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Grace Huckins
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Professional sports seem pretty strange right now. Baseball players play in front of cardboard trimmed stadiums that don’t blink; Sound engineers manipulate the false noise of the crowd to make everything a little more general for NFL viewers, but none of this can fit Jon Bois’s radical view. In his new online fiction paintings, 20020, the sports journalist imagines a long-term remote football game much stranger than anything noticed on television.
20020 was created on September 28 on SB Nation, the sports site where Bois is editor-in-chief, and has been updated 3 times a week since; The last bankruptcy came out today. The story occupies the year, that is, precisely in 18,000 years, but its characters and parameters are familiar. This is because, in the universe of 20020, everyone mysteriously stopped aging (and therefore dying) 2026 Starting from this premise, Hitale explores what today’s humans can do with an infinite time and without scarcity: what our environment would look like, how we would join each other and where we would place our purpose. thinking about the kinds of football matches we’d play.
Few sports writers would think of publishing science fiction, or would have the ability to make such works a success. Bois is shy in explaining why he had the idea to embark on this task in the first place. “Frankly, as a traditional sports writer, I’m that good,” he says. But what stands out in 20020 is less of a wooden hole than his wonderful creativity and prodigious skills in Google Earth. It tells your stories through a mix of written dialogues, photographs and embedded videos. interactive, like some of the works beyond electronic literature, but make full use of their online medium.
Bois spearheaded his storytelling technique in 17776, the predecessor of 20020, which came out in 2017. At the age of 15,000 in the football store, Bois assumed, humans would expand a pletlet of other types. of matches, all much more excessive than those played more than a hundred yards away. The boxes. And he not only described strange football games or drafted regulations (though he did too), he used Google Earth to create visual constitutions of his imaginary football boxes. a long, thin green rectangle on Google Earth topography. In a dramatic GIF, the herera drop moves from a bird’s eye view of the United States to the mountains of Utah, where a green stripe is visual across the landscape and in the distance. At the other end, Bois imagined what would happen if other people could only own pieces from a football box. He built buildings with the Google Earth polygon tool and put them in Denver’s Mile High Stadium. Residents of the land even have a Bojangles right outside their doors.
GIFs and videos in those spaces are essential multimedia elements in their narrative: they bring those absurd games, literally and figuratively, back to earth and are more than attractive or creative: by 20020, Wood used Google Earth’s simulation of the planet’s rotation to record a magnificent sunrise from UConn’s Husky Stadium.
While Google Earth is a vital component of the 17776 narrative, it is the backbone of 20020. Unlike 17776, he followed a number of other ball games (some of which were not football at all, even through the generous definition of 76), 20020 zooms in a single massive multi-millennia attack, played among 111 school football groups in a box resembling a collecting stick game. Wood built this box by removing each of the school’s royal football boxes from the two finish zones, until it touches an ocean or a foreign border. Overall, the terrain covers more than 130,000 miles, and much of the game consists of long walks across the country (cars are prohibited). With endless time, walking for months to succeed in a hitting line is not a problem.
The story was born from there. After Covid-19 became dangerous, the map became the way for Wood to see the world outside his home. He spent months tracking one of those 111 boxes on Google Earth, looking for stories. , a road or an herbal element, Bois looked up that post in the newspaper archives to see if something attractive had happened there. As one of the characters of 17776 says: “Each square, both positions trampling, that’s where it all happened. “Bois tells one of these stories, from Jesse James’ buried treasure to a far-fetched theory about Cleopatra’s burial in Illinois, by incorporating newspaper clippings from decades or even centuries into his text.
These multimedia inventions actually distinguish 20020 from the largest set of fresh science fiction. “I think it was inventiveness that led other people to percentage,” says Graham MacAree, who published 20020. And those electronic teams are strongly connected to the story, just as the contours of the football box have guided Bois to the search for ancient topics of interest, so those occasions show the football fit it represents. A dramatic moment comes when two characters use an out-of-control exercise to move a football from one team frame to another. another, along a piece of track he saw some other exercise in the race in 1910. However, 20020 is more than the sum of those virtual parts.
The big question 20020 seeks to answer is: what would other people do with infinite time?Wood has controlled to capture the full spectrum of feelings induced through its premise, from the deep terror of unlimited time and area to the undeniable thrill of looking into achieving something simply because it does. Despite the Byzantine absurdity of the football matches he describes, Bois painted a credible edition of what might happen if death disappeared from the equation.
Although it focuses on football, World of Wood characters do all kinds of activities: they do podcasts (about the stupidest football games in the millennial history of the sport), fast video games, play local chess variants and watch Law
They also don’t have to worry about earning a payout check. Bois calls the assignment “a birthday party of unproductiveness and waste of time. “But the way characters spend their time in 20020 is unproductive only through a new economic definition of productivity. On the other hand, most of the characters are incredibly productive: they devote all their time to the well-defined purpose of winning a football match and are on the loose to avoid the game at any time, or they will continue to do so forever, because they will have food in their mouths and a roof over their heads anyway.
Bois highlights his interest in this topic for a long time. “If I had an inspiration,” he says, “it may have been what some of my friends and I called “the old Internet,” the Internet before all the money came in, from the earliest days. “This is the era of GeoCities, where everyone seemed to have their own squeaky website, full of bright, completely individual text. That’s when the world met With Homestar Runner and Salad Fingers. “but also an incredibly compelling technique for creating online content, where everything that serves the story goes to the fore, whatever it means and anything.
Today, of course, the Internet is different. ” Since the Internet started generating money, things published on the Internet are governed by business interests,” MacAree says. “The challenge is not the Internet, it’s just, like artists paid to create something great that other people don’t know is going to succeed. “
In the global world wood created, such a query is debatable. The year 2020 has no concert economy, no jobs; hatred, exclusion and disorder are non-existent. No one is forced to suffer because of poverty, disease or discrimination; each and every individual is on the stage where they are located because they decide to be there, it is a tough antidote to the lack of what many other people feel here and now in the genuine global.
However, Bois’s stories do not forget the tragedies of our present. Bois not only used the Google Earth team to build strange cross-country football fields; it also put New York and parts of the Gulf Coast completely underwater. Monday’s bankruptcy of 20020 began with a symbol of Florida’s few remains, highlighted through a ghostly depiction of the state’s borders by 2020. Below is its design for the 201st century Florida state flag. Array that says in Latin: “We are still here. “
“It’s not paradise,” Wood said, “This is not a reality of choice, it’s at all times how global we’ve created. It’s very unlikely to read 20020 and what we’re doing to our planet lately. And imagining that other people like us will be alive in 18,000 years, Wood makes bets feel much closer to home.
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