Adoption: Always An Option

It seems like only yesterday in 2007 when I called on some kind soul of the Internet to adopt David Warner. Alas, none answered the call.


David Warner, circa 2009. Note the despair.



Yet, in the final hours of 2010, when all hope seemed to be lost, you stepped up and opened your heart and home! To be more accurate, Scott of the LATEANDSOON Group did! (The rest of you did nothing, honestly.)


Congrats, Scott and David!

Barry & The Setbacks: Episode 1

Hi, a little present for you during this holiday season.

My friend Andy and I have started what we hope to be a series of webisodes around his old friend Barry.

We have come up with 10 or so ideas. Some of them have a basis in fact, some are completely made up.

Unlike my previous Streaking For The Shy movie, there wasn't a lot of time spent scouting locations, storyboarding, rehearsing with actors, etc.

We had the idea, shot the thing in an afternoon without a script, Andy edited most of it, I wrote and recorded the theme song, and BAM! Finished.

I hope you like it. Oh, I play the prospective home buyer.

Barry & The Setbacks: Episode 1

Overexplaining Underappreciated Tweets #2

Twitter User:
ysplotchy

Tweet:
"Reap, those little slices of death; Oh how I loaf them." -- Edgar Allan Poe, Baker
(link to original tweet)


Overexplanation:
What went wrong here? I made Edgar Allan Poe a baker, and turned one of his most famous quotes into something a baker might say. How is that not funny?

Original quote: Sleep, those little slices of death; Oh how I loathe them.

Okay, okay, I think using "Reap" instead of "Sleep" was weak. Are there types of bread that rhyme with sleep? That would have been much, much better. I tried thinking of a better rhyme, but was unsuccessful. Reap was the best thing I could think of.

Still... I kept slices of death, and changed loathe to loaf. That was funny, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. It was indeed.

Overexplaining Underappreciated Tweets #1

Twitter User:
ysplotchy

Tweet:
"Take me hunk, I'm drome!" -- Spister Moonerism Brand Novelty Tees
(link to original tweet)


Overexplanation:
Spister Moonerism is a character I invented and have been playing around with for a couple months. As you may notice, the name is a spoonerism of "Mister Spoonerism". I have had people chortle at the ingeniousness of the name itself (for good reason). That being said, I don't expect all of my Spister Moonerism tweets to be favorited simply because I made another reference to the name. That is not why this particular tweet is underappreciated.

The briliance of this tweet hinges on my reference to an existing novelty t-shirt:

The source of the humor for the above shirt is that the words "drunk" and "home" are transposed. I believe the implication is that the person is so drunk they are jumbling up their words.

I thought to myself, why not take that shirt, and then spoonerize it! Not only have I transposed the words like the joke, I have also transposed letters! I have doubly transposed the shirt, deflating the original t-shirt's humor in an original and fundamental way.

And note the added satisfaction of the word "drunk" becoming "hunk". Does this add a little undercurrent of playful homoeroticism to the tweet? Yes, I think it does.

This tweet was not favorited or retweeted. I think I have sufficiently outlined and overexplained the tragedy of this to you, dear reader.

Overexplaining Underappreciated Tweets

Hey, you! Twitterer! Nee Borp Doobie Crutch! *

As you already know, Favstar is the metric by which the value of tweets is measured. On the site, one can easily identify the number of times a tweet has been celebrated. It can happen in two distinct ways.


1) Favorited - By favoriting a tweet, someone has literally given it a gold star, as if to say, good job, fellow Twitterer! A+!

2) Retweeted - When one is retweeted (aka RT) by someone, the original tweet appears as part of their feed. In this case what they are saying is, "Hey, look at what my smart and/or funny Twitter acquaintance has to say!"


Unfortunately, many tweets are not celebrated with the fervor they so richly deserve. Some terrible tweet by Justin Bieber gets vaulted to the highest echelons of Twitter accolades, while an immaculate, ingeniously-constructed joke languishes in the fetid basement of ignorance and misunderstanding.

You might visit Favstar in anticipation of witnessing the abundant praise lavished on one of your especially chuckleworthy tweets, but... it's not there! If it's absent, that means NO ONE has favorited it. NO ONE has retweeted it. The injustice!

I do not offer to correct this injustice. I am unable to do so, unless I buy Favstar and make it work like the world is supposed to work.

What I *can* do is provide a service. Have you felt one or more of your tweets was underappreciated? Did you feel that perhaps maybe your audience was a bit, for lack of a better word, dim, dull, incapable of seeing something FUCKING BRILLIANT?

