Most Awkward Boy in the World

Chris Gethard and Zach Woods (and a cornucopia of UCB folks in cameos) have made a series of videos. Enjoy.

SantaCon, Tomorrow

Don't forget. Check the site later tonight for where it starts.

You can also sign up to get text messages to get updates during the day about the mobs location.

(Oh, and Liquid Courage tonight. Midnight. Me. Four and half minutes.)

New & Old & Things I Should Do

I added a new feature, which I am sure you are all super excited about. (Sorry. I had my SARCASM LOCK key on.) But over to the right I have a UP NEXT FOR ME thingy. Just a quick guide to tracking me down. Might cut down on me making numerous posts about the same topic.

For example, right now I am going to remind you that I'll be trying out a sketch at Liquid Courage at UCBNY theater at 11:59pm this Friday (December 15th). Or that on Saturday (December 16th) is SantaCon and that you should get your butt to Halloween Adventure or other retail costume location a pick up a Santa suit.

I have also cut some the links out of my links lists. No matter how much I may respect those folk, I if they don't post regularly, they don't get a slot. (Side note: the little thrill of finding yourself blog roller by folks you don't even know is quite nice. For example Behind Closed Doors. I don't think I know any early 20's fashion industry folks in western New York... but there they are.)
Man, I keep meaning to write mini-reviews of Happy Feet and Casino Royale. And I was graciously taken to see Spring Awakening: A New Musical by a good friend and I should write something about that. Or I could write about how improv practice has been going. Or the fact that I had a another nice contact from a long lost good friend through MySpace. One of my favorite people so that is good. I also keep meaning to write a massive "Why Second Life Is the Future... for Good or Ill" post. And then there is my long delayed Gears of War review. Or a "When does a practice group become a real group and who gets to decide who gets to stay." Or "Podcasting: Harder Than It Seems."

But time is short and I am a busy busy boy. Laundry! On to laundry!

So much stuff to do!

I had a great rehearsal of something new. It was just–

Wait. Let me start again. There is just so much stuff going on right now, that I don't even know how much I'm going to be able to post. Let's go over all of the things you can find me at in the coming days.

Today (Tuesday, Dec. 5th): I shall be hitting Harold Night at UCB. Some fine teams shall be one stage. At 8pm you have T.R.U.C.K.S. and then Beverly Hills. Personally, I think Beverly Hills has the highest "sexy" quotiant of any other team right now. They just drip sexy. Then there is Creep and 1985. Creep has Angeliki George, Ryan Karel and Silvija Ozols who are all amogst my current favorites. Yes, Silvija is my current improv crush.

On Wednesday, I shall be going to Barcade for the Child's Play Fünde Razor. I will be the one losing at Guitar Hero. If that isn't your cup of tea, you should head to UCB at 11pm for a free show of some awesome sketch comedy... Hot Sauce Sells Out. Michael Showalter will there.

Thursday I am going to... you know, I don't know what I am going to. It is a mystery secret plan. I have not been told the details. I am to wear buiness casual.

Then there are meetings, gatherings, plans, and other such that who are not privy to.

But lets flash forward to Friday, Dec. 15th. You want to know where you want to be at midnight? (When I say midnight of Dec. 15th, I mean Friday, Dec. 15th, 11:59pm, just to be clear.) You will want to be at UCB again. Liquid Courage. You will want to see me perform a sketch of my writing. Me and my friend Vin performing. J Bob directing. It is some darn funny stuff. And it is free! Comedy! Drama! Violence! Me with a bad british accent!

Good good times.

And the next day is SantaCon. Wonderfully tasty SantaCon.

Where do they come from

More writing. Suffer suffer suffer. Joseph is doing a bit better, but only because I have to build him up a bit. He's got a part time job at the telemarketing company from Four Borders (no Dave doesn't work there anymore). But that job is going to lead to something more political, His girlfriend has also arrived from MA, so he's happy about that. I promise not to kill her... but not much else.

It was Wednesday so it was sketch class. I had written a bunch of sketches, tossed a bunch out. Settled on one idea, took a stab at it on Tuesday but t just wasn't happening. Then I put it off until 3 hours before class. I tried it again, did some quick edits to get it under 2 pages. Seem to go over well. Armando literally had no notes to give me. None. Said that there was probably reworking that would be done once it was being performed, but not much top do just on the page. Felt good... just not all that helpful.

And again, my ego is usually fine and needs no fluffing, thank you very much.

Anywhozits, I like to see what sites people come from to me lil' ol' blog. Many of these are from random Blogger blogs due do the random "Next Blog" button on the navbar. So let me honor a few of those here before I crash for the night.

I'm A Little Teapot from Debbie in Oklahoma. She likes, well, teapots!

