I have more ideas than I'll ever use: ideas for movies, inventions, utopias, T-shirts, businesses, and more. I could hoard them, but what would be the point? If you have ideas that you're squandering, send them to me - Rhys Southan - at mrsouth (-at-) gmail (-dot-) com. I'll post them for the world to take... if the world has any use for them.
Maybe this has been done before, but a simple idea for a music video - or maybe just part of a music video - would be to show the band playing a concert; strings shoot out of the band’s instruments and latch onto the audience members’ arms, legs and heads, tugging them into dancing to the beat, revealing the audience members for the automatons they are.
From Mr. Heavenly Blues:
I had an idea to start a casting agency for Hemmingway-look-a-likes or at least Hemmingway-esque. The idea is you could rent them out to sit in new trendy bars to add a level of authenticity to the establishments. They would have to have some interesting stories to tell if necerssary, but mostly would just sit in the dark corner and be paid to drink whisky.
Population growth foes: would you support a device that vanishes random people in overpopulated areas (toward reaching a pre-determined numerical goal) and then erases everyone’s memories of them, and reverts the world to how it would be if they had never been born? Since the mass memory wipe and world reversion would coincide with the vanishing, it would be like the vanished were never born. And fewer people being born is allegedly what overpopulation opponents desire.
Also, so that we wouldn’t live in fear of being disappeared ourselves, the entire world would have its memory wiped of the device after it was approved, so that no one could ever possibly know about it. This way the world’s population would be shrinking but no one would know why, or would even realize that it hadn’t always been that low.
If you would like fewer people to be born, but wouldn’t vote for the institutionalization of this device (coincided by the wiping of your own memory of the existence of this device), why not?
Totally normal, realistic (even boring) movie that has one scene in which, out of nowhere, a cartoon character on a fast food bag comes to life, leans off the bag, and eats a piece of food off someone’s plate. The guy who bought the food accuses his friend of stealing the food, and it turns into a bitter argument. Nothing else unrealistic happens for the rest of the movie.
A musician plays an electronic keyboard like a piano virtuoso. Her audience is riveted — admiring in silence or whispering about how brilliant she is. She becomes so confident in her mastery and her power over the audience that she turns off the keyboard, so that all the audience can hear now is the bumping of keys. At first the audience is intrigued to see where she’s going with this, but as she keeps going on with the key bumping, they get impatient; they shift in their seats, mumble and then walk out, irritated and unimpressed.
The musician can’t understand their dissent - she’s playing no less brilliantly.
I had this idea while taking a hot shower, instead of my usual cold one. For convenience, I’ve already translated it into stand-up speak, even including the gratuitous salty language. On its own, the joke isn’t much, but it might be a good start to a longer routine about hygiene.
“I take cold showers. Ya know why? I just like hot showers too damn much. With cold showers, you just wanna get the fuck out. When I’m taking a hot shower, I keep coming up with excuses to stay in longer. ‘I know my anus isn’t going to get any cleaner. But am I absolutely certain that I washed my scrotum as effectively as I could?’ I don’t use Tilex. I used Tilax. I encourage all that mold and mildew to grow. That way I can ‘accidentally’ lean into that scummy wall, and maybe even wipe my whole body against it a few times, just so I have to start my shower all over.”
From David Askin and brother:
A bank account (probably at a branch in Cambridge, MA or Madison, WI) that pays π% interest. Their marketing slogan (which comes from my brother) would be “Don’t be a square!”
From Michael Bluejay:
So you’ve heard of “practical jokes”. I’ve never really understood what was so “practical” about them. But I started thinking of completely useless pranks, so I figure I might as well call them IMpractical jokes. For example, you make a whole bunch of signs that say WET PAINT and post them throughout the subway. Everyone sees them and thinks there really is wet paint. But it’s actually just the signs, there’s no wet paint at all, so THE JOKE’S ON THEM! Ha ha ha ha! Or not.
Eventually, people will get so desensitized to wet paint signs, they’ll assume they’re a joke and become careless around them. Then the joke will doubly be on them.
I had this bumper sticker idea a while ago, but never got around to posting it. Now it’s totally out of date. Such is the peril of ideas conceived in election cycles:
“McCain: Bush’s 3rd Term (And If He’s Really Good, Bush’s 4th Term Too)”
Instead of answering every question in the order of hands raised, filmmakers or other illustrious types on a stage for a Q&A should have three or four people ask their questions, and then pick the best and answer that one. Or go on an extemporaneous riff that touches on all of them. Then they’d call on three or four more people, and pick the best of that batch as well. And so on, until their half-hour is up.
This would allow filmmakers to skip the boring questions like “How much was the budget?” “How long was the shoot?” and “Did you let the actors improvize?” in favor of the more intriguing questions that might have been overlooked in the swamp of raised hands. It would also accomodate people who have comments rather than questions (“Is there a question in there?” the audience members with actual questions grouse), since the comment wouldn’t need to be responded to at all.
The downside is filmmakers might use it as an excuse to skip over inconvenient questions that they don’t want to answer. But how often are those asked anyway?
A hip hop video that takes place at a Quaker session of silent “unprogrammed worship.” At these meetings, Quakers sit in silence for an hour, unless someone is led by the spirit to stand and share a message. The video would start with everything normal at one of these meetings:
We see shots of devout, conservatively dressed Quakers, silently pondering. Then we cut to a famous hip hop artist, who is also conservatively dressed and silently pondering with the others. We hold on his face for a few moments of his meditation, until he has a sudden revelation; he’s been moved by the spirit. He stands to share. Everyone looks at him politely.
