Aquarionics

The context for this was a discussion on the American healthcare system, and how everything this particular person knew about it was based on episodes of Scrubs. The response was a pretty predictable “I’ve never seen this scrubs thing, but if it’s anything like everything else Hollywood put out it’s talking bollocks”. I’m paraphrasing here, but you can see the rough idea. He’d have put comedy dollar signs in the esses in Hollywood if it had any. (Incidentally: Stop doing that. If you’re typing “Micro$oft”, even in rants about how evil they are to free software? I don’t want you on our side. It’s the satirical equivalent of comic sans).

Anyway, I think that comedy is context, pretty much, and in order to have comedy, you need the comedic thing to work the wrong way, but – and this is the key – for the rest of the universe to be predictable. Unless you’re subverting, in which case you’re living on the edge, I salute you, and if you get it right you can have a cookie. The rest of you need teapots:

Because sitcoms generally take an accepted situation and place a surreal
teapot on it to focus the humour. The sureal teapot on a fractal
landscape of spinning vortexes and melting concepts is not inherantly
funny. The sureal teapot on an elephant has a context that it is out of.

In the case of Scrubs, the hospital, patients and outside world are the
frame of reference and thus the audience need to understand and connect
with it, it does not and should not act out of “character”. The characters
and eventual situations (mostly, in Scrubs, the characters) are the teapots.

(Mostly this is here because I’m forever losing bits of text I enjoyed writing in the depths of usenet)

In the UK, you can text GIVE to 70077 and £5 will be added to your phone bill and given to DEC for the Haiti relief appeal.

This number was previously used for Children in Need, then the network operators waived transaction fees for doing this, O2 – who set up the above – have said they are doing that again, I do not have documentation for other networks.

Google is collecting other ways to donate too.

DEC and the Red Cross are good people to donate to for this. There are a number of scams running under the name “Donate to Haiti”. Sometimes humanity sucks.

Okay, only just “Tomorrow”, but I’ve been busy. Dragon Age, as a wise man once said, does not play itself.

The other two short stories in the Mean Streets anthology I mentioned yesterday were Remi Chandler and John Taylor. In the other order, then:

Take Neverwhere. Neverwhere is one of my favourite books in the world, so this is a good start. Take the central conceit – a world parallel to London that is full of weird shit – and literalise it. The Nightside is a hidden world within London town, a classic fantasy subcity of out of time adventurers and out of universe horrors; of evil beyond your mind and technology beyond our ken; a world that normality may occasionally stumble into, but never lasts long within. Then put a PI there, give him a hidden backstory and a genre awareness, season with mixed metaphors, and continue into the future. It’s a darker side of the same concept Neverwhere explored, with back story and structure where Neverwhere had whimsy and flow. Where it occasionally trips over is a need to explain the world around it, though this builds a deeper universe you feel you comprehend. In both cases, you understand the world you’re in as the character does. Oh, and there’s always the rising tide of bad juju.

An angel gave up on heaven and came to live on earth. He works as a private eye. He can understand his dog. Heaven occasionally needs his help to interact with humanity. There’s a rising tide of bad juju. It’s exactly like that, yes. It suffers somewhat from a lack of characters with a “normal” viewpoint, but given that this is a story about an immortal angel fighting his basic nature and trying to stay human against the background of aforementioned juju, that’s excusable. Possibly the weakest of the Mean Streets stories, but still pretty damn strong.

Now you should start recommending things at me :-)

For people who wanted to know what I look like when I’m in costume, this is it.

In memory of family and friends who have lost the battle with cancer; and in support of the ones who continue to conquer it! Donate to a cancer research charity, like this one.

Post on your livejournal or journal, and feel all virtuous about doing it as well, if you like, but don’t assume that posting this kind of thing is anything other than pointless.

some percentage of people will not bother to do this, and that’s fine, because they cannot afford it, or give somewhere else, or just don’t want to.

Have a sanctimonious day.

(This is a commentary on a meme you may not have seen)