Half Life / Half Life 2 story telling

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-narrative-had-to-be-baked-into-the-corridors-marc-laidlaw-on-writing-half-life

he was a rationalist rather than a populist - oppressing with appeals to reason, not emotion.

(this is not directly important to the story or the game or the article but the sentence itself is amazing)

[Marc] Laidlaw had the dev team explain the stories they were trying to tell, and helped them solve narrative problems through level design. “Lots of traps and detours and obstacles and occasional moments of breakthrough,” he says. “Really good level design tells its own story. You don’t need NPCs popping up to tell you what to do if your visual grammar is clear enough. Then when characters do pop up, they can say lines of dialogue that make them feel like characters instead of signposts.”

Carys Davies - "West"

A strange telling of a man leaving his young daughter behind to find the great beasts he knows for sure have been roaming the world once.


Dragging Elsie halfway across the world so she could die in an unfamiliar place? Should he have stayed in England, in the narrow lanes and what now seemed like the miniature hills of his youth, everything small and dark and cramped and a feeling inside himself that he would burst if he did not escape? Even then, a little of that prickling feeling, the vertigo; a longing for what he'd never seen and didn't know.

Don DeLillo - "Zero K"

Stopped reading it after 33%. Could not care.

Pauline Réage - "Story of O"

Bing Cosby on speed reading

(not something in years past I thought I would've enjoy reading)

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/16/how-to-read-faster-bill-cosby/


Bill Cosby may be best-known as the beloved personality behind his eponymous TV show, but he earned his doctorate in education and has been involved in several projects teaching the essential techniques of effective reading, including a PBS series on reading skills. In an essay unambiguously titled “How to Read Faster,” published in the same wonderful 1985 anthology How to Use the Power of the Printed Word (UK; public library) that gave us Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 timeless rules of writing, Cosby offers his three proven strategies for reading faster. Apart from their evergreen application to the printed word, it’s particularly interesting to consider how these rules might translate to the digital screen, where structural factors like scrolling, pagination, hyperlinks, and adjustable font sizes make the text and the reading experience at once more fluid and more rigid.



1. Preview — If It’s Long and Hard

Previewing is especially useful for getting a general idea of heavy reading like long magazine or newspaper articles, business reports, and nonfiction books.

It can give you as much as half the comprehension in as little as one tenth the time. For example, you should be able to preview eight or ten 100-page reports in an hour. After previewing, you’ll be able to decide which reports (or which parts of which reports) are worth a closer look.

Here’s how to preview: Read the entire first two paragraphs of whatever you’ve chosen. Next read only the first sentence of each successive paragraph. Then read the entire last two paragraphs.

Previewing doesn’t give you all the details. But it does keep you from spending time on things you don’t really want — or need — to read.

Notice that previewing gives you a quick, overall view of long, unfamiliar material. For short, light reading, there’s a better technique.

2. Skim — If It’s Short and Simple

Skimming is a good way to get a general idea of light reading such as popular magazines or the sports and entertainment sections of the paper.

You should be able to skim a weekly popular magazine or the second section of your daily paper in less than half the time it takes you to read it now.

Skimming is also a great way to review material you’ve read before.

Here’s how to skim: Think of your eyes as magnets. Force them to move fast. Sweep them across each and every line of type. Pick up only a few key words in each line.

Everybody skims differently.

You and I may not pick up exactly the same words when we skim the same piece, but we’ll both get a pretty similar idea of what it’s all about.

To show you how it works, I circled the words I picked out when I skimmed the following story. Try it. It shouldn’t take you more than ten seconds.



Skimming can give you a very good idea of this story in about half the words, and in less than half the time it’d take to read every word.

So far, you’ve seen that previewing and skimming can give you a general idea about content — fast. But neither technique can promise more than 50 percent comprehension, because you aren’t reading all the words. (Nobody gets something for nothing in the reading game.)

To read faster and understand most, if not all, of what you read, you need to know a third technique.

3. Cluster — to Increase Speed AND Comprehension

Most of us learn to read by looking at each word in a sentence — one at a time.

Like this:

My — brother — Russell — thinks — monsters…

You probably still read this way sometimes, especially when the words are difficult. Or when the words have an extraspecial meaning, as in a poem, a Shakespeare play or a contract. And that’s okay.

But word-by-word reading is a rotten way to read faster. It actually cuts down on your speed.

Clustering trains you to look at groups of words instead of one at a time, and it increases your speed enormously. For most of us, clustering is a totally different way of seeing what we read.

Here’s how to cluster: Train your eyes to see all the words in clusters of up to three or four words at a glance.

Here’s how I’d cluster the story we just skimmed:



Learning to read clusters is not something your eyes do naturally. It takes constant practice.

Here’s how to go about it: Pick something light to read. Read it as fast as you can. Concentrate on seeing three to four words at once rather than one word at a time. Then reread the piece at your normal speed to see what you missed the first time.

Try a second piece. First cluster, then reread to see what you missed in this one.

When you can read in clusters without missing much the first time, your speed has increased. Practice fifteen minutes every day and you might pick up the technique in a week or so. (But don’t be disappointed if it takes longer. Clustering everything takes time and practice.

Kristen Iskandrian - "The Inheritors" (in Tin Magazine)

I like being sad, which mystified her; I like it until I reach the nadir where sadness changes, as if chemically, to repulsion and selfloathing, making me wish tht I was "capable" of "handling" things instead of turning away from them in disgust until my disgust disgusts me, and my anger at my inadeuacy as a human being angers me, and all of that pure, easy, delectable sorrow gets squandered. She refused, cheerfully, to understand this, and it wasn't her refusal that was maddening but her cheer.

Nice story. No real ending, but in the pondering way that makes you stare ahead for a while, a story with enough threads to try to continue weaving, but you notice that all the plucking might make the original come loose.

Alice Munro - "Dolly" (in Tin Magazine)

What had happened to me was not uncommon, I thought.  Not in books or in life.  There should be, there must be, some well-worn way of dealing with it.  Walking like this, of course.  But you have to stop, even in a town this size, you have to stop, for cars and red lights.  Also, there were people going round in such clumsy ways, stopping and starting, and schoolchildren, like the ones I used to keep in order - so many of them, and so idiotic, with their yelps and yells and the redundancy, the sheer unnecessity of their existence.  Everywhere an insult in your face.  This is life, everything proclaimed.

Must figure out how she writes, for it's not obvious yet beautiful.

Amy Hempel - "A Full-Service Shelter" (in Tin Magazine)

Not sure I read it before, but a good read showing how a very simple structure ("They know us...", "they know me...") can be used and developed without becoming boring.

Plus, of course, Amy Hempel's insanely good writing.

Read in the Tin Magazine.