excellent read on why Dune took off.
You left one thing out, I think. The film "Lawrence of Arabia" was a huge help, had lots of coattails. Enough so that Dune was accused of being a rip-off.
Greg Tiney,
Yes LOTR got a boost from D&D. You deny that? LOTR was big without D&D, but lots and lots of D&D players - I am not claiming a majority of said players - read LOTR because of D&D, not the other way around.
For that matter, I read LOTR because way back in the day SPI announced it was creating a wargame based on the War of the Ring. I had attempted the trilogy before, but ground to a halt in book one. But if there was fodder for an actual wargame, I decided that there must be something actually HAPPENING in there somewhere, so I took another try and persevreed.
I re-read the trilogy every decade of so to this day.
Every little bit helps build up cultural steam.
]]>Dune
I read that one in 1976 or so. I was mildly impressed, but never had the desire to read it again. No desire at all to pick up any of the sequels or spinoffs.
Lord of the Rings
I read those about the same time. By halfway through the first volume I only kept going because I hate to not finish any book I paid for, but it was a chore to slog through the endless meaningless diversions and space-filling fluff long after I had lost interest. I would like to say I lit a fire and sacrificed the books to Ba'al, they probably got traded off somewhere.
]]>Basically every 5 to 10 years a new cultural generation of adolescents (and 20 somethings and so on) arises and needs to find books which speak to their own problems and issues to do with being an adolescent (or 20 or 30 something and so on). These books that succeed in this are often the ones that are remembered and re-read later in life, even if they no longer speak to the new generation of youth.
Therefore the next big thing is less "do unicorns take over from vampires" and more "Who has written a teenage angst novel that fits the current crop of teenagers?"
So with Twilight we get a naff story and writing and so on but it fits with what the teenagers want/ need; it's not definitely the next big thing, but in reality there's been vampires before and since, rather it fits a perennial need, and what actually happens in both the industry and discussion of it is that a lot of people mistake an idea/ world which meets the teenage need for books which they feel speak to them alone, for something that is actually the next big theme.
Hmm, my brain isn't working very well, I'm saying there's two things going on, one a generational need for books to suit them, and the fashionable change from vampires to unicorns in popular culture, to make up an example.
Which makes discussion of the next big thing rather more complicated.
Africans in places where there is little infrastructure have been using cell phone minutes as currency for years now, actually.
http://gigaom.com/2007/05/27/in-africa-money-not-necessary-for-mobile-banking/
Note the date of the article.
]]>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WDR_Fernsehen
with the composer being present, though AFAIR there was a translator involved, so I'm somewhat biased towards the guy being European, but sorry to say, this is pressing somewhat against the puberty version of childhood amnesia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia
Of course, some things stick out, like the aforementioned RPG disaster with 14, AKA "the inn keeper says there is no room left, OK, little Trott, you try to talk him into giving you some room, maybe in the attic, err, question, your magician has any necromancy skills, the inn keeper was just slaughtered by your two barbarian friends..."
Guess the drugs, alcohol included, are not to blame, or in a circumstancial sense, the memories becoming MUCH clearer once we discovered caffeine and nicotine...
]]>http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/FlashGordon
incidentally also a movie also produced by one Dino De Laurentiis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dino_De_Laurentiis
And while we're at it, ol' Dino is responsible for some other movies best watchable with some food and drinks high on the fat, TRPV1 agonists and a lot of caffeine on the Satellite of Love, namely King Kong(1976), the Amityvile ones, Conan, Red Sonja, some Stephen King movies, err, you name it...
Let's just start with the speculations where the Rohirrim get there twisted mentats from...
On LOTR, it's also somewhat tied in with quite some other subcultures, wanna play "Tolkien band names", for starters?
]]>Personally, I didn't particularly like the David Lynch version and loathed the SYFY channel edition (I mean, come on, they designed better guns back in the 16th Century. Come on, you idiot props people, make a decent ornithopter for once!), so I can't say I'm unbiased.
One odd gauge you can use is to google for crys-knife replicas, versus LOTR replica weapons. It's an interesting lesson in relative popularity.
As for the next big thing, I figure that the good goddess Eris keeps that in an envelope tucked into her bosom as she flies about on her black swan. In other words, you don't get to write to write the Next Big Thing. You get lucky.
]]>As for some of the hot-new-trends ... what is the stand-out/central technology that the story characters either refuse to use or completely rely on in the first hit story of a hot genre? Somewhere there's got to be a fit between new/hot technology and the mythos adopted by that youth/teen cohort.
Which brings me to the real reason why vampires are on their way out ... the latest tech usage is 'selfies'. (Unless new smartphone tech can image-capture a vampire ... I've no idea because I've never read nor watched any of the teen glam-angst vampire stuff.)
]]>Brains may well still have an OGRE game on the shelf from his teen years. (Pinkie doubtless spent his doing something more flamboyant.) So it's not at all unreasonable for the idea to be floating around among the Laundry's mad scientists.
They'd need a decent budget, although the lack of one leads to the amusing idea of an unstoppable robotic fighting machine mind installed on the chassis of a low performance plastic SmartCar...
]]>IIRC, you recently discovered why "everyone was tip-toeing away" from where you'd boldly rushed in....
]]>It's too bad the Libertarian die-hards won't listen to rational arguments. Experimentation is always welcome in finance but crypto-currencies are going to fail when huge blockchains start crashing their transaction processing systems.
Oh BTW, Bitcoin and HYIP frauds are now preying on each other: http://alfidicapitalblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-intersection-of-hyip-and-bitcoin.html That is the ultimate in hilarity.
]]>Yea, they can make their shows turn around that quickly. The cost? Hit-or-miss -- you like some, you hate others.
They are the only people doing this, currently, that I know of. So it's certainly not common.
]]>Bit coin volatility is due to the small number of venues using it, and its uncertain legal status. As more vendors accept it and its legality becomes clearer, it becomes less volatile.
The idea that bit coin is deflationary in any significant sense is based in the author's assumption that it is the only currency in use in an economy, like a government monopoly currency. But it is only one of many crypto currencies and it is not administered by a state monopoly bank or banking cartel.
]]>