Just when I think Hitherby Dragons has spun off into total incomprehensibility, back it comes with stuff like this. Awesome.
Category: People
Okay! We have successfully bullied seven people (er, counting me) into agreeing to come see Too Much Light on Sunday at 2:30. I bet you also want to come! I BET YOU DO.
I saw the Neo-Futurists doing their show Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind last Saturday night, courtesy of Unstoppable David Clark. I am going to see them again next weekend, at the 2:30 matinee on either Saturday or Sunday. Tickets are $25-$28 and you, you personally, had damn well better come with me. We can get a 10% discount if we scrape together ten people.
The Neo-Futurists are fucking amazing.
You can find all this out by going to their website, but because other humans are apparently lazy about clicking, here’s what happens: there are five performers and thirty (original) plays. They do, or try to do, all thirty plays in sixty minutes. They’re microplays. You understand why I am smitten.
The thirty plays may happen in any order, because they’re numbered and the troupe will do whatever number they hear the audience yell out as soon as the previous play is over. They also swap out 1d6 plays every night and replace them from a larger pool, so by this Saturday it might be a completely different show from what I saw.
As if this wasn’t enough, there is a seven-item checklist that I personally keep for determining whether or not any given show qualifies as performance art. The list is as follows:
- A person under a black cloth hood doing something ridiculous
- Giant diapers
- Performers dancing in the aisles and trying to get audience members to dance too
- Large pictures of female genitalia
- People eating money
- A man rubbing his nipples with an expression of fiendish glee
- The throwing of raw meat
And I shit you not, the version of the show I saw included six of those seven items. And it worked, because they were completely self-aware and loved it and laughed at themselves. They made metahumor work on stage. This is a feat akin to picking up litter with the pointy part of the Chrysler Building, and I’d only previously seen it done by the pre-Intel Blue Man Group.
I am completely serious about you coming with me to the show this weekend. Call or email me if you want me to add you to the possible-group roster, and I’ll tell you by Wednesday whether we have enough people. If the show sells out they’ll buy us pizza. I’m serious about that too.
Ian, I wish you could have been there. David Flora, the Neo-Futurists are from Chicago and they do this every week up there, you bastard, why haven’t you seen it yet?
I made myself wait two days to write this up because I didn’t want to rave and gibber and then be embarrassed when the high wore off. I’m raving and gibbering anyway. If you’re in Louisville, you need to come see the show.
What the hell, B button.
Everyone’s a-tizzy about the controller for Nintendo’s next console. By “everyone” I mean “all my friends are nerds.” In case the article I linked is still down, allow me to summarize for you:
- it’s a TV remote
- with a thingy that goes in it
The general reaction is positive. It’s new and different! It’s not the ten thousandth attempt to recreate the Dual Shock! You move the whole controller to move things on screen! (Yes, lovely, and check out the front end. That’s an IR panel. Want to know what happens when you point it straight down?)
My reaction is not positive, and this morning I remembered why: I am one of a rarefied set of humans who have actually played a video game with a remote before. That’s right. There was, for some time, in my living room, a Philips CD-i. I tried to swing a katana with it. I directed a claymation man through an Egyptian sewer. And, though I’m not ungrateful to Bruce for letting us play his video games, the fact of the matter is that its user experience
STOP READING HERE, MOM
sucked a dog’s penis.
Metaphorically.
You didn’t stop reading, did you, Mom? Sorry.
David Flora VERSUS the accordion! I want to see a human trying to play the background part that starts about ten seconds before the end. I imagine him or her sweating, off-kilter, arms flapping as if about to be pushed out of a nest.
Lisa has invented a Euro-Japanese pastry, by which I mean that she learned how to cook nikuman dumplings and then replaced the meat with Nutella.
I am not normally a huge fan of Nutella, but damn. Damn.
No, I mean DAMN.
Saved from an LJ comment feed, because Will asked. I don’t think I’ve ever explained Movie Pong here before.
Movie Pong!
In Movie Pong, which is normally played in groups of three or more, one human names a movie. The human to his or her left names an actor who appeared in that movie, and the next human along names a different movie in which that actor appeared, and the next a different actor who was in the second movie, et cetera. (You can also start with an actor, it’s just simpler to explain this way.) It’s better to play with odd numbers of humans, so that each player has to name both actors and movies.
If you can’t name a movie or actor when you’re up, you can challenge the person who went before you. If he or she can’t name one either, you win and he or she gets a strike; if he or she can, you get a strike. Three strikes you’re out.
If you play Movie Pong with DC, you will lose, but you might learn something. I suspect that Scott is the same way.
Using IMDB is cheating, but permissible for resolving disputes. Using the Oracle of Bacon is always illegal.
A variation I much prefer is Team Movie Pong, in which a group of humans work collectively to try and make a Movie Pong chain from one actor to another. It’s usually easy to do in seven links (Actor 1, movie, actor, movie, actor, movie, actor, movie, Actor 2). The challenge is considered won if the group can do it in five. Doing it in three is considered a mighty feat. Obviously, the more disparate the actors, the grander the accomplishment.
Just Letters: a Flash game that, as Ben said when he linked it, is “like the Internet in microcosm.” It’s difficult to get anything actually spelled out; it’s easiest to find the letters you need to steal in other people’s words, and vice versa. There’s a paper to be written in there about systems and recombinant entropy. Or maybe about memes. I couldn’t finish XORPH DOT COM or NOT ENOUGH VOWELS, but when I started sorting letters by color I had a dozen people helping me within ten seconds.