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How J.J. Abrams Created a Reading Experience Unlike Any Other

ceros.com

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Re: How J.J. Abrams Created a Reading Experience Unlike Any Other

#51

Post by Xoros »

brandur wrote: post #26
Xoros wrote: post #12

Had anyone read The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski ? A book in a book in a book. I feel some similarities with this one.

I've read it. I liked the premise for The House of Leaves and really _wanted_ to like the book, but to be honest, the whole experience felt a little gimmicky to me. I got to parts that were obnoxiously annoying to read (e.g. the shrinking tunnel), and the story didn't really feel worth it. S. has some of this too (the handwriting in the columns takes time to make out), but because the quality of narrative and the ove…

Well it's a little bit hard at moments when you have to read notes that are longer then the current page, and when you already read stuff form Stephen King or P.K.Dick, the story is not very original, but I really liked the concept.

I haven't yet read S, I'll give it a try.

Re: How J.J. Abrams Created a Reading Experience Unlike Any Other

#54

Post by jdlshore »

omaranto wrote: post #48

I take it this website did display text for other people. I wonder what it said... I only got a series of alternating dark and light grey rectangles to scroll through, without any text. Thinking maybe there was a problem with the CSS and the text was there but not visible, I pressed ctrl-A ctrl-C to copy all the text and pasted it into an editor: I only got the header and footer, there really was no article!

Same here, using Firefox. Worked fine in Chrome. The site's a bit overwrought.

Re: How J.J. Abrams Created a Reading Experience Unlike Any Other

#55

Post by jclulow »

colordrops wrote: post #40

J.J. Abrams is self-important and overrated. His works are predictable and uninspiring. He has become a name to attach to anything slightly fantasy or sci-fi oriented in Hollywood regardless of how much actual work he has put into the project. He's trying to be the next Spielberg but he's just a pale shadow. I don't like being so negative but he's pulled the wool over too many eyes.

Is it possible, just maybe, that at least _some_ people who enjoy his work are adults who can decide for themselves what they like, and aren't the victims of some elaborate confidence trick?

Re: How J.J. Abrams Created a Reading Experience Unlike Any Other

#56

Post by LukeShu »

jdlshore wrote: post #54
omaranto wrote: post #48

I take it this website did display text for other people. I wonder what it said... I only got a series of alternating dark and light grey rectangles to scroll through, without any text. Thinking maybe there was a problem with the CSS and the text was there but not visible, I pressed ctrl-A ctrl-C to copy all the text and pasted it into an editor: I only got the header and footer, there really was no article!

Same here, using Firefox. Worked fine in Chrome. The site's a bit overwrought.

To add a datapoint: it worked fine for me in Firefox (well, Iceweasel) 53, once I told NoScript to allow ceros.com.

Re: How J.J. Abrams Created a Reading Experience Unlike Any Other

#57

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

lvoudour wrote: post #14
EpicEng wrote: post #2

Fancy site... too bad it takes 30 seconds to load. I almost jumped ship.

I didn't believe it so I timed it. Took 15s for me, which is still absurd given the fact that civ 5 takes about the same time to generate a new game. Fancy or not it's just a website. I'm not an expert on the subject (web dev) so could someone explain why more and more websites have significant load times when all they do is load a few images and text? Is it a server issue, a dev issue or a browser issue?(pretty sure…

There are many reasons that are understandable, such as most media companies having to use multiple trackers to squeeze as much money out of their inventory as possible (ad javascripts take most of the loading time). I think these are shitty but still understandable.

But in this case, this is just a hipster website. The slow loading time is purely coming from the content. When NYT first did "Snowfall", people were trying to grasp onto anything that "might be the future of journalism", so that "rich format" took off for a while, but now people know better, these rich format articles have terrible ROI because creating them is really hard and not scalable, and in many cases it wastes a lot of traffic, and last and most importantly, readers couldn't care less about this "rich format" journalism. It's just the journalism people circle jerking about how "beautiful" it is.

Which is why this format mostly disappeared. That said, I have never seen anything THIS bad. I am leaving all these comments here because I am genuinely annoyed that they messed up the reading experience on a topic I was actually interested in reading, so bad that I decided not to read it.

Re: How J.J. Abrams Created a Reading Experience Unlike Any Other

#58

Post by Eric_WVGG »

Xoros wrote: post #12

Had anyone read The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski ? A book in a book in a book. I feel some similarities with this one.

Very similar, though I would say House of Leaves is a vastly better book.

S. is a fun conversation piece, but… it's not a great book. The "base" book is amusing enough, mostly as an exercise in the sort of adventure novel that peaked with Heart of Darkness and mid-century magical realism vis a vis Borges. The metafictional in-the-margins story is just a mess.

Re: How J.J. Abrams Created a Reading Experience Unlike Any Other

#59

Post by LukeShu »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #34

Is it just me or did anyone feel like this website was trying too hard to "create a reading experience unlike any other" of their own? It's like a no-name comedian introducing a world-star comedian for tonight's show, and trying to one-up him (and miserably failing) They had one job: convey the story of how "J.J abrams created a reading experience unlike any other"? They failed, because I got motion sick and just clo…

> "They had one job: convey the story of how ..."

It seems to me that that wasn't actually their job; that their job really was: Convince marketers that they are doing a good job of conveying the story of how J.J. Abrams created...

Ceros is "Interactive Content Marketing Software." Whether or not they actually do a good job of marketing "S." is irrelevant; they just need to convince would-be marketers that Ceros did a good job of marketing "S.", and that the marketers should pay for a similar treatment of their own product.

When convincing someone that you are doing something well, it helps to actually do it well, but it isn't a prerequisite.

Re: How J.J. Abrams Created a Reading Experience Unlike Any Other

#60

Post by wwalser »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #34

Is it just me or did anyone feel like this website was trying too hard to "create a reading experience unlike any other" of their own? It's like a no-name comedian introducing a world-star comedian for tonight's show, and trying to one-up him (and miserably failing) They had one job: convey the story of how "J.J abrams created a reading experience unlike any other"? They failed, because I got motion sick and just clo…

This is content marketing for ceros.com. Their job was to build a compelling experience so that other people telling stories online want to use Ceros.
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