Note: This post contains minor spoilers for Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice and Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Jurassic Park. In a 2009 interview, radio personality Ira Glass discussed a two-part method of storytelling, which he described as the combination of an “anecdote” and a “moment of reflection.” Glass…

Summary: The best tools are designed to be ergonomic — to be fitted to people, rather than asking people to fit them. Similarly, as a storyteller, you should design your stories to fit the way people’s minds work. In the 1940s, a psychologist named Paul Morris Fitts led an investigation…

In Character and Viewpoint, author Orson Scott Card explores four factors that have come to be called the “MICE quotient.” They are milieu, idea, character, and event. (1) Milieu is the “landscape, the interior spaces, the surrounding cultures . . . everything from weather to traffic laws.” …

This post originally appeared on natelistrom.com. You can group approaches to augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) into three categories: Wearables Implants Environments In this post, I’ll talk a bit about what each approach is, how they differ, and the challenges and opportunities I see in them. Wearables

This essay was originally posted on natelistrom.com. Summary: When engaging with stories, audiences experience a push and pull between effort and interest. Once you’ve mastered the basics of craft, you can tune the balance to control type of experience you give your audience. Mount Longonot is a volcano in the…

This essay was originally posted on natelistrom.com. Summary: Inciting incidents consist of one or more of three distinct story functions. This essay explains what each function is, how it works, and how I arrived at my current understanding. Bestselling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson talks about the difference between “chef writers”…

Epistemic status: Just the kernel of an idea. Epistemic effort: Been kicking around this kernel of an idea for a while but without really investing in fleshing it out or drawing conclusions. There’s an interesting thing that seems to happen predictably in so-called “creative” fields as technologies become less expensive…

The sound of the foundry pounds all around me. Blasting and burning and breaking and boiling, And twisting and turning and taking and toiling. The bending of steel and the grinding of wheels, And the pushing and the pressing and the stamping and the stressing. The dark and the heat…

By Nate Listrom Years ago, there was a discussion in the online design community about the merits and demerits of using things like filters, drop shadows, gradients, bevel effects, and the like. At the time, CSS3 wasn’t even a thing yet. The discussion was about Photoshop and how to use…