Latest Chris & Trilby comic: No. 0075 -
Quinn's Briefing Continues
19/2/05:
Education Can Suck My Nuts
Recently, in
addition to doing some work for Bad Brain
Entertainment which I may have mentioned, I've
gotten involved with another professional design
studio based here in Brisbane, and I've actually
met the rest of the team in person, astoundingly.
I'm the scriptwriter and we're making a demo to
secure some venture capital. If all goes well we
all quit our day jobs by next year. I don't get
paid anything at the moment, though, so don't
think you can stop donating.
So, there you go
- keep writing adventure games and releasing them
online, pimply dreamers, and one day they'll be
enough to impress the right people to get you
into the industry. It was while I was getting to
know my new colleagues, however, that I
discovered that every single one of them had been
to university except me. Ho no, you can't get
talent like mine in university, I told myself,
it's as ingrained as the congealed Weetabix on
the breakfast bowls. But then I put some more
thought to it, and I came to a rather upsetting
conclusion.
Friends, it's
like this. My education has done absolutely
nothing for me.
A jolly scene at Eastlands Primary
School, or as I like to call it, THE LAIR
OF THE CHILDHOOD THIEVES. |
And I
don't mean that as hyperbole. I can think
of literally nothing about my present
situation and intellect for which I can
thank schooling, and I really thought
hard. At first I thought this was cool.
Then I realised that this meant I had
spent ten or twelve years of my life
drinking a cocktail of boredom and misery
when I could have spent all that time
playing Sonic the Hedgehog and gotten
much the same out of it. That's, like,
about one seventh of my time on Earth,
gone, for no fucking reason. Now I've
only got the remaining six-sevenths to
leave my legacy for future generations.
That's not going to be enough time to
fulfill my major life objective - to
divert a river so that it spells out the
words 'EARTH NEEDS YOUR SEX' in joined-up
writing, large enough to be visible from
space. Thanks a lot, school system. |
I
can see a career in professional game design
without a telescope, but I got here on the
strength of my freeware games. I taught myself
how to program with AGS. I learned to type from
an early age with the family Amstrad, then the
family C64, then the family Amiga. At school they
only let you near a computer once in a blue moon
to play one of those god-forbid-I-call-them games
where you play Hangman in German or some shit.
I'm in Australia
because I saved up money from my last major job
in England, entering data for a surveying
company. I got that job because they needed
pretty much anyone, and I just happened to be
around, and I held onto it because I was good at
it. I doubt they even knew or cared if I had any
qualifications. I found it impossible to find
work before this job.
I met a lot of
friends at school, but lost touch with most of
them when they went to university, and the rest
of them when I moved to the neighbouring
hemisphere.
The more I think
about it, the more it seems certain - school has
given me nothing. I studied German for four years
and the only phrase I can recall presently is
"Mein Hut hat drei Ecke", and I'm not
even sure I've got the gender right. From
science, I remember that holding a test tube
while a red powder and a blue powder are reacting
inside will sting your fingers like a bitch, but
I couldn't tell you what the powders were called.
I learned more useful information from the Scouts
than I ever did at school, and I spent most of my
time in the scouts sitting in the corner scoffing
sweeties from the tuck shop.
Which is not to
say school taught me absolutely nothing. Ho yes,
it taught me that the slightest deviation from
the norm will result in ostracision and physical
chastisement. It taught me that being able to
absorb and parrot meaningless trivia was the only
valid intellectual skill. And I learned that I
could expect to get the shit kicked out of me in
sub-zero temperatures for two hours every Monday
afternoon.
| I and
everyone else in the world are subjected
to cruel psychological torture for over a
decade, when we are fragile kids no less,
but it's only now that I get the biggest
kick in the balls. The realisation that,
contrary to what I was led to believe,
none of it was for my benefit. What's
even worse is that there's no-one to
direct this anger at; the school system
is run by a bunch of clueless but
well-meaning jerks, continuing with how
things have always been just because
they're too afraid to change. I'm pretty
mentally fucked up from my school days,
and I dread to think what would have
happened if I'd stuck through the sixth
form, or God forbid university. I'm
pretty sure quite a few of my readers are
in full-time education, so my advice to
them is to get the fuck out.
Qualifications are meaningless. Exams are
just diagnostic programs for the obedient
little robot society wants you to be. |
The emblem of Lawrence Sheriff Grammar
School, where I estimate that I wasted
eight thousand hours of my life that I
could have spent masturbating, or
learning to figure skate. |
God
damn I'm depressed now, knowing that society
forced me to waste a full decade that I'll never
get back. I almost can't be bothered trying to be
funny. Here's my suggestion for an alternative to
school.
