I Saw It Coming
A busy day for me today. Today, we celebrated the birth of scouting with the Blue and Gold banquet at the YMCA camp in Oracle, Arizona. It is pretty much a full day of festivities, and I did not make it back to April’s Real Blog until late in the evening. Today’s strip mentioned John being afraid of April doing wrong things. He has such a perfect daughter; you would think he would be less concerned about such things. However, parents are like that. My children are not particularly well-behaved, but there is a couple at our church with 2 daughters that are practically angelic in their behaviour in comparison. They are the same ages as my two kids, so I get to see them quite a bit, so it is really not a case of my not having the opportunity to see bad behaviour. Nevertheless, their father is just like John Patterson and apologizes for even the slightest grievance in their behaviour, like they forgot to say “thank you” one time after having said it 50 other times.
So, I had my characters snark the daily strip a bit and then launched into the scheduled activity: Becky McGuire singing at the J.C. Dithers party. I have to admit, I was feeling a little drained after the 170 posts from the Thorvald wedding the prior day. In addition, I had already snarked the Blondie crew before, and it is difficult to find anything else to snark them on. They do not have an ongoing storyline. In fact, the characters have not changed one iota in the last 30 years. I decided to pick on Alexander and Cookie Bumstead this time.
In the midst of this, qnjones launched into a devastating snark on Elly Patterson. It got me thinking, how would Elly react to this? qnjones, typically does posts to get reactions from people, but there is no one posting for Elly on April’s Real Blog (and God forbid it should ever happen). Here are the things that qnjones as Becky says to Elly's face:
1. Retired people are an unproductive drain on society and you are retired.
2. You are old and nobody likes to hang out with old people.
3. You only visit your father when you have to take the dog over.
4. If you were better looking, or had not let your vagina shrivel up, your husband would not have perverted sex fantasies about your daughter April and here’s the proof he does.
I can see Elly taking #1-3 and just grumbling, but #4. That dog don’t hunt. I could not see Elly going back to her house and not saying something to John Patterson about it. John has shown a little less passive nature than Elly (i.e. going out into the street after Howard), so I am inclined to think he would do something in reaction to Elly’s reporting what Becky told her. However, he still has his passive characteristic, so he does not confront Becky directly, but uses a go-between, as he does when he fights with Elly. In this case, I picked Cora Dithers. That is my reasoning for that sequence, in case anyone was wondering.
As for the title of this entry, there was a controversy derived from a post made by schmoosie on April’s Meta Blog. schmoosie is the lady who was the original poster for Liz Patterson. schmoosie retired herself from doing Liz awhile back, so she could devote her time to writing anonymous fan fiction about a cartoon series. aprilp_katje took over posting for Liz and I remember a panicked post schmoosie wrote when she discovered someone else posting as Liz. I should mention that during the time that schmoosie posted as Liz, she had a tendency to identify very closely with the character and would take it personally when people said unkind things about her character in April’s Real Blog. schmoosie seemed relieved it was aprilp_katje doing her former character and even gave her some advice on Liz’s characterization.
Then qnjones decided that she would like to try her hand at Liz and aprilp_katje agreed to cede the character to her. However, I remembered schmoosie’s panicked post before, and I knew she would not take it well to discover qnjones doing Liz. When qnjones posts as Becky McGuire, she has had a history of posting a very low opinion of the Liz character. Just as I thought would happen, schmoosie decided to drop by April’s Real Blog, discovered that Liz was being handled by qnjones and then wrote a post decrying qnjones as Liz. The post was a little odd, because there were parts of it that seemed like they may have been intended to be funny (references to the word blasphemy, and talking about herself surfacing from a haze). I hope that is the way schmoosie intended it, because to think of it otherwise would mean that schmoosie was intentionally slamming qnjones. I would prefer not to think badly of schmoosie.
Then I made my big mistake. I did a post trying to interpret it as being funny, instead of sticking up for qnjones, as I had done on the occasions when adrianne_p criticized her posting. qnjones ended up being more pissed off at me than schmoosie, for not sticking up for her. I think we have worked it out now, but it was an awful feeling to know that I had hurt qnjones. I don’t do April’s Real Blog to make people mad or to hurt their feelings. I do it because it is fun and I hope that people will find what I write funny. I hate it when that goes wrong.
