Concept: a TV series consisting entirely of “filler episodes” from some notional story of grand adventure whose ongoing events can only be inferred from the incidental context of whatever character-driven bullshit is happening this week.
Like, maybe they’re a D&D-style adventuring party, and we only ever see them during downtime between adventures. Sometimes one of them is suffering from some improbable injury or bizarre curse, and the particulars of how it happened are only vaguely alluded to – their entire professional lives are basically one big Noodle Incident from the audience’s perspective.
I think you could get some use out of “previously on” and “next time on” segments showing footage that never happened.
For example: “Previously on, Champions of Karamore!” *Shot of a scepter lying on a pedestal in a tomb somewhere* Wizard: “The Scepter of Aratoom is the key to Garroth’s Ascension” *Four Seconds of the Heroes engaged in epic combat* Warrior: “I’LL HOLD THEM OFF, GET THE SCEPTER” Rogue *Looking at empty pedestal*: “IT’S GONE! WE’RE TOO LATE!” *Dark cloaked figure that the audience has never actually seen before, holding the scepter* “At last…it begins”
And then the entire episode consists of them hanging around the nearest inn, looking at maps and arguing about different ways they could have gotten there, and if any of those methods would have gotten them to the Tomb fast enough. “I told you we should have sold the horses in Roksport and taken a ship to Veremen” “We paid good money for those horses! Staying overland cut at least three days off our trip!” “It would have, HAD THE HORSES NOT BEEN EATEN BY WEREWOLVES!” “There’s no way we could have known about the Werewolves.” “THE TOWN WAS CALLED LYCANSBURG JEREMY!”
I’d like to see a Star Trek that’s all lower-deck functions on a big starship that gets occasionally interrupted by red alerts and ship-rocking explosions and whatnot, never with much context. Are they at war? Are they testing volatile new technologies? Are they lost in the Delta Quadrant? Who knows? Certainly not our characters.
The highest-ranked main character is an ensign, and she’s only peripherally present. The rest are random spacers and civilian support staff.
We see the captain once, off down the hallway.
It’s like five episodes in before the audiences even know the name of the ship.
I’m getting a lot of requests for the Macbeth story, which I’m sure I’ve told before but an old classic never dies.
Welp, might as well do something while I’m on the bus. Excuse any typos, typing on mobile is hard.
In news that will surprise no one, I was a drama school kid. I didn’t so much like to perform, but I did enjoy writing scripts and being the occasional narrator or background person.
In 5th year English class we were assigned a group project of retelling Shakespeare in six minutes or less. I rewrote the entire of Macbeth in a series of rhyming couplets, which by happy happenstance, synced up perfectly with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” (”yooooou’re so vain, I betcha think this throne is bound to you, don’t you, don’t you”) which is what the group sung it as, while my favorite English teacher (the one who did the Lord of the Flies experiment with us) sat with his head in his hands, occasionally making noises like he was crying.
If I ever find those notes I’ll let you know, but that’s not what this story is about, but it is where it started. Cause I won an award for that hot garbage, and found myself propelled into the actual drama class in sixth year because of it and that’s when shit got weird.
First of all, everyone knows you don’t call it Macbeth around actual drama people, you call it The Scottish Play because of the well established curse. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scottish_Play)
Which is what we all being good Scottish superstitious kids did. We called it “The Scottish Play” and never spoke any lines unless we were rehearsing cause that’s just what you do. And when your school is built less than a mile away from an iron age fairy mound and was built on the site of what used to be an old laird’s house that mysteriously burned down in the late 1800s and was subsequently rumored to be haunted, ye dinnae fuck wi fate like that.
Unless of course, your name was Mister Hadley, and you were a) newly arrived from England and b) didn’t believe in superstition and c) took every opportunity possible to spit in the face of the gods and call it MACBETH like you had nothing left to lose.
And this is my stop so I’ll post more when I get home.
Okay home now, lets do this.
