absolutely THE last postscript (on THIS account)
Over the previous weekend, my younger brother had a life-threatening and rather disquieting medical emergency-- the kind that has me calling a bunch of doctors on my end, because what happened to him very obviously should have happened to me instead, and actually it's now clear I've probably been dead already for at least five years and everything since Season 5 has just been an extremely detailed pre-death dream (with an awful lot of mundanity and 3500-word entries for a deathbed vision, I must say).
Aaaaanyway, my plans to turn in this week's entry, as required to continue as dont_be_first, were completely waylaid in all of the subsequent holding-vigil and endless family communications on the topic and assorted what-the-fuckery. I've never "forgotten" an LJI deadline in close to 80ish weeks of participation - this week, frankly, I kind of did, if somewhat on purpose.
As a further and more disturbing consequence of this insane week, what I didn't realize until just now (a few days after the fact) is that soopageek / crochet_all_day had effectively thrown in the towel. (In my hurried state, I did look a few days ago to see if he was on the vote-post list of buh-bye-nows right along with dont_be_first... but I guess he's posted crochet_all_day's "confession" for one last vote. So even as a symbolic gesture, please do go and vote for him, seriously - or, uh, srsly.)
Soop suggested that, the cat now being out of the bag, I might now more fully explain my "vision" for not just crafty_callie but also crochet_all_day. I guess, uh, that I'll try and do that now.
As Soop points out, this pairing of initially roleplayed characters was really more my idea, while the dont_be_xxx thing was his; we decided to do both at the start of the season. I wasn't really sure what Soop might decide to do with Deb / crochet_all_day after I accidentally blew Callie's cover; one problem we've had is that Soop is a far busier man than I am right now, with long stretches of time away from these casual-application Internets, and coordinating our intended efforts has been insanely difficult all season long.
When I had to abruptly give up the DBF / Callie ruse, I was unable to know what Soop's next steps were going to be; I essentially made up a bunch of BS about crochet_all_day's limited involvement, in the hopes that he'd just be able to keep going and do whatever he wanted with Deb, if he still wanted to take the character to interesting places. Now I guess I can tell what little is left to tell of the Callie / Deb story.
To an extent, actually, the model I had in my head was still pretty ill-defined in an underpants-gnome ????? --> PROFIT!!! sort of way. Looking back I probably should have come up with some kind of story bible for Deb and Callie, although I wanted things to be a more dynamic collaboration with Soop, so I left things more open-ended after a basic explanation that I'm not quite sure, in retrospect, was ever sufficiently clear to both of us.
We've been over and over Phase 1 of these characters - Callie and Deb, while playing normal if mediocre competitors in LJI, get into some kind of very conspicuous fight, the kind of nasty if benign drama that all of LJI should theoretically notice. I tried to get this conflict to play out much earlier in the first few rounds (note that the two contestants have names that are alphabetically close by design - I wanted it to happen while they were still in the same tribes). Unfortunately it just... didn't, or couldn't, for lots of reasons. I finally forced things to happen in Callie's last week / couple of nights of remaining character-cover. Then, of course, I fucked up and gave away both dont_be_first and crafty_callie in a moment's dumbly-misposted comment at the absolute peak of the kayfabe drama. (DVD commentary: Callie's fabric-store boss Kay was in fact named for kayfabe.)
Had this not happened, Phase 2 would have begun the very next week. You have these two contestants who are now widely known to be mortal enemies - even though, the way Soop played it, Deb was still sort of an innocent bystander to Callie's madness (I was kind of hoping he'd steer Deb more for Callie's throat). Suddenly, with absolutely no mention of the prior weeks' events, they would have turned in entries in a fashion that suggested...
...no, not so much that they were now happily working together or setting aside their differences... rather, they would have turned in a pair of entries suggesting that these previously-very-unexciting "people" were both being controlled and steered to write what amounted to the creepiest Intersection Week entries in the history of Idol, extensively manipulated by some kind of metaphysical force far beyond the control of either one of them.
Ideally, for anyone paying attention (and again, the goal was that everyone would be paying attention by now), this would have been a combination headslapper and a massive WTF moment. It would be instantly clear that these two characters had just been characters to this point, and that their author / authors had been colluding all along. But ideally, it also would have made readers wonder just what the hell was really going on, and/or where it might possibly go next.