So, I had my characters snark the daily strip a bit and then launched into the scheduled activity: Becky McGuire singing at the J.C. Dithers party. I have to admit, I was feeling a little drained after the 170 posts from the Thorvald wedding the prior day. In addition, I had already snarked the Blondie crew before, and it is difficult to find anything else to snark them on. They do not have an ongoing storyline. In fact, the characters have not changed one iota in the last 30 years. I decided to pick on Alexander and Cookie Bumstead this time.
In the midst of this, qnjones launched into a devastating snark on Elly Patterson. It got me thinking, how would Elly react to this? qnjones, typically does posts to get reactions from people, but there is no one posting for Elly on April’s Real Blog (and God forbid it should ever happen). Here are the things that qnjones as Becky says to Elly's face:
1. Retired people are an unproductive drain on society and you are retired.
2. You are old and nobody likes to hang out with old people.
3. You only visit your father when you have to take the dog over.
4. If you were better looking, or had not let your vagina shrivel up, your husband would not have perverted sex fantasies about your daughter April and here’s the proof he does.
I can see Elly taking #1-3 and just grumbling, but #4. That dog don’t hunt. I could not see Elly going back to her house and not saying something to John Patterson about it. John has shown a little less passive nature than Elly (i.e. going out into the street after Howard), so I am inclined to think he would do something in reaction to Elly’s reporting what Becky told her. However, he still has his passive characteristic, so he does not confront Becky directly, but uses a go-between, as he does when he fights with Elly. In this case, I picked Cora Dithers. That is my reasoning for that sequence, in case anyone was wondering.
As for the title of this entry, there was a controversy derived from a post made by schmoosie on April’s Meta Blog. schmoosie is the lady who was the original poster for Liz Patterson. schmoosie retired herself from doing Liz awhile back, so she could devote her time to writing anonymous fan fiction about a cartoon series. aprilp_katje took over posting for Liz and I remember a panicked post schmoosie wrote when she discovered someone else posting as Liz. I should mention that during the time that schmoosie posted as Liz, she had a tendency to identify very closely with the character and would take it personally when people said unkind things about her character in April’s Real Blog. schmoosie seemed relieved it was aprilp_katje doing her former character and even gave her some advice on Liz’s characterization.
Then qnjones decided that she would like to try her hand at Liz and aprilp_katje agreed to cede the character to her. However, I remembered schmoosie’s panicked post before, and I knew she would not take it well to discover qnjones doing Liz. When qnjones posts as Becky McGuire, she has had a history of posting a very low opinion of the Liz character. Just as I thought would happen, schmoosie decided to drop by April’s Real Blog, discovered that Liz was being handled by qnjones and then wrote a post decrying qnjones as Liz. The post was a little odd, because there were parts of it that seemed like they may have been intended to be funny (references to the word blasphemy, and talking about herself surfacing from a haze). I hope that is the way schmoosie intended it, because to think of it otherwise would mean that schmoosie was intentionally slamming qnjones. I would prefer not to think badly of schmoosie.
Then I made my big mistake. I did a post trying to interpret it as being funny, instead of sticking up for qnjones, as I had done on the occasions when adrianne_p criticized her posting. qnjones ended up being more pissed off at me than schmoosie, for not sticking up for her. I think we have worked it out now, but it was an awful feeling to know that I had hurt qnjones. I don’t do April’s Real Blog to make people mad or to hurt their feelings. I do it because it is fun and I hope that people will find what I write funny. I hate it when that goes wrong.
posted by howard at 11:05 PM
1 Comments:
Laura,
I do not have your work background, so I cannot address the real-life situation.
My perspective is if it had been April telling Elly, she probably would have ignored it, as she did the Kortney threats. But Becky is an outside source and a potential embarrassment if she tells her story to other people.
Elly jumps all over John for loading the dishwasher and for folding towels and for car purchases. So, I saw her mentioning it to John not so much because she thought it was true, but so John could take action against the potential embarrassment of Becky.
As for what they told Cora Dithers, I doubt they would even say "untrue rumors of a sexual nature." I tried to imply that they simply said that Becky had "insulted" them.
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