A Remarkably Specific List: The Hand Dies First

Today’s installment of a remarkably specific list covers plot lines from popular fiction in which a major character’s imminent demise is foreshadowed by problems with their hands.

• Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore - The sixth novel in the Harry Potter series, The Half Blood Prince, begins with Dumbledore coming to visit Harry on Pivet Drive. Harry notices Dumbledore’s hand is blackened and dead-looking. He asks about it almost immediately, but Dumbledore shrugs it off, saying “I have no time to explain now. It is a thrilling tale, I wish to do it justice.” Harry asks Dumbledore several more times throughout the book, but each time he is rebuffed. At the end of the novel, it is still a mystery. Well, sort of. The biggest mystery at the end of the book is the one of Snape’s allegiance. J.K. Rowling very cleverly unravels the story to make it seem as though Snape is evil, and aligned with Voldemort.  But if this is true, then Dumbledore was wrong about him, and Dumbledore was almost never wrong, particularly when it came to wartime strategizing. So at the end of the Half Blood Prince, if you wanted to get to the bottom of the biggest mystery, all you needed to do was concoct a little thought experiment.  If Snape was good, then the only reason he would ever kill Dumbledore would be on Dumbledore’s own orders. But why would Dumbledore want to be killed? Only if he knew his own death was imminent. And do we have any indications that Dumbledore might be ill?  The hand. Sure enough, near the end of the seventh and final book, it is revealed Dumbledore tried to wear Marvolo Gaunt’s ring, which was protected by a very powerful dark curse. The curse started at his hand and was spreading to the rest of the body when Snape was able to stop it.  But a curse such as this one could never be completely stopped. Dumbledore would be dead within a year, but he would be killed in the manner in which he chooses.

  

• Marty McFly – “Pretty mediocre photographic fakery; they cut off your brother’s hair!” This was Doc Brown’s comment after seeing Marty’s proof that he really was from 1985.  It was a photo of all three McFly kids, and his sister was wearing a sweatshirt that said Class of ’84. Soon, they realize Marty’s Mom is in love with Marty, and it all becomes clear for the Doc. They look at the picture again, and Marty’s brother’s head is now missing. Erased… from existence. The timer has started, and Marty needs to make his parents fall in love before his brother and sister are erased, because Marty himself will be next. It all comes to a head during the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. Marty is playing guitar on stage when some jerk cuts into George and Lorraine’s dance (laughing maniacally, for some reason). Marty’s hand starts to fumble at his guitar, and when he looks at it, he sees it disappearing right in front of his eyes. But of course George mans up, shoves that jerk to the floor, and kisses Lorraine. Marty pops up, narrowly avoiding imminent demise. Interestingly, problems with the same hand also play a role in the plot of Back to the Future Part II. In the original version of 2015, we learn that Marty was always a sucker whenever someone called him “chicken”. He had been goaded into a drag race with Needles (played by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, incidentally), and had crashed into a Rolls Royce, thus ending any hope of a music career. Luckily, Marty learns his lesson in the old west, never races Needles, and presumably goes on to become a huge Rock N Roll star.

  

• Roy Batty – Roy is a Nexus 6 Replicant in the film Blade Runner, which means he is an incredibly advanced robotic humanoid. It also means he was programmed to live only four years, in the hopes that he would be unable to develop complex emotions in such a short time period. Roy is perhaps the most obvious entry in this list, because his bodily failure begins with his right hand. In an effort to regain control of his hand, he takes a nail and jabs it through his flesh like some kind of zombie Jesus. At this moment, the audience realizes Roy’s time is quickly running out. At first it seems his last goal in life is to kill Deckard, but once he realizes death is so near, Roy saves him instead. Roy uses his final moments to wax poetically on life and death, saying “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe: Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

  

• Captain John H. Miller – Tom Hanks’s hand shakes in the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan because he is not an invincible war hero. He’s just a regular guy, a high school English teacher, thrust into war, trying to do the best job he can. He’s not John Wayne and he’s certainly not Superman.  He is, on the contrary, extraordinarily mortal. And this makes his character all the more heroic. This is also why the casting of Hanks is so perfect. Unlike Vin Diesel, who would use this film to propel himself into action stardom, Tom Hanks is the anti-action-star. He is the Jimmy Stewart everyman, and he makes us fellow non-action-stars ask ourselves: if we were in that position, could we do it? Speaking of Diesel, Saving Private Ryan featured a huge number of actors in small parts who would later find much success on the big and small screens including: Nathan Fillion (Firefly), Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad), Barry Pepper (True Grit), Jeremy Davies (Lost), Paul Giamatti (American Splendor), Ryan Hurst (Sons of Anarchy), not to mention established actors like Dennis Farina, Giovanni Ribisi, Matt Damon, Ed Burns, Tom Sizemore, and Ted Danson. Ted Danson plays a character named Capt. Hamill, whose name, along with the line “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”, are references to films of Spielberg’s good friend George Lucas.  These films lead us to the last character on this list…

  

• Darth Vader – Although Vader loses his hand immediately before his demise, I’m including him on this list as an exception to the rule. The loss of his hand does not foreshadow or lead to his demise, but it does the opposite: it nearly saves his life. The scene takes place in the final moments of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Luke is trying not to engage his father in a light sabers, but when Vader threatens Leia, Luke fights back with a fury. He slashes at a fallen Vader, cutting his hand off at the wrist. Vader is finally vulnerable, and it’s Luke’s chance to kill him. But Luke looks at Vader’s stub of an arm and then he looks at his own mechanical hand. He had lost his cool, he had stooped to Vader’s level, and he was through fighting. Vader is spared due to the sympathy gained from a missing hand. He is the anti-Dumbledore-McFly-Miller.

