Synchronicity

Mild synchronicity events this week. I went to a breakfast seminar hosted by Anecdote which looked at the use of Narrative Techniques for Knowledge Retention. Quite an interesting seminar, with provided some new concepts for me to investigate (Most Significant Change) and some new books to find (A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink). I'd like to say new books to read, but I suspect it will be skim, given my current backlog of 30 or 40 books (plus 7 or 8 games, plus 4 or 5 TV series, and God knows how many movies). Courtesy of an interview with Arthur Shelly done for the presentation, it provided a great example of the perils of lost knowledge, and the importance of meta-metadata (recording why something important is being done, not just what the important thing is and how to do it).

So it was that with narrative on the brain, I ended up watching a movie called Stranger Than Fiction, which I had wanted to catch while it was playing at the movies, but missed as I was moving house at the time. Now, if you want to see a movie about narrative, you could do a lot worse. The central premise is that a fairly ordinary guy starts to hear a woman's voice narrating his life, and - through a single sentence - changes the course of it. Not the belly-laugh comedy the trailers sell it as, but a quite interesting and entertaining little gem.

It also examines the nature of "story" - that almost all stories are either comedy or tragedy, depending on the outlook of the protagonist, and that powerful stories aren't always the best stories, and vice versa. It also manages to examine a story from the perspective of the writer, the reader AND the main character - simultaneously!

Then, to top it all of, I ended up doing a bit of re-research to remind myself of the (in)significance of the MacGuffin - courtesy of the almost archetypal example of one in Ronin - which I also watched by pure chance over the weekend.