beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Am attempting homework. Am still getting sidetracked into reading lots of new text.
Dante was depressing. People believed that stuff for literal? How did they dare do anything ever?
Artists did like drawing naked people on fire or up in whirlwinds in hell. Creepy.

Got sidetracked thinking about my space dystopia. Locations. There's three squares in Norwich, outside the Forum, outside Next, and outside Chapelfield. C has a huuuuuuge TV screen up above it, for the Watching You effect. The Forum looks all lovely and modern and glass and metal, and has that sort of mini amphitheatre with the steps, where the elephants were on display. Next, I have decided, is a great name for the job centre. I mean you can call it human resources or the job office or careers or something, but all those imply a possibility of being in a different category, like not a resource or job or career. Next is just, you know, what you do next. Also there's some lovely trees and that statue that's a Really Big Brain. Clearly the Really Big Brain is the sign outside the rehabilitation center, which is for fixing brains. The wall to that is big and white and with pretty flowers on it and a sprinkler system. So not the shops that are actually there. And the side that is a big church needs to be the side of a big train station instead. And probably they shouldn't have MacDonalds or Starbucks per se out in this dystopian future, because you wouldn't want to suggest that specific corporations are supporting the horrible. At least not on the BBC. Which makes the Next idea also a bit awkward, which is no fair because it's also a perfectly good word. But outside of there is also really interesting with steps and levels and some really big trees. Nothing says 'has been here ages' quite like a whole bunch of mature trees.

Cannot show you on Google Streetview because there's no driving in those bits.
Google for ' Norwich Forum ' in images and you get a whole page of very nice images.
This is Chapelfield before they put the big TV on it.
This is after the screen went on.
Neither shows you the little square it's set in, shops on both sides.

This explains the Really Big Brain.
Google for site:www.norwich.gov.uk Norwich Hay Hill
to get a bunch more interesting pictures.

This Norwich flickr photostream has a lot of interesting shiny. And the Elephant and TARDIS.
This is the closest that set gets to the view I'm thinking of, but too far to the right.

This and this are clearly not a spaceship, specially not on on mauve alert, sticking up above the mall for an escape pod.

So if my horrible future looks quite a lot like Norwich now, only cut and pasted a bit, then it will look quite a lot unlike any space future I've seen. But the future isn't new and shiny once you get there, sort of thing. People use it until it looks all public space.

This future would also have a lot of shops and shiny things on display. At first I was all 'but how bad can it be if they have shiny!'. ... er, yeah, bread and circus, velvet glove, a little shiny goes a long way. And if we're talking Elizabethan-with-spaceships then a *lot* of shiny was involved... for the few. Sumptuary laws. So there would be shiny, and you would have to show your ID before you could so much as get inside. And the shops would be labelled according to who was allowed in, so Factory and Office would make sense. The little stall of shiny things outside the Next building would be for selling you tokens so even if you're wearing your clothes from your old status you could buy a shiny that denoted your new version, and so not be confusing for many minutes at all.

Above all of it would be The Dome. It would be really big. Even compared to the Forum. Big giant dome like a sky full of spiderweb. Possibly made of eyes, like if you make lots of circles overlap you get the pointy oval shape, and then put circles in the middle of that, and you could have eyes drawn all over the sky in frosted white, keeping the elements at bay.

Actually filming these things would be a bit complicated, even if the actual places are there and bits would be covered up. For a start we'd either have to net over the whole thing or the future would have a pigeon problem. On other planets. Talk about depressing.

The shiny blank white corridor version of The Bad Future, or the grimy blank dark corridor with metal bits, has been done, and works fine for some areas, and means filming indoors and not needing many sets because it'd be like the entire future was a chain hotel. Possibly the Ibis, where we needed cards to make the lift work.

But the more bits of the here and now get in to the Bad Future the more connected it will feel.

Also, grand civic architecture with display spaces full of art and possibly a bunch of dancers doing a sort of cheerleadery thing gives a whole different feel to empty corridors. I somehow don't buy the corridors as being a whole proper civilisation. So much missing feels like someone would complain.

... or rebel, obviously.