Sai Shyam Page from Sai Shyam in Banglore, Karnataka, India. They actually linked to this site in their first post, but I think it was a test as that page has been deleted.

Donde Quedan Las Palabras from Diego Antonio Vivas Jiménez in Santiago de Cali, Valle del Cauca, Colombia. I think that translates to "Where did they leave the words?" I don't know.

The Incurable Allure of Carrots by Mr. Tangerine in Chicago, Illinois. Some very entertaining poems and stories and pictures.

The Phoenix Hearse is by an aeronautics engineer who loves her cars. She has a special feature once a week called Bitchy Monday. Guess what day it is on.

Slow novels, annoying subs, great classes

The novel is starting slow. Almost painfuly so. I don't want to get into it right now because there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful. But it does feel like I am climbing up a steep slope, believe that their is a much easier climb if I can just get past this first part... but not being able to see over the ridge, I can't be sure.

Sketch class had a sub teacher. He had good notes, but I felt like he thought he was running a group of writers for a specific show, and not a beginning sketch class. He also got very flirtery with the one woman in class. Whatever.

Improv class last night was frakin awesome. Just good work by everyone. Very very funny. I personally felt very in the moments. There were times in my scenes were I suddenly let myself give into emotions (in the scenes I got to kind of cry and in the group game I initiated I got have a ranting outburst). And suddenly I understood so much of what I was missing. I felt like I was gifting myself and gifting my partners. It was a great feeling.

The most expensive sketch ever written

So I finally finished my Commercial Parody sketch for tonight's class. I did to the Uwe Boll/Oregon Trail movie trailer. I inserted some commentary by Uwe himself so I could make fun of him more directly. I think it turned out pretty funny. But it is pretty ambitious if anyone were to try to shoot it. Fields on fire. Covered wagons forging rapids. Charging bears. Lots of gun fire. Charging bears on fire. A single shot that goes from a close up of Nicky Cage to high above the Pacific Northwest. The Pacific Northwest on fire.

But I did give Dakota Fanning dysentery. And Jessica Simpson syphilis.

Halloween was fine. Met my low expectations, which was dandy. I enjoyed dressing up and scaring little children with my Santa of Death. It is odd how even on Halloween people on the subway won't sit next to someone in a Santa suit, long skeleton fingers, skull face makeup with blood hand prints on the face and neck. Go figure.

UCB was so-so. Anthony King is amazing with his one-liner observations. And Angeliki George just slays me. Her Slappy, the UCB basement monster, was down with such incredible joy and conviction.

The Harold at 10pm seemed to be a hard struggle. They seemed to have a real hard time finding the game in many scenes. It was one of those backseat improv-ing nights, where in my head I keep yelling, "No no! You just passed up something and now who are taking too many left turns!" It is always easier in the audience... except for those times it's not and you are just amazed and surprised.

Someone did come in a great Joe Wengert costume.

Over on Neil Gaiman's blog, he has an amazingly adoreable picture of his daughter Maddy dressed as him. If you know Gaiman, this will make you laugh

Sketch Writing Dooldrums

I have to write a commercial parody for tomorrows class and it just isn't clicking. Somehow I though it would be simple, but nothing is exciting me. This the kind of thing that would be a lot easier for me if I was just given a specific ad to make fun of. Maybe it's because I can think of something funny to do of about any ad out there... I don't know.

I tried to do something based on the Michael J Fox/Rush Limbaugh stem-cell thing, but it just wasn't working as an ad. It is really more suited for a news segment. You know, on of those satellite group debate deals. MJF shaking on one side, Rush popping pills on the other, maybe bring back Pope John Paul from the dead to hit the Parkinson/stem-cell joke hard on last time. Just not suited to an ad. And making an UNfunny Parkinson's joke is just not cool. Funny, fine. UNfunny, no.

So I finally settled on a trailer for "Oregon Trail: The Movie." Directed by Uwe Boll. May only end up funny to a certain level of geek... and a certain age of geek. But it makes me laugh.

Still a pain to write. Not a lot of dialogue. A lot of description. I don't know how it will "read."

Sigh.

Pre-NaNo Inspiration

I'm in the Tea Lounge trying to finish writing my sketch for class. Meanwhile, I've been trying to find a "best friend" for my novel's main character. And I am listening to a Kurt Corbain-look-alike play guitar and play Wheels on the Bus for a gaggle of under 4 year olds and their West Indian nannies. He seems to be enjoying himself, but what if he was more like ol' Kurt? What would have Kurt been like if he had never formed Nirvana and became a coffeehouse children's music performer? But still shot herorin?

I have my best friend.

Back to the sketch. Jane is about to start nursing her dog.