Then he busts into a badass hip hop single. All the usual West Coast hip-hop video standbys - flashing lights, cops, gangstas, women in bikins bouncing a beach ball - descend upon the Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, dancing and grinding and jumping off the walls, though the Quakers hardly bat an eye.
When he finishes the song, his associates disappear, and the room returns to normal, as if it was never disturbed. He nods slightly and sits. The profound silence continues where it left off.
Two teenagers are at the edge of a cliff. Below is a lake. One is about to cliffdive off. The other is too scared. “Come on, live a little!” the brave one chastises the cowardly one. He then dives off and happens to land on a rock sticking out of the lake, splattering. The cowardly one looks down. “Live a little is right!”
Short movie about a six-year-old child who gets in big trouble and/or is wildly praised for doing the things that average adults do on a regular basis.
The movie opens with him taking his mom’s car keys and driving off with the family car, only to be pulled over by the police once he turns onto the highway. His parents are furious, but he makes the local news and is invited to a latenight talk show, where his matter-of-fact recounting of the incident is a huge hit.
The parents forgive him, but not long after, he sneaks into the liquor cabinet, gets drunk, and mouths off in front of a family-gathering, using language no kid is supposed to know. His parents are horrified and ground him, but most of the family members secretly find it to be hilarious.
The kid also somehow knows things that any typical adult would know, which earns him a spot in a gifted class, but gets him in hot water when he reveals more knowledge about sex and death than any kid should have.
He breaks so many age-based laws that eventually he is put on trial… as an adult. He represents himself (quite articulately, for a child) and is found innocent. When he’s released, he’s regarded as a rebel and an unsurpassed genius and goes on a lecture tour.
But as weird and outrageous and controversial and brilliant as everyone thinks this kid is, if he were an adult, none of his behavior would even raise an eyebrow.
Did I hear someone say “holding a mirror up to society”?
Here’s a funny bumper sticker idea from Nicole B.:
i saw a bumper sticker that said “i was against bush before being against bush was cool.” the bumper sticker irritated me because it was dumb. being against bush was always already cool. [editor’s note: I can confirm this, having witnessed/attended a large anti-Bush protest in Austin on his 2001 inauguration day]
so i thought it would be funny to have a bumper sticker that said, “i was against obama before being against obama was cool.” is this funny? i think it’s funny bc like nobody is against obama, and being against him is definitely not cool, which means that it would be more believable than that stupid bumper sticker that i saw today about bush.
I love this sticker, because it sounds like it was either written in a possible future where Obama hate is hip, or it is just making a wildly incorrect assumption that it’s long been trendy to hate Obama (which obviously hasn’t).
I’m trying to come up with a new religion that deals with the problem of non-believers without damning them or going to war against them. Since all religions — though they may have some good insights or advice — are, at their core, irrational, religion only seems plausible when you surround yourself with other people who believe the way you believe. Since your immortality rests on your set of irrational beliefs being true, being around people who have a completely different set of irrational beliefs is discomfiting… at best.
This is why conversion is a vital aspect of most religions. The more people who believe the way you do, the more true it seems to be. And since few like to contemplate the possibility that they are inevitably destined for oblivion (Just Earth? Eww.), people whose different impossible beliefs hold a funhouse mirror to our own impossible beliefs need to be destroyed in some way. Religion is blamed for a good amount of wars in human history, but it’s not the substance of the particular religions that causes conflict, but something inherent to religion as a whole: only one religion (at most) can be right; anyone who doesn’t buy into your fantasy is messing it up for you and all of your fellow believers. They have to be dismissed in some way or another (hell, nothingness, a lower level of heaven, STDs), and sometimes that involves murdering them.
But there has to be a way to create an immortality fantasy for yourself without leaving non-believers to decay.
Judaism kind of does this. It doesn’t actively convert anyone, and it doesn’t automatically damn anyone who isn’t Jewish to a miserable afterlife. Instead, it has The Seven Laws of Noah, rules for non-Jews to follow. The problem is that if you don’t believe in Judaism, why are you going to care about the rules Judaism says you’re supposed to follow as a non-Jew?
If the rules were so lax that any reasonable person could obey them without really trying, that might work, but the ban against idoltry rules out cross-worshipping Christians and anyone who watches E! Entertainment Television. Homosexuality forfeits your immortality claim here, as does eating an animal while it’s still alive (probably not a big deal most of the time, unles you like to eat raw oysters). Using the Lord’s name in vain is against the rules and rule seven, which says that you must have a judicial system that enforces Rules 1 - 6, arguably banishes all of us to non-existence.
So I think there’s still room for a religion that deals with non-believers in a completely neutral way. The only thing I’ve thought of so far is that a religion could be so confident in itself and the rightness of its beliefs, that it dismisses the possibility of a non-believer. There could be people who are unaware of the religion, but to have even heard of the religion is to know it’s true. And no matter what anyone says, or what religion they claim to believe in, they all secretly believe it.
To take this even further, one thing the religion encourages is to loudly repudiate the beliefs of the religion. This is beause it’s so obviouly true, to constantly ridicule and mock the religion can’t put a dent in it. This also further takes care of the problem of non-believers. Since even believers are constantly making fun of their own religion, there is no way to tell a believer and a non-believer apart.
Thus, everyone believes, we all think we’re immortal, and we don’t have to kill each other about it.
