Category: Writing

The Law of Meta

September 27, 2006 /

To do meta well, you must first do well the thing within. Checkerboard Nightmare did metahumor and it worked, because Kris Straub was already a skilled humorist; by contrast, almost all webcomics attempt it within their first couple of weeks and fail, because their creators haven’t developed any skill at comedy. So you can see why I’m worried about Studio 60.

Not that Aaron Sorkin’s not a funny writer–with Mitch Hurwitz out, he’s the funniest writer on network television–but he’s not a sketch writer. Sketch comedy is hard, and even harder to do consistently. The best writers in the history of the format have had a hit rate of maybe one in five; even in the age of viral video, the only success Saturday Night Live has found on the intertube was a fluke that relied on hip name-dropping and the tired joke of white guys and gangsta poseury. And that’s out of what, three hundred skits a year? William Hung has a better batting average.

Even if Studio 60 focuses mostly on the weekly downtime and not the show proper, eventually it’s going to have to back up its premise that Matt Albie is good at his job. That means showing us a sketch at least every few episodes. Last night they went as far as showing us the cold open, and it was just a joke they made five minutes earlier repeated to music. It was a nice dramatic moment, with the orchestra and the bold statement of purpose. But it wasn’t funny the second time through, or the third, or the tenth.

A special case of the Law of Meta is the Law of Writing A Character Who is a Writer. The law is: don’t. Doing so almost invariably turns into massive self-indulgence and, worse, annoys me. Even Sports Night couldn’t escape that toward the end. And given that Studio 60 is already nicking from SN (homage to Felicity Huffman, fights with Standards and Practices, I understand next episode the power goes out), well, you understand why I’m worried again.

But I want to see the next episode now.

Story Fight!

September 20, 2006 /

Riposte!

Miranda sits at the table and turns the ring over and over. “You should have called me,” she says.

“Of course I called you.” He blinks and frowns. “I called you until your mailbox filled up. I called out the window and I called 911. I called, I–I called you names–“

“Please don’t take that tone,” she says.

“Why not?” he asks coldly. “It’s not as if I can make you upset.”

But Miranda loves him, loves him like chocolate and heat and really good pop songs. She can’t speak. She slaps the table and all the windows blow out.

And it’s a bit of an in-joke, but William’s allegory for my occasional struggles with syndication is unfairly rich.

You can tell it’s not canon because it’s in the past tense

September 6, 2006 /

Spurred by my threat to kill off Marlo and saved from the LJ feed, Ben bends Anacrusis to his will:

Suddenly Millicent started moving again!

“Awwwww” said Cosette, lovingly. She squeezed her sweet adorable fuzzy wuzzy kitten with marble eyes tightly. Millicent purred.

Rob cheered up!

Holly cheered up too!

South settled down!

The Chosen Ones remained awesome!

The Justin finally defeated The Man!

Everyone danced for the next fifty words!

August 25, 2006 /

Oh that’s better.

For the first time in years, I can link people to xorph dot com–just plain Xorph Dot Com–without feeling like I’m showing off my dirty underwear.

August 10, 2006 /

Three years after switching to NewsBruiser, I finally have NFD looking like I wanted it to look all this time but was too lazy to figure out the CSS. Me, not it.

I’ve been writing HTML for over ten years and CSS for over six, just because it wasn’t hard to learn and I could do fun stuff with it, and now I find myself in the position of the guy who makes a living off his hobby. Admittedly, so far this has been largely the tedious bits–like if I spent most of my day trying to shake a little broken flange out of an O-scale model train–but compared to my previous job of shaking out, say, crusty ketchup from a broken bottle, it’s aces.

Other people that write good

August 5, 2006 /

UJ wrote a fantastic response to my “Christ of the Barricades” challenge, and Will wrote a prequel to Beloit, saved here from the LJ feed:

Tarnished as it is, the dirty chrome armour of the Heliocrashers shines as they blast through the wall: Erythrophobia zaps at a guard, but canon says that sonoluminescence doesn’t cause bubble fusion. So she punches him through a wall.

The other ‘crashers are covering her while she sets a charge against the generator’s critical weak point when canon oozes out of a grate and tears Erythrophobia in half. The charge doesn’t detonate because canon says they use fusion to fly, not fight: instead, her top half flies into a duct and her suit’s failing containment does the job just as well.

And then there’s stuff like Sumana’s MC Masala, which… you know about MC Masala, right? And Leonard is getting the kind of rejection letters most of us would kill for, for a story you will (when you get to see it) kill to have come up with.

There’s no unifying characteristic between the amazing writers with whom I associate, no New School or Movement, even though I keep trying to assign one. I guess I’m just going to have to publish all you guys?

Baudrillard would actually get a kick out of this whole thing

July 26, 2006 /

The phrase “Christ of the Barricades” popped into my head this evening and won’t leave. I knew I didn’t invent it, but my usual sources for cultural context nearly failed me–Maria hadn’t heard it, nor had Wikipedia, and Google gave me only one result. That result led me to historian Frank Paul Bowman, who wrote a book in French called Le Christ des barricades in 1987. Yes, in French, and no, it doesn’t appear to be available in translation.

Putting the phrase in French and applying it to 1789-1848 (the book’s subtitle) certainly places it in context, but that only makes me want to read more. Unfortunately, I know from painful experience that academic texts with intriguing titles end up being, too often, boring and labored with odd extended rants about Disneyland. Also I don’t know French. So I’ll probably never read Le Christ des barricades.

But that’s what we have participatory media for, I suppose. What does “Christ of the Barricades” mean to you? In 101 words?

Talk about loaded

July 6, 2006 /

The real basilisk is sometimes called the “Jesus lizard,” but the other basilisk may have been based on the cobra, which has crownlike markings and projectile venom. The enemy of the cobra is, famously, the mongoose; one species of mongoose is the meerkat, which in turn is called the sun angel, and protects villagers from the werewolf devil of the moon.

Mulch, mulch, rumble rumble.

June 5, 2006 /

Argh. For the record, I figured out why everybody reading this via RSS or LJ got the last fifteen entries today–I didn’t close a span tag when I edited the Brick rave, and RSS readers decided that the whole document was now a) different and b) invalid but readable. Sorry.

wheeeEEEEEOOOO

May 17, 2006 /

Will trashes Lyle’s assumptions with another sequel from the LJ comment feed:

“Elaine groans as the dripping ceiling becomes a trickle onto her math homework: melting clouds are not conducive to learning. She hasn’t actually gone to classes in two weeks, though; hasn’t gone outside. She’s afraid of what’s up there. Or what might be up there.

When the wall between her burrow and the next collapses Elaine builds a fort out of borrowed furniture, reads by the weird light of a shard of broken sky. This lasts two days, until Dave asks for his sofa cushions back–and by that time she needs to use the bathroom anyway.

She looks up, gasps:”