48 Hour Film Challenge - That a Cajun Chicken Wrap with Ranch Dressing

Okay, we are done. The final shots of the night was my death scene. Which I nailed, thank you very much. Over the top. And watch the drink. Just watch it. I'm pretty proud of it. Especially since I managed to repeat the same death 5 times from one angle and 2 times from another. AND then my body drag... Oh, the skill that took. You won't see it on the film, but it took a particular way of being limp.

So they are all packing stuff up as I get ready to go to SNL. Maybe I won't fal asleep during My Chemical Romance. Maybe I will. We'll see. Hopefully I will be awake enough when I return to make one more post.

Bill now gets to go off and edit the darn thing. We'll see if he plans to post it to the world. (8 minutes fits nicely on the Tube of You.)

Fun day. I wouldn't do it again tomorrow. But next year? Sure.

Tomorrow I have to write 3 small sketches for TRS and a bunch of sketches for my sketch writing class.

Love ya' all. Yes, even the little people.

A night of little sleep

A bit of the old insomnia last night. No reason really. I started with some emails and then a bit of forum posting. Then a bit of pre-NaNoWriMo-pipe-flushing writing, which led to going to those forums to ask a random question. And then I started checking out Lulu.com, which is basically a print-on-demand vanity press. Very very simple (except that you have to do all the formatting and it is a bit pricey... but there is no up front cost). So I got all wrapped up in that for a while. Made a cover, which was an interesting experience. See, my old copy of Adobe Illustrator doesn't work on my new mac. So I used the draw program in NeoOffice, a free open source MS Office type program. Worked out okay for what I was doing, just not very smooth. Again, I was just playing around.

Then I started to read about online worlds. You know, World of Warcraft, EVE, Second Life. I really appreciate these "games," I just can't play them. Way way to much time to devote to them, with little dramatic story. (I will write about my feeling on them in more detail later this week.) But I do love to read about what is going on in them.

I tried to write some sketches for next weeks podcast and failed. The theme is "Home" and I am just not getting a good idea. Blah. I am starting a sketch writing class on Wednesday at The Magnet. We'll see. I'm not a big fan of most writing classes. Too much "all ideas are god ideas" crap. Blah

Then I slept for a bit but woke up after 3 hours for no reason. So I blog-surfed for a while. And then I updated my links on this blog since they had all been flushed when I switched over to the Blogger 2.0 beta. Then I decided i didn't have enough links, so I searched for blogs by improvisors I like. Okay, right now it's mainly just folks who have taught me. (Improvisors are a bit of ass-kissers.) Then I played with some of the features in the Blogger 2.o and after an hour ended up basically were I started. (Changed my sub-title to better suit my current state of mind... that "from the edge" thing was pretty lame.)

Then I looked at sinks.

Now it is 8:30am and I have practice class at 12:30. I could sleep for another hour or two, but I know that won't happen. So I shall wrap this up, take a shower, do some laundry, go out for breakfast and the NYTimes and see how much coffee I can drink.

(Oh, I never said how Thursdays class went. Good. Still hard, I'm not actually over the hump, but I do really feel like I'm peaking of the top. I made some lame moves... or at least incomplete ones, but I also made some that I was proud of. And I'm not thinking about it as much. Looking forward to practice in 4 hours. Hopefully we'll have more people.)

Practice, practice, practice

We have a "practice group" set up for our improv group today. I'm very excited but unsure how many folks are actually going to be there. Hope we get at least five. I get very intense in class, trying to absorb every little nugget of knowledge. Today I want to play. Characters! I need to play characters! Perhaps I will play a sea captain/pimp today. Pimps at Sea! (If you know what I am referencing, you are officially a nerd. Go nerds!)

After class it is another recording session for The Terrible Red Show podcast. Looks like we're going to get more actors which is good. I wrote half a dozen or so sketches this week but not all that many on topic ("School"). I also have no idea if any of them are funny. There's a dueling one I like, but definitely not on theme. We shall see if any of them make the cut. Luckily my ego isn't tied to them so I'm not concerned.

On that topic, go to the TRS forums and vote for next weeks theme. If you vote for "Obligation," the dueling sketch might get on.

Going On's

Just got back from doing some voice work in some sketches for a podcast. I mean, you isn't at this point?

It was fun. Apparently the episode should be up tomorrow (which is pretty quick turn around). I am guessing John Robert doesn't sleep. Sounds like it may be a regular gig. Yeah, like I need another non-paying gig. Actually, I do. Gets me out of the house. Here's the site: The Terrible Red Show. Enjoy or not. See if I care.

I'll be hitting Harold Night at UCBNY on Tuesday. I'm doing the whole night because I'm excited about seeing Sensory Depravation at 11pm. Improvs with out sight and improvs without sound. Of course not at the same time. Improvs with just the senses of smell, touch and taste would probably end up messy.