Back from Amsterdam
Well, that was fun.
(If that vivid textual description of our week in Amsterdam fails to sate you, pictures and video will follow shortly.)
Okay so: Some of you may remeber that I am obsessed with thisisnottom, a web site that initially appeared to be a series of insanely hard riddles but has since become a larger multimedia experience. Every week, a mysterious video is posted to a youtube channel called isthistom. The video leads to an address at the thisisnottom.com domain, and then you have to solve a few more riddles.
And then the riddles lead to a snippet of a story about a woman who has escaped some kind of experiment (I think) in which she was able to go on adventures with people including David Foster Wallace (I think). The woman has lost her memory and is apparently counting upon us to help her recover it. I find the story very interesting so far.
If "This Is Not Tom" continues to tell an unfolding story, it begs the question: Can a good novel be hidden inside of riddles? I'm beginning to think so, and while I know that hypertext/online-only novels are nothing new, this feels new to me. And I like it. You?
posted by John Green @ Sunday, March 22, 2009
21 Comments
21 Comments:
Yeah, it sounds cool!
I'm reading your novels for my English class, and they're awesome so far! I recently finished Paper Towns and started An Abundance of Katherines. After that, I'll read Looking for Alaska. I love your books; they're so entertaining and funny! Keep up the amazing work!
sure, if you are good at riddles!
what if you can't figure out a riddle though...do you get stuck on a chapter and never get to put the story together? that'd be horribly frustrating and you'd miss out on a possibly intriguing story. good concept though.
Can novels be hidden inside other random things too? I'm thinking of writing one hidden inside fortune cookies. An epic featuring dragons, warriors and fox spirits, read in a completely random fashion and with chapters two lines long.
On second thought, it sounds a bit like Twitter.
Interactive storytelling can be nice, like those computer games in the adventure game genre with a few puzzles and a lot of story (Dreamfall and Fahrenheit for example). Making the story's progression a reward that you have to work for can certainly help to raise interest. But there is a very fine line to walk somewhere between boring the readers/players with puzzles that are to easy and turning them away with puzzles that are too hard. It is a very interesting idea but as someone mentioned earlier, it would be very unfortionate if you got stuck somewhere and never got to see the end of the story. I'm bad at that kind of riddles, I probably would not even get to see the beginning without cheating.
You need to post pictures from Amsterdam!
I love thisisnottom! :D
Haha, there's going to be an update today, actually, and I'm quite looking forward to it. :)
Regrettably, my riddle solving abilities are surprisingly abysmal- whether due to a genuine deficiency in that department of my brain, or a lack of that drive to pursue and research until finding the answer (without cheating). Thisisnottom pwned me so hard.
I love it when people write in creative ways (you know, even more creative than making up a story and setting it to paper).
I recently signed up for a project called "Skin", in which one woman is attempting to write a short story on people, having each of her volunteers or "words" have one word of the story tattooed on their body. I have planned on getting one tattoo for a while now (just one) and I'm so excited that it will be part of a project like this.
Yay to thisisnottom and yay to "Skin" for keeping an already interesting art form even more exciting and new!
*captcha dictionary
demonat-(n.) A democrat gone flakey.
I love it.
I want to know more about the Matrix-y experiment thing; it seems that she was a test subject, but the line "Did he let me go or did he assume no one would ever leave?" implies, at least to me, that she is somehow different from the other test subjects, that she's retained some of her memory, or at least feels a void, that she's missing *something* whereas the rest were completely brain wiped, -ish, maybe?
And also, who is "he"? The conductor of the experiment? She was given the option of participating?in whatever it is he's doing, and ahhhhh I don't know.
It's exciting.
I tried to get into thisisnottom, but I don't think I had the imagination or the patience to roll with it. It's sounding really epic though...
We may not know who this tom is, but he is certainly made of awesome!
Do you think you'll ever be coming to Toronto??
I have been enjoying tint for the past month or so, and the story is just getting more fascinating each week. I want to know more about experating and about the cubes she escaped from.
This week I especially enjoyed seeing the way a meme could be used to move a story forward.
I really like it. I love it, in fact. And I was talking with Alex today how he wishes more people were involved. I've seen people drop out. And I think they're missing something. I'm really excited for the story. It feels greatly rewarding after banging my head for a few hours on riddles to get to an awesome part of a story.
Thisisnottom is fun, I enjoy being challenged like this. And he's a great writer, if I was an editor I would publish him without hesitation.
Erg! Thisisnottom sounds so amazing, and exactly the kind of thing i would love, except im so bad at riddles, and i cant figure anything out!
someone needs to tell me how to get to the current end. i dont mind getting spoiled, i just wanna see the story unfold.
roar!
I find your blog and tweets quite entertaining and loved Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines so i gave you a Splash award over at my blog: http://yalitgoodbadugly.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/ive-been-splashed/
Hope you're having a great week!
I tried thisisnottom.com, and I worked backwards on the riddles. Since I was stumped, I looked up the answers (cheating, I know) and found their connection to the question. It was not as hard as finding out the riddles by themselves, and I didn't have to bang my head against the wall. Plus, the answers were very complicated and had many components.
thisisnottom.com is my new obsession. Every monday I rush home to get to work on the new set. When I fail, I go straight to the nerdfighters thread to get hints because someone always solves them first.
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