For the first
few years, have school as normal, but restricted
to teaching kids the basics - reading, writing
and 'rithmetic, so they can at least function at
the necessary level. Then, when they're about
eight years old, and learned everything they'd
need to know for, say, working behind the meat
counter at Sainsbury's, we move them onto the new
school, which I like to call AWESOMEDOME
TEN THOUSAND.
The Awesomedome
Ten Thousand is basically a big circular arena
divided into two halves. One contains a library
with a wide range of fiction and textbooks,
drawing and writing material, as well as some of
those snobby intellectual board games like
Scrabble. The other half contains a pile of
sports equipment and sharp objects. Children come
to the Awesomedome Ten Thousand for five or six
hours a day, and must choose in which half of the
dome they wish to spend this time beforehand. The
children cannot move from one sector to the other
at any point during the day, and they cannot take
anything from the Awesomedome.
That way, the
clever kids with a genuine curiosity of the world
can be free to pursue their own interests in the
intellectual section, gathering only the
information that is immediately necessary. And in
the other half, all the violent sporty kids can
fucking kill each other and leave the ones with
actual futures alone. I guarantee you that, as
well as no longer wasting everybody's time, this
new system will produce a perfect geniocratic
society within two generations.
I'm finished
with this topic; you have permission to agree
with me now.
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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15/2/05:
More Comic Capers
I like
webcomics. Well, let me withdraw that statement.
I like SOME webcomics. But I don't like to wade
through the neck-high ocean of shit out there to
find the diamonds in the little life rafts. So,
for anyone else with the same problem, I've
started a list of The Only Good Comics On
The Internet. Do let me know if you have any
additions to suggest.
UPDATE: Please
stop suggesting Ctrl-Alt-Del. I fucking hate
Ctrl-Alt-Del.
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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10/2/05:
The Secret Of Success
BEARDWATCH:
Still growing. Strangely, the beard around the
edge of my face is dark brown tinged with red,
while my moustache is blonde. It's like Joseph
and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamface over here.
CASHWATCH:
Now would be a great time to donate and get the 5 Days Special Edition, because I have an
electricity bill due soon, and I can't write
games with the power shut off! MORE INCENTIVE FOR
YOU!
Anyway.
I'd like to talk
for a moment about America. And contrary to the
expectations you have just formulated, I'm going
to start by talking it up.
Americans are
good at a lot of things. They're good at sport.
They're good at action films. They're good at
electing hideously irresponsible and
megalomaniacal governments into power and
creating international crises for no better
reason than - shit, I've lost track and I'm only
one paragraph in. Let me start again.
Americans are
good at a lot of things. They win a lot of medals
at the Olympics. and the reason for this is a
case of simple mathematics. They have a much
larger population than many other countries, and
as such have a greater number of people with
talents, even if they are flanked on all sides by
mindless population statistics who watch The
Bachelor and eat pancakes for breakfast. (Whoo,
nearly lost it there, try to keep on track).
Admittedly China has a bigger population, but
then independent thought is considered a social
faux pas in China. For all its faults, America at
least values personal liberty. What confuses me,
then, is why so much of their mainstream media is
unforgivably bad.
I mean, I know
there are talented writers and humourists in
America. It's just that they're all updating websites and appearing on Whose
Line Is It Anyway, when all the stuff getting
exported are fifteen hundred 'Crime
Investigation' dramas, all written by the same
guy who has spent his entire life in a basement
with a pile of NYPD Blue DVDs and no DVD player.
And all the mainstream novels are overlong
sensationalist tripe written by talentless hacks
called Stephen King. Why is this? Is it some
major plot on the part of American publishers and
TV networks to actively destroy creativity in the
populace, in case someone comes up with a
creative method to overthrow the government?
And then there
are American sit-coms, and here we get to the
delicious chewy centre of this article.
Now, as I said,
I know there are funny people in America. And
every now and again American networks produce a
comedy series that makes me laugh. But for each
one of these, I can give you five hundred boring
cookie-cutter sit-coms that are more painful than
unanaesthetised bowel surgery and about as fun to
watch. And we're not talking about the kind of
bowel surgery where the entire colon backfires
unexpectedly, pushing away the surgical
implements in a tidal wave of chunky diarrhoea,
because that can be vaguely entertaining. This is
the kind of unanaesthetised bowel surgery where
it's just a drill stuck up someone's arse while
they scream in pain and confusion for half an
hour.
