Name That Intro Planetscape

While sitting down to rewatch The Fifth Element with friends last night, I realized that the Intro Planetscape is one of the most common sci-fi tropes that I can think of (even if it has little to do with interfaces.)

That realization in turn made me want to make a Name That Intro Planetscape online quiz. I’d love some help. Do you have a favorite planetscape that appears in the first minutes of a sci-fi film? Tweet a screen cap of it with in the formula:

Hey @MakeItSoTweets, check out this #introplanetscape from the first few minutes of MOVIENAME.

Oh, be sure and attach the high-resolution screen cap, since that’s, you know, the point. When I get about 20 of them I’ll post a page with them all in a quiz format and credit the first people to provide particular ones. Nerd fame?? 3. Profit!

Happy Fifth Element Day!

Ah, OK. I couldn’t help myself, since it’s the 250th pre-anniversary and all. Next up: The Fifth Element review. (I’ll continue the webinar responses in parallel.)

Unpausing

The Make It So blog has been on a bit of a pause while I attended to my new alien overlord (read: kid) (not pictured). But as of this week, I’ll be brining the review of Prometheus to its conclusion with a report card and an email interview with one of the film’s designers! So stay tuned, and thanks for your patience.

Shift in strategies

I realized while writing up the Prometheus interfaces that the strategy I’ve been using for the website is not ideal. The idea was to combine many similar interfaces to make for a good in-depth read on Tuesdays and Thursday. But, it hinders use for actual research on a particular tag.

For instance, if a reader was curious about all interfaces with the “big label” tag and clicked the tag, she should just see a long results page with interfaces that had big labels. But since I’ve been clustering similar interfaces for long reading, she would have to skip over a lot of interfaces that don’t have big labels and try to suss out the ones that do.

Sadly, this isn’t a custom WordPress site, so I can’t do any customization that would help bridge the gap between reading and researching modes. Since the ultimate goal of publishing this material is to allow people to engage in the broad-sample comparisons with which we wrote the book, we’re going to err on the side of research and begin to publish individual interfaces. We’ll try this out for Prometheus to see how it goes, and if it works well, sometime in the new year I’ll go back and fix the blog posts I’ve already made.

Care to contribute?

Have too much spare time, like overthinking things, and think you have the midi-chlorians to contribute to the Make It So database? We’ve just posted an open invitation. Check out the Contribute! link on the left of the site to indulge in the full gauntlet of requirements.