An example of sorrrrta what I had in mind is actually hidden at the end of DBF's currently-last entry, the one that's second to last in a long set of written-out joke "trigger warnings:"
Trigger warning: whomever shall read this entry in part or full let him be forever cursed cursed cursed. CURSED. no man or woman who has glanced upon this text shall be granted mercy nor escape, as We pray to THE GREAT DARKNESS making Our most humble requests for the fate of Our most lowly and worthless reader-sacrifice, may his head swell and ache as his molasses-slow ox-wit is stopped forever like a failing cog in the grasp of invisible hands, preventing all possibility of escape from the fate which now awaits him, may his bowels then reveal their final contents everywhere in his surroundings as his body now fails his every useless command, falling forward to helplessly drown in his final bath of excrement, may his every orifice soon come to fester with inestimable maggot throngs nibbling away agonizingly at his most sensitive extremities, may his blood now boil within him where he sits, may his boiling blood now burst forth from every pore of his accursed countenance, a cleansing red rain, a most delectable and savory broth upon which We who are enlightened by THE DARKNESS may sup most greedily, as his futile screams go unheard by all but his supposed "loved ones," who shall show no pity but shall all turn away from him most visibly, and in his agonizing final moments as Our Master Of THE DARKNESS looks favorably upon Our accursed reader-sacrifice, in its final desperate gasps of vainglorious suffering and unanimous betrayal, and Our Master shall cackle and guffaw from His throne with the most obvious and exquisite delight, after which We shall enjoy and celebrate His newly found favour by wallowing in the blood and shit of Our chosen sacrifice with Our naked earthly bodies, and thereafter shall make full use of every inch of his stolid remains for Our own most depraved prurient pleasures without a moment's rest, until such time as the fourth subsequent rising of the sun or the arrival of the half-moon, whichever shall come to pass after the other, in His wicked name We solemnly pray Our will be His will and His will be done. Gloire et louange à toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs / Du Ciel, où tu régnas, et dans les profondeurs / de l’Enfer, où, vaincu, tu rêves en silence!
In the context of that entry, and in the tiny print I used, it's just another goofy "trigger warning" that isn't. But I wanted to use that blurb somewhere because I'd actually been slowly writing it, along a whole bunch of other chunks of sort of fucked-up stuff, about 20 words at a time every couple of days for weeks. It was meant to go somewhere in the middle of an entry by Callie, after she-- and Deb-- had both been "taken over" and were jointly, inexplicably LJing in tongues in Phase 2.
Of course, the above worked better in its final implementation as a joke "trigger warning" than as something that would actually freak people out, even if they read it in the midst of a bunch of other insane out-of-body gibberish from the previously-harmless Callie. But it definitely would have been an interesting avant-garde turn in the context of Idol - especially with Deb doing something very similar the very same week, right after they'd been at each other's throats.
And from that point forward, the two accounts would do whatever they liked-- always jointly, and always something weird / unexpected that would involve them taking on roles as totally new characters they'd never taken on before. Soop mentioned that we'd talked about playing LJI detectives. We determined that this wasn't sustainable for an entire season, especially with the limited amount of time we had to discuss and plan things out each week. But Callie and Deb could have gone there out of the blue, and we'd hoped to get to that point in Phase 3 or 4.
Alternately, Callie and Deb could have suddenly turned into Laurel and Hardy, or an inspiring junior-high basketball coach and his unlikely clumsy-wallflower-cum-star-player, or two completely-separate sides of the dialogue between two macho assholes in a bar fight, or two simultaneous over-the-top attempts to impersonate Gary, or... sky's the limit, really.
We would have kept this up until one or the other of us got thrown out, with the objective of no one ever knowing who the fuck we really were or why we were doing this, hopefully building a consistent voter cult that mainly just wanted to see what utterly unrecognizable forms Callie and Deb might take on the next week.
Since I blew BOTH of our chances of having all this fun way too early, I just want to issue a final thanks this season to soopageek for being one of my dearest and best buddies both in an e-sense and IRL. L, I'm sorry I fucked it all up for both of us.
...Listen, I may still come back as DBF later if the opportunity arises (I can hear the ecstatically cheering throngs already!). I get Soop's stated easy fatigue with LJI just generally... I absolutely do. But at the same time... as always... I really miss writing in what I consider to be the "LJ format," more than I miss just about anything about The Way The Internet Used To Be.