Boy, we sort of
took a U-turn from that whole 'talking America
up' angle, didn't we.
The most
infuriating thing is that the formula is so damn
easy to understand. Every time another lame
American sit-com comes along it always makes the
same mistakes. You know when Americans really
like some British comedy, then try to make an
American version, and it would be charitable to
call the result a big pile of used tampons and
poo? It's because they keep forgetting to follow
the very rules that made the original so funny in
the first place:
1. Be
Funny.
Now you'd think
this would go without saying, but apparently it's
still a concept American hack sit-com writing
committees have trouble with. It's not a
difficult formula. Setup, joke. Setup, joke.
Setup, joke. Hilarious misunderstanding. Setup,
joke. Setup, joke. Setup, joke. Advert break.
Setup, joke. Setup, joke. Conclusion. Joke. But
no, American writers seem to think that it is the
point of comedy to also lecture us on things like
family values, the importance of friendship, and
why Christianity is the only true faith. With
something like Friends, the formula goes like
this: Sarcasm masquerading as joke, soap opera
storyline, sarcasm masquerading as joke,
celebrity guest, advert break, sarcasm
masquerading as joke, more soap opera storyline,
hugely moralistic conclusion, everyone loves each
other. Family values and sentiment are the
territory of those oubliettes of cinematic glurge
Dawson's Creek and 7th Heaven. People do not
watch comedy to be morally lectured, for the same
reason they didn't go to see Die Hard for the
heartwarming romantic subplot. If the laugh track
isn't guffawing from word one to end credits,
your alleged comedy has MISERABLY FAILED no
matter how many future romances are hinted at.
2. Make
Everyone Hate Each Other.
Characters who
hate each other create a better humour dynamic
than characters who are the very best of chums.
Oh sure, sometimes American sit-coms try making
out that characters are on uneasy terms by
tossing in the odd sarcastic retort, but it all
boils down to hugs and love and Tubby-bye-bye by
the end. The best dialogue comes between
characters who, given the opportunity, would be
five hundred miles away without a backward
glance. And don't pretend that the American
public prefer a different dynamic to British or
Australian audiences, because The Office won two
Golden Globes and I don't remember any hugs in
that.
3. Ugly,
Unpleasant Characters With Shitty Lives
Let's make some
comparisons, here:
Red
Dwarf - Ugly Unpleasant Characters
Trapped Together In Space
= Comedy Gold!
Friends
- Beautiful Well-Adjusted Characters With
Glamourous Jobs Living In A Nice House
= Horrible Shit!
Father
Ted - Ugly Unpleasant Characters Trapped
Together In House
= Consistently Hilarious!
Will
& Grace - Beautiful Well-Adjusted
Characters With Glamourous Jobs Living In A Nice
House
= Consistently Dreadful!
Seinfeld
- Ugly Unpleasant Characters Having Various
Awkward Encounters
= Not Too Shabby!
My Wife
And Kids - Beautiful Well-Adjusted
Characters With Glamourous Jobs Living In A Nice
House
= Disembowellingly Cack-handed!
4. Don't
Ever, Ever, Ever Succumb To Sexual Tension
If you must have
sexual tension between two characters (which, if
you're following the first rule, YOU SHOULDN'T)
then don't for the love of God stoop to having
them get together in some big wedding episode,
because then your series is OVER and GOOD
RIDDANCE. Wedding episodes are frequently points
of shark-jump for many sitcoms, because it'll
drone with boring romantic sentimental moralist
shite for an hour with no-one on the crew being
able to pull themselves away from their fellatio
whores long enough to realise that the studio
audience haven't made a single chuckle since the
beginning. Wedding episodes should only be
considered when you have realised that the game's
up and it's time to jump the sinking SS Crapfest.
So there you
have it. Four simple rules for making a good
sitcom that people will like. If you take nothing
else from this lecture, let it be this: If your
studio audience ever goes "WOOOOOOOOOO"
in response to events taking place before them,
scrap the whole thing and start again..
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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1/2/05:
MRIs Are Made Of This
A few days back,
in the days of January aught-five, when men were
real men and the West was untamed, I had to get
an MRI scan done. This is because my doctor
thinks there may be some unwelcome guest in my
inner ear, and we have to make sure if he will be
a quiet and dutiful tenant or if he intends to
rip up the floorboards and play Insane Clown
Posse all night. So I was invited to the nearby
hospital to get my head examined.
I was looking
forward to it. I always look forward to medical
tests. I like being at the centre of attention.
