I love to play with my brain, and Messiaen offers a universe of possibilities.
Soccer offers a universe of worldwide dimensions: you follow the transfer market as players pass from Brazil to Russia to China and then back to Birmingham, and it makes our docile, regimented procession from high school to college and then on to the pros look dull.
21st century western Christianity offers a universe at once irrational and boring, a clean and tidy monotheistic metaphysic both unbelievable and uninteresting.
The game's fans tout its scale: NMS offers a universe of planets to explore and lifeforms to catalogue, and it does this with a technique called procedural generation, which uses algorithms to instantly create content that would've previously taken an artist hours to build.
Star Wars had offered a movie universe for its toys to share, but a toy on its own needed another kind of help.
In its casting and its subversive storytelling, its 1942 setting offers a parallel universe wherein not only are the Nazis invading Britain and coldly massacring the Home Guard, but postwar TV battleaxes such as Thora Hird and Patricia Hayes are caught in cinematic amber as plucky young Land Girls vigorously sticking it to the filthy Boche (with axes, bayonets, rifles and household pepper).
Besides Second Life, Linden Lab also offers a "3D universe" called Patterns; the tablet and mobile game Creatorverse; an online creative space called dio; and interactive fiction "experience" called Versu, which "makes the reader a part of a living story".
We've already been treated to a deviously mysterious teaser, which offered a glimpse of the universe that was being created.
Together they offered a representation of this universe radically slanted toward the poetic — "a life abjectly poor in its material condition, and in its spiritual condition, exaltedly religious," in the words of the preface to "Polish Jews".
Google's disorganized Android universe offered a perfect freebie opportunity to carve out an organized, profitable corner.