And even though my original form of participation in LJI involved taking Soop's offered position as a longwinded meta-snarkist, as the years have gone by I seem to keep coming back to LJI just for any possible excuse to narcissistically explore that "format" one more time... whatever form it may take for me that particular day.
Aaaaanyway, my plans to turn in this week's entry, as required to continue as dont_be_first, were completely waylaid in all of the subsequent holding-vigil and endless family communications on the topic and assorted what-the-fuckery. I've never "forgotten" an LJI deadline in close to 80ish weeks of participation - this week, frankly, I kind of did, if somewhat on purpose.
As a further and more disturbing consequence of this insane week, what I didn't realize until just now (a few days after the fact) is that soopageek / crochet_all_day had effectively thrown in the towel. (In my hurried state, I did look a few days ago to see if he was on the vote-post list of buh-bye-nows right along with dont_be_first... but I guess he's posted crochet_all_day's "confession" for one last vote. So even as a symbolic gesture, please do go and vote for him, seriously - or, uh, srsly.)
Soop suggested that, the cat now being out of the bag, I might now more fully explain my "vision" for not just crafty_callie but also crochet_all_day. I guess, uh, that I'll try and do that now.
As Soop points out, this pairing of initially roleplayed characters was really more my idea, while the dont_be_xxx thing was his; we decided to do both at the start of the season. I wasn't really sure what Soop might decide to do with Deb / crochet_all_day after I accidentally blew Callie's cover; one problem we've had is that Soop is a far busier man than I am right now, with long stretches of time away from these casual-application Internets, and coordinating our intended efforts has been insanely difficult all season long.
When I had to abruptly give up the DBF / Callie ruse, I was unable to know what Soop's next steps were going to be; I essentially made up a bunch of BS about crochet_all_day's limited involvement, in the hopes that he'd just be able to keep going and do whatever he wanted with Deb, if he still wanted to take the character to interesting places. Now I guess I can tell what little is left to tell of the Callie / Deb story.
To an extent, actually, the model I had in my head was still pretty ill-defined in an underpants-gnome ????? --> PROFIT!!! sort of way. Looking back I probably should have come up with some kind of story bible for Deb and Callie, although I wanted things to be a more dynamic collaboration with Soop, so I left things more open-ended after a basic explanation that I'm not quite sure, in retrospect, was ever sufficiently clear to both of us.
We've been over and over Phase 1 of these characters - Callie and Deb, while playing normal if mediocre competitors in LJI, get into some kind of very conspicuous fight, the kind of nasty if benign drama that all of LJI should theoretically notice. I tried to get this conflict to play out much earlier in the first few rounds (note that the two contestants have names that are alphabetically close by design - I wanted it to happen while they were still in the same tribes). Unfortunately it just... didn't, or couldn't, for lots of reasons. I finally forced things to happen in Callie's last week / couple of nights of remaining character-cover. Then, of course, I fucked up and gave away both dont_be_first and crafty_callie in a moment's dumbly-misposted comment at the absolute peak of the kayfabe drama. (DVD commentary: Callie's fabric-store boss Kay was in fact named for kayfabe.)
Had this not happened, Phase 2 would have begun the very next week. You have these two contestants who are now widely known to be mortal enemies - even though, the way Soop played it, Deb was still sort of an innocent bystander to Callie's madness (I was kind of hoping he'd steer Deb more for Callie's throat). Suddenly, with absolutely no mention of the prior weeks' events, they would have turned in entries in a fashion that suggested...
...no, not so much that they were now happily working together or setting aside their differences... rather, they would have turned in a pair of entries suggesting that these previously-very-unexciting "people" were both being controlled and steered to write what amounted to the creepiest Intersection Week entries in the history of Idol, extensively manipulated by some kind of metaphysical force far beyond the control of either one of them.
Ideally, for anyone paying attention (and again, the goal was that everyone would be paying attention by now), this would have been a combination headslapper and a massive WTF moment. It would be instantly clear that these two characters had just been characters to this point, and that their author / authors had been colluding all along. But ideally, it also would have made readers wonder just what the hell was really going on, and/or where it might possibly go next.