And I'm sure I'm not the only one who, on the way
to their test, silently hopes that at some point
the doctor will throw down their stethoscope and
announce "My god! I have never seen anything
like this in my entire life!" Then he'd call
up all his friends and say "Guys! Get in
here and get a load of this!" then all his
friends would come and stroke their beards in
wonder and have a party. Then they'd name a new
syndrome after me, or at least let me choose the
name. Something like 'Awesome Syndrome'.
Anyway.
The first thing
they did when I arrived was had me take off
anything metal, because when they say 'Magnetic
Resonance Imaging', they ain't fooling. So the
trousers had to come off, or else I suspect I
would have found my crotch awkwardly pinned to
the device. And of course I couldn't wear my
metal-framed spectacles, so the remainder of the
test passed as a load of indistinct smeary blurs.
So there I am in my baggy hospital pyjama
bottoms, all of which are apparently designed on
the assumption that Pavarotti might one day have
to wear them, my hair hanging around my shoulders
because my hair tie had a metal bit, squinting my
red-rimmed computer-screen-molested eyes in a
futile attempt to watch the TV in the waiting
room. They left me sitting there like that for
about twenty minutes, because when you're in a
hospital, the doctors get pissy if any of their
patients have more dignity than them.
I wasn't exactly
sure what an MRI scan entailed, but they asked me
if I was claustrophobic, which rang alarm bells
somewhere. They asked me what kind of music I'd
like playing while I was in the machine. I went
for Tchaikovsky, because I was going to show them
that they could put all the hospital pyjamas they
wanted on me and I could still be pretentious.
The MRI machine
looked kind of like what you'd get if you put one
of those big brain bugs from Starship Troopers
through the machine from the Sonic the Hedgehog
cartoon series that turned small furry animals
into similarly-proportioned robot monsters. They
lay me down on a little stretcher thingy, gave me
some headphones playing my musical choice, held
my head in place with straps, then fed me into
the machine like a torpedo into a tube.
When I was
shoved all the way into this huge robot nostril,
I discovered that they had thoughtfully placed an
angled mirror directly in front of my face. For a
moment I could see a pair of bloodshot
panic-stricken eyes, which turned out to be mine,
before the mirror adjusted slightly and I found I
was staring at a large window into the MRI
control room. A big widescreen TV was arranged
presumably specifically so I could watch it, but
the absence of my spectacles turned what I think
was sports coverage into the quarter finals of
Shapeless Blur, in which veteran Shapeless Blur
was being challenged for the title by plucky
newcomer Shapeless Blur.
My horrible,
horrible brain, not satisfied with putting me in
this situation in the first place, decided to
think at that point about that bit in The One
where Jet Li goes into an MRI machine and is
attacked by bad guys while in this extremely
vulnerable position. While Jet Li had the option
to go kung fu nuts, my sole comfort was a little
squeezy ball in my hand which they told me to use
if anything was wrong. I don't know what it did,
exactly. Perhaps it made a little 'alert' sign
blink on and off. Maybe one of the technicians
would come in and go kung fu nuts.
By this point my
mind was a-wandering, its knapsack on its back,
fal de ree etc. I tried to listen to the music. I
think it was Waltz of the Flowers.
Da de dum da de.
Da de dum da de
de DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Fuck me down to
the ground, the MRI machine makes a loud noise.
You know the noise made by a really old CD drive
when it decides to amuse itself by carefully
etching a Da Vinci line drawing in your copy of
American McGee's Alice? Take that kind of noise
and multiply it by about fifty million, and
that's what being in an MRI machine is like. So
there I was, shoved up a gigantic mechanical
rectum listening to it fart. I couldn't even hear
the music anymore. Why did they do this to me?
Why did they ask me what sort of music I would
like if they knew I wouldn't be able to hear it
over the machine? Was this, and the pyjamas, part
of a larger overall scheme to make my life weird?
Do the technicians film the scared and confused
MRI patients and sit down at the end of a long
day to watch the tapes with a glass of wine?
After that, I
went home, just in time for a phone call telling
me I have to come in and have another one.
Apparently they wanted to do it again with some
stuff injected into me first. That was what they
said, anyway. I suspect they just hoped I would
put on a better show the second time.
***
SUPER EXTRA BONUS PARAGRAPH ***
Hey, I noticed
that Brother Heccubus seems to have written this big
ol' rant against sprite comics. Now, don't get me
wrong, I ain't got nothing against the guy, but
he and I are forced to differ on this subject,
and for that reason he can suck the fossilised
shit from my dead grandma's bum. Yeah, 90% of
sprite comics are unfunny dross, but then so are
90% of all comics, not to mention 90% of the
internet, and 90% of the mainstream media. If
people would rather concentrate on writing over
artwork that seems completely fair enough to me.
