Saturday, September 3, 2011

6:00 - Write a blog from the perspective of your favorite fictional character


Hey there, my little blog munchkins. You're so cute out there, reading these words and -

HEY! YOU IN THE BACK! I SAW WHAT YOU DID, AND I ALREADY DID IT TO YOUR MOM LAST NIGHT!

Am I drunk? I am drunk. I am loquaciously drunk. Low Quay Shish. I had to let Blogger spellcheck that for me. You're doing a good job, Blogger. Way to not be a dick, guy.

Don't have long to write this, people to meet, boyfriends to kiss. Oh, don't look at me like that; they're not all my boyfriends. Is my hand on your leg? That's so fun. You're fun! Is that your girlfriend?

The trick is to have confidence. It's like I was telling Scotty - it's not the size of the guy kicking the crap out of you, it's the size of the hickey you left on his mom the night before. There's no situation that can't be helped with a few well-timed yell-

SERIOUSLY! I CAN SEE YOU! IT'S PRETTY UNPLEASANT!

In closing, your mother and I are very proud of you, and hope that someday you'll be a real boy. Possibly (definitely) in my bed.

Drunk now Wallace sleep.

5:00 - What the world would be like if people had gills/wings


So, you (and every other person who ever lived) was born with both gills... and wings. How to maximize your potential here? READ ON, FLYING FISH!

A) You need a super-efficient circulatory system in order to fly with wings (and I assume you want to be able to fly in this scenario). That means you can't half-ass this by being amphibious - it's go gill or go home.

B) That means that you're only fully functional when you're in the water. But those big ol' wings on your back are going to slow you down, making you way less efficient in the water than those atavistic wingless throwbacks. So you're going to be in constant competition for food.

C) In order to fully function, you're going to have to survive long enough to fashion a SCOBA (Self-contained Overwater Breathing Apparatus). Once you've got that full-body, gill-bathing piece of equipment, you'll be able to soar... After you spend an hour above-water waiting for your wings to dry out. So you're going to have to spend a lot of time engineering a watertank for the SCOBA big enough to hold enough breathable water, but that won't weigh you down to much. Maybe recruit the people at the Waterjet Propulsion Laboratories to help.

D) Once you can fly, the world is your oyster, where once oysters were your world! Fly onto land, craft weapons, burn fossil fuels, raise the temperature of the ocean, and boil those dolphin-kissers back below the waves. That's what they get for making fun of you back in fish-person high school.

4:00 - What your life would be like without computers




Which is to say, it would be like a poorly drawn skull and crossbones with inexplicable eyebrows.

Look at those things. But don't try to explicate them. That would be folly.



3:00 - Your favorite Make Believe Game


My favorite game involving make believe is the one I was playing instead of writing this blog on time: improv.

Improv comedy is a battle of the wits, a fight between brains, with intellects rubbing against each other, getting sweaty and sticky and....

Here's the thing. I've said it many times - I love puzzles. And improv is the best puzzle there is. The goal of the game: get a suggestion or idea at random. Build threads of connections based off that one idea, and then find all the strange thematic connections between these threads. And all the time, you're looking for the linchpin of the whole thing, the one strange idea hiding at the center of the web. Because once you find that one specific line, that one thing that distills everything you and your team have been doing for half an hour into it's core, singular idea... The room will explode, no one will be able to stop laughing, and for a moment you'll have united every mind in the room into one unified, hilarious whole.

So yeah. I like improv.

2:00 - How to make the food you eat the most





There is nothing so delicious as efficiency, my friends. And what can be more efficient, a better example of humanity's ability to master foodstuffs into convenient form... than the noble Pizza Roll? (Not to be confused with the Nobel pizza roll, which was designed as a way to quickly clear icy rubble from the back of old freezers).


But how do you get the perfect pizza roll? Do you just drop them, frozen on a plate, and then gnaw at them until your teeth fall off? Or do you throw them into the sun, trusting its radiant majesty to tenderly cook them, and the whims of gravity to return them to you? Maybe you put them in the oven, on some sort of cookie sheet.

Those are all stupid ideas. You're stupid. So stupid.

What you do is array Totino's Treasures (TT) on the plate in the manner of... A STARFISH, the most pizza roll-y of animals.



Specifically, you array 8 rolls on a plate. Cover them with a paper towel to absorb excess moisture (and hide the pizza rolls from prying eyes, as they are a shameful, shameful food). Then, set the microwave at full power to 1:23 (cooking times will vary with differently powered microwaves, so just come over to my house and use mine). Then, take them out of the microwave. Then, put them back in the microwave, and turn it on. Wait for one minute (also, twenty-three seconds).


If the pizza rolls were Pepperoni flavored, eat them. If they were any other flavor, use them to make some sort of art project, I guess. Or give them to a homeless. They eat garbage.



BLOG DONE.

24 HOUR BLOG DAY

Hey guys,

I am taking part in 24-Hour Blog Day today. That means I will write 24 blog entries in the next day! THAT IS CRAZY, RIGHT?

First blog post follows.

Facebook hub for the day's event:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=235951963111296

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Farscape on The Watercooler for Netflix

My friend Sarah does the awesome Tumblr blog/book club thing "The Watercooler for Netflix." Normally, she picks a movie available from Netflix Instant Watch every week, she and her readers watch it, and then discuss it. It's a great idea, and I've really enjoyed reading it in the past.

For the summer, she's trying something different. Instead of movies, she'll be covering TV shows. The shows she's picked, Farscape, Better Off Ted, and Downton Abbey, are all fantastic, so hopefully we'll be able to get a lively discussion going, doing a few episodes a week. Given that Farscape is my favorite sci-fi show of all time, I asked Sarah if it was okay if I reviewed the first season on the Watercooler this summer, and she was gracious enough to say okay.

So, head on over to http://netflixwatercooler.com/ and join the discussion. My goal is to post reviews of two episodes every week, which should get us through the first season just as summer is winding down. If you love the show, or just love good TV, I hope you'll take part - either commenting on my stuff, or, even better, submitting your own. Hope to see you there!

Edit: Fixed the link to the site that was wrong because of dumb.