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Post by Horsie on Dec 21, 2018 18:57:52 GMT
That's amazing.
I saw someone set up a fake package on their porch that would fire off a shotgun blank if it was lifted, and another that was full of firecrackers.
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Post by wordweaver3 on Dec 24, 2018 3:36:01 GMT
Glitter is obnoxious and annoying, but I'd rather go with this.
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Post by wordweaver3 on Feb 16, 2019 7:15:21 GMT
So I'm doing some middle of the night pondering. I was thinking about how musicals are all but dead as a movie genre (at least outside of stuff like Frozen) and I wondered if it was because the songs in musicals seem to, well, sorta fit musicals.
What if someone made a musical using music that doesn't fit musicals at all?
What if someone made a heavy-metal musical?
No, I don't mean:
I mean a serious effort at a metal story with metal themes backed up with on screen performances of heavy metal music by the cast. I'm not talking jam music into a kick ass story, I'm talking a kick ass story where the songs informs the story. The way musicals used to. The way they're supposed to.
Anyone interested or am I just having late night madness?
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Post by Horsie on Feb 16, 2019 16:23:38 GMT
I really don't like musicals, but I supposed I'd give that a shot, it's something new.
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Post by wordweaver3 on Feb 17, 2019 0:45:21 GMT
The more I thought about it the more I like the idea.
I'm thinking of a heavy metal remake of the greatest musical of all time. The Wizard of Oz.
Only Dorothy is a tattooed warrior princess and Toto is a fuckin wolf. Instead of ruby slippers it's crimson spiked armbands. The yellow brick road is replaced by the blood soaked trail. The scarecrow is like a skeletal warrior or something. The tin man is replaced with the Iron Executioner Mechanon! The cowardly lion is a chimera.
And when they kill the Wicked Witch of the West she fuckin melts a la Raiders of the Lost Ark.
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Post by Horsie on Feb 17, 2019 1:30:39 GMT
You've sold me on it, I'd pay to see that
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Post by Canuovea on Feb 17, 2019 1:30:44 GMT
Would that be Parasitic Storytelling? It would only be the 72435th take on A Wizard of Oz that tried to be subversive/change the genre though. I joke.
I have little interest in Heavy Metal, so I'm probably the wrong audience for something like this. That being said, I do like some musicals... but the problem with many of them is that the music just... isn't very good and doesn't match what is going on at all.
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Post by Horsie on Feb 17, 2019 1:34:21 GMT
You should do something about that
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Post by wordweaver3 on Feb 17, 2019 3:24:43 GMT
I'm thinking something more along the lines of what O Brother, Where Art Thou? did with the Odyssey. Where it's not immediately clear that it's a rendition of another story (outside the fact they straight-up tell you at the beginning). Only with metal.
That's why I picked The Wizard of Oz. It's a good example where the story doesn't just stop to have a musical number, the music informs and progresses the story.
Though I'd have to get permission to use The Wizard of Oz movie as a template. Although Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is public domain.
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Post by wordweaver3 on Mar 4, 2019 21:20:14 GMT
Anybody else remember that story idea I pitched a while back? The one about a neolithic serial killer?
Well, I just picked it back up after sorta giving up because my first attempt was abysmal. The other day I started thinking about it again and approached it from a different angle. So far I'm pretty happy with it.
The basic idea is the same but I really went into the world building more than I had before. I decided that one of the consequences of early agriculture was that if you stayed in one place for long enough and your population grew large enough the resources in the immediate area would start to deplete. Most notably the game animals would get further and further away, but your crop fields can't move so neither can you. Livestock hasn't been developed yet and grain fields don't provide enough protein on their own to feed everyone. This means the hunters, who are typically the men, would have to go further and further afield to get game, to the point where eventually they're away far more than they are in the village. This leaves the village under the supervision of the women in so naturally it would start to become a matriarchy. This leads to a system where wealth is determined by the number of children you have. The more children you have the larger the field you can manage and the more crops you can grow, which leads to surplus, which leads to more children and larger field management. Of course, pregnancy is risky in the stone age so you end up with more men than women usually. But women of wealth tend to take multiple men into their family, and the men are fine with this cuz "dat bitch got money". That works out well for the women since they can always have a man around for protection and additional agricultural labor (and other things) and a man (or three) afield bringing back game. More food, more wealth.
