|
Post by Cafe SalMONAlla on Sept 2, 2017 10:14:16 GMT -5
Take that, sophie. Well well well. Time for a new age! Mister M very kindly and ego-buildingly handed the editorship over to me, and I’m at least midly excited to mould this extremely well-regarded world famous publication to my own desires. Welcome to the first edition under my rule. For your perusal we have Tryina answering a question no one asked, a tell-all recap of Big Brother as related by one of the bros herself, a discussion of a Jon Klassen book by someone who insists upon using a pen name when Uniball would do just as well, and Mister M ranting about things that irritate him for some reason. Quisby is our resident cartoonist, and he provides an artistic take on some of the articles, and Zortegus has foolishly let himself in for a lot of work by taking on the banner-making job I used to have. That’s enough explaining of stuff you could have gleaned by reading the issue, so I’ll let you go ahead and read if you didn’t skip this editorial in the first place. WOO With all due respect, your editor and her sense of self-importance TABLE OF CONTENTS667 Big Brother: A Recap ~ by Linda Rant ~ by Mister M Books. A column written by Big Daddy Gomes ~ by [editor winces as she has been asked to credit the article to this pseudonym] Big Daddy Gomes Where in the world is Tryina Denouement? ~ by Tryina Denouement
|
|
|
Post by Cafe SalMONAlla on Sept 2, 2017 10:14:47 GMT -5
667 Big Brother: A RecapThe Beginning667 Big Brother, our online version of the popular reality tv show, has become a yearly (northern hemisphere) summer tradition. This year it began on June 9th and ended August 11th. The basic structure of the game was this - every weekend we had a small, optional task. Every week we had a large, mandatory task, and an eviction. The ninth week, rather than a regular task, was our championship voting. Zortegus and I began the game as the public face of the Big Brothers, though as we would later reveal, Trip was our third Big Brother who started off pretending to be a housemate while secretly having admin power and helping us plan. The HousematesWe started off with 13 housemates: Anka BSam Bun Him Luna Mister M Mona Quotester Renuoquidvis Sophie Trip Tryina Willis Week One - Start Your EnginesThe game began with introductions, and then the first task was a drag show! Because Zortegus is a Big Brother, and he can. Renuoquidvis with his game avatar and Bun with her drag Dumbledore won the task, and were chosen to be team captains for week two. Luna, a housemate who seems to have registered and then never logged in again, and who we nothing about except for her gender and the location of her ip address (Spain), was evicted. Week Two - Lights, Camera, Action!After a week of no indoor plumbing, the housemates were allowed to design a bathroom this weekend. For the weekly task, the housemates were split into two teams and each team created a scene they would like to see in the upcoming Netflix series. Renuoquidvis's team, with their Dewey's -death-by-harpoon scene, took the victory, but Bun's team with their elevator shaft scene (and accompanying BSam song) receives honorable mention. Unbeknownst to all, Bun was actually out of town this week, and was played very skillfully by Charlie. Quotester, a housemate who managed to post using only the quotes of other people, was evicted and revealed to be Comet. Week Three - Who Am I?During the third weekend Bun came back and Charlie won full housemate status. Because of the extra person in the house, a double eviction took place, of Mona and Sophie. For the weekly task, everyone was assigned a different housemate to impersonate for the week, and then at the end had to guess who was who. Trip and Him were the winners, though as we would discover, Trip cheated by being a secret Big Brother and already knowing who everyone was. Week Four - RoastingTrip started off the weekend by switching places with Zortegus and assigned the housemates to write limericks, a task Mona was glad to have avoided. The main weekly task was to roast each other - something that some housemates were better at than others. Housemates were supposed to have reregistered their accounts after the previous week's impersonation task, but Anka failed to do so and Mister M informed us that she was upset at the way the game was proceeding. She became our first voluntary eviction, and the rest of the housemates were safe for another week. Week Five - SuperheroesThere were two weekend tasks this time, each a play on words of the previous task - one a request for roasting recipes, another for ways to keep cool. On Monday, with the start of a new task, all the housemates were given super powers. They came up with origin stories, forged alliances and rivalries, and eventually put aside their differences and worked together to save the world. Zortegus, who had resigned as Big Brother due to lack