Darkly Witty

Who Do You Want Dead?

2009-09-09T22:27:00.000-07:00

In university I attended a course on creative prose writing. As I was already a published RPG author at the time, I thought the course would offer nothing more than another venue to flex my writing muscle (that's my brain, folks). After all, I spent most of my time in lectures paying no attention to the class and composing my own material; here was a course where I could be graded for that. As it turns out, the professor managed to stretch my bounds by giving me a variety of assignments on forms of writing I had never attempted. One such assignment was a pitch for a television series.

I used to (and still do) have quite the literary sadistic streak. Blame it on my fascination with Matthew Good, my days as an out-for-shocks punk rocker, or some lingering genetic predisposition for stirring the pot carried forward from my Welsh pirate ancestors. Regardless, I like to both entertain and disgust people. My best work are the pieces that leave you questioning whether you should be amused or horrified. I once wrote a piece based on what would happen if I had become a porn star that ended with an abrupt, existential suicide. I am telling you all this so that you will not be as surprised by what I am about to describe. I have decided to take my television show pitch from 2004 and flesh it out into a series of stories, with the aim of turning into a novella.

The show is called "Who Do You Want Dead?"

It's format is a combination of reality show and newscast, with unlimited resources and immunity from all jurisdictions. Its aim is to poll nearly every person on the planet once a week as to who they believe is most deserving of death, and then to execute the majority person on live TV.

Let that sink in for a second. Imagine, if you will, an American Idol-style poll where almost everyone has a say. Except instead of fame, the winner is met with death. No one is safe, no one is protected, anyone can be voted upon (even if their real names are unknown or if they have been in hiding for years; as I said, the show has unlimited resources). Everyone gets a vote, regardless of age, nationality, or even access to technology (again, unlimited resources). At the end of each weekly show, the person with the most votes is apprehended and put to death; the method of execution is determined by the spin of a wheel containing various options. The executions are never censored, but at the same time, they are rarely excessive. I say rarely because one option on the wheel, "karmatic end", dispatches the person in a manner befitting their notoriety, and thus could get a little messy. The vote totals carry forward each week, so last week's runner-up is this week's most likely corpse.

Each episode runs like a news show, with two main anchors delivering the top stories: who leads the polls, breaking news, unexpected results, etc. The show would pad out its hour-long run with three or four correspondence pieces. This allowed the show to explore the backgrounds of those leading the polls, expose people who probably should be voted for, and even give those being voted for the ability to make an "impassioned plea for life". In my mind, the idea was to take a typically unengaging thing like a news segment and incorporate it into a life or death decision. When we watch the news now, there are three inevitabilities: either death has already occured (top stories & breaking news), death is inevitable (reports, exposes), or death is not a factor (upbeat or human interest stories). With "Who Do You Want Dead?" I hoped to remove the inevitabilities from the news format. Suddenly, these stories have an impact: this report on a dictator is about someone you can vote to have killed, this very night.

In 2004, I had even envisioned an arc for the show. No one would take it seriously on the first episode, resulting in low participation, but the first live execution caught the world's attention. The second episode featured a record viewership that it maintained until its final show. Within the first two episodes, both then-President George W. Bush and Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden would have been executed; wasn't sure which one would happen first. This was to prove one major point, from my author's perspective: that nothing could prevent the show from carrying out the will of the people, regardless of status or how well one was hidden. The first ten shows assassinate a laundry list of high-profile, well-hated human beings. The show even starts to become an instrument of social change, like when billions of Chinese, despite being threatened with death, manage to vote their leader "out" (and are somehow protected by repercussions by the show itself). Things would get far more interesting as the show continued, for once the obvious candidates were gone, more obscure human beings began to fill the ranks of the top 10. Eventually one show would end with a belligerent internet personality voted to die, only to reveal that the person was in fact a twelve year old boy. The show would unflinchingly perform its duty. The next week, the entire world abstained from voting. The show ended there. I suppose it was supposed to be a tale of democracy taken to a severe extreme, exposing a human nastiness, until the breaking point came and the world sobered up. In the end, I suppose it was a tale of hope, that we humans could at least learn from our mistakes.

