Social-Creature

According to the Mayan calendar — as translated by new-age hippies I used to know, and depicted by Roland Emmerich — the year 2012 is alleged to herald the apocalypse. Perhaps this collective unconscious sense of mass destruction is what’s driving the popularity of turn-of-the-millennium musings about the end of the world. In June 2008, [...]

On September 8,2011, Nike announced they would be releasing a limited number of pairs of a new product. As the shoe’s official site explains: In 1989, Nike designer Tinker Hatfield was asked to design a shoe for the second chapter in the Back to the Future series. He created the power-lacing, self-illuminating, Nike MAG. Riding [...]

Jocelyn Marsh wearing headdress by Tiffa Novoa. Image: Brion Topolski, 2005 Right now all across America there is a feather shortage. In April, The Billings Gazette reported: Jewelry-makers and hairstylists have been snatching up the premium chicken feathers used in standby trout-fly patterns, creating a sudden run on a market that’s ill-prepared for significant fluctuations [...]

Image: Culture Wins Charlie Sheen is not crazy. Or, at least, he’s not crazy the way you think he is. Charlie Sheen may finally be admitting that he’s lost his mind — exclusively to Life&Style, of all places, if we are to believe it — but that’s something that would have already been a long, [...]

Last year, I wrote a post called “Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience.” In October, the post became the basis for a panel discussion event at the FutureM conference in Boston with me, Marta Kagan and Jan Libby. I have updated the deck from that panel, and am sharing here for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!

Image: Jordan Chesney I wrote a post recently about how Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience, which included the example of Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, Imperial Bedrooms, the 25-years-later sequel to his debut, Less Than Zero, which creates a sort of closed-circuit loop by bringing both the original novel as well as the 1987 [...]

You know those movies about characters trail-blazing the business of some terrible vice? They’re always set in a not-too-distant past, have trailers full of period-specific songs, and include the words “inspired by a true story” on the poster. There’s the initial meteoric rise to power and wealth, followed by a period of unbridled excess — [...]

A year ago I wrote a piece called “Your Lifestyle Is An Alternate Reality Game.” An ARG, for short, is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions. Lifestyle, I suggested, with [...]

Do you like Reggaeton? This was a question an old friend asked me while visiting in L.A. We’re both from Boston, where most people have never heard of Reggaeton. And I hadn’t either, until I moved to Southern California. If you don’t know what Reggaeton is, it’s: A form of urban music that became popular [...]

Just saw the trailer for the latest Bret Easton Ellis adaptation: The Informers – Check it (if you’re seeing this in a reader, click HERE to see the video). Ellis is one of my favorite writers. There’s a lot of people out there who enjoy his writing in a disturbingly literal way (particularly the people [...]