of time, decided that he was too busy to even be a housemate and decided to become the second voluntary eviction in order to save Charlie, who was also up for eviction that week. Week Six - SurvivorHousemates were given a surprise eviction this weekend, and nearly unanimously voted off the resident complainer, Mister M. For the main task, housemates were locked out of most of the inside rooms of the house for the week and given the task of surviving out in the woods surrounding the Big Brother house. BSam quickly organized an alliance among the housemates, which each of the remaining housemates except for Renuoquidvis joined. Some of the highlights of the week include Charlie cutting off his hair to use for bedding, Renuoquidvis wringing out koi fish for water and eating Mister M for food, Bun leaving the campfire unattended and nearly burning everything down, and a funeral and 503 individual graves for Mister M's eyebrow hairs. At the end of the week Tryina was evicted. Week Seven - Big Brother!!! on IceThe weekend started off with housemates being asked to imagine who they would spend seven minutes with, given the choice of anyone in the world. Charlie played matchmaker and encouraged BSam and Him to pick each other, a detail made more amusing later in the week when Him was evicted and it was revealed that Him WAS BSam. The weekly task was a homage to the anime Yuri on Ice, about professional figure skaters, and each of the six remaining housemates was tasked with designing skating programs. Willy and BSam won the task, with Bun coming in a close second. Week Eight - Search PartyThe weekend task was supposed to be people guessing who Renuoquidvis was (Quisby), but apparently everyone already knew his identity so that ended up being boring. Trip outdid herself by creating an exhaustive scavenger hunt, a task that was scored partially by the scavenger items but that also included secret bonus points. This week was another secret double eviction, with Quisby being voted off, and Charlie, as winner of the task, being allowed to pick the second evictee. In a passionate tale of betrayals and alliances, he explained to us why Willis had to go. The FinalThere were two parts to the final. First, we had our three finalists (BSam, Bun, Charlie) write essays about their time in the house and their fellow housemates, while people voted on who to evict next. Once the results were in, Charlie was gone, and BSam and Bun advanced to the championship. The board settings, which previously only allowed housemates to post, was modified to allow everyone to post their support of one or the other during the final vote, and eventually Bun was crowned champion of 2017's 667 Big Brother. ~Death, destruction and elimination at the BB house as portrayed by our resident cartoonist~
|
|
|
Post by Cafe SalMONAlla on Sept 2, 2017 10:15:34 GMT -5
Lemona is terrible at RantsOr 'Please read my new fic' By Mister M I hate when I'm in the middle of writing and I have to stop because of ~real life~ as if ~real life~ is actually more important than my ~imaginings~. like, c'mon. So Whilst I'm nearing the end of the eighth chapter of my wonderful fic 'Rivers of Blood' (Which, by the way, you should all go and read once you've finished reading this), I have now been summoned forth to unearth a rant from deep within my soul, to share upon you. This is not something I want to do, nor do I feel I will be any good at it. But at least I can plug my fic. plug plug plug. But look at this, i'm ranting about a rant. What Fun. The Rant is a long rested (and formerly regular) article that used to be written by someone who is now our editor. As part of the 'handing over' It was decided that it would be fitting for me to supplant Lemona's inherent rage, at least for this first issue. The problem is the only thing I actually have to rant about is the concept of having to write the rant itself, and that’s pretty boring. An easy thing to do would be to complain about the terrible lack of quality in this issue, but that would be a cheap joke as I'm sure the issue will be great so nah. But there is a reason why the rant was dropped in the first place. The reason being that it's difficult to find things to rant about in the first place. Lemona said to me that she was scraping the bottom of the barrel, that the only rants that she could now produce would be terrible. I insisted that nobody would notice the difference, but we decided to stop while we were ahead. BUT NOW IT’S BACK!!! Maybe I'll do this again next month if anyone cares enough to read. Maybe not. Maybe I could rant about how annoying it is when nobody compliments me on how brilliant my skills as a writer are... ~ This rant comes with an artistic interpretation of Mister M's suffering as envisioned by Quisby. ~
|
|
|
Post by Cafe SalMONAlla on Sept 2, 2017 10:16:40 GMT -5
