138 - Brainstorming IX 🖊️📽️
Hey there, !
Writing in other places: Mum, You Were Right on the As I Am Writing Corner - go take a lisen to the podcast while you’re over there!
Did you know: 138 in Chinese is lucky because it sounds like the phrase ‘keep getting lucky’ / ‘keep being fortunate’. There’s your trivia for the day!
Anyway, back to the brainstorming:
Previous posts:
- here (initial idea post),
- here (businesses I want to see that don’t exist yet),
- here (absurd products bought in pairs)
- here (businesses that take advantage of things you don’t use at home) and
- here (stupid businesses that can help you get rich)
- here (businesses for Asian-Australian kids)
- here (new sci-fi concepts)
- here (games - video, tabletop, online)
We’re back, and we’re raring to go to do some brainstorming of film/story ideas - inspired by FreeMovieIdeas on Instagram, as well as the zaniness of Everything Everywhere All At Once!
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The Ultimate Speed Date: every year, one ‘lucky’ man and woman get to be Date King and Queen, being the guests of honour at an annual speed dating festival where they are the only people who get to meet every single participant. But what if they were actually meant…for each other? (holy shit I’m bad at this)
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10 Words: what if you could only use 10 words a day? What would you use them for? The story of a playwright who tries to find investors - who would pay in their allocation of words for a year; what story is good enough to use your words for?
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The Melting: prophecies tell of a time when the mountains would melt and the land would flood again - but when will it happen? A post-apocalyptic tale of a world that has come out of an ice age generations after our own global warming has ruined the planet.
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Hi Uncle: the trials and tribulations of an Asian family that’s trying to keep their head down and lead as boring a life as possible to make sure they don’t stand out, but are thrust into the spotlight when they win the lottery. (jeez okay this is boring try harder). when they start getting pranked at home? when they start receiving death threats from some shitty teenagers? when they get shaken up by the triads? I just want a film that’s like…super boring and they get thrust into a situation they aren’t really ready for, and they pretty much fail except for the support system they never really knew was there helping to save them. (I feel like this has been done before right?)
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Middle Class Hero: the man who constantly seeks adventure and sets up the right situations for it but they always seem to peter out into something really boring. But in the process of seeking out adventure he’s always looking out for something more without seeing that the petering out into something boring was the adventure all along.
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Roll For It: a long-running DM is forced go without D&D after his group splinters (scheduling conflicts, y’know?) and starts to roll for his decisions in life, with wacky consequences. Cue final montage sequence where he goes back to the toxic group and rolls a nat 20 to see if he should keep playing, but leaves anyway because he doesn’t need their approval - he had control of his own life all along (?).
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Promotions: a group of irritated, underpaid supermarket chain employees gripe about their conditions, their pay, and the shitty customers at their newly built supermarket facility in a nearby village. Until one of them gets promoted to manager and realises that everyones just doing it for shits and giggles to torture the employees (the Hot Fuzz twist?).
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A Computer by Any Other Name Would Sound as Sweet: would have to option Isaac Asimov’s story ‘True Love’, but adapted to a more modern world, where an AI can sweep up all the social, digital and online channels of a person to find a true love match, but 1. the computer / AI tries to take over the man’s life using deep fakery, and 2. that the real world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (overloaded sensory information which causes the AI to…uh…melt?).
Let me know if you have any feedback for the newsletter!
✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness - it’s not bad. I’d recommend it if you are a Marvel fan; if not, it might be fun to watch for the horror elements; if not, you can probably skip it - or maybe just watch it for the gorgeous visuals. It’s not a must watch like No Way Home, or Endgame in terms of story, but the multiverse is fantastically envisioned and the CGI is top tier. A conditional recommend :D
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The Suicide Squad (2021) - actually so much better than the original. Still some bumpy moments but it was a fun film - like, it had a lot of humour, it leant into the zaniness and the characters felt realistic in terms of what they wanted and did with their actions. There was definitely a heavy Harley Quinn presence, but that’s fine - she’s their key draw to the film. I wasn’t able to watch it in cinema, but now it’s on Netflix and BINGE so you got no excuse. Highly recommended!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash - y’know, just weird things in software bugs. And. And. And. And. And. It was fixed, but kinda funny that it happened?
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Mechanical Watch – Bartosz Ciechanowski - one of the COOLEST breakdowns of a mechanical watch I’ve ever read - I feel like I could literally build one of these from scratch. It’s amazing the animations and graphics in this article - #goals for storytelling and technical breakdowns. Highly recommend reading this one!!
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Why innovation prizes fail - Works in Progress - did you know the first innovation prize presented was actually not really innovative at all? It was a series of known solutions that were just incredibly difficult to do, so people went and did it with the prize on the line. Fascinating stuff, hey?