Here's what you can do. In an email, provide me the underappreciated tweet, as well as a paragraph explaining the ingenuity of your tweet. Help us to appreciate this underappreciated tweet, my friend. You may contact me on the email address listed on my Blogger profile.

I will post your tweet and explanation on this blog, so everyone will realize what a mistake they made in not recognizing your genius. Better late than never, right?

So, are you with me? Let's not be underappreciated... Let's overexplain... TOGETHER!



* Standard informal Twitter greeting

Aa

Bb
Cc
Dd
Ee
Ff
Gg Hh Ii Jj
Kk Ll Mm

nN oO pP
qQ rR sS tT
uU
vV
wW
xX
yY

Barry & The Setbacks

Hiya!

I'm working on a series of webisodes with my friend Andy. We're calling it Barry & The Setbacks. We have the first one almost done. We need to get the very last shot, and we need a theme song along with a nice little opening credits sequence.

I worked a few hours on the theme song tonight. I'm not sure if we're sticking with this or not, but it's a start. I like it enough that I'd thought I'd upload it for your amusement and/or withering-yet-somehow-supportive criticism.

The track is a little under a minute long, because it's just going to be supporting the opening credits and such. I intended it to have a little maudlin, cheesy feel to it. Really, I meant to do that!

I have a verse or two for the song that I didn't include on this version, so I might record a longer rendition of the song, probably a more straightforward pop kind of thing.

And yes, that's me singing on the track, after I ran it through the "Helium Breath" filter on GarageBand.

Enjoy! (Or Don't!)

Barry & The Setbacks

Closed-Eye Scribble #3

Closed-Eye Scribble #2

Closed-Eye Scribble #1

Hi,

Here's something I just thought of. The closed-eye scribble. I like it.

STEPS:

1) Open MS Paint
2) Select the Paintbrush
3) Select circular brushstroke



STEPS: (continued)

4) Close eyes
5) Count to 30 seconds, while moving the mouse, left button depressed
6) Open eyes, save scribble


The default canvas size when opening MS Paint takes up less than 25% of the screen. So, most of my scribbling won't actually be recorded at all. This makes the creation of each scribble very random and enjoyable and wonderful.


FIRST CLOSED-EYE SCRIBBLE

David Patrick Kelly Has A Website

Cloud Smokestack Vapor Trail

Pulse

I want to write again. I don't know if I have the momentum.

I dearly love people I have met on Twitter, and that's what occupies most of any "creative"-type time I spend online.

But all that stuff funnels straight down the garbage chute. I thought blogs were ephemeral, but Twitter is ephemeral on ephemeroids.

And, believe it or not, I *do* get tired of desperately trying to please people, something I inevitably fall into when tweeting. Okay, I don't get tired so much as wearied by it. (P.S. LOVE ME. LOVE MEEEEEEEEEE!) I get my feelings hurt more than I care to admit. Hm. Okay, I just admitted it. Okay, so now, I get my feelings hurt as much as I care to admit. Exactly equivalent to that.

This blog has always been nice for me. And it's still here, even though I rarely tend to it. It's a robot pet that just needs its batteries swapped when I want to play.

Here, another metaphor. My blog is an island. It's mine. You can comment on my island, but I can shoot your comment with a fucking gun. There, I just killed your fucking comment. How does it feel, comment-leaver? Oh, I wouldn't do that. But I like having SPACE here, on the Interwebs. I even like having a little CONTROL.

On Twitter I'm just an account name and an avatar. My personality does percolate through, but I'm a dot bouncing around in something larger, anonymous and potentially unfriendly.

Hey, I *like* typing things that are longer than 140 characters. I like the idea of wasting page real estate.

Look!

1


2

3

4

5

6


7

boggedy boggedy boggedy boggedy boggedy boggedy!


That felt good. So good.


I like existing in space and time. I like leaving a trail. I like blogging.

There's nothing expected of me here, I know. I could post this and never say another word. But that's so sad. I want to have a pulse at this blog.

What am I gonna write about? I don't know. Maybe I'll make up a robot sister. Maybe I'll write about my goddamned feelings. But I'd like to have a pulse, to not be confused with something dead.

beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep, etc.

Unconnected Tuesdays

Ski Pants

Jellyfish

Grazle Parny

It's my blog.

If I want to create a post called Grazle Parny, I'm going to.