The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal - January 4th, 2008
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12:14 am
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All RIGHT!
My friend Nate is totally bragging with this post. But by God, he's right to.
Nice work, fella.
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09:38 am
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Yclept!
Last night, the most awesome gaming happened. Sadly, it was not during the actual Planescape roleplaying (which was mediocre at best), but rather with Rock Band.
See, we finally have a full band goin' - Yclept!, the sound that's sweeping Europe. All the folks in Italy are shouting, "We need someone who sounds almost exactly like The Rolling Stones playing Gimme Shelter, except they only hit 95% of the actual notes!" They're absolutely mad for a bizarre cover band to show up and almost play the songs! And by gum, Yclept! delivers.
It's fun playing with two people, but four people ratchets Rock Band up into the goddamned stratosphere. There were, I swear to God, actual moments of band-playing magic, touching upon those moments I was in an actual band and we just clicked. We have ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) justbeast learning the drums, and my lovely wife zoethe jackin' the bass, and yuki_onna and I trade off on lead vocals and lead guitar, depending on who knows the song better.
Singing is kinda scary on Rock Band. As Yuki notes, it's the only instrument where you're making your own sound, and when you bomb it's radically apparent. Plus, hitting the notes that Rock Band itself mandates you hit aren't always the best choice, making a really good vocal performance a 76% pass. But it is kind of like a whacky karaoke, with the exception that your band is backing you up. Everyone who sings on Rock Band is convinced they could have done a better job, which is as it should be... But fortunately, if the note's in my range and the moon is in the right phase, I can belt 'em out strong.
But what we discovered was that it was more fun to sing together. Indeed, soon enough Yuki and I were leaning at each other and singing together, which was awesome. And then we got to "Epic," which Yuki didn't know, so I had to do the dual role of sing and play lead guitar with Yuki on the chorus, which was awesome.
Then the craziest thing of all happened: Ian walked in on us, a little early for the roleplaying session, and immediately joined us as we all sang "Wanted Dead or Alive" together. It turns out that Rock Band hates choruses of people - our score sank like a weighted witch every time we all shouted into the mic - but fuck it, we were singing with a guest artist. And then Ian wanted to sing on his own, so we had him do "Creep" by Radiohead while we backed him up.
Then we spent at least half an hour dressing our little dollies, revising our band's look so we were the coolest band on the earth. The lead singer of the band, W00t!, is a bandage-wrapped mummy from World of Warcraft with brown skin, red eyes, and a glowing pink pompadour poking out from behind his eyepatch. Hell, who wouldn't want to see a band cover "In Bloom" when they look like that?
At the end of the night, Dmitri wanted to know when we were playing next. And man, if I didn't have a job and a kid showing up soon, the answer would be, "All goddamn weekend."
Tags: rock band
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10:02 am
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Reading Me
In the mail right now is my first audio submission to This American Life. I know it will be rejected, because it is terrible for radio. But this is something I have learned in between writing/reading my first submission and working on my second, and so I don't feel too bad about it.
Doing audio work is hard.
I've never been one to read my own work out loud, and it's surprisingly difficult. I'm told I tell a decent story in real life, and I know I can make a crowd of folks in my living room laugh... But when I clap my eyes to a piece of paper and do the alchemy of converting inky words into to vocal chords, it sounds like someone else. Gini said I sounded like I was reading off a script, which I was. Eric Meyer said my last video didn't even sound like me.
You wouldn't think that it would be that hard to read correctly, given that this is my stuff, but it is. I get lost in doing scripts. My natural rhythms vanish, replaced with paragraph breaks and commas; my intonations become mixed up with what I think radio folks should sound like, and it turns me into this bizarre hybrid that's not my voice and not a good voice, either. I'm not flat-out awful, but it feels like these are not the words I wrote.
As a special bonus, it turns out that my natural rhythms aren't good for radio, either. I talk too fast, a remnant of growing up in the shadow of New York. So I have to slow down to read comprehensibly, which further alters the tone of what I wrote.
It's kind of fun and kind of terrifying. It's something I have to work on, and it's kind of nice to know that you have this thing that's all upside from here. But reading so it sounds good for others is a skill that I know not everybody masters, yet if I want to get on TAL it's gonna be something I have to do.
Also, I have to work on structure. The first essay I did was a modified version of It's Im-Possum-Hole, one of my favorites... But now that I've read a lot on radio writing, I see that the anecdote and style are right, but the structure is entirely wrong. If you look at "It's Im-Possum-Hole," it's got a weak start; not only does radio have to rope you in in the first thirty seconds, which this doesn't, but every piece I've read talks about the necessity of opening it up to the universal as soon as possible.
By leading off about my experience finding a possum in my garage, I've told a story about me. And honestly? Nobody gives a shit about me. What I need to do is start off with a story that purports to be about me, but contains an element that applies to just about anyone. What I should have led with was the bizarreness of looking for a possum in a garage, starting off with the alien feeling of waving a flashlight around as I go looking for evidence of a possum breakin, which allows me to ramp right away into feeling foolish about not knowing something that really, few people in my position would know right off. That's a much stronger start.
Plus, the rhythm here is wrong. Ira Glass said that he knew David Sedaris would be successful on radio because of his anecdotes. Not only were his essays wickedly funny, but they consisted of smaller "beats" that were forty to fifty-five seconds long, and that's the natural heartbeat of a radio performance. My essay isn't bad, but it's not written in such a way that it quietly gives a new hook every minute or so, and I admit to feeling a little bored when I heard all five minutes on audio. That's even with the mediocre reading I gave.
I have a lot to learn, just as I did when I started Home on the Strange (and I assure you, I didn't get as good writing four-panel strips as I would have liked in two years' worth of experience). It's all upside, since I can only get better. The downside is that it's all upside. But we'll work.
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10:06 am
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One Last Thing
A strong meme from the Western shores, son of yuki_onna, son of regyt:
Please comment with something you think I should do or try to do in 2008. Big or small, silly or earth-changing.
Unlike Yuki, I don't promise to do everything suggested in 2008, since that might kill me - I need no further quests in my life, thankew - but why not boss me around for a bit?
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