!

ALL TIMEZONES: Thursday, Sep 5: 9am PST 10am MST 11am CST 12pm EST 2pm -03 5pm GMT 6pm CET 8pm MSK 9pm +04 10:30pm IST

Friday, Sep 6: 1am CST 2am JST 4am AEST 6am NZST

[noosphe-re]

Our biggest source of confusion was the heptapods' "writing.” It didn't appear to be writing at all; it looked more like a bunch of intricate graphic designs. The logograms weren't arranged in rows, or a spiral, or any linear fashion. Instead, Flapper or Raspberry would write a sentence by sticking together as many logograms as needed into a giant conglomeration. This form of writing was reminiscent of primitive sign systems, which required a reader to know a message's context in order to understand it. Such systems were considered too limited for systematic recording of information. Yet it was unlikely that the heptapods developed their level of technology with only an oral tradition. That implied one of three possibilities: the first was that the heptapods had a true writing system, but they didn't want to use it in front of us; Colonel Weber would identify with that one. The second was that the heptapods hadn't originated the technology they were using; they were illiterates using someone else's technology. The third, and most interesting to me, was that the heptapods were using a nonlinear system of orthography that qualified as true writing.

Ted Chiang, Story of Your Life

[guillotineman]

[nikomedes]

“Story of Your Life,” by Ted Chiang

[dreamy-conceit]

In war there are no winners, only widows.

— Arrival (2016), directed by Denis Villeneuve and adapted by Eric Heisserer. This sentence is said in Mandarin, and no translation is provided on screen.

[addictivecontradiction]

Arrival, 2016

[phenakistoskope]

story of you life by ted chiang was very reminiscent of samuel delany's babel-17, both meditate on how language influences how we think, and how this extends into our perceptions of space and time, cause and effect. personally, i enjoyed delany's novel more because it explored how language can alter our perceptions of gender and politics. chiang left things far more ambiguous, which in this particular case wasn't quite as impactful.

[shortstorytournament]

Short Story Tournament

THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO by Edgar Allen Poe (1846) (link) - tw: death

“I drink,” he said, “to the buried that repose around us.”

STORY OF YOUR LIFE by Ted Chiang (1998) (link) - tw: death

Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other.

[snoopdogg-with-a-blog]

The fact that they didn’t finish The Story of Your Life with Patrick Page is the big mistake in Spirited. I love that movie but what a fucking loss. The song is SO cool. I actually feel a little nervous when it starts because it’s kind of scary. Like what! Badass. Couldn’t they have Clint have an attitude after the song?

[anonymously-07]

“When writing the story of your life, don’t let anyone else hold the pen.”

- Jack Kerouac

[adamwatchesmovies]

Arrival (2016)

Watching Arrival a second time takes away its surprises but gives you a new appreciation for its storytelling. It’s a wholly different experience. You pick up on certain character beats and structural points that were impossible to spot the first time around. It’s a brainy sci-fi film so make sure you block off at least a half hour after it’s over to discuss it with your friends.

Twelve mysterious alien spacecraft have appeared across the globe. The U.S. government selects Linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to help communicate with the extra-terrestrials. She begins deciphering the way these visitors communicate but progress is slow. While Louise and theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) desperately try to convey critical human ideas and concepts to the visitors, the rest of the world becomes increasingly wary.

Residing in the same neighbourhood as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Interstellar, Arrival is about aliens but really, it’s about communication. Think about how many ways we communicate and how so many things are assumed when two people are face-to-face. You don’t have to speak the same language to know what barred teeth means. Smiles are universal. Even with all these things in common, we still misunderstand each other constantly. Now imagine communicating with a creature that (as far as we can tell) doesn’t even have a face. You wouldn’t know where to begin. At least you know they’re intelligent and willing to communicate. They haven’t blown us up yet. That’s promising.

Much of the joy of Arrival comes in the procedural bits. When Louise has an “aha!” Moment and makes a breakthrough, it’s the most exciting thing you’ve seen. The more her work comes together, the more eager you are for her and Donnelly to share what they’ve found with their superior (Forest Whitaker as Colonel G. T. Weber) and then get right back to teaching new words to the Heptapods.

The whole movie could’ve been just about learning to communicate with the visitors but unfortunately, mankind is never as open-minded as it should be. You can see the progress they're making but when Louise tries to explain it to others, they just don’t understand. Tiny, seemingly insignificant decisions snowball into avalanches which threaten not only this operation but the entire human-heptapod encounter and possibly, the world. There’s a sense of wonder and excitement blended with suspense and nerve-eroding fear that something will go horribly wrong any minute.

Now that we know the ending, aspects of the story change completely. Initially, you assume the images of Louise and her daughter Hannah are flashbacks. These "explain" why, she is now alone and isolated. Actually, those are not memories; they're glimpses of her future. Deciphering the alien language and immersing herself in it allows Louise to perceive time as they do: non-linearly. It’s an example of time travel done right. Louise can suddenly look into her future and find crucial information from conversations that haven’t happened yet, bring them “back” and make them happen. How did she know what words General Shang shared with his wife before she passed? In a way, she always knew. That’s how time loops work and if you don’t understand it, this is where that half hour you set aside will come in handy. The problem is that you’re still thinking of time as a line when it isn’t; not anymore.

Arrival has an airtight screenplay. Re-evaluating its story and themes further emphasizes how much time and effort was spent polishing it. It’s complex, which makes the moment where it finally clicks immensely satisfying. As a bonus, it’s wonderfully acted, extremely moody, gorgeous to watch and masterfully directed. This is the best sci-fi film we’ve seen in a long time. (On Blu-ray, March 15, 2019)

[toothpuulp]

i love you inevitably i love you determinism i love you no free will i love you “screw it, everybody dies” i love you “what if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? what if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?” i love!!!

[esevik]

Division by zero

This story is about a woman (and her husband) who discovers a mathematical equation that disproves our entire mathematical system and gets depressed over it. It's told both from her and her husband's perspective with some added intermissions about general math history. Overall the story is fine but it feels a bit lackluster that the realisation that math is "fake" since I thought that was pretty common knowledge, we just assigned numbers to things and then made rules about it. This story just lacked the hook the previous two stories had.

Rating: B

[notreallyanywhereanymore]

A few years ago, when ships appeared in orbit and artifacts appeared in meadows. The government said next to nothing about them, while the tabloids said every possible thing.

Story of your life - Ted Chiang

[starstruckodysseys]

story of your life is SO fucking good everyone needs to read it this is my truth