Stories I won’t write (but you can)

John Ohno
Student Voices
Published in
113 min readNov 11, 2016

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This is a list of pitches for stories I won’t write. You absolutely may write any of these. The full list (which gets updated occasionally) is here.

  • Our universe suddenly transitions to operating not on physics, but on aristotlean logic. Ravens quickly become black holes, and anyone who changes their mind ceases to exist, since they are a contradiction in the unified and artificially divided ‘now’
  • Some large (double-digit) percentage of people who experience free fall outside of the ionosphere later have an intense revelatory experience. Commercial space tourism companies pop up and produce a steady stream of exceedingly wealthy cult leaders. Governments later begin using this to discredit people they don’t like, sending them free tickets to space knowing that they are likely to come down acting entirely nuts (the way the CIA occasionally doped people with LSD to discredit them during the good old days of MK-ULTRA). Some of the cult leaders get their act together enough to organize and oppose space travel.
  • McLuhan had a theory of hot and cool media. The distinction is that hot media tells you what to think (and is therefore non-interactive) whereas cool media means nothing until you think about it (and therefore requires effort on the part of the consumer). McLuhan believed that cool media cools down political unrest by giving a built-in release valve for the need to engage in action, whereas he thought hot media countered apathy. Story: The BBC (who broadcasts in a wide variety of places) has a…

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John Ohno
Student Voices

Resident hypertext crank. Author of Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software. http://www.lord-enki.net