So Mister Hadley was a hip young thing, or at least he likely hoped he was. He would show up every day regardless of the weather wearing sandals under his dress trousers, and trying to hang out with us like we were his friends and not his students. He was, in hindsight, the exact type of smiling, friendly lech who thought Woody Allen was the pinnacle of genius and was likely writing a novel about a teacher who has a love affair with one of his students. And he hated superstition. Like, HATED. And he really hated that we kept correcting him whenever he called Macbeth, Macbeth while in the theater room. To the point where one day while standing on the stage, he got really exasperated and started yelling “MACBETH, MACBETH, MACBETH! There, see nothing bad happened! I mean, what could possibly go wrong?”
It’s subtle at first, like half the supporting cast coming down with mono the first month into rehearsals. Not an unusual thing of itself for a bunch of 17 year olds in close contact all the time.
But after that things get progressively weirder and wilder. And perhaps you might argue it was something of the Salem witch trials hysteria effect taking hold, and maybe it was. But let me tell you, it’s hard not to start having hysterics when one day in the middle of rehearsing her “out damn spot!” soliloquy, Lady MacB almost gets taken out by a falling stage light that plummets out of the darkness of the ceiling and smashes through the floor like an acme anvil falling through thin ice. It was so loud several teachers came running down to the auditorium cause they thought something had exploded, but all they found was Lady MacB standing frozen in the center of the stage covered in dust, starting at her upraised hand where she’d felt the falling metal whistle past her fingertips, and all of us staring at her realizing we’d almost watched out friend get crushed to death by falling stage apparatus. The school had to call in a second councilor after that.
And I mean, you’d think after that the school would think better of hosting this end of year play. You’d think. But after the room was inspected and repaired and the falling light deemed a freak accident we went right back to it. Persevering through random fire sprinkler mishaps that soaked the stage and scenery (not to mention the electrics), my friend Mark who was Lord MacB getting thrown against a window in a fight and falling out of it when it shattered. And several other small mishaps which by themselves wouldn’t have mattered, but when you compiled them all into one stressed out space, became completely overwhelming to the point where people left.
The cast began dropping like flies, their final grades be damned. Some others who needed to complete the class for their chosen elective the following year stuck around out of desperation. And then there were the ones like me, just there for the shit-show and to see who would be left standing at the end up. We all used to huddle together in the drama room on the 2nd floor after rehearsals, survivors of this mutual train wreck of a monument to our teacher’s ego, carrying salt in our pockets and throwing it over our left shoulders whenever we talked about the play even though we never said its name.
Mister Hadley
did though. All the time. Repeatedly. Even when we begged him not to.
Cause you see guys, this is Mister Hadley’s vision and nothing
small like 15 kids coming down with mono or having near death experiences is going to stop him. So I get
moved from helping to rewrite lines of this Modern adaptation which is
shaping up like Trainspotting meets Willy Wonka down a dark alleyway,
and I wind up on the raised podium off at the side wearing a black hat
and holding a broom. The irony of which was not lost on me or half my
friends, but hey, it’s supposed to be good luck to have a “real” witch
acting as one of the witches, maybe that’ll save us.
You might be thinking at this point, “buy Joy, what did your parents have to say about any of this, why was no one doing anything?”
Have you ever tried to tell your parents “our drama teacher cursed us all by saying Macbeth instead of The Scottish Play and now we’re all going to die”? I have. My mother said “no you’re not, dear” while my dad said “that’s nice, dear” and carried on reading his book. They genuinely did not believe us, and attributed it to “high spirits” and general shenanigans.
Until opening night that is, when the curtains lifted, and Lord MacB is standing there with his shredded arm in a sling, (there are pictures of this and I have been facebooking friends all night trying to get hold of them)
Lady MacB keeps looking up at the ceiling like she has a nervous tick, and everyone else is just plain god damn miserable and more than a little wild around the eyes.
But we get through it. Nothing else bad happens and no one nearly dies. Right until the very end, when
Mister Hadley
gets up on the stage to address our horrified looking parents to thank them for coming, says “ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to tonight’s performance of Macb—” loses his footing, and promptly falls off the stage and breaks his leg.
And that’s the story of my schools first—and last—official performance of The Scottish Play.
I’m telling this story again b/c fuck it but anyways I was playing D&D and one of my friends went “brown bear brown bear what do you see” and on cue three of us turn to him and like, death metal screech “ALLLL”.
