Week 1 Mars: Canal Crazies

Mistranslations can be forgivable.  We still manage to have it happen often in the present day.  Today, however, our means of communication are much faster, and so we can correct ourselves/ be corrected by others much earlier than before.  This wasn't the case in the late 1800's when an Italian astronomer believed he had found naturally formed waterways on the surface of Mars.  What was written was the word "canali," and it had been mistranslated into "canals" in the early 1900's, suggesting that these waterways were man-made.  Luckily it only took a few decades to spot this mistranslation.

We all know today thanks to the many different satellites and rovers we have sent towards the red rock that the only water on its surface is the ice caps on its poles.  All that dots the planet is craters and cracks.  Maybe one day humans would be able to make some canals on the planet, but that could take decades of terraforming, a technology and process we have yet to figure out step 1 in.

Week 1: Database Highlights

I can be a bit obsessive sometimes.  For seven years of my life, all my focus and fandom was on a buildable action figure line by Lego.  It was called Bionicle, and it was the only thing I knew about during that period of my life.  While all the other kids would be playing with the new toys that came out with the latest Star Wars prequel, swinging their plastic lightsabers at each other, I was creating [admittedly terrible-looking] characters with what adults at the time considered to be "not real Lego."  I didn't care what others thought of my obsession.  I had fun with it.  This world of robots living in a tribal island, fighting off an evil darkness was intriguing to say the least.

Eventually I got older and moved on to my next craze: video games.  I had tried them before and didn't care much for them, but suddenly, playing Guitar Hero III at a friend's house ignited my interest.  I quickly transitioned into playing Marvel: Ultimate Alliance which introduced me to comics, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed brought me in to a franchise I had ignored for so many years.

As I grew older I played more games, read more comics, and so on.  I dove into more mature stories like Mass Effect and Saga, loving the worlds that these stories to place in.  This is where my obsessions lie today: discovering new worlds and stories.  My focus is no longer on one specific piece of fiction.  I'm always on the lookout for new ones.

About

I'm a guy that loves a good story.  To me, what makes a good story, especially an engaging one, is believable characters.  If you craft a character that an audience can empathize with, one that they feel they could easily have a conversation with about that character's personal history, their beliefs and where those came from, if your character can be seen as a person, then you have created someone truly worth following on the journey you have in mind.

Its details like the one above that I adore in writing.  How far one needs to go for even a small piece of a larger puzzle to be well executed.  There are plenty of great examples of these things.  Some video games like Mass Effect or DOOM have the luxury to include a sort of "database" with its world's history or description of its technology, where a film needs to find a way to fit some of that information inside the script.

The most important thing I like to see in storytelling, is people creating exactly what they envision.  The vision may morph and shift and change, but what it most important is that the vision is their own.  Making that vision happen is always an amazing accomplishment.