In essence, it was fantasy, right down to its subtext. I don't know if I will be so hopeful this time around.

These are the stories I am going to write. A viewer will sit down to watch an episode of "Who Do You Want Dead?" and I will convey everything that viewer sees. Undoubtedly the story will creep into science fiction; after all, how can a single organization possibly conduct a worldwide election against all obstacles? If there is no limit to what the show can do to accomplish its goal, then there must be unfathomable resources behind the scenes. I don't intend to explain most of it, but I will let you get a glimpse (J. J. Abrams has taught me this much; folks love a mystery, sometimes more than solving a mystery). If this goes well, I would very much like to turn it into a podiobook. It will be based in the real world. It will be disgusting. I hope it will also be funny.

So far, do you know if you should be amused, or horrified?

Slowly Choking

2009-09-09T07:38:00.000-07:00

Ever had someone keep their hand on your windpipe all day and all night? Ever feel that hand start to close around your throat on its own whim, a little bit at a time, at random intervals, for anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours? Unless you're an asthmatic, you probably can't relate to this. I'm from Brampton, a place that used to be well-known for its quarries and terrible air quality (now it's known for heavy urbanization and massive influx of immigrants of a particular ethnicity). It was no surprise to my family when I was first diagnosed with asthma at the tender age of twelve. It sure as hell was a surprise to me.

I used to have a bad history of bronchitis. Between 10 and 12 years old, it got really bad. I would wheeze, get short of breath, and cough like the dickens. There was something about it that was just plain worse than the bronchitis I had dealt with for most of my life. We went to the doctors and I was given two puffers, regular scheduled visits with a breathing doctor, and the expectation that everything would be "all right" in a little while. The puffers helped; it's what they're designed to do. But I noticed that if I stopped taking the puffers, it would get worse. When I finally asked my parents about this when I was thirteen, they looked at me funny, as if I was supposed to know that asthma isn't a disease that just goes away. I was fucking thirteen. No one had told me 'til then that I'd spend the rest of my life as an asthmatic.

That pretty much put an end to my track & field pursuits; I already had respiratory problems due to a crooked nostril (something they never found out until they gave me a CAT scan when I was sixteen) and now I can't run more than a few paces before my lungs start to close, regardless of how many puffers I take. I still managed to stick with my karate training and earn my black belt, despite my asthma.

Things got a lot better when I went away to university in North Bay, Ontario. As the name implies, it's up north; far from the urbanized wastes of the Greater Toronto Area. Thus, it sports a superior air quality that I had never experienced before. For the five years I spent in the 'Bay, I rarely had a problem with my asthma, and could even stop taking my puffers for a time. It was beautiful, and if given the opportunity to move back there (or anywhere else north of there), I would take it in a heartbeat.

I would have happily stayed in North Bay if family issues had not called me back to Brampton. And here I've been, continuing to slowly choke on the air of a polluted, overcrowded cesspool. I've run out of asthma meds two months ago and have been sucking the fumes off my last puffer since. I've got no regular family doctor, and it's not like this stuff is available off-the-shelf at your local pharmacy (somebody please tell me why that is). Here's hoping the walk-in clinic today is nice enough to give me a prescription. I would very much like to breathe again.

FOLLOW-UP: The walk-in clinic was nice enough to renew my prescriptions, and I was able to acquire new puffers. I am breathing in a manner resembling normal now.

Creative Anathema

2009-09-04T22:03:00.000-07:00

I used to refer to my creativity as a "disease of the mind," because it seemed to act like an infection over which I had very little control. When ideas came to me, I'd record them in a fever pitch, heedless of of whether they made any sense. I defined myself as a writer by listening to the craziest voices in my head and putting their words to paper. My best work came from this time. Looking back on it, a lot of it shows my immaturity, my desire to shock and challenge, and my seriously fucked-up world perspective. I wouldn't have it any other way. My best work was done between 1996 and 2006; ten years of inspired insanity.

So what happened?

At some point, when I was in university, my disease of the mind was healed. Some salve soothed the infection that wracked my brain with feverish ideas. Maybe academia burned me out. Maybe I lost something during my studies, some essential component to my creative machine. Maybe I just got lazy. Whatever happened, I no longer find myself capable of even basic creative writing. It takes a lot just to get these blogs going.