The dude goes completely pale faced. I saw true horror in his eyes.
He didn’t know the joke.
So apparently dude just had three of his best friends demonically screech at him for no goddamn reason.
I do not think I will ever cause that level of sheer terror and confusion ever again in my life.
My name is Bear. Wen frum the deep The Old Wuns waken Frum their sleep And Cthulhu sounds His maddening call I do not blink I see it all.
In the galaxy, humans are known as the best allies you can have… and the worst enemy you can imagine.
+++
The Human Galactic Empire has a certain reputation that we tend to forget about.
See, humans are NICE. they’re cheerful, and curious, and mostly people treat them like overeager kittens, sticking noses and paws into whatever catches their interest.
And sure, there’s always those stories that go around. How the ship’s human crawled through ventilation ducts, and everyone thought they would die but it turns out they breathe waste-gasses.
About that one time when a ship crashed with no expected survivors, and when the recovery team got there, the humans were growing crops and splashing in the groundwater.
They survive. Everyone knows that humans are hard to kill on purpose and harder to kill by accident. They can live through things that are the stuff of nightmares, and only come out stronger.
But they’re CUTE. Cuddly and soft skinned with almost no natural weaponry. They’re small- lighter than almost any other race, and deceptively easy to break, even if it probably won’t actually kill them.
So when the Thraxxis invaded and the entire Galactic Alliance ran, because we were outmanned and outgunned, no one thought of the humans.
Unfortunately for them, neither did the Thraxxis.
First the humans fortified. Their own worlds were inhospitable anyway- they simply retreated to the parts where nothing else could live.
Next, they focused all their considerable determination on their allies. One by one, the alliance’s populated worlds became bastions for the humans to fight from.
We watched in disbelief. The only thing to do when the Thraxxis came was to flee. They devoured worlds and their armada was unstoppable.
Unless, apparently, you were human.
The humans took casualties- of course they did. The Thraxxis were four meters tall, had bone spurs and claws, and were feared for their skill in combat. Somehow, that only spurred the humans on. Every massacre turned into a homing-beacon and was quickly- ruthlessly- avenged.
They seriously underestimated both the humans’ terrifying ingenuity, and their startling territorialism. See, the humans are friendly. They are social. They are delighted to make friends with anything that holds still long enough to cuddle on.
They are also merciless, hard to kill, and traveled in packs of the strong, the fast, and the clever.
The invasion stalled. The Thraxxis couldn’t breach any the protected worlds, and yet still more powerful than anything the Alliance could field.
A call went out across the galaxy and farther. We did not understood why the humans would cry for aid so loudly- surely simple communication was enough? What need was there for a scream that reached even distant stars?
When questioned, the Human Commander showed his teeth, and said only, cryptically, “E.T. Phone Home.”
For months, the fight went stagnant. Only small frays and none of them much gain or loss for either side.
That was when something else appeared.
At first, we thought it was more enemies. The newcomers were massive- as big as a moon and filled to bursting with small, aggressive ships that swarmed anything that got near.
“That’s no moon,” The Human Commander told the Alliance, still cryptic, but eyes lit with the sort of smile the humans only made at their most deadly. He refused to explain, but the other humans seemed to understand nonetheless.
The moon-ship drifted into our occupied space, and when it was haled, a human face responded. A human, who wore a formal uniform. Who even the Commander spoke to with deference. His leader, from a galaxy the Alliance never knew the humans ruled.
Empire, we all remembered with sudden fear. The humans called themselves an Empire, and somehow no one ever questioned why.
Four more moon-ships arrived over the course of a week. With them came massive battleships, each capable of holding a world by themselves.
Humans breed fast, and suddenly we had cause to wonder just how many humans there really were, scattered here and there.
Trillions, the humans admitted casually when someone finally worked up the courage to ask. Spread over thousands of worlds and star bases. All emptied to defend the farthest wing of their sprawling empire.
The next battle would be forever remembered. It was the only time all five moon-ships fought together.
The Thraxxis looked at what they faced. At the moon-ships with their hives of fighters. At the warships, each a match for their own. At the worlds they lost, one by one as the humans rose up and tore apart their invaders.
