Category: Mild Lunacy
I make a very convincing Nazi
Lisa posted it way first, the how-fast-can-we-make-a-photocomic version (my estimate: five minutes in toto). I am a sneaky person who had the advantage of the original raw files to work with, so here’s mine, an hour and a half of work later:
Raiders of the Lost Ark in Three Panels
(SPOILERS)
Week Combat!
Anacrusis on Week Combat! been has this, record the for.
Story Hacks: Fourth in a Series
Most magazines pay by the word, but sometimes even doubling up on your adverbs won’t help you break that magic-million mark. How else can you fill the pages you’ll need to pay down that Porsche? That, dear wreater, is why Gutenberg invented the dream sequence.
Ooh! Dreeeeam sequence!
Some authors choose to “reverse-engineer”* one of the many sober, objective dream interpretation books on the market. If one wants to symboblize a penis, for example, one could use a snake, a pencil, a toothbrush, a remote control, a key, the letter I, or any of thousands of vaguely cylindrical objects we encounter every day. After all, our formative years were spent around lots of penises! Am I right? I’m right.
Of course, interpretative books with scanty indexing may require significant work to find the right symbiology. As we should know by now, work is the opposite of writing! Instead, google “dream journal” and grab about two things from every result you find. Don’t forget to change the names–unless you forget on purpose!
To help you get started, here are some useful common elements:
- Uncles
- Running but not going anywhere (isn’t that scary? It’s scary!)
- A hunchback
- Your mom
- This one house you went to but now it looks completely different
- Freud seriously said your mom
- Nudity
- People who are also other people
- Freud was like the Tupac of his generation, kids
Once you’re published, your consumers may pay a lot of attention to your dream sequences. If they don’t like what they find there, remind them that it’s just a dream! It doesn’t mean anything! Except hilarity! If they claim that you’re just writing nonsense to pad your word count, point out that it is way deeper than them, and that they just don’t get your symbliography. It’s true.
* Translation: “drive backwards.”
Today’s Hack in a Nutshell: Nothing you can “wrighte” is “wronge!”
Am I the only one who keeps conflating Killers lyrics with Strong Bad lyrics? Like
Cause heaven ain’t close in a place like this
I said heaven ain’t close in a place like this
Bring it back down, bring it back down tonight
Never thought I’d let a rumour ruin my moonlight
Well somebody told me
That you were so stupid
But I didn’t believe them
But now I believe them
or
Coming out of my cage
And I’m doing just fine
Gotta gotta be down
Because IT’S MID-NITE!
(The answer is: yes, I am definitely the only one.)
Oh shit, what if I like Fleetwood Mac?
Update 2223 hrs: Oh, okay, what if I just like Lindsey Buckingham?
Earlier entry explained
Almost my entire extended family on my mom’s side–the Dixons & Company–went to the Ohio Renaissance Festival as a crew of pirates, in full costume and character. There were forty-one of us. Some of the grownups started drinking at nine in the morning. The Dixons don’t actually drink very often, but when we do we are Catholic about it.
They knew we were coming, but I don’t think they were quite prepared.
There was a lot of shouting and ARRing and attempting to sing shanties to which we had managed to learn about one line each. The first of many attempts to break into song came as we crossed under the portcullis to enter the festival proper, and it went like this:
“Well the ship set sail with a lusty crew
ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL
The hmm a grr and rum da dum
ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL
And they all got something mumble barnacles
ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL
ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL
What’s the one about the cabin boy? Let’s sing that one.”
I am not kidding when I say costume and character, either. We all had handmade outfits courtesy of my aunt Lea and my cousin Jerusha, plus jewelry, flintlocks and cutlasses. Sneakers were not permitted. We were the crew and wench-brigade of the Slime Dragon, under command of Cap’n–no, Adm’ral!–Lice. When Queen Elizabeth I made a personal visit that afternoon, she was quite impressed with our display of fealty.
There were vague-but-fervent plots of mutiny and assassination all day, but–just like with real pirates–it’s tough to stay on track with drunk ringleaders. It was like the world’s least-organized LARP. I just tried to keep afresh of the prevailing wind, and I gave some money to the poor stage juggler after he endured a good deal of the crew yelling that wasn’t handling enough blades.
It should be noted that this was not a spontaneous occurrence. In addition to an extraordinary amount of planning and effort by my uncle Jeff’s family, we have a shared pirate-story canon as documented by multiple home movies dating back to the late Sixties. Though those scurvy dogs were also led by a Cap’n Lice, yesterday’s crew was missing several key members and had gained a number of new ones. It also seemed to be rooted in a different time and place. Perhaps this (sea-based) Cap’n Lice was an ancestor of the later lake-based one?
Anybody who wonders why I became a drama major and a role-playing nerd doesn’t have far to look for an explanation. The same goes for my fervent belief in art as commons and shared creativity. And pirates. My family is amazing.
More than anything, really, Sister Act was a disturbing object lesson about the man-worship content of Fifties pop music.