An example of sorrrrta what I had in mind is actually hidden at the end of DBF's currently-last entry, the one that's second to last in a long set of written-out joke "trigger warnings:"
Trigger warning: whomever shall read this entry in part or full let him be forever cursed cursed cursed. CURSED. no man or woman who has glanced upon this text shall be granted mercy nor escape, as We pray to THE GREAT DARKNESS making Our most humble requests for the fate of Our most lowly and worthless reader-sacrifice, may his head swell and ache as his molasses-slow ox-wit is stopped forever like a failing cog in the grasp of invisible hands, preventing all possibility of escape from the fate which now awaits him, may his bowels then reveal their final contents everywhere in his surroundings as his body now fails his every useless command, falling forward to helplessly drown in his final bath of excrement, may his every orifice soon come to fester with inestimable maggot throngs nibbling away agonizingly at his most sensitive extremities, may his blood now boil within him where he sits, may his boiling blood now burst forth from every pore of his accursed countenance, a cleansing red rain, a most delectable and savory broth upon which We who are enlightened by THE DARKNESS may sup most greedily, as his futile screams go unheard by all but his supposed "loved ones," who shall show no pity but shall all turn away from him most visibly, and in his agonizing final moments as Our Master Of THE DARKNESS looks favorably upon Our accursed reader-sacrifice, in its final desperate gasps of vainglorious suffering and unanimous betrayal, and Our Master shall cackle and guffaw from His throne with the most obvious and exquisite delight, after which We shall enjoy and celebrate His newly found favour by wallowing in the blood and shit of Our chosen sacrifice with Our naked earthly bodies, and thereafter shall make full use of every inch of his stolid remains for Our own most depraved prurient pleasures without a moment's rest, until such time as the fourth subsequent rising of the sun or the arrival of the half-moon, whichever shall come to pass after the other, in His wicked name We solemnly pray Our will be His will and His will be done. Gloire et louange à toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs / Du Ciel, où tu régnas, et dans les profondeurs / de l’Enfer, où, vaincu, tu rêves en silence!
In the context of that entry, and in the tiny print I used, it's just another goofy "trigger warning" that isn't. But I wanted to use that blurb somewhere because I'd actually been slowly writing it, along a whole bunch of other chunks of sort of fucked-up stuff, about 20 words at a time every couple of days for weeks. It was meant to go somewhere in the middle of an entry by Callie, after she-- and Deb-- had both been "taken over" and were jointly, inexplicably LJing in tongues in Phase 2.
Of course, the above worked better in its final implementation as a joke "trigger warning" than as something that would actually freak people out, even if they read it in the midst of a bunch of other insane out-of-body gibberish from the previously-harmless Callie. But it definitely would have been an interesting avant-garde turn in the context of Idol - especially with Deb doing something very similar the very same week, right after they'd been at each other's throats.
And from that point forward, the two accounts would do whatever they liked-- always jointly, and always something weird / unexpected that would involve them taking on roles as totally new characters they'd never taken on before. Soop mentioned that we'd talked about playing LJI detectives. We determined that this wasn't sustainable for an entire season, especially with the limited amount of time we had to discuss and plan things out each week. But Callie and Deb could have gone there out of the blue, and we'd hoped to get to that point in Phase 3 or 4.
Alternately, Callie and Deb could have suddenly turned into Laurel and Hardy, or an inspiring junior-high basketball coach and his unlikely clumsy-wallflower-cum-star-player, or two completely-separate sides of the dialogue between two macho assholes in a bar fight, or two simultaneous over-the-top attempts to impersonate Gary, or... sky's the limit, really.
We would have kept this up until one or the other of us got thrown out, with the objective of no one ever knowing who the fuck we really were or why we were doing this, hopefully building a consistent voter cult that mainly just wanted to see what utterly unrecognizable forms Callie and Deb might take on the next week.
Since I blew BOTH of our chances of having all this fun way too early, I just want to issue a final thanks this season to soopageek for being one of my dearest and best buddies both in an e-sense and IRL. L, I'm sorry I fucked it all up for both of us.
...Listen, I may still come back as DBF later if the opportunity arises (I can hear the ecstatically cheering throngs already!). I get Soop's stated easy fatigue with LJI just generally... I absolutely do. But at the same time... as always... I really miss writing in what I consider to be the "LJ format," more than I miss just about anything about The Way The Internet Used To Be.
And even though my original form of participation in LJI involved taking Soop's offered position as a longwinded meta-snarkist, as the years have gone by I seem to keep coming back to LJI just for any possible excuse to narcissistically explore that "format" one more time... whatever form it may take for me that particular day.