  

A Remarkably Specific List: Companies Inspired by the Activities of Online Communities

This remarkably specific list contains several companies whose founders were smart enough to notice the activities of a certain online community and recognize the potential for a new business. Sometimes the most difficult part of entrepreneurship is recognizing a need when you see one, and all of these founders were able to recognize a very specific one.

This list is definitely not comprehensive. There are probably hundreds of successful businesses that have started this way, and this list is merely a start to the conversation.

In no particular order:

• Threadless. The first chapter of Jake Nickell’s book on the founding of Threadless is called “The Accidental Business”. In it, he explains how he was part of a small online design scene, experimenting with computers, code, and art. He posted often on the forums on dreamless.org.  One day, the New Media Underground Festival held a competition on the boards to design a t-shirt for the fest. Jake won the contest, and had an idea. In an IM conversation, he told his friend Jacob DeHart about the idea: start an ongoing competition for t-shirt designers where the best designs would be printed and available for sale. The first competition was posted on the Dreamless forums, and it quickly evolved into an independent business. Threadless was founded in 2000. The term “crowdsourcing” wouldn’t even be coined until six years later.
• DailyBooth. Jon Wheatley, one of the founders of DailyBooth, tells the fascinating history behind the startup in one long, excellent blog post. In it, he details his specific inspiration for the site.  Back in 2007, the internet became fascinated by a series of videos uploaded to YouTube in which a person will take a single photograph of themselves every day for several years. They edit the photos together into a video, add some cool music, and the end result is a visual evolution of a single identity. The most famous example of this is probably Noah.  Jon thinks these videos are great, and he thinks more people would want to jump on this trend, if only they had a tool to ease the process. DailyBooth is born. The main idea behind DailyBooth remains the same, but with the parallel success of Twitter, it is now more popularly described as Twitter with images instead of 140 characters, rather than a tool to collect pictures and combine them into a video. As a sidenote, online communities were particularly important to the founding of DailyBooth, as that is where the founders first met.
• Flippa and 99Designs. Sitepoint launched in 1999, and its content has become an important resource for web designers and developers. The Sitepoint forums are humming with activity. It is especially interesting to see how closely the founders of Sitepoint have monitored their forums, and how quickly they can recognize a business opportunity when they see one.  When they noticed that their users were downloading and printing their content, they began publishing books. When they noticed that people were using their forums to buy and sell websites and domains, they set up Sitepoint Marketplace, which was eventually spun off as Flippa.com. The story of 99designs begins much the same way as Threadless.  The Sitepoint forum users were throwing impromptu competitions to see who was the best logo designer. Someone would create a fake project, 20 or 30 designers would enter, and a winner would be crowned. This went on for a while until someone who actually need a real logo offered to create a competition, and pay the winner $100. Sitepoint started charging users $20 to post a project in the forums, and in 2007, they spun that section off as 99Designs. Earlier this year, 99Designs announced the first outside investment in any of the Sitepoint properties, for $35 million.
• Imgur. Two and a half years ago MrGrim was a reddit user like any other.  Reddit sends massive amounts of traffic across usually to simple, funny pictures.  MrGrim and the rest of the community were tired of photobucket and imageshack. They were tired of bandwidth limits and being forced to compress their files. So MrGrim built a solution: an image host that required none of those restrictions while adding simple things like crop, resize, and rotate. He posted about his new hosting service, Imgur, and that post went on to win reddit’s Best Submission of the Year 2009.  In 2011, reddit is even more popular and it seems like almost every single image post on links to Imgur. As of this writing, Imgur is getting 6,320,064,355 image views per month.

• Concept art where the concept is “Surprise! I’m a monster!”
• Harrison Ford character names
• The hand dies first

A Remarkably Specific List: Surprise, I’m a Monster!

I’m a big fan of beautiful concept art. Some of the best concept art in the world is being produced, for free, within the forums of ConceptArt.org. If you want to hone your skills as a creature concept artist, consider entering the Creature of the Week contest. I was recently perusing the list of Creature of the Week winners and I started to notice a pattern. And then I noticed the pattern in other places, such as t-shirt designs on Threadless.

This version of a Remarkably Specific List contains art featuring creatures who are, aboveground (or above water), seemingly inviting or harmless and at the same time terrible, terrible monsters just below the surface.

[Sidenote: This is in no way a commentary on each artists' originality. As far as I know, they each came up with their ideas independently. Even if they didn't, there's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other work that impresses one's self.]

Mockfish by Peppi

Ye Pirate Muncher by Duddlebug

The Earth Grasshopper by Carlos Cabrera

Angler by Stephan Royer

Icebergs Just Wanna Have Fun by Mathijs Vissers

The Stepping Stone by Brian Cook

Flower Feast by Brian Cook

As I discover more of these images on the internet, I’m going to post them on Wookmark.com using this group:

http://www.wookmark.com/group/572/surprise-i-m-a-monster

Wookmark is a super useful image bookmarking site. They offer embeddable slideshows of their groups, so you can scroll through all of the images in this group using the slideshow below:

A Remarkably Specific List: Harrison Ford Character Names

I have a theory that states: If you are writing a screenplay, and you’re hoping to land Harrison Ford for a part, your odds of getting him increase up to 400% if you name the character Jack or Henry.  Please see the evidence below.

• Henry Jones Jr. – The Kingdom of the Crystall Skull – 2008
• Jack Stanfield – Firewall – 2006
• Jack Ryan – Clear and Present Danger – 1994
• Jack Ryan – Patriot Games – 1992
• Henry Turner – Regarding Henry – 1991
• Henry Jones Jr – The Last Crusade – 1991
• Jack Trainer – Working Girl – 1988
• Henry Jones Jr. – Temple of Doom – 1984
• Henry Jones Jr. – Raiders of the Lost Ark - 1981