The Thraxxis, wisely, fled with what little remained of their shattered armada.
The Alliance trembled. For so long, we believed that the silly pink monkeys were nothing, simply curious and cheerful.
The humans tried to reassure us. We were independent, they promised. They believed in the Alliance, and in the people, and in peace.
But we never forgot the might of the Human Galactic Empire. Our allies.
Ok so today I was on the bus with another trans guy and we were talking about how hard it is to get testosterone. The waiting lists, the price, all the doctors you have to go to, that kind of stuff. Except, we were calling it ’T’, like you do when you’re both closeted and in public.
Then suddenly the elderly lady sitting behind us was like ‘young men, either I’m going crazy or you both have never heard of supermarkets, they have shelves full of tea there! Do you need directions to one?’
To which my buddy starts to explain, because why not. ‘Well you see, we’re both trans, and… ’
The lady didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. ‘Oh no, I don’t mind that at all! Now do you want to know how to get to a place that sells tea? I’m actually heading there right now!’
We let her take us to the supermarket. We let her show us, excitedly, where the tea was. We both bought loads.
This is beautiful
Confused elderly lady doesn’t care if you’re trans or not. She just wants to make sure you’re stocked up on tea.
i thought i’d written this up on here before, but i can’t find it. so let me tell you my favourite story about my time in oxford.
my college library is a converted church (with graveyard still attached). and it closed at about 1am every night, but they let people keep working in the vestry – where there were… i think six desks? – overnight. i was not very good at doing my work at anything other than the absolute last minute, and would fairly often end up in the vestry the night before an essay was due.
it was grim. honestly i do not miss it.
the highlight of those nights was when i allowed myself a break to go out to buy a burger from the kebab van that was on the other side of the high street. the nearest kebab van was ahmed’s. kebab vans in oxford are serious business (there are few kebab shops, and they’re mostly not near the colleges, where the first and third-year students often live in). i just looked ahmed’s up to check i was spelling his name right and found this amazing painting of the van!!
anyway. so one night in – i guess it was probably april? i think it was in my final year, and not too long to go before exams – i walked out to the kebab van. it was 2am, or maybe 3am. a weeknight – maybe a tuesday – and there was nobody around. too late for other people taking study breaks, and maybe the people who were out clubbing weren’t coming back yet. i felt like i and ahmed and the other guy who worked in his van were the only people alive.
and then an entire band of men turned up in full 16th century regalia.
i think maybe one or two of them had musical instruments with them, but not all of them. they stood there. they didn’t seem to think that they were doing anything unusual. i guess for them, it wasn’t. nobody else came by. nobody said anything except to order some food.
i thought: am i hallucinating??? what is happening???
i always ordered a cheeseburger at ahmed’s, and as it wasn’t a busy night they didn’t already have any cooking, so i stood by the van for a good five minutes while it cooked, just watching these men, who seemed like time-travellers, solemnly order their kebabs. none of them had phones out or anything. nothing broke the illusion except the situation we were in. it honestly felt like time was collapsing. like we had all been pulled out of the timestream and were just chilling here together. it wasn’t april whatever, 3am, 2011. it was no time, no place. The Kebab Van At The End of Time.
they just seemed like people from the past who wanted to get something to eat. an eternal constant. and the guys in the van were as nonchalant about it as the men themselves were. yeah, we get sixteenth century people through here all the time.
disney concept art: the most beautiful dynamic original thing i have ever seen
disney finished project: rubber same face minimalism regurgitated plots
concept art:
final version:
What makes me so mad is that snow queen is such a lovely tale and there was an evil mirror that shattered and froze the queen’s heart. So the first thing the newly evil queen does is PLUNGE THE KINGDOM INTO ETERNAL WINTER.
And the kid Anna is based off of is actually this sweet peasant girl who is rescuing her best friend whom everyone else thought drowned and whom no one cared for because mirror shards got in his eyes and he only saw beauty in snowflakes while everything else was just disgustingly foul to him. Except he didn’t drown because he was whisked away by the snow queen.
Like this girl gives her shoes to the river to find out he didn’t drown. Her hair ribbons to the birds to find out who took him. Works her hands raw to get to him and has to suffer a mental breakdown because she got SO FUCKING CLOSE to saving him and he won’t even look at her because he wants to solve this puzzle the snow queen gave him.