So motherhood is paramount in this culture. In fact, they don't have a name for "father". For one, you can never be absolutely sure which one of the men in the family are your father (a man that a woman keeps being called a "house man"), for two, it's not exactly clear to them how women get pregnant.
Now a good old fashioned war would clear up that men/women ratio pretty nicely, but the society has developed to coexist with nearby tribes. This development is due in large part to the network of traveling priests. These people have so many gods that it's not feasible to have a priest of every one of them in every village. They simply couldn't support so many people doing nothing but meditating and preaching (well, some of them could, but they don't want to). The priests tend to move from village to village to perform their specific duties, bringing with them goods and gossip from other tribes. This leads to a loose camaraderie between tribes, those other people don't seem so foreign. It's also in the priest's best interest that the tribes don't fight since that will disrupt their routes, so they will take it upon themselves to try and settle disputes peacefully. A priest's life is pretty darn good, when they walk into a village they are typically treated like royalty, but if they stay too long people might start to resent them for basically doing nothing and expecting to get fed for it. During a war it's harder to move from village to village safely. Not to say that wars never happen, but they're rare.
Our main character is a priest of the goddess Murr. The moon and death goddess. His responsibilities are to the dead, so when he arrives in a village (after much eating and culture sharing) he has to tend to those that have died since he last visited. This is a messy affair since refrigeration isn't a thing. Bodies are kept far from the village in a specifically built structure where he goes to make sure their spirits make it into the next life safely. As such his official designation is "guide". Other duties include making sure the bodies are properly disposed of and that the structure for the dead is adequately taken care of.
He can also assist someone who is dying or simply wants to die due to pain or other reasons.
He has a student with him that is a woman. A female holy person is unusual since pregnancy makes travel very difficult and would impede their duties. However, the student had approached him with the request for a ritual suicide. After some discussion he discovered that the reason she wished for it was that she was destined for poverty. After many years she had yet to become pregnant and bear a child. Her house men had left her since no assistance was forthcoming on her part, and the fields given to her by her mother could not be tended. She lost her fields and her home. She believed herself to be without resources and death was the only option.
The priest offered to teach her the trade instead.
So I guess that makes the hero of the story Jack Kevorkian.
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Post by Canuovea on Mar 4, 2019 22:23:43 GMT
Is this going to become like Neolithic Cadfael?
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Post by wordweaver3 on Mar 4, 2019 23:07:43 GMT
Actually, yeah, kinda. Also some William von Baskerville.
The characters unique specialties and insights are going to give him clues to the nature of the killer, how and why he kills, and when and where he's likely to kill again. All with the irony that the hero himself deals in death and makes a living off of it.
I'm trying to present a sort of mystery in what is going to feel like a very alien world to the reader.
For one, priests are not celibate. In fact, while not going to be specifically said in the story, the priests are one of the elements that keep genetic stagnation from occurring in small population groups.
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Post by Canuovea on Mar 5, 2019 3:21:01 GMT
I think it is a really interesting concept. Pretty solid. Though now comes the question of execution.
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Post by wordweaver3 on Mar 5, 2019 4:52:30 GMT
My first attempt with the concept was pretty basic and I didn't really put much thought into the world building, so it was incredibly bland. It bored me so I gave up.
The second try the main character was coming off as a villain and self-important. Plus it was still pretty dry. Things were happening and characters were responding, but the world around it felt forced and without reason. I started to think the idea was just not going to work. Or at least I didn't have the talent to make it work.
My third attempt started when I was laying in bed sleepless at 4 am the other day. My mind started adding nuance to the world and extrapolating how this would affect the story and the people. I also decided to add the student as a bridge between the main character and the reader, so when things need to be explained he has someone to explain them to instead of just saying it for no reason or not at all.
So far I'm pretty happy with how it's going.
I was a little worried about some elements. The society for the most part has a very frank attitude towards sex due to the way it has developed. For them it isn't tied to marriage or even childbirth, it's just something they do that comes naturally. They don't even differentiate between homosexuality and heterosexuality because as far as they're concerned there's no difference. I was a little worried about it getting porn-ish. But I've noticed that if it written frankly without going into details it just becomes part of the fabric of the world. And really, when you live in a world where people regard sex as just another way to interact with each other there's nothing special about it. You're living your day to day life just struggling to survive.
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Post by Canuovea on Mar 5, 2019 5:03:52 GMT
Well, pornography is a matter of amount of detail, I suppose.
And of course geography.
I can see the world coming together pretty well though, from what you've described.
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