This is primarily why Tesla's Legacy has stalled. Essentially, it's in the same state I left it three years ago, albeit a little differently organized. I've had some good ideas for it (specifically, I've come up with more plausible scenarios for how a relatively small but technologically-advanced army would initiate an invasion of North America) but I haven't found good ways to incorporate them into the material. Hell, I can't even figure out how to present Tesla's Legacy anymore. I definitely need to focus my creativity elsewhere for now; I think Tesla's Legacy is too much of an artifact from a person I no longer am for me to be able to salvage it right now. If I am to find myself again, I believe I will need to start fresh.

There's the problem again: I have no more fresh ideas.

Apologies for the whining post, folks. It is my blog, however, and this is how I feel.

On Podcasts

2009-08-28T08:08:00.000-07:00

I listen to podcasts. Don't know what those are? This link should help you out. Get up to speed, then head on back; I got lots to share.

For those of you in the know, you should know I'm something of a podcast addict. I say "something" because I really only follow six or seven of them, but I say "addict" because I spend whatever free time I can muster listening to them. It all started when I used to frequent a little site known as Gamespot. It was my site for all my gaming news at the time, and it offered a regular, serialized audio recording of news peppered with spontaneous humour and engaging conversation. You could really say that Jeff Gerstmann, Ryan Davis, Vinnie Carravello, Brad Shoemaker, and Alex Navarro got me into podcasts. Their show was awesome; so awesome that I would spend a good twenty minutes each week uploading the new 'cast to my shitty phone via low-bandwidth Bluetooth. When I got my first iPod, the 80Gb Classic, I jumped to iTunes for my podcasting needs. What shit that was. iTunes ran slow, it would lock up for no reason, it ran slow, I had to coax it to finish downloads, it ran slow, it hogged memory, and it ran fucking slow. There were good points to iTunes, but none of them related to podcasts. Still, it was the only thing that really worked right with the iPod, so I never had much choice. Regardless of how it handled by 'casts, it allowed me to expand my 'cast horizons. I found dozens of new podcasts thanks in part to iTunes. I still listen to many of them today.

When I switched to Linux, I killed my iPod. I'm still not sure how. After trying to sync it with about four other programs, I managed to permanently damage the file structure and possibly even the firmware (which, as I understand the inner structure of the 80Gb Classic, is impossible). My regular podcast machine was dead, and I went back to my phone for a while. It was pretty terrible. I experimented with using Rythymbox, the default media player in my Linux distro (Ubuntu), as well as gPodder. They were all right, but they lacked features I had become accustomed to with my iPod: audio bookmarks, automatic syncing of new episodes, and automatic cleansing of episodes once they had been listened to. gPodder at least got the syncing part right. I managed to pick up a Sansa Clip 2Gb on the cheap, and that worked well for a down-and-dirty podcast machine.

Up to this point, podcast listening had always required two devices: the mp3 player (to listen to the podcasts) and the computer (to subscribe to, download, and manage the podcasts). Then I acquired a Playsation Portable system (a 2000 model, again on the cheap). I got it just for gaming. Turns out it's the perfect podcast machine.

The PSP has an RSS channel. I think it was intended for websites and video content, but it works really well for podcasts. Using the PSP's web browser, you can click any podcast RSS feed link to automatically subscribe to the feed in the PSP's RSS Channel. From there, you can either stream the audio (that's right, streaming!) or save it to the memory card to listen to it on the go. Or, you can just set the channel up to automatically check the feeds at a set time and download any new episodes. Every night at 3am, my PSP wakes up, checks for new episodes, downloads any new ones, and goes back to sleep.The process is seamless. With the PSP, I don't need a computer to manage my podcasts at all. The only downside is that the PSP isn't a particularly pocket-sized device. The upcoming PSPgo, however, is definitely pocket-sized.

The PSP: perfect podcast machine. Whodathunkit?

What's this, then?

2009-08-28T07:45:00.000-07:00

I already keep another blog which is meant to relate my stories from retail (and which I intend to keep distinct from this one, hence no link). This is my personal blog, focusing on my creative endeavors and random musings. The best kind of blog, right? Right?