And then her sobbing wakes him up and he cries and washes the shards from his eyes and the fact that she saved him is enough to melt the snow queens heart and she brings spring back to the kingdom.
Wow Frozen really is some weak shit
HOLY SHIT WHY DIDN’T THEY MAKE THE ORIGANIAL VERSION????
Seriously, it kills me when I see people hold scientists up as pinnacles of logic and reason.
Because one time the professor I was interning for got punched in the face by another professor, because mine got the funding, and told the other professor his theory was stupid.
This same professor told me to throw rocks to scare the “stupid fucking crabs” into moving so we could count them properly.
SCIENCE
thank you
this is one of the best comments this post has recieved
I have witnessed:
Two professors hiding around a corner and snickering, “Shhh, here she comes!” While a female professor approached and, when she finally found them, she proceeded to scream while pointing from one to the other, “You! I called your office but you weren’t there! So I tried to call YOUR office to figure out where HE was but YOU weren’t there!”
Two grad students standing outside a closed and locked door yelling, “Come out of the damn office. You haven’t left for days. If you didn’t have a couch in there I’d be concerned as to where you were sleeping!”
A religious studies professor apologizing for being late to class because, “security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit”
Watched a professor snort the results of my experiment to determine if I had the right final compound.
Two archeology professors toss priceless fossilized teeth back and forth in an attempt to figure out who is smarter by “guessing the type of tooth and species of animal before it lands”
Multiple fully degreed individuals throw dry ice at one another in an attempt to be first to use the lab/get that piece of equipment/or change the iPod song.
A genetics professor build furniture out of stacks of paper and planks of wood because she is that far behind in grading papers/responding. One of the impromptu furniture pieces housed a fish tank.
I could go on but I think that covers the larger portion of the insanity…
Every time it comes around on my dash, it gets better.
– I have had a professor buy a huge fuckoff bottle of rum during fieldwork in Costa Rica and let the undergrads get wasted because “you’re not underage in Costa Rica and we’ll be up all night with the bats anyway!”
– Same professor hung a bat from her headlamp and wore it as a decoration for an entire night.
– A whole swarm of older women – and these are women with PhDs and world-renown bat experts, the bigwigs – all, to a woman, go to the formal charity dinner at an international research symposium in Toronto in late October dressed in skimpy Batgirl costumes. Because Halloween was that weekend, you see.
– At a different conference, a professor get blackout drunk and pass out on the side of the road.
– “Yeah, we have to say we did it properly for the grant but to be really honest, Miracle-gro works better.”
– Teaching lab: we had liquid nitrogen for a demo, and after class the professor, the other TA, and I spent a good two hours freezing and breaking things in it.
a chemistry class begins with 30 students nine months later just six of us left sitting on tables dipping paper into contaminated chemicals to see what happens when we burn it teacher making idle suggestions while he marks our work
“go to the fume hood thing, yeah now put some potassium in chlorine” can i burn the results sir? “fuck it sure whatever its tainted anyway”
The prof I’m working for just asked me if I knew how to pick a lock, and when I responded “yes” she replied, “see, this is why I hire the former delinquents instead of the suck-ups. You’re actually useful.”
I then let her into her office.
“Security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit.” I would bet anything this has happened to Dr. Medievalist.
Semi-related non-academic anecdote: The concert hall security guys tried to throw out our violone player in between performances this spring because they thought he was a homeless guy. Despite the fact that he was wearing concert black… and carrying a violone. There is no more obvious instrument.
One of my English Professors admitted that sometimes “you just have to do a soliloquy” and would phone up the main office of the department on the internal phoneline to recite a Shakespearean monologue at them. No greeting, no warning, just “To be or not to be”.
every time i read this stuff i think about how upset vulcans would be to meet earth’s greatest scientific minds
At one of the leading conferences for a certain branch of mathematics, there is an annual tradition of “walrus wrestling,” where the participants kneel on the floor with their hands behind their back and try to knock each other the fuck over. This takes place at the formal dinner.
i'll apple your turnover 