I Guess Jeremy’s Not the Only One Who Can Screw Up
I ticked off aprilp_katje today with my Howard post of the Elly Patterson audition for a new best friend for April. I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but I guess the post was too Meta-ish to play out. I had in my mind the movie Sixteen Candles where Molly Ringwald’s character is saddled with an over-the-top Japanese stereotype played by Gedde Watanabe. I imagined April as Molly and the Elly chosen best friend as Gedde, except the over-the-top part would be every possible permutation of Ellyism manifested in a single person. It was motivated by the idea, “What kind of person would Elly pick for April’s best friend.” Oh well. Sometimes jokes misfire and tick people off.
Jeremy got his head whacked again. Jeremy abuse is always good, and I enjoy playing off of Adrianne for this. She has been hinting at a date for them, so we will see if this happens.
The good constable posted more disguised love stuff to Liz tonight. I have suggested a kayaking date for them, which will put them off of the ARB for awhile and describing the date after it is over. I hope that’s not a problem with schmoosie, who posts as Liz.
Not a big creative day for me. I mainly enjoyed watching qnjones fire on all cylinders with her Ted / Krystle posts.
Tomorrow: Zit jokes and the new best friend’s name is Eva, which means possibly some Latina in her background.
Jeremy got his head whacked again. Jeremy abuse is always good, and I enjoy playing off of Adrianne for this. She has been hinting at a date for them, so we will see if this happens.
The good constable posted more disguised love stuff to Liz tonight. I have suggested a kayaking date for them, which will put them off of the ARB for awhile and describing the date after it is over. I hope that’s not a problem with schmoosie, who posts as Liz.
Not a big creative day for me. I mainly enjoyed watching qnjones fire on all cylinders with her Ted / Krystle posts.
Tomorrow: Zit jokes and the new best friend’s name is Eva, which means possibly some Latina in her background.
posted by howard at 9:11 PM
6 Comments:
I've been trying to reply to you, both here and at the meta, for about two hours. Some cyber forces do not want me to get my reply in. Elly, is that you?!?!
First, I hope I haven't, in turn, pissed you off by undoing the auditions from yesterday. As for the "too meta" aspect, it comes down to this: Elly made comments that were very specific to what happened on the bus, so that from April's perspective, it would have to seem that Elly had programmed Eva. And since the comments that Elly delivered were very close to things that you and I had both written at Foobiverse, it seemed that Elly was occupying "our" subject position, which is a scary idea!
As I think about your intent, it seems the audition thing could have worked, if only there hadn't been such specific allusions to the strip itself. I don't want to set a "rule" about not bringing in Foobiverse snark, but I ask that you please consider whether such snark would recharacterize or recast the events depicted in a strip.
Anyway, I hope this posts!
schmoosie, Paul & Liz will leave on Saturday and return Sunday morning after spending the night together Saturday.
aprilp_katje,
It's difficult to piss me off, although my kids know exactly which buttons to push.
I fully expected you undo or ignore the auditions, based on the comments you made. If you don't want to take my feed to you, that's OK.
I like to do snark based on the daily strip. I have done many, many posts where the dialogue of characters unrelated to the strip closely matches the dialogue in the strip, but with hopefully enough twists to make it funny. It was just considered happy coincidence that the dialogue happened to be the same. Such snark almost always recharacterizes or recasts the events depicted in a strip. My whole "Howard attack on Liz conspiracy" falls into this category, as I completely recharacterized the events of that strip sequence to make it not really an attack. I must admit I was blissfully unaware that you didn't like those kinds of posts. Sorry.
Yikes, now I'm afraid of spoiling your fun and/or causing a chilling effect on your creative snarking. The conspiracy storyline was a stroke a brilliance. Aw, nuts--I dunno! :(
Howard,
I liked your audition post. I thought it better explained the lame ass strip on the bus. Which I thought was kind of point of snarking and things. And I could TOTALLY see Elly doing it.
I want to do the complete opposite of everything Elly asked the auditioning friends to do. I want to insult April's dress/sense of fashion and comment on her total lack of math skills -- though mine are worse -- and just do everything Elly said one should do. In my opinion a true friend will point out your weaknesses or be honest with you so I think I should but I don't know if it's funny or right or pointless or what ...
Posting Anon for my safety (which is a joke, bad one but joke nonetheless).
A
I could see Elly doing it, too, but then I'd have to have Eva be the friend that Elly hired and I'd have to play ARB April as an idiot who counts on her fingers and wears bad accessories. Which isn't the way I want to play April. I'm sorry if I seem as though I'm being a brat about this, but I do want to have some control over the way I portray April, and one of the central conceits of ARB is that the "real" April is cooler than Lynn's April. And she's got lame parents and a lame brother, but a sister who's also cooler than she tends to come off in the strip (hi, Schmoo!).
So maybe I'm a big baby who can dish it out but can't take it. I don't know. I don't want to make too much of all this, but it's probably too late for that. :(
anonymous, Thanks for the compliment on my audition snark.
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