A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Best wishes to the Post Meridian crew for their show at the Orpheum this evening!

This is the group I did the "Chicken Heart" thing with in 2005, and who have been putting on halloween staged radio plays every year since then. This year they got invited to participate in Boston's First Night celebration, where they are bringing Chicken Heart and other audio treats to a giant venue.

I declined the invitation to reprise my role as Cop / Army Commander / Courtroom Voice Number 6 for this production, but that shouldn't stop you from going to go see them if you're in town!

derspatchel wins the cookie of the day award. I have some great ideas for City of Heroes dudes and even started to enact them after daerr installed all the MMOs on the Volity office PC last spring, but I haven't done much with the game since. So Olympia Snowe and the Papa Hemingway Action Force will have to wait.

Speaking of (sorta), it is with regret that I announce that I ain't even trying to get into audioboy's Halloween show this year, much like I had to pass on metahacker's audio production earlier this summer. It is a casualty of this impending job thing, I fear. As much fun as Chicken Heart was last year it still took a lot of my time, event though I only had some piddling roles in it. The schedule I'm setting up for myself over the rest of 2006 just doesn't cotton to this sort of thing. I'll be in the audience, though, and will try to drag y'all along when it's time.

I feel I can get away with The Gameshelf because I get to control its schedule, and I'm firm in my utter lack of commitment to timeliness in producing it. Oh, and speaking of that, the existing shows are now live on Google video.

I have been having fun browsing GV. Here is an amazing collection of stock footage that just cries out for gratuitous misuse. I am actually surprised that Getty seems to have made a good chunk of their catalog freely downloadable via GV. Each clip's detail page has an invitation to license a high-quality version for $150 or whatever, but does this imply that you can go nuts with the lossy versions on GV?

audioboy has posted MP3s of the studio version of Chicken Heart. I haven't listened to it yet, so I have no idea how I sound, but I'm looking forward to it.

This was a fun experience. Time permitting, I'll be first in line to audition for whatever script PMRP next sets its sights on.

But for now I am only 100000. (Last year I was 11111.)

Delightful things:

* The Hunt was fun but short, ending less than an hour after Saturday did. I personally performed about as well as I did last year, and I think our team kept up with its own record too. We had one painful bottleneck about 12 hours in that locked us out of the leader-pack, but still ended up placing about two-thirds of the way up, if I read the graph correctly. I liked the theme and how it was run.

* Chicken Heart suffered from some technical flubs and missed cues (grr), but otherwise beat its way into the hearts of a full-house crowd at Arisia yesterday. Afterwards I received, along with everyone else involved with Chicken Heart, an email from Kibo containing a Kibo-penned one-minute summary of the show in radio play format. It's been years since I regularly read a.r.k but I couldn't help but thrill at this. You can take the jmac out of the fanboy, but you can't wait that's terrible.

* Received a delightful gift from jadelennox. Monkeys were involved.

* I was happy that I got to celebrate the last day of my 2000 Maine driver's license's validity by renting a Zipcar to help shuttle hunters and their stuff around after we struck the set. But now I can't drive at all anymore, and will have to go subject myself to the Mass RMV system once again, despite my no longer owning an MV to R.

Some thoughts about the show:

* My legs turned to jelly whenever I was in full view of the audience. I literally had trouble standing. I asked people if they saw me shake; some said yes, some said no. (People who knew me and my manner better said they noticed, so maybe most of the crowd didn't). Objectively, even as I was delivering my lines, I thought what an interesting and unexpected phenomenon this was. Subjectively, it was rather alarming.

I don't think I've ever experienced anything like that before. I wonder why, until I realize that, golly, this was actually my first real full-on stage experience. I succeeded in swallowing my nervousness, but then it went straight to my knees.

* Everyone came together really well for the main piece, the Chicken Heart play. It was great and brought the house down. Such as it was. And the house, I will note, was packed to the point of cast members scrambling to set up extra chairs when dozens of unreserved walk-ins all showed up minutes before curtain! I spoke briefly to the woman whose film project all this was a benefit for, and she was as pleased as you'd expect.

* She also asked if I wanted to be an extra in the movie, and I gave her my email. But you said no more..! Eh, it's only one shoot, next weekend. And anyway, movie! How could I pass that up?

* Once again, someone commented that my "performance voice" sounds like "Weird Al" Yankovic, at least for the "Ray" character, whose lines I did practically half-sing because, ehm, he's kind of a fruit. That said, I also learned that some heard my delivery as less gay and more Stimpy which I thought was interesting... I had misgivings at first about playing a stereotype, but if I succeeded in making the character into something more nuanced (cough) that's a win. (OTOH most Ray-lines that had people snickering at the rehearsal were met with dead silence at the performance. Tuff crowd.)

* Unforeseen not-quite-intentional humor: to simulate the sound of a flesh-eating mass of protoplasm devouring a hapless scientist, one of the sound guys noisily slurped a handful of Jell-O in front of a mic. We knew this would be funny. But then the followup line "It swallowed Dr. Atkins whole!" was, when actually performed, even funnier, because the panicking intern seemed to suddenly be talking about the sound dood (whom everyone in the audience was, at that moment, looking at) and not the chicken heart.

* My only note about working with Kibo is that he seems like a nice guy but it's kind of unnerving that he's actually really into all the stuff he's known for writing about, and will talk about them at every opportunity. For instance, he and I happened to be idling on the stage before the show last night, and he commented that the stage should have some orange cones on it. What can you say to that? When it's coming from the source, I mean.