Around about now there should be a new advice column written by everyone’s favourite Charlie, Charlie. However: He didn’t. Look out for it in our next edition. ---- Big Daddy Gomes likes to portray himself as a no nonsense character, impatient as they come, but in reality he is too patient for his own good. The Big Dee Gee sits around every damn year waiting for someone to stop writing novels, stop layering their bedroom walls with plot post-its for the next G.(A.)N., stop smithing 3-DUMBensional characters who pluck at your heartstrings when you get to know them, and, for the love of god, stop being middle-aged; then, for them to start learning other languages, start reading poetry in those other languages, and then start writing some fershlugging capital-p Poems in their own language. But sometimes the fella named Gomes can’t take it anymore: he (me, the Gomes man) is forced to recycle all his NYRB and his Paris Reviews and Times Literary Supplements. He’s gotta slaughter what’s left of capital-l Literature and get all up in those guts: act the haruspex till he thinks he knows where light might emanate from capital-b Books in the 21st century. Well, you can imagine how damn bloody are the fingers of Fat Father Gomes after all this. The only thing he has to show for it is 3 slim unpaginated Books by the canuck illustrator Jon Klassen-- dammit, the *only* BIG KAHUNA of literature in century the 21st ---or maybe he’s just bait, like the itsus bitsus piscus who features prominently in book the 2nd of his premature magnum opus (the hat trilogy), THIS IS NOT MY HAT -- but if so, it’s tasty enough bait for me all right. Let’s just get it out of the way right now: WE FOUND A HAT, the final installment of the trilogy, is not just the best picture book of 2016, it’s the best children’s book of 2016, and the best Book of 2016, and the best Book of the 21st century, and the best Book written in the last half century or so, this being 40ish years, meaning that no numbskull since at least the 1970s has managed to squeeze out a single printable sequence of ideas that is good enough to beat what is generally billed as a Cute and Humorous Sequel to a ‘Kids’ Bestseller. What is poetry? It’s just like prose, except the words used to describe and insinuate are reduced, and then they’re reduced some more, and then even more reduced until they don’t even spill over a line: extreme exiguity of ink, bearing pure abundance of meaning. Now I will tell you that the only poetry left in the 21st century is sentences like “WE ARE WATCHING THE SUNSET. WE ARE WATCHING IT TOGETHER.” Of course, these words might appear in some big dumb novel, or even a short story, where they would account for a fraction of a percent of the thousands of words used to make that big dumb narrative. But, when used in WE FOUND A HAT, they account for over 4% of the text. The smaller and simpler the text, the more important each individual word, this being the same in picture books and poetry. But contemporary novelists have honed down a good easyflowing style, haven’t they, straightforward and episodic with clinical imagery and extreme realism, innit? And if the shenanigans could not have really happened, it’s not really non-realism is it, it’s just ‘magic realism’ isn’t it? Real flowing dialogue, colloquial, like they were amongst a batch of coworking TV screenwriters, right? Like NO ONE wrote that novel, eh? (Digression: it just appeared in your mind like characters on a screen, where of course you cannot see who’s behind the camera.) Well, they certainly imitate speech well, Big Daddy will be the first to concede. The problem is to equate the simplicity of speech with the simplicity of poetry. Speech is inherently long-winded, cycling through many words before landing on a simple idea, the real simplicity being in the words chosen, because of limited lexicons or a stigma toward lexical flourish. Poetry can use big words -- endangered words and resurrected words -- all it wants, the simplicity lying in the number of words used, especially in relation to the complexity of the idea conveyed. “We are watching the sunset. We are watching it together” is simple, but not because it is colloquial -- nobody talks like that. You will find diction like that in didactic sentences for a Spanish 101 workbook. The difference is that those sentences, of course, don’t flow anywhere, they are isolated and meaningless. “We are watching the sunset. We are watching it together” is simple, but not because it uses words that early readers can understand. It’s because the height of meaning these sentences carry would pop your lungs if you caught your breath to expound such information in one (1) exhale. But you can easily exhale in -- 10 words, all of them irremovable without collapsing the tower, 6 for rhetorical purposes and 4 for syntactic purposes, all of them essential to poetical beauty. “Does it REALLY have THAT much meaning though? Like cmon bro” says a snotty-nosed reader whose