Don't be judgmental, Suckubus. Unless, like me,
you are never wrong.
And I like 8-Bit Theater. I am well-adjusted
enough to concede the fact that it is way funnier
than me.
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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24/1/05:
Sleeping Booty
Hey, I didn't
say stop giving me money! Still lots of people
who don't have the 5 Days Special Edition! Ha ha ha! I'm so fucking
skint.
Anyway, this
week I reviewed Anne Rice's Filthy
Disgusting Inexcusable Porno Books. Have a good read. I
dare you.
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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18/1/05:
Face Off
Recently
I was asked by my associate Stewart what I would
change about myself, given the chance. I replied
I would like to repair the hole in the crotch of
my trousers. When he amended his query parameters
to apply only to my body and personality, I
reluctantly nominated the lower half of my face.
I hate the lower half of my face. When I cover it
up with a scarf, my eyes and nose look dangerous
and wild, like those of an angry female tiger
whose young are threatened. But then take the
scarf away, and my helpless prey's fear turns to
bemusement as it takes in my full, womanly lips
and stupid teeth. Not only are my pouty smackers
unmanly, they are also a serious security risk.
Should the team investigating the city centre
petrol bomb attack ever think to interrogate me,
my characteristic mouth will easily give me away,
even if I was wearing a ski mask on the security
footage.
After
setting fire to Stewart so he wouldn't talk, the
evil smell that rose from his burning fur fired
neurones in my magnificent brain. The answer was
simple. Facial hair! What better way to draw
attention from my incriminating smile than a
thick beard growth? I would then additionally
have the option to join the Taliban if the
opportunity ever came up. I resolved to stop
shaving immediately, then, to decide on how best
to grow my new disguise, I took a recent photo of me and ran it through
Photoshop until it squealed for mercy.
 |
The
curly moustache has been very unfairly
treated in cinema. I mean, you're
probably assuming that the eyebrow is
raised in amusement, because I have just
tied an innocent young maiden to a
railroad track, or that I have
successfully fooled a wealthy dowager
into wedding me and allowing me access to
her family's enormous fortune. Thank
Christ then for David Suchet's portrayal
of Poirot. Now I could merely be
contemplating the solution of a dastardly
crime, or some splendid Belgian truffles.
Ugh. Next. |
 |
Ah. The
'Ming of Mongo' look. Difficult to pull
off, though. Something tells me, if your
beard naturally grows into an equilateral
triangle, there's something very, very
wrong going on there. If you look
closely, you'll notice I also attempted
to add eyeliner with the Photoshop brush
tool, but it looks more like a couple of
flies are drinking from my tear ducts. |
 |
I think
this would be my first choice, if it
didn't have this tendency to make a
person's face look like an unshaved
lady's pubic region turned on its side.
And then there's the Gordon Freeman
thing. After years of people asking me if
I was Gordon Freeman, I'd give in and say
yes, I am Gordon Freeman. Then I'd be
invited to lots of swanky parties and
command respect for the first time in my
life. But the little white lie would
spiral out of control, and one day aliens
from the dimension of Zotor B would
invade and everyone would be expecting me
to do something about it. |
 |
What
the 'mutton chops' imply about a person
depends on the time period. 150 years
ago, people would assume I was a rich
industrialist, and would cease inviting
me to their houses in case I kidnapped
their children and made them my little
chimney slaves. 100 years ago I would be
sitting in a gentleman's club, scoffing
at the incredible claims of a handsome
young inventor. Twenty years ago I'd be
the bass guitarist in an 80's hair band.
In today's cynical times, people would
just assume I was taking the piss out of
all of the above. |
 |
This is
where I started getting bored, so I drew
a picture of a lobster Flamenco dancing. |
I
have actually not been shaving for a week or so
now, and have nurtured a fine coating of straggly
bristles all around my face. It's been a great
learning experience. You know how people with
beards stroke them when they're lost in thought?
They don't do that on purpose. Several times now
I have caught myself doing it unconsciously.
Perhaps the beard is transmitting signals
directly to my brain, and if I don't keep
stroking it it will come to life and devour the
world.
Tune in next
time, when I will be hopefully be doing something
more mature than drawing all over my face.
- Yahtzee
PS. Donate $5 for the 5 Days A Stranger Special
Edition!
Please!
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|