mug the Big Dad Gomes wants to punch. You might, at least, admit that every sentence in a 50 page picture book *cannot be removed* without harm to the flow of the piece. Therefore they all at least have *some* kind of meaning that contributes to the overall message. Now asks yourself how many sentences in a 100,000 word novel are UTTERLY MEANINGLESS in the long run. How many can be chopped in half, how many can be smushed together, and how many can be outright obliterated without the slightest impairment of the reader’s ultimate comprehension? Buttressing the argument that the only poetry left in the 21st century is picture books, this obviously means that a sentence in a well-crafted picture book has preposterously higher levels of proportional meaning than a sentence in even a grand novel. That is by definition poetry. As for what is labelled poetry in the Year of Our Lord Twenty Seventeen, you’ll find (and Gomes The Explorer has found) that it is all, actually, prose, with arbitrary line breaks, usually sub-labelled with the fallacy of “Vers Libre.” This all without any mention of the illustrations for the Hat trilogy and some of Jonny’s other non-authorial works, which are masterpieces of sequential art and book design. For extraGomesicular reading on that front, visit Megan Dowd Lambert or Scott McCloud. For now, just read more children’s literature. CHUCH
|
|
|
Post by Cafe SalMONAlla on Sept 2, 2017 10:17:34 GMT -5
Have you been wandering the board, or the Facebook chat, and wonder where exactly Tryina is? Why she hasn’t appeared in a lot of 667 discussions? The last thing you might hear of her is her travelling to Hong Kong and Macau for her Eid holiday, if you’re a 667 BB 2017 spectator or participant. Then, she just disappeared like that, until this very day, when you are reading this article on the new and improved edition of the 667er. Where did she go exactly? Location-wise, she is still in the same place, which is Indonesia. However, she has been busily doing other things, such as procrastinating, having diets, occasionally improving upon her portfolio, and generally being very, very lazy and playing on the Internet all day. She is also working on her second book, however. There is a reason why Tryina has not busied herself with going to school again after graduating from middle school (or Secondary school for Teapotland people). She is only going to school next year, quite fortunately. However, she is planning to do a bunch of other things to fill up her time somewhat. She has recently been forced to go work out, a remarkable achievement considering Tryina is the type that slouches all day. She will also be travelling to Malaysia a day after the article will be published, which means she might be depleted of internet. So, there you are, folks; the question nobody has ever, ever asked has been answered. Where in the world is Tryina Denouement?
|
|
|
Post by Cafe SalMONAlla on Sept 2, 2017 10:19:42 GMT -5
Regrettably, there is no netflix news article this time, as our beloved trip is probably surrounded by fierce weasels or wedged tightly between two refrigerators. Instead, have a comic by quisby about some of the most important netflix developments of late, and the discussion they generate: DIDN'T HAVE THE TIME TO MAKE A PROPER ENDING FOR THE ISSUE WITH ADVERTISEMENTS AND WHATNOT (OR PERHAPS I'VE DONE AWAY WITH THEM, YOU NEVER KNOW) SO TA-TA FOR NOW AND THANK YOU EVERYONE. IF YOU WANT TO DO SOMETHING IN THE NEXT ISSUE PM ME
|
|
|
Post by Isadora Is a Door on Sept 8, 2017 17:28:53 GMT -5
It's Back! And it's about time... Editorial - (Yay, editorial). The idea of the Contents / Link way of publishing the issue is cool. Also due to a scar on my face I'm surprised if I have 503 eyebrow hairs. Rant - that drawing is scarily accurate
|
|
|
Post by soufflé on Sept 9, 2017 7:13:25 GMT -5
Quisby that drawing is amazing I love it
|
|
|
Post by Poe's Coats Host Toast on Sept 9, 2017 11:29:52 GMT -5
Haha, cool comic, Quisby; great last panel.
|
|
|
Post by Poe's Coats Host Toast on Sept 9, 2017 14:40:45 GMT -5
Oh, didn't see the other one! I meant the Netflix news comic, but I also love the panel that Lemona chose for her avatar.
|
|
|
Post by BSam on Sept 11, 2017 3:19:26 GMT -5
bump
|
|
|
Post by Cafe SalMONAlla on Sept 11, 2017 5:02:05 GMT -5
what for?
|
|
|
Post by BSam on Sept 11, 2017 21:58:49 GMT -5
It was a comment to let you know I've read it.
|
|
|
Post by Poe's Coats Host Toast on Sept 12, 2017 10:30:01 GMT -5
Re: Big Daddy Gomes' Books - but it doesn't even rhyme or fit in a meter so there (but good shout out to Scott McCloud, great writer on sequential art; I'll add Will Eisner's theoretical texts, too)
|
|
|
Post by Teleram on Sept 19, 2017 22:54:32 GMT -5
lmao I did literally nothing other than answer one PM from Lemona and still got credited as "Assistant Editor"
EDIT: turns out i mis-remembered; i didn't even answer her PM
|
|